The Chutzpah of Calling Something by its Rightful Name

It is one thing for a blogger content with being "as insignificant as I should be" to suggest that the President of the United States may be clinically mad, even when the suggestion is backed up with the insights of Carl Gustav Jung; but it is quite another when a contender for nomination by the Democratic Party to run for that Presidential office makes the accusation to a major metropolitan newspaper, that is both news and chutzpah. As was reported last night by Associated Press, the contender in question is Dennis Kucinich; and the newspaper is The Philadelphia Inquirer. Kucinich made the remarks during an interview with the Inquirer's editorial board prior to the debate at Drexel University. Here are his words:

I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health. There's something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact.

I think it is important to note that Kucinich tried to keep his own words as moderate as possible without diminishing the seriousness of his accusation. For the Dennis-the-Menace reputation he has acquired since his days as Mayor of Cleveland, these particular words are not the outcry of some bratty kid trying to tell everyone else that the emperor has no clothes. Like the kid he is trying to get us to see things as they are; but he has taken a rhetorical approach that recognizes that, if he succeeds, it may be very hard for all of us to sustain the "real impact" of what he has said. Yes, this may just be the chutzpah of a would-be candidate whose numbers are so statistically insignificant that he will do anything to get on the national radar. However, even before he had declared that he would seek candidacy, Kucinich has tried to invoke his personal talent for plain speaking to bring our attention to serious truths, even when they are truths that "men prefer not to hear." In other words it is the chutzpah of saying what discretion advises against saying, even if it needs to be said.

Because Kucinich has been doing this for so long, I may be accused of having neglected him in the past for a Chutzpah of the Week award, to which I can only reply, "Mea culpa." I suppose my own editorial stance has shifted from focusing on the outrageously offensive in the interest of ridicule to calling out outrageousness with a more positive connotation. As I have previously suggested, this seems to be a consequence of the extent to which outrageously offensive acts seem to have become commonplace. We are as used to them in "real life" as we are when we see them in those all-too-popular slasher movies. They all but flood us; so, as is the case with the blood the Macbeth has shed, we are "Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er." My hope is that positive acts of chutzpah can give us all the will to "return," rather than "wade deeper." Kucinich has been trying to achieve this goal for some time, and it is about time that the Chutzpah of the Week award acknowledge his efforts.

As a final thought I think that Kucinich deserves credit for treating Tim Russert's UFO question during the Drexel debate with the laughableness it deserved. Once again he put aside the dictates of discretion, in this case by taking a page from the playbook of Stephen Colbert. By choosing to ask the question at all, Russert made it clear that he was more interested in entertainment than discourse; and Kucinich stood up to the challenge of playing on that particular field. He even came up with a punch line that put Russert on the defensive:

And also, you have to keep in mind that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO, and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush's presidency.

Carl Gustav Jung Takes on the Faith-Based

It has been quite some time since I have submitted a post that is basically a commonplace book entry. However, this morning I happened to be reading Jung's Psychological Types in my doctor's waiting room and one paragraph jumped out of me for what it said about the relationship between Christianity (and other systems of institutionalized religion) and the very nature of our consciousness. I therefore felt it important to "share with the group" this particular paragraph:

The relation of the individual to his fantasy is very largely conditioned by his relation to the unconscious in general, and this in turn is conditioned in particular by the spirit of the age. According to the degree of rationalism that prevails, the individual will be more disposed or less to have dealings with the unconscious and its products. Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individual as much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. Instead, religion offers stereotyped symbolic concepts that are meant to take the place of his unconscious once and for all. The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form. Religious teaching supplies, as it were, the final information about the "last things" and the world beyond human consciousness. Wherever we can observe a religion being born, we see how the doctrinal figures flow into the founder himself as revelations, in other words as concretizations of his unconscious fantasy. The forms welling up from his unconscious are declared to be universally valid and thus replace the individual fantasies of others. The evangelist Matthew has preserved for us a fragment of this process from the life of Christ: in the story of the temptation we see how the idea of kingship rises out of the founder's unconscious in the visionary form of the devil, who offer shim power over all the kingdoms of the earth. Had Christ misunderstood the fantasy and taken it concretely, there would have been one madman the more in the world. But he rejected the concretism of his fantasy and entered the world as a king to whom the kingdoms of heaven are subject. He was therefore no paranoiac, as the result also proved. The views advanced from time to time from the psychiatric side concerning the morbidity of Christ's psychology are nothing but ludicrous rationalistic twaddle, with no comprehension whatever of the meaning of such processes in the history of mankind.

We now live in an age of a President who, for all his professions of faith, seems to have been subjected to the same temptation that the devil offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Unfortunately, to invoke Jung's terminology, our President has embraced "the concretism of his fantasy," providing us with "one madman the more in the world;" and, as I have observed elsewhere, there is little you can do with a psychotic other than medicate him into a state of oblivion. Sadly, that may be the only way to perform damage control on a fantasy-made-concrete that has gotten out of hand.

A Narrative Approach to Exposition

Now that Fast Food Nation is available for viewing on Cinemax, it deserves a bit of reflection. After I saw Waking Life, I realized that Richard Linklater had a fascinating knack for taking expository material and presenting it through the narrative text type. Fast Food Nation began as an extended exposition by Eric Schlosser of the fast food industry and all the processing that takes place in order for you to each your cheap-and-quick burger. To the extent that this is about what happens in the meat processing stage of the supply chain, Linklater is following in the honored path of Upton Sinclair, who took the same approach to a narrative account of that same workplace in his novel The Jungle. My high school history teacher told us that President Theodore Roosevelt hit the ceiling when he read Sinclair's novel, and that led to the birth of the regulatory system for food and drugs that we take for granted today. I cannot imagine anyone in the White House hitting the ceiling after reading either Schlosser's book or seeing Linklater's film, but then I cannot imagine anyone in the White House taking any time to examine either the book or the film (and, worse yet, I am not sure I can imagine any of our current contenders for the White House doing anything different). However, what struck me the most about the film was that, from a point of view of "ancestry," it involved more than reminding us that things have not changed very much from the world of The Jungle. By examining the sale of fast food products, as well as their manufacturing, Fast Food Nation owes as much of a conceptual debt to Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop as it does to The Jungle; and, from the point of view of a dispassionate camera eye that obliges you to look at uncomfortable things, the overall mood of the film is not that different from Mondo Cane. Both of these "ancestors" were also expository; so Linklater's real gift resided in his being able to weave a variety of different narrative threads together into a fabric that covers all the bases of supply chain analysis, the domination of marketing strategy over all other concerns, the corruption of running the whole system off of cheap labor (bringing in another "ancestor," Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed), and the necessity of students and illegal immigrants, without whom the cheap labor strategy would be impossible. What may be most important is that Linklater takes a chillingly low-key approach to delivering his message. This film is clearly agitprop; but it is agitprop at its most effective, because you never see the soapbox on which Linklater stands nor do you feel that he is haranguing you into paying attention. He lets the narrative do all the work, and the narrative does so amazingly effectively, possibly because Schlosser assisted Linklater in developing the screenplay. There is nothing particularly pleasant about this film, and those who are already aware of the nation that fast food consumption has made will not find any surprises. The power is all in the rhetoric, but this is the sort of situation that needs the force of rhetoric behind it.

Reflecting on Ornette Coleman

Yesterday, in preparing for going to hear Ornette Coleman at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, I tried to explore the problem of what it meant to be a good listener to free jazz, particularly in the setting of a "live" performance. Having now heard Coleman and his group (an interesting combination of two acoustic basses, usually one bowed and one plucked, electric bass, and drums, along with an unnamed tenor player), I can now reflect on yesterday's thoughts about free jazz, Coleman's particular approach, and the listening challenge. It has been almost forty years since I last heard Coleman. At that time he had a trio with David Izenzon on bass (acoustic) and Charles Moffet on drums; and, in the course of the gig I heard, Coleman alternated between alto sax and violin. This time, while the violin was on stage, he never touched it but would occasionally put down his sax and play a few passages on trumpet (the instrument that, back in the Atlantic days, was played by Don Cherry).

This is probably as good a time as any to address one key criticism of Coleman, which is that anyone who tries to play several different instruments never cultivates the chops to play any one of them particularly well. (Eric Dolphy was subjected to similar criticism, as was Roland Kirk, who stirred up even more controversy by playing multiple instruments simultaneously.) In addressing this criticism it is probably best to separate the two basic idioms of Coleman's inventions. One is a frenetic burst of notes, sometimes reduced to brief gestures that end almost as soon as they begun but can also spin out into extended passages; these bear at least a distant family resemblance (which may or may not be intentional) to the "moment" style of composition that can be found in so many of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. (I have previously suggested that the influence may have been from jazz to Stockhausen, rather than from Stockhausen to jazz.) The other is more sustained, giving the impression of a single linear voice, in contrast to the more rapid-fire passages that can sound more like multiple voices in a hectic chorus. In those sustained linear passages Coleman's sound is a coarse one, a major departure from the polished smoothness that we associate with so many of the great saxophonists from any period; and he rarely plays such passages on other instruments. So we just have to accept the fact that Coleman is not particularly interested in that sound we associate with Johnny Hodges playing classics by the Duke and Billy Strayhorn. Rather, Coleman's primary focus is on those bursts of energy; and, when he plays that way, I have to wonder whether or not his recordings are part of that "secret stash" that I have fantasized that Stockhausen keeps hidden in his basement. Coleman may not deliver the smooth sustained tone; but his approach to rapid delivery can be awesome, whatever instrument he happens to be playing. Even more awesome is when another "melody player" (such as Don Cherry) could deliver that same passage in unison with him. This made the anonymity of last night's tenor player more than a little frustrating (yet another item on my list of frustrations with SFJAZZ), since he seemed to have a good sense of how to keep up with that unison playing.

Let me now revisit yesterday's exploration of how the medieval trivium can guide one in listening to performances like Coleman's. As I said, the logic "may involve little more than a chain of spontaneous associations 'in the moment;'" but those associations are still informed by past experiences. I have no idea how many of the works on last night's program were new; but I know "Free" well enough to recognize that I heard it early in the evening. However, since Coleman was not performing with Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins (let alone making a recording in 1959), even a "classic" like "Free" still had its own set of associations. If listening to jazz is a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation, then, at least early in the evening, the conversations were fresh and alive. The problem was that, while the gig lasted for only about 90 minutes, towards the end of the evening, I found myself wondering if the performers had run out of things to say. There was no questioning their ability to make interesting conversation; but that interest did not seem to sustain over longer durations, such as that of the Atlantic Free Jazz recording. On the other hand, if the logic began to flag a bit towards the end of the evening, all of the members of Coleman's ensemble kept their grammar on solid ground, at least in terms of managing the embellished material in the context of that flood of embellishment that is so much a part of Coleman's style. That command of grammar then sustained the rhetorical delivery; but, without the support of innovative logic, after a while the ear realizes that it has heard pretty much all that there is to say.

This last sentence may give the impression of harsh criticism, but that would overlook the realities of the performance situation. Coleman has been innovating for over forty years; so is it reasonable to expect that he keep up with those innovations every time he faces an audience, particularly an audience that, out of the necessity of the seating in the Masonic Center, is so remote from him? Not every gig can make that you-had-to-be-there bid for immortality; and the sad truth is that mass audiences rarely "connect" the way we expect in a more intimate club setting. So last night was not necessarily the best of listening experiences; but it still had more than enough to offer, particularly in demonstrating that there is still much to hear on a Coleman performance.

Strong Words in South Carolina

Having decided to keep riding the painted pony of Stephen Colbert on the merry-go-round ride of the South Carolina primary, our anonymous "E&P Staff" has at least decided to come up with some better quotations in today's Editor & Publisher dispatch. They also may be offering some insight into what makes Stephen run. If, indeed, the man is coming at this with little more than acting credentials, then we are at least obliged to figure out what script he is using. In that regard "E&P Staff" may have given us a clue:

Colbert, at the campus of the University of South Carolina today, told several hundred sign-waving fans that he'll take care of the rival state to the south. "I promise, if elected, I will crush the state of Georgia," Colbert said to the cheering crowd.

Colbert added, "Our peaches are more numerous than Georgia's. They are more juiciful."

Unfortunately, the script may not be familiar to Colbert supporters, who would probably dismiss it as before their time. The script I am referring to is for the early Woody Allen film, Bananas. Those of my generation may recall that this film depicts a Castro-like revolution in a fictitious Latin American country. While making strategic plans up in the mountains, this character has all the admirable qualities of a reformer determined to clean the muck of corruption out of the government. Once he gains power, however, he starts making all sorts of silly proclamations (or, in the spirit of the title of the film, he goes bananas). Colbert's speech at the University of South Carolina honors the spirit, if not the text, of the silliness that Woody Allen wrote for his Castro-from-cloud-cuckoo-land. The only difference is that, when Allen's fictitious character begins his blathering, the citizens of the fictitious country start looking at each other wondering if they have made a colossal mistake in supporting the recently-completed revolution. Colbert's audience, on the other hand, seems to have eaten it all up with the same enthusiasm they display for their peaches.

Fortunately, there is at least one group that is giving serious consideration to what is happening and what to do about it, John Edwards and his staff. It is not often that a state may experience a battle between two favorite sons; and Edwards camp seems to recognize that they do not want to embarrassment of being scooped, even in the name of postmodern theory. Thus, they did not waste any time when Colbert decided to question Edwards' South Carolina roots:

The truthiness is, as the candidate of Doritos, Colbert's hands are stained by corporate corruption and nacho cheese. John Edwards has never taken a dime from salty food lobbyists and America deserves a President who isn't in the pocket of the snack food special interests.

I think this amounts to a rather nice blend of the humorous and the serious. It is a not-too-subtle reminder that a major television personality remains major only as long as he or she brings eyeballs to commercials for tortilla chips (or potato chips or car insurance or Viagra or what-have-you). However often Colbert's rapier wit strikes the heart of his target, The Colbert Report will only stay on the air if its commercial supporters want to keep it there. Perhaps this is one reason why we have not heard Colbert fulminate very much about the other candidates being controlled by special interest groups, because he has his "minders," too!

With this move the Edwards team has reminded me that, while a strategy of postmodern resistance may be a good way to bring attention to the need for reform and while Colbert seems to be able to "play" this strategy very well, I, personally, would feel really bummed out if Colbert were to thrash Edwards in the South Carolina Democratic Party. Perhaps this is because I am still drawn to Edwards as a voice of reason among the Democratic contenders, even when I agree with Isaiah Berlin that the voice of reason is not necessarily the best voice for a political leader. Edwards may not have that "ruthlessness factor" that I wrote about on Thursday; but I still believe that he has more to offer the Democratic Party than Colbert does. I do not want to see him undermined; and, if Colbert is determined to take on a candidate in that candidate's home state, perhaps he should accept the fact that he is now a New Yorker and pick on Hillary Clinton!

Preparing for Ornette Coleman

This past summer SFJAZZ, the organization behind the semiannual San Francisco Jazz Festival, approached me through electronic mail with a request to participate in a survey. I do not know if this was because or in spite of the fact that I had not purchased any tickets from them for a couple of years, but I hoped that the survey would give me the opportunity to vent my displeasure with their offerings. It did, which meant that I was able to make the two points that I felt were most important:

1. For the most part their offerings ran the gamut from lame to insipid. I realize that SFJAZZ cannot take all of the blame for this. I agree with Gary Giddins' arguments as to why jazz just is not what it used to be. I have felt that way for at least fifteen years when, in a conversation, I happened to remark that the only saxophonists who interested me were now dead.
2. Too many of the events take place in the Nob Hill Masonic Center. This may not be the absolutely worst place to go for serious listening to music of any kind, but it is definitely a major contender. Again the fault does not lie entirely with SFJAZZ, since, if they are to get even close to making budgetary ends meet, they need at least one venue that will hold a large audience.

To some extent my complaints may be a variation on the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall about the two old ladies at a resort in the Catskills. The first says, "The food here is really terrible," to which the second replies, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"

I suppose what matters to me most is that Igor Stravinsky's injunction about the need to be a good listener, which I have cited in so many contexts, is equally applicable when it comes to jazz. This is particularly evident when we read documents about Lennie Tristano's approach to teaching jazz improvisation, which put considerable emphasis on listening to recordings of major jazz solos and then reproducing by ear, either by playing or singing what one had heard. Unfortunately, Stravinsky was probably not a particularly good listener of the jazz of his day, at least if we are to judge him by his efforts to invoke a "jazzy spirit" in some of his own compositions. Most of those works have merits of their own; but it would not surprise me to learn that Stravinsky, himself, had to live with the cold truth that "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

As a "reward" for the hard line I took in participating in the SFJAZZ survey, I was informed that I had "won" two complimentary tickets to the current Festival. I was given several options, most of which reflected that the Festival organizers either disagreed with or ignored my first point. However, Ornette Coleman was one of the options; so I made it clear to SFJAZZ that this was the only option that interested me. If tickets were not available, then they could just not bother with "rewarding" me, since making those two points was all that really mattered to me. However, the tickets were available; so tonight I shall once again brave the ghastly setting of the Masonic Center in search of another good listening experience.

I have been listening to Coleman for quite some time, going all the way back to when I heard him bring his trio to perform at MIT. This was not long after he had decided to perform some of his work on violin. Since then I have built up a modest collection of CDs (including the Atlantic anthology); and my ears keep making progress in finding their way around his work.

The San Francisco Chronicle tried to do some advance work in last Sunday's "Datebook." The result was not quite as aggravating as many of the classical and opera reviews that I tend to read there, but I am not sure that it contributed very much to the cause of good listening. Coleman is primarily associated with the "free jazz" movement, since Free Jazz was the title of the Atlantic recording that was released in September of 1961. The basic idea was that, while improvisation had traditionally been a matter of spinning out embellishments on a familiar tune (often so elaborate that the tune was barely recognized), a "free" improvisation would dispense with having any such tune as a foundation (however far in the background it may have receded). Historically speaking, Lenny Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh were already experimenting with doing this sort of thing about fifteen years before Atlantic released this recording; and, to be fair about my own listening history, my first taste of this technique came when I heard the impulse! recording of John Coltrane's "Ascension," recorded at a session in June of 1965. The Chronicle piece, on the other hand, tended to concentrate on comparing Coleman with Cecil Taylor, basically arguing that Coleman was easier to take because his notes were not as densely packed as Taylor's and they tended to play out in more "melodic" lines.

