David Byrne and Brian Eno have a new record, available today.
Perhaps it will be good. “My Life In The Bush of Ghosts” is decent enough – more on that later – but the free download song off the new record is decidedly ordinary. That probably would surprise a lot of people, but it shouldn’t, because the two are relatively ordinary musicians. But this post is not about them so much as about the relativity of the avant-garde.
This article about the two, and their collaboration, takes as implicit that their connections to the avant-gare, which completely mystifies me. This is not a complaint about Eno or Byrne. They do what they do well. Although Talking Heads never spoke to me much until “Speaking in Tongues,” where they became good musicians and made good music, I have many Eno recordings I enjoy, and his last record is really pretty damn good; he has great ears and great taste. But I first heard his name back in high school, when people were talking about this totally avant-garde record, this idea of ambient music meant to be part of the environment. It was totally avant-garde!
Of course, it wasn’t. Well, if all you knew of music was pop and rock, it certainly was. And for the majority of listeners and critics, music began only in the 20th century and the only music that exists is rock and pop. When I first heard of “Music for Airports,” I had already known about Satie, so this idea was nothing new. And when I first heard The Talking Heads, I had already been playing free jazz, so again, nothing new.
The avant-garde as a movement in music really came into being in the 20th century, prior to World War I, and by that I do not mean that the directed development of music reached an ultra-extreme point, but that there was a conscious effort, begun by the Futurists, to destroy the previous history of music and start it again from a non-musical basis. Since that time, there have been a variety of attempts to put the possible future of music at some point far outside the contemporary limit of tradition; George Antheil based a career on it, the beginnings of tape and electronic music, the methods of Xenakis and Scelsi, all of these were truly avant-garde rather than logical next-steps in the progressive accretion of musical knowledge. What makes the avant-garde so vital is that, as T.S. Eliot pointed out, the tradition of an art form eventually reaches that outlying point and incorporates it, and so no artists is ever totally outside the tradition. The avant-garde is literally out front, waiting for the rest to catch up.
The same is not quite true for pop and rock music; these are forms with limited possibilities for expansion, and their history tends to be circular, recycling older styles in new packages. This is because, like non-Western “classical” music, the purpose of rock and pop is mainly social, so there are constraints on what is accepted, since the point is popular acceptance. Classical music is absolute music, it exists for itself, and so can attempt and incorporate anything that works. So the idea that Brian Eno would, in a pop music context, make a record that had no words, was quiet and was not meant to draw attention to itself, seemed more than a little odd, but in the history of music, the all-encompassing history, there was nothing odd or even new about it. In fact, this has been a long-time social purpose of music, and so fit perfectly well into the pop world. Eno, and Eno and Byrne together, have shown the pop world different ways to think about pop music, which makes for more interesting listening for us all. But avant-garde? No – neither starved for this.
My Mostly Mozart experiences wrapped up the last two nights, with concerts featuring absolutely no Mozart whatsoever!
The draw for me was the local premiers of two recent Kaija Saariaho, her oratorio on Simone Weil, La Passione de Simone, and her cello concerto Notes on Light, which was paired in concert with the Beethoven “Eroica” Symphony. Final results were the mix of two extremes, from the disappointing to the delirious.
The oratorio promised a great deal, with a collaborative of Amin Maalouf, Peter Sellars and Dawn Upshaw, not to mention Saariaho herself. Her style is one based around the exploration of sound, and she produces a rich blend of colors and textures that is sensual, mysterious, evocative and fascinating. Her approach to drama emphasizes the development of sound, rather than a Mozartian harmonic structure which mirrors and supports the story. This seems to me an excellent way to approach a passion story, one about transformation, as the composer can solve the problem by demonstrating the drama through the transformation of sounds.
