800 Words: Why Violence? (Part 1)

I.

When the Holocaust ended, my grandparents emerged from four years of hiding together in fields and barn houses eating a steady diet of raw potatoes.  My grandmother was already pregnant with my father, who would be born in the first week of 1946. When they returned to Bransk, my grandfather’s Polish hometown, they not only returned with my grandmother’s older sister, Rochel, in tow, but also with my father’s older sister, Tzipporah. For three years, they’d had to give up Tzipporah to a convent where she would either be turned in or be raised as a Catholic should they not return. Is there another Jewish family that made it out of the Holocaust intact?

There were three-thousand Jews in the town before the war, after the war there were thirty-seven – four of which were of my father’s family. At Rosh Hashana, my grandfather lead the prayers at the Bransk synagogue with his daughter sitting at his feet. By Yom Kippur, Tzipporah was dead from typhus. Not long after Yom Kippur, Rochel was caught in a crossfire between Polish nationalists and Soviet troops while food shopping, she was shot in the back and did not even live to see my father born.  

Of the thirty-five remaining, the plurality of the Bransker moved to Baltimore - their only connection to the town being that my grandmother (originally from another town) had much older sisters living here who emigrated long before the war. The Bransker all started various businesses together – working in each other’s stores, living in apartments together, lending each other money when the need came, and generally serving as one another’s extended family.

Business is a tough field, and depending on the field of business you choose, it can be a dangerous one. After surviving Hitler and Stalin, Pilsudski and Lenin, the Holocaust and the Purges, World War I and the Russian Civil War, the conscriptions of the Czarist Army and the Red Army, my grandparents lived through it all to taste freedom in the Land of Opportunity, and it blessed all the Baltimore Bransker with a prosperity in work and family that was as deserved for what they’d endured as it was unfair to the dead they left behind. And yet even here in the Land of Opportunity, two of the original Bransker were murdered in cold blood a full quarter-century into their American lives. In both cases, the murderers were probably contracted, and the men who ordered their deaths were never apprehended. One of them was murdered in front of his own wife while she was tied up in their home. At the funeral, she threw herself on his coffin. The other’s body clearly showed signs of severe torture. When he was found, his body was so severely burned that he could only be identified by his dental records.

Tragedy begets tragedy. The inquity of the father is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, and when misfortunes happen to some people, their newfound vulnerability makes it more likely, not less, for other misfortune to happen to them.

II.

Newtown, Connecticut is a 90 mile drive from where I went to boarding school. It was a school for kids who had ‘bad attitudes’ and fucked up their lives with drugs, or sex, or simply bad grades (take a guess…). It was April of my first year that Columbine happened. I have very vivid memories of the trouble a kid I was friendly with got into for saying that while he didn’t agree with what the Columbine murderers did, he could understand why they did it. Though I didn’t say it at the time, I absolutely agreed with him.

Perhaps Columbine was the retaliation of two nerds against bullies who made their life hell, or perhaps Columbine was simply the work of a sociopath and his naïve accomplice. But either way, there was something about Columbine that couldn’t help but speak to nerds of my generation. Within the myopia of high school social life, retaliatory murder is at least a legitimate fantasy.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold could so easily have been Hyde students. In a parallel universe, maybe they were my best friends. Perhaps they were even me. Who knows what any one of us ‘lost souls’ might have become at our lowest ebbs with easy enough access to guns, and explosive components, and improper medication, and too much weed and booze and worse drugs, and even to the experience of an excessively violent video game or movie at the wrong moment?

In the thirteen-and-a-half years since Columbine, there have now been thirty mass shootings in America that resemble Columbine in outline if not in particulars. And who knows how many others have been stopped? Columbine happened on April 20^th, 1999 – doubly significant to many possessing violent ideologies because April 20^th is also Hitler’s birthday. Ten days later, on the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide, schools in Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan New Jersey, and DC, had to close so they could investigate potential threats. On May 13^th of the same year, four middle school children forced their principal at gunpoint to call an assembly at which they planned on mowing down their classmates prior to killing themselves – they were stopped only because a kid they tried to enlist turned them in before they could enact the plan. On May 20^th, a high school student in Georgia injured six kids with a gun, he then put the gun in his mouth as though he was about to shoot himself, but didn’t pull the trigger. On June 14^th, a 13-year-old girl in Florida was indicted on a scheme to kill her teachers and classmates. Three days after Columbine, she showed her friends a map of the school’s surveillance system, a hitlist of people in the school she’d drawn up, and a getaway plan.

That was just the first two months after Columbine. On February 5^th, 2001, there were three kids arrested for planning a high school attack. At their homes were found bomb material and ammunition, an assault rifle, school floor plans, and White Supremacist drawings. Exactly a month later, a fifteen year old kid killed two students and injured another thirteen after telling other students he was going to go on a shooting spree in retaliation for being bullied. After police officers arrived at his home, they had to remove seven rifles. In Kansas, there were five kids arrested for plotting a copycat killing on Columbine’s seventh anniversary. On the tenth anniversary of Columbine, a copycat killing was barely stopped in England within a few days of the anniversary. When the police raided the teenagers houses, they found eighteen months worth of detailed notes on schematics of their school and local shopping mall, how to build bombs, and how to build the most efficient firearms.  In North Carolina there was a kid who was described as ‘obsessed with Columbine’ before he killed his father and fired shots at his school; in Montreal there was a killer of one and wounder of 20 who liked to play an internet video game called ‘Super Columbine Massacre’ which simulated the massacre in Littleton.

And we haven’t even gotten to Virginia Tech.

III.

There was one story in Virginia Tech, perhaps the most important story, which was completely ignored. The reasons for it are not difficult to understand – few Americans have a personal stake in a story like Liviu Librescu, but the fact that the massacre can be measured in double digits rather than triple is almost entirely due to a single old man whom nobody honored highly enough after the massacre’s occurrence.

When the Holocaust ended, Liviu Librescu was 15. As a Jew he had lived in the Foscani ghetto and was conscripted to work in a labor camp in a town called Transnistria. After surviving the Holocaust, Librescu was repatriated to Communist Romania – a country not only still beset by yet another totalitarian ideology, but historically already one of the most anti-semitic countries in Europe. Nevertheless, even in this toxic environment Librescu managed to graduate from the Bucharest Polytechnic University with a degree in applied mechanics, and eventually earned a Master’s Degree and a PhD. From 1953 to 1975, Librescu was one of the most respected scientific researchers in his country, but his career was forestalled because he refused to join the Communist party and was accused of harboring ‘Israeli sympathies.’ When he requested permission to immigrate in 1976, he was declared person non grata by the Romanian Academy of Science, fired from all positions and titles, and unable to find work. All that saved him was an academic paper on material dynamics that he managed to get smuggled into Holland, which drew such international attention that the Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, made a personal call to the Romanian dictator, Nikolai Ceausescu, to request that Librescu be allowed to emigrate to Israel. He taught for seven years at Tel-Aviv University and the Technion in Haifa before being offered a sabbatical position at Virginia Tech, whereupon the esteem proved so mutual that Librescu moved to Blacksburg, Virginia in 1986 and never left.

