Getting Even with Borat?

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has pretty much faded from memory (although I noticed that Cinemax gave it at least one screening this week); and along with it has faded much philosophizing about ridicule, cultural relativism, and offending audiences. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan is prospering with oil and mineral resources, while the source of those "cultural learnings" has become a more viable target for ridicule by dint of those economic follies that have been feeding its addiction to consumerism. All this seems like an appropriate context for the latest news from Kazakhstan as reported by Jeremy Grant for the Financial Times:

Markets are plunging, banks are collapsing and talk of recession is all about, but the global gloom is not stopping the launch of a MasterCard credit card inlaid with a diamond and laced with gold.

Known as the “Diamond”, the card has a 0.02-carat gem ­embedded in its centre and a picture of a peacock for female cardholders and a winged horse for men.

The card, which has a $1,000 (£620) annual fee, is to be issued in two weeks’ time by MasterCard and Kazkommertsbank, the second largest bank in commodities-rich Kazakhstan, where the oil and minerals boom of recent years has created a fresh crop of billionaires.

Kazakhstan has apparently found the best way to get even with Borat: Living well is the best revenge!

The Sound of One Voice in Conversation

When the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) announced that Alex Ross was going to be one of their speakers and that he would be talking about listening to music, I felt an obligation to hear what he had to say. My familiarity with his book, The Rest is Noise, came primarily through Michael Kimmelman's piece about it in The New York Review; and I am still resisting any temptation to buy a copy, simply because the pile of books I have to read first is both growing and staring at me menacingly. However, given that much of what I write about music focuses on what I am beginning to call "listening comprehension" (as opposed to "reading comprehension") and given how many of those books in my to-read pile were selected through my drive to develop a "theory of listening to music" (which is addressed by neither music theory nor the psychology of listening), it would have been negligent of me to pass up an opportunity to hear an author of such repute express his point of view.

Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at the JCCSF, the talk have been reconceived as a conversation with Joshua Kosman; and about the only thing pertaining to listening was Ross' remark that the subtitle of his book, Listening to the Twentieth Century, had deliberately omitted "music" as a final word. On the other hand Ross took great delight in waxing over his presence in the blogosphere. He talked about launching his blog while he was working on the book and about the rather impressive information resource it has become since then. He also talked about the virtue of the blogosphere for providing him with the opportunity to converse about the book, even while it was still a work in progress. This was enough to lure me to check out his site, pretty confident that I would find some way to enter the conversation taking place there. Unfortunately, what I discovered upon my initial examination was that none of the posts had been set up to collect reader comments, leading me to wonder just where the conversation was! Having had the good fortune to count John Cage as one of my teachers, I am well informed about the sound of one hand clapping; but this has got to be my first encounter with a conversation involving only one voice!

Technology Policy Chutzpah

Yesterday I took a parenthetical jab at Google's Philistine grasp of the subtleties of matters of governance. If Google wanted to retaliate, they could easily point to any number of government insiders who are just as Philistine. I would probably not disagree, but my reaction would be to take any of their examples who are still actively involved in government and short-list them for future Chutzpah of the Week awards. Anyone that close to the inside is either blissfully ignorant of how things work or should just know better.

Reed Hundt used to be such an insider. He was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997, appointed to that position by Bill Clinton. According to Stephanie Condon's latest Politics and Law report for CNET News, he is jockeying to be an insider once again, which, in my book, means that his philistinism, if serious enough, constitutes grounds for this week's award. The grounds to be considered can be found in Condon's opening paragraphs:

Even Republicans will probably concede that Barack Obama's campaign made good use of the Internet in the last year. Now an advisor is saying that an Obama administration would do the same, even turning to wikis to discuss topics like privacy.

Bureaucrats in Washington will have to confront a number of issues in the next few years such as how to regulate private, portable electronic health records, said Reed Hundt, a technology policy adviser for Obama and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

"That's the kind of thing that shouldn't be decided by one person in the new administration," he said on Thursday. "There's not anything wrong with a collaborative process that could literally include hundreds of thousands of people."

It was supposed to be a debate here between Hundt and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic policy adviser for John McCain and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. But the McCain guy never showed, giving Hundt--someone who Wired magazine once said had "as much sincerity as a photocopy machine salesman"--plenty of opportunities to jab at his absent opponent.

As a sidebar (hence the smaller font), I need to point out that nowhere in her article does Condon say where "here" is. Her byline is "Washington;" but that is not particularly helpful. Her photograph of Hundt suggests that the New American Foundation was the site of this would-be debate; but she seems to have forgotten to provide any more substantive background. This minor detail was missed by her editor (assuming that she has one).

I could care less about sincerity. Where any level of government is concerned, I continue to live by the wisdom of Mr. Dooley:

Trust everybody, but cut the cards.

However, when it comes to an understanding of the "collaborative process," that "photocopy machine salesman" simile may be appropriate. Indeed, the commission-based world of the salesman (escalated to the level of high drama by David Mamet) is so cutthroat that it is hard to imagine anyone in sales capable of uttering the word "collaborative," let alone embracing it in practice.

This brings us to Hundt's chutzpah. It all comes down to a single sentence:

There's not anything wrong with a collaborative process that could literally include hundreds of thousands of people.

It would probably be naive (if not arrogant) to suggest that anyone being considered for government service be required to take a test on the Federalist papers, whose results would be made available to those doing the considering; but those documents provide any number of challenges to Hundt's proposition. I am willing to grant his point, if he can refute all of those challenges; but my guess is that he never took the trouble to recognize that someone, even from the 200-year-old past, might have valid grounds for disagreement. That is where his chutzpah resides.

Ironically, Number 51 of The Federalist (whose author may have been either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) provides the critical precondition that would lend more plausibility to Hundt's claim:

If men were angels …

Federalist-style angels might at least be able to set aside the impediments of petty egotism in favor of effective collaboration; but, even if this impossible precondition were granted, there would still be problems. (Bear in mind that there are those, like George Balanchine's biographer, Bernard Taper, who believe that angels, as little more than carriers of divine messages, lack not only egotism but any evidence of personality whatsoever, in which case, if men were angels, we would be little more than a gathering of zombies, no longer worthy of the noun "society!") I am more concerned about whether or not Hundt has even the foggiest idea of what it would be like to manage the operations of "a collaborative process that could literally include hundreds of thousands of people." Does he have in mind any existing collaborative process that does this effectively? We do not have to look any further than the Central Intelligence Agency for evidence that Wikipedia is far from a model example of that "wisdom of crowds" mantra. Furthermore, there is the more general problem that most of the "social software" that enables collaborative processes does little, if anything, to impose regulatory safeguards against participants who willfully behave badly; and bad behavior is at the top of a slippery slope, which descends to malicious behavior and ultimately to pathological behavior. Hundt's "solution" appears to be that the very question of regulatory policy should be left to the "wisdom of crowds," which seems to indicate that he is as ignorant of Plato (and possibly Juvenal) as he is of The Federalist!

I have no idea whether or not Hundt has a personal stake in promoting such social software; but, even if this is not the case, his cleaving to the Web 2.0 evangelism of collaborative processes cannot be seen as anything other than faith-based chutzpah of the highest order, for which he deserves this week's Chutzpah of the Week award.

Is Google Still Making Money without Doing Evil?

Yesterday I cited a German author who understood revolution in terms of its dark consequences. I have also argued in the past that a disregard of such dark consequences, be it through will or abject ignorance, is leading Google to lose its moral compass, assuming that such compass was defined by anything other than the naive conviction that "You can make money without doing evil." Thus, it is no surprise that today's Germany is the site of a growing awareness of such consequences contingent on current Google activities; and much of that awareness has now been documented by Julia Bonstein, Marcel Rosenbach and Hilmar Schmundt in their article on SPIEGEL ONLINE with title and subtitle "Does Google Know Too Much?: Data Mining You to Death."

In many ways this is a David-and-Goliath story, in which a few German organizations at different levels of the government are trying to play David against Google's Goliath. (Putting aside the question of evil, we have entertained more than ample evidence that "Philistine" would be a good description of Google's grasp of the subtleties of matters of governance.) The contrast between the opponents is best appreciated when the government organization involved is all the way down at the local level. So that his how Bonstein, Rosenbach, and Schmundt begin their story:

The little town of Molfsee, near Kiel in northern Germany, has three lakes, an idyllic open-air museum and a population just under 5,000. It’s not the likeliest place to declare war against a global power. Yet Molfsee has won the first round of a battle against a powerful digital age opponent.

The source of friction is a fleet of dark-colored Opel Astras. The cars caused a stir when they started cruising the streets of German cities over the last few months, sporting roof-mounted cameras that record 360-degree images from 11 lenses. Some of the vehicles bear the name of the company that sent them on this massive photographic mission: Google.

"Street View" is the name of the service offered by Google. The California-based Internet company is photographing city streets all over the world, linking the images to digital maps and making the whole package available on the Web. Anyone with an Internet connection will then be able to call up not just a "Google Map" but pictures of the area as well. The company also plans a feature to let users take a virtual stroll through a city.

The camera-wielding Astras haven't come to Molfsee yet, and local Google opponents want to keep it that way. Some of them have resorted to local law. According to a road traffic act passed in the town, Google would need a special permit to drive and photograph in Molfsee. Local politicians have refused to issue the permit.

What makes this story interesting, however, is how this local act of consciousness-raising has worked its way up to the Federal level, which now has a Commission for Data Protection. It's commissioner, Peter Schaar is taking a serious look at Molfsee and definitely sympathizes with their local law and the way in which it was applied. However, this story is about more than Street View. Ultimately, Google wants us to believe that it is in the business of indexing and/or organizing all the world's information so that it can be the world's best information provider. Professor Hendrik Speck, on the other hand, does not see it quite the same way:

Well, compared to what Google knows about us, many intelligence agencies look "like child protection services," says Hendrik Speck, professor at the applied sciences university in Kaiserslautern, a southwestern German city. Theoretically, he says, Google could record a query for pregnancy tests, then nine months later provide advertisements for diapers. Or -- six years later -- it could show offers for after-school homework help.

"The more data Google collects from its users, the higher the price it can ask for advertisements," says Speck.

This is the point at which the Google evangelists retaliate: So what if Google can charge more for advertisements! The information they provide is available to all of us. Shouldn't we all share in the benefit, whether or not Google us making more money in the process?

That rebuttal hits at one of the more aggravating mantras of Internet evangelists, the faith-based conviction that "information wants to be free." Well, guys, "information" is an abstract concept, a denizen of the objective world that knows as much about wanting things like freedom as it knows about wanting chopped liver. Desires reside in the subjective world. Back in the pre-Google age, information was provided by people; and they had desires! Probably the quality of the work they performed had at least some correlation with the degree to which those desires were being satisfied, whether it involved buying a new car, making new friends, or just feeling good about what you were doing. However, those providers also worked for organizations that imposed responsibilities as well as compensation packages. Those responsibilities were set up as part of the organization's governance structure out of recognition that providing information has consequences; and the organization, as a whole, accepted the responsibility of safeguarding against those consequences being dark ones.

That closes the loop of the logic: Google is ultimately one behemoth of an objective beast. Invoking the language of Milton Friedman, the whole purpose of the Google enterprise is to "feed the beast." There is no room for thinking about the consequences (in both one's own subjective world and in the social world enclosing it) of one's actions in this picture, particularly if one is a part of that enterprise. As a result of pushback at the local level, the Federal German government is starting to get very nervous about what Google can do (or has already done) in their backyard. Meanwhile, down at the grassroots level, we are beginning to encounter efforts to define "Google-free zones." This may not be enough to bring down the Google beast with a slingshot; but, if more governmental institutions around the world take more notice of what is happening in Germany, we may discover that the beast will only be fed in accordance with a regulatory framework that respects the civil rights of individuals!

In Training?

There was no doubting the capabilities of the six students who contributed to the Piano Department Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night. However, either this has turned out to be a month of "too much music;" or there was something disconcerting about last night's event that had to do with more than listening burnout. Reviewing the program this morning, I realized that there was one question that continued to dig into the back of my mind: Did the evening have to consist exclusively of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Franz Liszt? Even it is a "truth universally acknowledged" that one cannot make a career as a concert pianist without a firm command of these three composers, is there no room for a bit more diversity, particularly within an academy where, by all rights, it should be "safe" to explore lesser known regions of the repertoire? The San Francisco Conservatory clearly encourages such expeditions, at least if we are to consider, as a case in point, the all-Hungarian concert given two weeks ago in the Chamber Music Masters series. On the other hand the imaginativeness of that evening must have had a lot to do with the presence of visiting violist Kim Kashkashian, the featured artist of the evening; and diversity of repertoire has played a major role in the progress of Kaskashian's career.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison, simply because the would-be concert pianist cannot necessarily engage the same career-planning strategy as the would-be concert violist. However, this set me to thinking about just what that "piano strategy" has become and whether or not "serious" career planning could be as much a part of the problem as a path to the solution. Recall that, when I wrote about a Senior Recital last week, I introduced the name of only one professional pianist, Alexander Toradze. I had mentioned that Toradze "only won the Silver Medal in the Fifth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1977)," invoking "only" to emphasize that, in a "business" with so few opportunities, anything other than first place may not count for very much (and first place may not count for more for very long). On the other hand anyone who saw the documentary of that Competition on PBS could not have forgotten the electrifying bravura approach that Toradze brought to his performance of Igor Stravinsky's piano arrangement of three scenes from his Pétrouchka ballet. Fortunately, some agent was enterprising enough to arrange for a telecast in which Toradze upped the ante with a solo piano transcription of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. Whether or not this was a key part of the strategy through which Toradze is now, in general, better known than Gold Medalist Vladimir Viardo may be debated; but Toradze's career path was certainly not paved strictly by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt!

Nevertheless, it is just as certain that the Cliburn Competition played a major role in getting that paving process under way in the first place; so my own discontent led me to seek out, once again, a post from March of 2007 entitled "The Competition versus the Music," which was written in a similarly disconcerted state following a recital by Ingrid Fliter, winner of the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award. This award is not based on a competition. It is based on judges; but those judges attend public recitals, presumably under the cloak of anonymity, and grant the award on the basis of such "field experience." This led me to speculate that, even if they were not performing in an explicit competition, up-and-coming pianists might feel obliged to treat every performance as if they were "playing for the judges," from which I then raised the question of whether accountability to such judges might, at least sometimes, find itself in conflict with accountability to the music itself. The rest of my post tried to elaborate what I meant by that latter accountability and explain why, in Fliter's case, it had been trumped by "playing for the judges," even if the judges had already granted their prize. To get back to the theme of last night's recital, the point of departure for my argument about Fliter was the program she had prepared to the evening:

Her program was a collection of works with challenges that would impress competition judges: Beethoven's "Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme," the Schubert A Major sonata written in the final year of his life (one of three extraordinary piano sonatas that left a wake of confusion for many decades after Schubert's death), and a Chopin assortment of familiar pieces, each with its own technical demands.

Nevertheless, the brunt of my argument was not directed at Beethoven and Chopin (or Schubert or the "absent" Liszt). Rather, looking back on that argument, I realize that the "strategic value" of such composers puts them in the same category as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in the context in which Henry Miller wrote about him in "With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert" in his essay collection, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:

No one asks you to throw Mozart out the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Laotse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

I would push Miller's injunction one step further. I would suggest that any pianist today can only keep Mozart (not to mention Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and Schubert) in his or her heart through an awareness of those "scratching on the window-panes," regardless of whether those windows look out over the nineteenth century (e.g., Jan Ladislav Dušek), twentieth (e.g., György Ligeti), or those who will make their presence known in the near future. Last night Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt were solidly in the fingers of six clearly talented students; but these students have yet to learn how to keep these composers in their respective hearts.

Dreaming about the Revolution

At the beginning of this month, I suggested that the fear greater than fear itself is the fear that a prevailing inability to deal with crises can undo our governmental framework into conditions of demagoguery. At the time I suggested that Sarah Palin was the most likely candidate for the resulting demagogue, but I also suggested that so many supporters of Barack Obama had endowed him with a "messianic aura" that, however honorable and sincere his intentions may have been throughout this bruising campaign, he, too, could emerge from the struggle as a demagogue. Yesterday Andrew Keen wrote a post to his Great Seduction blog entitled "Can Obama fix New York's traffic?," in which he finally seems to have tapped into the risks associated with an "Obama Revolution."

However, if we want to think about the "revolutionary" power of an Obama Presidency, we might do well to remember a lesson of an author from a country that had endured demagoguery at its worst. The country is Germany, the author is Peter Weiss, and the text is from his play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade. Here is the concluding passage from Sade's extended monologue on revolution:

And so they join the revolution
thinking the revolution will give them everything
a fish
a poem
a new pair of shoes
a new wife
a new husband
and the best soup in the world
So they storm all the citadels
and there they are
and everything is just the same
no fish biting
verses botched
shoes pinching
a worn and stinking partner in bed
and the soup burnt
and all the heroism
which drove us down to the sewers
well we can talk about it to our grandchildren
if we have any grandchildren

That last line has even more of a sting to it than it did when Weiss penned it, since I doubt that he was concerned about whether or not the earth itself would be able to continue sustaining human life.

Obama wants each of us to believe that our vote can make a difference. He is right, but Weiss' point is that difference means something different, so to speak, to each of us. About the only thing we all have in common is our foundational culture of instant gratification, which means we expect that difference we crave to be delivered to us on a silver platter the morning after Election Day. Obama has tried mightily to wean us away from that culture, as we saw in the acceptance speech he delivered in Denver; but this is a belief system that is just as addictive as our consumerism.

Weiss recognized the power of what, in his New Science, Giambattista Vico called "poetic wisdom," the power of poetry to enable understandings that we do not seem capable of arriving at through other means. Regardless of what Karl Marx said, getting on in this world is not all about learning enough from history to avoid repeating tragedy as farce. We can also learn from poetry, not necessarily to avoid past mistakes but to see the present with greater clarity. Vico thus offered us an alternative to the old saw: Those who ignore poetry are condemned to enact it! Here's hoping that the ghost of Peter Weiss has a sense of humor!

Capitalism's Stately Mansion

In this morning's San Francisco Chronicle John King wrote a fascinating review of the building at 185 Post Street, at the southeast corner with Grant Avenue. Since Old Saint Mary's Cathedral is at the corner of Grant and California Street, I figured I would have a look for myself on the way over to today's Noontime Concerts™ event. Here is how King set me up for the experience:

For all the low-key refinement, what's going on at the corner of Post Street and Grant Avenue turns heads: New glass walls encase a six-story masonry building from 1908. The glass is set 9 inches beyond the original wall, without window frames or mullions, so the effect is that of a 95-foot-high display case pulled tight across the past.

Not that there's much to display. The structure was altered so extensively over the years that the authoritative 1979 book "Splendid Survivors: San Francisco's Downtown Architectural Heritage" didn't bother giving it a rating. Nor did preservationists protest when it was to be demolished in 2001.

Plans at the time called for an eight-story Prada boutique designed by Dutch iconoclast Rem Koolhaas with walls of bead-blasted steel riddled by 8,000 portholes of varying size. Instead there was a recession, Prada bowed out and new owner Grosvenor Properties hired the San Francisco office of Brand + Allen Architects to redo what already existed.

Where Koolhaas muscled into the scene with blunt force, designer Koonshing Wong took a self-effacing route, drawing attention by fading away.

Strolling west on Post Street, for instance, you don't even perceive a building; 185 Post St. reads like an opaque sheet, a two-dimensional counterpart to the masonry temples of commerce that were erected after the 1906 earthquake and line the surrounding blocks.

Come closer and 185 Post St. pulls a vanishing act of another sort. The glass turns into a mirror, filled with reflections of such monumentally detailed neighbors as the baroque Shreve Building on the opposite corner.

Now take a look from directly across the street. The reflections fall away and the original structure emerges, an architectural specimen in an elegant jar.

The procession of illusions is due in part to the ceramic "fritting" on the glass, which creates a sense of translucence but is subtle enough not to be a distraction. When it needs to fog the glass, it does; when it needs to evaporate, it does that as well.

I have no argument with this description, but I have some additional impressions. Apparently, the only part of the building that is open for business is the ground floor, occupied by De Beers, nicely described by King as "a beyond-upscale jewelry store," the sort of place that gets nervous when someone as casually dressed as I was saunters in, only to ask if anyone knows about any other tenants in the building or what entrance they use. Nevertheless, I was politely shown the "other" entrance, where a sheet of paper was posted that informed me that work was being done before the only other tenant would occupy their space.

This has an interesting impact on the view that King described. I was able to get at what he meant when he talked about the reflections falling away in favor of the original structure. However, the light was such that one could see through the windows of that original structure, through which one could easily see the incomplete state of all of the upper floors of the building. Thus my own sense of irony saw this as a monument (obviously not intentional) to our current economic crisis: Consumption at its most conspicuous on the ground floor above which all is empty space desperately hungering for occupants. Better to back off and let the very identity of the building become absorbed into the reflections of all of its neighbors. What better metaphor for virtuality and its discontents?

Tchaikovsky at his Best

The Noontime Concerts™ October Russian Music Festival at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, on the edge of San Francisco Chinatown, concluded in grand style with a performance of Piotr Tchaikovsky's Opus 50, his A minor piano trio. The performers were Miles Graber on piano, Mariya Borozina (the one Russian in the group) on violin, and Victoria Ehrlich on cello. I believe this is the first time I have heard Ehrlich, but Graber and Borozina have played together regularly in the Noontime Concerts™ concerts series, such as this past June, when they joined cellist Miriam Perkoff for the first piano trio by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Graber also appears to be the "house pianist" for the pre-season preview of the Midsummer Mozart Festival at the Noontime Concerts™ series. Tchaikovsky is quite some distance from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart along just about any dimension, except that he was a great admirer of Mozart and demonstrated this in his fourth orchestral suite.

Tchaikovsky's piano trio bears the dedication, "In Memory of a Great Artist." The great artist is Nikolai Rubinstein, founder and first director of the Moscow Conservatory. His connection to Tchaikovsky is summarized nicely in this paragraph from his Wikipedia entry:

While holding his Moscow post, Nikolai persuaded Tchaikovsky to write for him the celebrated Piano Concerto No. 1. According to Tchaikovsky's letters, Rubinstein was unimpressed with the work, and would only perform it if rewritten. Tchaikovsky refused, and the work was premiered instead by Hans von Bülow. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Trio in A minor in Rubinstein's memory after he died in Paris.

Tchaikovsky was appointed Professor of Theory and Harmony when the Conservatory was founded; and, through an ironic gesture of history, the Conservatory has borne Tchaikovsky's name (rather than Rubinstein's) since 1940. To put the compositions in their historical context, the Opus 23 piano concerto, which Rubinstein rejected, was completed in 1875, while the trio dates from 1882, some seven years later.

We can only guess how Rubinstein's ghost would have reacted to this memorial. In contrast to his younger brother Anton, Nikolai "opted for a restrained classicism," as the Wikipedia entry puts it; and "restrained" is probably not the word that springs to mind when listening to the trio. Nevertheless, one could argue that it has more structural discipline than Opus 23. Its substantial duration is divided across two long movements, the first of which is labeled "Pezzo elegiaco" and the second of which is a set of twelve variations on a theme of folk-like simplicity, the last of which is on the scale of a sonata movement unto itself in a finale form that recapitulates the elegiac material. This is one of Tchaikovsky's tightest structural frameworks; and the two-movement structure might be seen as a nod to Ludwig van Beethoven's final (Opus 111) piano sonata were it not for the simplicity of the theme and the complexity of the conclusion.

This much would have undoubtedly have impressed Rubinstein; but within that structural framework we encounter much of that full-fisted piano writing that may have been the reason for Rubinstein's rejection of Opus 23. This stuff is as dangerous as it is passionate. I found myself reviewing an observation I had written back in February, when Nikolai Lugansky performed Opus 23 with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Herbert Blomstedt. Here is what I wrote about Lugansky:

This was a soloist who brought athletic strength to his performance, often making his instrument shake with the hammer-like impact of his fingers. This is the sort of performance one comes to expect from this concerto; but, since this is NBA All-Star weekend, the effect is a little bit like those "performed" slam dunks that really have nothing to do with how the game is actually played. Put another way, it is the epitome of that Brahms adjective "Lisztich" with a Russian accent. The difference, however, is that, even early in his career, Tchaikovsky had a much better sense of orchestral sound than Liszt did; and, while Blomstedt clearly understood that sense, he had to contend with Lugansky's pounding, which was ultimately a losing battle.

Needless to say, Rubinstein had a strong preference for Brahms over Liszt; but Brahms was just as capable of getting the piano to "roar" with a massively grand sound. Ultimately, the difference could come down to the distinction between control and abandon; and Graber delivered a performance that was far closer in spirit to Brahms than to Liszt. Thus, not only was this a performance that might have mollified Rubinstein's ghost; but also its abundant expressiveness was always kept under control, for the sake of both the pianist's personal energy budget and the need to balance the more limited dynamics of the strings against the power of the piano. This is not to say that the strings were weak: To the contrary, both Borozina and Ehrlich had very rich sounds, which carried their share of the "expressiveness burden" with an impressive palette of sonorities. The result was a performance that was true to both the music itself and the "memorial obligation" of the work's dedication, which is why my Title declared it an embodiment of Tchaikovsky at his best.

Who Benefits from Social Software?

