Ostensibly the subject of House, the wonderful television show on Fox, is the eponymous doctor’s attempts, week after week, to solve mysterious, tentacled illnesses. (Amazingly it always seems to take about an hour of television time, including commercials, to solve any illness.) Or else the real theme of the show is the character of House himself: complex, contradictory, savagely logical, flawed, somewhere between Richard III and Sherlock Holmes.
I prefer to dismiss both synopses. I propose that House is really “about” irony and sarcasm; it asks the question … what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?
Let us take another famous medical show, E.R. I have come to dread the 10 AM arrival of this program on TNT, rudely awakening me from the supernatural, ironic meta-worlds of Angel and Charmed into an ever-so-gritty-and-overworked Chicago emergency room. Oh, the humanity! Mark Green juggling child and ex-wife, Noah Wyle struggling with drug addiction and the burden of aimless wealth, George Clooney rebelling and refusing to commit, and of course the evil heartless Romano, colder than any demon in Angel’s dark, manipulated L.A. nightscape. I have come to hate all these characters and, particularly, the writers who subject us to their maudlin trials and tribulations. Everything is so, so emotional, and yet not redeemed by soap-opera camp; interventions abound; doctors weep quietly in locker rooms, and are asked if they are “ok”; schoolbuses of children are wheeled in, seemingly, only to be wounded and pathetic, and just as swiftly wheeled out. E.R. is Dr. Phil, in dramatic form; it wants us all to tell all, to confess, and be emotionally healed in the great common waiting room. Sarcasm is not welcome. (And again, after an hour, get the hell off the set, please.)
Enter Dr. House.
House strums certain recurring themes. First: is House really a softy, hiding under a sarcastic veneer? Such seems to be the constant, desperate hypothesis of his friends and colleagues, and the scriptwriters perpetually tantalize us with the possibility of a sentimental breakdown. At the end of the last season, when House finally went into rehab, I felt with dread the sense that the show would become classically heartwarming, that he would finally “learn something.” But magnificently—of course!—it all turned out to be a sham, showing House to be more manipulative, deceitful, and selfish than one could have ever imagined. I cheered. Why do these evils make me love him? His evil is entertaining, satisfying; his reformation would be boring, saddening, life-destroying. But he is not a villain.
As one watches, then, one gets mired in meta-concerns: we think less about the fate of patient X or disease Y than the fate of the show itself; will it disintegrate into E.R.-esque empathy, or will the writers somehow prolong the moral strange ground, the absence of judgment? In other words, can the show survive its premise?
A second theme: House “needs to be healed.” The writers gave him a painful, lingering, physical wound (metaphor for the inner, emotional wound) which is almost a deal-breaker, almost dips the show in a disastrous pity-bath. The other characters in the show always seem to want to heal him up, to convert him into a lesson learned, a summable plot point; they are always thematizing, moralizing, empathizing. “House is behaving this way because he secretly loves me, or craves love …” “House loves his own mind more than other people, and needs to change …” “House is trying to destroy himself, since he has no joy in life …” And House stands alone, protecting the fort of cynicism, deflating each of these pat theories. The perpetual explainer of illnesses, he refuses to be “explained.”
A third theme of House: the patient-at-fault, blame-the-victim. House is always suspicious of the histories his patients provide; it is often some concealed fact of the patient’s life that makes the difference … The patients are somehow therefore complicit in their failure to be healed, and most of House’s most amazingly cruel, but funniest, moments have to do with targeting those-who-are-to-be-pitied, with refusing to respect the sacred cow of illness. House is ill, like his patients; he knows, moreover, that everyone is ill. The people around him who think they’ve got it all together, that they’re “normal,” usual-life-livers, who imagine that they represent a “standard” or acceptable life-method: they’re the real suckers. Plus (and here’s the kicker): they’re boring.
House is a show where two possible shows intersect: imagine the story narrated by one of House’s underlings or colleagues, an earnest tale of a flawed doctor at work, and heartbreaking patients; or imagine the story narrated by House himself, in which all are exposed for the posers they are … and you must decide which story you prefer. And then take this principle and apply it to the vast surrounding narratives of our society, to CNN coverage of tragedies, to movies, to presidential speeches, newspaper editorials … I personally fantasize about replacing Matt Lauer with Gregory House, for a week. Apply it, if you will, to music …
House confronts the vast emotional movie-music of our time. Am I supposed to feel bad if I don't like Oprah or Dr. Phil, if I feel uncomfortable with this vast buffet of amateur psychotherapy, of human emotion and confession, bundled and marketed like a creamy, filling psychic Frappuccino? Am I repressed, elitist? Letterman speaks for me (yay!) when he mocks Oprah, when he says enough is enough, and yet a disturbing question haunts me. Why do I feel (self-satisfied jerk that I am) that it is better to play Beethoven or Ives for people, displaying and communicating publicly all sorts of emotions, and receive a check … how is that “better” than Oprah doing her emotional thing and becoming fabulously wealthy? If anyone has a good answer to this question, let me know. I know Gregory House would simply snort disdainfully, reminding me how pathetic I am to worry about the question in the first place.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Thanks, Rain
As the storm began to drip from the sky I found myself (as so often) in a back seat at the mercy of a madman. Lanes were shifting states of mind. First Avenue was a long vein (I thought in my daze) along which red lights like hemoglobin ran, glowing brighter as they slowed, clumping in difficult morasses and extricating themselves for a more perfect careening flow. My guide as he drove across intersections looked left not forward, in full motion, or barely and grudgingly slowing, glancing to gauge the souls of cross-streets. Few met his needs. His braking, even, was impatient. There is enormous space there in the back seat, too much space. I am a tossed toy there. The Avenue was a red compulsion, a motion guarantee, a bumpy lustful harrowing northward necessity: there, the next light, and the next. Beckoning, greening chain of blocks. I found the drive mysterious, I asked myself: again? The Food Emporium whizzed by, as always. I belted my body in, clutched my cell phone like a charm, found the constant left and right motion overwhelming, felt helpless, between a dream and an amusement park ride. On either side, narrow misses; we squeeze by. Even my thoughts seemed crowded, frightened, in the back of my brain, holding onto my skull walls for dear life.
The next evening I was crossing at 121st and Broadway to get a downtown cab and I stepped into an unexpected river near the median. It ran black, swift, cold, slanting down the great street, and my right foot went instantly frigid, suddenly aware of the world, like a college student graduating who must now find a job: the black shoe shiny like a beetle, immersed, emerging dripping and ruined. I stopped. There were no cars threatening in either direction, the bodega was shuttered, I was alone for a stark moment. Home and warm with shoes and socks abandoned around me the windswept rain just beat its random tap-dance against the rusty airconditioner, reminding me of that moment, and its manifold causes.
Music is amazingly well suited to depict rain … A particular favorite of mine is Debussy’s “Pour remercier la pluie au matin” [to give thanks for the morning rain], from the Epigraphes Antiques, which begins with an incredible 16th note ostinato, marked “doux et monotone” … soft and monotonous. I have always found this ostinato unnervingly beautiful, like a little plier or wedge inserted into time, forcing open some joint or nook in it which is normally hidden, smooth, continuous. Watching the water drip down taxi windows and sort of swoop and sweep around 91st Street yesterday, I was really enjoying (in a depressive way) its random endlessness: sensually, engagingly boring, a monotonous pleasure, like watching someone in a library writing their notes on index cards, hearing the soft scratch of pen across paper, the friction of molecules reflecting the strange ostinatos of thought, the lost encrypted hours. The code of a person: they sniff, scratch their head, shake their arm out, breathe uneasily, yawn, random bodily details. Each drop creeping slightly differently down the window, an endless array of data, but the net total a same down-drifting, a constant vanishing scribbling over the window landing in the drain. Over Debussy’s rain-ostinato, outrageously beautiful melodies begin to emerge and flower, but they do not dominate; they don’t become annoying apotheoses; rainy days don’t make for good apotheoses anyway… the rain speaks last, and most profoundly … The person in the library eventually gets up, stretches, heads back to world and friends, stuffing cards books pens into bag, and you know nothing more about them.
Composers mostly don’t wait for rain; they invent their own water. In the slow movement of the Archduke Trio, for instance, I feel Beethoven created the theme in order that he could simply swim in it. It’s a current which carries him, and the measure of his success is his surrender.
If it begins with duples, with the hymn and the hymnic, if it proceeds in stately quarters and eighths, by the first variation a different point begins to emerge. The music dissolves in triplets, the pianist is instructed to lavishly pedal, and Beethoven writes notes which float down and up in contrary motion, the hands like two mirroring waves, washing up against each other and retreating to the far ends of the keyboard, only to turn around and return (always, again, like tides). The theme has been “fluidified,” which is a ridiculous word to express the incredibly profound: abandonment of the discrete event and the washing-over of lines and demarcations: music’s love affair with continuity, the theme’s “passing over” into a different mode of existence, in which we no longer dole out our events and thoughts in bits and tablespoons of motive but simply turn on the faucet and let sounds flow. The flow is dictated, circumscribed, by the more discrete, previous theme, a structure which feels like the thin skin of the bubble which now floats.
I relinquish myself to the beauty of this variation, and try as much as possible to do as little as possible with it, whatever that means.
Beethoven’s choice, too, is clear: the premise establishes itself, and it runs on, then, more or less on its own. He tinkers, but only behind the scenes. The strings are made to do also as little as possible; they enunciate just the larger harmonic lilt, subtle self-effacing messengers of structure. In this way Beethoven draws the curtain aside to reveal no disappointing Wizard of Oz but the self-sufficiency of the idea: powerful, like a current; seductive, without deceit; the completely compelling, sustaining, non-narrative. In the next variation, we emerge somewhat from the triplet wash, to something dryer, more pointed, humorous; there is again a pointed edge to the variation after that, with its constant hocket of the hands; but by the Poco Piu Adagio, in the perfect words of my colleague the eminent principal cellist of our cheery NY Phil, we have come back again to a “great harmonic river.” The strings, in the middle register, hold down the harmonic fort, while from the left hand of the piano streams an unending undulation of 32nd notes, and the right hand offers an endless melody in its own time zone, a 16th note off from the other forces at play. A full but transparent texture, layers of motion, water passing over rock.
This slow movement slips in and out of this state—this fluid state. It passes from etched to brushed, and this drift, from real world to water-world, becomes its deeper theme below the theme.
As in so many Beethoven variation movements, the theme meets a “dark night of the soul,” where it questions its own identity by tearing itself apart. Beethoven has such an uncanny ability to do these things without a hint of contrivance, of the overwrought; he introduces the little free-radical note, the wrong note which leads down the “wrong path,” which always seems to lead to redemption, to some outrageously beautiful crisis and slow, masterful circling back home. And lo and behold, just at this moment, when the violinist and cellist are asserting some fragment of the theme in E major (the “wrong” harmony) the pianist interrupts, morphs the dotted rhythm of the theme into triplets, and submits the entire remainder to the triplet flow … I am sure Beethoven is calling back the world of that first variation, bringing its revelation back for a second look. The triplets never stop, then; nor do you want them to; they are an absolutely desired compulsion. You, I, all of us listening, the theme itself … all are taken by the current. The theme is refracted, then, through it; the triplet stream, continuing, absorbs all sorts of melodic and harmonic intensitiies, and there is an ache, a tremendous pathos, in the push and drag between the unbelievable material and the triplets which won’t cease to flow.
It is lazy to make up words, perhaps, when a scan of your existing vocabulary comes up empty, but I would like to propose in my laziness “threeness.” Why should a number have an emotional, adjectival function? But the theme here is made so much of thirds (F#-E-D), upwards and downwards, it is in 3/4 time, and you can see I feel the triplets have some import in the movement, comprising something like its most fundamental, truest, flow … its deepest current … and I believe there is something neither made of triplets or the interval of a third which expresses some deeper, familial connection between them, a weird charge of connected meaning. This would appear to be an abstruse point, in which I dissolve the magic of the movement into a number … but it is not abstruse for me at all, rather very emotional, instinctive, and irrational. For me the onset of the triplets is like a surrender to the most natural pace, to the perfect corresponding thing, to that which is in itself enough, that which—unlike the rain—you never want to end.
The next evening I was crossing at 121st and Broadway to get a downtown cab and I stepped into an unexpected river near the median. It ran black, swift, cold, slanting down the great street, and my right foot went instantly frigid, suddenly aware of the world, like a college student graduating who must now find a job: the black shoe shiny like a beetle, immersed, emerging dripping and ruined. I stopped. There were no cars threatening in either direction, the bodega was shuttered, I was alone for a stark moment. Home and warm with shoes and socks abandoned around me the windswept rain just beat its random tap-dance against the rusty airconditioner, reminding me of that moment, and its manifold causes.
Music is amazingly well suited to depict rain … A particular favorite of mine is Debussy’s “Pour remercier la pluie au matin” [to give thanks for the morning rain], from the Epigraphes Antiques, which begins with an incredible 16th note ostinato, marked “doux et monotone” … soft and monotonous. I have always found this ostinato unnervingly beautiful, like a little plier or wedge inserted into time, forcing open some joint or nook in it which is normally hidden, smooth, continuous. Watching the water drip down taxi windows and sort of swoop and sweep around 91st Street yesterday, I was really enjoying (in a depressive way) its random endlessness: sensually, engagingly boring, a monotonous pleasure, like watching someone in a library writing their notes on index cards, hearing the soft scratch of pen across paper, the friction of molecules reflecting the strange ostinatos of thought, the lost encrypted hours. The code of a person: they sniff, scratch their head, shake their arm out, breathe uneasily, yawn, random bodily details. Each drop creeping slightly differently down the window, an endless array of data, but the net total a same down-drifting, a constant vanishing scribbling over the window landing in the drain. Over Debussy’s rain-ostinato, outrageously beautiful melodies begin to emerge and flower, but they do not dominate; they don’t become annoying apotheoses; rainy days don’t make for good apotheoses anyway… the rain speaks last, and most profoundly … The person in the library eventually gets up, stretches, heads back to world and friends, stuffing cards books pens into bag, and you know nothing more about them.
Composers mostly don’t wait for rain; they invent their own water. In the slow movement of the Archduke Trio, for instance, I feel Beethoven created the theme in order that he could simply swim in it. It’s a current which carries him, and the measure of his success is his surrender.
If it begins with duples, with the hymn and the hymnic, if it proceeds in stately quarters and eighths, by the first variation a different point begins to emerge. The music dissolves in triplets, the pianist is instructed to lavishly pedal, and Beethoven writes notes which float down and up in contrary motion, the hands like two mirroring waves, washing up against each other and retreating to the far ends of the keyboard, only to turn around and return (always, again, like tides). The theme has been “fluidified,” which is a ridiculous word to express the incredibly profound: abandonment of the discrete event and the washing-over of lines and demarcations: music’s love affair with continuity, the theme’s “passing over” into a different mode of existence, in which we no longer dole out our events and thoughts in bits and tablespoons of motive but simply turn on the faucet and let sounds flow. The flow is dictated, circumscribed, by the more discrete, previous theme, a structure which feels like the thin skin of the bubble which now floats.
I relinquish myself to the beauty of this variation, and try as much as possible to do as little as possible with it, whatever that means.
Beethoven’s choice, too, is clear: the premise establishes itself, and it runs on, then, more or less on its own. He tinkers, but only behind the scenes. The strings are made to do also as little as possible; they enunciate just the larger harmonic lilt, subtle self-effacing messengers of structure. In this way Beethoven draws the curtain aside to reveal no disappointing Wizard of Oz but the self-sufficiency of the idea: powerful, like a current; seductive, without deceit; the completely compelling, sustaining, non-narrative. In the next variation, we emerge somewhat from the triplet wash, to something dryer, more pointed, humorous; there is again a pointed edge to the variation after that, with its constant hocket of the hands; but by the Poco Piu Adagio, in the perfect words of my colleague the eminent principal cellist of our cheery NY Phil, we have come back again to a “great harmonic river.” The strings, in the middle register, hold down the harmonic fort, while from the left hand of the piano streams an unending undulation of 32nd notes, and the right hand offers an endless melody in its own time zone, a 16th note off from the other forces at play. A full but transparent texture, layers of motion, water passing over rock.
This slow movement slips in and out of this state—this fluid state. It passes from etched to brushed, and this drift, from real world to water-world, becomes its deeper theme below the theme.
