The big news of the day around our house is Agnes. Agnes was a stray cat who has been around our house since we moved in. The guy next door used to feed her but he's since moved away and died actually, so we've been taking care of her. We kind of thought taking her in might be in some cosmic way a sort of memorial to our old neighbor. Clearly she's been homeless for a long time (at the very least for the 3 years we've lived here) but also clearly she's fixed as she's one of the few female stray cats in the neighborhood not shooting out kittens all the time. She's not wild at all. She's very meek, gentle and sweet to the point of seeming quite fragile. Of course, having three indoor cats, we couldn't really bring another one in. Any more than three and I think it ceases to be a better life for everyone involved. I think three cats is cat capacity for our house. So, when Mao Mao died we had an opening although we weren't sure if we were going to fill it. We decided if we did get another cat, the right thing to do would be to bring in Agnes although we would need to get her all of the appropriate medicine including tapeworm pills and earmite treatments. Agnes was old when we met her, she wheezes, she has parts of her ears missing, her fur is patchy, her eyes are sunken. And she doesn't meow so much as she makes little beeping sounds. We wanted to give her a good life. So last night we finally got the last pill in her and brought her into the house. She adjusted almost immediately and seems to love it here. She seems very comfortable and at peace.
Also last night we had a massive power outage in our neighborhood. This is what I look like in a power outage. Yep, just as much of a dork as when not in a power outage.
The other recent feline addition to our lives is the decidedly outdoor cat we call Evil Tom. Evil is the father of Napoleon and Mao and thousands of other kittens in the neighborhood. We call him Evil Tom because he fights with pretty much everything that moves. Getting him fixed is our next philanthropic savings project. Lately he's finally come around to being friendly to us and we are feeding him and harboring him under our porch. The feeding came first and then he became very friendly to us, so we're under no illusions that he likes us for our winning personalities. He's very skittish, but for some reason the power outage made him sociable enough to snap a few pictures of him.
Before the power outage, here's Laurie petting Evil Tom.
Yep. That's what we have for news in our lives. That's why I don't use this blog as a journal of my personal life very often.
Purple Hairstreak News: A Purple Hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Scotland this week, hundreds of miles from its usual habitat in high in the oak branches in Wales. The extremely rare butterfly is notable because it feeds on honeydew instead of flowers. They get their name from the gorgeous purple streak in their upper wings. See for yourself. It's the big picture of a butterfly over to the left there. Ben Notley, the discoverer of the butterfly at the Visitor's Center in Killiecrankie said, "It is the first time a Purple Hairstreak has been recorded at Killiecrankie and it was the first time personally that I've been lucky enough to see one."
Stalinist News:
This week in a move called bizarre by just about every news article I read about it (although to be fair, most of journalism these days is just cutting and pasting) Stalin's grandson is suing a Russian newspaper for "defaming Joseph Stalin" by claiming that Joseph Stalin personally ordered the deaths of Soviet citizens. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, is pretty much what Stalin is famous for. Many in Russia see this as another part of the Kremlin's recent effort to Stalinize Stalin's reputation. The more unnerving part of that branch of the story is the implication that the reason the Russian government would want to do that would be to suggest that Russia was strongest under the more totalitarian rulers. Of course, in another critique of journalism, none of the articles I read would sight who the "many in Russia" might be. All of which leaves me at the end of the story more confused than I was before I heard this story.
Nobel Prize News:
The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Herta Mueller, a Romanian author whose work focuses largely on growing up in communist Romania. There are some slight grumblings on the literary community over how Euro-centric the literature Nobels have been recently (much like, oh say, the mainstream news!) This rather puts me in mind of Jean-Paul Sartre who was the first author in history to decline the Nobel Prize. He claimed that "did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution." Although he later tried to get the money anyway. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of the Nobel Prize for Literature although in this and many other cases I do find the prize bringing attention to authors I might not have otherwise heard of or ever read. In short, good for you, Herta Mueller. I'll look for your work in the library.
With Friends Like You... News:
The Cultural Minister in France, Frederic Mitterrand, is experiencing a good deal of political pressure and public outcry this week. The issue is over a passage in a book he wrote four years ago, before he became a government official, in which he talks about paying to have sex with young boys in Thailand. Being France, it didn't cause much of a stir until Mitterrand started giving impassioned speeches in support of Roman Polanski. Someone remembered the book and away we go. Now, before we go too far with this story, despite appearances, there probably isn't really a dark and vast pedophilic elite underground in Europe conspiring to keep one another free and influencing government. But on the other hand, this isn't exactly the kind of support you want if you're trying to avoid conviction for a 30 year old child sex charge.
Saturn News:
Astronomers discovered a giant ring around Saturn this week. At first glance that doesn't sound like news at all. People discover rings around Saturn every time they look at it. But this is a vast, outer ring that no one had noticed before. It's comprised of dust and ice particles and while it is very cold it shines with thermal radiation. The ring starts 3.7 million miles away from the planet and extends to 7.4 million miles from the planet. It's so big that it would take a billion Earths to fill it. Big big big. So big no one noticed it before.
Addendum: I'll leave the above as a testimony to my misunderstanding of the story, but I've since learned that the reason people didn't notice it was not that it was too big, but rather that no one was looking at thermal radiation at the particular spot. It only showed up as thermal radiation! Which makes it even cooler in my mind. What else is out there that we just haven't looked at in the right way yet?
