Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Quote of the Day:
Le Malon: (describing the trailer for the new Aaron Sorkin show) BOLD ROGUE (who doesnt actually say bold things) stifled by the PEOPLE WHO FEAR BOLDNESS
Monday, April 2, 2012
800 Words: The Perils of Being a Relic at 30
For most of my life, I’ve heard that I was born in the wrong era – though nobody could seem to agree when the right one was. There are very few areas of my life in which I feel like I’m a person of my time. Most of my favorite music comes from the turn of the 19th century, the plurality of my favorite fiction writers from the turn of the 20th century, most of my favorite movies from the halfway point of the 20th, and even most of my favorite ‘popular’ music is pre-1970. My politics and religious views both come from other ages and are nearly as unfashionable today as most contemporary views would have been fifty or a hundred fifty years ago. Some people might say that these are not the views of a relic, they’re the views of a snob. Perhaps they’re right…
Nearly everything I believe in: Secular Enlightenment Judaism, Vital Center Liberalism, the importance of a humanist education, the ability to balance sublimity and fun, seems to be dying out. Jewish life, as life in every religion today seems to be, is bifurcating between believers and non-believers. Liberalism is increasingly seen even by the Left as a dirty word, inadequate to today’s demands – which only progressives can meet. Education is now a word that, at best, means extensive training in a highly specialized field without the ability to see anything in the context of others. And just as fun was banished from many older civilizations, the ability to experience anything deeper than fun seems in the final stages of being banished from ours. Video games have almost completely passed me by, gaming is something I’ve barely done throughout my life, most independent film leaves me cold, most sci-fi and fantasy books bore me. I’m as ill-equipped for 2012 as most people are ill-equipped for any other era.
I go on facebook and I see what other smart people ‘like,’ and I think to myself – ‘what am I missing?,’ or frankly more often, ‘what are they missing?’ I see all the which other upper-middle-class twenty and thirtysomethings are suppose to like: Blur, Wes Anderson, David Foster Wallace,…and those are only the one’s I’ve heard of, and I think to myself: How can anybody like this crap?
Who am I kidding? I was already as much a relic in 1990 as I am now. Twenty-two years later, the difference is that I’m more sure of it than ever, grumpier about it, and much prouder of who I am. For a number of years, I concluded the problem was me. I spent much of my adolescence in a hilariously desperate attempt to conceal my inner geek-among-geeks, mostly around the LD jocks I was placed in school with whom I worried might beat me up if they ever knew the ‘awful truth,’ which of course they knew anyway. Needless to say, these attempts were an abysmal failure. I was beaten up occasionally in spite of it, and I was probably lower in the social pecking order than I’d have been if I were proud about the things I loved.
Every era values a particular cultural sentiment too much - we can't help it. Sometimes it's romance, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy, sometimes epic, sometimes pastoral. At various points in our lives, our appetites for a particular genre are inexhaustible. And most often, what we like is simply a reflection of the culture that produced us.
I don't think it's any secret that we’re living in ironic times – at the end of a developing culture that stretches back to the First World War. All too many people seem to have no faith in families, friends, leaders, communities, the world at large. The culture in which we grew up is such common currency that we seem to have a pop-culture shorthand for every possible situation and emotion. Back in 1922, T. S. Eliot could ironically quote the references of his culture, and assume that a general public would understand most of them instantly. Nearly a century, Family Guy can quote a whole different set of references with the same irony and the same assumption that their audience will understand enough of them to keep tuning in. The difference is that it took 3000 years for the culture of The Waste Land to live a full life cycle before it T S Eliot could write a poem as a eulogy for it. It has been 90 years since The Waste Land was written, and in that time, an entire equivalent culture – a popular culture - supplanted Western highbrow culture, and lived an entire life cycle. What took three millennia to produce TS Eliot took only ninety years to produce Stewie Griffin.
I love irony as much as anyone, and like to think myself better at using it than at least 99 out of 100 people. But so much of what my prematurely aged ears hear in so much contemporary culture is irony in isolation; irony without context. In so much of the ‘art’ which current tastemakers love (those quotes are used as unironically as possible in the given situation), it is taken for granted that we should feel numb to any new development. Much music, however loud, has neither highs nor lows. Many movies, however clever, should not be made to move us or make us laugh too loud. I could name rock groups and movies and much else which display this malaise in abundance, but I have a feeling most people reading this could name even more. Only what I cite with disapproval and contempt, they cite with approval, sometimes even love. I simply don’t understand that.
The best which cultural history has to offer has irony in multitudes, but it also has empathy, comedy, romance, tragedy, bleakness and generosity of vision in equal measure. Preferably, the best art of all cultures can offer all that at the same time, making our responses to it forever ambiguous, making us be the judges of what we see, and forcing us to contemplate long and hard what we view. That is artistic greatness – be it Michelangelo or Matt Weiner.
We’re now growing up in an age when young kids not only find Beethoven stuffy, or Duke Ellington, they also have no use for The Beatles. We’re coming very soon to an era when music before Michael Jackson and Madonna does not exist, neither do movies before Star Wars, or TV before The Simpsons, or books before Lord of the Rings. Everything before them will be, at least to a stunningly large degree, antiques. Even The Simpsons might date – because how could a new generation possibly understand the cultural references of a culture they no longer inhabit?
Whether or not we realize it, popular culture recently pressed the reset button. We’re now talking about popular culture in terms that used to be reserved for classical culture. Rolling Stone has talked about rock music in classical terms for decades. But go to the Onion A.V. and read their reviews of old TV shows, they’re every bit as reverent (and perhaps as stuffy) as any literary criticism. The same might be said for any number of movie magazines, or reviews of Graphic Novels. One day, all too recently, America woke up to find itself a culture with a history. Watching The Godfather or listening to Sgt. Pepper was no longer a pleasure, it was a duty toward two of the founding documents of our civilization. In its wake, a new generation will rise up and find a new way to rebel. Perhaps they'll rebel with sincerity.
And just as in the final years of the previous culture, we rebel with excessive frivolity. They had The Charleston, we have booty drops. They had speakeasies, we have raves. They had the Lost Generation, we have Indy Hipsters. But nothing dates like the cutting edge. Enjoy these things while you can, because one day soon, these kids will grow up and have as much control over the culture as people just barely older than me do now. One day soon, you all are going to wake up to find yourselves every bit as much relics as I am.
Nearly everything I believe in: Secular Enlightenment Judaism, Vital Center Liberalism, the importance of a humanist education, the ability to balance sublimity and fun, seems to be dying out. Jewish life, as life in every religion today seems to be, is bifurcating between believers and non-believers. Liberalism is increasingly seen even by the Left as a dirty word, inadequate to today’s demands – which only progressives can meet. Education is now a word that, at best, means extensive training in a highly specialized field without the ability to see anything in the context of others. And just as fun was banished from many older civilizations, the ability to experience anything deeper than fun seems in the final stages of being banished from ours. Video games have almost completely passed me by, gaming is something I’ve barely done throughout my life, most independent film leaves me cold, most sci-fi and fantasy books bore me. I’m as ill-equipped for 2012 as most people are ill-equipped for any other era.