The last time I read one of Caroline McCarthy's posts to her blog, The Social, it was to fuel one of my frequent rants against technology evangelists, particularly those obsessed with Web 2.0 snake oil. Last night she took on a topic subsumed by this general rant concerned with the quest for useful information in this utopian world those evangelists keep flogging. The post is sufficiently short that it makes sense to examine it in its entirety:

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

McCarthy was spot on in backing off from the study itself and the circumstances under which BuzzLogic commissioned it in order to ask the more fundamental question of what the results actually mean. On the other hand I feel contentious enough to counter her question with a deeper one: Can this study possibly mean anything? My point is that the entire Jupiter Research methodology may be too flawed to provide data that would support any meaningful interpretations. The problem with any survey is that the questions often bias the nature of the answers; and, since this was a commissioned survey, there is the added risk that this bias has been induced by the sponsor. If we want to be serious about the general question of utility, then the survey is probably too blunt an instrument. We need a more ethnographic approach through which we can examine what people really do when they are trying to collect useful information before making a purchasing decision. Yes, information like that can be found on blogs; and those "trusted referrals" probably have at least some decision-support value. On the other hand how many users are out there who, out of either a lack of technical understanding or just plain laziness, set up a Google search and seek out things that look like opinions in the little content excerpts? How many of them can go to the next level and recognize which of those search results are for sites explicitly set up to collect reviews? How many of them know which search results are taking them to an individual opinion (such as a blog), rather than a collation of multiple opinions? Given the generally low numbers in this survey, we cannot dismiss that first (admittedly naive) sector without a better understanding of who they are and what they think they are doing. We may thus be wasting too many cognitive cycles on what is fundamentally a GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out) project!

Beach Chamber Music: A First Taste

My first impression of Amy Beach's Opus 67, her F sharp minor piano quintet, was that my study of her Opus 15 Sketches did very little to prepare me for the experience. I should not have anticipated otherwise. The four Sketches, composed in 1892, fit nicely into a repertoire of short poetic works for solo piano whose origins can probably best be placed in the shorter piano works of Franz Schubert. Within that repertoire she is chronologically a contemporary of Ferruccio Busoni (about a year younger) and most likely shared with him the influences of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Anton Rubinstein. 1892 happens to be the publication year of Busoni's Opus 31a Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, the work with which he won the 1890 Anton Rubinstein competition in Moscow. However, while Antony Beaumont identifies Busoni's inspirational sources for this work as Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Max Reger, Beach's Sketches are more a product of exposure to nineteenth-century American salons, where many of the compositions in John Gillespie's Nineteenth-Century American Piano Music anthology were performed.

Another interesting point of chronological orientation comes from Charles Ives, who was about seven years younger than Beach and composed his set of organ variations on "America" in 1891. Ives could never seem to resist the opportunity to express his contempt for that nineteenth-century piano repertoire, whether in text or in his own approach to composition. It is therefore at least slightly ironic that, in last night's performance of Beach's piano quintet, pianist William Wellborn was joined by the Ives Quartet, so named, according to the program, out of inspiration "by the passionate, artistic commitment and unique temperament" of that composer.

The chronology of the Beach piano quintet puts it in 1907, a time when Ives was just beginning to find his own rebellious way. Beach had come a long way from the short works of 1892 and the influence of light salon entertainment. This is serious chamber music on the scale of the other piano quintets and quartets that constitute its legacy (the same legacy that Ives would later take on in beginning work on his only piano trio in 1909). However, while I felt I had a comfortable sense of context for the Sketches, I was less sure of how to establish context for this particular piano quintet (as opposed to my first encounter with Ernő von Dohnányi's Opus 1 piano quintet, which clearly used Brahms as its point of departure). Perhaps the most important thing about Beach's approach is that she seemed after a way to compose a work for five "equals," as opposed to the frequent domination of the piano resulting in a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra." One might even say that she was anticipating later twentieth-century composition with a sensitivity for the sonority of each instrument that tends to occupy the ear more than her strategies for counterpoint and harmony. (Perhaps at least some of that interest in sonority grew out of her interest in documenting bird songs.)

Most important is that there is more in this composition than could be grasped by the single occasion of last night's performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. This is a work that deserves more attention. As I mentioned on Saturday, it occupies a somewhat culminating position in the history of piano quintets and quartets; and it is also a significant contribution to the repertoire of American music at the beginning of a new century. It deserves further listening, and we would do well to strive for a better understanding of the context in which it was situated. Saturday's conjecture that Wellborn had structured the first half of his program as a gradus ad Parnassum to Beach by way of Domenico Scarlatti, Joseph Haydn, and Franz Liszt turned out not to be the case. Liszt may have been an influence for the Sketches, but the piano quintet was cut from quite another cloth. Recent concerts have done much to expand our "listening comprehension" of compositions (particularly American) from the middle of the twentieth century; we all need to learn more about what was happening at the beginning of that century.

Mozart Takes on Free Will

The 2008–09 season of the San Francisco Opera is beginning to feel a bit like a seminar in an undergraduate humanities program. We began with a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, which offered up a tragic perspective on republicanism as practiced in fourteenth-century Genoa. We then moved on to the cultural studies (featuring a major sidebar on the sociology of mothers-in-law) of Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter. Then we had Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, which may well have told us more about the psychology of dreams than we could get from even the closest reading of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Anyone who was hoping to settle back into the art-for-art's-sake world of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera seria, Idomeneo, Re di Creta (K. 366), may have received a jolt from John Copley's conception, which situated the opera firmly in the domain of the opposition between free will and divine control. Whether or not Mozart was thinking in such terms is obviously open to question; but in Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook we can read the Mozart obituary by Adolph Heinrich von Schlichtegroll, which claims that the operas "Mozart esteemed most highly" were Idomeneo and Don Giovanni, the latter taking an even more dramatic approach to the confrontation between a libertine's free will and the divine force that ultimately consumes him. So we have good reason to believe that Copley was not overstepping Mozart's bounds in his approach.

Mozart, on the other hand, was definitely overstepping the bounds of opera seria, taking full advantage of the Mannheim resources at his disposal (as was emphasized in the book Mozart: The Early Years 1756–1781 by Stanley Sadie and Neal Zaslaw). This was not just a matter of exploiting "Mannheim dynamics" for the sake of dramatic impact. It also involved using the orchestra to greater advantage than was usually the case in opera at that time. Most important were his efforts towards a seamless flow of the action, resulting in arias whose conclusions would then immediately launch the next phase of the action. That seamlessness was further reinforced by having the recitativo passages accompanied by the full orchestra, rather than a keyboard-based continuo. This was a technique that Christoph Willibald Gluck had engaged with powerful effect in his Iphigénie en Tauride, which predated Idomeneo by about two years. Mozart was well aware of Gluck's innovative departures from the opera seria traditions of the time; and his "inner twenty-year-old" was probably champing at the bit to show off how he could strut the same stuff and take it to the next level.

When we move from the orchestra pit to the stage, we see that Mozart is also showing off what he could do with his resources. Most striking is probably the extent to which he uses multiple voices to greatest dramatic effect. Thus, the only duets we hear are embedded in choral passages and are sung by secondary characters: two Cretan women praising Idamante and two Trojan prisoners celebrating their liberation. (Could that latter pair have been an inspiration when Ludwig van Beethoven was working on Fidelio? The prisoner duet is there even as early as the 1805 Leonore version.) The first time the major characters sing together is in the second act terzetto for Idamante, Elettra, and Idomeneo, just before the former two are to board the ship that will take them for Argos, as Idomeneo has commanded. By this time we have a full grasp of just how conflicted the emotions of these three characters are, and Mozart's pen was stoked to let those conflicts weave through a counterpoint that displaced the usual dialog between soloist and orchestra. After the resulting catastrophe thwarts Idomeneo's wishes, we are back on "aria turf" until those conflicted characters come together again, this time in a quartet with Ilia added to the mix. This is dramatic emphasis at its best, and it allows us to appreciate that Mozart could be as good with subtlety as he could be with show-off display.

All of these skills were exhibited in the best possible light in yesterday afternoon's San Francisco Opera performance. Conductor Donald Runnicles has always had an excellent sense of how to pace Mozart, so the flow of the music was flawlessly delivered to support the flow of the drama. However, for those interested in whether or not the uncontrollable fates always have the upper hand over free will, we need to consider the case of the part of Idamante. For reasons that I shall not try to understand (let alone explain), the San Francisco Chronicle decided to give "full-court press" (pun intended) publicity to the return of Alice Coote to San Francisco to sing this role. This effort then begat a review that came a bit too close to suggesting that Coote was the only reason for seeing this product. Could this review have provoked the fates into visiting Coote with a back injury? The scenario of Idomeneo would certainly encourage us to ask that question, but the more important question was how prepared the San Francisco Opera was to go this particular distance without her. It turns out that she was replaced by first-year Adler Fellow Daniela Mack, who had just made her San Francisco Opera debut as one of the raunchy members of Marietta's theater troupe in Die Tote Stadt. This may not have been a "star is born" occasion (since Mack already has a rather impressive resume); but she definitely did not disappoint. There were a few awkward moments with the staging, and the astute ear could hear the way she was finding her voice in her first aria. However, she was on solid ground by the end of that aria and remained there for the rest of the performance. If the fates were trying to humble a public relations push, then Mack's free will trumped those fates as surely as the free will of both Idomeneo and Idamante prevailed over the force of Neptune!

Recovery Dreams (3.0?)

Moralistic as it may sound, I continue to believe that our current economic crisis needs to be examined not under the lens of economic theory but as a consequence of a predominant cultural Weltanschauung, which encompasses not only an addiction to consumerism but also the faith-based conviction (most popular among those who consume and those who feed their habit) that innovation solves all problems. I am thus more than a little concerned that Andrew Keen, in the latest post to his Great Seduction blog, seems to be looking seriously towards Silicon Valley for those who will pave the road to economic recovery:

In some garage or dorm-room, some smart kids are figuring out the future of media and technology. Global financial meltdown or not, Silicon Valley’s creative destruction – its law of motion -- is unstoppable. My own sense is that we need software and services that resynthesize the digital and real worlds. As NYU sociologist Dalton Conley suggests in his 2009 book Elsewhere, USA, technology has unmoored us from our real lives:

Our daily lives have changed, slowly but radically, over the past three decades. The division between work and home has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy encourages us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art.

Silicon Valley thus needs to work on reuniting work with home. Having destroyed leisure with their always-on media, the smart technologists needs to reinvent it. The digital economy now must figure out ways to speed up the analog world. Silicon Valley's laws of motion must become America's laws of motion.

This may ultimately be little more than a convenient misreading of history, which attributed the economic crisis that began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century with the irrational exuberance of Web 1.0 thinking and now lays the current catastrophe at the feet of Web 2.0. In his quest for "a consummation/Devoutly to be wished," Keen may have come up with little more than a candidate recipe for the next boom-and-bust cycle. Nevertheless, Conley's source text may be of some use if we are still interested in the question of how we got into our current mess.

While I think Conley may have a point with his punch line, it is more important to recognize that leisure most likely constitutes only a sliver of the "necessary arts" we have lost. I continue to hold to the belief that our very "sense of reality" (that oft-used phrase that I cribbed from Isaiah Berlin) has been significantly eroded, rather than enhanced, by recent technologies; and those "social software" Web 2.0 technologies are among the most corrosive. At the risk of going all Heideggerian, I wish to suggest that the fundamental art we have lost is the art of "being in the world;" and we have lost it because Silicon Valley has been such a successful breeding ground of positivist junkies who cannot see beyond the boundaries of the objective world. Can we seriously expect that the guys (and gals) who destroyed leisure are capable of reinventing it? At best, they will invent new ways for us to amuse ourselves to death (with apologies to the memory of Neil Postman).

"Jes' Fine"

I see from a report on Al Jazeera English that John McCain is as optimistic about his prospects as ever:

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has said that he is still in a position to win the White House on November 4.

He told NBC television's 'Meet the Press' programme on Sunday that he was "doing fine" despite some national and state opinion polls putting him more than 10 points behind Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate.

Given how much has been made of McCain's age, I know that he is old enough to remember the comic strip Pogo. I have no idea if he ever read it, but the way in which it treated the 1960 Presidential Election is somewhat of a classic in the political clout of the funny papers. Indeed, that treatment was later delivered as a stand-alone paperback book. The Amazon.com review provided by wiredweird (one of their "Top 100" reviewers) provides the necessary background:

It's election year again, so the swamp goes all out to celebrate the silly side of the democratic process. This time, Fremount (the boy bug) creates all the buzz. Not old enough to know many words, "Jes' Fine" is all he says. In the Okeefenokee, that's enough, so the campaign is off and running.

P.T. Bridgeport nominates himself campaign manager. Somehow, though, his news releases center on himself and often forget to mention the candidate. Congersman Frog announces his solidarity with voters of all the swamp's many species. An inane pollster and satiric Madison Avenue type make their appearances, with complete conquest of appearance over substance. And so on, with Howland, Churchy, Albert, and the usual cast of characters.

Of course, that includes Pogo himself and his friend Porky - the only two voices of sanity when everyone else gets caught up in the moment. They keep the tone gentle and civil, a sensibility that appears far too rarely in more recent commentary.

Given that Jerzy Kosinski's Being There came out in 1971, I have to wonder whether or not the family resemblance to Pogo is deliberate. Alas, neither Walt Kelly nor Kosinski is still with us; so neither of them can appreciate the transmogrification of a boy bug or "cognitively challenged" gardener into a Republican Presidential candidate. The irony will just have to be shared by the rest of us!

Hanging Tough on Statecraft

The first time I saw Tzipi Livni on television, sitting with the other member of Ehud Olmert's Cabinet, I had her pegged for a tough cookie. I was therefore not surprised that she would come out on top of Kadima Party leadership in the wake of Olmert's announcement of resignation. What did surprise me was that her toughness would be exerted less on behalf of Israel's business-as-usual "territorial aggression" (as in continuing to build settlements in occupied territories) and more towards those fundamental principles of statecraft about which Dennis Ross had written so admirably in his book (a book which had been highly informed by his own experiences in trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East). It is, of course, all too easy to dismiss Ross' book as the wishful thinking of a retired diplomat; but, when we see the principles of that book put into practice by the likes of Vladimir Putin, we have to acknowledge that there may be at least a glimmer of hope that a viable alternative to nationalist extremism is on the rise. Livni may now be adding to that glimmer.

I have come to this conclusion having just read the latest Al Jazeera English report on the current state of play in Israeli politics:

Tzipi Livni, the leader of Israel's ruling Kadima party, has called for early parliamentary elections to be held after she failed to form a coalition government.

The crux of this story is the reason why an effective coalition could not be formed:

The Kadima party had the backing of the centre-left Labour party and was expected to keep the small Pensioners party in the government, but it needed to get the ultra-Orthodox Shas party on board to secure a majority in the 120-seat parliament.

Shas said on Friday it would not join Livni as she had refused to pledge that the future status of Jerusalem would not be on the agenda in negotiations with the Palestinians.

It is that last sentence that got me to thinking about Ross again. At the risk of being too reductive, I came away from watching Ross' lecture on his book on Book TV with the idea that statecraft had a lot to do with using what you have to get what you want; and that presumes that you have a clear idea of what you want in the first place. We can thus understand much of our own diplomatic bungling in terms of its foundation of vague and ill-conceived faith-based goals, goals which, like those of the Shas party, have more to do with highly traditional readings of Scripture than with more contemporary documents (such as, for example, those produced and approved by the United Nations). However, it was not just Livni's rejection of a fundamental (play on words intended with all due deliberation) plank in the Shas platform but also the language she used in talking about the rejection. According to the Al Jazeera English account, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted her as saying:

When I had to decide between continued extortion and bringing forward elections, I prefered elections.

Now I have no idea how often the noun "extortion" is used in the course of Israeli political horse-trading; but it struck me as a highly appropriate bon mot for describing the lack of progress towards peace in the Middle East. The United States is all too eager to talk about the repressive nature of Muslim fundamentalism in a country like Iran; but, from a diplomatic point of view, Americans (with the primary exception of Jimmy Carter) have turned a blind eye to fundamentalist practices of Judaism that can be just as repressive. When those practices apply to life in the home or in a highly limited religious community, it is easy enough to apply the live-and-let-live rule of thumb; but, when they apply to national policy, they illustrate in the most vivid of terms just why the very principle of a "Jewish State" should make Israel's neighbors so nervous.

So Livni has opted for a new round of elections, letting vox populi decide who will speak for Israeli foreign policy. She may not have the strength of reputation that Yitzhak Rabin had, but she has displayed a toughness of commitment to getting the peace process rolling again. One of the Hebrew expressions I learned while I was teaching in Israel was "Kol HaKovod." This translates literally as "all the honor;" but I noticed that it tended to be used with the connotation of "More power to you!" If Livni is to prevail in the election she will now face, she will need all the power she can summon; let us hope that she is tough enough to do justice to all the honor that will be at stake.

Celebrating Amy Beach

Last June, when I was first starting to try working on the four Opus 15 Sketches for piano by Amy Beach, I mentioned that the San Francisco Public Library was planning an exhibit on Amy Beach and the time she spent living in San Francisco. That exhibit is now on display on the fourth floor of the Main Library building in the Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon (ask a local) Music Center, which houses the published Gesamtwerk editions of just about every major composer (along with a fair representative of minor ones) in the history of Western music. The title of the exhibit is "Amy Beach: Her Blissful Years in San Francisco." It would appear, on the basis of a post in the blog maintained by the San Francisco Public Library that the "blissful years" included 1878, when she visited her aunt and cousin as a ten-year-old, and the period between 1915, when she participated in the musical activities of the Panama Pacific Exposition (which commissioned the composition of her "Panama Hymn"), through 1916, the year of the premiere of her Opus 80 theme and variations, set for flute and string quartet and commissioned by the San Francisco Chamber Music Society.

The exhibit coincides with two major performance events. One, which I previously mentioned, is a performance of her piano concerto, which will be on the program of the first subscription concert by Symphony Parnassus and will feature Daniel Glover as soloist. The other will be a performance this coming Monday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music of her Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor. This will be the second half of a recital program by pianist (and faculty member) William Wellborn, during which he will be joined by the Ives Quartet. Since I had described my own encounter with Beach's piano music in terms of its "post-Liszt feel," "almost in the spirit of Ferruccio Busoni," the first half of Wellborn's recital may be viewed as a gradus ad Parnassum of envelope-pushing composers leading up to Franz Liszt himself by way of four sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and Joseph Haydn's 1771 C minor sonata (Hoboken XVI/20). Liszt is then represented by the "Sonetto 104 del Petrarca," from the second of the Annés de Pèlerinage, and his "Concert Paraphrase" on the quartet from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.

I believe that, taken together, the repertoire of piano quartets and piano quintets tell us much about how chamber music emerged from the eighteenth century (particularly in the two piano quartets of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and grew prodigiously in the nineteenth, particularly through Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms (one of whose I once called a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra"), finally crossing into the twentieth century through not only Beach (1907) but also Edward Elgar (1919). As one can see at the Library exhibit, the Beach quintet was reputable enough to be included on a San Francisco Chamber Music Society program; and the strength of that work probably contributed to the subsequent commissioning of a new Beach composition. It is almost impossible that any of these events influenced Elgar, but he was still basically building on the same nineteenth-century trends that Beach had been following.

The Library exhibit is a very modest one, probably too much so. There is a considerable body of interesting work that Beach was doing in trying to document bird songs and then incorporating her notated versions in her music; and this deserves more depth than the Library could display (even if the results in no way resemble subsequent experiments along the same lines by Olivier Messiaen). In many ways the exhibit is more interesting for the feel of San Francisco during those "blissful years." Beach was living on the Fulton Street side of Alamo Square (as opposed to the Steiner Street side, which holds the row of "painted ladies," where the tourist buses stop every day to disgorge their respective loads of picture-takers); and it is nice to be reminded of just how much history there is in some of the houses I tend to walk by so casually. Nevertheless, the best way to honor Beach's memory is to perform her music; and, having taken my own crack at that task, I look forward to being on the listening side of things on Monday evening!

Music in the Flesh

Last night I was reminded (once again, as if I needed reminding) that there is no substitute for the experience of the "live" performance, whatever the current (or even improving) virtues of recording and distribution technology may be. This time the reminder came from a Senior Piano Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and involved a work I had previously known only through recordings, Sergei Prokofiev's Opus 16, his second piano concerto in G minor. This being a "student project," the soloist was able to arrange for orchestral accompaniment by fellow students (including a student conductor), although the usually lush Prokofiev string section was reduced to two first violins, two seconds, and single performers for viola, cello (the only familiar face by virtue of this week's Cello Ensemble performance), and bass.

Even with the benefit of recordings, my familiarity with this work is pretty weak; but the recording I know best puts up pretty stiff competition. It is actually my personal recording of a broadcast of a 2007 Proms concert, which I made for one of my neighbors and liked enough to make a copy for myself. (For those who are interested, the entire concert has a Torrentz page.) The pianist was Alexander Toradze, and the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Valery Gergiev. This is the sort of team that can be really serious about its Prokofiev, not only in terms of virtuosic rhetorical flair but also down at the nuts and bolts of logic and grammar. Nevertheless, Prokofiev has written so much into this concerto that it take the immediacy of an actual performance to give full justice to all three of those trivium elements.

If this is a student who wishes to make a career out of dashing off the most challenging works in the piano repertoire, then this concerto is a good place to start; and Toradze is one of the better models out there. While he only won the Silver Medal in the Fifth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1977), I remember seeing him on Public Television, shortly after a documentary about that particular Competition, in which he played a solo piano transcription of Igor Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps," which may well have passed the ultimate acid test of understanding a composition in terms of its logic, grammar and rhetoric! Last night's student's performance could have done with a bit of refinement (as could the somewhat scrappy orchestral support); but he was no slouch in negotiating all of the burdens of complexity that Prokofiev piled on the back of the soloist. Watching this student negotiate the keyboard turned out to be as informative as the listening experience and may well have helped to sort out many of the grammatical priorities, which, if ignored, would have reduced the performance to a mere jumble of a whole lot of notes.

The truth is that, between all of those virtuosic excesses and his inclination for raucous orchestral sounds, Prokofiev poses a different level of challenge than one finds in Johann Sebastian Bach or Joseph Haydn (who happened to be the other two composers represented on last night's program). It is a high-wire act from which the performer can all-too-easily fall into a pit of vulgarity. However, whatever surface level weaknesses may have confronted last night's performance, there was a security in the "deep structure" that kept both soloist and orchestra from slipping off the wire; and that is quite an accomplishment for a graduating senior!

Having invoked the other composers on last night's program, it is worth saying a thing or two about their contributions to the evening. Haydn was represented by his 59th piano sonata in E flat major, listed in the Hoboken catalog as XVI/49 and completed in 1790. This makes it excellently positioned to serve as one of the inspirations for those Opus 2 piano sonatas that Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated to Haydn. It is as virtuosic for its time as the Prokofiev concerto was for the early twentieth century, and Haydn dishes out his virtuosity with an ample supply of wit that pervades the early Beethoven sonatas. However, the middle Adagio e cantabile movement reflects a deeper level of influence that we encounter at the other end of the Beethoven canon, the deliberately sustained theme that evolves through successive layers of embellishment into an entirely new genre of virtuosity in the final movements of Beethoven's Opera 109 and 111 sonatas. (Indeed, it is only through an understanding of how to sort out such embellishment that the mind behind the ear can get a handle on how Prokofiev took such embellishment to even more intimidating heights.) Thus, whether or not the strategy was intended, the Haydn sonata did much to set the ear up for confronting the complexities of the Prokofiev concerto.

Did Bach's sixth French Suite in E major (BWV 817) set the ear up for listening to the Haydn? This may be more of a stretch, particularly in the face of the rather straightforward binary form that structures its eight dance movements. What we encounter here has more to do with the interplay of a very small number (sometimes just two) of contrapuntal voices; and successful performance has to do with the clarity of that interplay. Once again this particular student would slip up on surface detail, but also again that clarity had more to do with understanding and rendering that deep structure of each movement. Thus, one might say that this beginning with Bach established a laying out of "grammatical ground rules," which then pervaded the rest of the recital, making the entire evening one of the more stimulating opportunities for those of us in the audience to refine our listening skills.

If You Give A Bank a Cookie

So is all that bailout money being put to good use? One possible answer just showed up on the BBC NEWS Web site:

A US bank has become the first to use some of the $700bn (£440bn) government bail-out to buy a rival.

PNC Financial Services Group is buying National City for $5.6bn - making PNC the US's fifth largest bank by deposits with the fourth most branches.

Cleveland-based National City needed to be rescued after being heavily weighed down by bad mortgage debt.

As part of the bail-out, the US Treasury aims to buy stakes in banks in return for capital.

And while recipients can use some of the investment for acquisitions, the aim of the controversial $700bn move was also to free up lending.

Has this done anything for the frozen credit market, or is it just providing an incentive for banks to play with new money in new ways? Consider this item by Lauren Tara LaCapra from TheStreet.com:

Regulators have decided not to release the name of banks that have been approved to receive capital from the government, but to allow companies to report individually, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The Treasury Department was first prepared to release a list of nearly two dozen banks who will receive funds from its $250 billion authorization to inject capital into the financial sector as early as 11 a.m. on Friday. However, it reversed course to avoid "creating winners and losers in the market," according to the source.

The announcement would have been a positive sign for those who make the list, because their financial state is strong enough to qualify for the program, the source says. On the other hand, those not included may have been seen as weak, and could have faced negative sentiment from customers, counterparties and investors.

