Me and Yobo

2011-12-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #22

Year-end Roundup, Part I

I’ve neglected this blog for most of this year, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t collecting notable examples of everyday English usage. I was, and it’s time to clear out the cache in time for the end of the year.

First up is an interesting smartphone app, Everyday. You take a photo of your face once a day or so, and the app turns them into a movie. Hew to the schedule long enough and you can bring an entirely new dimension to your masochism. I think the name is a sort of joke, but I’m not sure.

Reuters covers so many fascinating subjects that their copy editors sometimes find themselves challenged, or so I imagine. Take this story about beach polo in Miami by Simon Evans. I called it “Keeping the P in WASP” because down in the fifth paragraph, Evans describes the typical polo tournament as having “a gentile tone.” Mr. Evans wins the 2011 Close But No Cigar Award for that interesting use of the word. Follow the link to read my snarky comment and learn more about the gentile tone of polo in America.

The New York Public Library’s Library Lions gala is noted as one of the high points of the season. For that reason, as well as the association of the library with good writing, you might think that someone would have given the announcement more than a cursory read, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Nor did the writer notice the red line under “playwrite.”

This is an oldie but goodie, and since it involves John Boehner it deserves the widest possible exposure. I think this goes back to 2009.

International Business Times may still be looking for copy editors, both fast and knowledgeable. Or maybe just fast. I’m beginning to think that people don’t know what it means when a red line appears under a word they’ve just typed.

Nokia is a Finnish company, but surely its ad agency has some native English speakers on staff. On second thought, maybe that was the problem.

I'm still trying to figure out what was in the writer’s mind when he or she wrote this. What rule decrees that “being ordered around by crew members” is incorrect?

I hope you enjoyed these examples of mangled English and come back next week for more from the archives.

2011-12-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #21

I Can Has Smartphones?

This deck on the home page of the Wall Street Journal made me LOL this morning. Maybe I should cut the editor some slack — it’s hard to remember whether the subject of the sentence was singular or plural at 11 p.m. — but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t preserve it forever here.

2011-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #20

Rather than pin the blame on one of the reporters, let’s award this one (second paragraph, second line) to the Reuters copyeditor. Way to go, CE!

2010-04-11T19:26:00.001-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #19

Don’t blame the writer.

Headlines are seldom dreamed up by the reporter, so I won’t even mention the writer’s name on this piece from the Associated Press that was featured on Yahoo! tonight. For an explanation of the egregious mistake (because it’s in a headline and may be the only part of the story millions of people see), see Everyday I Have the Blues #17.

2010-04-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #18

We have another copy editor free zone: AOL’s DailyFinance. In evidence, I submit the lede paragraph from Willow Duttge’s story today about the Kia:

Hamsters That Sell: Kia’s Soul Commercial Wins Auto Ad of the Year

By WILLOW DUTTGE Posted 3:00 PM 04/01/10 Media

Evidently, hamsters are good for sales, or at least for getting viewers to remember your product. The Kia Motors (KIMTF) ad for it's Soul wagon created by ad agency David&Goliath, features dozens of them. The streets of a generic city are littered with hamsters that are stuck spinning on their creaky hamster wheels while hip hamsters zoom past in their bright red Soul. The ad was so effective in grabbing viewer's attentions that it was awarded Automotive Ad of the Year from the Nielsen Automotive Advertising Awards on Wednesday.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/9hOvbi

Willow is a seasoned journalist and a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (you can find out all about her here), but since she can’t rely on copy editor Matthew Schwartz or any of the other veterans listed with him on the DailyFinance site to correct her writing, she needs to learn the difference between “its” and “it’s” (one is a possessive—do you know which one it is?). She also should spend some time studying the concept of agreement: hip hamsters zoom past in their bright red Soul. Just the one? Without seeing the ad, I would guess that we see more than one Soul, no matter how many hamsters are in it. [NOTE: Skip the study. My assumption was wrong. There is only one hip hamster group (a family?) in one car in the ad. Still, it would have been clearer to say “while three hip hamsters zoom past in a bright red Soul.”]

Also, “grabbing viewer’s attentions” is completely confused. If there is more than one viewer, it’s “viewers’ ” but the convention is to refer to the viewer, which may be what she was thinking of at first but when she tried to bring in multiple viewers she couldn’t figure out how to construct the possessive, and then the whole thing just broke down.

And one last thing in this paragraph. The ad was awarded Automotive Ad of the Year at the Nielsen Automotive Advertising Awards, not from. Never from. Possibly by, but not from.

In the next paragraph we find “startting” for “starring.” It’s hard to understand how such a glaring mistake could have gotten past even a quick read through, but that’s a simple spelling goof. As I’ve said before, Spellcheck is your friend. There’s more, but I’ve had enough.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I applied for a job with AOL last year but was not hired. They thought they could get along without me and they may be right, though this story certainly indicates otherwise. I am not bitter. I am simply a disinterested copy editor, offering guidance to the many writers who struggle to write coherently, out there in the vast reaches of the Internet.

UPDATE: As of May 17th, all of the egregious errors cited above have been corrected, which proves that someone is reading this blog. No need to thank me, guys, it’s all in a day’s work. But DailyFinance could still use a copy editor. Reading the rest of the story, I see that in the next-to-last paragraph the second sentence is inexplicably uncapitalized:

But how did the commercial do in the category that really counts: selling cars? for 2009, Kia's sales were close to 10% higher, a bump the company partly attributed to sales of the Soul.

Since journalists don’t get to claim a dispensation under the poetic license, the quote above consists of two sentences, the second starting after the question mark and therefore requiring a capital F. So go fix it. We’ll discuss whether audiences can be “impacted” (fourth paragraph) another time.

2010-03-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

A first response to Jeff Jarvis’ column in The Guardian

Jeff Jarvis got all up in Rupert Murdoch’s face over Murdoch’s plan to start charging for access to The Times (London). The column ran in The Guardian, which a commenter pointed out is losing millions of pounds each month. It is well worth reading, and before more time passes I want to post some of my thoughts on what Jarvis said about the future of newspapers, free versus paid content on the Internet, and low-cost news businesses.

Why so emotional, Jeff? Rupert Murdoch instituting a paywall isn’t intended as a personal affront to you. It’s just business.
If something can’t go on the way it has, it won’t. There is no reason why there won’t be a second bursting of an Internet bubble, though this won’t return the genie to the bottle or restore newspapers and magazines to financial health. But it’s unreasonable to expect publishers (or anyone) to go on losing money year after year if profitability isn’t imminent.
Real journalism (sourced, fact checked) isn’t for amateurs. That doesn’t mean they can’t do it but that doing it consistently and well, and maintaining a site of some kind, is not going to be common. (See Dr. Johnson quote in the right column.) Some people keep on with their hobby, a very few make money at it, many give it up. Opinion is easy; news stories take time.
If journalism can’t pay more than twice the minimum wage, why should anyone with intelligence and ability go into the field?
What’s my personal bias in this? I don’t want to read a full newspaper or magazine on a computer monitor, e-book reader, or iPad. I don’t want to spend that much time tethered to the screen when I’m not at work. I would be willing to pay for an online subscription to The New York Times, but if I could afford it I’d prefer to buy it each day and read it on my way to and from work. I won’t subscribe to all the papers whose Web sites I look at now—very occasionally, to be sure. I almost never watch network TV news (PBS News Hour aside, usually on Friday for Shields and Brooks, and Washington Week—maybe I should have majored in poli sci) so I’m definitely in a minority here.