Liviu Librescu survived the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Georgiu-Dej, and Ceausescu. Those who knew him testified to a limitless intelligence and an equally limitless modesty. No professor in the history of Virginia Tech ever published more papers. He was on the editorial board of seven scientific journals and served as a guest editor for five more. And yet when this unlikely attack happened in the idyllic surroundings of rural Virginia, it was this legendary star professor, this Holocaust survivor who probably saw endless death before and after he was the same age as his students, who blocked the door with his own body, yelling at his students to hurry out the window of his classroom. Librescu was shot five times through his classroom door, and by the time the Virginia Tech gunman got past Librescu, only one student remained. We don’t know how long Seung-Hui Cho was distracted by Librescu’s act of heroism, or how many more lives Professor Librescu saved by distracting Seung-Hui Cho with a nearly futile task for so long. Could the death toll have gone into the hundreds?

The day on which Columbine happened was April 20^th, Hitler’s Birthday. The day on which Virginia Tech happened was April 16^th, Holocaust Remembrance Day. And yet the victory of this auspicious day belonged to a Holocaust survivor.  It took a person who’d seen more than his share of death to know what to do in such a situation and assume an act of undaunted, undersung heroism, that minimized the casualties that day. Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust, the postwar reprisals, the crackdowns of two iron-fisted Romanian dictators, and the rockets from the Lebanese Civil War, only to be gunned down in America. And yet it was only his knowledge of death and tragedy that allowed us to celebrate more life. 

For the Five Great Musicians Who Died This Week Part 1

Heaven clearly needed a benefit concert this week, so no less than five musicians of world importance died. There’s simply too much to write about all important musical figures who died this week. So rather than try, I’ll write a paragraph for each and let the music do the talking:

For Dave Brubeck (1920-2012): First of all, let me point out Le Malon’s wonderful guest post that he did last week to commemorate the old legend. But let me also add one thing, one which Le Malon will no doubt remember quite well. For me, as I suppose is true for many tens of thousands of others, memories of Dave Brubeck involves after-parties galore. The cheap beer and boxed wine would be accompanied by whatever indy music White Stripes white noise was fashionable between the years of 2001 and 2009, but the afterparty was where the good stuff was brought out, and usually that meant scotch and jazz. Short of Coltrane, I don’t think any musician was more featured on those playlists than Brubeck – at least not in my life soundtrack.

In Your Own Sweet Way

Strange Meadowlark

Koto Song

St. Louis Blues

Three to Get Ready

Fujiyama

A Full Live TV Studio Concert  in 1961

For Charles Rosen (1927-2012) - Everything about Charles Rosen bespoke the ultimate refinement. The ease with which he unraveled the most complicated technical problems on the piano, the dazzling manner in which he unraveled the thorniest problems of music theory in prose just simple enough to be understood and just dense enough to remind you how extremely learned he is; the plush Upper-East Side accent of his superbly articulate interviews, the (apparent) excellence of his French cooking; the eternal-seeming index of subjects ad nauseum which he wrote about for the New York Review of Books, and the honor roll of piano, language, and poetry students he taught both privately and at schools as venerated as MIT, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Oxford. Charles Rosen was the pie in the collective face of every person who despairs (often rightly) that musicians are uncurious idiots outside of their chosen métier. There was not a single vulgar bone in Charles Rosen’s body, and while he was a pianist of towering strengths, it was also his greatest (and perhaps sole) limitation. His playing was startlingly intelligent with effects seemingly executed with the same ease by which we laymen put on a CD. He was the model of good taste and the perfect pianist for connoisseurs of his generation, a Schnabel-like classics specialist just vulgar enough to be a superb Chopin and Liszt pianist (um gottes willen!) but not vulgar enough to play Rachmaninov or Prokofiev. This refusal to indulge in any mannerism which smacked of the masses was not a virtue and should not be celebrated as such. It was an excuse to renounce the better part of a musician’s individuality, and as a result, Rosen’s playing sounded like the ivory ideal heard in your own head – the realization of a dream, but telling you little you didn’t know already.

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata – Final Movement

Selection’s from Bach’s  Art of the Fugue

An arrangement of Chopin’s Minute Waltz with an extra line of thirds for greater virtuoso display – by Rosen’s equally legendary teacher in his era, Moritz Rosenthal.  Would that we had more from him like this and a few fewer Hammerklaviers. Here is some more unadulterated Chopin.

Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy – called by some the hardest piano piece in the standard repertoire, and apparently recorded when he was eighty-three!

Mozart on the pianoforte – Rosen was twenty-eight when he made this recording. He later became quite disparaging of trends towards historical performance practice.

Scarlatti on the pianoforte

Night Fantasies – written for him by his good friend, Elliott Carter – the equally upper-east side patrician composer of atonal music who lived to be 103 and died merely a month before him.  

The awesomely articulate Rosen in a radio interview.

Terrible Hannukah Songs Playlist

Christmas envy provokes the worst in Jews. Nowhere moreso than in the horrible, horrible, horrible music Hannukah provokes.

Ocho Kandelikas  (has to be the champion, worst Hannukah song ever. Thank god it's in Ladino, an even deader Jewish language than Yiddish.)

Light One Candle (Peter, Paul and Mary hathos award) 

I Have a Little Dreidel (Obvious)

Chanukah oh Chanukah (equally annoying in English, Hebrew and Yiddish)

Sevivon Sov Sov Sov

Eight Days of Hannukah (Written by Orrin Hatch. Yes, THAT Orrin Hatch...)

Candlelight 

The Rocky Hora Hannukah Song (sigh... why do i feel a moral obbligation after seeing this to do this song with my chorus next year?)

Those Were the Nights

I Gotta Feeling Hannukah

Hanukkah Hey Ya!

Miracle (The Maccabeats. Of all the embarressing Jewish ripoffs of Christian Rock, The Maccabeats must be the most annoying on the planet. At least they are now that Debbie Friedman's no longer with us...)

