He May Have a Point!

You have to hand it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. For all his bluster, socially-challenged manners, and (lest we forget) interminable oratory, every now and then he recognizes an opportunity to score diplomatic points; and it is usually the United States that provides the opportunity. Consider the following report from Reuters this morning:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged U.S. President Barack Obama to extradite an anti-Castro Cuban exile wanted in Venezuela who the administration of George W. Bush had refused to hand over.

Extradition of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, accused of plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jet that killed 73 people, could improve bilateral ties that have for years been frayed by a war of words between the Bush administration and Venezuela.

"Send us the terrorist Posada Carriles," Chavez said in a televised speech late on Friday. "We've been waiting four years for the extradition of the biggest terrorist in human history."

The Bush administration had refused to hand over Posada after he was arrested in the United States for entering the country illegally, sparking harsh criticism of a double standard in Washington's war on terror.

Like it or not, there is something to be said for that accusation of double standards, which is basically grounded in Bush's simplistic division of the world into good and evil, with the corollary that "agents of evil" (Hamas being the most recent example) are not included in diplomatic discussions. On the surface this appears to be an attempt by the Venezuelan government to put Gore Vidal's perspective on terrorism into practice by prosecuting a bombing incident as a terrorist act. Presumably the Bush Administration failed to cooperate since it regarded Chavez as one of those agents in evil and deduced that it would be impossible for Carriles to get a fair trial in Venezuela, regardless of whether there was any evidence to support that conclusion.

Basically, then, Chavez is appealing to Obama's sense of fairness in the arena of countries respecting each other's criminal justice systems. I am not suggesting that this will be an easy call for Obama. However, if he refuses Chavez' request, then, for the sake of his standing in the global community, he had better present Chavez with an air-tight argument for that refusal. Chavez has deliberately put Obama on a spot that the whole world may decide to watch (and we can count on Chavez persuading the rest of the world to look at that spot); and my guess is that the world will be expecting to see Obama's reputation for cool-headed reason satisfied, rather than abandoned for any cheap rhetorical tricks.

Bonuses and Regulation

Barack Obama used his weekly radio address to reinforce yesterday's sharp discontent with unrealistic (should we say "bloodsucking?") bonuses in the financial sector. Deutsche Press-Agentur (courtesy of Monsters and Critics) reported today's remarks as follows:

Obama also reiterated his criticism of bonuses paid to company chiefs in the past year despite the precarious economic situation. 'We'll ensure that CEOs are not draining funds that should be advancing our recovery.'

The obvious question is whether or not such abuse can be controlled through regulation. The latest New York Review has a piece written by Jeff Madrick on January 14 ("How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do"), which devotes a paragraph to this question:

Any regulation should also take account of the incentives for manages to take company risk for personal benefit. The ability to take immediate profits from fees on risky loans infected the financial industry and eventually the entire economy, and made possible disproportionately large annual bonuses. These incentives were among the main causes of the irresponsibility on Wall Street. The best way to prevent that from occurring is to base the bonuses and compensation of financial executives on the long-term profitability of the investment firms for which they work.

This kind of thinking is sure to raise howls from the high priests of free markets, but it is hard for them to make a case for the market punishing foolish decisions made in the name of nothing other than personal greed in this particular situation. Nevertheless, we have to wonder just how powerful the "greed lobby" will be. It is easy enough to assume that both Executive and Legislative branches will be made aware of Madrick's position statement; but it is just as easy to assume that those who cashed in on those bonuses will be applying some of their ill-gotten gains to maintaining this small corner of status quo. Invoking the rhetorical wrath of the President of the United States is a small price to pay if the rest of that money remains in your pocket. (This might be called "bribery logic.")

The overall message of Madrick's article informs us that recovery will be complicated but can still be feasible in spite of this complexity. Neither Obama nor members of the Congress will be able to "sell" recovery measures to the electorate on the basis of such complexity. It will be necessary to drive some stakes in the ground, even if they are largely symbolic, to demonstrate that progress has being made in ways that Main Street will appreciate. In choosing to go after those bonuses, Obama has probably chosen a good stake; since those bonuses are likely to aggravate just about everyone except their beneficiaries. If this means that our government decides to make "a Federal case" (as it were) out of reforming compensation practices in the financial sector, then I am all for a regulatory framework that can stand up free-market complainers in favor of everyone else looking for signs of repair.

A Tale of Two Tensions

I found it useful to read Gideon Rachman's analysis for the Financial Times of the proceedings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, since it provided an interesting perspective on how seriously the WEF took the "forum" part of their name. Like Arthur Conan Doyle's classic dog that did not bark in the night, what was most notable in that analysis was the "perceived absence," so to speak, of that "ideal speech situation" to which Jürgen Habermas seems to have aspired for so much of his intellectual career. Thus, Rachman's analysis may best be read as a study of two breakdowns in communication, related in reverse chronological order.

The more recent breakdown occurred over events in the Middle East, which, as I have already observed, remains the best counterexample for any theory Habermas has tried to develop. Here is Rachman's summary of the episode that has by now received considerable press coverage:

The organisers of the World Economic Forum like people to get along. The forum specialises in getting rivals and enemies to share platforms in Davos: Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Americans and Iranians.

But this week, the Davos consensus broke down in spectacular fashion. Recep Tayip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, stormed out of a session with Shimon Peres, the Israeli president. Angered both by events in Gaza – and by what he saw as unfair handling of the discussion he was taking part in – Mr Erdogan vowed never to return to the forum.

The cosy Davos world has already been profoundly shaken by the global financial crisis. The Erdogan walkout also pointed to the threat posed to the consensual tradition of Davos by developments in international politics.

For some years, Turkey has been a poster child for the politics of reconciliation that are promoted by the forum. It is a secular Muslim state that is also democratic, a member of Nato and has close ties to Israel. But there has been a growing, latent conflict between Turkish foreign policy and public opinion in the country. Opinion polls in Turkey have regularly revealed very high levels of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment. Some of those tensions burst into the open in the emotional performances of Mr Erdogan and Mr Peres in Davos.

The walkout also highlighted the extent to which the conflict in Gaza has further poisoned relations between Israel and moderates in the Islamic world.

It is that last sentence that demonstrates how ineffective the WEF has become as the forum it purports to be. Rachman's analysis does not provide much by way of trying to explain this inefficacity. I, for one, would look for an explanation in that other great "perceived absence" that seems to pervade all of their events, which is a general lack of a "sense of reality" regarding current global conditions; and it is unclear whether or not the WEF organizers will ever figure out that they have to descend from their tower before its weakening foundations bring down the whole structure.

However, as Rachman's analysis observed, it is not only Israel that is experiencing a breakdown in international relations. From the very beginning of the current gathering in Davos, it was clear that the United States was in the same position:

The two leaders who topped the bill at the forum were Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia. Both struck a similar note. They made appeals for international co-operation. But they also pointed to America’s central role in the global financial crisis and stressed the need for a multi-polar world.

On substance, however, the Russian and Chinese reactions to the early steps taken by the Obama administration were rather different.

The Russians have reason to be pleased. They believe that a deal may be in the works in which the Americans go slow on the deployment of anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, and play down the hopes of Georgia and Ukraine to join Nato. In return, Russia would be asked to provide more help on other important issues – in particular, the drive to halt Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Chinese delegation at Davos, however, were clearly displeased and alarmed by the suggestion by Tim Geithner, Mr Obama’s newly-confirmed Treasury secretary, that China has been “manipulating” its currency. In public and in private, they were at pains to dismiss this suggestion and to pin the blame for the global economic crisis on the US.

Rachman's conclusion that tensions over economic policy "may turn out to be more significant in the long term" than current tensions over Gaza strikes me as an unproductive attempt to compare apples and oranges. Yes, there will always be a tight coupling between economic and foreign policy; but it can still be the case that every breakdown in communications is, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, "unhappy in its own way," thus deserving to be analyzed strictly on its own terms. Put another way, our efforts to describe these situations must dwell on the specific rather than the general, which is why we should not try to rank-order their respective priorities. The only way in which these tensions can be resolved will be if each receives its own attention, deliberation, and (hopefully) corrective actions. This does not appear to be particularly important to the WEF, so perhaps it is time for that organization to stop wasting the world's precious resources for no interest other than helping the rich and mighty to feel good about themselves!

Brahms' Legacy

The program for last night's Graduate Cello Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of music provided an interesting complement to Tuesday night's recital by violinist Christian Tetzlaff accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, most notably in its choice of an opening. While the earlier concert began by introducing me to the violin sonata of Leoš Janáček, last night's began with the second of three cello sonatas by Bohuslav Martinů. Martinů was born in Bohemia a little less than half a century after Janáček; but he did not "make the cut" in the Oxford Dictionary of Music's "Bohemia" category in their "Nationalism in Music" entry. One reason for this may be that it would not be fair to consider him as a "Bohemian nationalist" composer, particularly in light of the Wikipedia summary of his music (reproduced here with with Wikipedia-style warts):

Martinů was a very prolific composer, writing almost 400 pieces. Many of his works are regularly performed or recorded, among them his choral work, The Epic of Gilgamesh (1955); his symphonies, a modern cycle of six; his concertos, including those for cello, violin, oboe and five for the piano; his anti-war opera Comedy on the bridge; and his chamber music, including eight surviving string quartets, a flute sonata, and a clarinet sonatina.

His music displays a wide variety of influences: works such as La Revue de Cuisine (1927) are heavily influenced by jazz, while the Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano and timpani (1938) is one of many works to show the influence of the Baroque concerto grosso. Other works are influenced by Czech folk music. He also admired the music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, among other composers.^{[citation needed]}

A characteristic feature of his orchestral writing is the near-omnipresent piano; most of his orchestral works include a prominent part for piano, including his small concerto for harpsichord and chamber orchestra. The bulk of his writing from the 1930s into the 1950s was in a neoclassical vein, but with his last works he opened up his style to include more rhapsodic gestures and a looser, more spontaneous sense of form. This is easiest to hear by comparing his sixth symphony, titled Fantaisies symphoniques, with its five predecessors, all from the 1940s.

One of Martinů's lesser known works is a piece featuring the theremin commissioned by Lucie Bigelow Rosen. Martinů started working on this commission in the summer of 1944 and finished his Fantasia for theremin, oboe, string quartet and piano on October 1, dedicating it to Rosen, who premiered the piece as theremin soloist in New York on 3 November 1945, along with the Koutzen Quartet and Robert Bloom.

His opera The Greek Passion is based on the novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis.

It is clear that, as a composer, he was subject to far more influences than his Bohemian roots; and this was evident last night.

The sonata on the program was composed in 1941 in the United States, sitting between the first sonata (composed in Paris in 1939) and the third (composed in Vieux-Moulin in 1952). Its number in Harry Halbreich's catalog is 286 (out of 384). With regard to the "citation needed" entry in the above Wikipedia passage, I would say that none of the enumerated influences were present in this sonata; but there was, instead, a decided "atmosphere" of the music of Johannes Brahms. This was not so much to make a case along the same lines that Arnold Schoenberg would later commit to text in 1947 in his "Brahms the Progressive" essay. Rather, it seemed to call attention to the relevance of Brahms to ears in the middle of the twentieth century and to reflect on how Martinů's own ears listened to that music. Since Brahms had composed two superb cello sonatas, it should not be surprising that Martinů would be willing to recognize Brahms as such an influence. This is not to say that either of the Brahms sonatas serves as a model for this particular Martinů sonata, but there are ways in which the latter provides opportunity to reflect on the work of the former.

This is evident not only in some of the muscular approaches taken to the cello part but also in both the full-handed writing for the piano accompaniment and many of the rhythms through which that writing is expressed. Thus, while Martinů's "melodic rhetoric" is far more angular than anything we would find in Brahms, one could see how the study of the Brahms sonatas could provide useful technical preparation for the performance of the later work. If we recognize that Schoenberg wrote his essay (and the lecture on which it was originally based) in response to what he felt was an unfairly dismissive attitude towards Brahms in the first half of the twentieth century, then Martinů's sonata basically made the same case through music, rather than through expository text.

The Martinů performance was followed by one of Richard Strauss' only sonata for cello and piano. This is a comparatively early work (Opus 6, completed in 1883) in which Strauss was clearly still in the process of finding his voice. Again, there is a clear sense of Brahms being an influence without necessarily providing any explicit models. Indeed, Strauss' composition actually sits between Brahms' two cello sonatas, the Opus 38 (completed in 1865) and Opus 99 (1885). The result is not as exciting as the Martinů sonata but still serves as an interesting harbinger of the sounds we would hear as Strauss become more mature.

Last night's recital concluded with a performance of the Beethoven piano trio in D major (Opus 70, Number 1, the "Ghost"). I found this slightly ironic (but hardly in a malicious way). Here was Brahms, who spent much of his life worrying about being in Beethoven's shadow; but in this particular program it was his legacy that was being honored, less as a shadow and more as a source of new light.

The Word that Dare Not Speak its Name

Steve Schifferes' analysis for BBC NEWS of the first day of the proceedings of the World Economic Forum in Davos focused (as it should have done) on the view of the world economy from Chinese and Russian perspectives:

In his first appearance at Davos, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hit back, placing the blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of the US authorities.

Among the causes of the crisis, he cited "inappropriate macro-economic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development" - a clear swipe at the low savings and high consumption rate of the US economy - and "the failure of financial supervision and regulation".

He also blamed the banks for their "blind pursuit of profit" and a "lack of self-discipline" which have landed the world economy "in the most difficult situation since the Great Depression".

Further criticism came from Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who said that "poor quality regulation" led to "the collapses of the existing financial system".

Mr Putin also criticised the world's dependence on the dollar.

"Excessive dependence on what is basically the only reserve currency is dangerous for the world economy," he said.

He said that the result was "a serious malfunction in the very system of global economic growth" and that "whole regions of the world, including Europe, found themselves at the periphery of global economic processes" and "were outside the framework of the key economic and financial decisions".

And he argued that the benefits of the boom "were distributed very disproportionately" both within countries and between them.

I was particularly interested in Putin's remarks. One rarely encounters a phrase like "serious malfunction" among the Davos cheerleaders. Through that phrase Putin was attempting to steer the general discourse in the direction of a word that, in either its noun or verb form, is practically taboo in the American economic community among all but the most serious progressives. That word is "reform;" and, by even suggesting it, Putin was throwing down a gauntlet before "the usual suspects" of the rich and mighty in his audience, challenging them to give as much thought to curing the underlying disease as they had thus far been giving in trying to alleviate the symptoms. As Schifferes observed, the United States is far from receptive to this kind of language at the present time; but Putin may have been just the right person to confront them with this word that dare not speak its name. As I wrote back in August at the height of a "double fever" of a Presidential Election and military activity in Georgia:

Putin is less a blustering militarist and more a cold-blooded chief executive determined to set achievable goals that can be brought about through well-executed plans. Put another way, he knows how to frame what he wants in terms of what he has; and he does it well enough to run up a good record of getting what he wants.

However, there is another side to Putin that Schifferes did not include in his analysis, even though it was revealed in his response to a question after his speech. I found that part of the story in a report by Erica Ogg for CNET News. The "question in question" (so to speak) came from none other than Michael Dell. Ogg's report reveals the rest:

During the opening of the show, Putin gave a wide-ranging, 40-minute speech. When it came time for questions, Dell asked "How can we help" you with your country's IT infrastructure, according to a report in Fortune.

Putin immediately rebuffed the PC company's founder. "We don't need your help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity," Putin responded. (I think the only appropriate response to that is, "Oh, snap!")

Now, I wasn't there, but it's highly unlikely this is anything close to what Dell was suggesting. Fortune writes that the "slapdown took many of the people in the audience by surprise." Um, rightfully so. But that wasn't the end of Putin's verbal judo attack on Dell and his company. Near the conclusion of his talk he reportedly talked up Russian scientists and how they are "respected not for their hardware, but for their software." Double snap.

Now from where I sit, Dell's question was presumptuous in a serious departure from the normative behavior of the rich and mighty; and, in the interest of maintaining a proper tone of discourse, he deserved to have his wrist slapped. Nevertheless, he did not deserve a humiliating full body slam; so the episode ended up telling us more about Putin's attitude toward that "proper tone of discourse" than it did about Dell's. When I wrote about Putin last August, it was to address his behavior in terms of how well he could play "the game of statecraft" according to rules set down by Dennis Ross in his book on that topic; but the "instruments" of that game are the instruments of conversation. Using those instruments to bully rarely advances a conversation (although it may explain why George W. Bush saw Putin's soul when he looked into the Russian leader's eyes). Putin is right about a conversation about reform being necessary; but stupid things usually get said in conversation, just by nature of the human condition. I really hope that he can refine his conversation technique a bit before any serious conversation about economic reform gets under way.

New Bookends

Last night's recital by violinist Christian Tetzlaff accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, in Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, offered its least familiar material at the very beginning and in the encores. This is hardly the first time I attended a concert that began with "something new;" but it made for an interesting way to arrange the evening. Before the intermission, Johannes Brahms' D minor (Opus 108) violin sonata was preceded by the violin sonata of Leoš Janáček; and the program after the intermission consisted of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's F major (K. 377) violin sonata and Franz Schubert's B minor rondo brillant (D. 895), followed by two encores of "Danses Champêtres" (Opus 106, Number 5 and probably Number 1) by Jean Sibelius.

San Francisco has been a good place to learn how to listen to Janáček. During her tenure with the San Francisco Opera, Pamela Rosenberg offered three of his operas, Jenůfa, Káťa Kabanová, and The Cunning Little Vixen; and last June David Robertson conducted the San Francisco Symphony in an exquisite performance of his Taras Bulba "rhapsody." I last wrote about Janáček in a post on "nationalist" music, observing that the Oxford Dictionary of Music had classified him as sharing the "Bohemian" category with Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák. At that time I questioned whether Bohemia was actually ever a nation; but I think it is important to recognize that the conditions of Janáček's birth do not necessarily endow him with any "family resemblance" to either Smetana or Dvořák. His voice is very much a unique one, and the only way to get to know it is through exposure. So I am glad that San Francisco has provided me with a generous share of opportunities for such exposure, because through that exposure I could begin to feel a sense of familiarity with Janáček's violin sonata, even though this was the first time I heard it.

In the framework of yesterday's "self-evident truths about listening," that sense of familiarity clearly resided in "features of the general." Being more specific (to play with the words), there is a particular sense of fragmentation in Janáček's approach to melody. When I wrote about Taras Bulba, I talked about Janáček approaching music "as a structuring of 'sonorous objects;'" and, while this may be most apparent in his orchestral writing, it was clear that his violin sonata involved an intimate interplay of particularly characteristic sonorities that he wanted to capture in both violin and piano. To some extent one could call the melodies themselves "Bohemian," particularly in the first movement; but the second movement ("Ballada") had less of that "folk" sound and felt almost like a deliberate move away from the "exotic." Taken as a whole, I found the four movements a welcome addition to the repertoire of accompanied violin sonatas and would like nothing better than more opportunities to listen to performances; so I can begin to make the move from the general to the more specific, since there is clearly a richness of detail in this work just waiting to be explored.

The Brahms sonata was basically the warhorse of the evening, which is not meant as a dismissive observation. Andsnes is an awesome Brahms pianist; this was clear from his performance of the Opus 83 piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony this past spring. He brings a level of energy that dismisses all of those clichés about Brahms' "stale classicism;" and Tetzlaff reinforced that energy, even if that reinforcement led to a certain coarseness of sound. However, if this sonata is considered from that same "progressive" perspective that I applied to the concerto, then there is much to be said for a performance that goes out to (if not beyond) the threshold of "disciplined control." This is not to say that the performance was reckless, but it delivered a sense of abandon to the music that seemed to make for an entirely appropriate interpretation.