Unfortunately, there was no drama to support. The cause is a combination of the specific subject and the text by Maalouf. As far as I can tell, the story narrated by the singer is that of Weil find her way to a sense of self-sacrifice that eventually led her to commit slow suicide via starvation in what she felt was the shared solidarity of her compatriots in Nazi prison and concentration camps. Maalouf seems to have used Weil’s Gravity and Grace as an important source, which is problematic. It’s a book that was never a book, her notebooks for her own personal thoughts, her way of working things out for herself. While reading it one stumbles on the occasional lovely axiom, it’s mainly impenetrable, a conversation in which only one side is heard. The result for La Passione is a very precious and admiring view of what was a sincere, but also dilettantish, life, which concluded with a morally untenable choice. The Weil in the drama is unattractively naive and shallow, and there is no discernible transformation. Nothing actually happens. There’s also a problem with the dramatic voice, with having a narrator sing about the main character who is further referred to in the third person. It seems to me misguided in that it removes all direct agency.
The music goes it’s own way, dark hued and rich, it’s lovely and even soothing, but since there’s no drama, there’s very little change in the music. Since the character undergoes no real transformation, the music follows along, going nowhere. It’s finely crafted and interesting to listen to, but it seems to lack a center. In complete contrast was the cello concerto, which had a superb performance from Anssi Karttunen. This is extraordinarily evocative music, both the cello part and the orchestral accompaniment. Rather than display the agility of the cellist, the writing is concerned with the types of sounds the instrument can produce, mainly ones that are full of timbre and overtones. The orchestra shades the cellist through the five movement, mainly quiet and slow, and highly concentrated. The harmonies are close, and emphasize the movement and tension between half-steps; there’s more than a little Scelsi in the piece. It has a wonderful sound, and was gripping throughout.
The accompanying ensemble both nights was the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, led by Susanna Mälkki with precision, sensitivity and verve. They showed complete command of Saariaho’s idiom and topped off the two nights with a tremendous performance of the Beethoven, one of the finest I have ever heard. It was thrilling, moving, full of rage and dignity and humor, in other words it was Beethoven. Mälkki’s choice of tempos was ideal, and her poise in them was constant, especially her exceedingly fast ones in the first the third movements. She matched the dynamics to speed wonderfully, and kept a focus on clarity of sound and rhythm. The moments of pathos, delight and chaos were all presented clearly and forcefully, yet without particular indulgence. Even at moments that almost beg for extra emphasis, as in when the music seems to disintegrate at points in the first movement, she kept the forward line flowing, and the orchestra played with fire, never seeming rushed. Stupendous. Mozart was not missed Thursday night.
What does it mean to be digital? Only a computer can say for sure, and they’re not talking. As for us human’s, we’re still analog in the way we think and function and act, and I hope we’ll stay that way for the conceivable future. We are not digital, but our tools are increasingly digital. It’s the conflation of the two which leads to the wrong question being asked, which further leads to answers that are jejune and materialistic. Why isn’t Negroponte’s book completely available digitally? Because being digital loses out to making money.
So, asking the wrong question means we can never get close to the answers we need. The right question, I think, is what does it mean to have digital tools? This is the answer that a lot of people and organizations, record labels most famously, are struggling with. Having digital tools means, fundamentally, that information of all kinds can be immediately and widely available (except, of course, “Being Digital”) and that the same information no longer has the structural integrity to which we’re accustomed. We think of things like books and recording as objects, when their physical manifestation is their packaging. This is not to denigrate the packaging – the Kindle has no appeal to me, because their is a physical part of reading that has to to with the pleasure of holding a book, smelling it and turning the pages. The package can also be an important part of the work itself, as it is with McSweeney’s, which consistently finds exciting and satisfying ways to put words in the palm of the reader’s hand. The same is true for music. Although I currently have almost 60GB of digital music, that’s still far less than what I have on CDs, and digital music cannot produce the same rich packaging that is possible with the physical object.
Still, what books and music are, fundamentally, are structured sequences of words and sounds, and those exist independently of their packaging. And those can be digitized. With that, all of a sudden, a book or recording can be broken down to its component parts. Again, and this is because we are proudly analog machines, with a free-flowing and unpredictable imagination, this is not a new idea or procedure. But with digital tools, it’s far easier to make use of these opportunities than it was when scissors, razor blades, glue and tape were the means of (re)production.
