Thursday, February 3, 2011
Super Mario on the Bassoons
Bassoons are an underrated instrument. There's no reason to take most of it this fast kids, it was never that fast in the games. Still, impressive even so some fantastic tempo-bending here (rubato). What is it about playing pop culture things on the bassoon that I keep seeing these things. When I was 14 I heard an arrangement of 'She Loves You' for 8 bassoons (though I forget exactly how many).
You'd think that neoconservatives would use the Egypt situation to find some common ground with liberals. Then you read something like this and you realize, they were EXACTLY as nutty as they looked.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Interior Quote of the Day
(Mom is baking chicken)
Jordan: Why does it smell like Challah?
Mom: I don't know, but I did put Shabbos wine in the chicken.
Jordan: I thought it smelled like Shabbos.
Mom: Aw, Jordan, that's the sweetest thing I've ever heard.
Jordan: It should be shabbos every day!
Evan's Inner Monologue: This is the kitschiest exchange I've ever heard.
ok...maybe outer.
Jordan: Why does it smell like Challah?
Mom: I don't know, but I did put Shabbos wine in the chicken.
Jordan: I thought it smelled like Shabbos.
Mom: Aw, Jordan, that's the sweetest thing I've ever heard.
Jordan: It should be shabbos every day!
Evan's Inner Monologue: This is the kitschiest exchange I've ever heard.
ok...maybe outer.
Quote of the Day
Jordan walks in on me listening to Elliott Carter:
Me: I want this piece played at my wedding.
Jordan: This is why you're not married.
Me: I want this piece played at my wedding.
Jordan: This is why you're not married.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
The Sorcerer's Apprentice...again.
Dirty little secret. I really can't stand most of Fantasia. I also kill kittens. But even I have to admit, Walt and Leo really got this one right.
Though I've always wondered, somewhere between Goethe, Dukas and Walt Disney, it must have occurred to one of them that The Apprentice could have just told the broom to do something else.
Hitch on Egypt
None of them ever seems to master a few simple survival techniques: Don't let the supreme leader's extended family go on shopping sprees; don't publicly spoil some firstborn as if the people can't wait for him, too, to be proclaimed from the balcony; don't display your personal photograph all over the landscape; don't claim more than, say, 75 percent of the vote in any "election" you put on. And don't try to shut down social media: It will instantly alert even the most somnolent citizen to the fact that you are losing, or have lost, your grip. ...
Amazing.
"About A Souffle"
Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was on TCM last night. It's a movie I never seek out to rewatch but like more every time I see it.
What amazes about it is not what people generally laud about the movie. Michel Poiccard might have been the acme of cool for decades after the movie's release, but he now looks definitively dated. Bogart/Brando-worship may have still been chic in 1960 (or even 1975), but in our day this character just looks like a middle-class kid looking for a way to slum. Perhaps it always did and I'm missing the point. But Americans like Pacino and DeNiro did the anti-hero thing much better, and with far more pathos than this one-dimensional stylistic trick. Perhaps we could see the whole movie as a director's wet dream. Pretending to be the hero of a movie he loves, when he isn't going to bed with a beautiful, intelligent woman.
The filming of course looks as wonderful as the day it was made, but what strikes us now is how traditional it looks: the jump cuts are tame in the age of Soderbergh, the gorgeous black and white photography of the Paris skyline is like so many other movies only more beautiful, and the 'frank' depiction of sex barely registers a blip in an age after the production code.
What amazes today is two things. One is Jean Seberg, still as much of a turnon in 2011 as she was in 1960. Belmondo's Poiccard may have aged badly, but Patricia is more modern than ever - the archetypal hipster American career woman, forty years before such a thing existed. Liberated, looking for exotic experiences, intimidated by nothing and hungry for danger - but only at arm's length. The idea of men still being like they are in this movie is laughable, but if you want to find women like Patricia, go out into the nearest street.
The other thing that amazes is the talk. Not the self-referential talk that only exists remind us that these are characters in a movie - and as the years went by, Godard would put more and more of those into his work. It's a private language that can only exist between two people: you hear it in the way they imply more than they say, the way they allow for comfortable silence (Tarantino knows his Godard), and the way they speak to one another oblivious to what they're doing. The conversation railroads through the sex scenes, and continues in public before and after. The reason Breathless still works, and the reason it's not nearly as great as its lovers allege, is because this is ultimately a movie about the way we talk.
