800 Words: A New Tonality - A Bad Composer's Manifesto - Part 3

I’m a weird guy. I can’t escape the fact that just about every person who meets me thinks some variation on that theme. Here I am, nearly 33 years old - perpetually single, unhealthily overweight, with a bag of facial tics and an extremely unattractive medical problem that causes me to burp every few seconds; tactless in the extreme, living alone in an apartment surrounded by music I listen to obsessively and books I usually stare at rather than read, and working in a nub of a job for my family because the anxiety and depression of working harder is too great.

Ambition is all I have, and I’ve always had enough of it for the entire city of Baltimore. But ambition alone does not make a career, and is practically the enemy of happiness. Were the circumstances of my life rather different, perhaps I’d feel less isolated; but as it is, I live in an inner world of my own creation - a world which, by definition, the outside world cannot provide its requirements.

I may be American by birth, upbringing, language, education, and culture. But I feel like a complete alien to this country. I don’t understand its music, I don’t understand its politics, I don’t understand its optimism. I don’t understand why time passes so quickly in America, or how Americans can be so fickle in every conviction except their sport loyalties, or how Americans can believe that ignorance is the happiest pursuit, or how Americans steadfastly believe that they can be masters of their own destiny when the world exists to prove to them otherwise. My perspective exists so far outside the American norm that I can’t help noticing that it occasionally gives me a certain miniscule amount of charisma in other people’s eyes - I’m so different that surely I must know something they don’t...

Surely I’ve listened to too much classical music over my 32-and-change years to belong anywhere but in Europe. And yet, every time I’ve been in Europe, I felt no less ill-at-ease - whether I was made to feel that way or not, I was acutely conscious of being American, being Jewish, being in extremely unfamiliar circumstances, and still felt as weird as ever. There was nothing about Europe, at least the Europe of today, that made me feel at home.

Whether I’d truly fit as some kind of educated European or New York Jew of fifty-to-a hundred years ago, I suppose that’s how I see myself. If my inner world, my worldview, my tastes, my lifestyle, fits with anywhere, it would be among people like them. Though perhaps my view of them is faulty, and I’d feel just as weird among them as I do among any peer of mine.

But if I sometimes project the air of worldly sophistication which such a background would guarantee, I’m able to do so because it’s completely unearned. I have an unusable bachelor’s degree in music from a third-rate institution, I’ve failed to learn to speak Yiddish, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, and perhaps Hebrew too, or master any math higher than the algebra I could do as a small child. I seem to have read the first 100 pages of every "major literary work," and seem to mean to go back to them all since I was a teenager. Few people wanted to educate themselves as much as I did, and I doubt many people have failed so often at the attempts. Had I succeeded in any of these endeavors, I’d probably be just another boring meritocrat, working some vaguely prestigious job in a vaguely more prestigious city.

But it’s because I fit so badly everywhere that I have a perspective that is so different from virtually everyone. Here I am, a Polish/Lithuanian Litvak Ashkenazi Jew, living in Baltimore - which must be the least European-like major city on the East Coast. For a variety of reasons, I’ve lived parallel to the American vernacular my entire life, and compared to virtually all my contemporaries, it touched me very little. Most classical composers of our day want to reflect American life better, but what does it mean for someone like me to reflect American life when I’ve experienced so little of it?

I’m an emissary from an alternative timeline - the timeline in which the twentieth century never happened and was purely an outgrowth of the nineteenth. People like to sheepishly claim that they have retro-musical tastes as though that proves their nerdiness, well… my preferred tastes start around 1780 and go to 1914 - after World War I breaks out, it gradually gets more and more hit-or-miss. While all the other nerdy college kids were immersing themselves in science fiction, I was enthralled to Chekhov and Kafka and Stefan Zweig. Even among artforms that postdate the 19th century, most people my age think movies and ‘popular’ music start with Star Wars and Michael Jackson, I think movies and pop music pretty much ended with Star Wars and Michael.

Lots of people think that I’m so different by calculated effect, and that most of my interactions are a kind of cultivated theatricalism in which I criticize people’s most cherished beliefs for the sheer joy of watching them sputter. Maybe there’s a very little bit of truth to that, but if there’s any truth in that at all, then surely it’s because I already feel so different that I can only feel comfortable by playing it up and embracing it. I can’t help who I am, and whether it’s by environment or by nature, my way of being is well outside of contemporary life’s norm.

Whether or not my music turns out any good, I think I’m in a unique position to write music very differently from most composers around today. I see myself a bit like a contemporary to the 1920’s generation - still trying to figure out where music can go after Mahler sounded the summit, the glorious final notes of the Symphonic Sonata-Allegro tradition handed down by Haydn to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorak. In all likelihood, my peers are the more mediocre incarnations of the composers from former generations like Bartok, Stravinsky, Berg, Janacek, Vaughan Williams, Ives, Honegger, Respighi, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Ravel, Szymanowski, Bloch, Holst, Falla, Martin, Martinu, Milhaud, and Villa-Lobos. Soon, young whippersnappers will be nipping at my heels like Shostakovich, Gershwin, Poulenc, Korngold, Copland, Revueltas, Britten, and Messiaen.

If this music actually possesses any quality, then secret to all this is that it’s not at all a conscious pose on my part. I simply can’t help thinking of music on their terms, because their view of the world is mine. I listen to more popular genres, I even enjoy them much of the time. Perhaps some of it will even make itself felt in the music I write. But my heart isn’t with them, I won’t pretend I understand much about what most ‘popular artists’ (in any popular genre) are trying to create. My mind, my heart, my self, is stuck trying to solve problems that existed 90 years ago, and according to some people, my music will probably be stuck in the same place.