Ironically, there was a similar level of abandon in the Mozart sonata, particularly in its opening allegro. This is the work of Mozart in his twenties, still the show-off kid strutting his stuff in Vienna. Presumably Mozart himself performed the piano part, hopefully with a violinist who was up to the task of keeping up with him. Andsnes is now well out of his own twenties. However, he knew how to summon his "inner twenty-year-old" for this performance; and Tetzlaff was, once again, right there with him in the spirit of the occasion. This time, however, the performance was less about abandon and more about control, although that control was applied to a variety of impressive virtuoso feats. Nevertheless, that spirit of abandon returned in the Schubert rondo. This work was composed almost two years before Schubert's death at a time when he was being very adventurous about both formal structure and the "action" within the structure. Within that balancing act we encounter the same sorts of flirtations with madness that surface in so many of his songs, as well has his earlier D. 760 "Wanderer" fantasy; but, for all those flirtations, Schubert never gives up control. Thus, performance demands a "deliberate depiction" of the madness; and that is precisely the approach that Tetzlaff and Andsnes brought to their interpretation.

Finally, the encores threw a new light on Sibelius' approach to violin music. We ended the evening where we began, with one composer's decidedly individual approach to his own country's "nationalism." Thus, in spite of the French title, these works elicit the voice of the violin as Finnish folk instrument (which I once had occasion to hear in conjunction with a conference on cognitive musicology). Here any coarseness of sound was definitely part of that "nationalist" spirit, which again seemed to approach composition through "sonorous objects," but with an entirely different spectrum of sounds. It is not often the case that the unity of a program extends to its encores, but there is no doubt that Sibelius was as important a "bookend" for the entire evening as Janáček had been at the beginning.

Another Departure from Reality in Davos

While there is no real need to compile a laundry list of all the ways in which the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its little party in Davos have lost their sense of reality, Morice Mendoza came up with some statistics for a background article for SPIEGEL ONLINE that really deserve to be shared:

There are only 4 women out of 22 on the foundation board (18 percent) and no women at all on the managing board, which is responsible for the operations and running of the WEF. There are 2 women among the 10 senior directors (20 percent), people responsible for subject areas within WEF. It is only lower down the management chain where you find the gender balance becomes healthier -- 52 percent of the directors are women. These people cover subject areas (e.g. security issues) and head functional areas such as accounting.

Loss of Talent and Perspective

Of the co-chairs -- very important figures who help to plan the Davos meeting -- only one of the seven is a woman: Maria Ramos, chief executive of Transnet, a South African freight, rail, and pipeline company. (Ramos announced recently that she had decided to step down from Transnet, after having turned the company around from a time when it had been, in her own words, a "value-destroying organ of the state.")

This dearth of women -- and the talent and different perspectives they could bring -- is reflected in the Davos event itself. The WEF has posted on its Web site an "abridged" list of business leaders who will attend this year. One has to assume it is a reasonably representative sample of the full list. Out of 81 people listed, only 4 are women -- under 5 percent

This raises a question (which hopefully is obvious to most): If both the Davos participants and the parent organization of the event provide such a poor sample of those who actually "make the economy work" (so to speak), should we attach any credibility to anything that gets said there? This leads to another question, which happens to come much closer to my own home: If the signal-to-noise ratio at Davos is so low, why is the Mayor of San Francisco hanging out there, instead of seeing to his "day job" at City Hall? Perhaps there is just something irresistible about being invited into this particular "garden of earthly delights," just as the surrealistic images of Hieronymus Bosch's eponymous triptych are so irresistible! Perhaps we should just recognize that this surreal world of the World Economic Forum has displaced that sense of reality and "is what it is" (in the immortal words of Jimmy McNulty of The Wire)! However, if their world is a surreal one, could it be that ultimately they live by André Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism? If so, then we may wish to be particularly aware of one sentence from Breton's text:

We are the prisoners of the mechanical orgy pursued inside the earth, for we have dug mines, underground galleries through which we sneak in a band beneath the cities that we want to blow up.

Be on the lookout for flying shards of Alpine geology!

Some (Probably) Self-Evident Truths about Listening

I have now made good on my promise to myself and launched into the somewhat opaque French prose of Philippe Hamon's Du Descriptif. My efforts to sort out some basic conclusions from all of that convoluted language may have yielded little more than a few self-evident truths (thus far, at least); but it may be worth taking stock of them, having just vetted them with my neighbor who plays second violin in the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. I shall lay these thoughts out in no particular order (unless, after having set them down, I decided to use copy-and-paste to give them some better structure).

Most important is what may seem like a word game, but I think the game is worth playing for the sake of our priorities. While, in our casual conversation, we readily talk about "listening to music," I believe it is important to recognize that we only listen to performances of music. Abstractions of music, such as score pages, are only enablers of what we experience. Even the recordings we listen to are recordings of performances; and, while it may be worth recognizing that there is some score (say of Gustav Mahler's sixth symphony) that is invariant across all of those performances, only the performance provides the auditory signals that are experienced through listening. (One reason I chose that particular Mahler symphony is that there are different opinions regarding the order of performing its two inner movements, regardless of the order in which they are printed in the score.)

Equally self-evident is the "double bind" problem of the nature of time, itself. I recently wrote about how every performance moves "forward along the time line;" and, indeed, without at least a bare minimum of that forward movement, sound itself ceases to exist for the sake of hearing, let alone listening. However, what happens when we try to describe that experience? Whether we try to abstract that description into a string of words that we write or summon a rich "multimedia" approach to dramaturgical action (as in Donald Schön's account of a master class over the first two sections of Franz Schubert's Opus 15 "Wanderer Fantasy"), description is, itself, a performance that also moves forward along its own time line. The double bind arises because the time consumed in attending to listening to the performance is time detracted from "performing the description," so to speak, and vice versa. We are on the same turf that John Cage encountered in Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki's lecture on how to attend a lecture.

As an aside I should point out that I do not take notes when I listen to a performance. When I write on this blog, I am beholden to no one other than myself. I do my best to write about what I remember and can then avoid writing about what I fail to remember, because I am the only person who can hold myself to task for my negligence!

There still remains the problem of figuring out just what goes into a descriptive text or one of those performances of a description. While my reading of Hamon thus far (which is only the first chapter of a six-chapter book) has concentrated on literary descriptions of static objects (frequently appealing to landscape and still-life painting), some of his insights pertain to the temporal nature of experience. Most important is his conception of a description that "moves" between the specific and the general. Within this conception the performance of a description can be considered in terms of a "strategy" for those moves that guides when one dwells on generality and when one homes in on details. This is rarely either a "top-down" or "bottom-up" systematic "traversal" that we would expect to find in a strictly objective world (which, as Paul Valéry put it, is "indifferent" to ordering). The strategy is motivated less by what is being described and more by the rhetorical setting (such as for one of Aristotle's forensic speeches) that requires the description. In my own efforts I tend to spend more time in the general, simply because there are only so many specific details that I still have with me by the time I get to my keyboard; and now we are back to the double bind. I could take notes to improve that situation; but my note-taking would probably distract from my efforts to apprehend the features of the general!

Finally, there is Hamon's decision to invoke Homer as a model of descriptive text. This is a bit problematic, since I subscribe to the belief that "Homer" is a "fiction of convenience" for a body of texts that emerged from a bardic tradition. Thus, both Iliad and Odyssey are "objectifications" of what was originally a performance practice. Nevertheless, Hamon's observation holds for the practice as well as the resulting text and may be even more relevant to the original practice. Simply put, he argues that there is no explicit description in either Iliad or Odyssey. Instead, description unfolds in the narrative account of the action. The example he gives is that, rather than describing a full suit of armor, "Homer" accounts for how a soldier puts on each of the pieces of that suit in preparing for battle. Description has been "dramatized," but not in the same way that Schön encountered dramatization in the master class he documented. From my point of view, this "narrative stance" is a by-product of bardic performance practice, which was not concerned with the composition of the sorts of texts that constitute Hamon's primary focus of attention but was, instead, concerned with the more nuts-and-bolts problem of holding audience attention. However, it also highlights the interplay between the time-line of the story being told and the time-line of the bardic performance of that story; and the management of that interplay often also has much to do with holding the attention of the audience.

Like a good mathematician, I may have reduced the problem of developing a theory of listening to music (sic, mea maxima culpa) to the problem of a theory of describing music performance. If the only progress I have made towards this latter problem has been a collection of self-evident truths, I feel that I have still made some forward progress, even if that progress can only be measured in inches! At the same time I have built myself a mental state that should serve me as my reading of Hamon progresses, and I hope that will serve my progress towards addressing both my primary and secondary problems!

Confronting the Rich and Mighty with Chutzpah

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo apparently has a knack for attracting early Chutzpah of the Week awards, since he won his first award about half a year ago on a Wednesday. That one was for waging a war against child pornography on the Internet by targeting all of Usenet, which I described at the time as "going after the Internet with a big stick without giving much thought as to where he is swinging it." This time, however, I am happy to announce that he is receiving the award for positive-connotation chutzpah; and it is very much an award for our current dire economic straits. The basis for the award comes from a report that Stephen Bernard and Ieva M. Augustums filed for the Associate Press this morning:

The New York attorney general on Tuesday issued subpoenas to former Merrill Lynch chief executive John Thain and Bank of America's chief administrative officer, J. Steele Alphin, amid an investigation into bonuses Merrill paid executives just before being sold to Bank of America.

Thain, 53, was serving as the head of the newly combined company's wealth management division before he resigned last week. The resignation came shortly after reports surfaced that billions of dollars were paid to Merrill executives in late December.

Those bonuses were paid as Merrill was about to report a $15 billion fourth-quarter loss, and while Bank of America was seeking more federal funds to help it absorb the mounting losses at the New York-based investment bank.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's investigation will center on trying to determine why the timetable for paying the bonuses was moved up to December from its normal period in January; who knew about the bonuses; and how Merrill could justify spending billions of dollars on bonuses knowing its was on the brink of reporting a multibillion loss for the quarter, a person familiar with the probe told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Bank of America has said in recent days it knew about the bonuses, but had no authority over the payout because the Merrill sale had not been completed. On Monday, Bank of America spokesman Scott Silvestri said: "John Thain and the Merrill Lynch compensation committee made the decision on the amount and timing of year-end compensation at Merrill Lynch. We had no legal right to challenge it."

I can think of no better way to throw a harsh bright light on the failure of the banking sector to provide the Government Accountability Office with the data necessary to monitor the bailout money they have received than to launch an investigation of a particularly egregious use of that money. Hopefully, the news of this investigation will percolate back to Philip Jennings, in the United Kingdom, to let him know that he is not alone in losing patience with the rich and mighty of the banking sector. Indeed, this story broke just in time to be included as part of the "welcome packet" that can be handed out to all of the World Economic Forum participants in Davos (which adds to its chutzpah factor in my book). This is about more that finishing your vegetables before running off "for a dessert of chocolate fondue in Davos;" this is about catching the scoundrels who tried to run off with the silverware! Davos delegates, all, look on the works of Andrew Cuomo and despair!

Running out of Patience with the Rich and Mighty

In the script that Philip Barry wrote for The Philadelphia Story, it is "a Spanish peasant's proverb:"

With the Rich and Mighty always a little Patience.

This may be the most appropriate epigraph for the preview of this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, which Tim Weber wrote for the BBC NEWS Web site. Still, given the general proclivity of the Davos crowd to drown themselves in Kool-Aid (mostly from Silicon Valley) in preference to conducting serious discussion over matters of economic health, including the allocation of financial assistance to those most in need of it, it is easy to understand that the patience of some might be wearing a bit thin. One of those who has lost such patience appears to be the new President of the United States. Considering the extent to which this year's Inaugural ceremonies were a "people's party" (even if the elites had their own events), we should be able to appreciate Barack Obama taking a dim view of anyone in his Administration going off to party with this particularly rich-and-mighty gathering in a time of economic crisis. According to Weber, Obama has translated these sentiments into nuts-and-bolts action:

More importantly, President Obama has ordered several key US officials to stay at home and tackle economic and political flashpoints.

Top economic adviser and Davos regular Lawrence Summers will stay in Washington. Tim Geithner is still awaiting his confirmation as new treasury secretary. US Fed boss Ben Bernanke will give Davos a miss.

Even National Security Adviser James L Jones has been told to stay at home.

As a result, the voice of the US government will be somewhat muted in Davos, and participants will sorely miss the input of heavy hitters like Mr Summers and Mr Geithner.

One wonders if there was a bit of irony in that last sentence. What sort of input would the Davos crowd have been expecting from these particular "heavy hitters." Was Summers scheduled to discuss the current state of equal opportunity in the workplace? Since "innovation" was such a strong ingredient in last year's Davos Kool-Aid, was Geithner planning to lecture on software innovations in tax preparation? Whether or not Weber was trying to be funny, the basic message was an important one: The children have to finish all their vegetables before they are allowed to run off for a dessert of chocolate fondue in Davos.

Obama is far from the only one with little patience for the World Economic Forum right now. One cannot imagine that the delegates will get much sympathy from those who cannot pull in a living wage. While their voices seldom carry to Alpine heights, there are still some trade unions left to speak up for them. Weber provided one example in his preview:

Philip Jennings, general secretary of global trade union UNI, said "we would not give a bonus to a factory worker who destroys the production line or a programmer who introduces a bug into software, yet all these bankers are being rewarded for watching while the industry ran headlong into a meltdown".

One might add to Jennings' list the manufacturer who continues to use his production line to grind out a product no one particularly wants to buy. That would provide us with a lens through which we could appreciate how much of our own bailout money has gone to businesses (whether in the financial or automotive sector) that have been consistently poorly managed and show no signs of either managerial or operational change. None of this is likely to introduce that oft-neglected sense of reality into the prevailing conversations that will begin in Davos tomorrow; still, it would be nice to find a counterexample to the words of the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon ("But absent friends are soon forgot"), when those in Davos give a bit of thought as to why their "friends" are absent this year.

Playing the Fool?

Last week's coverage by Matt Jaffe and Sarah Netter for ABC News of Rod Blagojevich's decision to boycott his impeachment trial could easily have been taken by many as not-so-covert promotion for ABC programming:

Embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich says he will boycott his upcoming impeachment trial, not as an act of defiance but rather to protest what he believes is an unfair process.

At a news conference this afternoon in Chicago, an animated Blagojevich said he would not attend the trial, set to start Monday in Springfield, because under state Senate rules he would not be able to call certain witnesses or sufficiently challenge the charges, making the proceedings a "trampling of the Constitution."

"It's a scary thing if they get away with doing this," Blagojevich said of state legislators. "Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence?" he asked.

Instead, the governor will appear in live ABC appearances on Monday morning, first on "Good Morning America" and then again live on "The View" where he'll be joined by his wife.

Since I personally have little time for this kind of television programming, I assume that, if anything of note happens, I shall read about it through one of my "hard news" sources. In this case I drew upon the BBC NEWS Web site for an account of the first stage of Blagojevich's effort to shift the venue of judgment from the Illinois Senate to the court of public opinion (as represented by ABC viewers):

Scandal-hit US Governor Rod Blagojevich has said he considered offering the Illinois senate seat vacated by Barack Obama to talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

Mr Blagojevich is facing an impeachment trial in the state senate over claims he tried to "sell" the seat.

He told ABC that Ms Winfrey, one of America's wealthiest women, would have been unlikely to accept.

Mr Blagojevich says he is innocent and that the trial, which he is not expected to attend, has been rigged.

He told ABC's Good Morning America that Ms Winfrey "seemed to be someone who would help Barack Obama in a significant way become president".

"She was obviously someone with a much broader bully pulpit than other senators," he said.

But he said Ms Winfrey "probably wouldn't take it" and that it would have been hard to offer the seat to her in a way that "didn't look like it was some gimmick and embarrass her".

Wow! Ever since Blagojevich was arrested in the wake of what seemed like a perfectly well-conceived effort to resolve the standoff between labor and management at Republic Windows and Doors by going after Bank of America as the root of the problem, I have been agonizing over what sort of motives led to the grounds for his arrest, assuming those grounds to be valid. One possibility, of course, is that those grounds are not valid; but they seem to be supported by some pretty strong evidence. We can only hope that the question of validity will be satisfactorily resolved during the Illinois Senate trial; and, if they are valid, then this question of motive could be a real stumper.

As is often the case, when faced with such a challenging question, I often look for an answer in the "poetic wisdom" of literature. In this case I turned to my (printed) copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for a phrase search on "play the fool." I found the following stanza from the poem "Plays," written by Walter Savage Landor in 1846:

When we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! what a chorus!

I particularly enjoyed Landor's use of punctuation, but the message is still a good one. Blagojevich may have been motivated by nothing more than a desire for a larger audience; and he decided (probably rightly) that "professional deliberation" over the selection of a replacement to fill Obama's Senate seat would not win him that audience. Thus, following a logic not that different from the Lucifer-turned-Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, Blagojevich decided that the role of the fool was preferable to that of the virtuous sage. At the very least this may have provided a nice little jolt for the ratings of Good Morning America and may do the same for The View; but it will probably also help Blagojevich's standing in that court of public opinion he is trying to court (not apologizing for that bit of noun/verb play). Blagojevich is betting that good political theater can always trump conventional jurisprudence, and it will be interesting to see if he cashes in any chips on that bet.

The Bipartisan, the Nonpartisan, and the Antipartisan

E. J. Dionne's latest column amount to a full-frontal attack against one of the more audacious positions that Barack Obama has tried to assume in shaping his new Administration:

Beneath the warm pledges of bipartisanship and the earnest calls for cooperation in the midst of a grave crisis lurks an unpleasant fact: From the moment it loses power, the opposition party turns to the task of getting it back.

However, when he tries to muster data in support of his position, I find that I do not necessarily interpret his data the same way he does. The data I have in mind come from the Gallup Organization:

On Friday, Gallup released a report that’s devastating to the GOP. The survey, based on 30,000 interviews over the course of the year, found that in 2008 an average of 36 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats and only 28 percent called themselves Republicans. Gallup noted that this was the largest advantage of the Democratic Party in more than two decades.

For some Republicans, these numbers counsel short-term prudence and suggest the need for at least a semblance of cooperation with Obama, whose personal popularity is soaring. Former Rep. J.C. Watts, once a member of the House Republican leadership, cautions his party: “Be careful how you throw eggs at this parade.” In Congress, this approach is reflected in the efforts of some Republicans to alter but not oppose Obama’s economic stimulus package.

But in what might be seen as a GOP good cop/bad cop division of labor, others in the party are already savaging Obama and his plans.

It seems to me that the more "devastating" part of the Gallup poll is that 36% segment that does not identify with either Democrats or Republicans. I read this as an indicator of just how fed up the electorate is with the status quo of our political system (which includes the historical ignorance of dismissing third parties as irrelevant). It may even indicate that the "change" for which that segment voted was a change in that status quo, seeing (or hoping for) an Obama who would bring new "rules of the game" to that system.

We need to learn more of the usual demographic details about this segment of the Gallup sample space. When times are good, those without preference figure that it does not matter very much whether Tweedledee or Tweedledum is in power; and they are probably right. However, in a time of crisis (particularly a crisis of personal cash flow), that indifference indicates the feeling that neither side is going to get us out of the mess. One way to combat that indifference is with those skills of community organizing of which Obama is so proud. However, on the basis of yesterday's attempts (by all the usual suspects) to survey the past week, I did not see any indicators to change the opinion of those who believe that neither political party is showing any signs of advancing economic recovery.

Who Gets to Dictate the Terms?

In reviewing the appointment of George Mitchell as the US special envoy for the Arab-Israeli conflict, I made it a point to stress that the current tensions on Gaza can only be resolved through productive communication. Needless to say, you cannot have productive communication if you do not have communication at all; and, where Gaza is concerned, this involves the disquieting question of who will be allowed to communicate. Adam Entous and Arshad Mohammed recognized this problem in a dispatch they filed for Reuters early this morning:

President Barack Obama plans to dispatch his Middle East envoy to the region next week, in a quick start to the new administration's efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and shore up a shaky Gaza truce.

