Prom 3 Review

Brian: Symphony No. 1 in D minor, 'The Gothic'
Susan Gritton (soprano)
Christine Rice (mezzo-soprano)
Peter Auty (tenor)
Alastair Miles (bass)
CBSO Youth Chorus
Eltham College Boys' Choir
Southend Boys' and Girls' Choirs
Bach Choir
BBC National Chorus of Wales
Brighton Festival Chorus
Côr Caerdydd
Huddersfield Choral Society
London Symphony Chorus
BBC Concert Orchestra
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

F

Never have so many gone to so much effort for so little reward. Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony is, literally, a Symphony of a Thousand. Two orchestras, four brass bands, six choruses, four youth choruses and four soloists. The total count must have been well over a thousand performers for this legendary curate's egg.

Perhaps one day Havergal Brian's time will come, just as Mahler's did. But I doubt it. This is everything Mahler used to be accused of being: long-winded, pointless loudness, rambling without end, no discernible sense of form and no building of tension. It is just one long trip through nearly two hours of musical static. There is no point to this music except for its enormity.

The failure must, almost entirely, lie at the door of the composer. Martyn Brabbins must be praised for an enormous feat of coordination. The orchestras sounded impressively prepared, the choruses coped mightily in Royal Albert's cavernous acoustic to listen to one another and stay on-key (not always successfully). They deserve the satisfaction of having put this piece on. Let it now stay in the vault for another generation to re-air it, and hopefully be less disappointed by the results than we are.

The William Tell Finale

I cannot bring myself to say that William Tell is a great opera. But perhaps I was a little hard on it in the post below. The great moments it has are absolutely glorious, and none moreso than in the finale Tutto cangia, il ciel s'abbella. This is a finale fully worthy of a great composer's swansong. Last night, it reminded me of Wagner, today it reminds me more of the grand finales to Tchaikovsky's amazing ballets and operas. Rossini would live as many years in retirement as he did in the rest of his life. But he could not have improved on this passage had he composed at the same frantic rate until his passing at 76.

Prom 2 Semi-Review

William Tell
concert performance; sung in French.
Michele Pertusi baritone (William Tell)
John Osborn tenor (Arnold Melchthal)
Matthew Rose bass (Walter Furst)
Frédéric Caton bass (Melchthal)
Elena Xanthoudakis soprano (Jemmy)
Nicolas Courjal bass (Gesler)
Carlo Bosi tenor (Rodolphe)
Celso Albelo tenor (Ruodi)
Mark Stone baritone (Leuthold)
Malyn Byström soprano (Mathilde)
Patricia Bardon mezzo-soprano (Hedwige)
Davide Malvestio bass (Huntsman)
Orchestra and Chorus of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Rome
Antonio Pappano conductor

B-

When it comes to keeping spirits high, nobody comes close. Rossini's music uncorks and fizzes through the air like a Veuve Cliquot. He is, to this day, opera's great comic artist. Opera humor is generally quite lame, but comedy is not just the art making you laugh, it's also the art of making you smile. And just as no opera composer earns more tears than Verdi, nobody gets more grins-per-bar than Rossini.

After an early failure, Verdi wisely waited to make a second comedy until he was eighty. By the time of Falstaff, he had written the perfect operatic tragedy with Otello. His mastery of tragedy was so ironclad that all he could do after Otello was to find a completely new direction.

Rossini had written dramas all through his career, but they have never attained the popularity of his comedies. The reason is that Rossini's natural effervescence is unsurpassed, and he could never tone it down sufficiently for the moments of repose which drama requires. By the time Rossini turned 39, he had written 38 operas. And while his mastery of craft was undeniable, he still lacked the maturity to branch out into a genre for which he was not naturally suited.

William Tell has all the sparkle of a Rossini comedy, but the moments of true weight are all too few. There are moments which sound like proto-Verdi grandeur (and at the very end, proto-Wagner), but these moments are far too few. In the meantime we are treated to all sorts of pleasures which sound like the rest of Rossini, with not enough difference to make us understand why this drama is particularly special among the rest of Rossini's output. I was put in mind of Rossini's comment that Wagner has great moments but awful quarter-hours. That's precisely how I felt about the experience of listening to William Tell.

Antonio Pappano marshalled the forces of Santa Cecilia in Rome with his typical hyper-effervesence. Some passages sounded overly frenetic even for Rossini. But with James Levine's health problems, there is no conductor more reliable today in directing Italian opera than Pappano, Muti included. Pappano is the Victor de Sabata to Levine's Toscanini and Muti's Ettore Panizza (what that means is for another day). The singers were, to a man (and woman) competent in the extreme and the choral work was a marvel. A wonderful performance, if you like this sort of thing.

800 Words: Classical, Folk and Kitsch

(Today, I'm just finishing the Jon Stewart Piece. In the meantime: Classical, Folk and Kitsch. A piece I wrote three years ago which still holds up fairly well)

This is the day of the Proms devoted to folk music. Allow me to repeat this: in the world's very greatest classical music festival, a festival that is one hundred thirteen years old, two months long, seventy-six concerts diverse, and capable of seating 10,000 at every one of them, there is a single day given over to the music that birthed the very music which we love enough to sustain such a festival.

There is a single day during which we make a half-hearted nod to the fact that our music does not just operate within an inbred vacuum of sterility. A single, segregated day when we acknowledge publicly that classical music has roots in the music of the people. The rest of the days we may fill with our Mahler symphonies, Stravinsky ballets, Handel oratorios and Bach cantatas, but never do we acknowledge in any more than the barest passing that the colossi of music were giants because they were fed upon a steady diet of other musicians who simply created music that lived in an ephemeral moment rather than for all time.

Please don't misunderstand, this is not an argument in support of devoting a week of the Proms every year to Joan Baez. This is an argument that says that the quality of the world's greatest music and the world's greatest music festival (and I truly believe that the Proms is just that) is ultimately suffering because - like most of our music world - it has a concept of 'diversity' that is intimately tangled up with the idea that cross-pollination will dilute the intelligence of what they can offer. We may, if we like, continue our retreat into a cave of ignorance that allows us to declare unser musik uber alles and continue polishing the halo that surrounds our music until its aural gleam deafens even us to its best qualities. Or we can accept that our music is great not in spite of its relation to the banalities of the real world but because of it.

I know, I know. I'm just another 'classical music is dying' bloviator and yet another finger-wagger who is telling you 'it's (y)our fault.' but if you like, you can go to your graves believing that suddenly (usually in '68) the masses got stupid and abandoned us to be the guardians of sacred knowledge that we must pass on from generation to generation until a Parsifal springs up that will deliver the musical world from its past iniquities and lead us back to that era of purity that was supposed to have existed before everything got corrupted by that evil of the 20th century greater than either fascism or communism, more pernicious than imperialism, more repulsive than antisemitism or segregation, the evil that sent the world on its irrevocable trajectory toward complete moral corruption. Surely by my description you know that I can only be speaking of kitsch.

You vaguely remember what kitsch means, don't you? Didn't some authors your college roommate made you read write about it? Didn't that Eastern European friend you once had always complain about how awful kitsch was and how much it was screwing up our lives before he made you listen to Somebody To Love twelve times in a row? Wasn't there something about the all-purpose use of that word that began to seem to you a bit tawdry, cliched...perhaps kitschy?