Artists have been challenging the integrity of works for at least 2000 years, and it was the early 20th century that saw the creation of new work from fragments of other work become a codified method. With digital tools, this method suddenly becomes available to everyone, and this is the exciting and to some worrying possibility. We are all post-modern now, and in the practical, not theoretical sense. The means of (re)production are in the hands of the masses, and development of material history that Karl Marx never predicted, especially because he didn’t have much use for the masses themselves. However, when you see how frightened politicians, news organizations and especially record companies are of the digital masses, it’s clear that we are seeing some constructive threats to the status quo. That part is good; most politicians, news organizations and record companies are ignorant, stupid and sclerotic, knowing only “how things are done,” rather than knowing howto do things, and of benefit to only a very small circle of people.
The part that’s not good, however, is that revolutionaries are also utopians, and attempts to create utopias on earth always end up damaging people’s lives, often permanently. With digital music, i.e. the world of sampling and file sharing, the damage is taking money out of the hands of the actual producers, the musicians themselves. And it’s happening, clothed in the easy language of anti-corporate rhetoric. I have no sympathy for the giant music labels – they bully, they use their weight to take possession of work they themselves did not make, charge almost $20 for something that takes about $.75 to produce, and pay salaries to a select few that have no actual relation to the worth of their work/contribution. The fact that musicians can now produce well-made music inexpensively and sell it, digitally, directly to listeners is fantastic. But there’s some problems as well.
Take Girl Talk, and his new record “Feed The Animals.” Until last week I had never heard of him, and now, as if he were my proverbial tipping point, I not only have heard him enough but I’ve been brought to the point of . . . blogging! Indeed! I read the article with interest and was moved to download “Feed The Animals” as a sort of experiment. I used to spin records at dances in college, and I love radio, so for a long time that was what my idea of a DJ was. I’ve been interested in this rising and hazy connection between DJs as record spinners and DJs as musicians – something that digital technology makes incredibly simple – and I certainly see the possibilities in have previously recorded music and sound available as the raw materials to make new music. What seemed different about Girl Talk was his use of well-known contemporary material and his complete thumbing his nose at the idea of copyright (here I should mention that as a composer, I think copyright is important in that people should be able to not only make money from their own work but have it identified as their creation, but I also think copyright is granted for too long and is too restrictive). Composers and musicians have been making music out of other people’s music for more than a thousand years, that is they have used previous material as a basis for making their own new work. It’s how composers learn and it’s how jazz is made in general and it’s how garage bands practice. Now it’s become an entire branch of pop music, and people like DJ Shadow and especially DJ Spooky are taking material and truly transforming it into their own new work, and no a more avant-garde basis Christian Marclay has been doing tremendously creative work for decades, making music out of old LPs, the ultimate DJ as musician, and a point where they package and the content are equally important material.
So then, I wanted to hear this for myself, and I came at it feeling a bit of sympathy for his defiance of the record companies. But this was an experiment for me, and since he himself is freely taking other people’s material, I felt that $1 spent on “Feed The Animals” was appropriate. I’ve now listened to it, and I think it has two serious flaws, one philosophical and one aesthetic. But first I want to say that it is incredibly accomplished technically. Just because digital tools make it possible to splice together and mash-up recordings doesn’t make it easy to master. And it is masterful. Aesthetically, it’s interesting to hear bits and pieces of contemporary pop history appear over the transom, little evocative surprises; “What is that from?”, “I know that!”. It’s also, ultimately, dull, relentlessly 4/4 square, a digitally quantized beat and the same tempo and dynamic level for the entire length. Girl Talk says he wants to be a musician, not just a party DJ, but he’s not the former and not much of the latter, it seems. Though the impression I get is that’s okay with his fans, mainly young and white, who want music to drink beer to.
