On the Virtue of Raising Hell

Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, which happens to be almost directly below where I live, started showing Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins this past Friday. There are very few films that I seek out as soon as they open, and even fewer of them that have nothing to do with either music or dance. However, there was no doubt in my mind that Janice Engel’s effort to chronicle the life and works of Molly Ivins in a documentary that runs a little over 90 minutes would be one of those films. Having now seen it, the first thing I can say is that my instincts were right on target.

I am not sure when I took my first hit of Ivins’ insight and the wit she engaged to seize and hold my attention. I am pretty sure that it was when she was being interviewed by Jim Lehrer, back when his television program was called The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her sense of humor was so outrageous that I could catch Lehrer himself squirming from time to time; but that was a time when Ronald Regan was the 40th President of the United States, making jokes about “We begin bombing in five minutes” during a sound check, not knowing that the microphone was going out over the air.

Ivins seemed to live by the mantra of never taking anything too seriously. To the contrary, she knew how to tease humor out of any number of dire situations. Many took offense at her style, but most of those had been responsible for getting our country into those situations. For the rest of us, her humor provided a release value and possibly the reassurance that there were clearer heads who could tell a naked emperor from one that could be taken seriously as a leader.

My one concern is the risk that the generations that have followed mine may not pick up on what this account of Ivins opinions signifies. Those who read this site regularly know my mantra that the prevailing culture is one that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Engel’s documentary reminded me that such a perspective was around long before we became a nation of zombies aware only of the screen on a cell phone. Ivins certainly knew about that culture. However, hers was an age when people still read text in print, rather than reading from screens; and, while her words may have offended some, they flashed on light bulbs for others.

Will Engel’s film flash on any more light bulbs? Damned if I know. I do know that Ivins mastered a sense of presence, both in her writing and when addressing an audience; and the nature of that presence reverberates, at least to some extent, in “new media” figures such as Jon Stewart and John Oliver. Indeed, I suspect that, were she alive today, Ivins would be impressed that someone like Oliver can deliver persuasive argumentation on the scale of a written essay and still, by interjecting just the right jokes at just the right time, command an attentive real-time audience. So I would like to believe that there was always a foundation of optimism supporting the plethora of razor-sharp barbs coming out of Ivins’ writing; and, if I can believe that, I can also hope that those now following Oliver will get around to realizing that “getting the message” should never be a passive response.

Richard Strauss’ “Orchestra Action” Complements the Staging

Those who follow my opera performance articles regularly know that I try, whenever possible, to arrange for at least one occasion when I have a good vantage point for the action in the orchestra pit. This turned out to be a particularly informative situation for the current performance of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” by the San Francisco Opera. As has already been observed, 95 players constitute the ensemble conducted by Henrik Nánási; and the score demands that he be as attentive to the “action in the pit” as he is to shaping the efforts of the vocalists up on stage.

Most important is another previous observation made in comparing this production with that of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, which is currently alternating with “Elektra.” “Elektra” may require more musicians; but, as I observed, Turandot is the offering that is “unabashedly loud” (and not in any negative way). What is most impressive about Strauss is how he covers the full breadth of dynamic range, even to the point at which the attentive listener can be aware of the solo string passages. Thus, having already praised Nánási for his attentiveness to “every last detail of instrumental activity,” I should add that each of those details had its own dynamic level to establish its rhetorical significance.

In addition Nánási’s interpretation suggested that Strauss had some very clear spatial effects in mind. These do not register when one cannot see the musicians. However, as is the case at an orchestra concert, “visual input” provides an opportunity to observe how thematic material can perambulate through the ensemble. Indeed, Strauss seemed to be particularly skilled at creating the auditory equivalent of a movie “dissolve” effect, in which thematic movement involves the gradual departure of one set of instruments matched by the gradual arrival of another.

All of this must then coexist with all of the activities on stage conceived by Keith Warner and realized for these performances in San Francisco by Anja Kühnhold. Warner’s museum setting suggests a coexistence of the immediate present with a past that is at least legendary and possibly totally mythical. Beyond the tales of the House of Atreus conceived by the Homeric bards, Aeschylus, Sophocles and the impact of those sources on Hugo von Hofmannsthal (and possibly Jean-Paul Sartre), Warner unfolds a narrative that suggests that an ordinary woman’s understanding of herself is emerging from her understanding of Elektra and her pivotal role in the broader Atreus tragedy.

Thus, while Strauss is exploring “dissolves” of his thematic material across his instrumental resources, Warner provides us with similar dissolves between the hear-and-now present and a mythic past. Furthermore, Warner is courageous enough to lead us through Hofmannsthal’s libretto as a journey of self-knowledge and then bring us to a conclusion that suggests that his present-day protagonist may not have advanced very much, if at all. It is almost as if Warner’s resolution of the staging may be looking not only at the Ancient Greeks but also at the final stanza of “Little Gidding,” the last of the four poems that T. S. Eliot published as Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Having followed Elektra through her convoluted confrontations with a series of murders (one from the recent past and two taking place over the course of the opera), Warner is suggesting that she now knows her “place” in the House of Atreus for the first time. If Warner’s present-day protagonist has followed this journey, then Warner’s journey comes back to the museum where it started; but he leaves it to us to resolve just how that protagonist now knows that “place for the first time.”

Back at the museum with Elektra (Christine Georke stretched out on the floor), Chrysothemis (Adrienne Pieczonka), and Orest (Alfred Walker, standing), photograph by Cory Weaver (courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Perhaps Warner intended to subject those of us on audience side to a deliberately disorienting journey at the end of which we are the ones arriving “where we started,” confronted with knowing “the place for the first time.” That would clearly make for much more than a sit-back-and-follow-the-story experience. Still, if you were fortunate enough to experience this performance as part of a group, Warner has created the sort of situation in which you really want to talk about what happened with the others. In other words there is a “social dimension” to this production that sets it apart from the vast majority of opera-going experiences; and my guess is that it will be far more memorable than most past such experiences.

Gabriela Martinez’ Debut Album with Delos is Delightfully Diverse

Almost two weeks ago Delos released its first album featuring solo performances by Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez. The advance material (reproduced on the Amazon.com Web page) describes her as the “Brilliant young Venezuelan pianist,” which gives me a bit of pause, since my first encounter with her was in July of 2007. The occasion was one of the summer concerts offered by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall, which SFS had designated as “bloggers’ night.” I was just beginning to write seriously about music, and this was an opportunity for not only free admission to an SFS concert but also the circulation of my writing among a new set of readers. The evening included both the concert itself and a question-and-answer session with Martinez after the concert had concluded.

Her selection that night was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. To put this in historical perspective, the performance took place about ten years after the release of Shine, an account (disputed by some) of David Helfgott’s efforts to learn Opus 30 and the unfortunate aftermath of those efforts. This film was clearly on the mind of many of the bloggers that attended the Q&A session, which is why the question quickly came up as to how much time it had taken Martinez to prepare the concerto. When she replied that it took about two months, one could hear gasps across Davies punctuated by dropping jaws. I ended up writing a piece in which I used a little bit of elementary information theory to make the case that too many minds had been sadly addled by the Shine narrative.