Everybody has had the experience of a guilty pleasure, even in music. You start by inveighing against something that to you represents every musical trend that is ersatz, destructive and evil. And just to reassure yourself that you're right that it's just as terrible as you think it is, you allow yourself to listen to it occasionally just so you can experience its badness anew. But then you find yourself gripped by the unsuppressable urge to listen to it 'ironically' over and over again until you finally can admit to yourself that there is nothing ironic about your response. As Noel Coward said, it's 'extraordinary how potent cheap music is.' Cliches are cliches for a reason, and the most extraordinary thing about cheap music is the duality of your response. Whenever we hear a cliche, we often realize the truth behind it at exactly the same moment that our stomach gives a slight churn because its truth is all too obvious to require any repetition. In just the same way, we can accept things we hear in music with total irony and total sincerity at the same time.

If you'd be so kind as to permit me a counter-factual exercise, then allow me to ask you to picture yourself living in central Europe a hundred years ago. Let's say that you were a music-lover living in Budapest who patronized the same coffeehouse week after week from 1885 to 1914. And for argument's sake, let's say that this coffeehouse was highly fashionable. Much of the time you would see all sorts of glitteratti coming in, and not just the celebrities of Budapest either. This haunt would be frequented by the greats of Vienna whenever they had business further down the Danube. Perhaps great authors like Schnitzler or Karl Krauss or Altenberg would stop there for a pastry and a cognac whenever they had a function to attend in the empire's second city. Whenever they were there they were perfectly happy to give you and your friends amiable answers to any questions you may have asked them about life, love and art. Perchance you could occasionally see a famous artist like Klimt scribbling furiously at a corner table while Schiele was yelling at the waiter that his master's absinthe should have been ten degrees cooler. Let's also suppose a rumor made the rounds that Archduke Rudolf once came in through the back entrance and took a secluded booth to meet for a tryst with Marie Vetsera. Maybe even a severely intoxicated Karl Lueger would occasionally stop by on a break from official business and treat you to a drink on the krone of the Jewish money he hated so much.

But the main reason that all these celebrities would make a point of coming to this cafe would be the music. Every night, an exotic musical act would entertain the guests. On any given night you might hear a traveling band of Roma musicians, or a troop of Turkish jannisaries, or perhaps if the management was feeling broad-minded they might have allowed some Jewish musicians to come in to play a spot of klezmer. Every single night a different group of musicians would be there who could hail from any corner of the Empire and occasionally from even farther afield.

And because your coffeehouse had such a sterling reputation for music, nearly every musician of note within the empire could occasionally be seen. Mahler had his own reserved table while he directed the Budapest Opera and would stubbornly insist that no diners speak while the musicians played. Whenever Brahms sailed down the Danube to hear Mahler conduct, Mahler would bring him along. Dvorak could also occasionally be seen peering behind a gigantic mound of goulash. Janacek came by few times and whenever he came could be seen furiously scribbling the notations of whatever he heard on a napkin. Johann Strauss was a frequent guest when his orchestra was off-season and even Richard Strauss was once seen at the cafe with a group of opera singers playing skat.

But there were two guests who came nearly every day from the time they were schoolboys until they were well into their thirties and always sat together at the same table. One was a debonair, extroverted young man who would invite unsuspecting ladies of good standing over to their table so he could bewitch them with talk of a revolution in Hungary that would begin with music. His name was Zoltan Kodaly. The other was a young and painfully shy little man who rarely spoke to anyone but seemed to hear everything. The few words he spoke were either to Kodaly or to the musicians whom Kodaly would invariably invite over to their table after the performance. The rest of the time he would sit quietly and when the music wasn't playing he would pour over mounds of sheet music with a red pen. His name was Bela Bartok. If there was indeed a coffeehouse that brought all the folk music of the empire together, it could not have been better memorialized than it was by those two visionary artists.

The reason all these great musicians would have made constant appearances at a coffeehouse like our imaginary one is because they understood that the 'simple' music of people who had given no thought to posterity or art was capable of containing as much inventiveness as the music of those who did. They, like us, sat through enough terrible concerts to know that 'art' was no guarantee of quality. They were wise enough to take inspiration wherever it came and humble enough to know that the soil which fertilizes great music is too rare to be spurned because of a compromised source. They may not have liked some or even most of the vernacular music they heard. But these composers were men of vision who might perceive the possibility of developing greatness out of even the blandest scrap of music. They knew better than to shut their ears to lesser music, because even in bad music may lay the seed of something infinitely greater.

There is no such thing as art that deserves to be taken seriously just because it is made in a certain style. No amount of protestation about the inherent superiority of classical music will make a bad piece of it seem like an infinitesimal fraction of the reward one derives from a good piece of music in any genre. Those of us who prefer classical music would do well to remember that in a just world, all great music eventually becomes classical.

For as long as I have been listening to the Proms, there has been talk of drastically shortening the season. Surely, people reason, there is no way to sustain a classical music festival at fever pitch for two months. Perhaps they're right. When you have seventy-six orchestral concerts (not to mention a dozen subsidiary ones at other locations), not all of them will generate the same amount of excitement. Maybe there is absolutely no way dress up the third concert of the season by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to interest people. But the solution to this problem is as plain as a British nose on its face.

As it happens, the BBC has at least taken baby steps in the correct direction by opening the door of the Proms at least 5 degrees ajar so that other genres can at least peak their heads in. The only problem was occasionally in how they chose to do it. Last year, rather than bring in the kind of jazz or rock or folk or eastern or theater acts that would honor the Proms with its presence, the otherwise sane Nicholas Kenyon chose to invite Michael ^#%^$*% Ball to give a concert. It was a baby step so far in the wrong direction that you have to wonder at the fact that the Proms manage to conduct themselves otherwise with so much intelligence. In any event, the concert was met with a wall of protest so loud that it's a wonder discussion of branching out to other genres was not closed down altogether.

But the truth remains obvious in spite of all the alarmist claims that any infringement on Radio 3's still extremely serious classical programming is a form of 'dumbing down.' There is simply no good reason why the Proms or Radio 3 should be exclusively classical. Those who complain incessantly about the dumbing down of Radio 3 would have a far better case if they did not regard any potential change in programming as inferior to the dulcet strains of Humphrey Searle that put them to bed every night as children. Classical programming itself will suffer as a result of operating without the context which a wider selection would provide.

There is no good reason why the Proms should not have other acts on their stage. There is no reason why the Proms should be just a venerated and venerable British institution when it could be every bit as important to European cultural life as the Edinburgh Festival.

Just imagine how relevant the Proms could be. Perhaps they could do an entire series devoted to the still remaining masters of jazz in its golden era. Just imagine, Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman give concerts on successive nights. Each concert is preceded by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic who have devised a three-concert series devoted to the great works of the masters who were influenced by jazz. The series could even begin with the original piece of swing music, the finale from Schubert's 'Great' C-major symphony. And they could close it with Rhapsody in Blue and announce an obvious soloist for it like Jean-Yves Thibaudet, but instead Hank Jones would walk out and the crowd would go absolutely wild.

Or in the span of a week you could have a special, one-off Proms performance of the four great Shakespearean tragedies for which you hire the very best to direct: Peter Hall for Hamlet, Peter Brook for Othello, Trevor Nunn for Macbeth and Nicholas Hytner for Lear. You could construct a makeshift stage for each of them in the middle of the stage. You could have McKellen or Christopher Plummer come to do Lear with John Hurt playing the fool, Patrick Stewart could come play Macbeth and maybe you could even get one of the Redgrave sisters to play the Lady. Maybe you could even get Brannagh to play Othello this time with an Iago from Jeremy Irons to match him and bring Kate Winslet back to the stage to do Desdemona. And maybe, just maybe, you could get Daniel Day-Lewis to do Hamlet while he still looks 30.