I go on facebook and I see what other smart people ‘like,’ and I think to myself – ‘what am I missing?,’ or frankly more often, ‘what are they missing?’ I see all the which other upper-middle-class twenty and thirtysomethings are suppose to like: Blur, Wes Anderson, David Foster Wallace,…and those are only the one’s I’ve heard of, and I think to myself: How can anybody like this crap?
Who am I kidding? I was already as much a relic in 1990 as I am now. Twenty-two years later, the difference is that I’m more sure of it than ever, grumpier about it, and much prouder of who I am. For a number of years, I concluded the problem was me. I spent much of my adolescence in a hilariously desperate attempt to conceal my inner geek-among-geeks, mostly around the LD jocks I was placed in school with whom I worried might beat me up if they ever knew the ‘awful truth,’ which of course they knew anyway. Needless to say, these attempts were an abysmal failure. I was beaten up occasionally in spite of it, and I was probably lower in the social pecking order than I’d have been if I were proud about the things I loved.
Every era values a particular cultural sentiment too much - we can't help it. Sometimes it's romance, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy, sometimes epic, sometimes pastoral. At various points in our lives, our appetites for a particular genre are inexhaustible. And most often, what we like is simply a reflection of the culture that produced us.
I don't think it's any secret that we’re living in ironic times – at the end of a developing culture that stretches back to the First World War. All too many people seem to have no faith in families, friends, leaders, communities, the world at large. The culture in which we grew up is such common currency that we seem to have a pop-culture shorthand for every possible situation and emotion. Back in 1922, T. S. Eliot could ironically quote the references of his culture, and assume that a general public would understand most of them instantly. Nearly a century, Family Guy can quote a whole different set of references with the same irony and the same assumption that their audience will understand enough of them to keep tuning in. The difference is that it took 3000 years for the culture of The Waste Land to live a full life cycle before it T S Eliot could write a poem as a eulogy for it. It has been 90 years since The Waste Land was written, and in that time, an entire equivalent culture – a popular culture - supplanted Western highbrow culture, and lived an entire life cycle. What took three millennia to produce TS Eliot took only ninety years to produce Stewie Griffin.
I love irony as much as anyone, and like to think myself better at using it than at least 99 out of 100 people. But so much of what my prematurely aged ears hear in so much contemporary culture is irony in isolation; irony without context. In so much of the ‘art’ which current tastemakers love (those quotes are used as unironically as possible in the given situation), it is taken for granted that we should feel numb to any new development. Much music, however loud, has neither highs nor lows. Many movies, however clever, should not be made to move us or make us laugh too loud. I could name rock groups and movies and much else which display this malaise in abundance, but I have a feeling most people reading this could name even more. Only what I cite with disapproval and contempt, they cite with approval, sometimes even love. I simply don’t understand that.
The best which cultural history has to offer has irony in multitudes, but it also has empathy, comedy, romance, tragedy, bleakness and generosity of vision in equal measure. Preferably, the best art of all cultures can offer all that at the same time, making our responses to it forever ambiguous, making us be the judges of what we see, and forcing us to contemplate long and hard what we view. That is artistic greatness – be it Michelangelo or Matt Weiner.
We’re now growing up in an age when young kids not only find Beethoven stuffy, or Duke Ellington, they also have no use for The Beatles. We’re coming very soon to an era when music before Michael Jackson and Madonna does not exist, neither do movies before Star Wars, or TV before The Simpsons, or books before Lord of the Rings. Everything before them will be, at least to a stunningly large degree, antiques. Even The Simpsons might date – because how could a new generation possibly understand the cultural references of a culture they no longer inhabit?
Whether or not we realize it, popular culture recently pressed the reset button. We’re now talking about popular culture in terms that used to be reserved for classical culture. Rolling Stone has talked about rock music in classical terms for decades. But go to the Onion A.V. and read their reviews of old TV shows, they’re every bit as reverent (and perhaps as stuffy) as any literary criticism. The same might be said for any number of movie magazines, or reviews of Graphic Novels. One day, all too recently, America woke up to find itself a culture with a history. Watching The Godfather or listening to Sgt. Pepper was no longer a pleasure, it was a duty toward two of the founding documents of our civilization. In its wake, a new generation will rise up and find a new way to rebel. Perhaps they'll rebel with sincerity.
And just as in the final years of the previous culture, we rebel with excessive frivolity. They had The Charleston, we have booty drops. They had speakeasies, we have raves. They had the Lost Generation, we have Indy Hipsters. But nothing dates like the cutting edge. Enjoy these things while you can, because one day soon, these kids will grow up and have as much control over the culture as people just barely older than me do now. One day soon, you all are going to wake up to find yourselves every bit as much relics as I am.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
800 Words: I Soprani di Gersia Nuova
It is a musical discovery akin to Schliemann's discovery of Troy. A lost cycle of six operas by Giuseppe Verdi (albeit the sixth is so long it will probably be divided into two separate operas and performed over a period of two days) which he wrote in segments for the rest of his life following the completion of La Forza Del Destino. Rumors of the these operas' existence had many champions at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Mussollini was credulous enough to dismantle and reassemble Verdi's villa in Bussetto in a failed attempt to find them. But since World War II the rumors of a lost opera cycle lying in a secret alcove at Verdi's villa have been dismissed by musicologists as a failed propaganda attempt by right-wing Italian patriots to stir up wounded Italian pride because Verdi never attempted an opera cycle on the scale of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.
As was eventually discovered, the final score was not kept in Bussetto. It was accidentally found in boxes underneath the floorboards of a Milan apartment that belonged to the paramour of Verdi's old age, Teresa Stolz. This score was accidentally found by its current occupant, a Milanese rave dancer who wishes to remain anonymous. When reached for comment at the house of former Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, she released a statement saying "I am proud to have contributed so well to Italy's rich cultural heritage."
It was thought that Verdi, a moody but generous man and not given to professional jealousy, was not one who willingly would enter himself into competition with Wagner. It has been speculated that perhaps he never showed these operas to anyone because he did not wish to willingly place himself in competition with his German rival. The loss was to millions of opera lovers deprived of six Verdi operas.
The libretti of the first four operas were written by Verdi's longtime librettist Francesco Maria Piave. The fourth seems to have undergone revisions by Arrigo Boito, who contributed libretti to the final two - which are said to be far more florid and dramatically experimental.
