Who Does A Better Joe Cocker?

Joe Cocker?



or John Belushi?

Roman Polanski survived the Holocaust to be raised by his father. His father was also a Survivor, but to become so had to endure Matthausen, a camp deadly enough that no reliable figures exist for the casualties. The Nazis destroyed most of the statistics before liberation, but it's believed that somewhere between 170,000 and 320,000 people were killed (though some historians have put the figure at 2 million). After a childhood under Stalin and Hitler, Polanski was rewarded with a young adulthood in Gomulka's Poland. As a budding Polish director, his first film had enormous success but came under official criticism at a time when official criticism often meant imprisonment and sometimes worse.

He received asylum in France in an era when defection from a Communist country was anything but easy. His first period in France was unsuccessful because the arts in France were dominated by fellow travelers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Paul Sartre who were hostile to anyone who might contradict their view of the Soviet Union as the anti-imperialist savior of the world. One bad word from a famous cultural figure was enough to scare producers into refusing Polanski more than a few francs at a time. So Polanski had to move to London, where he found success and began his western career in earnest.

But Polanski's early movies had very little to do with politics. He was much more interested in human beings, and particularly in their humiliation. The streak of cruelty that marks his movies (and his personal life) was manifest from the very beginning. Whereas filmmakers today like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez use violence as an omnipresent force whose shock barely registers on the screen, the violence in Polanski's films slices to the cruelest possible angle. Perhaps a man who saw so much of life's terrors would see brutality as a part of the commonplace, or maybe Polanski was just a born sadist. But even with the Hitchcockian manner by which he makes his characters suffer (particularly his female characters), he seems to identify with their suffering in a way the Hitchcocks of the world never do. In a perverse, almost psychopathic way, there lurks a feminist streak to Polanski. It is hardly a streak that absolves him, but certainly one that that should make people question the standard writeoff of him as a born mysogenist.

His most famous early movie, Repulsion, is a case study of the madness that creeps in from isolation. The icily beautiful Carol (played by the icily beautiful Catherine Deneuve) comes to stay with her sister and gets into an argument with her sister's omnipresent yet married boyfriend. After the argument, Carol's sister goes on vacation with him to Italy and Carol finds herself trapped in her sister's apartment with the effects of an insanity that becomes more apparent every passing day. Unable to connect with people in either her personal life or her work, she comes completely undone over the course of a week. We helplessly watch as her hair gets messy, her clothes become tattered, and the food she refuses to eat rots on the table. Having previously confided that she is a virgin and perpetually afraid of men, she attempts to connect with a man only to end up blugeoning him with a candlestick and then cuts the throat of her sister's groping landlord with a straight razor. The sister comes home at the end of the week to find the dead bodies and Carol hiding under the bed. In the final shot, the camera pans to a family portrait in which Carol isolates herself from the rest of the family's domestic contentment.

Habanera

(Oh dear, the hours I've spent imitating this with Andrew Gordon...)

Hugh Laurie Interviews Michael Jackson

Alicia De Larrocha (1923-2009): An Appreciation

It was heady times for pianophiles in the 1980's. The grand age of Romantic Piano was coming to its end with a Lisztian bang. And the bang was dominated by three pianists still near the top of their respective games in their mid-eighties, each representing the last vestige of a different dying tradition.



In the late 1980's, Vladimir Horowitz was arguably in better pianistic shape than he was at any time since the early 50's. When Horowitz died in late 1989, the age of Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Scriabin died with him. He was the last vestige of Russian pianism before the Revolution with its particular combination of elegance and volatility. The Soviet pianists after Horowitz could match him in temperament, but none of them could wed Horowitz's passion to his natural elegance.



One year older than Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin was nearly every bit the pianist at eighty that he was at thirty. The son-in-law of the great violinist Adolf Busch, the younger contemporary of Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Backhaus and a favored colleague of Arnold Schonberg, Serkin represented the last active link with the middle-class German traditions of chamber music, wide reading and bildung (though Wilhelm Kempff survived him in retirement). Serkin was the last pianistic link to an era in which German families would play Beethoven and Brahms for each other in drawing rooms. As a teacher Serkin mentored three generations of pianists and to this day generations of pianists he taught honor his legacy by playing the German classics with the same rigor and intensity he brought.



Serkin's exact contemporary in birth and death, Claudio Arrau, was Chilean by origin. But Arrau came from a tradition just as German as Serkin's and every bit as extinct. If Serkin was reared in the middle-class traditions of Brahms and Busch, Arrau came from the upper-class traditions of Liszt and Furtwangler. Arrau's music-making had a self-concious probity no other pianist would dare. No other pianist of the recorded era would chance to play the classics with Arrau's flexibility of tempo or disregard for written dynamics (not even his disciple, Daniel Barenboim). Arrau aimed not for Serkin's rigor but to endow music with all the weight of German philosophy. Every moment of Arrau's playing seemed to be an attempt to bend the listener's sense of time and space. Music-making has rarely been as 'heavy' an experience as it was in his hands.