As in so many Beethoven variation movements, the theme meets a “dark night of the soul,” where it questions its own identity by tearing itself apart. Beethoven has such an uncanny ability to do these things without a hint of contrivance, of the overwrought; he introduces the little free-radical note, the wrong note which leads down the “wrong path,” which always seems to lead to redemption, to some outrageously beautiful crisis and slow, masterful circling back home. And lo and behold, just at this moment, when the violinist and cellist are asserting some fragment of the theme in E major (the “wrong” harmony) the pianist interrupts, morphs the dotted rhythm of the theme into triplets, and submits the entire remainder to the triplet flow … I am sure Beethoven is calling back the world of that first variation, bringing its revelation back for a second look. The triplets never stop, then; nor do you want them to; they are an absolutely desired compulsion. You, I, all of us listening, the theme itself … all are taken by the current. The theme is refracted, then, through it; the triplet stream, continuing, absorbs all sorts of melodic and harmonic intensitiies, and there is an ache, a tremendous pathos, in the push and drag between the unbelievable material and the triplets which won’t cease to flow.
It is lazy to make up words, perhaps, when a scan of your existing vocabulary comes up empty, but I would like to propose in my laziness “threeness.” Why should a number have an emotional, adjectival function? But the theme here is made so much of thirds (F#-E-D), upwards and downwards, it is in 3/4 time, and you can see I feel the triplets have some import in the movement, comprising something like its most fundamental, truest, flow … its deepest current … and I believe there is something neither made of triplets or the interval of a third which expresses some deeper, familial connection between them, a weird charge of connected meaning. This would appear to be an abstruse point, in which I dissolve the magic of the movement into a number … but it is not abstruse for me at all, rather very emotional, instinctive, and irrational. For me the onset of the triplets is like a surrender to the most natural pace, to the perfect corresponding thing, to that which is in itself enough, that which—unlike the rain—you never want to end.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Area Pianist Ignored at Local Starbucks
In the wake of revelations emanating from the Washington Post this weekend, secret sources have confirmed that Upper West Side classical pianist Jeremy Denk has been scrupulously or virtually ignored at any number of locations in the New York City area.
Our correspondent followed Mr. Denk around yesterday in a shocking and heartbreaking experiment.
He emerged from the New York Sports Club at 4:46 pm and positioned himself poetically in line at the 93rd Street Starbucks. By most measures, he was quite descript: a graying youngish (with a certain musical emphasis, or "accent," on ish) white man in workout pants, a sweaty T-shirt, and a jacket he got on sale at an outlet mall ten years ago, radiating a confident odor of the Elliptical Cross Trainer. Our reporters watched, amazed, as he hummed through several phrases of the Archduke Trio, and gestured expressively into the air around him; clearly this was an artist at work, digesting great music behind his soggy brow, and yet his artistry, if anything, seemed to dissuade the attention of passersby. Would anyone notice?
Mostly mid-level yuppies pass through this familiar location: mommies, daddies, assorted persons of fungible sexuality, the occasional painfully metrosexual European family on vacation. In this quasi-erotic crossfire, each had a quick choice to make: do you stop and notice the bedraggled artist or do you scurry past with a blend of disgust and desire, aware of your cupidity but afeared of odor or solicitation?
Showered and transformed, Mr. Denk ventured out to Chelsea. At Patsy's on 23rd Street, he sat and ate an entire Rigatoni Bolognese. It was beautiful to watch. The acoustics of the restaurant were surprisingly kind, underscoring each appreciative smack and munch. He brought passionate forkfuls of pasta to his mouth, leaving artsy swatches of tomato across his chewing cheeks, which, like a true rebel, he refused to wipe away immediately. To this reporter's mind, he oozes, even suppurates artistry. But there was no response: nothing, but the clattering, random helter-skelter of a slow night at Patsy's. Even the waitress, amazingly, seemed a bit indolent in refilling his water.
At 36, Denk's an enigma. Medium-height, big-nosed, with constantly changing but unsatisfying hairstyles, he formulates an interesting countertext within the inherent binaries of the glamorous-artist archetype. "I like to live," he said, "you know, according to the moment. I also like snacks in my dressing room. And snacks, in general."
He consented to this article on one condition. "No," he said, "don't use the word genius." He mused for a moment, crumbs of Aztec Brownie slipping out of the delicate corners of his thoughtful mouth, "what about poetic soul? or associative mind? No, no, wait, let's call my publicist."
We followed Denk into Blades of Glory at the Chelsea Clearview. We paid a friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) to go with him; we wanted to see if it was just the stigma of solitude that was causing this pianist to be ignored. But no! There, too, events seemed to proceed in total disregard of Denk's musicality. Denk hit a low ebb when the two guys in front of him started making out. "But then I realized," he debriefed us later, "they were ignoring both me and the artistry of Will Ferrell ... I was in pretty good company ... at least there was that..."
Asked to sum up the day: "I mean the guy at the gym said, 'have a good workout,' and the guy at the Starbucks asked me if the brownie was 'the one with the weird peppers in it.' That's about it for meaningful interaction."
According to Mr. Denk, the only truly artistic reception he received yesterday, April 9, 2006, from 9:28 am to 1:31 am the next day, was on the phone with friend Lisa Kaplan. "I said, 'Lisa, let me sing you something,' and she said 'let me put you on speakerphone,' and I knew she wanted her friend Barbara to hear me sing, and I said 'No, no!' and as I started to sing she put me on speakerphone anyway."
We hesitate to report the rest of the story. "Barbara said my singing was like 'I saw into her soul,' but I realized she meant it ironically," Mr. Denk told us, choking back tears. Is there nothing left untouched by irony in these uncultured days?
Our correspondent followed Mr. Denk around yesterday in a shocking and heartbreaking experiment.
He emerged from the New York Sports Club at 4:46 pm and positioned himself poetically in line at the 93rd Street Starbucks. By most measures, he was quite descript: a graying youngish (with a certain musical emphasis, or "accent," on ish) white man in workout pants, a sweaty T-shirt, and a jacket he got on sale at an outlet mall ten years ago, radiating a confident odor of the Elliptical Cross Trainer. Our reporters watched, amazed, as he hummed through several phrases of the Archduke Trio, and gestured expressively into the air around him; clearly this was an artist at work, digesting great music behind his soggy brow, and yet his artistry, if anything, seemed to dissuade the attention of passersby. Would anyone notice?
Mostly mid-level yuppies pass through this familiar location: mommies, daddies, assorted persons of fungible sexuality, the occasional painfully metrosexual European family on vacation. In this quasi-erotic crossfire, each had a quick choice to make: do you stop and notice the bedraggled artist or do you scurry past with a blend of disgust and desire, aware of your cupidity but afeared of odor or solicitation?
Showered and transformed, Mr. Denk ventured out to Chelsea. At Patsy's on 23rd Street, he sat and ate an entire Rigatoni Bolognese. It was beautiful to watch. The acoustics of the restaurant were surprisingly kind, underscoring each appreciative smack and munch. He brought passionate forkfuls of pasta to his mouth, leaving artsy swatches of tomato across his chewing cheeks, which, like a true rebel, he refused to wipe away immediately. To this reporter's mind, he oozes, even suppurates artistry. But there was no response: nothing, but the clattering, random helter-skelter of a slow night at Patsy's. Even the waitress, amazingly, seemed a bit indolent in refilling his water.
At 36, Denk's an enigma. Medium-height, big-nosed, with constantly changing but unsatisfying hairstyles, he formulates an interesting countertext within the inherent binaries of the glamorous-artist archetype. "I like to live," he said, "you know, according to the moment. I also like snacks in my dressing room. And snacks, in general."
He consented to this article on one condition. "No," he said, "don't use the word genius." He mused for a moment, crumbs of Aztec Brownie slipping out of the delicate corners of his thoughtful mouth, "what about poetic soul? or associative mind? No, no, wait, let's call my publicist."
We followed Denk into Blades of Glory at the Chelsea Clearview. We paid a friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) to go with him; we wanted to see if it was just the stigma of solitude that was causing this pianist to be ignored. But no! There, too, events seemed to proceed in total disregard of Denk's musicality. Denk hit a low ebb when the two guys in front of him started making out. "But then I realized," he debriefed us later, "they were ignoring both me and the artistry of Will Ferrell ... I was in pretty good company ... at least there was that..."
Asked to sum up the day: "I mean the guy at the gym said, 'have a good workout,' and the guy at the Starbucks asked me if the brownie was 'the one with the weird peppers in it.' That's about it for meaningful interaction."
According to Mr. Denk, the only truly artistic reception he received yesterday, April 9, 2006, from 9:28 am to 1:31 am the next day, was on the phone with friend Lisa Kaplan. "I said, 'Lisa, let me sing you something,' and she said 'let me put you on speakerphone,' and I knew she wanted her friend Barbara to hear me sing, and I said 'No, no!' and as I started to sing she put me on speakerphone anyway."
We hesitate to report the rest of the story. "Barbara said my singing was like 'I saw into her soul,' but I realized she meant it ironically," Mr. Denk told us, choking back tears. Is there nothing left untouched by irony in these uncultured days?
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Ground
I was midway through my coffee’s journey, when I required the public men’s room near the Delacorte. A man was drying his underwear under the handblowers. Where was my explaining, comforting Virgil? The fact that it was underwear and not some other more benign garment or cloth took a while to register, but once it did, I had an immediate compulsion, a tic of the mind. “Aren’t all our lives, in a sense, just a matter of drying our underwear under hand blowers?” … the situation was dire. When I got home I dialed Metaphors Anonymous.
But before that, I hit the Great Lawn. I was forcing myself to Take A Walk in The Park, to stretch my fluttering, caffeinated wings outside the majestically decayed confines of the Greystone Hotel. I believe Sunday afternoons possess some unusual time-properties; they feel spread, like plains of hours. Endless Kansas time, the road heading off in every direction through taskless sprawl and corn’s quiet rustle. In this sprawl and under the blue Central Park sky in the breeze my eyes seemed very sharp, like every leaf was there, every hexagon of the sidewalk. I thought: they’re hexagons! Oy, Sundays: something sad about the flatness of everything, the waiting for something to happen which will not, the family dinner, the slow onset of evening and the cleanup of the dishes with the sound of the TV from the other room spouting idiocy, and no one saying what they really mean. For some reason, because of one Sunday afternoon in 1989, I also always associate Sundays with egg rolls. I’m just saying.
That was two Sundays ago. Last Sunday, I was playing the Bach d minor Concerto again with the Houston Symphony and I was having a great time. Each performance, however, the slow movement was infused with a bit more sense of struggle, some wish…
I came to realize that every so often my mind darts again to the left hand, which is doing some part of the ritornello, the ground … its unrelenting presence and movement under my melody is a powerful thing. I’m playing and suddenly the percentage of my brain paying attention to my left hand spikes … Oh yes, you are still there, mover (Creator?) … still doing your thing (Fate?) and everything I am doing is governed by you (Narrator?) in some way or another. Whatever fragment of the ground I happen to notice is preternaturally eloquent, always brings some rush of meaning, some sharp edge, affects my ongoing vision of the melody (yes that’s how I mean to say it), like some editor or kindly English teacher who scoops up your confused thoughts and rephrases them into insight. Otherwise I would be a idiotic singer going on and on in my lyrical way, effusing, boring everyone to tears, lamenting like Woody Allen, ridiculous, overwrought; but instead, the ground keeps me in check, its pace keeps me honest (so I must say what I mean, and only this), stops my voice from crowding out my brain. But! If I thought ONLY of the ground the whole time, there would be tedium … I would notice the scaffolding, recurrences, the grid, my logic, or the rhythm, in a sense, “too much;” it would be like living in a parking lot, only for usage, for passing, marked off but empty …
The wavering of my attention, my inability to truly multitask, to hear everything at once, becomes part of the beauty-tragedy. I am just Jeremy; thanks, Bach, for reminding me; not perfectly able to hear the “whole piece” (what is the whole piece anyway? certainly not discoverable on the page or in my mind); but I am able to appreciate my little flashes of reminder, to enjoy my vision that wanders and is drawn back into place, a vision in parts of a brilliantly conceived totality. And each blur back and forth comes with a little heartbreak, a little scrape of the irreconcilable.
And then the last orchestral statement after I am done: on Friday I literally shivered onstage (Saturday and Sunday, perhaps, I was too jaded, did not find myself as movable?) … My melody has worked itself up into a last frenzy, a last arpeggiated struggle; and in its wake comes again the same: which means, perhaps, nothing at all. Perhaps this is just a formality; in musicological speak it is just the framing return of the ritornello which is I suppose Italian for that which returns: tautological, superfluous. Instead of my space which I filled with melody, with ornament, there is just the empty space, the blueprint: whatever was behind the scenes. The set is stripped away, the worklights are visible, bare bulbs, the actors, tired, are shouldering their gym bags and heading home to their apartments to watch TV with their lovers and fall asleep and resume “real life.” A statement slash non-statement, the seemingly impossible display of a vacant space, of that which is gone, of empty Sunday hours where your clarity of sight is a strange, disturbing consolation.
But before that, I hit the Great Lawn. I was forcing myself to Take A Walk in The Park, to stretch my fluttering, caffeinated wings outside the majestically decayed confines of the Greystone Hotel. I believe Sunday afternoons possess some unusual time-properties; they feel spread, like plains of hours. Endless Kansas time, the road heading off in every direction through taskless sprawl and corn’s quiet rustle. In this sprawl and under the blue Central Park sky in the breeze my eyes seemed very sharp, like every leaf was there, every hexagon of the sidewalk. I thought: they’re hexagons! Oy, Sundays: something sad about the flatness of everything, the waiting for something to happen which will not, the family dinner, the slow onset of evening and the cleanup of the dishes with the sound of the TV from the other room spouting idiocy, and no one saying what they really mean. For some reason, because of one Sunday afternoon in 1989, I also always associate Sundays with egg rolls. I’m just saying.
That was two Sundays ago. Last Sunday, I was playing the Bach d minor Concerto again with the Houston Symphony and I was having a great time. Each performance, however, the slow movement was infused with a bit more sense of struggle, some wish…
I came to realize that every so often my mind darts again to the left hand, which is doing some part of the ritornello, the ground … its unrelenting presence and movement under my melody is a powerful thing. I’m playing and suddenly the percentage of my brain paying attention to my left hand spikes … Oh yes, you are still there, mover (Creator?) … still doing your thing (Fate?) and everything I am doing is governed by you (Narrator?) in some way or another. Whatever fragment of the ground I happen to notice is preternaturally eloquent, always brings some rush of meaning, some sharp edge, affects my ongoing vision of the melody (yes that’s how I mean to say it), like some editor or kindly English teacher who scoops up your confused thoughts and rephrases them into insight. Otherwise I would be a idiotic singer going on and on in my lyrical way, effusing, boring everyone to tears, lamenting like Woody Allen, ridiculous, overwrought; but instead, the ground keeps me in check, its pace keeps me honest (so I must say what I mean, and only this), stops my voice from crowding out my brain. But! If I thought ONLY of the ground the whole time, there would be tedium … I would notice the scaffolding, recurrences, the grid, my logic, or the rhythm, in a sense, “too much;” it would be like living in a parking lot, only for usage, for passing, marked off but empty …
The wavering of my attention, my inability to truly multitask, to hear everything at once, becomes part of the beauty-tragedy. I am just Jeremy; thanks, Bach, for reminding me; not perfectly able to hear the “whole piece” (what is the whole piece anyway? certainly not discoverable on the page or in my mind); but I am able to appreciate my little flashes of reminder, to enjoy my vision that wanders and is drawn back into place, a vision in parts of a brilliantly conceived totality. And each blur back and forth comes with a little heartbreak, a little scrape of the irreconcilable.
And then the last orchestral statement after I am done: on Friday I literally shivered onstage (Saturday and Sunday, perhaps, I was too jaded, did not find myself as movable?) … My melody has worked itself up into a last frenzy, a last arpeggiated struggle; and in its wake comes again the same: which means, perhaps, nothing at all. Perhaps this is just a formality; in musicological speak it is just the framing return of the ritornello which is I suppose Italian for that which returns: tautological, superfluous. Instead of my space which I filled with melody, with ornament, there is just the empty space, the blueprint: whatever was behind the scenes. The set is stripped away, the worklights are visible, bare bulbs, the actors, tired, are shouldering their gym bags and heading home to their apartments to watch TV with their lovers and fall asleep and resume “real life.” A statement slash non-statement, the seemingly impossible display of a vacant space, of that which is gone, of empty Sunday hours where your clarity of sight is a strange, disturbing consolation.
North Wind, come down,
Unloosen the hands that clutch the sandstone walls;
Scatter the books of hours on the attic floors.
Clear all away, cold wind, and then, let all
Be clearness of sight that has dominion over
The mind that does not know how to despair.
