Two or three weeks ago I saw Pan's Labyrinth for the first time in twelve years. It has existed in my mind since 2006 as one of the very greatest movies I've ever seen, maybe the best movie I've seen since 2000. But upon reacquaintance, I wonder if I've underestimated it. It is so good, in fact, that it exists on the kind of plane to which a once-or-twice-in-a-generation movie can ascend: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Pan's Labyrinth... It's that great.
I have never seen it except in the movie theater. The first time I saw it, I was a tear-stained wreck, and when we emerged under the lights, I saw that a friend of mine was even more of a wreck than I. The second time I saw it, I dragged a bunch of friends, who seemed to agree with me that it was incredible. I also made my father see it, and he liked it but didn't like it nearly as much as I because he didn't think Pan's Labyrinth was realistic....
It always comes back to these questions of the real versus the not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is like playing a game in which you see how long it takes audiences to cry betrayal over a series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all of their expectations. Nearly the whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything with it, and because all manner of series take the series through every conceivable narrative permutation, there eventually comes a point where there is no conceivable trick left. The author has exhausted every possible option, and like George R. R. Martin, has already taken the story in so many directions that there is no way to tie it all together to create an ending that's both satisfying and surprising.
A few months ago, before Game of Thrones ended, I wrote a piece on my Times of Israel blog which was not my best, where I charged Game of Thrones of being frivolous in part because it's fantasy. Well, in retrospect that's obviously a frivolous accusation, and one that I'm not even sure how much I believed when I wrote it. My distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, my distaste is with how fantasy so often panders to an audience's need for overstimulation, and how the need of so many millions around the world for overstimulation like you see in Game of Thrones becomes a narcotic whose requirement they can't help bringing to their real lives, where they seek experiences well beyond what an ordinary life promises; and if they can't find good experiences they'll pursue bad experiences - like electing fascists president or trying to overthrow capitalism forever.
I honestly don't know if that's any more true than the idea that the insane might get violent ideas from consuming violent video games and movies, or that men will be more likely to treat women badly if they consume media that demeans women. All three notions are simultaneously true and false down to the level of each individual at every moment.
But while Game of Thrones became a cautionary tale about the problems of fantasy, Pan's Labyrinth is a supreme examplar of its glories. The minefields of fantasy literature are so easy to step on, that when an artist gets it right, the achievement is that much greater, and by having used the world of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into the infinite.
I don't think it gives anything away to tell of the end of Pan's Labyrinth because the end of the movie is also the beginning. It is not only Ofelia, the Anne Frank-like young heroine of this doomed era, who is caught in this Labyrinth, it is Captain Vidal, and more even than they, it's us. By the end of the movie, we have absolutely no idea what is real and what is fantasy. The movie begins and ends with Ofelia's death in 1944, a year when so many children faced the same fate. And in Ofelia's final reel, what are we seeing? Is this all the doings of an anthropomorphic faun with supernatural powers - or of a supernatural being even higher than the faun? Or is it the final imaginings of a dying girl whose brain was dangerously imaginative on her best days? Or is it the drugged mind of Captain Vidal who is caught in the middle of a battle in a compromised state - and is the battle even real or is he hallucinating it? Or is it all of the above and many more, or is it just a movie?
...A few weeks ago, a particularly provocative acquaintance tried very hard to trap me into drawing parallels between Pan's Labyrinth and our contemporary political world in a manner that made me deeply uncomfortable. My problem was not with the idea that Pan's Labyrinth is a political movie with things to tell us about today, it obviously is and a searingly angry one, and in the context of 1944 Spain its anger is obviously directed at the Right rather than at the Left. But the movie is about things far more elemental than mere politics. The movie is about how humans require the world of fantasy to come to terms with its barbarity.
There is no question, art is political, but politics are far more complicated than most artists give it credit for being, and the political aspect of art is merely one arm on a Hecatoncheire-like entity with a hundred arms or more. The purpose of art is not beauty, as so many conservatives allege, nor is the purpose of art empathy, as many leftists allege. Nor is its purpose emotion, as I'm sure many people believe who don't think much about art believe it to be, and its purpose is most certainly not the message the work conveys, though that is closer to the mark, and because it's closer, it's correspondingly more dangerous in how it simplifies the truth. All four of those concepts are mere tools at art's disposal.
The purpose of art is meaning, and meaning is very personal. It comes to us in an infinity of forms - forms intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, and it always evolves upon reacquaintance. Nearly thirteen years ago, I was deeply moved and fascinated by it, indeed I was in awe. But watching it again, completely different aspects of the movie jumped out at me. Only a great, cosmic, eternal work of art can renew itself on reacquaintance in a completely different way than the way it used to. I have no doubt that as the years go on, I'll find very different things in this movie still. May we all avoid the situations it describes and live to see it again.
Monday, October 7, 2019
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Mini-Cast #6: Proof - Too Long
Proof is a play that knows nothing about math and everything about mental illness. In Proof, math is just what Alfred Hitchcock would call the 'MacGuffin', which he defined as the device that sets the plot in motion, and it doesn't matter a dime what that plot device is and can therefore be anything at all. Proof barely mentions math, it shows barely any understanding or atmosphere of the higher level math it's supposed to be portraying, it might as well be about chess or music or even sports.
I don't know much about higher level mathematics either. The last successful math I ever learned was when I was three years old, when my grandfather quite literally taught me algebra, and I have never truly learned any math at a higher level since then. If Proof had even mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I likely would believe anything they told me about it. But Proof barely even makes an effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes, and that's it.
Higher level math is not so essential a subject to most of humanity that there need to be great works of art about it. But insofar as there is a great play about math, just about everybody agrees that it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which is technically about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside of Copenhagen between the world's second and third most famous nuclear physicists: the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant who became head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed in their meeting is a mirror of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that atoms and electrons are so small that they cannot be observed in their natural state because the mere presence of light will change their position and movement. The principle itself becomes a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memory's uncertainty, our uncertainty at what they spoke of, our uncertainty at the lived experience of World War II, for the uncertainty of war, for their uncertain positions in a totalitarian society, and for the uncertainty of being itself.
I don't even think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know the discoveries of Proof's mathematicians. At the center of the story is the relationship between a father and a daughter - the father clearly both a genius and insane, the daughter possibly both as well. Clearly, the father, Robert, is modeled on John Nash, the Nobel winning mathematician who developed schizophrenia, and whose story was popularized in A Beautiful Mind. I hated that movie, I just loathed it, but even A Beautiful Mind tried to explain Nash Equilibrium - though according to mathematicians, they made a complete hash of Nash.
But as a case study of mental illness, Proof is one of the most convincing I've ever seen, and unlike math, I'm unfortunately in a position to observe its veracity with extreme expertise. I'm sure we will get into the reasons why as this podcast goes on.
The vagaries of a disturbed mind are further compounded by the vagaries of human behavior surrounding the mind's personhood. A mentally disturbed mind, whose thoughts are already compounded by delusions mental and emotional, is forced to contend with the behaviors of the people trying to deal with them, whose true motives can never be ascertained, and it is self-evident that there's no one in a worse place to understand the motives of others than a person who is already beset by delusions. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that everybody isn't out to get you, and even the motives of those who love the mentally ill most will always be compounded with certain resentments, doubts, and exploitations. And still further, the vast majority of the mentally disturbed will be disturbed in such a way that they view their life's developments with excess negativity rather than positivity, so the petty betrayals that comprise our loved ones at their worst will inevitably be exaggerated by our disturbed brains.
I'm not sure that I have ever seen a more admirable artistic description of this process than Proof, where the vagaries of family and romance wear a person down until they resolve that they must live with as few attachments as possible, because asking any more of life seems as though it will inevitably result in a terribly visceral cocktail of grief and terror that may last every day for months, years, even decades.
The obverse side to the uncertainties of mental illness is the now unfashionable notion that the tornado of mental overactivity in the mentally ill can result in leaps of creativity which more stable types of people regard as otherworldly. Even though today's occupants of the life of the mind seem as or more dissatisfied with their lots than ever before, few notions in today's artistic community are more disparaged than the idea that suffering is a necessary part of an artist's inspiration and preparation.
And of course, these artists have an enormously important point. The idea of the 'suffering' artist is an argument eternally used by many non-creative people to keep the artists among them in squalor. It is, at its heart, little different from the quote from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." This is the millennia-old justification used to keep the Christian masses suffering while the priestly class accumulates all the knowledge and wealth for themselves.
So let me conclude by positing a very different theory of the suffering artist, not an original one though I don't know its origin: The suffering of an artist is not what creates great art, the motive for creating great art is often to create a distraction from suffering. The easiest way to get rid of a destructive obsession is to find a constructive obsession, and few people but someone already in pain would take upon themself the masochism it takes to master a perilously difficult task.
Psychologists sometimes speak of phenomenon they call 'depressive realism,' meaning that depressed people, free from positive delusions, often see the world more accurately. Once again, that strikes me as ass-backward. If the depressed, or the mentally ill generally, see parts of the world more accurately, perhaps it's because their brains are wired excessively well for that particular realm of mental reasoning to the detriment of other realms. The obsession required for a brain to more accurately perceive parts of the world can mean that other areas of perception go to seed, and the lack of perception in other areas can severely damage a person's life circumstances.