Fortunately, Martinez’ new album is more about the diversity of her music-making skills than it is about debunking fictions fabricated in the name of entertainment. The title of the album is Amplified Soul, which is also the title of one of the tracks, a piece she commissioned from Dan Visconti, which is receiving its recording debut. Just short of five minutes in duration, this is music that appears to explore reverberations within the body of the piano and therefore requires what appears to be some rather detailed attention to which dampers are raised at which times. The title probably refers to the fact that, because the amplitudes of reverberating strings are much lower than those struck by the hammers, amplification is required to appreciate the full effect of the process. While the sorts of effects that Visconti appears to exploit are easily captured in the setting of a recording studio, there are likely to be technical challenges that will arise should Martinez decide to play this piece in recital.

Curiously, similar attention to reverberation also arises in the other recent work on the album, Mason Bates’ “White Lies for Lomax.” “Lomax” is, of course, Alan Lomax, the pioneering ethnomusicologist who devoted so much of his life to collecting and documenting the many different forms of folk music encountered across the continental United States. Bates describes the thematic material as “wisps of distant blues fragments,” adding that these fragments “are hardly honest recreations of the blues.” This explains the “Lies” part of the title. Bates does not say anything (at least in the booklet notes) about the “White” part. While this may have been his way of blunting the significance of his “dishonesty,” it is worth recognizing that Lomax was white, as is Bates, while the blues has its roots among African Americans living in the Deep South, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, there is some suggestion that Bates acknowledges distorting his source material and may even be calling out some of his predecessors, such as Aaron Copland or even George Gershwin, for doing the same, probably in the interest of appealing to what Amiri Baraka, back when he was writing as LeRoi Jones, called the middle-brow tastes of white critics.

The more traditional works on the album cover the period from the very end of the eighteenth century to the very beginning of the twentieth. The latest of these is Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 3, a set of twelve variations in B-flat minor that he composed for Artur Rubinstein. Somewhat earlier is the first (also in B-flat minor) of the set of six Moments musicaux (Opus 16), which Rachmaninoff composed in 1896. However, the album begins at the opposite extreme with the third (in D major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 10 sonatas, which he composed in Vienna in 1798 at a time when his reputation was just beginning to rise.

Taken as a whole, this is an album in which each of the compositions has its own distinctive rhetorical stance. Martinez is clearly comfortable with finding and delivering that stance in each of her interpretations. She has definitely come a long way since my first encounter with her almost a decade ago. I might even acknowledge that the use of the adjective “brilliant” in that advance work is justified. However, given my personal sense of my own aging over these last ten years, I have to wonder how much longer she will be presented as “young!”

Commoditizing Dreams

One particular passage leapt out at me while I was reading Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRBlog post about Beasts of the Southern Wild:

In movies the imaginary tends to be expensive, so independent live-action films generally work with what is already in place and steer clear of the realms of large-scale fantasy. Our dream worlds are elaborated for us by corporate entities with the necessary means. Beasts of the Southern Wild represents a kind of protest against this state of affairs, an assertion of the right to build one’s own make-believe world, with available tools however rudimentary, rather than submitting to the pre-imagined products of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and the rest.

It struck me that there were more meanings to that “dream factory” epithet assigned to Hollywood than I had initially imagined. Presumably the epithet emerged from the ways in which Hollywood took a mass-production approach to entertainment, putting out entertainment the way Henry Ford’s assembly line put out cars. However, there is a corollary to this interpretation, which is that Hollywood tapped into a means of production through which our very dreams would become commoditized.

Through this corollary, we see one way in which Walter Benjamin’s claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end” may be achieving validity. Storytelling (note the italics) is not so much about the story as it is about the subjective and social elements that a storyteller brings to that story. A “dream factory,” on the other hand, dispenses with such complications from the subjective and social worlds and is concerned only with efficient manufacture (and resulting return on investment) of the dream-as-product. Through commoditization, we have lost what O’Brien calls “the right to build one’s own make-believe world.” Indeed, we have become so addicted to the commodity that most of us probably do not even recognize that loss for what it is.

If we then return to my earlier discussion of Tim Parks’ NYRBlog post, “Do We Need Stories?,” we see that Parks put forth the proposition that “the self requires a story.” One may then view O’Brien’s statement as an assertion that, through commoditization, the self has lost the right to tell its own story. Max Weber may have only scratched the surface in warning that commodity-based capitalism could lead to the loss of both meaning and freedom. More serious than either of these losses is the very loss of self. Take away self and the question of whether or not freedom has been lost becomes irrelevant. Man is no longer a slave but simply an automaton that happens to have been constructed out of biological components.

CHUTZPAH Unregarded

I see I made it through last week without ever saying anything about a Chutzpah of the Week award.  Clearly, this has nothing to do with chutzpah going on a decline.  Rather, it is simply a matter of a shift in my attention.  Now that Examiner.com has changed policy to allow only explicitly local articles to appear on my SF Classical Music Examiner site, my Channel Manager has been generous enough to set up for me a “national” site, where I can write about matters of more general interest, including performances in cyberspace, recordings, and touring schedules of performers of interest.  This has led to a change in how I read my daily news feeds;  and, as a result, between what I now read and why I read it, I have had to retract by “chutzpah feelers.”

Because I shall continue to try to orient my Examiner.com articles around listening experiences, however, I shall continue to engage in active research over the nature of those experiences and how we communicate them, whether in the domain of listening or performing.  In keeping with the more research-oriented posts I have “rehearsed” on this site, I expect still to regard both performing and listening as behaviors that take place in the social world, which means that the domain of my overall research theme may probably best be called “the social world of music.”  If I ever have “world enough and time,” I may even be able to turn that theme into a book, for which my Examiner.com efforts may emerge as a major part of my “field work.”  This would amount to eating the dog food I cooked up when I took Harvey Sachs to task for being too much of a hagiographer and not enough of an anthropologist in his book The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824.  I summarized the primary ingredient of that dog food as follows:

The problem is that this book is top-heavy with adjectives of adulation and far to sparse when it comes to addressing the "work practices" (to appropriate the terminology of those anthropologists cited in the first paragraph) of a man with considerable musical skills, many of which could be attributed to a rich education and the rest to an equally rich body of "workplace experiences." Obviously, one cannot approach Beethoven as a workplace anthropologist, following him around at work day by day, capturing every activity with a handheld video camera and interviewing him to clarify what one observes; but there is an extensive historical record of documents by Beethoven and by those who worked with him. Sachs has been far to negligent of this record, perhaps because he wanted his book to appeal to a more "popular" readership or perhaps because he did not want to reproduce the scholarship of others. Whatever the reason, when it comes to trying to provide a sense of Beethoven as a "man at work," this book falls far short of what it could have been.