—Montale, tr. David Ferry
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
The Good, the Bad, and the Waldstein
Our horses were tired and as we urged them up the last scrabbly bit of the mesa we could feel them quivering and straining … we could hear the gravel they kicked up skittering down the inhospitable hillsides, the desert’s bitter laughter. I don’t know about you, a man like me really needs a good bedding-down after a day’s ride. But I figured on no featherbed, no downy sweet lady in a distant saloon; I had chosen the hard path. Purple sun-remnants rode out from the horizon, seeming to stop just short of our weary lookout, and dwindled gradually like the hopes of the villagers we had left behind.
My companion drank deeply from his dusty canteen. His hair was wild: not from wind, I knew, but from desire.
“Ride on,” he said. “C major’s somewhere out there, I just know it.”
“Lud, you been sayin’ that for days …”
Below us and around us an alien landscape, with motivic fragments blowing meaningfully in the dry breeze. I pulled some well-worn, coded papers out of my knapsack—ancient maps—and wished, for a whispering sad moment, that I could eat them. A silver band in the distance caught my eye, not for the first time; the shine of the road left behind; antlike figures crawled on it; I thought: those lucky devils are going home.
“Look,” I said, “C major’s right over there, on that road. We were just on it, Lud, and you made us leave, it just don’t make no sense…”
He simply shone on me his hard manly gaze, “The way I figure, a man who knows where he’s goin can afford to get lost.”
“Don’t give me that Zen crap, Ludwig baby, you are one Western teleological bastard and you know it.”
He smiled barely. “What I know is, you don’t know C major from your horse’s behind.”
Ah, the banter of composer and performer, two lonely partners on the road to nowhere. My horse neighed, in agreement or dissent? Its hindquarters twitched. Chastened, I looked once again at my ridiculous papers, which curiously didn’t show much but our present location: they faded out in the direction we were headed. What kind of map was that? I at least thought I knew where C major was, I thought I remembered ...
We heard light, dancing footsteps.
“Oh no, not him again.” We’d just ditched him in the last town, when we modulated to the mediant … he just couldn’t get over it (“E major! E major! I love it!” he was screaming over his schnapps) but here we were like a whole movement plus an Introduzione later (we skipped right past the ranch belonging to Ann “Dante” Favori) and he was there again, like a stray mongrel waiting for scraps. B muttered to me under his breath “I told him to come back when he could think less melody and more motive… I mean, how’s a man supposed to keep a narrative moving with that kind of discursive &*()?… When’s he gonna leave us alone?”
I kept my mouth shut. “How are you guys?” our visitor said, shyly scraping the gravel with his spurs. He didn’t seem to wear his riding gear normal, if you know what I’m sayin. “I love this place, too … it’s so, so beautiful…”
Lud rolled his eyes, looked up at the sky disdainfully (yes, I thought, only HE could give attitude to the very heavens themselves.) I could guess what he was thinking: of COURSE it’s beautiful, you idiot, now tell me something I don’t know. Our visitor (his name began with F I seemed to remember) just kept staring at him, adoringly, with tears like waltzes leaking out of the edges of his eyes; uncomfortable moments passed, what was there to say?
Gunfire… ominous rumblings … the call of distant voices, growing closer, shouting, screaming. I took cowardly cover with Frank (?) under an outcrop; Lud stood his ground, staring off, eyes narrowed… A man came running across the top of the mesa, breathless, straight into Lud; he was dressed more casually than I might have expected for this sort of thing, but no matter, it was refreshing! He had a nice, friendly look.
“Oh man, I’m so happy I ran into you!” he said…
“I don’t know you,” Lud said quietly. Being friendly didn’t necessarily ingratiate you with B.
“Oh I’m Greg.” Ah yes!, I thought in my hiding-place, I know this guy, Greg Sandow … he’s everywhere, you hear tell of him in every little town. Some call him villain, some call him hero, a renegade, a Lone Ranger …
“Greg, what can I do for you?”
“No, it’s what I can do for you! I want to save you!”
“Save me?” Lud paused, amused. “Thanks, but I really don’t need to be saved.”
“But they’re all coming after you!” Bullets whizzed around the bend.
“Who?” Lud asked.
“I don’t know … “ Greg foundered for a moment … “All sorts of people! Market forces! Shifts of sensibility! The inevitable drift of civilization! Television! Media!” He glanced about warily.
“Oh, them.” Lud took a breath. Just then, two other strangely dressed people wandered onto the scene, implausibly; they weren’t quite city or country folk, but somewhere in between … (it was like Grand Central Station up here on this lonely mesa--was this convergence the subtle machination of some strange authorial force?) They were talking in academic, tired tones. “Why did he write that ugly pedaling?” one wondered, her voice acidic, laser-clear, and the other, as if reciting some informed rosary for the nth plus one time, “Oh it didn’t really blur that much on the old piano, you have to take the pedaling of the Rondo with a grain of salt…”
I faintly recognized these two from a former life. Lud’s eyes flamed. Flinty, difficult things gathered in his face, and his cheeks swelled like he wanted to spit them out. “Ugly pedaling? UGLY PEDALING? If you want to know, Greg, can I call you Greg?, what I need to be saved from … Could it really be clearer? I wrote the pedaling exactly PRECISELY as I wanted it and … “ I’m a decent tonic-fearing man and I refuse to transcribe the rest of Lud’s diatribe. F was blushing. Greg understandably looked fearful… but I knew that despite a ferocious temper Lud knew exactly how to control it, where to draw the line. HIs anger was not peevish, not short or abrupt; it edged masterfully along tightropes, a beautiful, dangerous fire.
“Come on,” I said to Lud, “We need to find C major.”
Lud looked at me.
“Greg,” I said, feigning regret, “we’ve got stuff to do.” And with that our party began to disintegrate; ugly-pedaling woman went off with her friend, chatting; Greg, happy to escape from Lud’s temper, ran off to the audible, nearing battle; and F had some “new projects” he was working on, some sort of quintet about a fish which didn’t make much sense to me … Lud and I began to climb down the mesa we had just ascended, into terra incognita. He looked pensive, now; his storm had passed. We walked in silence, for a while.
"What amazes me," I said, "is the variety of perception. How could anyone possibly call that an ugly pedaling ... it seems so obviously to me one of the most beautiful inspirations, a miracle even... the most important possible thing..."
“You know,” said Lud, cutting me off, “maybe that Sandow fellow is right, what do I know about kids these days? Will anyone listen to my music in 2100, will I become obsolete?”
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he is right, but it makes my head hurt to think about it."
He was silent, he didn’t like my copout. I was a master of avoidance, but Lud was not one to give up on a difficult issue. “Tell the truth, it makes my head hurt too,” he said after a while (there was empathy, after all, in that formidable brain) and the mesa then was shrouded in an ominous cloud of dust and we walked uneasily through blurring winds. “What I chose to write at that moment, would I write it again in the present moment? That’s the question that keeps bugging me. What’s possible to write now? After me, is it possible to write further into the future?”
Dust and questions. And then, somehow, when the question began to seem inescapable, murkily impossible, the air cleared ... We were back in the light and I was seized by much more than a smile. It was C major, alright, but again I didn’t recognize it. Lud had tricked me, we had snuck up on it, it washed upon us all of a sudden, a wave of white-key now. How many times had I been there, over the same tired keys? But the blackboard was clear, and we were writing in tones, as if there were no other way to write. It was like the play or awakening of pleasure. Its appearance, simply: I am. I was surprised by the ease of the dream, my ability to float in it. And from the loud wash of this joy then there emerged a softer echo which was, if possible, even more wonderful, even more beautiful.
Lud was snickering at me. “I told you,” he said, “you didn’t have a clue about C major. Not a damn clue.”
Remembrances of scales, fingerings, Hanon: all strange skeletons compared to this living, surging C major. (Yet somehow the skeleton lay beneath.) I didn’t mind he was poking fun at me; I was happier than I remembered was possible.
“Lud,” I said, “I wish I could quit you.”
“Me too,” he gruffly replied, “you have no idea.”
My companion drank deeply from his dusty canteen. His hair was wild: not from wind, I knew, but from desire.
“Ride on,” he said. “C major’s somewhere out there, I just know it.”
“Lud, you been sayin’ that for days …”
Below us and around us an alien landscape, with motivic fragments blowing meaningfully in the dry breeze. I pulled some well-worn, coded papers out of my knapsack—ancient maps—and wished, for a whispering sad moment, that I could eat them. A silver band in the distance caught my eye, not for the first time; the shine of the road left behind; antlike figures crawled on it; I thought: those lucky devils are going home.
“Look,” I said, “C major’s right over there, on that road. We were just on it, Lud, and you made us leave, it just don’t make no sense…”
He simply shone on me his hard manly gaze, “The way I figure, a man who knows where he’s goin can afford to get lost.”
“Don’t give me that Zen crap, Ludwig baby, you are one Western teleological bastard and you know it.”
He smiled barely. “What I know is, you don’t know C major from your horse’s behind.”
Ah, the banter of composer and performer, two lonely partners on the road to nowhere. My horse neighed, in agreement or dissent? Its hindquarters twitched. Chastened, I looked once again at my ridiculous papers, which curiously didn’t show much but our present location: they faded out in the direction we were headed. What kind of map was that? I at least thought I knew where C major was, I thought I remembered ...
We heard light, dancing footsteps.
“Oh no, not him again.” We’d just ditched him in the last town, when we modulated to the mediant … he just couldn’t get over it (“E major! E major! I love it!” he was screaming over his schnapps) but here we were like a whole movement plus an Introduzione later (we skipped right past the ranch belonging to Ann “Dante” Favori) and he was there again, like a stray mongrel waiting for scraps. B muttered to me under his breath “I told him to come back when he could think less melody and more motive… I mean, how’s a man supposed to keep a narrative moving with that kind of discursive &*()?… When’s he gonna leave us alone?”
I kept my mouth shut. “How are you guys?” our visitor said, shyly scraping the gravel with his spurs. He didn’t seem to wear his riding gear normal, if you know what I’m sayin. “I love this place, too … it’s so, so beautiful…”
Lud rolled his eyes, looked up at the sky disdainfully (yes, I thought, only HE could give attitude to the very heavens themselves.) I could guess what he was thinking: of COURSE it’s beautiful, you idiot, now tell me something I don’t know. Our visitor (his name began with F I seemed to remember) just kept staring at him, adoringly, with tears like waltzes leaking out of the edges of his eyes; uncomfortable moments passed, what was there to say?
Gunfire… ominous rumblings … the call of distant voices, growing closer, shouting, screaming. I took cowardly cover with Frank (?) under an outcrop; Lud stood his ground, staring off, eyes narrowed… A man came running across the top of the mesa, breathless, straight into Lud; he was dressed more casually than I might have expected for this sort of thing, but no matter, it was refreshing! He had a nice, friendly look.
“Oh man, I’m so happy I ran into you!” he said…
“I don’t know you,” Lud said quietly. Being friendly didn’t necessarily ingratiate you with B.
“Oh I’m Greg.” Ah yes!, I thought in my hiding-place, I know this guy, Greg Sandow … he’s everywhere, you hear tell of him in every little town. Some call him villain, some call him hero, a renegade, a Lone Ranger …
“Greg, what can I do for you?”
“No, it’s what I can do for you! I want to save you!”
“Save me?” Lud paused, amused. “Thanks, but I really don’t need to be saved.”
“But they’re all coming after you!” Bullets whizzed around the bend.
“Who?” Lud asked.
“I don’t know … “ Greg foundered for a moment … “All sorts of people! Market forces! Shifts of sensibility! The inevitable drift of civilization! Television! Media!” He glanced about warily.
“Oh, them.” Lud took a breath. Just then, two other strangely dressed people wandered onto the scene, implausibly; they weren’t quite city or country folk, but somewhere in between … (it was like Grand Central Station up here on this lonely mesa--was this convergence the subtle machination of some strange authorial force?) They were talking in academic, tired tones. “Why did he write that ugly pedaling?” one wondered, her voice acidic, laser-clear, and the other, as if reciting some informed rosary for the nth plus one time, “Oh it didn’t really blur that much on the old piano, you have to take the pedaling of the Rondo with a grain of salt…”
I faintly recognized these two from a former life. Lud’s eyes flamed. Flinty, difficult things gathered in his face, and his cheeks swelled like he wanted to spit them out. “Ugly pedaling? UGLY PEDALING? If you want to know, Greg, can I call you Greg?, what I need to be saved from … Could it really be clearer? I wrote the pedaling exactly PRECISELY as I wanted it and … “ I’m a decent tonic-fearing man and I refuse to transcribe the rest of Lud’s diatribe. F was blushing. Greg understandably looked fearful… but I knew that despite a ferocious temper Lud knew exactly how to control it, where to draw the line. HIs anger was not peevish, not short or abrupt; it edged masterfully along tightropes, a beautiful, dangerous fire.
“Come on,” I said to Lud, “We need to find C major.”
Lud looked at me.
“Greg,” I said, feigning regret, “we’ve got stuff to do.” And with that our party began to disintegrate; ugly-pedaling woman went off with her friend, chatting; Greg, happy to escape from Lud’s temper, ran off to the audible, nearing battle; and F had some “new projects” he was working on, some sort of quintet about a fish which didn’t make much sense to me … Lud and I began to climb down the mesa we had just ascended, into terra incognita. He looked pensive, now; his storm had passed. We walked in silence, for a while.
"What amazes me," I said, "is the variety of perception. How could anyone possibly call that an ugly pedaling ... it seems so obviously to me one of the most beautiful inspirations, a miracle even... the most important possible thing..."
“You know,” said Lud, cutting me off, “maybe that Sandow fellow is right, what do I know about kids these days? Will anyone listen to my music in 2100, will I become obsolete?”
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he is right, but it makes my head hurt to think about it."
He was silent, he didn’t like my copout. I was a master of avoidance, but Lud was not one to give up on a difficult issue. “Tell the truth, it makes my head hurt too,” he said after a while (there was empathy, after all, in that formidable brain) and the mesa then was shrouded in an ominous cloud of dust and we walked uneasily through blurring winds. “What I chose to write at that moment, would I write it again in the present moment? That’s the question that keeps bugging me. What’s possible to write now? After me, is it possible to write further into the future?”
Dust and questions. And then, somehow, when the question began to seem inescapable, murkily impossible, the air cleared ... We were back in the light and I was seized by much more than a smile. It was C major, alright, but again I didn’t recognize it. Lud had tricked me, we had snuck up on it, it washed upon us all of a sudden, a wave of white-key now. How many times had I been there, over the same tired keys? But the blackboard was clear, and we were writing in tones, as if there were no other way to write. It was like the play or awakening of pleasure. Its appearance, simply: I am. I was surprised by the ease of the dream, my ability to float in it. And from the loud wash of this joy then there emerged a softer echo which was, if possible, even more wonderful, even more beautiful.
Lud was snickering at me. “I told you,” he said, “you didn’t have a clue about C major. Not a damn clue.”
Remembrances of scales, fingerings, Hanon: all strange skeletons compared to this living, surging C major. (Yet somehow the skeleton lay beneath.) I didn’t mind he was poking fun at me; I was happier than I remembered was possible.
“Lud,” I said, “I wish I could quit you.”
“Me too,” he gruffly replied, “you have no idea.”
Questions
While waiting to know what will happen to the forlorn Cheeto I couldn't resist the pull of Matthew Guerrieri's quiz.
1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.
General Hospital. (The Young and the Restless has much better music.)
2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.
The Goldberg Variations [zing!].
3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?
If I'm listening to the music, Ives I think; ditto if contemplating insurance; but if I'm looking for a composer with a rugged, manly, but still somewhat snuggly name, DEFINITELY Carl Ruggles.
4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.
Most of my choices are listed at pianopedia.com. [zing?]
5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?
Well I'd say I have a 12% record of playing the ending of the 2nd movement of the Schumann Fantasy with all the right notes, so ... that seems pretty unlikely.
6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)
Dawson's Creek (or perhaps Battlestar Galactica) set in 17th century France, with show dogs onstage (to symbolize the essential inhumanity of man, etc. etc.) and a chorus of ventriloquists (fill in your own annoying symbolic explanation HERE). Of course, any opera involving Joyce Hatto would be attended by me ... No, no I have it! I want Mel Gibson to direct a production of Falstaff set (and sung) in Aztec or Olmec or Mayan or whatever, entitled Apocalypto II: The Fat Man Gets the Last Laugh.
7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.
I prefer to see rather than smell non-standard concert dress.
8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?
I do not comprehend this "rock-and-roll" word; is this some sort of genre or style designation? Me dinosaur of dead music. No, really.
9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?
Aw jeez. Do I have to answer seriously? I mean, if I'm a clarinetist, probably Nielsen, but I'm so not.