Even More Crashing Things Into Other Things News:
If you're up on the west coast tomorrow morning at 4:30 am, that's when we're going to start bombing the moon! For those with short memories, this is an effort by NASA to learn more about the water molecules recently found on the moon. I hear all you will need is a halfway decent home telescope and you can watch the dust fly.
Celebrity Death News:
Photographer Irving Penn died this week. He was 92. Penn was a wonderful fashion photographer and while I'm glad he lived a rich full life, the world is a littler poorer in his absence. His work is stunning. As he said, "Photographing a cake can be art." He took my favorite picture of Truman Capote:
Italian News:
In a move uncharacteristically in step with European norms, the Italian government have decided that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is not immune from charges of bribery and tax fraud. Berlusconi, a long time boon to European comedians, has had a rough year with claims of inappropriate behavior with an 18 year old and his subsequent wife serving him divorce papers, his inappropriate bellowing at the London G-20 summit that lead Queen Elizabeth to comment "Why does he have to shout?", his missing a photo op with 27 NATO leaders because he was chatting on his mobile phone, his statements that people made homeless by a devastating earthquake should pretend it's "a weekend of camping", high price prostitutes claiming he'd patronized their services. One paper referred to this as Berlusconi's Annus Horribilus.
You know, I there's a lot more going on in the world this week. I could have written on Afghanistan, the deficit, and jobless rates. But I think this week I'm going to take it a little easier. All I really wanted to talk about this morning was butterflies and Saturn's new ring.
We own a lot of books. The largest section of our personal library is the religion section. It comprises two bookshelves in our front room. As with most of our library, we have books that we love and wholeheartedly embrace, some that are quite good in spite of a few points, some that we strongly disagree with and own for the sake of reference to some of the abysmal theology in their own words. And then we have some odd volumes which we own mainly out of how bizarre they are.
This first volume is Dying Testimonies by a Rev. Shaw. It's from the late 1800s and it is collected stories of people on their deathbed at the moment of their death. Some of the people see, feel, experience and communicate the divine, some are experiencing and communicating their first taste of the infernal. Regardless of what one may think of it (personally I take it as probably intended to be mostly truthful accounts, some hear-say, some highly colored by apperceptions, hardly scientific, but I don't doubt the honest intentions of the author) it is a chilling book mainly because it is accounts of people dying and some of those are far from peaceful. Here's a sample: "Near L-, lived P- K-, talented and wealthy, but a hater of God, of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the Holy Bible. He talked, lectured and published books and tracts against the Savior and the sacred scriptures... His death-bed beggared description. He clinched his teeth and blood spurted from his nostrils while he cried `Hell! Hell! Hell!!!' with a terror that no pen can describe. A neighbor declared that he heard him a quarter of a mile away. His family could not endure the agony of that death-bed scene. They fled to an adjoining wood across the road, and there remained among the trees until all became quiet at home. One by one they ventured back, to find the husband and father cold in death. He literally had been left to die alone, abandoned of God and of man."
I figured I would throw this in. You probably will either think this an odd volume or you will be entirely familiar with it. It's the Principia Discordia. It was written by two proto-hippies and, as the Discordians say, "Discordianism has been described as both an elaborate joke disguised as a religion, and a religion disguised as an elaborate joke." Although I strongly suspect that Discordians were the ones who have described it as such as I have my doubts as to how much of the rest of the world ever really thinks about them all that much. The religion itself, as much as it can be called that, is hard to explain. They don't have dogma. They claim they have catma instead. It's that sort of jokey religion thing long before the Sub-genius people were even born. It's full of clip art, strange little jokes, paradoxes, mind games and so forth. So much comes from this, like Fnord, the significance of the number 23, the Law of Fives, Pope cards, The Curse of Greyface. I think it may have something to do with enlightenment. It clearly has something to do with chaos. In my past I've known some Discordians. I've gone to some of their parties. In my experience they tend to be atheists or agnostics who have a raging sense of humor.
This is a tremendously odd book that my old friend Lob introduced me to. It's the product of one of those 19th century "automatic writers" (which is to say a form of writing where the writer goes into some trance state and channels the text from the writer might say spirits or God, the orthodox would probably say demons, the skeptic would probably say the person's sub-conscious or possibly their conscious trying to con people. Although a fairly orthodox Reformed Baptist myself, I tend to believe the latter.) It's touted as a "new Bible" and the people who follow it were (or are) called Kosmons. Yes. It's that kind of book. What I can guess from it is that they use some names familiar from Judeo-Christianity with a few mis-spellings here and there. Their deity seems to command them to be vegetarian. But what's always struck me most about the book is that it gets weirder the more you read it.
I hesitated to put this in the odd volumes (and apologize for the flash regardless.) This is a facsimile copy of the original 1611 King James Version of the Bible. The letter "s" looks like an "f" all the way through it. The font is "letters put in a printing press." And there are a few oddities in the text that you would not find if you walked into a bookstore and bought a more recent King James Version of the Bible. The textual variants are few. As you well know, we now have far more ancient and accurate manuscripts than they had in 1611. My pastor actually calls me every once in a while to ask what the passage he's teaching on looks like in this edition. While it is a supremely cool thing to own, it was also the only Bible I had unpacked when I first moved to Chico (I think it was at the top of a box) and I can tell you from that first week that it is not very user friendly for the modern Christian.