Obama has taken the Middle East by surprise with the speed of his diplomatic activism.

Western, Arab and Israeli diplomats said his envoy, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, plans to meet leaders in Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, but they ruled out direct contacts with Hamas Islamists who rule the Gaza Strip.

A Western diplomat said Mitchell was likely to go to Saudi Arabia but said Syria was not now on his schedule.

What is disquieting is that the exclusion of Hamas smacks of what I had called "Sin-of-Omission Diplomacy" when it was perpetrated by the recent Bush Administration. Where foreign affairs are concerned, the "change we can believe in" is a change in our lamentable tendency to regard ourselves as "the sole arbiter of who should and should not participate in discussions" over diplomatic crises, such as the current situation in Gaza. Hillary Clinton's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said all the right things about getting beyond such selfish thinking, but actions always speak louder than words. It would be nice to know if the "they" in that third paragraph of the quote encompassed all the enumerated parties or just reflected a submission to the principle that whatever the United States says is how things will go. Both interpretations are equally depressing; but I, for one, voted the way I did to get beyond another Presidential term of Bush-style bully diplomacy.

In all fairness, however, it is probably the case that the United States is not the sole impediment to the prospects of productive communication. Another Reuters dispatch, this one from Jeffrey Heller, indicates that Israel has its own part to play in this process:

International calls to investigate Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday to promise military personnel state protection from foreign prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers sent to Gaza should know they are safe from various tribunals and Israel will assist them on this front and defend them, just as they protected us with their bodies during the Gaza operation," Olmert said.

Last week, the military censor ordered local and foreign media in Israel to blur the faces of army commanders in photos and video footage of the Gaza war for fear they could be identified and arrested while traveling abroad.

Israeli media reports said the military had been advising its top brass to think twice about visiting Europe.

This is not so much a question of who gets to participate in the discussion as one of the agenda for that discussion. It is hard to imagine having a discussion about Gaza without raising questions about grievances. By all rights those questions should address who has legitimate cause for grief and who should bear the responsibility for that grief. There is no question that Israel had a hand in bringing grief to the civilians of Gaza; but blocking any discussion of this matter is to cut off an approach to "truth and reconciliation" that we had no trouble accepting when it was practiced in Africa. Meanwhile, as Entous and Nidal al-Mughrabi reported for Reuters this morning, Hamas is doing its best to assess which Gazans have that "legitimate cause for grief" and draw upon Hamas financial resources to provide at least interim compensation. Put another way, Hamas is showing signs of acting responsibly as an elected government, even when those signs continue to "pass unnoticed" before the eyes of both the United States and Israel. The "time of waiting" for Mitchell's appointment may be over; but we may be due for a much longer wait before any productive communication can begin.

Trying to Demystify the Dramatistic

I suspect that many who read yesterday's musings on trying to take a "dramatistic" approach to musical performance may have felt that I had forsaken the empirical-analytic not for the historical-hermeneutic (as Jürgen Habermas would have put it) but for fuzzy-headed mysticism. Was I really trying to ascribe motivated agency to "the music itself;" and, if so, where on the continuum between the strictly literal and the full-fledged metaphorical was I trying to do this? Given that the title of this blog is "The Rehearsal Studio," I have no problem answering the first question in the affirmative, with the proviso that, for the sake of "rehearsal," that ascription should be viewed as a hypothesis. As to the latter question, I was clearly working from the metaphorical end of the continuum. One does not walk up to a sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven on the street and ask if it is carrying an umbrella because it thinks it is going to rain (to choose a mundane agent motivation that we encounter frequently in San Francisco); but, also, to put aside those accusations of mysticism, one would not consult a medium to contact the spirit world to find out what that sonata would have to say about its motives. What the sonata "has to say" resides solely in the text that Beethoven bequeathed us, subject to the analytic enhancements of musicologists and editors and our own context-sensitive capacity for interpretation that can take into account both Beethoven's context and our own.

Where, then, do these motives reside? If they are to be viewed metaphorically, then the power of the metaphor may well reside in the etymology of that noun "motive." They may be viewed in terms of that dynamic force that is responsible for moving the performance "forward along the time line." I recently invoked this metaphor when I wrote about the "journey" through Elliott Carter's second string quartet, in which the "path from beginning to end" may be a challenging one (for both performers and listeners) but it still "navigable" if one is "equipped" with proper listening skills. In that same post I also argued that the skills that "equip" one for this quartet are significantly different than those with which we "navigate" the movements of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. However, to be more specific about what it means to be so "equipped" in the context of Yuliya Gorenman's Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music yesterday, I shall try to draw upon past thoughts regarding Beethoven's Opus 109 sonata.

As Gorenman observed, the first movement of this sonata deserves that same "quasi una Fantasia" label that Beethoven had assigned to this two Opus 27 sonatas. At the very least this suggests a departure from the normative structural conventions, which provide the usual "navigational maps" that lay out the "journey" from the beginning to the end of a sonata. Thus, when one prepares to perform (or listen to) that first movement, there is a real question of just where "forward" goes (other than in the temporal direction of the ticking clock). The last time I tried to address this question was when I heard Mack McCray play this sonata at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, which is rather a happy coincidence, since McCray, in his capacity as Chairman of the Piano Department at the Conservatory, was the one who introduced Gorenman to the audience. At that time I interpreted the sense of "forward" in terms of a temporal organization of the distribution of energy, illustrated by a graph that plotted the level of amplitude (a physical approximation to the psychological experience of loudness) across the time-line of the duration of the third movement:

As every good performer knows, a strategy for the distribution of energy requires knowing in advance where you want your climaxes to be and then gauging your "expenditures of energy" to make sure that those climaxes are delivered in ways that sound climactic. This a priori understanding of how energy will be distributed across the entire duration of the composition is part of what it means to hear the entire performance in your head before your body realizes that performance as "physical sound in real time." I should acknowledge that I was probably disposed to think about performance in these terms by not only McCray's performance of Opus 109 but also Gorenman's performance of Opus 27, Number 2 ("Moonlight") at a benefit luncheon I attended on Thursday. This earlier sonata is particularly distinguished by the radically different "energy strategies" required for its two outer movements; and the final movement is particularly challenging because, without a well-conceived strategy, it just all goes by in a blur. Gorenman had convincing strategies (which is to say strategies that the listener could readily follow) for both movements on Thursday; and much of her coaching of Opus 109 on Friday seemed directed at getting the student to think in terms of such strategies. I suspect that it was this "stance" she took toward performance as a journey through time that must be navigated that supported that claim I made yesterday that her Master Class was also an exciting lesson in learning to be a better listener.

Dramatistic Musical Performance

It is unlikely that Yuliya Gorenman was exposed to Kenneth Burke's dramatistic approach to human behavior, either while she was growing up in the Soviet Union (particularly in light of Burke's personal break with Marxism) or in the course of her music studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Peabody Conservatory; but there was a decidedly dramatistic flavor to the ways in which she coached three San Francisco Conservatory students in the Piano Master Class she conducted this morning. I mean this very much in the literal sense of Burke's own words, in that the conversations she conducted with the students (in which the audience would occasionally be included) were grounded more in theories of action than in theories of knowledge; or, to shift to my own terminology, her use of language was far more verb-based than noun-based. From Burke's point of view, this involved a focus on dynamic concepts such as purpose and motive, rather than the positivist emphasis on static texts (musical or otherwise) so characteristic of our legacy from the Age of Enlightenment. Most interesting in her approach was the extent to which she could apply these dynamic concepts to not only the behavior of the performer but also the music itself. Thus, she was perfectly comfortable with inquiry concerned with what the music wanted to do or say or with the contextual influence behind such actions. For those in the audience, the result was a refreshingly novel way in which to approach listening, demonstrated through performances of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Robert Schumann.

This is not to say that she disregarded the actions of the pianist. However, one came away with the impression that such actions can always be achieved through proper technical training, while the "secret sauce" of a good performance comes from a performer who already hears that performance in his/her own head and then simply summons the body to realize what the mind already knows through listening. That knowledge is verb-based and reveals itself through Donald Schön's two stages of knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action. Through this approach she could negotiate the almost improvisatory nature of the first movement of Beethoven's Opus 109 sonata and steer away from the dangers of repetition in the "Grand Polonaise Brilliante" section of Chopin's Opus 22.

However, this dramatistic thinking came into full flower when she took on the opening section of Schumann's Opus 17 fantasie, drawing upon the extent to which the composition delivered a "secret message," which drew upon its invocation of Beethoven's "An die ferne Geliebte." However, beyond the idea of delivering a message, Schumann's fantasie introduced a new rhetoric which extrapolated the German Lied to a strictly musical phenomenon. At a time when Felix Mendelssohn was just beginning to experiment with the idea of "songs without words," Schumann was taking the experiment to the next level of poetry without the poet, so to speak. In the melodies and phrases of the fantasie, we hear the phraseology of Wilhelm Müller, Heinrich Heine, and (of course) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The world of this fantasie is the world of a song cycle in which Schumann has distilled the musical setting of the poetry from the poetry itself. In coaching her student to meet the technical challenges of that musical setting, Gorenman coached the rest of us in hearing that "unwritten poetry" from which the music had been extracted, thus creating a listening experience as transcendent as Schumann's compositional effort. This was truly one of the most exciting lessons in learning to be a better listener!

Condi's Last Hurrah (hopefully!)

Condoleeza Rice's boss ran up quite a "surge" of Chutzpah of the Week awards during his lame-duck period in the Oval Office. Her "chutzpah count" had fallen so far behind his that it seemed as if she had lost any interest in comradely competition. However, as a performing musician (of sorts), she seems to appreciate the effectiveness of a good coda. To continue that metaphor, in a gesture that could well constitute the mother of all harmonic modulations, she has shifted her presence from the austere pages of Foreign Affairs to that of Variety, for which Ted Johnson reported the following:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has signed with the William Morris Agency, the first step in what is being called the “reinvention and evolution” of her career.

The agency said Rice will focus on books, lecture appearances, philanthropic activities and “new business initiatives in the media, sports and communications sectors.”

Rice will be represented by WMA chief Jim Wiatt and Wayne Kabak.

Kabak said that Rice will be writing two books: One will focus on her diplomatic career, and the other will be about her parents, the Rev. John Wesley Rice Jr. and Angelena Ray, whom her daughter has referred to as “educational evangelists” for their influence on pursuing academic excellence.

Apparently, Rice is more reluctant to give up the spotlight than her boss was, even if it means engaging William Morris in the interest of "reinvention and evolution." Considering her track record with the Bush Administration, the idea that she can "reinvent" herself as an entertainment commodity seems more than adequate grounds for assigning her a fifth (and hopefully final) Chutzpah of the Week award (which I hope that Wiatt and Kabak will keep in her portfolio).

Legitimacy and Security

To follow up on yesterday's post, "The time of waiting is over" (as the Jerusalem Bible chose to translate the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation): Yesterday Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of George Mitchell as the US special envoy for the Arab-Israeli conflict. The story was covered for the Financial Times by Daniel Dombey in Washington and Tobias Buck in Jerusalem, providing a dual perspective, which ultimately emphasized the "sin of omission" that has most concerned me as we emerge from Obama's transition period. That sin of omission involves the legitimacy of Hamas, and it was evident in Obama's choice of words for the remarks he gave during the announcement of Mitchell's appointment:

The outline for a durable ceasefire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire: Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza: the US and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot re-arm.

As part of a lasting ceasefire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime, with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.

In the first paragraph Hamas is confronted with an imperative, which serves as a precondition for a series of future-tense declaratives, giving the impression that progress depends critically on whether or not Hamas will obey a command. Subsequent future-tense language makes no further reference to Hamas, recognizing instead only the Palestinian Authority.

If the language in Washington came close to letting Hamas "pass unnoticed" (except for the "functional necessity" of following orders), the language in Jerusalem was clearer about taking notice:

Before Mr Obama gave his speech, an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit, a soldier held captive by Hamas since 2006.

“If the opening of the passages strengthens Hamas we will not do it,” the official said.

“We will make sure that all the [humanitarian] needs of the population will be met. But we will not be able to deal with Hamas on the other side. We will not do things that give legitimacy to Hamas.”

This smacks of that same ridiculous language that the United States invoked during the Fifties and Sixties concerning its refusal to "recognize Red China." Legitimacy was conferred upon Hamas by the people of Gaza through the democratic process of election, yet both Israel and the United States insist on holding to the position that this election "doesn't count," without producing any convincing evidence to support this position (nor did the people of Gaza insist that the results of their election be reviewed).

Yesterday I concluded my post with the hope that Mitchell would be able to initiate more productive communication to resolve the many differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors. I had anticipated that he would probably meet with considerable resistance from both Israel and the Palestinians. I had hoped that further resistance would not come from his boss or from his boss' boss. However, given Mitchell's capacity for hanging tough when things in Northern Ireland were at their most frustrating, I shall try, for now at least, to keep hoping.

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

I for one am waiting for the proposed appointment of George Mitchell as US special envoy for the Middle East to escalate from leaks from supposedly reliable sources to official announcement. Mitchell's achievement of the Good Friday agreement over Northern Ireland demonstrated just what an honest broker can do when it comes to reconciling the irreconcilable. Needless to say, the Middle East is not the British Isles; and the honest-broker reputation of his potential boss may well be tainted by her past close associations with AIPAC. Furthermore, as a recent Al Jazeera English story reported, Mitchell's own track record in the Middle East has not been as successful as his work in Northern Ireland:

In 2000, he also presided over a committee investigating the ongoing violence of the Middle East conflict and recommended Palestinians do more to stop attacks on Israel and an end to Israeli settlement building on occupied land.

Almost a decade has elapsed since that investigation. The problem of new Israeli settlements is still with us; and, even if there is currently a cease fire agreement over Gaza, the word from "media reports" is out that the tunnels that have been supplying Hamas with their weapons are back in business again.

According to a recent New York Times report, Mitchell may also have Dennis Ross as an advisor. Like Mitchell, Ross has experienced his own setbacks in Middle East negotiations; and his book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, is, in many respects, an attempt to theorize about those setbacks. However, much of Ross' theory has to do with navigating the discussions that take place between opposing parties; and, in the Middle East, getting those opposing parties to communicate at all, let alone over the sorts of issues that Ross investigates, continues to be an unsolved problem. (If ever there were a counterexample to Jürgen Habermas' "ideal speech situation," the Middle East would be it!) Consider the current "state of play" in the White House as reported by Al Jazeera English:

Obama, who was inaugurated as US president on Tuesday, made phone calls to several key leaders in the Middle East on Wedneday as the region continued to deal with the aftershocks of Israel's offensive in Gaza.

These included Hosni Mubarak, Egyptian president, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, Jordan's King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said.

While that makes for an impressive "roll call," as I observed yesterday, it is hard to imagine that productive communication can begin before Hamas no longer "passes unnoticed" and becomes a full-fledged participant. Hopefully, in trying to bring about such communications, Mitchell will be better informed by his success in Northern Ireland than by his (and Ross') frustrations in the Middle East. At the very least his honest-broker reputation is intact, which is more than can be said about those diplomats who represented the previous Administration.

Prioritizing What is Noticed

If the first words on Guantanamo Bay passed my "first sentence test," the "first paragraph" on the Middle East may require more scrutiny. I am referring to the report that appeared on Al Jazeera English within the past hour:

Barack Obama, the US president, has pledged his support to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, as foreign policy took centre stage on his first full day in the White House.

Nabil Abu Rudeina, Abbas's spokesman, said Obama had told the Palestinian president on Wednesday that he would work to "achieve peace in the region and that he would exert all efforts to achieve this goal".

"President Obama also said his administration would work with President Abbas, as a partner, to build institutions, reconstruct and achieve peace," a statement said.

When viewed through that same lens of symbolism that European Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot applied to the Guantanamo decision, this recognition of Palestinian government, such as it is, is a powerful message, particularly if it has apparently preceded any "official" statements about Israel. Unfortunately, this particular symbolic act may be more problematic if it has allowed the legitimately elected government in Gaza to (in those words of Pierre Bourdieu that I seem to cite so frequently) "pass unnoticed," which may be the greatest source of risk in any of our foreign relations. This could well be the first significant test of Hillary Clinton's assertion that "We must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries." It is hard to imagine a building process that would begin with an affront to Hamas, particularly in a time of an extremely fragile cease fire.

Beginning the First Day on the Job

There seems to be a media tradition according to which a new President is evaluated on the basis of his first 100 days in office; but there is a good chance that "Internet speed" will change all of that for Barack Obama. He may be lucky if the blogosphere will allow him 100 hours at work before laying down judgment; and the mainstream media will then pick up on the blogosphere for fear of accusations of being "out of touch." Fortunately, the new President seems to have an appreciation of what some literary critics call the "first sentence test" (whether or not the first sentence of a text leaves you with the desire to read more); and Demetri Sevastopulo was there to get the story to the Financial Times:

Within hours of assuming the presidency on Tuesday, Mr Obama told military prosecutors at Guantanamo Bay to seek a 120-day pause in the trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and his four co-defendants.

Mr Obama campaigned on a pledge to close Guantanamo which has stained the US image around the world. He is expected to issue an executive order in coming days calling for its closure.

In recent interviews, Mr Obama has played down expectations that the camp could be closed immediately, saying the process was more difficult than people realised. There are currently about 250 detainees at the camp which was opened in 2002 to house prisoners captured in the “war on terror”.

”We welcome our new commander-in-chief and this first step towards restoring the rule of law,” Major Jon Jackson, a military defence lawyer at Guantanamo representing Mustafa al-Hawsawi, one of the five 9/11 defendants, told the FT.

A military judge at Guantanamo is expected to rule today on the request to halt the trial of Mr Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators. In another Guantanamo case, a different judge yesterday granted the request, halting the trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has been detained in Guantanamo since he was captured as a fifteen-year old in Afghanistan in 2002.

The prosecution petition to halt the trials explained that the move was to “to permit the newly inaugurated President and his administration time to review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions”.

If the past few days have been concerned with how Obama has spoken to both "we the people" and the "legacy of history," this early decision may best be viewed as a need to speak to the "world community at large" sooner rather than later. This seems to be the way in which the European Union reacted to the announcement:

The European Union welcomed the news to halt the trials. Jacques Barrot, the EU justice commissioner, said the move was a “very strong symbol”.

”I am delighted that one of the first acts of President Obama has been to turn the page on this sad episode of Guantanamo prison,” said Mr Barrot.

Barrot was right to recognize that there may be more symbol than substance in this act, but the substance can only come after Executive review has taken place. Reflecting again on how William Safire chose to compare yesterday with past Inaugurations, I see great value on Barrot's choice of metaphor: This is not a time for passing John Kennedy's torches; it is a time for turning pages written by the Bush Administration and beginning the narrative of a new chapter.

The People Versus the Occasion?

The editors of The New York Times used their Room for Debate blog to harvest an "Experts' Critique" of Barack Obama's Inaugural Address. As of my reading this morning, this post had accumulated 340 comments, which is exactly the sort of engagement that I had so much wanted to see on the Change.gov Web site (and never did). As I see it, the mere fact that such conversations have emerged among Times readers (in the same spirit in which they emerge regularly over on Truthdig) may well be a sign that there are plenty of Americans out there ready, willing, and able to respond to Obama's injunction for us to work together to recover from the problems that now confront us. That theme was certainly present in the Address; and, whether or not the text had been composed "with an eye toward Bartlett’s" (as William Safire put it in his contribution to the critique, while also recognizing "the towering expectations whipped up" by the media), what I found most important was the extent to which Obama was willing to be up-front about how working together would not be a pleasant walk in the park. If the media feed off of expectations, then Obama certainly got off on the right foot by emphasizing the need for better expectation management.

