The Literal and the Figurative

Thanks to my Vienna feed reader, I just encountered an Al Jazeera article that could not have been better timed after the latest Saturday Night Live. Elon Musk used his opening monologue to talk about his use of Twitter. He admitted that he tended to write a mixture of powerful insights with utter balderdash, leaving it up to viewers to decided whether he knew which was which. That seems the best context for the following sentence I just read from Al Jazeera:

Musk said on Twitter in April that SpaceX was going to put a “literal Dogecoin on the literal moon”.

This was his way of saying that Dogecoin would pay for a SpaceX moon shot scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

Needless to say, there is nothing “literal” about any cryptocurrency. It is just another artifact whose value is determined strictly by trading practices. (Those practices were exercised in “real time” during that Saturday Night Live broadcast, when the trading value of Dogecoin took a serious drop after one of Musk’s throw-away jokes.) Mind you, whatever efforts there may be to impose standards, the value of anything traded is inevitably figurative, which is why retirement plans tend to go for conservative investment strategies. Nevertheless, even the most cautious investors cannot be fully protected against the bad judgement of other investors!

SFS to Give a Benefit Concert for the Bay Area LGBTQ Community

Next month the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, will be making its next East Coast tour. That tour was to have included two concerts in North Carolina. However, as was reported last December, these plans were made before the North Carolina state legislature passed into law a bill informally known as “HB2,” whose full title is “An Act to Provide for Single-sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations.” This has come to be known more casually as the “bathroom bill,” since it dictates that the use of such facilities is determined by birth certificate, rather than any more personal sense of gender identity.

Reaction outside of the state of North Carolina was heavily negative and included the National Basketball Association pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of the city of Charlotte. This past December is when SFS officially decided to join the protest by cancelling the two performances scheduled to begin the tour at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This means that SFS will be able to push back the date of its departure from San Francisco; and it will use the available time to present Symphony Pride, a benefit concert in support of the Bay Area LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) community.

The program has been prepared to acknowledge the impact of LGBTQ composers both on the Broadway stage and in the concert hall. Audra McDonald will appear as guest artist singing show tunes by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, John Kander (working with lyricist Fred Ebb), and others. McDonald will also serve as narrator in a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” Other composers whose works will be performed will be Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Meredith Monk, and John Cage. The program will conclude with the concluding movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, which was scheduled to be performed in its entirety at one of the Chapel Hill concerts.

This concert will take place on Tuesday, April 4, beginning at 8 p.m. Tickets are available in the Second Tier for $25, and a few seats are still available in the Orchestra for $50. They may be purchased online through the event page for this program on the SFS Web site, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Box Office in Davies Symphony Hall, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

Government by Comedy

BBC Trending just put up an article discussing the impact of Barack Obama's appearance on Between Two Ferns on visits to Healthcare.gov. The results seem to indicate that, at least in the short term, the impact was definitely a positive one. In is unclear how significant these results are, particularly because that "in the short term" qualifier cannot be overemphasized. However, in the longer term these results may add further data points to support the hypothesis that comedians on television are more trusted sources than just about anyone in the government, possibly (probably?) including the President of the United States. There is a tendency to say that this is just the best way to appeal to youth culture. On the other hand it may be worth considering that, in the political arena, there is nothing particularly new about trusting comedians. We are still more inclined to believe the witticisms of Will Rogers and Mark Twain than any official statement released at a Presidential press briefing. Perhaps we trust comedians to recognize bullshit, because bullshit is often the perfect source for a good joke (somewhat like chutzpah). On the other hand there is often an all-too-human tendency to laugh at a joke without necessarily getting what the joke really is. In other words, while we may accept the comedian as an authority, we are not always clear on his/her authenticity, which means that "policy by stand-up" can be just as flawed as "official story" press releases.

The Inadequate Scholarship of Reza Aslan

I recently started reading Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. It is one of those books that I had wanted to get around to reading, particularly after having seen the San Francisco Opera production of Mark Adamo's The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. There may be weaknesses in the historical record for events in the Middle East in the first century, but it is hard not to be fascinated with that period.

I was quickly impressed by Aslan's talent as a storyteller. He is particularly good as establishing context for the events he wishes to describe. Much of his language goes into providing the reader with a sense of place, whether the place is in the Temple in Jersusalem or backwater Nazareth. Nevertheless, since I do a lot of scholarly reading, I have had a fair amount to trouble sorting out how much of his storytelling is grounded on authoritative sources and how much was created for the sake of literary impact.

Because he confines his notes to the end of the book as a series of paragraphs, rather than numbered items called out by specific phrases in the main text, his approach to establishing authority never rises about the level of casual. This leads me to worry that it is more inadequate than should be acceptable. Consider his description of the priests of the Jerusalem Temple. He devotes a rich paragraph to describing their elaborate attire, including the breastplate with twelve precious stones, one for each of the tribes of Israel. He then describes the urim and thummim as "a sort of sacred dice made of wood and bone that the high priest carries in a pouch near his breast and through which he reveals the will of God by casting lots."

His notes for the chapter in which his appears never cite a source for this. Since I had always held to the verse in Exodus that associates the urim and thummim with the breastplate, I have to say that I find the Wikipedia page a more useful source than Aslan. Indeed, even Aslan's concept of revelation is a bit of an overstatement, since, if the use of the urim and thummim were used for any sort of divination, it apparently never involved anything other that establishing guilt or innocence.

Zealot tells a good story. Most likely it is a synthesis of other stories, perhaps with a bit of inference added. I happen to be one of those readers who likes to know which "men behind the curtain" played a role in the creation of this story!