Once again, the hippie era produced a spiritual text with jokes and clip art. The Boo Hoo Bible was written by Art Kleps who was one of the footnotes of Timothy Leary's Millbrook LSD experiences. In fact, Kleps tried to found a church so that he could take psychedelics for "religious purposes" but the use of religion as thinly veiled excuse was transparent to the US Government. The book rambles on about psychedelics and freedom and the establishment. So, why haven't you heard of Kleps and the Boo Hoo Bible? Why is it a bit of a rarity even though it's born from deep in hippie culture? Well, Kleps went on to become a rabid anti-semite, a Holocaust denier and a gun nut who actually got thrown out of The Netherlands for his nasty beliefs. I haven't read it and am kind of hard pressed, now that I'm talking about it, I'm a little hard pressed as to why I actually still own it. Hmm...
So, $35 plus shipping gets you my copy of this thing. Email me.
First a few words on seeing this film in the theater. Laurie and I have seen four movies in the theater in the three years we've been together. We don't go to movie theaters, and we have what we feel are very good reasons for that. This was a special case as it's timely (in fact likely to be dated fairly quickly), plus we like to cast our economic vote for more films like this being made (and possibly less being made like the ones we saw previews for) and we had eight bucks left on two year old movie theater gift cards.
When we walked in there was the cognitive dissonance of the preview for Disney's A Christmas Carol. As you well remember, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a tract denouncing the corrupt business practices of his day. Now it's going to be Disney's seasonal millions maker. In a way, it was both fitting and abominable. Coupled with that, I was grossly insulted by every one of the previews for upcoming films. Also, one of the strangest parts, which I'd forgotten, of seeing a Michael Moore film (and this one in particular) in the theater is the experience of having people around me laughing uproariously at parts when I am earnestly weeping. Mind you, they are laughing in solidarity to the points being made, but still. In this case it was the people behind us who looked like college kids with wealthy parents. Long may they still be able to laugh about such things. I cried most of the way through the film.
I waited until the end of my last post to trot out the Roman Empire. Michael Moore started with it. As usual, I won't go into great specific detail as you should all go experience it for yourself. The film discusses a dozen or so aspects of the economic mess we're in. In fact, I would almost say in one of my few critiques of the film that he may have bitten off a way bigger topic than two hours can do justice. However, I think both Laurie and I benefited greatly from having heard this interview last week before seeing the film. I thought it laid a groundwork for those who see the film. I would encourage you to listen to the interview and then see it for yourself regardless of your preconceptions, whatever they may be.
I thought he was very honest and fair in his pinning of responsibility on both political parties and more specifically to the bankers who pull their strings. There are graphic foreclosures and accounts of deaths, lay-offs and factory closings, in sum, grotesque business practices. I thought he did a very good job and spent a very good amount of time on the "why" of it. He introduced us to some of the more lugubrious members of our government and banking systems. He explained de-regulation and how we came to such a point of unfettered grief to where, as he puts it, all of America is turning into Flint, Michigan.
I especially appreciated the portions where he appealed to religion, mainly because I found it refreshing to hear Christianity regarded in a positive light rather than the mustache twirling villains we're so often cast as in modern Hollywood. Although I did notice he seemed to talk mainly to Catholics, I have to whole-heartedly agree with their assessment of contemporary American capitalism and Christianity.
I heard a film review before going to see it where the reviewer said that a few of the scenes seemed opportunistic to him. For example, when someone is honestly crying and the camera is eating it up. I disagree. The purpose of the film is to speak on the topic, and in order to do so Moore talks to people affected by the problem. It wouldn't be the film that it is, nor would it be very honest if it didn't include the stories of those who have been hurt. I thought Moore handled those situations very tactfully with great respect for the people suffering. People get really weird about Michael Moore. I don't think he's a god among men or anything, but people seem to try to get their negativity around whatever they can possibly think of in regards to him. I don't know. I get that he is famous and wealthy and all that while he says these things, but that's just it! How many other rich and famous people are devoting their careers to these topics?!!?
Some of Moore's gimmicks, like trying to get the money back from the banks or attempting to citizen's arrest CEOs, I personally feel are some of the weaker points, a sort of gratuitous comedy, but they also illustrate a larger problem in my mind. They are a bit like The Porter Scene in Macbeth, where if you didn't have the comic relief it would be hours of nothing but grim. But they also remind me of something New York Rob used to say to me. He said he wishes there was a building somewhere with "The Establishment" in big lighted letters on top so you could, you know, go pee on that building or throw eggs at it or something. Moore can go to a building and his very presence will make people nervous. Not so with me or you. I don't know any CEOs of major banks, and if I try to call them they will not panic. They will simply disregard me.
Also, a scene where workers staged a sit-down strike for their wages at their factory which was closing made me think, "Well, that's all well and good, they got their severance pay, but where are those people going to find jobs when this is over and their $6000 has run out?" If I were making the film, rather than the revolutionary rhetoric, I would have focused a bit more on a point he makes in passing toward the beginning which is that all votes are created equal. That's part of the beauty of democracy.
As I said in a previous post, Capitalism is not the American System. Democracy is. Moore saves what was to me the big guns for the end of the film. He reminded me of something I knew, a certain great political figure in American history who proposed a second bill of rights, seeing America for the great country it is, which included jobs and health care for all. Then he died. We're still working on what he proposed about 60 years ago. I'd forgotten all about it and was glad that Moore mentioned it.
I would recommend the film to anyone. It's a well made op-ed piece on what may end up being the biggest issue of our day. How we deal with the economic mess will probably define this period of history. Although, if you've never seen a Michael Moore film before, first of all, you should see one. There's a reason why he's one of the world's most respected documentary film makers alive. But personally I would recommend Sicko before this one. I thought it was a much more concise film - no matter how glad I was to see Wallace Shawn in this one.