The biggest problem, though, is not musical. Girl Talk is proud of not paying rights, which means he’s proud to be a criminal, because the record is pure theft. I am a great believer in fair use, and also in giving that as generous an interpretation as possible. But when Girl Talk uses a songs entire lyric, sampled as is and recast but not transformed into his own material in the least, that’s is simply not fair use. That is plagiarism. Fair use exists to allow discussion of work and to allow the creation of new work from older material. Girl Talk is doing neither. The article states that his is possible because “his samples are short, and his music sounds so little like the songs he takes from . . . ” is simply not true, and anyone with ears can hear that it is otherwise. His samples are extensive and his use is so mechanical and so without musical quality and thought – he has not made music so much as shown how other music can be stacked and shoved together – that there is none of his own quality in the record.
An example of what I feel falls under fair use, and which takes previous material and transforms it into something utterly new, and wonderful, is the work of Ergo Phizmiz. His collaboration with People Like Us on “Perpetuum Mobile” is delightful and astonishing, made with great humor and musicality. Here is a case where most of the samples are indeed short, and at best only vaguely identifiable as perhaps something heard in passing, somewhere, sometime before. The more extensive samples are turned into new pieces of music that successfully take old memory, of which music is the ideal art, into new memory. The difference may fundamentally be that instead of revving up a party to a specific number of beats per minute – and how unbearably material and dull is that – they seek to make music. That’s what makes a musician, and what makes possible the new out of the old. Here’s an interesting take on that process.
Digital tools especially made “Perpetuum Mobile” possible, the collaborative process and the final production. This is a whole new world of music that is happening right now and is genuinely new. Musical ideas have been reworked through history, by Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky and before and beyond. But now actual music, that actual piece of grooved vinyl or magnetic tape or binary code is being reworked in an almost physical process, and digital music making is starting to require an entirely new way of thinking about make music. I welcome this, and I welcome that fact that anyone with a Mac and a microphone can make a record. There’s a lot of musicality out there, and the means of production are now in the hands of the artists. I think more than anything else that is what scares the record companies. They existed to finance huge chunks of studio time and to distribute recordings, but now musicians don’t need the studio and can distribute everything themselves. The chairman of UMG should make himself useful coming up with a better business model. It’s not like it isn’t out there. The established companies that I see taking advantage of the ease of recording and distribution are DG and Decca, as well as the in-house labels of institutions like the Chicago Symphony. Yeah, it’s the stodgy world of classical music that has adapted to new technology the best (that and Peter Gabriel, of course). Recording complete concerts and making them digital downloads, with PDF booklets, is simple and brilliant. No expensive takes and retakes in the studio, and a unique musical experience. Want to hear great orchestras play great music in the concert hall? There it is. Also, if the prices I’ve been buying this stuff at are truly accurate, than these same type of labels are making profits off their excellent back catalogs and still making it dirt cheap for the consumer (hurry, the comparable Eugene Ormandy set I paid $9.99 three weeks ago is now $49.99 download). By offering something unique at a good price they essentially remove the need or desire for file sharing. It’s not complicated. But of course these labels don’t need to huge margins to finance their CEOs’ salaries.
I’m sorry I spent that $1 though. And I don’t doubt the thief is going to keep it. You should go take it for free, though. And pass it around.
That was fast . . . how long was Favre in camp with the Packers, five minutes?
It’s exciting for the Jets and their fans, of course. That team generally is a distant second to my beloved Jints in interest in the New York area, but now they should be watchable. It wasn’t just that they were awful last year, but that they were incredibly boring. They just may be exciting in ways their management doesn’t suspect.
With Favre and the current champions (authors of the most remarkable upset in NFL history), New York is currently the center of the football universe, where it joins jazz in that distinction. Even one of the great WKCR DJs, Sharif Adbus-Salaam, was jazzed about it last night!
It’s going to be good for some other team as well. Chad Pennington is actually a pretty damn good quarterback. It’s tough to look good when you spend a lot of time on your back, but that’s why good teams have good offensive lines – see the 2007 Giants – and bad teams don’t. I would also add that having a good offensive line makes a team exciting, because it means they can develop plays and drives and keep your eyes and mind interested. The guys at one of my new favorite blogs have more, and good arguments, but a team that can protect Penny will have really found something.
“The nexus of ignorance and insanity is ideology.”