I feel like the only person living in the alternative 21st century - a world that never saw Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler and Stalin, felt no true need for the State of Israel, and no desire for great powers to wage third world proxy wars. The nineteenth century was based on Euro-centric lies, but at least they had hope for a better future - a future which still hasn’t come to pass. Most importantly for me, my alternative timeline begins where high art and popular art divorced each other, and in my timeline, the marriage was always secure. I now have a hundred years of new music to unearth, and the process will hopefully take a lifetime.

800 Words: The New Tonality - A Bad Composer's Manifesto Part 2

Try explaining the rules of a new tonality to someone who grew up with American vernacular music - it’s nearly impossible, and probably not worth the effort. If you grew up with no feet in an alternative culture, there is no escape from the culture which birthed you. Everything which you do is either to embrace your tradition, or to rebel against it, and in either case, you’re beholden to it. If you grew up with American diatonicism as your daily bread, the same diatonicism which Western Europe dined on from Bach to Verdi, you might as well stay within it. Any culture that gave us Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, and so many others can stand proudly in a line with any other musical tradition. But with possible exceptions like Nina Simone or early Louis Armstrong, their extraordinariness is almost extra-musical. Take away the magnetism of their performance, and is there any raw material left?

Composition is what music is in the eternity before and after a performance. It is the quality that remains when there is no extraordinary performer to play ambassador for it. Many music lovers will pay $100 to hear a Beethoven sonata played by a pianist they’d never heard, because Beethoven, not the performer, is the main event. But who wants to pay $100 to hear a Johnny Cash song sung by a performer you’ve never heard? Even the best American popular music is not truly composed, it is at most arranged - often with great sophistication, but one can’t compare Ray Charles and Charles Ives, what they do is simply too different. But the music of performers like James Brown and Aretha Franklin is our great contribution to world music - bringing vernacular, or ‘folk’ music to the world stage - no longer to be enjoyed by a small community, but by millions of musical consumers. Our contribution to world music is that the art of music no longer requires composition to be recognized around the world as great. And as so much reward and effort goes into making this vernacular music of ours that our best compositional talents have little reason to work hard enough to equal the great past masters. The circumstances that made great compositions possible are virtually gone. The world of Napoleon and Bismarck is not our world, and the music of Beethoven and Wagner is simply not our music, so to create music the way they did is to create a second-hand imitation of what they already created. Just as few people would compare America’s cathedrals to the duomos and eglises of Europe, our composed music is, with a few extraordinary exceptions like Ives and Gershwin, a dim imitation of the original models. And so successful has our country been at exporting our models to the rest of the world that even Europe itself no longer knows how to develop its own musical traditions in meaningful ways.

And so the great art of music, like its analogue counterparts of previous eras, has gone underground in most Western Countries. Our greatest music is almost always more prized for for its electronically amplified lyrics than for its music, and has taken the place in our lives both of compositional music and of poetry. Our culture’s greatest plays are movies, our greatest art is photography and animation, and perhaps even our greatest novels are television shows.

Perhaps history works in such a way that the transition between epochs has to be rough, but it’s hard not to think that an entire way of being died somewhere between the trenches of World War I and the camps of World War II. Europe as it once existed, with all the energy it imparted to the world, has been virtually dead for a lifetime, and I can’t think of a composer born after World War II who is able to recapture the native energy of Western Europe. Everything there sounds either Americanized or in rebellion from Americanization.  

In this postmodern age of no rules, rather than focus on composition as it’s always been conceived - the laying out for the ear of formal patterns of sound, every modern composer has a responsibility to redefine composition according to his or her own rules. As in modern art, composer’s conception has become more important than how well the music lives up to the conception. And like in art, it’s now more important to categorize composers by a particular system than it is to ask if this composer can take in an infinity of musical (or human) experience.

Eastern Europe is at least still in decline. There is a generation of older composers - Schnittke is dead, so is Berio and Ligeti, however inconsistently great those two could be, but at least we still have Penderecki, Kurtag, Shchedrin, Kancheli, and Rautavaara - who still think by that early 20th century rubric, find new harmonies and make our instruments sing new songs!

Harmony is no longer a concern for modern composers - and our lives are so saturated by rhythm that most every new composition we hear is either defined by rhythm, or defined by its absence. So often, we hear a revolting air of self-congratulation when a composer is described as being concerned with ‘timbre’, or ‘his music encourages contemplation.’ What that usually means is that the composer’s music is so boring that he can’t even bother to put up a rhythmic framework to orient the ear.

Schoenberg once described Stravinsky as music defined more by what it’s not than by what it is. What Schoenberg said holds true for the vast majority of twentieth century composers - particularly those influenced by Schoenberg. unable to square themselves with the reality of the modern world - which is that they are part of the world of rock music and fast food whether they want to be or not, and by avoiding that truth, they offer no substitute in their place.

And yet, does anybody really want to be known by history as hailing from the culture whose most lasting contributions are The Monkees and Chicken McNuggets?

800 Words: A New Tonality - A Bad Composer's Manifesto pt. 1

So what’s Evan been doing instead of blogging?

Well, he’s been trying to write music. Writing music involves mostly looking at internet gifs, until an idea comes his way, and he writes jots it down, one cool chord at a time. Sometimes it’s just one cool chord a day if he’s lucky.