In terms of my current “field work,” I would note only that, in my Examiner.com pieces, I try to approach that sense of the “musician at work” in terms that make sense from the audience side.  I am less interested in “dishing the dirt” on what happens in rehearsals and conservatory studies and more interested in how listening can be informed simply by recognizing that there are “work practices” in performance that may help the mind to find order in the sensory signals coming in through the ear.

Needless to say, the connotation in that last sentence of Friedrich Hayek’s speculative investigations into the nature of “sensory order” was deliberate.  Listening to music engages as much of our faculties of consciousness as does reading a book.  It may even engage more of those faculties because the experience is far more time-dependent.  Thus, I anticipate that I shall continue to explore the nature of those faculties in a broader context on this site, just as I anticipate that I shall continue to engage disciplines such as philosophy and social theory in my general reading practices.  Hopefully, this will make for an interesting and informative journey, even if my aspirations for a book to make sense of it all are never fulfilled.

Brahms and Mozart

Writing earlier this morning on Examiner.com about the performances of the music of Johannes Brahms in this week’s subscription concerts by the San Francisco Symphony, I suggested that one of the motives behind Brahms’ first piano concerto (Opus 15 in D minor) may have been to refute, if not attack, the music practices of Franz Liszt, using his first piano concerto in E-flat major as a case in point.  Liszt’s concerto premiered in Weimar in 1855, which puts in in the middle of that period of time Brahms devoted to his own concerto.  It is unclear how much attention Brahms gave to this concerto;  but one could understand that it would have played a role in Brahms coining the adjective “Lisztich” as a synonym for excessive bad taste.

The reason it might have played that role is that Brahms may well have perceived the concerto as an attack on his personal sense of identity.  For better or worse Liszt’s concerto was iconoclastic, and the icon that took the most severe smashing was the concept of the concerto itself as it had developed through the efforts of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.  From this point of view, Brahms could well have felt that Liszt was undermining his own “presentation of self” (as Goffman put it) as a music-maker.

This would then raise the question of how significant Mozart and Beethoven had been in shaping Brahms’ sense of that “presentation of self.”  There is no question of Beethoven’s role in this process.  I have even described Brahms as having “to live with the influence of Beethoven without succumbing to that influence.”  However, on the basis of the following sentences from Brahms’ Wikipedia entry, we may assume that Mozart’s influence was less of a source of anxiety:

Brahms also loved the Classical composers Mozart and Haydn. He collected first editions and autographs of their works, and edited performing editions.

This has led me to wonder just what performing editions of Mozart were products of Brahms’ editing.  My initial attempt to search for scores in the Library of Congress catalog was not successful, so I am not yet ready with a quick answer.  There is a side of me that wonders whether Brahms’ work on his D minor piano concerto may have been influenced by his preparing a performing edition of Mozart’s concerto in the same key.  (It is hard to imagine that Brahms was not one of the many serious listeners who was most impressed by Mozart when the latter was working in a minor key.)  Hopefully, I shall be able to create some personal research time to investigate this matter further.

"… we are our capacity to buy …"

Is Facebook really the foundation for individual identity in the Internet age, as the social software evangelists would have us believe?  I have been reading Zadie Smith’s review of The Social Network in the latest issue of The New York Review, and I have been pleased at the way she addresses issues of Facebook itself in parallel with her assessment of the film.  The paragraph that has made the deepest impression on me thus far has been the following:

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

By calling out the failings of Facebook to address the nature of identity in the social world, Smith gives the lie to all of that enthusiastic evangelism.  She then cuts to the more realistic core truth in that last sentence.  All that matters is “our capacity to buy;”  and, in the “Internet economy,” that comes down to whether Facebook or Google exercises more control over that capacity.

This is the lens through which we should examine the latest ComScore data, reported this morning by Lance Whitney on his Digital Media blog for the CNET Blog Network.  Whitney wastes no time hauling out the hard numbers:

Facebook served up the greatest number of online display ads among all online publishers tracked by ComScore over the third quarter.

With a total of 297 billion online display ads, the popular social network accounted for 23 percent of all ad impressions (the number of times an ad is displayed), ComScore announced yesterday. Facebook's market share for ad impressions jumped 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in last year's third quarter.

For those who do not want to do the math on percentage figures, this means that the total number of those online display ads is 1,284,315,000,000, in other words, about one and a quarter trillion. 

Make no mistake about it:  Social software is the platform through which those ads are served up with a combination of efficiency and effectiveness that would make any engineer envious.  Note, also, Smith’s keen choice of words.  We are not what we own, nor are we what we buy.  We are our capacity to buy.  In other words we are our susceptibility to marketing.  Having become a nation dominated by marketing, it is no surprise that economic statistics have reduced our presence in manufacturing and agriculture to barely significant numbers.

Digital Art

Bill Thompson’s latest piece on the BBC News Web site, on the subject of “digital art,” gets off to a great start:

At a recent conference on the future of the arts in a digital world the opening night panel was asked to name a digital art work that had impressed them.

All stumbled, perhaps unsure of who was doing 'interesting' work in this rapidly changing field, leaving the delegates at the Media Festival/Arts with the sense that digital might not really count as far as they were concerned.

Unfortunately, he then goes on to compensate for the tongue-tied panelists (whom he never names) and decides to take a crack at answering the question himself.  For my part, however, I found myself more interested in why such a seemingly innocuous question should have been so problematic.

By way of a disclaimer, I have to say that, after many years of sitting on both sides of the table for such events, I find just about all panel discussions to be highly counterproductive.  A panel is rarely anything other than a platform on which a collection of egos can strut.  As such it rarely throws any informative light on the topic being discussed and is at its most entertaining when the boredom of self-preening is disrupted by a heated difference of opinion.  When the panelists are all full-fledged citizens of the world the Internet has made, any available light is further dimmed by a lack of context, particularly historical context, behind any propositions that are asserted (by those with enough linguistic coherence to get beyond meandering and get down to actually hypothesizing or asserting).

There is a good chance that the panelists at this particular event, with its emphasis on art in the age of digital media, could easily have been oblivious to a favorite mantra of the man who may be regarded as the grandfather of media studies, Marshall McLuhan.  The mantra is one that he supposedly picked up on Bali, where he claimed that people said, “We have no art, we do everything as best as we can.”  As a young student I had the usual gee-whiz reaction to this declaration.  Now I realize that it comes close to one of my own hobby-horses and may explain why the question put to the panel so flummoxed them.

Assuming that McLuhan’s account is a faithful one, it strikes me that his Balinese informants had an appreciation for the distinction between the world of nouns and the world of verbs that McLuhan may not have explicitly considered (either when he was in Bali or in any of his subsequent writing).  As I discovered on my own visit, there are lots of Balinese who are very skilled in fashioning artifacts in a variety of media;  but it took me a while to appreciate the extent to which the act of fashioning was more important than the resulting artifact.  Ironically, the lesson was staring me in the face during my visit;  but it took me about a decade to realize what I had learned.