These performances would sell out immediately and on days between performances, maybe Claudio Abbado could be convinced to bring over the Lucerne Festival Orchestra to do a series of programs about music based on Shakespeare. We could even have an Otello the day after Ken and Jeremy go to town on each other, only this time with Jonas Kaufmann (for surely he was born to star in Otello) and Sergei Leiferkus.

Of course this is a pigs fly vision of how the Proms would operate. But would the Proms truly be worse if we tried to make them more like that? How many new fans could we engage by showing other intelligent people that we don't want our fun to be sequestered? We ought to share in their fun and we ought to do everything to make them want to share in ours. If the Beeb can do that, then there's no reason the excitement can't last all throughout the two months. Hell, maybe it could go on for three or four.

800 Words: The End of Jon Stewart?

The Anthony Weiner scandal looks to be, definitively and thankfully, over. As with every sex scandal in American history, historians will be flummoxed that Americans were so oblivious to the world that they devoted a two weeks of their free time to reading about the genitalic contents of their leaders (to say nothing of the year they devoted to Bill Clinton’s). But the Weiner scandal reached an especial level of stupid - even for a sex scandal. The fact that his behavior was even a scandal says something about our stupidity, and the fact that he would engage in it says that much more about his.

Yet just as this particular scandal was particularly stupid, its ramifications will reach particularly far. Unfortunately, not in the realm of politics, where neither the politicians nor the people who vote for them have learned anything more than they have from the last hundred sex scandals. The place where the ramifications will reach deepest is on Comedy Central. Whether or not we acknowledge it, it is possible that the Age of Jon Stewart just ended.

When the same historians of America stop marveling at The Weiner Twitpics, they will turn to things that matter (hopefully) and not hesitate to proclaim the 00’s a decade in which America was principally shaped by three people (or at least their handlers): George W. Bush in politics, Francis Collins in science (chair of the human genome project), and Jon Stewart in culture. Why Bush should be obvious and why Collins will become moreso as time advances. But Jon Stewart is at least a bit more elusive.

Anybody who’s sat through a Daily Show episode, let alone thousands, realizes that Stewart is as inconsistently funny as he is likable. There are fists-full of jokes that don’t work, a revolving door of variably funny correspondents, and an assortment of guests boring enough to make you think you’ve accidentally switched to Charlie Rose.

But when he’s on...oh my, when he’s on...

The pummelling starts out slow. All Stewart has to do is report the news as any serious newscaster would, albeit at a much faster pace so as to alleviate boredom. Then, with a sleight of hand subtle enough to stupefy a FOX newsman, all it takes is one word in a perfectly placed context - an ‘is’ or ‘has’ to frame the whole thing - and then the show cuts to a politician uttering a phrase so ridiculous as to defy belief. We have no idea how it would sound without the setup, but we double over every time. Not only because it’s funny, not only because we never saw it coming, but also because we can’t believe that we live in a country in which people this stupid run our lives. Then we cut back to Stewart, who in his best moments knows that no commentary can improve on what he just did. He just sits there, with a vague shake of the head, and we absorb it as if it were our own reaction, because it is.

Then the pounding starts to build. More news. A story that grew out of the first story, and before we know it we’re watching another political figure saying something even dumber. Now the cackle is loud enough to make the person in the next room wander over to ask what’s so funny. “Sit Down.” you say every time.

Stewart’s reaction is a little less modest this time and there’s a corny joke made in a corny voice. It isn’t funny, nor is it really meant to be. It’s his way of saying, ‘don’t pay attention to me, pay attention to what I’m showing you.’ Not that we need to be told twice, but self-effacement is the most important part of his brand.

Now comes a bit of editorializing. Not Lou Dobbs faux-grandiosity, not Andy Rooney triviality and certainly not Bill O’Reilly finger-pointed-at-camera. Usually, just a sentence long. “Gee, maybe they should try _____ _____ _____” And those last three words, whispered with the back of his right hand shielding his mouth from whoever’s backstage left. And out comes the most obvious statement imaginable, said as though it’s the most subversive thing anyone’s ever said. A mild titter follows that puts us at ease.

“I mean, if they didn’t think of that, maybe they could try this?” And out comes a random youtube clip or 80’s music video, the height of stupidity. A connection we could never have thought of ourselves between the youtube video and the important people on the screen, which makes us both elated by the comparison and depressed by how dumb these guys are. We suddenly find our ribs hurting, as though we’ve been endlessly walloped by a prizefighter, and still we can’t stop laughing.

And now all the clips we’ve seen and more are going together as the screen erupts in total anarchy. We’re assaulted by a montage that includes Star Wars, Stan Bush, babies dancing, John Wayne, Fox & Friends, cats playing pianos, Jimmy Buffett, Al Jolson, a human cannon ball and The Unabomber. We’re down for the count, the tear ducts are flowing, and we can’t stop laughing all through the commercials.

The apparent irony of it all is that the moment we’re worked into that helpless state is the moment Jon Stewart strikes the serious note and tells us why the world should be a different place than it is. The sermon is never more than three sentences long, and one would think we’d never be able to hear it through our spasms. But we hear it every time. We’re never more receptive than that moment when we’ve passed over from laughter to tears. For anybody who could do that to us, we would march on Poland.

What we’ve just been through is our generation’s defining experience; as crucial to our development as dissecting Dylan lyrics was to our parents, or dancing the lindy-hop was to theirs; an experience that lets us experience the freedom of a part of us which our elders forbade us to ever know was there.

Sex was the forbidden for our grandparents. Rebellion was the forbidden for our parents. For us, the forbidden is plain speech. The simple notion that we should say what we truly think has so long disappeared from modern life that we no longer recognize it as a necessary part of human nature, and therefore it has all the attraction to us of a fresh self-discovery. And how could it be anything but a discovery in today’s world? Businesses trample our need for plain speech with every TV advertisement we watch. Academics thumb their noses at our need for plain speech with every incomprehensible journal article they publish. Political actors exploit our hunger for plain speech with memes like ‘Straight Talk Express’ and ‘No Spin Zone’ as a means of feeding us a daily intake of political spin. Every time there is the whiff of a celebrity scandal, every television network pretends as though it is at all shocking; and we the consumers pretend that it is at all interesting. Financial firms pretend that the worries of your life will simply wash away so long as you invest your money with them, and do so while creating mathematical money-siphoning schemes too complex for the regulators to ever understand. Soundbites have become more reductive, intelligent speech more obfuscating, and the twain never doth meet. Our government was so convinced by half-truths of its own invention that it convinced itself to launch a (thus far) eight year war in Iraq - a country whom every major intelligence bureau in the world decided had weapons of mass destruction without a shred of empirical evidence. The lack of plain speech has become the most prevalent, and probably most destructive, feature of our daily lives. None of us are immune from its reach, and all of us have become less trusting of others as a result. As Peter O’Toole’s character said in The Last Emperor, ‘If you do not say what you mean, how can you mean what you say?’

The Princeton philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, perhaps put it best when he said; ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there’s so much bullshit.’ in his monograph, ‘On Bullshit.’ To Frankfurt, bullshit and lies have less to do with one another than lies do to truth - at least a lie is told to evade the truth, bullshit is spewed with disregard for it.

The world we grew up in was ripe to be skewered. All that was needed was two things:

1. A person who could dissect bullshit and do it in an engaging manner.
2. A person able to take on bullshit without getting smeared by it.

There were many who tried. Michael Moore gave it his all, so did Bill Maher, and Al Franken, and David Cross, and Chuck Palahniuk, and Garrison Keillor. To say nothing of Christopher Buckley, Dennis Miller and P.J. O’Rourke as advocates for the ‘other side.’ But none of them understood the one thing that would let them pass test #2.