The scores themselves are said to be among the most dramatic Verdi ever wrote, albeit with some inevitable longeurs. Phillip Gossett, a Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of Chicago, edited the scores, and when reached for comment said that Verdi wrote these operas as a private laboratory for his public works. "The signs that these scores were not meant for public consumption are on every page of this manuscript. Some scenes seem underorchestrated and Verdi made far less dynamic indications than he generally made for singers. But there are formal experiments with Wagnerian through-composition, strange whole tone Debussy-like harmonies, eleventh and thirteen chords that sound straight out of Scriabin, some strangely chromatic writing reminiscent of middle-period Schoenberg, and even some passages with rhythmic complexity on the same level as anything in Stravinsky."
A joint press conference is scheduled for Tuesday between Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb and Teatro La Scala Intendant Stephane Lissner, who shall together announce that a staged production of the complete cycle will be unveiled at both Teatro La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera over the course of Verdi's upcomming bicentennial year, 2013. Both productions will be under the direction of eminence grise, Franco Zefferelli. Both runs are slated to be conducted by the companies' respective music directors: Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. This also means that there will be an announcement on Tuesday that James Levine is slated to make a comeback out of his health-related retirement to conduct all six operas, though Fabio Luisi will remain on call if Levine proves unable to complete the cycle. Plans are also being made to bring productions of I Soprani di Gersia Nuova to the Royal Opera House in London, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris National Opera, the Berlin State Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Bavarian State Opera of Munich, the Zurich Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Aix en Provence Festival, the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, and opera houses all over Italy with all due haste. Furthermore, the Chicago Symphony schedule is going to be completely revamped so that Riccardo Muti may present the complete cycle in concert during the fall of 2012, first at Orchestral Hall in Chicago over a period of two months, and then at Carnagie Hall in New York over the span of a week.
Details of the productions are forthcoming, but the Chicago Symphony, La Scala and the Met have announced that they will be sharing their casts and that both the manuscript and the printed score will soon be made available on all three websites.
Setting: Gersia Nuova and it's surrounding environs.
Time Period: The Late Fourteenth Century
Cast:
Don Antonio: Baritone - played by Dimitri Hrovotovsky (Placido Domingo campaigned for the part, but it was decided that a true baritone must undergo the role's first assumption.). The Doge of Ghiersia Nuova, The Lion of Caldvellia Ovest. A charismatic leader of men who pursues his enemies with horrifying vengeance, but is haunted and tortured by his terrible sins.
Donna Carmela: Mezzo - played by Olga Borodina. Don Antonio's seemingly loyal wife. An ageing lady of formidable stature who disarms her confidants while manipulating them ruthlessly to pursue her own interests.
Melfi: Contralto - played by Nathalie Stutzmann. A gypsy fortune teller whom Don Antonio often consults in secret about his decisions.
Christoforo Moltisanti: Tenore di Forza - played by Jonas Kaufmann. Don Antonio's nephew and designated heir. A man of terrifying rage who feigns loyalty to Don Antonio while constantly searching for ways to overthrow him.
Don Corrado: Basso Cantate - played by Feruccio Furlanetto. Don Antonio's uncle and rival of dangerously unsound mind.
Silvio Dante: Basso Profundo. Played by Matti Salminen. Don Antonio's trusted advisor who often manipulates Don Antonio into acts of terrible ruthlessness.
Paolo Noce: Basso Buffo - played by Paul Plishka. Don Antonio's bumbling but loyal general.
Antonino: Tenor - played by Gerhard Siegel. Don Antonio's lame son, who by virtue of his condition speaks truths to his father which no other man dare utter.
Medonia: Soprano (...) - played by Karita Matilla. Don Antonio's virginal daughter. The apple of his eye whom he shields from the horrors of our world.
Adriana La Cerva: Dramatic Mezzo - Played by Elina Garanca. The foul temptress of Gersia Nuova, who ensnares Christoforo into temptation in order to further the downfall of Don Antonio.
Janella: Coloratura Soprano - Played by Diana Damrau. Don Antonio's volatile sister who both supports and plots against Don Antonio.
Roberto Baccallieri: Basso Buffo: An officer of Don Corrado's army who changes his loyalty to Don Antonio an is rewarded with the hand of his sister. A reward he comes to regret.
Salvatore Bonpensiero: Character Baritone - Played by Leo Nucci. A loyal general in Don Antonio's army compelled by the church to betray Don Antonio. Nucci will also sing the role of the fish.
Donna Livia: Character Soprano - played by Anja Silja. Don Antonio's evil mother who plots to kill him.
Don Giovanni Sacramoni: Bass - played by Samuel Ramey: Don Antonio's rival with whom he dreams of an era of piece.
Rafael Cifaretto: Dramatic Tenor - penciled in to played by Rolando Villazon. A murderous captain in Don Antonio's army from whom Don Antonio fears insurrection and must have executed.
Don Fillippo Leotardo: Heroic Bass Baritone - played by Bryn Terfel. A ruthless rival Doge who declares war on Don Antonio.
Antonio Blundetto: Lyric Baritone - played by Thomas Hampson. Don Antonio's cousin who has forsworn violence and pledged himself to the church.
Arturo Bucco: Character Tenor - played by David Cangelosi. Don Antonio's peasant cook whose homespun wisdom is a source of consolation to Don Antonio.
Furio Giunta: Lyric Tenor - played by Vittorio Grigolo. A soft-hearted captain in Don Antonio's army who nearly assassinates Don Antonio because of his passion for Donna Carmela.
Riccardo Aprile: Basso Cantate - played by Rene Pape. The evil older brother of former Doge Giovanni Aprile who returns from exile and becomes betrothed to Janella before she kills him.
Vittorio Spatafore: Verdi's only known Castrato part, will probably be assumed by countertenors - played by Andras Scholl. Don Antonio's captain who develops a passionate loyalty to Medonia's betrothed.
Donna Rosalie Aprile: Baritone - played by Bea Arthur. The widow of Giovanni Aprile who is now the chief Lady in Waiting to Donna Carmela.
As was eventually discovered, the final score was not kept in Bussetto. It was accidentally found in boxes underneath the floorboards of a Milan apartment that belonged to the paramour of Verdi's old age, Teresa Stolz. This score was accidentally found by its current occupant, a Milanese rave dancer who wishes to remain anonymous. When reached for comment at the house of former Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, she released a statement saying "I am proud to have contributed so well to Italy's rich cultural heritage."
It was thought that Verdi, a moody but generous man and not given to professional jealousy, was not one who willingly would enter himself into competition with Wagner. It has been speculated that perhaps he never showed these operas to anyone because he did not wish to willingly place himself in competition with his German rival. The loss was to millions of opera lovers deprived of six Verdi operas.
The libretti of the first four operas were written by Verdi's longtime librettist Francesco Maria Piave. The fourth seems to have undergone revisions by Arrigo Boito, who contributed libretti to the final two - which are said to be far more florid and dramatically experimental.