I write music so that I can hear the music I want to listen to. As I’ve too often said, popular music went in one direction, classical music went in another, and the two had the kind of divorce that requires restraining orders. Today, they live on opposite sides of the earplanet. One side of music, not just what we think of as classical music, involves extreme complexity of the type which announces that it is above the din of mass crap - which is very nearly the same as announcing that it’s as much a slave to it as anyone who thinks music begins and ends with Taylor Swift. The other involves extreme simplicity - the reassurance that everything is awesome, nothing but earwigs, a weightless one-dimensional product designed to assure the consumer that his spirit needs no challenging examination. The true challenge to a general public is ignored, and what’s left will be unmemorable to public past the one they had. I know that every generation believes itself the last wave of greatness, but I can’t help wondering that with the death of Alfred Schnittke, Western Classical Music lost its final giant. We have a number of promising little leaguers, but even among the older generation, is there a single composer today whose work can reliably make us both laugh and cry aloud? We still have at least a few musicians in other genres who can - Stephen Sondheim, Randy Newman, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Tom Waits - but songwriter is something so different from music that the two genres deserve completely different terms. One is music, the other is something else, perhaps equally great in its way, but not music as it used to be understood.

So it’s time to put up or shut up. Show people how to write the kind of music you want to hear.

...so what’s that music?

Well, start with this: composers have lost sight of one of the only two weapons in their arsenal that no other musical genre can touch for interest. While the desire to create new forms of music, both in the temporal sense and in the sense of new instruments, is thriving as much as ever before, the desire to create new harmonies is moribund. We’re fundamentally either stuck in the three-chord American popular vernacular, or drowning in the atonal soup. In its place is a passion for rhythm.

I have nothing against rhythm, I love a good beat as much as anyone else. But we’re inundated by rhythm, saturated by it. Rhythm is order, and the easily accessible rhythm of the American popular tradition is what revs us up to go in the morning, propels us through our work days, and gives us the energy to go out at night. Anything that isn’t animated by a commanding beat reminds us of the fundamental fact of our lives - that we’re exhausted, and something more contemplative will put most people to sleep. In a world where every option is available to us, what chance is there to reflect on them?

Harmony is the haunting flavors of our earpallete that open up when we are able to examine our lives. Every chord gives us its own emotion, its own sensation, a perfectly placed chord can build us up, destroy us, and build us up again. This series of sensations is called ‘harmonic rhythm.’ Every piece of Western Classical Music is its own harmonic drama, in which a tonality is met by a dominating opposite, with which it must do battle, and either emerge triumphantly from the struggle, or slump down in defeat.

But beginning perhaps with Mussorgsky, or perhaps as far back as Liszt or Wagner, or perhaps even with Glinka, a new tradition emerged. One who’s center of gravity was farther East than classical music’s main centers like Vienna, Munich, Leipzig, Prague, Rome, Venice, and Paris. In this version, development of harmony didn’t matter nearly as much, all that mattered was the harmony itself - free floating and able to be used for whatever poetic purpose the composer wished. No longer was tonality a kingdom on which warlords did battle, it was a republic in which all chords may have their voices heard if the composer so wished. But like all republics, the distance to autocracy is very closeby. What began as a republic became a totalitarian dictatorship masking itself with the temptation of a true democracy. In the world of atonality and especially serialism, no voice is heard but an unending sameness. Some particularly gifted composers are able to work such a system to their advantage, but why did they have to? Wouldn’t composers as gifted have created something far greater without so many strictures?

And so the great art of music, like its analogue counterparts of previous eras, went underground in Western Countries. Our greatest music is almost always more prized for for its electronically amplified lyrics than for its music, just as our greatest plays are movies, our greatest art is photography and animation, and perhaps our greatest novels are television shows.

800 Words: When Facebook and Blogging Become One

To be a Jew is to be a natural arguer. And outside of music, there wasn't a single influential gentile in my life until I was 16. Everything in my life since then is seen through the inheritance of those conflict-laden formative years. When I see the conflicts of today, gradually accumulate influence and militancy every year since I was a teenager and showing every sign of growing far more than it already has, I not only see the beginnings of a Tea Party of the Left, I see the young Menachem Begin and the Irgun, which eventually evolved to the modern Likud of Netanyahu. To the young Begin, violent opposition to what he felt to be unjust rule was always tolerated, often encouraged, occasionally participated in, and all cautious and nuanced words treated as though it is the same as though caution is as evil as the vilest bigot. What we're currently seeing on the streets is the formation of a neoconservatism for the left. Eventually, whether now or in a hundred years, caution, and only caution, will be what can win this current battle against racism - just as caution was what eventually won the Cold War, Jewish statehood, and the American Civil War. But just as in every one of those conflicts, there will be conflictmongers who will claim that their bellicosity was responsible, and people will believe them, only for the extremists to pervert the victory into something unrecognizably tyrannical and start the cycle of conflict anew. Mid-century America was a terrible place, it was also the best place the world had ever seen, in which the choice in planning for the future was between Roosevelt's Democrats, the party of liberalism, and Eisenhower's Republicans, the party of more gradual liberalism. If the world's made progress since then, it is because of what those two visions of America were able to implement for today's world. The Republican party went off the rails quickly afterward, and descended further year by year into a pit of authoritarian conservatism from which they have no escape. The Democratic party, never moreso than under Obama, did what it could to stand guard against them, and was burdened with doing the thinking that should be split between two functional political parties. But Obama, and all the progress he's made for us, has been betrayed by the very progressives who should be most aware of how he's resurrected the best liberal traditions. After he leaves, it's hard not to think that we will see the ultimate triumph of conservatism, which is the eradication of liberals who think with any more nuance than conservatives. After 9/11, we saw the us vs. them mentality so recently, and today's torture report shows exactly how that can warp people's sense of right and wrong. Yet every day on facebook I see people sharing pieces about how more moderate people use euphemisms to keep the old order in place, and are nothing more than conservatives in disguise. Or how allies have no place in the fight but to march lock step without asking questions. Yes, the old order is terrible, but the world can descend so quickly into so many worse terrors. Maybe people have a subconscious wish to bring us there, but once we get there, I think they'll be nostalgic for what once was. If you think your side is not capable of evil just as great, history will make a fool out of you. I first became politically aware at a young age, but for the entirety of it, I've seen a gradual destruction of everything effective which liberalism once stood for, and I expect it will gradually erode for the duration of my lifetime. It's like watching the Titanic gradually sail its way toward the iceberg at a glacial pace, and being powerless to stop it. In its place, as once happened in Europe, will be two diametrically opposed dogmatic revolutionisms, which will resemble one another far more than anything else. Jewish history is nothing if not symmetrical. Thank you for indulging me if you've read this far.