That was evidenced by the deal PNC (PNC Quote - Cramer on PNC - Stock Picks) reported on Friday to acquire National City (NCC Quote - Cramer on NCC - Stock Picks) for $5.58 billion, while receiving $7.7 billion in federal funds in exchange for preferred equity. The government rejected Nat City's proposal to receive funds, forcing it into the hands of PNC, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Indeed, another post to TheStreet.com, this time by Laurie Kulikowski argues that this sort of the thing is the beginning of a trend:

"I expect more consolidation," says Roger Cominsky, a partner in Hiscock & Barclay's financial institutions and lending practice area. "The Treasury is using the $250 billion to prop up the capital of the surviving banks. Those banks are going to be under immense pressure to acquire the sick, but not dead banks."

Additionally, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "has a vested interest in seeing more consolidation because that lessens the risk of the insurance fund," Cominsky adds. "So you will probably see more consolidation over the next few weeks or months."

Hopefully, the current generation of kids are familiar with Laura Joffe Numeroff's book, If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, which, in its own cute little way, explores the unintended consequences of giving out of kindness. I suppose this book is not easily available at bookstores in the District of Columbia. If it were, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (not to mention both Houses of Congress) would not have required much cognitive skill to recognize that the book is about more than cute mice and cookies.

Meanwhile, the question remains as to whether this whole recovery plan is for American citizens in dire straits or for shareholders heavily invested in the financial sector. Those curious in the academic exercise can take a look at the chart for PNC over the course of this year. It is not exactly rosy; but it is also not as bone-chilling as the charts the media prefer to show us. All things considered, PNC looks like a happy little mouse; but it may yet get fat and lazy from eating too many cookies!

The Chutzpah of Ignoring History

Google won a Chutzpah of the Week award for throwing the super-exclusive party in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention, which was trying like hell to put up the front that theirs would be a ticket of national unity across all strata of society. AIG did not win one for the $440,000 spa getaway they organized at the St. Regis hotel in Laguna Niguel within days of receiving $85 billion worth of government bailout money, but only because even more outrageous things (relating to the election) were happening that week. This week they were in the running again for hitting up the Federal Reserve for another $90.3 billion, but I have to confess that they were scooped basically because I always prefer sticking it to the Web 2.0 set. Thus I have Caroline McCarthy to thank for the latest post to her CNET blog, The Social, for at least giving Laguna Niguel a second crack at being a venue for chutzpah:

When the economy heads south, anything involving beaches and luxury resorts is a terrific recipe for guaranteed bad press.

That's why there was a fine line to be walked at the WebbyConnect conference, the second annual retreat-slash-ideafest organized by the directors of the annual Webby Awards. In the diverse vegetable patch of media conferences, this one is the organic arugula. The venue was the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel resort, a sprawling beachfront complex and occasional filming spot for MTV's haute-reality soap Laguna Beach, just down the road from the St. Regis hotel where American International Group executives famously spent $440,000 on a spa getaway days after an $85 billion government bailout.

But even with wallets shrinking and belts tightening across technology, digital media, and advertising, the people who shelled out more than $2,000 for a WebbyConnect ticket insisted on one thing: this event, unlike so many others on the industry's calendar, is worth the price tag.

"What an amazing, diverse group of people we have gathered under this roof, and I know that's a cliche but like most cliches, it's true," Jamie Pallot, editorial director of Conde Nast's CondeNet, observed while moderating a panel on Wednesday. "We all work for a bunch of very different companies, we play wildly different roles in those companies...what brings us all together here and what we are excited about is the innovation that technology can bring, and how that can change the places where we work, and what we can do in those places."

Getting to the intimate, 200-person conference from the entrance to the Ritz involved winding through groves of palm trees and ponds of bright orange and white koi, past stunning ocean vistas dotted with surfers and pools surrounded by the resort's usual clientele, wealthy retirees in town for Orange County's famed golfing. The three half-days worth of conference panels featured a slew of digital media's glitterati, from The Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan to The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., to Aaron Koblin, the Google Creative Labs designer who worked on the video for Radiohead's "House of Cards."

As the reader can tell, McCarthy herself preferred seeing stars (presumably on someone else's nickel), rather than a case study in conspicuous consumption. Her report focused on the free-flowing California wine rather than the evangelical Kool-Aid. Nevertheless, this was a highly exclusive event, possibly in the same league as the Google shindig in Denver. Now I doubt that presenting the WebbyConnect organizers with the Chutzpah of the Week award will persuade them to stop throwing circuses and start thinking about bread, but at least the award can serve to hold them up as an example of the real priorities of Internet evangelism for all those in need of bread to see.

I Voted!

That's what it says on the sticker that is supposed to be handed to me by the poll worker who accepts my completed ballot. This year, however, there is a big push in California to vote early. Not only does the seriousness of the Presidential Election promise to (finally?) bring out a large number of voters; but also there are twelve State Propositions on the California ballot (and another 22 for the City and County of San Francisco). Completing a ballot is going to take more than the usual amount of time, even in the best of circumstances.

In my case it was a choice between enjoying the convenience of my polling place being down on the mezzanine of the building where I live or walking a couple of blocks to City Hall to vote early. I opted for the latter primarily on the basis of reliability. Having now voted quite a few times in my own building, I have noticed a progressive drop in the quality of our poll workers. These are volunteers, so I do not say this to criticize them. Rather, I suspect that they are victims of budget cuts that have impacted how well they are screened (for such things as which languages they speak, which is particularly important in California), how well they are trained after passing screening, and how well they are served by the call center they are supposed to consult if they have any questions. Thus, during the Primary we had a poll worker who spoke Chinese (which matters in our District). Unfortunately, he spoke only Chinese; and none of the other poll workers on site could communicate with him! The good news is that one of the voters waiting was fluent in both Chinese and English and was able to help him get the ball rolling; but she made it more than clear (several times) that she was in a rush and was none too happy about giving her services. One would have thought that, between screening and training, this situation could have been anticipated; so I take what actually happened as an indication of the effectiveness of those two processes.

Sadly I also managed to get a taste of call center operations. On this particular occasion the Chinese-only poll worker was just one of several problems, which included the procedures necessary to complete before opening the polling place, making sure that each voter was directed to the right worker (this being a Primary, different parties had different ballots), verifying that the ballot box was empty, and making sure that each completed ballot was properly accepted by the ballot box. Thus, I knew that the call center had been contacted and given the response that help was on the way. By the time I (along with most of those in line with me when I arrived, including the Chinese woman-in-a-rush) had completed my ballot, help (presumably based those few blocks away in City Hall) had not yet arrived. I was watching the poll workers run into yet another instance of the kind of "service pathology" about which I have written on several occasions. Thus, for better or worse, I decided that I did not want this particular ballot to be subject to the vagaries of screening, training, or service pathology; so I cast my vote early.

I realize that, while we generally worry about an "October surprise," the way in which the media business now works allows plenty of time for a "November surprise" in the few days before November 4. Nevertheless, I have put in a lot of time deliberating on how I would fill out my ballot (and even shared some of those deliberations on this blog). I have my reasons for voting the way I did, and I strongly doubt that the media are going to pull out of their collective hat any rabbits that will gnaw away at those reasons like their cousin Peter in Mr. McGregor's garden. I thus decided to act on the basis of where I felt my ballot would be handled most securely, and that took me to City Hall.

It was pretty empty when I was there, but I asked what conditions had been like. I was told that it got pretty busy later in the day. Also, because my wife wanted to vote on Saturday, I was told to advise her to show up early, because they are expecting heavy voting over the weekend. I find the promise of such a high level of participation encouraging; and, if there are problems with the efficiency of dealing with such volume, I am glad that there are still ways in which our votes stand a good chance of being effectively processed. That is too much to say on any sticker I might get after voting!

The Liability of Intellect

Reading the latest issue of The New York Review is becoming a rather disconcerting affair. The lead article is titled "A Fateful Election" and is introduced by the Editors with the following sentence:

For an election in which so much is at stake, we asked some of our contributors for their views.

The New York Review is one of the few American publications where you can consistently enjoy intellectual thinking at its best delivered through text. For the reflective reader this is its greatest asset. For an election that is likely to be decided more on the basis of suasion than on that of logic, the intellectual impact of The New York Review may also be its greatest liability. Consider, as a case in point, the final paragraph of the contribution by Ronald Dworkin, by far the most capable of those New York Review contributors who "cover the legal beat:"

These reasons why Obama should be president make the stakes in this election even greater. Our economy is near catastrophic and worsening, unemployment and foreclosures are increasing, our foreign and military policies are disastrous, the Republican president is ridiculed and despised, the Republican candidate flails and lies. Even a mediocre Democratic candidate should win easily. If a remarkably distinguished candidate like Obama loses, this can be for only one reason. We Americans can do something great in November. Or we can do something absolutely terrible and then live with the shame of our stupid, self-destructive racial prejudice for yet another generation.

Obama supporters may delight in having such a ringing endorsement; but will it "ring true," so to speak, to those undecided voters, who may well decide the final outcome? Do those voters want to be made to feel as if they are on the bring of doing "something absolutely terrible" and that they stand for "the shame of our stupid, self-destructive racial prejudice" simply by virtue of not yet having made up their minds? The Editors of The New York Review are not exaggerating about how much is likely to be at stake in this election, but the criticality of the election should not be enough to push Dworkin from his usually reasoned prose into the depths of the sort of polemic of which all of us, particularly those undecided voters, have had our fill.

Consider what is really at stake. Of all the reasons there may be to support Barack Obama, the one that has influenced me the most is the way he has demonstrated the potential to persuade us to work together to get out of a mess brought about by a powerful few. This has not been cast as a condemnation of the Bush Administration or even of the ineffectiveness of the Congress in the face of Executive abuse of power. Rather, the message is that, however we got into the mess, we can only get out by uniting our wills and our efforts. It also reminds us, without mounting an explicit attack, that George W. Bush's claim to be a "uniter" was hollow rhetoric at best and an egregiously deceptive fiction at worst. Obama did not have to attack, because he could inspire with a coolness of speech that could deliver all the suasion of rhetoric without forcing the logic on his listeners. That coolness may ultimately be his greatest asset in the face of those undecided voters who are clearly fed up with polemic, no matter who happens to be providing it.

Overlooking Oversight

Given that the Congress is not "officially" in session (allowing all of its members to be properly beholden to the electoral process, whether or not they are actively running for office), it is nice to see at least one thin slice of the House of Representatives opting to do the people's business in Washington, rather than barnstorming out on the campaign trail. I am referring to this morning's session of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, presumably called by Chairman Henry Waxman. Waxman kept a relatively low profile while the bailout was being debated; and questions about whether assisting Wall Street was more important than identifying and seeing to the problems of the "real economy" of Main Street were really not the affair of his committee. Rather, his committee is finally getting around to doing the job that should have been done before the White House threw the entire country into panic by goading Congress to "act immediately or all is lost." The job of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is to serve my oft-cited precept that you cannot strategize your way out of a mess until you have a clear understanding of how you got into it. If, as Patricia Williams has suggested in The Nation, this mess is the product of a government that failed to govern, then Waxman is in charge of the Committee with the power to investigate that proposition.

Today's committee session was scheduled to hear from three men, all of whom should know a thing or two about oversight in the elevated world of high finance: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Security and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. All three of these men are free market ideologues, which means that, at least on principle, none of them are particularly comfortable with the recent revival of Keynesianism or the need to reassess regulatory policies. According to the Al Jazeera English report of the session's proceedings, Waxman had no problem with cutting to this ideological core in addressing all three of these men:

Our regulators became enablers rather than enforcers. Their trust in the wisdom of the markets was infinite. The mantra became that government regulation is wrong. The market is infallible.

If Waxman was looking for contrition, he may have been satisfied with Greenspan's testimony:

Greenspan, who headed the central bank for more than 18 years, said that he and others who believed that lending institutions would do a good job of protecting their shareholders are in a "state of shocked disbelief".

His critics charge that Greenspan left interest rates too low in the early part of this decade, spurring an unsustainable housing boom which went largely unregulated.

Greenspan admitted that he had "found a flaw" in his free-market ideology.

"Yes, I found a flaw. That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well," he said.

Greenspan said he had also been "partially" wrong in his opposing the regulation of derivatives in recent years.

Ironically, Greenspan's reversal brings to mind one of my favorite stories about John Maynard Keynes: The story goes that, during a heated debate one of Keynes' colleagues accused him of changing his mind on a particular issue. Keynes is said to have replied, "When I encounter new data that refute my position, I change my position. What do you do when you encounter new data?" It appears that Greenspan is at least willing to admit that he has "encountered new data;" but he is no longer in a position to do anything more than let others know that those data were strong enough to force him to change his position. The more critical question is what those with the power to act will do with those same "new data;" and the actions we have witnessed thus far have not been particularly promising.

Reencountering an Old Friend

I have to confess a great weakness for the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, particularly where his cycle of nine "Bachianas Brasileiras" compositions are concerned. I say this having survived an age in which it seemed as if everyone and his dog had decided to take the fifth of these compositions into a recording studio (the dog being Johnny Mathis). None of these works really deserved to be reduced to the "pops" treatment they received in the Sixties, particularly since they constitute such an interesting exercise in trying to capture how the music of Johann Sebastian Bach sounded to at least one set of Brazilian ears. I suppose the lesson behind that exercise is that there is less opposition between the respective voices of Bach and Villa-Lobos than one might assume in light of their geographical and temporal separation. Nevertheless, these are compositions in Villa-Lobos' own original voice, confident it its own situation to avoid any feelings of being "stuck in the long shadow of the history of music."

Villa-Lobos, himself, was a cellist; and the instrumental resources for two of the compositions in the set, the first and the fifth, consist entirely of eight solo cello voices. A soprano is added to the fifth, which consists of two movements, "Ária (Cantilena)" and "Dança (Martelo)." The Ária is an adagio, which is very true to the spirit of those arias for solo voice that we encounter in the cantatas and passions, all the way down to being in da capo form; but Villa-Lobos introduces the twist of giving the soprano words only in the middle section of the structure. The Dança is far more Brazilian in nature, probably more in recognition of the extent to which Bach drew upon the dance forms of his own culture.

These days it is harder to encounter performances of this work, partly because of the resources it requires. However, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music has a Cello Ensemble, consisting mostly of students; and, in the recital they gave last night, the Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 was the only work that did not require arrangement! This made it one of the high points of the evening, since some of the arrangements, such as one by Douglas B. Moore of the overture to Gioachino Rossini's Barber of Seville for cello quartet, seemed to have their greatest value as high-wire acts. I appreciate that arrangements provide performers with an opportunity to experience actively music with which they would not otherwise engage so directly; and I like to consider any arrangement as a window into the arranger's own approach to listening, in the same spirit as the Villa-Lobos compositions (which are decidedly not arrangements). Nevertheless, every arrangement can never be more than an experiment; and not all experiments turn out for the best.

Fortunately, the weakest of the experiments came and went at the very beginning of the evening: the arrangement for multiple cellos by Colin Hampton of two movements from Bach's sixth suite for solo cello (BWV 1012). There is much to be said for the ways in which these suites approach the very sonority of the solo cello voice. (The fifth suite requires a retuning of the strings.) To my ear, however, Hampton seemed more interest in "sharing the wealth" of Bach's contrapuntal lines than in realizing a listening experience around the effect of sonority. This compared disappointingly with the arrangement for an ensemble of violas of violin duos by Béla Bartók that I found so stimulating last week. Hampton had invoked a sense of Bach but not a sense of either sound or space, and that neglect impoverished the listening experience as a whole.

On the lighter side there were arrangements that were clearly conceived for their amusement value. The transmogrification of "Frosty the Snowman" into an exercise in four-voice fugal structure was right up there with Dudley Moore's (late) Beethoven-inspired rendition of the "Colonel Bogey March." Similarly, the evening ended in recognition of the role that string quartets played in some of the Beatles hits by offering arrangements of both "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby." Leave the audience with something good for foot-tapping!

Repetition with neither Tragedy nor Farce

Where technology is concerned, the repetition of history need not necessarily be either tragic or farcical. Sometimes it is just a matter of recognizing that an idea good enough to work in one context can be just as beneficial in another. This can become particularly interesting when such duplication of a good idea reflects from a new technology back into an old one.

Consider TrueCall, a recent invention by British inventors (who used to be telemarketers) Steve Smith and John Price. This is a device to protect the land lines of good old-fashioned POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) customers from unwanted intrusive calls, most of which are for marketing purposes and some of which have far more malicious intentions. The description of TrueCall given on this morning's BBC NEWS Web site suggests that the invention was not only inspired but also significantly modeled on technology that detects spam (junk mail) before it gets to your electronic mail inbox. I might even venture to be more specific and note that the basic process that TrueCall implements in the analog world of POTS land lines bears a striking resemblance to the way in which Microsoft Outlook manages its Junk E-mail Folder. This is not to deny that Smith and Price have been innovative but to observe that innovation often is a matter of adapting an existing idea to a context not previously considered. In terms of what Mark and Barbara Stefik call "The Dance of the Two Questions" in Chapter 2 of their Breakthrough book on the subject of "radical innovation," Smith and Price recognized that the "What Is Needed?" question for POTS users could be answered through the "What Is Possible?" question in the domain of electronic mail.

Nevertheless, Smith and Price may not be in the best of positions for making a killing from their innovative skill. The POTS user community is likely to experience attrition along two fronts:

1. Cell phone users are discovering that a land line is less important than it used to be; and they are just as inclined to use their cell phones at home as when they are "mobile."
2. Meanwhile, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are gradually beginning to migrate from specialist providers (such as Skype) to the more traditional players, such as AT&T, and the less-traditional ones trying to "cash in on convergence," such as Comcast. Most VoIP services also allow incoming calls to be "delivered" as electronic mail messages. This makes unwanted calls just another form of spam, which means it is only a matter of time before spam-detecting technology beging to address the audio files delivered by a VoIP provider.
   

Thus, once we back off from the dazzle of TrueCall's bright idea, we may discover that it is the latest telling of that old joke about the monorail, which dubbed it "an idea of the future whose time has passed." Ultimately, the moral of this story may be: If you are going to make an innovative context shift, look before you leap!

Intellectual Property Barbarians at the Gates

I had a truly grand time reading Adam Kirsch's piece about Karl Kraus in the October 23 issue of The New York Review. My greatest regret is that my command of German is far too weak to really negotiate, let alone appreciate, all of the linguistic hoops through which Kraus could jump. However, now that all of the German sources are available online, this may be just as well: Were my German up to the task, I might well end up spending the rest of my days indulging in Kraus' texts and lose track of all of my other pursuits!

Like his contemporary, Robert Musil, Kraus was meticulous about language. Both of them believed passionately that the decay of the proper use of language was an omen of the decay of the culture speaking that language; and this is a torch (out of deference to the title of the periodical for which Kraus served as sole writer and editor) that I have tried to carry in my own modest way, particularly in taking on topics like "The Illiterate Blogosphere." It is in the spirit of that torch that, in my recent piece about C. Wright Mills (whom, fortunately, I can always read in English), I referred to the phrase "intellectual property" as "that ne plus ultra of linguistic barbarisms." One might say that Kraus and Musil saw the need to conflate the metaphorical sense of barbarity in that use of the word "barbarism" with the literal sense. The "modern" generation of barbarians would storm the gates of even the most securely established institutions, which is basically how fin de siècle Vienna saw itself, armed not with weapons of mass destruction (which would assume new meanings with the development of new technologies) but with the power of language deceptive enough to influence behavior without ever communicating anything with clarity. Whether or not the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire can be attributed to a phenomenon as simple as people no longer knowing what they were talking about within all the different strata of society can be debated among historians; but it does not take much to leap ahead one century and view the damaging effects that neglect of the proper use of language have wreaked on just about every institution in the United States over the last eight years. The concept of intellectual property impacts a relatively small slice of the population; but we can view it as the tip of an iceberg big enough to sink the Titanic (or, if you prefer, the global economy).

I write all this as background to my interest in reading Andrew Keen's latest Great Seduction post, based on an interview with King's College Professor David Llewelyn. Llewelyn is currently writing a book about intellectual property entitled Invisible Gold, in which the theme of "IP balance of payments," based on the commoditization of intellectual property, figures heavily. Here is Keen's basic account of Llewelyn's message:

Llewelyn explained to me that there is a quartet countries -- USA, UK, Japan and Sweden -- currently carrying what he calls an "IP balance of payments surplus". Every other country in the world, then, is carrying an IP deficit -- meaning that they are importing more IP protected products than they are exporting. As Llewelyn suggested, this is the real "battlefield" of the 21st century, where countries will either invite or cheat economic death. He explained that high growth countries like China, India and Korea are all challenging the dominant quartet and it's from this international war over IP that the next generation of global economic powers will emerge.

Llewelyn also suggested that the we are all, as individuals, participants in a kind of Darwinian IP struggle for survival. The next frontier, he explained, is in the development of branded individuals who will use IP law to protect their unique identities in the digital economy. …

Just as countries have an IP balance of payments, so individuals too carry either a surplus or deficit of IP. The new global elite of the 21st century will, of course, have the healthiest surplus.

One does not have to read as assiduously as Kraus or Musil to see this for the double-talk it really is. At best it may stand as a validation of Marx' principle that tragedy is repeated by farce. We are currently living in a tragedy brought on by, among other factors, the commoditization of debt, through which pieces of paper that were basically IOU notes immersed in a sea of incomprehensible legalistic jargon were being traded as facilely as pieces of paper that alleged (through a comparable sea of incomprehensible legalistic jargon) to represent a "share" of a corporation like General Motors. As I pointed out in one of my comments on The Great Seduction, in another setting this would have been as farcical as the antics in David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross; but none of us would be laughing because we have all become victims. However, as victims we are likely to be safely detached from the absurd antics of the farce that Llewelyn is readying for Wall Street; if we play our cards right, we may well be able to enjoy a good belly-laugh at the expense of those whose reckless thinking reinforced by slovenly language games (so abused that they must have set Ludwig Wittgenstein spinning in his grave) wreaked such havoc on our personal financial resources!

Disputations with the Master

Many good observations emerged from the Piano Master Class that Leon Fleisher gave at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and very few of them pertained directly to three individual performances that he examined (the opening movement of the Opus 31, Number 3 E-flat major piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven and two works by Frédéric Chopin, the Opus 60 barcarolle and the fourth, Opus 52, ballade). This is the sort of experience that makes education interesting, when one realizes that, almost without conscious recognition, one has escalated from the specific to the general. After all, much of my own writing has tried to take on the general question of the nature of performance, whether the performance happens to be of Beethoven or Chopin (or, for that matter, György Kurtág). Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the more elevated world of the general tends to be populated more by hypotheses than by logically substantiated propositions; and, unless it can be resolved one way or the other through the rigors of formal logic, every hypothesis can be challenged. From this point of view, I would like to consider two of Fleisher's observations; and, if I do not challenge them directly, I would at least like to consider alternative perspectives.

The first of the observations concerned a question of the foundations for thinking about the music itself. Fleisher invoked the old chestnut about an affinity between music and mathematics and then suggested that a more valid affinity could be found in physics. His argument was that music is all about motion and thus should be considered in light of those fundamental laws of motion through which we understand so much about the physical world. This opens the door to some interesting pedagogical methods. Thus, one might benefit from converting the literal terminology of physics (mass, velocity, momentum, energy, impulse, and so forth) into a metaphorical terminology for how music is performed (and perhaps also perceived). One may even adopt literal interpretations of concepts of both time and space in ways that are meaningful in musical practice. (Consider the spatial perspective I took in writing about last week's Chamber Music Masters performance at the Conservatory.) On the other hand both the literal and the metaphoric can easily come under strain when one starts considering the rules that are stated in terms of physical terminology. Would it really make sense to talk about Newtonian conservation of energy, let alone the relativistic impact of near-light-speed velocities? In other words invoking physics may get your head in the right place for certain perspectives, as long as you remember that, whatever the positivists may try to tell you, musical phenomena cannot be reduced to physical phenomena.

Taking the positivists to task also raises another problem with trying to form too great an affinity with physics. This concerns the extent to which the performance of the music that occupied Fleisher in his Master Class is fundamentally a matter of interpreting a text, even if the lexical primitives of that text involve the symbols of music notation, rather than words in the English language. From this point of view, I need to emphasize, once again, the precept that the interpretation of any text in a "natural" language (and we may regard any instance of music notation as such a text) needs to be informed by not only the laws of the objective world (which is the only legitimate domain of physics) but also the principles through which we understand behavioral patterns in the subjective and social worlds. Within this expanded scope what may simply be called "events" in the physical world need to be sorted out (drawing upon the terminology of narratology) into "actions" and "happenings," the distinction being that actions are performed by (usually motivated) agents, while agents are not directly involved in the occurrence of happenings. Of particularly importance is that adjective "motivated" (even if I chose to parenthesize it): Music "moves" as much through the motives of composers and performers as it does through the "physical specifications" of tempo. In the analysis of literary texts, Kenneth Burke attached so much importance to motive that he tried to approach it structurally (through a "grammar"), functionally (through a "rhetoric"), and interpretatively (through a "symbolic"). Looking back on Burke's accomplishments, it is hard to tell how successful he ultimately was; but I suspect it was from Burke that I first started trying to apply the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric to the systematic study of performance practice.

Thus, in some way or another, I feel it is important to approach performance within the framework of the interpretation of texts; and this brings me to the second of Fleisher's observations. He talked with his final student about approaching music on both a "micro-level" and a "macro-level." The micro-level is the level of notation primitives and how those primitives are "translated" into those actions from which performance emerges. The macro-level, on the other hand, is the level from which the performer can perceive what it being performed in its entirety and then understand where every instance of performance is situated within that broader view.

