800 Words: The Ideal Band: co-written by Hector Berlioz (part 1)

(The ideal orchestra of the 1830’s in action)

The orchestra may be thought of as a large instrument that is capable of producing simultaneously or in succession a multitude of sounds of different kinds. Its power can be limited or considerable depending on whether it draws on the totality or only part of the performing resources available to modern music, and depending on whether those resources are well chosen or not and set out in acoustic conditions that are more or less favourable.

The band was once thought of as a small instrument that is capable of producing simultaneously or in succession a highly limited selection of sounds. What distinguished it from its predecessors was that through amplification, this small selection of sounds could supersede the largest acoustical orchestra in loudness and visceral impact. Over a period of roughly 60 years, the band has accumulated enough technological and artistic developments to create a multitude of sounds to rival any orchestra. Yet most musicians belonging to them persist in clinging to an ersatz ideal of simplicity which was exhausted many decades in the past.

Whereas the performers of all kinds which together make up the traditional orchestra would then seem to be the strings, tubes, boxes, flat surfaces, of wood or metal, that are like machines endowed with intelligence but actuated by a vast keyboard played by the conductor under the direction of the composer – the performers of various rock bands are also in fact a machine endowed with such self-directed intelligence as the orchestra only seems to have. The band, like the orchestra, is akin to a giant keyboard, but this keyboard is a self-directed one in which the band leaders and song writers are mere consultants. The electronic instruments, acoustic instruments, DJ’s, producers, stage managers, and sound system engineers each play their own part of this giant keyboard; each capable of being coordinated like a traditional orchestra, yet all required to make decisions in an instant that cannot be planned so much as a moment in advance. Each member of the group is in part a conductor and composer for this new type of orchestra.

It seems to us impossible to explain how beautiful orchestral effects are invented, and that this faculty, which practice and reasoned observation probably help to develop, is, like the faculty of creating melody, expression, and even harmony, one of the precious gifts that the poet-musician, like an inspired creator, must have received from nature.

On the other hand one can certainly demonstrate easily and with virtual exactness the art of making orchestras that are suitable for rendering faithfully compositions of every form and dimension.

The place occupied by musicians, the way they are arranged on a horizontal or inclined platform, in an enclosure that is shut on three sides or at the centre of a hall, in a stadium or in a club, with sound-reflectors made of hard material suitable for reflecting sound, or of soft material which absorbs it and cuts the vibrations short, with amplifiers placed nearer or further away from the musicians, all of these have considerable importance. Sound amplifiers are indispensable for a 21^st century band; they are found arranged in different ways in any building, open or enclosed. The nearer they emit to the sounds’ point of origin the more effective they become.

That is the reason why open air music can now exist. The most formidable 21^st century orchestra placed in the centre of a vast garden open on all sides, such as that of the Tuileries, may now have miraculous effect. Whereas the sounds used to get immediately dissipated in every other direction, they now may be focused by amplification to any direction the artist desires – creating a veritable concert hall within the dimensions of the amplification’s acoustical placement. When placed in an open plain, a single guitar, properly amplified, may have more musical effectiveness than an orchestra with a thousand wind instruments, and a chorus of two thousand voices. After a single rehearsal, an ordinary orchestra of eighty musicians and a chorus of a hundred voices, carefully arranged in the hall of the Conservatoire, cannot achieve the coordinated musical effect of a guitar, bass guitar, drums, and a single voice. The brilliant effect of the finest orchestras in large cities supports this statement while appearing to contradict it. To achieve their Olympian effects, they must coordinate their efforts over tens of thousands of hours of meticulous rehearsal, sectional drills, and individual practice. In this case their music is not in fact a free exercise of the spirit, but a rigorous drill coordinated to the most infinitesimal precision. Each instrumental doubling, each harmonic overtone, serves as its own amplifier. The sound reverberates and circulates actively in the narrow space between them before escaping through the spaces left open into the concert hall. But if the traditional orchestra were to play as a rock band with each player given a wide berth to leave his own interpretive stamp upon the music, the sound would immediately turn to utter chaos, the harmoniousness of a fine orchestra vanishes, and there is no music.

But the finest 21^st century band, for a venue scarcely larger than that of the Fillmore in San Francisco, the most complete, the richest in nuances and variety of tone colour, the most majestic, powerful and at the same time the most mellow, would be an band composed as follows:

1 Lead Vocalist

11 Backup Singers 

1 Lead Guitar

4 Rhythm Guitars 

3 Bass Guitars 

3 Violins (must double as electric violinists) 


2 Drummers


5 Percussionists


1 Drum Machine Programmer

1 Synthesizer Programmer to pre-Program 4 Synthesizers 

4 Keyboardists 

2 DJ’s 

(38 musicians)

If the intention was to perform a set involving a horn section, such a band would require:

4 saxophonists capable of playing each saxophone – doubling as 3 clarinets and a bass clarinet 

3 trumpeters 

3 trombonists 

3 flautists 

2 euphonists  and 1 tubist 


(16 extra musicians for a total 54-piece band)


Such an instrumental complement has the following advantages:


12 vocalists may together create as much harmonic variety as there are notes in the Western Scale. In the case of alternative scales which require more pitches, more backup singers may be used. For example, for Indian music one can easily add another 14 singers to make a backup chorus of 25 singers.


4 rhythm guitarists may cover other types of guitars as needed and play against one another in 4 polyrhythms, the maximum the human ear can reasonably be expected to follow.


3 bass guitars may create a three-part harmony in the bass, when combined with 3 trombones the harmony can be given more definition, and when combined with 2 euphoniums and a tuba can be given less definition. 


3 violins may together create a three part harmony in the treble. To add more definition one may add three trumpets, and to create less definition one may add three flutes.


4 preprogrammed synthesizers may create 4 part counterpoint with as many timbral combinations as possible. 4 live keyboardists may create another set of 4 part counterpoint while adding still more timbral combinations. 


2 DJ's may utilize any particularly attractive musical moment for sampling or looping in real time, sometimes to be played against each other. And both can also use turntables for additional sampling to create more musical possibilities. 

By doubling or tripling in the same proportions and order this body of performers the result would probably be a superb superband. But it is a mistake to suppose that all bands must be constructed according to this scheme, which is based on the predominance of electronic instruments. Excellent results can be achieved with the opposite system. In the latter case the acoustic instruments would be too weak to dominate the mass of guitars and percussion and would serve to provide a harmonious bridge with the strident sounds of a band solely composed of electronic instruments. In some cases they would soften their brilliance, in others they would give warmth to the impetus of the music. Furthermore, common sense suggests that unless the bandleader is obliged to make do with whatever size of band is available, he must put together his body of performers according to the style and character of the song he is writing and the type of principal effects the subject may require.

This is the place to draw attention to the importance of the different points of origin of the sounds. Some parts of an orchestra are meant by the bandleader to question and answer each other, and this intention only becomes clear and beautiful if the amplification of groups which engage in said dialogue are placed at a sufficient distance from each other. Before each concert, the band leader must make explicitly clear to his sound team the layout of amplification that he thinks is appropriate.