My education took place during a visit to Ubud, an inland village (far from the madding beach crowd) that was home to a community of wood carvers.  When one of those carvers thought we were not impressed with the pieces in his shop, he invited us upstairs to see where the work was actually done.  The first thing I saw in his workspace was a pack of wooden coyotes, all exquisite copies of those Mexican carvings that became popular when urban centers like New York discovered southwest art (many of them making the discovery while going to the Santa Fe Opera, as my wife and I had done).  I pointed at the coyotes.  The carver smiled.  He told me that another American had come to him with a photograph (which he showed me) and asked, “Can you make these?”  The results were now there in great array, all howling at a desert moon halfway around the world.

To an American this might be little more than another story about the extent of the knock-off business progressing from Gucci handbags to Southwest American folk art.  For the carver, however, it was nothing more than the recognition that any “art” (if the word can be used at all) was in the act of carving, regardless of what artifact emerged from the act.  His personal identity was one with the verb-based world of working the wood;  and what the noun-based result of that work happened to signify, whether the reference was to Hindu or Hopi mythology, was virtually irrelevant.

This noun-based misunderstanding of art is as prevalent in the Western world as it is in this remote village in Bali.  In my own writing for Examiner.com, this was particularly evident in my take on The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 by Harvey Sachs, which was so absorbed in marveling over the artefactual qualities of Ludwig van Beethoven’s final symphony that it lost all track of what I called “a sense of Beethoven as a ‘man at work,’” even if that sense got to the real heart of Beethoven’s own identity.  In our own culture, of course, the resulting artifact has assumed more relevance than any of the artifacts of that Balinese carver;  but too much attention to the artifact still distracts from the fact that, where music is involved, the heart of the experience will always be in the making (both compositing and performing) and the listening, both of which are semantically anchored in verbs, rather than nouns.

From this point of view, any question to the panel about “a digital art work that had impressed them” is, by its very nature, seriously misplaced.  One might better ask which, if any artists, have created lasting impressions based on work with digital media (and it might even be fairer if, in the Balinese tradition, the noun “artists” were replaced with the more general “individuals”).  For example, from a verb-based point of view, I have been thoroughly delighted with some footage I have seen of David Hockney doing finger-painting on his iPhone, even if I could care less whether or not any of the results end up on the walls of gallery or museum here in San Francisco.  Ironically, Hockney’s name never came up in Thompson’s piece, either in his account of the panel or in his own efforts to take on the problematic question put to them.

The subtitle of McLuhan’s Understanding Media book was The Extensions of Man.  The significance of that title seems to have been overshadowed by the title of the first chapter of the book, which is the sentence most associated with McLuhan, “Medium Is the Message.”  (Note that this phrase is frequently distorted by inserting “The” at the beginning.)  I would argue that this noun-based focus on “message” is far less important in understanding McLuhan than is the verb-based question of how media have come to extend the capabilities of “man the message maker.”  Perhaps that is because the extensions have now overwhelmed any thoughts about just what messages we want to make.

Understanding Misunderstanding

I am never sure how much significance to attach to job titles;  but it appears that BBC News now has a “Technology of Business reporter” named Sharif Sakr.  I am not quite sure how this fits into their current ontology of news topics, since their “top-level banner” has categories for both “Business” and “Tech.”  I clicked to get to Sakr’s latest story through my “BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition” RSS feed to my Google Reader.  My guess is that it will also show up on my Technology feed (once I get around to looking at it);  but the page itself appears as an entry in the “Business” section.  I also wonder if Sakr’s job title is a one-off or if it is a sign that the BBC wants to provide more technology coverage in their Business division.

The article I chose to read attracted me through its somewhat provocative title, “Can avatars and hyper-real video conferencing replace business meetings?”  This is an area in which I was actively doing research in my Silicon Valley days.  It continues to interest me;  but I would like to believe that my senses for detecting snake oil have become more refined, now that I no longer have a stake in pitching the stuff.

The main thing that has changed since the days of my own research is that more bandwidth is more readily available.  (I remember once attending an Institute of the Future symposium entitled Bandwidth to Burn.  It now seems hopelessly naïve in retrospect, which should serve as an object lesson for those who are attracted to the siren songs of futurists!)  Sakr’s article basically surveys a variety of ways in which increased bandwidth is now being exploited in the interest of improving personal communication, primarily in business settings but with one fascinating example of distance learning from the Manhattan School of Music.  My overall impression was one of bemusement at how many far-fetched speculations were now finding their way into products, rather than just promising prototypes.

Unfortunately, once you enter the world of products, you also leave the world of objective evaluation.  This was painfully evident when Sakr chose to conclude his report with an interview with Cisco's James Campanini.  Now that Cisco has begun to invade the airwaves of commercial television with what amount to “more bandwidth for everyone” advertising spots, one has to be suspicious of anything that counts for the corporate party line.  An excellent case in point is the conclusion to Sakr’s story:

In a further effort to persuade customers, Campanini commissioned independent scientists to compare video chat against old-fashioned telephone conferencing and instant messaging.

The scientists used EEG electrode caps and other sensors to monitor things like stress and attentiveness.

The results?

Luckily for Campanini, video chat won the day. But the study also hints at how much productivity could be lost due to people's current reliance on text tools like IM, SMS and email.

No matter which new technology wins the battle for our eyeballs - telenoid or telepresence or something else - perhaps anything is better than depending on the written word.

"Stress levels with IM were really high", says Duncan Smith of MindLab International, who headed up the study.

"It's just too easy to misunderstand each other using text."

I can believe that Cisco was able to commission an experiment that would be biased in their favor, but the result is that Smith’s summary of the results is misleading.  At best it should be reworded as follows:

It’s just too easy to misunderstand each other using instant messaging.

This is entirely understandable, if not blatantly obvious.  Instant messaging has reduced us to the exchange of cryptically abbreviated codes that deprive our use of language of just about any sign of grammar and rhetoric;  so it should be no surprised that the “logic” of the message may also get lost in the encoding-decoding exchange.  The risk of misunderstanding through a telephone call is far less than that of instant messaging, even without the rich media supplements of telepresence or robotic telenoids.

What is missing from Sakr’s article (not to mention the entire Cisco mentality) is an appreciation of the difference between the nature of communication framed as an engineering problem and the nature of communication framed as a social theory problem.  In the former case the problem always reduces to getting bits of signal from one place to another without those bits being distorted by noise.  Increasing bandwidth is all about moving more of those bits more efficiently, meaning that one can supplement (or replace) traditional uses of “raw text” with “richer media.”  However, the concept of “understanding” is beyond the scope of this framing of the problem;  and, unless someone can come up with a mathematical theory of understanding that is as rigorous and useful as Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, that concept will remain beyond the scope of engineering.  If we wish to appreciate just how remote the social nature of communication is from engineering thinking, we need only consider the recent problems our State Department has encountered as Twitter has begun to play a role in the practice of diplomacy, a discipline in which the problem of misunderstanding may best be described as “mission-critical.”