You like that? It’s a phrase I coined a few weeks ago while walking the dog, and I’ve since been able to share it only with my wife. So enjoy.
But that’s what this posting is all about, through the prism of the Dark Knight, the character and the movie. Upfront, my general view, as a kid growing up on comic books, is that Batman has always been the ideal comic book character, that the TV show was dreck and the Tim Burton spawned movies not much better, and that Christopher Nolan’s work has not been re-imagining the character but excavating his core, which has been buried under years of pop culture neglect and, yes, ideology. Because they are coming at us in waves nowadays, there’s an understandable tendency to see Batman Begins and The Dark Night as genre movies – the superhero genre – which they are not. They are movies about a singular character, generally akin to the James Bond movies. They are about a pop culture figure who superficially resembles a superhero but is actually nothing of the sort.
I like these movies – I think the first is excellent and the second, while not as tight, has admirable ambition and is full of satisfying tension. The first movie was modestly successful and so didn’t engender much nonsensical bloviating in major media outlets. The second has blockbuster status, so every asshole has an opinion. And I do mean asshole:
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.
“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.
Now, I will only briefly mock this, since that’s been donewell by others. First of all, I hope his books aren’t written like that because I feel embarrassed reading such awful prose – embarrassed for him. Second, anyone seeing the film without preconceived notions, a desperate need for self-validation and any critical faculties whatsoever will have no problem understanding that it’s political and moral universe is confused as some would say, or ambivalent and unsettled as I see it. Third, Klavan once again confirms the obvious about the current state of self-proclaimed American conservatives, they are both deeply stupid and deeply assured of their own brilliance. In other words, completely incompetent as human beings. This is not news, as any glance at what passes for conservative thought or accomplishment these days will confirm (note that if you try and click through to the PNAC site, you’ll see it’s been suspended – probably didn’t pay their hosting bills).
It’s also not news that tendentious idiots would try and co-opt pop culture hits of any kind to prove the supposed popularity of their own ideas. Conservatives, much as they would like, cannot produce their own successful pop culture, because conservatives actually have no ideas or tastes whatsoever. All they do is oppose anything that does not match their narrow, shallow, constipated worldview. They hate pop culture, actually, since they hate that anyone could enjoy pleasure in something they themselves did not order, as the essence of American conservatism is authoritarianism, nothing but and nothing else.
So all that makes this more than trivial – in the context, it’s cogent. There are two essential features that make Batman an interesting and out-of-the-ordinary comic book character, and fecund for artistic exploration; he is a man with no super-powers and, even though he is a vigilante, he does not kill. An enormous failure of Tim Burton’s conception is that he has Batman kill The Joker, and not only kill him but strafe him in the street from his plane. Klavan should be wetting his pants over that, because it places Batman in a military context, and conservatives worship Ares. The real Batman does not kill – although he won’t necessarily make an effort to save every villain’s life – and would gladly never appear in the night again if the state could take up it’s proper, effective role in protecting the law. He believes in civil society and has both a moral and a civic code. I think the appropriate philosophical viewpoint is that of virtue ethics – Batman may find what he is doing distasteful, and may have ambivalent views of his own actions, but he has an absolute need to not turn into what he is pursuing. He is maddened by The Joker but will not become his adversary in order to stop him. He seeks to preserve and build up the structures of civil society. In this way he is a Classic conservative, but that has nothing to do with Klavan and the man he worships, George W. Bush.
Bush is the figurehead – and just that, he’s far too shallow to have any ideas of his own – of an actually nihilistic viewpoint. American conservatives clearly only believe in power. Their claims to an ideology of morality and social responsibility, freedom and small government have been trampled by their lust for decadent, selfish pleasures, no accountability, authoritarianism and the development of government as a jobs program for their fellow travelers. They are base and puerile. And they love torture because it’s a pure exercise of their power and has no other purpose than to show who’s boss. It doesn’t fight terrorism – this administration is actually doing very little to fight terrorism, so there’s certainly no set of armored tights in Bush’s closet. Conservatives celebrate that Bush has no doubts about anything, while Batman is full of doubts. Conservatives think that they are made men by removing all legal limits on what the government can do, while Batman has his limits. It’s a measure of ignorance about the world and the strategic situation to think The Joker is bin-Laden. One thing bin-Laden is absolutely not is a nihilist, like it or not, he believes in things. He certainly doesn’t believe in chaos as anything other than a tactic, he seeks the restoration of a geo-political power. That may be crazy, but it’s not nihilistic. In contrast, who are the celebrators of pure force and destruction?