While all three pianists still played around the world in their mid-eighties, their technique seemed fundamentally indestructable until the end (though Horowitz and Arrau had many off-nights). As they played on, a slew of slightly younger pianists seemed to find it excruciating to cope with the octogenarian onslaught. Among the Eastern Europeans: Emil Gilels, Gina Bachauer and Geza Anda all died early. Mieczyslaw Horoszowski and Shura Cherkassky seemed content to stay out of Horowitz's limelight, and Sviatoslav Richter confined his appearances to festivals. The entirety of th German-speaking lands did not produce an heir to Serkin until Alfred Brendel reached maturity and Arrau fans had to wait even longer for the maturation of Daniel Barenboim. Great American pianists seemed to appear at the speed of light: William Kapell, Julius Katchen, Leon Fleischer, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis, Van Cliburn - and yet every one of them seemed to die or burn out as quickly as they appeared. And that's not even mentioning Glenn Gould to the North... Maurizio Pollini was at his peak as he was twenty years before and still is twenty years later - playing the piano to an unassailable technical standard with barely any hint of a beating heart behind it.

With all these pianistic casualties, only two pianists the world over seemed to be able to compete with the old men on their own terms. Both were Spanish-speaking women, but there similarities end.



The Argentinian Martha Argerich was still only in her forties. Critics never seemed to tire of using words like 'volcanic' and 'smoldering' to describe her playing of the great Romantic works. Physically beautiful and forever rumored to be as tempestuous in her private affairs as she was in her pianism, her performances electrified crowds in every city. Like Horowitz, she seemed to carry an aura of instability and danger that magnetized audiences. Like Arrau and Horowitz, she overwhelmed her public with the enormity of her conceptions more than she did with the rightness of them. To this day her playing can be as wrong-headed as any great pianist in history, but her pianism was as unmistakable within a few notes as it is now.



But the Spaniard Alicia De Larrocha was Argerich's antipode in every way. Physically diminutive, Laroccha looked like a diminutive grandmother who couldn't possibly manage the piano's physical demands, and in a way she played exactly how she looked. Hers was the playing of a master who never tried to inundate the audience with pyrotechnics. Never especially intense or fiery, never prone to exaggerated phrasing or distended tempos, Laroccha's playing was elegance personified. She seemed to traipse onto the stage, blithely unaware of audience's expectations and played in a manner that seemed unaware there was an audience to play for.



In Larrocha's playing, proportion was the key: Every note articulated perfectly in proportion to the phrase in which it came, every phrase exactly right in proportion to the phrases around it and through it whole movements built with the efficacy of a master builder. Every tempo was perfectly chosen, and every tempo modification applied so judiciously to be unnoticeable. And all of that coupled with a touch to the piano that endowed Steinways worldwide with the most beautiful sound since Artur Rubinstein.



In the words of her manager, Herbert Breslin, "Alicia has two kinds of repertoire. The stuff she plays extremely well, and the stuff she plays better than anyone else." So it should come as no surprise that a pianist of such supernal elegance would be the undisputed Mozart pianist of her generation. But in the span of a concert she could go from making Mozart sound more pellucid than ever to making the music of her countrymen resound with swagger and abandon. Rubinstein and Barenboim have played Spanish music with more fire, but not even they could make it sound as natural, as "Spanish," and however she did that was her secret.

Pianists like Alicia De Larrocha are not supposed to be superstars. The kind, polite pianist who plays music like an eloquent conversation is not supposed to fill Carnagie Hall half a dozen times over. And yet in her era of giants, Alicia De Larrocha found an enormous place in music for intimacy and refinement. She was the most beloved pianist of an era and (with all due respect to the fine Maria Joao Pires) no heir has yet arrived to conjure up her particular breed of pianism for another generation.

Shaft

As played by the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Israeli Feta Ad

Streisand doing Avinu Malkeinu

Self-explanatory.

Yom Kippur Scene from Jazz Singer Remake.

Neil Diamond returns to his father's synagogue (the father played, naturally, by Sir Laurence Olivier) at which he thrusts the cantor aside to sing either the second or third repetition of the Kol Nidrei. I cannot have been the only Jewish kid of my generation to have been regularly regaled by my parents about the awfulness of this movie. Can I?

Perry Como Sings Kol Nidrei

Mr. Relaxation sings the world's most austere prayer.

...And if you're a real masochist, here's Johnny Mathis doing it too.