The bottom line is that it is very unlikely that engineering will ever solve the “problem of misunderstanding,” simply because that is not the sort of problem that can be framed in engineering terms.  On the other hand there is no reason why we cannot (in Wire-speak) dismiss this insolvability as “ain’t no thing.”  The bigger “thing” is the question of whether technology companies are willing to allow their products to be subjected to more rigorous and less biased analysis based on a social theoretic perspective on communication and understanding.  Such analysis may lead to identifying problems that can be framed in engineering terms, with the promise that engineering solutions would lead to better products.  Isn’t it about time that Cisco recognize the value of such a social perspective?

Boundaries

Christopher de Bellaigue’s NYRBlog post last week, “Should Afghanistan Exist?,” should raise broader questions of worldview beyond the mindset of our current military adventures in that part of the world.  After all, one of the fundamental premises of the Internet age is that cyberspace is a “world without borders.”  Yet in the physical world we continue to believe that “good fences make good neighbors,” that there is no way in which the “extended self” of any community could possibly coexist with any other community unless there are boundaries to define “who belongs where.”  What makes de Bellaigue’s analysis interesting, however, is that it goes beyond the usual demographic question of where people are and considers questions of where they go and when they go there.  In other words the fundamental assumption behind any boundary is that, at some level of spatial resolution, people are basically static;  or, as I prefer to put it, we confine ourselves to a world of nouns modified by adjectives because our “supporting technologies” (if not our own minds) cannot manage very well (if at all) in a world of verbs.

This assumption is not likely to change.  Thus, whatever the ideals of the United Nations may be, societies will continue to be obsessed with nationalism;  and obsessions with nationalism will continue to lead to wars.  The only things that will change will be the devices with which those wars are fought, which always seem to be one step ahead of our own provincial imaginations, no matter how technologically rich we think we are.

Prizes!

However strong the case I tried to make last month may have been, David Simon did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  On the other hand I have read enough of the writings of Mario Vargas Llosa that I cannot really complain about this year’s selection.  Furthermore, I take the following paragraph from the report by Julie Bosman and Simon Romero for The New York Times as a good sign for future consideration of Simon:

In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. Recent winners included Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist, in 2009, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey in 2007 and Harold Pinter of Britain in 2005.

What I find more amusing is that the day on which I decided to make my case for Simon as a Nobel Laureate, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected him as a recipient of one of their $500,000 “genius awards.”  Truth be told (to invoke a bit of Wire-speak), I have never been more than tepid about those awards.  There have been recipients I have admired and others who have never struck me as anything other than a colossal waste of my personal attention.

Then there is that “genius” appellation, which threatens to bring any tepid sentiments to a roaring boil.  I feel as if the award amounts to putting a price on a concept that is far too context-sensitive to be fully appreciated, with the result that yet another piece of our terminology has fallen victim to that disease that Max Weber called “loss of meaning.”  Thus, while I do not begrudge Simon the $500,000 (and I am pretty sure that he will put it to good use), I find it more than a bit ironic that it takes only a little text analysis to find that same symptom of loss of meaning poking around the twists and turns of the plot line of The Wire.

Could Simon have ever been a contender?  Unfortunately, the Nobel Committee does not leak any information about short-lists, which may be just as well.  The fact is that undue attention to even the most prestigious of prizes amounts to an assault on time that could be better spent.  I once heard John Cage give a lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and for that occasion he chose to repeat a lecture he had recently given after accepting some other prestigious award.  I forgot the specifics long ago, but the message of the talk was unforgettable.  While the delivery was true to Cage’s Zen sense of equanimity, his words turned out to be a smooth veneer coating one of the most aggressive statements I ever heard him make, framed as the question:

Where were you when I needed you?

Too many prizes seem to do little more than recognize those who have already been recognized.  Perhaps this broadens the scope of recognition to a wider audience;  but it also strikes me as institutional neglect of “the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes,” as Henry Miller put it.  Given our cultural aversion to history, we can certainly do with increased awareness of past achievement;  but that awareness derives its value from its impact on present action and future achievement.  I suppose my concern is that too much attention to prizes for the past will blunt that impact even more than it has already been blunted by our Internet-based culture of self-promotion.

Losing Track of History (again?)

Thomas Vinciguerra's piece in the Arts and Leisure section of today's New York Times turned out to trigger all sorts of nostalgic nerves, as well as a general sense of personal, if not social, history. It concerns one of those aspects of freshman orientation at Harvard University that is probably not highly publicized but may well play a fundamental role in how undergraduates develop a sense of personal identity:

Nowhere is “Love Story” more pummeled than at Harvard, the site of Oliver and Jenny’s gooey courtship. Every year the Crimson Key Society, a student organization that conducts campus tours and otherwise promotes college spirit, runs “Love Story” strictly for laughs for first-year students during their orientation. This year’s two screenings take place on Aug. 30.

The meaning of "strictly for laughs" is then elaborated (as if it would need elaboration) as follows:

“We’re looking to entertain the freshmen and help them feel comfortable in this new place,” said Maya Simon, the co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association.

That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the rear of the auditorium of the Science Center building and jeering the proceedings in the manner of a midnight viewing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Just before Ms. MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Crimson Key members loudly implore her, “Don’t say it!” At the conclusion, when Mr. O’Neal repeats her bathetic utterance, they shout, “Plagiarist!” And so it goes. At one point, Oliver enters Jenny’s dorm, learns from a receptionist that she is in the “downstairs phone booth,” and asks, “Where is that?”

“Downstairs, stupid!”

I found the reference to Rocky Horror at bit curious, particularly after Vinciguerra decided to give that nail another whack with his hammer:

Crimson Key’s hallowed tradition apparently began in the late 1970s, just as “Rocky Horror” was setting the standard for cult-flick audience participation.

Clearly, Vinciguerra is not of my generation! My own freshman orientation at MIT took place in September of 1963. It did not take me long to discover that our Lecture Series Committee ran a series of weekend films at which improvised sarcasms from the audience were almost always a part of the show. I have no reason to doubt that the same sort of high jinks were taking place every weekend on the other end of Massachusetts Avenue up at Harvard. Indeed, I would guess that this was a normal weekend ritual at just about every American college. Undergraduate life always hits you with more pressures than you expect. This was a great way to blow off steam in a relatively innocuous setting in the company of your fellow students.

In all the screenings I attended, I never saw anyone get up on stage, as would later happen at midnight screenings of Rocky Horror; but I also suspect that our own audience participation was never (well, hardly ever) rehearsed, which was probably part of the Rocky Horror ritual and seems to have been appropriated by Crimson Key. Rocky Horror did not set any standards. It just provided one of those opportunities where undergraduates could indulge in a practice previously confined to the campus and where those of us who remember being undergraduates could do the same in good company. In other words college life had institutionalized the practice long before Rocky Horror was released. Midnight movies just provided a way for that practice to establish itself in a new setting (and, in my own experience base, long before Rocky Horror there was the midnight movie experience of Pink Flamingos).