I am a Latke  (On second thought, this is the worst holiday song ever written. It would be awful without it, but a hundred Jewish children singing about being burned alive puts it over the top. )

They have the Hallelujah Chorus, we have I Have a Little Dreidel.

Guest Friday Playlist by Le Malon: For Dave Brubeck (1920-2012)

Dave Brubeck served in Patton's Army during World War II (during which he was actually ordered to form a band by superior officers impressed by his piano talents), he looked as square as any Nixon staffer, he is noted for being a devout Catholic and one of the most personally stable family men in the music business, and enjoyed Top 40 Chart success and platinum status for a jazz recording - a dubious honor usually reserved for Kenny G-style dreck. 

So to someone unfamiliar with his work, it might come as a surprise to hear that Brubeck is one of the most successful avant garde radicals of the past 100 years. 

His impact on American music rivals that of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Aaron Copland. He subverted all of our conceptions of what "jazz" meant, in the ideal sense of someone who rejected the notion that "classical," "jazz," "blues," etc were meaningful distinctions. He composed and performed music. And that music both transcended and upheld a tradition and a spirit that was fundamentally jazz. 

This is a man with boundless energy who did not want to be constrained by what he viewed as the overly rigid structures of any genre. So he used different time signatures. It used to be that the only deviation in jazz from 4/4 time was an occasional 3/4 waltz. He did plenty of those (damn well, I might add), but he then showed us that you could play in 5/4, 6/4, 7/4, 9/8, 13/4, and switch back and forth between time signatures in the same song and still keep that swing. He incorporated Turkish street folk, Mozart, and 12 bar blues into the same song. And as noted in a wonderful NPR remembrance today (click here and click on the audio link), his longtime sax player Paul Desmond was extremely intimidated at first by the man when he started to play in two different keys at the same time. 

All of this requires the technical mastery of a Julliard-Trained maestro (which he wasn't) while maintaining the wild improvisational spirit of a hot jazz club performer in 1920s Harlem. 

"Take 5" [5/4]
Let's start with the big hit. A melody so sweet and accessible it charted and caused thousands of Americans to start tapping their feet in 5/4 time without even realizing it. Deceptively simple sounding, it's actually tough as hell to play (as a mediocre high school jazz band pianist, I quickly learned that all Brubeck pieces were out of my league). This song was actually written by Desmond, it's important to note. 

"Blue Rondo a la Turk" [9/8 and 4/4]
This is the Turkish streek folk/Mozart/12 bar blues piece I mentioned earlier. This is the opening track on the "Time Out" album, and it blows your mind immediately. The version I link to is from his legendary At Carnegie Hall performance. In this version, the intensity blows the roof off. You can feel his manic energy and how it infects a quartet that wants to keep up - he's almost daring them the entire time. 

"Bossa Nova USA"
Another Carnegie Hall recording, and another example of Brubeck blending genres. 

"Unsquare Dance"
7/4 time!!! Also a hilarious video. From the Time Further Out album, where Brubeck played the tracks in numerical order by time signature. This song also made the Billboard Hot 100. 

"Elementals"
Brubeck's first orchestral composition; comprises the entire Side 2 of his album Time Changes. YouTube has it split in two parts for some reason. The link is to Part 1. Listen to both. This blew me away the first time I heard it. 

"All Night Long"
This is actually a trailer for a weird looking movie. But it includes both Brubeck AND Mingus. No further explanation needed.

"40 Days"

From 1966's Time In. He started playing around with religiously-inspired work at this time. More downbeat than some others, and somewhat eerie. 

"Cassandra"

Also from Time In. 

"Sermon on the Mount"
Click on the first track here. This is Brubeck with his sons, featuring his son Matthew on cello, recorded in 1997 on the album "In Their Own Sweet Way." 

There are many more great pieces I could share. Look them up. You can't go wrong. Dave Brubeck represents everything that is great about American music. It is a fusion of cultures, styles, and techniques. And much like our country as a whole, our music is best displayed and appreciated when all of the component parts are pieced together. And the great thing that Brubeck always understood was that new components are added to the mix every day. Music doesn't stand still. And Dave Brubeck never did, not even for a second.

800 Words: Best of the Year (Part 2)

Worst (cultural) Experience of the Year: Rewatching 90’s Action Movies

The 90’s was the Golden Age of the Hollywood Action Movie. When the 90’s began, Spielberg had just wrapped up the third Indiana Jones movie. When it ended, Peter Jackson had yet to finish Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and George Lucas was only beginning to screw up his legacy with the Star Wars Prequels. The implications of the Spielberg/Lucas revolution were felt as never before or since in Hollywood, and it looked for a time as though special effects could be worked into the fabric of great movies as an enhancer for greatness rather than a substitute. To see the promise which Special Effects and CGI held for movies, all one has to do is look at the imagination on display in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

And yet it never worked like that. Special effects meant that filmmakers had no limits on what they could imagine, so rather than Hollywood using CGI for greater imaginative flights, most Hollywood movies settled for far less imagination. And since special effects could help to stage the most spectacular effects known to the human eye, it would necessarily follow that most of the most spectacular effects humans can think of are violent effects.

This point was brought home to me just this Sunday as I tried to relax at home by watching The Fugitive - an R-rated action movie so beloved that it almost qualifies for most people as family entertainment, indeed I first saw it when I was 11 or 12 during a sleepover with both my friend and his parents. And yet within the first five minutes, we see a grizzly murder of a beautiful woman so graphically rendered that any hope of relaxation is impossible - followed by a 911 tape recording of her dying wheeze. There was simply no reason for this level of violence except to show that they can get away with it. The violence is not there because of any humane horror at the awfulness of murder, the violence is there because audiences find murder exciting. Well, sure, it’s exciting, but it’s also tragic and disgusting, and there’s no reason to make a spectacular movie with its most grisly scene at the beginning of it unless you want to use the graphic murder of a beautiful woman as a means to excite your audience.     

I had a similar sinking feeling recently when I watched The Rock. Your teenage self will thank you endlessly if you don’t watch it again. It is so much worse than you remember. From the corny one liners which Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery say when driving their cars alone in a chase scene to no one in particular, to the speeches about honor which various marines make to one another right before they kill each other real good; to the stereotype of the gay barber clearly meant to be offense, to the catchphrases thrown in with no context (“winners go home and fuck the prom queen”); to the psychotically violent threats of ex-marine turned terrorist solders, to the “satisfaction” of watching two of their faces get melted off by a chemical weapon. That last one was particularly terrible to think of as the prospect of chemical warfare’s resurgence in Syria is raised.