2010-03-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #17

Before too much more time passes I would like to welcome Hilton Als and The New Yorker copyediting team to the Hall of Embarrassing Usage with this example from the February 15/22, 2010, issue.

When the camera hones in on Linney’s heart-shaped face...

I confess that I had to look up ‟home in on” and ‟hone” in the dictionary before I could be sure that I wasn’t the one who was confused. After all, I’m just a freelance copy editor. The New Yorker is — or used to be — one of the best edited magazines in the country. As this example shows, ‟used to be” is more like it.

2010-03-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation, part II

Here is another page of my notes on the program Horton Foote and David Mamet gave at the 92nd Street Y in 1986, the first part of which is here. I will post additional material if I find more pages.

Mamet: [In Hollywood] if someone gets shot in Act III, they don’t see why they can’t get shot in Acts I and II also.

Mamet: More and more, the kind of movie I like is a silent movie.

Mamet: Wait a second—you’re writing about human beings and I’m writing about Chicago?
Foote: I mean, human beings in Chicago.

Mamet: ...wishing they hadn’t sent the limo because you know you’re going to pay for it at the story conference.

Mamet: They always invite me to come on the set... they never mean it. Sure, I’d love to stand on the corner for three hours feeling like a damn fool while they massacre my screenplay.

Mamet: It’s like the mother of Moses—you just watch your baby go [when you sell the copyright].

Mamet: All you can put on the screen is the narrative line or what Aristotle called the ‟structure of the incidents.”

Foote: Couldn’t your work [About Last Night, based on Sexual Perversity in Chicago] have been done correctly?
Mamet: Yes, but it was done by venal and unpleasant people.

Foote: I wanted to be an actor in the worst way.
Mamet: I did too. I was an actor in the worst way.

2010-02-27T20:11:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #16

VentureBeat is a Copyeditor-Free Zone.

Keeping the experience inside the social network makes the user inclined to stay their longer or even share it with friends.

Kim-Mai Cutler, author of the above blunder, must belong to the generation that doesn’t see any difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” The sentence quoted above comes from ‟Marketers: ‘Twitter Is Your Small Forward, Facebook Is the Point Guard,’ ” a story carried by The New York Times’ Technology section,which isn’t responsible for the error. They have enough of their own to worry about (note correct use of “their”).

2010-02-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #15

Blues on the Subway

The New York Daily News is welcomed to the blog with this story by Pete Donohoe, a staff writer, about a 3-D presentation available to a relative handful of subway riders: Ageing subway goes 3-D. Go down to the seventh paragraph and you will find this quote from a passerby:

Still, as Fleurante pointed out, “You don’t see stuff like this everyday in the subway. Only in New York, right?”

Wrong, Pete! You don’t see stuff like that every day.

2009-12-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #14
What is AP style on “everyday”? Here's a paragraph from a story on PIMCO᾿s CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, by Bernard Condon, an AP business writer, that ran on December 27th :

El-Erian says he learned to be open to many different views on the world (and markets) from his father, an Egyptian diplomat who insisted on reading several newspapers everyday, both on the right and the left. El-Erian had hoped to become a college professor. But when his father died, he took a job at the International Monetary Fund to support the family. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming deputy director.

Read the whole article here.

2009-12-17T18:23:00.000-08:00

Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation

When I moved to New York in 1980 I went a little bit wild. Yes, I did, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. After years of relative deprivation in Denver, I subscribed to concert series like they were going out of style, joined Manhattan Theater Club and the Public Theatre, and even became a member of the 92nd Street’s Poetry Center. Those were the days, my friend! I heard Eudora Welty, Eugene Ionesco, Bill Murray perform in a Yeats play, Robert Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and so on.

And there, on October 6, 1986, introduced by Lindsay Crouse, Horton Foote met David Mamet for a conversation on writing for the theater and the movies. I took notes, either to share with a friend who couldn’t be there or for my own amusement. When Horton Foote died earlier this year, I looked for the notes but couldn’t find them. It would have made a nice commemorative post, I thought. Since then, one page of the notes turned up and even though there’s more Mamet that Foote in my notes, I’m going to share them in Foote’s memory.

Mamet: Their idea of the craft of screenwriting jingles when you put it in your pocket.

Foote: Nobody is writing plays, stories, or poems much — they’re all writing screenplays. I quickly try to discourage them from that.

Foote: I was an actor and I started from the most terrible reason: I wrote myself a part.

Mamet: Why should one go back to that other hell-on-earth unless one’s wife needs a new kitchen?

Mamet: Tolstoy, I kind of think, was a Russian Dreiser.

Mamet: I just kind of write down what people say to each other. That’s where I think the theater differs from the movies.

Mamet: Dodsworth was one of the greatest American movies ever made.

Mamet: Sandy Meisner told me I’d starve in the gutter if I became an actor. And well I would have, if any gutter would have had me.

2009-08-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Star-Pupil Syndrome

One of the things I’ve done this summer is catch up on my reading, specifically the books that have been sitting around, waiting for time to read them. Some have been in boxes, packed away more years ago than I care to say. A few were sitting on the bookshelf and now that I have to make room I have finally taken them down and worked my way through them. I finished The Art Lover by Carole Masi, which was quite a slog, and Larry McMurtry’s Film-Flam: Essays on Hollywood, which was also a slog, to my surprise. There was entirely too much of McMurtry decrying the state of Hollywood and drawing conclusions on the state of America’s youth from the behavior of characters in movies. There wasn’t a whole lot of oomph in the writing, as if he decided too late that he wasn’t all that interested in writing the columns for American Film but a promise is a promise. I realized, when I was almost done with it, that it would have gone down more easily if I’d read it with a Texas accent.

Still, I’m a persistent cuss and I finished it, and so I came to the paragraphs I’ve excerpted here. There was a shock of recognition as I read about the Star-Pupil Syndrome and saw myself in it. I wanted to defend myself to McMurtry, even as I saw that he was absolutely right. I wanted to add that rather than conferring respectability, in some circles **cough** Parterre Box **cough** status depends on having seen, heard, and read everything. More and more I realize that is impossible, an insight that now seems obvious but that I appear to have ignored for most of my life, as I made lists of records to buy and books to read. And so for your delectation and edification, here’s Larry McMurtry.

My problem with great founts, apparently, is that the water which flows from them is sometimes so satisfying that having drunk deeply once, I feel no urge to drink again. I knew fourteen years ago, walking out of The Naked Night, that it would be a long time before I really needed to see another Ingmar Bergman film. I was simply filled by that film, where its author is concerned. I went on and checked out Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal and several others, and I admired a few lyric moments and few great austere images, but I had stopped being hungry for Bergman and they meant little to me. I felt the same way about Truffaut, after seeing Jules et Jim.

This is not, I should say, an attempt to propose a one-man, one-masterpiece theory. Artists are welcome to as many masterpieces as they can pull off, and a great artist might manage to pull off several. My point is that one’s need for masterpieces is not simple or uniform—one is not obliged to confront them every time one has the opportunity. For most of us, the opportunity comes too often; so much magisterial art is not easy to incorporate into one’s life.

The belief that one is obliged to read all the books of every author, hear all the music of every great composer, and see all the films of every great director is surely a kind of neurosis, and a neurosis whose origin can usually be traced to one’s university career. A compulsion toward over-informedness is most apt to occur in individuals who have been arrested at a graduate school level of development; it is an intellectual infirmity, rather than a sign of health, and is so common now that it perhaps deserves to be elevated to the status of a syndrome: the Star-Pupil Syndrome. If the desire to shine as a pupil is sustained too long it can cause even the most committed worker to work badly.