What amazes about it is not what people generally laud about the movie. Michel Poiccard might have been the acme of cool for decades after the movie's release, but he now looks definitively dated. Bogart/Brando-worship may have still been chic in 1960 (or even 1975), but in our day this character just looks like a middle-class kid looking for a way to slum. Perhaps it always did and I'm missing the point. But Americans like Pacino and DeNiro did the anti-hero thing much better, and with far more pathos than this one-dimensional stylistic trick. Perhaps we could see the whole movie as a director's wet dream. Pretending to be the hero of a movie he loves, when he isn't going to bed with a beautiful, intelligent woman.
The filming of course looks as wonderful as the day it was made, but what strikes us now is how traditional it looks: the jump cuts are tame in the age of Soderbergh, the gorgeous black and white photography of the Paris skyline is like so many other movies only more beautiful, and the 'frank' depiction of sex barely registers a blip in an age after the production code.
What amazes today is two things. One is Jean Seberg, still as much of a turnon in 2011 as she was in 1960. Belmondo's Poiccard may have aged badly, but Patricia is more modern than ever - the archetypal hipster American career woman, forty years before such a thing existed. Liberated, looking for exotic experiences, intimidated by nothing and hungry for danger - but only at arm's length. The idea of men still being like they are in this movie is laughable, but if you want to find women like Patricia, go out into the nearest street.
The other thing that amazes is the talk. Not the self-referential talk that only exists remind us that these are characters in a movie - and as the years went by, Godard would put more and more of those into his work. It's a private language that can only exist between two people: you hear it in the way they imply more than they say, the way they allow for comfortable silence (Tarantino knows his Godard), and the way they speak to one another oblivious to what they're doing. The conversation railroads through the sex scenes, and continues in public before and after. The reason Breathless still works, and the reason it's not nearly as great as its lovers allege, is because this is ultimately a movie about the way we talk.
Schoenberg Pressings
(Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw. One of the most terrifying, and moving, pieces of music ever written. Wagnerian Grandiosity tied to serial technique. It cannot be denied, this is extremely human music.)
Boulez always likes to say that Shostakovich is like a third olive-oil pressing of Mahler. I disagree vehemently with that statement, but if there's any truth to it at all, then Babbitt can be said to be a similar third pressing of Schoenberg. After listening to Babbitt, Schoenberg sounds downright coherent. I don't think Schoenberg was even one of the greatest talents of his own generation (those would be Bartok, Stravinsky and Berg). He was not the great genius the world touts him to be, nor was he the monster of little old ladies' imaginations. He was simply a very good composer who developed a single, extraordinarily powerful, idea that served him extraordinarily well. His music is the beginning of the very dark conclusion to the Austro-German line. In Schoenberg's music, I hear the disintegration of a civilization very clearly. This is by no means mechanical music. It is extremely human, and what it communicates is despair. When musicians are being honest with themselves, I'm sure they wouldn't disagree.
(Webern's Concerto for Nine Instruments. His music contains the most pure interrelationships between notes since the early Rennaissance. It can be chillingly beautiful, but how can you figure out the interrelationships by listening? Because much of his music, at least the serial stuff, doesn't give you much else to concentrate on except to figure them out.)
It's one of the ironies of music that atonal and dodecaphonic music, the most hyper-controlled music ever put to page, sounds as chaotic as any unorganized noise. It produced some very human music, but it did so through an anti-human process. For a thousand years, the primary way of communicating music was to write it in a score, and like a cathedral the greatest scores were built cell-by-cell, brick-by-brick, each cell intimately related to what came before, what comes after, and what it overlaps with. Small four-note cells ('motifs') are turned upside down, backward, upside-down backward, modulated, transposed, and everything in between in an infinity of possible combinations. Perhaps it was inevitable that eventually, some composer would focus just on the inter-relationships and not on making them sound at harmony with one another. Once you stop caring about coherance of the inter-relationships to the human ear, there is an infinity more of relationships between the notes to explore. It can turn into a kind of weird fetish, fascinating in its way, but divorced from the reality of human expression. If Schoenberg's music can perhaps sound like an aural equivalent to the horrors of World War, Fascism, and the Holocaust, then perhaps Milton Babbitt sounds like the aural equivalent of Dr. Strangelove.
(look at Babbitt's score. Every note is hyper-controlled. Would you ever know how much effort goes into it without the score? I think I can hear the interrelationships - though I'm not sure. But now that I do hear them, why do I care?)
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