The scores themselves are said to be among the most dramatic Verdi ever wrote, albeit with some inevitable longeurs. Phillip Gossett, a Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of Chicago, edited the scores, and when reached for comment said that Verdi wrote these operas as a private laboratory for his public works. "The signs that these scores were not meant for public consumption are on every page of this manuscript. Some scenes seem underorchestrated and Verdi made far less dynamic indications than he generally made for singers. But there are formal experiments with Wagnerian through-composition, strange whole tone Debussy-like harmonies, eleventh and thirteen chords that sound straight out of Scriabin, some strangely chromatic writing reminiscent of middle-period Schoenberg, and even some passages with rhythmic complexity on the same level as anything in Stravinsky."
A joint press conference is scheduled for Tuesday between Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb and Teatro La Scala Intendant Stephane Lissner, who shall together announce that a staged production of the complete cycle will be unveiled at both Teatro La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera over the course of Verdi's upcomming bicentennial year, 2013. Both productions will be under the direction of eminence grise, Franco Zefferelli. Both runs are slated to be conducted by the companies' respective music directors: Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. This also means that there will be an announcement on Tuesday that James Levine is slated to make a comeback out of his health-related retirement to conduct all six operas, though Fabio Luisi will remain on call if Levine proves unable to complete the cycle. Plans are also being made to bring productions of I Soprani di Gersia Nuova to the Royal Opera House in London, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris National Opera, the Berlin State Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Bavarian State Opera of Munich, the Zurich Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Aix en Provence Festival, the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, and opera houses all over Italy with all due haste. Furthermore, the Chicago Symphony schedule is going to be completely revamped so that Riccardo Muti may present the complete cycle in concert during the fall of 2012, first at Orchestral Hall in Chicago over a period of two months, and then at Carnagie Hall in New York over the span of a week.
Details of the productions are forthcoming, but the Chicago Symphony, La Scala and the Met have announced that they will be sharing their casts and that both the manuscript and the printed score will soon be made available on all three websites.
Setting: Gersia Nuova and it's surrounding environs.
Time Period: The Late Fourteenth Century
Cast:
Don Antonio: Baritone - played by Dimitri Hrovotovsky (Placido Domingo campaigned for the part, but it was decided that a true baritone must undergo the role's first assumption.). The Doge of Ghiersia Nuova, The Lion of Caldvellia Ovest. A charismatic leader of men who pursues his enemies with horrifying vengeance, but is haunted and tortured by his terrible sins.
Donna Carmela: Mezzo - played by Olga Borodina. Don Antonio's seemingly loyal wife. An ageing lady of formidable stature who disarms her confidants while manipulating them ruthlessly to pursue her own interests.
Melfi: Contralto - played by Nathalie Stutzmann. A gypsy fortune teller whom Don Antonio often consults in secret about his decisions.
Christoforo Moltisanti: Tenore di Forza - played by Jonas Kaufmann. Don Antonio's nephew and designated heir. A man of terrifying rage who feigns loyalty to Don Antonio while constantly searching for ways to overthrow him.
Don Corrado: Basso Cantate - played by Feruccio Furlanetto. Don Antonio's uncle and rival of dangerously unsound mind.
Silvio Dante: Basso Profundo. Played by Matti Salminen. Don Antonio's trusted advisor who often manipulates Don Antonio into acts of terrible ruthlessness.
Paolo Noce: Basso Buffo - played by Paul Plishka. Don Antonio's bumbling but loyal general.
Antonino: Tenor - played by Gerhard Siegel. Don Antonio's lame son, who by virtue of his condition speaks truths to his father which no other man dare utter.
Medonia: Soprano (...) - played by Karita Matilla. Don Antonio's virginal daughter. The apple of his eye whom he shields from the horrors of our world.
Adriana La Cerva: Dramatic Mezzo - Played by Elina Garanca. The foul temptress of Gersia Nuova, who ensnares Christoforo into temptation in order to further the downfall of Don Antonio.
Janella: Coloratura Soprano - Played by Diana Damrau. Don Antonio's volatile sister who both supports and plots against Don Antonio.
Roberto Baccallieri: Basso Buffo: An officer of Don Corrado's army who changes his loyalty to Don Antonio an is rewarded with the hand of his sister. A reward he comes to regret.
Salvatore Bonpensiero: Character Baritone - Played by Leo Nucci. A loyal general in Don Antonio's army compelled by the church to betray Don Antonio. Nucci will also sing the role of the fish.
Donna Livia: Character Soprano - played by Anja Silja. Don Antonio's evil mother who plots to kill him.
Don Giovanni Sacramoni: Bass - played by Samuel Ramey: Don Antonio's rival with whom he dreams of an era of piece.
Rafael Cifaretto: Dramatic Tenor - penciled in to played by Rolando Villazon. A murderous captain in Don Antonio's army from whom Don Antonio fears insurrection and must have executed.
Don Fillippo Leotardo: Heroic Bass Baritone - played by Bryn Terfel. A ruthless rival Doge who declares war on Don Antonio.
Antonio Blundetto: Lyric Baritone - played by Thomas Hampson. Don Antonio's cousin who has forsworn violence and pledged himself to the church.
Arturo Bucco: Character Tenor - played by David Cangelosi. Don Antonio's peasant cook whose homespun wisdom is a source of consolation to Don Antonio.
Furio Giunta: Lyric Tenor - played by Vittorio Grigolo. A soft-hearted captain in Don Antonio's army who nearly assassinates Don Antonio because of his passion for Donna Carmela.
Riccardo Aprile: Basso Cantate - played by Rene Pape. The evil older brother of former Doge Giovanni Aprile who returns from exile and becomes betrothed to Janella before she kills him.
Vittorio Spatafore: Verdi's only known Castrato part, will probably be assumed by countertenors - played by Andras Scholl. Don Antonio's captain who develops a passionate loyalty to Medonia's betrothed.
Donna Rosalie Aprile: Baritone - played by Bea Arthur. The widow of Giovanni Aprile who is now the chief Lady in Waiting to Donna Carmela.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Friday Playlist #9: Mad Men Edition
Bob Dylan/The Band: Don't Think Twice It's Alright
Click here to see the scene.
Arthur Collins (1899): Hello My Baby
Click here to see the scene.
One more...
Still one more
Bobby Helms: You Are My Special Angel
Click here to see the scene.
Gillian Hills: Zou bisou bisou
Click here to see the scene
Luis Mariano: C'est Magnifique - Click Here
Click here to see the scene
Voices of Washington: By The Rivers of Babylon
(utterly shameless...i know....)
Click here to see the scene
Advanced Playlist:
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
To go or not to go to the performance this weekend...
Click here to see the scene.
Arthur Collins (1899): Hello My Baby
Click here to see the scene.
One more...
Still one more
Bobby Helms: You Are My Special Angel
Click here to see the scene.