Vinciguerra clearly lacks such an extensive experience base. I feel sorry for him. For most of us, everyday life now presents us with stresses that would make undergraduate life seem innocuous. We clearly need better ways to blow off steam, particularly when we see so many examples of the pathological behavior of those who apparently lack such means. By missing out on this point, Vinciguerra appears to have also missed out on the full signification of the material he was reporting.

Rediscovering the Public Library

In hard economic times free is good, and the public discovers that there is value in a variety of free resources that tend to be ignored when money flows readily. It is therefore nice to see that one of the most ubiquitous of those free resources is experiencing a revival at a time when it sometimes seems as if it is under siege from the world of the Internet. That institution is the public library, one of those service organizations with a long tradition of both understanding and appreciating the value of service. Because these institutions are financed primarily out of government budgets, they can apply most of their efforts to providing services, rather than figuring out the best fee-for-service price points.

When it comes to video entertainment, it turns out that our cash-strapped public is beginning to appreciate that the public library offers a better deal than the fee-for-service businesses that have been praised by technology evangelists for their innovative thinking. Earlier this week, Kim Velsey filed a report for the Harford Courant, which began as follows:

Red boxes, red envelopes and the blue and yellow Blockbuster stores may dominate the movie rental landscape, but according to a recent survey, when Americans want to watch a DVD, they are most likely to turn to their local library.

The survey, released this year by OCLC, a nonprofit library co-operative and research organization, found that public libraries in the United States lend an average 2.1 million videos every day, slightly more than the 2 million that Netflix ships. The other top two competitors, Redbox and Blockbuster, come in at 1.4 million and 1.2 million respectively, according to daily averages provided by company representatives.

The findings were part of a report called "How Libraries Stack Up," which highlights the many roles that libraries play in communities, according to OCLC market analysis manager Peggy Gallagher. It also includes statistics on career assistance and Wi-Fi use — the extent of which might be surprising to the general public or even to businesses offering similar services.

The story is saturated with ironies, but the best of them is not actually in the text. Like many online versions of a newspaper, Courant.com derives revenue from advertising content on each of its Web pages. Velsey's report covers two such pages, each of which is practically saturated with Google-placed Netflix ads, three on the first page and two on the second! It is as if the ads are screaming, "Don't read this article when you can click here instead!"

(I noticed that, as soon as this piece was posted, a Netflix ad was assigned by Google to its newly-created page.)

Actually "Netflix" is in the text content of the story in a rather amusing manner:

"I think of libraries as places for books," said Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice president of corporate communications, adding that Netflix doesn't view public libraries as a competitor.

"It's free," said Swasey, "so it's a whole different model."

The first quote is just a matter of bald ignorance. If this came from an interview conducted by Velsey in preparing the story, one should wonder if the reporter had the backbone to ask this guy about the last time he had bothered to enter a public library, when (if ever) it was and what he experienced there. The second quote then takes us back to my initial point, which is that services are provided most effectively when the service providers are not spending all of their time worrying about fee-for-service (as is so painfully the case in our health care system).

Then there is Jose Rosa, who still maintains his streaming Netflix subscription but is spending more time at this public library:

Largely, though, he likes the library because it's a library. He can look at movies while his 12-year-old son finds books to take home.

I am reminded of a public library branch in Singapore that was deliberately set up in a major shopping mall. Beyond an extensive collection of children's books, they had enough of a facility and personnel to qualify as a day care center. When I visited the place, one of the librarians explained (with a thoroughly straight face) that they provided the perfect place for mothers to leave their kids while shopping. However, underneath the humor on the surface is a more important generalization that applies to us as much as it does to Singapore: A public library is far more than a "content repository" (to invoke a bit of Internet-speak). It is a community institution. Its very presence enriches the community and may even play a signifying role in defining the community's sense of identity. That sense of community identity is, itself, under siege through the impact of "social networks," which, by many criteria of social theory, may better be described as antisocial. Perhaps, as people have to be more careful about how they spend their money, they will discover, rather like Hans Christian Andersen's Chinese emperor with his mechanical nightingale, that technology really is not the solution for everything!

A Chilling Parallel

While Bertrand Russell may have been the one to label Friedrich Nietzsche one of the "philosophical progenitors" of Nazis and Fascists in his History of Western Philosophy (published in 1945), I first encountered the connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis through a far more pedestrian path. Indeed, that path came from an essay entitled "Nietzsche and the Nazis," which, as I recall, was in Harry Golden's collection, Only in America (which happened to be a bar mitzvah present). That essay was compelling enough to persuade me to purchase a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, which I still own even if less authority is attached to Walter Kaufmann's translation now than when he was accepted as one of the prime movers to revive interest in Nietzsche after the Second World War. Nevertheless, notwithstanding Russell's protestations, the Wikipedia entry probably chose the right word in describing any Nazi use of Nietzsche's philosophy as "selective."

On the other hand, when one encounters texts that are so rich in aphorism, can one read them in any way that is not selective? Consider the following sentences from Twilight of the Idols (in Kaufmann's translation):

Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true of power politics. A new creation in particular—the new Reich, for example—needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary.

This is a key element in the argument developed in the section entitled "Morality as Anti-Nature;" and one can easily start thinking about National Socialism even before one encounters Kaufmann's decision to leave "Reich" untranslated. Unfortunately, in this new century we can now turn to other political ideologies that appear to have thrived from needing enemies more than friends, the closest example of that ideology being the "New American Century" thinking that assumed such a strong hold on the policies of the Administration of George W. Bush. Indeed, I have gone so far as to suggest that The Project for the New American Century may well have been the key factor through which Dick Cheney became "The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction." Is this not evidence enough of the trouble we can get into through our willful cultural ignorance of history?

Playing by the Old Rules

One of the major points I tried to make yesterday in commenting on the use of Twitter in our State Department is that social software is changing the rules of the "great game" of diplomacy. This then raised the question of what will happen to the "old rules." The more commentary I encounter on the current case of the apprehension of eleven Russians presumed to be moles, the more I realize that this whole episode amounts to a collision between new rules and old. In this framework observations, like the one on NPR this morning, to the effect that these spies cannot be that good (because the good ones never get caught) miss the point. Moles like these may be a product of "old school" thinking, just as Vladimir Putin has the resume of someone who became a master in that old school; and, in the interest of keeping a balance, it is important to recognize that former President George W. Bush was just as "old school" when he directed the Central Intelligence Agency to apply more resources to agent activities and less to the work of analysts. I am not suggesting that agents (including moles) have been rendered irrelevant by the abundance of information on the Internet (a point that too many commentators make too glibly); but the rules that guide what agents actually do are changing. Boris and Natasha (as in the nemeses of Rocky and Bullwinkle) were comic because they never "got" the rules; and that is why so many commentators are now waxing nostalgic over their favorite Boris and Natasha routines. This time around, however, Natasha looks like Anna Chapman; and in her column this morning for The Social on CNET News, Caroline McCarthy observed that Chapman "had been a prolific Facebook and LinkedIn user."