Many years ago, when Laurie was just a friend of mine, one evening at a study she told me a story about when she was a teenager and they unplugged a jukebox at a camp because the kids kept playing "One Tin Soldier" over and over and over. She was amazed that I had never heard One Tin Soldier. I think later that night I drove down for one of my Orange Country trips (which I used to do when I was single - leave to drive to OC at 9pm and get there just before sunrise.) Within 24 hours I was at a friends house and asking them about One Tin Soldier. It turned out everyone else on Earth had heard the song before, but I got the strange idea in my head that I should record a cover of the song, never having heard it before, of what I might suppose it might go like. I envisioned a whole album of covers of songs I'd never heard. My version was highly percussive and had a lot to do with Red Buttons making time go slow and Jonathan Winters' head rising like the sun.
I'm about to do something similar and, probably, about to finally write the post that will make everyone furious with me. Deo Volente, Laurie and I are spending the last of our movie theater gift certificates tomorrow to go see Michael Moore's new film "Capitalism: A Love Story." I thought I might say a few words here in the autumn of 2009 just before seeing the film; and then after seeing the film I can write a review and see what the two entries look like next to one another.
I've enjoyed some of Moore's films and I would direct you to my recent post of separating art from artist. I thought Sicko hit the nail right on the head; and I cried most of the way through Bowling For Columbine. And when I disagree with him, he at least gets us thinking and talking about why, which I think is always good. In the end, I like his op-ed pieces. I take them as op-ed pieces, (not as journalism) regardless of what I think of him or how much or little I agree with them. At the very least, I think he puts on a good show and sparks some nifty conversations. And sometimes he hits it hard and he hits it exactly on the head.
Now, to Capitalism as an economic system. Here's a clip of Senator Sanders responding to a question by Michael Moore:
I don't think Capitalism is necessarily a great evil in and of itself. Like Moore, I understand that it is not by necessity the American Way. Democracy is The American Way. We can have whatever economic system we choose. I have no problem with rewarding good production and hard work. In fact, I would like to see that.
It's always puzzled me how a first world country, born from The Enlightenment, can have people who die of heart attacks because they don't call the ambulance because their family could not afford the medical bills. Or how there can be people, like me, who desperately want to work, when clearly there is an abundance of work that could be done to build our nation, but are unable to find work because no one is hiring. Or that people who want to work lose their houses and cannot afford food. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a new, bigger flatscreen iTV. I'm inclined, with Senator Sanders, to agree that a lot of Europe seems to put us to shame. Not that I think Europe is some Utopia by any means. Also, upon consideration of the temperature set by television's screaming heads, I should probably add that I love my country.
It would seem to me that our country could be a hot-bed of progress, innovation, ideas, culture, and philanthropy. At the moment, I think we're slouching toward the polar opposite. There could be jobs for all! When I took a business leadership course in college (I think I was planning on using the concepts in stage management) I did a report on Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and their corporate structure, which includes taking scrupulous, almost Nordic, care of their employees, and the CEOs not making more than seven times what their lowest employees was paid (I say "was" because they eventually ended up having to sell the whole company to Hagen Das in one of the more depressing bits of business news of the last 20 years.)
I'm not here for an anti-capitalism rant. I do think capitalism can be a good incentive system. I think that people striving for better stuff is fine, so long as one's not glutting while someone else willing to work, unable to find work, is outside starving, sick without means for medical care and being foreclosed upon. And so long as the people who are doing the work that deserves the rewards are getting the rewards, but that is so very rarely the case. Unfortunately, unfettered capitalism seems to have led to a sort of Social Darwinistic economy where the "fittest" are either: 1) those born to rich parents; 2) those so brutal, amoral, and backstabbing that they politic, coerce, and destroy their way to the top or; 3) the kind of entertainer or athlete that advertisers and corporations feel okay backing because they do nothing to disrupt the culture of consumption.
I am achingly aware that money does not really exist. It is merely an agreed upon idea. However, as most of you who have reached adulthood have probably noticed, even in America you can die from a lack of agreed upon ideas.
So, as with Twitter, I don't think Capitalism is in and of itself evil, but the people who wield it often are. The way we use it often is. The top feeders in modern America seem to have come from the Charles Dickens Villain School of Business and Economics. The recent bank bailout debacle serves to illustrate again that people are not inclined to do the right thing.
Yesterday, I had a whole post on Classicism worked out in my head until I took the dogs out and a truck drove by. The truck was playing music of a man screaming as though he were about to kill people and the discordant cacophony behind his vocals were tailored to a pace to mimic a heart that is about to explode in panic. I thought about how things are getting kind of bad around here, and are in fact getting kind of bad all over the place. I don't come from a great golden age of decency. I am a child of the '80s. But I can say that things did not used to be as bad in America as they are now. People did not behave in the manner they now behave. Entropy ravages our closed system. And I started thinking about the murderous, vile, selfish hearts of humanity. But, 'twas ever thus. The murder in the hearts of those walking around, the selfishness and hatred, could be a fitting description of the days of Noah, or of the men of the city that Lot and his family fled in Genesis.
My brother brought up this morning in conversation how the church should take care of its own. I agree! Last night Laurie was asking me if I regretted that I don't have money and travel; and I said words to this effect: "Laurie, I am a man with a lot of regrets from his time in this world thus far. That is not one of them. I am very smart and could have sought after money and travel. But what is this world to me? Without Christ's abundant grace, I have nothing." And again I would point out that we can talk about economics until doomsday, but a world without Christ is going to be wicked and sinful. A world without Christ has no hope. Without Christ, all is worthless.