Gillian Hills: Zou bisou bisou
Click here to see the scene
Luis Mariano: C'est Magnifique - Click Here
Click here to see the scene
Voices of Washington: By The Rivers of Babylon
(utterly shameless...i know....)
Click here to see the scene
Advanced Playlist:
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
To go or not to go to the performance this weekend...
800 Words: Epistolary Blogging: Jacques Barzun
Dearest Jacques,
In case there’s anybody who cares (though I have no idea why you would) there is not a single matter of life on which I take a position that is anything resembling conservative, and and only a reactionary could mistaken me for one. This much has been true for me ever since I was an adolescent animal rights protestor who found himself defending all sorts of people he never wanted to defend, merely because God forbid the world should be viewed as something more complex than we, the forces of light and virtue, doing battle with they, the army of darkness who will triumph over us all if I occasionally eat a piece of pizza with unsynthetic cheese on it. Over and over again, I find myself feeling sorry for people I never wanted to feel any sympathy for, merely because the people on my side who trash them seem so stupid, so tonedeaf to the nature of problems, so unwilling to consider a point of view from any side but their own, that there’s no mystery as to why the world’s in bad shape: most of the people who believe the right things are just as dumb as the people who believe the wrong ones. What matters is that you come to conclusion through actual thought, and you entertain the thought that the people who believe differently from you might be right. So if not always approving of every radical solution to a probem is a conservative position, then fine, I’ll be a conservative. If not always trying to preserve every old institution makes me a socialist, then fine, I’m a socialist. But let’s not pretend that there is anything worth living for in a world where there is only one right answer to every question.
Over the course of thirty years, one meets many of these morons, and some of them are quite brilliant. Idiocy can take many possible forms, and just as people can be right and wrong at the same time, people can be utterly moronic simultaneously to being incredibly intelligent. No one has a greater capacity for self-deception than smart people, and no one finds it harder to resist simplistic explanations for a world too complex to understand. Dumb people might be taken in by religion, but smart people are the ones who lead the religions.
Your book, From Dawn to Decadence, gets most things utterly wrong; yet it is, beyond doubt, one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. An 800 page history of culture in the last 500 years and its decline, impeccably researched, spectacularly written, air-tightly organized, and thoroughly wise. You trace cultural developments from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century in a matter which shows that culture – that dirty word of our time – has been thoroughly exhausted, and can be traced from the romantic spring of the Rennaissance to the authoritarian black comedy (still a happy ending because it ultimately spread the reach of culture) of the Baroque to the bright comedy of neo-classicism, to the tragic crisis of faith in culture which befell Romanticism, to the decadent ironies of modernism. It is so erudite, so utterly well-supported in its arguments that I find it difficult to disagree with any of your conclusions. And yet your conclusions are thoroughly wrong, and I know it even as I read them. You go out of your way to praise writers like Montaigne, Bagehot, and William James whom you feel represent a ‘double vision’ that can get inside the heads of those whom they disagree with so that they might understand different conclusions. Yet you seem completely oblivious to the fact that you thoroughly lack this double vision yourself.
Like all attempts to interpret history, you reduce the unknowable course of human events to a series of biases that can’t help but be spectacularly wrong. Yet you realize that it does not alleviate you, or us, of the burden of the attempt. We either study our origins, and accept that we can only have a bad understanding of the past, or we forget the past and we doom ourselves to a future of ignorance. In the perfect society that can never exist, people like you are the loyal opposition – always present to remind us of what worked in the past even if you are incapable of looking toward the future. Woe betide the country lead by a person (there are many) like you; still living, and turning 105 this year, yet the world seems to have stopped around the time of your birth. The great achievements of twentieth century culture: modernism, cinema, popular music, graphic novels, Keynesian economics, international law, linguistic developments, have completely passed you by, and you dismiss it all with a simple wave of you hand. You only concede that a single 20th century intellectual, Jose Ortega y Gasset (never read’em) has an understanding of the world equal to the greats of the past. You are the very epitome of the brilliant idiot.
It does not occur to you that the chaos that is modern civilization existed in every possible antiquity – with corrosive social degeneration that is forever in conflict with progress and humanism. In every age, there are great humanist artists like Chekhov, Mozart, and Jean Renoir, and there are great (by some people’s definition) anti-humanists like Dante, Wagner, and Stanley Kubrick. Sometimes degeneration wins, sometimes progress does – and we have no way of being certain which side of any issue is progress and which is regression. All we have is unverifiable speculation and opinions – and we do the best we can to make our lives as good as we can. Great historians like are particularly susceptible to the idea that your field have a unified theory; whether it’s the conservative theories Spengler and Niall Ferguson, or the socialist theories of Eric Hobsbawm and Tony Judt.
Like you, when I see how people in our time, in my own generation, have so little regard for the great achievements of the past; who’ve never listened to the entirety of Beethoven’s Fifth, or seen a Breughel drawing, or are bored by Shakespeare, and it fills me with more than sadness; it fills me with disgust. Every time I see people watch Jersey Shore, or dance to Lady Gaga, it makes me wretch. I have no problem with their existence (I even once danced to a long stream of Lady Gaga songs at a wedding. My friends were a little too impressed....), only with their omnipresence. You can't escape either, and it's the sort of groupthink that makes a person somehow 'weird' if they don't want to listen/watch either or hundreds of other pop culture memes that are forgotten nearly as quickly as they become a craze. I don’t want to live in a world without entertainment, but there have to be periods in history when people were more interested in the sublime, the transcendent, the aesthetic bliss only borne of long study, than this one. I think of all the idiots who got a much better higher education than me without learning to appreciate a single thing that’s truly beautiful about the world, and it makes me want to throw something through a window, it really does (Y’all idiots use reality TV and the Top 40 like a crackpipe). But a world like the one for which you wish, in which everyone can resist the urge to indulge in the lower pursuits sounds every bit as hollow, as puritanical, and as unenjoyable as I find our current one. We are the victims of our own success. We live in a world where people experience so much comfort that many of them do not do experience enough life to require Mahler or Chaucer or Werner Herzog or Tom Waits. When every desire in life is so instantly available, what need is there for art that requires thought? Perhaps this is a triumph, not a defeat. But I find people who don’t need ‘the good stuff’ to be incredibly dull.
One day, perhaps I’ll get into all the uncertainties which this book provoked in me. But provoking uncertainty is not the aim of a book like this, the aim is persuasion. We are meant to see the world in a different light – your light. I can’t imagine I’d ever concede that you’re right, yet there is that 5% of me that gnaws at the back of my head, telling me that possibly, just maybe, you understand the world better than I do. And that is what it means to really study our origins. Thank you for that.