In the case of drum sets, cowbells, bongos, hammer dulcimer, and slide whistles, for example, if they are used all at once to play certain rhythms in the commonplace manner, they can remain grouped together. But if they are playing a rhythmic dialogue, one part of which is performed by hammer dulcimer and cowbell, and the other by bongo and slide whistle, it is probably the case that the effect will become immeasurably better, more interesting and more beautiful if the two groups of percussion instruments are amplified at the two ends of the audience, and therefore at a fairly great distance from each other. This means that the constant uniformity in the placing of masses of amplification is one of the greatest obstacles to the production of monumental works that are really novel. It is imposed on rock bands more by habit, routine, laziness and lack of thought than for reasons of economy, though these are unfortunately all too compelling, particularly in America. Here music is far from our national habits, our market consumes everything a manufactured musical idol produces, but nothing by real musicians. Wealthy magnates who are prepared to give 5,000,000 francs or more for a crappy painting from a dead artist, because this represents a safe investment, would not spend even fifty francs to make it possible to hold once a year some musical celebration worthy of a country such as ours, which would display to good effect the considerable musical resources it does actually possess but which in practice cannot be put to good use very often.

And yet it would be interesting to try once to make simultaneous use of all the musical resources that can be assembled in Baltimore/DC, in a group of works specially written for the occasion. Assuming a songwriter/arranger had such resources at his disposal, in a vast performance space designed for this purpose by an engineer versed in acoustics and music, he would need to determine precisely before starting work the disposition and layout of this huge superband, and then keep them always in mind while creating these works. It can be assumed that it is highly important in using such a vast mass of players to take into account the distance or the proximity of the different amplifiers that make it up. This is an essential precondition for achieving the best possible results and calculating with sureness the intended effects. In musical festivals up till now all that has been heard are standard bands but with their parts quadrupled or quintupled, depending on the smaller or larger number of performers. But this would involve something very different, and the composer who wanted to show off the prodigious and innumerable resources of such an instrument would certainly have to perform a novel task.

In tomorrow’s post I shall endeavor to show how such a superband could be created. 

ET: Almanac

The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

The most incurably frustrated--and, therefore, the most vehement--among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Eve the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

Abide With Me by Thelonious Monk

I'd never heard Monk's version of this until it was pointed out to me by my ever-favorite lit-blogger Patrick Kurp.

The similarity to the finale of Mahler 9 has been pointed out many times. When I was at my most ambitious with the old chorus, I thought of taking the whole text of Abide With Me (every verse) and setting it as a hymn to the music of Mahler 9's last movement. But you'd certainly need a 50-member chorus of steel in order to make it happen. Some things are probably best left dreams...but the dream abides.

800 Words: The Many, Many Times I've Been Wrong

“And then there’s the still more amazing Glagolitic Mass - described by Milan Kundera as 'more an orgy than a mass.' It’s just the plain Church Mass which so many Christian denominations use to this day, but it’s in Old Church Slavonic rather than Latin or Greek or Russian. Oddly, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) section is missing, with its invocation ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Give us peace). It’s fruitless to speculate, but my guess is that Janacek did this deliberately, and substituted in its place a war cry. Specifically a war cry played by the Organ, to sound a note of defiance for the Czech people who had been under Austro-German subjugation for so many centuries (and would soon be again).”

(The Agnus Dei of Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass.)

The evidence on this blog keeps piling up that I’m either a fraud or going senile. I’d hope that anyone who knows me well enough would think it more likely to be the latter. The Glagolitic Mass is a piece I could probably write out in full score with reasonably impressive accuracy (both in original and revised versions – just don’t expect me to remember the text…). And yet I’d written that there’s no Agnus Dei section. No doubt, any number of experts would read that statement and conclude that I know absolutely nothing about Janacek…perhaps I don’t if I make a mistake that obvious. But if that’s the case with a composer I love as much as Janacek, then there’s probably no hope for me to opine reliably on any other subject either. Perhaps my memory for facts and figures is going the way of my memory for everything else, aka arguably non-existent. As my brother Ethan reminded me last night, I seem to remember any fact I’ve been told once over my lifetime, yet I seem to be locked out of my apartment once every three days.

I’d like to think that this is the single worst transgression against easily confirmable facts which I’ve ever committed on this blog. But I know myself too well to ever believe that. During the last couple weeks I referred to Walther Rathenau as Walter von Rathenau, I entitled a post ‘Culture of Offense’  after I’d devoted an entire jeremiad on this blog to the misuse of the term ‘culture’ as a way to describe anything people dislike about other people. But the single worst mistake was when I wrote an entire post about Istanbul, or 'Istambul' as I spelled it...for the entirety of the post. I'd even visited Istanbul (for a day) when I was 17. I genuinely didn’t realize the mistake I’d made until Der Koosh pointed it out to me, at which point I truly didn’t believe him until I googled the city, and then realized that I’d been spelling it wrong my whole life.

This particular mistake only occurred to me yesterday as I was biking, alone with my thoughts and the good weather. In a fit of dread, I nearly doubled back to my apartment correct the error the moment I realized it. And then I thought… why bother? The damage is done; just another in my series of easily correctable mistakes, most of which I probably haven’t yet noticed.

Fortunately, very few people regularly read this blog. If they did, I’d have long since been discredited as a credible source for just about anything – and that’s precisely why it stings so badly when I’ve been blamed for things I know I’d done correctly. During the extremely brief period I was a fourth-string music critic for the Washington Post, I apparently got the facts wrong on the price of a ticket – and the ticket price was the crux of my entire review. But there remains another fact that I’d found three separate websites which listed the ticket price I listed (one of which changed the listed ticket price for the group’s concert a mere hour after I called to inquire, thereby sabotaging my claim to the Post editors). Meanwhile, my old editor at our college webzine is a rising star at the Washington Post. He recently did a profile about the likely next Senator from Maine, Angus King. He referred to King as a thoroughly independent-minded politician in the tradition of such other iconoclastic Maine politicians as Olympia Snowe, Margaret Chase Smith, and George Mitchell…George Mitchell was a Senate Democratic Majority Leader. When George HW Bush tried to paint Bill Clinton as another ‘tax-and-spend liberal’, it was George Mitchell (along with Ted Kennedy) to whom he most liked to compare Clinton.

I’m a family business factotum; he’s a star at the Washington Post. Life isn’t fair, and people who are far worse off than I could complain with much more authenticity than I can.


So what can I possibly say in my defense except that like any writer entertaining enough to be worth reading, I’m wrong at least as often as I’m right? Like any blogger, the onanistic pleasure of bloviating to the wind is but a click of a mouse away. Who needs facts when you have opinions? I don’t claim to be smarter than everyone else, just that I try to be J. 

ET: Almanac

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his religion, his race or his holy cause…

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat…

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowing selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless…

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

800 Words/Late Friday Playlist #18: Janacek - the Good Stuff

Let's start with some of the operas:

To see some of the extraordinary stuff in Jenufa, scroll down to end of the last post. But here's one more gorgeous clip. 

The opera after Jenufa was Osud. A hall of mirrors in which the main character is a composer who is putting on an opera. Listen to the music here and try to tell me why the hell is this music not performed more often?

Next came his sci-fi/fantasy opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek. Mr Broucek gets drunk and finds himself first on the moon and then in the 15th century. If I told you that an opera with a plot this awesome was merely the 7th-best opera by Janacek, you'd have no reason to believe me. It's not at all a bad opera, Janacek is just that good. 