I would also point out that the Bible doesn't command me to endorse a particular mode of government or economic structure.
But don't let's just tear down. When the economy collapsed, I thought it seemed like a very good time to re-organize, re-think, and re-structure. The video below is an interview (it's about 15 minutes long, but way better than whatever you were going to do with those 15 minutes anyway) with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglizt about the gross mishandling of the banking crisis, how the economy really looks now, and some archaic aspects of our current economic structure (although I was laid off from a business with the 19th century mode of ownership that he was talking about. The dis-unity is a bit of a problem too, especially when you have 19th century style businesses competing with slick 21st century structured businesses and then wondering why they're having so much trouble.) To those already made politically uneasy by some of what I'm saying, I would point out that Stiglitz criticized Obama just as much as Bush. (Lately I've been using the word Carter-esque way more than I ever hoped to use it again in my life.) I thought it was a fair and thought provoking analysis of the current economic situation, which included some solutions which I don't think even went far enough and won't happen anyway. But, I thought I would pass it on.
You know, this is such a wonderful country. I love this country dearly. So much so that I think it would be an enormous tragedy to see it fall over something so stupid as the mismanagement of the economy. We wouldn't be the first to fall in such a way. The Roman Empire had a more dignified death.
There were some fairly major earthquakes in Samoa, Indonesia and Peru this week. The Indonesian earthquakes have caused over 1,100 deaths so far. When I called my parents that night they told me that there was a tsunami warning in Garden Grove, which I'm not sure communicates the weirdness to everyone. Suffice it to say it's probably the first time in the history of the world that Garden Grove has had a tsunami warning.
I remember when I was growing up in Orange County every once in a while, during slow news times, or other times when the news industry suspected people might not be afraid enough, they would run a special report about "The Big One," which was a long anticipated 8.3 earthquake. They would talk about how utter the destruction would be and how to prepare for it, which usually boiled down to them just saying "you can't." Anyway, the Samoan earthquake apparently was an 8.3. And now New Scientist brings us this story about how the series of major earthquakes elsewhere could trigger The Big One. One more reason why everyone I know should move to Chico.
Also in catastrophe news, the public option in America's health care reform is doomed doomed doomed. Predictably, the health of the poor has become partisan politics prohibitive. Still and always, everything I've said about health care reform stands. Having said that, I'm not sure how closely we're going to follow health care reform in my Thursday News In Review anymore (as thousands cheer) because it'll be hard to write about through the cloud of doom that's enveloping me and millions like me. I don't know about you, but I'm bracing for how hard this is going to suck.
Stepping Down News:
Physicist Stephen Hawking is stepping down from his post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He announced his stepping down earlier this week. The position was previously (much previously) filled by such scientific luminaries as Isaac Newton, Sir James Lighthill, and Charles Babbage. Cambridge claims it's the University's policy for holders of that position to retire at 67, which Hawking turned in January.
James Levine, the conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera and all around walking awesomeness, is stepping down from conducting after an unanticipated herniated disc surgery. Doctors say he may return as soon as December. Considering the booing of the recent opening of the NY Met's production of Tosca, it might be well timed. Very well timed. Suspiciously well timed even. Edo de Waart will replace Levine for Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier.
Publishing News:
Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" (not, as my brain keeps reading it, "Going Rouge") is a best seller and it hasn't even been released yet. The best seller status, of course, comes thanks to pre-orders on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com. Which is fine with me. The unemployed should do what they can to provide for their families and, besides, I think it's good to remind people why Obama is our president.
However, Neil Gaiman's, The Graveyard Book passed a landmark for Neil Gaiman this week. It has been a NY Times best seller for a year this week. I think it's currently #8. I am seriously considering buying a copy for myself this week in casting my small vote toward keeping it on the NY Times best sellers list and would encourage all of you to do likewise. Gaiman is a fantastic writer, such a joy to read.
Censorship News:
This week also marks Banned Books Week. This is not a celebration of the practice of banning books. No, it's actually the opposite, which is why I am calling attention to it. I am wholeheartedly against banning any book in any form. I'm also against buying some books, but mainly those are because they are crap. (I would never never suggest banning Dan Brown. I would highly recommend that no one read him. In fact, I would suggest to anyone thinking about reading Dan Brown that they instead read a classic. Perhaps a banned one.) Like Voltaire, while I may not agree with what you say, you ought to be able to say it. That's key. Working on people's taste in what they read comes second. Here's a terribly depressing list of challenged books in what is supposed to be a free country.
Ig Nobel News:
The results for this year's Ig Nobels are in. You all know, of course, that the Ig Nobels are given out at Harvard by the Annals of Improbable Research for scientific achievement in the field of things that seem like a strange thing to devote a lot of time to. They opened with a keynote by Benoit Mandelbrot who years ago discovered after much study that financial markets fluctuate wildly. In case you haven't caught it by now, yes, they are joke science awards.