In order to clarify what he meant by the macro-level, Fleisher asked the student to imagine that the wall on the side of the performing space was covered with all the pages of the sheet music (suggesting that a larger wall would be needed if a Wagner opera were being performed). This is, again, valuable as a metaphor; but the metaphor only goes so far. After all, as is the case in most semiotic systems, the relationship between the signifiers of music notation and what they signify is a purely arbitrary one. Fleisher might do better to acquaint himself with the research of Robert Cogan, who has spent much of his professional life analyzing music on the basis of visual traces of the physical vibrations that produce the auditory signals we hear. The equipment Cogan used for his first studies is hopelessly primitive by today's standards; but the good news is that anyone not afraid of computer software can now easily reproduce his results with far higher-quality displays. Furthermore, most of that software supports a "zooming" feature, through which any duration of time, from that of a Chopin ballade to the entirety of Siegfried, can be expanded or contracted to fit the extent of any horizontal time line.

By way of demonstration, one of the examples that Cogan considered in his book, New Images of Musical Sound, was the first movement of Beethoven's Opus 109 E major piano sonata. Here is a version of Cogan's image, which originally required about twelve inches, reduced to a seven-inch printout (subsequently reduced for display in this post) with software I was running on a Macintosh in Singapore back in 1995:

I offer this illustration to make two points:

1. If we really want to visualize a composition in its entirety, we should do so in terms of its actual physical features (even if they are the features of a specific performance), rather than the notational abstraction of a performance.
2. Computer software has matured to a point that we can visualize an entire musical performance on any display scale, no matter how large or small.

I do not always agree with the analyses that Cogan extracted from his data; but I agree with Fleisher about the need to think at the macro-level. Technology is now available to support such thinking, and it may be time for us to address more seriously how that technology can be put to good use. By way of a personal disclaimer, I should note that I served as advisor to a Master's student at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who submitted her thesis based on the use of this technology in June of 1997. My only regret is of how little has been done to continue this work in the ensuing ten years!

The Big Government that Wouldn't

In her "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" column for the November 3 issue of The Nation, Patricia J. Williams decided it was time to remember a few things about Eliot Spitzer other than the sex scandal that forced him to resign. Come to think about it, her column is not just about Spitzer; and also about the whole damned (and far more scandalous) Bush Administration. Here is the way she tells the story:

Some three weeks before New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign his office in disgrace (sex! scandal! floozies!), he published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Titled "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers," the piece expressed Spitzer's concern that for several years there had been a marked increase in predatory lending practices, including distortion of terms, surprise balloon payments, hidden fees and deceptive "teaser" rates. These practices, he wrote, were having a "devastating effect on home buyers." In addition, the sheer number of such transactions, "if left unchecked, threaten...our financial markets." To those in the know (OK, those few egghead "elites" not enthralled by the birth of the Brangelina twins), the situation loomed so egregious that the attorneys general of all fifty states, both Democrats and Republicans, lodged suits against the worst predatory subprime lenders. A number of states, including New York, passed laws to rein in such practices.

The response was shocking, and not nearly wellpublicized enough: the Bush administration employed a little-used 1863 law to annul all state antipredatory-lending laws and, if that wasn't enough, to block states from enforcing their own consumer protection laws in suits against national banks. Thus, when Spitzer tried to open an investigation into discriminatory mortgage lending in New York, the administration actually filed a federal lawsuit to block it. These interventions were so extreme and so unprecedented that the attorneys general and the banking superintendents of all fifty states came together to oppose the rulings unanimously. But to no avail.

It is worth quoting the last paragraph of Spitzer's op-ed in its entirety: "When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers."

Spitzer wrote his article eight months ago, in February. To some, it might be tempting to characterize his observations as prescient. It's probably more accurate to say that Spitzer just had his eyes open (if not for Mata Hari)--and he was not alone. Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been sounding the knell for a very long time. But, frankly, I worry that even now there is too little attention--in media or in political debate--to the incremental ingredients of this crisis. For it is not merely a failure to regulate Wall Street; it's a failure to govern at all. The FDA is packed with industry insiders who seem content with the gross understaffing of inspections bureaus. Animal feed laced with melamine was imported from China, consumed here and has now entered the human food chain. Nontherapeutic experimentation with pesticides on humans has been given the nod. Pharmaceutical companies have gotten approval for drugs like Vioxx and Fen-Phen that should never have been put on the market. Efforts by farmers to do voluntary testing for mad cow disease have been blocked by the Agriculture Department. The Justice Department's civil rights division has been gutted. The FCC has hacked away at public access to the airways and OK'd obscene concentrations of media power. The Transportation Department is underfunded beyond all conscience, and the toll has been tragic: collapsed bridges, breached levees up and down the Mississippi and nearly unnavigable railroad tracks. And FEMA... well, we all remember FEMA.

This story appeals to me for a variety of reasons. Obviously, it would be nice to read it as a conspiracy theory of a corrupt Wall Street getting Spitzer out of their way "by any means necessary." One can also read is a Cassandra story, with both Spitzer and Krugman singled out as Cassandras (although their voices are far from the only ones to have been ignored). However, the greatest impact of this story resides in the middle of that last paragraph, which suggests that, since George W. Bush took the oath of office, we have been laboring under a government that has failed "to govern at all." For eight years we have been enduring the consequences of turning our country over to individuals whose self-interest is so unenlightened as to make Adam Smith spin in his grave and who neither know nor care what the very descriptions of their jobs are, even when those descriptions reside in our very Constitution.

Williams is generous enough to acknowledge Sarah Palin's observation that we should not be arguing about causes when we are in the midst of a crisis; but I think this misses a fundamental point, best recognized by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May in this historical analysis of Presidential decision making. This is the precept that you cannot strategize your way out of a mess until you have a clear understanding of how you got into it. This is not great profundity. History is littered with disastrous decisions that emerged from making the same mistake twice, and the only argument seems to be whether the consequences were tragic or farcical. Thus, if our current catastrophic situation is a consequence of large sectors of our governmental institutions simply failing to do their jobs, we need to be looking towards Election Day in light of whether or not we can return to the Oval Office a leader who will restore a Government that is actually working on behalf on the American population, rather than just thinking up and packaging innovative ways to feather its own nest. In that respect we may very well be in the midst of tragedy, because, in the privacy of the election booth, we really have no way of knowing whether that candidate we select will have the will to restore our Government to what it should be or the power to implement such a restoration. No wonder Marx seems to be gaining popularity among European readers!

The First Monument

There is a tendency among scholars of the work of Ludwig van Beethoven to single out two "monuments" in the canon of piano sonatas, each with a "nickname:" the Opus 57 in F minor ("Appassionata") and the Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier"). In last night's stage of András Schiff's traversal of this canon at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Opus 57 was the second of the five sonatas performed. One of the reasons for this higher "population count" was that two of the sonatas, Opera 54 and 78, consisted of only two movements; but the three movements of Opus 57 made up for most of the duration of the first half of the evening. Performing it before the intermission, rather than at the end of the evening, took away some of that "monumental" status, making it easier to listen to in its historical context, rather as a "grand finale."

That context can be seen as a span of work running from 1803 to 1805 in which two highly intense approaches to composition, Opera 53 ("Waldstein") and 57 surround the far more modest (and seldom heard) Opus 54 in F major. Nevertheless, the entire span is a period of fascinating experimentation, whether it is a matter of exploring the limits of the sounds a piano was capable of producing or rethinking what constitutes the structural framework of a sonata. Like most of the nicknames, "Appassionata" was not chosen by Beethoven; and the greatest risk in performing it is to succumb to that nickname and let passion run wild. (William Shakespeare's carp in Act III of Hamlet about out heroding Herod comes to mind.) True, the sonata may be viewed as experimenting with the juxtaposition of extremes in both dynamics and tempo; but that sense of extremity emerges from the juxtaposition itself without being forced by the performer. Thus, Schiff brought his usual approach of a controlled and disciplined execution to this work and revealed that the music itself could speak for itself with far more passion than any reading by an overly-emotive pianist. This was particularly the case in the final movement, which guns up to an allegro ma non troppo as it segues out of the second movement and drives forward full-tilt through a relatively conventional sonata structure, only to climax in a coda that ups the ante to a presto, visiting the thematic material one more time in what is now a whirlwind of notes. Fortunately, Schiff understands that the notes matter more than the whirlwind; and his clarity made for as stunning an execution of this work as I have ever heard.

It is easy to see Opus 57 in terms of continuing the energetic impulses of Opus 53, but it is important not to dismiss Opus 54 from the context. This is easy to do since, as I have observed, the work is seldom performed and may seem puzzling with a first movement marked "In tempo d'un Menuetto" that defies offering even the slightest family resemblance to a minuet. Nevertheless, within this movement we are already hearing the seeds of those experiments with the juxtaposition of extremes; they are just not called to our attention by any nickname. This movement is then coupled with an allegretto that also bumps up with a più allegro in its final page. Thus, if we dispense with the "emotional interference" of nicknames, Opus 54 emerges as sort of a drawing board on which Beethoven took stock of where he had been in Opus 53 and started working out where he next wanted to go. This probably would have been clearer to the listener had these three sonatas been performed as a set in a single evening, but that would have upset the relatively neat way in which Schiff has scheduled the entire canon.

The second half of last night's program, on the other hand, did encompass the entirety of another interesting span in Beethoven's creative development, the years 1809 and 1810. For one thing he seems to have recovered his light touch as he began to put some distance from the writing of the "Heiligenstadt Testament." Thus, in spite of its six sharps, the two movements of Opus 78 are quite affable, if not downright playful. Similarly, the sun shines bright on Opus 79 as it romps through its opening presto alla tedesca, lolls about in its andante, and dashes off to its final vivace. In this case the pace is not driven by cranking up the metronome but by augmenting a relatively straightforward 2/4 meter with three-against-four rhythms. If last week I had been concerned that Schiff was dragging out the clock time with performances that were too deliberative, these two sonatas breezed by so casually that one needed Schiff's clarity to be reminded of their very presence.

This period in Beethoven's life (and the concert) concluded with the E-flat major Opus 81a. (For those curious about such things, Opus 81b is a sextet for string quartet and two horns!) In this case Beethoven is responsible for assigning programmatic names. The sonata as a whole is called "Les Adieux" (the farewells); and each movement has a German title: "Das Lebewohl" (the farewell), "Abwesenheit" (absence), and "Wiedersehen" (reunion). This is not as light as Opera 78 and 79, and the adagio opening takes a somewhat soul-searching approach to the prospect of departure. Nevertheless, the final movement, marked Vivacissimamente, is a burst of positive energy. Those who tend to overdramatize Beethoven's life might wish to read this as a reflection on his own contemplation of withdrawing from the world in the face on oncoming deafness and then deciding to return, but this would be fictional distortion at its worst. Opera 78 and 79 were hardly the work of a man thinking about rejecting the world; and Opus 81a may just be as it appears on the surface, an experiment in structuring musical form around a non-musical program, rather in the spirit of his sixth ("Pastoral") symphony (Opus 68), which he had composed in 1808.

For his encore Schiff left the world of Johann Sebastian Bach and turned instead to the final movement of Robert Schumann's C major fantasia, Opus 17. He seems to have made this selection because the movement makes a reference of homage to material from Beethoven's "An die ferne Geliebte." Since this is a much later work (Opus 98, published in 1816), that homage was not quite in the spirit of the time frame of this recital; but the Schumann fantasia is a wonderful work taken strictly on its own merits. Schiff once again knew exactly how to let this music speak for itself with all of its clarity and intensity. Meanwhile, the Beethoven canon takes a break and does not continue until 1814 with Opus 90; so it is not unreasonable for us to wait until the end of March for Schiff to return and complete the cycle!

Keynes Ascendant

It is no longer a question of whether or not, as Andrew Keen put it, John Maynard Keynes has been rehabilitated as we try to work our way out of the economic mess we have created. If media recognition is used as an indicator, the spirit of Keynesianism is definitely on the rise, even if the man is no longer around to enjoy the adulation. This may be most evident in the invocation of one of the last global events to which Keynes was a major contributor. Consider the way in which BBC NEWS reported the outcome of the meeting that President George W. Bush held with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and EU Commission chief Manuel Barroso:

President George W Bush has invited world leaders to gather in the US by the end of the year to discuss reform of the global financial system.

The summit would be the first of a series announced after talks between Mr Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and EU Commission chief Manuel Barroso.

Here is the final sentence of the article:

Correspondents say such meetings would echo the Bretton Woods conference of 44 nations after World War II, which established many of the institutions and monetary systems that are now under threat.

On the BBC NEWS Web page just above that sentence, we even have an old Agence France-Presse photograph of that gathering, which even the Chicago economists will probably recognize as a major event in the history of economics.

Not too long after BBC NEWS released that story, the Web site for the Financial Times ran the following report by Jim Pickard and Nicholas Timmins:

Alistair Darling evoked the spirit of John Maynard Keynes on Sunday as he ­signalled a “reprioritising” of spending plans towards capital infrastructure, housing and energy.

The chancellor of the exchequer will call on departments to bring forward billions of pounds of capital expenditure to invigorate the economy ahead of an expected recession.

The government is limited in its ability to step up overall spending for the current three-year period, set at the last comprehensive spending review. But it can bring forward money from planned budgets in 2010-11 – after the next general election – creating potential difficulties for whoever is in government.

The challenge will be to accelerate the spending in such a short period, not least given the chill in private finance initiative markets upon which many such projects depend.

Mr Darling, in a newspaper interview published on Sunday, spoke approvingly of Keynes, the economist who urged the use of public money to finance job-creating capital projects in difficult times.

It may be just as well that Keynes himself is not around to witness his revival. For all his clarity of expression, which earned the adulation of John Kenneth Galbraith, I suspect that he would be more than a little disconcerted with what now passes for news in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Indeed, he probably would have been downright depressed over the role that the media played in promoting Chicago-style free market thinking (going back at least as far as coverage of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan); so, if anything were to surprise him, it would be only how long the United States had managed to endure on such a heavy diet of toxin-laced Kool-Aid, not to mention that Kool-Aid being the beverage of choice at the regular gatherings of the World Economic Forum. Indeed, were Keynes to be raised from the dead and allowed to walk the surface of today's world, I wonder if the only human being with whom he would feel capable of conducting intelligent conversation would be Muhammad Yunus!

The Bretton Woods system was, of course, the product of an international agreement rising to the challenge of restoring economic stability to a world torn apart by war. The invocation of the memory of that famous meeting in New Hampshire is ironic to the extent that, this time, the damage was done by the unbridled greed of the financial elite, rather than bloodthirsty tyrants like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. If we can get beyond that irony, we may appreciate the sobering lesson that neither peace nor democracy necessarily entails prosperity or even economic security. I invoke the adjective "sobering" because I suspect that economic stability will not be restored by new (or revived) institutions and practices alone; recovery is likely to require the moral equivalent of a twelve-step program. It is unclear that a convocation of even the wisest of economic heads can implement that kind of rehabilitation on a global scale, particularly if the countries most responsible for the catastrophe (such as the United States) are still loath to fess up to having a problem in the first place. Nevertheless, however rough the going may be, it would probably be a lot worse if there were not at least a few Keynesians around to try to keep the ball rolling in the right direction!

Sociology: Who Reads What?

Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change lays out a fascinatingly provocative challenge. He basically situates the study of philosophy within a vast (and, as his title implies, global) social network of practitioners, in which the "nodes" of the practitioners themselves are connected by three primary link types:

1. The "vertical" "master-pupil tie"
2. The "horizontal" "acquaintance tie"
3. The "conflictual tie," which can be either horizontal or vertical

It takes only a superficial understanding of Collins' approach to recognize the folly of trying to read any philosophical text in a context-free isolation from not only the texts of the author's own time but also the texts of others influenced (positively or negatively) by that text. This book could easily provide a better introduction to the study of philosophy than many of the introductory texts written by philosophers, were it not for its daunting length that exceeds one thousand pages.

Reading Andrew Keen's latest post to his Great Seduction blog, I realized that Collins could do the world a great service by writing a Sociology of Social Theorists, applying his methodology to his own profession. Back on October 7 Keen decided that he was going to try to frame an understanding of Twitter in terms of Vilfredo Pareto's Law of the Vital Few. This post brought one of the larger numbers of negative responses, and that seems to have fired up his interest in Pareto. Thus, this morning's offering was an analysis of "Wall Street's financial elite" based on Pareto's 1901 essay "The Rise and Fall of Elites."

I have yet to read any Pareto, and I know his name primarily from Collins' Theoretical Sociology textbook. However, I really wanted to consult one of Collins' social networks to see where he was situated with respect to those link types. Since I could not do that, I have to resort to some of my own favorite sources.

Since Keen was basically trying to address the question of a "power elite" (which I have visited from time to time in my own posts), I felt the best place to begin was with the man who wrote the book on this subject, so to speak, C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite was published in 1956; and, when I consulted my copy of the Mills essays collected in Power, Politics and People, I discovered that Mills had written about Pareto in the May 1, 1954 issue of The Saturday Review, in a piece entitled "IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology." The timing seemed to be consistent with when he would have been working on his Power Elite book. His comment on Pareto may be a reflection of what he thought about the man's ideas about elites:

Do you remember the big literary rush to Vilfredo Pareto during the thirties? Well, as the general inattention to him nowadays reveals, he wasn't worth it.

Ironically, Mills is up against the same attention problem these days, although, thanks to John Summers, who has compiled a new collection of Mills essays, and Alan Wolfe, who prepared an excellent review of that collection for The New Republic, that tide may be turning.

From Mills I proceeded to dig into Theoretical Sociology. There I discovered that, in his work in economic sociology, Talcott Parsons took Pareto and Alfred Marshall as his most influential sources. This resonated ironically with a throwaway parenthetical remark that Wolfe had injected into his review of the Summers collection:

"Who now reads [Herbert] Spencer?" Talcott Parsons once asked. The same could now be said of Talcott Parsons.

By way of disclaimer, I should confess that I have read extremely little of Parsons; and most of what I understand about his attempt to develop a functionalist action model of social systems comes from Theoretical Sociology. Life is short, and there was nothing in Collins' exposition that encouraged me to dig deeper.

My point, however, is that the sort of social network that Collins' built up around practicing philosophers is just as informative when we try to read social theory. (Even Collins has is influences, and he is up front about them in his Sociology of Philosophies book.) When we ignore the social network of social theorists, we run the risk of cherry-picking when we try to invoke any of them as sources. Thus, when Keen tries to write about "Wall Street's elite" on the basis of three sentences extracted from a 1901 Pareto essay, all I see is a picked cherry, perhaps more informative than the sorts of cherries that get picked for political advertising, but not necessarily by any great degree. The result is that I find myself reflecting on my own recent writing (vanity of vanities!), specifically when I was trying to flesh out what I called a "caveat lector philosophy" about half a year ago. Nevertheless, I have to confess that being true to this philosophy demands considerable time, which is why I continue to sympathize with Keen when it comes to technologies like Twitter, which seem to do little other than distract from our setting aside longer spans of time for well-needed reflective reading.

An Interesting Precedent for Social Behaviorism

Having recently written about my interest in George Herbert Mead and the concept of "social behaviorism," I was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting precedent for his approach to social theory. Here is the text that was the source of my surprise:

The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

The second sentence provides the punch line that interested me, but the first sentence provides the better clue to the source. The author is Karl Marx. The text comes from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was written in 1859. That is an honorable ancestry for a turn-of-the-century American social theorist, not to mention reinforcement for my recent argument that our own political economy is in need of some serious rethinking!

To Infinite Brahms and Beyond

By paying so much (too much?) attention to whether or not Johannes Brahms was "stuck in the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven," I realize I have neglected the extent to which Brahms cast a shadow of his own into the twentieth century, perhaps because it sometimes seems as if Arnold Schoenberg was the only one to recognize that shadow. Indeed, on the basis of the Chamber Music Masters concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night, organized around the visit of violist Kim Kashkashian, there is good reason to believe that Brahms was already casting that shadow before his death. Viewed in terms of that possible shadow, what made last night's event particularly interesting was that the four composers on the program were all Hungarian, thus at least suggesting that, for all the ways in which Brahms had been influenced by Hungarian sources, the "real Hungarians" were now ready to turn the tables on him, not so much out of revenge but more out of a need to clarify Hungarian identity.

The laws of optics explain why it is that shadows are always sharper when one is closer to both the source and the light behind it. From this point of view, I think it makes sense to examine the works on the program in chronological order. This is not the order in which they were performed; but, since the order listed in the program also had to be modified, I have no qualms about imposing my own order to provide a better perspective on the listening experience.

Thus, I shall begin with the final work on the program, the Opus 1 of Ernő (Ernst) von Dohnányi, the first (of two) piano quintets he composed, this one in C minor. According to my records, I have written about Dohnányi only twice and about the same composition on both occasions, his Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. In both of those programs, his music was coupled with that of Brahms; and my first post was entitled, "Late Brahms and Early Dohnányi." However, while this Serenade dates from 1902, the piano quintet was completed in1895, which puts it approximately two years before Brahms' death and one year after the two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas with which Brahms had emerged from "retirement" under the inspiration of Richard Mühlfeld.

Whether or not Dohnányi intended it, there is nothing wrong with listening to this piano quintet as a sincere homage to Brahms Both the key and the plan of the work follow those of Brahms' final (Opus 60) piano quartet (about twenty years old when Dohnányi was working on his own project); and, as is the case in the Brahms piano quartet, the third movement is dominated by a melodic line in the lower voices. However, while the cello dominates in the Brahms, the viola takes the lead in the Dohnányi, which may explain Kashkashian's interest in the work. The only really interesting difference is that Dohnányi has dispensed with the "Werther connection," often associated with the Brahms piano quartet. In spite of its minor key, the Dohnányi quintet is charged with highly positive energy and has progressed into the major key by its final movement. Thus, this is a work that, even if it is an "Opus 1," has very much established its own voice; and the "family resemblance" to Brahms simply guides our understanding, just as Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that conceptual understanding, in general, is guided by such family resemblance.

The next work in the chronological ordering I have chosen to follow is a 1905 Adagio for viola and piano (again featuring Kashkashian) by Zoltán Kodály. In this case the only time I previously wrote about Kodály's music was when it also shared a program with Brahms, this time the Opus 25 G minor piano quartet, with its distinctively Hungarian final movement. It sometimes feels as if Kodály is better known for his ethnomusicological studies of Hungarian folk music than for his composing; but, if I am to believe the dates in his Wikipedia entry, I would assume that this Adagio was completed before he began his extensive field work. This is thus another composition where the primary influence appears to be coming from Brahms, most likely the reworking of the Opus 120 clarinet sonatas as viola sonatas. As was the case with the Brahms sonatas, it is an excellent vehicle for demonstrating just how lyrical the sound of a viola can be; but it makes its case in a single ternary-form movement.

Chronological order next brings us to Béla Bartók and the 44 violin duos, number 98 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers. These were completed in 1931, which places them after Bartók had begun to accompany Kodály in his ethnomusicological field work. We have now left the domain of direct influence from Brahms and entered that of some of Brahms' sources. Bartók, however, was finding his voice in the original sounds, which were often quite striking in comparison with what one was expecting to hear in a concert setting. Eleven of these duos were performed from a transcription for two violas, possibly by Kashkashian herself. They were also arranged (again possibly by Kashkashian) for an ensemble of eight violas, which included six students and Conservatory Faculty Member Jodi Levitz (along with Kashkashian herself). These arrangements used the ensemble in a variety of ways, not only in terms of when a voice was played by a single or multiple instruments but also with regard to the spatial effects of which voices came from which directions. (The ensemble was arranged in a U formation, with the open end facing the audience.) All of the works were brief, and a few felt as if they filled the duration of a single breath. However, even the more pensive works were highly charged with energy; and I could easily understand why, chronological considerations aside, this made for an excellent beginning of the evening's program.

This brings us to 1978, the year in which György Kurtág completed his "Hommage À Mihàly András, 12 Mikroludien Für Streichquartett." I was first introduced to Kurtág when Marino Formenti gave his three "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in April of 2007, the first of which was entitled "Kurtág's Ghosts." From that concert I learned that Kurtág was a miniaturist with a truly exhaustive sense of music history. I also formed the suspicion that he had a sense of humor; and that suspicion was confirmed when I heard another of his homage compositions, this one for Robert Schumann, performed last April in another Chamber Music Masters concert. That humor is again evident in his bilingual title in which he invents a word that conjures up Bartók's (also miniaturist) Mikrokosmos, the plural of the German for "prelude" that we find in the scores for Johann Sebastian Bach, and quite possibly a play on the Latin ludus for "game" (as in Paul Hindemith's own set of preludes and fugues, Ludus Tonalis). The shadow of Brahms has now grown so faint that we can barely recognize it (if it is still there at all in any form other than Kurtág's "Schumann connection"); and it may even have been displaced by the shadow of Anton Webern. These pieces are even shorter than the Bartók duos, and they reflect the influence of both Bartók and Webern in their approach to eliciting unconventional sounds for the instruments of a string quartet. They also remind us just how far our capacity for listening has progressed since the death of Brahms and how much further it may yet venture!