No matter how many times they tell you otherwise, creative people are different than you, and a large part of your legacy is how you deal with the different among you, and the closest people to you who are obviously different are creative people. And they, more than anyone else, will be the ones who can render judgement of your lives for posterity. So be nice to the creative types in your life, whether deliberately or accidentally, they can render all manner of creative means for ironic punishment.
I don't know much about higher level mathematics either. The last successful math I ever learned was when I was three years old, when my grandfather quite literally taught me algebra, and I have never truly learned any math at a higher level since then. If Proof had even mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I likely would believe anything they told me about it. But Proof barely even makes an effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes, and that's it.
Higher level math is not so essential a subject to most of humanity that there need to be great works of art about it. But insofar as there is a great play about math, just about everybody agrees that it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which is technically about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside of Copenhagen between the world's second and third most famous nuclear physicists: the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant who became head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed in their meeting is a mirror of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that atoms and electrons are so small that they cannot be observed in their natural state because the mere presence of light will change their position and movement. The principle itself becomes a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memory's uncertainty, our uncertainty at what they spoke of, our uncertainty at the lived experience of World War II, for the uncertainty of war, for their uncertain positions in a totalitarian society, and for the uncertainty of being itself.
I don't even think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know the discoveries of Proof's mathematicians. At the center of the story is the relationship between a father and a daughter - the father clearly both a genius and insane, the daughter possibly both as well. Clearly, the father, Robert, is modeled on John Nash, the Nobel winning mathematician who developed schizophrenia, and whose story was popularized in A Beautiful Mind. I hated that movie, I just loathed it, but even A Beautiful Mind tried to explain Nash Equilibrium - though according to mathematicians, they made a complete hash of Nash.
But as a case study of mental illness, Proof is one of the most convincing I've ever seen, and unlike math, I'm unfortunately in a position to observe its veracity with extreme expertise. I'm sure we will get into the reasons why as this podcast goes on.
The vagaries of a disturbed mind are further compounded by the vagaries of human behavior surrounding the mind's personhood. A mentally disturbed mind, whose thoughts are already compounded by delusions mental and emotional, is forced to contend with the behaviors of the people trying to deal with them, whose true motives can never be ascertained, and it is self-evident that there's no one in a worse place to understand the motives of others than a person who is already beset by delusions. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that everybody isn't out to get you, and even the motives of those who love the mentally ill most will always be compounded with certain resentments, doubts, and exploitations. And still further, the vast majority of the mentally disturbed will be disturbed in such a way that they view their life's developments with excess negativity rather than positivity, so the petty betrayals that comprise our loved ones at their worst will inevitably be exaggerated by our disturbed brains.
I'm not sure that I have ever seen a more admirable artistic description of this process than Proof, where the vagaries of family and romance wear a person down until they resolve that they must live with as few attachments as possible, because asking any more of life seems as though it will inevitably result in a terribly visceral cocktail of grief and terror that may last every day for months, years, even decades.
The obverse side to the uncertainties of mental illness is the now unfashionable notion that the tornado of mental overactivity in the mentally ill can result in leaps of creativity which more stable types of people regard as otherworldly. Even though today's occupants of the life of the mind seem as or more dissatisfied with their lots than ever before, few notions in today's artistic community are more disparaged than the idea that suffering is a necessary part of an artist's inspiration and preparation.
And of course, these artists have an enormously important point. The idea of the 'suffering' artist is an argument eternally used by many non-creative people to keep the artists among them in squalor. It is, at its heart, little different from the quote from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." This is the millennia-old justification used to keep the Christian masses suffering while the priestly class accumulates all the knowledge and wealth for themselves.
So let me conclude by positing a very different theory of the suffering artist, not an original one though I don't know its origin: The suffering of an artist is not what creates great art, the motive for creating great art is often to create a distraction from suffering. The easiest way to get rid of a destructive obsession is to find a constructive obsession, and few people but someone already in pain would take upon themself the masochism it takes to master a perilously difficult task.
Psychologists sometimes speak of phenomenon they call 'depressive realism,' meaning that depressed people, free from positive delusions, often see the world more accurately. Once again, that strikes me as ass-backward. If the depressed, or the mentally ill generally, see parts of the world more accurately, perhaps it's because their brains are wired excessively well for that particular realm of mental reasoning to the detriment of other realms. The obsession required for a brain to more accurately perceive parts of the world can mean that other areas of perception go to seed, and the lack of perception in other areas can severely damage a person's life circumstances.
No matter how many times they tell you otherwise, creative people are different than you, and a large part of your legacy is how you deal with the different among you, and the closest people to you who are obviously different are creative people. And they, more than anyone else, will be the ones who can render judgement of your lives for posterity. So be nice to the creative types in your life, whether deliberately or accidentally, they can render all manner of creative means for ironic punishment.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Mini-Cast #6 - Proof - First Third
Proof is a play that knows nothing about math and everything about mental illness. In Proof, math is just what Alfred Hitchcock would call the 'MacGuffin', which he defined as the device that sets the plot in motion, and it doesn't matter a dime what that plot device is and can therefore be anything at all. Proof barely mentions math, it shows barely any understanding or atmosphere of the higher level math it's supposed to be portraying, it might as well be about chess or music or even sports.
I don't know much about higher level mathematics either. The last successful math I ever learned was when I was three years old, when my grandfather quite literally taught me algebra, and I have never truly learned any higher level math since then. If Proof had even mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I like would believe anything they told me about it. But Proof barely even makes an effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes, and that's it.
Higher level math is not so essential a subject that there needs to be great works of art about it. But insofar as there is a great play about math, just about everybody agrees that it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which is technically about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside of Copenhagen between the world's second and third most famous nuclear physicists: the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant who became head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed in their meeting is a mirror of scientific discoveries they made - like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that atoms and electrons cannot be observed in their natural state because the mere presence of light will change their position and movement. The math itself becomes a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memory's uncertainty, our uncertainty at what they spoke of, our uncertainty at the lived experience of World War II, for the uncertainty of war, for their uncertain positions in a totalitarian society, and the uncertainty of being itself.
I don't even think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know the discoveries of Proof's mathematicians.
I don't know much about higher level mathematics either. The last successful math I ever learned was when I was three years old, when my grandfather quite literally taught me algebra, and I have never truly learned any higher level math since then. If Proof had even mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I like would believe anything they told me about it. But Proof barely even makes an effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes, and that's it.
Higher level math is not so essential a subject that there needs to be great works of art about it. But insofar as there is a great play about math, just about everybody agrees that it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which is technically about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside of Copenhagen between the world's second and third most famous nuclear physicists: the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant who became head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed in their meeting is a mirror of scientific discoveries they made - like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that atoms and electrons cannot be observed in their natural state because the mere presence of light will change their position and movement. The math itself becomes a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memory's uncertainty, our uncertainty at what they spoke of, our uncertainty at the lived experience of World War II, for the uncertainty of war, for their uncertain positions in a totalitarian society, and the uncertainty of being itself.
I don't even think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know the discoveries of Proof's mathematicians.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Mini-Cast #5 - The Future of Verdi - Rough Draft
As I write these words I'm getting ready for a late night showing of the second half of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, a five-and-a-half hour cinematic fresco about the breakdown of Italy's time immemorial way of life in the 20th century. More on that in another podcast, but what matters in this one is that the entire movie begins with a peasant announcing on horseback that Giuseppe Verdi is dead.
As much as one might be able to say that Steven Spielberg is modern America, Giuseppe Verdi was the Italy of his time, perhaps even much more so. He was born just before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, came to international superstardom just as the 1848 revolution made the movement for Italian independence and unification an eventuality rather than mere radicalism, and Verdi became the cultural voice of Italian independence just as Mazzini was its political voice and Garibaldi its military. He lived to nearly ninety, long after Italy turned into a democracy with a monarch as its figurehead - and if Italian democracy was obviously unstable... well, so is modern Italy's, and even after seventy-five years of severe dysfunction modern Italy has not become a true dictatorship, so there was little reason to foretell the turmoil which awaited Italy in twenty years.
Verdi, like Spielberg, is emblematic of a country at the height of its prosperity and achievement, such as it was..., and at the time of America's dominance, a lot of people couldn't get enough of Verdi. American stars at the Metropolitan Opera like Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill were on Ed Sullivan right before Elvis and right after Chuck Berry. It was a different era. There was not the enormous back catalogue of American music to listen to, and intellectuals didn't automatically move to New York or Chicago. So if the intelligentsia of small towns wanted to experience music better than top 40, they had to hear it on classical radio or television variety shows. If Metropolitan Opera divas like Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland weren't as well-known as movie stars, they were astonishingly close. Opera was a mainstream phenomenon, and no composer wrote with an ear for the mainstream of taste like Verdi.
There is so much for a cynical era to make fun of in Verdi: the melodrama, the stupidity of his characters, the oom-pa-pa orchestra, the complete sincerity, the cliches of the libretto, the death scenes where sopranos only die after thirty minutes from singing their lungs out. And when a cynical era curdles into an angry era, there is still more to hate: the glorification of male rage and frail women, the exoticizing of eastern cultures, the near-monopoly Verdi's held over opera for a century-and-a-half, the fact that Verdi's the face of extravagant opera productions where money's strewn about the stage for the sole pleasure of the rich - sucking out money from generations of composers who never got a proper public.