The Ig Nobel in economics went to The Banks of Iceland "for experimentally demonstrating that financial market fluctuations can rapidly transform very small banks into very large banks, then rapidly reverse the process, thereby demolishing the national economy." The Public Health prize went to Elena Bodnar who this year patented a duel use brassiere that can be used as a gas mask should the need arise. The Peace Prize went to Stephan Bollinger of the forensic medicine department at the University of Bern in Switzerland who did research to find out if a full bottle of beer or an empty one is more likely to crack someone's skull. He mounted bottles and dropped 1-kilogram steel balls on them, discovering that empty bottles make better skull cracking weapons. Some of us already knew this. Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga and Victor Castaño of the National Autonomous University of Mexico won the chemistry prize for discovering that tequila can be used to make diamond films, the expensive, hard to make raw material to turn diamonds into semi-conductors. The Physics Prize went to a study on why pregnant women don't tip over. The Veterinary Medicine Prize went to a study that found that cows who are given names produce more milk than cows who are not given names. And the coveted Medicine Prize went to a man who sought to discover if cracking your knuckles really causes arthritis. He's spent the past 60 years only cracking the knuckles on one hand. He found that cracking knuckles did not give him arthritis.
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.
"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." - Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 3
When I worked in a Shakespearean theater company there was a type within the ranks of the subscription ticket holder whose path I would occasionally cross. All of the subscribers were not like this, but this type existed. Often I would talk to them, and a good deal of the poor little dears didn't have the sense to be ashamed of what I'm about to tell you. Some, in fact, were proud of this. The type was as follows: They went to Shakespearean productions to be more cultured. When I put that way it sounds fine, possibly even admirable. But, don't miss this, they felt as if becoming more cultured was something that happened to them by sitting in a room where Shakespeare was happening. It didn't matter if they paid attention or even stayed conscious. Shakespeare was cultural detention for them instead of a passion, a love of language, an unquenchable thirst for the greatest dramatic works ever penned. Unfortunately this reinforces the common (and misguided) perception that Shakespeare is too high fallutin, too esoteric for the common people to understand or enjoy. That's the real crime: people using Shakespeare to authenticate their sense of superiority eclipsing people who find Shakespeare's works so marvelous that they want to share Shakespeare with everyone.
I don't know why people fall for it. I have to assume that it is out of ignorance. I mean, we're talking about plays where men's heads turn into donkey heads; fat drunken men with adulterous intentions hide in the laundry basket. There are spells and monsters, ghosts and fairies and sometimes even bears onstage; villainous hunchbacks and virtuous heroes swordfight; pranks are played; Puritans and fops are lampooned; fortunes are gained and lost; people get murdered; people fall in and out of love; songs are sung; great wars and mighty storms happen; great men are born, made or sometimes have greatness thrust upon them; and, occasionally, there are witches and cannibalism - all to some of the most beautiful poetry and prose ever written in the English language. The appeal is anything but obscure. The appeal is universal. It is the very stuff of life.
Laurie and I were talking this morning about how the Christian church in America, in our experience, is full of non-Christians. This takes many forms that we've noticed in the many churches we've attended. There are those who are at church kind of like one would go to The Rotary Club, those who actually go there to actively sell things to people who have to listen because you're supposed to be a fellow Christian (this has happened to both Laurie and I multiple times), those who go there because it's supposed to be the religion of the Republican party, those who go because their parents went, those who go because they like to show off how they are anti-some other group of people who are not at that particular church because of their beliefs and/or lifestyle choices, those who go because the pastor is kind of a local rock star, those who are there because their boss is there, those who go because they are afraid of Hell, those who go because they want to let everyone know how superior they are (I think the Higher Life/Second Blessing/"sinlessness while we are still alive on Earth" from the Keswick crowd is one of the most evil theologies within the church today. It's tailored for people who want to look down their noses at other "lesser" Christians. What pain and meanness the Second Blessing lie has unleashed within Christianity, not to mention how those people treat unbelievers. How strange to turn Christianity, of all things, into a form of snobbery. Give me someone who admits to their glaring flaws readily any day! That's the person I can believe to tell me the truth.) or wag their fingers at others, those who go because they have a crackpot worldview and the church has to listen to them and the church is supposed to be too nice to tell them that they are barking mad, those who like to be right about everything and use correct biblical doctrine as a means by which to stroke that urge, those who go because churches give stuff out and sometimes serve meals, those who go because the rest of society has marginalized them, and on and on and on. Often one finds such churches have a low view of Scripture, salvation, God and Christ. Often one finds such churches would suggest that if you repeat a little prayer in your head and raise your hand while no one is looking, your salvation is assured no matter how much you continue to live like the Devil. As George Bernard Shaw so aptly put it "Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen's attention to a couple of hours every seventh day, and let him alone on week-days."
True salvation comes through faith alone in Christ alone. While we were dead in our sins, God removed our hearts of stone and replaced them with hearts of flesh, so that those given the gift of faith (by no work of their own) in His atonement - God's Son on the cross, enduring God's wrath for our sins, dying, and rising to life again, a living Savior, after three days in the tomb - should abide with Him forever. This new heart produces an earnest desire in the believer to repent of sin, focus on God, to draw nearer to Him and do what is pleasing to Him, to know His Word and to glorify Him in all that he does. That is the meaning of life. We are no longer citizens of Earth, but citizens of Heaven and it should burn brightly in every aspect of our existence.
In my experience, those who have true conversion (become new creatures, catch fire for the Lord, become zealously passionate about His word and glorifying Him) have one of two things happen to them. Either they are run out of the church or they are made associate pastors. Which one happens, I think, has to do with whether the church thinks they can control the person or not.
A lot has been written on Matthew 7:21-23 which is the passage that reads "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'" It can be a scary passage because it begs the question, how does one know if one is authentic? Actually, Jesus speaks to that directly before this passage "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.Thus you will recognize them by their fruits."