Faking Authenticity

Reading Christopher Benfey’s latest NYRBlog post, “Posing for the Senate,” was more amusing than I anticipated it would be; but it was also more than a little disconcerting. He did a good job of warranting his conception of the Massachusetts Senate race between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown as a remake of Adam’s Rib. My guess, however, is that the analogy will be lost on a major portion of the Massachusetts electorate, on the grounds that they have never heard of the movie, let alone seen it.

That would sort of deflate the message Benfey was trying to deliver, which is his suggestion that the voters are looking for authenticity, rather than “posing.” I cannot conceive of any election that has ever been grounded in authenticity; and, of course, the whole point of Adam’s Rib is that our adversarial legal system is such that juries are more likely to respond to “poses” than to authenticated facts. The Massachusetts Senatorial election is not about which candidate is more likely to improve the quality of life for the state’s residents. It is about the goals of the respective political parties to establish a strong majority in the Senate. In other words it is about which party (if either) will have a firm lock on power, through which it can then command allegiance from its members. The voters simply do not figure into that equation, whether or not they recognize authenticity or care about doing so.

Fox Doesn’t Know What a Fact Is!

As Brian Stelter reported in this morning’s New York Times, both CNN and Fox initially misreported yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on the mandate for individual health care. Here is how he described the situation over at Fox:

“The mandate is gone,” Shannon Bream, a Fox News correspondent, announced at 10:08 a.m. as a graphic flashed on the screen that called it unconstitutional. A moment later, one of the Fox anchors, Megyn Kelly, cautioned that Ms. Bream might be wrong.
 “We’re getting conflicting information,” Ms. Kelly said, while reading from Scotusblog, an authoritative Web site about the court. Citing the blog, she accurately told viewers that “the individual mandate is surviving as a tax.”

Far more interesting, however, was the statement issues by Fox executive Michael Clemente:

Fox reported the facts as they came in.

Clemente apparently does not know the difference between a proposition (whose authenticity may not yet have been established) and a fact. If this is, indeed, the “view from the top,” then it may be time for this channel to change its name to “Fox Fiction!”

Getting Rid of Dead Wood

This morning BBC News reported that Google is getting rid of seven of its products.  The general consensus is that Google is finally recognizing the seriousness of competition, and the BBC story cited Facebook as a specific example.  It described Google’s action as a “cull” and observed that this was the third such effort.

I suppose it comes down to whether you prefer animal or vegetable metaphors.  Personally, I thought that Knol was dead wood from the day of its launch.  In this case I suppose that I preferred vegetable to animal because, at the time of launch, no one bothered to take word “BETA” off of its Web site.  It was as if one faction thought this “knowledge product” was cool but another likened it to a bowl of leftover lima beans.  It was definitely hard to think of Knol having any animal qualities.  At best is was a product of let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom thinking;  and now it has suffered the fate of all those flowers that bloomed in Mao’s garden!

Julian Assange at Hay

From my vantage point in San Francisco, I really do not know what to make of the Hay Festival.  Since the event is organized by the London Telegraph, it makes sense that the Web site for this newspaper give heavy coverage to the Festival events;  and I certainly cannot object that an old and established newspaper (which I read for its arts coverage, rather than its politics) should commit itself to the nuts and bolts of a literary festival.  My biggest perplexity has to do with what seems to be a parallel commitment to celebrity appearances.  It gives the impression that the Telegraph believes that no one would trek out to a remote village in Wales were it not for the opportunities to gawk at celebrities.  Whether or not this happens to be true, it is just too dismal a premise for me, which is probably why I am just as happy to trek up to the Poetry Room of City Lights when I want to hear talk about books.

Presumably the appearance of Julian Assange at this year’s Festival falls in the celebrity category.  He is clearly not an author, nor does he have aspirations to be one.  Why he appeared at an event called The Book Show is beyond me, but it probably captures yet another of those dismal premises.

The worst of it, however, is the way in which Telegraph reporter Louise Gray prepared a story of how various people (including some celebrities) reacted to the event.  The bottom line is that none of those reactions really address what Assange has done and why he did those things.  Given that Assange has always been pretty straightforward in expressing both of these aspects, I can only conclude one of two things:  Either his audience was incredibly dense, perhaps choosing not to pay attention to what he was saying;  or Gray really made a hash out of her sample space.

The bottom line is that the sample space expressed a preference for negative impressions of mistrust, which all seemed to be based on Assange’s surface-level appearance and behavior.  By those criteria Albert Einstein could just as easily be dismissed as a mad scientist.  My real aggravation, however, was Gray’s presentation of one Paola Cooper, who accused Assange as being a “manipulator of information.”  Following that capsule introduction, Gray provided the following quote:

What makes him any different from the organisations he is tracking? He decides what to publish and what not to publish.

Personally, I see Assange walking a fine line between disclosure and publication.  He usually says that he just downloads stuff into a publicly accessible database.  Decisions about publication are left to specific news providers who can do what they feel is professionally responsible with that database.  I would be surprised if he did not repeat this mantra at least once during his Hay appearance.

My own conclusion about Gray’s report is that the Telegraph wants to portray Assange as a representative of all that is evil in the news business.  The problem is that Assange is not in the news business.  One might even say that he is not in any business.  It makes me wonder why he agreed to put in an appearance in the first place.  Was he made an offer so generous that he knew it would help with legal expenses, or did he think that the Hay audience would be more enlightened than one that has been thoroughly conditioned by the different media outlets controlled by Rupert Murdoch?  If the latter was his motive, then I feel kind of sorry for him.