As to the critique itself, the Times collected an interesting panel:

• William Safire, a speechwriter to President Richard Nixon
• William Gavin, a speechwriter to President Richard Nixon
• Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter to President Bill Clinton
• Gordon Stewart, a speechwriter to President Jimmy Carter
• Mary Kate Cary, a speechwriter to President George H.W. Bush
• Clark S. Judge, a speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan

In other words this was very much an assembly of "technical experts;" but, whatever their professional standards may have been, the variations in both style and substance were strikingly disconcerting. They ran the gamut from a few comments that read like gratuitous throw-aways to the kind of comprehensive coverage we have come to expect from Safire, whatever we may feel about his politics.

Beyond the analysis, however, I was most taken with Cary's statement of her preference for Sunday's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I suspect that Safire could have exercised an alternative repertoire of analytical techniques in comparing these two speeches, rather than comparing Obama's Inaugural to those of past Inaugurations. Lacking Safire's skill, I would only suggest that the difference in occasion would have provided the reason for a different analytical approach. Sunday was an occasion of, by, and for "we the people;" and Obama's speech was effectively directed at "we the people," all of whom had been suitably prepared by the entertainment program. The Inauguration was an entirely different affair. Once again, "we the people" turned out in large numbers, just of the sake of "being there," even if "there" was in a crowd watching a large television monitor; but this time, strictly speaking, they were not "the audience." This time the audience was the legacy of history, embodied by a relatively exclusive sample of dignitaries; and, even if Obama did not go "off message" in this setting, there was a faint sense of constraint in his rhetorical strategies that had been absent on Sunday. He had not really given such a speech in the past, because he had not previously been required (by protocol if by nothing else) to address the occasion itself, which was quite another matter from addressing the people who had made that occasion possible.

Nevertheless, that sense of constraint was not particularly strong. For most of "we the people," Obama was still speaking to us. If he sounded a bit more formal than usual, well, everything else about the occasion was far more formal than any previous setting for one of his speeches. If it was fundamentally "all about the occasion," then there is no doubt that he rose to that occasion, leaving us all confident that he was more the prepared to face his first full day at his new job.

Seeing is Believing

I am not that big on satellite pictures and (Lord knows) I muster little enthusiasm for Google; but the photographs that Stephen Shankland posted on his Underexposed blog for CNET News probably provide the best way to get a good sense of how many people turned out to brave the cold just of the sake of situating themselves somewhere between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument while Barack Obama took the Oath of Office. The images came from GeoEye-1, which will shortly be Google's new source for Google Earth and Google Maps. As Shankland observed, the crowd formed clusters around large television monitors set up for the occasion (as they had been at Sunday's concert).

The Music is the Message?

I noticed that, for the entrance of the Clintons, the Marine Band chose to play the first movement from Ralph Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite. I am less interested in the choice of a British composer than I am with the title of the song that is central to this particular movement. The title is "Seventeen Come Sunday;" and those of us who know the words are probably wondering if there was a hidden message for Bill in this selection!

Tweeting Trumps Reflecting

Yesterday I observed that, for all the well-orchestrated entertainment that HBO had delivered in their We Are One special (which my wife insisted on watching for a second time), the high point occurred when Barack Obama walked to the podium and once again addressed a massive crowd with a combination of both substance and style that I have come to appreciate. (I have to confess that I was impressed with how well Jamie Foxx had nailed that style; and, if the brief camera glimpses were representative, it looked like Obama was impressed, as well as amused, too!) This is how I summarized that substance/style blend yesterday:

After eight years of George W. Bush raising our fears to levels of hysteria and then getting away with abuses of power by treating us all like scared children, Obama demonstrated, once again, his skill at addressing us as sensible adults.

I elaborated on this "adult perspective" at the end of November, after examining the texts of the recordings that George W. Bush made for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress:

What runs through all of these texts is the invocation of simplistic formulas that substitute for serious reflection and thus lead to the distorted view of reality that has been the real legacy of the last eight years.

The "adult nature" of Obama's speeches derive significantly from not only the reflective stance that he takes but also in the way he enjoins us to reflect along with him, since it is only through such reflection that we shall be able to extricate our country and ourselves from the almost innumerable messes in which we are now bemired.

I found myself "reflecting on reflection" this morning while reading "How to get social on Inauguration Day," which Caroline McCarthy filed on the Webware section of the CNET Web site. This is what she submitted at 5:36 (Pacific time) this morning:

If you thought that social-media sites were foaming at the mouth on Election Day in an attempt to get the most eye-catching, mashed-up, user-generated gimmicks in place, you might not be too surprised to find out that the social Web has gone just as nutty over the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

Here's a roll call of a few notables: There's an official user-sourced inauguration blog that uses collaborative platform Tumblr to post everything from recommended links to funny photos of people posing next to cardboard cut-outs of Obama. Social network Facebook has partnered with CNN for CNN Live, which displays participating members' election-related status messages in a feed next to a live stream of the ceremony. MySpace, meanwhile, has collaborated with Ashton Kutcher's Katalyst Media for a celeb-studded "Presidential Pledge" project.

Cable network Current will be displaying related messages from Twitter on-screen in its inauguration coverage (which will also be streamed on Current.com), much as it did during the presidential debates.

Also on the live-streaming front, Web video hubs like Joost and Hulu--in addition to the sites of just about every major broadcaster--will be showing inauguration coverage with varying degrees of user commentary and interactivity.

Not to mention the fact that a zillion of the Twitterati, from reporters to on-air anchors to random bystanders to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, are actually in D.C. for the occasion. It shouldn't be too hard to track down their raw commentary, especially since gossip blog Gawker is mining through notable media figures' "tweets" to poke fun at them.

If that were not enough, here are the updates that have appeared to this story since I started writing my own post:

6:56 a.m. PT: AllVoices.com, a "citizen journalism" site, appears to have been hacked on Inauguration Day, with the entire site replaced by a text message that says "HI ETHAN." This tip comes from the Twitter feed of Rachel Sterne, whose site GroundReport is also in the citizen news business.

Meanwhile, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter has Twittered that cell phone service in D.C. is already showing signs of stress; he says that he can text but not call.

7:05 a.m. PT: Digital marketing agency Deep Focus has created Tweet The Inauguration, which aggregates Twitter updates that have, say, the word "inauguration" in them or are accompanied by the #inaug09 hash tag (which the Twitter community has generally accepted to delineate inaugural tweets. It's a lot like Current's strategy. My only gripe? It only displays one tweet at a time.

7:14 a.m. PT: Tim Shey reports via Twitter that the live broadcasts from both Hulu and CNN.com were too slow. "We went to good old digital broadcast: NBC in HD."

7:19 a.m. PT: A Twitter user asked me how you can watch the inauguration on your iPhone. I pointed him to Ustream.tv's inauguration stream. The Ustream app is brand-new in Apple's App Store.

Also, I'm noticing that Twitter is loading a little more slowly.

7:22 a.m. PT: If you want a report that's more on-the-ground and less about whether Twitter has crashed yet or not, check out our sister site, CBSNews.com, and its Political Hotsheet.

7:24 a.m. PT: Media pundit Jeff Jarvis has Twittered that he's having issues with Ustream's iPhone app while attempting to stream inauguration coverage. "Just as I tweeted I was watching live TV on my iPhone with UStream, it crashed," Jarvis lamented. "Now it's buffering. Tough day to launch this."

7:27 a.m. PT: Have a look at Twitter Search's top trending topics: " #inaug09, Happy Inauguration, #inauguration, Washington, White House, President Obama, Hulu, #tcot, National Mall, MSNBC."

7:29 a.m. PT: One Twitter user is very happy to have found a live stream with closed captioning, on the Senate's Web site.

7:31 a.m. PT: Yup, Twitter's having issues. "Twitter already starting to fail under the load," one user reports. "I'm not even getting the whale when it does."

7:33 a.m. PT: Another Twitter user says that Ustream.tv's live feed is holding up better than Hulu's.

7:35 a.m. PT: Loads of Twitter users are directing me to TweetGrid, another aggregation site. The TweetGrid app has created an inauguration-specific site, but it's already starting to periodically get downtime errors.

7:38 a.m. PT: What am I watching? I've found Ustream's coverage to be very stable.

7:46 a.m. PT: Dispatch from our wacky-news correspondent, Stephen Shankland: "A viral marketing stunt at its finest: Trident's site called Joe Biden's teeth. Upload your smiling photo and give them your address and they'll give you a pushpin on a Google maps mashup and send you some gum in 6 to 8 weeks."

7:47 a.m. PT: In case you're tired of whatever live stream you're watching, here's a very interesting article about how Obama's inauguration may be one of the biggest days for the Internet--literally.

7:51 a.m. PT: Just tried to load Paste Magazine's Web app "Obamicon Me," which stylizes any photo you give it to look like artist Shepard Fairey's now-iconic "HOPE" poster. The site's still up--but taking an awfully long time to load.

7:54 a.m. PT: Another inauguration aggregator: Twinauguration.com. I'm checking it out now.

7:56 a.m. PT: Somebody is aggregating inauguration-related posts to TwitPic, the mobile photo service that syncs to Twitter. TwitPic crashed when it was the source of the first close-up photo of last week's Hudson River plane crash: think it'll stay afloat during Inauguration Day?

8:01 a.m. PT: San Francisco counterculture blog Laughing Squid has linked to some Flickr photos detailing how pranksters changed every sign on the city's Bush St. to "Obama St."

8:05 a.m. PT: Lots of Twitterers have been talking about the fact that outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney is at the inauguration in a wheelchair after pulling a muscle in his back. We hope that Cheney makes a speedy recovery, but that hasn't stopped the Web's snarkmongerers from comparing the much-vilified vice president to the likes of the villainous Mr. Potter from It's A Wonderful Life and Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.

Meanwhile, I have the Joost feed from CBS running on one of my Firefox tabs, and the truth is that right now the media (professional or "social") seem to be doing little more than filling all that bandwidth space with babble. My greatest fear is that, when Obama finally delivers his Inaugural Address, he will have to contend with the momentum of all this babble.

John Cage used to tell stories about his studying Zen with Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki at Columbia University. My favorite of these stories concerns a lecture that Suzuki gave on how to attend a lecture. Suzuki began by stressing that the most important thing in attending a lecture was to avoid taking notes, the point being that you needed to focus on the lecture, rather than your efforts to compose notes about it. Cage realized that he was sitting next to a woman who was furiously scribbling away into her notebook. He gave her a polite nudge and whispered to her to ask if she had heard what Suzuki had just said about not taking notes. She suddenly froze her scribbling and frantically examined the page in front of her. Then she relaxed and replied to Cage, "You're right, I have it written down right here in my notes!"

This seems like the appropriate cautionary tale of the day for those who have become so obsessed with their social media that they feel they must always be transmitting something to somebody. We know from Obama's track record of oratory that the best way we can honor him, particularly on this historic day, will be to drop everything (including our texting devices) and listen. With any luck that listening will beget reflection; and that capacity for reflection may be more important than the new occupant of the Oval Office in getting this country out of its messes over the coming four years.

A Timely Celebration for the Times

There has been a fair amount of discussion (sometimes contentious) on Web sites such as Truthdig over whether or not the celebratory excesses surrounding the Inauguration of Barack Obama are in order in a time of economic crisis. However, when compared beside similar excesses, whether they involve giving awards in the entertainment industry or holding political conventions, We Are One demonstrated that, once again, HBO knows as much about the craft of putting together a good show (particularly one that is broadcast live) as it does about lining up the talent for that show. I had not planned to watch this broadcast, but my wife really wanted to see it. Since it began while we were having lunch, I joined her for the beginning and ending, dropping in for samples during the middle. While I am not big on this particular line of entertainment, I must again emphasize that noun "craft" to HBO's credit. The whole event held to schedule impeccably and with minimal hitches. One does not encounter that often these days, and it testifies to the simple principle that even the most joyous of celebrations still benefit from serious planning.

Phil Gallo was impressively efficient in getting his review to the Variety Web site, but I did not give it a serious reading until this morning. Gallo is not of my generation; but I was glad to see the extent to which he was moved by what I felt was the high point of the entertainment schedule:

The afternoon's penultimate moment again found Springsteen, joined this time by Pete Seeger and a different choir, singing Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," a song once viewed as a leftist national anthem that the Boss rightfully referred to as "the greatest song written about our home." The perf was a moment of community with no star turns, a song that worked off of a collective voice of the people onstage and the thousands gathered around the reflecting pool on the Mall. It was the song that did the best job of reinforcing and galvanizing the thoughts that had been expressed throughout the day and the Obama campaign.

The only thing missing from this account was the reminder that Seeger had been blacklisted during most of the Fifties as a result of the government's obsession with "Un-American Activities," whose abuses of civil liberties now pale in comparison to the revival of such practices in the name of "Homeland Security." Seeger was the one guy on the program who had experienced the previous generation of fear-based threats to the Constitution; and here he was, still standing and still singing (if in a far weaker voice) as we are now emerging from the efforts of the Bush Administration to repeat that particularly ugly stage of our national history. Put another way, Seeger was the one guest at this party who could teach the guest of honor a thing or two about "the audacity of hope."

Note that I called this "the high point of the entertainment schedule." Gallo did not write anything about Obama's address near the end of the party. I do not fault him for that, since this was not part of his "entertainment beat." Still, while the "serious political reporters" are probably gearing up for tomorrow's Inaugural Address, this speech was definitely one for the books. After all, it was delivered the day before today's King Holiday on the same site that Martin Luther King had delivered one of the most important speeches of the twentieth century (with no assistance from HBO or any other major entertainment corporation) to a gathering as impressive as the one that turned out for this "people's celebration" of the Inauguration. However, while King mustered all of his rhetorical powers to inspire us with his dream of the future, Obama focused on the present, choosing to carry a torch passed not by King but by Franklin Roosevelt.

Very early in the show, Laura Linney introduced the footage of Roosevelt's first Inaugural Address when, from the depths of the Great Depression, he reminded the country, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." After eight years of George W. Bush raising our fears to levels of hysteria and then getting away with abuses of power by treating us all like scared children, Obama demonstrated, once again, his skill at addressing us as sensible adults. He stressed that we should work towards gradual improvement, rather than expecting miracles; and he reminded us that, whatever the improvements might be, there would also be setbacks. Most importantly, he maintained the theme that improvements will come when we work together to achieve them (even if he did not dwell on the problem that coming up with good ways to work together will probably have its own setbacks). None of these points were new, but the joyous mood of celebration may have provided the right context for us to be reminded that the most audacious hope of all might be that the United States is about to return to the world of sensible and responsible adults. This was an occasion to appreciate the global extent of HBO coverage, because, beyond the level of the entertainment factor, this was a message for the entire world to hear.

An Official Response to Charter 08

One of the high points of the first issue of The New York Review in 2009 was the publication of the full text of Charter 08, translated into English from the original Chinese by Perry Link, who also provided an introduction and postscript. Link's introduction describes this document has "signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens," ascribing the title to "admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia," an organization founded by Václav Havel (among others) to lobby for Czech conformity to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This admiration was reflected by the publication of Charter 08 on December 10, the 60th anniversary of the ratification of that Declaration. Reading Charter 08 one also sees the clear influence of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, as well as the political philosophers who had been their inspiration. Knowing what we know about the official Chinese reaction to dissidence, the publication of Charter 08 was a bold move.

Early this morning Ian Ransom reported for Reuters on what may be a definitive "party line" response to Charter 08. That response came from Jia Qinglin, China's fourth-most senior official, and includes the following injunctions to Chinese Communist Party members:

Build a line of defense to resist Western two-party and multi-party systems, bicameral legislature, the separation of powers and other kinds of erroneous ideological interferences.

Consciously abide by the Party's political discipline and resolutely safeguard the Party's centralized unity.

I find the use of the adjective "erroneous" particularly interesting. I forget the source of the joke I heard that Democrats think Republicans are stupid, while Republicans think Democrats are wrong; but the point of the joke is that both premises basically cut off all opportunity for discussion, deliberation, and ultimate resolution of differences. Neither is worse than the other, since each refuses to allow for what Jürgen Habermas (in his Theory of Communicative Action) called "the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims" on both sides of the argument. To accuse Chinese citizens of stupidity might reflect badly on the country's educational processes; so the most face-saving way to condemn Charter 08 is to assert that it is in error. Needless to say, the second injunction makes it clear that the Party has no truck with Habermas, since its "political discipline" is not based on "intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims." Thus, the Chinese Communist Party will "deal with" Charter 08 by allowing it to "pass unnoticed," a strategy that, sadly, we have seen in the workings of our own government, most recently in response to our economic crisis. Perhaps Niall Ferguson's remarks about "Chimerica" are not as outrageous as they may seem to some of us!

Final Days of Damage

Perhaps the real legacy of the Bush Administration will be what Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson called the "sweeping array of 'midnight regulations'" (in an article appositely entitled "Bush's Final F.U."); and it seems as if, as long as there remains a midnight for letting another demon out of the box, the White House is ready with one. The latest of these zingers was reported by Jane Kay, Environment Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle:

The U.S. Interior Department, acting in President Bush's final days in office, proposed on Friday opening up 130 million acres off of California's coast to drilling for oil and natural gas, including areas off Humboldt and Mendocino counties and from San Luis Obispo south to San Diego.

After a hands-off policy for a quarter-century, the administration submitted plans to sell oil and gas leases for most of the U.S. coast, from the Gulf of Maine to Chesapeake Bay and the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Coast.

New drilling also was proposed in Alaska's Bristol Bay, one of the nation's most plentiful sources of fish, and the Arctic Ocean.

Kay led with California for the obvious reason; but, as her second paragraph makes clear, there is precious little American coast that will not be affected by a final "rebel yell" of "Drill, baby, drill!" The good news is that any lease or sale of offshore lands for drilling will not happen overnight, which means that, once in office, Barack Obama will be in a position to cancel the entire proposal. Still, the last thing Obama will need on his first day in office is the prospect of having to clean up one more mess. I rather like the way that Richard Charter of the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund up it:

What we see today is the political equivalent of a rock star trashing the hotel room right before checkout.

This may turn out to be the best way to summarize the Bush legacy.

The Lesson of the Story

The BBC News Web site has a story that Paul Moss filed while on a visit to Masada. Here is how it begins:

"You cannot surrender, you cannot give up. You should fight to the last second," the young Israeli boy said after scratching his head and thinking for just a few seconds.

He was talking about what he had learned from his tour of Masada, the ancient site where a band of Jewish rebels once held out against the might of the Roman Empire.

The tour prompted a similar conclusion from one of his female classmates: "It's really important to stand up for yourself."

"Especially now that we're at war. We need to do whatever it takes," she told me.

It is something of a rite of passage for Israeli schoolchildren - a trip to Masada - as obligatory a part of their upbringing as exams and sports days.

And Masada is a remarkable story, albeit one that is mired in legend.

The rebels, or Zealots as they were known, are supposed to have held the Romans at bay for several years before retreating to their final hold-out in about 70 AD.

Then, rather than be captured, they committed collective suicide - men killing their own families, afterwards each other, until one remained to kill himself.

Unsettling lesson

"We want to show the children that this place is where people fought for their freedom, that you have to fight for your freedom, and give even your life," one of the teachers at Masada told me.

She makes an explicit connection between what happened at Masada and Israel's present conflict in Gaza.

"They want us to vanish from the world. But it will never happen. Masada will never fall again!"

I asked her if it was not perhaps manipulative to teach such a profound and unsettling lesson to young children.

"No," she insisted. "it's just realistic."