[I omit a digression on Joyce Carol Oates. Addison]

The weight of the academic experience is such, for most of us, that it sometimes takes about ten years to realize that we have, after all, graduated. There comes a time when one no longer has teachers to please; thus it is not really necessary to read everything, see everything, and hear everything in order to remain respectable. One eventually begins to notice that the cellars of all the arts are filled with the over-informed, and finally one is forced to admit that there is just too much art—far more, at least, than I can use, either as a writer or as a person. With that recognition the nature of the search changes, and instead of trying, perhaps unconsciously, to please one’s teachers one begins to seek out sources of response for oneself—people and books and films that one can hearken to, and perhaps be heartened by.

One of the reasons, I imagine, why I continue to go to silly films rather than serious films is that the vast majority of serious films, like the vast majority of serious books, are mediocre, and nothing can be more disheartening than mediocre, realistic art.

Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival (originally published in New York magazine)
from Film-Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1986) by Larry McMurtry.

2008-12-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #13

CompuServe remains a source of surprising copy. I call this one “It’s A Hell of a Wine.”

Zin vs. Primitivo

What happens when American Zinfidels

go head-to-head with Italian Primitivos?

2008-12-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #12

Sara Elder had a good story in The Times last month called “Learning How to Walk (Chewing Gum Not Included),” about retraining adults to walk in a non-stressful way. It was quite interesting but I’d say it illustrates the danger of cutting and pasting from your notes. I scanned the relevant part of the article and tried to highlight the passages that escaped the copy editor’s eye, but if the highlighting is hard to read here they are:

“Each part of the body has it’s own job, and everything is connected.”

“You can’t make your bones go in different direction than than they want to go in,” he said.

said Ms Goldman, the editor of a marketing trade magazine.

And darned if they aren’t all in the version of the story posted on the Web.

NOTE: I checked the story on August 27, 2009, and “than than” had been corrected in the online version. The other mistakes were still there.

2008-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #11

AOL’s CompuServe features several stories on its home page each day. Here’s the headline and teaser for one from Thursday, October 2:

The Secret of How to Barter
Why pay $100 for something if you can get it for $75? Learn how to barter in 4 steps.

Why indeed? And why barter when you can bargain?

2008-09-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #10
Monday, September 29, must have been an extraordinary day at The Times, what with the bailout package collapsing and stock markets swooning. Just look at the lead story on the first page of Tuesday’s Business Day, “The Banking Crisis Trickles Up,” and let your eye travel down until it stops just above the fold. There you will see HEAD W. SANDWICHKICKER TAG, underneath which are two lines of what we call in the business Greeked type. Oops. Of all the things they hate in the newsroom, a big goof in a headline or caption is right up there at the top of the list. Maybe it was corrected in a later edition. I hope so.

But that’s not what gave me the blues. It was a story in SportsTuesday about Charles “Chongo” Tucker, a rock climber who lived in Yosemite Park: “His Roof Is the Sky” by Michael Brick. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I rarely read a sports story. It’s not a very Addison thing to do. This story piqued my interest, though, and I read it from beginning to end, stopping only to puzzle over two sentences.

The first was this one, on the first page: “Rumors of his whereabouts began to trade around the big rocks and rope-walking fixtures of the Western states.” Huh? Rumors traded? “Hold on a doggone minute, Mr. Brick,” I said to myself. “Rumors are not independent actors, no matter how much you may want them to be, and they’re not traveling around the West on their own.” The sentence reads as if he wanted to construct it without any people, who would be the ones trading rumors as they climbed the rocks. Why he’d want to do that I haven’t a clue but it didn’t work for me.

On the next page, Mr. Brick tries to strike another literary note in describing Chongo: “Leathery skin, knowing eyes and a dilettante’s smile gave him the cabalistic twinkle of a movie pirate.” Leaving aside the dilettante’s smile, which I still have trouble imagining, I was baffled by the cabalistic twinkle. If the second meaning of “cabala,” according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is “a traditional, esoteric, occult, or secret matter,” then is a cabalistic twinkle “a way of looking at someone that implies possession of esoteric or occult knowledge,” a la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean? It could be but just what was twinkling? His whole face? Just his eyes? If they’re already knowing how are they radiating cabalistic knowledge at the same time?

It’s a pity no one had the time to wrestle his meaning out of Mr. Brick when the story was being edited. Except for those two clunkers it’s a good story.

2008-09-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #9

Last week, The Times published an obituary of Norman Whitfield, the Motown Records songwriter and producer. As a dedicated follower of obits and a fan of Motown’s golden era, I read it with great interest until the last sentence in this paragraph stopped me cold.

For all his renown as a composer, Mr. Whitfield was even more prominent as a producer and arranger. He was known especially for his work with the Temptations; he produced many of their recordings for Motown, including the album “Cloud Nine,” whose title track earned the group a Grammy in 1969. He also helped usher in the era of psychedelic soul, producing the work of artists like Edwin Starr and the Undisputed Truth.

Look at the name of the second artist. If the group’s name is Undisputed Truth, then that is what it should be called. If the group called itself The Undisputed Truth, then “the” should be capitalized, the same way The New York Times styles its own name. Sheesh.

NOTE: And the same thing goes for The Temptations.

2008-09-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #8

David Pogue had me awfully confused today. In his State of the Art column, “Nontechies, This One's For You,” he threw what looks like a comma splice into his review of the Peek.

The power cord ends in a micro U.S.B. connector, alas, you can’t recharge the Peek from a computer, as you can with a BlackBerry or an iPod.

I had to read that pesky sentence two or three times and I still don’t know why he didn’t either put a semicolon after “connector” or just split the darn thing into two sentences. If anyone can explain what he was doing there I’d love to hear it.
“Nontechies, This One's For You,” by David Pogue. Page C1, The New York Times, September 11, 2008.

NOTE: Read the comment for David Pogue’s response.

2008-08-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #7

That little gem is from the NewEgg.com e-mail newsletter “Back to School All-Category Savings Spectacular! Up to 60% Off!” from August 19.

2008-08-21T13:36:00.001-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #6

Sometimes Spellcheck is your friend.

Add creative inspiration and a love for trends and brand indentity, and you’re on your way to forging breakthrough ads.

“Copywriting: Mastering Ad Writing. Break into advertising,” e-mail from MediaBistro.com

This was the pullquote they used:

Before taking this course I knew nothing about copywriting now I know how to take an idea and turn it into a great ad.
--Latrice Harris

2008-08-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #5

Typos don’t really count as wince-inducing but this one is too amusing not to pass along.

It is also the most ambitious classical music offering to date at Le Poisson Rouge, a new Greenwich Village club started by a pair of still-practicing classical sting players intent on presenting music of every description.

Can’t you just see Robert Redford on violin and Paul Newman on viola, playing the Maple Leaf Rag?

The Listings: Classical: Opera: “The Coronation of Poppea,” by Allan Kozin. The New York Times, p. E21, Friday, August 15, 2008.

2008-08-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #4

When I read today’s sentence my first reaction was “Didn’t anyone read this?” And it’s possible that there wasn’t time to read the story, just run it through the grammar and spelling checker. Spellcheck is a great thing, but it won’t save you if you don’t know the difference between “there” and “their,” “your” and “you’re,” or “a device that fits inside or around a garment for hanging from a hook or rod” and “a covered and usually enclosed area for housing and repairing aircraft.”

A vibrant 55-year-old, Ms. Olsen is coming to terms with the unceremonious end of her fashion career — as the windows of the last remaining stores were papered over last month and the stock sold at discounts of 70 percent, including the hangars — at the same time she is starting over as an artist and entrepreneur.