I would take this as a serious injustice to both Coleman and Taylor, but I think it illustrates why listening to free jazz is more challenging than listening to even the most highly embellished bebop solos. Once you kick away all the foundations, then you are, literally, free to take your playing anywhere you want. From an analytic point of view, this means that what you play is really only informed by your past experiences of playing and listening, whatever they may have been. Tristano, Taylor, Coleman, and Coltrane all had widely differing experiences. It makes little sense to compare them, nor to assume that my past experiences in listening to any of them will help me very much when I listen to Coleman tonight.

Does this mean that we really cannot be a good listener at a "live" performance of free jazz, whoever its creators may be? Does it all fly by too fast for our cognitive capabilities to keep up with it? To the extent that we may never tease out all the intricate interplay of detail that we can find in Wagner, this is probably the case; but who expects to hear Wagner at any jazz performance? (Yes, I know that Gerry Mulligan was good enough to tack the opening bassoon solo from Le Sacre on to the end of one of his improvisations; but listening to Stravinsky was not the point of that gig!) Nevertheless, I believe that our listening can still be guided by that medieval trivium that I continue to invoke. The logic may involve little more than a chain of spontaneous associations "in the moment;" but the performers have enough command of what they are doing to recognize the difference between the embellishing and the embellished and render a grammatical prioritizing of what they are playing. Finally, the issue of rhetoric is no different than it is in any other performance, addressing the problem of how to both attract and then hold the listener's attention, whether by devices of musical invention or by performances gestures that facilitate the ear finding its way around such a "free space." These three elements always guide us, whether through a microscopic moment captured by Webern or the impetuous forty-minute "ride" of the Atlantic Free Jazz recording; so they will be with me (as usual) when I hear Coleman "live" for the first time since my student days.

Stephen Colbert's Postmodern Electoral Strategy

My initial reaction to Stephen Colbert announcing his candidacy for the Presidency was supportive, but from sort of a "meta" view of current political practices:

Going on at great length about the impact of image makers on the political system just does not play that all well among the voting public. Demonstrating the role that image making plays, on the other hand, might have more of an effect. Perhaps Colbert has found the right way to get us all to look at the other candidates and ask what kind of an act each of them is playing. If this is the case, then I applaud his experiment but would like to remind him that there are now various regulations regarding how such experiments should be conducted when the subjects are human!

Unfortunately, most of the folks that Colbert is twitting are so entrenched in their behavior that they may not realize that their are being twitted. I offer as a case in point an article published by Editor & Publisher on Thursday evening, recently cited on Truthdig. This article, authored by "E&P Staff" appeared under the sort of headline that one would not associate with "America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry:"

New Poll Suggests Stephen Colbert Should Be Frontrunner Within a Month!

I have to confess that I had absolutely no idea how to react to this article. If it was meant as a gag, then it sorely lacked any of the style of delivery that makes Colbert (and, for that matter, Jon Stewart) attract such a following, in which case I would advice its anonymous author(s) to go back to their day job. However, if this article was a piece of “day job” work, then the are a few elements that would lead one to question its credibility. First of all is it accepted practice at Editor & Publisher to rely entirely on Huffington Post for sources? More importantly however, does the support for the headline lie solely in this one sentence?

If he keeps gaining over 10% a week, Colbert should be leading the field before November is out.

All campaign watchers know that this sort of momentum is a tricky phenomenon that never grows linearly. My conclusion, then, is that this is either a poorly written gag or an equally poorly written editorial, neither of which puts Editor & Publisher in a particularly good light.

On the other hand I think that Colbert comes out on the high side as a result of this journalistic blunder. Indeed, I strongly suspect that Colbert is playing the same sort of postmodernist game that I previously attributed to Pete Stark’s apology. If Stark’s use of the word “insignificant” represented an act of resistance (rather than opposition) “against a Congress whose normative practices undermine the democratic foundation that the Constitution tried to lay down for it” (as I previously wrote), then Colbert is calling on us all to resist an outmoded electoral process, which is also undermining our democratic foundation (as we saw all too well in both 2000 and 2004). Like the protagonist played by Robin Williams in Man of the Year, Colbert is smart enough to know that he would not do a particularly good job in the White House; but supporting him may be the most effective way for us to voice our resistance to a hopelessly broken electoral system. As they used to say in the Sixties, “If you’re not part of the solution, you can at least make the problem so bad that someone will have to fix it!”

Music for an Era?

Sometimes a piece of music becomes representative of a particular era. Beethoven's ninth symphony probably acquired an iconic status during the nineteenth century, due less to Beethoven's (many) merits than to the raising of public consciousness of Beethoven by Franz Liszt (with some assistance from Richard Wagner) within the context of what Isaiah Berlin called "the apotheosis of the Romantic Will." To some extent Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" is assuming a similar role for the twentieth century, having drawn upon the harrowing texts of Wilfred Owen, written from the trenches of the First World War and invoked to rededicate cathedrals destroyed in both England and Germany during the Second World War. We have not yet completed the first decade if the twenty-first century; and I find myself wondering whether or not Appomattox will play a similar role in representing its Zeitgeist. Ultimately, the opera is less about the conclusion of the Civil War than it is about the problem of discrimination that has yet to be resolved in relations between the races in the United States and looms with equal significance in just about every other part of the world. It is also interesting to note that while Beethoven's symphony stood as a celebration of the best of humanity, particularly as seen through the post-Enlightenment lenses of Romanticism, Philip Glass has followed Benjamin Britten's selection of the requiem structure as a framing of the time that Berlin would later call "the most terrible century in Western history." Through its flash-forwards Appomattox reminds us that we should mourn not only the blood shed during the Civil War but also the extent to which, in spite of Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, that blood was shed in vain and will continue to be shed, both literally in continuing acts of racial violence and figuratively in the growth of more insidious discriminatory practices.

Resolving yet another Mass Appeal Mess

The most important lesson I took away from The Money Game, which George Goodman wrote under the appropriately-chosen pseudonym of "Adam Smith," was that "the crowd is always wrong." While "Smith" invoked this rule to demonstrate the folly of investing by following the crowd, the rule certainly generalizes beyond the world of financial planning. Most recently we have seen it by comparing the opening-weekend box office numbers with the reviews of the films that were opening. On many occasions the film that grosses the most marbles has not even bothered to arrange a screening for critics, knowing full well that it will get trashed by "considered opinion;" but absence of knowledge does not prevent the crowd from gobbling up such tripe.

Unfortunately, going against the crowd can have its drawbacks, particularly when one does it in writing. Nevertheless, whatever the risks may be, I sometimes feel I need to do this in the arena of public performances. Last July I stuck my neck out to express a jaundiced opinion of Live Earth, but the most flack I ever caught was when I had the audacity to take a skeptical view of Bill Moyers and those who sail under him. If I have learned anything from these experiences, it is that it always helps have to have a supporting point of view in your intellectual knapsack, if only to reassure you that you are not alone in your unpopular opinions.

This brings me to the subject of Ken Burns. It is about time that I come clean and aver that, on every occasion that I have attempted to sample this guy's work on Public Television, I have succumbed to an irresistible urge to shut down the damned thing within fifteen minutes. Given the scale of most of his work, that makes for a pretty feeble statistical sample. However, my music composition teacher led me to appreciate that every gesture should direct the mind behind the ear towards what comes next; if the mind ceases to care about that, then the composition is a failure. There is no reason why this rule cannot be applied to film, whether fiction or documentary. In other words I find it very difficult to watch anything that Burns has made (including interviews I have seen him give) without feeling a numbing sensation in my mind that could care less about what the visual and auditory cortices happen to be feeding it.

The good news is that Chalmers Johnson (who I happen to feel writes excellently and speaks at the same level of quality, whether in delivering a lecture or being subjected to an interview) seems to have helped me identify just why Burns' products (what else can I call them?) have this effect on my mind. Ironically, Johnson did this in the book review he prepared for Truthdig concerning the posthumously-published book by David Halberstam about the Korean War, The Coldest Winter. For all of the well-deserved praise that Johnson offers over the best parts of this book, he still offers a paragraph of annoyance:

One aspect of Halberstam’s commitment as a historian and the consequent effect on his writing must be dealt with at the outset and then put aside. That is what he conceives of as his duty to present a populist portrayal of the ordinary soldier in day-to-day, sometimes hand-to-hand, combat and endless homilies on courage, fear, leadership, stamina, cowardice and any other emotions and qualities that might be encountered on the battlefield. I call this the Ken Burns-Tom Brokaw school of writing, hero worship, Great Generationism and military narcissism. Even in ordinary doses it is unimaginably tedious and boring. The amount of it in this 700-page book sometimes generated in me a deep regret that I had agreed to write this review.

Reading this made me realize that Ken Burns could turn any subject, whether war, baseball, or (one of my most sacred cows) jazz, into an orgy of his own narcissism, as if his unconstrained enthusiasm for his observations (it is impossible for me to call them insights) is reason enough for the rest of us to be equally enthusiastic.

That such an approach to delivering content should attract so many eyeballs to Public Television (not to mention DVD collaterals) should not be a surprise. Christopher Lasch wrote about our society as a "culture of narcissism;" and, as I recently reported, Charles Taylor has been exploring the same sort of social trend in developing his concept of "culture death." I shudder to think that the very mind-numbing quality that turned me away from Burns' work is what attracts the bulk of his following, a culture that does not care about where events and ideas lead but is content to wallow in each moment with a comfortable reassurance that the next moment will be just as pleasing. As I said, my most sacred cow to fall victim to the Burns treatment was jazz; and (to choose as an example a performer who always seemed to be embraced by the general public) I find it hard to believe that Louis Armstrong would have had much tolerance for that kind of comfortable reassurance from either those who played with him or those who listened to him.

APPOMATTOX Revisited

My first post about Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera was written in haste, because I felt it was necessary to set down my thoughts before going off to hear the second concert in András Schiff's cycle of the all of the Beethoven piano sonatas. However, I concluded with some remarks as to whether or not the production had "settled" and suggested that I would try to see the opera a second time. I was therefore glad to find myself with a ticket to the final performance last night, not only because of the question of how well the production had "converged" but also because I think it is terribly unfair that new works end up getting reviewed on the basis of a single performance experience. The evening also provided me with an opportunity to hear the music conducted by Assistant Conductor Sara Jobin. I have had little (if any) exposure to Ms. Jobin's work. However, I caught the tail end of her pre-performance talk the last time I saw this opera; and she won me over at a level of understanding with her concluding remarks about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This is probably the institution that best "gets" that "Civil War Without End" message that I stressed in my last post. I learned about SPLC several decades ago, when I first started donating to their Klanwatch effort; and they continue to be a valuable resource for my wife's teaching activities. I am now happy to report that I was as pleased with Ms. Jobin's command of Philip Glass' score as I was with her politics!

Having dealt with one relatively peripheral matter, let me now turn to the substance of that score, which Ms. Jobin conducted as well as Glass expert Dennis Russell Davies at the first performance I attended. I do not think I read a single review of Appomattox that, at some point, did not invoke the noun "monotony," or one of its variants, in describing Glass' music. I am not going to single out any of those critics, but I think they all need to be haunted by the ghost of Igor Stravinsky haranguing them on the importance of being a good listener. Yes, ostinato plays a significant role in the grammar of Glass' compositions; but ostinato does not imply monotony. No one seems to have a problem when Beethoven uses it as heavily as he does in his sixth symphony; so why must every self-professed expert get on Glass' case about it? If we really want to get at how we should be listening to this music, we need to begin by asking what that music is. Only then can we decide whether or not we want to pick a fight with the composer over his grammatical style.

Simply put, the score for Appomattox is a dirge, very much in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary sense of "a slow mournful song." Having raised Stravinsky's ghost, at this point I think it is important to note that Stravinsky once composed a ballet score that took the concept of a dirge and sustained it for over half an hour. The ballet was "Orpheus;" and over that sustained period the orchestra "raises its voice" only once, at the moment when Orpheus looks back and Eurydice is pulled back to Hades. The last time I heard this music performed, that one moment scared the hell out of me. From this experience I realized that a dirge is all about the tension that comes with trying to control grief and that the release of that tension has to be managed scrupulously in order for the music to have the strongest dramatic impact.

I do not know how familiar Glass is with this particular ballet, but there is no doubt in my mind that he understands this nature of the dirge. It is all about tension and release, and ostinato provides a device through which Glass controls our feelings of tension. As far as I am concerned, he does this very well, well enough to expand Stravinsky's half-hour scale to two-and-a-half hours; and if none of the critics I read seem to have "gotten" this point, then the loss is theirs! In this respect I think it is also important to note that the entire cast (along with the orchestra) seems to have "gotten" this sense of tension and release to such an extent that some of the more obvious instances (such as the passing of Grant's migraine) almost (but not quite) intrude on the subtle undercurrents of the music.

Lest some readers think that I am theorizing excessively in defense of Glass, the dirge theme of this opera confronts us in the staging of the Prologue. Having opened with the "tragic perspective" of the Civil War through the words of Julia Grant, Mary Curtis Lee, and Mary Todd Lincoln, we are then confronted with a full chorus of women in mourning, each of whom places a portrait of a fallen soldier at the foot of the platform on which most of the action will take place. Those portraits remain there for the entire opera. They are the ghosts of the fallen, bearing witness to the final blood sacrifice at Richmond, the diplomatic dance of resolving a surrender, and those flash-forwards that remind us of how little was settled at Appomattox. We then conclude with Julia Grant reminding us once again of the tragic nature of the war, set now in the context of Lincoln's pessimistic observation that human nature dictates that what occurs will eventually reoccur (as those flash-forwards have already demonstrated).

To the extent that dirge is also about "disciplined understatement," I think it is important to credit Christopher Hampton for the libretto. There are those who seemed to feel that the text was too "talky;" but it was actually extremely spare. The result was that every word mattered and, to return to my approach to Stravinsky, voices are raised seldom but always with devastating impact, particularly in that final solo based on the words of Edgar Ray Killen.

So last night the curtain descended on Appomattox for the final time. What will happen now? Contemporary operas have a hard time getting programmed. Look at how long it has taken for the Metropolitan Opera to get around to performing Satyagraha. This opera is too important for such neglect. I just hope that the directors of other American opera companies "get the message" about Appomattox and keep it from fading into the obscurity of so many other recent works.

The Ruthlessness Factor

My conjecture that the Republicans treated Pete Stark as a sign of vulnerability in Democratic leadership, which they could then exploit in going after Nancy Pelosi, seems to have attracted some attention over at Truthdig. Reader Outraged now seems convinced that the Republicans are planting moles among the Democrats, so they can plan and implement further attacks. I certainly agree that the concept of a "loyal opposition" has become about as quaint and outmoded as the concept of "public trust;" but I suspect that the adversarial relationship between Republican and Democrats has not (yet?) escalated to a level of Cold War thinking. Everyone has vulnerabilities; but, in a town that has as many off-the-record blabbermouths as the District, you do not need undercover agents to figure out what they are!

Rather, I think it is just that the era of the "loyal opposition" has given way to an era of overt ruthlessness; and I’m afraid the problem is that the Republicans are just a lot better at that overt ruthlessness than the Democrats are when it comes to playing power games; and ruthlessness trumps reasoned deliberation in the face of complex problems every time. Indeed, "ruthless" is the adjective that dare not speak its name in Isaiah Berlin's essay on "Political Judgement;" but there is no doubt that it is lurking in the subtext. After all, Bismarck is one of Berlin's prime examples; and he was about as ruthless as they get.

This is not to say that ruthlessness was not a factor in the good old days of "loyal oppositions;" and it is not as if Democrats have always been naive about ruthlessness. What, after all, was behind LBJ's famous "I've got his pecker in my pocket" metaphor? The problem seems to be that inter-party ruthlessness now undermines deliberation, and one of the most important contributions that the Congress makes to the balance of powers is its capacity for deliberation. However, if we have now slipped down to the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, dispensing with deliberation in favor of acting for immediate self-gratification, then Eugene Robinson's editorial last June about the need for a "brainiac president" is way off the mark. After all, the brainiac was always the first kid to get the crap beaten out of him by the school bullies; or, in a more innocuous setting, the brainiac is the victim of Lucy van Pelt in Peanuts, who once said, "He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him."

So this brings me back to yesterday's agonizing over the extent of the corruption of the body politic and the need for the how-did-we-get-in-this-mess question. One explanation may be that ruthlessness trumps deliberation because it is far more entertaining. After all, how many people actually watch the C-SPAN coverage of the Congress, compared to the number of people who watched Glenn Beck deliver his serves-them-right fulmination over the victims of the California fires? For that matter, how large an audience did Don Imus attract for doing the very things that eventually got him kicked off the air? In the language of the preceding paragraph, in the business of mass media, the market for school bullies is always going to dwarf the market for brainiacs; and, like it or not, political decisions and actions now have far more to do with what "sells" than with the subtle questions that arise in the course of deliberation. Whether or not this is the government we deserve, it certainly appears to be the government we want!

It's Not just about Chutzpah

Could it be that there is more to the report of Representative Pete Stark's apology on the House floor than the mainstream media (with their shock troops of pundits) want us to believe? Yesterday I tried to address this story in terms of whether or not Stark's Chutzpah of the Week award needed to be recalled; but this has always just been my own strategy for using ridicule, rather than indignation, as a way to cope with horrors that are too depressing to confront by any other means. Nevertheless, I started to sidle up to those horrors when I suggested that the text of Stark's apology could be read as an act of resistance (in the postmodern sense of this word) against a Congress whose normative practices undermine the democratic foundation that the Constitution tried to lay down for it. Today I feel a need for an even bolder confrontation with how bad things may be.