800 Words: Identities

There are many, many things in life I’m deeply uncomfortable with. I’m uncomfortable with Baltimore, uncomfortable with the Left, uncomfortable with many women, uncomfortable with many friendships, uncomfortable with Judaism, uncomfortable with my generation, uncomfortable with just about every major aspect of my life, and forced into a close, unnatural proximity with them all. Some days, perhaps most days of my life since childhood, I wonder what would happen if I were able to take a sledgehammer to the walls of my life. Would my life be better? Am I even able to do it?

Uncomfortable is different than not wanting to be part of it. I’m very much a Jew, I’m just not a Jew anybody wants - an ambivalent agnostic who likes some of the Bible, most of the food, a bit of the music, and and has contempt bordering on hatred for the rest. I loathed growing up in Jewish day schools, forced to learn Hebrew and Yiddish, in a homogenous community of co-religionists who assured me that the wider world wasn’t much worth seeing. Yet I can’t deny the impact it had. In the wider world, I’m nothing but Jewish. I spend as much time outside of Pikesville, MD as possible so that I may be a Jew - inside Pikesville MD, I’m a bad Jew. I’d much rather have been raised Jew-ish - sent to a Baltimore private or magnet school like Park or Friends or Carver, where ‘different drummer’ types were encouraged. Would it have been so terrible if as an adult I turned out to be a social justice protestor type who smoked weed every day of his adolescence and thought music didn’t get better than indy rock? I’d have been less in touch with reality, I’d have also been a much better adjusted adult.

Ditto whatever sort of left/liberalism I subscribe to - which I’m reminded nearly every day is completely out of step with virtually everyone I know save perhaps my father and a few college friends. Eventually, every old leftist looks on the developments of their younger counterparts and sees their aspirations mocked in favor of another unrealistic goal - aspirations toward rights of workers in our great-grandparents’ generation gave way to longings for racial equality in our grandparents’, which gave way to pining for world peace in our parents’, which gave way to yearnings for complete rights of the bedroom in our own generation. Perhaps all four generations of leftists have made a small bit of headway on their chosen issue, but nowhere near what they dream, and the miniscule progress they made makes their aspiration a tantalizing mockery, only closer enough to see just how impossibly far it still is. Inevitably the generation after them has a different focus, and old leftists look at the generation after them as having betrayed the revolution that ‘really matters.’ For me, the leftist utopia of my dreams is the one in which utopia does not exist - everybody pursues data-driven, practical solutions that give the greatest good to the greatest number of people. There is no need in such a world for ideology, politics is something boring that the left-brained people can provide for us in the best manner, while us right-brained creative types who always spell trouble in the political arena can be divorced from politics altogether.

What would my ideal 32-year-old self be? Well, for a start, I’d be about seventy pounds lighter and the incessant ulcer burping that started two years ago would never have happened. We’ll take it as a given that height cannot be changed. Also, as perhaps a given, I’d be less narcissistic and less given to wondering about what my ideal self would be.

At 32, I think I’d like to have lived in New York. Preferably downtown Manhattan or the Lower-East Side but if that’s too pricey then Brooklyn wouldn’t be a bad option either. I eat out with friends five nights a week, and two nights a week I cook - once for friends and once for my wife. If I’m temperamentally the same person, then I’m far from ready to be a father, but I’d like to think I’d have been married around the time I turn 30 after a 20’s which are obviously filled with ungodly amounts of meaningless sex. The girl is Jew-ish, as practical as I’m dreamy, so much smarter than me that she makes me smarter, and indulgent of all those special ways in which I’m particularly stupid. She’s a few inches taller than I, and possessed of a number of qualities prized by the superficial male… I’ll spare whoever reads this the details, and there are many, but truth be told, since this is of course my fantasy, she’s as beautiful as I’m homely. There’s a small part of me who believes that every good looking person has a moral obligation to settle down with an ugly one. The fate of the human race depends on us all being understanding and compassionate towards one another - what better way is there to train ourselves to do that than in matters of love and sex? Beautiful people need be trained to look past the ugliness in others in the same way that ugly people need to be reminded that they can be beautiful. If more beautiful and ugly people manage to couple with one another, we know we’re getting better as a species.