Chutzpah Google has Found to be True

At a time when all roads seem to lead to further thoughts on our economic crisis, it seems appropriate to present Google with its second "corporate-level" Chutzpah of the Week for the role it is playing (and the money it is making) in leading so many us further and further into that crisis. My line of reasoning began with Andrew Keen's latest rant on his Great Seduction blog. His target in this case was the United Kingdom division of Google, which had decided to remove the ban it had placed on running advertising for gambling companies. I agree with Keen that gambling is basically addictive, so providing people with Web pages that provide easy links to gambling sites could well be seen as feeding that addiction.

However, by setting his sites on the other side of the Atlantic, Keen missed out on the extent to which Google is already thriving (and, considering the latest news from Wall Street, that use of the present tense is very much in full force) on a much stronger addiction. That is the prevalent addiction to consumerism in the American culture, which is the primary reason why so many Americans are now living with levels of debt they cannot manage. How, then, has Google become such an economic success? Certainly not by "organizing everything we know," which is the "party line" promoted by Randall Stross' Planet Google book. Their success resides primarily in the ways in which they deliver advertising, combined with the extent to which the search engine has become a major tool for shopping. Google is thus a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental) motivating force that induces consumerism addiction!

This leads both Keen and me back to where Google stands on that old question of being evil. Now, just to be fair to Google, all this "don't be evil" talk is a product of those who, for one reason or another, have never bothered to check the source document, which is a corporate information Web page that Google modestly calls "Our Philosophy" (leading those of us who have put some time into seriously reading philosophy to wonder whether or not those guys actually know what a philosophy is). This page has a list of "Ten things Google has found to be true" (which further fuels the fire of the principle that, whatever Google has done, they have not read much philosophy). About halfway down this list (not at the top, mind you) we find:

6. You can make money without doing evil.

Now, on the basis of my own study of philosophy, I would not commit to whether or not this is true; but, in the spirit of those Transcendentalists who believed that, whether or not God exists, there are advantages to believing in God, I believe that there is, at the very least, a moral (continuing with the snide parentheses, I have to wonder if that word is in the Google working vocabulary) advantage in accepting this proposition. Nevertheless, whether or not Google once found it to be true, they seem to have hit on a "higher" (scare quotes) truth: You can make so much more money if you don't let the evil bother you!

Putting the question of evil aside, it would probably be a mistake to accuse Google of driving the bus that led us all down the road to economic ruin. However, it might still be fair to say that, at the very least, they provided a lot of the heavy machinery used to build and pave that road in the first place (consider, for example, all those advertising links to mortgage companies); and now they are still prospering on Wall Street while everyone else has gone into free fall. Since their prosperity depends on feeding a major root cause of the crisis, I can think of no better reason for presenting them with their second Chutzpah of the Week award!

Trying to Recover a "Real Economy"

Marie Cocco's column for today's Washington Post, reproduced, as usual, on Truthdig, has the great title, "It’s the Jobs, Stupid;" and that is exactly how she begins her text:

The last thing we need is another “economic stimulus” package. What we need is a jobs package. And we ought to start calling it that.

The argument that she develops around this precept is laudable, but I think she has missed out on the extent to which that argument has to be embedded in a bigger picture. That bigger picture involves the more general question of what Japanese broker Masatoshi Sato, whom I cited yesterday, referred to as "the real economy." As I tried to argue yesterday, this "is the economy where 'real people' (rather than the once and future 'Masters of the Universe' in the financial sector) have to make basic purchases for food, clothing, and shelter." Needless to say, you could have flunked Economics 101 and still come away realizing that you need an income source in order to make those purchases, which is where Cocco's arguments about jobs come into the picture. What concerns me is that we may have become too far gone in the confidence games played by those "Masters of the Universe" to regain our footing in such a "real economy."

Consider the argument I first floated at the end of last week: On a global scale the bank that may well have suffered the LEAST from the current crisis may well be Grameen Bank. The reason for this (at the risk of sounding too reductive) is that Grameen is still based (as I put it in my argument) on "an exchange system that is still grounded in the more concrete realities of cows and chickens." The economic engine of the United States is no longer grounded in manufacturing or agriculture. Indeed, it is no longer grounded in anything that Economics 101 would call "goods." Worse yet, most of the "services" that have displaced the position of those "goods" have either been shipped overseas (as in call centers) or subjected to devastating cuts in resources (whether we are talking about librarians or bank tellers). This leaves the United States with a very narrow band of service providers in the financial sector who do little more than manipulate people's belief systems over the value of "fictions of convenience," such as currencies, stock futures, and commoditized packages of debt. Our economy is so far from reality that, were it being analyzed by a psychiatrist, it would be deemed psychotic without a moment's thought!

Thus, while Cocco's call for a jobs package is admirable, there is a serious underlying question: "Jobs for what?" The fact is that we need to rethink the very nature of our political economy beginning with its very foundations. I say this knowing full well that talking about a critique of political economy is sure to get many of our "true patriots" foaming at the mouth, since it invokes Karl Marx, that boogie man who probably continues to terrorize them even more than Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, if we are going to try to restore that "sense of reality" to the foundations of our economy, we would do far worse than to revisit the "Critique of the Gotha Program" and consider what its famous motto ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") is really trying to say. Grameen Bank knows how to think in terms of needs and abilities and still make a profit. Can our country think in similar terms and find its way back to living under a "real economy?"

The Poll after the Final Debate

While I continue to be skeptical about the AT&T Yahoo! polling process, I also continue to take an interest in whether any useful information may be mined from their arbitrarily collected data points. For example, I try to examine the results at the same time of day to get some idea of the comparative size of the number of participants. This may be the most interesting aspect of the most recent poll over who "won" the final debate between Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama:

As of my participation and examination of the results, 87,568 votes had been collected. That is, by far, the largest participation number since I started "polling these polls." Second place is held by the number responding to Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention; but, with a count examined at the same time of day of 20,830, that is a considerably distant second. It is interesting, however, that, when I examined those results, I remarked on how many people had responded. If we were thus to use the raw participation numbers as an indicator of interest, regardless of what the responses themselves were, that large number may be interpreted as predicting a very strong turnout on Election Day. Given the pathetically low turnout ratio for past elections, this, in itself, may be a good sign.

This takes us to the results themselves: 3% making no choice and the remainder perfectly evenly divided between the two candidates (with round-off lurking somewhere among those three numbers). At the very least, this should lead us to question some of those recent "double-digit" leads given to Obama on the basis of more "scientific" (scare quotes meaning sanctioned by the community of professional practitioners) polling methods. I am not saying that AT&T Yahoo! is providing a more representative sample; I am just saying that the significant difference between their numbers and the "professional" numbers should raise questions. Did what happened in the final debate have such a significant effect on that 10% of the electorate that was giving Obama his advantage; and, if that is the case, did those 10% have some common sore nerve that Obama happened to touch, perhaps inadvertently (or, to be fair, did McCain find some way to give them just the strokes they craved)? Is it possible that the advantage, itself, was in error (or, worse, had been "cooked" by using a particularly conducive methodology)? My personal feeling is that, as was the case with the previous debates (and the AT&T Yahoo! poll results), neither candidate gained an advantage; and perhaps that is all that these particular numbers are saying. Put another way, the 87,568 participants may just have said that this debate had no impact on how they would vote in November.

The real problem may be that the media has tried to present each debate as a prizefight, while the electorate, fully aware of the many messes they now have to confront, wants nothing more than a clear and reliable information resource. Since the media continue to represent that "American Ruling Class," rather than the lion's share of the electorate itself, it is not really in their best interests to serve any general public quest for information that will be useful on Election Day. So perhaps the statistical tie of these results does little more than validate the proposition that all three debates failed to provide viewers with that clear and reliable information resource. In retrospect this should not be surprising. Those viewers already know that television advertising is a representative sample of how little useful formation the television medium provides. They just let it be known that the debates made as little difference to their final decision as all that campaign advertising, which could be perceived by anyone familiar with television as a few grains of signal dissolving into an ocean of noise.

"Attention has now shifted to the real economy."

Those are the words of Masatoshi Sato, a broker at Japan's Mizuho Investors Securities, as reported on Al Jazeera English, in reaction to a worldwide drop in the markets. That same report also provides an explanation for the fall in the United States:

Investors' mood soured after a government report showed that sales at US retailers last month fell by the biggest monthly drop in more than three years.

This brings us back to that fundamental precept that was ignored when bailout was first being debated and continues to be ignored: If Main Street is unhappy (as demonstrated by, among other factors, a drastic decline in sales), then Wall Street cannot help but be unhappy, whatever our Government may be doing to cheer it. Sato-san's "real economy" is the economy where "real people" (rather than the once and future "Masters of the Universe" in the financial sector) have to make basic purchases for food, clothing, and shelter. We need to get behind the problems I examined yesterday and start making serious moves towards an economy that supports sensible consumption of necessary goods and services without relapsing into addictive consumerism. None of the markets around the world can recover until the ability to exchange money for such sensible consumption has been restored. This means that people around the world need to be earning living wages, protected by regulations against efforts to thwart legitimate management of those income resources. It means that those people can once again claim to be part of the economy, rather than exiled from it as victims of the War Against the Poor.

The latest issue of The New York Review has a piece by Max Hastings entitled "The Most Evil Emperor." The basic argument is that, while Hitler was brilliantly ruthless in bring European country after European country into submission, he was utterly incompetent in managing the empire he had accrued. By never being able to get beyond conquer-and-pillage, Hitler basically squandered the resources of each of his conquests, turning each one from an economic asset into a military liability. This may well describe how the American Ruling Class has ended up waging its War Against the Poor. Like Hitler, the American Ruling Class may have been striving to create a new class of slaves; but they have created a social infrastructure that is too incapacitated to contribute to that "real economy," even as slaves. Like Hitler, they may ultimately be undone by their strategic ("Mission Accomplished?") success.

Can the interests of the "real economy" be salvaged? I suppose the question we have to face is that of who is up to the task of salvaging it. John McCain certainly does not come off as having either the ways or the will. Barack Obama has given the matter serious thought and offered a vision in which we shall all work together at the salvaging. However, he will only be able to do this as President if he can assemble an effective staff that he can dispatch across the country to implement that vision of working together effectively. Note that I have not identified anyone in the current Administration. This Administration seems to know more about where all the local churches are (particularly the ones with High Rollers, rather than Holy Rollers) than it does about where that metaphorical Main Street is. I cannot imagine Main Street trusting anyone from the Administration to come in and fix things. They still remember how they fixed things in New Orleans. Listening to the latest statement from President George W. Bush on today's PBS delivery of BBC World Service News, I was struck only by his inability to form coherent, let alone convincing, sentences.

There is one other possibility. People can start working together without someone like Obama leading the way on the national scale. Obama is far from the only one who has been successful as a community organizer. Perhaps we just need a critical mass of like-minded community organizers to start the ball rolling now, as they had started rolling the ball that resulted in Obama's nomination, working with whatever resources can be scrounged up by hook or by crook. The best way to demonstrate that Government is the fundamental problem behind our financial catastrophe is to start climbing out of that catastrophe without expecting any commitment of resources from that same Government. If Obama could get enough people shouting "Yes We Can!" over that objective (and then acting accordingly), he will have demonstrated that he will be the most qualified person next to occupy the Oval Office.

Rarely-Heard Twentieth Century Music

The composer George Rochberg was in the Music Department of the University of Pennsylvania back when I was teaching Computer Science there. To call him reclusive would be a polite understatement. I taught there for five years and never saw him once (and my building was across a parking lot from his). On the rare occasions when his name came up, even in the Music Building, there was often the connotation that he lurked in his office a bit like Fafner in his cave (at least in Siegfried), not to be roused by the faint of heart (even those with tenure). From this it also follows as a corollary that, over those five years, I never heard any of his music performed. Indeed, my first taste of his music only came last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Master Class conducted by violist Kim Kashkashian, where the first students to present offered the first movement of his viola sonata. Given Kashkashian's background, I was not surprised that she was familiar with the work; so this was an excellent opportunity for my personal listening experiences to break new ground. Ironically, this sonata was completed in 1979, which means that he may have been working on it while I was at Penn.

Had I known that Rochberg would be opening the program, I would have done well to approach the evening with a bit of background, such as this summary of his compositional approaches from Wikipedia:

After a period of experimentation with serialism, Rochberg abandoned it after 1963 when his son died, saying that serialism was empty of expressive emotion and was inadequate to express his grief and rage.[1] By the seventies he had become controversial for the use of tonal passages in his music. His use of tonality first became widely known through the String Quartet No. 3 (1972), which includes an entire set of variations that are in the style of late Beethoven. Another movement of the quartet contains passages reminiscent of the music of Gustav Mahler. This use of tonality caused critics to classify him as a neoromantic composer. He compared atonality to abstract art and tonality to concrete art and compared his artistic evolution with Philip Guston's, saying "the tension between concreteness and abstraction" is a fundamental issue for both of them (Rochberg, 1992).

Of the works composed early in his career, the Symphony No. 2 (1955-56) stands out as an accomplished serial composition by an American composer. Rochberg is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3-6 (1972-78). Rochberg conceived Nos. 4-6 as a set and named them the "Concord Quartets" after the Concord String Quartet, which premiered and recorded the works. The String Quartet No. 6 includes a set of variations on the Pachelbel Canon in D.

A few of his works were musical collages of quotations from other composers. "Contra Mortem et Tempus", for example, contains passages from Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives.

Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, and 5, and the Violin Concerto were recorded in 2001–2002 by Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and released on the Naxos label.

I am not sure I am comfortable attaching that adjective "neoromantic" to the viola sonata, even if the timing is right for it. I am also not sure that I would listen to the sonata in terms of a "tension between concreteness and abstraction." On the other hand the concept of tension itself was extremely important to Kashkashian, who spent much of her time on this piece dealing with how to create and manage a sense of physical tension that controls how the bow is drawn across the strings. Nevertheless, the Guston reference is probably appropriate, since familiar concrete objects first began to appear on Guston's canvases in the mid-Sixties; so the Guston of the late Seventies may very well have been on Rochberg's mind. For those with a sense of irony, Guston's portrait of Morton Feldman, "Friend – to M.F.," which appears on the cover of the collection of Feldman-related essays published by Beginner Press, was painted in 1978, a time when Feldman was practically black-listed by most of the established academic music departments (including the one at Penn). I suppose that Rochberg could have been a "closet admirer" of Feldman, just as I have suggested that Karlheinz Stockhausen was a "closet admirer" of Eric Dolphy (among others); but, on the basis of what I heard in this viola sonata, I doubt that Rochberg ever gave much (if any) thought to Feldman.

Indeed, I have to wonder to what extent Rochberg gave much thought to listening itself. There is clearly much to occupy the mind of the performers; this was evident even before Kashkashian started offering her own observations. However, I was left with the nagging suspicion that Rochberg may have cared about little more than the relationship between the violist and pianist and the notation staring at them from their parts. The very presence of listeners seemed supererogatory, if not irrelevant. This may, of course, all be a product of an imagination colored by past encounters with a cloud of mystery that was always surrounding the man; and, on the basis of what I heard last night, I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to hear this sonata performed in its entirety, even if the composer would have regarded me as an unwelcome intruder.

By way of comparison, Paul Hindemith's name is much more familiar, at least to those familiar with twentieth-century music. While he may not receive very much attention in the concert audience, many ballet audiences are likely to know at least one of his compositions, since it was set by George Balanchine for his ballet "The Four Temperaments." Hindemith had a particular interest in Gebrauchsmusik, which his Wikipedia entry translates as "Utility Music." This was music for all sorts of different collections of instruments, often written at a level suitable for amateurs. The second work prepared for Kashkashian was an excellent case in point, three movements from Hindemith's Opus 35, "Die Serenaden," which he called a "little cantata for voice, oboe, viola, and cello." I have to wonder whether or not Hindemith may have had at least a few thoughts for Johann Sebastian Bach in this piece, since Bach's cantatas could be seen as the "primal spirit" of Gebrauchsmusik, with solo parts that tended to be written for the instrumentalists who happened to be available for a given Sunday service. The full plan for this cantata, taken from the Schott Music Web site, is as follows:

1. Barcarole (Adolf Licht)
An Phyllis (Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Gleim)
Toccata für Violoncello
Corrente für Sopran und Violoncello
Nur Mut (Ludwig Tieck)
2. Duett
Der Abend (Joseph von Eichendorff)
Der Wurm am Meer (Johann Wilhelm Meinhold)
3. Trio
Gute Nacht (Siegfried August Mahlmann)

The three songs performed for Kashkashian were "Nur Mut," "Der Wurm am Meer," and "Gute Nacht." Since the audience was not provided with the texts and I was unfamiliar with all of them, I am not sure what to make of the listening experience. I know that the viola and cello provided an interesting bit of tone painting of a sea serpent ("Wurm am Meer") slithering just below the surface of the water and occasionally (and always briefly) rearing its head; but, beyond that rather obvious depiction, I drew blanks. This is a piece that probably requires more homework than the Rochberg sonata, particularly since I think Hindemith had a bit more consideration for listeners, at least to the extent that he composed music through which performers could form a relationship with their listeners. At the very least this composition offered an interesting latter-day take on the nature of the cantata itself, which, in my book, is reason enough to learn more about it.

Where Milton Fumbled

I found last night's Great Seduction post by Andrew Keen, entitled "The End of Quack Economics," to provide a nice complement to my observations yesterday about the faith-based nature of "Chicago school" economic ideology. Keen is all but dancing around the funeral pyre of that ideology:

One of the few benefits of the global financial meltdown and its consequent government activism is the return of the economics of sanity. Paul Krugman's Nobel prize is excellent news. So is the rehabilitation of Keynes and the resurrection of Gordon Brown.

If Keynesian economics is back in vogue, then it's Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and the laissez-faire Vienna School who are suddenly out of fashion. Yes, the free market Gods have failed.

I particularly liked that last touch about "the free market Gods," which I took as an affirmation that it was faith-based thinking that got us into this mess, just as it had gotten us into the mess in Iraq, not to mention our entire approach to the Global War on Terror.

Regardless of where the vogue happens to be (remembering, as always, those words from The Money Game, by the "other" Adam Smith: "The crowd is always wrong"), I figured that, having just hammered Friedman and (at least by association) Hayek, it was time for me to refresh my memory of John Maynard Keynes; so I turned to the chapter, "The Mandarin Revolution," in John Kenneth Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty. From Galbraith I was reminded that Keynes' first interest as a student at Eton was mathematics; and it was only at King's College at Cambridge that he fell in with economists. Thus it would be fair to say that his respect for mathematics was as great as any that could be found at the University of Chicago. This led me to wonder what it was about Keynes' path that led to a departure from that Vienna School thinking that would later be embraced in Chicago.

One hint came from a passage that I had marked in my copy of Galbraith concerned with Keynes' activities after the First World War:

Mostly in those years Keynes wrote. Good writing in economics is suspect—and with justification. It can persuade people. It also requires clear thought. No one can express well what he does not understand. So clear writing is perceived as a threat, something deeply damaging to the numerous scholars who shelter mediocrity of mind behind obscurity of prose. Keynes was a superb writer when he chose to try. This added appreciably to the suspicion with which he was regarded.

This passage may be read as a loosely-veiled attack on the cultural influence of Vienna Circle positivism on the Vienna School economic theorists. The fundamental precept of positivism is that pure mathematics (and, consequently, the modeling of logical deduction by pure mathematics) can speak for itself without the mediation of prose, which will always be vulnerable to going "off message" by virtue of less logical devices, such as rhetoric. (Consider, as a historical context, Plato's opinion of the rhetoric teacher Gorgias.) Good writing is therefore suspect because it distracts from those mathematical models wherein "all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" resides. Keynes, himself, was therefore also suspect for turning away from the "direct communication" of the mathematics at his command in the interest of a communication that would serve the needs of readers who were not experts at interpreting the pure mathematics and logic behind the results they supported. At the risk of being overly reductive, Keynes held to the personal conviction that people matter more than mathematics and became a thorn in the side of those theorists who agonized over why people would not willingly do what the models told them was best for them.

This people-based approached would later receive an ironic endorsement through Public Television. In many ways the ideological dispute between the Chicago School and Keynesianism was embodied in a personal rivalry between Friedman and Galbraith. That rivalry came to a head when the televised version of The Age of Uncertainty was being produced. Each "episode" corresponded to a chapter in Galbraith's book but also included an "epilogue," during which Galbraith interviewed a leading economic theorist about the "lesson of the week." Rather like the evil fairy Carabosse in the Sleeping Beauty ballet, Friedman was mightily offended at having been passed by for any of these weekly epilogues and, rather than forcing Galbraith into deep slumber through a poisoned spindle, enlisted his free-market allies to support his own ten-episode television series, entitled, aptly enough, Free to Choose.

For all of the power of that supporting positivist ideology, Friedman launched his series with a gesture that was purely rhetorical. This was because Galbraith had chosen to conclude his argument with a visit to Singapore as a model example of how successful a controlled economy could be. This apparently inspired Friedman to begin his series in Hong Kong, where his first episode, "The Power of the Market," amounted to an apotheosis of the sweatshop mentality, the perfect example of what, during Ronald Reagan's campaign against Jimmy Carter, came to be called the rising tide that would lift all boats. The extent to which those sweatshop workers had been reduced to less-than-human objects (or, to invoke Hayek's metaphor, serfs) mattered little compared to the power of free markets to promote growth.

The Hayek reference serves to magnify the irony. The basic argument of The Road to Serfdom was that excessive regulatory control, shown in the best possible light in Galbraith's analysis of Singapore, would turn us all into a new generation of serfs. What we have seen instead is that free-market thinking has been the ideological standard of the War Against the Poor; and its victims now suffer the serfdom of those Hong Kong sweatshop workers with little hope of rising from the muck. Nevertheless, it would be premature to declare, as Keen did, that "the free market Gods have failed." If they are truly out of the picture (which I find unlikely), then, at best, they are in hibernation, rather like those desert toads that bury themselves underground in suspended animation, only to spring back to life with the first drops of the spring rains (whence come the next rising tides). Even under Keynesianism there will be those coming up with new strategies to "keep the poor in their place" by providing them with new and freshly paved roads to serfdom!

Back to the Dream-World

Today's performance by the Russian Chamber Orchestra under Alexander Vereshagin as part of the October Russian Music Festival organized by the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco reminded me that Die Tote Stadt is not the only theatrical composition that spends the better part of its plot in the dream-world. Marius Petipa's ballet Raymonda, with music by Alexander Glazunov, goes into the dream-world in the second scene of its first act and remains there for all of its second act. Since this ballet was first presented in 1898, it predates The Interpretation of Dreams; and I doubt that Petipa would have had quite the analytic interest in dreams that occupied Sigmund Freud. Nevertheless, I once saw the Boston Ballet perform excerpts from Swan Lake as entertainment for a convention of the American Psychiatric Association, prefaced with remarks by dance critic Doris Hering to the effect that any prince who tells his mother that he wants to marry a swan must be ripe for analysis.

Similarly, one could approach Raymonda in terms of the psyche of its protagonist, who is basically a young woman who gets cold feet on her wedding night and dreams of being abducted by a Saracen chief who her betrothed had conquered in the Crusades. However, while both the music and the libretto of Die Tote Stadt delve deeply into the psyche of a man obsessed with his deceased wife, Raymonda is best known for the easily danceable music that Glazunov provided. Vereshagin presented a suite of four of those movements, all of which serve primarily to revive memories of past ballet performances (in my case the American Ballet Theatre production staged by Rudolf Nureyev). Basically, this means that through Vereshagin the music conveyed its own sense of motion, sufficient to breath life into even the vaguest memories of a ballet company versed in the classical Russian style.

The rest of Vereshagin's program was also theatrical in nature, divided between opera and dance. While they were new to me, I suspect that the "Gavotte" and "Valse" that concluded the program were extracted from one (or two) of the "Ballet Suites" that Dmitri Shostakovich had composed for orchestra, not always with specific choreography in mind. I also suspect that the arrangement for chamber orchestra (strings and one percussion player) was Vereshagin's and was effective enough that one did not miss the usual lush orchestral sound characteristic of the composer.

On the opera side the program opened with the Polovtsian songs (rather than the more familiar dances) from the opera Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin. Like the dances, these songs (again arranged for chamber orchestra without any vocalists) captured many of the idiomatic folk elements that can be found in the dances. Much of the rhetoric is similar, but there is a clear sense of a vocal line and accompaniment. The other operatic excerpt was the intermezzo from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride.

Given Vereshagin's tendency to go "pops" with an encore, I wondered whether or not this concert would end with an encore of the "Tahiti-Trot," Shostakovich's orchestration (and arrangement) of Vincent Youmans' "Tea for Two." Those unfamiliar with this side of Shostakovich will probably appreciate the Wikipedia entry for this work:

The "Tahiti Trot" is Shostakovich's 1927^[1] orchestration of "Tea for Two" from the musical No, No, Nanette by Vincent Youmans. Shostakovich wrote it in response to a challenge from conductor Nikolai Malko: after the two listened to the song on record, Malko bet 100 roubles that Shostakovich could not completely re-orchestrate the song from memory in under an hour. Shostakovich took him up and won, completing the orchestration in around 45 minutes. The "Tahiti Trot" was first performed in 1928^[2], and has been a popular encore ever since. It was used as an entr'acte for the ballet The Age of Gold at the suggestion of conductor Alexander Gauk^{[citation needed]}.

However, the joy of this work really lies in Shostakovich's use of his orchestral palette; and I doubt that Vereshagin would have been able to maintain the Shostakovich flavor in a chamber orchestra version!