After doing some more background reading yesterday, it occurred to me that the Executive thugs could care less about Stark. Their real target is Pelosi, and nothing pleases them more than finding the weak spots in her leadership and going after them with long and sharp knives. The point is that they can attack Pelosi by denying her access to contact with the Executive branch, just the same way that they deny dissenting journalists access to the White House Press Room. Every now and then they need to remind Pelosi who is really in charge to keep her in line, and she is then discredited in public opinion when she dances to their tune. I suspect that my charge yesterday against the Congress was too specific. The undermining that is taking place is hardly restricted to the Congress. The corruption that grew within the Executive has now metabolized in the other two branches; and the whole “body politic” may never make it out of Intensive Care.

Chutzpah Denied?

So Truthdig has reported (with video to verify) that today Representative Pete Stark apologized, from the House floor, "to Bush, his family, the troops and his congressional colleagues." Does this mean that his Chutzpah of the Week award needs to be recalled? What if Stark was actually pulling a postmodern sucker punch on his fellow Representatives? The thing is that, having "done the right thing by the offended parties," Stark then concluded his speech by hoping that he could now go back to being "as insignificant as I should be;" and I would like to take this phrase as a hoisting (albeit at bit cryptic) of his true colors. The adjective "insignificant" can be read as an act of resistance (in the postmodern sense of this word) against a Congress whose normative practices undermine the democratic foundation that the Constitution tried to lay down for it. Perhaps I am being too generous to the man, but I would say that Stark took his lumps by giving out a few of his own! His award still stands, even if he may now have to hide it in a closet!

Ecuadorian Chutzpah

Once again, it is a bit early in the week to be homing in on the Chutzpah award. However, since the news just seems to keep getting worse, I find myself more and more attracted to those who invoke chutzpah with a positive connotation. Thus, unless a more worthy candidate comes along before the end of the week, I am prepared to grant this week's award to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. This comes with an Honorable Mention award (yes, I know, the first of its kind) to Amy Goodman, whose news headlines on Democracy Now this morning provided the only coverage I could find of why President Correa deserves the award:

Ecuador Refuses to Renew Lease for U.S. Military Base
Meanwhile a dispute continues over a U.S. military base in Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has refused to renew Washington's lease on the Manta air base. In an interview with Reuters Correa said he would renew the lease on one condition -- the United States allow Ecuador to build a military base in Miami. Correa said: "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United States." It is estimated that United States has over 700 military bases in foreign countries.

I have no idea why this story did not show up on the Reuters RSS feed for International News. However, regular readers have seen enough accounts of how all is not well in the Reuters garden; so this particular lapse should come as no surprise. So thank you, Amy, for not letting this story languish on the cutting-room floor; and thank you (oh so much), President Correa, for taking just one symptom of American imperialism and shoving it back into the imperialist faces!

A Queen of the Night to Remember

The Artist Profiles in the program for the new San Francisco Opera production of The Magic Flute (shared with the Los Angeles Opera) described Erika Miklósa as "Sought internationally for her interpretation of the Queen of the Night." It is easy to see why she is so much in demand, as she is, without a doubt, the first coloratura I have actually witnessed who gave the impression of being comfortable with the demands of the role that make it so notorious. I first came to know this music through an old Herbert von Karajan recording on which Wilma Lipp sang the part with an effortlessness that I was too young to appreciate. (The same can be said of George London's performance of Sarastro on that recording.) In many ways this is the ultimate high-wire act; and most audiences tend to be satisfied as long as all the notes are in the right place at the right time. Miklósa convinced us that, for her, performing a solo, no matter how demanding it may be, had to be more than acrobatics. Whether her approach to modulating the dynamics of her delivery to provide the emotional character supported by the text was her own conception or whether she worked it out in conjunction with conductor Donald Runnicles, she rescued this poor Queen from her usual flat stereotyping. Indeed, when one gets beyond those acrobatics, one appreciates the complementary relationship between the (astral?) heights of her cadenzas and the (earthy?) depths of Sarastro's low notes. So Miklósa and bass Georg Zeppenfeld (making his American opera debut) perfectly nailed the musical representation of the dialectical opposition of their respective characters.

For all that, however, we should remember that this opera was first offered as what might best be described as "suburban entertainment." Librettist Emmanuel Schikaneder was not after the insights into the multifaceted human heart that Lorenzo da Ponte had provided Mozart for Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and (without a doubt, the deepest of all) Così fan tutte. The comedy directs low blows at women and blacks, the characters are basically made out of cardboard, and the action freezes to allow the characters to deliver fortune-cookie style moral precepts with a frequency that would be annoying were the music not so wonderful. Making this opera "work" on the stage is no easy matter; and the directors who do it best tend to apply an it-is-what-it-is strategy. Peter Hall departed a bit from this approach, most notably by changing Monostatos' color to green, leaving us to wonder if Schikaneder's text for "Alles fühlt der Liebe Freunden" should not have been changed to "It isn't easy being green;" and most of the demeaning text about women was dismissed. As to the volt face of the plot line, when the point of view shifts from the Queen of the Night to Sarastro, Hall did not try to tease out any underlying logic, because, at the end of the day, the logic really is not there in the first place. (I do remember one production, though, that tried to suggest that the serpent pursuing Tamino at the beginning of the opera was actually put there by the Queen of the Night.)

So, if we are to chuck the logic and enjoy the spectacle, then it is enough to enjoy Mozart's music (easy enough when it is under the control of a conductor like Runnicles getting every voice on stage and every instrumentalist in the bit to deliver at peak performance) and drink in all the eccentricities of the design by Gerald Scarfe. These days the design for The Magic Flute seems to be all about the animals. Why else would the Met bring in the director of The Lion King for the job? The cover of the program book prepared us for the fact that Scarfe had a taste for the chimerical, covering a scale from an oversized ostrich with the neck and head of a giraffe down to a penguin that could have come out of Happy Feet had it not had the head of a crocodile. The cover, however, did not prepare us for the penguin-crocodile having red sneakers, which was a very nice touch, indeed.

The cast of The Magic Flute is too large to reduce crediting every voice in laundry-list style. However, I was particularly struck by a last-minute cast change that offered "auxiliary" interest beyond the coupling of Miklósa and Zeppenfeld, which I found so interesting. The Speaker, who provides Tamino with his first impression of Sarastro's realm, was sung by Philip Skinner. It was not just that I was pleased with the quality of Skinner's voice but that I remembered him from last week, when he scared the hell out of most of the audience in his performance as Edgar Ray Killen in Appomattox. Here is someone with both vocal and acting chops for an operatic repertoire that has become as broad as it now is. I look forward to seeing what other elements of performance he brings to the stage of the War Memorial Opera House.

Another Raucous Night of Classical Music

I suspect that many of my readers may have been a bit surprised at my recent invocation of the adjective "raucous" in association with Johannes Brahms. Personally, I would have anticipated that it would be even harder to associate that adjective with conductor Kurt Masur, whom I have always associated with grace and refinement; but I can think of no better adjective to embrace the program he prepared for his visit to the San Francisco Symphony. Masur made it clear that he could have just as much fun with his work as the next guy without in any way compromising the disciplined technique that his particular work demands. I suppose I should not be surprised, since, in the concert he prepared for the Symphony last year, he had no trouble cutting loose in a wild and wooly reading of Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche;" but last night's concert at Davies Symphony Hall made the Strauss performance seem tame by comparison.

Perhaps Masur thought that he should do something in keeping with the fact that Halloween is just around the corner. This seems to be the best explanation for his opening the concert with Franz Liszt's "Totentanz" with piano soloist Louis Lortie. Larry Rothe's essay in the program book may have opted for covering up this piece as a "guilty pleasure;" but I think Seth Montfort came closer to the mark with his "Liszt in Leather" metaphor, which he invoked earlier this month at the Grand Opening Gala for the Russian River Performing Arts Center and Conservatory. On the surface this is an extended series of variations on two of the phrases from the "Dies Irae" chant in the Liber Usualis; but, once we get beyond any formal association with the text of the Requiem Mass, we are left with one of the best examples of that kick-ass exhibitionism that earned Liszt the reputation (notoriety?) of the ultimate piano virtuoso of the nineteenth century. Of course there was nothing new in those days with taking the simplest fragment of material and pushing it for all it was worth (and then some). Liszt himself must have been intimately acquainted with how Beethoven had inflated Diabelli's trivial little waltz into 33 variations. Only a year after "Totentanz," Brahms would publish his own extended set of variations on a Paganini caprice; and, given Brahms' tendency to invoke the adjective "Lisztich" when talking about excessive bad taste, we have to wonder if hearing "Totentanz" had provoked him into his Paganini project.

None of this should retract from the fact that "Totentanz" offers one of the best occasions for unadulterated riotous fun. It is one of those works that starts loud and (with occasional pauses to catch its breath) keeps getting louder. Lortie was able to summon all of the energy and technique necessary to pull off the stunt with aplomb, and Masur was there with orchestral reinforcement. If the second-chair second violinist, sitting no more than a few yards from Lortie, was having a lot of trouble keeping a straight face through the whole affair, he was far from the only one. When the work finally concluded, I realized that I was not applauding because I had doubled over in uncontrolled fits of laughter. I would take issue with Rothe, though, because I felt absolutely no guilt in the pleasure I derived from this experience!

Perhaps the most important lesson from this experience is that a virtuoso pianist could drive an audience in 1865 as crazy as a rock star can today, and that tradition was already firmly in place when Liszt was making his reputation. "Totentanz" was followed by Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy," which predates it by little more than half a century but is basically a similar take on virtuoso exhibitionism. It begins with an extended solo piano improvisation, although Robert Levin is probably the only pianist who has experimented with recording improvisations of his own in place of what Beethoven ultimately set down for publication. This is followed by a theme-and-variations form in which more and more resources are engaged. In the first phase the resources are orchestral; and, in this case, the orchestra is far more than reinforcing backup for the pianist. Indeed, one of the more intriguing variations is for string quartet, played by the first chairs of the two violin, viola, and cello sections; and another variation has an extended obbligato passage for solo cello that reminds us how much Beethoven must have loved this instrument (as if his five sonatas were not enough of a reminder). Having fully developed the orchestral resources, the work finally lives up to its name, bringing in a full chorus with six solo voices. This was where we finally got to enjoy Mazur's chops, because he had a keen sense of making the entire work an extended crescendo. Thus, as the work finally barreled into its coda, Mazur kept us on the edge of the seat by eliciting slight swells, just to let us know that the build-up was still proceeding.

The "Choral Fantasy" is far from Beethoven at his best. Those who view it as an exercise that would prepare him for his ninth symphony probably have a good point. So listening to it is a bit like reading Stephen Hero after one has begun to get one's mind around Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is good to have both in the historical record, but the latter work still dwarfs the former. Nevertheless, it was clear that Mazur wanted to conduct the work on its own terms, regardless of whether it should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The result was another perfectly-rendered instance of raucous virtuosity, but from a time when the raucous had not quite escalated to the degree that Liszt would achieve.

The intermission was followed by a performance of the cantata that Serge Prokofiev prepared from the music he wrote for the soundtrack of Sergei Eisenstein's film, Alexander Nevsky. I have to confess that I still cannot get enough of this film; and, in the context of my generally cool attitude towards Prokofiev, I feel that the film score may be one of his best pieces of work. This is not due to any particularly outstanding efforts at compositional innovation but for the way in which he worked with a studio orchestra to prepare an effective soundtrack at a time when sound recording was still extremely primitive. Prokofiev recognized that delicacy was just not going to register with the recording process; so he drew heavily on loud brass and, in so doing, managed to develop a broad emotional palette from what would have seemed a limited set of resources. In fairness to Eisenstein, that palette probably owes as much to the visuals as to the music; but my point is that Prokofiev-the-team-player seems to have emerged as more of a "firebrand" than Prokofiev-the-composer.

The cantata, on the other hand, is a radically different piece of work. The orchestral palette is far broader, and Prokofiev works it all with a keen ear. Single instruments and small groups carry just as much weight as the great masses of growling brass (although, of course, it was all that growling that maintained the raucous spirit of the evening). What particularly interested me was the rather sparing use that Prokofiev made of sopranos, relying much more on an alto-tenor-bass mix to achieve dark colors. As to the overall compositional structure, it really helps to know the film. The basic "language" of the score is relatively limited and involves far more repetition than development (as if we had not yet had our fill of extended development in the first half of this concert). Thus, as was the case with that solo cello work by Kaija Saariaho, which I recently heard at the San Francisco Conservatory, the cantata is basically an extended exercise in sonorities and how to listen to them. On these terms Prokofiev provided us with more than ample material to refine our listening skills; and Masur had no trouble eliciting every fleck of color from the orchestra, making sure that each was situated in its proper place and time.

Unfortunate Timing

András Schiff's cycle of the all of the Beethoven piano sonatas seems to be inspiring me to review my background knowledge of Beethoven, even to the point of consulting my copy of Thayer's Life of Beethoven, which I have not previously done very much. One reference in Thayer that struck me was to "the glorious series of sonatas" from the years 1798 and 1799. For Thayer this series began with the Opus 10 set, continued through the Opus 13 "Pathétique," and concluded with the two Opus 14 sonatas. Thus, Schiff's second recital launched us into this series; but the way in which the cycle has been scheduled means that we shall have to wait for Opus 14 until April. This is an unfortunate lapse of time for anyone other than myself interested in following the thread of Beethoven's creative development!

I am sure there are any number of explanations for why things turned out this way. However, it does raise the question of why such a project should be scheduled in the first place, particularly from the point of view of the more general audience, which is probably not interested in doing any background research or trying to take a context-based approach to listening. Is it just something to be done for the sake of doing it? In that case it is worth remembering what the Japanese say about climbing Mount Fuji: "There are two kinds of fools: those who have never climbed Fuji and those who have climbed it more than once." However, I would argue that this precept is more applicable to a live performance of Kaikhosru Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum than to the complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas, simply because the latter are more likely to inform us about practices of good listening, even on repeated experiences, than the former, which is little more than an athletic accomplishment.

I suspect that, where general audiences are involved, this kind of "cycle programming" provides an interesting bridge between the experience of the "live" performance and the experience of listening to recorded performances. After all, it is not particularly difficult to find box sets of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas; and I would not be surprised to find collectors who have amassed several of these sets reflecting performances of a variety of markedly different pianists. In other words it is not out of the question to assume familiarity with the full cycle, if only through a CD collection; so why not enhance that familiarity with an opportunity to hear them all in a "live" setting? From that point of view, this is yet another way to demonstrate that no recording, no matter how well it has been produced, can ever substitute for "the real thing;" and why not make that point "in the large" for all of the Beethoven piano sonatas, rather than confining it to the program of a single recital? If the realities of what a professional pianist has to do in order to schedule such an event then end up interrupting a "glorious series of sonatas," then that is not an unreasonable price to pay for such an enjoyable listening opportunity.

More on the Beethoven-Bach Connection

I attended the Menachem Pressler Master Class and recital with a friend who has been a piano teacher for many years and whose opinion I greatly respect. Since, like myself, she attended the first two concerts in András Schiff's cycle of the all of the Beethoven piano sonatas, I decided to raise that question of the extent to which that Bach C Minor keyboard partita could be viewed as a predecessor of Beethoven's Opus 13 "Pathétique" sonata. (She has read some of my blog posts; but, since she does not use a computer, she does not read them regularly. So she had not seen my position on this matter, which is that I did not really buy into the connection Schiff was trying to demonstrate.) Her position was that it was clear as day that the connection was there, delivered in that dismissing tone that would wither away anyone presumptuous enough to think otherwise. Naturally, this set me to thinking (defensively?) more about my own position; and I have decided to reframe my opinion in terms of the typical rabbinical it-is-and-it-isn't strategy. Now let me try to make a case that I am neither caving nor waffling.

First of all, I still hold to my position that the entire Bach partita does not serve as a model for the entire Beethoven sonata; and I think my friend agrees with me on that count. So that is the it-isn't part of the argument. Where, then, lies the it-is part? I would argue that it lies in the fact that the opening "Sinfonia" of the Bach partita is an "overture in the French style," characterized particularly by the dotted rhythms of the opening slow section (marked both "Grave" and "Adagio" in the Alte Ausgabe). Bach had a great love of this style, and it even found its way into the sixteenth of his "Goldberg" variations.

This brings us to the "Pathétique" sonata. This sonata also opens with a "Grave" section in dotted rhythms, dotted sixteenths, in fact, just as in the Bach partita; but the analogy quickly breaks down after that. The Bach "Sinfonia" is a multi-section overture: The "Grave" introduction is followed by an "Andante" two-part invention with a cadenza that leads into a concluding two-voice fugue. The Beethoven sonata, on the other hand, takes, as its point of departure, the model of an Allegro first movement having a slow introduction, except that, in this particular sonata, the introductory material recurs throughout the movement, even in the coda. This is, in no sense of the concept, a "French style overture." Rather, it is an exploration into new ways to structure a piano sonata, just as the Opus 2 sonatas explored taking new approaches to models that Haydn had previously developed. Indeed, the very idea of the slow introduction, which is probably invoked most classically in the first movement of the first symphony (Opus 26), does not reappear in the piano sonata cycle until the second sonata of the Opus 31 set (the one that supposedly has a connection to Shakespeare's Tempest), where it is almost a fragment and recurs in a matter similar to that established in the "Pathétique." To the best of my knowledge, Beethoven never drew upon this French overture model, even in his own monumental collection of variations on Diabelli's theme. In other words even the it-is part of the argument is fraught with so many qualifications that the association may be too weak to signify.