10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?
What, this hasn't been proven already?
1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.
General Hospital. (The Young and the Restless has much better music.)
2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.
The Goldberg Variations [zing!].
3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?
If I'm listening to the music, Ives I think; ditto if contemplating insurance; but if I'm looking for a composer with a rugged, manly, but still somewhat snuggly name, DEFINITELY Carl Ruggles.
4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.
Most of my choices are listed at pianopedia.com. [zing?]
5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?
Well I'd say I have a 12% record of playing the ending of the 2nd movement of the Schumann Fantasy with all the right notes, so ... that seems pretty unlikely.
6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)
Dawson's Creek (or perhaps Battlestar Galactica) set in 17th century France, with show dogs onstage (to symbolize the essential inhumanity of man, etc. etc.) and a chorus of ventriloquists (fill in your own annoying symbolic explanation HERE). Of course, any opera involving Joyce Hatto would be attended by me ... No, no I have it! I want Mel Gibson to direct a production of Falstaff set (and sung) in Aztec or Olmec or Mayan or whatever, entitled Apocalypto II: The Fat Man Gets the Last Laugh.
7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.
I prefer to see rather than smell non-standard concert dress.
8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?
I do not comprehend this "rock-and-roll" word; is this some sort of genre or style designation? Me dinosaur of dead music. No, really.
9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?
Aw jeez. Do I have to answer seriously? I mean, if I'm a clarinetist, probably Nielsen, but I'm so not.
10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?
What, this hasn't been proven already?
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The Easy Button
Spring everywhere. Even the smell of paper in Staples was fresher, like it was about to bloom back into trees. Riotous piles of multicolored paperclips like tulips. A boy stood in front of me, blocking my path.
“Mom? Where are you? Where are you?” He was apostrophizing a pile of index cards.
I had a heart-wrenching mindflash: me in a department store screaming, age 5 or 6, my mother just two or three sale racks away, but invisible, and there was no map of the world any more, no house or place, and I was lost like in my dreams, dreams in the jungle where I was supposed to hold on to my father and he got smaller and smaller and finally I dropped him because he was so tiny and there was nothing but green overgrowth and night. Spring takes me all over the place.
The boy tried again, nervously: “Mom? Where are you?”
A New Yorker’s curt twangy voice from the next aisle: “I’m here, Matt, I’m here.”
There was a pause. “I don’t know where here is,” he replied.
I was now next to him; I could see, as it were, the whites of his eyes. I shouldn’t have said anything, I really shouldn’t have, but his response seemed very beautiful. “Join the club,” I said. Just then, the mother came into view from around a bin of binders. She heard my comment, saw me address her child: she was not pleased.
“Mom? Where are you? Where are you?” He was apostrophizing a pile of index cards.
I had a heart-wrenching mindflash: me in a department store screaming, age 5 or 6, my mother just two or three sale racks away, but invisible, and there was no map of the world any more, no house or place, and I was lost like in my dreams, dreams in the jungle where I was supposed to hold on to my father and he got smaller and smaller and finally I dropped him because he was so tiny and there was nothing but green overgrowth and night. Spring takes me all over the place.
The boy tried again, nervously: “Mom? Where are you?”
A New Yorker’s curt twangy voice from the next aisle: “I’m here, Matt, I’m here.”
There was a pause. “I don’t know where here is,” he replied.
I was now next to him; I could see, as it were, the whites of his eyes. I shouldn’t have said anything, I really shouldn’t have, but his response seemed very beautiful. “Join the club,” I said. Just then, the mother came into view from around a bin of binders. She heard my comment, saw me address her child: she was not pleased.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Touchstone
I am prone like many concertgoers to terrible, quasi-spiritual restlessness. I wiggle about my cushion. I creak and sigh. My legs take turns becoming unhappily aware of themselves. My mind gives up, surrenders helplessly to the pointless rustle of my program booklet. Agh. What do I possibly think I will find there?
The other week I read the program notes (!) for my own performance of the “Spring Sonata,” and I read that the slow movement was a kind of touchstone. The word leapt out at me. Ah, yes, I thought, in the flush of affirmation, so true, so very true! and at the very next moment I wondered, hey, what is a touchstone? Heh. I am going through a little phase of loving my Dictionary app on my computer (me: easily pleased), and surrender myself between emails to little ecstasies of word clarification. Aha! I think, and then, How do they do it?, because my concepts of words are so corrupted by usage and life and sake tastings that they drift like icebergs farther and farther from their supposedly incorruptible cubbyholes of meaning—so that when I see the “actual” meaning there on the page, expressed in a few well-chosen words, I am often baffled, like when you run across the pimply bespectacled school nerd at your 10-year reunion and he has become a dazzling supermodel.
Finally, I met someone who works at a Very Important Dictionary. I assumed that if you could really know What Words Mean, you would be analogously precise at all other areas of life—that you would never make a late payment on your credit card, or lose your keys, or miss a flight, etc.—however, what I really didn’t expect or predict was that this highly-placed dictionary person would have the sparkle of a certain insane joy for life, a certain devil-may-care, wicked-librarian-on-the-loose quality (no reference tome she!) … and I looked at dictionaries differently from then on, with a kind of “I know what you’re up to” glare, as if, despite their perspicacity, they might suddenly get up from their dusty pedestals and go clubbing until 4 in the morning and then drive hurtling nonstop to greet the dawn in Montauk.
So. The word touchstone—as I’m sure you all know—refers to “a piece of fine-grained dark schist or jasper formerly used for testing alloys of gold by observing the color of the mark that they made on it.” By which metaphorically (perhaps usage is not such a big, bad, sinful bogeyman after all!) it has come to mean, “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized”: is this what the program notes really meant?
I was seduced not by judgment or criterion, but by the image: the one stone scraping against the other, as a way of knowing if a stone was “good.” Knowing by the mark that is made, by the grit, the dust left behind. I imagined a composer taking his material and scraping it up against certain things (processes, problems, surprises, limitations), and knowing thereby that he had something worthwhile to work with. And I am always desperately questing for new “sublime” images and metaphors to express the ridiculous exasperation of playing the piano … the sheer physical illusions and self-deceptions at the heart of the enterprise, the grit you must find within. 88 identical silly (plastic!) keys and what you are looking for is always in between them; a situation in which (at bottom) you are simply pressing a button down a very small distance, over and over again, behind which gadgets mysteriously, heartlessly operate; you must always press down though you want many of the notes to feel “up;” you are a deluded Frankenstein, pretending to animate an inanimate object; you want to feel the keys, though they cannot “feel” you; inevitably, absurdly, you may feel that how you cross the next 3 millimeters of space with your little finger may mean as much, say, as the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The monstrous tension you must feel inside of you between two notes: a total paradox against the polished mechanical ease of the big black monster. And by the way, in case you were wondering, you are always scraped against the piano to measure your own worth.
I was sitting restlessly, ruffling program pages, thinking these thoughts, listening to some very beautiful singing, and not in the mood for those beauties. I needed edge, and I needed to be scraped. There was no mental touchstone, there was some unmeasurable quantity slipping away from me every moment, some repetitive random loss, and my head was sinking into a soft flutey fuzz. Nina Simone’s version of “Just in Time” popped into my head and I craved it deeply; I needed to flee. The person next to me whispered to his friend that the music we we hearing was “luminous,” and I snarked, yes, luminous like the soft light in a GE commercial … not like the light of Nina’s singing, the brazen belted thrash of her notes, their harsh waver …
When I got home I played “Just in Time” over and over and—yes!— the edge was there, just where I left it, in the CD player. I lolled amongst my unopened scattered mail and sang along horribly, passionately.
But also in my head, suddenly, conning its way in, was the slow movement of Op. 96, saying, hey, I'm in E-flat too! I had a little cascade of epiphanies. Both begin with relatively simple, periodic, well-behaved delineations which then reach unprecedented, unexpected emotional heights; they sear similarly; they both yearn and want so much; they both are exhilarated in a dark place; they both sit at the edge of loss, contemplating destruction from a vantage of redemption. Both begin from an accepted basis, buy into it, as it were, but when they open up what they've bought, they get more than they bargained for.
Nina’s point of departure is the standard “Just in Time”: she’s not, I think, in love with the tune, but with latent possibilities: rising suspensions, cresting waves of intensity--what the tune allows her to see. So that when first she sings “just in time, you found me just in time,” there is a ho-hum, here-are-the-chords quality … just layin it down for you, baby. (Same as opening of Beethoven, without the "baby.") Yes, there is the world, do you see?, the song exists, like anyone's perception of the world, within boundaries … but the piano takes over, improvises, and in the process something about the harmonic scheme begins to crystallize, some of the latent “problems” emerge … and when Nina reenters, the boundaries vanish, she's almost incanting; the words are charged, electric, out of control, over the same harmonies, now an enormous scrape of intensity:
I was lost [wonderful suspension over the harmony change]
the losing dice were tossed [suspension, surge in piano]
my bridge is overcrossed [more surge in piano]
nowhere to go [desperate, up to F]
nowhere to go [rising to G, even more desperate]
[brief respite] so let’s live today anyway…
… and finally, with the words, CHANGE ME, CHANGE ME two tremendous vocal slides, scraping over the essential, central pitches of the song (A-flat to E-flat), but absolutely grating, dissonant, passing from song into cry, the cry of the desire to escape yourself (to escape the song) to destroy your own habits and become a new, redeemed person … totally overwhelming … and when it is done, you know, breathlessly, that the song is “good.” I find myself shaking, vibrating, thrilled. I press repeat on the CD player, like a child, and do it all again.
Beethoven’s point of departure is the chorale … a beautiful chorale, to be sure, but “just” a chorale. How can a chorale be edgy? But it is; its sweetness is constantly laced, mixed, complicated, etched. I got obsessed with imagining the piano’s opening chorale ...
as a whole, arching, thing, kind of a singularity, a particle of music. Why? When I play it, to begin with, I want the spell of unity. I want to make love to coherence, the kind of emotional SuperGlue, which builds and breathes life into the sentence. In musical analysis we do due but strange deference to this coherence; we realize (perhaps?) it is so important, so emotionally basic, to hear and feel the one-thingness of it, that, with a pedagogical flourish, we label it with the most heartless possible term, perhaps just a capital A with a bracket, like so:
… code telling us A is the first thing we hear (therefore letter “A” and not "B") and it lasts just that long (8 measures, in case you are counting) and this is all—do you get it?—one thing. We analysts, in our modesty, and despite our labeling mania, don’t by any means want to “encumber” the music with any emotional subtext, so we use a letter and a bracket and leave the emotions up to you. Anyway they’re not that important, haha.
I would like to abolish the A bracket. It domesticates units. It reduces a whole to a thing. I hate it. I propose in place of the A-bracket combo, the idea of a musical “image.” This chorale is an image. Ezra Pound (the Imagist) wrote a rather famous, beautiful image:
You see, it all goes together, the vision, in a flash? But in the first printing he wanted it separated thus…
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
...which Kenner describes as “one image, five phases of perception.” I love this expression. The chorale, too, cut up into four similar phrases, each a variation on the other, each reflecting back on the other: and I think that is the perfect way to describe what happens, emotionally, musically: one image, four phases (phrases) of perception. It unfolds in time and each moment is of course different from, consecutive, "after" the last, but behind the consecutiveness and more important than any "after" is something that continuously spreads its tentacles everywhere, connecting, pattern-making, associating… a total image, a metaphoric associative dazzle …
There is, finally, something which interrupts the image, which expands or distorts it. (Which scrapes against it, makes clear its value, its meaning.) At the end of the chorale, the final three notes are repeated several times … G-F-Eb …
How can this soft, diminishing, peaceful ending paradoxically be edgy, be a touchstone? I don’t want to “encumber” the music, or make any of you purist analysts all uncomfortable-like, but for some reason this moment provokes me into all sorts of wild associations. The chorale has a rhythm, an inevitability (perhaps: a sing-songy predictability) and this repetitive conclusion is like a strange, alien, stretching at the end of its symmetry… an oddity pulling at the fabric of the piece (the chorale has a fabric, a weave)… When I think about this, I get an image, out of nowhere: a child tugging on the corner of her mother’s dress, saying “no, come this way,” or simply: “let’s go to sleep, let’s just rest here a while.” It is an unnerving, premature lullaby. The movement has barely begun, and yet (and yet!) there is a desire to surrender to the lulling, seeming ending; to give up (as if your bridge were “already overcrossed”), to dangerously allow an imagined repose.
By pulling the chorale out of its rhythm, this repetitive passage places it in a wider context of meaning … some way, some criterion (hmm) to measure and comprehend the chorale’s existence.
So we have lulled ourselves to sleep. Only by the most extraordinary leap of the imagination (and a literal leap of notes), does the piece wake itself up … an unexpected leap now infused with enormous meaning in the context of the lullabying sameness…
If we were really boring, we would say, describing this passage: “the violin now enters with a new melody, accompanied by the piano,” and we would write out the violin melody so everybody knows what it is:
But those two first leaping, symbolic notes, leading into the melody …
are taken up by the piano’s accompaniment, becoming a kind of constant, haunting reminder underneath:
What is the accompaniment’s role, anyway? In the opening chorale, a “typical” accompanimental situation is present: the sixteenth notes run beneath the melody, like a river—filling, fluidity, connection—expressing the slurs over the notes with smaller notes which do not presume too much, which do not take too much space, which know their place, which leave room for melody, for something “greater.” There is an acceptable hierarchy of meaning and value. But here, there is some confusion; the piano’s “accompaniment” keeps referring to the beginning of the violin’s “melody” (as if it wants to start over, to rehear the amazing opening), and keeps stopping short of the beat, a broken river. Which is melody and which is accompaniment? There is confusion, a sort of scrape of meaning between the two parts, as if instead of one stream, the discourse branches into two:
The violin’s melody moves slowly, is not particularly “catchy,” appears to be plain, empty. It plays unguarded notes, diatonic notes without “edge”--if you look at them by themselves--which need to be filled with meaning. And the piano is trying to fill in these notes, to make sense of them—or at least that is its “role.” The violin and piano, in a sense, keep measuring themselves against each other …
The piano is trying to give the violin a harmonic point of reference; at the same time each gesture is insufficient, and the violin keeps shifting, and the chain never stops. What the piano is trying to fill cannot be filled; there is more meaning there than it is capable of expressing. Instead of the river: a continuous breaking-apart, an accompaniment which expresses its own futility, where the image and its meaning refuse to merge. This “accompaniment,” which began its life as the introduction to a melody, this dissociated bit, becomes an obsessive idea, a constant burn behind the coda, a tremendously touching instability: a touchstone for the whole movement, scraping and leaving its mark irrevocably on the initial evenness of the chorale. The rhythmic tension of this idea “redeems” the chorale, saves it from its lull or its predictability, proves its worth. The lack of merging, this branching of thought, this grind of melody against accompaniment is so beautiful that each time as I play it I begin to feel myself changing (CHANGE ME!); at each rest, where the violin plays its new note and I am mute, I love, I desperately hold on to what I am not able to say.
The other week I read the program notes (!) for my own performance of the “Spring Sonata,” and I read that the slow movement was a kind of touchstone. The word leapt out at me. Ah, yes, I thought, in the flush of affirmation, so true, so very true! and at the very next moment I wondered, hey, what is a touchstone? Heh. I am going through a little phase of loving my Dictionary app on my computer (me: easily pleased), and surrender myself between emails to little ecstasies of word clarification. Aha! I think, and then, How do they do it?, because my concepts of words are so corrupted by usage and life and sake tastings that they drift like icebergs farther and farther from their supposedly incorruptible cubbyholes of meaning—so that when I see the “actual” meaning there on the page, expressed in a few well-chosen words, I am often baffled, like when you run across the pimply bespectacled school nerd at your 10-year reunion and he has become a dazzling supermodel.
Finally, I met someone who works at a Very Important Dictionary. I assumed that if you could really know What Words Mean, you would be analogously precise at all other areas of life—that you would never make a late payment on your credit card, or lose your keys, or miss a flight, etc.—however, what I really didn’t expect or predict was that this highly-placed dictionary person would have the sparkle of a certain insane joy for life, a certain devil-may-care, wicked-librarian-on-the-loose quality (no reference tome she!) … and I looked at dictionaries differently from then on, with a kind of “I know what you’re up to” glare, as if, despite their perspicacity, they might suddenly get up from their dusty pedestals and go clubbing until 4 in the morning and then drive hurtling nonstop to greet the dawn in Montauk.
