All you have to do is take one look at $81 million in the first day of her candidacy to realize that Kamala Harris is suddenly likely to be the next President - at least she is barring a third, fourth, or fifth world historic event in the next few weeks. She still might not. She has yet to undergo the coming orgy of Republican slutshaming (she started in politics as the girlfriend of legendary San Francisco mayor Willie Brown), and for all the leftshaming of Harris for being a prosecutor, Republicans will charge that she was disgustingly lax on crime. She'll be thought of as the 'Border Czar,' a thankless job that will cause the right to charge she was absurdly lax on immigration, and the left to charge that she was absurdly strict.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Kamala. Good for....?
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Great American Art: Part 1
The Musicals of Stephen Sondheim: If I had to go to bat that there is one American creator that can inspire the immortal love that generation after generation get from Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt, Montaigne, Pushkin (read him if you don't believe me...). Leaving aside that he's one of three creators I can think of who unquestionably transcends the classical/popular divide (Gershwin and Joplin, more on them anon), his musicals are owners' manuals for life itself - packed with the wisdom of the world. In Sondheim comedy stands proudly next to tragedy, realism next to the most astonishing fantastical flights - often in the same show, along with a gallery of characters possibly as unforgettable as Hamlet and Juliet. Look particularly to Gypsy, Company, A Little Night Music, and especially West Side Story and Into The Woods.
New Hollywood: when we talk about 'New Hollywood', we really mean the years 1967-1983. These were the years that movies, beset by television, had no idea what to do to keep audiences interested, so they did the only thing they could: trust the moviemakers to make the movies they wanted to make. There were a lot of creators who had one-off conferences with the mysterium, but they had it because Hollywood was, for that brief period, more interested in art than money, and many of the usual impediments to making something great just weren't there. Look particularly to The Godfather Epic and Star Wars obviously, but just a little more obscurely: Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, Harold and Maude, Cabaret, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Carrie, Being There, The Right Stuff.
Scorsese and Spielberg: but there are two creators from that period whose entire output courts the kind of lastingness we attribute to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No prizes for guessing who they are. Now that they're on either side of 80, they're still doing much of their best work as though it's still 1975. If Sondheim plants a bullseye between classical and popular, Scorsese and even Spielberg exist just barely on either side of the high/low divide - again, no prizes for guessing which is which. Scorsese, for all his encyclopedic art, would be nowhere near so compelling without the streetwise dialogue and the pop music soundtracks, and that's nearly as true for his historical epics as his gangster ones - epics like Last Temptation of Christ and Killers of the Flower Moon seem to exist as much in the times they were made as they do in the times they're set. Spielberg, on the other hand, would not be Spielberg without shots that use light and darkness with all the virtuosic beauty of Rembrandt or Caravaggio, and whether popular blockbusters or historical epics, seem to have the spiritual charge of painting's old masters. I won't say which to look to by either, they're too well-known to need any recs from me, except to make a special plea for late Spielberg nobody went to the theater for like West Side Story and The Fabelmans, and certain less known early Scorsese like Mean Streets and After Hours.
The Simpsons, seasons 1-8: Screw you, it's my list, and any list of great art from me is going to have it. You either get why it's there or you don't. Whether its comedy will need footnotes in 50 years, all of American life is in it. If you want to understand what it means to be American, that's what you watch.
Louis Armstrong Symphony Hall Concert, Boston, 1947: It was with Satchmo that it all began. Play a single trumpet on a microphone loud enough, it can blow a 100 piece orchestra away. Whether the best pop music is great music as traditional poetics understand it, it is perfect like the great folk art, perhaps the greatest folk art we will ever know. And Louis Armstrong is greater than nearly anything that comes later. Like Mozart and Sondheim, all the comedy and tragedy of the world is in it, often compressed into two minute perfection, along with a type of rhythmic vitality that was almost entirely new to music. But as great as those 1920s recordings are, they only give a dim idea of what Satchmo sounded like live. The Symphony Hall Concert is doubtless a little grander than how dance hall and bar audiences were accustomed to hearing him, but this is him at his best in sound vivid enough for three dimensions.
Golden Age Disney: Leave aside the universality of stories, simultaneously leave aside any 'problematic' elements in their archetypal narratives, look at any drawing from Pinocchio, Bambi, Snow White, even Dumbo, and ask yourself if there is any less art that goes into it than the greatest art. Then ask yourself how the lightest elements in the human experience can exist next to forces that are so oppressively dark. There may be terrible holes in their storytelling, but narratives as absorbing as any there have ever been are told with art from the ages.
The Muppet Show - original run 1976-1981: Like The Simpsons, you could not explain the Muppets without watching them. I don't know what else to say.