So should I have been firmer in holding my ground? What really came out of my disagreement with my friend was an urge to do some homework that I probably should have done before challenging the point that Schiff was trying to make. Besides, this was not an exercise in winning arguments but just another take on that question of how we can be good listeners; and, as I have tried to demonstrate with the Beethoven-Schubert connection, good listening is context-based listening. Thus, the real question we should be considering is where Bach was situated in Beethoven's context. One way to address this question is to consult Thayer's Life of Beethoven, where we find a citation of notices by Ferdinand Ries, which acknowledges that Beethoven had a high opinion of Bach; but that same notice also states that he had a higher value of Mozart and Handel! Schiff, on the other hand as a performer, clearly has a very high opinion of Bach; so I have to wonder if the connection he tried to demonstrate was ultimately a matter of Schiff translating his own love of Bach into his worldview of Beethoven!

The Jokes Keep Coming!

Having taken so much pleasure in the Master Class that Menahem Pressler gave on Tuesday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I was looking forward to his appearance at the Chamber Music Masters concert last night. I like the way in which the Conservatory tends to structure these events. The "guest" (in this case Pressler) performs with both faculty and students; and a students-only performance usually gets sandwiched between two appearances by that "guest." In this case the middle of the concert was a string quartet of students playing the single-movement (structured in three sections without any breaks) Opus 138 string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich. Since the "sandwiching" compositions went for a light touch and with (both gentle and raucous) wit, all of the "weight" of the evening resided between the two slices of bread. The members of the quartet (violins Eric Chin and Emily Nenninger, viola Matthew Davies, and cello Samsun Van Loon) were definitely up to the seriousness of their task and had a good sense of how to deliver the three sections as an integrated da capo whole. Written five years before the end of Shostakovich's life, this was very much a meditation on death; and, while the program notes dwelled on pain and grief, I felt that this was a work in which Shostakovich had gotten beyond the need for the sharp crypto-irony that had enabled him to survive under Stalin. This was the retrospective view of a survivor of nightmares that escaped the confines of the dream world; and, for me at least, this particularly performance was more about a Kübler-Ross approach to an acceptance of death, rather than a reaction of depression or anger.

By leaving Shostakovich to the students, Pressler was free to deal with the lighter side of things, first in the D. 574 violin sonata of Franz Schubert and then in the Opus 25 piano quartet by Johannes Brahms. These two works represented, respectively, what, in the previous paragraph, I called "gentle and raucous" approaches to wit. Indeed, the wit of the Schubert sonata is very much the wit of those Opus 10 piano sonatas of Beethoven that András Schiff played this past Sunday. Recall, that I had already suggested that the second of these piano sonatas probably had an impact on Schubert's compositions for solo piano; but the violin sonata had more to do with picking up on what I had called Beethoven's sense of play in the Opus 10 sonatas. Pressler clearly understood that sense of play; you could see it in his entire body. Unfortunately, violin faculty member Axel Strauss did not seem to grasp the concept; and this undermined the chamber music ideal of a small number of musicians performing as one.

On the other hand the musicians who joined Pressler for the Brahms piano quartet, violin faculty member Ian Swensen and students Daniel Jang (viola) and Erin Wang (cello), all agreed on the more raucous wit of what they were playing. This kind of raucousness is most apparent in the final "Rondo alla Zingarese" ("Gypsy") movement, which is about as over-the-top as Brahms ever got (leaving it only to the Schoenberg orchestration to take things even further over the top); but there is nothing restrained about the other three movements, particularly when the serenity of the "Andante con moto" third movement gets interrupted by a puffed-up parade that seems to have more to do with Bismarck than with Brahms. Needless to say, this was the sort of performance that makes an audience leap to its feet at the final note; and it was good to see two of the Conservatory students share in the fun of it all. Pressler is a regular visitor to the Conservatory; but this was my first chance to see him "in action" there. Between the Master Class and the recital, I just hope it is not my last.

Trying to Save the Sinking S-CHIP with Chutzpah

Returning home from a concert last night, I flipped on the C-SPAN Radio channel on my XM receiver in the hope of hearing some of the House debate that preceded the failure to override the President's veto of the S-CHIP legislation. What I heard was a side show over an attack against California Representative Pete Stark, demanding that he retract remarks he made in the course of the debate. Unfortunately, I fell asleep before I was able to determine what this argument was all about; but Erica Werner's report in this morning's Chicago Sun-Times has resolved the matter for me. In so doing she has provided me with the necessary data to present Pete Stark with the Chutzpah of the Week award, recognizing, once again, that chutzpah can be invoked in a positive way. I take considerable comfort in doing this, because this was certainly one of the more depressing week's for news readers; so Stark's straight talk directed at a dead moose on the table that both houses of Congress keep doing their best to ignore was more than a little refreshing.

For those unfamiliar with what happened yesterday, these are the words that triggered a demand for retraction:

You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.

The demand for retraction was made by House Minority Leader John Boehner in the following words, which, true to the wisdom of Ambrose Bierce, demonstrated a patriotism that is the first refuge of a scoundrel:

Congressman Stark's statement dishonors not only the commander in chief, but the thousands of courageous men and women of America's armed forces who believe in their mission and are putting their lives on the line for our freedom and security.

According to Ms. Werner, "A White House representative was not immediately available to respond to Stark's comment." She also reported that Stark responded to Boehner by sticking to his guns:

Instead of retraction or apology the statement Stark issued in response to Boehner just offered more criticism of the ''chicken hawks in Congress who vote to deny children health care.'' Stark also expressed respect for the troops.

Stark thus deserves his award not only for the chutzpah of the initial act but also for the chutzpah of defending that act. My only regret is that the award is a virtual one, because I would really like to send him something physical that he can display with pride in his office in the District!

Enterprise Thinking about Health Services

Marissa Meyer is in good company. According to Eric Auchard's Reuters report, Google's vice president of Search Products & User Experience addressed the Web 2.0 Summit on the subject of her company's efforts to deal with health information products, saying the following:

We do have a broad interest in this area. It will start with search.

By saying this, she has at least implied that health care is an industry in dire need of enterprise software, beginning with better capabilities for search. I would argue that this aggravates a misunderstanding of the nature of health care that would best be compared with President George W. Bush's misunderstanding of education by characterizing it as a civil right. The two of them make a lovely couple as together they bungle the two most critical service offerings in our country.

At least Ms. Meyer has an excuse: It is her job to see to the revenue stream of her company, particularly where search is involved. Like it or not, just about every player in health care (hopefully with the exception of those who actually face patients, who always seem to get pushed into the background by the other players) seems hell-bent on making an industry out of it. Once again, the concept of a "public trust" seems outmoded, or at least too old-fashioned to satisfy everyone's pursuits of profit and growth. Some of the attempts to reform health care have tried to restore this public-trust status to both the institutions and the professionals who work there; but, given the political context (which is to say, the influence of special interests) in which any efforts at reform will take place, those attempts are likely to be the first to be swept off the table as infeasible. Meanwhile, a rich company is positioning itself to get rich by becoming a player in whatever reforms do take place while promoting their activities as being in the best interests of the general public by keeping that public better informed.

Still, I suppose the Web 2.0 Summit was the right place for Ms. Meyer to make this sort of pitch. Well-informed columnists such as Caroline McCarthy and Ellen Goodman have already written eloquently about how a fire-hose of search results and hyperlinks does not necessarily make for a better informed public; and I still appreciate Ms. McCarthy providing us with the "era of gullibility 2.0" epithet. However, just as the Web 2.0 evangelists could do little more than wallow in misconceptions when Kathy Sierra was receiving her death threats, they can now do the same with the health care crisis; and those most likely to be victims of this crisis are also those lease likely to be served by Web 2.0 thinking.

This Scherzo is ANOTHER Joke!

Given my enthusiasm for the music of Charles Ives, it was a real treat when I discovered that one of the pieces Menahem Pressler would be covering in his Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music would be the second movement of the Ives piano trio. One might wonder if a German-born Israel-trained pianist would be the right person to coach a performance of Ives; but Pressler is also a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, which played a key role in bringing this trio to the attention of the listening public. Furthermore, since the Beaux Arts worked closely with John Kirkpatrick, one of the foremost authorities on the performance of Ives, in preparing the work for their repertoire, it is hard to imagine anyone with a better understanding of how this trio should be performed. So this was a golden opportunity for me, not only to hear one of my favorite pieces of chamber music but to provide the chance that I might learn a few more things about how to listen to Ives. I ended up scoring on both counts.

The second movement of the trio is a presto with the title "TSIAJ," which stands for "This Scherzo Is A Joke." (I was amused that, in introducing the piece, the pianist (Kevin Korth) tried to pronounce it as if it were an acronym.) My own learning was actually prompted by those introductory remarks and then enhanced by Pressler's coaching. Korth described the movement as being like a "frat party," assuring us all that it would be all right to laugh. However, when Pressler asked the violinist (Leonie Bot) to play a quotation from the "Sailor's Hornpipe" by holding her instrument down like a country fiddler, I realized that the depiction was not of a bunch of rowdy fraternity boys but of a gathering of village musicians whose technical skill was vastly overwhelmed by their enthusiasm. This then reminded me that "The Village Musicians" was a subtitle occasionally used for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Musikalischer Spass, which we know in English as "A Musical Joke." Having already explore a connection between Ives and Johannes Brahms, it is too far-fetched to imagine that "TSIAJ" is Ives' "reply" to Mozart by comparing the bad habits of their respective village musicians?

In both cases playing bad habits "the right way" is no easy matter. However, once Pressler got Korth to tone down enough to let us hear the other two musicians, it was a real joy to hear this group at work. If the biggest problem with Mozart's village musicians is a fumbling on playing the right notes, the sore spot of Ives' villagers lies in their ability to keep time. Anyone who has ever seen the opening scene of Carl Reiner's The Jerk, where Steve Martin is absolutely incapable of stamping his foot in time with the music, will immediately recognize what is going on in Ives' imagination. Korth was particularly good at this, starting with his first extended passage at the very beginning of the movement and later charging into a hopeless muddle of "Jesus Loves Me" with "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood." Pressler said the Kirkpatrick had identified fifty song reference in this short movement but that the Beaux Arts had only found forty of them. Does it matter if we hear them all? I doubt it. Often several are coming at you all at once, so all you can do is take in the overall texture and let your ears pick up the threads that it can. The Beaux Arts knew how to make this work; and, thanks to Pressler's tutelage, we now have a few budding performers catching on to the same skill.

Who is Stephen Colbert?

This morning Caroline McCarthy used her Social blog post to agonize over whether or not the announcement Stephen Colbert made of his intention to get on both the Democratic and Republican ballots for the presidential primary should be taken as truth or "truthiness." Almost immediately, she received a comment to the effect that Colbert is hardly less qualified than Fred Thompson. Whether or not this is true (and we at least know a thing of two about Thompson's track record in government service), qualification is not the issue. The real issue is more complex and is therefore worth exploring.

When we watch Law & Order, we see Fred Thompson playing the role of Arthur Branch, who is a relatively sympathetic character due to his ability to cool down hotheads without losing touch with a basic sense of right and wrong. We could do a lot worse that having someone like Branch in the White House. The problem is that Fred Thompson is not Arthur Branch; he just plays the guy on television! This is the old "media equation" phenomenon that Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass managed to inflate into a book back in the days when everyone was still in the thrall of Wired magazine. It does not take an awful lot of attention to identify all the ways in which Thompson's own character differs from Branch's; and the media is doing a reasonably good job (with a fair amount of assistance from Thompson himself) in raising public awareness of those differences.

Colbert is another matter. He, too, is an actor who has developed a fascinating (if not exactly nuanced) character. The problem is that the name of the character he portrays is "Stephen Colbert!" My guess is that Stephen Colbert the actor is not anything like the Stephen Colbert character he portrays on television. I may be wrong; but I just feel that the latter (fictitious) character is just too well-designed to be "authentically human." So which Colbert is running for the presidency? My guess is that, in this case, it will actually be the fictitious character; and the "real" Colbert is basically running a "social experiment" to see just how far he can take his act. This may not be so big a deal. After all, every other candidate is providing us with a public face that has been finely crafted by an image maker. Why can't Colbert just be his own image maker, given how good he is at image making? (It's probably a lot better than the proverbial man who chooses to serve as his own lawyer!)

Perhaps that is the game that the "real" Colbert is playing. Going on at great length about the impact of image makers on the political system just does not play that all well among the voting public. Demonstrating the role that image making plays, on the other hand, might have more of an effect. Perhaps Colbert has found the right way to get us all to look at the other candidates and ask what kind of an act each of them is playing. If this is the case, then I applaud his experiment but would like to remind him that there are now various regulations regarding how such experiments should be conducted when the subjects are human!

"I Am the Resurrection" … and the Chocolate

Hopefully some readers remember the great controversy surrounding the exhibition during Holy Week of Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord," a life-sized sculpture of the crucified Jesus made out of chocolate (complete with genitalia), which Daniel Trotta reported for Reuters. Well, the story has risen again; and Trotta was there to document its second coming (again for Reuters). Here is the "happy ending" to the story:

The chocolate Jesus will be joined by sculptures of several fully clothed saints, but the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said it will not protest because, unlike before, there are no plans to put the "anatomically correct" Jesus in public view during Holy Week.

The Proposition gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood will present "Chocolate Saints ... Sweet Jesus," an exhibition timed to coincide with All Saints' Day on November 1. The show will run October 27 to November 24.

This time I was glad to see that the artist was given a chance to talk about his motives in making this work:

A gallery statement said Cavallaro was raised as a Catholic altar boy and questioned church precepts but always held a fondness for Holy Communion.

"Remembering the mystical/transcendental quality and rushes of memory associated with the Catholic wafer received during Holy Communion, he recalls equating that ritual of ecstasy to his own experience of chocolate," the statement said.

Personally, I am willing to accept the surface-level sincerity of this text. I find it far more genuine (and believable) than most of the more institutionalized professions of faith, particularly those that feel that God has given them a right to interfere with my private life, and would place it in the same category as the religious philosophy of John from Cincinnati. After all, art remains one of the best channels through which we can reflect on our own natures; and, for many of us, that "experience of chocolate" is part of our human nature!

Postmodern Opera

I previously cited my neighbor, who plays second violin in the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, as an inspiration for much of my musical thinking. Where our points of view seem to be most different is over the question of taking a revisionist approach to the staging of an opera. To choose an example that is not from the current season here, she really had a hard time with the Hansel and Gretel production that was shared with the Welsh National Opera. (I choose this example because some readers may have seen the Welsh version when it was broadcast on the now-defunct Ovation channel.) She wanted to know why this production was as "ugly" as it was, particularly by ending with all the children, having been released from the witch's spell, sitting down with Hansel, Gretel, and their parents to feast on the witch (whom, you will recall, Gretel had shoved into the oven). I have to admit that this was a pretty unnerving sight; but, given that just about every fairy tale has a pretty substantial dark side, I simply accepted this as putting an ironic twist on that dark side. Nevertheless, I do not think that my attempt to put a positive spin on this single example made for a particularly convincing argument.

Then I realized that what I had written at the beginning of this month about "Postmodern Politics" might be equally applicable to how many directors now think about the operas they stage. The source I cited in that post tried to make the case that postmodernism was all about resistance and how resistance different from opposition. Whereas opposition was an instrument for revealing truth by subjecting every assertion to dialectical challenge, resistance involved "questioning the possibility of attaining truth with the view that the 'possibility of attaining truth' is itself an idea, which results from an historical event where 'truth or falsity' became a dominant style of thinking." Resistance suspects an assertion, rather than challenging it, advocating only that acceptance be deferred in the face of the questionability of that "possibility of attaining truth."

What does this have to do with staging an opera? Traditionally, staging has been a matter of accepting a libretto as a "dramatic ground truth," which is warranted by the structure and performance of the music. To continue my ongoing thoughts about the medieval trivium, that "ground truth" is the logic of the opera, which must then be conveyed to the audience through the rhetoric of the staging. However, by questioning the very nature of the "possibility of attaining truth," postmodernism also questions the need for both identifying and rendering that logic; and, as an alternative, the libretto becomes viewed as a point of departure for suspicion.

This is nothing new in drama. To a great extent this is the position that Berthold Brecht took in his efforts to achieve his "epic theater." The Welsh Hansel and Gretel exhibits a debt to Brecht without actually following any of Brecht's paths. Indeed, the very notion of an integrated vision is made suspect by giving each of the three acts an independent perspective. The first act sets the context of poverty in a setting that could be taking right out of D. H. Lawrence. The second act concentrates on the dream sequence and envisages it as an encounter between Max Ernst's Semaine de Bonté and Maurice Sendak's Night Kitchen. Finally, the third act sets the trajectory of the concluding feast by presenting the witch in the image of Julia Child; so, as the meal is served up to the final chorus, we can almost hear, in the background, her distinctive voice chiming in, "Bon appétit!"

Let me now make clear that I offer this argument as explanation, rather than advocacy. When it comes to my own audience experience, I find postmodernism a tricky business. As Merce Cunningham liked to say, "Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't." Hansel and Gretel "worked" for me. In a similar vein I would say that the current production of Tannhäuser "works" most of the time (but definitely not in the choreography). Appomattox, on the other hand, is very much about dialectical opposition, rather than postmodern resistance and succeeds, in large part, because of its commitment to delivering its particular "ground truth" about the Civil War.

I am not sure there are any guidelines as to when a postmodern approach is likely to "work." I think, to a great extent, postmodernism works best when it obliges us to rethink old thoughts that we practically take for granted, such as the fairy tales we remember from childhood or, for that matter, Jonathan Miller's decision to set Rigoletto in the Chicago of Al Capone. The risk, however, is always that a postmodern stance is reduced to little more than novelty for novelty's sake; and this serves neither the spirit of resistance or the particular work being "resisted." As is always the case, we all have to make up our own minds and should do so after the final curtain has fallen, rather than before we enter the opera house!