So. The word touchstone—as I’m sure you all know—refers to “a piece of fine-grained dark schist or jasper formerly used for testing alloys of gold by observing the color of the mark that they made on it.” By which metaphorically (perhaps usage is not such a big, bad, sinful bogeyman after all!) it has come to mean, “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized”: is this what the program notes really meant?
I was seduced not by judgment or criterion, but by the image: the one stone scraping against the other, as a way of knowing if a stone was “good.” Knowing by the mark that is made, by the grit, the dust left behind. I imagined a composer taking his material and scraping it up against certain things (processes, problems, surprises, limitations), and knowing thereby that he had something worthwhile to work with. And I am always desperately questing for new “sublime” images and metaphors to express the ridiculous exasperation of playing the piano … the sheer physical illusions and self-deceptions at the heart of the enterprise, the grit you must find within. 88 identical silly (plastic!) keys and what you are looking for is always in between them; a situation in which (at bottom) you are simply pressing a button down a very small distance, over and over again, behind which gadgets mysteriously, heartlessly operate; you must always press down though you want many of the notes to feel “up;” you are a deluded Frankenstein, pretending to animate an inanimate object; you want to feel the keys, though they cannot “feel” you; inevitably, absurdly, you may feel that how you cross the next 3 millimeters of space with your little finger may mean as much, say, as the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The monstrous tension you must feel inside of you between two notes: a total paradox against the polished mechanical ease of the big black monster. And by the way, in case you were wondering, you are always scraped against the piano to measure your own worth.
I was sitting restlessly, ruffling program pages, thinking these thoughts, listening to some very beautiful singing, and not in the mood for those beauties. I needed edge, and I needed to be scraped. There was no mental touchstone, there was some unmeasurable quantity slipping away from me every moment, some repetitive random loss, and my head was sinking into a soft flutey fuzz. Nina Simone’s version of “Just in Time” popped into my head and I craved it deeply; I needed to flee. The person next to me whispered to his friend that the music we we hearing was “luminous,” and I snarked, yes, luminous like the soft light in a GE commercial … not like the light of Nina’s singing, the brazen belted thrash of her notes, their harsh waver …
When I got home I played “Just in Time” over and over and—yes!— the edge was there, just where I left it, in the CD player. I lolled amongst my unopened scattered mail and sang along horribly, passionately.
But also in my head, suddenly, conning its way in, was the slow movement of Op. 96, saying, hey, I'm in E-flat too! I had a little cascade of epiphanies. Both begin with relatively simple, periodic, well-behaved delineations which then reach unprecedented, unexpected emotional heights; they sear similarly; they both yearn and want so much; they both are exhilarated in a dark place; they both sit at the edge of loss, contemplating destruction from a vantage of redemption. Both begin from an accepted basis, buy into it, as it were, but when they open up what they've bought, they get more than they bargained for.
Nina’s point of departure is the standard “Just in Time”: she’s not, I think, in love with the tune, but with latent possibilities: rising suspensions, cresting waves of intensity--what the tune allows her to see. So that when first she sings “just in time, you found me just in time,” there is a ho-hum, here-are-the-chords quality … just layin it down for you, baby. (Same as opening of Beethoven, without the "baby.") Yes, there is the world, do you see?, the song exists, like anyone's perception of the world, within boundaries … but the piano takes over, improvises, and in the process something about the harmonic scheme begins to crystallize, some of the latent “problems” emerge … and when Nina reenters, the boundaries vanish, she's almost incanting; the words are charged, electric, out of control, over the same harmonies, now an enormous scrape of intensity:
I was lost [wonderful suspension over the harmony change]
the losing dice were tossed [suspension, surge in piano]
my bridge is overcrossed [more surge in piano]
nowhere to go [desperate, up to F]
nowhere to go [rising to G, even more desperate]
[brief respite] so let’s live today anyway…
… and finally, with the words, CHANGE ME, CHANGE ME two tremendous vocal slides, scraping over the essential, central pitches of the song (A-flat to E-flat), but absolutely grating, dissonant, passing from song into cry, the cry of the desire to escape yourself (to escape the song) to destroy your own habits and become a new, redeemed person … totally overwhelming … and when it is done, you know, breathlessly, that the song is “good.” I find myself shaking, vibrating, thrilled. I press repeat on the CD player, like a child, and do it all again.
Beethoven’s point of departure is the chorale … a beautiful chorale, to be sure, but “just” a chorale. How can a chorale be edgy? But it is; its sweetness is constantly laced, mixed, complicated, etched. I got obsessed with imagining the piano’s opening chorale ...
as a whole, arching, thing, kind of a singularity, a particle of music. Why? When I play it, to begin with, I want the spell of unity. I want to make love to coherence, the kind of emotional SuperGlue, which builds and breathes life into the sentence. In musical analysis we do due but strange deference to this coherence; we realize (perhaps?) it is so important, so emotionally basic, to hear and feel the one-thingness of it, that, with a pedagogical flourish, we label it with the most heartless possible term, perhaps just a capital A with a bracket, like so:
… code telling us A is the first thing we hear (therefore letter “A” and not "B") and it lasts just that long (8 measures, in case you are counting) and this is all—do you get it?—one thing. We analysts, in our modesty, and despite our labeling mania, don’t by any means want to “encumber” the music with any emotional subtext, so we use a letter and a bracket and leave the emotions up to you. Anyway they’re not that important, haha.
I would like to abolish the A bracket. It domesticates units. It reduces a whole to a thing. I hate it. I propose in place of the A-bracket combo, the idea of a musical “image.” This chorale is an image. Ezra Pound (the Imagist) wrote a rather famous, beautiful image:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.
You see, it all goes together, the vision, in a flash? But in the first printing he wanted it separated thus…
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
...which Kenner describes as “one image, five phases of perception.” I love this expression. The chorale, too, cut up into four similar phrases, each a variation on the other, each reflecting back on the other: and I think that is the perfect way to describe what happens, emotionally, musically: one image, four phases (phrases) of perception. It unfolds in time and each moment is of course different from, consecutive, "after" the last, but behind the consecutiveness and more important than any "after" is something that continuously spreads its tentacles everywhere, connecting, pattern-making, associating… a total image, a metaphoric associative dazzle …
There is, finally, something which interrupts the image, which expands or distorts it. (Which scrapes against it, makes clear its value, its meaning.) At the end of the chorale, the final three notes are repeated several times … G-F-Eb …
How can this soft, diminishing, peaceful ending paradoxically be edgy, be a touchstone? I don’t want to “encumber” the music, or make any of you purist analysts all uncomfortable-like, but for some reason this moment provokes me into all sorts of wild associations. The chorale has a rhythm, an inevitability (perhaps: a sing-songy predictability) and this repetitive conclusion is like a strange, alien, stretching at the end of its symmetry… an oddity pulling at the fabric of the piece (the chorale has a fabric, a weave)… When I think about this, I get an image, out of nowhere: a child tugging on the corner of her mother’s dress, saying “no, come this way,” or simply: “let’s go to sleep, let’s just rest here a while.” It is an unnerving, premature lullaby. The movement has barely begun, and yet (and yet!) there is a desire to surrender to the lulling, seeming ending; to give up (as if your bridge were “already overcrossed”), to dangerously allow an imagined repose.
By pulling the chorale out of its rhythm, this repetitive passage places it in a wider context of meaning … some way, some criterion (hmm) to measure and comprehend the chorale’s existence.
So we have lulled ourselves to sleep. Only by the most extraordinary leap of the imagination (and a literal leap of notes), does the piece wake itself up … an unexpected leap now infused with enormous meaning in the context of the lullabying sameness…
If we were really boring, we would say, describing this passage: “the violin now enters with a new melody, accompanied by the piano,” and we would write out the violin melody so everybody knows what it is:
But those two first leaping, symbolic notes, leading into the melody …
are taken up by the piano’s accompaniment, becoming a kind of constant, haunting reminder underneath:
What is the accompaniment’s role, anyway? In the opening chorale, a “typical” accompanimental situation is present: the sixteenth notes run beneath the melody, like a river—filling, fluidity, connection—expressing the slurs over the notes with smaller notes which do not presume too much, which do not take too much space, which know their place, which leave room for melody, for something “greater.” There is an acceptable hierarchy of meaning and value. But here, there is some confusion; the piano’s “accompaniment” keeps referring to the beginning of the violin’s “melody” (as if it wants to start over, to rehear the amazing opening), and keeps stopping short of the beat, a broken river. Which is melody and which is accompaniment? There is confusion, a sort of scrape of meaning between the two parts, as if instead of one stream, the discourse branches into two:
The violin’s melody moves slowly, is not particularly “catchy,” appears to be plain, empty. It plays unguarded notes, diatonic notes without “edge”--if you look at them by themselves--which need to be filled with meaning. And the piano is trying to fill in these notes, to make sense of them—or at least that is its “role.” The violin and piano, in a sense, keep measuring themselves against each other …
The piano is trying to give the violin a harmonic point of reference; at the same time each gesture is insufficient, and the violin keeps shifting, and the chain never stops. What the piano is trying to fill cannot be filled; there is more meaning there than it is capable of expressing. Instead of the river: a continuous breaking-apart, an accompaniment which expresses its own futility, where the image and its meaning refuse to merge. This “accompaniment,” which began its life as the introduction to a melody, this dissociated bit, becomes an obsessive idea, a constant burn behind the coda, a tremendously touching instability: a touchstone for the whole movement, scraping and leaving its mark irrevocably on the initial evenness of the chorale. The rhythmic tension of this idea “redeems” the chorale, saves it from its lull or its predictability, proves its worth. The lack of merging, this branching of thought, this grind of melody against accompaniment is so beautiful that each time as I play it I begin to feel myself changing (CHANGE ME!); at each rest, where the violin plays its new note and I am mute, I love, I desperately hold on to what I am not able to say.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Blue Bottle
When the concert ended, a Chinese man drove me back to my hotel in a large black Towncar. All the way down Geary. There were Russian bakeries, Dim Sum joints, gas stations, spas, the whole beat hybrid of San Francisco deciding, block by block, whether it is a city or not. I called up a friend in Chicago, and she was getting stoned.
I dumped my bag, my music, my concert clothes in my hotel room and, with everything piled prosaically on the bed, took quick stock. There were empty hours ahead and I could make no comprehensive plan.
I went to Blue Bottle. This is a little coffee kiosk on Gough and Linden that I discovered, walking one morning, saw people waiting outside of it, fell in with the herd, and when I tasted my first sip of their filter coffee and bit into a chocolate macaroon, the sunshine itself seemed to be jealous. How is it that anyone can drink other, crap coffee? Every cup of Starbucks, for instance, I had ever drunk seemed a terrible, terrible mistake, even an amoral act. When something beautiful happens to you you sit still and work to appreciate it, you don’t mess around. I sat on a bench basking and sipping and when the coffee was finished I was not sad. I did not suck at the empty cup like the addict I am, but moved on to other enjoyable things.
So, I went to Blue Bottle, to get an afternoon cup. Their motto:
I was standing in line and the time and the little alley seemed drifting, out of the way, a corner. My day had blown itself into this strange, bluish, dusky bend. As I ordered my filter coffee, a girl and her friend who seemed intriguing came up behind me, and the girl sort of caught my eye and I did the awkward thing of seeing her and not seeing her at the same time. But then she made a move, and asked “Do you live in the neighborhood?” and I said, no, I was visiting, and it turns out she’s a student though I didn’t ask what she was studying, but now she knows I’m a pianist. Then I fled without wanting to. I strode off with my coffee wishing entirely I had kept talking to her and to her intriguing friend.
But I had left my wallet in my hotel room and I needed to retrieve it.
So I began to walk back with this cup of coffee and there was a certain late-afternoon breeze. It blew just a little. 4:45 pm, color of bluish sky, temperature of breeze, semi-quiet though the street was busy. The coffee didn’t throw me, didn’t jostle the string which was inside me and was allowed to vibrate. I kept walking, feeling, listening. A certain temperature of breeze was which maybe exactly precisely the same temperature of some other afternoon, an afternoon I am sure, though I do not remember the exact date or person at all (to say the least), an afternoon in which I was in love with someone.
A feeling took hold. A quiet and focus, despite busy streets, and despite the caffeine ringing inside of me, and I could pay a great deal of attention that I don’t normally pay. I would live continually like this if I could. I had no desire to stop or alter the flow of the moment. (Totally irrelevant phrases to me right now: waiter bring the check; why don’t we grab a drink; what should we do next?) Proust, man, I thought, I know exactly where you’re coming from, I am so happy right now and I could feel two moments, now and some distant time, rubbing shoulders in their breezes, because the earlier afternoon, which had been totally forgotten, was not “remembered” so much as made totally alive within me: but only the essentials, and none of the facts. I felt still capable of whatever it was.
The Inn at the Opera has a very silly (quaint?) old elevator which plays all sorts of canards from the classical repertoire, including a very vexing, limp, waddling version of the Mozart Flute Concerto, which makes the endless process of waiting for the elevator to get to my floor, at times, a complete misery. That morning at 7 am, bag of laundry in hand, jetlaggy and confused, I stood and descended through a merciless and mediocre tutti, which made the morning seem unnecessarily cruel. In my mind I scolded the strings, no, I thought, don’t you get harmony AT ALL? I glowered at the concierge, as if he were responsible.
But just then, coffee in hand, the last movement of Tchaik 6 was on, while I was headed up to my room to grab my wallet and head back out, those few moments of music were thrilling. Tchaikovsky! I sympathized with him. It was that moment over a timpani pedal point. That was his world; yes, I thought, that’s yours. The strings played yearning phrases (I thought, grooving: this is really really yearning, he got that) and my soul or my stomach tidally went back and forth with them, I moved without moving. Obviously I was feeling receptive, in a mockable way, but I couldn’t laugh at myself, loving Tchaikovsky, because it was too good for laughter. The melancholy all-in-the-throatness of it, the heart well past the sleeve, pure cry and wish.
A momentary digression. This post really has no plot or point whatsoever, so digressions should be fine. We (me and Josh) had many wonderful audiences on our most recent tour, but my favorite was in Madison, Wisconsin. This is because when Josh announced our (perpetual) encore, “None But The Lonely Heart,” as usual some portion of the audience sighed and swooned and gasped with delight. Another portion, however, after a telltale moment—and I imagine this was the younger, more studentish portion of the crowd—found this gasping ridiculous and overwrought (and probably don’t really know “None But The Lonely Heart” anyway): they laughed. This second tide of laughter was the antidote to the gasping cliché. Oh, Tchaikovsky! How Romantic! Get over it, you’re a sucker. I enjoyed this, a lot. Perhaps too much. I laughed an evil laugh inside. Perhaps somewhere deep down I had some resentment towards “None But The Lonely Heart” stored up and I was letting the audience work it out. I enjoyed imagining the two elements of the audience at war, something like the war between the lyrical and the cynical within myself. What a ridiculous title, “None but the Lonely Heart;” doubtless some mangled original Russian, some stilted bit of fey easily-sold Romantical drivel. Yick. Clearly I have issues.
And then I was back out on the street in the same breeze and still in love with someone irrelevantly in the past. Which caused me no regret, to feel the love again, disembodied. I walked a few blocks with absolutely no plan except not to imprison myself in any situation. I looked down the alley for the same girl and her intriguing friend who had talked to me, and now they were gone. No matter, they might have been a distraction. I was in a humming, happy solitude and every sight was fresh. But all I could do was walk.
I drifted into a used bookstore and bought a couple wonderful books entirely on a whim, I didn’t want to think about them. I considered getting depressed by all the old musty books and all the lives they represented but I didn’t. But there in the history section, the Brahms Horn Trio came back to me, which I had just performed (for some reason I almost just typed “deformed”): particularly the Trio of the Scherzo, the truly most melancholy moment. (Other pole to jolly E-flat.) It reverberated from the Tchaikovsky? The phrases were similar, gluey, wanting.
When music manages to feel achingly physical. When the simplest interval is back, baby, when you know it is just that wide. When all the voices of the chords seem to be resolving like intertwining hands. Some fourth resolves to the major third and there, your lover puts a hand on yours and skin touches skin; and the touch is so not about just the place you are touched, but radiates in internal channels and carries secret messages all around your body. And that is how those phrases seemed to me, of Brahms, and of Tchaikovsky, and I think some sort of pubescent naive bodily-ness came to me all of a piece with the Tchaikovsky which I had not ardently listened to since I was 15. Message carriers, profound touches. Same with every sight, every grimy street corner, every glimpsed couple in a restaurant across the street, every small whispered word, the aggregate world of every person’s ridiculous gesture all the way down Market Street to Noe and back.
And so, in conclusion, I suggest you go to the Blue Bottle coffee kiosk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, as soon as possible, and order a filter coffee, nothing more complicated than that, and keep ordering one a day, at least, for the rest of your life.