Love,
Evan
In case there’s anybody who cares (though I have no idea why you would) there is not a single matter of life on which I take a position that is anything resembling conservative, and and only a reactionary could mistaken me for one. This much has been true for me ever since I was an adolescent animal rights protestor who found himself defending all sorts of people he never wanted to defend, merely because God forbid the world should be viewed as something more complex than we, the forces of light and virtue, doing battle with they, the army of darkness who will triumph over us all if I occasionally eat a piece of pizza with unsynthetic cheese on it. Over and over again, I find myself feeling sorry for people I never wanted to feel any sympathy for, merely because the people on my side who trash them seem so stupid, so tonedeaf to the nature of problems, so unwilling to consider a point of view from any side but their own, that there’s no mystery as to why the world’s in bad shape: most of the people who believe the right things are just as dumb as the people who believe the wrong ones. What matters is that you come to conclusion through actual thought, and you entertain the thought that the people who believe differently from you might be right. So if not always approving of every radical solution to a probem is a conservative position, then fine, I’ll be a conservative. If not always trying to preserve every old institution makes me a socialist, then fine, I’m a socialist. But let’s not pretend that there is anything worth living for in a world where there is only one right answer to every question.
Over the course of thirty years, one meets many of these morons, and some of them are quite brilliant. Idiocy can take many possible forms, and just as people can be right and wrong at the same time, people can be utterly moronic simultaneously to being incredibly intelligent. No one has a greater capacity for self-deception than smart people, and no one finds it harder to resist simplistic explanations for a world too complex to understand. Dumb people might be taken in by religion, but smart people are the ones who lead the religions.
Your book, From Dawn to Decadence, gets most things utterly wrong; yet it is, beyond doubt, one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. An 800 page history of culture in the last 500 years and its decline, impeccably researched, spectacularly written, air-tightly organized, and thoroughly wise. You trace cultural developments from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century in a matter which shows that culture – that dirty word of our time – has been thoroughly exhausted, and can be traced from the romantic spring of the Rennaissance to the authoritarian black comedy (still a happy ending because it ultimately spread the reach of culture) of the Baroque to the bright comedy of neo-classicism, to the tragic crisis of faith in culture which befell Romanticism, to the decadent ironies of modernism. It is so erudite, so utterly well-supported in its arguments that I find it difficult to disagree with any of your conclusions. And yet your conclusions are thoroughly wrong, and I know it even as I read them. You go out of your way to praise writers like Montaigne, Bagehot, and William James whom you feel represent a ‘double vision’ that can get inside the heads of those whom they disagree with so that they might understand different conclusions. Yet you seem completely oblivious to the fact that you thoroughly lack this double vision yourself.
Like all attempts to interpret history, you reduce the unknowable course of human events to a series of biases that can’t help but be spectacularly wrong. Yet you realize that it does not alleviate you, or us, of the burden of the attempt. We either study our origins, and accept that we can only have a bad understanding of the past, or we forget the past and we doom ourselves to a future of ignorance. In the perfect society that can never exist, people like you are the loyal opposition – always present to remind us of what worked in the past even if you are incapable of looking toward the future. Woe betide the country lead by a person (there are many) like you; still living, and turning 105 this year, yet the world seems to have stopped around the time of your birth. The great achievements of twentieth century culture: modernism, cinema, popular music, graphic novels, Keynesian economics, international law, linguistic developments, have completely passed you by, and you dismiss it all with a simple wave of you hand. You only concede that a single 20th century intellectual, Jose Ortega y Gasset (never read’em) has an understanding of the world equal to the greats of the past. You are the very epitome of the brilliant idiot.
It does not occur to you that the chaos that is modern civilization existed in every possible antiquity – with corrosive social degeneration that is forever in conflict with progress and humanism. In every age, there are great humanist artists like Chekhov, Mozart, and Jean Renoir, and there are great (by some people’s definition) anti-humanists like Dante, Wagner, and Stanley Kubrick. Sometimes degeneration wins, sometimes progress does – and we have no way of being certain which side of any issue is progress and which is regression. All we have is unverifiable speculation and opinions – and we do the best we can to make our lives as good as we can. Great historians like are particularly susceptible to the idea that your field have a unified theory; whether it’s the conservative theories Spengler and Niall Ferguson, or the socialist theories of Eric Hobsbawm and Tony Judt.
Like you, when I see how people in our time, in my own generation, have so little regard for the great achievements of the past; who’ve never listened to the entirety of Beethoven’s Fifth, or seen a Breughel drawing, or are bored by Shakespeare, and it fills me with more than sadness; it fills me with disgust. Every time I see people watch Jersey Shore, or dance to Lady Gaga, it makes me wretch. I have no problem with their existence (I even once danced to a long stream of Lady Gaga songs at a wedding. My friends were a little too impressed....), only with their omnipresence. You can't escape either, and it's the sort of groupthink that makes a person somehow 'weird' if they don't want to listen/watch either or hundreds of other pop culture memes that are forgotten nearly as quickly as they become a craze. I don’t want to live in a world without entertainment, but there have to be periods in history when people were more interested in the sublime, the transcendent, the aesthetic bliss only borne of long study, than this one. I think of all the idiots who got a much better higher education than me without learning to appreciate a single thing that’s truly beautiful about the world, and it makes me want to throw something through a window, it really does (Y’all idiots use reality TV and the Top 40 like a crackpipe). But a world like the one for which you wish, in which everyone can resist the urge to indulge in the lower pursuits sounds every bit as hollow, as puritanical, and as unenjoyable as I find our current one. We are the victims of our own success. We live in a world where people experience so much comfort that many of them do not do experience enough life to require Mahler or Chaucer or Werner Herzog or Tom Waits. When every desire in life is so instantly available, what need is there for art that requires thought? Perhaps this is a triumph, not a defeat. But I find people who don’t need ‘the good stuff’ to be incredibly dull.
One day, perhaps I’ll get into all the uncertainties which this book provoked in me. But provoking uncertainty is not the aim of a book like this, the aim is persuasion. We are meant to see the world in a different light – your light. I can’t imagine I’d ever concede that you’re right, yet there is that 5% of me that gnaws at the back of my head, telling me that possibly, just maybe, you understand the world better than I do. And that is what it means to really study our origins. Thank you for that.
Love,
Evan
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Quote of the Night:
The Hicks (about his first experience of listening to Das Rheingold): You ever call someone and the the boring, useless, pedantic significant other traps you in an endless conversation about bullshit?
Quote of the Day:
Aunt Debbie: We Jews are not a good looking people. It must be all that inbreeding. We did an enormous favor to our people by adopting Leeor.
800 Words: ET: Almanac
I will have a comment upon this passage tomorrow. In the meantime, I cede the floor to Jacques Barzun.
Let Us End with a Prologue
"The careful historian, before he ventures to predict the course of history, murmurs to himself 'Schedel.' It is not a magic word, but the name of a learned German who, in 1493--note the date--compiled and published the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages of mankind was drawing to a close, and it included several blank pages for recording anything of interest that might still occur during the final days. As we know, what occurred was the opening of the New World and all innovations that followed from it--hardly a close. With this risk in mind, I mean to set down what appears to me possible, plausible, likely, as our own era reaches an end.