I have no problem with violence in movies. In fact, it would be just about impossible to create drama, and perhaps even comedy, without it. But violence has to be viewed with critical distance or else it has no purpose except to excite the people who watch it - perhaps even to imagine, or begin to consider, themselves able to perpetrate all the terrible things which 90’s movies let them see. Even if I opposed their methods, I understand the reasons behind the movement to censor violence in movies, music, and video games. I honestly would have little problem with its censorship it if I thought for a moment that it would be successful or wouldn’t be abused by people who want to ban violence wholesale. But violence cannot be contained. There are certain irrational parts of human behavior that are impossible to stop - sometimes, like in sex, those irrational behaviors are pleasant, sometimes, as in violence, they are loathesome.

The difference between the violence of 80’s action and horror and 90’s action and horror (don’t get me started on horror movies) is simple. The more CGI took over the film industry, the more excited people could be by the gorefests, which could reach a level of realism and disgust impossible in the days of cartoonish special effects. Indeed, there’s a whole subset of violent art movies - from directors like Gaspar Noe, Uwe Boll, Mel Gibson, Michael Haenke, Dario Argento (perhaps the all-time champion), and a whole industry of them in Asia - who try to dress up a taste for mindless violence as though they’re making great art. Sometimes even more prominent filmmakers indulge in the same violence fetish, you can see it in the work of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, David Fincher, The Wachowski Brothers, The Coen Brothers, and Jonathan Demme. Even Steven Spielberg is not immune to it. At least filmmakers like Eli Roth and Paul Verhoeven are upfront about the fact that they make trash. But to pretend that art exists to excite our animal instincts is not just high class barbarism, it’s an insult to our humanity and an incitement to evil. The inevitability of people being seduced by violence is one of the great tragedies of human nature - in fact you can make a great movie about that. In fact...many have.

An Approximately Ranked List of the Greatest Films of the Nineties I Can Think Of Right Now:

Before Sunrise
The Truman Show
The Apostle
All About My Mother
Forrest Gump (yeah, that’s right...Forrest Gump)
Schindler’s List
Rushmore
Pleasantville
Primary Colors
Husbands and Wives
Babe the Pig/Babe: Pig in the City
Shakespeare in Love
Boogie Nights
Deconstructing Harry
Trainspotting
Malcolm X
Quiz Show
The Madness of King George
Vanya on 42nd Street
He Got Game
Three Colors Trilogy
Crumb
Saving Private Ryan
The Remains of the Day
The Lion King
Bringing Out the Dead
Sunshine
A Simple Plan
Boys Don’t Cry
Bullets Over Broadway
Out of Sight
Eve’s Bayou
Groundhog Day
Jackie Brown
Les Miserables
Goodfellas
Dazed and Confused
The Insider
South Park
Election
What About Bob?
In the Name of the Father
Beauty and the Beast
Unforgiven
Casino
Pulp Fiction
Three Kings
Fargo
Aladdin
Out of Sight
The Big Lebowski
Fight Club
Heat

(I reserve the right to change this list as time goes on)

Best of the Year 2012 - Der Koosh

Prelude 

My recent "thing / criteria" when it comes to evaluating a show, movie, book, etc involves what isn't on the screen/text, but is a quintessential part of the universe.  By that I mean what you can speculate about that isn't part of the main plot, but may or may not contribute to it.  I don't mean trying to guess a character's motivation for a specific action, or what the director meant by a particular shot angle, or even what might've happened to a character if their arc peters out prematurely.  No, I mean more about thehistory, future, and off-'screen' present of the book/show/movie.  What happened to bring the world to this point, what's going on in the world that's hinted at but not part of the plot (distinguishing it from a loose end which is distinctly brought up, but left unresolved), and where is this universe going after we close the last page / the credits roll.

(Oh dear, I hope this doesn't mark me as a post-modernist.)

A great example of this principle is Babylon 5.  Yes, it was crippled by numerous problems: a borderline schizophrenic approach from the show's backers, bad sweaters (it was the 1990s, even if it was the 2250s-60s), and a ridiculously slow start that didn't really get moving until a quarter of the way through Season 2.  But the universe that existed was so expansive, that you can (and I have) speculate about so much of both a character's past and that of their species without having to actually touch what happened on screen at all.  The characters and their dialogue betrayed so much behind the curtain that wasn't seen, but was brought with the characters, that it creates a universe which you, the viewer, can fully participate.  This is one of the reasons why Doctor Whohas taken a step back for me as of late; everything's explained in such a nice little package that I might as well be consuming the show instead of participating.

Best Book You Read This Year

Hasn't really been an impressive slate this year, I'm afraid.  Too much election reading, not enough fiction reading.  I don't know if this really counts, but Great Paintings, by DK Art and Collectibles would probably be my choice.  They have a fine range of paintings included therein, and very in-depth analysis of each that is extensive without getting too abstract.

Best TV Show You Watched

Disclaimer: This is going to be a long one.  Settle in.

The show that I started watching this year, and the one to which I'm indelibly hooked, is decidedly not what most would expect from a straight, married man in his late-20s.  That being said, when I say that I'm hooked, I mean that I visibly worried for a few weeks when I first heard that the third season was slated for only 13 episodes, when the first two seasons had 26.  As an economist, I first did a rudimentary trend analysis and sent the following distressed email to my wife: "I DON'T LIKE THIS TREND.  WHAT IF THEY'RE GOING TO CANCEL IT?!!!!!"

Thankfully, one of the show's co-creators came out recently and said that there will be many more seasons, and that the season length will vary based on the demands of the plot. That, obviously, was an enormous salve for me, and it's allowed me to assuage my fears that a show that I've only recently discovered would be snuffed out so quickly.  So that bodes well.

When I mentioned in my prelude that what I enjoy about books, shows, movies lately is the ability to perceive the universe outside the main plot, character arcs, etc. without it being crammed into the book/show/movie, it's this element that this show has in spades.  Just the other day, I had a 20-30 minute discussion with a friend of mine (also a friend of the show) about whether one of the characters of the show was a benevolent autocrat in the Judeo-Christian God mold or a savvy Machiavellian operator.  Seriously, we worked out how you can interpret her actions over the course of the episodes, what her real intentions are vis-a-vis the main character (what's her long game?  Is this Janus trying to eliminate a potential rival for power, or manipulate the protagonist into being completely under her thumb so when said character realizes her full potential, she'll be a loyal vassal of this brilliant schemer?

Obviously, the show I'm talking about is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

This show may be the greatest children's show of all time, which is ironic because it's not really a children's show at all.  It's arguably the best thing on television right now.

No, I don't like Mad Men and I haven't seen Game of Thrones.  Deal with it.  