I would actually agree with that final sentence, but I would fault Wood for failing to ask a far more critical question. Is the Masada story just as relevant to the "zealots" of Hamas in the embattled Gaza Strip? It is all very well and good to glorify defiance, but what do you do when your enemy is as defiant as you are? Israel should have recognized the relevance of these questions when they discovered that they could not subdue Hezbollah with the same strategies that won them the territories occupied during the Six-Day War. Unfortunately, they share with the Bush Administration this faith-based fixation of being on "the right side" in a battle of good against evil, which may explain why the only "international dialogue" that Israel wishes to conduct seriously over the current situation in Gaza seems to be with the United States.

The Crowd Speaks, but Does it Speak Wisely?

Back when I tried to take Dan Froomkin to task for his Wiki White House proposal, I tried to stress that the ways of governance are not so much mysterious as they are subtle. Anyone who has had to sit on a jury that did not immediately decide on a verdict probably has at least adequate appreciation of that subtlety; but only a small percentage of our voting public get to have such an informative first-hand experience. Others can acquire that appreciation by following the news; but only if they bother to read (or watch on television) more than headline content. Nevertheless the wisdom-of-crowds evangelists continue to ride roughshod over their opponents, sometimes to the point of glossing over actual evidence.

As Tim Dickinson pointed out in the latest post to his National Affairs blog, that evidence can be informative to those who bother to open their eyes and view it. In Dickinson's case the evidence comes from the recently launched Citizen's Briefing Book, which is not a shared-content-authored Wiki but simply an instance of reader-rated content:

The Obama transition team at Change.gov have implemented an innovative idea called the Citizen’s Briefing Book, a way for average citizens to suggest and vet policy proposals that will ultimately be presented to the president.

Anyone can post an idea.

From there it’s kind of like ReadIt, where users can give other people’s ideas a thumbs up or thumbs down.

So what has bubbled to the top among the reader/raters of this site? Here is what Dickinson discovered:

The top three citizen proposals in order:

Ending Marijuana Prohibition

Bullet Trains & Light Rail

An end to the government sponsored abstinence education to be replaced by an introduction of age appropriate sex education.

It saddens me to realize that most readers these days have probably never seen Jack Benny fold his arms, stare straight into his audience (or television camera), and declaim nothing other than the word, "Well!," since that is sort of the way I felt after reading this list. Where is the economic crisis that supposedly motivated the electorate to choose Obama in the first place? Where are the resources (human and material) being squandered in the name of imperial adventurism hiding behind the mask of the Global War on Terror? Where is the fact that we have been trying to reform health care since the early days of the Clinton Administration and have not yet managed to get to square one?

My efforts to refute Froomkin involved the suggestion that public addiction to consumerism may play a role in addling that purported "wisdom" of crowds. The three proposals that Dickinson encountered are highly consumerist in nature: They are all aspects of "stuff" on which we can spend our money (even if it is nothing more than a condom). However, they all assume that we have that money to spend: that we have not lost our money through medical bills we cannot afford, unrealistic real estate purchases, or portfolios that tanked along with the rest of the stock exchanges. It is as if Barack Obama has restored our optimism in the future without marshalling our will to work together to build that future (which was the most important message of his campaign). Put another way, now that Obama has been elected, the crowd that elected him is less inclined to listen to his strong but gentle injunctions to hard work and more inclined towards Tom Friedman's pie-in-the-sky promises of the next road to wealth creation. Thus, when it comes to policy proposals, they are more interested in what they will do with the money they do not yet have than in how they will get and manage that money in the first place. So does anyone think that the Obama Administration will seriously entertain what I previously called "the moral equivalent of a twelve-step program" to deal with that problem of addiction that is still very much with us?

"Was He Still Alive?"

I shall be interested to see what sort of obituaries are published following the announcement of the death of Andrew Wyeth. When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 (on April 15, in ironic date in light of many of his critical views about the United States), it seemed as if many of my friends reacted by asking, "Was he still alive?" I honestly cannot remember the last time I heard Wyeth's name raised in any context; nor do I recall reading any accounts of the retrospective exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 (which, according to the report in the London Telegraph "drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15½ weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist"). Worse, it is now hard for me to think of any reference to "Christina's World" as being anything more than a cliché (which probably has less to do with any aesthetic criteria and more to do with the overexposure the painting has suffered). The Telegraph report includes an Agence France-Presse photograph of George W. Bush with his arm over Wyeth's shoulder, which (accidentally?) raises the question of legacy. Whether Wyeth's legacy will fade into the same shadows of insignificance that now cloak Sartre, at least it will not suffer the infamy of the last President to honor him.

Going out with an Even Fifteen?

I doubt that George W. Bush's farewell speech was designed to bump his count of Chutzpah of the Week awards up to fifteen. For one thing the number will never be an even one, since the count is influenced by one award that he shared with his entire Administration (regarding the decision not to sign a United Nations declaration on the decriminalization of homosexuality); but, since the true "legacy of Bush" will be the association of his name with nouns like "chutzpah," "denial," and other nouns left as an exercise for the reader to provide (not to mention a metaphor I recently invoked), it seemed appropriate to recognize the "chutzpah content" of what most of us hope will be his last words. What made the speech interesting was his last-ditch effort to prioritize his eight-year record in terms of what he thought were the positive high points. The result was one of those instances of "double-barreled chutzpah," with ammunition for each barrel salted (as always) with a generous sprinkling of denial. Let me consider these two barrels in the reverse order from how they were covered by Al Jazeera English (which was probably the order in the speech, which I could not bring myself to experience "first-hand"):

1. Given that the economic crisis was one of the major factors behind the American people voting for change, so to speak, it was rather a surprise that Bush would have the chutzpah to say anything about the economy at all:

   Bush also defended his economic record and in particular the $700bn bailout of Wall Street firms earlier this year in attempt to stave-off a financial crisis.
   
   "Facing the prospect of a financial collapse, we took decisive measures to safeguard our economy," Bush said from the White House.
   
   "The toll would be far worse if we had not acted."

   In retrospect those "decisive measures" seemed to involve little more than fear-mongering and running around like decapitated chickens (as if to demonstrate that the fear was justified). I hope I am not alone in my desire that the new Administration will be one in which any such "decisive measures" are preceded by cooperative deliberation on the parts of both the Executive and Legislative branches, an approach to decision making that seems to still be beyond the comprehension of our "Decider." The chutzpah of these remarks is further underscored now that more analytic minds are beginning to suggest that the bailout money spent thus far has had absolutely no effect, thus holding that last quoted sentence up to question if not falsifying it flat-out. Still, in the grand scheme of things, this is the weaker of the two barrels in Bush's chutzpah gun.

2. The stronger barrel, as it were, is, of course, the even more fear-riddled terrorism barrel:

   In his final televised address Bush insisted that his response to the attacks, including the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would define his legacy.
   
   "There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results - America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil," he said in the speech broadcast live from the White House.

   That last sentence finally clarifies just what it was that Bush meant by a "Global War on Terror." He is right that there can be little debate about the premise in that sentence, but that means that terrorist attacks in any other country just do not signify. The "Global War on Terror" was not about making the world safe from terrorism (as a worthy variation on the old Wilsonian ideal); it was about taking our war on terror to any part of the world where we felt it was necessary. When we combine this insight with recognizing the extent to which the attacks on September 11, 2001 might have been prevented had the President paid more attention to warning signs from his intelligence sources (sources that were later harnessed to make up stories about "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist), any claim that "homeland security" is part of the Bush legacy is, as I like to say, chutzpah of the highest order.

Fifteen is a good number for Chutzpah of the Week awards. The awards can be arranged in a triangular array, rather like bowling pins with an additional row of five behind the row of four. Come to think of it, that would make for an interesting new variation of bowling. Imagine having fifteen pins at the end of the lane, each with Bush's face staring back at you. That would be an appropriate legacy for the last eight years! This sounds like an excellent opportunity for Brunswick or AMF to contribute to economic recovery with a new product that could have considerable mass appeal, particularly on Main Street!

Paying a Whole Orchestra of Pipers

I am glad to see (finally) that I am not the only one grousing over the amount of money going into the whole Inaugural celebration. In better economic times I might have been more sympathetic to pulling out all the celebratory stops for what is clearly one of the most significant historic occasions I am likely to witness in my lifetime. However, the economy is in bad shape, we are being braced for the likelihood that things will not be much better in 2009, and at least one of the commentators on NPR's Marketplace finally came out and said point-blank that all of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bailout money spent thus far has had absolutely no effect one way or the other (whether or not we have a clear idea of what the recipients actually did with that money). If we then take into account that things are still a mess in Iraq (where our adventures have played a major role in running up our debt), then is it not worth asking why the outgoing "Surge Administration" is being replaced by an incoming "Splurge Administration?"

So, as I say, I am glad I am not alone in my kvetching. Marie Cocco's latest column for the Washington Post, which has now been posted on Truthdig, has taken this bull (double entendre intended) by the horns:

Sorry to rain on the inaugural parade, but we need to find a better way. The financing of President-elect Barack Obama’s big day is just as much of an embarrassment to the country as the financing of inaugurations past.

First we force financially strapped municipal and state governments—particularly the District of Columbia—to pay enormous costs for security, transportation and emergency preparedness that simply shouldn’t be their responsibility. Then, because we want to stage an extravaganza that is as big and as bountiful as the day seems to require, we have the president-elect tap the same deep-pocketed donors who finance political campaigns.

Most of her column deals with those "deep-pockets donors," which is as it should be since it is hard to believe that influence will not continue to oil the machinery that turns the wheels of the Federal Government. The real problem, however, is that I have yet to see what the total bill for all of these festivities is likely to be. Cocco only addressed the first sentence in the second paragraph:

A part of inaugural financing that almost certainly will be worse this year is the portion that comes from the District of Columbia government and, because next week’s swearing-in is expected to draw a record crowd of about 2 million, is set to be the costliest in history. Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose city already faces a budget shortfall due to the weak economy (and which already cut funds for housing, health care and transportation to close last year’s budget gap), has told Congress that municipal inaugural costs are expected to balloon to $47 million. That’s about triple Washington’s cost four years ago.

Because of the enormous crowds and the strain on regional transportation and emergency systems, the governors of Maryland and Virginia also have complained. The three jurisdictions estimate a total expenditure of about $75 million—yet Congress has so far allocated just $15 million to the District of Columbia government to defray its expense. At Fenty’s request, Bush has declared the inauguration to be a federal “emergency” so that additional federal funds can be made available, but it is unclear how much extra money will result.

Those are pretty serious numbers, possibly even serious enough to reduce budget items such as the Inaugural Ball to statistical noise. (Are Beyoncé, The Boss, and Bono appearing pro bono? Sorry, that one was hard to resist!) No matter how you look at, we are going to see a lot of money going in for one big circus at a time when there are too many voices (particularly those living under those "financially strapped municipal and state governments") crying for bread (not to mention clothing and shelter). Perhaps, in light of the budgets currently being considered for economic recovery, the bottom-line cost of the Inaugural shindig could also be called "statistical noise;" but, even if reallocating that amount was more symbolic than substantive, would it not still be the case that it would be a powerful symbol that the "change we can believe in" was actually in the works?

Serious Drama Follows Opera to the Movies

While I was arguing that "I would have paid the price of an HD Metropolitan Opera movie ticket to see any of the London Symphony Orchestra performances of the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during its 2007–2008 season, all conducted by Valery Gergiev, particularly if the video was directed in the spirit of [Jordan] Whitelaw and [Barbara Willis] Sweete," plans seem to have been under way to allow me to enjoy Britain's National Theatre as an alternative. Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent for the London Telegraph, just released the following story:

Around 50 independent cinemas around Britain, but not in central London, will screen a single night of four productions, including the Picturehouse chain. They will use satellite transmission to beam in high definition pictures. About 100 cinemas in North America, Australia and elsewhere will also screen them within 24 hours.

The first production to go live in cinemas will be Phèdre, a French classical tragedy, which will star Dame Helen [Mirren] in the title role.

Outlining what is to be called 'NT Live' Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, said the filmed performance would take place a couple of weeks after Phèdre opened in June.

He admitted using Dame Helen as a figurehead to draw attention to the idea - and get fellow actors and actresses on board.

"The reason I said Phèdre [would be the first production to go live] is that Helen said 'Yes' and I dare anybody to say no," he said.

Mirren, 63, was invested as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2003. Three years later she won an Oscar for best actress for her title-role performance in The Queen. She last appeared at the National Theatre in 2004.

Hytner said independent cinemas rather than multiplexes have been chosen because he did not think the screenings would appeal to viewers of the latest "gross-out teen comedy".

He and his colleagues have yet to chose the other three productions to be filmed, he noted, adding: "We will look for stuff that really has wide appeal."

Personally, I think this is a great idea. I have not been particularly happy with the opportunities for serious theater in San Francisco, and things have not been much better in the broader scope of the Bay Area. As a matter of fact, I am not sure I have had an opportunity to see any Racine since I moved to the Bay Area in 1995. To be fair, those opportunities are pretty sparse anywhere in the United States; and the only time I ever saw Phèdre was during my student days in the greater Boston area. Since Hytner himself has a good eye for cinema/video capture, I am hoping that he will draw upon video talent as good as the team behind the Metropolitan Opera productions. I am not sure that Racine falls into that category of "stuff that really has wide appeal;" but we certainly cannot discount Mirren's star power. (Think of the star power behind the Lincoln Center production of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy, which led to New York bookstores selling out their copies of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers.) Having now seen HD from the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, as well as the Met in New York, I have been wondering when I would get to see something from London; and I certainly appreciate this news that the National Theatre will be leading the way into this application of the new technology.

The Dark Side of Ferguson's Thesis

I was far too tired last night to try watching The Ascent of Money at 10 PM, but my VTR captured it. Thus, I should be able to digest it at a time when my mind is fresher; and, if necessary, I can deal with it in smaller doses, rather than trying to take in the full two-hour packaged in one gulp. Nevertheless, I found myself thinking about "Ferguson's thesis" while reading "A Chill on 'The Guardian.'" This is a piece that Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief of The Guardian, wrote for the latest issue of The New York Review, in which he tries to provide an expository account of the prolonged (and highly expensive) history around a libel suit that global retail giant Tesco filed against The Guardian. After reading this piece, I am hesitant to provide too many details about the case itself, save that The Guardian had made mistakes in a story about Tesco's tax avoidance strategies (and a footnote makes it clear that "Tax avoidance does not mean illegal tax evasion in the American sense"); and Tesco chose to take legal action even after The Guardian had publicly acknowledged and apologized for their errors.

Nevertheless, there is one paragraph from the article that throws an interesting light on what Robert Skidelsky (coincidentally in that same issue of The New York Review) took to be the primary theme of Niall Ferguson's book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World:

Throughout history men have been more ingenious at finding ways to make money than to make things.

My first reaction upon reading this was that it provided a bracing reality check to all those technology evangelists (particularly the ones with pulpits in Silicon Valley), who not only believe passionately that technology can solve all problems but also have managed to inject their religion into such gatherings as the World Economic Forum, probably to the detriment of the global economy (or at least those in the economy on or over the brink of poverty). However, the paragraph I have in mind from Rusbridger's article reveals the dark side of this theme:

The truth is that the advance tax planning undertaken today by most global companies is as intelligible to the average person as particle physics. This state of incomprehension extends to most journalists, editors, parliamentarians, and, importantly, company directors themselves—executive and nonexecutive. It is the very problem these same people have in trying to understand the epidemic of "innovative financial products." In the middle of October's banking implosion, Dan Bögler, the managing editor of the Financial Times, said:

Unfortunately, financial journalists—and the FT has better-trained financial journalists than others—don't really understand this stuff, and they join a long list of people that starts with bank regulators, central bank regulators and money managers.

Perhaps what is called for is the need for a critique of innovative practices themselves, whether they pertain to making things or money.

The particle physics simile provides a good point of departure for such a critique. I would argue that conversations about science, whether they involve specialists or the lay community, ultimately revolve around the powers of description that are applied to the phenomena being discussed (which regular readers will recognize is the argument I recently tried to make about conversations concerned with the performance of music). The descriptive strategies of science tend to be built upon foundations of defining and exercising appropriate abstractions; and one way to view mathematics is that it provides the "ground rules" for how those abstractions can be both defined and applied. Thus, the insights of pure mathematics often provide new approaches to representation that simplify concepts whose descriptions had previously been complex. My favorite example is the expressiveness of the fundamental operators of vector calculus, which vastly simplified James Clerk Maxwell's four fundamental equations of electromagnetic theory. These days it sometimes feels as if there is a sprint-speed relay race taking place between advances in pure mathematics and the demands for expressive representations required to support conversations about particle physics. Where José Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, once accused experimental science of being "the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre," we now see theoretical physicists seeking advances through the manipulations of complex mathematical representations with little regard to whether or not any "physical reality" (whatever that may mean these days) lies behind those representations. This is not to disown my own doctoral degree in applied mathematics but just to recognize that our powers of effective description do not always keep up with our powers of innovation.

For better or worse, most of us do not have to worry about following any ongoing conversations about particle physics, let alone trying to engage in them. However, what we have learned from our current economic crisis is that the consequences of failing to understand conversations about "innovative financial products" have been extremely serious. Furthermore, it is not as if we had not received warning signs about such consequences. Enron may have been the highest-profile example of innovative thinking that both rose and fell over the failure of those responsible for oversight to "really understand this stuff." However, if Enron led to new regulatory standards for oversight, innovative thinking just shifted the playing field to new domains to exploit. Back when he was at Yahoo! Udi Manber used to say that spam protection is best viewed as an ongoing arms race, and this may be the best metaphor for the relationship between those who try to regulate financial practices for the sake of a common good and those who apply their innovative skills to evading such regulations.

Where, then, does this leave Ferguson's "long view of history?" My guess is that this is the question that will most occupy the back of my mind as I watch his television program. No historical perspective can be trivialized to Jacob Bronowski's "ascent of man." One cannot tell a story of progress without including accounts of regress through wars, plagues, and what the twentieth century came to call "crimes against humanity;" so it is clear that economic history will have its own "accounts of regress." Future historians will probably write about our current circumstances in that light, just as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve wrote about the Great Depression. So I suppose I shall watch The Ascent of Money to see whether or not Ferguson is as perceptive about regress as he is about progress. John Kenneth Galbraith was able to do that in his television series, The Age of Uncertainty; and watching his program prompted me to read his book for more thorough reflection. Hopefully, I shall emerge from my two hours with Ferguson with the feeling that his book will also sustain such reflection.

Choosing Hillary's Choice

There is a good chance that Hillary Clinton's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in preparation for the Senate vote on her appointment as Secretary of State, will be one of the most closely watched and commented stories of the day (and not just in the United States). In The Wire the bowl of shit became the operative metaphor for the relationships between the Mayor of Baltimore and all the interest groups (both formal and informal) that stood between him and the electorate that put him in office, each bowl being basically a demand of an interest group that must be satisfied (i.e. consumed/consummated). During the current transition period, however, the metaphor seems more applicable to the legacy of the Bush Administration, which our outgoing President keeps trying to place in favorable light without ever realizing that the lighting never affects the contents of the bowl. One of the largest of these bowls would have to be the one cooked up by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, winner of multiple Chutzpah of the Week awards, which means that it is now destined for Clinton's table.

However, if Daniel Dombey's report for the Financial Times is a reliable one, then we can assume that Clinton will not be one to languish in the world of fetid metaphors:

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, which like the full Senate is expected to confirm her appointment, Mrs Clinton sought to strike a much less ideological and confrontational line than that carved out by the exiting Bush administration.

Mrs Clinton said that Middle East peace was a top priority of the incoming team, as was working with Beijing and Moscow on “vital security and economic issues like terrorism, proliferation, climate change and reforming financial markets.”

She said: “Foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology; on facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice,” and called in her statement for “cooperative engagement” and the use of “smart power” rather than just “hard” or “soft” power.