Our Age
Some of the descriptive labels: Age of Uncertainty, Age of Science, Age of Nihlism, Age of Massacres, Age of the Masses Age of Globalism, Age of Dictatorships, Age of Design, Age of Defeat, Age of Communication, Age of the Common Man, Age of Cinema and Democracy, Age of the Child, Age of Anxiety, Age of Anger, Age of Absurd Expectations
"Some writers have called our time the end of the European age. True in one sense, the phrase is misleading in another: it overlooks the Europeanization of the globe. Techno-science and democracy are far from ruling everywhere, and in certain places they are fiercely opposed, but together they grip people's imagination and inflame their desires. The whole world wants, not freedom, but EMANCIPATION and enjoyment. And the West is the corner of the globe whose peoles, borrowing freely from all others, have shown the way of achieving the one and given the means of possessing the other. [A book to browse in is Pandemonium by Humphrey Jennings.] The shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone's power to define, if it were guessable it would not be new. But on the character of the interval between us and the real tomorrow, speculation is possible. Within the historian lives a confederate who is an incurable pattern-maker and willing to risk the penalties against fortune-telling.
"Let the transitional state be described int he past tense, like a chronicler looking back from the year 2300. As the wise ancient Disraeli remarked, 'We cannot be wrong, because we have studied the past and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place.'
"The population was divided roughly into two groups; they did not like the word classes. The first, less numerous, was made up of the men and women who possessed the virtually inborn ability to handle the products of techne and master the methods of physical science, especially mathematics--it was to them what Latin had been to the medieval clergy. This modern elite had the geometrical mind that singled them out for the life of research and engineering. The Lord Bacon had predicted that once the ways and biases of science were enthroned, this type of mind would be found relatively common. Dials, toggles, buzzers, gauges, icons on screens, light-emitting diodes, symbols and formulas to save time and thought--these were for this group of people the source of emotional satisfaction, the means of rule over others, the substance of shoptalk, the very joy and justification of life.
"The mind was shaped and the fancy filled by these intricacies as had been done in an earlier era by theology, poetry, and the fine arts. The New Man saw the world as a storehouse of items retrievable through a keyboard, and whoever added to the sum ws in high repute. He, and more and more often She, might be an inventor or a theorist, for the interest in hypotheses about the creation of the cosmos and the origin of life persisted, intensified, from the previous era. The sense of being close to a final formulation lasted for over 200 years.
"It is from this class--no, group--that the governors and heads of institutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain--clerics in one case, cybernists in the other. The latter took pride in the fact that in ancient Greek cybernetes means helmsman, governor. It validated their position as rulers over the masses, which by then could neither read nor count. But these less capable citizens were by no means barbarians, yet any schooling would have been wasted on them; that had been proved in the late 20C(entury). Some now argue that the schooling was at fault, not the pupils; but when the teachers themselves declared children unteachable, the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everybody to its view.
"What saved the masses from brutishness was the survival (though in odd shapes) of a good deal of literature and history from the 500 years of western culture, mingled with a sizable infusion of the eastern. Some among the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people with a culture over and above the televised fare. It was already well mixed and stirred by the 21C(entury). Public readings, recitals of new poems based on ancient ones, simple plays, and public debates about the eternal questions (which bored the upper class), furnished the minds and souls of the ordinary citizen. This composer of longings, images, and information resembles that which the medieval monks, poets, and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman heritage. Religious belief in the two ages alike varied from piety, deep or conventional, to mysticism.
"As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, superseded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency. Their The pretext was rarely borne out but the game prospered and the character of the players followed another medieval prototype: constant nervousness punctuated by violent and arbitrary acts against persons and firms. Dismissals, resignations, wholesale firings of workers and staffs were daily events. There being no visible bloodshed, wounds and distress were veiled. The comprehensive welfare system, improved since its inception, repaired the damage. Its decisions being all made by computer on the basis of each citizen's set of identity numbers, there could be few terrible grievances. Those due to typing errors would be corrected--in time. There was thus no place for the citizen voter and the perpetual clash of opinions that had paralyzed representative governments.
"The goal of equality was not only preserved but the feeling of it enhanced. Faith in science excluded dissent on important matters; the method brings everyone to a single state of mind. On the workaday plain, the dictates of numerical studies guided the consumer and the parent, the old and the sick. The great era had ended--by coincidence, no doubt--as it had begun, with a new world disease, transmitted (also like the old) through sexual contact. But intense medical research in due course achieved cure and prevention, and the chief killer ailment was once more heart disease, most often linked to obesity. The control of nature apparently stops short of self-control. But Stat Life, ensured by the many specialized government agencies, inspired successful programs and propaganda in many domains of the secure society. The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather suddenly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, seuxal promiscuity, and tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, having to be concealed, attracted only the bold and reckless. And even they agreed that the veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity.
"As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the West from the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident and America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming, in offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into their plans.
"After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence--in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of our nascent--or perhaps one should say, renascent--culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive."
Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence
Let Us End with a Prologue
"The careful historian, before he ventures to predict the course of history, murmurs to himself 'Schedel.' It is not a magic word, but the name of a learned German who, in 1493--note the date--compiled and published the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages of mankind was drawing to a close, and it included several blank pages for recording anything of interest that might still occur during the final days. As we know, what occurred was the opening of the New World and all innovations that followed from it--hardly a close. With this risk in mind, I mean to set down what appears to me possible, plausible, likely, as our own era reaches an end.
Our Age
Some of the descriptive labels: Age of Uncertainty, Age of Science, Age of Nihlism, Age of Massacres, Age of the Masses Age of Globalism, Age of Dictatorships, Age of Design, Age of Defeat, Age of Communication, Age of the Common Man, Age of Cinema and Democracy, Age of the Child, Age of Anxiety, Age of Anger, Age of Absurd Expectations
"Some writers have called our time the end of the European age. True in one sense, the phrase is misleading in another: it overlooks the Europeanization of the globe. Techno-science and democracy are far from ruling everywhere, and in certain places they are fiercely opposed, but together they grip people's imagination and inflame their desires. The whole world wants, not freedom, but EMANCIPATION and enjoyment. And the West is the corner of the globe whose peoles, borrowing freely from all others, have shown the way of achieving the one and given the means of possessing the other. [A book to browse in is Pandemonium by Humphrey Jennings.] The shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone's power to define, if it were guessable it would not be new. But on the character of the interval between us and the real tomorrow, speculation is possible. Within the historian lives a confederate who is an incurable pattern-maker and willing to risk the penalties against fortune-telling.