“Her Forced Retirement” by Eric Wilson. The New York Times, G1, August 14, 2008

2008-08-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #3

I tell people not to use “comprise” unless they have the proper training and permit, but do they listen to me? No, they don’t. They just go right on and embarrass themselves in print anyway. This is from sign-on instructions I received the other day from the human resources department of one of the biggest banks in the world.

Step 1 Begin the Sign-on Process.
* Enter your standard ID on the single sign-on screen.
* Enter your default password, which is comprised of:
* The first three characters of your Standard ID
* The last four digits of your Social Security number or national ID number.
et cetera

2008-08-10T16:35:00.001-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #2a and 2b

I know, I know, it’s not really fair to spotlight goofs in The New York Times. They work under a daily deadline and there aren’t enough copy editors to give the copy a good going over. However, my criterion is the wince factor and these two examples supplied a good wince apiece.

Mr. Medoff said he hoped that people would read the comic and agree. “There’s a certain amount of ongoing pressure, but it’s been so far not efficient to make the authorities bow.”

“Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust Artist” by George Gene Gustines, p. B7, Saturday, August 9, 2008

Did Mr. Gustines transcribe the interview poorly, did he misread his notes, or can we blame the editor for transforming “sufficient” into “efficient”? I can’t say but the quote doesn't make sense as it was printed.

(Mr. Kraus said he was germophobe when it came to the subway.)

Jamie Bishop/Christian Kraus wedding announcement, Sunday Styles p. 16, Sunday, August 10, 2008

Just what did Mr. Kraus say? That he was a germophobe or that he was germophobic? Maybe the editor couldn’t make up her mind, or maybe she doesn’t know the difference.

2008-08-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Everyday I Have the Blues #1

This is the first in an occasional, though possibly daily, series of posts featuring English usage that makes me wince. Spotlighting these won’t make the world a better place, I know, but they deserve to be shared.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Membership News, the lead sentence in a story about the horticulturalist at The Cloisters:

Even in a city of more than 8 million residents, Deirdre Larkin easily has one of the most unique jobs.

2007-10-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

Another Blogpost for Burma

2007-07-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time III
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes) (comp. 1893)

David Ocker, a college classmate and fellow ex-member of the Carleton Orchestra, wrote in his blog Mixed Meters a while ago that when someone asked him why he lost interest in Mahler, he said “instantly, without thinking and completely accurately, ‘I grew up.’” I’m not sure what he meant and I’m curious to find out, because I still find Mahler’s music, especially his songs, as enjoyable as when I first heard it more than 40 years ago.

One of my favorites among Mahler’s works is the song Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes. In his notes to the Virgin Classics recording of Songs from The Youth’s Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Terry Barfoot quotes Mahler as saying, “Not one of the fish is the wiser for the sermon, even though the saint has performed for them! But only a few people will understand my satire on mankind.” I have to wonder if an urban audience, especially a Viennese audience which was likely as sophisticated as any in the world, would not have gotten the message of the song.

Still, though the message is obvious, it is no less true today. And it isn’t unique to the song. Think of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” A great variation on that is the saying collected by Ken Weaver, a member of New York proto-punk group The Fugs, in Texas Crude: “You can buy ’em books and buy ’em books, and they just chew on the covers.”

As I probably made clear in the first two installments of this series, the words are as important to me as the music, and Saint Anthony’s Sermon has a wonderful lyric. From the opening, where St. Anthony (1195–1231) finds his Paduan parishioners have all stayed away from the church and decides he will give his sermon to the fish in the river, on to the ending, where the fish swim away unchanged by what they’ve heard, it paints a great picture.

The text is full of exclamation points which give an elbow-in-the-ribs quality to the printed lyric but don’t carry over to the music. The first comes in the opening verse:

Antonius zur Predigt
die Kirche find’t ledig!
Er geht zu den Flüssen
und predigt den Fischen.
or
Anthony, at sermon time,
Finds the church empty!
He goes to the river and
Preaches to the fishes.

Can you imagine, the lyric says (probably heavily edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano), that the people would have passed up the chance to hear St. Anthony preach? Unbelievable! Maybe it was a nice day or they were all out of town. The song may have been inspired by the story that St. Anthony was such an eloquent preacher that even the fish in Padua’s Brenta River enjoyed his sermons, and created a cynical elaboration on it. Another version of the story, cited by gonomad.com, sets the sermon in Rimini.

While in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he encountered some difficulty in getting the local population to listen to him. Somewhat dejected, he went down to the shore, where the river Ariminus runs into the sea, and began to speak to the fishes.

No sooner had he spoken a few words when suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood. All the fishes kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

As he continued speaking, the fish began to open their mouths and bow their heads, endeavoring as much as was in their power to express their reverence. The people of the city, hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it.

Right from the beginning of the Lied, Mahler sets up a regularly accented three-quarter meter, possibly evoking the river and the movement of the schools of fish, before the singer sets the song up with the astonishing event of the empty church. With a repeated rising fourth in the lower timpani, a portentous sound that turns out to introduce a less-than-terrifying message, bassoons, clarinets, and string basses provide only about 10 seconds of vamping until the singer comes in and the rest of the orchestra joins (usually) her. Notice the triangle chiming along as the singer describes the sun reflecting off the river and the fishes’ scales. Mahler brings the triangle back periodically as a bit of orchestral color, and perhaps as a reminder of the sun on the river.

The strings are in constant motion, sometimes harmonizing the melody, sometimes stating a countermelody. When they drop out, the winds, especially the clarinets or brasses, by turns take over. In this song, at least, Mahler doesn’t throw the whole orchestra at the audience. Rather, as B.H. Haggin pointed out, he uses all of the resources of a large orchestra judiciously, never just for the sake of making a big sound, contrary to the obtuse views of some critics, perhaps most notably, Olin Downes of The New York Times.

Much of the fun of the song comes from listing of the fish species and their attributes — pike: belligerent, stockfish: always on a diet, crabs: slow moving, sturgeon: delicacies for the wealthy — and the refrain, “Kein Predigt niemalen/Den Fischen so g’fallen!” (No sermon ever/pleased [insert fish species here] as much!), coupled with the subtly ironic melody and orchestral accompaniment.

With a steady, rhythmic drive, the voice and accompaniment work through nine verses of catchy, folk-inspired melody, as potent a collection of hooks as you would want to hear. Finally, St. Anthony reaches the end of his sermon and the singer reports on its effect on his listeners:

Die Predigt geendet,
Ein jeder sich wendet,
Die Hechte bleiben Diebe,
Die Aale viel lieben.

The sermon having ended,
each [fish] turns himself around;
the pikes remain thieves,
the eels, great lovers.

Die Predigt hat g'fallen.
Sie bleiben wie allen!

The sermon has pleased them,
they remain the same as before!

Die Krebs gehn zurücke,
Die Stockfisch bleiben dicke,
Die Karpfen viel fressen,
die Predigt vergessen, vergessen!

The crabs still walk backwards,
the stockfish stay fat,
the carp still stuff themselves,
the sermon is forgotten!

Not surprisingly, the fish, like most preachers’ human parishioners, go away as they arrived. The accompaniment doesn’t even pause to comment, but sinks lower and lower and ends with an extended bass note: as it began, at the bottom of the river. The complete text, by the way, is available at The Lied and Art Songs Text Page and the translation from German to English is copyright © by Emily Ezust.