I dumped my bag, my music, my concert clothes in my hotel room and, with everything piled prosaically on the bed, took quick stock. There were empty hours ahead and I could make no comprehensive plan.
I went to Blue Bottle. This is a little coffee kiosk on Gough and Linden that I discovered, walking one morning, saw people waiting outside of it, fell in with the herd, and when I tasted my first sip of their filter coffee and bit into a chocolate macaroon, the sunshine itself seemed to be jealous. How is it that anyone can drink other, crap coffee? Every cup of Starbucks, for instance, I had ever drunk seemed a terrible, terrible mistake, even an amoral act. When something beautiful happens to you you sit still and work to appreciate it, you don’t mess around. I sat on a bench basking and sipping and when the coffee was finished I was not sad. I did not suck at the empty cup like the addict I am, but moved on to other enjoyable things.
So, I went to Blue Bottle, to get an afternoon cup. Their motto:
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I was standing in line and the time and the little alley seemed drifting, out of the way, a corner. My day had blown itself into this strange, bluish, dusky bend. As I ordered my filter coffee, a girl and her friend who seemed intriguing came up behind me, and the girl sort of caught my eye and I did the awkward thing of seeing her and not seeing her at the same time. But then she made a move, and asked “Do you live in the neighborhood?” and I said, no, I was visiting, and it turns out she’s a student though I didn’t ask what she was studying, but now she knows I’m a pianist. Then I fled without wanting to. I strode off with my coffee wishing entirely I had kept talking to her and to her intriguing friend.
But I had left my wallet in my hotel room and I needed to retrieve it.
So I began to walk back with this cup of coffee and there was a certain late-afternoon breeze. It blew just a little. 4:45 pm, color of bluish sky, temperature of breeze, semi-quiet though the street was busy. The coffee didn’t throw me, didn’t jostle the string which was inside me and was allowed to vibrate. I kept walking, feeling, listening. A certain temperature of breeze was which maybe exactly precisely the same temperature of some other afternoon, an afternoon I am sure, though I do not remember the exact date or person at all (to say the least), an afternoon in which I was in love with someone.
A feeling took hold. A quiet and focus, despite busy streets, and despite the caffeine ringing inside of me, and I could pay a great deal of attention that I don’t normally pay. I would live continually like this if I could. I had no desire to stop or alter the flow of the moment. (Totally irrelevant phrases to me right now: waiter bring the check; why don’t we grab a drink; what should we do next?) Proust, man, I thought, I know exactly where you’re coming from, I am so happy right now and I could feel two moments, now and some distant time, rubbing shoulders in their breezes, because the earlier afternoon, which had been totally forgotten, was not “remembered” so much as made totally alive within me: but only the essentials, and none of the facts. I felt still capable of whatever it was.
The Inn at the Opera has a very silly (quaint?) old elevator which plays all sorts of canards from the classical repertoire, including a very vexing, limp, waddling version of the Mozart Flute Concerto, which makes the endless process of waiting for the elevator to get to my floor, at times, a complete misery. That morning at 7 am, bag of laundry in hand, jetlaggy and confused, I stood and descended through a merciless and mediocre tutti, which made the morning seem unnecessarily cruel. In my mind I scolded the strings, no, I thought, don’t you get harmony AT ALL? I glowered at the concierge, as if he were responsible.
But just then, coffee in hand, the last movement of Tchaik 6 was on, while I was headed up to my room to grab my wallet and head back out, those few moments of music were thrilling. Tchaikovsky! I sympathized with him. It was that moment over a timpani pedal point. That was his world; yes, I thought, that’s yours. The strings played yearning phrases (I thought, grooving: this is really really yearning, he got that) and my soul or my stomach tidally went back and forth with them, I moved without moving. Obviously I was feeling receptive, in a mockable way, but I couldn’t laugh at myself, loving Tchaikovsky, because it was too good for laughter. The melancholy all-in-the-throatness of it, the heart well past the sleeve, pure cry and wish.
A momentary digression. This post really has no plot or point whatsoever, so digressions should be fine. We (me and Josh) had many wonderful audiences on our most recent tour, but my favorite was in Madison, Wisconsin. This is because when Josh announced our (perpetual) encore, “None But The Lonely Heart,” as usual some portion of the audience sighed and swooned and gasped with delight. Another portion, however, after a telltale moment—and I imagine this was the younger, more studentish portion of the crowd—found this gasping ridiculous and overwrought (and probably don’t really know “None But The Lonely Heart” anyway): they laughed. This second tide of laughter was the antidote to the gasping cliché. Oh, Tchaikovsky! How Romantic! Get over it, you’re a sucker. I enjoyed this, a lot. Perhaps too much. I laughed an evil laugh inside. Perhaps somewhere deep down I had some resentment towards “None But The Lonely Heart” stored up and I was letting the audience work it out. I enjoyed imagining the two elements of the audience at war, something like the war between the lyrical and the cynical within myself. What a ridiculous title, “None but the Lonely Heart;” doubtless some mangled original Russian, some stilted bit of fey easily-sold Romantical drivel. Yick. Clearly I have issues.
And then I was back out on the street in the same breeze and still in love with someone irrelevantly in the past. Which caused me no regret, to feel the love again, disembodied. I walked a few blocks with absolutely no plan except not to imprison myself in any situation. I looked down the alley for the same girl and her intriguing friend who had talked to me, and now they were gone. No matter, they might have been a distraction. I was in a humming, happy solitude and every sight was fresh. But all I could do was walk.
I drifted into a used bookstore and bought a couple wonderful books entirely on a whim, I didn’t want to think about them. I considered getting depressed by all the old musty books and all the lives they represented but I didn’t. But there in the history section, the Brahms Horn Trio came back to me, which I had just performed (for some reason I almost just typed “deformed”): particularly the Trio of the Scherzo, the truly most melancholy moment. (Other pole to jolly E-flat.) It reverberated from the Tchaikovsky? The phrases were similar, gluey, wanting.
When music manages to feel achingly physical. When the simplest interval is back, baby, when you know it is just that wide. When all the voices of the chords seem to be resolving like intertwining hands. Some fourth resolves to the major third and there, your lover puts a hand on yours and skin touches skin; and the touch is so not about just the place you are touched, but radiates in internal channels and carries secret messages all around your body. And that is how those phrases seemed to me, of Brahms, and of Tchaikovsky, and I think some sort of pubescent naive bodily-ness came to me all of a piece with the Tchaikovsky which I had not ardently listened to since I was 15. Message carriers, profound touches. Same with every sight, every grimy street corner, every glimpsed couple in a restaurant across the street, every small whispered word, the aggregate world of every person’s ridiculous gesture all the way down Market Street to Noe and back.
And so, in conclusion, I suggest you go to the Blue Bottle coffee kiosk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, as soon as possible, and order a filter coffee, nothing more complicated than that, and keep ordering one a day, at least, for the rest of your life.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
I Don't Know What To Call This
I was really feeling this tremendous desire to—how shall I put this?—let my brain fry in the skillet of our times. So I hitched my pants up a shade and surrounded my sofa with Snackwell Cookies and pork rinds and Mountain Dew and put an old DVD-R in the trusty laptop: the episode of the Anna Nicole Show where she feeds Prozac to her dog. I felt if I went back to the old beloved chestnuts, I might just recover some of the early eclat of reality TV, some bracing frisson distilling the creative juices which brought us to the tremendous cultural summit we inhabit, here in late February 2007. We are all, in a sense, survivors of Survivor.
I expected the computer to come quickly to life with flickering images of limousines, manicures and breast enlargements. But: it was not to be. The DVD drive whirred a second overlong, and instead of iDVD, my favorite eponymous app, ubiquitous, rascally iTunes started bouncing up and down in its Dock, a crazed attention-seeking icon… not unlike, I mused mid-rind, the woman whose show I was hoping nostalgically to view. And there in the left column of my iTunes window, I saw something confusing, even flabbergasting, something which contradicted everything I absolutely knew to be true:
I trembled on my sofa’s oft-stained cushion. How was this possible!? The DVD was clearly labeled ANNA NICOLE 2002; I recalled, in those heady days, recording the program with finicky flicks of my own fingers … but, cunningly, the machine did not lie. When I pressed play, lo and behold! a sober tuxedoed pianist strode onscreen, to invisible applause; stormy octaves and other Lisztian mannerisms ensued.
I grabbed the phone in an access of panic. Cory, luckily, was at home.
“Cory, I am trying to watch some Anna-Nicole …”
“Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy … isn’t it about time for you to move on?”
“No.” I huffed in frustration. “It’s not about that.”
“Yeah, right,” he said… “You know, chimps are learning to write, and all you can think about is Anna Nicole!” I had never heard him hyperlink over the phone like that before; it was a breathtaking display of communicative virtuosity, causing me to drop my Snackwell thunk! upon my keyboard. But while I cursed the sticky mess, I noticed that the Anna Nicole show was playing in place of Laszlo Simon.
“Holy silicone!" I exclaimed, “she’s back!”
Cory was silent.
Never had a low-fat chocolate product proved so fateful. My Snackwell had pressed the fast forward button. And at precisely 2x faster than the original, Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes seemed magically, even effortlessly, to transform themselves into the Anna Nicole show. There she was, flouncing into shops on Rodeo Drive. Though I wanted to surrender to the program and lie back on my sofa, reclining, as it were, in the nether regions of my mind, I knew something was at stake here, something bigger than my brain-frying pleasures, if that were possible. I related all this to Cory and we decided that expert guidance was needed…
Who else to call but Professor Barrington-Coupe, distinguished guru of the Reality TV Institute of Greater La Jolla and Surrounding Frivolous Areas? Luckily, he was on my speed dial. While Cory collected some pan-Asian takeout and jaunted over to my place, I was able to convince the Professor’s many layers of secretaries to let me speak with him, that there was, in fact, an urgent, unusual cultural emergency, revealed by the confluence of iTunes and a Snackwell! Finally I got his well-worn voice on the phone, Cory walked in with some miso-glazed brie, and together we laid out the seemingly impossible facts.
“So you see, Professor … “
At first Barrington-Coupe pretended to be mystified. “My boys, too much Mountain Dew on the brain, perhaps … some cosmic joke…” but as I persisted, I heard his voice go tired. The fight was not in him; he was going to reveal to us the dangerous truth…
I was passionate. “But which one is REAL, Professor? Is the Anna Nicole show the real thing, and the Liszt merely a slowed-down fake? (… a speculation which would involve some fancy historical footwork?) … or, which seems more likely, is the Anna-Nicole show—a reality TV show, for heaven’s sake!—just a plagiarized, sped-up version of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes?”
Even as I uttered this last sentence, I gasped at its yawning implications. It would certainly put a dent in my conception of the sanctity of Reality TV.
Cory and I, side by side on the sofa, listened, tense with anticipation, to the silence on the speakerphone. It seemed we could hear his moral hesitations, his reluctance to divulge, but when the truth came it came in a flood:
“My friends, don’t you know?” (his voice quivering) “…that there is no novel, there is no ‘work,’ per se, the author and authorship is dead, and thank goodness too! Long live the reader, who becomes thereby no mere consumer but a producer of the text. And there is of course no ‘one text,’ but in its place a vast intertext, where everything is a gateway to everything else, the infinite creation of the readerly, an endless unencumbered plural… You don’t believe me? Just press fast forward again, I dare you!”
Not knowing if I would regret it, I pressed FF; at 4x suddenly the video became Vladimir Ashkenazy’s cancelled cooking show, How to Cook Russian on the Road. Cory and I gazed, wide-eyed. I pressed on, with my sense of reality collapsing around me, and at 8x the video became Tom Cruise in that horrible bartender movie which I can never remember the name of … ahhh! would it never stop, this endless cross-pollination? I took a bite of some teriyaki soufflé.
Barrington-Coupe’s voice took on a hushed, conspiratorial tone, now he almost seemed to be laughing at us … “and you know boys heh just take it down to 6% of the original speed … hehhehheh" ... the tentative laughter dissolved into a kind of crazed coughing …
We followed his instructions, and suddenly we were watching He Said, She Said.
Barrington-Coupe explained: “The well-known game is a misnomer … well … perhaps a case of mere faulty orthography. It is not a matter of degree. At 6 percent, EVERYTHING is Kevin Bacon.”
“Everything?” I whimpered, not wanting to know the answer …
“Everything written or filmed since the dawn of human recorded thought.” The Professor’s voice was now flatly, oddly calm, as though with the deliverance of this awful, unifying truth, the sort of Law that Science only dreamed of delivering to the world, the small pitiful anxieties of human life could and would disperse into a giant field of undifferentiated Baconianism.
“You know, sometimes I see Kevin at Gennaro, just around the corner from my house…”
Cory rolled his eyes at my first-name-dropping.
But the Professor was distracted. Faintly, we heard another voice over the speakerphone, a strangely familiar voice calling, it seemed, from another room (or from another dimension?): “Come back to bed, Professor. It’s getting cold in here … “ A giggle and the unmistakable pop of a champagne bottle followed.
“Ummm, errr … “ The Professor stammered, now no longer the calm prophet of universal mutation but a human being whose deception has been uncovered. “I really need to be going …” he said, and the female other-voice was heard again… “I need to be taught a NAUGHTY lesson, Professor …”
Just then the phone went dead. Cory and I looked at each other. With dread in the pit of my stomach, I returned the DVD to its 2x setting, and after only a few seconds I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the voice I had just heard over the speakerphone, despite many nodes of intermediate translation, and despite manifest impossibility! Was she, then, alive? Oh it was too much to hope for! And perhaps, dare I say it, the issue of her daughter’s patrimony had yet another, astounding wrinkle? The world might never know, if not for the brave, unimpeachable reportage of Think Denk!
Cory sniffed. “Not everything exists to be material for your blog, Jeremy. Try to restrain yourself.”
But I already had my coat on and was headed for Gennaro. I had to ask Kevin something really really important …
(...credit for much of the above, whether he wants it or not, belongs to the extremely estimable pianist Cory Smythe.)
***
The following comparative chart may help people sort out the two great scandals of our age. I post it with great reluctance. If you are prone to be offended, please READ NO FURTHER, we will return to polite blogging in the next post, I promise.
I expected the computer to come quickly to life with flickering images of limousines, manicures and breast enlargements. But: it was not to be. The DVD drive whirred a second overlong, and instead of iDVD, my favorite eponymous app, ubiquitous, rascally iTunes started bouncing up and down in its Dock, a crazed attention-seeking icon… not unlike, I mused mid-rind, the woman whose show I was hoping nostalgically to view. And there in the left column of my iTunes window, I saw something confusing, even flabbergasting, something which contradicted everything I absolutely knew to be true:
Laszlo Simon: Liszt Transcendental Etudes, Book I
I trembled on my sofa’s oft-stained cushion. How was this possible!? The DVD was clearly labeled ANNA NICOLE 2002; I recalled, in those heady days, recording the program with finicky flicks of my own fingers … but, cunningly, the machine did not lie. When I pressed play, lo and behold! a sober tuxedoed pianist strode onscreen, to invisible applause; stormy octaves and other Lisztian mannerisms ensued.
I grabbed the phone in an access of panic. Cory, luckily, was at home.
“Cory, I am trying to watch some Anna-Nicole …”
“Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy … isn’t it about time for you to move on?”
“No.” I huffed in frustration. “It’s not about that.”
“Yeah, right,” he said… “You know, chimps are learning to write, and all you can think about is Anna Nicole!” I had never heard him hyperlink over the phone like that before; it was a breathtaking display of communicative virtuosity, causing me to drop my Snackwell thunk! upon my keyboard. But while I cursed the sticky mess, I noticed that the Anna Nicole show was playing in place of Laszlo Simon.
“Holy silicone!" I exclaimed, “she’s back!”
Cory was silent.
Never had a low-fat chocolate product proved so fateful. My Snackwell had pressed the fast forward button. And at precisely 2x faster than the original, Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes seemed magically, even effortlessly, to transform themselves into the Anna Nicole show. There she was, flouncing into shops on Rodeo Drive. Though I wanted to surrender to the program and lie back on my sofa, reclining, as it were, in the nether regions of my mind, I knew something was at stake here, something bigger than my brain-frying pleasures, if that were possible. I related all this to Cory and we decided that expert guidance was needed…
Who else to call but Professor Barrington-Coupe, distinguished guru of the Reality TV Institute of Greater La Jolla and Surrounding Frivolous Areas? Luckily, he was on my speed dial. While Cory collected some pan-Asian takeout and jaunted over to my place, I was able to convince the Professor’s many layers of secretaries to let me speak with him, that there was, in fact, an urgent, unusual cultural emergency, revealed by the confluence of iTunes and a Snackwell! Finally I got his well-worn voice on the phone, Cory walked in with some miso-glazed brie, and together we laid out the seemingly impossible facts.