Tweaking the System

The question of whether or not the United States Government would follow the British lead by making equity investments in the nation's banks as an effort to restore credit flow has been resolved. Martin Crutsinger, Business Writer for Associated Press, reported the announcement by President George W. Bush this morning that $250 billion would be allocated for this purpose. Since that announcement Reuters has been tracking the markets. Here is their summary as of 11:00 AM EDT:

Stocks fell on Tuesday as investors sold technology shares on fears that fallout from the credit turmoil would hurt profits despite the U.S. government's plan to invest in banks to shore up the financial system.

Concerns about the economy's health and the profit outlook overshadowed the Treasury Department's plan to inject $250 billion in major banks to stabilize the financial system.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 1.91 points, or 0.02 percent, at 9,385.70. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was down 2.55 points, or 0.25 percent, at 1,000.80. The Nasdaq Composite Index was down 39.46 points, or 2.14 percent, at 1,804.79.

My guess is that this announcement was an effort to maintain the momentum of yesterday's good news from the markets. If yesterday's 900-point rise in the Dow was basically the largest "dead cat bounce" in recorded history, the last thing needed would have been a things-are-better-now message from the White House; and that seems to be the message that the markets are currently trying to send. A series of apparently planned and certain actions, not swayed by either bad or good news from Wall Street, may have more to do with building confidence than the details of the strategy behind those actions; but it looks as if the markets are beginning to recognize that economic health beyond the narrow corridor of Wall Street is also important.

In light of recent events, it may be worth revisiting some of the points that had been raised by those seeking alternatives to the original plan that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had submitted to the Congress. Consider, for example, Ann Pettifor's remark about Republican ideology being brought down by the discredited deregulation policies, which are basically the "Chicago School" legacy of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. This ideology grew out of a faith in the "reality" of elaborately-designed mathematical models; and that faith was neither more nor less reliable than any faith in a supernatural being, distinguished only by its pedigree from what we still call "The Age of Reason." The problem with the positivist legacy of The Age of Reason, however, is that its inheritors have always preferred looking at its capabilities to the exclusion of its limitations.

This was first brought home to me by a remark my former thesis advisor, Marvin Minsky, once made about the limitations of logic. (I am pretty sure he documented it in his book The Society of Mind.) Minsky observed that formal logic may be the best possible tool for providing systematic explanations for observations of past situations, but its power in representing the past provides no useful information about the future. Thus, the mathematical representations handed down to us by Hayek and Friedman may tell us much about how markets have behaved in the past; but, while, as William Shakespeare had Antonio say in The Tempest, "What's past is prologue," that prologue can only set a context for what will next happen, rather than defining what that will be. Markets are social systems, which can be, at best, only vaguely approximated by the objectivity of mathematics. Knowing the context is important in understanding how a social system is likely to behave; but that behavior still resides in the actors themselves, rather than the context in which they are acting.

It would appear that Paulson, along with those who hold his equivalent position in the other G7 nations, has cultivated an appreciation for the fundamental fact that markets cannot be controlled. I do not know if he believed this before taking over the Treasury Department; but I suspect that, at the very least, his experience in dealing with our Congress gave him a sobering appreciation for the limitations of control. The best he can do, then, is "set context" and then have the discipline of a good scientific observer to "act as audience" and see what the actors do. The actors certainly put on a good show on Wall Street yesterday, but Paulson seems to know enough to appreciate that one good scene does not justify bringing down the curtain. Yesterday's market behavior has now become prologue; and today's announcement is the latest contribution to the context-building effort.

The risk remains, however, that an improvement in the scenes played out by the actors on Wall Street may still distract us from the actors on Main Street. Yesterday on Morning Edition, Chana Joffe-Walt ran a story now listed on the NPR Web site as "Using Mail As An Economic Indicator." This was an interview with a mail carrier to demonstrate what we can learn about the state of the economy from what people are receiving in the mail. Needless to say, a lot of the data points were bills, particularly overdue ones. Thus, we learned that, on this particular "Main Street," bills usually came in white envelopes, overdue notices in yellow ones, and "serious" demands for payment in blue ones. We also learned that there has been a significant drop in letters from credit cards with an invitation to apply. What surprised me, however, was that a delivery that might include several yellow and even blue envelopes could easily also include a package from QVC or Fingerhut. Even when confronted with a frightening pile of bills that absolutely need to be settled, people are still buying "stuff," much of which they really do not need.

The problem on Main Street is not, primarily, a problem of frozen credit markets. It is the problem that James Scurlock put on the table in his Maxed Out documentary. Main Street remains heavily populated by men and women hopelessly addicted to consumerism; and that addiction has as much to do with the unsavory (if not downright fraudulent) practices of credit card companies as it does with the 24/7 hucksterism of cable television channels devoted entirely to shopping. If the Treasury Department is beginning to master the fine art of context-setting, then we are all going to have to own up to the fact that Main Street is in as much need for a change of context as Wall Street is. This will ultimately be a much harder task, and I am not even sure that the Treasury Department has the appropriate resources to take on such a responsibility. Indeed, if the Government is to show any initiative in taking on this problem, that initiative would probably best come from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which was created to be independent of all Cabinet-level Departments.

I would thus like to submit the "modest proposal" that it is time for Hank Paulson to schedule a serious meeting will William Kovacic, Chairman of the FTC. (There's a name that gets even less attention from the media than Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader!) If Paulson really wants to be serious about finding the most effective ways to deploy that $700 billion for which he is responsible and if the Congress really wants to be serious about exercising oversight in the allocation of those resources, then this seems like a good time to make sure that Main Street gets as much consideration as Wall Street. If the metaphor of "rescue" is as applicable to that vast population in dire need of rehabilitation from their addiction to consumerism as it is to falling share prices and failing banks, then it is time to talk about all those American citizens who matter most (since they are the ones who will ultimately determine the nature of that "health" metaphor for our economy); and it seems as if the FTC is as good a venue for such talk as any.

Beginning the Second Half of the Beethoven Cycle

Last April András Schiff concluded the first half of his cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven with one of Beethoven's two "runs" of consecutive opus numbers, 26, 27, and 28, all completed in 1801. At the beginning of last night's recital, we were still in 1801 with the three Opus 31 sonatas, after which we advanced to 1804, when the Opus 53 "Waldstein" sonata was published. In his program notes Michael Steinberg suggested that Beethoven may have intended the Opus 31 sonatas "to set out on a new path" (words from Beethoven's correspondence), having written that he was "little satisfied" with how his work had progressed. I can imagine any number of composers today who would have been perfectly satisfied to have Opera 26–28 in their own portfolio, but dissatisfaction can be an even more effective mother of invention than necessity.

To my own ears that "new path" may have involved experimenting with structural forms; but much of the rhetoric of the first half of the cycle is still there. Beethoven is still in the best of spirits, and all three of these sonatas exhibit his wit at its best. He is also still very interested in using "significant silence" as a rhetorical device in both witty and serious settings. In other words the Beethoven we got to know so well during the four concerts of the first half is still very much with us.

On the other hand it seemed as if Schiff had gone through a quantitative shift (pun not really intended) in his approach to this Beethoven. His performances were far more deliberative, and he seemed more occupied with dwelling on individual notes than on whole gestures. This made all three of the sonatas feel qualitatively as if they were taking too much time; and, while I was not taking accurate measurements, my watch seemed to agree. Unfortunately, this did not serve Beethoven's rhetoric particularly well. The silences were less significant and felt more like excessive rests, while the wit felt more than a little labored. As had been the case with previous sonatas collected under a single opus number, Schiff tried to group them together as a single event (with time for applause and bows); but the spirit of previous collections just was not there, which meant that the sense of unity was also absent.

Things improved considerably with Opus 53, perhaps because the dramatic intensity was now a more dominant factor. We are now at a time after the "Heiligenstadt Testament;" and there has been a considerable shock to the system of Beethoven's worldview. That dramatic intensity appears to have beefed up the intensity of Schiff's performance, making for an exciting listening experience. From an academic point of view, it would have been nice had Schiff decided to perform the F major "Andante (favori)" (WoO 57) as his encore, since this had originally been intended as the middle movement of Opus 53. However, instead Schiff chose to continue with his "whole Bach" encores moving from the keyboard Partitas and French Suites to the Italian Concerto. Unfortunately, given the duration of the evening before the encore and given Schiff's approach to Opus 31, this choice did not really add very much to the listening experience.

Dream-World Opera

It was more than a little frustrating that my subscription to the San Francisco Opera required me to wait for the final performance of the opera I was most excited about seeing, Die Tote Stadt, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. However, I have been sufficiently busy that my patience was not unduly tried; and I have had previous experiences with final performances by this company. They tend to be just as energetic as other performances, if not more so, making the whole event almost a celebration unto itself. With an opera like this one, everyone finally has the luxury of singing full-out without worrying about having energy left for the next performance; so, if this was a celebration, it was certainly a rousing one.

Furthermore, there was a lot to be said for seeing this opera in the wake of yesterday's Salome experience. Like Richard Strauss, Korngold was not shy about deploying a full panoply of orchestral resources and then expecting his singers to be heard above all that orchestral activity. This is a composition in which balance is everything; and Donald Runnicles had as strong and sure a command of maintaining acoustic balance as Patrick Summers did in the Metropolitan Opera House yesterday. Furthermore, while the lead soprano in Tote Stadt has little to do with Salome, the double role she has to sing requires the same kind of kick-ass performing that Karita Mattila brought to her performance yesterday. The cynical might say that this was a nothing-succeeds-like-excess weekend; but, while much has been written about Korngold going over the top with his excesses, both Runnicles' conducting and Willy Decker's staging made those excesses not just palatable but downright necessary.

The important thing to recognize about Die Tote Stadt is that it is an opera conceived in the shadow of Sigmund Freud, with particular emphasis on The Interpretation of Dreams. This book is usually read in terms of what the patient's dreams tell the analyst about the patient's condition. However, closer reading of Freud reveals that, whatever, ontologically speaking, the "dream-work" may be, it is fundamentally a mechanism through which the dreamer makes sense of the complexities of a reality in which (s)he is embedded. The whole scenario of Die Tote Stadt is ultimately about such sensemaking on the part of the protagonist, Paul. This scenario is sufficiently important to the opera that Korngold himself provided his own synopsis.

Paul is a widower whose wife, Marie, has died at a very young age. He has been in mourning since her death; and, while Korngold was not specific about how long this has been, Paul's housekeeper, Brigitta, refers to it as "all these years." So he has shut himself off from the world, turning the main room in his house in Bruges (the "dead city") into a "temple of memories," in which he worships her portraits and a braid of her "golden blond hair." In an episode that could well have inspired Alfred Hitchcock's plot for Vertigo, he meets a woman on the street who bears an uncanny resemblance (at least to his eyes) to Marie; and he invites her to call in order to show her his "temple." This woman, whose name happens to be Marietta, is little more than a dancer in a troupe currently visiting Bruges to perform Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable; but Paul's obsession, enhanced by the two of them sharing a song about faithful love ("Glück, das mir verblieb"), is a major shock to his psyche. Within the first half-hour of the opera, we are transported into Paul's dream-world, excellently realized by Decker in terms of a variety of approaches to distorting the physical space on the stage.

In that dream-world Marie basically tells Paul to get a life; and Paul commences a pursuit of Marietta, encountering all of the raunchy members of her performing troupe in the process. To make a long story short, his pursuit is ultimately consummated, after which, having "conquered" Paul, Marietta ridicules his attachment to Marie. When she wears Marie's hair, Paul goes mad and strangles her to death with the hair. In terms of the overall structure of the opera, the dream begins at the end of Act I with Marie's admonition and continues through most of Act III until Marietta's death. At this point Decker restored "spatial order" to the set, to let us know that Paul has returned to reality, fully aware that the Marietta he met has nothing to do with Marie and ready to leave the "dead city" and return to life. True to Freudian theory, the dream has enabled him to make sense of his situation; and he is the better for it.

As one might expect, there is very little logic in this dream-world. It is all shocking images and turn-on-a-dime associations. This is evident not only in Decker's staging but in Korngold's score. Indeed, because the dream-Marietta is interested in little more than seducing Paul for the sake of conquest, I suspect it is not coincidence that Korngold allowed a brief suggestion of Salome to insinuate itself into his score. The point is that, when properly executed, these devices all work very well and inform us just as effectively about the working of our own psyches as any of Freud's writings could ever do. This is not an opera about Freud, but it is an uncanny demonstration of how we can better understand Freud through opera!

I mentioned that this is also an opera that demands kick-ass performing; and I made it clear that Runnicles was delivering such a performance from the pit. Emily Magee threw herself into Marietta/Marie with all the energy that Mattila threw into Salome; and watching her was just as exhausting (and exhilarating). Torsten Kerl was equally effective as Paul, sympathetic to the difficulties of his character without wallowing in them. Furthermore, the chemistry between Magee and Kerl delivered just what the scenario required. They were as much a "dynamic duo" as they were powerful soloists. At the risk of exhibiting the over-indulgent side of Korngold, my only real regret is that I was able to see this production only once; but at least I still have my Erich Leinsdorf recording to keep my memories alive!

A Younger Strauss

It was only coincidence that the Metropolitan HD telecast of Salome in the morning (Pacific time) was followed in the evening at Davies Symphony Hall by one of Richard Strauss' earliest works, his "Burleske" for piano and orchestra. Emanuel Ax was soloist with Peter Oundjian conducting the San Francisco Symphony. This is pretty much the only opportunity we have to hear Strauss composing for piano orchestra, and this work is almost a double concerto movement for piano and timpani. Come to think of it, for all of his later resourcefulness with percussion in his orchestration, this is pretty much his only effort at using the timpani in a melodic manner.

I think this was only my second opportunity to hear the "Burleske" in concert; and the first was a telecast of a European concert that I had the good fortune to see while in Singapore (but have no memory of the performers, alas). In many ways this short work provides an introduction to Strauss finding his voice. The piano figures are highly virtuosic but tend to draw upon familiar idioms with more than a hint of Johannes Brahms in the overall flavor. The innovation, for the most part, reside in the use of the timpani, which is the real show-stealer. Ax took a good-natured approach to the work and turned his solo into witty exchanges with both the timpani and the rest of the orchestral ensemble. Among all of these good spirits, the seasoned ear will also catch the first seeds of the voice of the more mature Strauss, particularly in the form of gestures that would return in Der Rosenkavalier in an entirely different light. (The is also one quieter gesture that may have suffered the fate of appropriation by Leonard Bernstein.) Because it tells us so much about Strauss in his youth and the direction he is facing towards maturity, this is a work that deserves to be heard more often.

Ax also performed the solo part of Karol Szymanowski's "Symphonie Concertante" for piano and orchestra, also classified as his fourth symphony. Szymanowski composed this work at 1932 at a time when the musical language of the first half of the twentieth century was beginning to converge on a variety of relatively consistent voices. Those voices are most evident in the solo piano work, while the "symphony side" takes a variety of innovative approaches with regard to both form and orchestral voicing. The primary influences on the piano solo involve the emergence of a more percussive approach (thus making the pairing with the Strauss "Burleske" an appropriate one). We can thus assume that Szymanowski was familiar with at least some of the piano compositions of Béla Bartók and, as James Keller suggested in his program notes, at least one of the piano concertos of Sergei Prokofiev. Keller also heard an evocation of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (from his Hollywood years) in the final rondo; but I was less convinced. Ultimately, Szymanowski engaged the idioms of his time with his own voice; and, since the work was dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein, we have the opportunity to become more familiar with it through the recording that Rubinstein made with Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The "bookends" for Ax's solo work consisted of opening with the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Magic Flute and closing with Piotr Tchaikovsky's "Francesca da Rimini—Fantasy after Dante." The former was light and energetic, providing a nice match for the wit of the Strauss "Burleske." The latter was ponderous by being excessively repetitive. Now we all know that, on just about any scale, Tchaikovsky had a tendency to go overboard with repetition; but those of us who saw the PBS clip of Valery Gergiev rehearsing the Met Orchestra in the opening of Eugene Onegin know that, if you get down with the Devil in the details, Tchaikovsky had a lot of clues as to how to keep those repetitions from sounding repetitive. So it may well be that Oundjian lacked either the time or the inclination to endow this "Francesca" with a feeling of progress, rather than one of iteration. He could always fall back on the mighty noise that Tchaikovsky elicits from his orchestra, ultimately a richer sound than the one Franz Liszt had elicited for his rendition of this tale from the Second Circle of the Inferno in his "Dante Symphony." On sound alone this stood as the sort of rousing climax that would bring the audience to its feet to cheer, which is what they did.

Giving Oscar his Due

Operatic interpretations of literary works frequently provide interesting insights into the story, but it is seldom the case that the discourse structure of the original text is given very much consideration. The most notable exception in the nineteenth century was Arrigo Boito's libretto for Giuseppe Verdi's Otello. The text included with the old vinyl recording that Arturo Toscanini made of this opera had three columns:

1. Boito's Italian
2. An English translation of Boito's text
3. Excerpts from Shakespeare's text that paralleled Boito's version (when they existed)

The parenthesis says it all: There are long stretches where that third column is blank, but the parallels that exist are provide some fascinating insights into Boito's approach.

A more systematic move in this direction was applied by Richard Strauss in his opera Salome. This is best appreciated by considering the pedigrees of both the play by Oscar Wilde that inspired it and the libretto that Strauss ended up using. The account that Michael Kennedy gave in his notes for the Georg Solti recording on which Birgit Nilsson sang the title role:

Wilde had been drawn to the subject by the Salome paintings of Gustav Moreau. These had also inspired Flaubert's short story Hérodias (1877) and Massenet's opera Hérodiade (1881). Wilde's play was a failure in Paris [originally written in French] and was banned in England [but translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas]. But in 1901 it had a success in Breslau in a German translation, and ran for two hundred performances in Berlin in 1902-3 in Max Reinhardt's production of another translation by Hedwig Lachmann.

Strauss asked [Anton] Linder [who had offered to give Strauss a libretto based on Wilde's text] to send him some sample scenes of a Salome libretto. When these arrived he was only mildly impressed and compared them with the Lachmann translation. Lachmann's opening line, "Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!" ("How beautiful is the Princess Salome tonight!" [Note that these are Douglas' words, although my edition uses the spelling "to-night."]) immediately suggested music to him, and his copy of the play shows that against various crucial lines he scribbled musical ideas. So when he went to see the play in Berlin in 1903 he was already at work on the opera.

The result was an opera that did as much honor to Wilde's original discourse strategies as had been preserved in Lachmann's translation.

I have written all this because I feel it is relevant to an appreciation of how Jürgen Flimm has staged Strauss' opera for the Metropolitan Opera, having just seen the live HD telecast at my local movie theater. I have seen this opera many times in both live performances and telecasts, but I have to say that this production is the first one through which I felt I was finally beginning to make sense of what Wilde was doing in his play. This is best explained in terms of my recent excursions on the subject of narrative genres. I would argue that the best way to approach the play Salomé is as a demonstration of the principles of Wilde's particular approach to the aesthetic and decadent movements put into practice. The result is a clash of identity-defining narratives:

• Disgusted with the lewd stares of her stepfather, Herod, and bored with the decadence of palace life in a colonial outpost, Salomé's identity becomes focused on a fierce craving for the beautiful, so fierce that it drives her to seek it in the squalor of the physical condition of Jokanaan, who is being kept in solitary confinement at the bottom of a cistern.
• Equally focused on beauty and just as distorted are the motives of the Syrian Captain of the Guard (named Narraboth in the opera), who, for all the authority of his military rank, is a hopeless slave to Salomé's every wish, serious or frivolous.
• Meanwhile, Herod has formed his own identity around conspicuous consumption. No longer satisfied with all the food and riches at his disposal, that consumption is now being directed at his wife's daughter. His obsessive craving for Salomé makes him just as much a slave to her wishes as the Captain of the Guard has become.
• Jokanaan's identity, on the other hand, is basically shaped by the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah and his conviction that the Messiah has finally arrived. He has been imprisoned for declaring Herodias a sinner for having married Herod, who is the brother of her deceased husband. His faith sustains him through his imprisonment and keeps him impervious to Salomé's advances.
• This brings us to Herodias whose identity is driven by double insult: from Jokanaan's accusations of incest and from Herod's neglect in preference for her own daughter.

Out of this bizarre mix, the values of Herod's decadence and Salomé's aestheticism ascend and are both consummated. However, these consummations are not without consequences. By the end of the play, the Captain of the Guard, Jokanaan, and Salomé have all perished, Herodias is vindicated, and it is unclear whether or not Herod knows what the hell has happened to him.

Whether Strauss understood any of this or was just taking his cue from honoring not only the story line but also Wilde's very words (at least as Lachmann had rendered them in German) should not influence the way we listen to his score. However, Wilde's conception seems to have had a significant influence on Flimm; and he has been blessed with a cast that could not only hold its own against Strauss' gargantuan orchestral resources and demanding vocal lines but also deliver on the theatrical realization of that conception:

• Faced with Deborah Voigt holding a microphone and asking for a few words for the HD audience, Karita Mattila replied with what she said were her words before every performance: "Let's go out and kick some ass!" Fully aware that she would be contending with no end of camera close-ups, her performance of Salome did just that. If Wilde had conceived of Salomé's conception of beauty as having been warped by her circumstances, then Mattila knew exactly how to sing Strauss' version while portraying just the right number of loose screws in her character traits. This is a role that cannot help but exhaust the soprano, but she came through it by exhausting all of us in the audience.
• Similarly, Joseph Kaiser knew how to present Narraboth as a man whose very sense of reality has been sacrificed on the alter of his obsession with Salome's beauty. There was a crystal clarity to his tenor voice, but Kaiser was not afraid to elicit the befogged mind behind that voice. His own death is a suicide, which is basically brought on by his recognition that he can no longer makes sense of what is going on around him. It is the first of the three deaths and is often treated as incidental. Kaiser's sense of Narraboth was too keen for that episode to be so lightly dismissed.
• Kim Begley's Herod came off as an interesting synthesis of the Aegisth in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Strauss' Elektra and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Can on a Hot Tin Roof. His tenor voice was also a model of clarity, and the casualness of his obsession with Salome was absolutely bone-chilling. There is nothing inconsistent about the almost throw-away gesture with which he orders her death in the final words of the text.
• Juha Uusitalo sang Jochanaan with an equally solid baritone voice, particularly important since so much of that singing has to come from the bottom of that cistern (figuratively, if not literally). The dramatic challenge for this role is to provide equal force to both off-stage and on-stage presence. When we finally see Jochanaan, what we see must be consistent with what we have already been hearing; and, working with Flimm, Uusitalo figured out the most effective ways to deliver that consistency.
• If Kim Begley was Big Daddy, Ildikó Komlósi delivered a Herodias that looked as if it had originally been cast with Elizabeth Taylor in mind, not as Maggie the Cat but as Big Momma herself. As that victim of double insult, Herodias is motivated by nothing other than getting even; and Taylor could be very good at that sort of thing. Ultimately she gets even with both Jochanaan and Herod (in that order); yet, by the time all the tables have turned in her favor, she is too drunk to notice (not that different from Martha at the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). As is the case with Narraboth, it is too easy to dismiss Herodias as a secondary character; but that did not prevent Komlósi from delivering a primary portrayal.

As most of us know, James Levine has tuned the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra to a level where it can now give its own performances in Carnegie Hall. Strauss' score is probably more demanding than most of his orchestral works. The Met Orchestra has to deliver from the confines of their pit and maintain balance with the voices on the stage. Patrick Summers stayed on top of all these demands while conducting them. He also knew how to pace the energy through an opera that is almost two hours long without an intermission and offers few moments of relief from dynamics that always tend towards the intense. In all respects this was a performance that deserved to be captured on video. It provided opportunity for those who lack the opportunity to attend a live performance, while setting a standard for how future performances may be conceived.

Post Script: In Robert Graves' version (in Claudius the God), Salome is not killed under Herod's order. She lives and eventually marries her first cousin. Claudius (as narrator) reproduces "an indiscreet letter" shown to him by a member of Herod's family. In includes the following passage:

It reminds me of what you said when we had that mystical idiot John the Baptist beheaded—"Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity."

Graves was less interested in the stuff from which dramas and operas were made!

Another Narrative Genre

Colm Tóibín has a fascinating piece in the latest New York Review of Books, which explores parallels between James Baldwin and Barack Obama. Tóibín's "home turf" is in fiction; and thus his investigation has more to do with text analysis than with politics and ideologies. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions; but, as should be clear from many of my own posts (as recently as yesterday), I sympathize with his method and appreciated the opportunity to see him exercise it. Nevertheless, regardless of where that matter led him, I found in his study a new light to throw on that claim by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek that "We don't have a narrative," which seems to have gotten under my skin.

I am still willing to grant Žižek's point within the limited domain of ideological narratives; but last Wednesday I tried to push the point further by arguing that we had abandoned all forms of "sensemaking narratives" (not just the ideological ones) in favor of narratives of the supernatural, most likely because a predominant preference for faith over rationality is still with us. Tóibín reminded me that there is at least one other narrative genre that is still going strong (even to the point that it has its own cable channel), which is the "narrative of identity," usually cast in the form of a "life story," either autobiography or biography composed by a third party. Just about all of the texts, from both Baldwin and Obama, that Tóibín examines are narratives of identity; but he seems to have missed a critical difference in the motives of the two authors of those texts. Baldwin was primarily interested in his "aesthetic identity," probably first for the sake of focusing his own creative priorities but possibly to provide context for those reading his fiction and essays. Obama, on the other hand, seems to have been interested in his "political identity," probably from the time he first started to work on Dreams from My Father and definitely through the whole process of writing The Audacity of Hope. From this point of view, a literary comparison with John McCain's "narrative of identity," Faith of My Fathers, would probably serve us more in our efforts to make sense of the current Presidential campaign than any study of Baldwin (although I suspect that Baldwin would not be surprised at the extent to which Sarah Palin has roused the rabble to the point that they cannot tolerate McCain's recognition of Obama's basic decency as a human being).