Still, Klavan does point out the self-enrapture that is his drug of choice, his belief that since he’s on the side of the might, he’s on the side of the right. There is a Bush figure in The Dark Knight, one who thinks he’s absolutely dedicated to right, has no self-doubts whatsoever and is completely assured he’s doing the right thing, even though all he’s doing is seeking vengeance and destroying everything in his path to achieve it, regardless of guilt or consequences. He abdicates all responsibility from decision making by having a crutch that makes choices for him. That’s Harvey Dent, of course, otherwise known as Two-Face. Batman always had the best villains.
I recently started subscribing to The Nation. Some may be surprised that I hadn’t already, but . . . I get a lot of magazines. I like that – and I also like this one too, I think I’ll keep it.
But there’s few magazines that I read in their entirety. Part of the pleasure for me is the way they regularly show up in the mail box and the unique rhythm to reading each one. I’m still figuring that out with The Nation, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to get to the point where I consistently skip the cultural criticism at the back of the book. What drove it home was this article about Elvis Costello. I was eager to read it because I have been a long-time and profound fan of his, but I was left puzzled, puzzled over what it was supposed to be about, and also puzzled over how some writers manage to get gigs like that.
Pop music criticism is a pretty bleak field in general. There’s very little I have read that is even competently critical about the music – instead it’s a litany of pop culture signifiers, indicating the essential hipness and superior taste of the writer and is commonly about everything but the music itself. This is particularly true about Costello, who is a great pop musician who has also been completely unselfconscious about growing older and developing different ideas and tastes. That’s what mature people do, but when it comes to pop music the fundamental value is the eternal preservation of a kind of atavistic myth of adolescence. That cultural idea has been completely co-opted by commerce, making it something material and conservative. If I had written the article, it would have been about Costello’s satisfying musical growth and the cultural and aesthetic values that embodies. Instead, David Yaffe gives us liberal interpolations of song lyrics embedded in his own writing, his tiresome opinion of and projection onto The Police, and a hipster’s attempt to fit all of Costello’s work into what Yaffe feels makes himself cool.
Unlike musicians who do the exactsame thing, endlessly, across the decades, and are adored for it by fans who wish for Neverland, Costello made sharp, bilious music when he was a pissed off young man, wistful, ambiguous music as he lost his youth, and classic, personal and assured music now that he’s a fully grown adult. I’ve had the good fortune to have him as a companion as I myself grew up. He’s an artist who accepts what happens inside himself as a natural course of life and sees it as natural to express himself differently in his 40s.
Without the musical growth, all this is moot. But Costello loves music and has genuinely broad, not eclectic, taste, meaning an ear for quality in all sorts of circumstances. Early on he had the good taste to higher The Attractions, simply one of the best bands ever, able to play beautifully and masterfully in every style because they too had big ears. And to see them in concert, and even the contemporary variation of The Impostors, is exciting and satisfying for the sheer musicality of joy of playing. Costello and the band are exceptional performers. There’s no bullshit, no themes, no stage show – they just play, and play unbelievably well. And that’s how they made the newest record, Momofuku. I’m not offering a review here, but will say that if you love Costello, than you know the pleasure of just hearing him make music. He’s broken a lot of new ground in his career, but that’s not an obligation, and he doesn’t do so hear. If you need to have something NEw NEW NEW NEW NEw, then you can skip this disc. But it’s damn good. And while there’s a certain fetish to noting that they made it all just playing in a studio for a couple weeks, that’s how music is made folks, or has been until recently. Studio technology allows for semi-competent musicians to make highly polished records through a detailed and slow process. These recordings are then recreated on the concert stage. Costello and his band are just old-fashioned; they play their instruments and work it out together. They just make music, always good, often great, and that’s high praise.