“So you see, Professor … “
At first Barrington-Coupe pretended to be mystified. “My boys, too much Mountain Dew on the brain, perhaps … some cosmic joke…” but as I persisted, I heard his voice go tired. The fight was not in him; he was going to reveal to us the dangerous truth…
I was passionate. “But which one is REAL, Professor? Is the Anna Nicole show the real thing, and the Liszt merely a slowed-down fake? (… a speculation which would involve some fancy historical footwork?) … or, which seems more likely, is the Anna-Nicole show—a reality TV show, for heaven’s sake!—just a plagiarized, sped-up version of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes?”
Even as I uttered this last sentence, I gasped at its yawning implications. It would certainly put a dent in my conception of the sanctity of Reality TV.
Cory and I, side by side on the sofa, listened, tense with anticipation, to the silence on the speakerphone. It seemed we could hear his moral hesitations, his reluctance to divulge, but when the truth came it came in a flood:
“My friends, don’t you know?” (his voice quivering) “…that there is no novel, there is no ‘work,’ per se, the author and authorship is dead, and thank goodness too! Long live the reader, who becomes thereby no mere consumer but a producer of the text. And there is of course no ‘one text,’ but in its place a vast intertext, where everything is a gateway to everything else, the infinite creation of the readerly, an endless unencumbered plural… You don’t believe me? Just press fast forward again, I dare you!”
Not knowing if I would regret it, I pressed FF; at 4x suddenly the video became Vladimir Ashkenazy’s cancelled cooking show, How to Cook Russian on the Road. Cory and I gazed, wide-eyed. I pressed on, with my sense of reality collapsing around me, and at 8x the video became Tom Cruise in that horrible bartender movie which I can never remember the name of … ahhh! would it never stop, this endless cross-pollination? I took a bite of some teriyaki soufflé.
Barrington-Coupe’s voice took on a hushed, conspiratorial tone, now he almost seemed to be laughing at us … “and you know boys heh just take it down to 6% of the original speed … hehhehheh" ... the tentative laughter dissolved into a kind of crazed coughing …
We followed his instructions, and suddenly we were watching He Said, She Said.
Barrington-Coupe explained: “The well-known game is a misnomer … well … perhaps a case of mere faulty orthography. It is not a matter of degree. At 6 percent, EVERYTHING is Kevin Bacon.”
“Everything?” I whimpered, not wanting to know the answer …
“Everything written or filmed since the dawn of human recorded thought.” The Professor’s voice was now flatly, oddly calm, as though with the deliverance of this awful, unifying truth, the sort of Law that Science only dreamed of delivering to the world, the small pitiful anxieties of human life could and would disperse into a giant field of undifferentiated Baconianism.
“You know, sometimes I see Kevin at Gennaro, just around the corner from my house…”
Cory rolled his eyes at my first-name-dropping.
But the Professor was distracted. Faintly, we heard another voice over the speakerphone, a strangely familiar voice calling, it seemed, from another room (or from another dimension?): “Come back to bed, Professor. It’s getting cold in here … “ A giggle and the unmistakable pop of a champagne bottle followed.
“Ummm, errr … “ The Professor stammered, now no longer the calm prophet of universal mutation but a human being whose deception has been uncovered. “I really need to be going …” he said, and the female other-voice was heard again… “I need to be taught a NAUGHTY lesson, Professor …”
Just then the phone went dead. Cory and I looked at each other. With dread in the pit of my stomach, I returned the DVD to its 2x setting, and after only a few seconds I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the voice I had just heard over the speakerphone, despite many nodes of intermediate translation, and despite manifest impossibility! Was she, then, alive? Oh it was too much to hope for! And perhaps, dare I say it, the issue of her daughter’s patrimony had yet another, astounding wrinkle? The world might never know, if not for the brave, unimpeachable reportage of Think Denk!
Cory sniffed. “Not everything exists to be material for your blog, Jeremy. Try to restrain yourself.”
But I already had my coat on and was headed for Gennaro. I had to ask Kevin something really really important …
(...credit for much of the above, whether he wants it or not, belongs to the extremely estimable pianist Cory Smythe.)
***
The following comparative chart may help people sort out the two great scandals of our age. I post it with great reluctance. If you are prone to be offended, please READ NO FURTHER, we will return to polite blogging in the next post, I promise.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Good Old Beethoven
There is probably a better way of putting this. But who cares? I enjoy Beethoven the most when he doesn't insist so much on being "manly." For example, the “Eroica” Symphony is just manly enough; the last movement of the Fifth Symphony is way too manly, etcetera etcetera …
Beethoven’s anomalies, his offbeat sforzandi, his moments of disruption, jagged dissonances, rhythmic refusals-to-conform: these events can pose either as comic or heroic, or points between. (Comic or heroic dissonances: the difference between the “accidental” and the “chosen” wrong note?) If you trace the line from Haydn’s humorous quirks to Beethoven’s, if you watch the incubation of the Haydnesque egg in early Beethoven, you see how gradually the comic, opera buffa incidents hatch (!), grow into more “serious” usages, until accidents become more and more structural, more and more life-threatening … until Beethoven, in a sense, really “means” them.
Sometimes I wonder: why, oh why, Ludwig, do you have to mean them SO MUCH? If occasionally I have trouble taking the Appassionata Sonata as seriously as it needs to be taken (though I can see, from a certain emotional distance, how great it is), I have no trouble at all taking Beethoven’s funnier, “lighter” pieces very seriously, totally to heart.
For instance, Op. 96. Beethoven doesn’t get gentler than Op. 96, or more profound. The piece begins with the inviting trill, the fourth, the unchallenging diatonic, the definition of a world: the pastoral and, by association, the country dance; rolling triple meters, easy blossoming dialogue …
There are no destructions, no crises; there are lots of circling, hovering, beautiful moments: and that's enough, thank goodness … enough to present a whole world of human experience. Yes, it is possible not to be epic, or overwrought, and yet to do something complete, arching, emotionally significant.
Put another way, Op. 96 does not feel at all “confined” in its lyricism. But, it does engage the question of bounds. The impetus for this post was the following moment (which I just played some 15 times with JB):
The pianist wanders off (“out of bounds”), lets the chromatic spirit take him, and JB must sit idly by, while I blur. Haha. You just wait over there, Mr. Violinist, while I have some fun. Too bad for you! The fact that the violin does not play here is (of course) no accident. It suggests that while one element of the piece sits by, passively (helplessly?) another is let loose, unmoored. The violinist, perhaps, is the saner melodic, assembling, force … while the pianist at that moment symbolizes some lone renegade element of the piece--a chromatic vigilante!--some dissociated, dissociating urge. The image that keeps coming to my mind is a beach ball, (happily) neglected, accidentally dropped into the water, sailing off in some unexpected current.
A million similar tender transgressions lurk under the surface tranquility of Op. 96. The gentle giant, Beethoven, having set up the general frame of the piece—the lyrical, the dancical (heh)—creates a play at its edges … a fuzziness at the edge of the piece’s mood.
One of the most beautiful fuzzinesses of the piece is here:
Let’s say the first idea of the piece is pastoral, and the second “theme” is more purely and classically comic; in comparison this third (or closing theme) seems to suggest an awakening Romantic. This Romanticism is partly a harmonic proposition: the entire theme is played out over a dominant prolongation (if your eyes are glazing over, non-music-theory people, I’m sorry!); in other words, it lives penultimately, on the continuous verge of delayed resolution (you don’t need any racier metaphors from me, as much as I’d love to supply them). And partly this Romanticism is a question of motive: the two portato notes (portato, notes against resistance, caressing notes) headed always for the dissonance/resolution … musical heaves and sighs. Get the picture?
This “Romantic” theme cannot, by its nature, end. This would ruin it. A cadence would be nonsense, would feel tacked-on; its ending is therefore, by necessity, a non-ending. (The cadence is anathema to the true Romantic.) How not to end? The ongoing crescendo, as so often in Beethoven, meets the “accident” of a subito piano, and in place of D-major diatonic tones, we get the “accidental” B-flat:
Whoops! Except that the “mistake” is so *&(*ing beautiful. It’s no kind of ending, per se, in the Classical sense, but this little dark intrusion sticks out enough to make itself into at least a semicolon, just, in a sense, by being there … they say half the job is just showing up! I think of it as a kind of “marker”: within a predominantly sunny, G major, pastoral piece, an unexpected minor-key inflection, a call or signifier from another work (momentary, fleeting). It’s the sort of thing that one imagines Schubert must have really paid attention to, that he must have digested over breakfast some morning, saying to himself “Ach! That is fantastic! I must use that!” before knocking off fifty or so songs and calling it a day.
Most magically of all, when the violin’s turn comes, these final two notes, constituting the false ending, are repeated four times in a row, as if a broken record …
Since records were apparently not invented yet (according to my scholarly research on Wikipedia), perhaps it is more appropriate to describe this moment as an echoing or reverberation, a sinking-in of the last two notes … a propagation through time (which is musical space). Again strangely I am reminded of the beach ball, of waves, of something being allowed to drift.
The first time this happens, I think it is unarguably weird, as if, again, the violinist were “stuck.” (So many times in a row!) But, it turns out, Beethoven repeats these two affecting notes exactly four times, making a kind of peculiar, but standard, four-bar phrase out of nearly nothing, out of pure iteration. And then this four-bar idea (nothing) becomes kind of the foundation of the development. (Castles in the air.) So: what was excessive, bizarre, transgression, becomes normative, becomes the rule. Beethoven founds a temporary grammar on exception and paradox. The composer’s magic of getting the listener to accept the bizarre or asymmetrical. And once the strange becomes “normal,” then departures from the strange themselves become strange, the Alice in Wonderland, upside-down, beautiful world is created.
Watching this winding in and out of normality through the development, as we play it each night, I do feel like what I imagine the children, say, in Chronicles of Narnia feel stepping through the wardrobe, and the faun in the forest says hello. A hush comes over me in each development, each performance. Tightrope act: you don’t want to make a false move, or the dream will vanish, but on the other hand, you must relax and let the dream take you where it wishes. And dramas in Narnia reverberate back and forth significantly to reality (the development, as meditation, back to the exposition, music into life, etc.) … my touring life against “real life,” the symbol against the event, the idea versus the thing … how much does my immersion in the development of Op. 96 affect the way I live my so-called normal life? The children of Narnia must leave the fantasyland behind in order to grow up.
Just at that moment, when I am absorbed pristinely in the Beethovenian loveliness, and associated questions, happy as a clam, the man’s cell phone rings across from me (in the Quiet Car, no less!): it is Für Elise. How ever did that become the National Anthem of Beethoven? Für Elise, played heartlessly by a computer chip (have a heart, chip!). I stare for a scornful moment at him and his device, baleful angels of reality; he smiles at me, a polite businessman’s smile, and when I look back down at the open page of my score, the wardrobe is just a place to hang your clothes.
Beethoven’s anomalies, his offbeat sforzandi, his moments of disruption, jagged dissonances, rhythmic refusals-to-conform: these events can pose either as comic or heroic, or points between. (Comic or heroic dissonances: the difference between the “accidental” and the “chosen” wrong note?) If you trace the line from Haydn’s humorous quirks to Beethoven’s, if you watch the incubation of the Haydnesque egg in early Beethoven, you see how gradually the comic, opera buffa incidents hatch (!), grow into more “serious” usages, until accidents become more and more structural, more and more life-threatening … until Beethoven, in a sense, really “means” them.
Sometimes I wonder: why, oh why, Ludwig, do you have to mean them SO MUCH? If occasionally I have trouble taking the Appassionata Sonata as seriously as it needs to be taken (though I can see, from a certain emotional distance, how great it is), I have no trouble at all taking Beethoven’s funnier, “lighter” pieces very seriously, totally to heart.
For instance, Op. 96. Beethoven doesn’t get gentler than Op. 96, or more profound. The piece begins with the inviting trill, the fourth, the unchallenging diatonic, the definition of a world: the pastoral and, by association, the country dance; rolling triple meters, easy blossoming dialogue …
There are no destructions, no crises; there are lots of circling, hovering, beautiful moments: and that's enough, thank goodness … enough to present a whole world of human experience. Yes, it is possible not to be epic, or overwrought, and yet to do something complete, arching, emotionally significant.
Put another way, Op. 96 does not feel at all “confined” in its lyricism. But, it does engage the question of bounds. The impetus for this post was the following moment (which I just played some 15 times with JB):
The pianist wanders off (“out of bounds”), lets the chromatic spirit take him, and JB must sit idly by, while I blur. Haha. You just wait over there, Mr. Violinist, while I have some fun. Too bad for you! The fact that the violin does not play here is (of course) no accident. It suggests that while one element of the piece sits by, passively (helplessly?) another is let loose, unmoored. The violinist, perhaps, is the saner melodic, assembling, force … while the pianist at that moment symbolizes some lone renegade element of the piece--a chromatic vigilante!--some dissociated, dissociating urge. The image that keeps coming to my mind is a beach ball, (happily) neglected, accidentally dropped into the water, sailing off in some unexpected current.
A million similar tender transgressions lurk under the surface tranquility of Op. 96. The gentle giant, Beethoven, having set up the general frame of the piece—the lyrical, the dancical (heh)—creates a play at its edges … a fuzziness at the edge of the piece’s mood.
One of the most beautiful fuzzinesses of the piece is here:
Let’s say the first idea of the piece is pastoral, and the second “theme” is more purely and classically comic; in comparison this third (or closing theme) seems to suggest an awakening Romantic. This Romanticism is partly a harmonic proposition: the entire theme is played out over a dominant prolongation (if your eyes are glazing over, non-music-theory people, I’m sorry!); in other words, it lives penultimately, on the continuous verge of delayed resolution (you don’t need any racier metaphors from me, as much as I’d love to supply them). And partly this Romanticism is a question of motive: the two portato notes (portato, notes against resistance, caressing notes) headed always for the dissonance/resolution … musical heaves and sighs. Get the picture?
This “Romantic” theme cannot, by its nature, end. This would ruin it. A cadence would be nonsense, would feel tacked-on; its ending is therefore, by necessity, a non-ending. (The cadence is anathema to the true Romantic.) How not to end? The ongoing crescendo, as so often in Beethoven, meets the “accident” of a subito piano, and in place of D-major diatonic tones, we get the “accidental” B-flat:
Whoops! Except that the “mistake” is so *&(*ing beautiful. It’s no kind of ending, per se, in the Classical sense, but this little dark intrusion sticks out enough to make itself into at least a semicolon, just, in a sense, by being there … they say half the job is just showing up! I think of it as a kind of “marker”: within a predominantly sunny, G major, pastoral piece, an unexpected minor-key inflection, a call or signifier from another work (momentary, fleeting). It’s the sort of thing that one imagines Schubert must have really paid attention to, that he must have digested over breakfast some morning, saying to himself “Ach! That is fantastic! I must use that!” before knocking off fifty or so songs and calling it a day.
Most magically of all, when the violin’s turn comes, these final two notes, constituting the false ending, are repeated four times in a row, as if a broken record …
Since records were apparently not invented yet (according to my scholarly research on Wikipedia), perhaps it is more appropriate to describe this moment as an echoing or reverberation, a sinking-in of the last two notes … a propagation through time (which is musical space). Again strangely I am reminded of the beach ball, of waves, of something being allowed to drift.
The first time this happens, I think it is unarguably weird, as if, again, the violinist were “stuck.” (So many times in a row!) But, it turns out, Beethoven repeats these two affecting notes exactly four times, making a kind of peculiar, but standard, four-bar phrase out of nearly nothing, out of pure iteration. And then this four-bar idea (nothing) becomes kind of the foundation of the development. (Castles in the air.) So: what was excessive, bizarre, transgression, becomes normative, becomes the rule. Beethoven founds a temporary grammar on exception and paradox. The composer’s magic of getting the listener to accept the bizarre or asymmetrical. And once the strange becomes “normal,” then departures from the strange themselves become strange, the Alice in Wonderland, upside-down, beautiful world is created.
Watching this winding in and out of normality through the development, as we play it each night, I do feel like what I imagine the children, say, in Chronicles of Narnia feel stepping through the wardrobe, and the faun in the forest says hello. A hush comes over me in each development, each performance. Tightrope act: you don’t want to make a false move, or the dream will vanish, but on the other hand, you must relax and let the dream take you where it wishes. And dramas in Narnia reverberate back and forth significantly to reality (the development, as meditation, back to the exposition, music into life, etc.) … my touring life against “real life,” the symbol against the event, the idea versus the thing … how much does my immersion in the development of Op. 96 affect the way I live my so-called normal life? The children of Narnia must leave the fantasyland behind in order to grow up.