Giving the Software Too Much Control

Consider the following image, just snapped from my ATT.NET home page on Yahoo!:

Compare what it says about the current temperature with today’s forecast high.  The obvious question arises:  When was that forecast formulated, and why is it still in place in the face of contrary data?  (For the record, when I look out the window, I see the sun shining on everything in sight.  I see clouds in the sky, but I figure that this would count for “partly” rather than “mostly” cloudy!)  Clearly, the forecast was generated by software (isn’t everything these days?);  but should not software, particularly software put out there as a public service, be subject to that same injunction that Juvenal proposed for any “authority figure” (bearing in mind that he assumed such figures would be human):  “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”  One would think that such sanity checking would be second nature in any large enterprise that depends on software development expertise;  but maybe this is one of those data points that warrants the sorts of things that the doom-sayers are proclaiming about Yahoo! these days.  After all, can you trust any source that is easily contradicted by looking out the window?

How CNN's New Boss Neglects the News

This morning's New York Times Web site includes an interview with Ken Jautz filed by the Hollywood Reporter, courtesy of the Reuters wire, and released under the headline "How CNN's New Boss Plans to Revive Ratings."  As I wrote on Friday, Jautz is the new head of the United States division of CNN (now part of CNN Worldwide in the organization chart food chain).  I took some satisfaction in Jautz taking full credit in that interview for the accusation I laid on him this past Friday, that his major achievement at Headline News was "wiping out all trace of the you-give-us-twenty-minutes-we'll-give-you-the-world motto."  At least now I know the motivation behind the massacre, so to speak:

We purposefully made HLN much more pop culture-oriented than CNN and tried to establish its identity as something different.

At the very least we can take this as evidence that Jautz knows more about pop culture than he does about news.  However, this raises the question of whether or not Jautz knows anything about news.  Consider his response to the question about whether he plans to "make things livelier" by adding "opinionated pundits" to his broadcasters:

By the time you get to primetime, in today's media environment, there are so many websites and outlets, people know basic facts. In addition to facts, they want analysis, they want context, they want perspective and they want some opinion. And yes, I think we should provide them with as many points of view as possible, but we should provide them from all different ends of the political spectrum and from newsmakers as well as pundits. As long as we continue to be smart and insightful and informed in our reporting and analysis, that will differentiate us.

We can begin with the problem that the opening premise for this response just "ain't necessarily so" (in the words of the great poet Ira Gershwin).  It would be more accurate to say that "today's media environment" is so riddled with the impact of the consciousness industry that "people" have little idea what they "know," because just about any account of 5W1H (who, what, when, where, why, how) "basic facts" is so wrapped in the rhetoric of strident opinion that it is hard to tell one from the other.  Strident opinion attracts viewers.  More viewers mean more ratings;  and improving ratings is CNN's biggest problem, the very first point Jautz made in his interview.  His assumption that people get their "basic facts" elsewhere is, at best, naive;  and I wish someone would hold his feet to the fire and demand that he warrant his premise!

Actually, on the basis of recent events, I have one possible warrant, which is the Comedy Channel.  This source may make the clearest distinction between fact and opinion:  If people do not laugh, it's a fact;  when Jon Stewart develops an analysis that culminates in a funny joke, that's an opinion!  It's an easy rule to follow;  and it may explain why so many people are willing to trust The Daily Show when it comes to "basic facts."

From this point of view, there is a good chance that the American public knows more about news than Jautz does;  but that just raises the question of whether or not CNN Worldwide cares that he knows so little about news.

Beyond Spectacle

The Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI) program of seventeen opera and operetta scenes took place last Thursday; and my Examiner.com piece about this performance appeared the following morning. However, this event seems to have lodged in my memory more securely than many more polished "professional" performances; so I feel a need to sort out some of the afterthoughts that have managed to linger for several days after my "official examination" went to press, so to speak. Many of those afterthoughts emerged from the setting of the event, which was the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As its name implies, this space was not conceived or designed with staged events in mind, although it does have a modest orchestra pit. Nevertheless, it has been engaged for a variety of innovative staging efforts, not only for the productions of La Calisto and "Suor Angelica" in this summer's BASOTI season but also in a stunning dramatization of the Conservatory's Blueprint Project production of The Soldier's Tale, whose director, Giles Havergal, seemed to have come up with ways to use every conceivable part of the Rehearsal Hall space.

It goes without saying that these three productions had little in common from either a dramatic or a musical point of view. However, I would argue that the setting established a commonality of its own. That commonality can be appreciated when we recognize that the constraints imposed by the Conservatory Recital Hall would probably have made a significantly positive impression on Aristotle, at least on the basis of the text of his "Poetics." The sixth section of this treatise itemizes six components of tragedy, one of which is spectacle (οψις). Aristotle clearly does not think particularly highly of this element, which is indicated by its penultimate position on his list. He gets more specific in the opening paragraph of the fourteenth section:

The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play—which is the better way and shows the better poet. The plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one. To produce this same effect by means of the spectacle is less artistic, and requires extraneous aid. Those, however, who make use of the spectacle to put before us that which is merely monstrous and not productive of fear, are wholly out of touch with tragedy; not every kind of pleasure should be required of a tragedy, but only its own proper pleasure.

The operative adjective in this critique is "extraneous." Spectacle may facilitate the visualization of the plot; but, when the text is properly crafted, the audience should be able to take care of such visualization on its own (perhaps with the suggestion that visualization in the imagination of the viewer has more impact than visualization made explicit through spectacle).