The Gershwin Songbook: We tend to remember George Gershwin for his few orchestral pieces, and if people are lucky they get to hear Porgy and Bess, but the best Gershwin, the most perfect, the most vital, is isolated from any show, it's simply the songs themselves with lyrics by brother Ira. Like Sondheim, they perfectly straddle that line between high and low, comedy and tragedy. But if Sondheim exceeds Gershwin, it's because while Sondheim is interested in the hard work of relationships, Gershwin is interested in beginnings, the allure of possibility, particularly sexual possibility, which is the allure of so much sophistication personified by early 20th century Hollywood and Broadway. And yet, like Sondheim, the songs have meanings so much deeper than their surface. Just think of that famous line, 'who could ask for anything more?', when you think about it, he's got rhythm, he's got music, he's got sunshine, he could ask for a shitload more... Start with Ella Fitzgerald, but find as many of the great jazz singers doing Gershwin as you can: Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and crown it all with Nina Simone doing her towering, tragic cover of I Loves You Porgy.
Citizen Kane: It's almost impossible to talk about Kane without talking about technique, and literally impossible to talk about it without talking about its making. I'm going to try the former, won't even touch the latter. There were movies before Kane, but there were not Movies, and Kane is more than a movie, it's proof that if the work is great enough, it's dangerous. It's a work so good that it proved dangerous to its makers. So damning seemed this antihero who resembled a newspaper tycoon to an actual newspaper tycoon that the movie was almost destroyed unseen, while its director barely ever worked in Hollywood again, its screenwriter never did, and the studio which bankrolled it went bankrupt. Kane is proof that movies are often as much an artform as anything in Beethoven or Dante, and just as visceral as those two. Two hours go by in a flash of lightning, and so alchemically did Kane tap into the American spirit that it can be interpreted as a prophecy of Donald Trump.
Plenty more if I finish this...
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Artists, get ready
Saturday, July 6, 2024
Chronic Illness
It's the result of a twenties and thirties of ravenous appetites. One mood medication induced a massive appetite for food, another slowed my colon like a tortoise. I knew the inevitable result would be something like this or still worse, yet I felt completely powerless to stop. I take the most minimal amount now of the former medication, but for the latter there is no antidepressant that will not induce something similar, and potentially a bit worse.
Friday, June 28, 2024
I didn't watch the debate
I didn't watch the debate. I won't watch the debate. The moment Biden entered, I switched it off. Whether due to a cold,, or laryngitis, or whether he simply had a bad makeup job, or just that he was tired, the moment he stepped on that stage, Biden looked like that foolish fond old man in Republican wet dreams. Dearest Joe looked older than old, he looked like the increasingly wax likeness of a person in the weeks before their passing. From that moment, I knew that even if Biden were full of life for the last hour of the debate, something so shallow as a debate would be decided by the first impression, and the first impression was that Biden is close to the end.
Joe Biden may come back, even from this. Debates are stupid. Debating Trump is stupider. Barely a single American hasn't made up their mind for whom they're going to vote, and many swing voters are even stupider than they look. If you haven't made up your mind by now, a blow of the wind will make you change your mind again, and again, and again, until your mind shows itself unable to hold anything at all.
The problem isn't Biden, the problem isn't even Trump, the problem is us. The problem is the whole system we've refused to reform for a half-century after reform's necessity was clear. Biden is just the personification of that system.
I believe Joe Biden is the best President of my lifetime. Obama was like Jefferson: an intellectual with words more inspiring than any action; but he proved willing to ditch lofty ideals when the reality of governing set in. Like Jefferson, Obama was truly great when he was great, but sometimes he was hidebound by his own abstract ideals, and when he was the results were scarcely mediocre. George HW Bush might have been up to it, but he governed like an Adams: a patrician who might have been great had he not given his bully pulpit to a mob movement he plainly despised. So Biden is the only President I've ever seen equal to the task of governing, but even if he's equal to the presidency, he's not equal to THIS presidency. This increasingly seems a moment that demands a Washington, a Lincoln, an FDR, who throws out the blueprint and redraws the country from scratch; so even a semi-giant like Eisenhower with enormous pre-Presidential experience and achievements won't cut it. Eisenhower presided over America after a great crisis: a period when the country knew best what it was and what its mission should be, because the world had no choice but look to America for answers they couldn't provide themselves.