Just at that moment, when I am absorbed pristinely in the Beethovenian loveliness, and associated questions, happy as a clam, the man’s cell phone rings across from me (in the Quiet Car, no less!): it is Für Elise. How ever did that become the National Anthem of Beethoven? Für Elise, played heartlessly by a computer chip (have a heart, chip!). I stare for a scornful moment at him and his device, baleful angels of reality; he smiles at me, a polite businessman’s smile, and when I look back down at the open page of my score, the wardrobe is just a place to hang your clothes.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
In Search of Yesterday's Cheese
My powers of empathy are so extraordinary at times, I even surprise myself. For example, today I was sitting in the sunshine looking down at Lake Leman, and across it at the Alps, in the middle of vineyards perched on rolling hills, with a pleasingly rotund bowl of warm coffee cradled in my sleepy hands, and the remnants of some pear and apricot tarts next to me on a little charming plate, and I was so looking forward to the roast veal and salad the housekeeper was making for me for lunch, and... just at that moment... I had the most vivid, electric connection to what my friends HY, M, and J must be feeling cramped in their airplane seats or gate lounges. Never imagine I am a narcissist! On the contrary, I conjured in great detail the gungy orange or mauve of the chairs my friends were belted into and the sour tepid "coffee" they were reluctantly sipping from plastic cups, and the arguments they were having with clerks about cello seats, and the way they must have felt when the alarm went off at 7 am etc. etc. And thus ruminating, wiping the sated surplus sleep out of my eyes, I padded in my bare feet to the kitchen, and opened the walk-in fridge to find some Vacherin and Gruyere to snack on before luncheon, and possibly a nice glass of white wine to tide me over through this perfectly sunny early afternoon ... yet more intensely I had another overwhelming wave of empathy, the most exquisitely precise photographic image of an airline attendant leaning over HY with a cold tray of skeletal salad and forlorn fruit. A baby squirmed and whined in the adjoining seat. It was almost enough, this perceived misery, to stop me in my aimless tracks, and in order to sufficiently comfort myself I spooned a giant dollop of soft, oozing Vacherin onto a crusty round of bread, and lay myself in the sunshine until my selfless empathy was no longer a curse.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Looking for Work?
WANTED: S. Richter lookalike to work as an extra
Reply to: gigs-278167412@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-02-13, 1:56PM EST
Seeking someone who resembles late, world renowned pianist Sviatolsav [sic] Richter in ‘late’ phase of his life to work for two hours as an extra in a visual art project. There is no special talent needed, just the looks.
IN ORDER TO SEE PHOTOS PLEASE GOOGLE: Sviatoslav Richter using Google/Images option.
Also, please note that Sviatoslav Richter was very tall - which may not be so obvious from the available photos. Job description: this person will just sit in a pleasant, not at all boring environment for about two hours, wearing tuxedo or other formal, elegant outfit, playing a passive yet very important role. It should be a lot of fun. More details later. Compensation+ credit.
(Courtesy Gabriel Kahane)
Reply to: gigs-278167412@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-02-13, 1:56PM EST
Seeking someone who resembles late, world renowned pianist Sviatolsav [sic] Richter in ‘late’ phase of his life to work for two hours as an extra in a visual art project. There is no special talent needed, just the looks.
IN ORDER TO SEE PHOTOS PLEASE GOOGLE: Sviatoslav Richter using Google/Images option.
Also, please note that Sviatoslav Richter was very tall - which may not be so obvious from the available photos. Job description: this person will just sit in a pleasant, not at all boring environment for about two hours, wearing tuxedo or other formal, elegant outfit, playing a passive yet very important role. It should be a lot of fun. More details later. Compensation+ credit.
(Courtesy Gabriel Kahane)
Friday, February 09, 2007
Anna
Perhaps many of you out there will not agree with me, or will think I am making light of a tragedy (I am not, this is a terribly sad story which we will never really know), but I think this New York Times obituary is a masterpiece. There are so many ambiguous subtexted paragraphs in it, for instance:
The tantalizing, lingering qualification: "hired by the family..." Again and again Ms. Goodnough gives us facts, simply arranged or juxtaposed on the page, with less explanation than you would expect, and says more with less elucidation than reporters on CNN could ever manage in 3 hours of Idiot Coverage. Her journalistic "objectivity" is a linguistic pose behind which she hides the daggers of her insight. For instance, this supposedly harmless listing of her professional accomplishments:
And finally, I will hold up as paragon of simple, unflinching narrative, this timeline of her teens and twenties:
"In the course of her dancing career"! Bravo, Abby. No one could have written it better. And this new Anna seems to me just as tragic as Tolstoy's, just as symptomatic of the age.
P.S. the Washington Post obituary is--I am not kidding!--an extended comparison of Anna Nicole Smith to Odette from In Search of Lost Time, Violetta from La Traviata, and Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata." Yeesh! What a cultural fount this is turning out to be!
On Sept. 7, 2006, Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. On Sept. 10, Daniel, Ms. Smith’s son from her first marriage, died suddenly while visiting mother and child in the hospital in the Bahamas. A medical examiner hired by the family found that the death was the accidental result of the interaction of methadone with antidepressants.
The tantalizing, lingering qualification: "hired by the family..." Again and again Ms. Goodnough gives us facts, simply arranged or juxtaposed on the page, with less explanation than you would expect, and says more with less elucidation than reporters on CNN could ever manage in 3 hours of Idiot Coverage. Her journalistic "objectivity" is a linguistic pose behind which she hides the daggers of her insight. For instance, this supposedly harmless listing of her professional accomplishments:
She appeared in several movies, among them “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” (1994). Her other cinematic credits include “Playboy Video Playmate Calendar” (1993); and “Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration” (2003).
And finally, I will hold up as paragon of simple, unflinching narrative, this timeline of her teens and twenties:
When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1986; the couple divorced in 1987.
Ms. Smith worked as a waitress, later becoming a topless dancer in Houston. After submitting photos to Playboy, she appeared on the cover of the March 1992 issue. In 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year.
In 1994, Ms. Smith married J. Howard Marshall II, a Texas oil billionaire and former professor of trusts and estates at Yale Law School whom she had met in the course of her dancing career. She was 26; he was 89. Married life for Ms. Smith was a bounteous stream of clothes and jewelry.
"In the course of her dancing career"! Bravo, Abby. No one could have written it better. And this new Anna seems to me just as tragic as Tolstoy's, just as symptomatic of the age.
P.S. the Washington Post obituary is--I am not kidding!--an extended comparison of Anna Nicole Smith to Odette from In Search of Lost Time, Violetta from La Traviata, and Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata." Yeesh! What a cultural fount this is turning out to be!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Weathered
Let us plumb boredom's depths and further discuss the weather. I mean, really. Yesterday, in my ongoing quest for what I don't want to know, I hit up the Accuweather site, and was confronted by a giant, ominous curving blue arrow directed precisely at my geographical location. Labelling letters read: "BRUTAL COLD." I particularly enjoyed, in this weathermap, how even the letters themselves seemed to quiver and shiver, as if fonts too could freeze. (How I wish, some days, I were a font!) The man in front of me in the endless taxi line at LaGuardia turned during a gust and simply said "Wow," like a great composer, summoning much heartfelt feeling out of little material.
The other night in Ann Arbor, it was cold enough that crossing the two-lane street from the concert hall to the hotel seemed polar-arduous, and I ended up not going out on the town, but sheltering in the hotel bar, gathering my thoughts for a talk on the music of Leon Kirchner the next day. The bartender graciously made me an unusual Cosmopolitan, and I had my nerdy but cute (Apple, of course) laptop out on the bar, and a copy of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and a score of Kirchner's Sonata No. 2, and a notebook, and all in all I thought I did a pretty good job of showing that I was working. No, no, I'm not lonely, I'm just working here at the bar with a drink. This was the message I hoped I was projecting.
However, fate. A woman a mere stumble away down the bar seemed to feel I needed company, and when her companion would head to the bathroom (which happened strangely often) she would come over and chat me up. She was at the concert; she said how much she enjoyed it; she was a friendly Japanese woman who evidently knew a great many people who knew a great many musicians, and Lord! how I tried through subtle and gracious body language to indicate that I was not feeling terribly chatty! but her radar was not receiving on my frequencies. Her accent was a bit heavy (perhaps ever so slightly drink-induced, as I also was inducing drink) and though I would be reading studiously, triple-dipping into my books and notebooks, she would come up and start in like this:
Wow. My eyes, which had been previously delving into a complex score of Kirchner, and my brain, which had just survived a two hour concert including a very rhythmically challenging work of Meyer ($@#&#$*#$!, don't tell Edgar I said that): both of these glazed and lost focus, like a donut wilting in the sun. I would smile and grammar itself (if not its logical underpinnings) seemed to flee and leave me flailing for utterable phonemes. I had my hand still on my score, as if to declare I belonged there, in the land of my studies and my notes, but she drew me ever further into her land which was like no land I had ever visited, an Eastern and yet still Dickensian world of strange coincidences, and people who know people from other lives, and conductors who love cookies.
I don't want to offend any readers of Think Denk or put anyone off from saying hello after concerts and whatnot, but I hope it will not shock you if I say that occasionally someone launches into a story backstage and I find my mind wandering, for whatever reason. Call it artist fatigue, if you will; a casualty of circumstance. Often you are so preoccupied with what you &*()@#$ed up during the concert that you have trouble concentrating on the people before you. But I cannot say, in this case, that I was bored or lost interest; what she said was so Joycean in its manifold twists and turns and streams of association that I was actually flabbergasted and simply intellectually at a loss. And when her friend came back she would go back to her segment of the bar, and I would be left with my brilliant computer file, a miracle of productivity, consisting of:
And these generic, hopeful but pathetic words now seemed stripped of even the possibility of meaning, rotating as they were in the vortex of the narrative the woman had left behind. And may I remind you, reader, that the woman came back several times, in installments if you will, resuming the story which seemed unresumable, like the Scheherezade of Michigan, telling and retelling, always leaving a dangling thread...
Finally, I had finished my drink and my cheese plate. Crumbs were delicately and casually spread over my scores and books. It was nearly time to go. My file had slightly grown. At that moment, a third party, who apparently worked at the hotel, came to speak to the woman and her friend, and the following dialogue ensued:
Hotel Woman: Hey.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Hey.
Hotel Woman: Were you at the show tonight?
Japanese Woman: Yes.
Hotel Woman: How was it?
Japanese Woman: It was really good.
Hotel Woman: Well, how did it compare to Spamalot?
Japanese Woman: Well...
Friend: I mean that's not fair...
Hotel Woman: Nothing can really compare to Spamalot.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Right.
I stared at my now empty cocktail glass and at the relics of literature and "high art" scattered about me. They too seemed insulted, demeaned; the beautiful moment where Leon quotes Pierrot Lunaire in the Sonata No. 2, allowing it to emerge from the Viennese waltz, was open on the bar, and it sulked, knowing itself unrecognized ... And I shudder to imagine what Saul's novel was thinking! People have the power to compare anything, even the incomparable. I know Greg Sandow is going to come down hard on me for being an elitist fool, deaf to the decline of our way-of-thinking, but I had felt somehow (with no offense to the many good, presumably well-intentioned, people who have worked on the show) in my heart that Beethoven Op. 96, at least, if nothing else, could be seen by most people as objectively "better" than Spamalot. I saw Spamalot in St. Louis and should never have sat in the balcony because I considered throwing myself off several times. But, Spamalot lovers, I understand that there must be differences of taste, and in these matters there can be no dispute blah blah blah etcetera etcetera, and as I packed up my things and headed up to my room I tried to draw a whole moral from the evening but perhaps I would just lie down .... zzzz ...
The other night in Ann Arbor, it was cold enough that crossing the two-lane street from the concert hall to the hotel seemed polar-arduous, and I ended up not going out on the town, but sheltering in the hotel bar, gathering my thoughts for a talk on the music of Leon Kirchner the next day. The bartender graciously made me an unusual Cosmopolitan, and I had my nerdy but cute (Apple, of course) laptop out on the bar, and a copy of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and a score of Kirchner's Sonata No. 2, and a notebook, and all in all I thought I did a pretty good job of showing that I was working. No, no, I'm not lonely, I'm just working here at the bar with a drink. This was the message I hoped I was projecting.
However, fate. A woman a mere stumble away down the bar seemed to feel I needed company, and when her companion would head to the bathroom (which happened strangely often) she would come over and chat me up. She was at the concert; she said how much she enjoyed it; she was a friendly Japanese woman who evidently knew a great many people who knew a great many musicians, and Lord! how I tried through subtle and gracious body language to indicate that I was not feeling terribly chatty! but her radar was not receiving on my frequencies. Her accent was a bit heavy (perhaps ever so slightly drink-induced, as I also was inducing drink) and though I would be reading studiously, triple-dipping into my books and notebooks, she would come up and start in like this:
... well my nephew who is 14 he has piano lessons and I was at a festival in Europe in Switzerland, you know, and my friend who took me knows the conductor who used to be there and so we went backstage and were talking and I met someone there and he was saying hello and he played Beethoven and...
Wow. My eyes, which had been previously delving into a complex score of Kirchner, and my brain, which had just survived a two hour concert including a very rhythmically challenging work of Meyer ($@#&#$*#$!, don't tell Edgar I said that): both of these glazed and lost focus, like a donut wilting in the sun. I would smile and grammar itself (if not its logical underpinnings) seemed to flee and leave me flailing for utterable phonemes. I had my hand still on my score, as if to declare I belonged there, in the land of my studies and my notes, but she drew me ever further into her land which was like no land I had ever visited, an Eastern and yet still Dickensian world of strange coincidences, and people who know people from other lives, and conductors who love cookies.
I don't want to offend any readers of Think Denk or put anyone off from saying hello after concerts and whatnot, but I hope it will not shock you if I say that occasionally someone launches into a story backstage and I find my mind wandering, for whatever reason. Call it artist fatigue, if you will; a casualty of circumstance. Often you are so preoccupied with what you &*()@#$ed up during the concert that you have trouble concentrating on the people before you. But I cannot say, in this case, that I was bored or lost interest; what she said was so Joycean in its manifold twists and turns and streams of association that I was actually flabbergasted and simply intellectually at a loss. And when her friend came back she would go back to her segment of the bar, and I would be left with my brilliant computer file, a miracle of productivity, consisting of:
Leon Kirchner's Music
Ideas
?
And these generic, hopeful but pathetic words now seemed stripped of even the possibility of meaning, rotating as they were in the vortex of the narrative the woman had left behind. And may I remind you, reader, that the woman came back several times, in installments if you will, resuming the story which seemed unresumable, like the Scheherezade of Michigan, telling and retelling, always leaving a dangling thread...
Finally, I had finished my drink and my cheese plate. Crumbs were delicately and casually spread over my scores and books. It was nearly time to go. My file had slightly grown. At that moment, a third party, who apparently worked at the hotel, came to speak to the woman and her friend, and the following dialogue ensued:
Hotel Woman: Hey.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Hey.
Hotel Woman: Were you at the show tonight?
Japanese Woman: Yes.
Hotel Woman: How was it?
Japanese Woman: It was really good.
Hotel Woman: Well, how did it compare to Spamalot?
Japanese Woman: Well...
Friend: I mean that's not fair...
Hotel Woman: Nothing can really compare to Spamalot.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Right.
I stared at my now empty cocktail glass and at the relics of literature and "high art" scattered about me. They too seemed insulted, demeaned; the beautiful moment where Leon quotes Pierrot Lunaire in the Sonata No. 2, allowing it to emerge from the Viennese waltz, was open on the bar, and it sulked, knowing itself unrecognized ... And I shudder to imagine what Saul's novel was thinking! People have the power to compare anything, even the incomparable. I know Greg Sandow is going to come down hard on me for being an elitist fool, deaf to the decline of our way-of-thinking, but I had felt somehow (with no offense to the many good, presumably well-intentioned, people who have worked on the show) in my heart that Beethoven Op. 96, at least, if nothing else, could be seen by most people as objectively "better" than Spamalot. I saw Spamalot in St. Louis and should never have sat in the balcony because I considered throwing myself off several times. But, Spamalot lovers, I understand that there must be differences of taste, and in these matters there can be no dispute blah blah blah etcetera etcetera, and as I packed up my things and headed up to my room I tried to draw a whole moral from the evening but perhaps I would just lie down .... zzzz ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