Consider, now, my selection of the "Presentation of the Rose" scene from Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier as the high point of the first half of last Thursday's scenes program; and consider, more specifically, how this scene tends to be staged in a large opera house. That staging is usually set (if one is to be faithful to the libretto) in the extreme opulence of both the Faninal mansion and Octavian's entrance (often with an uncountable number of footmen), all of which are reinforced in extremis by Strauss' lush orchestration. Clearly, there was no way that any of this opulence could be conveyed in the Conservatory Recital Hall. However, rather than feeling this as a loss, I found myself better appreciating how much the music itself actually expresses about these two young people; and I realized how easy it is for all of that expressiveness to get "drowned in the spectacle" (which is exactly the point that Aristotle was trying to make)! Now, we all know that audiences love to be dazzled by Strauss' spectacles (and his wife was good at translating that love into monetary value, at least according to Alma Mahler's memoir); but this bare-bones approach was of great value to those of us more interested in what goes on at the heart of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's text. I would not have traded the BASOTI staging for any other, regardless of any "resource advantages" afforded by the trappings of "grand opera."

Strauss was not the only composer to benefit from this more intimate point of view, but the other significant example was an unexpected surprise. In this case the scene came from the fourth act of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore. This was the opera whose production was selected by the San Francisco Opera for a simulcast in AT&T Park; and, as I wrote last October, neither the opera nor its staging were "well served by the shortcomings of the ballpark setting." I then reinforced this point with a rather critical assessment of the lead soprano:

Sondra Radvanosvsky (Leonora) never quite had a secure command of the virtuosic demands of her part; and the camera ended up exaggerating her trials, turning an acceptable performance into an unpleasant one.

In a business as competitive as opera, a phrase like "acceptable performance" is generally taken as an example of "damning with faint praise;" and I realized that my choice of words was still haunting me as I listened to a student soprano perform Leonora's principal aria from the fourth act as one of the BASOTI scene selections. Listening to the latter performance, I discovered subtleties in Verdi's setting of Salvadore Cammarano's text that, as far as my experience was concerned, turned a potboiler melodrama into a tragedy that would have been more acceptable to Aristotle's standards.

In this case the differentiating factor of the Recital Hall was not one of spectacle, however. It was one of the raw physics of acoustics. In a space as large as the War Memorial Opera House, the human ear is just not going to pick up the subtleties of inflection that can register in the more intimate setting of the Conservatory Recital Hall. Thus, if there is to be a comparable effect in the Opera House, the soloist will have to exaggerate that effect; but this is one of those cases where exaggeration cannot avoid distortion. Thus, while we tend to identify Verdi as a paragon of opera at its grandest, there are any number of examples where the demands of the drama itself require intimacy. Verdi knew how to translate that intimacy into music, but his translations simply do not hold up particularly well in the physical scale of today's opera houses. Thus, while it is hard to imagine a performance of the "Anvil Chorus" in the Recital Hall that would be anything by ludicrous, we really need to get physically closer to a character like Leonora to appreciate just what makes her tick in Cammarano's scenario; and the Recital Hall allowed the audience to do this.

What does this mean for the future of opera? The economics of opera production pretty much require that large audiences be accommodated for each performance. The San Francisco Opera has been experimenting with video projections in the upper balcony to provide better visual intimacy without forcing everyone to purchase opera glasses (or military-strength field glasses). However, the acoustic problem remains; and it may be that performances that honor opera music at its most intimate may demand more attention to matters of physics than were considered by past generations of opera performers.

Matt Taibbi's Diagnosis

Having just invoked the medical metaphor to characterize our current situation in Afghanistan as a "disease," I feel obliged to report that the dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal seems to have provoked Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi into "diagnosing" the prevailing enfeebled state of political journalism in this country (if not elsewhere). In his latest post to Taibblog on the Rolling Stone Web site, entitled "McChrystal and Us," he suggests that, when it comes to providing news about politics in the United States, the practice of journalism "has been reduced to an access-trading game, where reporters are rewarded for favorable coverage of those in the know with more time and availability." At the risk of following The Nation's John Nichols down the primrose path to PowerPoint rhetoric, here is an itemized list of the symptoms described by Taibbi that support his diagnosis:

1. This symbiotic dynamic affects not just individual reporters but whole publications and news channels; it's a huge reason why reporters have in general resisted challenging political authorities. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets not only himself but his whole paper shut out of the access game. Since many recent politicians have made good on this implied threat (George Bush's shut-out of the Washington Post's White House reporters is a classic example), what we get is coverage that across the board fails to ask hard questions and in general treats leaders with a reverence they don't always deserve.
2. Or we get the other thing: partisan coverage in which the right-wing guys hammer the Democrats and the lefties hammer the Bushes and the Cheneys. That's a sort of Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact approach to the access question. You agree to forswear attacks on your own team, then you can get all the access you want from the guys in your locker room. A lot of outlets make this choice and that's why we get the impression that news coverage is negative, because there is in fact a lot of screaming and finger-pointing on the airwaves — but mostly that's partisan entertainment, not a healthy free press challenging authority.
   The media business is so used to associating the whole idea of challenging or negative reporting with partisanship that even the coverage of our role in the McChrystal thing is being pitched to audiences as a kind of extreme version of the usual crap — that what Rolling Stone is doing is "attacking Obama from the left." It's almost like it's not considered possible anymore for tough reporting to exist without some kind of partisan angle, which is sad, because just a generation ago an almost completely apolitical iconoclasm was the expected ideological orientation of the investigative journalist.
3. A third thing we get these days is outright prostitution, and unfortunately I can't even tell all the stories I've heard about the kinds of things that go on in our business. I will say that in the world of business journalism in particular there are prominent news organizations that will openly promise favorable coverage in exchange for access to major business figures. This behavior is common enough that it's not at all a surprise that the major business networks missed the signs leading to the financial crash; they were too busy lobbing softballs to bank CEOs as part of pre-arranged interview deals.