But Verdi didn't used to be all this. In an era when we can say what we mean and mean what we say, Verdi means very little, but in an era when Austra's imperial censors guarded all art for any intimation of treason, Verdi put Italian suffering and longing for freedom into the mouths of the world's most oppressed people: Jews, Romanis, Ethiopians, Moors, the disabled, and, most of all, women. The state or clerics might be from far away lands, but he portrayed them both in the most totalitarian terms. In code, Verdi sang of freedom, and every Italian of his time deciphered it, along with hundreds of millions of people around the world, often living in the world's worst regimes.
Except for Beethoven, it's difficult to think of a composer more synonymous with liberty. But towering as he is, Verdi is not quite so universal that he translates well into every time and place. While performances of the still more distant Mozart thrive more than ever, the once inevitable Verdi has faced a clear albeit relative decline in his popularity, and in an era which complains about opera's interminable nostalgia, for its glamorizing of women's alleged frailty and men's alleged strength, its orientalizing of non-Western cultures, the cliched tropes of Verdi is ground zero of everything about opera which today's intelligentsia finds offensive about it.
It's easy to forget the necessity of liberty in a zeitgeist of illiberal democracy. In an era when liberty is sometimes an oppressive force of its own that allows the rich to implement a plutocratic tyranny, you can't quite blame people for finding Verdi a difficult pill to swallow, even if you find the ideologies which motivate them incredibly stupid. Verdi encountered something like a similar pushback in the late 19th century from more radical ideologues and aesthetes of a more decadent era than the one which grew him to fame.
And yet today, a new society emerges with exponential quicknessacross the Pacific Ocean, one accustomed not to illiberal democracy, but to still less liberal authoritarianism. 40 million Chinese children currently learn the piano. They will exist their entire lives in a social credit system, a government by algorithm that bases their opportunities over whether they partake in activities the government finds palatable. If they long for freedom, and I have to imagine they do, hundreds of millions will never be allowed to express their longings for freedom aloud. As in the Soviet Union, artists and writers might be policed with draconian severity until all that remains is state propaganda. It may only be in the unspecificity of music that the Chinese may feel free, and it is only in the longings of unfathomably distant lands and eras and persons that the Chinese may find their longings articulated with any specificity. However insulting and dated Verdi seems to so many Americans today, he may seem very current indeed in the East. Even if Verdi leaves America, he may well find a home among the kinds of non-Western people many Westerners think opera has long orientalized.
It's easy to forget the necessity of liberty in a zeitgeist of illiberal democracy. In an era when liberty is sometimes an oppressive force of its own that allows the rich to implement a plutocratic tyranny, you can't quite blame people for finding Verdi a difficult pill to swallow, even if you find the ideologies which motivate them incredibly stupid. Verdi encountered something like a similar pushback in the late 19th century from more radical ideologues and aesthetes of a more decadent era than the one which grew him to fame.
And yet today, a new society emerges with exponential quicknessacross the Pacific Ocean, one accustomed not to illiberal democracy, but to still less liberal authoritarianism. 40 million Chinese children currently learn the piano. They will exist their entire lives in a social credit system, a government by algorithm that bases their opportunities over whether they partake in activities the government finds palatable. If they long for freedom, and I have to imagine they do, hundreds of millions will never be allowed to express their longings for freedom aloud. As in the Soviet Union, artists and writers might be policed with draconian severity until all that remains is state propaganda. It may only be in the unspecificity of music that the Chinese may feel free, and it is only in the longings of unfathomably distant lands and eras and persons that the Chinese may find their longings articulated with any specificity. However insulting and dated Verdi seems to so many Americans today, he may seem very current indeed in the East. Even if Verdi leaves America, he may well find a home among the kinds of non-Western people many Westerners think opera has long orientalized.
Mini-Cast #5: The Future of Verdi - First Half
As I write these words I'm getting ready for a late night showing of the second half of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, a five-and-a-half hour cinematic fresco about the breakdown of Italy's time immemorial way of life in the 20th century. More on that in another podcast, but what matters in this one is that the entire movie begins with a peasant announcing on horseback that Giuseppe Verdi is dead.
As much as one might be able to say that Steven Spielberg is modern America, Giuseppe Verdi was the Italy of his time, perhaps even much more so. He was born just before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, came to international superstardom just as the 1848 revolution made the movement for Italian independence and unification an eventuality rather than mere radicalism, and Verdi became the cultural voice of Italian independence just as Mazzini was its political voice and Garibaldi its military. He lived to nearly ninety, long after Italy turned into a democracy with a monarch as its figurehead - and if Italian democracy was obviously unstable... well, so is modern Italy's, and even after seventy-five years of severe dysfunction modern Italy has not become a true dictatorship, so there was little reason to foretell the turmoil which awaited Italy in twenty years.
Verdi, like Spielberg, is emblematic of a country at the height of its prosperity and achievement, such as it was..., and at the time of America's dominance, a lot of people couldn't get enough of Verdi. American stars at the Metropolitan Opera like Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill were on Ed Sullivan right before Elvis and right after Chuck Berry. It was a different era. There was not the enormous back catalogue of American music to listen to, and intellectuals didn't automatically move to New York or Chicago. So if the intelligentsia of small towns wanted to experience music better than top 40, they had to hear it on classical radio or television variety shows. If Metropolitan Opera divas like Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland weren't as well-known as movie stars, they were astonishingly close. Opera was a mainstream phenomenon, and no composer wrote with an ear for the mainstream of taste like Verdi.
There is so much for a cynical era to make fun of in Verdi: the melodrama, the stupidity of his characters, the oom-pa-pa orchestra, the complete sincerity, the death scenes where sopranos only die after thirty minutes from singing their lungs out. And when a cynical era curdles into an angry era, there is still more to hate: the glorification of male rage and frail women, the exoticizing of eastern cultures, the near-monopoly Verdi has held over the opera stage for a century-and-a-half, the fact that Verdi is the face of extravagant opera productions where money is strewn about the stage for the sole pleasure of the rich - sucking out money from generations of composers who never got a proper public.
But Verdi did not used to be all this. He wrote for a very different era to which our era would have enormous trouble relating. In an era when Austra's imperial censors guarded opera for any intimation of treason, Verdi put Italian suffering and longing for freedom into the mouths of the world's most oppressed people: Jews, Romanis, Ethiopians, Moors, the disabled, and, most of all, women. The state or clerics might be from far away lands, but he portrayed them both in the most totalitarian terms. In code, Verdi spoke of freedom, and every Italian of his time deciphered it, along with hundreds of millions of people around the world, often living in the world's worst regimes.
Mini-Cast #4 - Pan's Labyrinth - First Half
Two or three weeks ago I saw Pan's Labyrinth for the first time in twelve years. It has existed in my mind since 2006 as one of the very greatest movies I've ever seen, maybe the best movie I've seen since 2000. But upon reacquaintance, I wonder if I've underestimated it. It is so good, in fact, that it exists on the kind of plane to which a once-or-twice-in-a-generation movie can ascend: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Pan's Labyrinth... It's that great.
I have never seen it except in the movie theater. The first time I saw it, I was a tear-stained wreck, and when we emerged under the lights, I saw that a friend of mine was even more of a wreck than I. The second time I saw it, I dragged a bunch of friends, who seemed to agree with me that it was incredible. I also made my father see it, and he liked it but didn't like it nearly as much as I because he didn't think Pan's Labyrinth was realistic....
It always comes back to these questions of the real versus the not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is like playing a game in which you see how long it takes audiences to cry betrayal over a series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all of their expectations. Nearly the whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything with it, and because all manner of series take the series through every conceivable narrative permutation, there eventually comes a point where there is no conceivable trick left. The author has exhausted every possible option, and like George R. R. Martin, has already taken the story in so many directions that there is no way to tie it all together to create an ending that's both satisfying and surprising.
A few months ago, before Game of Thrones ended, I wrote a piece on my Times of Israel blog which was not my best, where I charged Game of Thrones of being frivolous in part because it's fantasy. Well, in retrospect that's obviously a frivolous accusation, and one that I'm not even sure how much I believed when I wrote it. My distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, my distaste is with how fantasy so often panders to an audience's need for overstimulation, and how the need of so many millions around the world for overstimulation like you see in Game of Thrones becomes a narcotic whose requirement they can't help bringing to their real lives, where they seek experiences well beyond what an ordinary life promises; and if they can't find good experiences they'll pursue bad experiences - like electing fascists president or trying to overthrow capitalism forever.
I honestly don't know if that's any more true than the idea that the insane might get violent ideas from consuming violent video games and movies, or that men will be more likely to treat women badly if they consume media that demeans women. All three notions are simultaneously true and false down to the level of each individual at every moment.
But while Game of Thrones has become a cautionary tale about the problems of fantasy, Pan's Labyrinth is a supreme examplar of its glories. The minefields of fantasy literature are so easy to step on, that when an artist gets it right, the achievement is that much greater, and by having used the world of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into the infinite.
I have never seen it except in the movie theater. The first time I saw it, I was a tear-stained wreck, and when we emerged under the lights, I saw that a friend of mine was even more of a wreck than I. The second time I saw it, I dragged a bunch of friends, who seemed to agree with me that it was incredible. I also made my father see it, and he liked it but didn't like it nearly as much as I because he didn't think Pan's Labyrinth was realistic....