Satire is comedy first, message second. It is impossible to make fun of pretension credibly if you have pretensions yourself. In each of the above cases, the humor seemed to serve a larger agenda. No matter how skilled each of the above humorists were at the mechanics of satire, their aim is so consistently in one direction that they can’t arrive at something which seemed like plain speech. Every time we watch Michael Moore yell at an unsuspecting passer-by, or Bill Maher growl at the camera, or Dennis Miller reference mid-16th century chiauroscuro, something in us suspects that they’re going over the top merely as compensation. Perhaps there is something in them no more credible than the people they foil.

Before Jon Stewart inherited the Daily Show, he was thought of as a comedian who never hit his peak, with a movie career that sputtered before it began. At one point in 1993, he was considered the prohibitive favorite to replace David Letterman at NBC’s Late Night; and instead watched himself passed over for a comedy writer with almost no on-camera experience named Conan O’Brien. He had no less than four failed TV shows to his credit. In all likelihood, he was the party to feel lucky to land The Daily Show, not the other way round.

When he arrived, The Daily Show’s aim was far lower. The content of the show was grounded in entertainment, not satire. Craig Kilborne had wanted the feel of a local news show, with spoofs of human interest news stories and celebrity snark being the driving forces and politics a distinctly secondary concern. It certainly seemed like the right choice for the time. It was the 1990’s, and politics seemed to have little interest to America except for how politicians’ behavior mirrored celebrities. The hook for the show was its edginess. His show was marketed, correctly, as one that made jokes too edgy to be shown on the on Saturday Night Live newscasts. Perhaps the early Daily Show’s most obvious decendent is The Soup, with the similarly vinegar-veined Joel McHale taking Craig Kilborne’s place.

Kilborne left The Daily Show after three years for what he had thought would be greener pastures - following David Letterman at CBS. While Stewart changed the format dramatically, he did so with almost all of the same writers, same production team and same correspondents whom Kilborne used. Comedians are, generally speaking, an intelligent group of people. So Stewart simply told his writers to start writing pieces about the issues they cared about. Perhaps, Stewart must have reasoned, if the writers felt an engagement in the material, they’d come up with funnier things to say about it.

As a comedian, Jon Stewart was always funny. But there was always something a little too sensible about him to be one of the immortals of traditional standup. Unlike Robin Williams or Louis CK he seems far too aware of the risks involved to throw himself completely into the performance. His comedy was always not only more substantial and more literate than other comedians, but also nicer. Sure, there was always the same vulgarity you’d find in Carlin or Pryor; but unlike the true greats, Stewart was always at great pains to show you that how generous, how principled, how earnest he was. Every breech of good taste would immediately be followed by a step back. “Can’t the aliens catch the people we don’t want.....like Kathy Lee Gifford?” he would say, followed by “Kathy Lee Gifford personally insulted me on her television program, and I think I’m still holding a grudge.”....just in case Live with Regis and Kathie Lee fans were not mutually exclusive from the people who frequented late night comedy clubs.

Even with the steel it must take to nightly hammer on points about the Iraq War which journalists never dared, there is something within Jon Stewart that naturally defers. He is at his best when his material does the speaking for him. Even his best shows are peppered with throw-away jokes that don’t work, if only to fill the space. But those jokes serve a second purpose as well - they deflect from the idea that Stewart is personally as funny as the things he’s showing you. Stewart’s personality does not radiate from the screen. If one were asked to describe the personalities of David Letterman or Craig Ferguson from their onscreen personas, it would be fairly easy. But to describe Stewart off-camera would be far more difficult. One would probably conjure an image of a vaguely likeable guy who’s interested in politics. It should then follow that a genuflecting sort like Stewart would leave a vacuum on the screen that would require more dominating figures to occupy the space he was loathe to take up himself.

Enter the Stepvhens. Two homonymically eponymous comedians who seemed joined at the hip from the beginning of their careers. One, the most dominating comic presence the Boob Tube has seen since the heyday of John Cleese. The other, the quickest comedic improviser in Hollywood since Johnny Carson.

It was Colbert and Carell, roughly simultaneously, who developed the correspondent persona which dominates The Daily Show to this day. Where Stewart was jocular and amiable, while the correspondents were deadly serious. Yet Stewart was the straight man and the correspondent the clown. It was the utter humorlessness of the correspondent’s delivery that made it so funny. In every show, they would present us with a deadly serious justification of behavior that defies logic in every way, and do so by contorting logic in a way so outrageous that we had to laugh, both delighted and scared by how easy they made it seem. What we were seeing was more than simply the bending of logic. Every time we watched the Stepvhens at their best, we got a brief glimpse into the ease by which bullshit can harden into Newspeak. On some level, it disturbed us as much as it delighted.

Inevitably, the Stepvhens were far too hot to keep around. Fundamentally, each could have had the other’s career, but both of them chose wisely. Colbert, the more imposing presence, becoming the second half of the Daily Show brand - an O’Reilly-style blusterer as self-aggrandizing as Stewart is effacing. But Carell, whose talent relies more on agility than strength, chose the harder path. He has taken the Daily Show correspondent model, softened it, and made it work for mainstream comedy. What is Michael Scott but the Stephen Colbert persona trapped in middle management? So much of The Office is clearly unscripted that one can’t help marveling at how Carrell makes his character consistently one-up the outrageousness of twenty other characters, each played by a gifted performer.

Neither Jon Stewart nor Stephen Colbert were ever the Orwellian prophets of some people’s fevered imaginations. In an authoritarian regime, a Jon Stewart would never have been possible. He’d have been assassinated about five minutes after the first time he aired a Lewis Black commentary. America is not an authoritarian country, and contrary to some people’s beliefs, Jon Stewart is neither the leader of a ‘resistance’ nor a man with an especially insightful ethical code for us all to follow.

The reason we find Jon Stewart compelling is because he speaks to a specific, nameless fear we all have. America is still very much a democracy, and every Jon Stewart super-fan who blames capitalism when his credit card maxes is evidence of that. But in a country where our leaders no longer inspire trust (whether they ever deserved trust is a question for another day), Stewart is the mouthpiece for that barely nameable fear we all have that all these bullshitters may be taking away our ability to ignore them; and that if they did, we’d never see it coming because they’ve been spewing bullshit the entire time. The day we wake up and realize that we are being forced to proclaim our allegiance to bullshit or face dire consequences, if or whenever it comes, is the moment when Bullshit will harden into Newspeak.

We’re not there yet. But the delicate dance between Stewart, Colbert and the Mainstream Media shows how perilously close we continually come. The MSM never knew what to make of them, and Stewarts relationship to the MSM provides greater evidence as to why he is America’s defining cultural figure of our time than any other facet of his career.

At first, there was no reason for the Media pay attention. Stewart was testing formats for a year and only hit upon the right one during the 2000 election cycle. But the first time when Stewart was indispensable was after 9/11. After David Letterman bravely went back on the air only six days after 9/11, Jon Stewart returned three days later. Letterman’s response, like ours, was one of dumbfounded incomprehension. It was riveting television, and very moving. But Stewart’s return was cathartic. It was Stewart who showed us the way forward with these lines:

"They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position...We sit in the back and we throw spitballs – never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that...The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. Now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that."

It was the first moment when he changed the curve of America’s arc. Letterman was in the present, but Jon Stewart looked toward the future. More than any of the thousands of public figures on television during that time, he demonstrated that there was a proper way of looking forward while still honoring those who died. From this moment on, Stewart was impossible to ignore.