I find this analysis particularly ironic in light of the recent move by Yahoo! News to a crowdsourcing model. Those who still believe in the wisdom of crowds believe that the truth will always be revealed, regardless of Taibbi's diagnosis or the list of symptoms he cites. However, as I recently observed, the crowd is more interested in amusement than truth, which is why "Katherine Heigl's dowdy dress" gets a higher "crowd rating" than the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano. ("Dude, what did you expect? That was in Iceland!") To invoke the title of Nicholas Carr's recent book, we have become a society hopelessly mired in "the shallows;" and that setting is the perfect breeding ground for the metaphorical microorganisms responsible for the disease Taibbi has diagnosed.

Fauré the Impressionist?

I found myself hedging this morning while preparing my Examiner.com piece on last night's Left Coast Chamber Ensemble performance. The hedge had nothing to do with any of the performances. Rather, it had to do with some of the opening remarks by Artistic Director and violinist Anna Presler:

Presler invoked the impressionist movement in painting, with its power to suggest objects while concentrating on the nature of the physical materials applied to the canvas. Whether or not this is a fair characterization of Fauré himself, the four composers that preceded him all demonstrated characteristic strategies for working with the physical materials of sound extending beyond such traditional confines as harmony and counterpoint.

This left me wondering whether or not it was fair to characterize Fauré as an impressionist; so I decided to run yet another experiment on just how useful Google can be as a "knowledge tool."

I took the simplest possible approach, giving Google the two keywords "Faure" (without the accent) and "impressionism." The hit count was 91,300; but I was struck by the fact that none of the ten hits on the first page came from what I would call an authoritative source that would resolve my question. What amused me the most was that the article I had submitted only a few hours earlier to Examiner.com placed sixth on the list. (Vanity would tempt me to conclude that my own authority had just been validated by Google, but I know better!) Less amusing was that the first item on the list was a page from Yahoo! Answers and, to be more specific, Yahoo! Answers Singapore! Now, to be fair, this was the only hit on the first page that explicitly addressed my question in a definitive way; but could the authority of the answer be trusted?

In the spirit of Al Smith, let's follow his advice and "look at the record." Here is the way the question was posed to Yahoo! Answers Singapore:

Is Gabriel Fauré impressionist?

Can the French Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré be considered as a composer of impressionist music, or would he be more under Romantic? Also, what other composers other than Debussy and Ravel can be considered more impressionist than anything else?

This was definitely the sort of thing I had in mind as a question. This is what the "Asker" of the question selected as the Best Answer:

No, Fauré was a mid to late Romantic whose fundamental instincts were if anything distinctly classicist, even scholastic at times. Engrained with an almost all-encompassing sense of harmony-as-architecture, the fluidity and at times amorphous tendencies of 'impressionism' (the word is a passable portmanteau convenience, but it really belongs in Painting alone, for which it was actually coined) couldn't be further from his instinctive 'home turf' as a rule.

The answer came from a user with the handle Nemesis, labeled as a "Top Contributor." It also appears to have been entered relatively promptly.

In terms of the way in which it frames its reply, the answer is not a bad one; but is it an answer we can trust? To address this question I took advantage of the fact that my San Francisco Public Library card gives me access to Grove Music Online, which is part of the Oxford Music Online Web site. The entry for Fauré was by Jean-Michel Nectoux, of whom I know nothing; but I have no problems trusting the editorial management of Grove content. In this entry I discovered the claim that Fauré's Opus 19 ballade "anticipated Impressionism." However, this was the tip of an iceberg that extended far deeper than I had anticipated.

Here is the relevant paragraph:

His music may be divided into four styles, roughly corresponding to chronological periods, which represent his responses to the musical problems of his time. After early attempts (1860–70) in the Classical manner of a follower of Haydn and Mendelssohn, his first personal style shows him assimilating the language and aesthetics of Romanticism; he initially set poems by Hugo and Gautier, but he also set Baudelaire, and his best passages are either sombre (La chanson du pêcheur, L’absent, Elégie) or express rapt emotion (Le voyageur, Automne, the chorus Les djinns). His second period was that of the Parnassian poets, and coincided with his discovery of Verlaine, as in Clair de lune (1887), which accorded with his sprightly yet melancholy temper. He also sometimes yielded to the gracefulness of the ‘1880s style’ – melodious, tortuous and languid – which he used in certain piano pieces and the works for women’s chorus (such as Caligula). The success this music achieved in its own time has since damaged his reputation. In the 1890s his third style matured with an accession of bold and forceful expressiveness; the great piano works and La bonne chanson have real breadth. This expansiveness is particularly evident in the lyric tragedy Prométhée, which sums up all the facets of his style at the turn of the century: delicacy and profundity, but also measured force. In the style of his last period, he pursued a solitary and confident course, ignoring the attractive innovations of younger composers and the beguiling elements of his 1880s style. The increasing economy of expression, boldness of harmony and enrichment of polyphony give his work of this period an authentic place in 20th-century composition; the expressive dissonances of the Nocturne no.11 (ex.1), the whole-tone writing in the Impromptu no.5 (ex.2) and such highly chromatic music as the Scherzo of the Second Piano Quintet are representative.