It always comes back to these questions of the real versus the not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is like playing a game in which you see how long it takes audiences to cry betrayal over a series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all of their expectations. Nearly the whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything with it, and because all manner of series take the series through every conceivable narrative permutation, there eventually comes a point where there is no conceivable trick left. The author has exhausted every possible option, and like George R. R. Martin, has already taken the story in so many directions that there is no way to tie it all together to create an ending that's both satisfying and surprising.
A few months ago, before Game of Thrones ended, I wrote a piece on my Times of Israel blog which was not my best, where I charged Game of Thrones of being frivolous in part because it's fantasy. Well, in retrospect that's obviously a frivolous accusation, and one that I'm not even sure how much I believed when I wrote it. My distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, my distaste is with how fantasy so often panders to an audience's need for overstimulation, and how the need of so many millions around the world for overstimulation like you see in Game of Thrones becomes a narcotic whose requirement they can't help bringing to their real lives, where they seek experiences well beyond what an ordinary life promises; and if they can't find good experiences they'll pursue bad experiences - like electing fascists president or trying to overthrow capitalism forever.
I honestly don't know if that's any more true than the idea that the insane might get violent ideas from consuming violent video games and movies, or that men will be more likely to treat women badly if they consume media that demeans women. All three notions are simultaneously true and false down to the level of each individual at every moment.
But while Game of Thrones has become a cautionary tale about the problems of fantasy, Pan's Labyrinth is a supreme examplar of its glories. The minefields of fantasy literature are so easy to step on, that when an artist gets it right, the achievement is that much greater, and by having used the world of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into the infinite.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Mini-Cast #3 - Sweat by Lynn Nottage - Complete Rough Draft
I saw a very bad production of a very good new play last week. I won't say the name of the company, because it was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater is merciless. It exposes actors who aren't up to their material, even the best actors come undone sometimes, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers actors deserve mercy they rarely got from me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weaknesses like performing for others, and before performers are criticized, they should be commended for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop goes to flourish - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and even when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates have names too - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of this or that political force, capitalism more often than anything else, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest socialist playwright of all time, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, the most reliable villain in the theater is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some plays working in this model, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, are plays that could live forever. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.
Yet in the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
In the years before Angels in America, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.
The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival. It's a legitimate point of view, and perhaps as relevant as it's ever been. But the points have been been made, over, and over, and over again.
There is plenty more to say about what directions might be alternatives for an American art form that operates like a bastard older brother to the movies and TV. But for today, I'll just say that all of this is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Apparently Lynn Nottage went into Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the highest poverty rate in the country - 40%, and interviewed all kinds of residents, and it's incredibly apparent that she listened because we watch a very modern American story. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families celebrating every occasion together. The divisions of this America is not the divisions of the Wilson era, they are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who will work for wages long-rooted Americans would find unacceptable.
While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may ever commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. Class was the killer of the 19th century, race the killer of the 20th. The great killer of the 21st is not race, it will be immigration, and yes, there's an enormous difference. And the greatest dramas of a century with weather patterns that uproot whole countries will probably be about immigration. May we all live to see them.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop goes to flourish - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and even when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates have names too - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of this or that political force, capitalism more often than anything else, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest socialist playwright of all time, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, the most reliable villain in the theater is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some plays working in this model, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, are plays that could live forever. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.
Yet in the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
In the years before Angels in America, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.
The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival. It's a legitimate point of view, and perhaps as relevant as it's ever been. But the points have been been made, over, and over, and over again.
There is plenty more to say about what directions might be alternatives for an American art form that operates like a bastard older brother to the movies and TV. But for today, I'll just say that all of this is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Apparently Lynn Nottage went into Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the highest poverty rate in the country - 40%, and interviewed all kinds of residents, and it's incredibly apparent that she listened because we watch a very modern American story. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families celebrating every occasion together. The divisions of this America is not the divisions of the Wilson era, they are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who will work for wages long-rooted Americans would find unacceptable.
While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may ever commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. Class was the killer of the 19th century, race the killer of the 20th. The great killer of the 21st is not race, it will be immigration, and yes, there's an enormous difference. And the greatest dramas of a century with weather patterns that uproot whole countries will probably be about immigration. May we all live to see them.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Mini-Cast #3 - Sweat by Lynn Nottage - Almost Complete Draft
I saw a very bad production of a very good play last week. I won't say the name of the company, because it was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater is merciless. It exposes actors who aren't up to their material, even the best actors come undone sometimes, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers actors deserve mercy they rarely got from me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weaknesses like performing for others, and before performers are criticized, they should be commended for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop goes to flourish - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and even when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates have names too - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of this or that political force, capitalism more often than anything else, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest socialist playwright of all time, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, the most reliable villain in the theater is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some plays working in this model, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, are plays that could live forever. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.
Yet in the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
In the years before Angels in America, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.
The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival of interest. It's a legitimate point of view, and perhaps as politically relevant as it's ever been. But the point has been been made, over, and over, and over again.
There is plenty more to say about what directions might be alternatives for an American art form that operates like a bastard older brother to the movies and TV. But for today, I'll just say that all of this is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Apparently Lynn Nottage, went into Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the highest poverty rate in the country - 40%, and interviewed all kinds of residents. We hear their stories from the inside. We never see the business school vulture capitalists who maximize capital at their expense - perhaps their stories could turn up some pathos too - though admittedly that would be unexpected. So yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families celebrating every occasion together. These divisions are not the divisions of the Wilson era, these are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who will work for wages that long-rooted Americans would find unacceptable.
While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may ever commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. There is no price that will repair slavery's damage. The issue of today is not race, but immigration, and yes, there's an enormous difference. Hopefully, this podcast will have plenty of episodes to delineate it.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop goes to flourish - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and even when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates have names too - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of this or that political force, capitalism more often than anything else, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest socialist playwright of all time, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, the most reliable villain in the theater is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some plays working in this model, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, are plays that could live forever. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.
Yet in the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
In the years before Angels in America, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.
The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival of interest. It's a legitimate point of view, and perhaps as politically relevant as it's ever been. But the point has been been made, over, and over, and over again.
There is plenty more to say about what directions might be alternatives for an American art form that operates like a bastard older brother to the movies and TV. But for today, I'll just say that all of this is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Apparently Lynn Nottage, went into Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the highest poverty rate in the country - 40%, and interviewed all kinds of residents. We hear their stories from the inside. We never see the business school vulture capitalists who maximize capital at their expense - perhaps their stories could turn up some pathos too - though admittedly that would be unexpected. So yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families celebrating every occasion together. These divisions are not the divisions of the Wilson era, these are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who will work for wages that long-rooted Americans would find unacceptable.
While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may ever commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. There is no price that will repair slavery's damage. The issue of today is not race, but immigration, and yes, there's an enormous difference. Hopefully, this podcast will have plenty of episodes to delineate it.
Friday, September 27, 2019
Mini-Cast #3: Sweat by Lynn Nottage - Really Rough Incomplete Draft
I saw a very bad production of a very good play last week. I won't say the name of the company, because it was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater is merciless. It exposes actors who aren't up to their material, even the best actors come undone sometimes, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers actors deserve mercy they rarely got from me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weaknesses like performing for others, and before performers are criticized, they should be commended for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater's a place where agitprop flourishes - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of capitalism, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the writer writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. But ever since, the most reliable villain is the evils of capitalism that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. A few playwrights working in this model, like Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, did great work consistently. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama was ultimately a hinderance rather than a help.
But In the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that ideas and identities defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
And this is why I found Sweat so impressive. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism, but rather than show villains twirling mustaches, we see
The problems of theater in America are many, but the problems are also the glories. The theater is the most reliable place where American misfits can find acceptance. Sensitive high school kids, bullied by jocks for having no real use for sports, can always find a place for themselves in a high school theater - whether in front of the stage as an actor or behind it as a techie.
But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.
Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.
For as long as America had theaters, theater's a place where agitprop flourishes - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of capitalism, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the writer writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.
By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. But ever since, the most reliable villain is the evils of capitalism that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. A few playwrights working in this model, like Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, did great work consistently. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama was ultimately a hinderance rather than a help.
But In the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that ideas and identities defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.
And this is why I found Sweat so impressive. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism, but rather than show villains twirling mustaches, we see
The problems of theater in America are many, but the problems are also the glories. The theater is the most reliable place where American misfits can find acceptance. Sensitive high school kids, bullied by jocks for having no real use for sports, can always find a place for themselves in a high school theater - whether in front of the stage as an actor or behind it as a techie.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Minicast #2: The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Rough Draft
Nobody likes Cormac McCarthy, but you have to reckon with him. There are no rich rewards from his books, all you need is twenty pages to understand how much more they demand than they give. No humor, no compassion, no fun, no character observations. What you get from McCarthy is hundreds of pages of nature descriptors, and the pure, unmitigated darkness of our worst fears - for our people, for our country, for our selves.
Much moreso than George R. R. Martin, McCarthy is only interested in human beings for the way they die. What really interests him is the desert, the western American landscape, described more ripely than any John Ford movie. There are none of the traditional Western myths where manly heroes kill outlaws and Choctaws. For McCarthy, there is no higher human being - humans are no less part of nature than animals, and humans kill as animals do, squalidly, gorily; they kill to enjoy themselves, they kill to eat each other, they kill to use the features of the dead as jewelry.