I think we ought to be passionately concerned about our salvation. I think that we all ought to be self-examining at all times, tossing that which has wicked motivation or is wrongheaded, seeking to draw closer to a life which bears good fruit. I think it's a good thing to have constant awareness of why we are doing what we are doing (although at times I would settle for awareness of what I am doing.) It is promised that the gate is narrow and hard. Don't do things out of a sense of social duty or fear of man. I would really rather see huge masses of rank heathens and a handful of the saved, than mega-churches jammed full of those unable to hear the gospel because no one can convince them that they aren't already Christians.
I tend to gravitate toward the honest and the admittedly flawed. I like it when people admit who they are regardless of what that may be, or, more to the point, I find that preferable to those who pretend to be something close to what I am.
My folks were in town this weekend which ought to explain my relative internet silence this weekend. On Friday Laurie and I, my brother's family, and my folks went out to dinner at Original Pete's (where I had never eaten before. I know from my delivering days that they have a very clean kitchen though. The food is excellent.) All of us in our assorted permutations of Mathers families are going through rough patches right now. Long time readers of the blog know the last time I saw my mother an emergency room doctor had just told her to say her goodbyes. She pulled through and this weekend they came up to visit. But there is a strength when we are together. We have a very strong family and a very loving family. At that dinner there was so much laughter and so much love. I've said it before, but I won the family lottery. Not only do we love each other in the kin/blood way, but we actually really like on another. We are friends as well. A long time ago when I was going through a rough period of my life (when my ex-fiance left me) I was hiking one day in the Modjeska Canyon area. I remember sitting by a creek in an obscure, esoteric portion of the canyon. It was a minor tributary, but I sat there for a long time listening to the trickle of water and watching the creek. I remember thinking while I was up there "Remember, when you get back, when you're in the midst of all your troubles in the city, remember that this is still going on up here. This still exists." I think this weekend had a little of that same feeling for me. Anyway, it was wonderful to spend time with my family and good for my soul.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal section this morning on works by authors published posthumously. There are a lot of them about to be published this autumn and the article brings into question what the authors would have thought about those works being published.
I have a few reactions to it. One is that it must be taken on a case by case basis what they would have thought. I have a hard time imagining Kurt Vonnegut being too upset about a couple of collections of unpublished short stories being published after he died. At worst, if they are horrible, it's not really going to destroy his reputation as one of the greatest authors in American history. And more likely they will probably be pretty darned good. Mark Twain, on the other hand, had scads of works and fragments unpublished at the time of his death. For a long time they were locked away and suppressed. Now most of them have been published and a good deal of Twain scholars claim that we probably didn't ever really need to have sub-par Twain. Others argue that it's a valuable look into his mind. I think it's probably safe to say that those works were one-off publications while Huckleberry Finn will be in print 500 years from now. At worst they are novelties for the completest Twain fan.
It gets a little dicier with David Foster Wallace who had two manuscripts for a novel when he hung himself. His editor has no idea which one Wallace preferred, so they're just going to run with one. Similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Original of Laura was left in manuscript form to his family when he died with the strict (and strange) instruction from the author to burn it after his death. By no means did he want it to ever be published. Guess what's being published this fall? Not to be too harsh to Nabokov, but, in my opinion, you lose your vote by dying. History will cull the material. The crap will fade into obscurity while the gold will remain. One of the more exciting ones for me is Carl Jung's, The Red Book, to be published next month. It is his journal of his waking hallucinations from a part of his life when he was having hallucinations. It's been in a safe deposit box for a century and his family has greeted any suggestion of publication with downright hostility. Until now. By a lot of accounts I've been reading, it looks like it very well may end up being an instant classic and a key work in the field of psychology, as well as a smashing good read. I would be planning to camp out in front of Barnes and Noble were it not $105. Thank you very much, Norton, but I've been waiting 100 years, I think I can wait a few more for the Penguin Classics edition.
Currently, I'm reading a collection of interviews of Truman Capote. When Capote died he had published in magazines three parts of a supposed larger work called Answered Prayers. After he died the manuscript still hasn't shown up aside from those fragments to this day. There are various stories from the end of his life. One is that he left it in a cab. One is that a lover of his stole the manuscript. One is that he threw it in the fire, as we know for sure he did with another of his mid-period complete manuscripts. One is that he never finished it beyond the three fragments, and, indeed, some of his statements back this up, while some statements of his claim that it was completed. Added to the mix is that the man spent the last 15 years of his life drunk about 23 hours a day, so his testimony is suspect.
The fragments of Answered Prayers have been published anyway (for quite some time now) and they are amazing. It is like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. It is a classic in itself; but one aches to know that once there was probably more to it. There is still hope though. Lost literary manuscripts are sometimes found and sometimes wonderful. Sometimes they are awful. But, again, I think there's nothing wrong with publishing them. Time and the people will decide if they endure. Besides all that, indulge the curious, a wonderful group whose ranks I am proud to be a part of.
Garry Kasparov and Anatoli Karpov are having a rematch. You all know of their famous face off from 25 years ago and their few rematches in the time since. They are playing 12 blitz games of about an hour a piece to avoid a 5 months long game. As of my writing this, Kasparov is owning Karpov without mercy.
Also in chess news, I am now on Chess. com with the username Fafner. I welcome all challengers.