In other words Fauré went through four stylistic periods, none of which made for a particularly good fit with impressionism. Furthermore, the work performed on last night's program was the Opus 45 piano quartet in G minor, completed in 1886. This would put it in the second period of Nectoux' classification system; and, while Nectoux described this stylistic period in terms of his vocal writing, it could hardly be taken for a musical version of impressionism. On the other hand one could talk about many of the episodes of Opus 45 in terms of that "sprightly yet melancholy temper!"

I am not particularly concerned with whether or not Presler misspoke in her casual introductory remarks to the audience. I have no problem with taking casual remarks in the informal spirit in which they are delivered. I worry more about whether or not this case study is a representative example of the quality of information available through Yahoo! Answers, regardless of the specific host country. Clearly one cannot draw any conclusions from a single data point, but one may wish to apply that data point as a basis for a more systematic inquiry. Consider, for example, the hypothesis that an aversion to saying "I don't know" may simply be an attribute of human nature, neither sinister nor innocuous. From this we might then propose a corollary hypothesis that giving a definitive answer is part of what Erving Goffman calls "the presentation of self in everyday life." Put another way, we establish our identity through our capacity to give good answers, even when the answers are only good with respect to surface structure.

This does not mean that we should undertake a "social engineering" project to change the course of human nature. However, if those hypotheses can be validated, they would provide yet another example of what happens when the world the Internet has made "bumps into" (as Ken Auletta likes to put it) the deeper structures of the social world. At that deeper level there are great risks in assuming that "wisdom" resides in the crowd itself, let alone in crowdsourcing technology.

In the pre-Internet world, to paraphrase the old joke about Las Vegas, what happened in idle conversation tended to stay in idle conversation. If something stuck with you after the conversation and if you felt it might be important, you might try to confirm it in your books, through your local librarian, or through a personal friend whose authority you trusted with confidence. Today you go to Google; and, if you trust anything, it is the authority of a high page rank. This problem was not addressed directly in Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?;" but it is certainly consistent with his accusation that Google is eroding our reflective capacities. This should be sufficient to lend a note of urgency to the need to explore the above hypotheses of how and why we answer questions the way we do.

A New Take on "You Are What You Eat"

After having vented (excessive?) spleen at the United Kingdom on this basis of its warping of the semantics of "taste" through its mass media, I have to give credit where credit is due and call attention to recent research at University College London reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The research results were summarized on the BBC NEWS Web site as follows:

Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests.

What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found.

Data on diet among 3,500 middle-aged civil servants was compared with depression five years later, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported.

The team said the study was the first to look at the UK diet and depression.

They split the participants into two types of diet - those who ate a diet largely based on whole foods, which includes lots of fruit, vegetables and fish, and those who ate a mainly processed food diet, such as sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products.

After accounting for factors such as gender, age, education, physical activity, smoking habits and chronic diseases, they found a significant difference in future depression risk with the different diets.

Those who ate the most whole foods had a 26% lower risk of future depression than those who at the least whole foods.

By contrast people with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression than those who ate very few processed foods.

There are many issues that have to be resolved to establish the significance of these findings, and they are given due attention in the remainder of the BBC report. However, if this study does little more than warrant the close coupling between physical and mental health (as was observed by Margaret Edwards of the British mental health charity SANE), it will have served a valuable purpose. Here in the United States the ABC News crew has been running a series of stories on the problem of obesity, but they have not yet taken on the dimension of any connection to mental health. I am hoping that they will pick up on this new source of data as they continue their own effort to take on the damage that the "industrial" approach to food provision is wreaking upon all of us, particularly when we are deliberately kept in ignorance of what it is we are actually consuming.

Talent for What?

It all began when my colleague, SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner, called my attention to the YouTube clip of a salesman at CarPhone Warehouse in Britain singing "Nessun Dorma" on Britain's Got Talent. I have never been a big fan of this kind of television programming in either the United States or the United Kingdom. At the risk of sounding too much like a sourpuss, I think I am beginning to home in on just why things like this rub me the wrong way. It comes down to the simple fact that neither the judges nor the audience are particularly serious about opera; and, for them, "Nessun Dorma" is nothing more than a World Cup anthem. I find myself reminded of the Knaben Wunderhorn poem, "Lob des Hohen Verstands" (Praise of Lofty Judgment), about a jackass called upon to judge a singing contest between a cuckoo and a nightingale. Lacking any other criteria, the "judge" awards the prize to the bird singing the loudest (the cuckoo). I suspect it was not by chance that Gustav Mahler selected this as one of the poems he would set to music, and it would not surprise me if this was one of his personal favorites. I do not begrudge either the Britain's Got Talent judges or their audience (who could barely hear the music for all of their cheering during the performance) their enthusiasm; and, if the guy in this particular video clip benefits from that enthusiasm, I wish him the best. If he is serious about singing opera, he may be able to apply his newly advantageous position to getting himself a good teacher; and that would be a win for all of us!

Verdi Reconsidered

Having now seen the San Francisco Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore in the War Memorial Opera House, as opposed to AT&T Park, I can conclude that much of my discontent can be attributed to the ballpark setting. Indeed, to follow up on my first round of negative impressions, I can even see how a conductor like James Levine could take great pleasure in conducting this work; and the energy that new conductor Nicola Luisotti brought to his performance had a lot to do with my arriving at that understanding. None of this is to apologize for the ludicrous plot and its rendering at the hands of librettist Salvadore Cammarano. Rather, it is to suggest that this production was not well served by the shortcomings of the ballpark setting.