The cautious reader, however, is the one who recognizes that, particularly in the political domain, identity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand a sense of identity that we do understand will carry far more weight than any number of policy statements, which often never leave the lofty heights of abstraction and address the real problems on the ground. Unfortunately, politics has a long history of fabricated narratives of identity, skillfully crafted fictions designed for no other reason than to attract public support. For example, Suetonius (and later Robert Graves) provided us with some nice examples of Julius Caesar's talent for such fabrication; but today we know that Suetonius himself was not above such fabrication for his own political purposes! Determining whether or not a narrative of identity is authentic is no easy matter. The good news is that the news media seem to be rediscovering the extent to which fact-checking is part of the job. The bad news is that political strategy now seems to have embraced the postmodern principle that, if the facts do not serve your ends, you can always fabricate the identity you want through rhetoric! If we are aware of this hazard, we may recognize that even a writer like Baldwin may have been doing the same thing with his rhetoric, even if his motives were aesthetic, rather than political.

The Presidential Mouth is Working Overtime

Where is President George W. Bush getting his input, and is he paying attention to it? Consider his Rose Garden speech this morning. Here is a bit of the text from that speech, as reported by James Politi for the Financial Times:

The [Treasury] will implement measures that have maximum impact as quickly as possible. The plan we are executing is aggressive. It is the right plan.

Did he hear what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in his statement yesterday? The good news is, now that he has his carte blanche resources, Paulson has embraced Senator Christopher Dodd's injunction that doing the right thing is more important that doing anything quickly. The bad news is that this means that the Administration does not yet have a plan; that is why Paulson claims he is working hard to make sure that things get done right before anyone jumps in and starts doing them. Will the plan be the right one? No one can answer that. If Paulson is a good planner, he will set himself periodic assessment points and be prepared for a mid-course correction after each one, if that is what the assessment tells him. Will the plan be aggressive? My guess is that Paulson is not yet ready to commit to that adjective. Chances are that the plan will end up utilizing both carrots and sticks.

This then leads to another one of the President's allegedly comforting observations:

Anxiety can feed anxiety, and that could make it hard to see all that is being done to solve the problem.

This one I find patently insulting. It amounts to saying, "Your brain is so clouded by your anxieties that you cannot see the positive things we are doing." Now that the Executive and Legislative branches have come to an agreement that Paulson will not be doing anything without oversight, Paulson is at least beginning to show the dignity of speaking to the public as if they were grownups. The President cannot seem to get beyond comforting them as if they were scared children. Given all the things he has done to cultivate a culture of fear in this country, this rhetorical stance should not surprise us. The bottom line is that he really wants to talk to the scared children about having faith; but, since the public is as grown up as Paulson is willing to assume they are, they are not going to buy the faith line any more. As the title of Jean Shepherd's book put it, "In God We Trust: all others pay cash!" Now that Paulson has the cash, let's give him a chance to tell us what he will do with it and let the Presidential mouth take a vacation!

Electoral Chutzpah

This week's act of chutzpah worthy of the Chutzpah of the Week award comes from Rensselaer County in upstate New York. The act was reported by Bob Gardinier, Staff Writer for the Albany Times Union (yet another institution of journalism that no longer seems to believe in reporters). The item is short enough to be reproduced in its entirety, thus avoiding an accusations of cherry-picking from the source:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's last name is spelled "Osama" on hundreds of absentee ballots mailed out this week to voters in Rensselaer County.

The misspelling, which elections officials on both sides of the aisle insist was simply a typo, is causing embarrassment for the county.

''No question this is an honest mistake innocently done,'' said Edward McDonough, the Democratic commissioner. ''We catch almost everything.''

''This was a typo,'' said Republican Commissioner Larry Bugbee. ''We have three different staff members who proof these things and somehow the typo got by us.''

Officials say the flawed ballots were sent to approximately 300 voters. On row 1A Barack Obama's name is spelled Barack Osama.

Is it a Freudian slip, intentional act or a mistake? Voters are sure to have opinions, and one pol pointed out that the letters 's' and 'b' are not exactly keyboard neighbors.

But even the county Democratic election commissioner is apologizing for what he calls a terrible mistake.

McDonough said the absentee ballots went out to voters in Brunswick, Nassau, Sand Lake, Schaghticoke and Schodack with the error.

So far three people have called to point it out, he said. Those people will get new ballots sent to them.

One Sand Lake resident who caught the misspelling, and who asked to remain anonymous, was skeptical.

''It's a little suspicious and at least grossly incompetent,'' the voter said. "If I crossed out the name and wrote in the right spelling my ballot would be invalid."

Cynic that I am, I basically agree with Gardinier's observation against it being a mistake, honest or otherwise. Whether the act was intentional or a Freudian slip is, for me, academic, given the hobby-horse I keep riding about the importance of editing; and, given that I really do not want this to slip through the cracks of "the usual 'nobody's fault' syndrome," I believe that this week's award should go to those with the responsibility (sic) of proofreading the ballots before they went into the mail. Since we do not know exactly how that editing was performed, the award should be shared by McDonough and Bugbee for their lame excuses. There has been so much attention given to this particular slur on Obama's name that this cannot be written off as an "honest mistake" (certainly not the "honest" part). Also, I am not sure I agree with the "solution" of sending new ballots only to those who complained. All of these ballots should be declared invalid on grounds of providing false information, and everyone who requested an absentee ballot should receive a correct one. Furthermore, given how sensitive we have all become about how taxpayers' money is allocated, the expense of replacing the ballots should be covered directly by McDonough and Bugbee, which is where the buck happens to stop in this case.

Why Grameen Bank Can Continue Through the Crisis

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE has an interview with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microcredit institution, Grameen Bank. Yunus received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of a financial system that placed its highest priority on "providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind," rather than the usual priorities of "the maximization of profits and rapid growth." At the present time Grameen appears to be maintaining its stability, while just about every major bank around the world has at least one cause for significant distress. Is this just because Grameen is small?

The SPIEGEL ONLINE interviewer (Hasnain Kazim, translated from the German by Charles Hawley) framed the question in terms of whether there were lessons that "the entire finance world" could learn from the Grameen model. Here is Yunus' reply:

The fundamental difference is that our business is very connected to the real economy. When we provide a loan of $200, that money will go to buy a cow somewhere. If we lend $100, someone will maybe buy some chickens. In other words, the money goes to something with concrete value. Finance and the real economy have to be connected. In the US, the financial system has completely split off from the real economy. Castles were built in the sky, and suddenly people realized that these castles don't exist at all. That was the point at which the financial system collapsed.

Given my own preoccupation (thanks to Isaiah Berlin) with the need for a "sense of reality," particularly when the World Economic Forum meetings continue to remind me how much of that sense has been lost, these are refreshing words. In a financial system where debt itself became a commodity that could be traded (and thus inflated to unrealistic prices), there is something comforting about an exchange system that is still grounded in the more concrete realities of cows and chickens. Yunus hit on just the right metaphor: It is almost as if the entire vocabulary of current financial practices provided the building blocks for those castles in the sky; and, since the words had concrete semantics (even if they were understood by only a very elite few), the world at large took it for granted that the castles were just as concrete, so to speak.

When you think about it, this economic crisis is a postmodern malady for postmodern times. If the very "possibility of attaining truth" can be questioned as being nothing more than idea represented by some configuration of significant symbols, then why should the concept of price (continuing to cleave to Robert Solow's preference for talking about economics in concrete language) be any less vulnerable to questioning? What is debt-as-commodity other than such a configuration of significant symbols that became endowed with semantics more on the basis of rhetoric than on the foundation of any concrete logic? Cows and chickens, on the other hand, are not significant symbols; they are objects through which one can obtain food, clothing, and possibly even shelter. Grameen Bank thus confines itself to exchanges grounded in such objects, rather than those fictions of convenience that would change the rules of the game for those playing for "the maximization of profits and rapid growth." The problem is that the new rules were the rules of a confidence game; and Grameen, with its unconventional system of priorities, knew enough to stay out of that game.

This is not to deny that objects cannot have their own problems. Cows may not give enough milk; and, as a result of their diet, the milk they give may be sour. Chickens may not lay enough eggs, and the chickens they then breed may be too scrawny to eat. Nevertheless, these are problems of resource management; and those who know about farming are likely to be better equipped to deal with them than with problems of debt management. I suppose that the basic Grameen principle is that the customer should worry about sensible resource management and let the bank worry about responsible debt management. Somehow I just cannot imagine Wells Fargo thinking in those terms (although they may well have done so in their earliest days)!

Stone CONTRA Žižek?

Yesterday I contested Slavoj Žižek's proposition that we do not have a narrative that helps us make sense of our current situation by suggesting that, to the contrary, we are "awash with narratives." Nevertheless, I may have ended up supporting his point by suggesting that the narratives we do have may not serve our sensemaking very well because they are not "narratives of rationality," which led me to address the question of why we, as "consumers of narrative" (basically the way Hollywood views us) no longer tolerate such narratives of rationality. Thus, the narratives we have do not "work" (Žižek's word choice) any better than the ideological narratives enumerated in the quote I cited.

I was thinking about this line of reasoning as I read John Hiscock's review of Oliver Stone's W for the London Telegraph. Like any good newspaperman, Hiscock gets his main points out in his first sentences:

Oliver Stone has said he wanted to understand, not to hurt, George W Bush and to give a fair and true portrait of the man. And with W, the filmmaker - who stirred a firestorm of controversy with JFK and Nixon - has presented a relatively even-handed and entertaining portrait of the current US president, although it is sure to raise White House hackles, nevertheless.

W covers Bush's life from the age of 21 up to his invasion of Iraq, portraying him as both an arrogant, egotistical bully and a confused, sad and almost tragic figure manipulated by his aides and helplessly unable to come up with an exit strategy for Iraq.

This returned me to my thoughts of the role narrative can play in sensemaking. While Žižek is right about the predominant ideological narratives not working, could it be that they have distracted his search for alternative sensemaking narratives? Should we be looking, instead, for biographical narratives that can serve as models of behavior or cautionary tales (or, perhaps, both at the same time)? Karl Marx said that "Men make their own history;" but, in making it for themselves (whether or not it comes out "just as they please"), they also make it for the rest of us. Biographical narratives thus become narratives of the historical context in which we are then embedded, and that context can serve our need to make sense of our present situation. If Stone has, indeed, taken an even-handed approach to his biographical task, he may have provided us with the sort of narrative that Žižek has been frustrated in finding. In the process of doing so, Stone may have also managed to twit Marx by casting his narrative in a Hegelian synthesis of tragedy and farce!

Star Power

This was not a good morning for reading Truthdig. Things started with Scott Ritter's "Third Party Blues" report, which laid out in well-argued assertions how little difference there really was between Barack Obama and John McCain. From there I progressed to Marie Cocco's column, which developed a similar theme on the proposition that the "stars" of Tuesday night's debate were neither of the candidates but those who asked the questions. Given the number of questions that had been submitted and the intense winnowing that had to take place to fit the limitations of a ninety-minute debate, it is hard to tell how representative those questioners dubbed by Cocco as "the stars of this show" really were. (I am even cynical enough to believe that the questioners we saw on the stage were chosen as much for the telegenic symbolism of their identity as for the questions they posed, if not more so.) The real message of Cocco's column, however, is that, when confronted with solid, straightforward questions that cut to the bone of why many of us cannot sleep at night any more, both candidates responded with the usual evasive political rhetoric, never answering a simple question with a simple answer (and, as moderator Tom Brokaw kept observing, always taking excessive time to do so). If this was not already obvious as the debate proceeded, Brokaw made it so by trying to end with a yes-or-no question, which neither candidate answered accordingly.

Both candidates blew it. Anyone who still believed that McCain was the "straight talk" candidate was given a serious reality check by his talking about anything other than a straight answer. Obama was no better, always talking up the points that differentiated him from McCain but never driving home any of those points as a "difference that made a difference." Thus, I find myself forced to agree thoroughly (and dejectedly) with the conclusion of Ritter's extended analysis: "The two-party system is failing in America." Perhaps it has failed beyond a point of recovery. What may be worse is that, as I suggested yesterday, through a bizarre mechanism of Social Darwinism, we have evolved into a culture that wanted it to fail (back when we thought we would never have to pay the piper). This brings me back to Slavoj Žižek's punch line: "Dangerous times are coming." I would only want to take issue with his use of tense: Dangerous times are here!

We Don't Have a Narrative?

Ever since I saw the recent documentary about him, I have been intrigued by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; but I have to confess that, until this morning, I had not read any of his texts. Ironically, his San Francisco City Arts and Lectures talk was on KQED last night; but I caught only bits and pieces of it, which is basically what you get from the documentary. Fortunately, Andrew Keen's Great Seduction post this morning has provided me with an entire paragraph:

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.

This has been written in such a way that anyone who has heard Žižek's voice can probably hear all the inflections he would engage in delivering this text. This makes the text very compelling and even seductive, whether or not you agree with it. Since I do not quite agree, it gives me an excellent point of departure.

Like Žižek I find that one of the best ways to understand things is to stand them on their head. Thus, if Žižek is arguing that we do not have a narrative that helps us make sense of our situation, I would argue that this is not a problem of "narrative shortage." Setting aside his examples of "ideological narratives" that "don't work" any more, we are still awash with narratives of imagined worlds upon we which we can draw to further our understanding. Thus, once we free ourselves of the constrictions of strictly literal (fundamentalist) interpretations, sacred texts still have much to tell us about the social world, the subjective world, and sometimes even the objective world. More important, however, may be the narratives that are "manufactured" by those who see our entertainment as their revenue stream. Something as trivial as which of those narratives are most popular may well inform us more than we might imagine.

Where, then, does such popularity lie? During this past weekend I used my cable feed to watch the latest episode of True Blood and I Am Legend. I also used my DVR to save the pilot for Sanctuary, which I started watching last night. This left me with a question: Are all the major narratives about monsters (not always malicious) these days? If so, are these monsters products of what Goya called the "sleep of reason" in the introductory plate for his Caprichos? Put another way, do we lack the sort of "sensemaking narrative" that Žižek seeks because we are so immersed in stories of the supernatural that we no longer tolerate narratives of rationality, so to speak?

The problem is not that we don't have a narrative. The problem is that, perhaps because we still have not recovered from our "faith-based hangover," we continue to reject those narratives of rationality. We prefer stories of mass destruction to those of people solving their own problems by their own perfectly ordinary means. I continue to point to Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" as a prime example of this latter kind of narrative; but, as I have previously argued, such narratives were eliminated by a process of "natural selection" through which consumer-based narratives were assigned higher "survival value." In other words the machinery of Social Darwinism has evolved us into a culture that no longer wants the sort of narrative to which Žižek attaches such significance: We have become infantile consumerists for whom narratives that inform us about who we are, where we are going, and what we can do no longer have significance. These questions have now been trumped by, "Who will give me what I want?" That is why "dangerous moments are coming!"

He's the Expert!

When the Congress was deliberating the bailout proposal submitted by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was testifying in support of that proposal, we kept reading about Bernanke's perspective being important because he was an expert on the Great Depression. Well, now that the Treasury proposal has been signed, sealed, and delivered, the "resident expert" seems to be singing a different tune, at least according to this account on Al Jazeera English:

There was little cause for optimism as Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US central bank, said that the crisis would continue despite the government's $700 billion bailout plan to halt the turmoil.

Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, said that the US economy was likely to remain "subdued" for the rest of this year and into 2009.

"The outlook for economic growth has worsened," he said on Tuesday in Washington DC.

"The heightened financial turmoil that we have experienced of late may well lengthen the period of weak economic performance and further increase the risks to growth."

He also said the Federal Reserve would have to consider if its current stance of holding rates steady "remains appropriate" given the fallout from the worst financial crisis to hit the US and global markets in decades.

Earlier, the Fed had announced plans to buy massive amounts of corporate debt to improve lending in the markets, where many companies turn for short-term loans called "commercial paper".

Fears that loans will not be repaid has made it both difficult and expensive for businesses and consumers to borrow money.

Where, then, is all that talk of confidence that was such an obsession with President George W. Bush when he was ramming the bailout down the Congressional throats? In the Al Jazeera account it does not seem as prominent:

George Bush said on Tuesday the economy would be "just fine" in the long run, but that he was in close contact with European leaders to ensure the market turmoil would not destabilise foreign markets further.

"We have been through tough times before and we're going to come through
this again," he said.

Bush also said that finance ministers from the G7 nations would be meeting in Washington DC this weekend to discuss the crisis.

We seem to be back to "long run" talk, which did not play very well with those on Main Street who had bills to pay when this crisis was just beginning to show how ugly it was and is not going to play any better now that the shallowness of both Executive and Legislative thinking is haunting us all. Is there anyone in the Congress with the courage to propose legislation to repeal the bailout, now that we know how ill-conceived and ineffective it is? Wouldn't it be nice if Senator Christopher Dodd took this as a rude awakening and went back to rallying his colleagues in both Houses to return to the principle of doing it right, rather than doing it quickly? As I have been trying persistently to demonstrate, there is more than enough to deliberate; and, if the Congress took their work more seriously (and stopped counting calendar days until Election Day), we might yet have a more convincing plan for getting out of this mess!

The Gloves are Off Because its My Fight [MEIN KAMPF] (you betcha)

Is it alarmist to view Sarah Palin's campaign activities as demagogic? We certainly do not seem to be encountering the language of demagoguery in the main stream media, let alone any attempt to draw historical parallels with, for example, the rise of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, we need to "look at the record" (as a failed Democratic Presidential candidate once said); and anyone who reads that record is free to draw his/her own conclusions.

One of the most recent contributions to that record came from Dana Milbank's "Washington Sketch" column in this morning's Washington Post. Consider his account of Palin's campaign activities (and audience response) in Clearwater, Florida:

Barack Obama, she told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.

McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

It may be alarmist to draw attention to such activities and try to frame them in a historical perspective, but calling such behavior alarmist does not negate the possibility that there may be cause for alarm! As Milbank's account continues, we see demagogic crowd manipulation as worthy of the history books as it is homage to Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd:

The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Palin also told those gathered that Obama doesn't like American soldiers. "He said that our troops in Afghanistan are just, quote, 'air-raiding villages and killing civilians,' " she said, drawing boos from a crowd that had not been told Obama was actually appealing for more troops in Afghanistan.

"See, John McCain is a different kind of man: He believes in our troops," she said.

At times, Palin hinted at the GOP campaign's troubles. "It's going to be a hard-fought contest, especially in these swing states, some maybe we would not have expected," she admitted to donors. She allowed that "John McCain and I need to do a better job" of talking about the economy.

At other times, she had troubles of her own, as when she spoke over the weekend of "our neighboring country of Afghanistan" or when she got choked up at the Clearwater rally, saying, "Some of your signs just make me wanna cry," without explaining which ones or why.

But then the gloves came off, the heels came out, and Palin was once again talking about her opponent hanging out in a terrorist's living room.

As I pointed out on Sunday, the Bill Ayers gambit is right up there with the scurrilous techniques that had been applied with such relish by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy over fifty years ago. Perhaps that temporal distance is where the problem lies. It is bad enough that ours is a culture that has become oblivious to our origins, particularly when it comes to the efforts of our Founding Fathers to both draft and win ratification of our Constitution; it is worse that our historical ignorance now views the twentieth century as a past as distant and irrelevant as the eighteenth. I am reminded of the words of Marcy Kaptur's reaction to the passing of the bailout bill, which I cited on Friday:

Pray for our republic. She's being placed in very uncaring and greedy hands.

Those "uncaring and greedy hands" are pulling as many strings in this political campaign as they were in Congressional deliberations over the Treasury proposal. However, the problem with pulling strings to promote a demagogue is that, sooner or later, that demagogue starts pulling his/her own strings; and those who thought they had been controlling everything to their personal advantage discover that control has slipped out of their hands. Control now resides in the totalitarian authority of the demagogue him(her)self.

What will it take to get the mainstream media to start reading history? Do we need another burning (as opposed to just banning) of books? Will we need our own night of broken glass? Is this an alarmist way to read history? As I said, alarmist it may be; but the cause for alarm may still be there!

An Unexpected Ligeti Fix

I really do not like to miss an opportunity to hear a performance of the music of György Ligeti; so, while I was not particularly tempted by tonight's program by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, I was delighted that they arranged one of their Contemporary Insights events devoted entirely to the first work on the program, Ligeti's "Sippal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel," sung by mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger accompanied by four percussionists, none of whom were identified (but I recognized William Winant among them). For those for whom Hungarian is as tongue-twisting as it is for me, all those syllables translate to "With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles."

I have always felt that Ligeti was one of the more accessible of the composers who pursued all manner of experimental approaches to their work in the wake of the Second World War. As I have previously observed, the only time I ever saw Pierre Boulez with a smile on his face was in the presence of Frank Zappa; and, even when his music could be construed as at least slightly playful, Karlheinz Stockhausen always looked deadly serious. The most notable exception to this prevalence of the dour was John Cage, who was never ashamed to write about his "sunny disposition." Fortunately, the trend changed once we got out from under the "tyranny of algorithms" that was occupying many of these experimenters; so there were a lot more sunny dispositions in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In many ways, however, Ligeti led the way in this attitude change, because he always managed to find wit in what he did.

"Sippal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel" (thank God for copy-and-paste) is one of his later works (composed in 2000); and the wit begins in the title. As I mentioned, the work is for mezzo and four percussionists; and, while all four of them have to blow into one kind of pipe or another in the course of this fifteen-minute setting of seven Hungarian poems by Sándor Weöres, the closest any of them get to a fiddle comes when one of them strokes a cymbal with a bow! Ligeti is playing with our expectations before we even start to form them; but then Weöres is doing the same with our expectations of poetry, two of which are in nonsense syllables, at least one of which has a folk quality, and most of which boil down to rather simple syllables (which is probably advantageous for any singer unfamiliar with Hungarian). The result is a healthy supply of good-natured fun, whose music tweaks all sorts of conventions, from folk music collected in the field, through composition based more on sonorities than on the usual conventions of counterpoint and harmony, all the way to the Eurovision Song Contest (getting its best ribbing since the days of Monty Python). Yet, as is again almost always the case in Ligeti, there are sublime moments that lie down with the ridiculous as securely as Isaiah's lamb keeps company with the wolf.

Since the work was only fifteen minutes long, the Contemporary Insights audience got to hear it twice, along with a fair amount of explanation, much of which was helpful. Unfortunately, none of that explanation touched on Ligeti's wittier side, which I found quite unfortunate. Music is often most poorly served by those who take it too seriously!

Fearing More than Fear Itself

Truthdig's decision to post the video clip (courtesy of NBC.com) of the Saturday Night Live version of last week's Vice Presidential debate (on the grounds that "Parody is the best policy") has attracted a lively assortment of comments. One of the more interesting of these comments came from "Catherine," who seems to feel that these times are too serious for parody:

Unfortunately, George W. Bush made gullible and non-thinking Americans believe he was “just like them” by being an airhead, and they loved him for it. The airheads believed that if he was an idiot and could be president, then why should he be challenged? After all, being against W was being against them.

Palin is doing the same thing, just in a different package. Her behavior at the VP debates clearly illustrated that ideal. While Tina Fey is an excellent mimic, I find it very disturbing because the real Sarah Palin isn’t funny at all. She’s Bush in a tight skirt. It’s a little bit like laughing at a funeral.

The problem with this approach is that you cannot win over people who are finally beginning to realize that voting for Bush was a mistake by beginning with the premise that they are airheads. Put another way, the proper targets of criticism are the candidates; and, if those who voted for Bush now recognize that this was a mistake, then the criticism should be directed at the mistake, rather than the voters. This is one reason why I have tried to focus my own criticism on cultivating the image of Sarah Palin as a demagogue in the making and exploring how that image was further cultivated by her recent post-debate performance. Demagogues rise to power (either through their own willful actions or through the initial boosting of others, as was the case with Adolf Hitler) in times of great misfortune; and that is exactly where we are. We have only to consider the bailout strategy, whose votes of no-confidence are now coming in faster than they can be counted, almost immediately on the heels of the first signs of how the plan will be implemented. As is always the case, the first feedback comes from Asia, documented for the Associated Press by Business Writer Emily Flynn Vencat:

Across Asia, all markets were also in the red. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index fell to its lowest level in 4 1/2 years, sinking 4.25 percent to 10,473.09.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index slid 5 percent to 16,803.76. Markets in mainland China, Australia, South Korea, India, Singapore and Thailand also fell sharply. Indonesia's key index plummeted 10 percent, it's biggest one-day drop ever.

Vencat's dispatch also accounted for the first signs from Europe:

Britain's benchmark stock index, the FTSE 100, lost 220.11 to 4,760.14 — a 4.42 percent fall. The declines were led by the banking industry, with the mining and oil industries also suffering drops. HBOS PLC's share price dropped 15.7 percent, while the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC fell 13.6 percent.

Germany's DAX index fell 4.22 percent to 5,552.27. France's CAC-40 index dropped 4.85 percent to 3,882.81. In Russia, the RTS stock index tumbled more than 7 percent in first 20 minutes of trading.