She added: “We must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own and the world cannot solve them without America… America leadership has been wanting but is still wanted… With smart power, diplomacy will be at the vanguard of our foreign policy.”

This is encouraging language in the wake of a President who, even in his final days, continues to drum fear of those who would wreak damage upon the United States, choosing to view such threats as abstract minions of evil, rather than motivated agents, thus closing the door on the premise that understanding the motives might benefit our "homeland security." It is also the language of one for whom Dennis Ross' book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, is likely to serve as more than a paperweight, thus elevating Ross to a status where his own government takes him as seriously as Vladimir Putin appears to do. Indeed, according to a New York Times story by Mark Lander, Ross may be up for another tour of duty:

Mr. Ross, 60, is expected to receive a senior post at the State Department, officials said, directing policy on Iran and advising on the rest of the Middle East.

However, before we haul out that metaphor of "a new day" (also in the narrative of Baltimore politics in The Wire), I have one cautionary remark about Clinton's choice of words. In an ideal world her preference for "facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice" would be laudable; but ours is a "postmodern" world in which every agent constructs his/her own reality (usually based on those motives that the Bush Administration chose to ignore with its black-and-white classifications of everyone as good or evil). What Clinton may have overlooked is that even the most concrete of items of evidence are still subject to interpretation by those who examine them; and, being all-too-human, we cannot banish our emotions and prejudices and perform such interpretations in a purely "objective world." The key lesson of Ross' book is that statecraft is conducted by people, rather than embodied vehicles for principles; and all people act on their motives, which means that they do not always act according to any objective rationality. (In the language of postmodernism, they engage in resistance, rather than logical opposition.) Perhaps the greatest threat to Clinton's effectiveness would be the influence of AIPAC, though which she would try to apply such objective rationality to the "facts and evidence" coming out of Israel without giving due consideration to the complex web of motives in which every Israeli (not to mention every Palestinian) is entangled. What remains to be seen is whether my optimism over Clinton's desire to "build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries" will be sufficient to counter my concerns over that dark glass of objective rationality.

Finding Substance on Television

Forgive me for taking a rather ho-hum attitude towards the Motion Pictures category of the Golden Globe Awards given out each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I recognize that this is the Hollywood part of the event, through which all those foreign journalists can show off how much they enjoy being posted in Hollywood and serving as the front line for Oscar buzz. However, with the exception of the award for Colin Farrell in In Bruges (which simply demonstrated that he had the chops for Martin McDonagh, regardless of how Hollywood wanted to push him as "property"), the real action was over in the Television category.

Consider the complete list (courtesy of the Associated Press):

• Series, Drama: "Mad Men."

• Actor, Drama: Gabriel Byrne, "In Treatment."

• Actress, Drama: Anna Paquin, "True Blood."

• Series, Musical or Comedy: "30 Rock."

• Actor, Musical or Comedy: Alec Baldwin, "30 Rock."

• Actress, Musical or Comedy: Tina Fey, "30 Rock."

• Miniseries or Movie: "John Adams."

• Actress, Miniseries or Movie: Laura Linney, "John Adams."

• Actor, Miniseries or Movie: Paul Giammatti, "John Adams."

• Supporting Actress, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Laura Dern, "Recount."

• Supporting Actor, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Tom Wilkinson, "John Adams."

What this list tells us is that HBO still has "the touch," even if the viewer numbers have not reflected the enthusiasm of the foreign press. John Adams cleaned up on every possible category, simply because Abigail provided the only female role of substance. However, if the women of the eighteenth century were too diminished by the historical record, Laura Dern made up for the deprivation with her no-prisoners approach to Katherine Harris in the "contemporary history" of Recount. Meanwhile, although I would not deny Mad Men its best dramatic series award, the real acting in that category was best displayed by Gabriel Byrne and Anna Paquin, both of whom got to work with some of the most interesting material of the season, albeit in radically different ways. With that kind of substance on television, our household has little time for musicals and comedy series; but in this election year at least I could sympathize with the award-winning actor and actress!

In Praise of Naumburg

I may have found a data point that runs contrary to my generally dismal view of music competitions and judges whose interests seem to conflict with what I have called "accountability to the music itself." The source of the data is the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation; and, because San Francisco Performances has an association with the Naumburg Foundation through which they present a recital by each year's Naumburg Competition winner, I have now been able to enjoy two thoroughly "music-based" performances. The first was in 2005 by soprano Sari Gruber; and the second was last night, when I heard 23-year-old cellist David Requiro at Herbst Theatre. I probably should not be surprised that I seem to enjoy Naumburg winners better than those who have won other prizes. Last night I learned that Robert Mann is the current Director of the Naumburg Foundation, the same Robert Mann whom I was extolling on Saturday for his communicative skills in a pedagogical setting. Most important among those skills is his ability to communicate about music, rather than just technique, assuming that technique can only be mastered once one understands the music to which it is being applied.

Requiro is a model example of an up-and-coming musician who appreciates the value of such understanding of the music he plays. Thus, while I often try to look for a unifying theme in a concert program, the primary asset of Requiro's selections was the breadth of repertoire over which he is willing to apply his understanding skills. On the historical time scale the program ranged from Ludwig can Beethoven in the past to William Bolcom in the present, with "stops along the way" for Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, and Gaspar Cassadó. This scope also demonstrated an ability to work with a variety of time scales, from the relatively brief and distinct Beethoven WoO 46 variations (on the "Bei Männern" duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte) and the comparatively short movements of Bolcom's capriccio through the "unified" three movements of the Debussy sonata to the symphonic-scale Brahms F major (Opus 99) sonata. In other words each of the works on the program required its own characteristic approach to execution. Not only did Requiro find that approach in each case; but also his rapport with his accompanist, Elizabeth DeMio, was so thorough that the results always constituted a well-conceived and shared vision.

I also appreciated that the program honored both "abstract" and "representational" approaches to composition. Thus, the symphonic plan of the Brahms sonata was nicely balanced by not only the explicit depictions of Cassadó and Bolcom but also the possibly "hidden program" of the Debussy sonata. (The program notes by Eric Bromberger neglected to mention that Debussy had considered titling this sonata "Pierrot fâché avec la lune" [Pierrot annoyed with the moon]. One has to wonder if this choice of title had anything to do with a reaction of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which had been composed about three years earlier. Debussy fâché avec Schoenberg?) Consequently, the wide diversity of performance challenges also made for an equally wide diversity of listening experiences. One could not ask for more of any concert program.

The Arts of the Artificial

After yesterday's exploration of the premise that a musical performance could be viewed as a designed artifact (albeit a dynamic one), it seems worth while to consider the parallel premise that every musical composition is just as much a designed artifact. Those who romanticize the arts tend to eschew such thinking, forgetting the old saw about art consisting of only 10% inspiration but 90% perspiration. The idea of design as a conscious and highly reflective activity accounts for all of that perspiration; and sometimes our abilities to listen to the results can be facilitated by taking such an "artefactual" stance. I would argue that such a stance was valuable in approaching this week's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall.

The program was arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with Aaron Copland's concert version of music he had written for the 1940 film Our Town. This was followed by the 1929 orchestration of Alban Berg's Opus 6, the three pieces for orchestra, which had been completed in their original form in 1915. The program after the Intermission consisted entirely of Johannes Brahms' first (Opus 68) symphony, completed in 1876.

Much is written about how long it took before Brahms composed his first symphony. There are, of course, those documents that allude to Brahms having been "haunted by Beethoven's shadow;" but my more recent thoughts seem to have tended less to a haunting ghost and more to a passing torch. On the other hand Brahms may well have been haunted by the idea of symphony-as-artifact. Beethoven had certainly broken with any number of conventions as a symphonist, and Robert Schumann was only too happy to pick up that torch in his four efforts to reconceptualize what he felt a symphony could and should be. Given Brahms' closeness to the Schumann family, one could appreciate his reluctance to approach the turf where Schumann had been experimenting so energetically; and that may even explain why it took about twenty years after Schumann's death for Brahms to finally seek his own path on that turf.

Opus 68 is definitely Brahms' own path (Brahms' Way?). Like Schumann, he was interested in taking a more integrated approach; but he was more interested in integration within, rather than across, movements. We encounter this at the very beginning, when the Un poco sostenuto of the first movement reveals itself as an "abstract" of the following Allegro. This, however, is only a "warm-up" for the final movement, whose opening Adagio again lays out the "building blocks" for the Allegro ma non troppo, ma con brio, but with a new architectural twist to the traditional exposition-development-recapitulation structure. The twist comes from folding development and recapitulation together into a single structural unit. As a result the ear experiences the materials of this movement on three scales:

1. The abbreviated "abstract" of the Adagio
2. The elaboration of that "abstract" in the exposition
3. A "higher level" of elaboration that follows the basic plan of the exposition (as the recapitulation does), while introducing development-like embellishments along the way

Brahms definitely found his own turf with this symphony; and, while he never repeated this trick, he was now free to explore new experiments in symphonic structure.

Others have already written about the rather brisk and energetic approach that Michael Tilson Thomas took to conducting this work. Personally, I felt that his sense of pace was exactly what was called for in clarifying all three of those scales of the last movement. This was hardly surprising from a conductor who has mastered the pacing of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony in order to elucidate its far vaster, but still structurally coherent, architecture. Indeed, if we wish to think in terms of a torch passed from Beethoven to Brahms, possibly by way of Schumann, then the next stage would be the passing from Brahms-the-symphonist to Mahler-the-symphonist, with the latter's eighth symphony apotheosizing the entire process. In such a setting we can appreciate the extent to which Thomas brings to his podium an understanding not only of the composition being performed but also of the historical context of that composition.

This brings us to the next chronological level, so to speak, since Thomas tends to approach Berg's orchestral writing in terms of a torch received from Mahler; and part of the historical context has to do with the naming of the composition itself. We already see Schumann resorting to the non-committal noun "piece" (Stuck) for several of his compositions; and we encounter that nomenclature again in Brahms' final piano works. Arnold Schoenberg did the same for his initial experimental ventures for both orchestra and piano, as did Anton Webern as well as Berg. Nevertheless, his Opus 6 "pieces" still have highly dramatic connotations; and it is no surprise to read in Michael Steinberg's program notes that he first saw a performance of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck while working on these pieces. The result is a synthesis of a retrospective view of Mahler with what is almost a sketchbook for the orchestral rhetoric that Berg would summon for his opera based on Büchner's play. Personally, I find it hard to listen to Opus 6 without hearing fragments from the Wozzeck libretto in the back of my head, particularly in the round-dance piece (Reigen) and the concluding surrealistic march.

Also, as is the case with Mahler, this is music that simply cannot be accommodated by the limitations of recording technology. Too many things are happening, and Thomas was in peak form keeping them all properly under control. Indeed, so much is happening that the ear benefits significantly from visual cues as to "where the action is." The result is a ride wilder than anything the Disney folks could have ever conceived and a reminder of just how energizing the experience of musical performance can be.

From an artefactual point of view, Copland's composition was an artifact for an artifact (the film, which was actually an artifact based on an earlier artifact for the stage). Furthermore, that sense of artifact was foremost in Thornton Wilder's mind for the stage play, drawing upon a bare minimum of resources and leaving the rest to the imagination of the audience. I was pleasantly surprised at the extent to which the film honored Wilder's deliberate artificiality, rather than smoothing it over with a "Hollywood treatment." However, if director Sam Wood managed to avoid sliding into Hollywood sentimentality, I fear the same cannot be said of Copland's score. This is not a problem when it is kept under control by skillful film editing; but, taken on its own, it seems to miss the darker and more ironic points that Wilder was able to tease out from his deliberately artificial pastoral setting. Thomas had no trouble giving all of Copland's expressiveness its proper due (thus making up for the brutality of the editing table); but that expressiveness covered up the deliberate artificiality of Wilder's original conception. On the other hand, in the context of the intensity that would follow in the music of both Berg and Brahms, it may have been a good idea to begin the evening with this bit of "quiet time."

Communicating about Music

In the course of my trying to approach a theory of listening to music in terms of a common ground shared by George Herbert Mead and Donald Schön, I have reread my copy of Schön's The Reflective Practitioner and moved on to Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. While much of the theory behind this latter book is little more than a rehash of a case study from the first book, I was particularly drawn to the second book by a "practice" chapter entitled "A Master Class in Musical Performance." The case study of this chapter is supplemented by anecdotal accounts of other classes, one of which involves Bernard Greenhouse (formerly of the Beaux Arts Trio) recalling his cello studies with Pablo Casals. Following the theoretical foundations of the first book, the second explores educational strategies for cultivating the practice of knowing-in-action and then evolving that practice into reflection-in-action. I agree with Schön's premise that this approach is relevant to the study of musical performance, but I believe it is also appropriate to how we learn to be better listeners. Indeed Greenhouse's anecdote about Casals was about learning "how to improvise in Bach;" and it struck me that Casals' method was concerned as much with cultivating Greenhouse's listening skills as his execution skills with his instrument. From this point of view, much (if not most) of the communication that takes place between teacher and student involves the description of musical experiences, either as-heard or as-made. It also stands to reason that such communication involves far more than verbal exchanges, which is one of the paths through which Mead's social behaviorism comes into the picture.

This raises an interesting broader question, which is how we communicate descriptions of anything. Description is one of the fundamental categories of text type theory; but the only thorough account of it that I have encountered has been Philippe Hamon's Du Descriptif (which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been translated into English). I have had one round with this book, and the going was pretty rough. I owe myself another try, but I suspect that my current reading is warming me up for that next bout.

Accepting that description can be a tough nut to crack, there is still the Mead-based behavioral path through which we can examine our communicative actions; and this is basically the agenda behind The Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas. What Habermas calls "communicative action" is actually the fourth (and most refined) of four "sociological concepts of action" that he examines in his book. These deserve a brief summary:

1. The teleological concept is based on the formalist principle that an action effects a state transition. We thus understand actions in terms of the states they are intended to achieve, either directly or as part of a more extensive plan; and actions are described through rules that map a state and an action to a resulting state. The major flaw in Herbert Simon's naive approach to a theory of design is his assumption that all actions are teleological.
2. The normative concept assumes that actions are regulated by socially determined norms. In other words the "goal state" of an action is less important than whether or not that action is acceptable in the social setting in which it is taken. Because that setting is rarely (if ever) static, this concept is more firmly grounded in the dynamics of behavior than is the state-based teleological concept.
3. The dramaturgical concept views the acting subject as "playing a role" in a social setting that provides an "audience." It is perhaps best captured by the title of Erving Goffman’s pioneering analysis, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This concept, again, is grounded in the dynamics of behavior.
4. The communicative concept refers to both the dynamic and state-based properties of the interpersonal relations of at least two subjects who seek a shared understanding of a given situation "in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement" (as Habermas put it in his book). These are precisely the personal interactions that take place in the most effective of educational settings, not to mention over work practices in offices concerned with "knowledge work." It is in this concept of action that Habermas drew upon Mead as his primary source.

This classification draws upon a Habermas theme that I continue to emphasize, particularly when I am exercising my critical chops over some egregiously technocentric thinking. This is the theme that we all live (and communicate) in three worlds: objective, subjective, and social:

1. The teleological concept of action is strictly a product of the objective world and can only function in that world.
2. The normative concept of action is grounded in the conventions of the social world.
3. The dramaturgical concept of action deals with "performance" as behavior in the subjective world.
4. The communicative concept of action transcends the other three by synthesizing behaviors grounded in all three of these worlds.

From this point of view, is there a "world" in which we learn about performing and listening to music? Schön's examples actually cover two of the concepts of action. One teacher (pseudonymously named "Rosemary") works with her student from the teleological stance of problem solving. Performing a composition (in this case the first movement of Johannes Brahms' Opus 108 violin sonata) is a problem, which may then be decomposed into subproblems, each of which may be addressed independently. After all the subproblems (which may need to be further decomposed) have been solved, they may be assembled back into a coherent whole. On the other hand the (also pseudonymous) "Franz," who is coaching a student in the first two sections of Franz Schubert's Opus 15 "Wanderer Fantasy," takes an overtly dramaturgical approach, using a rich repertoire of both musical and bodily performance to make his points to his student.

I have seen both of these concepts in action, so to speak, at Master Classes I have attended at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I would also suggest that Robert Mann has explored the normative concept, particularly in his belief that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which that composer was exposed. However, this might be selling Mann short. He may be one of the best examples of the synthesis necessary for communicative action that I have encountered. His own dramaturgical approach has certainly been similar to that of "Franz" in Schön's account; but he was at his most interesting when I saw him coaching a performance of the music of Elliott Carter. While Mann was clearly subjective is talking about his experiences in performing Carter's music with the Julliard Quartet, he was not shy about addressing the need from some nuts-and-bolts objective problem solving that was necessary to the process of preparing for performance. It thus seems that, in his own efforts in teaching the performance of music, Mann appreciates (even if only intuitively) the necessity for the full scope of communicative action and does not do a bad job in satisfying this ideal.

Does this approach also apply to how we learn how to listen to music? Since this is not treated as a discipline to the same extent that performing is, even in a conservatory setting, there is no conclusive answer to this question. Personally, I believe that the richness of communicative action may be necessary for any effort of description; but I cannot support my conviction with anything more than scattered anecdotes, most of which are personal. In another setting I might be able to pursue this as a serious research project, but for now I can content myself with the realm of idle speculation!

On the "Historical Record" of Modern Jazz

Anyone who has seen the German documentary, Blue Note - A Story of Modern Jazz, as I did back when the Ovation Channel was still in business, can be forgiven for taking it to be the story of modern jazz. However, while there is no denying the major role that Blue Note played in cultivating the necessary listening skills for the new sounds of jazz that began to emerge after the Second World War, it would be a mistake to overlook some of the other labels that issued recordings without which any historical study of jazz would be woefully inadequate. Consider, for example, those two works that had been so influential to Anthony Braxton, Albert Ayler's "Bells" and John Coltrane's "Ascension," both of which were produced by Bob Thiele for Impulse! Records. Admittedly, Creed Taylor would not have been able to launch Impulse! in 1960 had Blue Note not prepared listeners for their "new wave of jazz;" but, if we are to accept Ashley Kahn's epithet for Impulse! as "The House that Trane Built," we should remember that Coltrane's work with Blue Note was relatively modest (which is not to dismiss the significance of Blue Train) and that much of his truly formative work (including his recordings with Miles Davis' "first quintet") was produced by Prestige. I find myself writing this because I have come to realize that much of my appreciation of "emerging voices" comes from the Prestige anthologies I have acquired over the years, which include (in alphabetical order) John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. These CD collections are products of meticulous compilation by Eric Miller (Dolphy and Monk) and the venerable Orrin Keepnews (Coltrane, Davis, and Rollins); and they are invaluable resources for anyone (like myself) who believes that both composition and performance are best understood through opportunities for diachronic listening. When I then consider the richness of the notes that accompany each of these collections, I realize how clueless "Audiophiliac" Steve Guttenberg is in his despair over a report that "projects that it won't be until 2012 that download sales surpass CD sales." However, this is not the first time I have had to recognize that Guttenberg seems more interested in listening to high-quality digital sounds, rather than high-quality performances of music!

Positive Chutzpah for Peace?

The economic crisis may have been the most influential factor in Barack Obama winning the November election; but, if ever there were a need for a "change we can believe in," it is in the current Administration's approach to diplomacy built upon a dual foundation of denial and myopia. Most important may be what I have called our "Sin-of-Omission Diplomacy," through which we have tried to set ourselves up as the sole arbiter of who should and should not participate in discussions over the current situation in Gaza. Well, if we are to believe the sources cited by Suzanne Goldenberg for a story she filed last night on guardian.co.uk, Barack Obama may have taken his first major step towards such change in our foreign policy; and it may be audacious enough to earn him his first Chutzpah of the Week award with a positive connotation (having already received two on the negative side, one entirely his own and the other shared with his campaigning colleagues). We remember the flack that Obama took for suggesting that holding talks with Iran could be done in an appropriate manner; and, for all of the conciliatory things he said to AIPAC last June, he managed to reinforce that particular position during his speech at their convention.