After the premiere of Jenufa, Janacek ran off with the mezzo who played Kostelnicka (the older lady who drowns the infant), and even brought the singer home with him – insisting that she stay as both his mistress and a houseguest. Understandably, this caused Janacek’s wife, Zdenka, to attempt suicide. Leos and Zdenka remained separated for the rest of their lives, rarely ever seeing each other. It’s said that the turbulence of his first string quartet, the “Kreutzer Sonata” (based on the Tolstoy novella about a husband who murders his wife, not Beethoven’s sonata) is based upon the turbulence of his marriage. In a letter, he confides about the work “I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.”

Janacek was a Moravian Czech, not a Bohemian Czech. While this distinction may mean very little to us, it meant a great deal to him. The Bohemians (among them composers like Dvorak and Smetana) hailed from the Czech lands’ Western half, and were oriented to Central Europe. Their capital was Prague, the second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their culture modeled itself on the polished sophistication of Vienna and the German capitals. The Moravians hailed from the Czech east, with the comparative backwater Brno as their capital. The Moravians were very much Slavophiles who hoped that Russia would unite the Slavic peoples. Their lifestyle was more rural, coarser, more peasant-rooted. This is reflected in Janacek’s music, which is far less refined than Dvorak’s and must have disturbed many German listeners, who thought even Dvorak an exciting Czech barbarian. True to his pan-Slavic beliefs, Janacek created an orchestral rhapsody called Taras Bulba, based on a Gogol novel about a militant Cossack feudal lord in the Middle Ages who must sacrifice his two sons in his pursuit of Russian glory. In addition to being a very political work, one can’t help but notice the symmetry to Janacek’s personal life, in which he lost both his children before adulthood.

There are three other great works, greater than Taras Bulba, that have to be considered explicitly political. One after the other in 1926, Janacek wrote two of the most exciting works in the concert repertoire. The Sinfonietta, which he dedicated to The Czechoslovakian Armed Forces, and which he said was intended to celebrate ‘contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, his courage and determination to fight for victory'….whatever. I just know that it’s one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written, with a particularly stunning finale.

And then there’s the still more amazing Glagolitic Mass - described by Milan Kundera as 'more an orgy than a mass.' It’s just the plain Church Mass which so many Christian denominations use to this day, but it’s in Old Church Slavonic rather than Latin or Greek or Russian. Oddly, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) section is missing, with its invocation ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Give us peace). It’s fruitless to speculate, but my guess is that Janacek did this deliberately, and substituted in its place a war cry. Specifically a war cry played by the Organ, to sound a note of defiance for the Czech people who had been under Austro-German subjugation for so many centuries (and would soon be again).

As a sidenote, I will say that the most extraordinary musical experience of my life occurred when I heard this piece performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall next to an old lady who claimed to know Bela Bartok. We spoke about Bartok for a number of minutes, about Janacek, and about the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras – an Australian judged by nearly all music lovers to be the greatest Janacek conductor of all time. I sat in the audience, and wept hot tears for the next forty-five minutes as the most religious experience of my life came over me. At the time, I was unaware that the ‘original’ version of the piece existed – and that it made certain passages sound completely unrecognizable. The Veruju always felt like there was something missing, as though the highest peak had not been hit – and then it most certainly hit that peak. After an experience like that, how could I ever leave music? After the performance, I stood in line to greet Mackerras at a CD signing and I said “Maestro, I hope I should one day be able to conduct ay composer half as well as you do Janacek. Everybody around Mackerras seemed extremely impressed by my gumption, but he beckoned me to say it to him closer. He still couldn’t hear after the second time. I tried one last time, but he still couldn’t hear me and simply said “Yes,…. Janacek’s a great composer!

The third of them is Janacek’s last ‘completed’ work, “From the House of the Dead.” It’s his most advanced piece of music – musically, dramatically, politically. The opera is based on a Dostoevsky novella of the same name about a Siberian prison camp. There are scenes in which prisoners are beaten and humiliated, but the book is meant to show how people are capable of keeping their dignity even under the worst conditions – an opera that proved more and more prophetic as the 20^th century advanced. Musically, Janacek never wrote a more daring score – full of harmonies and instrumental effects which would be advanced even for the 1960’s. But to the end, however much he bended it, Janacek stuck stubbornly to tonal music.

And then there’s his unfinished Symphonic Poem “Danube” (doubtless meaning the Danube River which runs through all the Balkan lands). It very well have been meant as a similarly political statement, but we’ll never know because the always sloppy Janacek left Danube in such an incomplete mess that it had to be reconstructed. Even in its reconstruction, it’s a shame this piece isn’t better known – it has some of Janacek’s most daring writing, perhaps that’s why he couldn’t complete it.

And now comes the Kamilla story…

In 1917, the 63-year-old Janacek developed an infatuation for an unsophisticated girl he met at a spa. Kamila Stosslova was thirty-seven years Janacek's junior, married anything but his intellectual equal, and it’s probable that their relationship was never consummated – in spite of the hundreds of letters Janacek sent her, nearly all of which Kamila saved. Many, perhaps most, of these letters contain melodramatically passionate declarations of love. It’s probable that Janacek’s feelings were unrequited, but Kamila kept a very close correspondence with him all the same and made Janacek a close family friend. It was Kamila who was with Janacek at his bedside when he died in 1928, after going out into the woods at night to search for her son.

One also has to wonder whether Janacek’s own feelings were quite as erotic as he claimed. Janacek developed a similar infatuation for another young woman (also named Kamila) shortly after his daughter died – it’s possible, though perhaps unlikely, that Janacek was in fact seeking a psychological substitute for his deceased daughter Olga.

In any event, even if Kamila was never Janacek’s lover, she was certainly his muse. The first fruit of his infatuation was an unforgettably beautiful song cycle: The Diary of One Who Disappeared. It is a diary in poems which tells a story about a village boy who comes across a gypsy girl (re: the worldly Leos and the unsophisticated Kamila) and decides to leave his family and village to be with her. The song cycle has parts for both tenor and alto (and an almost unbearably haunting offstage ensemble of three female singers). In one letter to Kamila, he wrote “…And the black gypsy girl in my Diary of One Who Disappeared – that was you. That’s why there’s so much emotional fire in the work. So much fire that if we both caught on, we’d be turned to ashes…And all through the work I thought of you!”

If that declaration was embarrassingly intimate, there is also his second quartet, which he subtitled ‘Intimate Letters.’ In case there is any doubt what’s meant by that title, he wrote in another letter to Kamila “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. Those notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately…” ….yowza! Well, even if this is dirty old man music, it’s breathtaking. The two middle movements contain some of the most gorgeous music written in the twentieth century.

And then, finally, there are the three operas in which Janacek claimed to represent Kamila in his protagonists:

The first was Kata Kabanova, which Janacek explicitly dedicated to her – which tells story in a drab, provincial town (not unlike a smaller version of Brno) of an extra-marital affair and the woman’s eventual suicide. The music representing Kata, the protagonist, is both pure and ecstatic – like a perfect fusion of religious and sensual feeling, but set against her is oppressive music that at times sounds like apocalyptic brutality. The fusion between these two creates the greatness of this opera – the contrast between all life’s savage tribulations and all that makes life worth living – is what makes the opera work so miraculously. The tragic ending is made that more poignant because she’s clearly an oasis of something lovely in a drab place.

 For the moment, we’re going to skip over the next opera chronologically and move on to The Makropulos Case, an opera based on a play by Karel Capek (better known as science fiction’s inventor of ‘robots’). In this opera, Kamila is represented by the world-famous singer: Emilia Marty. While Marty seems young, she is in fact 338 years old and possesses a potion which keeps her perpetually young. Like so many great performers, Emilia’s core of vulnerability is concealed by an emotionally frigid exterior – treating subordinates and lovers alike with terrible indifference. The layers of psychological meaning in this opera are unbelievably thick. Is Emilia Marty in fact a portrait of Kamila, or is she a portrait of Janacek himself – a great artist, coldly indifferent to those around him (like his wife) and with great sexual bravado into old age? Or is Janacek represented by Hauk-Sendorf, the senile old man who recognizes Emilia as Elina, a girl he had an affair with half-a-century before when Emilia assumed a different identity.

And now we come to the greatest opera of the last 200 years – if we still don’t count Sondheim musicals as opera then I’m deadly serious. Since Mozart, there has been no opera composer but Janacek who could possibly match him in the ability to create living characters, diversity of emotion, and sheer musical wonders. At the top of the opera heap, it’s just Mozart and Janacek, there is no third.

Mozart beats Janacek in his seamless ability to blend the emotional content and intellectual content to the point that they’re one and the same. In Mozart, just as there’s no musical effect that overwhelms the dozen others that are happening simultaneously, there is no character who overwhelms any other (except of course Don Giovanni – the exception who proves the rule because that’s exactly what Mozart set out to do). But not even Mozart (nor Beethoven) proved himself capable of writing a piece of music that showed an entire cosmic view of all life – birth to death, highest forms of life to lowest, highest tragedy to lowest comedy. There are four musical works I can think of which achieve this (obviously with extra-musical help) – The Creation by Haydn, Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony, arguably Into The Woods, and The Cunning Little Vixen. And of those four, The Cunning Little Vixen clearly does it best. For profundity, there is not a single piece of music in all creation that equals it – and it’s an opera based on a comic strip!

Like all those cosmic works – it contains every dramatic state within it: tragedy, comedy, clearly there’ irony - we’re  watching animals talk like human beings, and there’s much Romance as well – a we watch foxes marry one another. So why then should a cutsie opera (made still more cuddly than it needs to be by too-cute productions) that skirts a fine line between the ridiculousness of opera and the ridiculousness of Disney be considered the most profound opera ever written? The answer can probably be found by a description of the plot.

It helps digesting all that depth to know that this is one of the world’s most entertaining pieces of music – full of comedy that needs no apologies by saying it’s ‘opera comedy’ and full of romance to balance out the death (and arguably rape) that takes place over the course of the opera. In this piece, Janacek presents us the entire natural world as though it’s an opera by Pixar – anthropomorphic animals seemingly of every genus and species, with opera singers playing foxes, dogs, gophers, chickens, frogs, mice, and insects. And these characters behave much as humans do – discussing matters of the farm and the forest as though they’re political and philosophical issues. It presents us with the life cycle of a vixen named Sharp Ears (Kamila) – independent, strong willed, a sort of female animal version of Tom Sawyer in her younger days who thumbs her nose at all authority. A farmer captures her to be a housepet, but she eats half the hens after luring them out of their coup with a rousing speech about how they are being exploited by the capitalist hen for their work. She then tries to befriend a haughty bourgeois gopher who rejects her, she then she drives out of his burrow by peeing on him.  We then watch as she meets a male fox and falls in love with him, gets pregnant, and summons the entire forest for their wedding – all in the span of twenty minutes.

The first act was comedy, the second act is romance. The third act is tragedy, a death so that the life cycle can begin anew. The farmer, swearing vengeance on the Fox for killing his chickens, hunts Sharp Ears obsessively. But it’s a friend of his who finds Sharp Ears with a tasty Rabbit trap which she escapes easily. But while Sharp Ears has an enormous family to feed, she still feels no compunction about breaking the trap or about scampering as though nothing’s wrong when men are clearly so closeby. And it’s this hubris which inevitably results in her getting shot.

But that only leads us to the most life-enhancing part of this story. Before the final scene, the old gamekeeper notices that the same friend, who married the town beauty every man had a crush on, gave her the fur of Sharp Ears as a present. This double loss causes him to go back into the forest to the place where he first saw the Vixen. He mourns the loss of them both, he despairs the dullness of his marriage and mourns the time of life when he and his wife were vigorous and attractive. But then he sees another Vixen who looks so much like the young Sharp Ears that it's clearly her daughter. And just before he can capture her, a frog jumps into his lap for the second time during the opera. But this frog speaks to him, and tells him that it was his grandfather who'd once jumped into his lap, and that his grandfather told all sorts of stories about the gamekeeper. And thus the opera ends on a note which says that life will always go on, even after death.

What makes Janacek so extraordinary is that he belongs in that elite cadre of artists for whom anything is possible – and nothing is predictable. So many artists have infinite intellectual reach, yet their intelligence precludes any emotional give – along with ditching traditional forms they ditch the emotions those forms housed. Other artists have a bottomless well of emotion to give us, yet their music is predictable – hewing to the same formulas again and again. But there is an exceedingly rare group of artists whose work suggests more things in the heavens and the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy – if I wanted to count the number of musicians who master both playing fields consistently, even Mozart and Sondheim can’t make it on here – too rigid: I think of Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Janacek, Ellington, Schnittke, The Beatles, … and then my mind draws a blank. Janacek is one of the very few geniuses of music who can open up the entirety of the cosmos. If you’ve never heard his music, it’s a large part of the cosmos which you’re missing.

…And I haven’t even gotten into the piano or a cappella choral works….

800 Words: The Disorganized Imagination of Leos Janacek

I have a mind that goes into overdrive all too easily. I find that if I don’t write something – something long - every day, I spend whole hours or afternoons which should be spent at my desk finding ways to be productive in boyish fantasies of being productive – my favorite fantasy is indulging in the thought of being the great Maestro Ivan Tuckerini who made his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic when he was six. Now I spend only eighteen weeks of every year on the podium – six for orchestras, six for operas, six for choruses, and no more than eighteen weeks because any more feels utterly limiting for an artist of such burning creativity as myself. Another eighteen weeks of the year are spent writing Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, plays, poetry, history, and even the occasional symphony if I have a week to spare – every book I write makes the New York Times Bestseller list and my books are said to have initiated a new Golden Era of reading and writing for American society. Inner city children wander the streets quoting my poetry, sexually liberated graduate students hang on my every word when I speak at their colleges. The rest of the year I spend touring around with my grammy-winning classical/jazz/blues/roma/bluegrass/soul band for which I’m lead singer, violinist, and co-songwriter. The rest of my band consists of a Jewish folk-song expert from Minnesota who can’t sing, two Liverpudlian Brits, one of whom’s taken up with a Japanese conceptual artist; a working class New Jersey college dropout, two very sincere multi-instrument-playing Canadian hippies – one guy, one girl; two London art-school kids who love the blues, a New York Jewish son of a dance-band leader (though his singing partner doesn’t make it); and a gay piano player from the London suburbs who loves 50’s rock’n roll.

This life of selfless devotion to my art continues until I die at the age of 95 from complications due to a twelve-hour orgasm brought on by my second, much younger wife (I was an early widower who bravely raised three children by myself) and half-a-dozen groupies who accompany us from show to show. In my unauthorized biography, it is revealed that I negotiated peace in the Middle East and cured lymphoma.

Unfortunately, I have a mind that operates on spontaneous combustion, and order is utterly anathema to my brain. Even if I wanted to,I wouldn’t know how to organize my thoughts, and believe me I’ve tried. One can either beat oneself up for one’s faults or accept who one is, and above all else, I am thoroughly disorganized.

In art, as in life, my mind tends toward the disorderly. Give me the diverse ramblings of Chaucer, not the well-ordered tiers of Dante. Give me the mad confusion of the Marriage of Figaro any day over the plastic perfection of The Magic Flute. Give me Beethoven fugues, not Bach’s. Give me Bellow, not Nabokov. Give me Turner, not David. Give me Howard Hawks, not Stanley Kubrick.

It’s very easy to admire orderly things – well put together art, well organized buildings, well-built people. But perfect order is beyond us – humanity is not perfect, and perfect things are cold, distant, and unobtainable for us mortals. No matter how much we long to possess it, to understand its perfection, the experience of perfection eludes us every time - something is always in the way. Perfection, if it exists, needs nothing but itself, and no matter how much we try to love it, we ultimately fail because something perfect is incapable of loving us back - if it's perfect, it has nothing to do with us because we could only besmirch it. Perfection demands everything of us, only to give nothing back in return.

This is why Leos Janacek is such a necessary composer for classical music (a disorganized preamble if ever there was one…). In a century of composition that nearly banished all concerns but structure and design, Janacek stands out as one of the few great composers whose primary concern was human expression. The form of his music, such as it was, had no reason to exist except to fit the content. And if the content was too diverse for any form to fit, that was OK too.

I remember reading a music critic – Greg Sandow if I’m not mistaken – who compared classical music’s obsession with form to people who complement a woman for having beautiful face because her skull is perfect (why is this post so sexual?). To appreciate the design without the content which the design provides is to utterly miss the point of why music, why art itself, exists - it exists for us to love, not to worship.

I remember a harmony class with a professor I was (unsuccessfully) trying to win over. Like most music theory teachers, his mind went unfailingly towards the orderly and well-kempt. He was an organist who loved Bach and sacred music, so naturally we weren’t meant to get along. At the time, I was just falling in love with Janacek and I asked him what he thought of my new favorite composer. His response was instant, “He’s the best third-rate composer I know.”

Composers like Janacek will never appeal to the orderly mind. It still amazes me that certain classical musicians have overcome their hatreds of Mahler and Ives, composers of disorganized genius if ever there were any. But in some ways Janacek is on a level of disorganization entirely above even Mahler and Ives – even above Schumann and Mussorgsky (ok…maybe not Mussorgsky). In Janacek, there is no such thing as musical development. A theme can be non-chalantly thrown in only for another theme to replace it instantly, then another, and another, with no sense that one theme has anything to do with the other. At least in Italian opera, the various melodies and motifs are divided into arias (songs) and recitatives (sung exposition) - but no such division is necessary in Janacek. All that mattered to Janacek was to capture the right music to suit the expression of that particular moment, and if the music had nothing to do with the music that came before or the music that came after, that was perfectly acceptable. His only compatriot in this regard is Modest Mussorgsky - but Mussorgsky did not live long enough to stretch this technique to Janacek's extent. Other modern composers, like Debussy and Stravinsky, mostly rejected the very ‘German’ idea of developing the same musical themes. But of those who rejected musical development, only Janacek and Mussorgky made emotional expression their primary goal.

Like Ives, Janacek toiled for his entire career as a virtual unknown in the provinces – not acquiring a name for himself until he was retirement age. He made his living as nothing but a mere provincial organist and musicmaster, and came home every day to a disastrous lifelong marriage and children he eventually had to bury. In an era when Vienna was still the center of music, Janacek couldn’t even live in the second city: Prague. He lived in Brno, Prague’s grimy industrial counterpart in the Czech-speaking lands.

 (For me, the most terrifying scene in all opera, even if it's in the wrong language here - German rather than Czech. The old town sacristan convinces herself to drown her ward’s newborn bastard son in a frozen lake.)

It was in Brno, at the age of fifty, that Janacek penned his first masterpiece. As his daughter lay dying in the next room, Janacek wrote the opera Jenufa. In doing so, Janacek finished the job begun by Mozart to take opera out of the stylized realm of Gods and legends and put it squarely in the realm of human beings. For Janacek, opera was not poetry – it was everyday prose. Every emphasis of the words, every rise and fall in the melody, is as precisely notated as possible to correspond with everyday speech. When a person grows angry, he speaks in a different manner than he does when he’s happy, or sad, or ambivalent. Janacek’s great insight is to find the appropriate speech pattern for each psychological state. The result is a dramatic expression every bit as heightened as in any other great opera, but with a naturalness and believability that is only Janacek’s. Of course, for melodic passages he slows down the speech patterns, but they are still the same speech patterns, just done in half-or-quarter time.  This is musical organization of a type every bit as precise as anything in Monteverdi, but in a manner so different that to certain people it seems like a jumble of musical sludge in which one musical motif has nothing to do with any other.

(The astonishing finale of Jenufa from the astonishing third act of Jenufa. Just watch.)

To the end of his career, Janacek remained utterly devoted to his speech method. He would notate people’s speech precisely as he heard it, with cadence, rhythms, and notes on the page existing exactly as they were when they came out of people’s mouths, and in his papers there exists a page on which he notated his daughter’s dying breath.

There is not a single great opera composer since Janacek who has taken up his mantle. Britten and John Adams occasionally let their music speak through prose, but mostly as buildup to another poetic section. With the exception of Berg, none of the high modernists from Schoenberg to Birtwistle have cared a fig for making characters sing as people would speak. One can only surmise that had more composers followed Janacek’s example, the story of 20^th century music would have been very, very different.

ET: Almanac

...prose is not only a form of discourse distinct from verse; it is also an aspect of reality, its daily, concrete, momentary aspect, and the opposite of myth. This goes to the deepest conviction of every novelist: there is nothing so thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform his life into myth--seeks, so to speak to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse). If the novel is an art and not merely a "literary genre," the reason is that the discovery of prose is its ontological mission, which no art but the novel can take on entirely.

- Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

800 Words: Assad Remains

The death toll of the Syrian uprising has now well exceeded 14,000. There’s no sense pretending otherwise, the Syrian government will get away with it, and the death toll will grow much, much higher before these massacres end. If we’re not going to flinch from the truth, it looks for the moment as though Bashar al-Assad will mow down the entire Arab Spring movement in Syria and unless there is an unforeseen solution, he will imprison, exile, or kill anyone in his country who shows the any sympathy with it. And no one in the entire world is in a position to stop him.

To be even blunter, the only option that would remove Assad is military intervention. No amount of arming rebels will bring Assad down – arming Saddam against Iran did not bring down the Ayatollah, and sanctions brought down neither Saddam nor Milosevic, it merely starved the people they didn’t kill themselves. Nor would diplomatic overtures to Iran solve anything. Syria is far too important to Iran for Iran to demand anything of Assad.

No, no diplomatic measure will stop the coming disaster, only military intervention could. But military intervention will not happen at any point in the next ten years. Assad is now the only steadfast ally of Russia and China in the Arab world, and for them to allow him to fall make despots around the world would question the health of any of their alliances with these two 'superpowers.' America is overcommitted to Afghanistan and must still be considered ‘on call’ in case a true Iraqi civil war breaks out. England and France are still entangled in Libya and Germany won’t even bail out Southern Europe. Turkey has already made an enemy out of Iraq on their border and can’t afford a second neighboring enemy. Ironically, the only country in the world with the economic, military, and nation-building strength whose interests might be served by an intervention is Israel; but nothing would give Assad more credibility in the eyes of his countrymen than to have the Syrian government fight yet another war against those ‘Zionist pigs.’  

It would appear that Bashar al-Assad, once the ‘idiot son’ whom everyone thought was too weak to even last a decade, held firmly onto power while every one of his ‘more competent’ colleagues fell. And he did it by being firmer, more ruthless, and ‘stronger’ than any of his peers. Like George W. Bush, he was ‘misunderestimated’ by everyone, and the world pays the price for thinking he didn’t have what it takes to rule with an iron hand.

Along with Abdulaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Assad is one of only two Arab Nationalist dictators remaining – the rest of them, Saddam, Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, and Saleh are all gone. Each of them ended their career ignominiously as a dinosaur-like remnant from the age of pan-Arab nationalism – in which newly liberated Arab states thought they could stand up to their former colonial conquerors. Among the major Middle East powers, every military dictator has fallen but Assad.  

Ironically, while the model of the pan-Arabist ‘strongman’ seems extremely passé and 20^th century, the Kings and Sultans of the Middle East seem to have all the staying power they had in the Middle Ages. The reason for this isn’t hard to figure out: while Middle East dictators traditionally looked to Communist countries as allies, the monarchies looked to the West. The West bequeathed their ancestors with the thrones they currently occupy, and so long as their pipelines stay flowing, the West will protect these ‘sympathetic’ rulers by any means necessary.

The liberals of the Middle East look to America and Western Europe for support, however begrudgingly. They ultimately realize that the only these countries will support their cause with an eye for the liberals to prevail in the inevitable conflict that will arise against religious extremists. The only alternative is to look for support from the autocrats of Russian and Chinese governments, with whom the Islamists share a common loathing of liberal causes like free elections and due process.

So long as Russia answers to Vladimir Putin, Russia in particular will never be convinced to abandon Assad, and it’s lunacy to pretend any diplomatic overture would result otherwise. From the moment that the British and French abandoned their colonies in the Middle East, Russia (and before it the Soviet Union) looked upon the entire Middle East as its colony in all but name. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya have all overthrown their Russian ‘proxy’ governments. In Vladimir Putin’s mind, this is a cataclysmic loss in prestige. If Putin can’t guarantee the safety of his allies in as firm a Russian stronghold as the Middle East, what chance does he have of building long-term alliances with sympathetic autocrats in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? If Assad goes, Russia’s protection is meaningless.

Turkey may seem to have a vested interest in Assad’s fall, and no doubt, Erdogan would like to see it happen. But whatever the Turkish governments’ defects, Turkey is seen as the world’s sole functioning democracy in the Islamic world and the Middle East’s sole center of stability. To invite open warfare with Syria, to even be seen as supporting the rebels too strongly, is to jeopardize all the influence which Turkey won over the course of the Arab Spring. If conflict with Assad becomes too open, Turkey stands to lose all its stability, and all its reputation for humanitarianism – war is murder, and when waging open warfare against their neighbor, Turkish soldiers could ill-afford to show more mercy than their Syrian counterparts.

For many years, the Iranian government needed Assad far more than Assad needed them. Iran needs safe passage through Syria to wage holy war against Israel. Iran, like Turkey, still harbors dreams of leading the entire Islamic world. To enable Syria to have an Islamic regime would firstly mean to cede Syria to the Sunnis. Assad is Allawite Shia, which is a 12% minority-within-a-minority sect in a mostly Sunni country. But it would secondly rob Iran of the ‘coming glory’ which masterminding the destruction of Israel would endow them – and yes, even if Iran doesn’t use the bomb against Israel, the destruction of Israel is still the centerpiece in their plans to come to the vanguard of the Islamic world. People who say that Iran would abandon Assad because he’s not religious enough have the issue entirely backwards – if Iranian government policy were not so grounded in religious dogma, they’d have long since abandoned Assad. Without Assad, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would have any rocket supply, and Israel would long since have dismantled the Iranian nuclear program. Now more than ever, the Iranian government has reason to support Assad.

That the Arab Spring happened at all is its own kind of miracle – it only happened because pan-Arabism seems dead, at least for the moment. No matter how effective they once seemed, no military dictator in the Middle East since Ataturk brought anything like the eminence, the wealth, or the progress he promised. The vast majority of the Middle East has long since put its faith in either liberalism or political Islam. But miracles do not happen twice. In every country where a military dictatorship fell, there is an inevitable conflict brewing between liberalism and Islamism – and between all the factions within them both. Every outside country with a vested interest in the Middle East used up its political capital before the Arab Spring reached Damascus. Assad’s held onto power by doing what any good dictator does – suspending rule of law, imprisoning agitators and killing his enemies. He knows that if he can hold onto power for just long enough, the world will forget about Syria. Sadly, the coming violence in the Middle East may well make what’s currently happening in Syria seem rather small scale and insignificant. Assad is banking on that, and the worst part is that he may well be exactly right.   

Quote of the Day

The Harris: Upon my grave: Here lies ------ Harris, in death as in life,  a little stiff.

800 Words: Why Mad Men Matters

He sits blankly at his desk against the wall in his cathedral of an office, with a cloud of smoke as thick as incense permeating the room's every corner; his face as illegible as an icon, the blankness of his visage absorbing every emotion simultaneously. His eminence is adorned by apparel as central to his image as birds to Francis and lambs to Agnes; a suit tailored so immaculately as to look like organic tissue, hair gelled to seem at one with a face sculpted out of marble, and a nicotine bass that seems to emit minerals. He does not tailor his appearance, he is his appearance. It is a figure as familiar to us as our parents, welcoming us to our dreams and haunting us in our nightmares. He is the very image of America, repelling us with every gesture even as we're seduced – not a man who wants to be liked, but a vengeful god to be worshiped. 

This is Don Draper, creative director of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Advertising Agency of the 1960's - a man paid to convince people that their dreams exist; a man without qualities or quality, his two definable characteristics being his ability to understand what we desire, and to make us believe it attainable. He is more paradigm than character, everything Americans are told to aspire to from birth, yet unknowable either to other characters or to his audience. 

Don Draper is not a person, he is America itself – precisely the image all America wants to present to each other: self-made, independent, competent in everything he touches, and tough as iron. Don Draper, the bastard son of a dead whore and an abusive farmer, became the King of Madison Avenue. Like everyone else in our country, he aspired to the American Dream. Unlike everybody else, he had the willpower it took to achieve it, and can't understand why other people don't have the same. Like all Americans from Jay Gatsby down to Willy Loman, Don is first and foremost a salesman – and we believe everything he sells us because we want to believe it’s possible, and he is his own best evidence. But few if any of us are as tough as Don, and if Don is America, then Mad Men is the story of how the world came to reject Don Draper’s sales pitch.

The beguiling layers of echoes and enigmas which surround Don Draper are only possible because the world around him is so immaculately recreated exactly as it should be - perhaps not as it was, but precisely as we remember it - a world created by advertising, full of the promise of the 'American Pastoral' in which cigarettes, alcohol, misogyny and high cholesterol were mere venal sins. It was a world which ran on the Faustian bargain of being a White Male: who accepted the world on a plate in exchange for the anonymity which conformity brings, and who surrounded himself with an invisible underclass of all who are unable to be a part of the same pact. 

Indeed, the seduction of this show comes from the almost imperceptibly slow realization of each of its major characters that their lives are changing, inexorably and forever. But it is not a metamorphosis that happens in the twinkling of an eye, it happens so slowly that only we know what will happen. With our 50 years of hindsight, we know exactly what people like the cast of this show turned into, but what makes the show so watchable is that they have no idea. 

It never ceases to amaze that Mad Men's detractors claim there is nothing behind the show's immaculately conceived veneer. Time and again, people hear and read the same contradictory views: 

To half Mad Men's critics the show is pornographic nostalgia - presenting a past bereft of half-a-century's liberal guilt during which America was free to be its truest self: an era in which American superiority had no reason to be questioned and the 'American Way' was the world's. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate longing to recapture a paradise lost, an era that can never again be and perhaps never was. These critics allege that the show looks upon the suppression of the rest of the world to a tiny coterie of white males with nostalgia, perhaps even approval. 

To the other half of its critics, perhaps the more vocal half, the show is a nightmare vision of the past - presenting an era so backward in its view of the world that we from the present can bask in a cozy blanket of self-congratulation. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate arrogance in assuming that we of the Obama era are far superior in our enlightenment to those who preceded us. These critics allege that the show looks upon the vices of the sixties with such holier-than-thou self-satisfaction that it turns a blind eye to to the virtues of that era, and even moreso to the vices of our own.

It is no blight upon the greatness of the show to concede that there is something to both interpretations. Who can look at the workplace camaraderie on display and deny that something important was lost in the intervening years? But just the same, who can look at the workers blatantly casual mistreatment of one another and deny that something at least as important was gained?

No, Mad Men is not a show that presents the sixties exactly as it was. No television show could. Those who claim that Mad Men is nothing more than surface rendered immaculate give the show far too much credit. Whole websites exist to document its errors of period style. The show is great not because it presents the sixties exactly as it was, it is great because it presents the sixties exactly as we remember it. 

It was Emerson who said that "[A man] dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty." The genius of Mad Men is that it displays America's memories of the sixties with complete fidelity to our present view of it. It's all there: the infidelities, the smoking, the drinking, the racism, the sexism, the pride and the prejudice, displayed with neither guile nor guilt. It takes no side and seeks nothing more than to present this era to us without judgment or inhibition. The fact that people have such divergent reactions to it speaks to that it does so with all the clarity of a balance sheet. Mad Men is not a show like The Sopranos that achieves greatness by giving us visceral thrills. It is a show that presents us a vision of an era that’s supposedly distant, and we respond because it is still an era very much like our own.

Like The Sopranos, Mad Men holds a mirror up to us, but what their mirrors display are very different. In The Sopranos’ mirror is a society of murderers and thieves from America’s present; we’re supposed to be repelled by their acts, yet we see that in so much of their lives they live exactly as we do – and we have to wonder, how different are we really from these thugs? In Mad Men, the mirror shows us an American society fifty years in the past in which the upper class is utterly indifferent to those around them – and we can supposedly congratulate ourselves on being different. Yet how much has really changed? Supposedly, we’re a less racist and misogynist society, more inclusive, more aware of our faults. But the poor of America is a larger group of people than ever, and probably poorer too. Is our country any more aware, any more concerned for their welfare than ever before?

As we wrapped up the fifth season, the show became ever truer to our memories. Those who once disliked have grown to hate it. For a number of years, the show seemed to be 'about' less and less with each passing episode. Just as history seemed to take a break from America in the late 50’s and early 60’s, the show opening seasons set a glacial pace, perfectly reflecting how light were the burdens of a white upper-middle class that had everything, yet was miserably unhappy. Nothing of consequence happened to them, and so they felt utterly without purpose. By the middle of season three, it's became difficult to remember if there was any linear plot to the show at all.

But since the end of season three, the momentum of plot development has grown as exponentially as an avalanche. Mad Men was once nothing more a smoky hall of mirrors with which the viewers could interact in any way they saw fit, but the mirror has long since shattered to reveal a funeral pyre. In season 5, probably the best yet, nearly every episode revealed a new development more shocking than the last. World events are catching up to these people, and the turbulence is getting closer and closer until the talons finally draw upon their necks.  

This show is about nothing less the dawn of the era that is still with us and now draws to its close. By 1968, the springtime romance of American power drew to its end, and in its place came the black comedy of a superpower grown fat on its over-privilege. Don’t expect that any of these people will be at the vanguard of the 60’s, it isn’t that kind of show. Mad Men is not a show about underclass people, it’s a show about the overclass’s reaction to the underclass – it’s a show about spoiled people who go through life blithely unaware that there are people whose entire existence is bound up in serving them, and these people are suffering. It never occurs to Pete or Roger that these people whose lives exist at their whims might want more, and if they’re not given it as a gift, they may take it.

I hate to disappoint people, but Mad Men will not end with the Storming of the Bastille. The Pete Campbells and Roger Sterlings of America still control this country, and the more people bristle at their authority, the tighter their grip grows. It’s 2012, and the story of Mad Men has still not finished, and the true rebellion against the partners of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has not happened yet. I shudder to think of the magnitude of the explosion Mad Men foretells when it does. 

ET: Almanac

La Lupa by Giovanni Verga:

She was tall, and thin; but she had the firm vigorous bosom of a brown woman, though she was no longer young. Her face was pale, as though she had the malaria always on her, and in her pallor two great dark eyes, and fresh, red lips, that seemed to eat you.

In the village they called her la Lupa, because she had never had enough—of anything. The women crossed themselves when they saw her go by, alone like a roving sh-dog, with that ranging, suspicious motion of a hungry wolf. She bled their sons and their husbands dry in a twinkling, with those red lips of hers, and she had merely to look at them with her great evil eyes, to have them running after her skirts, even if they’d been kneeling at the alter of Saint Agrippina. Fortunately, la Lupa never entered the church, neither at Easter nor at Christmas, nor to hear Mass, nor to confess.—Fra Angiolino, of Santa Maria di Jesu, who had been a true servant of God, had lost his soul because of her.

Maricchia, poor thing, was a good girl and a nice girl, and she wept in secret because she was la Lupa’s daughter, and nobody would take her in marriage, although she had her marriage-chest full of linen and her piece of fertile land in the sun, as good as any other girl in the village.

Then one day la Lupa fell in love with a handsome lad who’d just come back from serving as a soldier, and was cutting the hay alongside her in the closes belonging to the lawyer: but really what you’d call folling in love, feeling your body burn under your stuff bodice, and suffering, when you stared into his eyes, the thirst that you suffer in the hot hours of June, away in the burning plains. But he went on mowing quietly, with his nose bent over his swath, and he said to her: “Why, what’s wrong with you, Mrs. Pina?”—In the immense fields, where only the grasshoppers crackled into flight, when the sun beat down like lead, la Lupa gathered armful after armful together, tied sheaf after sheaf, without ever wearying, without straightening her back for a moment, without putting her lips to the flask, so that she could keep at Nanni’s heels, as he mowed and mowed, and asked her from time to time: “Why, what do you want, Mrs. Pina?”

One evening she told him, while the men were dozing in the stackyard, tired from the long day, and the dogs were howling away in the vast, dark, open country: “You! I want you! Thou’rt handsome as the day, and sweet as honey to me. I want thee, lad!”

“Ah! I’d rather have your daughter, who’s a filly,” replied Nanni, laughing.

la Lupa clutched her hands in her hair, and tore her temples, without saying a word, and went away, and was seen no more in the yard. But in October she saw Nanni again, when they were getting the oil out of the olives, because he worked next to her house, and the screeching of the oil press didn’t let her sleep at night.

“Take the sack of olives,” she said to her daughter, “and come with me.”

Nanni was throwing the olives under the millstone with the shovel, in the dark chamber like a cave, where the olives were ground and pressed, and he kept shouting Ohee! To the mule, so it shouldn’t stop.

“Do you want my daughter Maricchia?” Mrs. Pina asked him.

“What are you giving your daughter Maricchia?” replied Nanni.

“She has what her father left, and I’ll give her my house into the bargain; it’s enough for me if you’ll leave me a corner in the kitchen, where I can spread myself on a bit of a straw mattress to sleep on.”

“All right! If it’s like that, we can talk about it at Christmas,” said Nanni.

Nanni was all greasy and grimy with the oil and the olives set to ferment, and Maricchia didn’t want him at any price; but her mother seized her by the hair, at home in front of the fireplace, and said to her between her teeth:

“If thou doesn’t take him, I’ll lay thee out!”

La Lupa was almost ill, and the folks were saying that the devil turns hermit when he gets old. She no longer went roving around; she no longer sat in the doorway, with those eyes of one possessed. Her son-in-law, when she fixed on him those eyes of hers, would start laughing, and draw out from his breast the bit of Madonna’s dress, to cross himself. Maricchia stayed at home nursing the children, and her mother went to the fields, to work with the men, just like a man, weeding, hoeing, tending the cattle, pruning the vines, whether in the north-east wind or the east winds of January, or in the hot, stifling African wind of August, when the mules let their heads hang in dead weight, and the men slept face downwards under the wall, on the north side. Between vesper bell and the night-bell’s sound, when no good woman goes roving round, Mrs. Pina was the only soul to be seen wandering through the countryside, on the ever-burning stones of the little roads, through the parched stubble of the immense fields, which lost themselves in the sultry haze of the distance, far off, far off, towards misty Etna, where the sky weighed down upon the horizon, in the afternoon heat.

“Wake up!” said la Lupa to Nanni, who was asleep in the ditch, under the dusty hedge, with his arms round his head. “Wake up! I’ve brought thee some wine to cool thy throat.”

Nanni opened his eyes wide like a disturbed child, half-awake, seeing her erect above him, pale, with her arrogant bosom, and her eyes black as coals, and he stretched out his hand gropingly, to keep her off.

“No! No good woman goes roving round between vespers and night,” sobbed Nanni, pressing his face down again in the dry grass of the ditch-bottom, away from her, clutching his hair with his hands. “Go away! Go away! Don’t you come into the stackyard again!”

She did indeed go away, la Lupa, but fastening up again the coils of her superb black hair, staring straight in front of her, as she stepped over the hot stubble, with eyes black as coals.

And she came back into the stackyard time and again, and Nanni no longer said anything; and when she was late coming, in the hour between between evensong and night, he went to the top of the white, deserted little road to look for her, with sweat on his forehead;--and afterwards, he clutched his hair in his hand, and repeated the same thing every time: “Go away! Go away! Don’t you come into the stackyard again!”

Maricchia wept night and day; and she glared at her mother with eyes that burnedwith tears and jealousy; like a young she-wolf herself now, when she saw her coming in from the fields every time silent and pallid.

“Vile woman!” she said to her. “Vile, vile mother!”

“Be quiet”

“Thief! Thief that you are!”

“Be quiet!”

“I’ll go to the Sergeant, I will.”

“Then go!”

And she did go, finally, with her child in her arms, went fearless and without shedding a tear, like a madwoman, because now she also was in love with that husband of hers, whom they’d forced her to accept, greasy and grimy from the olives set to ferment.

The Sergeant went for Nanni, and threatened him with gaol and the gallows. Nanni began to sob and to tear his hair; he denied nothing, he didn’t try to excuse himself.—“It’s the temptation,” he said “It’s the temptation of hell!” and he threw himself at the feet of the Sergeant, begging to be sent to gaol.

“For pity’s sake, Sergeant, get me out of this hell! Have me hung, or send me to prison; but don’t let me see her again, never, never!”

“No!” replied la Lupa to the Sergeant. “I kept myself a corner in the kitchen, to sleep in, when I gave her my house for her dowry. The house is mind. I won’t be turned out.”

A little while later, Nanni got a kick in the chest from a mule, and was likely to die; but the parish priest wouldn’t bring the Host to him, unless la Lupa left the house. La Lupa departed, and then her son-in-law could prepare himself to depart also, like a good Christian; he confessed and took the communion with such evident signs of repentance and contrition that all the neighbours and the busybodies wept round the bed of the dying man.

And better for him if he had died that time, before the devil came back to tempt him and get a grip on his body and his soul, when he was well.

“Leave me alone!” he said to la Lupa. “For God’s sake leave me in peace! I’ve been face to face with death. Poor Maricchia is only driven wild. Now all the place knows about it. If I never see you again it’s better for you and for me.”

And he would have liked to tear his eyes out so as not to see again those eyes of la Lupa, which, when they fixed themselves upon his, made him lose both body and soul. He didn’t know what to do, to get free from the spell she put on him. He paid for Masses for the souls in Purgatory, and he went for help to the priest and to the Sergeant. At Easter he went to confession, and he publicly performed the penance of crawling on his belly and licking the stones of the sacred threshold before the church for a length of six feet.

After that, when la Lupa came back to tempt him:

“Hark here!” he said. “Don’t you come again into the stackyard; because if you keep on coming after me, as sure as God’s above I’ll kill you.”

“Kill me, then” replied la Lupa. “It doesn’t matter to me; I’m not going to live without thee.”

He, when he perceived her in the distance, amid the fields of green young wheat, he left off hoeing the vines, and went to take the axe from the elm-tree. La Lupa saw him advancing towards her, pale and wild-eyed, with the axe glittering in the sun, but she did not hesitate in her step, nor lower her eyes, but kept on her way to meet him, with her hands full of red poppies, and consuming him with her black eyes.

“Ah! Curse your soul!” stammered Nanni.

- Translated by D. H. Lawrence