There are about 15 versions of Des Knaben Wunderhorn listed at arkivmusic.com. Since I have only heard a few of them I hesitate to make a recommendation, though if I had to choose one from that page I’d probably go with Claudio Abbado’s version with Anne-Sofie von Otter and Thomas Quasthoff. I have the Vanguard stereo recording with Maureen Forrester and Heinz Rehfuss, the Thomas Allen/Ann Murray/Sir Charles Mackerras recording, and Thomas Hampson’s survey of the original piano accompaniments. The last two CDs are out of print but might be found in a used CD store or on Amazon.com and are worth picking up. To give a sense of the Lied to anyone who is unfamiliar with it, the opening and closing of Ann Murray’s recording in mp3 format is available here.

2007-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

A Mensch, He’s Not

Howard Katz, a play by Patrick Marber, who also wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal, among other pieces, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Pels Theatre. This is what The Times said about it:

The subject of Patrick Marber’s comedy of unhappiness about a rabid talent agent, starring a baleful Alfred Molina and directed by Doug Hughes, is nothing more nor less than your standard-issue midlife crisis. This familiar topic gets the better of all the talented people here trying to make it seem fresh. (Brantley)

Yes, it was. It was like The Book of Job without the happy ending, starring Woody Allen’s Danny Rose in a particularly foul mood. Where Rose tried to create a career for his entertainment industry dead-enders, Katz tells them that they have no talent or have had too much surgery. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go over too well with the owners of the agency where he works. But before he gets the sack, his marriage ends, he tells off his father, and hits his son. Then he doesn’t have sex with a prostitute, quarrels with his brother, fails to buy a gun with which to commit suicide, gives his watch and wallet to a mugger, and either loses or dreams that he loses his last £2,000. There’s also a returning-to-the-faith-of-his-fathers subplot that surfaces now and then, though it isn’t clear what purpose it serves except to provide a little bit of ethnic spice.

The exact order of events is confused by the play’s dreamlike chronology but in the last scene, Katz — sans money, sans home, sans everything — seems to pull himself together to strew his father’s ashes, which he has been carrying around for what must have been weeks, off Tower Bridge.

Maybe Katz would follow the ashes into the Thames since he doesn’t seem to have anything to live for or any idea of what to do, but it isn’t clear. The play doesn’t come to a conclusion or dramatically satisfying resolution. It just ends, and what a relief that is.

Howard Katz was yet another play in which the greatest pleasure was found in the work being done, rather than the work being performed, on the stage. Among the talented actors in the company, nearly all playing multiple parts, were Euan Morton (Boy George in Taboo in London and New York), Alvin Epstein, Elizabeth Franz, and Jessica Hecht (The House in Town). It was a particular pleasure to see Jessica Hecht again, especially in the scenes where she played the co-owner of the talent agency.

Marber seemed to working out something deeply personal with Howard Katz, though exactly what wasn’t clear. Now that it’s out of his system, here’s hoping he moves on to work that says more than “if you’re not a nice person, bad things happen to you and no one likes you.”

Image from Roundabout Theatre

2007-04-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Slightly French is Slightly Good

I saw Slightly French over the weekend and submitted this review to Internet Movie Database today.

Slightly French is a rather a leaden trifle, which today is chiefly of interest to students of Douglas Sirk’s films or Dorothy Lamour or Don Ameche fans. I thought the implausible plot would have worked better in the late 1920s or early ’30s, and found at IMDB that it was a remake of Let’s Fall in Love, a 1933 vehicle for Ann Sothern. By 1949, passing off a New York Irish carnival dancer as the Parisian cousin of a vocal coach, and tying her starring in a movie to bringing back a fired director, was too great a suspension of nearly anyone’s disbelief. (And note that Lamour was 35 in 1949 while Sothern was 25 when she made Let’s Fall in Love. Lamour was far from old but the plot would have been more convincing if she were younger.) The breezy style needed to carry it off was just a memory, at least on the Universal studio lot.

Nevertheless, everyone involved in the production was enough of a professional to keep a not-too-demanding viewer entertained with the plot twists, snappy dialogue, and musical numbers. Lamour gets to sing — in French-accented English — a short version of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's “Let’s Fall in Love,” the only song in the picture that sticks in the memory, to excuse her calling a playwright at a press party a “plagiarist.” She dances a little, too, though in the big dance number set in the streets of Paris the soloist looks younger and thinner. Ameche is a stereotypical egomaniacal director, single and living with his sister in an oceanfront Hollywood-moderne mansion. The explanation for his bachelorhood is excessive self-love, but his best-friend producer is similarly single. Inquiring minds inevitably will speculate on the coincidence, though both end up symmetrically in love by the picture’s end.

Meant for the bottom half of a double-bill, Slightly French never quite gets out of its B-picture category, but for a low-budget black-and-white musical it isn’t half bad.

2006-12-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I heard a recital by Magdalena Kozena, a soprano with an international career and several well-received recordings. I wrote about it and tried to summon up some enthusiasm for what I thought should have been a good concert — tried and failed. I just wasn’t moved, and I thought something must have been wrong with me: I wasn’t in the mood, or I was preoccupied by some crisis or other in my life. I told a friend that it was a perfectly nice recital but I couldn’t get excited by it. Yesterday, I heard Angelika Kirchschlager sing Schumann and Schubert, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, who was also Kozena’s accompanist. After the first measure of Schumann’s Freisinn it was clear that the problem at Kozena’s concert wasn't my mood. It was that Kozena wasn’t as moving or as involving a singer.

Kirchschlager, whom I didn’t like the first time I heard her, carried me away, to my considerable surprise. Her voice is smooth and rich, and her legato is exemplary. The voice is not without minor flaws — there were times when an increase in volume came with too much vibrato, though that seemed to abate as she warmed up, and not every note was perfect — but that didn't matter when so her singing was so beautiful. Most of the songs in both parts of the program were unfamiliar to me, which increased the pleasure of hearing her sing them. (The program, complete with the opus numbers Playbill saw fit to leave out, can be found at the la Verdi.org Web site: http://www.laverdi.org/english/quartetto.php. Apparently, Kirchschlager has been touring with this same program, though she was accompanied by Helmut Deutsch in Milan. Note also that the concert there was part of a 10-concert season for 100 euros, or $130. Tickets at Tully Hall were $48 for nonsubscribers.)

Also in contrast to Kozena, Kirchschlager’s dress was much more conservative, that is to say, not cut down to there, and displayed only a bit of lace on the sleeves. If I was in the diva advisory business, I would advise Angelika to “rethink the jewelry,” since a choker and a necklace are a touch over the top, especially when the necklace is evening length and sets up a contrasting movement to the rhythm of the music. Her encores (there were only two) were Widmung by Schumann (Op. 25, No. 1, from Myrthen), which was stunning, and Hôtel by Poulenc (No. 2 from Banalités, FP 107, text by Apollinaire), which was delivered in a wonderfully idiomatic style. It was a pleasurable shock after 24 Lieder to hear so ingratiating a mélodie.

Kozena deserves another chance. Perhaps she was nervous or having an off day. Kirchschlager, after Sunday’s recital and despite the minor shortcomings, takes her place as one of my Top Ten Recitalists.

2006-11-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Down: Three Views of Pynchon's New Novel

Whom do you trust? The complete reviews from which the following excerpts were taken were available on the Times and New Yorker Web sites.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 20 November 2006
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day, reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.

There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Dozens of characters are sent on mysterious (often half-baked) quests that intersect mysteriously with the mysterious quests of people they knew in another context, and dozens of portentous plot lines are portentously twined around even more portentous events: the appearance of a strange figure in the Arctic, a startling “heavenwide blast of light”, the hunt for something called a “Time-weapon” that might affect the fate of the globe.

Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning Mason & Dixon, demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons.

Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review, 26 November 2006
In Against the Day, his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives, hours that do “not so much elapse as grow less relevant.”

Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of Dune, that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates. In any case, Pynchon (speaking, one presumes, through his characters) dismisses the existence of time as “really too ridiculous to consider, regardless of its status as a believed-in phenomenon,” asserting that civilization has been dead since World War I and “all history after that will belong properly to the history of hell.” He also rejects a fixed notion of place. To him, delineations of the known world are merely maps that “begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again.” Let us proceed, then, like Pynchon: as we wish, without a map, and by bounding leaps.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker, 27 November 2006
Do The Math: Thomas Pynchon returns.

Thomas Pynchon is the apostle of imperfection, so it is arguably some sort of commendation to say that his new novel, Against the Day (Penguin; $35), is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of “Ambitious but flawed.” Imperfect in the sense of “What was he thinking?”

The book is set in the period between 1893 and around 1920, and this is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse’s sons—Kit, a mathematician; Frank, an engineer; and Reef, a cardsharp and ladies’ man—set out to avenge their father’s murder. (Webb also has a daughter, Lake, but she takes up with one of the killers.) This story requires a thousand and eighty-five pages to get told, or roughly the number of pages it took for Napoleon to invade Russia and be driven back by General Kutuzov. Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot—that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The rest of the novel is shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper: fantastic invention, arcane reference, virtuosic prose. Elaborately imagined characters and incidents, from a man who may or may not be transformed into a jelly doughnut to a city beneath the desert and a near-death experience in a mayonnaise factory, pop up and disappear after a few pages, so many raisins in the enormous loaf. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; the mysterious collapse of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, in 1902; the equally mysterious Tunguska Event, in 1908, in which roughly eight hundred square miles of Siberian forest was flattened, evidently by an exploding asteroid; the Mexican Revolution; and the troubles in the Balkans leading to the First World War all figure in the book’s pages. Longer-running characters include the eternally youthful crew of a sometimes invisible airship, Inconvenience, who style themselves the Chums of Chance; initiates of a British spiritualist society called T.W.I.T.; a private eye named Lew Basnight; a glamorous mathematician named Yashmeen Halfcourt; and an itinerant photographer called Merle Rideout, his daughter, Dahlia, and his ex-wife, Erlys, who has run off with a magician named Zombini. Scenes are set in (among other places) Colorado, New York, Venice, Paris, Croatia, Macedonia, Mexico, various points in Asia, and Hollywood. Characters are given names like Alonzo Meatman, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, Professor Heino Vanderjuice, the Reverend Lube Carnal, and Wolfe Tone O’Rooney. Pig Bodine, a recurring avatar who appeared in Pynchon’s first novel, V (1963), puts in his ritual appearance. There is a literate dog, a machine for time travel, a “subdesertine frigate” for voyaging beneath desert sand, and assorted mad inventors, shamans, clairvoyants, terrorists, drop-dead-gorgeous women, and drug abusers. The whole thing sloshes along, alternately farcical and magniloquent, with threads left dangling everywhere, sometimes for hundreds of pages, ultimately forever. The novel doesn’t conclude; it just, more or less arbitrarily, stops.

2006-11-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

Brava Kozena!

Brava to Magdalena Kozena for programming an encore by Erwin Schulhoff at her Alice Tully Hall recital in New York on Sunday. For encore fans everywhere, she began with Schulhoff’s “When I Was on My Mother’s Lap,” about 60 seconds of presto vocal filigree. Try as I might, I couldn’t find an opus number for it. It’s possible, but I wouldn’t want to have to swear to it, that it hasn’t been recorded yet. Kozena followed that with two songs of Dvorak: “There is nothing that could make me happy,” Op. 2, No. 3, and “The Mower,” also known as “When a maiden was a-mowing,” Op. 73, No. 2. Both were lovely.

Kozena put together an interesting program, beginning with five songs of Mendelssohn, which are not often peformed but deserve to be, followed by Schumann’s Frauenliebe and -leben, seven songs of Faure, and concluding with Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs, Op. 55. Kozena has a beautiful voice, and it was fascinating to hear how much she sang without vibrato—very cool, and reminiscent of early music singers like Emma Kirkby. Apparently, there is some controversy over whether she is a mezzo (vide Cecilia Bartoli) but she sounded like one to me.

Her accompanist of the afternoon, Malcolm Martineau, is of the accompanist-as-equal-recital-participant school, playing with the top of the piano up, and not a retiring partner at all. But someone needs to tell him to stop mugging at the audience at the ends of songs. It is jarring. He doesn’t need to swivel his grinning face around at the end of a comical number to make sure we get it. Malcolm, we get it, O.K? After a few grimaces from the keyboard, I had to stop looking at him. (James Levine is another one who gets into the act, in case anyone in the audience doesn’t notice the other person on stage.)

A word on Kozena’s recital dress: She seemed to be in costume for the Gypsy Songs and considering the chill in the air, I hope she didn’t catch a cold. She had on a black lace top, cut down to just above her navel, accessorized by a massive necklace/pendant affair. Her beige dress had a train she had to carry on stage, and doing so highlighted her knee-high (or nearly) black leather boots. It certainly excited comment amongst the audience members. Whether it was in keeping with the tone of Frauenliebe and -leben, and particularly the last song in the cycle, is a valid question but it is a tribute to her singing that I didn’t really notice what she was wearing most of the time.

NOTE: Kozena recorded the Schulhoff song, “Kdyz jsem byla mamince na kline” [“On my mother’s knee”] as part of her CD, Songs My Mother Taught Me. The piece comes from Národní písne a tance z Tesinksa (Folksongs and Dances from the Tesinskso Region) and is WV120 - 15 in Schulhoff’s catalog.

2006-11-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

I think I heard Florence Foster Jenkins’ recordings for the first time in the 1960s on WBAI-FM, New York’s left-wing listener-supported station. During the regular pledge drives, a few minutes of Mme. Jenkins was sure to get a steady stream of listeners to promise to contribute if the DJ would get her off the air. Yes, people would pay to stop her singing. And hanging out with fellow teenage musicians as I did at that time, fans of Tom Lehrer and the Goon Show, it was inevitable that we’d come across RCA Victor’s Jenkins LP, The Glory (????) of the Human Voice. So when I saw a notice on Parterre Box for the premiere screening of Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own, I simply had to go.

Filmmaker Donald Collup, assisted by researcher Gregor Benko, assembled a 91-minute film that explores all the facets of Jenkins’ life, and if it wasn’t tragic, there was certainly more than enough pathos to quiet some of the laughter around her recordings. As it turns out, there was more to Jenkins than someone whose attacks on notes above high C have left listeners gasping in disbelief for more than sixty years. There was the father who stifled her aspirations to study music in Europe, the goal of all serious students at the time. There was the accident that ended her piano studies. Later, her husband was a disappointment and the marriage led to her being disinherited for a time. She never could overcome her small-town background, though she traced her forebears back to the Revolution. A dedicated social climber, her tactic of choice was membership in New York’s women’s clubs. She belonged to more than a dozen and even founded one, the Verdi Club, but her aspirations to be accepted into New York City high society were never realized.

And, of course, there was her singing. She studied for years, performed at her clubs and at society musicales, but her dream was to be recognized as an artist. She could almost be the inspiration for Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “bouquet,” of course) of Keeping Up Appearances. That Jenkins was in her seventies when she went into the studio explains a lot about the way she sounded. Explaining the rest may be a combination of profound self-delusion and the complete absence of a musician’s ear.