It’s a first for me, actually attending a Mostly Mozart event. In the past, I had never been interested in it. It was inaugurated with the aesthetic of Mozart as palatable, easy-listening type music, meant to provide low energy charm for a midsummer evening’s snooze in the air-conditioned concert hall, and unfortunate cultural aspect of Lincoln Center generally (and one that the NY Phil, among other groups, still can’t seem to let go of).
But the festival has grown in artistic ambitions, although not to everyone’s delight, and there’s an interesting mix of the old and new. I was are Rose Hall yesterday for a newish version of something old, a concert performance of La Clemenza di Tito. Newish in that it was presented by the period instrument group The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, playing on old instruments, which is still a newish style.
It seems there is a minor revisionist trend to place this opera, Mozart’s last, in the group of his great dramatic masterworks, and there is a fine new recording of it. But experiencing this in performance, I can’t say that either works or is appropriate. The opera was written in under two months, and it shows. Much of it was written by Mozart’s assistant Süssmayr – the program notes indicate this was the simple recitatives, but my ears tell me it’s more than that. The opera is heavy on recitatives, and they are competent, as are many of the arias, but they are nothing like the music in Figaro, for example. The most inspired music is indeed wonderful, the overture is fine and the climaxes to each act, with ensemble pieces and wonderful clarinet obligati, are great, but the work itself is mainly rote, stiff, second-rate Mozart. The libretto by Caterino Mazzolá is shallow and stiff and the dramatic structure is more like Händel, with characters singing at rather than with each other, than the great Mozart dramas. Not a surprise from a rush job by committee, but it’s best to hear it for what it is, rather than what the audience would like it to be.
This audience loved it, actually, and there’s no fault in that. It may be second rate Mozart, but the performance was superb, great playing from the orchestra and some of the most consistently fine singing I have ever heard, beautiful and committed. The star was Alice Coote as Sesto, and Toby Spence was terrific as Tito. There’s more opera to come, and it will be truly new, and hopefully first rate.
One of the reasons I’m a sports fan, and I’m a big sports fan, is that it is a usually consistent respite from the nonsense of every day discourse, a place where actual achievement can be measured and where the final result is pretty much just that – final. Someone wins, someone loses, game over.
I especially need this refuge because the nonsense and bullshit is coming down thick and fast. Here we are, almost seven full years into WAR ALL THE TIME, living in a country with a foundering economy, a government which spies on all its citizens and which tortures people for no reason other than the sadism of weak, cowardly men with compensation issues, and this is the kind of trivial, mean-spirited and small-minded gossip we get from supposed professionals. If political journalism was baseball, these fools would have been kicked out of the league a long time ago, replaced by actual talent.
Unfortunately, we seem to be in a stretch where this kind of nonsense has developed too much power and prominence in sports. For example, can anyone explain to me this mess around Brett Favre? He’s one of the greats, and when he announced his retirement, it seemed the ideal moment. The best time for the best athletes to retire, I think, is when they have satisfied their own sense of wanting to play well, and prior to a drastic decline in skills and achievement. Go out at or near the top, if you can. Favre had a fine year, but a tough time in the NFC Championship game, which was sentimentally supposed to favor the old quarterback playing in brutal conditions. Instead, each close-up shot seemed to show him in physical distress, eyes watering from the cold, trouble breathing. The Giants were able to pressure him, and it was his final mistake that sent the underdogs to the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, Eli Manning seemed to not even notice that it was zero degrees on the field.
But, I’m sure Favre can still play. And although there is some sense of embarrassment in retiring and then rescinding that decision so soon, he’s the best quarterback the Packers have right now. So why are they so desperate to keep him from playing? Why do they feel they must play Aaron Rodgers? If the goal of sports is to win, they have a better chance of winning with Favre, and it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to say that. Favre changed his mind, can’t the Packers? But they have now gone into government-corporate thinking mode, where things are done a certain way, and that’s that, and they made a decision and are sticking to it. The quality of the decision doesn’t matter, it’s all about staying the course and trying to spin some justification for it. They are now the GOP of the NFL, stuck in their own lack of ideas and their values of authority and obedience. And of course, the weird desire to have Daddy both scold and protect them from themselves. Which is all John McCain has to offer, along with his narcissistic sense of grievance the he deserves this, and how dare they expect him to have to campaign for votes.