Biden is a President for the mid-20th century presiding in the 21st. It is astonishing how much of the old formulas of Eisenhower, Truman and Johnson translate to our own time. Compare the first four years of Obama to the first four years of Biden: Obama did a lot, Biden did more. Yet even so, Biden is the dogmas of the quiet past unequal to our Stormy Daniels present. He's solving 2020s problems with 1950s solutions: they still work pretty well because they were good solutions, but they're old solutions near the end of their shelf life: incapable of solving anything for more than a couple years. Biden is demonstrably unequal to the enormity of an unprecedented crisis, not because he's old, but because our whole era is old. Any infirmities he exhibits are just a metaphor for the bigger problem. Biden does not see a way forward except through frameworks of a past which hardly anyone lived through but him. Obama was unequal to these problems too, but Obama saw that new ways forward were needed, and he spoke to that need for a new, cleaner air which every American intuited.
Obama bet on the light of our common humanity, and that bet allowed inhumanity to slither into the sunlight unashamed. He believed that given the objective truth, America would embrace truth. But few people want the truth, they want a truth told slant to flatter them.
The problem is not Biden or Trump, the problem is the way we process information. There is so much information to process now, an infinity of statistics most find too difficult to interpret except through a filter of ideological theories. There is hardly any news anymore, there is only news that's framed through commentary. Whether these ideological framers mean good or ill, it's impossible for objectivity to get through them. News is no longer news, it's just theories about what's going on. In most people's minds, these theories are either proved by statistics, or the statistics are lies. Artificial intelligence will only make this reality more acute as we have to doubt the veracity of everything we ever see on a screen - screens which are now the way we process the world.
Biden and Trump are just symptoms of this problem. Biden is old truths, old reliabilities, the certainties we've always known, the institutions that keep us together - but these institutions are falling apart, and if they're to be renewed, they need assurance that someone can keep them going through the next four years. Biden, God protect him, can't give that. Trump is a perfect incarnation of the doubts, the worm that eats through plants and certainties, trying to convince us the institutions that kept us together never did, never worked, and should be shed as a snake does its skin.
The problem is that Biden is the old guarantees: NATO, an impartial Supreme Court, legislatures without gridlock, lawmakers who vote their individual beliefs rather than party line. So effective were these old certainties that over of a half-century they made way for new possibilities: Civil Rights, The Great Society, Roe vs. Wade, the Kyoto Protocol, Obergefell vs. Hodges, and, most importantly, the Paris climate Agreement. The story of these victories is not the victories themselves but the lives they make better; but this improvement is temporary, we all know that now. New generations will be forced to watch as these possibilities turn into kindling little different than forest fires. Their challenge, our challenge, is to preserve or resurrect these possibilities for a better life, and to turn them into ironclad certainties.
Obama was wrong, change does not happen from the bottom up. It happens in synergy from the bottom to the top: a sturdy foundation of community activity is what creates a great leader, but change without a presiding leader is anarchy: only with a great leader is lasting change implemented without billions of unforeseen problems along the way. Leaders will come who are able to do it, but we don't know who they are yet, and we may not for a terribly long while. New problems need to be understood before they can be solved, and great as Biden is, he was never the leader to understand them. Great leaders will only come to help us after we take the lead in our own small spaces. We have to vote, we have to volunteer, we have to phonebank, knock on doors, go to town halls, sit on schoolboards, attend those PTA and HOA meetings, clean the local parks, get the crossing guards hired and more stop signs on the roads. Obama was right in the sense that we are the ones we've been waiting for. We are all our own little leaders, and there's no point in larger leadership if there's no leadership beneath them. To a certain extent, we get the leaders we deserve, so if most of us are not willing to demonstrate how leaders should lead, we get bad leaders.
Thursday, June 20, 2024
Walter Klein
I'd heard the name Walter Klein before yesterday, but somehow I'd never listened to him. I think I've happened on another of those artists whom your life changes when you hear them for the first time.
Monday, June 17, 2024
Two Small Words on What's Going With 'The Situation'
When you're part of a group who chants 'Intifada Revolution/There is only one solution,' whether or not you realize that that's deliberately channeling Hitler's final solution, that's what literally hundreds of millions of antisemites hear. So if you're part of a group which does that, you might or might not be an antisemite, but if you don't dissociate yourselves from the group that organizes the protest, you're at very least an idiot.
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If there ever were a ceasefire with Hamas (and there won't be, and if there is, not one that isn't broken a hundred times...), the more chance there is of full scale war with Hezbollah, an organization that created a dictatorship in south of Lebanon in all but name with weaponry that makes Hamas look like slingshots. That's what it means to work together in the 'Axis of Resistance.' The quieter one front gets, the louder the other gets. The more numb people grow to Gaza, the more fresh outrage can be generated by anything that happens in South Lebanon. The whole point of this operation is to keep Israel at war perpetually until world public opinion hemorrhages totally, Israel loses its economic opportunities, its sponsors lose their credibility, and their dictatorial backers gain the prestige lost by democracies like the US and EU. The whole point is to paint the entirety of the Israeli populace, and the US populace, as one monolithic block of imperialism, thereby driving a billion progressive idealists around the world into the arms of political Islamists that would set their allies on fire the moment they gain power over them.