There is nothing unique about human beings in a Cormac McCarthy novel. To him, we're all mere ridges on the ancient mesas, natural manifestations of a dead earth who don't belong upon it, born merely to die in a climate that kills everything, and therefore have a barely suppressible urge to end one another's lives, seeing the out of place within each other which we do not see in ourselves.
I'm currently reading the infamous Blood Meridian, and will probably have a cast about that. Was the American West truly as brutal as Blood Meridian makes it seem? Well, I doubt it was in every particular, but there is no question to my mind that Blood Meridian conveys the spiritual reality of the West. Blood Meridian means what it is to reckon with Manifest Destiny - a doctrine with genocide seared into its dogma.
In an era when we begin to wonder anew of what bigots are capable, it's important to remember how little control we have over their rage. Even at its height, Manifest Destiny was not embraced by more than a portion of the entire American public. Raised against Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were voices from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln, but even if you prevent the slaughter a hundred times, there will always be a hundred-first. Grisly murder is part of the human condition, and McCarthy is its prophet.
Part of grappling with Manifest Destiny's reality is the realization that America is too big to be a mere country - there are too many facets, too many peoples, too many cultures to govern something so unwieldy without good intentions going awry. Perhaps no continent should be its own country, and within that continent there are so many foreign places and peoples to take in that many facets of the country will always be foreign to each of us.
To those of us hailing from plentiful vegetation, nothing is more foreign than desert. There is nothing more foreign than that climate of death who seems to install a homing device in its citizens to return as many of each other to the land of the dead as we can before we are duly returned ourselves. And yet, the desert of McCarthy and the southwest may yet be our truest future, a worldwide desert, perhaps even a universal desert, in which all remaining life is alone for all time. This is the sort of image of climate change that haunts our dreams - an image of universal death. This is the image that clearly haunts Greta Thunberg, and probably haunts all those millions who protested with her.
This is why it's simultaneously stunning and unsurprising when I read an article today reporting that Cormac McCarthy edits science articles for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It makes a perverse kind of sense that a writer who spends hundreds of pages chronicling every hue of sky and rock would be interested in their formation, and would also take an interest in questions of what might happen to the landscape after the age of sentient humans.
I've spent so little of this podcast talking about The Road. Suffice to say that it's a book so perfect that a critic can say little about it. The Road's journey is as much spiritual as physical - of a father to keep his son alive in an age post-apocalypse most food humans can eat is each other. It is not only a book about preserving life, but about preserving souls. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy's fascination with violence deadens our horror, you almost feel him rooting for the killers. In The Road, the desire of a nameless father and son to survive is so basic that our horror at the dangers they pass will never cease. This is real horror, not the macabre gore of Stephen King whose disgust you're meant to enjoy, this is what it means to live in a place where the homing instinct to return all things to nature is so strong that it's obliterated nature itself. This father's desire to raise a decent son may be the last good impulse in the universe. It's such a simple story, and yet how many reverberations does it have to human history? How many reverberations would it have to the many, many stories of cannibalism during World War II, the civil wars of Africa, the Communist and Imperial famines?
And how many more reverberations will it have to the future? Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 - part of the same pessimistic generation as Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick who first heard of the Holocaust and the Bomb when they were adolescents, spent their adulthoods haunted by nuclear war, and are now in their dotage must hear about planetary death. The specter of planetary apocalypse has been with us nearly seventy-five years, and yet it has not come. When the generation born between 1925 and 1942 passes, the 'Silent Generation', will we remember their era as an age of anxiety, beset by premonitions of a disaster that never came, or will their anxieties be vindicated?
Much moreso than George R. R. Martin, McCarthy is only interested in human beings for the way they die. What really interests him is the desert, the western American landscape, described more ripely than any John Ford movie. There are none of the traditional Western myths where manly heroes kill outlaws and Choctaws. For McCarthy, there is no higher human being - humans are no less part of nature than animals, and humans kill as animals do, squalidly, gorily; they kill to enjoy themselves, they kill to eat each other, they kill to use the features of the dead as jewelry.
There is nothing unique about human beings in a Cormac McCarthy novel. To him, we're all mere ridges on the ancient mesas, natural manifestations of a dead earth who don't belong upon it, born merely to die in a climate that kills everything, and therefore have a barely suppressible urge to end one another's lives, seeing the out of place within each other which we do not see in ourselves.
I'm currently reading the infamous Blood Meridian, and will probably have a cast about that. Was the American West truly as brutal as Blood Meridian makes it seem? Well, I doubt it was in every particular, but there is no question to my mind that Blood Meridian conveys the spiritual reality of the West. Blood Meridian means what it is to reckon with Manifest Destiny - a doctrine with genocide seared into its dogma.
In an era when we begin to wonder anew of what bigots are capable, it's important to remember how little control we have over their rage. Even at its height, Manifest Destiny was not embraced by more than a portion of the entire American public. Raised against Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were voices from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln, but even if you prevent the slaughter a hundred times, there will always be a hundred-first. Grisly murder is part of the human condition, and McCarthy is its prophet.
Part of grappling with Manifest Destiny's reality is the realization that America is too big to be a mere country - there are too many facets, too many peoples, too many cultures to govern something so unwieldy without good intentions going awry. Perhaps no continent should be its own country, and within that continent there are so many foreign places and peoples to take in that many facets of the country will always be foreign to each of us.
To those of us hailing from plentiful vegetation, nothing is more foreign than desert. There is nothing more foreign than that climate of death who seems to install a homing device in its citizens to return as many of each other to the land of the dead as we can before we are duly returned ourselves. And yet, the desert of McCarthy and the southwest may yet be our truest future, a worldwide desert, perhaps even a universal desert, in which all remaining life is alone for all time. This is the sort of image of climate change that haunts our dreams - an image of universal death. This is the image that clearly haunts Greta Thunberg, and probably haunts all those millions who protested with her.
This is why it's simultaneously stunning and unsurprising when I read an article today reporting that Cormac McCarthy edits science articles for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It makes a perverse kind of sense that a writer who spends hundreds of pages chronicling every hue of sky and rock would be interested in their formation, and would also take an interest in questions of what might happen to the landscape after the age of sentient humans.
I've spent so little of this podcast talking about The Road. Suffice to say that it's a book so perfect that a critic can say little about it. The Road's journey is as much spiritual as physical - of a father to keep his son alive in an age post-apocalypse most food humans can eat is each other. It is not only a book about preserving life, but about preserving souls. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy's fascination with violence deadens our horror, you almost feel him rooting for the killers. In The Road, the desire of a nameless father and son to survive is so basic that our horror at the dangers they pass will never cease. This is real horror, not the macabre gore of Stephen King whose disgust you're meant to enjoy, this is what it means to live in a place where the homing instinct to return all things to nature is so strong that it's obliterated nature itself. This father's desire to raise a decent son may be the last good impulse in the universe. It's such a simple story, and yet how many reverberations does it have to human history? How many reverberations would it have to the many, many stories of cannibalism during World War II, the civil wars of Africa, the Communist and Imperial famines?
And how many more reverberations will it have to the future? Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 - part of the same pessimistic generation as Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick who first heard of the Holocaust and the Bomb when they were adolescents, spent their adulthoods haunted by nuclear war, and are now in their dotage must hear about planetary death. The specter of planetary apocalypse has been with us nearly seventy-five years, and yet it has not come. When the generation born between 1925 and 1942 passes, the 'Silent Generation', will we remember their era as an age of anxiety, beset by premonitions of a disaster that never came, or will their anxieties be vindicated?