Far from being an obscurity, as I assumed she was, Jenkins was well-known enough to leave a considerable documentary trail. Using a surprising number of articles from newspapers and magazines, supplemented with interviews, plentiful photographs, and period music, Collup has produced a film somewhat in the Ken Burns mode, though there was no contemporary movie footage. The testimony of people who were at the 1944 Carnegie Hall recital —Marge Champion, Alfred Hubay, and Daniel Pinkham — along with the photo taken from the stage, showing Cole Porter, were fascinating, as were articles by critics and gossip columnist Earl Wilson. Overall, we get perhaps too much information about Jenkins — I could have done without the family tree, for example — but the result is that a person takes shape behind the notorious recordings. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” applies here.

Collup’s film is aptly titled. Jenkins did her best to construct a world of her own but ultimately had to live in the same world as the rest of us, where disappointment is plentiful and triumphs hard-won and often fleeting. Though not without its longueurs, Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own is well worth seeing if you are at all interested in understanding the person behind the legend.

NOTE: In response to public (?) demand (!), Video Artists International released A World of Her Own on DVD. It is available from VAI, as well as Amazon and other fine retailers.

2006-10-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

Don’t be a luddy-duddy!

A friend recently asked my advice about an investment suggested to him by a salesperson with one of the larger multinational financial services companies. I thought there were some problems with the vehicle, a unit investment trust, though it might not be a bad choice for someone in his circumstances. But it reminded me of the archetypal encounter between salesperson and prospect portrayed in W.C. Fields’ The Bank Dick. It seems likely that Fields was reliving the days before the 1929 stock market crash, when fast-talking brokers unloaded soon-to-be-worthless stock on eager would-be investors, lured by a flowery spiel promising a life of luxury and ease.

The Bank Dick
Universal
1940

CAST:
Egbert Sousé.................... W.C. Fields
J. Frothingham Waterbury...... Russell Hicks
Og Oggilby.............................. Grady Sutton

INT. BLACK PUSSY CAT CAFÉ.

WATERBURY

Pardon me, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Waterbury’s my name, J. Frothingham Waterbury.

SOUSÉ

Very glad to know you. My name is Sousé, accent grave over the e.

WATERBURY

I’m in the bond and stock business. Now, I have five thousand shares of the Beefsteak Mines in Leapfrog, Nevada, that I want to turn over to your bank. I like this little town and I want to get some contacts, I think you’re the very man.

Now, these shares are selling for ten cents a share.

SOUSÉ backs into a table, impaling himself on a fork. Squealing, he removes it.

WATERBURY

Now, these shares are selling for ten cents a share. A telephone company once sold for five cents a share. These shares are twice as expensive, therefore, consequently they’ll be twice as valuable. Naturally, you’re no dunce. Telephone is now listed at one seventy-three and you can’t buy it. Three thousand, four hundred and sixty dollars for every nickel you put into it. The point I’m trying to make is this —

SOUSÉ takes hat off hatrack, puts it on.

WATERBURY

The point I’m trying to make is, these shares sell for ten cents. It’s simple arithmetic — if five’ll get you ten, ten will get you twenty. Sixteen-cylinder cars, a big home in the city — balconies upstairs and down. Home in the country — big trees, private golf course, stream running through the rear of the estate. Warm Sunday afternoon, fishing under the cool trees, sipping ice-cold beer.

WATERBURY mimes blowing foam off beer

SOUSÉ

I can almost see the foam, yes.

WATERBURY

Ham and cheese on rye —

SOUSÉ

With mustard. We have plenty of mustard at the house, yeah.

WATERBURY

Yes. And then this guy comes up the shady drive in an armored car from the bank, and he dumps a whole basket of coupons worth hundreds of thousands of dollars right in your lap. And he says, “Sign here, please, on the dotted line.”

SOUSÉ

I’ll have a fountain pen by that time.

WATERBURY

And then he’s off, to the soft chirping of our little feathered friends in the arboreal dell. That’s what these bonds mean.

SOUSÉ

They do, eh?

WATERBURY

I’d rather part with my dear old grandmother’s paisley shawl or her wedding ring than part with these bonds.

WATERBURY removes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his eyes.

SOUSÉ

It must be tough to lose a paisley shawl.

SOUSÉ takes the handkerchief from WATERBURY and dabs at his eyes in sympathy.

WATERBURY

Gosh! Oh, pardon my language. . . I feel like a dog. But it’s now or never. It must be done. So take it or leave it.

SOUSÉ

I’ll take it.

WATERBURY

Fine, fine, fine.

* * *

EXT. LOMPOC STREET.

SOUSÉ walks to the bank in a big hurry.

INT. LOMPOC STATE BANK.

SOUSÉ finds OGGILBY in the vault.

SOUSÉ

Og, my boy, I’ve got you set for life! I don’t hang around that Black Pussy Café for nothing. I met a poor fellow who is in trouble. There’s something the matter with his grandmother’s paisley shawl. He has five thousand shares in the Beefsteak Mine and you can buy them for a handful of hay!

OGGILBY

Hay? And they’re worth. . .

SOUSÉ

Ten cents a share. Telephone sold for five cents a share. How would you like something better for ten cents a share? If five gets you ten, ten’ll get you twenty. Beautiful home in the country, upstairs and down. Beer flowing through the estate over your grandmother’s paisley shawl.

OGGILBY

Beer?

SOUSÉ

Beer! Fishing in the stream that runs under the arboreal dell. A man comes up from the bar, dumps three thousand five hundred dollars in your lap for every nickel invested, says to you, “Sign here on the dotted line,” and then disappears in the waving fields of alfalfa.

OGGILBY

Gosh! Do you think he was telling the truth?

SOUSÉ

You don’t think a man would resort to taradiddle, do you? Why, he sobbed like a child at the very thought of disposing of these shares. How does a bank make its money?

OGGILBY

By investing.

SOUSÉ

That’s the point. You don’t want to work all your life. Take a chance. Take it while you’re young. My uncle, a balloon ascensionist, Effingham Huffnagle, took a chance. He was three miles and a half up in the air. He jumped out of the basket of the balloon and took a chance of alighting on a load of hay.

OGGILBY

Goll-ly! Did he make it?

SOUSÉ

Uh. . . no. He didn’t. Had he been a younger man, he probably would’ve made it. That’s the point. Don’t wait too long in life.

OGGILBY

I’ve never done anything like this, and for another thing, I haven’t got the money. Of course, my bonus comes due in four days — that’s five hundred dollars. I could buy ’em then. And then with all that money I made I really might be worthy of your daughter’s hand.

SOUSÉ

Women really appreciate the fine things in life. You don’t want to die and leave your wife and children paupers, do you? Borrow the five hundred dollars from the bank. You intend to pay it back when your bonus comes due, don’t you?

OGGILBY

Oh, sure.

SOUSÉ

Surely. Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a moon-calf! Don’t be a jabber-nowl! You’re not those, are you?

OGGILBY

No. Well, I guess there’s no way you could confuse it with stealing, is there?

SOUSÉ

[Chuckling] Nothing could be more absurd.

OGGILBY

Well, all right, send him in.

Note that Sousé’s invented uncle is named Effingham Huffnagle, an alternative spelling of which might be F---ingham Huffnagle. Fields was always trying to slip double entendres past the Hollywood censor and frequently succeeded. Just one example in The Bank Dick (the title is another one), is when he says, “I don't hang around that Black Pussy Café for nothing.” Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue — “an inadvertent peccadillo,” Fields might call it — but based on the frequent appearance of pussycats in his movies I don’t think it was inadvertent at all.