Basically, there were two reasons why this setting undermined the event. Visually, this is not an opera that you want in your lap, so to speak. From a dramatic point of view, close-ups can do more harm than good. This was a production that is easily admired from a distance; and, as that distance increases, the absurdities fade away faster than the music, which brings up the second reason. This may not be Verdi's finest hour, but it still has more than its share of memorable minutes. Unfortunately, those moments are best appreciated without the interference of audio equipment. They have as much to do with the physicality of the opera house as they do with those responsible for turning the notes on the page into a musical-dramatic experience.

Much of the problem of visual distance is a matter of how individual performers approach the dramatic side of their roles and mesh that dramatic side with the musical demands. Sondra Radvanosvsky (Leonora) never quite had a secure command of the virtuosic demands of her part; and the camera ended up exaggerating her trials, turning an acceptable performance into an unpleasant one. Stephanie Blythe (Azucena), on the other hand, was in control of every last detail; and the camera helped us appreciate how meticulous her command of detail was. Marco Berti (Manrico) sounded underplayed at the ballpark; but, in the presence of "real" sound, one could appreciate not only the strength of his voice but also his ability to keep that strength in balance with both the orchestra and all the other voices on stage. Finally, there was Dimitri Hvorostovsky (Count di Luna), whose every note could shine through the shortcomings of the audio system but who never seemed comfortable with his dramatic stance. He has now left San Francisco, and yesterday his part was taken by Quinn Kelsey. Kelsey may not have Hvorostovsky's matinee-idol looks; and his voice is still maturing. However, last season he gave us some excellent interpretations of Gustav Mahler, both in recital and with the San Francisco Symphony, and a solid interpretation of Marcello in Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème. He now has Luna in his comfort zone; and I suspect that, given the opportunity, he would have been able to maintain his command of the role under the harsh scrutiny of a video camera.

The shortcomings of AT&T Park should not support argument against the principle that opera should be made available to more people in more ways. Rather, it emphasizes that certain works (not to mention productions of those works) play better for mass audiences than others. I came across one impression of the AT&T Park captured in a single sentence: "Why didn't they do Fledermaus?" Why indeed? The ballpark is as much a grand social setting as anything else. Why not go for something that plays up a similar kind of social setting seasoned with a lot of low humor about sex? When subtlety can be the factor that makes or breaks a performance, save the performance for a setting in which that subtlety can be achieved!

"But how will we know what to believe?"

There are entirely too many one-liners in Ellen Goodman's latest Washington Post column, which has now been reproduced on Truthdig. They come not only from Goodman herself ("Twittering is just frittering.") but from her designated spokesperson for the "digital perspective," John Palfrey ("Bullets are more powerful than bytes."). Nevertheless, the message in this column is strong enough to rise above any "rhetorical noise," because it recognizes that "journalism in the Twitter era" (the title of Goodman's column) has to contend with a new "fog of war." This metaphor used to refer to the chaos of battle itself, its distorting influences on our basic capacities for perception, and the impact of those distortions on our abilities to make effective decisions. The new metaphor now refers to data sources, regardless of whether or not they may be distorted by that chaos of battle; the metaphor has become, as Goodman put it, a "downpour of texts and tweets." Within that downpour, it is as difficult to distinguish signal from noise at it was under the old metaphor to distinguish friend from foe.

Goodman uses this new metaphor to build a strong case that we need the disciplines of traditional journalism more than ever. More specifically, the extraction of signal from noise is a matter of validation, vetting, and editing. From Goodman's point of view, the current crisis in journalism comes down to the loss of valuable resources:

I don’t have to remind readers of newspaper woes, but in this imploding world, who will do the job of the mainstream media?

This is an indisputable point. However, if we are going to address questions of resources, we need to remember that time is as significant a resource as manpower. Goodman first really came to my attention a little over two years ago, when she wrote a column entitled "The Benefits of Slow Journalism." Even before Twitter was a gleam in some venture capitalist's eye, she realized that the Internet was more about speed than about reflection. Looking back on both that column and my "reflection" on it, I realize that those practices she advocated in her "post-Twitter" column, validation, vetting, and editing, are all highly reflective activities. If you are going to try to perform them at "Internet speed" (the primary target of Goodman's earlier column), you might as well not perform them at all.

For Goodman, the fundamental question is the one I incorporated in my title: "how will we know what to believe?" Pessimist that I am, however, I wonder if the real question is a darker one: Do we care whether or not we know what to believe? Instant gratification does not necessarily require validity as a prerequisite. It just has to provide the "buzz" of being right there "in the moment" when (to choose a poignant example-of-the-moment) a cell phone captured the shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan on video. Without any subsequent reflection, however, that buzz quickly deteriorates into trivialization; and those of us desperate to avoid such trivialization find ourselves in the same boat as Abraham Lincoln, asking questions about those who may have died in vain. I thus worry that Goodman's latest column may be that proverbial tree falling in a forest where no one can hear it. It definitely made a sound worth hearing; but, if that sound has not been perceived by those with the power to do something about it, it might as well not have been made at all.

The Spirit of the Schubertiad

I found it interesting that both Joshua Kosman (in the San Francisco Chronicle) and I (on Examiner.com) both tended to treat Julia Fischer's performance of Franz Schubert's D. 438 rondo as somewhat of an afterthought in the context of the rest of the evening. Having focused on those contributions to the program that had drawn on the final year of Schubert's life, I concluded with the following text:

Finally, Schubert was represented by more than his final year. Julia Fischer performed his 1816 rondo in A major for violin and strings (D. 438). This is more "traditional" Schubert; and grace was the key operative element in Fisher's performance. To this end she was well supported by Thomas' decision to conduct a highly-reduced string ensemble. The positive energy between Fisher and this group was particularly emphasized by her attention equally divided between Thomas on the podium and Alexander Barantschik in the concertmaster's chair. A similar spirit of intimacy emerged in the second rondo that Thomas performed with Bronfman in the pre-concert recital, D. 608 in D major from 1818.