Beethoven's Wit

Yesterday I made reference to the various interviews that Philip Glass gave prior to the first performance of Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera. One of those was actually a "conversation" with Opera Director David Gockley in an event held for the benefit of Opera patrons. In the course of this conversation, Gockley tried to draw out how it was that Philip Glass "became Philip Glass," so to speak. By way of an answer, Glass talked about the time he spent in Paris studying under both Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar in terms of the impact of these two highly contrasting pedagogical influences. Those of us in San Francisco who believe that we always have more to learn about being a good listener got a taste of that kind of experience yesterday with the good fortune of being able to attend Appomattox in the afternoon and the second concert in András Schiff's cycle of the all of the Beethoven piano sonatas a few hours later. The contrast between these events almost goes without saying; but what may deserve mention was the extent to which Schiff brought out those key elements of wit that pervade the three Opus 10 sonatas in the context of the "stark and dark" moods that constitute the spirit of Appomattox.

We tend not to think of Beethoven as a wit, probably because most of us are too saturated with that Titan-wrestling-with-the-Gods metaphor that Wagner invoked. With such a frame of mind, it is almost impossible to believe that the man would be capable of play; but that is really what he is up to in the Opus 10 sonatas. We are comfortable with discussing how Beethoven's compositions would thwart the expectations of his contemporaries, both performers and listeners. This is definitely the case in Opus 10, but it is achieved with a light touch. Beethoven plays, in the literal sense of the word, with almost insignificant fragments of notes, turning them every which way and, every now and then, just to remind you that all this is play, inflating them with grand gestures that fit the music about as poorly as Beethoven's clothes fit his body in many of the portraits he have of him.

The good news about last night's recital is that Schiff was unquestionably in on the game, a true master of that light touch in both the physical and metaphor senses of the phrase. We were all a polite enough audience that we were pretty good at restraining several well-deserved belly-laughs when Beethoven went over the top and Schiff followed him there, but fun was still definitely the order of the first half of the evening. The not-so-good news is that the second half was devoted to the first "named" (and, therefore, war-horse) sonata, the "Pathétique;" and I am not sure that the performance held up that well in its context. The Opus 10 sonatas are more demanding than the Opus 2 set that Schiff played last week; so last week the general effect was the Opus 2 built us up for the more passionate Opus 7. This time the Opus 10 was very much a journey unto itself; and I, for one, found the "Pathétique" to be a bit of an intrusion on my desire to savor the delights of that journey. This is not to say that the final sonata was not well played. Schiff has been most reliable with both his keyboard technique and his capacity for drawing expressive rhetoric from that technique. I suppose it was more like turning the ancient Greek dramatic practice on its head, drawing upon tragedy as an afterthought to comedy, rather than the other way around.

Then Schiff pulled an interesting move. He told the audience that he felt the true "ancestor" of the "Pathétique" sonata was the C Minor keyboard partita of Johann Sebastian Bach and proceeded to play the entire partita as an encore! Personally, I do not agree that connection that Schiff was trying to demonstrate is a legitimate one; but, to return to my opening theme, this was very much an exercise is good listening!

On the other hand there was another connection that Schiff did not recognize that I would take more seriously. I think that we can take the Allegretto (second) movement of Opus 10, Number 2 as the "seed" for the compositional explorations that Franz Schubert would take in his own shorter piano works, whether he called them Moments musicals, Impromptus, or just Klavierstücke. Last week Schiff took one of those Klavierstücke as an encore, as if to demonstrate the influence of Beethoven of Schubert; but it was in Schiff's performance of Opus 10, Number 2 that the impact of that influence was really driven home. As a listener it was as if I had experienced the opening of a door through which both Beethoven and Schubert would pass, each setting off in a different direction after crossing the threshold.

Civil War without End

Today is a "double header" day for me. I just returned from seeing Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera and will shortly set off for Davies Symphony Hall to hear the second concert in András Schiff's cycle of the all of the Beethoven piano sonatas. My guess is that I shall be having thoughts about Appomattox for some time to come, but I wanted to set down my first impressions before shifting my attention to Beethoven.

Appomattox is, without a doubt, the best new work I have heard performed by the San Francisco Opera (and I have heard quite a few by now). The historical foundation will raise questions of comparison of other operas that take a political view of history, such as Doctor Atomic and, for that matter, Harvey Milk. One cannot ignore either the historical record nor the political implications when viewing such narratives. The challenge is to bring all the elements of opera to bear on a reflection of these issues, rather than simply a rendering of events.

In pre-premiere interviews Philip Glass made it clear that such reflection was important to him, important enough to be the most important element of the resulting libretto. Glass spoke from experience, having been born in Baltimore in 1937 when that city was still segregated. He thus approached this project from the point of view that the treaty signed at Appomattox put an end to hostilities between military forces but little more than that. This point of view was delivered by interrupting the staging of the Appomattox proceedings with a series of flash-forwards (which director Robert Woodruff called "car crashes"), allowing us to see the present day in the context of this past event.

The result was a forceful statement about racial equality delivered through accounts of episodes in the Civil Rights movement. One of these, dealing with the protest march on Montgomery, Alabama, drew spontaneous applause from the audience; but, unfortunately, that was not the last of the flash-forwards. That episode (which was probably about as close to a psychological car crash as one could get) was an extended aria, sung by Philip Skinner, taken from the words of Edgar Ray Killen, who is still serving a sixty-year sentence for his role in the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. In the context of my remarks about Arthur Rimbaud earlier today, this is about as "outlaw" text as you can get. The words are so raw, chilling, and unrepentant that, for all the power of the music, we are unlikely to hear it as a recital piece. It took a lot of guts for Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton to decide to work with Killen's words and, for that matter, just as much guts for Skinner to work with Woodruff on how they would be delivered. Nevertheless, this is the moment when the inexorable logic of the narrative of the entire opera slams us in the face; and it is impossible to witness this staging and not feel moved.

What follows is not peace. We return to Appomattox Court House and witness the plunder of the room in which the peace treaty was signed, no one having thought of the need to protect such a significant site. Julia Grant (sung by Rhoslyn Jones) then returns to recapitulate her role in the Prologue. We are reminded, one last time, of the tragic nature of war and of its inevitability due to the inability of human nature to change.

Just for the record, the performance I attended was the third of a series of seven. I was very comfortable with this. Newspapers may be obsessed with covering opening nights; but I believe there is a lot to be said for letting a production "settle in" before viewing it. This is not to dismiss the contribution of the final dress rehearsal, but there is no substitute to performing before an audience. I suspect that the production is now pretty well "settled." I would encourage anyone to see any of the remaining four performances and I may even try to get over to see the opera a second time.

The Triumph of the Dead White European Male

The "motto" for the BluePrint series of concerts at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is "building new music for the city." The first concert in their series provided a venue to follow up on "Bloggers' Night" at the San Francisco Symphony. The event was different in just about every way: a program that one would be unlikely to encounter at Davies Symphony Hall, a more intimate performing space, and, befitting the space, more intimate musical ensembles. The theme of the concert was "Synesthesia: Bridging the Senses," which provides some interesting opportunities for experiments. The fact that not all of the experiments succeeded did not detract from the overall value of the performances.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evening was Artistic Director (and conductor) Nicole Paiement's decision to offer two musical perspectives on texts by Arthur Rimbaud through two works separated in time by some sixty-odd years. Since so many of Rimbaud's texts were synesthetic, these settings made the strongest case for the overall theme, while attempts by several of the other performances to draw explicitly upon "rich media" had less impact. The more recent Rimbaud effort was Jay Lyon's "Voyelles," a setting of the poem of the same name, first performed in 1998 and subsequently reworked into a version heard for the first time at this concert. The text is an exploration into the "naissances latentes" ("hidden births") of the five vowels, each associated with its own color, which is then elaborated into a haiku-like impression of an image. These are all images of the "outlaw" Rimbaud, who was so much of a hero to one of our own greatest "outlaw" writers, Henry Miller. Even those that at first appear innocuous reveal a more sinister side, which justifies why these "births" are better "hidden;" and the poem is all the more fascinating for the way in which all of these images are compacted into the fourteen lines of a sonnet.

Lyon's composition has its own "outlaw" nature in the form of a rap text that basically provides a series of running tropes on Rimbaud's words. This makes for a rather dense listening experience. The Rimbaud text is both sung by a soprano and mezzo-soprano and declaimed by a speaker while, at the same time, MC WiseProof is holding forth with his rap. The result is far more than a human ear can track, at least on a first hearing. The rap dominated to such an extent that the spoken French was pretty much inaudible; and, every now at then, a vocal gesture would emerge when WiseProof was catching his breath. This would probably outrage most traditional concert-goers, thereby achieving the sort of effect that Rimbaud was often trying to achieve in his writing. His spirit is still with us and may well be more at ease with our century than it ever was in his own nineteenth.

Of course Rimbaud is no stranger to those traditional concert-goers, due largely to Benjamin Britten's setting of his Illuminations texts. This is probably Britten's best-known departure from the "Rumpole world" of the Oxford Companion to English Literature; and it is one of his three major song settings for tenor and chamber orchestra. This was the earlier Rimbaud perspective that Paiement programmed; and, to make the performance even more interesting, the texts were sung by a soprano, Conservatory graduate student Ambur Braid. The "outlaw" side of this work is far more cryptic, probably because of Britten's own "outlaw" relationship with Peter Pears, the tenor for whom the work was composed. However, Paiement and Braid worked well together to deliver an alternative "outlaw" perspective, beginning with Braid's appearance (far more striking than that of any other performer on the program, pushing at the limits without a Madonna-style "going over the top"). The appearance, however, was only there to supplement the delivery, which toyed with the listener's emotions in the same ways in which Rimbaud could toy with the instincts of his readers. Britten was at the top of his game when he composed this song cycle, so it was really exciting to experience a performance that was also at the top of the same game.

Nevertheless, there was a certain irony involving the spirit of the evening. After the dust had settled, one realized that, for all the other works on the program (including an extraordinary experiment with the sonorities of a solo cello by Kaija Saariaho), once again it was the Dead White European Male who stole the show. This is even more ironic since, when I was first getting to know Britten, he was still very much alive and composing and was often rejected as "too modern" by many of those traditional concert-goers! Still, I do not think the message is that we need more composers willing to honor Britten more than rap. Rather, the message is that we now have enough exposure to Britten to accept his music as "part of the tradition," which means that Paiement's "mission" to provide more exposure to those now following Britten is an important one, however frustrating some of those newer works may be when we first hear them.

Depression on the Job

In light of yesterday's extended post on depression, it is worth noting that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has just released a report that ranks jobs on the basis of the percentage of employees who get depressed with their work. The key results have been summarized in an Associated Press dispatch by Kevin Freking:

People who tend to the elderly, change diapers and serve up food and drinks have the highest rates of depression among U.S. workers.

Overall, 7 percent of full-time workers battled depression in the past year, according to a government report available Saturday.

Women were more likely than men to have had a major bout of depression, and younger workers had higher rates of depression than their older colleagues.

Almost 11 percent of personal care workers _ which includes child care and helping the elderly and severely disabled with their daily needs _ reported depression lasting two weeks or longer.

During such episodes there is loss of interest and pleasure, and at least four other symptoms surface, including problems with sleep, eating, energy, concentration and self-image.

Workers who prepare and serve food _ cooks, bartenders, waiters and waitresses _ had the second highest rate of depression among full-time employees at 10.3 percent.

In a tie for third were health care workers and social workers at 9.6 percent.

The lowest rate of depression, 4.3 percent, occurred in the job category that covers engineers, architects and surveyors.

There may an interesting correlation lurking in these data, which is that there is a correlation between the probability of depression at work and the extent to which work is conducted in the social world (as opposed to the subjective or objective worlds). Is this a sign that empathy may be an "occupational hazard;" or is it a consequence of the likelihood that one may have to empathize with a client who is, as a result of prevailing conditions, already depressive? In the Mencken tradition any simple answer to a question like this is bound to be wrong; but just raising the question supports the premise that we need to recognize that there pathological aspects to work today, which are in dire need of serious analysis. There are truths lurking here that, as Herbert Agar put it, "men prefer not to hear;" but, like Oedipus, we must pursue those truths, even if they ultimately lead to unpleasant truths about ourselves. After all Oedipus was eventually redeemed at Colonus and died a quiet and peaceful death there. Given the extent to which our very environment (both physical and social) is exacting revenge for the damage we have done to it, the rest of us should be as fortunate as Oedipus!

One Human Surrounded by Cardboard Symbols

Having gone back to see Tannhäuser for a second time at the San Francisco Opera, I realized that for all my deep-ending into matters of the text and the score to puzzle out my thoughts about the staging, I had written very little about any of the performers other than conductor Donald Runnicles. Much has been written both others more professional than I about the strength of Peter Seiffert's command of the leading role; and I am not much for saying little more than "me, too," where such matters are concerned. What I realized, however, is that, for those most part, those "others" offered little more than a role call of the other performers; and, while I did not feel there was a weak voice in the entire production, I felt that the performance deserved a less perfunctory view. In response I would like to focus in on one specific performer (other than Seiffert), soprano Petra Maria Schnitzer, who sang Elizabeth.

The thing about Wagner operas is that they tend to be viewed as endurance trials; and, since Seiffert spent the most time on stage, he does deserve the most attention. However, the reason that endurance is such a problem is that the dramatic motivation behind them is, except for much of the third act, stentorian, to say the least. Tannhäuser, himself, is forceful about pretty much every thing he does, including setting off on his pilgrimage, which offers us a significant clue as to why his mission will be a failure. The Wartburg is a community of rough-and-tumble knights (including Wolfram) presided over by a non-nonsense Landgraf. Even Venus is a commanding presence, as well she should be, given her divinity.

This leaves us with Elizabeth; and, when we start examining the music that Wagner composed for her, we quickly recognize that hers was the one truly human character in a narrative in which every other character is a symbol of some sort or another. This comes out in dynamics that are modulated with a subtlety that is missing in all the other voices, with the possible exception of when Tannhäuser joins her in a duet and has to come down to her level. (This is not to dismiss the level of sensitivity in Wolfram's part but to recognize that, even in the Abendstern aria, his worldview is more abstract that heart-felt.) I have to believe that Schnitzer's performance of Elizabeth was a result of her working hand-in-glove with Runnicles to allow the subtlety of her vocal line to serve as a stabilizing force above all the other symbolic abstractions and Sturm und Drang.

This was particularly evident in the second act, where she is as much a dominant force as is Tannhäuser himself. First we have her anticipation (childlike, in her own words) of seeing him again after all the years of his disappearance. Then we have their actual encounter, where we detect the mixed emotions of the purity of her chastity and at least a tacit acknowledgment that love eventually leads to the carnal relationship that will bring forth that next generation of Wartburgians, about which I previously wrote. Next we have the song contest, which pits the sterility of Wolfram's love against Tannhäuser's Venus-inspired passion. Everyone recoils in horror from this confrontation, particular all the women who have been costumed as clones of the Virgin Mary; but Elizabeth intercedes in the name of humanity. She becomes the pivot of the entire plot; and Schnitzer elevated this to a moment of believability, rather than some cheesy intercession-of-the-Virgin Sunday school tale. Indeed, without this moment, the crux of the third act, in which she intercedes yet again, this time before "the highest authority," would be little more than a silly plot device.

I suppose one can view Elizabeth as a more mature version of Senta, a product of Wagner-the-librettist having more experience upon which to reflect on real life. Senta sacrifices herself for a fairy tale. The result is transcendent, but it does not go anywhere beyond two souls united in heaven. Elizabeth, on the other hand, embodies the distinction that Harold Bloom has posited between Yahweh and Jesus. In the name of humanity itself, she rejects the strict injunctions of the punishing Yaweh in favor of that God-who-so-loved-the-world. She intercedes for Tannhäuser, not just through love for him (which she even admits is still at the schoolgirl-crush level), but for that higher sense of love that is the very foundation of her faith. Schnitzer performed this role as if she intuitively grasped that concept of humanity, leaving me fascinated by her performance and curious as to what she could bring to other operatic roles.

Making Too Much of the Nobel Peace Prize

Don't get me wrong. I sympathize from the depth of my heart with the first paragraph of Joe Brewer's blog post on The Huffington Post yesterday afternoon:

The big story today is that the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes the climate crisis as a genuine threat to humanity. It now has official standing along with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, conflict in the Middle East, landmines, and poverty as something that causes harm to people within and beyond conflict zones.

Brewer then went on a moderate rant against the media for trying to turn this into a story about Al Gore getting into the Presidential race; and I sympathize with that rant, too. My problem is that, however big the story may be (even the right one), I find it hard to believe that it is going to have much impact, at least in our own country.

The issue is not "that the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes the climate crisis as a genuine threat to humanity." Rather, the issue is the question of whether this recognition will have any impact on those faith-based environmentalists that continue to dictate our country's policy. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the basic precept of faith-based environmentalism is that God provided the bounty of the Earth for Man to consume and enjoy. When that bounty runs out, God will take care of those who believe in Him; and the rest (presumably including myself) will have to fend for themselves. This concept did not originate with the current administration. It goes back at least to when James Watt ran the Department of the Interior under Ronald Reagan; and, as a policy, has changed very little (if at all) since then. Bush simply continued the principle with his conviction that accountability to God (or his interpretation thereof) was more important than accountability to the Kyoto Accord.

Technology Bungles Again!

Having just finished my last post, I happened to notice that Google had placed an ad on it with the text, "Keep the NCLB [No Child Left Behind] Law Strong." My guess is that this ad was placed on the basis of the appearance of the phrase "No Child Left Behind" in yesterday's post. Of course anyone who actually read that post would quickly recognize that it objects to that NCLB law in a variety of ways! I suppose the logic is that the ad will appeal to those who violently disagree with me. I wonder if anyone has ever bother to test that hypothesis!

Depression is not just Economic

Over the last two days my RSS feeds have provided me with the sort of insight about public mood that the mainstream media sources tend to be afraid to touch, and what particularly interested me is that the insight came from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The first source was a Huffington Post blog post by Naomi Wolf under the title "American Tears." The lead provides a good summary of the overall content:

I wish people would stop breaking into tears when they talk to me these days.