When Stewart proved impossible to ignore, the MSM made a grand show of embracing him with all too open arms as if to offer him a place as one of them - Newsweek and Time covers, profiles on every major network news show, pundits marvelling about how substantial he can make comedy seem. And as time went on, the MSM’s paeans to Stewart got increasingly ostentatious; as though their hope that he was one of them turned into fear that he excelled them at their own job. Stewart not only pointed out the tried and true hypocrisy of politicians, but also of the journalists who cover them. But it was Stewart himself who brought an end to the MSM's overtures by appearing on Crossfire, CNN’s 20 year showcase for out-of-work pundits looking for a quick buck, and telling them to ‘Stop Hurting America.’ At that moment, Stewart became larger than journalism itself. ‘Do your job’ he said to the MSM, because as a comedian he did his job better than most of them ever did theirs; and showed how much overlap on both sides there could be between the two.

To most of us, 2003 seems like so long ago that we forget how close we came to the bullshit hardening. It was one of the few times in American History when a sitting President declared criticism of his policies to be unpatriotic. Dissent was nearly silenced in the name of unity; in the face of an enemy that remained virtually unidentifiable.

For all the deserved criticism of the media during the Bush years, one consideration should be remembered. They were scared. After 9/11, most of us had enough good faith to believe that when our President says that there are Weapons of Mass Destruction in a country with the desire and capability to attack us, he damn well means it and knows something we don’t. Most people would believe their President on something that grave even had 9/11 never happened. But even if we take our politicians on faith, it’s the job of journalists to be skeptical.

In an age when scared journalists would not ask questions, it took a comedian to regularly put the questions we all should have been asking on television. It was not a question of bravery, because if Stewart were ever subject of intimidation, he could have simply hidden behind ‘I’m just a comedian on a comedy network.’ He has many times before. What motivated The Daily Show to ask questions about Iraq was not bravery, it was comedy. The fact that reputable journalists refuse to ask the most crucial questions about the outrageous facts their government claims to find without displaying empirical proof........that’s really funny.

After twelve years, the frequency at which The Daily Show still manages to reach those moments of stupefied hilarity is remarkable. The edges are certainly fraying, but the core remains fundamentally intact. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After the Stepvhens left, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After the election of Obama, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After his somewhat ill-conceived Rally to Restore Sanity, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. Yet Stewart has remained through it all, because his hold on us is larger than any facet of his show. If it’s funny to make fun of a public figure’s pretense or hypocrisy, whether Conservative or Liberal, he’s never had any scruples about it (one can’t help it if there’s simply more comic fodder from the right).

And this is why his reluctance to go after Anthony Weiner is so troubling. Weiner was, in so many ways, The Congressman from The Daily Show. Granted, Weiner and Stewart are good friends. They had known each other since their college years, and it is not hard to see why they befriended one another. Weiner has long been known as one of the funniest members of congress, probably less afraid to use humor to emphasize his points than any present member. He is also, like Stewart, doggedly persistent; able to ask questions about the hypocrisy of fellow members which less brave congressman would never dare. Like Stewart’s favorite foils, he is also a dominating presence - in his way, as imposing a television personality as Stephen Colbert. The fact that such a man with so close to, and so similar to Jon Stewart could make such a grave (and gravely hilarious) lapse in judgement calls for all the more reason that Jon Stewart had a responsibility to treat him like any other.

But this was the first moment in the history of the show when you could feel Jon Stewart wishing himself to be a self-effacing standup comic again. The Daily Show provided him with a program where he could entertain people with the most biting possible humor and still earn plaudits for being principled and respectable. But how can a person be principled and respectable if he lampoons his friend on National Television? The humor of Jon Stewart was supposed to shield us from bullshit exactly like this. And now we’ve learned that like everything else, it doesn’t. The moment this story hit the headlines was, perhaps inevitably, the moment which Jon Stewart broke his contract with us. We would view life with all the silliness and directness which he demanded. And in return, he would provide us immunity from all the bullshit which politicians tell.

But every revolution betrays its principles eventually. That never means the revolution was a complete failure. Jon Stewart put plain speech back into our discourse. We’ve now elected a president who admits to marijuana and cocaine use without fear of stigma. We routinely share things on Facebook and Twitter which, eight years ago, would have taken Patriot Act Authorization to discover. Financial firms are finally being warned (if not held accountable) for obfuscating about the ways they make money. Academics are occasionally held accountable for writing unclear prose.

None of this is Stewart’s doing. But as history turns its wheels, it will need a figure who epitomizes these beginning steps in returning towards clear, plain speech; in which people speak their minds freely and without fear of giving away some advantage for having done so. Why would Jon Stewart exemplify this? Because no one has done so in public as well or for as long. Just look at what he says here:

"….And I may have mentioned during the discussion we were having that Harry Truman was a war criminal. And right after saying it, I thought to myself that was dumb. And it was dumb. Stupid in fact. So I shouldn't have said that, and I did. So I say right now, no, I don't believe that to be the case. The atomic bomb, a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say. Which, by the way, as it was coming out of your mouth, you ever do that, where you're saying something, and as it's coming out you're like, "What the fuck, nyah?" And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, "No, no, he wasn't, and you should really say that out loud on the show." So I am, right now, and, man, ew. Sorry."

Try to imagine Bill Maher saying that.

Quote of the Day:

Der Fersko: Disney passed on Harry Potter when they were shopping it around after the first book was published
They said it was too British, too dank, and that kids wouldn't be interested in a movie that took place in a school
They also burn money on Sundays

Prom 1 Review

Weir, Brahms, Liszt, Janacek

Benjamin Grosvenor (piano)
Hibla Gerzmava (soprano)
Dagmar Peckova (mezzo-soprano)
Stefan Vinke (tenor)
Jan Martiník (bass)
David Goode (organ)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Jiri Belohlavek (conductor)

B+

Is it just me, or is Jiri Belohlavek waking up? When he came to the BBC Symphony, he seemed a competent but dull musician who gave off occasional flickers of inspiration, but his firebreathing moments have come increasingly often. Next year, he leaves the Beeb for the position he should have held for twenty years, the Czech Philharmonic, who fired him in 1991. Perhaps he's reinvigorated by the rapproachment. Or maybe it's just the water.

The concert itself was a weird compromise between the old tradition of beginning the Proms with a grab bag of light hits and the older tradition of beginning the Proms with a major choral work. On the first half were three light pieces, all played for maximum lightness.

First came a 4-minute commission: Stars, Night, Music and Light by Judith Weir. It was a very fine piece for a huge array of forces including chorus and organ. Stylistically, it was equally Messiaen and John Williams. And needless to say, it did not outwear its welcome.

After Weir came a very frothy performance of Brahms's Academic Festival Overture. The tempo was fast, and there was not much of the flexibility great Brahms requires. But spirits were so high that it mattered little. The result was perhaps more a Franz von Suppe operetta than Brahms. A surprise came at the end when the Chorus entered to sing the old College song which Brahms appropriated for the piece: 'Gaudeamus Igetur,' in Sir Malcolm Sargent's arrangement. It was a nice gesture to Sargent, the second-most important figure in Proms history. But it's hardly appropriate to stuff 200 singers into such a no-fat performance. Even so, I had to wonder, why only the final song? Why not all four of the songs Brahms incorporated into his lightest orchestral work? Ah well, still a very enjoyable performance.

Next came Benjamin Grosvenor, who at 19 is being charged with the task of performing both Liszt Piano Concertos at the Proms. First comes the Second, and Grosvenor tackled Liszt's Second Concerto with no fear. When interviewed, he mentioned his love of Gyorgy Cziffra and the inspiration Grosvenor draws from Cziffra as a Lisztian. But precious little of the quixotic quirks which make Cziffra's Liszt so fascinating made its way to these ears. Grosvenor's runs and octaves were so impressive as to sound sculpted from ice. Both Grosvenor and Behlolavek made easy work of this sprawling piano monsterpiece which sounds turgid in so many less capable hands. The form was always clear and the textures polished to ultimate sheen. All that was missing was the bravado risk-taking without Liszt ceases to be Liszt. In its place was all the tastefulness and elegance for which one could wish. But what is Liszt without vulgarity? (Rather boring. In case an answer was needed to the rhetorical question.)