Having posted my own account, I could then take Kosman's final paragraph strictly on its own terms:

The evening's only anomaly came at the beginning, with a clear, crisp and unmemorable account of Schubert's Rondo in A for Violin and Strings. If there is anything in this piece aside from tuneful charm - anything that would have connected it to the evening's overarching themes - Thomas and violinist Julia Fischer seemed to have mislaid it.

There was clearly a disagreement here; but it was a "surface structure" disagreement seemed based on a shared "deep structure" view of the priorities of the overall program for the evening.

I found myself thinking about this comparison this morning while reading the following text from Yehudi Menuhin's memoir, Unfinished Journey:

Perhaps what we have lost is the courage to appreciate the violin at something less than its most exalted. I don't view the eclipse of salon music with satisfaction, nor rejoice in the discrediting of the style which purveyed it. Not long ago I played at Pamplona, Sarasate's native town in northwest Spain, and seeing the honor in which he was held—squares, buildings, institutions bore his name—I concluded that here was sufficient commitment to light-heartedness to launch a Concours Sarasate, directed to presenting the violin as a salon instrument, in contrast to the general run of existing concours, which increasingly stress size, in solidity of works, big tone, huge—rather than elegant—technique.

I suspect this passage leapt out at me because, regardless of my personal feelings about salon music, Pablo de Sarasate, or Menuhin, his use of "elegant" came close to what I was trying to get at in invoking the noun "grace." From this point of view, I could then shift my attention from the salon of Sarasate's day to the spirit of the Schubertiad, which had recently been invoked so effectively in a concert that Paul Hersh had arranged at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I could then reckon that, while a string orchestra would probably not fit in any setting for a Schubertiad, there were probably several middle-class "domestic" spaces that could accommodate that "highly-reduced" ensemble that had performed at Davies. Thus, like the pre-concert offerings of four-hand piano rondos, Fischer's offering was best suited for the elegant (or graceful, if you prefer) setting of the Schubertiad.

Clearly, the physical setting of Davies Symphony Hall did little to evoke the spirit of such Schubertiads; but the same could be said of the Recital Hall at the Conservatory, in which Hersh had presented his offering. In both settings we, as audience, had to assume some level of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." Since I was sitting just off the aisle three rows from the edge of the stage, I did not find this particularly difficult. For most of the Davies audience, however, it could easily have been more problematic!

Chief Apology Officer

Would you buy a used insurance policy from this man? For those who do not recognize the face, he is Edward Liddy, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the American International Group (AIG); and today he will be in Washington facing members of Congress who will most likely provide faithful representation of the "tidal wave of rage" of American voters over his company's business practices. Needless to say, he will begin by delivering a prepared statement, which can be previewed on the BBC NEWS Web site:

The chief executive of AIG has admitted that fundamental mistakes were made at the US insurance giant.

"Mistakes were made at AIG on a scale that few could have imagined possible," Edward Liddy will tell a Congressional hearing later on Wednesday.

He will also admit that AIG is "too complex, too unwieldy and too opaque".

Mr Liddy also calls the $165m (£119m) bonuses paid by AIG "distasteful" after the insurer took about $170bn of aid from the US government.

…

In a prepared testimony, Mr Liddy says the company "strayed from its core competencies in the insurance business".

Nowhere was this more evident than in "the creation of what grew to become an internal hedge fund, which then became substantially overexposed to market risk," he adds.

He also addresses the contentious issue of excessive bonuses.

"I am mindful of the outrage of the American public and of the president's call for a more restrained compensation system," he says.

Mr Liddy said that he would never have approved the $165m bonuses if he had been chief executive at the time the contracts were signed.

"It was distasteful to have to make these payments," he says.

Since Liddy only became CEO last September, I am not surprised to see that he plans to fall back on a not-on-my-watch defense. More to the point, however, is whether it had occurred to him that, in a time of crisis for so many businesses in the financial sector, it would make some sense to do some "due diligence investigation" of what he might face in his new job. Had that been the case, such "due diligence" would have benefited from a conversation with Robert J. Arvanitis as serious as the one Joe Nocera had conducted in preparing his recent Talking Business column for The New York Times. I am thinking particularly of the internal view of AIG business practices, of which, as I documented in my own recent analysis, Arvanitis said, "they never thought of it as abuse."

I got a sampling of some of the wrath that Liddy is likely to face by watching a bit of C-SPAN yesterday. As a matter of fact, the specific wrath I encountered was a Republican suggestion that it might be a good idea to let AIG fail after all. So much for "the party of big business" (although it is a nice reminder that laissez-faire has a dark side, too)! My guess is that Congressional decorum will prevail over preparing any tar and feathers and then riding Liddy out of town on a rail; but I would hope that Liddy is smart enough to realize that heartfelt apologies are not going to get him very far (particularly among any who doubt that he has a heart at all).

The real benefit of having the text of his prepared statement is that those who will question him will have a point of departure for more productive conversation. I, for one, want to hear someone ask, "The buck now stops at your desk; what are you doing to clean up the mess, even if that mess happens to be inherited?" As we used to say in the Sixties, if Liddy cannot make a clear case that he is part of the solution, then he is just another part of the problem. Perhaps a faint whiff of boiling tar in the Committee Chambers might help inspire him to shift from apologies to productive proposals!