Stay liberal, but do not be naive.
Saturday, June 8, 2024
A Few Points about Otello
I just heard Otello performed in concert tonight at the National Symphony in DC. If it weren't already three in the morning I'd write a long post about Otello.
- Otello is a greater work than Othello. Othello is towering, but it's two plays awkwardly shoehorned into one: Othello's descent into jealous madness, and the rise of Iago's evil powers. Verdi, as practical a man of the theater as the Bard, streamlines it to one story by making Iago evil personified from the first word. Othello sprawls into a hundred directions. Otello is a masterpiece of concision. You know exactly why every note is there.
- The way Verdi cuts Othello in half is through Iago's Credo, which literally sets a trifling prose poem Boito wrote as a vent for his own domestic frustration that had nothing to do with Otello. The setting would be astonishingly modern even in Wagner, and it is one of the core glories of all opera. While Shakespeare's Iago evolves, Verdi's Iago is. Iago, like Hagen, is evil: not only is he evil, he is evil itself.
- Race is obviously near the core of Shakespeare's conception. One of Shakespeare's many tropes is to show that a villain from a disparaged race is the way they are because circumstances forced them to be. Just as Shylock is a Jew forced into his own stereotype, Othello is a moor forced into his. They are both villains and figures of great pathos. But the primary concern of the Othello story in any form is jealousy, but whereas Shakespeare's Othello is concerned places jealousy in a racial context, Verdi's Otello places it in the context of relationships, how envy leads friends to betray each other, and how envy leads to abusive domestic relationships.
- There are moments when what happens in the music is so violent that one can only speculate that the music expresses what the stage directions lack. After Verdi sets Shakespeare's line, 'I took thee for the cunning whore of Venice,' the wrath of the music is so terrifying that one can only infer the actions the music implies.
- Next time you hear Otello's shout of 'a terra, e piangi!' think of Pagliacci. Note for note, Leoncavallo literally sets the same musical cell as 'ridi Pagliaccio!'
- Much is made by musicologists the subtle ways Iago insinuates his evil machinations in Act II, at least much is made by Ernest Newman. It's important to pace Act II relatively quickly, as Gianandrea Noseda did tonight (too fast elsewhere), because Iago's insinuating chromaticism can seem like mustache twirling unless it's done at the speed of conversation. Whether in Shakespeare or Verdi, Iago has to seem plausibly normal in order to make his devestating effect.
- Late Verdi is a master, maybe the master, at coming up with the proper onomatopoetic musical gesture for every action. Such gestures are everywhere in Falstaff, but until tonight, the extent of it in Otello didn't quite occur to me. The Act III domestic squabble proceeds like so many fights do. It starts with one partner's cutting remarks that just barely keep civility's veneer, while the other partner does everything they can to subtly imply the unpleasant thing they need, only to proceed to the place of hurt, where the lid of respect falls off. Points of aggravation are repeated over and over again. And in the worst fights, there is always a place where the unforgivable thing is said, the point from which there is no return.
- As the composer who perfected the tropes of grand opera, Verdi is in a unique place to play around with them. At least twice, Verdi seems as though he is about to go into an aria, once with Iago in Act I, once with Otello at the end of Act III, and probably half a dozen times between them in Act II, only to interrupt what seems like an introductory melody for something far more naturalistic.
- We always talk about the importance of key and harmony in Wagner, but barely anyone speaks of Verdi as though he has any sort of tonal plan. And yet the harmonic plan in Otello is so clearly laid out. The love of Otello and Desdemona is played out in the tonality of E. The kisses are in a blissful E-major, but the jealousy takes root in b-flat minor, the most distant key from E. The constant rebukes and insinuations are always in a much more complex E-major, like a love that is struggling to remind itself that it exists. But at the most harrowing moments of domestic strife, the music turns to E-minor. The opera ends again in E-major but the most resigned, morendo E-major.
- But the harmonic masterstroke is that the Willow Song is in C-Sharp minor - E-major's relative minor. The very note E has become the source of Desdemona's pain, and when it comes time to sing Ave Maria, she sings it in the dominant of C-Sharp, A-flat major. It's like a harmonic signal that heaven hears her pain, and will save her for it. All of which leads us back to the low E on the double basses with which Otello makes his final entrance.
Monday, June 3, 2024
Israel/Palestine 3 1/2 FAQ's
First the half question, which I won't even put in the form of a question.
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
A Liberal Israel
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Ten reasons I haven't written about the campus protests so far.