Another 55ish Albums - More Tomorrow
Alessandro Striggio: Mass for 40 and 60 Voices - Le Concert Spirituel/Herve Niquet
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Victor de Sabata in Salzburg
The Beatles: Rubber Soul
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni - Metropolitan Opera/Bruno Walter/Ezio Pinza/Alexander Kipnis
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 - Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Hermann Abendroth
Johannes Brahms Violin Concerto: Bronislaw Huberman/New York Philharmonic-Symphony/Artur Rodzinski and Fritz Kreisler/London Philharmonic/John Barbirolli
Thomas Weelkes: Anthems and Madrigals - Consort of Musicke/Anthony Rooley
The Immortal Otis Redding
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony no. 8 - Moscow Philharmonic Kirill Kondrashin
Songs and Dancing Ballads by Percy Grainger: Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra/John Eliot Gardiner
Bela Bartok: Bluebeard's Castle - George Solti/London Philharmonic/Kolos Kovats/Sylvia Sass dir. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Wolfgang Sawallisch/Bavarian State Orchestra/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Julia Varady
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies 39-41 - Concentus Musicus Wien/Nikolaus Harnoncourt
The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1-3
Giuseppe Verdi: Otello - La Scala/Carlos Kleiber/Placido Domingo/Mirella Freni/Piero Cappucilli or NBC Symphony/Robert Shaw Chorale/Arturo Toscanini/Ramon Vinay/Herva Nelli/Giuseppe Valdengo or Metropolitan Opera/Ettore Panizza/Giovanni MartinelliMaria Caniglia/Lawrence Tibbett
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker - Mariinsky Ballet/Victor Fedotov chor. Marius Petipa
Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring - Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa Pekka Salonen
Modest Mussorgsky: Complete Songs - Boris Christoff
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Sadko - Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov
Duke Ellington Live at Newport 1956
Karol Szymanowski: Collected Works - City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Simon Rattle/Soloists
Ottorino Respighi: Boticelli Triptych - Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Veljo Tormis: Curse Upon Iron - Works for Choir (full album)
Ernest Bloch: Baal Shem Tov - Isaac Stern/Alexander Zakin
Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall 1938
Frank Martin - The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (full album)
Walter Gieseking Plays Debussy Preludes
Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff - Metropolitan Opera/Leonard Bernstein/Anselmo Colzani (it's not complete, for complete I would recommend Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff - La Scala/Victor de Sabata/Mariano Stabile)
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Forests of the Amazon - Moscow Radio Symphony/Alfred Heller/Renee Fleming
Sergei Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky - St. Petersburg Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony no. 10 - Mariinsky Theater Orchestra/Valery Gergiev
Louis Armstrong Live at Symphony Hall 1947
Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring - Los Angeles Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess - London Philharmonic Orchestra/Glyndebourne Festival Chorus/Simon Rattle/Willard White/Cynthia Haymon dir. Trevor Nunn
Alberto Ginastera: Panambi - London Symphony/Giesele Ben-Dor
Silvestre Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas - Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel
Charles Mingus: Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Lili Boulanger: Collected Works - BBC Philharmonic/Yan Pascal Tortelier
Robert Schumann: Symphony no. 2 - Detroit Symphony/Paul Paray
Franz Schubert: Symphony no. 2 - Dresden State Orchestra/Wolfgang Sawallisch
Charles Ives: Symphony no. 2 - New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
Nina Simone Live in Holland and England
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem - Concentus Musikus Wien/Arnold Schoenberg Choir/Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Soloists
Ernest Bloch: Avodat HaKodesh New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein/Robert Merrill
Alfred Schnittke: Symphony no. 1 USSR Symphony/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Frank Zappa: Freak Out
Claude Debussy: La Mer - Boston Symphony/Serge Koussevitzky
Ravi Shankar: Three Ragas (full album)
Duke Ellington - Reminiscing in Tempo
Mahler: Symphony no. 1 "Titan" Bavarian Radio Symphony/Rafael Kubelik (live)
Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine: Into the Woods - Original Broadway Production
Dave Tarras Trio (Klezmer) - Dave Tarras Tribute Concert
Alan Lomax: Songs of the South Collection
George Friedrich Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks (No strings, full album) - The English Consort/Trevor Pinnock
Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore - Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera Chorus/Herbert von Karajan/Franco Corelli/Leontyne Price/Ettore Bastianini/Giulietta Simonato
Edward Elgar: Violin Concerto - Nigel Kennedy/BBC Concert Orchestra/Paul Daniel
Claude Debussy: Nocturnes for Orchestra - Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Giacomo Puccini: La Boheme - La Scala/Riccardo Chailly/Roberto Alagna/Angela Gheorghiu
Jean Sibelius: Symphonies 1 and 5 - Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Ludwig van Beethoven: Appassionata Sonata - Sviatoslav Richter
Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 7 - Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
Shostakovich: Suite on Poems of Michelangelo
Frank Zappa: One Size Fits All
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Victor de Sabata in Salzburg
The Beatles: Rubber Soul
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni - Metropolitan Opera/Bruno Walter/Ezio Pinza/Alexander Kipnis
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 - Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Hermann Abendroth
Johannes Brahms Violin Concerto: Bronislaw Huberman/New York Philharmonic-Symphony/Artur Rodzinski and Fritz Kreisler/London Philharmonic/John Barbirolli
Thomas Weelkes: Anthems and Madrigals - Consort of Musicke/Anthony Rooley
The Immortal Otis Redding
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony no. 8 - Moscow Philharmonic Kirill Kondrashin
Songs and Dancing Ballads by Percy Grainger: Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra/John Eliot Gardiner
Bela Bartok: Bluebeard's Castle - George Solti/London Philharmonic/Kolos Kovats/Sylvia Sass dir. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Wolfgang Sawallisch/Bavarian State Orchestra/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Julia Varady
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies 39-41 - Concentus Musicus Wien/Nikolaus Harnoncourt
The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1-3
Giuseppe Verdi: Otello - La Scala/Carlos Kleiber/Placido Domingo/Mirella Freni/Piero Cappucilli or NBC Symphony/Robert Shaw Chorale/Arturo Toscanini/Ramon Vinay/Herva Nelli/Giuseppe Valdengo or Metropolitan Opera/Ettore Panizza/Giovanni MartinelliMaria Caniglia/Lawrence Tibbett
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker - Mariinsky Ballet/Victor Fedotov chor. Marius Petipa
Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring - Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa Pekka Salonen
Modest Mussorgsky: Complete Songs - Boris Christoff
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Sadko - Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov
Duke Ellington Live at Newport 1956
Karol Szymanowski: Collected Works - City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Simon Rattle/Soloists
Ottorino Respighi: Boticelli Triptych - Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Veljo Tormis: Curse Upon Iron - Works for Choir (full album)
Ernest Bloch: Baal Shem Tov - Isaac Stern/Alexander Zakin
Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall 1938
Frank Martin - The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (full album)
Walter Gieseking Plays Debussy Preludes
Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff - Metropolitan Opera/Leonard Bernstein/Anselmo Colzani (it's not complete, for complete I would recommend Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff - La Scala/Victor de Sabata/Mariano Stabile)
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Forests of the Amazon - Moscow Radio Symphony/Alfred Heller/Renee Fleming
Sergei Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky - St. Petersburg Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony no. 10 - Mariinsky Theater Orchestra/Valery Gergiev
Louis Armstrong Live at Symphony Hall 1947
Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring - Los Angeles Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess - London Philharmonic Orchestra/Glyndebourne Festival Chorus/Simon Rattle/Willard White/Cynthia Haymon dir. Trevor Nunn
Alberto Ginastera: Panambi - London Symphony/Giesele Ben-Dor
Silvestre Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas - Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel
Lili Boulanger: Collected Works - BBC Philharmonic/Yan Pascal Tortelier
Robert Schumann: Symphony no. 2 - Detroit Symphony/Paul Paray
Franz Schubert: Symphony no. 2 - Dresden State Orchestra/Wolfgang Sawallisch
Charles Ives: Symphony no. 2 - New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
Nina Simone Live in Holland and England
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem - Concentus Musikus Wien/Arnold Schoenberg Choir/Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Soloists
Ernest Bloch: Avodat HaKodesh New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein/Robert Merrill
Alfred Schnittke: Symphony no. 1 USSR Symphony/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Frank Zappa: Freak Out
Claude Debussy: La Mer - Boston Symphony/Serge Koussevitzky
Ravi Shankar: Three Ragas (full album)
Duke Ellington - Reminiscing in Tempo
Mahler: Symphony no. 1 "Titan" Bavarian Radio Symphony/Rafael Kubelik (live)
Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine: Into the Woods - Original Broadway Production
Dave Tarras Trio (Klezmer) - Dave Tarras Tribute Concert
Alan Lomax: Songs of the South Collection
George Friedrich Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks (No strings, full album) - The English Consort/Trevor Pinnock
Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore - Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera Chorus/Herbert von Karajan/Franco Corelli/Leontyne Price/Ettore Bastianini/Giulietta Simonato
Edward Elgar: Violin Concerto - Nigel Kennedy/BBC Concert Orchestra/Paul Daniel
Claude Debussy: Nocturnes for Orchestra - Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Giacomo Puccini: La Boheme - La Scala/Riccardo Chailly/Roberto Alagna/Angela Gheorghiu
Jean Sibelius: Symphonies 1 and 5 - Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Ludwig van Beethoven: Appassionata Sonata - Sviatoslav Richter
Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 7 - Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
Shostakovich: Suite on Poems of Michelangelo
Frank Zappa: One Size Fits All
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
About 50 Albums - Another 50 Tomorrow
______ _______ asked me to do the ten recording album covers in ten days. I have a feeling FB is using it to track us, and I just don't understand the technology involved. So rather than that, I'll just do list as many of my favorite recordings as I can think of every day with links. Let these double as recommendations:
Osvaldo Golijov La Pasion Segun San Marcos: Schola Cantorum Caracas/Maria Guinand
Gustav Mahler Symphony no. 3: New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein or Concertgebouw Orchestra/Bernard Haitink (live) or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Rafael Kubelik (preferably live)