For a living, I’m an opera composer. Nobody’s ever made a living purely on writing operas since Puccini, but in my fantasy world, my premieres and recordings would be looked forward to as eagerly as the latest album from Bjork or Radiohead, and I’d be remunerated accordingly. My operas would be progressively tonal - akin in harmonic language perhaps to Prokofiev or Poulenc or Britten but with both more popular appeal and rhythmic kick, and more intellectual depth than any of them. They’d be far less obfuscatory than your average avant-garde operatic fare from Henze or Birtwistle, but far more complex than the average musical or rock opera. The faucet of words, then as now, would never shut off. But my always obstructed faucet of notes would repair itself in this parallel universe, and I’d have written an opera every year from the time I was twenty-one. The music could portray every style, the words every conceivable character. Both glide effortlessly though that always fragile line between tragedy and comedy, and my ideal self would find an idiom that does justice to ‘my masters’ - Mozart, Janacek, and Sondheim. Politics, so time-consuming in my real-life’s thoughts, would be the secondary concern it truly is in these works. What would matter in these works is ‘permanent things,’ only permanent because they're so obviously ephemeral. They wouldn’t be too far from the plotlessness of life itself - the life of The Marriage of Figaro, or Uncle Vanya, or Middlemarch, or Seinfeld, or Tokyo Story, or The Adventures of Augie March, or The Rules of the Game, or Mrs. Dalloway, or Company, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Louie, or The Confessions of Zeno, or Mad Men, or A Long Day's Journey into Night, or The Human Stain, or perhaps something a little more fantastical like The Simpsons or Into The Woods or Don Giovanni or Fanny and Alexander or The Cunning Little Vixen. The subject, for one and all, would be life itself, how it passes through us, and how we pass through life - with all its tragedy, comedy, and absurdity completely intact. The subject of the operas would be life as people like my real self live it.

Ideal Evan would never make the cover of Time Magazine, not at least until he was in his sixties, and wouldn’t ever become a household name, but he would get blurbs fairly often. He would have enough success by this age that he can make a lot of side money by conducting, or directing theater, or giving master classes at universities, or even writing book reviews. Once a week, a la Woody Allen, he would have a group of musicians with whom he’d perform in public as a violinist in a regular place - the genre would be somewhere in the nexus between jazz, gypsy music, and generic American folk and roots. He would be a blogger like he is today, only every blogpost would have a thousand comments. Mornings would be spent reading and listening to music, afternoons spent in writing of various sorts, evenings taking in New York City in its various forms, and perhaps most importantly, he would be able to get to sleep every night between 10 and 11 should he so desire, and this horrible insomnia which has plagued him since he was 7 years old would never have reared its pillow-tussled head. Long international vacations would be taken twice a year, visits to Baltimore to see family would happen once every three months - usually in keeping with the Jewish Holidays, and family would be up to visit me a different four times a year.

It seems like a very good life… But 99.9999999% of us can only fantasize about the lives of our ideal selves, and the few among us who achieve our ideal selves are probably psychopaths who have to throw hundreds of people under a train to get and keep the lives we all so fervently desire. The rest of us have to figure out how to live a decent life in the circumstances which conspire to keep us disappointed by the way life unfolds.

800 Words: Delusions of Grandeur - My Unrealized Projects - Part 2 - Theater

Operas:
The Ten Commandments - The movie that's on every Passover, watching it is a rite of passage for every Jewish kid to sit through. It would make a great subject, albeit getting the rights would be torture. It is operatic at every pour, and has the perfect combination of high drama and soap opera for an opera. It also has, as many operas do, an obsessive interest in freedom and individualism which can make, if the composer is good enough, for a lot of very stirring music.

Watchmen - I'm sure you've heard of the graphic novel. I think it would make an amazing opera. 'Nuff said.

The Portage of San Cristobal A.H. - It's a novella about Nazi hunters who stumble on Hitler in his 90's in the Argentinian jungle and put him on trial only for Hitler to mount a brilliant defense of himself. It would be, I think, a fantastic project, albeit one that disturbs the hell out of me.

A Tale of Two Liars - I've had this idea since College. It's based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story about two con artists, a man and a woman, who come into a shtetl and become the rage of the town. The devil decides to get involved and make them fall in love with each other. With predictable mayhem ensuing. It would be a black musical comedy, but it would be set in Yiddish.

Plays:

Deli Strummer: Deli Strummer was a Holocaust survivor from Vienna who spoke all around Baltimore for years when I was a kid. She was amazingly charismatic, spoke fantastic English, and could reduce even the most jaded children to tears. It then turned out that she falsified the account of her survival.

The Rules of Our Game - Based on Renoir's 1939 movie - The Rules of the Game. In this version, a group of spoiled Ivy League Seniors, perhaps from Princeton, go for a weekend on the beach, perhaps Cape May, with the intention of hitting the Jersey Shore bars. There would be equivalents to each character, I can explain those in detail. It would be, in many ways, a portrait of the income disparities in our generation and how that warps us all. At the end, the weekend goes terribly awry, ending with the death of one of the Princeton students, and everybody's parents agreeing to smooth over the details of what happened.

DC Story - Based on Tokyo Story, the Ozu film from 1952. A very simple story. Two old and ailing parents from Baltimore keep trying to visit their children in DC, but their children don’t have time for them and view them as pests. Then one of the parents dies, and the children realize that they never made the effort.

Fanny and Alexander - Based on Ingmar Bergman's 1983 movie, but with a much more political edge. A rich Jewish family in 1960's Baltimore, loving and cultured, with three middle aged brothers who run various parts of a business together. Their mother is a widow, who has a romantic relationship with her husband’s black business partner. But after the oldest brother dies, the his wife remarries to a right wing religious clergyman who basically abducts the children. The marriage of the youngest brother is torn apart by affairs with young hippies. The middle brother is also a college professor, and his job is victim to radical divides he doesn’t understand.
The American Presidency - Shakespeare wrote histories about kings. Why hasn’t some American playwright taken it on himself to write something similar to chronicle American presidents? Given how the modern mind works, it would probably only be effective if the presidents were in living memory - perhaps Roosevelt onward. But given the drama that accompanies American history, the plays would almost write themselves.

Graz 1907: This would take a little more detail to explain, just because it's so obscure. Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler hike up a mountain on the day that Strauss's opera, Salome is being premiered. Present at that premiere, among others, will be the two of them, most of the kings of Europe, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Adolf Hitler, and Adrian Leverkuhn (the main character of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus). Mahler, an extremely anxious and moody Jew, worries that he's being run out of his position as director of the Vienna Opera, and fears that what's happening to him is happening all over Europe, and something terrible may soon happen. Richard Strauss, a level-headed Bavarian obsessed with money who will one day would become a Nazi collaborator, assures Mahler that he has nothing to worry about and his carrying on is, as always, ridiculous. In the second act, Mahler goes to the men's room a half-hour before the opera begins. Mahler is stopped before he leaves by a young man named Adolf from Upper Austria, who says that Mahler made him accepting of the fact that he's part-Jewish, and talks about how he wishes he could be a conductor and emulate Mahler's conducting style, and how the sets of his art director, Alfred Roller, could be the basis for rebuilding an entire nation. He then tries to touch Mahler's hair the way Salome does, then tries to kiss Mahler. Mahler runs out horrified, and Adolf Hitler may have been born in that moment. Act III would be a party gathering of all the various celebrities and the various hijinks that ensue. I can explain it if you need me to.


Shakespeare:

Richard III: Richard is usually portrayed as a kind of Hannibal Lector - a loveable psychopath who gleefully commits crimes. But the more I delve into Richard III, the more I wonder if the text supports that interpretation. The Dream scene, particularly makes no sense in that interpretation. Perhaps Richard is truly tortured, a depressed and malformed man made by circumstances into a reluctant lunatic - not unlike Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. When he says about Clarence “I do love you so that I shall send you to heaven.” Perhaps he really means it. When he goes after Princess Anne over the body of Prince Edward and says her beauty made him do it, perhaps that’s really why he did it.

Romeo and Juliet: I always thought R&J could be played as 80 year olds, but apparently that was done a few years ago in England. Instead, what if Romeo and Juliet are both obese? All the stuff about Rosaline is in fact merciless taunts by Mercutio, who is simply a bully, and sees Romeo pining after a girl clearly far out of his league. The Nurse could be a gorgeous but poor older contemporary of Juliet, and the fan scene could be something which makes the Nurse look fat. Paris could be a money grubber who clearly has no interest in Juliet.

Wiki Midsummer Night’s Dream - I will never have the organizational ability to bring this off, but I think it’s a great idea for someone who could. Each of the four worlds could be done by a different artist, a different director, and a different cast. Perhaps each scene even could… The fairy world could be done as animation or as a series of paintings with voiceovers, perhaps the rude mechanicals could be done as a really bad student film. I suppose it would also be possible to do The Tempest like this, but I think it would work better with Midsummer.

Julia Caesar - We’re on the cusp of the first female President at the exact same era that we’re the American Presidency has powers verging on dictatorship. There would never be a better time to do a Julius Caesar about feminism. Julius Caesar would be a woman, so would Antony and Octavian, and the conspirators would all be men. It would play into all of men’s fears about losing their privileged position and becoming obsolete, it would play into . The murder could (should?) even be done as a sexual assault that Brutus stops right before Caesar says ‘Et tu Brute?’. It could contrast the masculinities of Brutus, a traditional male who upholds real masculinity, with Cassius, a traditional male who pretends to. Antony’s last line over Brutus ‘this was a man’, would have a completely different meaning.


The Henriad in a Single Night: Orson Welles cut it down to make a play in which Falstaff would be the main character, I don’t see why it couldn’t be done again, though perhaps with the focus on the story itself rather than on Falstaff. Though making Falstaff the main character would be fun too.

800 Words: Something to Say - Part 1

What we have in life is conversation - the ability to communicate to one another, to listen, and to evolve. We grew from hearing, and we grow from being heard. Conversation is the only thing in life worth a damn, because if we’re ever going to understand each other, it will only be by hearing what we all have to say.

As I was driving home last night form a concert, an interview with Dick Cavett came on the radio. I’m probably the only person under the age of 40 that knows who Dick Cavett is, but for those who don’t, he was, in so many ways, Stephen Colbert for another generation. The only difference is, Cavett didn’t have to wear a mask of ignorance. He’s an emissary from a gentler, more cultivated era, when self-consciously intelligent people needn’t be typecast as intellectuals, could be knowledgable without seeming smug, and even a standup comedian could be intelligent. Comedians are probably the world’s smartest people, but don’t try telling that to the average American, it’ll make America a much less humorous place.

(Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer)

Cavett made a great point - what makes talk shows unique is the talk, not the show. And whom among today’s celebrities do we really want to hear talk at length? We spend, at most, fifteen minutes in the company of these guests, and in that time, most of them will have exhausted whatever there is of value which they have to say. Back in Dick Cavett’s day, he would have guests on for a full half hour, and if they were especially interesting, the tape would simply keep rolling, and Cavett would get a full week’s worth of broadcasts out of it - or a whole gaggle of guests, each of whom could be fascinating in his own way. The conversation might be enlightening, it also might be a circus freak show. It was Charlie Rose by way of Letterman - it was simply every possible excitement which you could ever want out of a conversation. And like everything else in America with the temerity to combine the lighthearted with the serious, the profane with the sacred, the carnival with the temple, Cavett has been forgotten. But no matter what happened, a live audience was present, and Cavett trusted that whatever happened would be interesting enough that a live audience would stay engaged for the whole of it. This was not a format the 92nd St. Y, this was for network television! And yet it never happened again. Such is the way of America - giving us the power to create the most truthful and beautiful things, only to cover up our national treasures when they hold up a mirror to us that’s too clear.

(Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog)

Just do a youtube or wikipedia search for Dick Cavett and it becomes clear how different this show is than anything on today. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal squaring off against each other after Mailer headbutted Vidal backstage. Comedian Mort Sahl threatening to hit the critic John Simon in the face. Truman Capote attacking Sonny Liston with a handkerchief. Oscar Peterson playing piano for an audience of millions. Weeks worth of shows devoted to pornography and depression. A roundtable with Satchel Paige, Lillian Gish, and Salvador Dali during which Dali brought an anteater onstage and deposited it into Gish’s lap. Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Stephen Stills on the day after Woodstock ended.  A film director’s panel with Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, and Frank Capra. Janis Joplin, Margo Kidder, and Gloria Swanson on simultaneously! Jack Benny and Bill Cosby on together. A whole show with John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazarra. Full hours with Groucho Marx, Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, John and Yoko, David Bowie, Ray Charles, Fred Astaire, Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Woody Allen, Zero Mostel.

(John Lennon premieres "Imagine")

No talk show on television today, not Stewart, not Colbert, not Letterman, not Charlie Rose, is nearly so ambitious as this. It is a show which is literally meant to take the pulse of the entire country during an age when the country was still sufficiently united that its pulse could be taken. In the ‘rough and tumble’ of an hour-long conversation, there’s no Colbert-esque hiding behind a persona with quick one liners, and no Carson-esque staff to prepare you for what you should be asking. There is only the native intelligence it takes to know your material well enough that you can talk about your subject in detail.

(John Cleese)

How many of today’s huge stars are interesting enough that we’d want to spend an hour in their company? Perhaps George Clooney or Jennifer Lawrence among movie stars, but how many others can you think of who’d be worth that chunk of your time? Tom Cruise? Brad Pitt? Kristen Stewart? Anne Hathaway? When you mention names like those, the question becomes self-answering. Movies, at least movies which come from the old star system, are almost completely dead. So their biggest stars are, almost necessarily, people who are dead on the inside.

(Marshall McLuhan and Truman Capote)

If you want to hear from interesting actors, you have to get actors who are actors first, movie stars second. Ian McKellen and especially Patrick Stewart have reached an Indian Summer on the internet, and it’s because their careers are more than simply careers - they are real human beings with real skills who have fallen into the movie business as if by accident. Stewart may be slightly wooden and hammy in genuine theatrical roles (not for nothing was Captain Picard the perfect role for him), but who wouldn’t want the company of a 75-year-old Shakespearean actor who posts a picture of himself on twitter dressed as a lobster?

(Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Stephen Stills)

Comedians also make for great talk show guests. Comedians, more than virtually any other job, is grounded in people who make their careers based on having interesting things to talk about. A fact that’s hit home in Jerry Seinfeld’s web series - Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The show itself is not particularly extraordinary, but it’s a thoroughly watchable show, because Seinfeld understands that what we’re watching is funny people talking to each other, and in order to be funny, you have to be interesting first and have insights which are worthwhile to be heard. Among comedians, Robin Williams was of course the most amazing talk show guest, not only because he was funny, but because he was smart. There was no way he could get access to that extreme barrage of references without a first-class brain to access. If he had an hour on a talk show, he could probably improvise an entire hour’s worth of material - very nearly it’s own HBO special made up on the spot.   

(Katherine Hepburn)

To paraphrase Citizen Kane, there’s no great secret to being famous, if all you care about is being famous. If fame is your biggest motivator, there is a checklist of things you must do in order to achieve it, and if you combine that with a little bit of luck, you will achieve your life’s goal. But as with any other career, if you’re defined by your career, you will be uninteresting and unworthy of company outside of it. Your boringness may even make you worse at your job.  

800 Words: Robin, Woody, Joanie, and Bill (part 1)

We live in a great time to love standup comedy, but it’s a horrible time to be a standup. We live in an era when Louis CK has more influence than any standup comedian since the 1970’s heyday of Pryor and Carlin. Within his kingdom is a treasure trove of great, slightly more minor comics: Stewart and Colbert of course (though you can’t really call what they do Standup…), Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifinackis, Maria Bamford, Ricky Gervais, Kristin Schaal, Mike Birbiglia, Sarah Silverman, Eddie Issard, Tig Notaro, Brian Posehn, Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes, Marc Maron, Margaret Cho, Jim Gaffigan, Chelsea Handler, Doug Stanhope, Adam Carolla. Among the veterans, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Kathy Griffin, Lewis Black, Lisa Lampanelli, Colin Quinn, David Cross, and Jeff Garlin are still going strong. Until recently, Patrice O’Neal, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, and Greg Geraldo were going strong, and Bill Cosby and Dave Chapelle both look determined to make a strong comeback.

And yet, it must be a stressful, anguishing time to be a comedian, because nothing is guaranteed to be funny anymore. Whether or not the outrage is justified (and I’m willing to acknowledge that much of it is), we live in a society of perpetual anger, perpetual grievance, and perpetual victimhood. Much of the anger, grievances, and claims to victimhood are entirely justified, and the voice which the internet gives to such people is so long overdue in coming as to render it an historic event in human history. When women, gays, and ethnic minorities have been bullied for a million years of human existence, it’s rather understandable that when given a medium which allows new levels of independence, they might overreact to some provocations. But our concern here is neither the long view of human history nor the history of twitter outrage, it’s merely standup comedy. Comedians can now stream their own albums with no intermediary, their work can also be scrutinized by more people than ever in the history of comedy, and combed through for matter which gives offense to anyone looking for it. This may spur comedians to still greater flights of creativity, but it must also makes their job that much more terrifying. There is already no job in the arts more punishing than the standup comic. Only foolhardy people would ever countenance becoming one, and in our day of internet searches and viral content, the burden of that job just became that much more onerous.