On the other hand not all the rules change. While everyone (including, alas, McCarthy) wants to look at Boris and Natasha, we have forgotten, in our cultural amnesia of history, to look at Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. All of the "Cambridge five" succeeded as double agents because they conformed so well to the norms of British society (they were, after all, products of Cambridge) that their could be no question of their loyalties. Alan Bennett got it best in An Englishman Abroad with the line that went something like "Burgess can't possibly be a spy; he and I share the same tailor." Double agency is all about maintaining two different identities. That rule will remain in place no matter what rules guide what double agents do (or determine whether or not they are necessary). However, while this high-level rule has not changed, the lower-level rules through which identity is defined have changed considerably since the days of the Cambridge spies. Identity through Facebook has confined identity of one's tailor (not to mention having a tailor) to the ash-heap of history. Also, another more important rule has not changed, which is the point behind that NPR observation: Just because you have caught eleven individuals who have not mastered the new rules, it is still possible (if not likely) that just as many "better players" are currently in your midst!

The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the "Techno-Moron"

By my records it has been over three years since I invoked the pejorative colloquialism "techno-moron." At the time I was railing against the "Innovation America" initiative, which had been established by the National Governors Association and may have provided me with my first incentive to view innovation-centered thinking as "the new Kool-Aid." As I saw the matter, the toxic nature of the Kool-Aid was similar to that of Homer's addictive lotus plants; but, while the latter banished all thoughts of home (and therefore identity) from the eaters' minds, the former could drive out any rational thinking about consequences. I may have dropped the colloquialism, but I find that I cannot say enough about the neglect of consequences in prevailing decision making. Last week, for example, I got onto a roll on this theme with back-to-back posts entitled "Reckless Innovative Minds?" and "Reckless Innovative Journalism?"

I thus took some comfort when I discovered that Friedrich Hayek had documented the origins of this intellectual myopia in a 1941 paper entitled "The Counter-Revolution of Science." He associated those origins with the impact of the French Revolution on the rise of positivism. His view of French society in the early nineteenth century uses language far more polite than my more colloquial rhetoric; and, as a result, his text is probably more effectively acerbic. Nevertheless, we can see from this paragraph that he is targeting a class of individuals who are flourishing just as much today as they did in the period he examined:

Thus a whole generation grew up to whom that great storehouse of social wisdom, the only form indeed in which an understanding of the social processes achieved by the greatest minds is transmitted, the great literature of all ages, was a closed book. For the first time in history that new type appeared which as the product of the German Realschule and of similar institutions was to become so important and influential a figure in the later nineteenth and twentieth century: the technical specialist who was regarded as educated because he had passed through difficult schools but who had little or no knowledge about society, its life, growth and problems and its values, which only the study of history, literature and languages can give.

In other words it is through such neglected issues as "knowledge about society, its life, growth and problems and its values" that we become sensitized to the relevance of the simple precept that all actions have consequences. One may aspire to "positive" truths; but only the most abstract of those truths are eternal (and most of them were documented in Principia Mathematica). Indeed, I suggested in my very first blog post that any "specialized truth" has a "half-life," based on the effects of those aforementioned neglected issues; and, if Homer's lotus obscured all thoughts of home, the Kool-Aid of innovation-centered thinking dulls our awareness of the "rate of decay" of those truths. Hayek has is own punch line for this state of affairs. However, rather than saving it for a parting shot, he uses it as his opening sentence:

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success.

Hayek's lesson is that it was ever thus, so we should not be surprised that it still is!

What Went Wrong?

It has been a long time since I walked out on a performance. Between that "find the beauty" lesson that David Amram learned directly from Thelonious Monk, Billy Eckstine recalling that, in the midst of all the radical experimentation in jazz taking place in the Forties, "we never knocked nobody else's music," and my own premise that any effort at execution, whether on a stage or in a classroom, can teach me something about listening, I have been a lot more tolerant as part of my ideological shift from criticism to "examination." Before that shift my wife and I used to have a code phrase that we would apply to dramatic performances in theaters and opera houses. If one of us was losing patience with a production, then the first thing that person would say at the intermission was, "If I tell you how it ends, can we go home?"

At the first intermission of last night's San Francisco Opera performance of Giacomo Puccini's La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the Golden West), both of us immediately realized that neither of us cared how it would end. This was as unexpected as it was disappointing, particularly after conductor Nicola Luisotti's expressed enthusiasm for the music at the Insight Panel at the beginning of this month. It seemed as if Luisotti could not say enough about the influences of Richard Strauss' Salome and Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande on Puccini's score. On the basis of his Salome "insights" last fall, I have acquired considerable respect for Luisotti. Prior to those remarks, I had never heard anyone talk about the transparency of orchestral textures in any Strauss opera. Luisotti understood listening at a level that would have made Igor Stravinsky proud.

In the course of the first act, I could appreciate Luisotti's point, if not his enthusiasm. There were many occasions when it was clear that we had ventured onto Debussy's turf, whether it involved melodic lines, harmonic progressions, or orchestral textures. The Strauss influence was less evident; and my strongest conjecture is that this had less to do with the actual musical "language" of Salome and more to do with Strauss' skill at unfolding this highly compact one-act drama into a continuous flow of music. Like Salome, Fanciulla does not bring the progress of the narrative to a screeching halt for the sake of a star turn for the diva. (Even during Salome's final monologue "aria," the narrative is clearly still churning forward to its catastrophic conclusion.)

The question is not whether the influences are there but whether they enrich the score and its performance. As my thesis advisor Marvin Minsky put it in his Society of Mind book, are they "differences that make a difference?" My current conjecture is that there is little that any composer can do to work with the flow of a narrative that does not have a lot of flow in the first place. One can appreciate how Puccini could take David Belasco's rather flimsy (if not insulting) play about an American in Japan and turn it into an experience as transcendent as Madama Butterfly; but that dog just does not hunt in a California mining camp, probably for several reasons.

One may just be that we are more sensitive to "realism" when it gets closer to our personal "reality." It is one thing if both Belasco and Puccini were wide of the mark on Japanese culture and quite another when the scene shifts to the North American continent and the audience has had more than its fair share of the myths of Hollywood Westerns. Indeed, even those further than driving distance from where Fanciulla's camp could have been have experienced changes of thought about the nature of "the Wild West." The reality of John Ford (even when it was more sophisticated than most audiences apprehended) has given way to the reality of Deadwood (which Ford probably would have appreciated, even if he might not have wanted to tell the story that way). Ironically, Fanciulla now provides a memory trigger for Deadwood with its reference to Cornish miners, who were Hearst's primary source of exploited labor in his silver mining ventures (but this connection probably has nothing to do with Belasco's plot line).