More Crashing Things Into Other Things News:
The probes have confirmed it. Water has been discovered on the moon. Or, more specifically, a thin layer of hydroxl molecules (no, it's not what the cookies are made from) on the surface, but water none the less. It's not going to be a viable solution to the ground water problem on Earth as one football field worth of surface on the moon would yield less than a quart of water. The more interesting part is that it isn't supposed to be there. Scientists are as of yet uncertain why there is water on the moon.
Unemployed People Rule! News:
An unemployed man in England was walking around with a metal detector in a field in Staffordshire and found what he rightly called "what metal detectorists dream of." He stumbled upon the largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found (nearly 1,400 items.) It's believed to have been stashed around the 7th Century. Of course, the hoard has been claimed by The Crown. But how cool is it for an unemployed guy with a metal detector going out one morning and changing history, becoming an important figure himself in archaeological history. It should give each of us hope for each new day. We have no idea how important today might be.
Vaccine News:
Another piece of very good and potentially history making news is the promising HIV vaccine news released today, greatly upstaging the UN speeches (and thank God for that pleasant side effect as well!) A group of scientists in Thailand have tested an HIV vaccine which appears to reduce the spread of the virus by 1/3rd. Which may not sound all the great at first, but do bear in mind that this is the first vaccine of any efficacy against the virus ever.
UN Weirdness News:
World leaders are gathering for a UN conference in New York and, as usual, many of the world leaders are barking mad. Obama opened with a re-commitment of the US to the UN (after, you know, 8 years of the US flipping the UN the proverbial bird) and a call for nuclear disarmament already. Then there were speeches by other world leaders, many of them madder than an old hooty owl.
Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, who rose to power through a coup in 1994, said that he will have interfering human rights workers killed. "I will kill anyone who wants to destabilize this country," he said. "If you think that you can collaborate with so-called human rights defenders, and get away with it, you must be living in a dream world. I will kill you, and nothing will come out of it."
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, straight from a recent monstrous anti-Semitic Holocaust-denying rant, gave a speech denouncing the "Age of Empires" which was a fairly thinly veiled saber rattle over larger nations' actions to prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devoted most of his speech to rebutting Ahmadinejad's speech and, indeed, his very presence. He called Ahmandinejad's speech a mockery of the United Nations, and said people who listened to the Iranian leader gave " "legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of 6 million Jews, while promising to wipe out the state of Israel, the state of the Jews."
"Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come and to those who left in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you brought honor to your countries.
"But to those who gave this Holocaust denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere, have you no shame? Have you no decency?"
And then there was Libya's leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi (or Gaddafi. I don't know.) whose rambling 90 minute speech included: tearing up the UN charter, claiming that swine 'flu is man-made, losing his place on his tiny sheets of handwritten note cards surprisingly often, talking about his jet lag and speculating on the killer of JFK. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown noticeably avoided Qaddafi. As you well remember, Scotland's release of the Lockerbie bomber... didn't go so well. Brown, however, got up after Qaddafi and changed his speech off the cuff to reaffirm and defend the UN charter. Points to Gordon Brown, for a change. All of which could be viewed as a really depressing mess, dashing hope for unity and world peace. Which leads me to end on:
Fashion Week News:
Fashion Week happened this past week. I've been following it closely on the news, Youtube and Twitter. Fashion Week gives the major houses of fashion the opportunity to show new collections and trends with lavish runway shows. New York, London, Milan, and Paris (in chronological order of their shows) are all the hubs of some of the major fashion weeks although they take place worldwide (Chico doesn't have one yet though.) So, you're probably asking yourself why I, a man who just went outdoors in a Grateful Dead t-shirt and basketball shorts, am so interested in Fashion Week. I suppose there is an element of being fascinated by something I am so removed from, although at one time in my life I was very fashion forward to the point of extreme eccentricity.
But really, it's because, make no mistake, the fashion industry is one of the most innovative and exciting art forms of our time. From the top there are innovators like Betsey Johnson, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Tam, Jean Charles dr Castelbajac who bring freshness, whimsy and joy to their work. Karl Lagerfeld has become sort of an unlikely hero around our house with his stark, stunning style and his tendency to bring technological advances to his work. Actually, it may have more to do with his sense of humor, charm and high quotability, but whatever. The quiet elegance of Vera Wang. There are fresher faces like Alexander Wang, Prabal Gurung, and probably a few hundred others I've never heard of. And these are the heavy hitters. These are the top designers. These are the old guard of haute couture at this point. I've seen things in sketchbooks by college students who haven't broken that glass ceiling yet that would turn your hair whiter than Lagerfeld's (I would also point out that that is how Gaultier got his start, with no formal training, just an awesome sketchbook passing before the right eyes.) It is one of the most exciting art worlds I know of, and one of the industries that happily marries champagne and fun with hard business.
Having said that, times being what they are, sometimes things like Fashion Week look a bit Masque of the Red Death to some. The fine arts are the first to suffer in times of economic free fall. If I were to report "lots of biker shorts, peach and purple lipstick (also some clean, no makeup looks), and goddess hair to come this spring" while struggling to keep my house and daily looking and failing to find work for the past 5 months, you might see the cognitive dissonance. And by "you" I guess I mean me in my darker moments. In those moments I need to remember to lighten up. The sun still rises, I still have life and a family that loves me. Even if I lose everything, what does it matter if I maintain my soul. So often I have argued that art is probably even more essential for the poor. Otherwise the world is entirely ugly. That's the thing about fashion week. It is entirely a luxury and therefore necessary. As Camus wrote "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. " Or, as Karl says below, "beyond practical."
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.
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!