Why do I think it's the best thing on television right now beyond the fact that I watch very little non-British television nowadays andSherlock is off the air until late 2013?  The philosophy, the characters, the message, the comedy, and the complexity.

1) The philosophy.  As someone who's a huge Plato fan, I've never seen a show with stronger parallels to The Republic (despite the fact that the linked article is from one of my favorite blogs, I noticed the parallels independently).  The three types of ponies in the show obviously reflect Plato's three components of the soul - the telekenetic, studious (with magic obviously subbing in for reason/knowledge, exemplified by the main character Twilight Sparkle) unicorns as "gold" reason, the proud, militant (Fluttershy exempted) Pegasi as "silver" warrior spirit, and the commerce-focused, far more numerous earth ponies as "bronze" desire.

Not only is the philosophy spectacular, but its approach to religion is amazingly humanistic.  In one episode, the main characters play-act the "origin story" of the realm of Equestria, and what it took to get off the ground.  As you can imagine from the title of the show, teamwork was involved, but that's not what I want to point out.  The flag that the ponies raise at the end after they, on their own, come together is the same flag that they raise at the start of the show.  That may not seem like a big deal, but keep this in mind: on the flag are the two quasi-deities of Equestria: Princess Celestia (of the Sun) and Princess Luna (of the moon) - both recurring characters in the show.  The thing is that as far as the origin story is concerned, neither Celestia nor Luna has shown up yet, as the two of them are regularly cited as the reason by which Equestria is held in egalitarian harmony/balance.  What this is saying, in effect, is that the ponies, upon that first instance of working together and founding modern Equestria, created Celestia and Luna as deities to lend a quasi-religious sheen to ensure the success of their society.  This is an incredibly human (some might say cynical, as was brought up about Civilization V's introduction of religion as a cultural force) way to portray religion: that it was developed not out of divine inspiration, but that it evolved out of either conscious or unconscious understandings of society's needs and environmental considerations at large.

How often do you see that in what's nominally a children's show?

2) The characters.  In retrospect, I didn't have many female role models in media growing up.  In this show, there's several, all of whom have a very human realism about them.  Yes, they each have their distinctive, exaggerated character traits, but often entire episodes exist to help them break out of those archetypes, instead of crystallizing them: the bookish Twilight is forced to find a role without magic, the jock Rainbow Dash discovers the joys of reading after repeatedly making fun of "eggheads," etc.  Instead of over-emphasizing what makes the characters different, the show illustrates the complexity that exists within each of them, and challenges the very exaggerations which make the characters memorable in the first place.  In so doing, the show demonstrates just how complex we all are as human beings (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

As you can imagine, the overwhelming majority of characters in this show are female; in fact, there isn't a male non-comic relief character who shows up until the end of Season 2.  That being said, the characters themselves cover the gambit of the emotional spectrum quite well; the militant, competitive, quick-to-anger Rainbow Dash and the tough, hardworking farmhand Applejack exemplify many male characteristics on their own, and the rampant sarcasm that so many of the characters use is as common as any "bro" show would include.

3) The message.  This is absolutely one of the biggest selling points for me.  I knew I was hooked halfway through the second episode, when the characters are on a journey to discover a weapon capable of saving the kingdom.  I won't give too many spoilers, but they encourage an incredibly frightening scenario, and only emerge from it because one character encourages them to laugh in the face of fear.  This lesson really stuck with me, because it's something for so many children to learn.  What makes MLP so unique to me is that, unlike so many children's shows that simply ignore the presence of darkness or evil in the world, MLP fully embraces.  It's as if the show is saying, "Yeah, there are scary things out there, but here's how you can deal with them."  That sort of gritty realism coupled with a fundamentally optimistic look really meshes well.  The whole show is a reflection of that idea; often, the situations that the characters face have very real-world applications, and they don't shy away from showing both sides of a dispute (one episode in particular comes to mind, when the characters have to work through a land-use dispute between what are, essentially, Native Americans and cowboy settlers).  Further, the lessons at the end are not your simple, run-of-the-mill, borderline-useless "be nice to everybody" platitudes.  Through example, the show shows kids how to deal with real-life problems.

As a future father, I fully plan on importing those messages to my kids.

4) The comedy.  Again, growing up, the closest thing I saw to a woman being a victim of physical comedy (in a non-cruel way) was Bugs Bunny in one of his many cross-dressing affairs, or maybe Lucy.  Regardless, they were few and far between.  But with MLP, the fact that there's almost exclusively an all-female cast makes that a virtual necessity.  The fact that it's a necessity doesn't take away from the fact that the show isn't afraid of having its characters, say, get hit by a rapidly-opened door or fall head-first into a giant puddle of mud.  I don't point this out for some sort of schadenfreude, but rather because it shows female characters in a "real," non-dainty way.  The show's characters are confident enough that they won't erupt into tears when having, say, a bowling ball hit them on the head (that episode dealt with the paradoxical nature of time travel, but I digress).  It's a very real, human way to portray women, and one I don't see that often.

5) The complexity.  As if the above hasn't convinced you that this isn't some superficial sparkly girly-girl show, let me make one last point.  While there are far too-few "arc" episodes in a given season in my mind, the ones that exist definitely build on the idea that the characters are really evolving.  In a cartoon, this is tough to show because the characters aren't getting "older" or developing physically.  However, each season premiere and finale brings the characters up against tougher challenges, pushing them further and further away from their comfort zones, dealing with both existential crises and political / military ones, really asking what are, essentially, characters in their late teens / early twenties (Twilight Sparkle, the show's main protagonist, definitely strikes me as a graduate student) to grapple with problems far above what you'd expect their scope to be.  The fact that these characters are called on again and again, not only by the religious/political authority (Celestia) but by the earthly authority (the town's mayor) for important, leadership-dependent responsibilities demonstrates a real trust in "the younger generation" that is far removed from today's sickening Baby Boomer-centric slurping in the nation's politics, op-ed pages, business elite, etc.

In short, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a phenomenal show.  It contains all the symbolism, comedy, drama, undertones, and fundamental optimism that we expect from great art.  That's right, I'm a huge fan.  And I'm not alone. 

Best Movie You Saw

Midnight in Paris. In fact, it's the best movie I've seen in quite a few years, let alone just this one.  Let's go through the awesomesauce:

1) The casting.  Boy, does Woody Allen know how to put together a dynamite cast.  Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Dali (Adrien Brody) positively steal the show.  And throwing in Carla Bruni as a Museum Guide?  That's just unfair.  If Best Casting was a category at the Academy Awards - and it should be - this movie would've won it by such an overwhelming margin that the Academy wouldn't have even bothered nominating anyone else.  I actually didn't mind Owen Wilson being cast as Owen Wilson Gil Pender because, frankly, his character doesn't have the stature that just oozes out of the Fitzgeralds, Hemmingway, Stein, Dali, Gaugin, Degas, Toulouse-Leutrec, et al.  Therefore, he shouldn't be the one driving the plot, even if he is the protagonist.

2) The setting.  I mean, c'mon.  I'm well aware what our dear blog host thinks about Paris, but the shots they take in that movie - both in the present and the 1920s - are just architecture porn.  As Arnost Lustig might say, "Ohhhhh, Paris, she soooooo beautiful.  Right now, little boys touch themselves thinking about how beautiful she is."

3) The characters.  Not just the ones based on real people (because, again, Hemingway and Dali, WHOA) but even the fictional characters.  I've already gone briefly into Gil's merits, and I like that he grows enough over the course of the film to arrive at the film's main realization organically.  Good writing, for me, demands as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that the writer leaves a trail of bread crumbs that's small enough not to actively notice, but once the big reveal happens, they shine so brightly that you wonder how you missed them in the first place.  And Woody does a masterful job here with Adrianna as muse / plot device.

4) What Isn't Seen.  See my disclaimer.  There are so many avenues to go here, not the least of which is that the movie is unique as a romantic comedy because the romance is Gil falling in love with Paris, and that the two women with whom we expect him to connect with, he doesn't.  It's only at the end of the movie we see the beginning of a romance.

5) Carla Bruni.  Yes, again.

Best Music You Listened To

Regina Spektor's new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats.  I love Regina's voice, quirky non-sequitrs, mood, beat, you name it.  Just a solid, solid album.  I don't really know how to talk about music, and I barely can discern lyrics as-is, so I won't try to push any further than that.

Best Misc.

I'd go with "best political blog," but really couldn't tell you if Ezra Klein's Wonkblog or Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight makes more sense, as they're both pretty equal in my mind, be it the former's excruciating detail in explaining policy or the latter's excruciating detail in explaining polling.  My inclination is to go with Silver, since Wonkblog pretty much wins every year and Nate Silver had to deal with far more dumb and non-sequitur attacks from the "unskewed" crowd than Klein did, so I'll give it to Five Thirty Eight on Level of Difficulty points.

Worst Social Media Trend

When someone you know on Twitter or Facebook posts some stupidly radical / uninformed / unsourced quote, anecdote, or statistic, captions it "Interesting..." and leaves it at that.  No defense, no criticism or endorsement, no explanation, nothing.  I point this out now because this trend was rife during the primaries and the election season in general.  I can't describe how many times I saw a story pop up on my feed along the lines of "Obama's trying to institute martial law - here's how" or somesuch nonsense.  I'm aware that truth is the first casualty in politics, so I shouldn't be surprised.  I suppose it just feels worse this year because Twitter/Facebook "chain emails / stories" are so much more prevalent nowadays, and it's doubly irritating to see them from people you didn't think were initially political.

I'm not saying that people should go out intentionally picking fights on Facebook.  That being said, what you post is, unless you explicitly criticize it, an endorsement of what you believe.  After all, it's going out under your name.  If you're confused or unsure about what you're posting, either 1) don't post it until you've figured it out, or 2) explain why you're confused or intrigued.  Give some context for people so, if someone comments, they have something to play off of instead of trying to tease out your cowardly non-position.  And if you get upset at people for calling you out on it, then maybe you should think about what you're sharing before you share it.  Maybe those few seconds of thought will make you realize that it's really not your belief...or maybe it is, and you can at least articulate it.  What social media needs aren't thoughtless linking to a million stories - things are already cluttered enough - but thoughtful, reasoned, civil opinions to provide context for the reams of information thrown at us every day.  People follow / subscribe to you because they want your thoughts, not just what you randomly link to without any sort of context

800 Words: Best of the Year Part 1

I don’t like Best of the Year lists. Not only do they promote false claims of authority in bloggers, but the lists also forces bloggers to go through thousands of mediocre things that are not worth the time to examine for the sake of completion. Such a list does not allow for any of the flexibility which good writing requires. When creating lists, no longer do you write because you’re moved to write about something - whether in love or hate. When making a ‘best or worst of the year list’, you’re moved to write out of a sense of obligation. What should be done with inspirational fire is done by rote.

So as with last year, only in two posts rather than 40, I’m going to change this pseudo-objective ‘best of the year’ list to a more honest ‘Best Things I Read/Saw/Heard/Watched this year. This won’t be about things which happened this year, this will be about things which happened to me.

But there’s a further problem. One of the worst parts of constant writing is that you lose a bit of your ability to be surprised. As you write your reactions, you contemplate yourself all the more frequently, and you begin to ever but heavily know yourself. If you’re thinking constantly, the wall of resistance to new ways of thinking becomes insurmountable - not because you’ve closed off new paths, only because you’ve already tried every path of which you’ve already thought, and a person becomes understandably circumspect at the thought of walking down a path he knows will lead to a dead end.

When I think of my formative cultural experiences, I realize they’re nearly all in the past now. It’s a terrible thing to know what you like, because you know precisely what will not impress you only to have your knowledge confirmed yet again. Those early, formative, semi-religious experiences of music, and movies, and books, which raise your pulse and hormones to exalted levels happen ever-more seldomly as that critical voice nags at you that there’s no way Hamlet could ever catch the conscience of the King with a play - especially one which sucks as much as The Murder of Gonzago.

Every new experience becomes an act of faith that somehow, some way, you’ll find a means to rekindle the old fire. And the worry becomes inevitable that as you grow older, kindling will become harder and harder.

Best TV You Watched This Year: Louie



It’s easiest when the rules of what works are just being written. We still in the process of understanding what works on television, and being present at the Idiot Box’s creation is one of the most thrilling things about being alive in our time. Think about it, we were a generation that learned how to be kids by watching Bart Simpson, learned how to behave like an adolescent by watching Jerry Seinfeld, and learned about what happens if we don’t graduate college by watching Tony Soprano. It’s a pretty awesome time to grow up.

Mad Men was the perfect show to watch when you were 25 - you’re finally finished with school, you’re free to create yourself in any way you wish, only to realize that even when you’re completely free to be yourself - life is still as disappointing as ever. And if Mad Men is the perfect show for 25, then Louie is the perfect show for hitting 30. The responsibilities pile up, the sense of grievance at how your life’s turned out settles in, the realization hits that you’re either using others or being used, and you begin to pursue the thankless work which success entails simply as a means to spite a world that tells you you’re destined to fail.