Finally came Janacek's Glagolitic Mass. For this blogger (who moonlights as a choral conductor), one of the towering choral masterpieces of all time and second only to Stravinsky's Les Noces among twentieth century works in the genre. When I lived in London, I heard a performance of the Glagolitic Mass by the late Sir Charles Mackerras which I still count as one of the two greatest live performances I've ever experienced in my life.

Now that Mackerras has passed on, Behlolavek is almost universally acknowledged as the greatest of living Janacek conductors. His view of the Glagolitic Mass is shockingly different from the tasteful inoffensive performances we've come to expect from him. This was a performance full of raw, ugly sounds, with huge (and unmarked) shifts in tempo. It all sounded a bit under-rehearsed, and perhaps not thought through well enough. But one can't argue with this kind of commitment. No performance I've ever heard, not even those by Mackerras or Kubelik, ever lived up to Milan Kundera's description of this work as 'More orgy than Mass.' Carefulness reared its head intermittently (particularly on the part of the organist, David Goode) but I think Janacek would have easily approved; certainly far more than he would have of the rigid and desiccated performance Pierre Boulez gave at the Proms three years ago. This is Janacek with the full range of his passions intact. If he remains unacknowledged as one of music's supreme creators, it is because people have not heard performances of this caliber.

Perhaps part of the reason for the performance sounding under-rehearsed is because of the score itself. For seventy years, Janacek's score existed only in a simplified, bowdlerized edition which severely curbed his individuality. To have heard the Mass in the simplified version for years and then to encounter the original is a revelation. There is hardly a single page in which the score is not altered immeasureably. And with every new 'original edition,' (one seems to come out every few years) the score is altered still further. I wonder if we have not passed the point of alterations helping. The piece now sounds stranger than ever, but not all the weirdness sounds like an improvement. I eagerly await the day (perhaps in vain) when conductors amass the self-confidence to make a performing version purely meant to work for themselves.

800 Words: Harry Potter and the Magic of Money: Part 1

Imagine, purely as an exercise, that you’re J. K. Rowling. The clock’s been wound back to 1999. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has been an American best-seller for an entire year, even if the publishers insisted on changing its title because Americans won’t buy any book with ‘philosopher’ on the cover. Five years ago, you were supporting your daughter with welfare checks, yet by this year you’ve come into more money than anyone with whom you grew up ever dreamed of seeing. Movie studios are falling over themselves to buy the rights to your entire series and you realize that in ten years you might be richer than the Queen of England.

You, faithful Social Democrat which you are, make a vow to yourself that this money will not be hoarded. It will go to people like you who so direly needed a J K Rowling to champion their causes if they wanted a fighting chance in this world. So you become the spokesperson for causes you would have needed a few years ago. Since you were raising your daughter without a father, you become the ambassador for One Parent Families. Since you watched your mother slowly die of MS for a decade, you become the spokesperson for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. You make a point of becoming good friends with Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon, the power behind Tony Blair and soon to be the Labour Prime Minister who will restore England to its pre-Thatcher glory days. Sarah will key you into all sorts of other enormously important charitable work, and all sorts of enormously important people to help promote it. And in order to impress those enormously important people, you need an enormously important house and clothing and husband and schools for your children. And when all these enormously important people are enormously impressed with all the components of your enormously important life, it occurs to you that you may have been chosen for something still more important. You are becoming England’s spokeswoman for charity herself, chosen by God or destiny to fill the hole which Princess Diana left in people’s hearts for someone at the top who speaks for those on the bottom.

Still, there are those books to write, and those movies to make. Not that they’re a burden. They are a fun diversion from all the anxiety of the parties and the dinners. They are the only place where you can still be ‘Jo.’ But like everybody who wants their share in this world, you have to strike that perfect balance between quality and quantity. Shakespeare wrote for the money, and he can occasionally be a crashing bore, but the world still loves him. So if the books occasionally lag, that’s alright. Perhaps the new commercial appeal will focus your imagination that much more. And even if it doesn’t, you never set out to make ‘great art.’ You just wanted to write good books which your daughter could enjoy as much as you do, and you bloody well succeeded. Now if only those pesky superfans would stop telling you how to write your books.

But even if the fans will never stop telling you how to write, the editors have. They no longer want a breezy read with all the detail omitted. ‘This is unnecessary,’ is what the red-pencil used to say on every other paragraph; now it says ‘Elaborate. We want to know more!’ You’re your own brand now, and people will gobble every word. The longer the novel, the more the publisher can charge. And that means more money for the charities!

And then there are the movies. My god, movies out of your books! Someone at the BBC called to feel out an offer for a miniseries one day after the first book was released. But you knew that it would be an affair done on the cheap and that if the sales numbers were anything like what was anticipated, you’d have offers that would reach an audience well beyond those who pay a licencing fee.

And so you’re faced with the double challenge of writing ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’ while Universal Pictures makes the first movie. The realization occurs to you that every book you write for the rest of your life will be made into a movie. Even if it’s just a million pounds for the rights to the first four books, the merchandizing from Harry Potter alone could rake in tens of millions for you by themselves. You picture the movies and the possibilities put tears in your eyes. All the greatest English actors can have hands in it. You’ll have Alan Rickman as Snape and Ian McKellen as Dumbledore; Maggie Smith as McGonnagal and Judi Dench as Sprout; Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid and Colin Firth as Quirrell. You can feel the presence of these actors in the characters so vividly that you start to write the characters with them in mind. You begin to imagine stunning visual tableauxes which a visual imagination on the order of Terry Gilliam’s could feast upon. Or maybe even... dare you think...Steven Spielberg?

And so you go into those first meetings with Universal. True to the fairy tale your life’s become, they promise you everything you could possibly dream. Hundreds of millions in merchandise, the best production team in Hollywood and a competent screenwriter who will do precisely what you tell him. The best news of all comes last, Spielberg’s interested!

‘There’s one catch though. Remember Haley Joel Osment, that kid from the Sixth Sense? He has to play Harry.’

‘But he’s American.’

‘Steven is sure that Harry Potter’s appeal can be more universal. He thinks that people in some places might be put off by a British Harry Potter. If we want Harry Potter to appeal to people around the world, it would be better to make him American.’

‘Well,...I’d have to think about it.’

‘Please do. He’s eager to talk with you. Here’s his number.’

And for the first time since the fairy tale began, you’re overmatched. You dial the phone with a feeling of dread. You are about to have a conversation with the most influential cultural figure of your time, and he’s going to show you your proper place in the world.

“These books can be the cultural phenomenom of this generation the way Star Wars was for yours. People can look to the Harry Potter series and say that it did more to shape our kids’ lives than any other influence outside their homes. It really has that kind of potential and you shouldn’t settle for anything less.....”

Steven Spielberg doesn’t seem particularly interested in anything you have to say, but he certainly thinks highly of your work.

“So did they tell you about Haley? He really is the most gifted child actor I’ve ever seen. I’m working on this great new movie called A.I. It was supposed to be Stanley’s but he gave it to me before he passed away. He’s playing a kid robot and he plans everything from the number of steps he takes to the amount of time between every blink. He’d be exactly what you’re looking for.”

“I was actually hoping to talk to you about that Steven. I always saw Harry Potter as an English story with British characters and actors.”