"Let the transitional state be described int he past tense, like a chronicler looking back from the year 2300. As the wise ancient Disraeli remarked, 'We cannot be wrong, because we have studied the past and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place.'
"The population was divided roughly into two groups; they did not like the word classes. The first, less numerous, was made up of the men and women who possessed the virtually inborn ability to handle the products of techne and master the methods of physical science, especially mathematics--it was to them what Latin had been to the medieval clergy. This modern elite had the geometrical mind that singled them out for the life of research and engineering. The Lord Bacon had predicted that once the ways and biases of science were enthroned, this type of mind would be found relatively common. Dials, toggles, buzzers, gauges, icons on screens, light-emitting diodes, symbols and formulas to save time and thought--these were for this group of people the source of emotional satisfaction, the means of rule over others, the substance of shoptalk, the very joy and justification of life.
"The mind was shaped and the fancy filled by these intricacies as had been done in an earlier era by theology, poetry, and the fine arts. The New Man saw the world as a storehouse of items retrievable through a keyboard, and whoever added to the sum ws in high repute. He, and more and more often She, might be an inventor or a theorist, for the interest in hypotheses about the creation of the cosmos and the origin of life persisted, intensified, from the previous era. The sense of being close to a final formulation lasted for over 200 years.
"It is from this class--no, group--that the governors and heads of institutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain--clerics in one case, cybernists in the other. The latter took pride in the fact that in ancient Greek cybernetes means helmsman, governor. It validated their position as rulers over the masses, which by then could neither read nor count. But these less capable citizens were by no means barbarians, yet any schooling would have been wasted on them; that had been proved in the late 20C(entury). Some now argue that the schooling was at fault, not the pupils; but when the teachers themselves declared children unteachable, the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everybody to its view.
"What saved the masses from brutishness was the survival (though in odd shapes) of a good deal of literature and history from the 500 years of western culture, mingled with a sizable infusion of the eastern. Some among the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people with a culture over and above the televised fare. It was already well mixed and stirred by the 21C(entury). Public readings, recitals of new poems based on ancient ones, simple plays, and public debates about the eternal questions (which bored the upper class), furnished the minds and souls of the ordinary citizen. This composer of longings, images, and information resembles that which the medieval monks, poets, and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman heritage. Religious belief in the two ages alike varied from piety, deep or conventional, to mysticism.
"As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, superseded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency. Their The pretext was rarely borne out but the game prospered and the character of the players followed another medieval prototype: constant nervousness punctuated by violent and arbitrary acts against persons and firms. Dismissals, resignations, wholesale firings of workers and staffs were daily events. There being no visible bloodshed, wounds and distress were veiled. The comprehensive welfare system, improved since its inception, repaired the damage. Its decisions being all made by computer on the basis of each citizen's set of identity numbers, there could be few terrible grievances. Those due to typing errors would be corrected--in time. There was thus no place for the citizen voter and the perpetual clash of opinions that had paralyzed representative governments.
"The goal of equality was not only preserved but the feeling of it enhanced. Faith in science excluded dissent on important matters; the method brings everyone to a single state of mind. On the workaday plain, the dictates of numerical studies guided the consumer and the parent, the old and the sick. The great era had ended--by coincidence, no doubt--as it had begun, with a new world disease, transmitted (also like the old) through sexual contact. But intense medical research in due course achieved cure and prevention, and the chief killer ailment was once more heart disease, most often linked to obesity. The control of nature apparently stops short of self-control. But Stat Life, ensured by the many specialized government agencies, inspired successful programs and propaganda in many domains of the secure society. The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather suddenly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, seuxal promiscuity, and tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, having to be concealed, attracted only the bold and reckless. And even they agreed that the veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity.
"As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the West from the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident and America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming, in offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into their plans.
"After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence--in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of our nascent--or perhaps one should say, renascent--culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive."
Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence
Monday, March 26, 2012
And Yet We Are Here!
by Karl Wolfskehl
Always driven, always in the bite of
the blast --
Was the burden of life ever bitterer
on earth?
Has harsher yoke pressed on calloused
shoulders,
The plough of dark Destiny cut deeper
furrows?
Were death and dread ever quite so
near?
And yet we are here!
And yet we lifted our foreheads over
and over,
And yet our songs of thanks, our
prayers and paeans mounted,
When air and light stole through a rift
of the mouldy dungeon,
They found us bowed on the book, at
God's work, the workers!
Our hearts did not break though our
lot was austere,
And yet we are here!
Terrible Fate, you bring weeping and
the lust to kill,
All day you crouch in corners, threaten
and leer,
All night you gnash your teeth and
lurk by our pallet.
When we sobbed, swore, implored, it
was you who spoke.
Only Hatred replied with savage jeer
And yet we are here!
Yes, yet we are here, and must remain,
Sucking at pain as at honeycombs.
The others go -- are allowed to! Our
hour
Once shall bloom from a fertile wound.
Then we shall know why He suffered
our tears.
Then, when the trumpet's holy Yes
rings clear,
We shall be here!
Always driven, always in the bite of
the blast --
Was the burden of life ever bitterer
on earth?
Has harsher yoke pressed on calloused
shoulders,
The plough of dark Destiny cut deeper
furrows?
Were death and dread ever quite so
near?
And yet we are here!
And yet we lifted our foreheads over
and over,
And yet our songs of thanks, our
prayers and paeans mounted,
When air and light stole through a rift
of the mouldy dungeon,
They found us bowed on the book, at
God's work, the workers!
Our hearts did not break though our
lot was austere,
And yet we are here!
Terrible Fate, you bring weeping and
the lust to kill,
All day you crouch in corners, threaten
and leer,
All night you gnash your teeth and
lurk by our pallet.
When we sobbed, swore, implored, it
was you who spoke.
Only Hatred replied with savage jeer
And yet we are here!
Yes, yet we are here, and must remain,
Sucking at pain as at honeycombs.
The others go -- are allowed to! Our
hour
Once shall bloom from a fertile wound.
Then we shall know why He suffered
our tears.
Then, when the trumpet's holy Yes
rings clear,
We shall be here!
Friday, March 23, 2012
Friday Playlist #8: 30th Birthday Party Edition
Duke Ellington: Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue -
Leonard Bernstein: Mambo -
Louis Armstrong: Hello Dolly
Abreu: Tico Tico -
Frank Sinatra: I Get A Kick Out of You
Ginastera: Estancia - Danza Final (Malambo)
Advanced Playlist: Bruckner Symphony No. 9 with completed and reconstructed Finale
Leonard Bernstein: Mambo -
Louis Armstrong: Hello Dolly
Abreu: Tico Tico -
Frank Sinatra: I Get A Kick Out of You
Ginastera: Estancia - Danza Final (Malambo)
Advanced Playlist: Bruckner Symphony No. 9 with completed and reconstructed Finale
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