(Spoiler alert for this paragraph) In Season 3 of Louie, we’re forced to watch as Louie gets dateraped by a woman, chickens out of a reunion with his estranged father, chickens out (mutually) of a fling with a guy, has to decide whether to make an unspoken suicide pact with another woman he dates, is put through an endless series of personal humiliations so he can have the mere chance of landing his dream job, watch himself powerlessly as his daughter gets bullied by other girls in her class, and watch just as powerlessly as the woman with which he’s in love with dies within minutes of their reunion.  

If Louie is the best comedy since The Simpsons, and I’m prepared to argue with anybody who says it’s not, then it’s the best because it’s the most painful. We laugh so that we may not cry. Louie is the cruelest show on television, but unlike the cruelty of so many other shows, Louie is cruel so that it can impart the most amazing, inspiring dignity to its subject. The subject is not Louie, the subject is us. Louis CK uses the experiences of his own life as a standin for all of our lives and how fate conspires to spit on our fondest hopes. And yet, like Louie, we go on hoping against hope that in the future, life will do better by us.

Best Book I Read This Year: Piles of Eric Hoffer



Just like there are TV shows for every segment of life, there are books and writers too. When I was of college age, I loved writers who were cynical solipsists. Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Philip Roth, and Kafka for fiction, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman for politics, Pauline Kael for film, Robert Hughes for art, Richard Taruskin and Alan Rich for music. These writers were perfect for me. People are stupid, I suppose I reasoned, and deserve to be known as such. In their distinct ways, each of the above writers were poets of contempt, and contempt was my favorite emotion during that period of my life. When I was in the midst of my twenties, I graduated to writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Michael Kinsley, Jonathan Chait, Tim Page, and David Thomson who, in their own ways, would humiliate their subjects just as often, but viewed their subjects as deserving of compassion in spite of their stupidities. Now that I’m on the other side of thirty, I’m tending towards more and more non-fiction. The writers which I now try to read exhaustively now are Stefan Zweig, Amos Oz, Isaiah Berlin, Bohumil Hrabal, Roger Ebert, Alan Rich, Robert Christgau, and Eric Hoffer. This is the first time in my reading life that writers speak to me who do not seem to view life as a curse. They almost, not quite, seem to view it as a blessing, or at least as a mixed one.

Among non-fiction writers, Eric Hoffer is now my greatest hero and an ambition to which I can only hope to aspire. Hoffer was no Intellectual with a Capital I - he worked his entire life as a San Francisco longshoreman who wrote down his thoughts when he got home from work. Hoffer never went to college, spent the Great Depression on Skid Row, and wrote down all his favorite passages of the books he read on index cards. He maintained his commitment to learning through the toughest imaginable circumstances.  Rather than tailor his style as an academic might to an audience of academics, or even as a journalist might to an audience of like-minded readers, Hoffer had no such luxury. He was forced to write his books in such a way that any curious amateur could not only understand it, but be elevated to the level of his material. The result is a style of aphoristic essay for which Montaigne himself (Hoffer’s greatest hero) would be proud to call his own.

One of the great ironies is that the alleged Marxist ideal of the cultured worker who lives by his hands during the day and by his pen at night should find its greatest flowering in America in the hands of a philosopher so contemptuous of communism that he regarded it as interchangeable with fascism and fanatical Christianity. Hoffer was no Conservative: in the above interview he refers to then-Governor Reagan as a ‘B-Movie actor who wants to run California on a B-Movie budget.’ But he was unapologetic about his belief in the greatness of American individualism, and merciless in his critiques of those philosophies which negated the individual.

Whether in The True Believer or The Ordeal of Change or The Temper of Our Time, Hoffer believed in the aim of a dippy concept like ‘self-esteem.’ But in Hoffer’s hands, an abused concept like ‘self-esteem’ has real meaning. Like the term ‘ego’, self-esteem has taken on a meaning that signifies almost the opposite of the meaning for which the word was created. We do not aspire to high self-esteem, we aspire to self-esteem, period. And if we do not achieve self-esteem, nobody fills that void by inflating their sense of esteem, we fill that void by convincing ourselves that the self does not matter. And therefore, those of us who do not believe we matter attach ourselves to groups which we believe do matter. God only knows how Hoffer would have lain into the Tea Party...

According to Hoffer, we gain our self-esteem by succeeding at that with which we are put on earth to do. Those of us who can partake in those activities which give us contentment and joy, whatever those may be, are people who’ve realized their sense of self. Those who cannot partake in those activities shall find no substitute. It is difficult to believe that many people were more tested in that regard than Hoffer himself - an uneducated blue-collar worker who never married and didn’t write his first book until just before his fiftieth birthday. And therefore, his life, his writing, his entire legacy, should be an inspiration to everyone. Writing was what he was put on earth to do, and he wrote on in spite of all life's attempts to deposit him in the least sympathetic surroundings for his joy.

Best Music I Listened To This Year: Evan Goes Back To The Proms


I went back to London this year, and everything was new again. If you’re like me and need a sense of self-esteem, go to The Proms. It’s the only place in the world where every complaint I have about the classical music ghetto of my youth has even a prayer of being redressed. The Proms is the one place in the entire world where classical music seems to matter so much that it’s given to the public as a fundamental right. 5-quid seats, standing room in the front, a 6,000 person capacity audience a night, and at very least one concert once-a-night every night for two months. If an angel assured me that The Proms tickets would be available in heaven, it’s probably the one incentive that could make me behave in this world like a righteous man.


(Daniel Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at The Proms. If you look five rows back you can see me... Well, I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.)

On the day I arrived in London, I got to see Daniel Barenboim conduct his orchestra of Israeli and Arab youth in the piece he performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in a free concert on the day the Berlin Wall fell. If you believe that music means more than a bunch of notes and symbols, an experience like that is unmissable. If you don’t believe that music is more than mere music, it’s difficult to believe you still could after an experience like that. I’m not a knee-jerk Daniel Barenboim fan, but that concert was one of the most inspiring experiences I’ve ever had in the concert hall, and can make you believe that maybe, maybe, just maybe... music can build the bridge that is more than a self-congratulatory symbolic one.  


(Vaughan Williams 6. Amazing.)