“Haley can do a British accent no problem.”

“I’m sure he can. But I need to know he’ll have the guidance he needs through all the movies.”

“That’s no problem. Believe me, I know a bunch of great filmmakers who can guide the kids through the sequels.”

“You mean you wouldn’t be in charge of the whole project?”

“I’d be an Executive Producer. If you need anything, I’m just a phonecall away.”

“Who would you get then to direct the others.”

“That depends on who’s available. I’m sure that anybody from Bob Zemeckis to Rob Reiner would love to sink their teeth into this. But if I could choose anybody, I’d say Chris Columbus. He’s fantastic with kid actors, great with writers and he built the Gremlins franchise single-handedly. I’ll get you a meeting with him. You’ll love him. Anyhow, I’ve got principal photography at 6 tomorrow morning so I’ll have to leave. It’s great to finally talk to you and I’m sure we’ll talk again. Have a good one Jo.”

And just like that, Steven Spielberg spoke at you for nearly an hour. Telling you precisely who you are and what your movies are going to be.

Your next meeting at the studio starts out well enough. They’re talking about bringing Haley Joel Osment in for a screentest and saying that they have to find a time for Chris to come in to administer it.

“Chris? As in Chris Columbus?”

“Sure. You’ll love him.”

“So this means Chris Columbus is directing?..”

“Didn’t you and Steven agree that he’d be a great choice?”

“I...well....not really. Does this mean that Steven won’t be directing?”

“He’s going to be an executive producer. He’ll be just a phonecall away.”

“But...wait....so you’ve cast Haley Joel....as Harry Potter and Steven won’t be directing?”

“Wasn’t that what we all agreed on?”

“I’m fairly certain that the deal was that we’d take Haley Joel on so long as Steven’s directing. But if he isn’t, I’d like to look at other kids.”

“Are you sure about that? He’s really great. Steven says Haley’s the most gifted child actor he’s ever seen.”

“Well, if Haley is the star, can’t we look at other directors? What about Terry Gilliam or Peter Weir?”

“You’re gonna love Chris! Look, let’s set up a dinner date, the three of us. I know this great Italian place in Castellamare. They make all the ingrediants in-house and the chef is a personal friend. Just come with us as a favor to me, you’re gonna love everything about him.”

So you go to dinner. Chris Columbus shows you pictures of his daughter, whom he tells you is the “#1 Harry Potter fan.” He tells you how in love he is with the whole book. He says that he got the script already from Steve Cloves, and the moment he got the script he started re-writing it, free of charge....So they’ve already written the script, and the director’s already rewritten it....

Columbus starts mouthing off about other directors “Oh god. That guy’s so full of himself.” “I tried to have a phone conversation with this guy about a project we could do together, and he can’t bother to listen to me for two minutes.” “So many of these guys can be so pompous. They don’t know what it’s like to work their way into movies so they just take what they want. I was the son of two miners from Ohio. I worked for everything I ever had and that’s why I love Harry Potter. He seems like any kid I could have grown up with in Youngstown.”

And that last line is the moment when you relent. This movie may not be the Harry Potter you always wanted, but this director clearly understands what Harry Potter is.

First thing the next morning, the studio calls. “Isn’t he great?”

“I’ll be delighted to have him as a director. But on only one condition.”

“Whatever you want.”

“The entire franchise is done with all-British casts. Harry Potter is an English book, and it needs English actors for it to work. I’m sure Haley is a wonderful actor, but we need a British kid to play Harry.”

“Consider the twerp fired.”

“I have people in mind for the various parts too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Well,...how about Ian McKellen as Dumbledore.”

“Can’t. He’s playing Gandalf for New Line’s Lord of the Rings.”

“Oh...Well,....Alan Rickman for Snape?”

“That’ll be good. But have you thought about Tim Roth?”

“I really like Alan Rickman.”

“He’s a little pricey but we’ll see what we can do to get him.”

“Robbie Coltrane for Hagrid.”

“We were going to suggest him too. Done and done.”

Conversations like this go on for a while, but at some point you realize that you’ve scored a major Hollywood victory. You’re a writer for a major Hollywood production who gets final approval on what you like. You may not get creative input, but you can veto anybody else’s. When is the last time the writer held this much power over the adaptation of the book? Out of curiosity, you take out some of Chris’s movies. You remember liking Home Alone. You rent Mrs. Doubtfire and like everybody else you think Robin Williams is really funny. But then you watch Nine Months and Bicentennial Man and you nearly have an anneurism. Did I just entrust my franchise to a guy who put Tom Arnold in a family film and made Robin Williams a robot?

Clearly, the movie won’t be what you’d hoped. Even if it’s good, it will be far lighter and more sentimental than anything you envisioned. There will be far more pandering to children than challenging them and you’ll have to make sure he consults you every day to ensure that he doesn’t decide to put in any American slang or rock’n roll montages. Still, you assure yourself; he’s done good work before. He’s committed to the project and everybody does seem to listen to you now.

And besides, even if Chris injects enough sugar for a diabetic, that can be a bone to the mainstream after what you’re planning next: 600 pages of The New Harry Potter; an adolescent full of angst and dark foreboding - suddenly awake to girls and called upon to perform tasks far more dangerous than stabbing a tooth through a book. The fourth book has more challenging material for a generation grown too old for beginner spells and Every-Flavored Beans.

And then Book IV is released. The fairy tale can’t any get more beautiful. The kids buy it by the millions. Toy companies are offering hundreds of millions for the rights to the movies. Critics begrudgingly admit that Harry Potter might be good entertainment for adults as well as children. It dawns on you. ‘I may or may not be the Princess Diana for my children’s generation. But I am certainly their George Lucas.’ You have created the mythology of a generation. For their entire lives long, your daughter and every peer she ever meets will turn to the stories you wrote as a source of entertainment and spiritual uplift. Harry Potter will affect the way they speak their language, the way they see images, the way they perceive the world around them and the way they treat one another.

But you saw the first two Star Wars prequels. You can see how much of a burden privilige and achievement can be, and how quickly it can burn out a great gift. You swear to yourself that George Lucas will not be me. Once Harry Potter is done, you will turn to something else and leave an extraordinary achievement be for whatever posterity wills.

So life continues, fairy dust intact. You’re beginning work on Book V. You get emails with updates every day from the set of the first movie and the responses sound like everybody’s genuinely considering your input. Chris privately screens a rough cut for you in Edinburgh. It’s certainly lighter and sugarier than you’d have liked. But it’s not as bad as you feared. Maybe Chris can do justice to these movies, in his own way.

The movie’s released. It’s the hit of the Christmas season. Critics praise it mildly, but the box-office numbers don’t lie. $33.3 million on its first day. $33.5 on the second. $90.3 million on the first weekend. 66.1 million pounds in England (a record). $317.6 million in America. $974.7 million worldwide! This is, finally, success on a level beyond your dreams.

Is it too much? Your mind starts to wander to pre-Potter life. You miss your Mum. You wish, more than anything, that she were here to see what you’ve become. And almost as much, for her guidance through the maize which your success has become. You never thought you could be nostalgic for pre-Potter life. Yet that’s precisely what you experience.

The darkness finds its place in your writing. This will be the most personal Potter book yet. It will be still longer. Harry will wander through the halls of Hogwarts a depressed outcast for hundreds of pages. His first kiss will be a tear-stained affair and the trust of even his closest friends and allies will be tried. At the end of the book, Harry will lose the closest thing to a father he ever knew.

Reports come in from the set of the second movie. Chris seems so bewitched by the flying car sequence that he wants to make it to be twenty minutes of the movie. ‘Think of that scene from American Graffiti with the Fonze and Harrison Ford crossed with the flying sequence in ET. You're gonna love it.’ Well, if this is what’s going to keep Chris passionate about the project... why not?