I am traveling across the country at the moment -- Colorado to California -- speaking to groups of Americans from all walks of life about the assault on liberty and the 10 steps now underway in America to a violently closed society.

The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness -- but I am finding crowds of people who don't need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.

But I can't stand the stories I am hearing. I can't stand to open my email these days. And wherever I go, it seems, at least once a day, someone very strong starts to cry while they are speaking.

Wolf's text was, for me at least, a blessed antidote (without being overly optimistic) to the far more virulent first sentence that Bill Maher cooked up for his blog post to Huffington Post yesterday:

Have too many Americans become gullible, ill-informed idiots who have elevated feelings over facts and replaced critical thinking with a blind sense of trust for authority?

Beyond the rhetorical ineptitude of trying to get your message across to a constituency by calling them "gullible, ill-informed idiots," Maher's rant misses out on the heart of Wolf's matter. It is not a matter of either intelligence or cowardice that provokes the crying jags that Wolf encountered. Rather it is fear and, what is worse, a feeling of total helplessness in the face of that fear.

It is times like these that we need to remember that Norman Rockwell was not the naive and sentimental dabbler than intellectuals made him out to be on the basis of his Saturday Evening Post covers. We should remember that one of his "Four Freedoms" paintings was entitled "Freedom From Fear." (In that context we might also want to remember that, when Gulf Oil appropriated those "freedoms" in the advertising space at the "Meet Mister Lincoln" exhibit at Disneyland, they took it upon themselves to add a "fifth freedom," which was "free enterprise!" Back in those days few would have thought that their "freedom" could lie at the heart of a pervasive national fear; but that was a time when we were just beginning to shed innocent blood in the name of bigger oil profits.) Rockwell saw us through the Second World War and the Korean War with the conviction that ours was a government that would protect us from fear. Now it is a government that gets its way by instilling fear and then pretending that it will free us from that fear when, in fact, they are only immersing us all deeper in it. Gone are the days when we had nothing to fear but fear itself. They have been replaced by the days of fear as an instrument of manipulation; and, beyond the fear itself and the recognition of our own manipulation, is it any wonder that so many of us should be reduced to helpless blubbering?

This brings us to today's Guardian report from the other side of the pond:

National tests for seven and 11-year-olds are putting children under stress and feeding into a "pervasive anxiety" about their lives and the world they are growing up in, according to an intimate portrait of primary school life published today.

Primary-aged children worry daily about global warming and terrorism as well as their friendships and passing the next exam, according to a report based on 700 in-depth interviews with children, their teachers and parents, which will feed into the biggest independent review of primary education in 40 years.

The findings echo a report from Unicef which this year placed Britain at the bottom of a league table charting the well-being of children across the developed world. This week a survey by the Howard League for Penal Reform revealed that 95% of 10 to 15-year-olds in the country have experienced crime at least once.

Today's Cambridge University report, Community Soundings, says national tests leave most children stressed and some middle class parents paying for a "parallel" education system employing tutors to get children through their exams even before the age of 11.

Some pupils said the tests were "scary" and made them nervous.

So in the United Kingdom it is not only the conditions of the world that instill fear and helplessness but also the primary education system. This is not to single out one country, since many of us are familiar with similar accounts of anxiety from other countries, particularly Japan. My point is that, while the powers-that-be continue to focus their attention on the global perspective of economic well-being, psychological well-being, even on the broad scale of the national level, is on the rocks, whether we are looking at the "developing" or "industrialized" cultures (scare quotes added to indicate the absurd bias of the language we use). Could this be the vision of T. S. Eliot's "Hollow Men" finally come home to roost? Is this the "global whimper" that will usher in "the way the world ends?"

By way of an afterthought, I should note that Alan Greenspan has suggested that there is actually a tight coupling between economic and psychological well-being. The Book TV program concerned with his new book was actually a Politics and Prose event at which Greenspan was interviewed by Daniel Yeargin. In the course of this interview, Greenspan asserted that one of the better ways an economist can understand "what is going on" it by assessing the level of euphoria or anxiety. In other words the self-perception of psychological well-being can serve as a measure of the general perception of economic well-being. Thus, the question of whether or not we are currently in an economic depression may have less to do with what the numbers tell us and more to do with all those tearful subjects that Wolf has encountered!

Civil Right or Public Trust?

If the President of the United States makes a public spectacle of his failure to grasp the nature of our country's crisis in education, why should we expect anyone else to take the issue more seriously? Consider that Rose Garden ceremony on Tuesday, reported in The New York Times by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Diana Jean Schemo, basically a gratuitous piece of political theater designed to pressure the Congress to renew the 2001 No Child Left Behind education law. Note that the staging for this event surrounded the President with civil rights leaders, because the message he wanted the microphones to record and broadcast to the nation was that "education is a basic civil right."

Does this really mean anything; or was it just a cheap trick of specious logic based on the premise, "If civil rights leaders say it is a good thing, then it is a good thing?" Education is certainly not a civil right under the benchmark of the Bill of Rights. We are not talking about legislation that would infringe upon rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution, even if there is a guarantee of public education institutions for children up to a particular age. However, I would argue that. beyond the guarantee of the institutions themselves, we are talking about something significantly different, which we used to associate with the profession of journalism.

I recently invoked John Carroll expressing his regret that the newspaper had ceased to become the public trust that it had been for most of the first 200 years of our nation's history. This phrase has been used so frequently that we seldom give much thought to its meaning. It embraces a concept that a newspaper was something more than a product whose success or failure depends on its circulation numbers. Rather, the public depended upon the newspaper for a variety of services. Those services included more than just timely delivery of news. Newspapers provided other forms of information, ranging from objective "facts" to (often richly) subjective opinions. The real public trust of the newspaper was perhaps best expressed about 100 years ago by that great sage of that era, Mr. Dooley:

Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

These days such a service-oriented view of journalism is about as quaint as Mr. Dooley's way with words. However, it should remind us that education is also, fundamentally, a service profession. Indeed, as I have said before, education is basically the second oldest profession; and the first is also a service profession. However, I feel that this point cannot be repeated enough, since, as I have also said before, since the beginning of the twentieth century, the practice of education has been seriously contaminated by the principles of scientific management, which had been developed with the production industry in mind.

My point is that, while educational institutions may not do "ivrything f'r us," they have traditionally done far more for us than enable students to meet specific standards of achievement in reading and mathematics. Indeed, to the extent that we can trace the practice of education back to Socrates (which is to say before education was institutionalized), the scope of education has always been far beyond meeting achievement standards. Unfortunately, ours is very much a culture of production and productivity, which means that neither our lawmakers nor their constituents have much grasp of why service professions are different from production professions. The general consensus seems to be that those differences are only of interest to academic social theorists who never seem to matter very much when real-world issues are at stake. Unfortunately, that consensus makes us vulnerable to the blatant exhibition of misunderstanding that dominated Tuesday's Rose Garden ceremony.

Perhaps the best analogy can be drawn from that Russian comment about art that I cited at the beginning of this week. Education may be best viewed as "food for the soul;" and, in that context, the "public trust" of an educational institution is that it provide its pupils (and, therefore, indirectly, the community-at-large) with a "balanced diet." Pursuing that analogy leads to the proposition that No Child Left Behind has enabled a solution that fills the stomach without addressing nutritional needs, which is to say that it is a "junk food" solution. To try to cast this solution in the arena of civil rights is to distract from the lesson of that analogy. Any serious educator could tell our President this fundamental truth, which may be why none of them were present at Tuesday's political theater. Indeed, considering where we are in the week, I suspect that this willful disregard of practicing educators should provide sufficient grounds for granting President Bush his fourth "personal" Chutzpah of the Week award!

Looking Back 100 Years

This morning I read the "appreciation" of Félix Fénéon by Luc Sante, which appeared in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Two things particularly stood out for me as evidence that our understanding of the present can be informed by an understanding of the past. Both have to do with disruptive times, which are precisely the circumstances in which we need to be as well-informed as possible.

The first concerned the anarchist movement at the end of the nineteenth century, in which Fénéon was vigorously (to say the least) involved in Paris. While the movement was not restricted to Paris (and, for that matter, had extended from Europe to the United States), Sante concentrates of the movement as Fénéon knew it. Sante wrote the following about what motivated these anarchists:

In the face of horrendous labor conditions, a vast and unbridgeable gap between rich and poor, minute surveillance of dissidents, and a draconian if capricious repression, the anarchists declared war on a power structure that was warring both against them and against the poor and unlettered who were in no position to fight back themselves.

This sort of language should be familiar to regular readers of The Rehearsal Studio, whether it involves my own dispatches from the front on the war against the poor or my analysis of Larisa Alexandrovna's thesis regarding the civil war that has now absorbed our country. It also throws light on that video and transcript of Osama bin Laden that found itself the center of so much wrongheaded misinterpretation. This sentence reminds us that bin Laden is continuing a tradition of protest that can be traced back over a century, the only real difference being that today's technology allows him to be far more destructive than his ideological predecessors were (not unlike our own military forces).

Needless to say, this argument does not justify bin Laden's behavior, but it throws an interesting light on that recent news regarding our Defense Department's "discovery" of the social world. Anthropologists may be part of the solution, particularly once we are immersed in active combat; but when we are trying to deal with terrorism, particularly in the face of distractions that try to call our efforts a "war on terrorism," we need to broaden the scope of our social thinking. Our knowledge of anthropology must be supplemented by a richer knowledge of history that is apparently currently taught in military colleges, where the historical focus appears to be on military engagements without paying enough attention to the contexts in which such engagements arose. Bin Laden is repeating a history of anarchism that we seem to have chosen to ignore; but, regardless of what Marx may have said, the repetition is turning out to be anything but farce.

The second item that stood our for me involve a later period of Fénéon's life when he turned to journalism. Sante offers a nice sketch of what newspapers were like in those days:

In 1906 the newspaper, around the world, was in its golden age. It enjoyed undisputed dominion over communication (radio would not come about for another decade and a half; movies and sound recordings were still in a primitive state), it existed in profusion (major cities would have from four or five to a dozen or more competing morning paper, and an only slightly smaller number of evening editions), and attempts to increase circulation resulted in gimmicks and experiments that were often trivial but sometimes ambitious and transformative (color comics sections, rotogravure supplements, graphics that broke across the column format). At the same time, just-the-facts impersonality had not yet been ratified as the official journalistic voice, which meant that pompous rhetoric and uninformed blather was often the norm in newspaper prose, but there was also an allowance for adventurous and unconventional writing of a sort that has seldom been seen in daily papers since. Whatever its merits or drawbacks, the newspaper ruled daily life. It represented the most visible incursion of the public sphere into the private.

While reading this I could not help but be reminded of the rant I posted yesterday under the title "The Illiterate Blogosphere." To some extent, of course, the blogosphere has turned that relationship between public and private on its head. The public sphere is no longer committing an act of incursion but, instead, is "responding to invitation," by responding to opportunities to submit comments. Part of my point yesterday, however, was that, even when coming in with an invitation, one can still behave as if one were engaged in incursion; but today we use the noun "flaming" instead of "incursion." Furthermore, the blogosphere has provided us with a new venue where "uninformed blather" is accepted as normative behavior; and it is an amusing coincidence of history that all this should be happening at a time when "citizen journalists" are once again experiments with "gimmicks and experiments" to bring more eyeballs to their Web pages. Is this an example of the repetition being farcical? It is probably too soon to answer this question, since we really cannot yet assess the impact of the blogosphere on normative behavior associated with the dissemination of news. That assessment will have to take consequences into account, and not enough of those consequences have manifested themselves yet.

The Illiterate Blogosphere

Say what you want about the "open forum" of the blogosphere. Every now and then we have to confront an episode in which the absence of both editorial control and an agreement to adhere to social norms can turn the best of intentions into an orgy that runs the gamut from silly to reprehensible behavior. I suppose this is the sort of episode that reveals who we really are, however painful it may be to bow to that inevitable.

The specific episode I have in mind began last night at 8:45 PM (probably EDT), when The Huffington Post posted a link to a New York Times story for which they supplied their own headline:

Two Months After Vow To Reign In NSA, Dem Concessions On Wiretapping Expected

A bit less than an hour after this post appeared (9:39 PM), reader DarrowFan felt a need to point out that this headline had been incorrectly worded. The resulting comment was polite, socially proper, and even understanding:

Hey Huffington Post Editors: It's "REIN" in and not "reiGn" in. To "reign" is what kings and queens do. When you "rein in somebody" (with no G in the spelling), you're doing the same thing you do to horses: You "rein" them in, and that's what you meant to say here. "...rein in NSA..." You should really fix this headline! (I understand how it happened though because years ago when I was a magazine editor, an issue almost went out the door with this same error! Happily, somebody caught it. So, no criticism from me, believe me! Just think you need to change it.)

(My own reaction was that the headline was some sort of Freudian slip, but that is just the way my mind works. Personally, I was glad to see someone with a background in magazine editing take the helm on this.) Unfortunately, this effort to make a positive contribution seems to have touched off a whole host of sore nerves, reminding me of Herb Gardner's simile in A Thousand Clowns, likening telling a bad joke to raping someone's pet turtle. Within a dozen minutes (9:51 PM), mike53 had his flame-thrower locked, loaded, and firing:

Enough with the grammar lessons. Adults get the context even though the words may not be correct. Go be "superior" elsewhere.

DarrowFan tried gamely to hold his position and argue that proper use of language was not a matter of flaunting superiority. However, hugs4u jumped into the pool with the next attack at 10:15 PM:

Who gives a shit on proper english, when the house and senate are screwing people, proper english is the least of the worries.

Then, at 12:43 PM today, freespeach delivered the coup de grace in a manner that well suited the author's handle:

ATFU Darrowfan. You are clearly trying to distract from the point of this thread with your red herring spelling rant. GFY

The Democrats are whores who do not deserve our votes. Vote Green, vote any third party in your district.

Is this the sort of thing that the Web 2.0 evangelists have in mind when they wax so eloquently about the "wisdom of crowds?" DarrowFan was actually following a time-honored tradition, which goes back at least to the days of Robert Musil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Musil was a fixture of the Viennese cafe society of that time. It was said that he spent most of the day at his favorite table with a pile of the day's newspapers, marking off every spelling, syntactic, and semantic error he could find. It would be nice to believe that his assiduous attention to what we say and how we say it could have averted the colossal mess of the First World War, but that would be fantasizing to a point of absurdity. Nevertheless, I firmly agree with DarrowFan that reckless indifference to our use of language is a symptom of sloppy thinking (if not the absence of thought altogether). Were Musil to attempt his task today, given the sharp reduction in newspapers, it would probably consume less of his time; but, if he were apply the same approach to what he heard on television and radio (not to mention what he could read in the blogosphere), he probably would not be able to finish one day's work before the next day had begun!

The Beethoven Cycle Begins

Having just gone on a rant against those who talk about the arts in the newspeak "of a globalized world of work that we barely understand," I feel it is important to acknowledge a major project by a performing artist who cares more about doing than talking. The artist is pianist András Schiff, and the project is the performance of the complete cycle of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in several North American cities. San Francisco is one of those cities, along with New York (Carnegie Hall), Los Angeles (Disney Hall), and Ann Arbor (Hill Auditorium). The project will take two years with four recitals in each year, probably neatly divided into four sonatas per recital.

Since I have been a rabid attendee of piano recitals since I bought a condominium in Stamford, Connecticut in 1981 that was walking distance from the train station. I found myself wolfing down performances at Carnegie, Alice Tully Hall, and the 92nd Street Y as if I had been on a starvation diet during my three years in Santa Barbara, even though it was my piano teacher in Santa Barbara who was responsible for stimulating such a voracious appetite. As a matter of context, this was a time when a soloist's reputation was tightly coupled to a recording contract, which means that it felt as if the roost was being ruled by Claudio Arrau and Alfred Brendel, neither of whom every really did it for me. Arrau had this authoritarian aloofness that made for rather tedious readings of both Beethoven and Chopin; and Brendel always seemed to come on stage with this poorly-hidden sense of boredom for the whole affair. As a result my preferences ran to a hero of my childhood (and home-town favorite), Rudolf Serkin, and a discovery from my student days, Paul Badura-Skoda. Both of these pianists shaped the way I listened to the Beethoven piano sonatas through their ability to hear and communicate both the cognitive side of taking on compositional challenges and the emotive side of the rhetorical impact of the "solutions" to those challenges. Serkin and Badura-Skoda presented two sides of the coin, particularly after Badura-Skoda turned his attention to playing Beethoven on period instruments, since this required radically different strategies than those applied to the modern piano.

Going to Davies Symphony Hall last night, I really had no idea what to expect; but what I encountered was a spirit of performance that I really had not heard since I was fortunate enough to hear the last Carnegie Hall recitals that Serkin gave towards the end of his life. It did not take long for Schiff to remind me of all the things I had admired in Serkin. He conveyed that attitude that, for all that has happened in the evolution of music history, Beethoven still matters and, more importantly, every performance of Beethoven matters. As soon as I opened the program, I knew I would be facing a perspective that would challenge my own listening. Rather than taking an intermission half-way through the "sonata count," the intermission was placed between the third and fourth sonatas. This meant that the three Opus 2 sonatas were performed as a group (Schiff did not even leave the stage between them), saving the Opus 7 for after the intermission.

This posed an interesting approach to the scale for listening to Beethoven. Schiff wanted us to hear those first three sonatas as an almost continuous fabric; and, even at the sonata level, the pauses between movements were very brief. The fourth sonata was then presented as an object unto itself after we were given a chance to catch our breaths after this approach to the first three.

Did this work? I think the way in which it did work was that it shed light on the somewhat conflicted relationship that Beethoven had with Haydn. The Opus 2 sonatas are dedicated to Haydn, with whom Beethoven had studied. However, he had really wanted to study with Mozart (who died before he had the chance); and his overall relationship with Haydn did not appear to be a good one. Nevertheless, Haydn was using this own piano sonatas to explore those "compositional challenges;" so I think it makes sense to think about the Opus 2 sonatas as a response to Haydn's own activities. It is not that Beethoven is offering an homage but that he seems to be saying, "I see what you were getting at when you did it that way; but what do you think of this way?"

There are any number of ways in which Beethoven makes it clear that he is not following in Haydn's footsteps. In my own book the most interesting of these surfaces in the third of these sonatas, because this seems to be where Beethoven discovered the rhetorical impact of the rest. There is a certain irony to the fact that John Cage never spoke well of Beethoven because the former thought there was too much "ego" in the latter's music, yet I think we can make a case that everything Cage discovered about what one can do with silence can be traced back to Beethoven. Furthermore, that case is reinforced by the way in which approaches that are being tried out in the third sonata reveal themselves with great profundity in the second movement of the fourth sonata (after all the storms of the preceding movement). My own pet theory is that this second movement was probably one of the strongest influences on Richard Wagner, who heard the volumes spoken by those silences and eventually mastered the art of doing the same in those opening measures of Tristan und Isolde.

Having said all that, I now need to say a few things about the problematic side of this strategy. The sad truth is that I am not sure I have experienced the depth of such silence since my days at Carnegie Hall in the eighties. I used to sit at the front of the top balcony there, and there were silences when I was afraid to breathe. I have yet to have an experience like that in San Francisco. Almost a year ago Peter Serkin came here to give a recital of the works of Toru Takemitsu; and the blog post I wrote after that concert was entitled "The Unbearable Being of Silence." If I were more cynical, I would say that today's audiences have such a fixation with value for money that they feel they are not getting their money's worth if they are not hearing something; but I suspect that the truth has more to do with the extent to which silence makes us nervous. The way I put it in writing about Serkin was that we "are just frightened by the absence of sound the way we are frightened by the absence of light."

For what it is worth, my own solution has been to do my best to minimize the distance between myself and the stage. It seems easier to get beyond what comes from behind my head, as opposed to what comes between my ears and the music! Last night I felt I was in good company. All of us down there at the front of the Orchestra section of Davies were drawn into Schiff's approach to the poetry of Beethoven's silences; and I think we all felt fortunate that San Francisco had been included as one of the cities he had chosen for his project.

"Food for the Soul"

This morning Raymond J. Learsy used his Huffington Post blog to file a report on the second National Arts Policy Roundtable, recently held at Robert Redford's Sundance Preserve. Here is his summary of the activities:

At the forefront of the discussions that lasted nearly two days, was the importance of arts to the future of the nation's competitiveness in a changing paradigm of global, economic, technical and social evolution and cultural change. That creativeness, or perhaps better understood, 'innovation,' is and will become a factor of singular significance to the quickly changing world of the 21st Century.

Under the visionary leadership of Robert L. Lynch, its CEO, a fundamental goal of the American for the Arts is the advocacy of arts education. Much of the focus of this gathering centered on the lack of arts and cultural engagement in our schools at virtually all levels. That this reality was impacting the creative capabilities of our workforce and risked our ability to compete effectively in a world where innovation critical thinking and its attendant attributes of flexibility, problem solving, innovation, entrepreneurship were not only growing exponentially in importance but were becoming key to commerce and success in a wired and in an ever flattening world. The discussions were fascinating and a comprehensive report will be issued in due course by the Americans for the Arts.

Anyone reading my blog probably knows how seriously I take the arts, particularly the performing arts; and, as a minor matter of personal history, I honestly cannot remember whether I learned to read books before or after I learned to read music. However, it is because I am so serious about the arts that it is very hard for me to respect any discussion of them that is so dominated by the newspeak (thank you, George Orwell) of a globalized world of work that we barely understand. (The ambiguity of that sentence is intentional: Because our comprehension of the world of work is so weak, our comprehension of the words we use to babble about it is totally impoverished.) The worst of those newspeak terms has to be "innovation," which should be evident by the flood of equally hollow terms that emerge in its wake in the second paragraph I selected to cite. This takes us to the next paragraph in Learsy's account:

Much of the discussion surrounded "the arts" as a viable tool that would help our workforce be more productive and adapted to the exigencies of 21st century. Questions raised were how to disseminate and inculcate this message to hierarchal groups and to enlist their help. That is to help persuade government and educational institutions to introduce arts education into the curriculum of our schools from kindergarten through college. So that indeed, the arts and its attendant creativity could become a mainstay of our educational experience and thereby helping us as a society to embrace the arts on both a personal and national level.

That first sentence is the real killer. Anyone who talks about "a viable tool that would help our workforce be more productive and adapted to the exigencies of 21st century" is talking about technology, at least subconsciously, if not explicitly. This is the language of solving problems; and the very suggestion that art solves problems is a naive misconception that, in the past, has sometimes had tragic consequences. My favorite example is the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. His supporters said that he sincerely believed that, if Hitler heard Beethoven's ninth enough times, he would finally come around to appreciate that universal brotherhood of man behind the text "Alle Menschen werden Brüder;" and, on the basis of my own probes into Furtwängler's life and work, I have no reason to doubt that sincerity.

Learsy provided a take on an interesting anecdote to conclude his post:

A story was repeated at the conference of an especially revealing moment experienced by staff member of the Americans for the Arts, Randy Cohen, its VP . It is worthy of retelling. The Americans for the Arts were visited by a delegation of Russians on a fact finding mission, to learn about the methodology of support for our arts institutions. The Russian delegation was responsible for the fiscal well-being of myriad institutions ranging from the Bolshoi, to Moscow's and regional theaters and museums. With Russia's expanding cultural programs, money, as everywhere in the cultural world was a problem. Asked by one their hosts, what were the ticket prices to the concert halls, theaters and museums under their organizational umbrella? They responded with a touch of pride, "well, about the cost of a cup of coffee." Aha, was the almost automatic response, "why not raise your ticket prices, after all they seem very low compared to ours."

At the end of the table, a rather burly Russian stood up, placing the palms of his hands on the table, hunched forward, and intoned "You must understand, in Russia art is food for our soul. We would never do anything to keep it from our people." Hello America, hello Washington, hello state capitols. Are you listening!?

That final question should be directed at the National Arts Policy Roundtable, itself, before firing it at the upper echelons of government. Was there anything in all that utilitarian language than indicated even the most rudimentary grasp of a concept like "food for the soul?" Indeed, I found it interesting that none of the participants in Learsy's account were practicing artists (with the possible exception of Robert Redford, who seemed to be serving more as host than as participant).

However, that "rather burly Russian" understood something else about "food for the soul" that goes far beyond the Roundtable's agenda. He spoke from a cultural context that appreciated that appreciation for the arts needs to be tightly coupled to the rest of the educational process. On the basis of Learsy's account, it appears that the Roundtable chose to overlook the ugly truth that we have a badly hemorrhaging educational system desperate to sacrifice as much as it can just to make ends meet; and the arts tend to be the first discipline to go when the budget gets cut down to the bone. Yes, I think it is wonderful that we have advocacy for arts education; but, unless those advocates make active and aggressive contributions to the healing of the entire educational system (which can feed the soul with not just the arts but all the other benefits of a liberal education), the points they make are likely to be perceived as gratuitous (at best) or elitist (at worst). Hello, Robert Lynch, are you listening?

American Buffalo Chips

Most people probably view the recent news of the arrest of O. J. Simpson as a here-we-go-again story with intimations that the guy may finally get what's coming to him. However, for those of us who follow the plays of David Mamet, the scent of life imitating art is beginning to diffuse through the air. Consider the dispatch that Kathleen Hennessey file from Las Vegas yesterday for the Associate Press. Here is her lead:

O.J. Simpson's alleged hotel room heist involved a group of men with little in common, save for an interest in an infamous former football star and, in some cases, a penchant for running afoul of the law.

Simpson and his five co-defendants are accused of holding memorabilia dealers Bruce Fromong and Alfred Beardsley at gunpoint Sept. 13 in a hotel room and taking autographed footballs and other collectibles. Simpson claims some of the items belonged to him and he was retrieving them.

That first sentence bears such a close family resemblance to the plot line for American Buffalo that it is hard to believe that this was a play he dreamed up in 1976. One can then read the bulk of Hennessey's story almost as if it were a proposal for a cast of characters:

• Fromong, 53: An associate of Beardsley's, Fromong appears to have owned the memorabilia allegedly stolen from the Palace Station casino hotel room and calls himself a friend of Simpson's.

After Simpson was acquitted in the slayings of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, Fromong, of North Las Vegas, testified for the defense at Simpson's civil trial.

Fromong told jurors that the market for Simpson's autograph had slowed since his acquittal in the slayings.

After the hotel room incident Fromong suffered a heart attack and spent several days in a hospital.

• Beardsley, 45: As a longtime Simpson paraphernalia collector, he frequently has emerged in the struggle of the families to reclaim Simpson memorabilia to help satisfy the families' $33.5 million civil judgment against Simpson.

He recently was peddling a suit worn by Simpson when the jury returned a not guilty verdict in his double murder trial. He hoped it would fetch $100,000, Beardsley told TMZ.com.

The Burbank, Calif., man was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in 2000 after he slammed his car into newspaper columnist's van while the columnist was inside.

In 2004, he was convicted of stalking a waitress, a felony that landed him three years probation.

• Tom Riccio, 44: An auctioneer and part owner of Universal Rarities in Corona, Calif., he first made headlines when he brought Simpson to a horror convention in Los Angeles for an autograph signing after Simpson was acquitted.

He later sold Anna Nicole Smith's handwritten diary.

In the mid-1980s Riccio was convicted of felony grand larceny in Florida. In 1994, a California jury convicted him of receiving thousands of dollars worth of stolen rare coins.

Riccio's attorney Ryan Okabe says his client's past legal troubles are irrelevant.

He arranged the meeting between Simpson and the memorabilia dealers; he has not been charged.

• Walter Alexander, 46: Simpson reached out to Alexander shortly after both men arrived in Las Vegas for a mutual friend's wedding, according Alexander's lawyer, Robert Dennis Rentzer.

A real estate agent from Mesa, Ariz., Alexander had been Simpson's golfing partner before a falling out. His uncle was the godfather of a child from Simpson's first marriage, who died in a swimming pool accident.

Simpson told Alexander about his plans to surprise Beardsley and Fromong and retrieve memorabilia. Police say Alexander was armed at the time of the robbery, but that his firearm was not drawn.

In 1987, Alexander was arrested in Los Angeles for kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, but the charges were dismissed because a "witness refused to ID the defendant," court records show.

"For at least 10 years, if not longer, he has been leading a very upright and proper life," Rentzer said.

• Clarence Stewart, 53: "C.J.", of North Las Vegas, also golfed with Simpson when he visited.

Stewart's lawyer, Robert Lucherini, described him as a mortgage broker, a family friend and a sort of "concierge" for Simpson on his Las Vegas trips. He has no criminal record.

The evening of the hotel incident Simpson wanted a ride to meet Beardsley and Fromong, Stewart reluctantly obliged, Lucherini said. Stewart brought a friend, Charles Cashmore, who wanted to meet the infamous star.

• Charles Cashmore, 40: He's a "local union guy" who does a little bit of everything, his lawyer Edward Miley said.

He's spent most of the past 15 years in Las Vegas and finds work at the local laborers union hall, sometimes as a chef. In his off time, he deejays at private parties, Miley said.

In 1996, he was charged with felony theft in an embezzlement case in Provo, Utah. Cashmore pleaded guilty and bargained the charge to a misdemeanor and probation.

• Michael McClinton, 50: McClinton is the man police believe pulled a gun, acted like a police officer, and searched Fromong and Beardsley for weapons.

A search of his Las Vegas home turned up two handguns, a suit that matched one worn by a suspect, and a concealed weapons permit in McClinton's name, according to police.

McClinton's attorney, Bill Terry, said his client works in security and has a clean record. He declined to comment on McClinton's connection to Simpson.

• Charles Ehrlich, 53: A real estate agent, he lives with and cares for his elderly mother outside Miami, according to his lawyer John Moran Jr. Ehrlich, a Simpson acquaintance, also was in Las Vegas for the wedding, Moran said.

Ehrlich's criminal record includes a conviction in the early 1990s for trafficking cocaine. Moran describes it as "brushes with the law." "His role is basically a non-role," Moran said.

The one reason we can assume this is not Mamet's work is that almost all of his plays involve a much smaller number of characters. Still, one has to wonder if all of these guys talk the same way as Mamet's characters, constantly wrestling with a poor command of language to wrap their words around ill-formed ideas. My only regret is that this sort of stuff still makes for better drama that anything I have seen recently on The Unit!

A New Civil War?

Late yesterday afternoon (while my computer was busy with its monthly full backup), Larisa Alexandrovna submitted a fascinating and provocative post to her Huffington Post blog. The thesis was that the United States is once again in the midst of a Civil War. This time around, however, the war is a "cold" one, not involve active engagements between military forces. What is most interesting about this thesis is her argument as to the opposing forces in this war:

In our cold civil war, the enemy is not a part of the country called the "red states," as conveniently manufactured. Nor is the enemy a phantom right wing "wing-nut" or left wing "liberal loony," although there are some people who fall very much under those definitions. On the whole, however, there are simply not enough delusional and/or corrupt Americans to fill the manufactured stereotypes of the typical this or a typical that, even if the label is even color-coded for political fear tactics.

The image of a divided nation at war with itself is a false one, as false as the reasons for this war and the general war on terror, which is more of a reign of terror than anything else. But who is it trying so hard to divide this nation and for what reason?

Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in that same question reworded thusly: Who benefits? Consider this question in yet another way: So long as we are standing face to face and not standing shoulder to shoulder, who is benefiting? The answer of course is the same corporations and their lackeys masquerading in the garb of government. They need to distract us, divide us, spend billions of dollars trying to convince us what we need, what we hate, what we love, who is evil, who is good and everything in between.

These authoritarians, more appropriately fascists, understand that dissent is to be treated like a virus. It has to be, because the spread of individual opinions might collapse a whole industry. The more you know, the more you question; the more you question, the more you infect others; and the more people there are asking questions, the more we become a nation that cannot be ruled or bullied. We are far too many, and if we are left to think for ourselves, we might not like what we find.

We are, therefore, a threat, a virus, a thing that must be entertained, distracted, confused, frightened, anything, but allowed the freedom to think for ourselves or express those views to one another. People standing shoulder to shoulder outnumber the few who have claimed the control of our nation for themselves and against our best interests. We outnumber them and we frighten them because should we stand together, they cannot stand for long.

This is an intriguing perspective, and the overall arguments makes sense in many ways. The problem, however, is that, if, indeed, we, the general public, are confronted with the enemy of corporate fascism, what are we to do about it? Ms. Alexandrovna offers some suggestions along the lines of forcing these corporate enemies into a more "defensive posture;" but this strategy overlooks the extent to which we are dependent on those enemies. This is not just a question of whether or not we are addicted to shopping and should liberate ourselves through the Gospel According to Reverend Billy. The dependence also extends to how much retirement income is now supplied through the profits of the corporate world (along with clever financial strategies for offering loans in that corporate world).

Thus, while our freedom has been jeopardized by conflict, it is not the conflict of a war, even a cold one. Rather, it is a conflict born of our having entrapped ourselves in conditions of enslavement. Those conditions were held out to us by the corporate world, packaged in propaganda that made them appear tempting; and we bought the whole package with little idea of what we were actually buying (just as, many decades in the past, we bought up Ford Pintos with exploding gas tanks). Furthermore, the dependence is not only economic. Consider the extent to which Ms. Alexandrovna (not to mention the entire Huffington Post establishment or the very humble post you are currently reading) is dependent on all of those authoritarian players in the corporate world.

This is not a problem that can be resolved by burning down the Big House on the plantation or calling a strike against the Bosses. It may be that the only resolution will reside in making the case that the dependence actually extends in both directions. We need to identify the key vulnerabilities in how the corporate world depends on us, which is likely to be primarily as consumers. I tend to agree with those who claim that this was the real strategy that broke the back of apartheid in South Africa. If it could work for the conditions of enslavement there, we should learn from those experiences and start thinking about how to apply them here.

Knowledge of the Social World Considered Strategic

At the end of August, I wrote a post entitled "Knowledge of the Social World Considered Dangerous," which had grown out of a series of posts concerned with the dangers of enterprise software ignoring (or, worse yet, misunderstanding) the social world. The primary danger I was exploring had to do with being careful what you wished for; or, to invoke one of my favorite concepts, thinking about the consequences before figuring out how to make your wishes come true. Today David Rohde filed a story for The New York Times from the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan, which throws an interesting light on this whole matter of wishes and consequences; and, if one comes away from this story without any sense of a resolved conclusion, then at least one has learned how complex the issue is. (Those familiar with Plato may recognize that this is the lesson of his "Theaetetus" dialogue, which begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge and ends with Socrates' reassuring Theaetetus that, even if they could not find a satisfactory definition, their time was far from wasted.)

Let's start with the wish, which probably can be traced back at least as far as the Vietnam War, if not further. As the discontent with our involvement in Vietnam grew, it was fueled by the voices of social theorists (most of which were speaking from their metaphorical armchairs) grousing about out blatant ignorance of the social context in Vietnam and therefore our failure to understand just who the "actors" were, let alone the nature of their motivated interpersonal actions. This armchair theorizing is arising once again; and this time the theorists have two contexts to fuel their grousing: Afghanistan and Iraq. For a while in Iraq, it seemed as if General David Petraeus was taking some of this theorizing to heart and trying to develop strategy around his own anthropological understanding, which, while it may have been amateur, was not without merit. Afghanistan, however, has received less attention, at least while we were able to sustain the "mission accomplished" myth that we had eliminated the Taliban and would soon be able to do with same with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Then the word began to leak out that, for all of their extremism, the Taliban was winning more hearts and minds than the "legitimate" government was, probably because so much of the population was perceiving that government as hopelessly corrupt (and may have been right in their perceptions).

This brings us to today's Times report, based on the following background paragraph:

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.

In other words the Department of Defense has decided that it is looking for a few (or more) good social theorists who are willing to get up out of their armchairs and see how well their theories stand up to practice under fire (literally, not metaphorically). Since the Times story was filed from Afghanistan, it concentrates on the impact of this new strategy in dealing with the Taliban problem:

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

On the surface this seems to be good news. Social theory really can stand up to practice. However, some of theorists who are still in their armchairs disagree:

Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

This is where the story turns to that problematic confrontation between wishes and consequences. To invoke an Asian metaphor, Professor Gusterson sees this as a camel's nose getting under the tent; and the rest of the camel just not have the sorts of humane values that Colonel Schweitzer is currently extolling. Here is an even more critical voice:

Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.

“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”

What does all this mean and to whom does the meaning signify? While Professor González is right to raise a red flag over activities that serve short-term interests, I feel that the exploration of new strategies for our interpersonal relations, both in war and in peace and particularly on an international scale, is just as important for the long-term needs of living in a peaceful world as it is for the short-term objective of getting us out of the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also believe that both these short-term and long-term goals are more important than whether or not the discipline of anthropology will be "harmed." Is Professor González worried that theory will change as a result of bumping into practice? If so, then I fear he has a potentially dangerous fundamentalist view of theory. His concern about abuse is more to the point. However, abuse of any knowledge is always a problem, whether in anthropology or physics; but whether or not that abuse harms the discipline is ultimately determined by those who study and practice that discipline.

As a result, I would say that the argument will involve the opposition of two positions. On the one hand we have those who flat-out distrust anything that our current Administration does; and, given its track record, they have every right to be suspicious. On the other hand there are those who see this as a step towards making the world a better place and feel that giving this new approach a try is better than wallowing in our current messes. I tend to side with the latter camp but with the proviso that, as I have previously discussed, there is a fundamental "tragic flaw" in utopian thinking. The truth is that we are always going to be in some mess or another, just because life is like that. This is not the boulder rolling back on us when we finally get it to the top of the hill. It is that we have the capacity to solve problems and there is no reason to assume that such a capacity will ever become as vestigial as our appendices. So I would like to applaud the efforts of the Department of Defense to find value in social theory, recognizing that I am a member of neither our armed forces nor any academic department in the social sciences!

The Absurdity of Reducing Biology to Physics

Reading Dan Agin's latest blog post on The Huffington Post reminded my of a post on my old blog in which I enumerated five examples of books by author's who assumed that their "reputation" was an acceptable substitute for intellectual authority in the subject matter about which they were writing. In this case Agin has written a review of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, by "Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D." (as it says on the book's cover), along with his research assistant, Michael Rae. I shall not provide a detailed account of Agin's review, because it is a real pleasure to read. Suffice it to say that the book is "about how to 'engineer' human immortality;" and, while Agin never says anything explicitly about distrusting any author who feels a need to display his doctoral credentials on the cover of a book, his account of the book reminded me of my own distrust in this matter.

What I would like to quote from Agin's review is his account of de Grey's background, because I think this is useful information for anyone who chooses to thumb through the book (at a bookstore or on a friend's shelf or coffee table) or linger at the Amazon.com page (possibly due to a recommendation link):

De Grey has a B.A. in computer science from Cambridge University. He has a Ph.D., but it's a degree peculiar to Cambridge, which has a rule that if you're a graduate of that university, you can offer a book you've published as a doctoral dissertation, and if you successfully defend the book as a scholarly contribution they will award you a Ph.D. without your attending any classes or passing any qualifying examinations in anything at all. De Grey offered a controversial book in theoretical cell biology (about mitochondria), a book he published in 1999, and he received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2000. Given that most graduate students in science spend four, five, or six years of sweat, toil, aggravation, and general misery in a stinking bench laboratory or coughing up chalk at theoretical blackboards to get a Ph.D., de Grey's feat at Cambridge is an item. I don't know anyone else in modern science who has accomplished this feat at a major university. If you know of anyone, please let me know.

But de Grey doesn't call himself a scientist, he calls himself an engineer. He says the fact that he's not a scientist means he can think differently than scientists and see scientific problems from an engineering perspective.

Having worked in communities of both scientists and engineers, I find it hard to believe that any engineering community would accept de Grey as one of them, let alone that "perspective" that he regards as his major asset in writing this book. A key aspect of engineering talent is the ability to scope out a problem in terms of its feasibility. We saw that at its best in the American effort to put a man on the moon. De Grey seems to think that the "engineering perspective" of the space program was a framing of the problem in a multi-step strategic plan. While this is a good start in characterizing that perspective, it does not go far enough, because the man-on-the-moon plan was constrained by reality checks involving the required resources (both physical and temporal); and those reality checks were imposed after (and often during) each of the steps of the plan. De Grey seems to think that such reality checks are minor details and that the plan is all that matters; and Agin cleverly undermines that assumption by concocting a plan of his own (for intergalactic space travel) that is free of any of the burdens of reality checking.

However, even before embarking of developing a plan, good engineers pay a lot of attention to the more general question of whether or not it makes sense to work the problem in the first place. Hubert Dreyfus (who is a philosopher, rather than an engineer) has pursued this question intensely in his critiques of artificial intelligence as either (cognitive) science or (knowledge) engineering. Dreyfus' favorite metaphor was that you could not get to the moon by coming up with ways to bounce higher on a trampoline. Now one of the comments to Agin's review suggested that de Grey was a "tinkerer," rather than an engineer; but if he is a tinkerer at all, then his strategy is one of trampoline-tinkering.

Personally, I agree with de Grey that he is not a scientist; but I would not call him an engineer either. He also seems to lack (willfully?) any ecological perspective of both the structures and processes of living systems (probably because the 1000+ pages of James Grier Miller's book on this perspective were too much for him), which would have been a good point of departure for the question of the sensibility of working the immortality problem at all. So I guess he is just another guy who writes stuff and then tries to figure out what to do to get people to pay to read it!

"Iraq is a soverign country"

I find it interesting that I had to go to Al Jazeera English to learn that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had a meeting at the White House yesterday. It makes me wonder whether or not Representative Henry Waxman knew that the Iraqi President would be in town. I suspect that Talabani would have provided a valuable perspective on the current investigation of Waxman's committee into Blackwater's practices in Iraq (which finally seems to be attracting the attention of the mainstream media, despite the fact that Jeremy Scahill's book about Blackwater has been out for some time and holding a good best-seller position). More likely, President Bush wanted President Talabani all to himself as a weapon in what are sure to be contentious Congressional debates over the funding of the Iraq war. Continuing along the theme of postmodern thinking, if Bill Clinton will go down in history for questioning the semantics of "is," Bush may be remembered for playing the same game with the semantics of "progress," in the hopes that he can turn a sow's ear into a Coach knock-off, if not a silk purse:

The US has defended Iraq's lack of political progress after Jalal Talabani, the country's president, visited the White House.

Pressed on the lack of progress towards reaching political benchmarks that George Bush has called critical to quelling sectarian violence, Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said "Iraq is a sovereign country".

In other words the United States should not be held accountable for the mess in Iraq because the Iraqis are merely exercising the sovereignty that the United States helped them achieve. Does Bullwinkle plan to pull any more rabbits out of his hat before the primaries begin?

Postmodern Politics

It has been a while since I have tried to view political behavior through the lens of postmodern thinking; but the latest round of rationalist frustration with the recent behavior of President George W. Bush (much of which keeps him ahead of the pack in Chutzpah of the Week awards) has led me to revisit this point of view. My interest in postmodernisms was also revived by the chapter on organizational culture that Linda Smircich and Marta B. Calás prepared for the first edition of The Handbook of Organizational Communication. This chapter offered one of the best characterizations of the postmodern condition that I have seen for some time:

Postmodernism is resistance, not opposition. Opposition substitutes one notion of “truth” with an incompatible alternative—for example, advocating one paradigm over another. The postmodern notion of resistance, in contrast, suspects and defers acceptance of any notion of “truth.” Resistance means questioning the possibility of attaining truth with the view that the “possibility of attaining truth” is itself an idea, which results from an historical event where “truth or falsity” became a dominant style of thinking (Foucault, 1976; Hacking, 1982; Rorty, 1979). It involves deconstruction (Derrida, 1974), as in suspecting, taking apart, or deferring resolution (not as in destruction) of our taken-for-granted modes of thinking.

If we try to interpret this in a political context, then it would be fair to say that Bill Clinton was our first postmodern President (demonstrated best when he tried to fend off a question about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky by questioning the semantics of “is"); but, in the grand scheme of things, President Bush has revealed himself as a master of resistance. I doubt that any of us will ever know his true mental acuity and the extent to which his persona is a well-crafted act (the postmodern triumph of rhetoric over logic); but he has built up a flock of faithful followers (too much talk about literature makes me alliterative) around this idea that the wisdom of the heart is more important than the “possibility of attaining truth.” Bush seems to appreciate (even if only intuitively) the power of the socially constructed reality; and he and his cronies have mastered the art of getting our society to construct that reality in the image they (i.e. the Bush league) want. Like it or not, that image has nothing to do with eliminating ignorance through rational practices. Welcome to the twenty-first century!

Share the Chutzpah!

It looks as if New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is going to have to share his Chutzpah of the Week award. Deborah Howlett has now reported on NJ.com that New Jersey is going to make the same move against the Bush administration:

New Jersey filed a federal lawsuit today charging the Bush administration is illegally trying to change the rules of a health insurance progam New Jersey and virtually every other state uses to provide coverage to 6.6 million children in working poor families.

Furthermore, for those who might think that this is the work of some "Port Authority Cabal," it looks like a total of eight states are currently on this particular lawsuit bandwagon:

The filing of New Jersey's lawsuit comes on the same day that seven other states announced they would pursue legal challenges to the Bush Administration's directive. Those states are Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York and Washington.

So I guess this week's chutzpah award will have to be divided into eight slices (rather like a Kosher pizza)!

Positive Chutzpah

An act of chutzpah has more to do with how outrageously excessive it is, rather than whether or not the act is bad or good. This is evident in the definition that Leo Rosten supplied in The Joys of Yiddish:

Gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible "guts"; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.

The Chutzpah of the Week award has concentrated almost exclusively on the negative connotation of the word, which is why, early in the week as it may be, I feel a need to assign this week's honor to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer has done quite a few gutsy things in his career as New York Attorney General, but he is now preparing to bring the full force of his office against President George W. Bush over the latter's threat to veto the SCHIP bill. He has just announced this commitment on both the Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. Here is the basic thrust of his argument:

The bureaucratic barriers to coverage the Bush administration has imposed are not only fundamentally misguided, but also illegal...

...They conflict with the statute authorizing SCHIP. Moreover, they were issued without the opportunity for public comment, as required by federal law. Accordingly, I have joined Democratic and Republican governors from states across the country to bring a lawsuit challenging these new rules in court.

How far will Spitzer get with his challenge? I suspect that, at the very least, he will give the White House lawyers a run for their money; and Spitzer's track record for keeping his outrages in the public spotlight has been a good one. If this turns into a case of major national embarrassment, then it will have been an exercise of chutzpah for a good cause!

The Selective Censuring of Censorship

Last week it appeared that Verizon was quick to respond when Amy Tiemann put up a News blog post about their refusal to carry text messages from NARAL. Yesterday, however, Timothy Karr used his Huffington Post blog to post a response of his own to the effect that, first, Verizon put little more than a tiny bandage on a gaping wound and, second, they were not the only ones attempting to impose censorship on their customers:

While they may have scrambled to fix one "dusty policy" and let these messages through, we can see in the details of this and other episodes a worrisome pattern of abuse. And it's not just at Verizon. Over the weekend, the technophiles at Slashdot exposed what many of us failed to read in the fine print of our AT&T customer agreements.

This should not be that all new to those of us who remember the days of Ma Bell, when you could lose your telephone service if your language got to foul (particularly if you were directing it to one of their operators). Nevertheless, Mr. Karr's post reminds us that we need to apply present-day thinking to a present-day problem, which is a great advance from the rather naive punch line in Ms. Tiemann's original post:

Laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmission on phone lines do not apply to text messages. It's time to change that law to protect free speech, no matter how it is communicated.

I am not quite sure what laws Ms. Tiemann had in mind; and, on the basis of Mr. Karr's post, I get the feeling that she does not have a clear distinction between civil rights laws and contractual agreements. This is why, as I observed, many of the comments to her post came from free-market advocates. Mr. Karr, on the other hand, is astute enough to recognize that that language of the First Amendment, in and of itself, neither guarantees nor protects free speech in all generality, including the choice of where one wishes to exercise it. Here is his punch line:

Speech should be free wherever it occurs - on the Internet, over cell phones, on the streets - everywhere. And it should be protected.

More and more of our communications occur in digital formats. It's time Americans safeguarded free speech in this new media with the passion that we protect it in old. A good place to start is with the two companies that control Internet and cell phone access for more than 120 million Americans.

Earlier today, my organization Free Press called on Congress to convene hearings that address phone company censorship policies. You can support this effort by writing your member of Congress and urging them to stand with the rest of us and investigate this abuse.

The biggest threat to free speech in America is public complacency. We must have this discussion about our democratic rights while we still can.

Phone lobbyists exert immense power over both Democrats and Republicans in the halls of Washington. As an alternative to opening their doors wide to AT&T and Verizon lobbyists, the least our elected officials could do for us is keep new communications open for everyone.

I think this is a step in the right direction, at least to the extent that it should be examined by the Congress. However, I also believe that such an examination needs to take into account whether or not free speech should be guaranteed "wherever it occurs." Justice Holmes was not speaking frivolously when he raised the example of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded auditorium. Similarly, examination should take the protection of free speech into account, particularly with regard to such questions of "How?" and "By whom?"

Furthermore, I have to confess that my current confidence in the Congress to debate this issue is not particularly high. I have already written about Congress being ill-equipped to deal with the Net Neutrality question, reducing the seriousness of the matter to a battle among the peripheral influence peddlers. Mr. Karr would be naive to assume that those influence peddlers would not descend on the Congress to protect the power of those commercial interests that now control most of the channels through which we can exercise free speech. As John Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, put it, the age of the newspaper as a public trust is dead and gone; so why should we assume that any other medium of communication should assume a similar public-trust responsibility? Nevertheless, if we follow Mr. Karr's advice and urge Congress to start deliberations, then, should we do so, we should also take the next step and monitor those deliberations, letting our representatives know what we think as those deliberations proceed.

Segregation Redux

Michael Fauntroy has now posted his thoughts on last week's Republican presidential candidate's forum at Morgan State University to his blog on The Huffington Post. Most important was his by-the-numbers account of how this event was covered:

This event was hurt by the absences of the four top-tier candidates. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and former Senator Fred Thompson all cited scheduling conflicts in their decision to skip the forum. That reason flies in the face of the fact that those forum invitations were issued in March. Their absence left a decided lack of electricity from the evening. In some ways it was like watching a concert of preliminary acts with no head liners. The auditorium was about two-thirds full and about 80% of the accredited media did not bother to attend.

I would add to this my own observation that it seems as if those "accredited media" have a tendency to back away from many of the events in which Tavis Smiley plays a major role. Since I no longer spend very much time in my car and even less time with PBS, it seems as if my primary contact with Smiley is through C-SPAN coverage of such events, either directly or through their affiliation with Book TV. The consequence is that, should something arise at one of those events and I want to do a bit of digging before writing, I often have to search frantically for any account on the Web. (Hey, this particular event occurred last Thursday; and Fauntroy's post did not appear until today?)

What is it about Smiley that brings him to the brink (if not over the brink) of untouchability? As either a host or moderator, he tends to be a bit loquacious; but at least he speaks clearly and honors the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. This leads me to wonder if we are dealing with a willful ignorance of what Smiley has to say that should be added to the list of instances of racial discrimination that I began to compile back in the heady days of the Imus affair. My fear is that the mainstream media looks at Smiley the way Lucy van Pelt used to look at her kid brother Linus, best summarized by the Peanuts strip whose final frame yielded the punch line, "He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him." Is Smiley being penalized by that "American Ruling Class" for making too much sense and, by so doing, threatening their vested interests? I am really not that big on conspiracy theories; but, every time I find yet another candidate (even a potential candidate) to add to my racial-discrimination list, I have to wonder if there is some over-arching causal mechanism behind all the items on the list.

Mahler in Baltimore

Apparently Michael Tilson Thomas was not the only conductor to launch a subscription season with Mahler this past week. On the other side of the continent, Marin Alsop opened the subscription series of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Mahler's fifth symphony. Rather than coupling her Mahler with a work on the scale and period of a Mozart symphony, she, instead, began her program with John Adams' "Fearful Symmetries," which clocks in at an uninterrupted half-hour. Since this was Alsop's debut as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, making her the first woman to hold such a position, The New York Times decided that this concert was worth covering and sent Anthony Tommasini to do the job. His account is worth reading on several scores, but I am glad to see that he spent more time on the music than on the feminist angle. I was particularly happy to see his emphasis on the attention that Alsop plans to give to living composers. This is no surprise to those of us who know her primarily by her work in California, and I am pleased that she plans to move this emphasis from festival settings to the more mainstream subscription series.

Tommasini also gave an encouraging account of her interpretation of Mahler. Whether she will become a contender in what I have speculated may be a period of "Mahler turf wars" remains to be seen (and heard). For now the good news is that she seems to have command of the attention span of the mainstream subscriber audience of Baltimore, getting an enthusiastic reception after leading them first through the uninterrupted half-hour of Adams followed by the more massive scale of the Mahler fifth. Tommasini also reported that XM Satellite Radio will be broadcasting eight of this season's concerts, allowing an even wider audience to appreciate what Alsop will be bringing to Baltimore.