After three weeks in France and a rather uninspiring Boulez concert (Boulez couldn’t even show up, “Bosh Flimshaw!” as Mr. Burns would say), I returned to the Proms to hear a program I’ve long dreamed about (conducting or listening to): the three middle symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams on the same program. Vaughan Williams wrote his three middle symphonies when already in his sixties and seventies - old RVW was forced to watch as darkness descended upon both his personal life and the life of his country. The fourth symphony is a harrowing, boiling piece of music - the rare moment of rage from this most sober composer is exhilarating. RVW wrote the fourth as Hitler began conquering Europe and as his wife began her descent into the long illness which would kill her a full fifteen years later. The fifth was written during wartime and after Vaughan Williams began to take up with the mistress who would become his second wife. The fifth is as consoling and humane as the fourth is brutal. But imagine my astonishment that after eighty minutes of tremendously difficult music, Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony reserved the finest for last. Vaughan Williams’s 6th symphony is a postwar symphony, full of Cold War anxiety and written as RVW cared for his first wife on her deathbed. It’s been suggested by some that the supremely mysterious final movement is a depiction of earth after the nuclear apocalypse, and by others that it is a depiction of his dying wife. Whatever the truth, it was an absolutely extraordinary end to yet another of the greatest concerts of my life.


(Petrenko does Manfred...amazing...but...)

And yet the wonders did not cease. A mere two days later I was back in the Royal Albert pit to hear Vladimir Jurowski conduct the London Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. For two years, I’ve listened to a Proms performance from Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic practically on loop - first from a radio relay, then on youtube. I could not have imagined better advocacy for this great yet flawed semi-symphony by Tchaikovsky. But that was before I heard Vladimir Jurowski do it live. Vasily Petrenko is a young Russian conductor who reminds one of those supervirtuoso Russian pianists who possess the ability to pull off effects of color and dexterity that make your hair stand on your head, even as you wonder if they're capable of doing anything less superficial. But Vladimir Jurowski is a great conductor who happens to be Russian, with a Carlos Kleiber-like ability to hone in on the composer’s precise intent. No conductor since Kleiber has a more uncanny musical sense, but like Kleiber, his talent is so huge that the lack of spontaneity is almost crippling. To a conductor like Jurowski, the idea that an interpretation can happen spontaneously is a horror - and that’s what made his Manfred an amazing experience. No matter how rambling the passage, Jurowski controlled it with an iron hand, and therefore nobody in the hall was able to tear their ears away from the black hole of emotional darkness contained within every bar of this black pearl of a work for even a moment. Wait until that performance gets to youtube...



(HMS Pinafore with Sir Charles Mackerras in 2005)

It would have been fantastic had Sir Charles Mackerras lived long enough to conduct a semi-staged Yeoman of the Guard at the Proms, as he inevitably would have if given five more years. Jane Glover is a competent replacement, but she clearly does not have Mackerras’s inspirational spark. For years, I’ve liked G&S well enough, but never have I loved their operettas enough to seek them out. The continued appeal of G&S is easily enough explicable - sublime silliness behind a flimsy pretext of high seriousness. But The Yeoman of the Guard is the only opera by G&S which aims at a humanity beyond the Muppets-type shenanigans. It’s fun for a night at the theater, still more fun to act in (I’ve been the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance, and played in the pit for Mikado) but those who don’t know G&S shouldn’t have to put everything down to find it. Except, that is, for The Yeoman of the Guard, which I did not know before this production. It is the only G&S operetta that is anything but a comedy. A comedy it certainly is, but a tragic comedy in which the main character’s ending is extraordinarily sad. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I didn’t see it coming, and it was so affecting that I literally sobbed as I applauded. It is the only G&S show with more weight than a piece of paper, with an almost Mozartian sadness that pervades the whole show, and a stunning score with which Sullivan's great musical ancestor couldn't possibly be delighted. Indeed, had Mozart lived eighty years later, perhaps Yeoman of the Guard is precisely the sort of tragicomic opera he'd have written.


(Vanska doing Nielsen 4 in a 2005 performance that’s still a benchmark for me)


And finally, we come to two heroic symphonies. Carl Nielsen’s music does not have Beethoven’s diversity. But Nielsen is the only composer since Beethoven to share the same towering moral vision. Every note of Nielsen’s symphonies is an heroic affirmation that with enough perseverence and fortitude, a better world shall be built. Even if he might be wrong, we need to believe that Carl Nielsen is right. It is nearly impossible to view the fifth symphony as anything but a depiction of World War One, with all its terrors and graphic suffering intact, you can hear the march of soldiers, the whizzz of the bullets, the terror of the battlefield, and the hymns which beg an uncaring God to save us and those whom we love. The second half-movement of the symphony is one of the most moving works of art ever created, during which Nielsen instructs a snare drum player to improvise around an orchestral hymn ‘as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra.’ It is an affirmation of order and meaning in the midst of indifferent chaos and violence, and it is one of the great glories of all music. Osmo Vanska is not equally great in everything he conducts, but he is, among other things, the greatest living Nielsen conductor. No other living conductor who champions Nielsen (not even Blomstedt) is as reliably in possession of the fire it takes to breath life into these Beethovenian masterpieces. I expect it will be decades before I’m as moved or thrilled or shaken by Nielsen as I was by this performance by Osmo Vanska and the BBC Symphony.



(The closest I’ll ever get to watching ‘me’ conduct at the Proms. Andris Nelsons)

And finally, the night before I left, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony and Andris Nelsons. There is enough to say about Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony to fill an entire 4,000 word post - don’t think I haven’t thought about it. I occasionally wonder if this alleged piece of bombastic trash isn’t the greatest symphony written since Beethoven. Classical music lovers condescend to Shostakovich at their peril, and history will vindicate Shostakovich at their expense, even if contemporary fashion doesn’t vindicate him. But the greatest part of this concert was finally seeing Andris Nelsons live. …

There was something about watching the enthusiasm this uninhibited 34-year-old Latvian exhibits (is he the first conductor since Leonard Bernstein who star-jumps?), the half-a-dozen misplaced cues, the pool of sweat separating him from the first-desk stringplayers, the receding hairline and the already swelling beer-gut that makes me wonder - is this the best vicarious thrill I’ll get to watch myself conduct a major symphony orchestra? Nelsons is precisely the kind of conductor I love to listen to. Fearless in repertoire, fearless in interpretation, sloppy but always exciting. Vladimir Jurowski may be even more talented, but Jurowski is all control, and the result is the kind of perfect performance that provokes awe but no love of music. Nelsons is all enthusiasm, and there are all sorts of questionable choices Nelsons makes both as a conductor and as an interpreter, and yet when he succeeds, which is quite often, he works absolute magic. In a few years, he may take his place with Kubelik, Bernstein, Mitropoulos, Jarvi, Munch, De Sabata, and Rattle at the top of my personal pantheon.