This was bad news, particularly in the wake of Europe's own effort to address matters in a "financial summit" in Paris. Vencat included the following attempt at analysis in her report:

But analysts said that, like the U.S. plan, the lack of detail in many of Europe's moves failed to restore investors' confidence, resulting in the stock market tumbles. "What the markets need are some more details about exactly when and how these plans are going to come in," said Richard Hunter, head of British equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers, "And they need some proof that some of these measures are taking hold."

There it is, that "C-word," "confidence," the word on which Bush went "all in" with the stakes he held, regardless of the truly nasty double entendre of "confidence game" that it cloaked. The question had less to do with how strong a card Bush had in the hole and more to do with whether he knew what he was doing or betting on impulse. It was that "lack of detail" that betrayed the impulse; and now we see that, for whatever perceptive criticisms they may have voiced about what has been happening over here, they are not doing any better about the "Devil in the details" over there.

At this point the story gets picked up on this side of the pond by Associated Press Economics Writers Martin Crutsinger and Jeannine Aversa:

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets said in a statement Monday it planned to quickly implement the expanded authorities granted to federal regulators by the $700 billion rescue package passed on Friday. The working group was formed after the 1987 stock market crash.

The group, which includes Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, said it planned to move "with substantial force on a number of fronts."

To that end, the administration was expected to announce shortly that it had tapped a 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs executive to head the government's rescue effort on an interim basis, according to an official who asked not to be named.

This raised an immediate question in my mind: If the President had a "Working Group on Financial Matters," why did we (including the Congress) only hear from two of that Group's members (who seemed to be speaking ex officio, rather than representing the Group) once the White House recognized that things were bad enough to require action? However, because this question will never be anything more than an academic exercise, I was personally more struck by the way that last paragraph aligns with a prediction I made on Saturday:

A lot of work is going to have to be done before this system can start functioning. That work is going to require a lot of expert effort, and many of those experts are going to be put on the Government payroll. Whence will those experts be recruited? Given that the Treasury Secretary himself is a Goldman Sachs veteran, it seems likely that he will be providing a new income stream for his former cronies from Wall Street.

Sometimes I just hate to call things right! I'm not the only one, though, as the latest word from Wall Street, provided by Associated Press Business Writer Joe Bel Bruno seems to indicate:

In midmorning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 443.08, or 4.29 percent, to 9,882.30, dropping below 10,000 for the first time since Oct. 29, 2004. At one point, the Dow was down nearly 600.

Broader indexes also tumbled. The Standard & Poor's 500 index shed 53.12, or 4.83 percent, to 1,046.11; and the Nasdaq composite index fell 101.07, or 5.19 percent, to 1,846.32. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped 29.31, or 4.73 percent, to 590.09.

There were only 78 advancing stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, compared to 3,080 decliners. Volume came to 512.4 million shares.

There you have it, how the chips are falling as the confidence game stays in play (mixing my metaphors perhaps a bit more than they deserve). This is a vote of no-confidence against not only the Executive Branch, with its uncritical embrace of a highly biased analysis from the Treasury, but also the Legislative Branch for caving in after mouthing those platitudes about doing it right rather than doing it quickly. Could there be a better time for a demagogue to rise to power?

The irony is that the messianic aura that his many supporters bestowed on Barack Obama could have run just as much of a risk of demagoguery. This may be one of the reasons why he delivered his acceptance speech wearing his community organizer hat, talking not only about what needed to be done but also about how we all had to work together to get it done. Palin and those pulling her strings haven't a clue about what needs to be done; and the only thing they want the electorate to "work together" on is getting her ticket into the White House. These guys may yet come away with the prize, simply because she will be more appealing to a disenchanted electorate.

The reaction to the Saturday Night Live skit also brought a comment from Ron Ranft endorsing Ralph Nader. There is no questioning either Nader's accomplishments or the extent to which our political discourse has been seriously hobbled by a lack of recognition of any "third-party" candidate. However, Nader tends to come off as a champion supported by enthusiastic followers, which, whether he likes it or not, is yet another formula for demagoguery. This is significantly different in "social spirit" from successful community organization projects. So I, for one, suspect that I shall have to put up with Obama "being the politician" in order to get elected (which included his being one of the Senators who caved on the bailout) in the hope that, should he win the Election, he will be able to devote at least some of his time to "being the community organizer" again.

Palin Channels Joseph McCarthy

Having passed her Demagoguery 101 midterm with flying colors, Sarah Palin is now going boldly into territory once staked out with horrendous consequences by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy could bring down entire careers in the Fifties by simply suggesting (without even a hint of substantiation) that an individual had consorted with "known Communists." Palin has discovered that there is campaigning gold in substituting "terrorists" for "Communists;" and, as reported on the BBC NEWS Web site, yesterday she started flexing her new-found muscle:

Speaking to supporters in Colorado and later in a Los Angeles suburb, Alaska Governor Palin said the time had come to take the gloves off.

Quoting a New York Times article, she attacked Senator Obama over his link to Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, which waged a violent campaign against the Vietnam War.

The group was blamed for a number of bombings in the US in the 1960s.

Mrs Palin described Mr Obama as someone who saw the US "as being so imperfect... he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country".

Mr Obama served on a charity board several years ago with Mr Ayers, who is now a professor at the University of Illinois.

Having passed by a Summer of Love anniversary celebration yesterday in San Francisco, which seemed to be attended primarily by those not yet born at the time of the event being celebrated, I have to assume that many in Palin's audience (and perhaps many readers of this blog) have no idea who Ayers is. So, in the (probably vain) interest of trying to stop this particular mud before any more of it gets thrown, I figured it would be a good idea to provide a bit of background.

This is probably a case where the Wikipedia entry is as good a place to begin as any. It provides the necessary background on what the Weather Underground was, how Ayers become involved with the movement, and the bombings for which they took responsibility. Ayers put much of this information into the public record when he published his memoir, Fugitive Days in 2001. In terms of addressing Palin's accusation, the following two paragraphs from Wikipedia may be the most relevant:

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since the year 2000 stems from an interview he gave to the New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication.^[18] The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."^[14] Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer's characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion."^[19] In the ensuing years, Ayers has repeatedly avowed that when he said he had "no regrets" and that "we didn't do enough" he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as ". . . inadequate [as] the war dragged on for a decade."^[20] Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs.^[20][21] The interviewer also quoted some of Ayers' own criticism of Weatherman in the foreword to the memoir, whereby Ayers reacts to having watched Emile de Antonio's 1976 documentary film about Weatherman, Underground: "[Ayers] was 'embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.' "^[14]

"We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."^[2] In a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune, Ayers wrote, "I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official". He also condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks in that letter. "Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."^[22]

As to Ayers current academic status and credentials, Wikipedia provides a useful straightforward summary:

Ayers is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues.^[33]

He began his career in primary education while an undergraduate, teaching at the Children’s Community School (CCS), a project founded by a group of students and based on the Summerhill method of education. After leaving the underground, he earned an M.Ed from Bank Street College in Early Childhood Education (1984), an M.Ed from Teachers College, Columbia University in Early Childhood Education (1987) and an Ed.D from Columbia University in Curriculum and Instruction (1987).

He has edited and written many books and articles on education theory, policy and practice, and has appeared on many panels and symposia.

Finally, the entry also clarifies the connection with Obama:

Ayers worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in shaping the city's school reform program,^[34] and was one of three co-authors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2 million over five years for public school reform.^[35] Since 1999 he has served on the nine-member a board ^[36] board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation established in 1941, a board that Barack Obama also served on starting in 2001.

According to Ayers, his radical past occasionally affects him, as when, by his account, he was asked not to attend a progressive educators' conference in the fall of 2006 on the basis that the organizers did not want to risk an association with his past.^[37]

Following up on the hyperlink for the Woods Fund, I discovered that Palin's mud was actually a hand-me-down from George Stephanopoulos. The Wikipedia entry for the Woods Fund included a link to a News Update for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, dated April 17, 2008. Presumably, this is where the campaign staffers mined the mud for Palin's attack; so it is worth examining:

The Woods Fund of Chicago has been thrust into the middle of the latest controversy in the heated Democratic primary battle between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

As a result, the staff at the private foundation is now attempting to handle a swarm of attention from journalists, which is centered on a longtime Woods Fund board member and his relationship with Mr. Obama, who had been a member of the Fund’s board from 1998 to 2001.

The controversy stems from an exchange during Wednesday’s nationally televised debate in Philadelphia, where Mr. Obama was questioned about his relationship with William C. Ayers, a Woods Fund board member who had been part of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground used terroristic methods, such as setting bombs, to protest the war. Mr. Ayers had later written that he did not regret setting the bombs.

During Wednesday’s debate, Mr. Obama was questioned about his ties to Mr. Ayers through the Woods Fund — a private foundation with more than $58-million in assets that works to alleviate poverty.

According to the Woods Fund’s filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been a member of the Woods Fund’s board of directors since at least 1998. He has received $6,000 annually for his work on the board.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, had been a board member from 1998 through 2001.

The foundation’s Form 990-PF tax filings show Mr. Obama received similar $6,000 payments in 1998, 1999, and 2000. He did not receive any compensation in 2001, the tax records show.

George Stephanopoulos, one of the ABC News moderators of the debate, asked Mr. Obama about his relationship with Mr. Ayers.

“An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. “Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?”

Ms. Clinton then brought up the fact that both men had been members of the Woods Fund board — a connection Mr. Obama said is not relevant to his White House aspirations.

“President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act than me serving on a board with somebody for actions that he did 40 years ago,” Mr. Obama said.

I feel sorry for the Woods Fund. Any philanthropic organization that is trying so hard to direct resources as a defense measure in the War Against the Poor should not have to put up with press harassment that bears little relevance to their activities. What seems more relevant is that Ayers is now in a place where he is fighting the good fight in that War Against the Poor without recourse to bombs. As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, this man will never escape his past; but he seems to be doing a damned good job of making the best of his present. One cannot say the same of any of the parties involved in the Republican campaign for the White House!

New Old Mills

Regular readers of this blog may have become familiar with the name of C. Wright Mills from my occasional references to his 1956 book, The Power Elite. Actually, my first encounter with Mills was through my mother, who had decided that she would finally get a college education after both of her sons left the nest. I came back from MIT during one of my breaks and first saw the book From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, which Mills had collected and edited with Hans Gerth. For many this was the first exposure to Weber, and it was not a bad place to begin. Personally, I actually started in the middle with Weber's classic analysis of bureaucracy on page 196; and, like many, my whole thinking about politics was seriously influenced by the text of his "Politics as a Vocation" speech. Not too later on, my personal book collection also came to include the primary collection of Mills' own essays, Power, Politics and People. This was at a time when much of Silicon Valley was abuzz with talk of "situated cognition" (not to mention "situated action" and "situated learning"); so I was a bit surprised when I discovered that the very terminology could actually be traced back to a paper that Mills published in the 1940 Volume of the American Sociological Review under the title "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive." As a result of reading this paper, I developed an appreciation for the value of both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey in my own efforts to make sense of both the social world and those "situated actions" involved in artistic (particularly musical) performance.

Power, Politics and People was edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, who would later come under considerable attack for muddying the waters of those interested in pursuing scholarly research on Mills' life and works. One of Horowitz' fiercest attackers was John Summers, who has now compiled his own collection, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. Alan Wolfe has reviewed this new book for The New Republic, providing an excellent introduction to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Mills' career in the process. Here are a couple of paragraphs from Wolfe's article that provide an excellent sense of the whole:

Mills was attracted to the theme of responsibility because his style of social criticism ranked hypocrisy among the most serious of vices: you, the protectors of power and privilege, claim to be acting as responsible managers of the national interest, but in reality you are oblivious to the havoc produced by your decisions. Many of the terms that made Mills famous--"crackpot realism," "the American celebration," "the military metaphysic"--were pithy expressions of the failure of America's leaders to live up to the ideals that they espoused. The role of the social critic was not to posit unrealizable utopias. It was to hold people accountable for their decisions.

If you are not going to be responsible, Mills went on to say to the powers of his day, intellectuals will have to do it for you. "The intellectual ought to be the moral conscience of his society, at least with reference to the value of truth," he wrote in Dissent in 1955, "for in the defining instance, that is his politics." Unlike businessmen or military officers, intellectuals need not say one thing and do another--not as long as they adhere to their proper calling. "The work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article," Mills continued, supplying the words that give this book its title, "does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, is the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality." Mills was not given to underplaying the importance of the kind of intellectual work in which he was engaged. "Since we belong among those who ask serious questions and try to answer them," he told a group of Canadian educators in 1954, "we also belong--whether or not we know it--to that minority which has carried on the big discourse of the rational mind, the big discourse that has been going on, or off and on, since western society began some two thousand years ago in the small communities of Athens and Jerusalem."

I realize that this perspective of the intellectual-as-conscience must seem outmoded to many today. Indeed, there seems to be a general tendency towards disdain of the very concept of intellectualism, scorned on the one hand for its skeptical attitude towards faith and derided on the other for offering little more than abstruse talk in trying to oppose those faith-based fanatics. As a result, about the only time we encounter "intellectual" as an adjective is in that ne plus ultra of linguistic barbarisms, "intellectual property." Thus, one of the few bloggers who is willing to recognize that the word "intellectual" can be used in any other context is Andrew Keen (who seems to be having a field day with it right now in the matter of Sarah Palin).

Are the intellectuals a dying breed not even worthy of the attention we give to endangered zoological species? There are certainly some that seemed to like nothing better than to revel in their own opacity, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault; and what does it mean that the first examples that immediately leapt to my own mind were French? Then there is Jürgen Habermas (German this time), whose texts need to be carefully teased out, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and eventually essay-by-essay, but who has a reputation for speaking to the public about public issues (such as the European Union) in language far more direct than that of any politician. (In this respect he has been appropriately compared to John Dewey.) Then there is one of my personal favorites, Isaiah Berlin, who is almost always up there with Marcel Proust when it comes to sentence lengths; but, as they lead you down many paths at once, those sentences always seem to end with you staring directly in the face something both startling and evident.

Perhaps my Berlin experience best illustrates the real value of the intellectual. The intellectual provides us with text that may not be that all easy to read but which can be unimaginably rewarding if we take the trouble to honor it with serious reading. In other words we are back on the turf that Nicholas Carr was exploring in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The question is not whether the intellectuals are dying out because they are not worth reading but whether we are (at least metaphorically) killing them off as a consequence of the deterioration of our own reading habits along the sorts of lines that Carr had suggested. Perhaps that old saw about people getting the government they deserve covers only part of the story. Because people shape their own culture through those "situated actions" and "vocabularies of motive" that Mills had studied so attentively, they get the very culture they deserve, leaving those of us outside the boundaries of that culture in danger of the "persecution of the other."

Wisdom from Germany

While I have been trying to focus my attention on the wise words of cooler heads in Congress during the debate over the Treasury bailout proposal, I am pleased to report that there are also words of wisdom to be harvested from Europe. Ironically, one of the better sources for those words is Al Jazeera English in its report on the current gathering of European leaders in Paris to deliberate over the financial crisis from a global point of view. In preparing their report, the Al Jazeera reporters interviewed German economist Max Keiser, who seems to have the same gift for plain, if brash, speaking that I continue to admire in Dennis Kucinich:

This is a global war between savers and speculators.

Henry Paulson, the US treasury secretary, who is a chief speculator, now wants to peddle hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US treasury bonds to Europe.

I think the German leaders and the German people don't want them stinking up their banking system because they've already caused massive global banking failures.

Are you taking notes, Dennis? However, since we keep being told that this is not time to play "the blame game," Keiser is also prepared to argue on principles:

Hopefully German mentality will prevail and we won't see the EU going down the path of hyper-inflation.

You can't fight debt by issuing more debt. There needs to be a recognition of the basic underlying business model of speculation, over production, over workers is false. It didn't work. It's a 20-year neo-liberal model that has failed.

They have to allow some of these banks to go bankrupt. The solution they are proposing is making the situation much worse.

President George W. Bush, please take note: This is not a problem that will be resolved by giving Chancellor Angela Merkel another back rub!

What Happens Next?

When the Treasury Department's bailout plan was being debated in Congress, we did not hear very much specific language about how that $700 billion would actually be used. Whether this is because Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson did not give very many details in his testimony (either because he did not volunteer them or because those who questioned him did not press for them) or because the media neglected to report those details, figuring that they would confuse, rather than enlighten, the American public, the question remains. Now that the die has been cast, can it be answered in language that the rest of us can understand?

Leave it to the BBC NEWS Web site to inform the American public when other media do not seem to care very much. Perhaps this confuses their "home audience" even more than it does those of us who have to live with the consequences; but Gregg Wood, North America Business Correspondent for BBC News, seems to have taken the best crack at spelling out, in relatively clear language, what we can expect to happen now that the bailout bill has been passed and signed. The basic plan is simple enough to leave us wondering why we had not yet heard it: Banks with the most "toxic" assets will have the opportunity to sell them (that is, their securities backed by mortgages that have either defaulted or are at high risk of default) in a series of auctions to private buyers. Wood explains the details as follows:

One leading US investment firm said there was a very large pool of private capital available to buy distressed mortgage-related assets now that the Treasury had put a floor under the market with the bail-out deal.

If this auction process is typical, buyers will bid the price they want for the amount of mortgage-backed securities they want, and those securities will be allocated to buyers at the highest price which ensures that they're all sold.

Banks have typically marked down the price of their mortgage-backed securities to around 20% of their face value.

So for the banks to obtain any relief, the auction process will have to obtain a price higher than 20 cents on the dollar.

If no private buyers are willing to pay that price at auction, then the US Treasury will have to use taxpayers' money to pay above the market price for toxic assets in the hope that they appreciate in value over the next few years.

One would have thought that both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee would have wanted to raise questions about that last sentence. In many ways an auction is a gamble on future value (not that different from commodities speculation for purposes of this discussion); but the best gamblers are the ones who can look at both the payoff and the risk with equal dispassion. Who is to say that, in a time of crisis, risk will be viewed so dispassionately? Just because there may be "a very large pool of private capital," might not those controlling that capital be more interested in risk-averse stability while they ride out the current storm, particularly when they know there is a "floor" price at which the Treasury will automatically outbid them? In other words is this really an incentive to get private interests to participate in solving a problem cause by other private interests?

So much for the details of the strategy itself. Then there are the details of the implementation of that strategy. As Wood points out, that may be where the real Devil resides:

The first is not likely to take place for at least a month.

That's because private financial firms will have to be hired to handle the process.

Up to 10 asset management companies will be used by the US Treasury.

The Treasury will also have to take on new staff to write the rules of the auction process and make sure the private firms running it don't abuse their position.

Had the Republicans heard any of this, they would have found themselves in a quandary over whether to scream "Socialism!" or scream "Big Government!" A lot of work is going to have to be done before this system can start functioning. That work is going to require a lot of expert effort, and many of those experts are going to be put on the Government payroll. Whence will those experts be recruited? Given that the Treasury Secretary himself is a Goldman Sachs veteran, it seems likely that he will be providing a new income stream for his former cronies from Wall Street. Job hunters from Main Street need not apply!

Wood concludes his report by addressing the other critical question: Once the strategy is implemented and running, how will its effectiveness be monitored? Again, this is a question that can be answered in relatively plain language:

The key indicator of whether the plan is working will be what happens to the rates the banks charge each other for borrowing money - interbank rates. They are currently sky high.

The banks don't want to lend other banks when they don't know what toxic assets they may be holding.

If the auction process helps to put a reasonable price on those assets and take them off the banks' balance sheets, then interbank rates should fall, easing up the flow of credit throughout the economy.

So it's a long and complex process. The passing of the bail-out plan is just the first stage.

And it will be several months before we can tell whether it's working or not.

Now there is nothing wrong with being cautioned that we are not going to see any results before Election Day; but this provides a good reminder of Joseph Stiglitz' attempt to take a broader view of the crisis (and the apparent reluctance of the Congress to disregard that view while deliberating over Paulson's proposal). Like it or not, there are more problems to solve than the current lack of "flow of credit." Yes, flow of credit is felt on Main Street as much as on Wall Street; but there are other Main Street problems, particularly those related to unmanageable debt, that are unlikely to be resolved by a flow-of-credit strategy (which seems to have a track record of making debt even more unmanageable). Who will be seeing to those problems between now and Election Day? Will Paulson simply tip his hat and say, "My work here is done;" thus reflecting how little our current "Denial Presidency" really feels about Main Street. Will both Houses of Congress abandon any effort to follow up on Stiglitz' analysis in favor of putting in time on the campaign trail? Even if Paulson's plan does work, Main Street will be left holding a big stinking bag, with little sign that anyone in either the Executive or Legislative Branches seems to care very much.

Fool Me How Many Times?

Iacta alea est (at least in the Suetonius version). As Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported (or as they apparently prefer to say, "wrote") for the Associated Press, the "sweetened" version of the bailout proposal that the Senate passed has been passed by the House 263-171. There are still the heroes of dissent, who insisted that you cannot deliberate without alternatives. The flamboyance of Dennis Kucinich won him another Chutzpah of the Week award, while Marcy Kaptur responded with language more relevant to our faith-based administration:

Pray for our republic. She's being placed in very uncaring and greedy hands.

Our faith-based President exerted all of the pressure of his office in the interest of "rapid response," because, as he put it (probably oblivious to the double entendre of "confidence"), "it's important to have confidence in our financial system." The bill was passed from the Congress to the White House so rapidly that, for all I know, the ink had not yet dried when the President applied his signature, according to Davis with the following comments:

"We have acted boldly to help prevent the crisis on Wall Street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country," Bush said shortly after the plan cleared Congress, although he conceded, "our economy continues to face serious challenges."

He should have kept his mouth shut.

The task of writing now shifted from Davis to Business Writer Tim Paradis, who accounted for how the financial system reacted:

The Dow fell 157.47, or 1.50 percent, to 10,325.38 after rising more than 310 points just after the House vote began.

Broader stock indicators also ended lower. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 15.05, or 1.35 percent, to 1,099.23, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 29.33, or 1.48 percent, to 1,947.39.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 18.27, or 2.87 percent, to 619.40.

Bush may have stressed the need for urgency in terms of "people" (whoever they were) "losing confidence;" but at the end of the day (which is usually when the numbers "go on the record"), what matters is whether or not the "financial system" (embodied in those who exercise it through trading) has confidence in itself, so to speak. The President pushed, Congress capitulated, and Wall Street reacted. Unfortunately, their reaction may have been one against acting too hastily in the face of a poor understanding of what the problems really were and what actions were likely to be most effective, whether or not they were most efficient. In other words confidence (or lack thereof) in the judgment of the Government ended up trumping (and trouncing) confidence in the financial system.

This brings us back to poor embattled Bernie Sanders, who really tried to be the guy you couldn't fool twice, and Lloyd Doggett, who declared on the House floor that we had already been fooled twice, first by the Iraq War and then by the Patriot Act. Now it looks as if even the traders are siding with Kaptur. Just who was that pundit who had asked rhetorically how much more damage the Bush Administration could do before leaving office? "[N]ever send to know for whom the bell tolls," indeed! The tolling has gotten damned deafening!

Demagoguery 101: The Midterm

If, as I suggested after the Republican convention, John McCain's campaign as being run as an on-the-job-training course in demagoguery and if Sarah Palin is the prize student in the classroom, then last night's debate with Joe Biden should count as her midterm; and she may well have passed with flying colors. Reading Andrew Keen's Great Seduction post this morning, I realize that he had extracted the two Palin quotes that stuck in my craw more than any of the others. The first was her up-front defiance of the ground rules of the debate itself:

I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear, But I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.

The second was her preemptive strike against all the media pundits that would rush to analyze the debate as soon as it concluded:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter even of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they just heard. I'd rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

Of course one did not have to be a media pundit to identify how seldom she actually answered any of those tough questions, consistent with her rejection of debating rules; but this just brought us back to those memorable words on Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC that got me thinking about demagoguery in the first place, "Who cares?" Palin has all the makings of being the first significant American demagogue of the twenty-first century; and, given where she is heading, she may well rise to world-class status.

So, regardless of the motives of mainstream media, why have we not seen more pushback in cyberspace? Consider Keen's reaction to the second Palin quote:

That should have been the moment when all the progressive critics of traditionally curated media -- from shrewd Arianna to crazy Markos at the Daily Koz to Hegelian Steve, the ringmaster at the Gillmor Gang -- should have woken up from their democratizing dream by the nightmare of digital fascism.

My own hypothesis is that all those "usual suspects" of progressive criticism did not pick up from either Wallace or Palin on this emergence of demagoguery because, when push comes to shove, they're all in it for their vanity. Put another way, they want the same "star power" that Katie Couric has. Indeed, they feel entitled to it because they think they're smarter than she is! Unfortunately, as folks like Stephen Jay Gould used to demonstrate with hard examples, people who think they are smart are often the most gullible; and McCain has a team that can prey on the gullible for all they are worth.

Keen also suggested that Palin is the perfect example of the media trumping the message, and I also have a hypothesis to explain this proposition: The media can be consumed, but the message has to be interpreted. Those of us who attend to the messages of political discourse are happy to read the editorial opinions that explore different interpretations. In her role as "media object" Palin can and, more importantly, does disregard interpretation. (Actually, Wallace disregards it, which is why her who-cares strategy may actually succeed.) The McCain team knows that their best chance at success comes from running an advertising campaign (as in Joe McGinniss' book about Richard Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign, The Selling of the President), rather than a political one. Put another way, it is about impulse buying, rather than deliberating over a choice.

At least Obama's numbers have been improving (for now)!