Alicia De Larrocha (1923-2009)

Mad Music (part II of VIII) - Sex and the 60's

1963. Marilyn has just died. So have Clark and Bogie. Memories of Jimmy and Jayne are still fresh in everyone's mind. Jack is a marked man, and Jackie marked for shipping. Marlon is balding, Grace is retired, Elvis is declining, and the Beatles are still a year away. It is the year of Bull Connor and 'I Have A Dream,' of the test-ban treaty and Diem's assassination, the year of John XXIII's death before Vatican II reforms are finalized, of the last Mercury satellite, of Blowin' in the Wind and Cat's Cradle, the ascendance of Koufax and the descent of the Yankees.

A cliche list like this is just a prelude to repeating the cliche 'something was in the air that year', but it remains true that a different era creates different people, and demands different icons. Television had realized that its future was in entertainment rather than education, and it was keeping movie audiences away of the theater. If the movies had to change. Just the year before, David Lean made the second-most lucrative film of the decade by going into the Arabian desert to shoot three-and-a-half hours without stars, familiar surroundings, women, or concessions to American middlebrow tastes. Lawrence of Arabia succeeded beyond measure by being everything a movie was not supposed to be.

But one thing Lawrence could never point to was the way to make movies American again. Audiences would still flock to movie palaces to see what they've never seen before, but they no longer came to see themselves. People watched versions of their own lives unfold on the Dick van Dyke and Andy Griffith Shows. And if they missed the movie stars of their childhood, they could stay up late to watch them get interviewed by Johnny Carson.

What became clear was that while The Movies were still a belove pastime, they were no longer the American church. Americans no longer felt their dreams and horrors reflected directly by what they saw on the screen, and Americans no longer looked at theirs stars as ideals to fulfil.

There was a time when

Seth MacFarlane at the Proms

...talk about worlds colliding.

Mad Music (part I of VII)

It never ceases to amaze that Mad Men's detractors claim there is nothing behind the show's immaculately conceived veneer. Time and again, people hear and read the same contradictory views:

To half Mad Men's critics the show is pornographic nostalgia - presenting a past bereft of half-a-century's liberal guilt during which America was free to be its truest self: an era in which American superiority had no reason to be questioned and the 'American Way' was the world's. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate longing to recapture a paradise lost, an era that can never again be and perhaps never was. These critics allege that the show looks upon the suppression of the rest of the world to a tiny coterie of white males with nostalgia, perhaps even approval.

To the other half of its critics, perhaps the more vocal half, the show is a nightmare vision of the past - presenting an era so backward in its view of the world that we from the present can bask in a cozy blanket of self-congratulation. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate arrogance in assuming that we of the Obama era are far superior in our enlightenment to those who preceded us. These critics allege that the show looks upon the vices of the sixties with such holier-than-thou self-satisfaction that it turns a blind eye to to the virtues of that era, and even moreso to the vices of our own.

It is no blight upon the greatness of the show to concede that there is quite something to both interpretations. Who can look at the workplace camaraderie on display and deny that something important was lost in the intervening years? But just the same, who can look at the workers blatantly casual mistreatment of one another and deny that something at least as important was gained?

No, Mad Men is not a show that presents the sixties exactly as it was. No television show could. Those who claim that Mad Men is nothing more than surface rendered immaculate give the show far too much credit. Whole websites exist to document its errors of period style. The show is great not because it presents the sixties exactly as it was, it is great because it presents the sixties exactly as we remember it.

It was Emerson who said that "[A man] dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty." The genius of Mad Men is that it displays America's memories of the sixties with complete fidelity to our present view of it. It's all there: the infidelities, the smoking, the drinking, the racism, the sexism, the pride and the prejudice, displayed with neither guile nor guilt. It takes no side and seeks nothing more than to present this era to us without judgement or inhibition. The fact that people have such divergent reactions to it speaks to that it does so with all the clarity of a balance sheet.

And as it enters its third season, the show becomes ever truer to our memories. Those who already disliked it will soon come to hate it. With every episode, the show seems to be 'about' less and less. In the most recent episodes, it's becoming difficult to remember if there was any linear plot at all. Mad Men may soon reach the point in which it becomes nothing more a smoky hall of mirrors with which the viewers interact. The show is about nothing less the dawn of an era that is still with us. The major characters are not specific people, they are archetypes. They are supposed to resemble people we either know, hear about, or read about. Each of them resembling a one particular type of person in our mind's view of the decade that created contemporary America.

For the past month, critics were warning us that this past week's episode would be the best yet. After seeing it, it's difficult to imagine too many die-hard fans disagreeing with that statement. In the space of an hour, it balances the stories of seven different major characters, and does so simply by telling their stories through music. For one episode, Mad Men was not a television show, but an opera. The music sums up everything about each major character with all the clarity you find in the Marriage of Figaro.

Over the next week, we'll look at the way music tells the story of each character.

RIP Erich Kunzel (1935-2009)

Our generation's King of Pops, the most important man in America every July 4th, has passed away. Pops concert crowds and youtube crowds seem to be mutually exclusive so there isn't much good footage of the man conducting. But here he is doing Elmer Bernstein proud.