But doubts continue to linger. In your most insecure moments, you wonder to yourself if the second book is not still the best of the four. Far more full of terror than the first, without the digressions of the third or the elaborate set pieces of the fourth. This is the book where your gift shows itself best. It would be a shame if Chris....well, best not to think about it.

Chris comes to Edinburgh again with the rough cut. It’s exactly what you feared. The genuine terror is almost completely excised from the book in favor of kids flying a car and a house-elf that seems all too close on the screen to Jar-Jar Binks. The main plot of Tom Riddle’s diary is given a perfunctory short shrift in the running time and even with 2 and a half hours, the whole thing feels too rushed. God only knows how Chris will handle dementors and killing curses.

Best of Groundskeeper Willie

Why not? Though I can think of a number of Groundskeeper Willie lines I'd rather have than some of the ones here.

Quote of the Day:

Der Koosh: I don't respect morons in literature
they should know better
particularly fiction

Signs the Period Performance Movement's Getting Ridiculous

OK. We've now gotten Mahler and Elgar on period instruments. Now we're getting Holst. Pretty soon some university will put on a performance of Thomas Ades's Asyla with the original coffee tins. Enough already!

Quote of the Day:

Le Malon: i like a lot of depressing sh*t
i'm reading "Augustus" right now
biography of, well, Caesar Augustus
one conclusion: romans were f*cking awful people
i mean, wow
all the lead characters are first class pr*cks

800 Words: A Bend in the River (actually 1293)

There is a storied catalogue of fiction about the effect which Imperial Rule has on both ruler and ruled. But there are two basic things to which one has to admit if one wishes to discuss it:

1. I haven’t read most of it.
2. Most of what I’ve read is pretty boring.

When it comes to cataloguing suffering, fiction is in a particularly tough bind. Whether the sub-genre is ‘White Males Are Bad’ or ‘Goyim Are Bad’, ‘Look what these evil people did to me’ doesn’t make for compelling fiction. ‘Look what evil people did’ is precisely why we often read history books and eye-witness testimony. The more horrific the detail, the more we love it. Nobody can get around the fact that so much of history has an almost pornographic tone; full of murderers, rapists, liars and plunderers.

Nothing in fiction can compare with real life. In fiction, we read about individual murders and the betrayals of one person to another. But fiction cannot begin (or at least has not begun) to cover the vast network of motives that lead half a society to murder the other half. If you want to read about real evil, nothing in Shakespeare can compare with a police blotter. We simply can’t believe that people would be so evil, but we can’t help reading on because it’s through that process that we begin to wonder about the darkness of our own natures - merely by reading about the acts of butchery, we become complicit in them. We can’t stop them, and having never been in their situations, we don’t know if we would if we could. We may feel horror and revulsion for what they do, but it also leaves an aftertaste of horror and revulsion at ourselves. Of course, many considerate questions come out of that reading, but why would we be provoked into asking them unless so much of history did not happen at the most viscral level?

But if a fiction writer constructs hundreds of pages around a character who undergoes a bunch of awful situations that resemble the sufferings of real people - but didn’t actually happen - he would do well to find a second hook. The difference between ‘this did happen’ and ‘it’s just a story’ is deeply embedded in our unconscious. We can be overwhelmed by a story, moved to terror and tears, but if the story doesn’t ask deeper questions, we discard it from our memory as easily as a toy. If the motivations of the story can be explained in less than a paragraph, what reason is there left to read?

A Bend in the River begins with what might be the most famous opening sentence in any book from the twentieth century’s second half: 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it'. And it is with this bold declaration that Naipaul sets up the expectation of a sociopathically pitiless view of human affairs. We are led deliberately to expect a Homeric (or perhaps Leni Riefenstahl-esque) hymn to the willful triumph of the strong over the weak. Indeed, many readers have fallen for it and still consider Naipaul the ultimate colonial apologist in spite of so much evidence to the contrary. Many of his fellow writers consider him the ultimate case of literary Stockholm Syndrome. Time after time, he’s attacked in the press as an inhumane monster of a writer; unsympathetic and resentful to the plight of the third world about which he’s written volumes. It's a view he’s done nothing to refute in interviews, during which he seems to take relish in the most provocative statements. But however inhumane Naipaul is in person, charges of inhumanity are refuted by his writing.

The tension between that apparent pitilessness and the overflowing compassion of what follows in A Bend in the River creates a narrative of, at times, atomic power. The question of how to make mass fictional suffering palpable is solved all too simply - we never see it happen. We see minor skirmishes that could be threats of things to come, but we never read anything so heinous that it couldn’t conceivably happen in the best neighborhoods of the First World. We read about people living; birthing, dying, working, fucking, betraying, saving, feeling, thinking, creating, destroying and surviving. And all under the threat of far larger forces that can destroy the fragile lives they spent years building at any moment. The subject of this book is not death, but life.

The Indian Muslim from whose point of view the book is told, Salim, is not a sentimental man. He owns a slave, he patronizes prostitutes, he deserts his parents’ family and he continually goes back on his promise to marry a woman. Yet it is clear that he does more work for the slave than the slave does for him, he falls in love all too easily, and his guilt about leaving his family is crippling. He all too easily sees the flaws in others, therefore when they act with noble intentions he is moved all the more. He is an unreliable person who makes for an extremely reliable narrator.

Through his eyes, we meet the people of an unnamed African country (probably Zaire) called ‘The Domain’ in transition. Among others, we meet Metty, his African slave who is all too dependant and worshipful of his master. We meet Shoba and Mahesh, the Indian Muslim couple forced to flee for their lives because their families opposed their marriage. We meet Raymond, the white intellectual who lives in ‘The Domain’ so he can lend credibility to its leader. We meet his young European wife, Yvette, seduced by Raymond’s intellectual allure and lead into a life of disappointment and isolation. And we meet Ferdinand, an African of ‘The Bush’, who is promoted over time to a station well past everyone he knows as part of the ‘radicalization’ process.

These are people who, like most of us, live lives that are generally unfulfilling. Unlike most of us, they also live every day with the knowledge that their lives could turn far worse at any moment. The dread they feel is unbearable, and in their desperation they look to their President-For-Life (probably based on Mobutu Sese Seko), whom they refer to as ‘The Big Man’, as the person who will deliver them from their massive problems. As a reward for their hopes, they eventually find themselves the scapegoats for the problems of the entire country. The novel ends with a heartbreaking scene in which Salim gets ready to board a ship to leave before a town massacre and tells Metty that he will be left behind but that he will be alright after it’s over because this too shall pass. Neither Salim, nor Metty, nor we, have any reason to believe it’s true. But we tell these lies in order to carry on all the same.


If it is, in fact, Zaire of which Naipaul is writing, the book becomes all the more poignant. In the three decades after A Bend in the River’s publishing, Zaire became all the more fraught with massive violence. The Death Toll form the Congo Wars now stands at well over 3 million people. A fragile semblance of civilization like the one Salim and Metty lived in at the bend in the river would be utterly impossible in today’s world. That opening salvo, which can inspire such revulsion as we begin, appears to absorb new qualities - perhaps declared in resignation rather than hatefulness, or perhaps even a howl from the graveyard.

Dusty Springfield Sings Wagner

What it says.

ET: Almanac

"... they were tanned a colour so reddish it was almost strawberry. It was another episode in my long history of unsuitable shoes, a story which is not yet closed and would need a book of its own. Let's just say that even now, when I have learned to dress as plainly as possible, I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet. It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane."

- Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs II