My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks by Richard Brilliant

"[A] well known piece of baseball philosophy.  Three umpires are discussing how they do their jobs.  The first, who is also the least experienced, says, "I call 'em as they are."  The second, who has been in the game a little longer, says, "I call 'em as I see 'em."  The third says, "They're nothing till I call 'em."  These three could be characterized as objectivism, relativism, and postmodernism respectively." -Andrew Rawlinson

The above quote is simultaneously the epigraph placed at the beginning of the final section of  My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks by Richard Brilliant, as well as the first and last time you will see a sports metaphor on my blog.  Be that as it may, it sums up Professor Brilliant's thesis nicely.  My Laocoön is, in one sense, a book about the famous masterpiece known as Laocoön and His Sons or the Laocoön Group which resides in the Vatican.  Pliny the Elder attributes the piece to three sculptors from Rhodes.  You are most likely familiar with some variation of the image.  It looks like this:

  But it also looks like this:

There is a rich and complex history of the images which, if memory serves, Professor Brilliant finally totals about 4 different versions.  The first is the Book of Q version which is the original which we shall never see.  The second is the image immediately above, if I've followed the labyrinthine narrative properly, discovered in 1506 and highly influential on Renaissance artists.  The last is the restoration of the 1950s (the first of the two I've posted above) which is considered more "correct."

Professor Brilliant also speaks of a third image which is extracted from the 1506 version, but achieves an "otherness" even to the point of requiring another category as the image becomes "a vehicle for critical discourse on the nature of art and its powers."  A portion of the text deals with specific critical responses.  There is also a moment, early in the work, where Professor Brilliant tells about a time when he sat by the two sculptures in the Cortile del Belvedere (which people pass through on their way to the Sistine Chapel) and watched the tourists pass by, observing their responses.  A good deal of them were confused by two similar statues placed side by side. Some knew the history of sculpture and knew to some extent that the less authentic is still largely the authoritative version in our culture which has weaved so much time, thought, and history into the 1506 version.

Professor Brilliant writes, "Yet, rarely did they appear to engage the sculpture as a work of art having meaning for them as an aesthetic object of value."

I felt that, at this moment, he reveals a sort of superobjective, an unspoken thesis.  By no means is this an anti-intellectualism argument.  I do know art, and I like what I know.  Notwithstanding, there is a danger of opacity on either end of the spectrum: be it through ignorance and apathy, or be it through seeing the image so much through the filter of what others have written/thought about it that one cannot see the image for itself.  Indeed, the book is also, in fact I would dare suggest primarily, about ways of seeing art, using a piece with a history of interpretation and reproduction variants wrapping around the piece like so many snakes.

He also compares the ways of seeing the Laocoön with other masterpieces that have suffered similar contortionistic manipulations.  He mentions Titian's Sacred and Profane Love:

Which is likely not even the original title or subject matter.  He spends a portion of the book talking about titles, both important as reference points and misleading.  For example, he also talks of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.  Picasso himself was reluctant (petulant even) to name his paintings.

He also brings up Velasquez's Las Meninas (I have a reproduction of it in my living room.)  The enigmatic presentation of the image has inspired volume upon speculative volume on the piece:

I cannot speak for Professor Brilliant, although I thoroughly enjoyed the ameliorating experience provided by way of his work.  I have my suspicions that he would agree with a metaphor of my own devising on the matter.  There is little in this life so enriching as to be excited about art.  The arts reflect the highest aspirations of humankind.  To seek to know more is a natural outworking of said excitement.  Looking to what's been observed about a work is a bit like spicing a dish.  Properly measured, it can make the entire experience much richer than it ever could be on its own.  Poorly measured, it can drown all of the inherent flavor of the dish.  I'm not sure if it was his intention to put so fine a point of this danger, however I find it was my primary takeaway from the book. 

The Falstaff Coat of Arms

Laurie and I have declared a few nights a week our "project night."  They are usually Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays as well.  It is a night in which we do not watch movies or sit around refreshing Facebook after work but, instead, work on projects.  Sometimes it is as practical as moving furniture and laying our floor.  Sometimes our projects are more along the art project line.

The other night we watched Verdi's opera Falstaff (a Royal Opera House production from the early 1980s with Renato Bruson in the title role.)  The action is loosely based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. There was the scene in which Falstaff finally gets alone with Mistress Ford and he said/sang:

"T'immagino fregiata del mio stemma, 
Mostrar fra gemma e gemma
La pompa del tuo sen."

Which is to say that he was imagining his own coat of arms somewhere in the general vicinity of her décolletage.

Which led me to think, "I wonder what Falstaff's coat of arms looks like."

Which led me to think, "I should design a coat of arms for Falstaff!"

What I've done above is to suggest a few elements of Falstaff while hopefully preserving the spirit of a coat of arms.  There is a stag which, of course, suggests the more libidinous side of his character.  The horns, of course, remind us of the cuckold motif in The Merry Wives as well as Herne, the Hunter.  On his antlers, of course, is a bunch of grapes, which should be fairly self-explanatory.  The rearing up before the crown is intended to suggest both knighthood and aspirations toward royal favor (as seen in Henry IV.)  

The inscription at the bottom is Latin for Falstaff's well known and probably most oft quoted line "The better part of valor is discretion."  His turn of phrase is a defense of cowardice.

This is what I do for fun.

Let Them Eat Glass!

Laurie and I were recently lunching at the home of friends new enough to our lives to have been the occasion of our first visit to said home.  On those occasions, I am to bookshelves as a moth to a flame, and the first hour or so of my visit to someone's home for the first time is usually consumed with talking about the books that they own.

On this occasion, one of their shelves contained a book that changed the course of my life when I was a young shaver and Laurie called on me to relate the story.  The book was the autobiography of the comedic actor Harpo Marx, titled Harpo Speaks.  I think I was around 10 or 11 at the time and my father and I were at a video store (which was a sort of store in which one could rent videotapes of films for a fee.)  I don't know what I was intending on renting, but I'm sure it was some abysmal piece of childish tripe that my father was less than enthusiastic about having to be in the same house in which it was playing.  Thinking quickly, he brought me an alternative suggestion, one that I'd never heard of.  He brought me a copy of Duck Soup, which was one of the Marx Brothers' earlier films.  This was my first encounter with the Marx Brothers and I decided to give it a try.

I loved it.  My obsession with the Marx Brothers was the sort of obsession that only a 'tween is capable of maintaining, although the obsession quickly transferred as you shall see anon.

I remember going to Rizzoli's bookstore in South Coast Plaza and finding a copy of Harpo Marx's autobiography very soon after seeing the movie.  I bought the book and read it with great gusto.  I still have that copy and it is now in tatters from the number of times I read it.  My obsession transferred from the Marx Brothers to an unusual place for the obsession of a Junior Higher: Alexander Woollcott.

Alexander Woollcott was a theater critic, wit, literary personality, and social commentator in the first half of the previous century.  He held literary court at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, surrounding himself with a laundry list of luminaries of his day, including a close friendship with Harpo Marx.  I began collecting the books of Alexander Woollcott in junior high.  I still a have whole shelf devoted to him.  Several of them are signed.  Along with his more abundantly printed works, I have a rare copy of his ill-fated play which he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman called The Dark Tower, a collection of his reportage from the first World War for Stars and Stripes, and several other rarities which I must check my pride in not listing here at great length.  I have now been a collector of Woollcottalia twice as long as I was ever not one.

Woollcott was, as I mentioned, among other things, passionately interested in literature and the theater.  Those passions transferred to me.  I began to branch out and read George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham (I remember taking The Moon and Sixpence with me to a Quaker junior high camp), Dorothy Parker, and so forth, which then lead to Faulkner and Hemingway and Whitman and Poe and Twain and many many others.  I remark on this because, before I saw Duck Soup, I was not a child particularly inclined towards reading and certainly not towards reading anything serious.  A slapstick comedy from the 1930s set me on the course towards intellectualism.  Laurie asked me, earlier today when we were discussing this, what I think I would have become has it not been for that chance encounter with that film.  I answered that I probably would have been your run of the mill Comic-Con geek, playing RPGs, waiting outside a movie theater at midnight to see the latest costumed hero movie, and posting .gifs from The Big Bang Theory on my Tumblr as the closest thing I get to a creative act.

I have a more complex set of reactions to my entrance into love for compositional music, specifically contemporary experimental music.  Back in Orange County, I used to listen to KUSC, the world-class local classical music station, and specifically loved The Record Shelf which was hosted by Jim Svejda.  Listening to that show was like taking a free classical music appreciation course.  I remember Mr. Svejda, at one point, expressing his disdain for what was a ponderous, extraordinarily difficult opera about Albert Einstein on a beach.  Like so much of life, the object forbidden to me by an authority took on a special place of interest and, at the end of my teens, I became a fan of the music of Philip Glass.

I do still admire Woollcott a great deal and I still think he was wonderful (evident, no doubt, in my verbosity and circumlocution.)  As someone known in the circles in which I travel as a "book person," I am sometimes asked about, say, the Harry Potter books.  For the record, how I feel about them is that there is a whole upcoming generation who may very well have been hooked into being life-long readers from the series, far more than anything that happened to the generation that I grew up in.  This is an excellent and hopeful development.  Do I think they're great?  Not particularly.  But, I feel that people who engage with the world around them, who interact with different ideas and viewpoints, who value knowledge and art, really do make the world a better place.  I feel the world would be a better place if such values spread like wildfire, not if they are kept in a secret chamber where the people who hold the esoteric knowledge can feel smart and superior to the common rabble.  I feel that people can aspire towards higher concepts like beauty, truth, virtue, and peace; the reflection of the divine within the limited scope of our existence.  I will even go so far as to say things like that at the risk of sounding snotty and judgmental in the suggestion that there are "baser" things.

But there are.  There are low and base entertainments; there is art that reflects the highest aspirations of humankind; and there is a vast grey area of places in-between.  And we all have a lifetime in which to interact with them, communicate with them, and come to our own conclusion.  Possibly even make some of our own.  Like what you like and interact with what hooks you. 

Every time I mention Philip Glass, someone makes a denigrating joke or remark, and I'm not here to shame anyone for doing so.  I get it.  Saying Philip Glass is your favorite composer is like saying Danny Elfman is your favorite composer.  However, I would like to offer my own point of view.  If I had a young and promising relative of about 13 or 14, I would not buy them something by Arnold Schoenberg.  I would buy them Glass' Solo Piano or Hydrogen Jukebox or possibly Satyagraha.  There is nothing wrong with liking the things that you like, being where you are, and seeking to better yourself where you are.  Sure, at some point you will probably move from living on milk to meat, but there are also grapes and yogurt and rye bread and horehound candies and olives and any number of other means of sustenance, which science has known for well over a year that a healthy diet is one of variety.

Or, perhaps a more apt metaphor, the lamppost directly inside the wardrobe to Narnia is a fantastic object.  The magic draws Lucy in and is the catalyst for a great deal of adventure.  Of course, the Pevensies don't spend the rest of their lives camped out next to the lamppost.  They have a whole world to explore!  But is the lamppost any less magical than reaching Cair Paravel?  Is it any less a part of Narnia?  Do we imagine the full grown Pevensies mocking the time when they were so entranced by the lamppost, unaware of the wonders to follow?

It is my belief that there are far too many obstacles in our culture to seeking to better one's self, be they economic, peer pressure, levels of difficulty, fear of scorn.  If I can be so crassly Wagnerian, it is not the job of the Guardians of Splendor to bar the gates to keep out the riff-raff.  Our brave new world does a fine enough job of that on its own.  Rather it is ours to beat the drum as loudly as we possibly can and hope open the gates as wide as they can go.

Day 6: At The Getty

One rainy morning in 1777, a fifty year old man walked into the parlor of a lush, opulent, and one might daresay stately home in Chesterfield.  It had been a long, rainy journey from London and the man worried about a slight tickle that was gnawing at the back of his throat, developing into a sniffle.  He began to set up his canvas.

The Count walked bruskly into the room with a train of men, functionaries of the Royal Society (the so-called "Invisible College") precariously holding stacks of papers in their arms, one or two trying to direct the Count's attention to the matter they found important.  The Count's eyes locked onto the painter and said, "Ah, so you made it through the deluge, Gainsborough.  Very good.  You're early.  Anne shall be down when she's finished with her morning prayers."

Thomas did not look up from his work.  He lifted the nine foot tall canvas and placed it between two grips which he tightened.  "I thank you, sir.  I shall be ready."

The Count cleared his throat and continued out of the room, his retinue in tow.

Thomas thought briefly about Johann Christian, the composer's son, whose portrait he'd recently completed. Such a warm and intelligent man, so earnest and devout, salt of the Earth.  He thought of Mary and dear Margaret so patiently posing for him with his gamble, his promise to them that once he was satisfied with his exhibit for the Royal Academy they would all quit the city and their life with galling deference to the vapid upper-classes.  No more of setting ruddy old tool merchant's children posing in lavish blue suits for a few week's worth of rent and pub money.  They would retire to the country, buy a modest cottage.  Thomas thought of that dip in the road, about 20 miles south on his way up, that fell into a dark, wooded valley, with mottled sunlight speckling the dark brown, moist leaves.  For the rest of his life, he would remember whenever life became difficult that that place existed somewhere.

In July of 2011, Paul Mathers walked into a room in an art gallery in Los Angeles and saw the Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield by Thomas Gainsborough.  His first thought on reading the plaque was of a verse from a Noël Coward song about the stately homes of England and their tendency to house portraits by Gainsborough.  He also thought of how this was painted when his nation was but a fledgling making it's first unsteady trip out of the nest and how Gainsborough, as a patriotic Englishman (with somewhat of an American view towards social class), probably did not have a favorable view of the colonists revolting for tax purposes.  He also thought that where he was standing was Junipero Serra country in those days, almost as far removed from all of that as Paul Mathers in 2011.

The plaque mentioned Gainsborough's frustration with his great and immediately recognized talent for portraiture and his desire for a pastoral life of painting pastoral scenes.  Paul thought of poor Franz Schubert who thought his great talent was as an operatic composer but, indeed, was actually in everything but that.  He thought of J. Paul Getty's own description of art collectors as those who have all of the eye and love of beauty of an artist, but lack the skill to create their own artwork.  And, indeed, Paul thought of Paul.

He sat in front of the grand canvas on the sort of round red ottoman provided by the museum in the middle of each of their major rooms.  He found it to be stunningly beautiful, the fast dashes of oil resolving into a gorgeous portrait of a graceful young lady when one stood a good six feet away from it.  He wondered about the young lady in the portrait, a hint of mad, instant love tugging at his heart, and resolved to see if he could find any biographical information on the subject, perhaps for a blog entry.  He thought about his life, wondered what it's going to amount to in the end.  A group of five young college students walked into the room and stood between him and the canvas, blocking his view.





Laurie and I took far too many pictures at the Getty Center to post here, but I did make a photo album of them on Facebook.  You can find it here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150275228202340.354007.519217339&l=63f40fa096&type=1

Days 4 & 5: Bijou, Bijou!

Laurie and I spent a day shopping.  Window antiquing mainly.  Above is a photograph I surreptitiously snapped in the yard of an antique complex in the city of Orange.  I was especially interested in the castle doors.  I joked that we could replace the entire front of our house with them.

Naturally, we went used booking as well.  Picked up a copy of Collector's Choice:The Chronicle of an Artistic Odyssey through Europe by Ethel LeVane & J. Paul Getty.  It's a biographical (and, in parts, autobiographical) account of Getty's art collecting.  The section I'm reading right now reminds me quite a bit of Rudolf Bing's account of his years with the New York Metropolitan Opera House, 5,000 Nights At The Opera, especially the accounts of John Christie's Glyndebourne and how problematic the political climate around the second world war made operating in the world of the arts, especially those arts historically dominated by the Germanic and Italian.  Laurie purchased a few books on the Inquisition.

Next to the bookshop was an indoor reptilian zoological garden.

Then to Downtown Orange and the many antique stores thereabouts.  Laurie and I window shop here in the same way we did at South Coast Plaza, which is to say with an eye toward sparking creative ideas that we might create on our own budget.  Outside of George Antiques I saw that a simpatico graffito scribe had also passed those hallowed byways.

The next day I spent with my father. He took me to the LA County Fire Dispatch complex where he works and I was given a grand tour.  The building sits on shock absorbers, rather than any traditional foundation, which are able to withstand at least an 8.5 earthquake.  I was taken to the basement where I was able to see them (photography in such an environment, however, seemed like it would be frowned upon, so I refrained from asking.)  The dispatch room looks like something out of an action film and, indeed, I am told has recently undergone a $4 million renovation.  LA County is, in my estimation, in very good hands.  I was honored to find that my father has two of my paintings in his office.

We then went to the movies, which is something both of us, in our respective lives, rarely ever gets to do.  We saw a satirical film about a super-hero in World War II.  It starred Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones.  Or, at least, it did for me.  My father came out of it having seen a film about motorcycles.

That night we went out to dinner with members of Laurie's family.  A splendid time was had by all.  We tried (and failed) to get to bed early as the next day was our day at the Getty Museum.  More soon!

Crimes Against Humanities

"By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful." - Socrates

In my mid-20s, I had a nervous breakdown.  It came as I was suffering the birth-pangs from the womb of higher education into adulthood, but also as my entire plan for that adult life, which I had been working toward for years, were shattered when the woman I planned to marry dumped me to join a Buddhist meditation community and immediately start seeing someone else.  I went a little cra-cra after that.

At the time I was seeing a psychiatrist-in-training from a local university.  There are clinics that exist in some universities where one can receive analysis, therapy, treatment, the whole she-bang, for a supremely diminished fee.  Personally I feel that, unlike a barber's college, the less experienced may be an asset in this case as the psychiatrist is closer to their education and, more importantly, possibly more current in their understanding of the understanding of workings of the human mind.

The experience helped me through that difficult time and, I think, equipped me for the transition into adulthood in a lot of ways.  It was very helpful and I still highly recommend "#1 on the Stanislavski chart" to everyone.  But a lot of the harder, more existential wrestling matches in my life have been resolved or, at least, ameliorated in some less conventional outlets.  As many of you know, religion has been more of a battlefield than a refuge for me.  So much of my therapy has come from other places.

I was listening to All Things Considered the other day when, to my great surprise, a story came on which struck me rather across the face as being intensely classist.  The story was about the disturbing trend in America of defunding public libraries (as though those were a huge economic drain in the first place.  But I'm already getting ahead of myself.)  The story, however, did not focus on that trend being disturbing.  Instead the story focused on eBooks, specifically the scramble to optimize profits in that industry and the burden that free lending libraries place on that goal.  One solution seems to be the trend toward limiting the amounts of times one can "check out" the virtual intellectual property before the customer (in this case the library) is forced to re-purchase the book.

But hiding in the periphery of the story was the point that has been like a stone in my shoe for the past week.  The person interviewed and the interviewer both suggested that brick and mortar libraries with brick and mortar books are becoming archaic in the digital age.  I felt they even went so far as to suggest that this was common knowledge and a point not open for debate.  I've stated my position on eBooks before.  First of all, I don't have an eBook reader because I never have a disposable income of $100+ to spend on one and most of the books I stuff into my brain through my eyes come into my hands gratis, either by parties who support my decidedly bohemian path, or by the very public libraries that, paradoxically, the public radio program was denigrating.  I am not against eBooks.  In fact, I'm very excited by the world of possibilities they afford, perhaps undermining the Boy's Club publishing industry just as the internet undermined the Boy's Club music industry about a decade ago, and opening the doors for authors who may not have otherwise "made it."  I also think the readers, specifically the Kindle and the Nook, are aesthetically pleasing.  They look like things I would enjoy carrying around.  They also get internet access anywhere, for those times when you're walking down the street thinking "What was the name of that Weimar era cabaret performance artist who staged psycho-sexual nightmares and was fired for breaking a champagne bottle over the head of a patron?"

I live in a poor neighborhood and we have ongoing issues with people who have chosen "substance abuser" as the key selling point on their curriculum vitae.  We live directly in the path between the soup kitchen and the shelter, which occasions all manner of behavior outside of the realm of accepted legal social behavior taking place in and around our front yard.  It also occasions the people who, for any number of reasons, have been thrown out of said soup kitchen or shelter to camp in or around my front yard.  There is a specific older gentleman I'm thinking of who lives in a 1970s one-person sleeper RV filled with detritus which spills out when the door is open, making him into an unwitting Hansel, who camps, lets his dog run free, sells and indulges in what I assume to be methamphetamines, and whose key personality hook, in my experience, seems to be belligerence. The function of the lending library will not be obsolete until that man has unlimited and free access to an eBook reader.  I am not saying that their existence will effect this outcome, but their existence ensures that at any time he can go into that building and learn just about anything.

I have another facet of the argument to illustrate, exiting the tenuous realm of the hypothetical and entering the privileged position of personal testimony.  In a lot of ways, I was a version of the man in that story once.  I was once a drunkard, and I spent a lot of time in front of the television, filling my brain with mediocre crap.  At one point, I had a major health scare that gave occasion for me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life.  The library is where I then went and largely where I have stayed.  I remember one startling realization I had, which is a microcosm of what I am talking about.  Laying on my bed, staring at the cottage cheese ceiling after brushing with mortality,  the scales fell away from my eyes, and I awakened to the knowledge that I'd never at that point heard one of Beethoven's symphonies all the way through, but that I had probably watched days worth of Gilligan's Island.  And I didn't even like Gilligan's Island.

I have a virtual friend, Maura Lafferty, who recently said, "There isn't much in life that can't be solved by Beethoven's 7th." There is a great truth to that statement.

In college, I largely studied the works of, and how to produce productions of, the works of William Shakespeare.   I took a Shakespeare Intensive course through Shakespeare & Company.  We chose a passage from Shakespeare to work on.  The first few days we worked on establishing the emotional connection to the piece.  The latter few we worked on text work (scoring the trochees, spondees, and dactyls, and that sort of thing.)  I chose a short passage from the beginning of The Winter's Tale when Leontes is waxing soliloquific about his nascent suspicion of his wife's infidelity.  I was walked through a series of questions which left me a wailing mass of tears on the floor, what is referred to in psychological circles as "a breakthrough."  I was wailing uncontrollably on the floor like a child having an enraged tantrum being ignored and feeling entirely powerless in a savage, predatory world.  I was unable to stop it and I remember several people coming and holding me down at one point.  Much later I was able to articulate that it was as if I had previously thought I had a well within me, but I then discovered that I had a dormant volcano that extended down to the Earth's molten core.

Later, I had a friend who directed me in a directing-class project of the "wooing of Lady Anne" scene from Richard III.  I played Richard and I obsessively threw myself into the part and the study of the work.  I remember having a moment, and it still haunts me a little, where I became hyper-aware that I, Paul Mathers, could, under the right circumstances, given certain external stimuli, be Richard III.  I could kill.  So could anyone else.  We all have within us the potential for the greatest good and the starkest evil, or anything in-between.  This realization walks around with me.  Sometimes it is supremely encouraging.  Sometimes it is terrifying.

So often I have worked through a problem with the aid of the humanities.  When Rob died last year, as I've so often mentioned, I found no comfort in the places one is commonly sent for comfort in times of grief by well meaning parties.  Much to my surprise, I found so much comfort in what I happened to be reading at the time, which was Plato's accounts of the death of Socrates.  I have had occasion to recommend the same in the past year to a few people who have been struggling in similar ways in their own lives.  

There have been many who have articulated the argument for the humanities far better than I.  It is an age old and, I dare say, aphoristic problem that arts and education tend to take the first and harshest cuts whenever budgets are tightened in a society.  There are even highly insulting terms often employed like "entitlements" or "unmonetizable knowledge" that inevitably rear their ugly heads.  At the risk of being crass, one can imagine the social puppeteers or lunatics who, as the adage would have it, have appropriated the office of the Psychiatric hospital's chief doctor, fully realizing the profit loss of touching the war machine, protecting, creating, and imperializing their financial interests and certainly not touching their own pay rate.  Defunding Crackhead Jim's access to beauty and truth seems a much easier pill to swallow.  It is a reptilian mindset that suggests parents who give their child a dollar instead of a hug every time the child cries out for love.

Although I will tarry a moment longer in the domain of polemic to point out the key flaw in the "unmonetizable" argument.  It can be illustrated by this formula:

The level of focus on The Profit Margin is in direct proportion to the output of crap.

You want a better profit margin, you use cheaper ingredients, you fire the experienced workers and hire cheaper, less experienced employees, you cut corners, you save time.  This is why a 30 year old vacuum cleaner is better than a new one.  This is the slippery slope of attention to wealth.

Example: 1995- "Let's reclaim the invention of the television for education!  Let's make a television station called The Wonder Channel, funded both by subscription AND advertisers, and create content based on learning, exploring, wonder, creativity, truth, and beauty!"
2011- "Next up on '-Der': Barbecue Pit Bosses.  Join Cleavus and Lil' Vinton as they build backyard barbecue pits.  You will learn neither how to make a barbecue pit nor how to barbecue from watching this program.  Mainly you will watch the two leads yell bleeped out swears at each other.  Brought to you by Tadalafil."

Eventually the series is canceled when a video from the cutting room floor is leaked to YouTube in which Cleavus gives a profanity-laden rant against one of the credit card companies that finance the show.  The entire story is sad and makes the world seem slightly lonelier and life seem slightly more fleeting in the collective unconscious until the only flaccid pleasure people can derive from interacting with the world at large is mock and scoff, guffawing at the very Hellbound handbasket in which they are firmly tucked.

Although a Theater major, I am able to readily identify the unsustainabilty of a system where the bulk of the wealth is funneling to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population and that increasingly smaller percentage is paying increasingly less into the system.  The three card monte game of the Right is to fool the working class, through appeals to down-hominess, old fashioned values and so forth, into thinking that they, the Proles, can one day, through hard work and enterprising, become one of them, the Cake-Eaters.  This is false.

So, the news is full of talk about defunding the arts and education.  As I said before, it's an easy place to cut when you're holding the cutting device and when you interests lay elsewhere.  It's way easier to fund and maintain a prison-industrial complex than a flourishing public education system.  And, if you don't do the latter, you're going to have to do the former, so I guess they go for what's cheaper and easier.  But once again I think of society as something we will to make.  The world is what we make of it.  What if we had a population who were consumed with truth, beauty, love, equality, and unity?  Let's not even go that far though.  What if we just had a society where humankind's expressions of and arguments for those highest of virtues were accessible to every citizen?  How much better would that be?

And I'm not necessarily making the argument for government funding of the humanities exclusively.  As with any other source of funding, there is always the problem of "biting the hand that feeds" the arts, much like poor Cleavus.  I am in favor of heavy government funding of the sciences and the humanities.  But more to the point, I am for accessibility to the sciences and humanities for everyone.  There are many admirable attempts at putting the cookies on lower shelves within the humanities.  There are "rush" seatings at most live concert and theater venues in which one can go to the ticket booth within the last 30 minutes before a performance and get severely discounted seats.  Many theaters have "pay what thou wilt" nights.  The internet has an embarrassment of riches of free resources of lectures, classes, and readings, free for the taking.  The doors to the libraries are still open.

I think that the humanities have so much to offer a society.  If we must talk about the monetizable aspects (and, unfortunately, there exists the type of philistine tromping around the offices of elected officials who will demand the monetizable aspects) I would bring up health care.  Foresight dictates that the future of health care demands preventative health measures.  However, the prevailing philosophy of modern western medicine trends exclusively toward the palliative.  George Bernard Shaw wrote a brilliant foreword to his play The Doctor's Dilemma in which he makes the point that the paradox of the medical field is that if it ever reached a point of ultimate efficacy, it would put itself out of business.

The Humanities are good for the future health of a society.  They allow so many avenues for growth, education, and progress.  A civilization filled with growing, educated, and progressing individuals has a more optimistic future than one filled with demotivated, ignorant, cynics.  So, investing in the Humanities as a society is much like putting aside money into a long term IRA or Keogh plan.

The Humanities offer so much in the way of mental and physical health to the individual as well.  They are a conduit for the highest aspirations of humankind.  The Humanities are indicative of a good life, which is something that no one should be denied access to.  I would hasten to add that anyone who has studied the great civilizations of old knows that so often the great civilizations fall at the hands of utter brutes.  As Dystopian authors or social commentators know, there is a great danger in hiding the light under bushels of reaching the point where "We have seen the brutes who will fell our civilization, and they are us."

New Podcast!

This week's podcast is a lecture to art students given by Oscar Wilde.  I thought it was an excellent lecture and am very excited to offer it here this week.  I hope that all of you are as delighted and inspired by his words and I was and am.

Did you know Oscar Wilde almost married the woman who went on to marry Bram Stoker?  Apropos of nothing.  That is just a fun fact I came across in preparing this podcast.

This week a major glitch happened in the website I formerly used to upload these.  I think in trying to get this podcast uploaded I stumbled upon a way to do it that expedites the process on my end considerably.  This means nothing to you except for the warm feelings you may experience over my job being easier, and also if you follow the link to download the podcast, this is why the page is now grey when it used to be kind of peach.

You can listen to the podcast here:



Or, you can go and download it for yourself on the link below.  Simply right click and save the 11MB link:

http://www.archive.org/details/ReadingTheClassicsWithPaulMathersPodcast7

The Ethics of Bookbuying

I had an unusual quandary to extricate myself from this afternoon, one that I would hazard a guess falls neatly into the "kind of problems you want to have" column. Laurie and I went to the major chain bookstore in town in solidarity with my middle niece. My middle niece's ballet troupe was performing a small sampler show in the children's section of same bookseller as a fund raiser. They had their show and then, if you bought a book and told the people at the counter you wished to support the troupe, the store would give a portion of the sale to the dance troupe (and neatly write-off the charitable donation this near to the fiscal year's end.)
Of course, it takes little to compel me to buy a book, especially when my parents are in town and went even the further step to pay for the books that we wanted. In essence, I was told "Go and pick out a book."

This happens to me more often than you'd think. I think it's partly because we're poor and partly because we are surrounded by people who love us. So often I am given a sum of money as a gift with the stipulation that it is to be spent on books (because otherwise I will use it to pay bills.)

So, I've been on an Evelyn Waugh kick lately; and the other day I almost picked up a copy of Brideshead Revisited, but stopped, mainly because the cover was from a recent film adaptation and I found myself not terribly interested in carrying around a book with such a horrible cover. I mean, I've done it before, I've lashed myself to great books with embarrassing covers, but I was sure with such a classic I could do better vis a vis cover design. Today, finding myself in that position, I did indeed find one I could stomach a little more. But then I wandered the shelves and walked past I book I'd been meaning to read for a long time and I ended up purchasing that instead.

The book I bought was Liquor, by Poppy Z. Brite. She is a fantastic author. She, like many other modern authors, has an online presence and often lets readers see into the life of the author to some extent. Many of you know that I am a fan of author Caitlin R. Kiernan . In fact I would, apologetically to the wounded party, probably say I am an even bigger fan of Ms. Kiernan's work than I am of Ms. Brite's work (although this is purely personal taste and by no means meant as any form of denigration of the brilliant work of Ms. Brite. I would heartily state that both are of the finest writers working today. It's simply a matter of if I were given a choice between a Kiernan novel and a Brite novel, I would personally probably gravitate toward Kiernan first. Recommendation wise I would endorse either with equal gusto to anyone. And anyway at least with Brite's more recent foodie fiction, we're talking apples and oranges here with the standard intentional pun). Kiernan similarly has a very strong web presence and often writes on the subject of the life of a professional writer. What so often strikes me about them is that they both have written works known the world over. They are some of the greatest living professional authors, and yet they are unable to seek medical attention when they need it. They are selling autographed copies of their books on e-Bay to make rent. I recently bought a t-shirt of Kiernan's new (and fantastic) book, The Red Tree, which my step-daughter often notes I seem to be wearing almost every time she sees me nowadays.

These authors are still struggling to keep the electricity on; and these are even people with moderate names in the business who get interviewed in major magazines. Also out there are some people I actually know personally, like Robert H. Morris or Brendan Constantine (or me!) who do not have works published by major publishers and whom you actually have to seek out to buy their books. People who not only have to have day jobs, but really have little to no hope of ever being "discovered." One begins to realize that there are not only lost masterpieces out there in the dunes of time, they are as many as the grains of sand on said dunes. Which is part of why I highly encourage everyone to sift through smaller presses like Soft Skull or Black Sparrow or even smaller, underground ones which print books as good if not better than you will find elsewhere.

On the other side of that coin is the used book seller, of which I am one. I personally do not sell the works of Kiernan or Brite, partially because I want people to buy their work new, but also because I tend to keep anything I find by them for myself. Most of what I read are found in the category of "Classics" in bookstores which means they were largely written by people who are now dead. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about buying those books used or borrowing them from the library. In fact, let me get the library out of the way here. I have no problem borrowing anything by anybody from the library as 1) I am too poor to buy every new book that is out there, 2) a book in the library is a book that was bought, and 3) a book in the library is a book that could be picked up by anyone, enjoyed, and other books by that author are then sought out.

But one thing that you should know is if a text is from WWI or before, the text is most likely public domain. Which means that the publisher is making nearly pure profit off of the text. Although in the fantasy universe where I am filthy rich I would buy the entire catalog from Modern Library and Everyman's Library because, my goodness, but they print gorgeous books, I don't tend to buy them new in this reality. Although I would be more than pleased to receive anything from either of those publishers as gifts.

I will say that again. I would be more than pleased to receive anything from either of those publishers as gifts

Now, the book world is not a huge world in this time and place. As I've said, I tend to read classics mainly because time's refining fire seems to have largely made the gold easier to find as the dross has burnt off. In any modern age there will be a surfeit of crappy books as publishers throw things against the wall to see what sticks. It's more difficult to find the greatness, although I would hasten to add that this is not an excuse for laziness in the reader. The reader ought to dig for the gold. Especially since someone out there might be starving for your book dollar, your economic vote toward their continued existence as an author.

I'm also not talking about New York Times bestsellers. David Sedaris, as much as I love his work, can probably demand around 10 grand or more for a speaking engagement. Morality is not a movable feast, but I would point out that there is a subtle shift here that one might note. I can tell you that the used book seller is not a wealthy man. I can also tell you that having your book on the New York Times bestseller list generates a lot of money around your work. Unfortunately I cannot tell you this from experience.

And here we hit a little choppy waters ethically speaking. One ought not seek a career as an author for fame and fortune, but sometimes (rarely) they find them just the same. If someone is on the New York Times bestseller list, I really don't have much of a personal problem with buying their books used as the used bookseller probably is a bit more needy than the author at that point. But there are also exceptions to that personal rule of mine, especially if I can cast my economic vote. Recently I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman's, The Graveyard Book, in hopes of casting one vote toward him staying on that list another week (and, hopefully, casting my one vote against the Sarah Palin "book" which also came out that week.)

This doesn't even touch on the ethics of publishers and literary agents. Or of eBooks although the ethics of those really ought to be exactly the same as the ethics of hard copies. Plus I am of the semi-Luddite group who believes that eBooks will never really take off or, at the very least, shall never surpass tangible books, which are one of the most wonderful things human beings have ever come up with. I would not turn down the gift of an e-Book reader, but I think I will probably one day die as I've lived, with my living space full of books.

Heck, I would like to see a society where art and literature are created out of the abundance of the hearts of the artist with no need for concern over their own welfare, because the society recognizes what they are doing as valuable. Which brings me around to my larger point. You've probably noticed that I don't have a lot of clear-cut answers. But I do have one. Everyone should read. Everyone should kill their televisions. They are not helping at all. Everyone should spend less time on the internet. Everyone should bring a book, carry it with them everywhere, read passionately and insatiably. Reading should become one of the hippest things one can do; and I'm even willing to say that people who do not read and remain willfully ignorant should probably be social outcasts. As it stands, rather the opposite is true. We live in an anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant time. I really do think that if most of the people read more the world would be a much better place. So, in the end, the real ethic of book buying that I want to proclaim and proselytize is simply this: Buy and read books. Lots of them. Give them as gifts. Talk about them constantly. Discover and grow. It's one of the better things you can do for yourself and for the world.
Good books, that is. There is such a small percentage of people reading and a small percentage of those are reading good books. Read good books. In fact, only read great books. That is my advice to you. Read great books and be noisy about it.

Book Review- R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated

"Noah was a drinker. Abraham was a liar. Sarah was a manipulator. Lot was a compromiser. Jacob was a deceiver. Job was arrogant. Moses was hot-tempered. Joshua was undiscerning. Gideon was idolatrous. Sampson was lustful. Eli was passive. Saul was insecure. David was violent. Solomon was a hedonist. Elijah was given to self-centeredness. Jonah was given to racism. Isaiah was given to evil speaking. Jeremiah was given to complaining."
- Arturo G. Azurdia III
(as a pure parenthetical, having nothing to do with the rest of this review, to point others toward another thing I've been excited about recently, some of the better sermon series I've heard in the past year are Azurdia's series on Revelation and Steve Brown's series on radical grace. Both of which I would recommend to anyone.)

The above quote serves to illustrate the vast imperfections of the Fathers of the Faith. They were gritty and flawed like all flesh, like all of us. They failed in ways that all of us fail (which also points to the need for a Savior.) In a church culture that favors the pastel-colored, soft-edged nursery wall version of Noah's Ark, rather than a devastating image of God's wrath, it is not difficult to see why it's easy to lose track of the earthiness of the core text. It's also easy in such a climate to lose a personal, visceral connection with the text. Enter Robert Crumb.

The book I'm reviewing, for those of you who don't know, is an illustrated version of the book of Genesis, in the fashion of a graphic novel, by a very well known underground comics artist who made his career in the 1960s and '70s. His famous characters include Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, also the "Keep on Truckin'" guy. He's one of those anti-establishment artists who has stuck around long enough to become an establishment artist through time and no effort of his own. Once his work got banned, now his work gets national awards. Some of his more well known works include themes of sex and drugs. Also his earlier work was marked by a zany sense of humor. The marketing push of this particular volume might have surprised some old fans who hadn't been following his career very closely.
Which unfortunately leads me right off the bat to one of my criticisms of the book. My two main criticisms are the introduction and the commentary which serves as the afterward. The introduction read a bit to me like Crumb taking great pains to assure his audience that this is not his "Slow Train Coming" album. He looked at the project as a straight illustration job and in that I think he mainly succeeded. He also points out that other illustrated Bible texts, largely put out by religious artists funded by religious institutions, tend to add or remove parts for clarity or doctrinal agendas by people who would otherwise claim the text to be divinely inspired. Crumb does not believe this text to be divinely inspired, yet he has not deviated from the text at all as far as he knows (Crumb also wasn't commissioned by a church. He chose the material himself.) I found Crumb's introduction a little frustrating, first of all with what I thought was a craven need to explain himself to his fans; but more to the point, the work should be able to stand if no one knew who R. Crumb was. The art speaks for itself. I found the introduction superfluous.

Since I've hit the criticism portion of my review, let's get the other one out of the way and then I can get on to the praise. The commentary in the back I found embarrassing. Crumb reveals himself to be anything but an expert on the material, he cites pop-vaguely-spiritualized books on biblical figures that would be laughed out of even the most liberal archeology departments of universities. He writes, in my assessment, like a man who was turned on to Steinem era feminism 40 years ago, has stuck to that point of view without the slightest change ever since, and may even be trying to impress a particular audience. I mean at this point in history calling God in scripture "patriarchal" is a fusty old statement borne from a gross misunderstanding of the character revealed in the text. He also does the now age old bait and switch of siting "many scholars" and stating the these stories are an amalgam of several early Sumerian texts without providing a lick of evidence. The mentions of the struggle between the matriarchal and patriarchal seem like he was referring to the different book than the one I just read.

Having said that, I don't think Crumb is seeking to offend anyone, and it's his book. He can say whatever he wants in his commentary and, as far as biblical criticism goes, it's pretty tame by today's standards. Again, even to the point where I personally found it unnecessary.

He approached the project as a serious work of art; and I think he absolutely succeeds magnificently. I think he approached the text with reverence and an attempt at accuracy and even says as much in the commentary. There are no visual jokes and nothing I found disrespectful to the narrative. I don't think the sex and violence is meant to rub believers' nose in what actually is written in their sacred text. If a believer reacts in that way, as some seem to already have, I would suggest that they may want to seek a fuller knowledge on what Genesis actually says. There is nudity, lust and sex, there is gruesome murder and war, there is death, drowning and famine. Crumb illustrates exactly what is written in the text and Adam and Eve do not magically find themselves behind bushes until they discover the necessity of fig leaves. Personally I applaud Crumb for it, not out of any love for the darker sides of life, but for his honesty in his art. I'm not sure what it says about the church that we would never allow such honesty in our own illustrations (although I get that there are usually children present in churches and that has a lot to do with it.)

Crumb's theological ignorance very rarely comes through. There are a few moments, for example when God says right after the Fall "Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he might reach out and take as well from The Tree of Life and live forever," God has an expression like it's a terrible epiphany for Him, complete with hand over mouth. As though God were surprised. But really that's one of the very few examples I can come up with.

Another thing I would point out to my fellow believers out there if any still remain skeptical, I would remind you that if we relied solely on believers for religious art, we would have little and the bulk of it of poor, toothless quality. Compare Thomas Kinkade, that horrid mass producer of mediocrities, to Michelangelo or Da Vinci. Now look up some biographical information on Michelangelo or Da Vinci. Which gives me the opportunity to once again make one of my favorite arguments that a great work of art should continue to be as great (or even greater) a work of art if you remove the artist's signature.

The book itself is a masterpiece.
He used a strange mixture of Robert Alter's Five Books of Moses Translation and the King James Version of the Bible. The former being a modern, slightly loose translation and the latter being what I imagine Crumb would see as an appeal to an authoritative text. It works and it works well for his purposes. I think Crumb does better with an external script. In his own work, his writing can be a bit awkward, in my opinion, but he shines when he has Moses or Harvey Pekar writing his script.

The art is stunning. The detail is gorgeous and the expressions are compelling, often even heartbreaking. I think Alan Moore is the only other comic medium artist that has brought tears to my eyes. Crumb even takes the time to draw a portrait of each name in the genealogical lists, making even those sections engaging.

Abraham and Isaac on Mt. Moriah, Jacob's ladder, the flood, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the destruction of Sodom especially stick out to me as staggering. This is an artist in the fullness of his craft and genius. When God tells Noah of the coming flood, when Israel comes to Joseph, the heartbreak of Hagar, the wicked men of Sodom, the dread of the baker and cup bearer in prison with Joseph and so much more are marked with such subtle and so very real emotions in the faces of the characters. Even God is made awesome even while retaining the archetypal anthropomorphism of an old man with a flowing beard.

I would recommend this book to anyone. Heartily in fact, I would urge you to have a copy in your library. As I've said, this is bound to be one of Crumb's masterpieces. It is a wonderful book. It captures the humanity and the very raw nerve emotional content of the text. It strives to be honest and the very few bits I personally felt were mis-steps still served as rich conversation starters in my house.

In his winter years, Crumb has produced a fresh and masterful piece of religious art. Crumb continues in his anti-establishment career because who else in the art establishment is making fresh and masterful religious art in 2009?

Die Meistersinger

Long ago I was given the sage advice "Never meet your heroes."

I did meet a few of my heroes and it went well. Ray Bradbury was one of the nicest and most wonderful people I've ever met in my life. But, I also knew that the few I'd met I had met on good days in controlled environments, and that just because I liked what a person was known for did not mean that I would like the person or that the person would like me (The converse also holds - just because I didn't like what a person was famous for didn't mean I might not get along splendidly with the person.) Some monsters make great art; and some saints create mediocre art. So I stopped seeking them out and I still think that that's wise. With eBay and a little bit of wisdom, I can have autographed copies of books without leaving this chair.

Once again, I had a news story for my Thursday News In Review which I thought I could write a whole blog entry on. But then it morphed inside my brain and turned into something I've wanted to write on for a while now. The story in question is the arrest of Roman Polanski who, as I'm sure you all know by now, drugged and raped a 13 year old girl about 30 years ago. He was convicted and fled the country before sentencing because he claims he was afraid the judge was going to make an example of him. He fled to Europe and spent the bulk of my lifetime living like a prince.

Look, Rosemary's Baby, and Chinatown are classics. There's no question in my mind that he has produced some fine films. The Pianist deserved its Oscars. I even kind of liked The Ninth Gate, although the book was astronomically better and a completely different galaxy of a story than the weird thing Polanski directed. But it's not about any of that. It's about raping a 13 year old girl and fleeing the country to avoid whatever the US Justice system deems an appropriate punishment. I'm sure there are other pedophiles in prison now who are capable of making great art. Some of these hypothetical pedophiles may even have had loved ones brutally murdered in their lives. None of that changes the pedophilia that they committed (which was the eventual actual charge by the way. The rape charge was dropped and he pled guilty to sex with a minor) which we as a people correctly agree is wrong. We also correctly agree as a society that fleeing justice is wrong. It doesn't matter if the now-grown girl forgives him. Doesn't matter if the mother tarted up her daughter and pushed her on him (in fact, doesn't that make it worse?)
I can't take anyone who defends Polanski seriously.

Although admittedly my artistic regard for Polanski is limited to a moderate appreciation of a handful of films which I'd gone years without thinking about even once. That's really all I have to say about him and all it's done has reignited something I've been thinking about for some time now. What this whole story has me thinking of is a book that if I turn my head slightly to the left right now I can see on my shelf taunting me. The book is titled My Life, and it is the autobiography of Richard Wagner. I've not read it yet, but I will, and probably will very soon; but I'm a little afraid to. I hold Wagner in very high artistic esteem, and it's rare that a day goes by that I don't at the very least think about The Ring Cycle, or mention Hans Sachs or Tristan or The Flying Dutchman (or, at the very least, leitmotifs) in conversation. And Parsifal I can only speak of in the hushest of tones and, were I one who wore hats, I would have to remove it whenever the opera is mentioned. I think he was one of the greatest artists in the history of Western Civilization. It would be a high watermark in my life if I ever am able to make a pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival. In spite of everything I just said, I probably wouldn't call myself a Wagnerite as I am also definitely and outspokenly a devotee of Johannes Brahms. I have no problem with loving both.

But personally, as I understand Wagner's life, he was a horrible man. He was strongly and outspokenly anti-semitic. He played with sort of proto-themes of the uber-mensch and was strongly nationalistic. Although he had some very close Jewish friends, he published many anti-semitic pamphlets and highly nationalistic pamphlets on what it means to be German. On one level it's fortunate that he kept this aspect of his worldview from being explicit in any of his operas. However, in case you didn't know, and as you can well guess from the direction of the rhetoric of his pamphlets, there is much heated debate over the responsibility of Wagner for the Nazis. I could point out that Parsifal was one of the operas banned by the Nazis. I could also point out that Wagner was not by any means anywhere near the only artist that the Nazis cannibalized. But, when it comes down to it, yes, I have to agree that the question arises as to artists' responsibility over what they incite.

To a large extent, you cannot blame the artist for the actions of the fans any more than you can blame the fans for the actions of the artist. We all have personal responsibility for our actions. Wagner was not a Nazi and it's hard to imagine if he had by some remarkable circumstance survived (he would have been 120 at Hitler's rise to power) if he ever would have been a Nazi. Still, there is no excuse for some of the atrocious things he said in his pamphlets. I tend to think of him as a heinous man who happened to produce some of the most beautiful works in the history of western civilization (a bit like how Salieri saw Mozart in Peter Schaffer's masterpiece Amadeus.)

But, then, on the other hand, the work of art lives outside of the artist in history. We should be able to fully enjoy the work without knowing a single thing about the artist (and, in some cases, we might be happier if that were the case.) If I were to despise every work of art by an artist who I found some flaw in their character, the only art I would enjoy would be by Anonymous (although art does exist which advocates horrible, foul and evil behavior, we're not talking about that right now.)

However, the individual is accountable and responsible for his behavior. If one does something evil, doing something wonderful does not nullify the evil action. One is still accountable for the evil action while the something wonderful floats away from the artist into the world to have a life of its own. All of which I suppose is a very long winded way of saying that I have no problem saying the following two statements with equal enthusiasm:

1) If you've never seen it, do go rent Chinatown. It is one of the greatest films in the history of film. It is a wonderful work of art and a masterpiece in the medium.
2) It would be entirely appropriate and just if Roman Polanski spends the rest of his life in prison.

A Shabby Little Shocker

I was going to lead with this story in tomorrow's news roundup, but decided that I could do a whole post on it. The opera world caught fire this past week when the New York Metropolitan Opera opened with Giacomo Puccini's Tosca and the director and designers were booed to scorn by the audience at the curtain call. Just the production team were booed, which is good because this would be a whole different kind of tirade if I ever caught people disrespecting conductor James Levine. By all accounts, the musicians and singers were fantastic.

Tosca is one of the more heavily rotated operas in the canon. Briefly, it's about a singer named Tosca, her lover, and a cop who tries to threaten Tosca with her lover's execution to get her to sleep with him. It's Puccini, so by the time the curtain falls all three of the leads are dead. Tosca kills the police officer; the painter lover is executed; and Tosca kills herself by throwing herself off of the ramparts of the castle where the execution took place. It's one of the greatest operas in the history of the form; and you probably know some of it whether you realize it or not. The boos came because of some of the forehead-slappingly poor directorial choices by Luc Bondy. Previously the Met had a production by Franco Zeffirelli (who non-opera folk may remember as the director of the 1968 Romeo and Juliet film, Jesus of Nazareth, and the Mel Gibson Hamlet.) They might do well to go back to that production so that future audiences can hear the music over the sound of Rudolf Bing spinning in his grave.

Bondy's production takes liberties with the story. He tried to cut out as many religious trappings as he could. Tosca is a religious woman, but not in this production. Instead of Tosca attacking Scarpia with a knife, she lays on the couch with a knife hidden and he kind of... lays on it. In the text, the highly religious Tosca places candles around Scarpia's body and a crucifix on his chest, and then flees the scene horrified by what she's done. In Bondy's production, she looks out the window and then goes and sits on another sofa, hanging out with the corpse as the scene ends (and the first round of boos started). Apparently Tosca's suicide was very awkwardly staged as well. I guess there was hesitation in Tosca's suicide as well. It seems to me you don't improve Italian opera by making the dramatic tension weaker.
NY Met director Peter Gelb said of the booers that they are "perhaps too rooted in the past."

Peter Gelb is not one of my favorite people. He famously watered down Sony's classical label when he was in charge, seeking a more mainstream audience. When he became director of the Met he said, “I think what I’m doing is exactly what the Met engaged me to do, which is build bridges to a broader public. This is not about dumbing down the Met, it’s just making it accessible." Translation: It's about dumbing down the Met.

This kind of thinking about serious music leads to things like this, which embarrass both the classical and the mainstream music world (I love Pavarotti; and I love Barry White; and I love My First, My Last, My Everything. This was a train wreck.) Frankly, I think I can speak for all people passionately devoted to classical music when I say we are so sick of this crap.
Gelb also said "But after 25 years of the old Tosca, in order for this theater to continue to stay vital, we must move forward by offering new productions that will stimulate our imagination and that will demonstrate that our art form is not locked in the past.” Locked in the past?!!? We're talking about opera here! You can't get much more archaic in your art forms! We like it that way.