Nothing in entertainment or the arts dates faster than comedy. Routines from favorite comics which seemed hilarious three months ago can leave you in stunned silence as you wonder how you could ever have thought that bit was funny. Fifteen years ago, Bill Maher was considered the vanguard of comic performance for the morally righteous. Today, both most comedians and most progressives view him as an embarrassment for his sexism, his racism, and his pomposity. Whenever Conservatives need a straw man to show that liberals are ‘just as bad’, they use Bill Maher. But Bill Maher is merely an extreme example: every major comedian has a few bits that in retrospect make some among their listeners cringe - Louis CK has a bit about fantasizing about murdering his children, George Carlin had a bit about how rape could be funny, Sarah Silverman has a joke about how 9/11 is the worst day of her life because she found out that a Starbucks soy chai latte has 900 calories.

The job of a comedian is to push every conceivable boundary and find our weak spots. They are the frontier workers of our culture, working on our most sensitive fault lines. They inspire more love than anyone else in the arts, and consequently also inspire more hate.

Comedy is virtually the only artform that demands a completely visceral response from the viewer - if you don’t laugh, the comic fails. No artform takes more courage to practice, no artform runs a greater risk of failure, no artform requires more refinement and evolution, and in no artform is the humiliation of failure so obvious. It therefore follows that the people attracted to comedy are the biggest risk-takers. They’re often the smartest and most interesting people in the world, and they’re often the most dangerous too. To be a good comic, there must be a hole in your life so deep and empty that only the sound of laughter can fill it.

In the last year, the world lost two comedic icons, and it’s in the process of losing a third. Weirdly enough, not a one of them is Robin Williams. You don’t lose an icon through death, if you did, then we’d have to remember David Brenner (does anybody?). You lose an icon by the icon ceasing to stand for what made him iconic. We lost Joan Rivers to death, though perhaps we lost her as an icon a number of years before. Back in Februrary, the world re-lost Woody Allen as an icon, just as it prepared itself to re-embrace his hallowed status. And as of this week, we seem to have lost one of the biggest icons of them all: Bill Cosby. Both Woody Allen and Bill Cosby are still alive, but everything which made them such legends is dead.

On the other hand, we will never lose Robin Williams. Through suicide, Robin Williams underwent an amazing transformation. Just three months ago, he was a washed-up hack. He is now an Icon of American History. He was more than simply a Shakespearen/Mozartian talent of comedy, however ill-utilized, he was a primal archetype. He was the father my generation wished we had, who loved us unconditionally and always knew what to do to cheer us up. He bridged the divide between children and grownups, assuring us we didn’t have to be terrified of the adult world. But the adult world is a terrifying place, and to the end, Robin Williams was clearly half child. And like a child, when he realized that the world might not love him unconditionally, he couldn’t help but take it as a personal offense. It must have been terribly difficult for an unhinged talent like Robin Williams to process rejection. I can’t imagine that he wasn’t devastated by the downturn in his fortunes. I imagine him in his final years being something like TS Eliot’s infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Surely Williams had a dark side, but he admitted to it, and never excused himself for his flaws. In later years, his standup specials were virtual catalogues of his various human frailties. And even so, he never glorified in his failings. He wanted to be known for being a better man than he was, but since he was not a better man, he would be forthright about who he was instead.  

In death, as in life, he generated more love than any other person ever could. In its way, his death was as devastating for my generation as John Lennon’s death was for our parents. It’s the ultimate wakeup call - our youths are over because Robin Williams will never give us any new consolation. We now have to fend for ourselves, and Robin Williams belongs to the Ages. In a hundred years, people will still watch his routines and marvel that this comedic volcano could possibly exist. What other comics had to log hundreds of hours honing and sharpening, Robin Williams seemed to do with no edit button necessary. Comedians like Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld gain tremendous respect for using no vulgar language - ‘working clean’ they call it - and supposedly that is the hardest thing to do in comedy. But I would argue that Williams worked clean in a much deeper, harder sense - he barely made fun of anyone except himself, and yet he was still the funniest man alive. His comedy was utterly without compromise. It hardly made fun of no one but the most powerful people, he never used it to project an image of himself as anything but the trainwreck he was. What he did was not only pure comedy, it was pure integrity.

But to Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, we now learn that there is very little integrity to what they do, and that the truth about them is unfortunately more interesting than the front they no doubt slaved to project. In retrospect, it’s difficult not to wonder how more people didn’t see the truth about them before.

It would seem as though every decade had three comics which dominate: the white comic, the black comic, and the female comic. The audience for comedy is sufficiently small that the same people usually listen to the same comics. But the traditions and concerns which they represent are so different that there always seems to be room for all three at the top of the food chain. And yet, today, the dominant comic is so obviously Louis CK that it seems tough to remember that there are other comics. But even today, clearly Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman together tower over female comics in both recognition and respect, but the comic who would probably be today’s dominant black comic is Patrice O’Neal, but he died quite painfully and tragically a few years ago. Perhaps Hannibal Burress will soon take his place, or perhaps Wyatt Cenac, or perhaps Key and Peele. But think of the 00’s, clearly Jon Stewart was biggest white male name, and clearly Dave Chapelle was the biggest black Male name, and clearly Margaret Cho was the biggest female name. In the 90’s, you could clearly see that Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ellen DeGeneres were the most important names. In the 80’s it was Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopie Goldberg. In the 70’s, it was George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers. In the 60’s, it was Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Phyllis Diller.