Meanwhile, how can this be explained? Here’s a guy committed to winning and putting his resources behind the front office to make it happen, and a city that wants a winner. It’s very strange that Cuban could offer the highest price for the Cubs, and BE TURNED DOWN! What does it take to make his money good enough? He has to properly belong to the elite club. Most fans, and most Americans won’t understand that, but then the owners are generally like the Republicans in baseball as well. They pay lip service to capitalism and practice socialism amongst themselves; they value hereditary privelege over merit; they think they understand things better than the rest of us, even though by definition they are stupid; and most of all they seek to maintain an elite status for themselves and work to keep as many people as possible out of the club. When Karl Rove tried to portray Obama as the nasty, superior guy at the country club, it can have only made sense to himself, or maybe David Broder. They’ll have to do a lot better than that, or this.
Back to the Cubs – they’ve had an impressive year so far. They really showed how good a team they are when they went to rival Milwaukee and swept a four game series. Merit wins out – spin is for the losers. And my Dodgers made the trade of the year, getting a great ballplayer for just about nothing, making what I think is a wise gamble in a weak division. I saw his first at-bat in Saturday’s game, the fans giving him an ovation as he walked to the plate, then demanding a curtain-call after he hit a two-run homer. The great thing about it though is that we’ll be able to tell exactly how wise it was. The White Sox made a big deal too, and they are clinging to a tiny lead. Did they really need more left-handed power, though? The Yankees certainly needed catching, and they made a steal too. Hey, baseball can be based on faith as much as politics, and the Tigers believe in Kyle Farnsworth. That’s a pretty odd cult, though.
This is the best time of the year for the game, though. Division rivals play each other a lot, and most races are close. The Mets have their own shot, but the bullpen is shaky. They did nothing to improve that part of the team, and one would think that means they would attempt to play a different way, not rely on the division of labor that has become the conventional wisdom in the game. We’ll see. It will be proof of whether thinking can overcome inertia. That’s a challenge everywhere, of course, and sports are not completely immune to the herd mentality, to sticking with bad ideas because that’s how it’s done everywhere, of seeing the problem for what it actually is, rather than putting an easy and wrong label on it. It’s an institution, and can be slow to change.
But it did change drastically once. It took the right combination of daring, confidence, talent and attitude. It took a lot of courage and sacrifice too. One of the conditions that Jackie Robinson played under his first year in the majors was that he had to take whatever came at him, insults to baseballs, and not retaliate in word or deed. He had to just play, and show how good he was, and let the merit of the experiment prove itself. And was he good, and did he play. And after that first year, he took his revenge.
Obama is in a similar situation. He is a pioneer in the biggest game of all and playing under a bizarre set of rules that have been imposed on him. It’s one thing for John McCain to shriek and whine like a little spoiled baby – he’s a scurrilous, egocentric, dishonorable, petulant man who has no reason to be President except that he thinks he deserves it. But when other organizations agree with his rules, when McCain saying you can’t vote for the guy because he’s black is okay, but Obama . . . what . . . admitting, revealing (?) that he himself is a black man is playing the race card, then the rules are whatever the winer says they are that moment. And Obama is just going to have to take it, because that’s the way this game is played. It’s not a game, of course, except for a very small group of people. And Obama is trying to get into their game, and they are, at best, reluctant to let him play. Because, like Jackie Robinson, his very presence is demonstrating that the old, white men who have been running the game for so, so long may not actually have been as able as we were led to believe. Obama as President may mean that this idea may actually be broached in polite conversation. This is going to be a lot uglier than it is now, uglier than the climax of “Rollerball“, but the best revenge Obama could have is simply to win. And he’s got a great example to follow, in that of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