Right now, however, the question of talking to Iran has been displaced by the question of talking about Gaza. The Bush Administration has been adamant in its refusal to recognize that Hamas has a legitimate voice in any discussion about Gaza. According to Goldenberg's report, however, the Obama Administration seems willing to reject such intransigence:

The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush's doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organisation, sources close to the transition team say.

The move to open contacts with Hamas, which could be initiated through the US intelligence services, would represent a definitive break with the Bush presidency's ostracising of the group. The state department has designated Hamas a terrorist organisation, and in 2006 Congress passed a law banning US financial aid to the group.

The Guardian has spoken to three people with knowledge of the discussions in the Obama camp. There is no talk of Obama approving direct diplomatic negotiations with Hamas early on, but he is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracising Hamas is counter-productive. A tested course would be to start contacts through Hamas and the US intelligence services, similar to the secret process through which the US engaged with the PLO in the 1970s. Israel did not become aware of the contacts until much later.

I can understand why these sources are confidential. As Obama has no trouble reminding us, he is not yet President; and any move that might undermine Bush Administration activities could well be folly, rather than chutzpah. Nevertheless, this "confidential leak" is one of the most positive signs we have seen of an approach to the Middle East that could be both serious and substantive. Whether it will be sufficient to enable some form of interim cease fire until the Obama Administration is in a position to act remains to be seen, but it was in the hope of seeing this kind of positive chutzpah that I cast my own vote for change!

On Sharing and Keeping in China

The Financial Times Web site just ran a fascinating story filed by Kathrin Hille from Shanghai:

In the industrial town of Kunshan, Thermos, the manufacturer of vacuum flasks, is among the lucky few. Revenues jumped more than 30 per cent last year, and record-low steel prices could make 2009 its most profitable business year yet.

But the company has other worries. It has to hand over part of its profits to help soften the impact of the global economic crisis on others.

As factories in this manufacturing hub near Shanghai, hit by the sudden collapse of export orders in the past few months, fail by the dozen, the government of the district of Lujia is scrambling for financial aid to pay off thousands of laid-off workers. It has turned to the few flourishing businesses in town for help.

“We were approached for a sum of Rmb5m [$740,000, €540,000, £490,000] to Rmb8m,” says Lin Chao Min, deputy chairman of Thermos (China) Housewares.

For Kunshan, home to the largest cluster of Taiwanese-owned manufacturers in China, this is a drastic turn in its fortunes. The arrival of manufacturers from the island in the mid-1990s, which quickly built profitable export bases for everything from computer components to furniture, made the city the first in China with tax revenues exceeding Rmb1bn.

This might be called "A Tale of the Fundamental Law of Economics in a Time of Crisis." Recall the simplest statement of this law:

People are willing to share poverty, but they would prefer to keep wealth.

The ideal of socialism had been intended to sustain the enormous population of China through insufferable poverty. Whether or not it ever succeeded, it was put to its most severe test when China finally began to emerge as an "engine of wealth creation," particularly when, under the new game rules of globalization, that wealth would accrue to those who invested in China as well as (instead of?) the Chinese population.

Hille's story provides us with an account of how China wants to deal with the problem of a spanner (might as well use Brit-speak to honor the source) thrown into the works of that wealth creation engine. Once again menacing ghosts of poverty are rearing their heads; and with them comes the socialist ideal of sharing wealth (for which Barack Obama took so much flack when he tried to explain the principle to Joe the Plumber). China knows just how ugly poverty can be, so we can understand why they should appeal to this ideal. Unfortunately, the principle is being applied to a Taiwanese business that decided to "follow the money" and build its manufacturing facility in China. One can imagine how the owners of that business are reacting; however, as I learned while living in Singapore, whatever your principles may be, your practices remain bound by the laws of the country in which you live. If those Taiwanese do not like their current situation, they should not take it out on the Chinese; they would do better to direct their wrath towards Tom Friedman, who served them the "globalization Kool-Aid" in the first place!

Listening to Anthony Braxton

When Mosaic Records first announced their release of The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, my first reaction was my usual concern about space being at a premium in my condominium (the same reaction I had a year earlier when my wife received the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition as a gift). I figured that the few Braxton CDs I had accumulated would be sufficient. I certainly enjoyed those recordings, as I enjoyed the ways in which Braxton pushed the envelope of classification.

Organizing my personal collection has never been an easy matter. It took me a while to converge on a systematic approach that I could actually use when I was trying to find anything specific. I ultimately resorted to a technique I learned about 25 years ago from the librarian at KUSC. She hit on the idea of organizing everything according to the old (and now defunct) Schwann record catalog, saving back issues of the catalog to keep track of recordings that had gone out of print. (She delighted in being able to call her method "Schwann's Way.") I have pretty much picked up this method in spirit. Since Schwann is no longer with us, I have saved only one old issue each of Schwann Opus (for classical music) and Schwann Spectrum (for everything else), not for assistance in finding specific items but just as reminders of the basic categories.

Unless I am mistaken, Braxton is one of two composers whom "Schwann's Way" assigns to different categories, some recordings classified as classical and others as jazz. (The other composer is John Zorn.) Personally, I think the Schwann classifications had more to do with the publisher than with the content itself; but I have decided to honor their guidelines as best as I can.

What interests me more than his defiance of conventional categories is that Braxton is almost exactly a year and a month older than I am. Taking into account my having skipped a grade in elementary school, there are many ways in which we have probably shared listening experiences during our formative years. True, while I went straight from high school to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I then remained for my doctoral studies, Braxton entered the army after high school; and, as Mike Heffley documents in the Mosaic notes, it was during his service in Korea that "he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Albert Ayler's Bells, Coltrane's Ascension, then returned to Chicago." Barry Kernfeld's biographical entry for Grove Music Online has him spending two years at Roosevelt University "reading" philosophy and composition, meaning that he probably did not earn a degree; but, more importantly, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and formed a trio with Leroy Jenkins and (now Wadada) Leo Smith, which recorded in New York as the Creative Construction Company and travelled to Paris in 1969. According to Heffley, the trio's nickname was "the slide rule boys." After returning from Europe, he spent "some quality time around the post–John Cage Wesleyan University" (Kernfeld's words), which probably put him in touch with Alvin Lucier, Richard Teitelbaum, and Frederick Rzewski. This would have been shortly before Lucier received his faculty appointment at Brandeis University, which is when I first became aware of his work and his colleagues in the Sonic Arts Group. Braxton was thus looking for a path that would lead to innovation through innovative thinking about structure, which is basically the same sort of path I had been trying to explore in my own approach to computer music in my doctoral research. My guess is that it is only through bad luck that I missed any opportunities to hear him perform around the same time that I was encountering other composers, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich; but, as I said, what strikes me the most is the extent of overlap in our listening contexts.

The breadth of Braxton's listening context is more evident in the Mosaic collection than it can be in any of the individual recordings I had previously acquired. Only through a project like this one would Rzewski end up in my jazz collection by virtue of a performance of Braxton's "Opus 95 For Two Pianos" along with Ursula Oppens. There is a sense of Rzewski's presence in Braxton's listening context, but this composition is still very much a product of Braxton's own voice. Similarly, the "Opus 82," conceived for four 39-piece orchestras, reflects the influences of Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis but also points the way to Braxton's later "Composition No. 165" for eighteen instruments, recording almost fifteen years later by New Albion (and classified as "classical" by Schwann). The period covered by the Mosaic collection (1974–1980) also includes innovative (but decidedly jazzy) approaches to Scott Joplin, Lionel Hampton, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. This is a collection that takes the ear in far more diverse directions than just about any other anthology in either the jazz or the classical category. Nevertheless, as the Discography in Braxton's Wikipedia entry indicates, the 8 CDs in the Mosaic collection are actually a rather modest sample of his work; and, as far as I can determine, he is still taking that work down new paths!

My Grove Press copy of Henry Miller's Topic of Cancer includes an essay about Miller by Karl Shapiro entitled, "The Greatest Living Author." I still remember this sentence about Miller's work from that essay:

Let's assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes.

In a similar vein I would like to envisage a world in which one may start one's day with Braxton's music in the company of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and John Coltrane. Sadly, even with my XM satellite service, I have yet to hear anything by Braxton through a broadcast medium. I suppose that means that I shall just have to fashion this world for myself, without the prospect of sharing it with others!

Denial Along the Nile

There is more than a little poetic license in that title. According to the latest Al Jazeera English report, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was instrumental in formulating a truce plan for Gaza; but the work appears to have been done in Sharm el-Sheikh (at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula), rather than on the banks of the Nile (in Cairo or elsewhere). Since Al Jazeera is the only news agency with reporters officially allowed in the Gaza Strip, they tend to be one of the better sources for tracking this story (although the BBC can be good at getting to a story, even if they have to do it sub rosa). However, when we combine Al Jazeera's own resources with what they gather through their wire services, we have to wonder just how realistic the plan for truce being reported is. Consider, for example, how the report is introduced:

Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has said that Israel and the Palestinian Authority have accepted a Franco-Egyptian truce plan for Gaza.

A statement from Sarkozy's office on Wednesday said: "The president is delighted by the acceptance by Israel and the Palestinian Authority of the Franco-Egyptian plan presented last night in Sharm el-Sheikh by [Egyptian] president [Hosni] Mubarak."

While Sarkozy deserves credit for trying to fill the diplomatic vacuum created by a combination of negligence and bad faith on the part of the Bush Administration, his track record of self-promotion obliges us to question his statement; and it does not take much questioning to trip over the noun "acceptance." Certainly the only Israeli source Al Jazeera was able to turn up was far from ready to commit to that noun:

Israel's ambassador to the UN said on Tuesday that the Israelis were taking the ceasefire proposal "very seriously".

"I am sure that it will be considered and you will find out whether it was accepted," Gabriela Shalev told reporters in New York. "But we take it very, very seriously."

At the same time, Israel's security cabinet is meeting to discuss an escalation to a "third phase" of the war on Gaza, which would see ground combat from street-to-street, according to two senior Israeli political sources.

This strikes me as far more suspicious than Mr. Dooley's admonition to "Trust everybody, but cut the cards."

Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side the best reactions Al Jazeera reported came from two key sources. Here is their quote from Mohammed al-Masri, a strategic analyst at Jordan University's Centre for Strategic Studies:

It [the truce plan] is not talking about Hamas as a partner, who were elected to govern the Palestinian people. It is not talking about recognising Hamas.

The other is Azzam Tamimi, author of Hamas: The Unwritten Chapters, who accused Egypt of having been "a conspirator with Israel." Tamimi's quote argues that acceptability will require a bigger initiative:

Egypt, geographically, is indispenable, but we need to have Turkey and Qatar in this initiative, for example.

Qatar has spoken out about the situation in a way that the Arab people understand and has had success in mediating Lebanon's crisis. Turkey is a Nato member, close to Europe and willing to convey the Palestinian perspective.

He also echoes al-Masri on excluding Hamas from the discussion of any truce proposal:

Tamimi said the problem with the Egyptian initiative is that it treats Hamas "as if it is not a player".

"But it is the player," he said. "It is fighting Israel and so cannot be ignored as part of the process."

This context makes the Hamas side of the story perfectly understandable:

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Beirut, Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said: "The [Hamas] movement is now discussing its stance to the Egyptian initiative, keeping in mind that there are, in principle, a number of reservations on this initiative.

"Israel has not accepted the French-Egyptian initiative yet. They said they are looking positively to this initiative, that does not mean they have accepted it.

"As for the Palestinian Authority, they could accept it but everyone knows that who is on the ground - and can decide 'yes or no' - is the resistance, that means Hamas and the resistance movement. So there is no use in them saying yes or no.

"It is Israel who started the war, not Hamas. When Israel decides to let humanitarian aid into Gaza, it is not a big deal. They have to do that. They are doing this because they are now realising the international anger over the UN school bombing".

This leaves us with the conclusion that the only real beneficiaries of the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting appear to be the only participants, Mubarak and Sarkozy, by promoting their reputations for reasonable deliberation in times of diplomatic crisis. Unfortunately, the only reputation that has emerged is one for the same sort of denial that we have associated with the Bush Administration and is now being adopted by Tzipi Livni, who is presumably speaking for the Israeli government. Meanwhile, the population of the Gaza Strip continues to be punished for nothing more than their exercising their right to choose their leaders through a democratic electoral process.

Atoms Redux

There is an amusing irony in the building of what appears to be a pretty strong consensus behind infrastructure repair as an economic recovery strategy. Back in the ancient history of the Clinton Administration, the Reverend Nicholas Negroponte would preach the ascent of bits over atoms to his flock of Wired subscribers (later rebottling his Kool-Aid in a book). As the bits rose with the inflation of the dot-com bubble, few paid attention to the deterioration of infrastructure atoms. It is nice to see the recovery of a sense of reality where the value of bits can only be assessed in terms of their service to the atoms!

The Two Oppenheimers

I just finished reading "Oppie in New York," Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the Metropolitan Opera production of John Adam's Doctor Atomic, which appeared in the latest New York Review. Mendelsohn followed a path similar to my own, reviewing Penny Woolcock's staging through the lens of the original San Francisco Opera production staged by librettist Peter Sellars. However, since our conclusions came close to being diametrically opposed, I decided this would be a good time to review my own thoughts in terms of how they stand against the many good points that Mendelsohn makes in his text.

Like Mendelsohn I am a firm believer in "reading in context;" and I agree with the strategy of his review, which bases most of its context on Adams' previous collaborations with Sellars, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. However, Mendelsohn introduced one point in passing to which I would assign greater value, which was Adams' description of Klinghoffer "as being more like a Bach oratorio or Passion than like a conventional opera" (Mendelsohn's words). Mendelsohn interpreted this remark in terms of a "static form [that] brilliantly serves the content;" but I am more inclined to take a more narratological point of view. When any composer makes the decision to set a narrative excerpt from Scripture to music, particularly if that setting is prepared for performance in a place of worship, that composer has assumed the task of telling a story for those who already know the story. There is no doubt that librettist Alice Goodman chose to frame the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in a manner radically different from any account given to us by the mainstream media; and her decision to present Palestinians and Jews as "parallel exiles" brought the production far more flack than one expects for grand opera. On the other hand the decision to mount an opera about a living American President who had resigned from office in disgrace had also engendered considerable controversy. My point is that there was so much media attention given to both the Nixon visit and the Achille Lauro incident that, in the spirit of most of Bach's sacred music, their respective operas could be more concerned with meditating on the basics of the plot, rather than just narrating those basics.

To some extent the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, is also a familiar story. Even though the test took place more than half a century ago, the incremental declassification of the documents associated with the Manhattan Project (and with other "matters of J. Robert Oppenheimer") has induced a perpetual revival of interest in the event. Each time more data become available, there are one or more new tellings of the tale that account for those data. Thus, in spite of our cultural aversion to the long view of history, there is something about the basic plot of the Manhattan Project that stays with us through this process of "updated retelling," rather in the same spirit as the Judeo-Christian retelling of Biblical stories. Consequently, the premise that one could use opera to meditate on the narrative of the Trinity test is a sound one.

Mendelsohn's primary argument, however, is that the path to Doctor Atomic was far more problematic than the respective paths to Nixon and Klinghoffer; and he makes some good points. The first of those points had to do with the opera's origin. Shortly after becoming General Director of the San Francisco Opera, Pamela Rosenberg approached Adams to do an opera about Oppenheimer as part of a "Faust Project" she was planning. As Mendelsohn observed, this was basically a misconception of both Goethe and Oppenheimer:

The work's real nineteenth-century model, anyway, isn't so much Goethe's Faust as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, an Enlightenment figure whose misplaced faith in scientific creation leads inevitably, tragically, to complete destruction.

As I shall later observe, I do not quite buy Mendelsohn's warrant; but I basically agree with his claim.

The other major problem concerned the libretto. As I recall from attending a donor's event, this project lost its librettist within months of its scheduled opening. In response Sellars assembled (his word choice) a collection of texts combining Manhattan Project documents with poems that had particularly appealed to Oppenheimer. In theory this was basically a reworking of Johann Sebastian Bach's strategy of alternating Scripture with meditative poetry; but, from a literary point of view, most of the declassified documents that Sellars selected hardly rise to the artfulness of Scripture. The result is that Doctor Atomic depends more on those in the audience already knowing the story than either Nixon or Klinghoffer did; and this is a point that I feel Mendelsohn missed when he tried to compare the stagings of Sellars in San Francisco and Woolcock in New York.

Before developing this point I should point out that both Mendelsohn and I shared a common disadvantage in attempting such a comparative analysis. I attended the San Francisco Opera production but could only see the Metropolitan Opera version through HD projection. Mendelsohn was at the Met but only knew the San Francisco production through a DVD (which he only watched after having attended two Met performances). In both cases the camera is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it can compensate for inadequate staging; but it is just as likely that the camera director can miss the point that the stage director was trying to make (which I had argued was the case with the recent HD transmission of the Met production of Hector Berlioz' Damnation de Faust). Since I have not seen the San Francisco DVD, I have no idea how representative it is of my "live" experience; and I suspect that Mendelsohn has not yet compared the HD recording of the Met with his own experiences of those two performances.

Having made that point, my primary disagreement with Mendelsohn is that he gives Sellars too much credit. He sees Sellars as gifted with a "deep sense of theatricality" whose "visual inventiveness" can compensate for shortcomings in any text (and perhaps music as well). I, on the other hand, am willing to give Sellars credit where credit is due but not to write him the sort of "blank check" that Mendelsohn offered. My lower level of enthusiasm is due, at least in part, to the more recent collaboration of Adams and Sellars in A Flowering Tree, which involved a story that most of the audience did not know and devolved very quickly into an incomprehensible muddle with an excess of eye candy. Thus, I was willing to set Sellars and Woolcock on a level playing field upon which I then decided that they were best differentiated through the priorities they set.

These priorities are best understood in terms of the "grounds for meditation" that would support a Bach-like approach to the presentation of the narrative. From my point of view, those meditations are all concerned with an assemblage of "dark tensions" that roil beneath the surface of the "historical events." Four of these tensions figure in the way in which the text of Doctor Atomic emerged:

1. The relationship between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty: This seemed to be the one that interested Sellars the most, and the confrontation between Robert's obsession with his work and Kitty's alcoholism makes for quite a clash. The problem is that the real stories behind this confrontation took place before and after the Manhattan Project. In many respects Kitty is a far more secondary character than Sellars chose to make her. Yes, she made a good vehicle for Muriel Rukeyser's "Am I in Your Light;" but I am not sure that she was a relevant vehicle for this particular narrative.
2. The relationship between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller: This is the relationship with the most significant historical consequences. As I previously wrote, Woolcock decided to focus on this one, viewing it as the seed of the tragedies that Oppenheimer would encounter in the Fifties. Sellars, on the other hand, tried to turn Teller into a sympathetic cautionary philosopher, which, at the very least, was a gross distortion of the historical record. (Of all the members of the Manhattan Project, Teller was the one least capable of "playing well with others.")
3. The relationship between Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves: This is actually the embodiment of a more philosophical relationship between science (concerned with what John Dewey called "inquiry") and engineering (concerned with "getting things done effectively"). As Director of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer basically installed himself as the mediating agent between some of most brilliant scientific researchers of the time and the Army representative for whom building a bomb was no different from building the Pentagon. This is one area where Sellars' choices of text got things right. Oppenheimer gets all the poetry, while Groves never gets anything more than the most mundane of prose.
4. The relationship between "twentieth-century man" and Native Americans, particularly with regard to the role of man in the face of natural forces: The most important of those natural forces was the weather. Mendelsohn carped that "the nonstop talk about matters meteorological was unintentionally hilarious." Apparently he never saw the documentary film The Day After Trinity, or he might have had more respect for Sellars' attention to the thunderstorm that almost prevented the Trinity test. Had he seen the footage of the "gadget" swinging precariously in a strong wind with lightning striking in the distance, he might have seen less humor in what was almost minute-by-minute monitoring of those "matters meteorological." At the very least that historical context makes Pasqualita's almost ritualistic aria about a gathering storm (while cleaning up Kitty's empty bottles) anything but gratuitous. The fact that the "gadget" did not detonate by accident in that storm (in which case there could well have been no Adams, no opera, and no argument between Mendelsohn and myself) was sheer luck and a reminder that, whatever his positivist pretentions may have been, twentieth-century man could not control everything.