Another possibility may be that there was far more substance to Belasco's play and that Puccini never "got" that substance. Thus, we have over a dozen separate singing male roles in that mining camp. A good production team for the play would draw upon the expressive capabilities of both costume and acting technique to make sure that each of those characters spoke with a distinctive voice that established a "sense of role" not only in the text of the play but also in the unfolding of the narrative, however flimsy that narrative may have been. (A really good director would probably be bold enough to cut any lines that did not contribute to that "sense of role.") No such distinctive voices emerge in Puccini's musical language; and, in the midst of all the stage activity emerging from Lorenzo Mariani's direction, it was often difficult to establish just who was doing the singing at any given time.

In fairness to the San Francisco Opera, I should point out that this is a shared production and that any of the problems I have tried to address may have originated with the partners. Those partners are the Fondazione Teatro Massimo de Palermo and the Opéra Royal de Wallonie, both of which are European institutions. At the Insight Panel Mariani talked about dividing his time between Europe and the United States; but his base is in Palermo, which is where this production originated. My guess is that a production team with "better grounding" in American culture might have been able to overcome any of the limitations in Puccini's score; but would such a production have succeeded in Europe? Perhaps we need to consider other approaches to production that originated in the United States, particularly in the context of a "post-Deadwood" frame of reference.

Who is in the Audience?

I have never tried to hide the premise that the writing I do for Examiner.com is directed at "serious listeners." At the same time I am well aware that, regardless of the performance I happen to be attending, it is probably the case that most of the people sitting around me do not share my seriousness of purpose. In recent correspondence with a colleague about the sort of point of view that a performer might take towards the audience, I wrote the following:

I have been (often) reminded that most people in the audience are there for "entertainment" rather than "work." They are not interested in whether or not that entertainment may actually be enabled by the work. They just want to tune out the world outside the performing space.

I intended this as a non-judgmental statement of a societal norm. I realize that this is an instance of what I have called "that all-purpose escape clause, 'it is what it is;'" but in this case I take it as guarding against having any grandiose illusions about what I do!

Beyond those illusions lies a possible motivating force for why one writes at all. It is not strictly a matter of writing for those who are interested. Rather it involves writing for those who might be interested, hopefully in an encouraging enough way that one offers a "hook" for that transition from "might be" to "are." That hook does not necessarily involve seeking out "entertaining" aspects of the experience. A good case in point is how my eminent predecessor as SF Classical Music Examiner, Scott Foglesong, prepared a preconcert talk at Davies Symphony hall for a performance of the eighth C minor symphony (Opus 65) of Dmitri Shostakovich. When I reviewed the recent Naxos recording of this symphony conducted by Vasily Petrenko (who had also been the conductor at Davies), I described his approach as follows:

As Scott Foglesong observed in the preconcert talk he prepared for this event, Opus 65 is probably the most despondent of Shostakovich's symphonies, so much so that he felt that, after reviewing the work, Foglesong could not ask anyone to "enjoy" the performance. Instead, he chose to conclude by wishing "The Force be with you" to his audience. When the time came for those of us on the audience side to experience Petrenko's performance, we could appreciate Foglesong's conclusion. The expressiveness of this symphony is so unrelenting that it takes a certain strength of character for a listener to accompany both composer and his performers on this particular journey. Nevertheless, with the power of such a "Force," the occasion etched itself clearly into memory and, like any important memory, created a desire that the experience could be refreshed.

This is probably the best case study I could imagine. It is absurd (or pathological) to think that one would be "entertained" by this Shostakovich symphony. One can either "get into" the experience (and be "guided by the Force"); or one can choose to ignore it. There is no acceptable middle ground.

So, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the prevailing opinion in the audience is, "Why would I want to do such a thing as be guided by that Force?" I feel that Foglesong set a standard that I try to follow. It is not a matter of harnessing all of the rhetorical powers of persuasion to answer that question. Rather, the question can be set aside; and the rhetoric can be exchanged for description. One says (or writes) "This is what happens" and leaves it to the inquisitive nature of the reader/listener to decide whether or not to be a party to that happening. Where my own writing is concerned, I had the interesting challenge of approaching this particular piece of music both retrospectively (in reviewing the San Francisco Symphony performance) and prospectively (in writing about a CD that any reader could purchase); and I decided to use the Symphony performance as a point of reference for the CD review as a way to acknowledge that, for at least some readers, prospection would be informed by retrospection.

This kind of commitment to description is no an easy matter, but it is a challenge I always seem to enjoy. I also see it as an important distinction between "examining" and "reviewing." Those interested in entertainment often seek out reviews to answer the question, "Will I enjoy myself?" I am more interested in the extent to which description can create interest in a new experience, even if that experience does not necessarily entail enjoyment. Some might dismiss this as an "academic pursuit." I prefer to think of it as a writing goal to bear in mind, even if I do not always succeed in achieving it!

The Death of Discretion

BBC News Business Reporter Will Smale released a series of anecdotes this morning about people getting into trouble through their spontaneous use of Twitter under the headline "Be careful what you tweet." Those of us with a sense of history know that this is not really news; it is just the acknowledgement that Twitter supports flaming as effectively as any other form of computer-mediated communication. The only change seems to be that the size of the audience keeps growing.

Communication is one of the ways in which we establish identity; and spontaneous utterances tend to give a more faithful account of identity than deliberated ones. When the spontaneity is positive, it may tend to facilitate understanding among the communicating parties, proving far more effective than any of the conditions behind Jürgen Habermas' concept of an "ideal speech situation." However, in the Newtonian tradition of "opposite and equal," negative spontaneity (even less a part of an "ideal speech system") can undermine understanding as effectively as the positive side facilitates it. Face-to-face encounters tend to provide us with ample opportunities to learn that discretion is the better part of spontaneity, particularly when one of those faces gets slapped. However, even when an indiscreet remark does not lead to blows, there are any number of paralinguistic cues that warn us immediately when we are getting ourselves (or have gotten ourselves) into deep yogurt over a spontaneous utterance.

That is what is missing in computer-mediated communication, the means through which the reaction to an ill-conceived spontaneity can be just as spontaneous, thereby immediately setting the wheels of "repair" into motion (or at least creating the opportunity for such motion). In other words this is yet another instance of one of my favorite topics: All actions have consequences, including the full panoply of our speech acts. The problem is that the physical world does a better job of putting out cues about possible consequences than the virtual world does, and one might say that discretion is the fine art of probing for those cues and attending to them. The result may be that, as more and more of our communications are computer-mediated, our capacity for such probing will erode through not being exercised; and, since everything happens at "Internet speed" these days, it may not be long before the very concept of discretion no longer figures in our working vocabulary.