Joseph Haydn The Creation: Gabrieli Consort/Paul McCreesh or in German - Capella Augustina/VokalEnsemble Köln/Andras Spering
Leos Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen: dir. Walter Felsenstein cond. Vaclav Neumann or London Philharmonic/Simon Rattle/Lillian Watson or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Franz Welser-Möst/Martina/Jankova or Orchestre de Paris/Sir Charles Mackerras/
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Marriage of Figaro: Metropolitan Opera/James Levine/Bryn Terfel/Cecilia Bartoli/Dawn Upshaw/Dwayne Croft dir. Jonathan Miller (also, a very different audio recording: Berlin Radio Symphony/Ferenc Fricsay/Renato Capecchi/Irmgard Seefried/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Maria Stader)
Johannes Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel: Van Cliburn
Modest Mussorgsky Boris Godunov: Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov/Alexander Prigorov/Ivan Kozlovsky
Igor Stravinsky Les Noces: Pokrovsky Ensemble/Dmitri Porkrovsky or Mariinsky Opera/Valery Gergiev
Guillaume de Machaut Messe de Notre Dame/Ensemble Organum
John Coltrane: A Love Supreme Gustav Mahler Symphony no. 3: New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein or Concertgebouw Orchestra/Bernard Haitink (live) or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Rafael Kubelik (preferably live)
Joseph Haydn The Creation: Gabrieli Consort/Paul McCreesh or in German - Capella Augustina/VokalEnsemble Köln/Andras Spering
Leos Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen: dir. Walter Felsenstein cond. Vaclav Neumann or London Philharmonic/Simon Rattle/Lillian Watson or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Franz Welser-Möst/Martina/Jankova or Orchestre de Paris/Sir Charles Mackerras/
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Marriage of Figaro: Metropolitan Opera/James Levine/Bryn Terfel/Cecilia Bartoli/Dawn Upshaw/Dwayne Croft dir. Jonathan Miller (also, a very different audio recording: Berlin Radio Symphony/Ferenc Fricsay/Renato Capecchi/Irmgard Seefried/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Maria Stader)
Johannes Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel: Van Cliburn
Modest Mussorgsky Boris Godunov: Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov/Alexander Prigorov/Ivan Kozlovsky
Igor Stravinsky Les Noces: Pokrovsky Ensemble/Dmitri Porkrovsky or Mariinsky Opera/Valery Gergiev
Guillaume de Machaut Messe de Notre Dame/Ensemble Organum
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 "Pastoral" - Dresden State Orchestra/Herbert Blomstedt
Antonin Dvorak: Dumky Trio - David Oistrakh/Sviatoslav Knushevitzky/Lev Oborin
Leos Janacek: Jenufa - Bavarian State Opera/Rafael Kubelik/Hilde Hilldebrecht/Astrid Varnay
Leos Janacek: Jenufa - Bavarian State Opera/Rafael Kubelik/Hilde Hilldebrecht/Astrid Varnay
Robert Schumann: Fantasy in C - Claudio Arrau or Mikhail Pletnev
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis - Boston Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Leonard Bernstein or
Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain
Bach: Goldberg Variations - Glenn Gould or Igor Kipnis
Bartok String Quartets: Takacs Quartet
The Tallis Scholars Sing Thomas Tallis
Johannes Brahms: Symphony no. 1 Finale - Berlin Philharmonic/Wilhelm Furtwangler, for complete NDR Symphony/Wilhelm Furtwangler
Ralph Vaughan Williams: London Symphony - Cleveland Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs - Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/George Szell/German Opera Berlin Orchestra
United Sacred Harp Musical Association 1959
Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 9 - Berlin Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein or Berlin Philharmonic/Claudio Abbado or Vienna Philharmonic/Bruno Walter
Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals of War and Love - Jordi Savall
Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time - Tashi Ensemble
Robert Schumann: Carnaval - Alfred Cortot
Luciano Berio: Sinfonia - New York Philharmonic/Luciano Berio
Leos Janacek: Glagolitic Mass - Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Sir Charles Mackerras
Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang - Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber
Antonin Dvorak: Piano Quintet - Sviatoslav Richter/Borodin Quartet
Alfred Schnittke: A Faust Cantata
Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition - Sviatoslav Richter or Chicago Symphony/Sir Georg Solti (live)
Tan Dun: The Map
Johann Sebastian Bach: Chaccone in D-minor - Yehudi Menuhin or Bronislaw Huberman
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes - Royal Opera House Covent Garden/Benjamin Britten/Peter Pears
Leonard Bernstein: Candide - London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Leonard Bernstein/Jerry Hadley/June Anderson/Christa Ludwig/Adolph Green
Charles Ives: An American Journey - San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas
Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 2 - Arthur Rubinstein/Boston Symphony/Charles Munch or Wilhelm Backhaus/Vienna Philharmonic/Carl Schuricht
Bedrich Smetana: Ma Vlast - Czech Philharmonic/Vaclav Talich or Czech Philharmonic/Rafael Kubelik
Hector Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust - Lamoureux Concert Orchestra/Elizabeth Brasseur Chorale/Igor Markevitch/Richard Verrau/Michel Roux/Consuelo Rubio
Georges Bizet: Carmen - l'Opera Comique/Andre Cluytens/Solange Michel/Raoul Jobin/Martha Angelici/Michel Dans
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin - Bolshoi Opera/Alexander Orlov/Andrey Ivanov/Yelena Krugilova/Ivan Kozlovsky
Antonin Dvorak: Symphony no. 9 'From the New World' - Czech Philharmonic/Frantisek Stupka
Franz Schubert: Winterreise - Hans Hotter/Michael Reichhausen
Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg - Bavarian State Opera/Eugen Jochum/Hans Hotter/Gunther Treptow/Annelies Kupper/Benno Kusche
Josef Suk: A Summer's Tale - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Libor Pesek
Georges Enescu: Octet - Janine Jansen and Friends
Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka - Leningrad Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov or London Symphony/Valery Gergiev
Monteverdi - Madrigals Book VII: Concerto Italiano
Rued Langgaard: The Music of the Spheres - Danish National Radio Symphony/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Scott Joplin: The Sting Soundtrack
Robert Schumann: Faschinggschwank aus Wein - Sviatoslav Richter or Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony - London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir/Sir Adrian Boult/John Carol Case
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 4 - City of Birmingham Symphony/Andris Nelsons
Johannes Brahms - A German Requiem - Danish National Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Herbert Blomstedt
Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov - Russian Easter Overture - USSR Symphony/Yevgeny Svetlanov
Franz Schubert - String Quartet in C -Isaac Stern/Alexander Schneider/Milton Katims/Paul Tortelier/Pablo Casals or Melos Quartet/Mstislav Rostropovich
Richard Strauss: Alpine Symphony - Dresden State Orchestra/Rudolf Kempe or National Youth Orchestra of the USA/Antonio Pappano or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Sir Georg Solti
Henry Cowell: Piano Works - Stefan Schleiermacher
Bruckner: Symphony no. 9 - Dresden State Orchestra/Eugen Jochum
50ish more tomorrow...
Bach: Goldberg Variations - Glenn Gould or Igor Kipnis
Bartok String Quartets: Takacs Quartet
The Tallis Scholars Sing Thomas Tallis
Johannes Brahms: Symphony no. 1 Finale - Berlin Philharmonic/Wilhelm Furtwangler, for complete NDR Symphony/Wilhelm Furtwangler
Ralph Vaughan Williams: London Symphony - Cleveland Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs - Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/George Szell/German Opera Berlin Orchestra
United Sacred Harp Musical Association 1959
Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 9 - Berlin Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein or Berlin Philharmonic/Claudio Abbado or Vienna Philharmonic/Bruno Walter
Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals of War and Love - Jordi Savall
Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time - Tashi Ensemble
Robert Schumann: Carnaval - Alfred Cortot
Luciano Berio: Sinfonia - New York Philharmonic/Luciano Berio
Leos Janacek: Glagolitic Mass - Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Sir Charles Mackerras
Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang - Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber
Antonin Dvorak: Piano Quintet - Sviatoslav Richter/Borodin Quartet
Alfred Schnittke: A Faust Cantata
Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition - Sviatoslav Richter or Chicago Symphony/Sir Georg Solti (live)
Tan Dun: The Map
Johann Sebastian Bach: Chaccone in D-minor - Yehudi Menuhin or Bronislaw Huberman
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes - Royal Opera House Covent Garden/Benjamin Britten/Peter Pears
Leonard Bernstein: Candide - London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Leonard Bernstein/Jerry Hadley/June Anderson/Christa Ludwig/Adolph Green
Charles Ives: An American Journey - San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas
Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 2 - Arthur Rubinstein/Boston Symphony/Charles Munch or Wilhelm Backhaus/Vienna Philharmonic/Carl Schuricht
Bedrich Smetana: Ma Vlast - Czech Philharmonic/Vaclav Talich or Czech Philharmonic/Rafael Kubelik
Hector Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust - Lamoureux Concert Orchestra/Elizabeth Brasseur Chorale/Igor Markevitch/Richard Verrau/Michel Roux/Consuelo Rubio
Georges Bizet: Carmen - l'Opera Comique/Andre Cluytens/Solange Michel/Raoul Jobin/Martha Angelici/Michel Dans
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin - Bolshoi Opera/Alexander Orlov/Andrey Ivanov/Yelena Krugilova/Ivan Kozlovsky
Antonin Dvorak: Symphony no. 9 'From the New World' - Czech Philharmonic/Frantisek Stupka
Franz Schubert: Winterreise - Hans Hotter/Michael Reichhausen
Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg - Bavarian State Opera/Eugen Jochum/Hans Hotter/Gunther Treptow/Annelies Kupper/Benno Kusche
Josef Suk: A Summer's Tale - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Libor Pesek
Georges Enescu: Octet - Janine Jansen and Friends
Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka - Leningrad Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov or London Symphony/Valery Gergiev
Monteverdi - Madrigals Book VII: Concerto Italiano
Rued Langgaard: The Music of the Spheres - Danish National Radio Symphony/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Scott Joplin: The Sting Soundtrack
Robert Schumann: Faschinggschwank aus Wein - Sviatoslav Richter or Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony - London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir/Sir Adrian Boult/John Carol Case
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 4 - City of Birmingham Symphony/Andris Nelsons
Johannes Brahms - A German Requiem - Danish National Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Herbert Blomstedt
Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov - Russian Easter Overture - USSR Symphony/Yevgeny Svetlanov
Franz Schubert - String Quartet in C -Isaac Stern/Alexander Schneider/Milton Katims/Paul Tortelier/Pablo Casals or Melos Quartet/Mstislav Rostropovich
Richard Strauss: Alpine Symphony - Dresden State Orchestra/Rudolf Kempe or National Youth Orchestra of the USA/Antonio Pappano or Bavarian Radio Symphony/Sir Georg Solti
Henry Cowell: Piano Works - Stefan Schleiermacher
Bruckner: Symphony no. 9 - Dresden State Orchestra/Eugen Jochum
50ish more tomorrow...
1-10 Albums
______ _______ asked me to do the ten recording album covers in ten days. I have a feeling FB is using it to track us, and I just don't understand the technology involved. So rather than that, I'll just do ten of my favorite recordings every day with links. Let these double as recommendations:
- Osvaldo Golijov La Pasion Segun San Marcos: Schola Cantorum Caracas/Maria Guinand https://www.youtube.com/watch…
- Gustav Mahler Symphony no. 3: New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40IVvFhP8XI
- Joseph Haydn The Creation: Gabrieli Consort/Paul McCreesh https://www.youtube.com/watch…
- Leos Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen: dir. Walter Felsenstein cond. Vaclav Neumann https://www.youtube.com/watch…
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Marriage of Figaro: Metropolitan Opera/James Levine/Bryn Terfel/Cecilia Bartoli/Dawn Upshaw/Dwayne Croft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVwCrltEeok
- Johannes Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel: Van Cliburn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4b_TrbX34E
- Modest Mussorgsky Boris Godunov: Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov/Alexander Prigorov/Ivan Kozlovsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nU6e9Y5C8
- Igor Stravinsky Les Noces: Pokrovsky Ensemble/Dmitri Porkrovsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bzqV6lv0a0
- Guillaume de Machaut Messe de Notre Dame/Ensemble Organum https://youtu.be/1gEV42RKf6E?t=317
- John Coltrane A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU
- Gustav Mahler Symphony no. 3: New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40IVvFhP8XI
- Joseph Haydn The Creation: Gabrieli Consort/Paul McCreesh https://www.youtube.com/watch…
- Leos Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen: dir. Walter Felsenstein cond. Vaclav Neumann https://www.youtube.com/watch…
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Marriage of Figaro: Metropolitan Opera/James Levine/Bryn Terfel/Cecilia Bartoli/Dawn Upshaw/Dwayne Croft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVwCrltEeok
- Johannes Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel: Van Cliburn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4b_TrbX34E
- Modest Mussorgsky Boris Godunov: Bolshoi Opera/Nikolai Golovanov/Alexander Prigorov/Ivan Kozlovsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nU6e9Y5C8
- Igor Stravinsky Les Noces: Pokrovsky Ensemble/Dmitri Porkrovsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bzqV6lv0a0
- Guillaume de Machaut Messe de Notre Dame/Ensemble Organum https://youtu.be/1gEV42RKf6E?t=317
- John Coltrane A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU
10 more tomorrow.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Mini-Podcast Script 1: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance - Mostly Final
Well, beware of critiques bearing gifts I guess... It's the only reason I can think of to explain how liberal journalists so rejected a Republican coming to them, bearing a gift we've sought from any eminent Republican at all, long before a Donald Trump presidency was possible - that what animates Trumpism is not the language of the unheard, what animates Trump supporters is nihilism; pessimism that is in no small part self-inflicted, a culture of grievance; a refusal to practice their espoused values, and a belief contrary to reality that the world is out to humiliate particularly them.
It should be music to liberal ears, yet since its first ecstatic reception, left-liberals closed ranks against a book everybody else knows is a masterpiece of personal memoir for which politics peppers only the slightest flavor, flavors that are easily excised if you're warned about the few pages on which the writer uses conservative political cliches with admirable frugality. There are millions of American stories like Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think it be fair to say that there are an equivalent number of white stories of adversity to black stories, or male stories to female, but I do think it would be fair to say that for every two stories, and not even per capita, like Between the World and Me, or The Other Wes Moore, there's at least one story like Hillbilly Elegy.
I have no doubt that some of the book's problems with acceptance may be traced to the pundit JD Vance became in the years following Hillbilly Elegy - the Republican talking head sought after to explain Trumpism. And to a certain extent, Vance's soundbite interpretations of Trump country differ from the admittedly anecdotal (rather than statistical) thoughtfulness of his book; but I believe what people really resent in Vance's TV persona is not his explication of Trumpism but rather his explication of why Trumpists resent those who resent Trumpists. He raises all manner of David Brooks-like straw men about the pseudo-sophistication of elites like me and you soon to be listeners, and yet come now...
I could spend an hour throwing statistics after a month of research, but can only quantify classism to a certain extent, so search your mind anecdotally. There are moments in every coastal liberal's life when a later-to-be-Trump supporter wanted a garrulously friendly conversation, and sensing that this rough person would be an annoyance that might take an hour, or a day, or years to get rid of, you did everything you could to ignore him. I have on multiple occasions. There are two sides to this story, and I guarantee that every person who shouted at a Trump rally has just as many stories about the humiliation of being on the other end of his reluctant monologue.
I could spend an hour throwing statistics after a month of research, but can only quantify classism to a certain extent, so search your mind anecdotally. There are moments in every coastal liberal's life when a later-to-be-Trump supporter wanted a garrulously friendly conversation, and sensing that this rough person would be an annoyance that might take an hour, or a day, or years to get rid of, you did everything you could to ignore him. I have on multiple occasions. There are two sides to this story, and I guarantee that every person who shouted at a Trump rally has just as many stories about the humiliation of being on the other end of his reluctant monologue.
Humiliation is part of life's cycle; a mind that does not feel humiliated is a mind that creates events about which to be humiliated. You needn't look further than that if you don't understand internet flamewars. We gain our self-worth by the adversity we overcome, and therefore, I believe firstly that when there is insufficient adversity, the human mind invents adversity, and secondly that because issues of pride are invented adversity in which we control our own narrative, the human mind is programmed to be more assertive on issues of pride than on issues of survival.
And as I see it,, this is why thousands of rural Trump supporters are so much more assertive. They're more threatening and potentially more violent to those who disagree with them than urban African-Americans whose basic survival is continuously challenged, and yet whose violent elements direct themselves mostly at one another--often for slights of pride, rather than threaten to turn violence upon the millions of more fortunate whom they believe do not understand their mentalities. Police brutality alone cannot account for such a wide disparity.
The disparity can only be explained through that overused, constantly misused term, culture. Whatever a person's culture, it is their cultural pride that makes their life worth living, and is therefore worth dying and killing for. The American Culture Wars are the ultimate wars of pride, but forget pride for a moment: who has more reason for rage? A white liberal flirting with radicalism - entertaining that free speech is a manifestation of privilege, or a black resident of urban blight? The average resident of urban blight is too busy trying to survive to focus on their humiliations, they have no time to focus on their opinions. If such residents had time to make their opinions known, they'd neither find the average radical an advocate effective nor articulate.
Perhaps it's selfish, but most of us would rather die than go through life in a constant state of humiliation. The more pride we have, the more pride we have to lose. And who has lost more pride than a person who once was able to feel himself better than his fellow man merely by virtue of his identity?
I will bring up Eric Hoffer in these brief podcasts again and again, and in the book The True Believer, a book in which my esteem approaches true belief, he writes:
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause."
So why then reject the Vance diagnosis? The only reason I can think of is that it would cast an unflattering light upon our own culture. A light which would show that we claim excellence for our values that we lack in ourselves. and a light which already shines every time we write off all forms of capitalism as an engine of evil, append censorship directly into the classroom, make so little distinction between forms of sexual misconduct, reject the relatively often necessity of military involvement, and... of course, espouse liberalism and equality only to clearly view those who disagree with us with contempt and hatred.
Monday, September 9, 2019
When Facebook Becomes Blogging
Driving yesterday evening I put WYPR on, and in 3 seconds I realized that Prairie Home Companion was on, and Chris Thile was playing Bach's Chaconne on the mandolin, and it was dull as hell. You can tell that many of the most skilled non-classical musicians think classical music is dull as hell by the ultra-respectful way they play it. Yehudi Menuhin plays the same piece of music 100x more rock 'n' roll than Thile does. Start at 4:42, and try telling me or yourself that the next hundred seconds is not one of the most jaw-droppingly exciting things you've ever heard. It's completely disrespectful to the way Bach wrote it - he asked for no acceleration, he asked for very different bowing than Menuhin does here. Who cares? The point is that Menuhin's ideas work with Bach's clear intentions rather than against Bach. Bach wrote this piece right after his first wife died, and when Menuhin recorded this in 1956, the entire eastern hemisphere was still reeling from a half-century of death which showed every sign at the time of continuing. The one thing 'classical' music still has on the other genres is the simple level of tragedy its most serious exemplars still process. This ability to provide a space to process the larger than life events which are beyond our control, the rage, the tragedy, the shock, the horror, is why classical music still matters.
https://youtu.be/BApAF0DwSW8?t=282
https://youtu.be/BApAF0DwSW8?t=282
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