Mendelsohn's "bottom line" is that "Doctor Atomic is a show that can't—and doesn't—go on." I would say that, to the contrary, the Met decision to have Woolcock introduce a new staging is a sign that Doctor Atomic could be more "durable" than either Nixon or Klinghoffer. With so many "dark tensions" behind the plot line, there are any number of ways in which a director may approach the opera; and the assumption that any of Adams' operas have only "worked" by virtue of Sellars' direction strikes me as unwarranted. The greater challenge concerns what will happen to all three of Adams' operas when those who already know the story are long gone. I would hope that there will be a new generation of directors to bring meaningful staging to these works, just as this past season of the San Francisco Opera had provided us with meaningful insights into the affairs of both Simon Boccanegra's republican Genoa and Boris Godunov's tsarist Russia.

Choosing a Biased Word

Having made the case that the Financial Times is not above suspicion (at least in the reporting of news from Washington), I think it is also worth noting that another of their Washington reporters, Andrew Ward, in reporting the problems that are likely to arise during the Senate swearing-in ceremony, referred to Al Franken as "the comic-turned-politician," which carries the connotation that his credentials for service are questionable (like those of Jesse Ventura or perhaps Ronald Reagan?). "Satirist" would probably have been closer to a mot juste, although I, for one, never felt that any of his work on Air America could be classified in terms of satire or any other form of comedy. There is no reason to assume that Franken pursued his Senate campaign with a seriousness less than that of normative political practices; and, when the Minnesota results are so close and still disputed, the last thing we need is a supposedly respectable reporter resorting to biased verbiage!

Confused Reporting

It is unclear why two fundamentally unrelated events reported by Edward Luce were packaged as a single story on the Financial Times Web site. The pessimistic explanation would be that someone over at the Financial Times decided that it was time to run a things-are-not-going-well-for-Barack-Obama story, even if, prior to Inauguration Day, it is a bit of a stretch to say that "things are going" at all. Furthermore, only one of those events, the decision of Bill Richardson to withdraw his nomination for Commerce Secretary (for what appear to be perfectly acceptable reasons), is directly related to Obama's transition planning. The reporting of this decision was then convolved with a discussion of the rate of progress in Congressional deliberation over the next round of actions to take towards economic recovery (which I am sure we all expect the Congress to do between now and Inauguration Day).

This second side of Luce's report was further confused by what appeared to be a failure to recognize the difference between deliberating and dithering. If one wanted to pick on the Congress, a better place to start might be with Majority Leader Harry Reid's comment on Meet the Press that it was important to "do it right the first time," as if, through a sort of "Kol Nidre effect," all actions (vows) taken in 2008 (particularly when under the duress of pressure from the Bush Administration) are now "off the books." From a Constitutional point of view, this may be a new Congress; but, particularly over the last three months, many things have been done (particularly involving the commitment of Federal funds) that cannot be undone. The Congress that meets this week does not have a clean slate but one on which much has been written, and it is no easy job to sort out how much of that text is wisdom and how much is folly.

However, if we give Reid some slack by taking "the first time" as a rhetorically confused slip of the tongue, then this may actually be a sign that, as I had previously written, Congress is ready to begin "deliberating over solutions rather than providing ineffective bandages made out of checks for large amounts of money." Put another way, Reid wants to run the Senate in such a way that it steers a course between the Scylla of the tendency to expect instant gratification under the new Administration by virtue of Barack Obama's "messianic aura" and the Charybdis of pressure for immediate action applied by the fear-mongering faith-based alarmism of the Bush Administration. From that point of view, any rumors that Obama would have a Congressional solution plan on his desk on January 20 is a gross departure from realistic thinking that could easily be taken as psychotic. The idea that Fox News would think of pressuring House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer over the Congress needing the time until the President's Day recess for proper deliberation should remind us that journalistic practices are still in serious need of improvement; but it is even more preposterous that the usually-staid Financial Times should decide to treat such claptrap as news. The only "real news" that came out of today's antics of the "Sabbath-Day gasbags" (as Calvin Trillin used to call them) is that they are already hard at work trying to tear down our new Congress before the first gavel has fallen in either the House or the Senate!

Cold Start

I have to confess that Joshua Kosman's forecast of classical music events for the coming year, as published in today's San Francisco Chronicle, left me on the cool side of lukewarm, if not downright cold. Those who have been following this blog for some time may recognize that this is a marked contrast to the way in which I reacted to the announcement of the 2008–09 season of the San Francisco Opera about a year ago. In retrospect that announcement made General Director David Gockley appear downright prescient, since the Opera was already readying itself for economic hard times while, as I put it, "the powers that be play their language games over whether or not we are in a recession." With all his cautionary strategies (reinforced with the remarks he made prior to the first performance of La Bohème), Gockley managed to end the Opera's fiscal year in the black, which is as worthy an achievement as the mounting of the most stimulating series of productions I have seen since I first became a subscriber. Unfortunately, Kosman's forecast could not take plans for the 2009–10 season into account, since, like the respective seasons for the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Performances, they have not yet been announced. So things may warm up by September, if not sooner.

Nevertheless, I am a bit disconcerted about what I feel were sins of both omission and commission in Kosman's list. From my own (biased) point of view, the greatest omission was the failure to include the final two recitals in which András Schiff will complete his cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. While I had some misgivings about Schiff's approach to the Opus 31 sonatas, this series of concerts, taken as a whole, has been highly stimulating and, as I have tried to indicate in my posts, contributed significantly to making me a better listener. These last two recitals take us into a world of "monuments;" and, while many tend to single out Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier") for the top of the heap, every sonata that Schiff will play is, as Tolstoy might say, monumental in its own way.

Still, I suppose any reader of Kosman's list will have some item regarded as unjustly neglected; so I would prefer to vent over his selection that fills me with the most trepidation. This is the San Francisco Performances concert of a complete performance of Philip Glass' Music in 12 Parts in Davies Symphony Hall. The last time San Francisco Performances arranged a Glass event in Davies, it was a series of three evenings, one for each of Godfrey Reggio's films (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi) with "live" performance of the music; and, from a purely organizational point of view, the event was a fiasco, primarily because San Francisco Performances had failed to organize box office operations to accommodate the number of people who wanted to attend. Thus, each evening got off to a late start, making the whole affair more than a little dissatisfying, if not just plain irritating.

However, beyond the problem of mismanaged "crowd control" was the questionable decision to use Davies for such an event in the first place. Davies is just not the place to go to watch a film, and the actual staging gave little support to either the film or the performing musicians. The result was more like a celebration of an occasion for the sake of the occasion, rather than for the sake of the material actually being performed; and this strikes me as the problem lurking behind the Music in 12 Parts event. Putting aside the question of whether or not those twelve parts should be performed consecutively in a single marathon event (which will include a break for dinner), there remains the problem that these early statements of what Glass called "the highly reductive style known as minimalism" are all works of chamber music that were originally performed in relatively intimate settings around New York. As a result it is hard to imagine that this event will be anything other than a hollow ceremony of celebration for the benefit of those who either were not around or chose not to pay attention when Glass was first struggling to make his compositional voice heard. Since I fall into neither of these categories, I fear there is nothing about this upcoming event that particularly appeals to me.

On the other hand I also fear that there is something symptomatic about such events in San Francisco. For all of the pleasures I derive from living in this city, these Glass events are far from the only examples of trying to give those who missed the boat a second chance (which turns out to miss the boat just as badly). The San Francisco Jazz Festival seems to make it a point to program ten-year anniversary performances of John Coltrane's "Ascension;" and, as I have previously written, the one I attended in 2005 was painfully disappointing. I can understand the problem that most people in the audience really have no idea what to do when confronted with an in-your-face performance of such music, just as I can understand why, much to the annoyance of Michael Tilson Thomas, the music of Anton Webern always seems to elicit nervous coughs in its most silent moments; but, while Thomas understands the nuts and bolts of performing Webern properly, the 2005 Jazz Festival performers seemed absolutely clueless about what Coltrane had been trying to do (if not totally disinterested in trying to learn about it). I suppose what it comes down to is that there is no need to celebrate "someone else's history" (so to speak) in a city that has "made its own history" (in the spirit of Karl Marx?) in so many ways; and, as is the case in so many cities, it is the people with the "money power" who end up thinking up these making-up-for-missing-the-boat events.

In spite of this rant against the San Francisco Jazz Festival, I must admit that their plans for their spring season (which happens to be a tenth anniversary) are far more promising than most of the events I found in Kosman's column. This spring the Festival will include Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner (who will be featured in their Gala event but will also give a "real" concert), Kenny Barron, Roy Hargrove, and James Carter, as well as Mingus Dynasty, which has done so much to keep the music of Charles Mingus alive and "in repertoire." Furthermore, the Festival has finally decided (or had decided for them) to abandon the Masonic Auditorium, which has done as little justice to jazz as the San Francisco Performances events in Davies have done to Glass. So the future is not that all bleak; it's just that the Chronicle did not provide a column for jazz as they had given for classical music!

Explaining the Mess

The last time I wrote about Niall Ferguson and his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, I mentioned that the book was based on a television series and hoped that the series would air soon in the United States. If I am to believe Robert Skidelsky's review of this book in The New York Review, then the television source is only a two-hour documentary, rather than the sort of extended series developed for John Kenneth Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty. Nevertheless, the documentary is scheduled for airing on PBS on January 13; and I have already confirmed this on the KQED Web site.

I have not been a fan of PBS for some time. They descended into a hole that was first dug by the Reagan Administration and rarely see daylight any more. Here in San Francisco I rely on PBS for little more than a regular BBC news feed; and that reliability is far from rock-steady. For anything other than straight news, the BBC seems to have found a better (as in better financed) partner in HBO; but HBO has not yet decided to serve as a platform for "television dons." Unless they come up with another cash cow as lucrative as The Sopranos, I doubt that their bean-counters will endorse any such serious commitment to providing educational content. Thus, since I am not sure when, with my current reading list the way it is, I would find time to read Ferguson's book in its entirety, giving it the attention it deserves, and since I was quite taken with the interview he gave on Book TV, I shall probably bite the bullet and give KQED a try for something other than my daily half-hour news fix.

According to Skidelsky, Ferguson's take on our current economic distress is based on a far longer view of history than is within the comfort zone of most media content providers (not to mention our government):

The spread of home ownership in the twentieth century—largely promoted by government in an attempt to make capitalism more popular—made possible a vast expansion of collateralized debt, and was the main stimulus to the development of the conversion of debt into securities.

In other words for most of us, the "ownership" part of "home ownership" is only what I have called in the past a "fiction of convenience." Capitalism did not empower anyone to possess his/her own home; it only created "institutions of debt" whose metaphorical doors were open to anyone, regardless of their financial status. This proposition serves as a prime example of what Skidelsky takes as the primary theme of Ferguson's book:

The large claim Ferguson makes is that we owe our prosperity more to finance than to technology. Throughout history men have been more ingenious at finding ways to make money than to make things.

This throws a new light on the thesis that the "Silicon Valley miracle" was a product of a social network of innovators, venture capitalists, and lawyers by vastly diminishing the significance of the first of those parties. Were most technology evangelists capable of humility, they would recognize this for the humbling insight it was intended to be.

Skidelsky continues his review by exploring the risks associated with the securitization of debt; and this is where the long view of history encounters our present situation with a head-butt worthy of the most vicious rugby player:

Ferguson points out that property "is a security only to the person who lends you money. … By contrast, the borrower's sole security against the loss of his property to such creditors is his income." This is not quite true. The lender's security also depends on the income—actual or expected—of the borrower, because, although the property cannot "run away," it may lose its value, or it may be costly, and even impossible, for the creditor to get possession of it. Ferguson might have told the story of the costly mistake made by France's Credit Lyonnais, which set up its own proprietary credit-rating agency in the late nineteenth century. Its mistake was to rate the credit-worthiness of governments not on their debt-to-income but on their debt-to-property ratios. The imperial government of Russia got top rating, because, despite its disordered finances, of all governments it owned the most property. On the basis of this rating, French investors snapped up tsarist bonds. They lost all their money, not because the property disappeared but because the government did. Credit Lyonnais failed to take into account "political risk."

The tsarist government would now be considered a subprime borrower. Yet today's vastly more sophisticated credit-rating agencies made the same mistake in giving triple-A ratings to bonds that took no account of the income of the borrowers—what the professionals called "toxic waste." Ferguson notes that a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers were ethnic minorities and wonders whether subprime is a new euphemism for black. Both Democratic and Republican administrations brought pressure on lenders to relax their rules in order to spread home ownership—for example, not to press borrowers for full documentation. And indeed home ownership—or bank ownership of homes—did expand greatly in the last ten years. The bubble burst in 2007 when a rise in the federal funds rate from 1 percent to 5.4 percent coincided with the expiring of the enticing "teaser" rate periods that lenders had offered subprime borrowers. Repayments were then set at much higher interest rates and many could not pay.

There is a grim irony in this analysis, which basically argues that the foundations of capitalism have been shaken by the same kind of erroneous thinking through which the Russian Revolution shook the foundations of Credit Lyonnais. This is probably not what Nikita Khrushchev had in mind when he ranted that Communism would "bury" the institutions of capitalism; but the "family resemblance" is striking! The only thing more ironic is that Soviet Communism did not endure long enough to witness this economic crisis and that the "new Russia" is as much a victim of the current situation as is any other industrialized nation.

Sin-of-Omission Diplomacy

Once I decided to grant the Chutzpah of the Week award to Tzipi Livni for handling the current crisis in Gaza with "diplomacy by denial," I figured it would only be a matter of time before multiple-award-winner Condoleeza Rice would attempt to challenge my decision. After meeting with her boss (the über multiple-award winner) she issued a statement that included one zinger that certainly deserves attention but is not enough to snatch the prize away from Livni. That statement was pulled from the wire services by Al Jazeera English in their latest report on the Gaza situation:

We are talking constantly with the Israeli government to find a solution to Gaza that will be a sustainable one for the people of Gaza, for the people of Israel, and for the people of the Palestinian territories of the Middle East more broadly.

One does not have to be the sharpest of readers to recognize that party that is missing from Rice's list of those with whom the United States is "talking constantly." That party is, of course, any representative of the legitimately elected Hamas government in Gaza, who can speak for one of the opposing sides in this dispute that continues to escalate. After all, any solution that is "a sustainable one for the people of Gaza" should, by all rights, recognize those whom the people of Gaza granted authority through an electoral process that we, as Americans, so value.

The problem with speculating on how much damage the Bush Administration can do before Inauguration Day is that any number of answers keeping coming out of the "voodverk" like vicious gnurrs. This particular gnurr should be familiar to all of us by now. It is that particular perversion of statecraft through which the United States sets itself as the sole "Decider" (to use Bush-speak) of which parties are allowed to sit at the table in the discussion of a crisis situation. Thus, Livni's denial that there is a crisis in the first place has now been reinforced with the proposition that those responsible for much of the recent violence should not be allowed a voice in any efforts towards restoring some level of peace. If the evidence of history (which our government has done such a good job of willfully disregarding) has taught us anything, it is that such double-barreled denial will only strengthen Hamas' resolve (just as the ancestors of those who now govern Israel strengthened the resolve of their opposition to Roman occupation).

Business-as-Usual Chutzpah

The last time I wrote about Tzipi Livni it was from an optimistic point of view:

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).

Israeli politics being what they are, one cannot pursue such statecraft without the chutzpah of standing up to some very aggressive opposition, such as that of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which basically sees the Israel Defence Forces as the collective instrument through which all Palestinians will succumb to the Old Testament wrath of God. My failure to give Livni a Chutzpah of the Week award for her attempt to hang tough against such opposition would save me the trouble of considering retracting it today. Instead, I can use today to give her an award for her aggressive return to the status quo, seasoned with more than a soupçon of that denial for which George W. Bush has become so famous in my "chutzpah archives."

The basis for this week's award is best expressed in the report that Al Jazeera English compiled from their wire sources:

Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, has again rejected a French proposal for a ceasefire to allow aid into the Gaza Strip saying there is "no humanitarian crisis".

Israel's foreign ministry quoted Livni as having said in a statement during a trip to Paris that "there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce."

Over the past six days more than 400 Palestinians have been killed and 2,000 wounded under an Israeli aerial bombardment.

The strip, home to 1.5 million people, is already suffering shortages of power, food and medical supplies due to a two-year blockade imposed by Israel on the area.

Livni was quoted as saying: "Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Strip... and has even been stepping this up by the day."

Some Angel of Rhetoric at least seems to have stilled her tongue before she could get out the notorious "Everything is under control." sentence; but it still takes real chutzpah to deny that Gaza is in a state of humanitarian crisis, much (most?) of which can be attributed to Israeli actions (which would probably include a rejection of the legitimacy of the elections through which Gaza chose to be governed and represented by the Hamas Party). Nothing is even close to "under control" in Gaza right now; and Livni deserves her chutzpah award for converting her power to hang tough against business-as-usual to hanging tough in support of it.

Beethoven and the Trombone

I first became aware of Ludwig van Beethoven's three equale for four trombones (WoO 30) during my student days, when I purchased a (vinyl) disc on which Jean-François Paillard had compiled a "historical anthology" of brass music, with Josquin des Prez at one extreme and André Jolivet at the other. (I think the recording was called Fanfares from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.) Beethoven was represented by the first of those equale. At the time all that really struck me was how little it sounded like any Beethoven I had previously heard; but, since my listening experience was pretty limited back in my freshman year, I did not give it much further thought until it showed up in that Brilliant Classics Gesamtwerk collection of Ludwig van Beethoven. By this time my listening experience had become far more extensive, but this music still had an uncanny uniqueness to it.

This prompted me to attempt a bit of research. About all that I could cull from my Thayer was that the music had been published in 1812. Grove Music Online was a bit more informative. First of all it reminded me of what I should have already known, which is that an equale is a composition in which all the voices are the same (or very similar), hence the "equality" of the four trombones. I also learned that Beethoven wrote these three short pieces for performance in Linz Cathedral on the Feast of All Souls, leading me to believe that he was interested in the solemnity of the sound of the trombone, perhaps inspired by the way Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had featured it in his K. 626 setting of the requiem mass or, for that matter, the ritualistic elements of Die Zauberflöte (K. 620). However, the "constraint of equality" obliged Beethoven to come up with four-voice harmonies that were more "tightly packed" than we would encounter in more conventional ensembles, such as a string quartet. I think it is the way in which he approached this problem of "density" that made this music as unique as it is; and I do not think I have encountered any other Beethoven composition that works with such a "tight equality." Perhaps he was not particularly satisfied with the results; and, having fulfilled his obligation to Linz Cathedral, returned to other pursuits that interested him more. (1812 is also the year of his last violin sonata and may also be viewed as a "calm before the storm" in which he worked on his final round of piano sonatas, the ones that András Schiff will be playing in the last two recitals of his traversal of all of those sonatas.) So, while we should probably not read too much into these three little trombone pieces, they do have a way of sticking in the memory once they have been encountered!