Look, I'm all for fresh takes on classics if done properly. A slick, modern, Matrix style Hamlet (which I spent about 2 years as an Assistant Director, and then light operator, on) or a minimalist The Tempest, or even a gender reversed Waiting for Godot can all be fine ideas if they are done well. It adds to the timelessness of the piece and our connection to it while allowing for personal artistic style. But never at Shakespeare Orange County did we change the plot; and always we sought excellence in stage direction. At no point did we try to shake things up by saying "maybe we could downplay Falstaff's drinking" or "let's make Shylock a Frenchman in this version." This production of Tosca seems to have been by all accounts a double whammy of tampering with a classic poorly and inept stage direction.

I am a poor man and my wife has only recently come to love opera through DVDs from our library. Suppose we won a trip to New York and, as would likely be the case, one of the most exciting prospects for us would be to see an opera at the Met. We would scrimp and save for tickets; and suppose we pinched enough to afford to see Tosca. Then suppose what we ended seeing was not Tosca per se, but some pompous director's reinterpretation. Imagine the conversations that would follow of, "No, I'm telling you that scene is usually one of the more moving scenes in opera." Someone should tell Bondy (and Gelb) that "innovative" is not a synonym for "poorly executed."

Bondy is peddling elitist crap (I know! "Elitism at the opera? Now I've heard everything!") with the goal of rattling the season ticket holders, with no regard for the art, the piece, and the people who earnestly desire to experience Tosca for perhaps the first time. And he won, as the NY Times (and my blog) are talking a blue streak about it and the run has already sold out. Gelb's rhetoric leads one to expect Bizet's Carmen with Taylor Swift in the title role (complete with "Carmen, I'ma let you finish, but Aida had the greatest aria of all time!")

Although in fact next up is Mozart's Die Zauberflote staged by the awesome Julie Taymor, which if I were offered tickets in return for a finger I would seriously think "well, I don't use my pinkies that often..."

Just because we can do something does not mean that we should. If you're looking to do edgy, let's see the Met do the new Doctor Atomic opera or Howard Shore's opera based on Cronenberg's The Fly. I can't speak to the quality of either as I've never seen or heard either, but quality seems to have fled the day anyway. I don't see the Met doing Anthony Davis' Malcolm X opera. That one would raise some eyebrows. What I'm driving at is when they say they are looking to be innovative and to breathe life into the opera, they are bald-faced lying! If you want to do new, you can do new. There are starving composers walking the Earth as we speak. It's laziness.

But, in conclusion, this is a disappointing beginning for the NY Met season and a sad commentary on the state of the arts in America. Appreciate the classics and seek to find (or, better yet, create) the contemporary works that will be future classics. Cheap tricks don't fool anyone.

The Odd Volume- Volume 2

After two aborted blog attempts (one on college degrees and one on Richard Wagner) I decided to do another one of these posts on weird books in my personal library.
A note to new readers, this blog is not entirely about books (just mostly.) Also, once again, you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

On the left is a book that probably should be called an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. It's a book of information a la the Encyclopedia Britannica except that it is entirely focused on imaginary places like Oz, Neverland, Lilliput and so on. There are maps and drawings of flora. For some reason I've always loved books that break down the fourth wall of imagination and treat the fantastic as one treats the scientific. It's far from exhaustive, but it is a rip-roaring fun book to take down and spend a few hours in. The writers did a fantastic job. The entries have history, geography, economics, and other information on the imaginary place followed by the work of fiction from which the place comes.
As interesting and on a similar note, A Natural History of the Unnatural World deals with crypto-zoology which is to say the zoology of creatures which are most likely mythological. This one's design is far more compelling although slightly less information rich with photographs, drawings, biological information, testimonies, geographic information, and so on. There are entries on dragons, Basilisks, elves, trolls, kobolds, kelpies, sea serpents, mermaids, minotaurs and on and on and on. Both books play it very straight. Both are the kind of thing that I would have carried with me at all times as a child.


Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author who one day found himself living in one of his plots against his will. For those of you who don't know, he had a strange experience in the 1970s where reality went all funny on him, he saw ancient Rome superimposed on modern times, he saw visions of fire, flashes of works of modern art, and much more. One of the stranger bits was he "received" the information that his son had an uncommon life threatening hernia which, while not easy to detect, was easily solved with surgery. He took his son to the doctor to check and, indeed, he had that very condition. The vision saves his son's life. This sort of visionary oddness lasted several months and then stopped. PKD spent the rest of his life (about a decade) trying to figure out what had happened to him.
But he didn't come up with any concrete answers. He wrote three novels on the subject (which I think are his best work. They are Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.) But he also wrote thousands of pages of what he called his "Exegesis" speculating soviet (or Nixonian) mind control, theophanies, anamnesis, schizophrenia, messages from aliens, or any mixture of those. When PKD fans hear about this, they tend to say "my gosh, I wish I could read that." For a short time they could because Lawrence Sutin put together a highly abridged version in the early 1990s. It's now extremely rare. There are very few people in the world who would be interested in such a volume, but those who are are VERY interested.




Sparrow is a poet in New York. On the left is an account of his "run for president" on the Pajama Party ticket in 1992. He lost. Mainly he stood outside political events with a megaphone and read poetry.
The volume on the right is Yes, You Are A Revolutionary! It's an instruction book for revolutionaries and it is hilarious. It gives advice like "train yourself to leave a movie in the middle" or "infiltrate the Boy Scouts" or "draw with your foot" or "study the hula." It also has some striking bits like this "Begin taking long walks, through a city. Notice the CEOs and limousine drivers and toiling waitresses and laughing children. Look at the children carefully. What will they become when they are large? Will they still be laughing?"
It also has recipes for Revolutionary Fortune Cookies, The People's Polenta, and Victory Ice Cream.




This book is many lists of dead celebrities. It has how and when they died, but more importantly it has where they are buried. I used to live in Southern California and you'll notice the book has a lot of wear to it. That's because I used to organize groups to go to Hollywood on cemetery trips to visit the graves of celebrities. I cried at Truman Capote's grave by the way.
One time we went to the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery and I wanted to go into the mauseleum where Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Rudolf Valentino were buried, but it was closed. I was dejected and an older man came up and asked if we had come to see River Phoenix. I said, "No, I wanted to see Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Rudolf Valentino." The man was thunderstruck that kids our age even know who those people were and he was so impressed that he (who was an off-duty tour guide) gave us a free walking tour of the cemetery (which included Douglas Fairbanks, Mel Blanc, Tyrone Power, and Virginia Rappe who was the girl that Fatty Arbuckle killed.)
It's an old edition so I think it only goes up to about 1998, but I'm sure there are even more recent editions.




Ah, fellow hardcore Orson Welles fans know this rare little volume. Clifford Irving, fresh from hoaxing the world with a fake "autobiography" of recluse Howard Hughes, wrote this biography on Elmyr De Hory, the greatest art forger of our time. It's said that if you go to a museum of modern art there is a strong chance that a large portion of the major works you're looking at are actually by Elmyr. It's a tremendous story about art forging and the dishonesty of experts. Orson Welles made a film based on it (but also drawing Clifford Irving's own fakery and, in fact, Welles' own fakery into the story. Even to the point of suggesting that Elmyr may or may not have actually existed and the whole thing may be either entirely true or entirely false or some variation thereupon.) Along with all of that, it's a very interesting and well told story. As with all of these, it's a shame that it's not more widely available.



Well, I don't know about you, but I'm enjoying these posts and plan on doing more. It's great fun for me to do, I get to write about books which I love, and it's something for slow news/opinion days. I have a Religion edition and a Cookbook edition planned in the near future. Ta!