2006-10-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

Anna Russell (1911-2006)

I note here with sadness the passing of Anna Russell, the funniest lady in classical music. I was privileged to see her perform at Carnegie Hall twice. The first time, in 1965, the hall was nearly empty. The second time, for her farewell tour in 1984, the place was packed and the audience was in stitches. She had impeccable timing, an upper crust British accent that made everything funnier (to American audiences, at least), and knowledge of music and musicians that skewered the pompous, the pretentious, and the just plain silly.

The obituary in The New York Times was excellent (registration required and it’s probably on Times Select by now). Other good pieces are in The Telegraph, The Washington Post, and Opera News, which has a lovely photo of Ms. Russell in her salad days. A personal reminiscence from a Canadian point of view is in this piece from La Scena Musicale.

The picture below is of Russell and the Valkyries from a Canadian production of Die Walküre in 2004.

Some clips are posted at google.com (here and here) for anyone who never saw her and for anyone who did. VAI has a DVD taped at her (First) Farewell Tour, television appearances from the 1960s and 70s, and a CD of her performance in Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s opera, Arcifanfano or You’re Always Too Old to Learn, with the great American soprano Eleanor Steber, as well as a live performance of some of her opera pieces from 1973.

It’s a cliche, but true nevertheless, that we will not see her like again.

2006-10-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time II: Fool in Love (Ike Turner)

I was talking about love and relationships a couple of days ago — in fact, I was explaining something about Yobo — and I quoted the chorus of Ike and Tina Turner’s astounding song Fool in Love:

You take the good along with the bad, Sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re sad.

It reminded me that Fool in Love is one of my Top 300 Favorite Songs.

Here’s another song, like Love Potion #9, that has an unsurpassable, even inimitable, opening: Without any warning, like a volcanic eruption, Tina Turner shouts “There’s something on my mind. Won’t somebody please, please tell me what’s wrong?” And with four perfectly placed intro chords, the band starts playing and in close, gospel-inspired harmony, The Ikettes sing

You’re just a fool, you know you’re in love.
You’ve got to face it to live in this world.
You take the good along with the bad,
Sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re sad.
You know you love him, you can’t understand
Why he treats you like he do when he’s such a good man.

The Ikettes, having explained exactly what the situation is, step back and Tina returns to the mic for the first verse. In her take-no-prisoners style, Tina explains how dire her straits are and I suspect that her audience understands that she’s talking about something more serious than being made to wear white flannel after Labor Day or not being allowed to use the right fork.

He’s got me smiling when I should be ashamed,
Got me laughing when my heart is in pain.
Whoa now, I must be a fool,
But I'll do anything he wants me to. Now, how come?

Back come the Ikettes to reiterate that she’s just a fool, and Tina has two more verses to explain that she knows she is a fool, but she loves her man so much that she can’t leave him, no matter what.

Without my man I don’t want to live.
You think I’m lying but I’m telling you like it is.
He’s got my nose open and that’s no lie,
And I, I’m gonna keep him satisfied. Now, how come?

Ways of actions speaks louder than words —
The truest thing that I ever heard.
I trust the man and all that he do,
And I, and I’ll do anything he wants me to do. Now, how come?

There are two things that I love about Fool in Love and that are a big part of making it one of my Top 300 Favorite Songs. The first is that Tina Turner’s delivery is completely at odds with what she’s singing. She doesn’t sound the least bit confused or perplexed, or in need of advice. Her powerful voice doesn’t convey any sort of weakness on the part of its owner. The second is that the Ikettes don’t second Tina’s supposed confusion. The words of the chorus chide, lecture, and advise. They rebuke the naive woman who doesn’t know about love or even how to live in this world. Most times the backup singers ratify the lead singer. Not here. Tina’s delivery and the words of the chorus provide the tension that keeps the song interesting no matter how many times you hear it.

A good cover of Fool in Love is by Marcia Ball, Angela Strehli, and LouAnn Barton on Dreams Come True. Notice that it takes three lead singers to replace one Tina Turner. Nevertheless, they do a good job of delivering a solid version of the classic original.

I don’t remember exactly when I heard Fool in Love for the first time, but it was probably on Valaja Bumbulis’s show on KARL-AM, Carleton College’s student-run carrier current radio station. Valaja (a/k/a Linda Stephani) was a dedicated Ike & Tina Turner fan in the late 1960s, so even though I was born and grew up in New York City, I didn’t hear Tina Turner until I went to Northfield, Minnesota, hardly a hotbed of R&B outside the Carleton campus. But once I’d heard Tina Turner I became a fan, and was happy to see her subsequent success, especially once she ditched Ike. Valaja was definitely onto something.

I plan to write about other of my Top 300 Favorite Songs, including Mahler’s Knaben Wunderhorn song Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes, Marshall Crenshaw’s Some Day, Some Way, Graham Parson’s Luxury Liner and Wheels, Candi Staton’s Victim, and Let It Be from the Mad Dogs and Englishmen concert album, so keep an eye out for those.

2006-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

T’aint Funny, McGee, Part II

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. It’s a sign of the times, I guess, something that comes with reaching “un certain age.” For one thing, it seems like a lot of people I know (or knew) are dying. Of course, people are dying all the time, but this year’s been an especially striking one for me. So far, I’ve lost my last two aunts (both in their 90s) and a friend of the family who I’d known since I was born (89). There were also people who weren’t close but went way back: my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law’s mother (88), a woman who grew up in my building (54), a man I knew when I was a journalist (56), and one I found about by accident, a man I knew when I was at the University of Denver in the 1970s (50). And a suicide, who I saw a just couple of days before he jumped off the roof of his building, the production manager of a quarterly magazine I copyedited for. At the end of last year, I saw two articles in the same week that continued the theme: “Death and a dinner party” in the D.U. alumni magazine, about planning one’s funeral, and another in The Times, about planning one’s parent’s funeral.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t find Keeping Mum so very funny. Laughter is a way of keeping away the ghosts but when they come as close as I’ve felt them this year, the laughs aren’t as spontaneous as they usually are. Kristin Scott Thomas was excellent and Maggie Smith was fun to watch, but Rowan Atkinson seemed to be trying too hard not to be funny. The characters played by Patrick Swayze and Tamsin Egerton were more cartoonish than believable. The settings were lovely, in a travelogue-of-Britain style. I couldn’t figure out, though, why Thomas, the vicar’s wife, was taking golf lessons from Swayze, the local club’s pro, and how he found his way to the out-of-the-way course on the English coast. Better not to ask too many questions, I guess, and just go with the comfy flow. Think of it as Arsenic and Old Lace with a posh accent, and let it go at that.

2006-08-31T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Work Song

There can’t be too many points on which RuPaul and President Bush agree but our President’s obsession with hard work is uncannily close to “You better work,” RuPaul’s admonition in his hit, “Supermodel.” A musical expression of our president’s obsession is “Hard Work,” Harry Shearer’s brilliant and hilarious remix of soundbites from the 2004 presidential debates — more than 20, according to one source — with a smooth jazz groove. And who could forget the compliment to former FEMA head Michael Brown: “Heck of a job, Brownie.”

Darned if he isn't at it again. We learn from news reports from Katrina—The Anniversary Tour that President Bush is out there working hard and praising those who are hard at work. In her Wednesday, August 30, New York Times column, Maureen Dowd reported that Bush told a crowd at a high school in New Orleans, “I’ve been on the levees. I’ve seen these good folks working.” He amplified that observation in the speech he gave in New Orleans on the anniversary of Katrina’s Landfall, saying, “The Army [Corp of Engineers] has been working nonstop — and I mean nonstop — to repair the damage and make 350 miles of the system stronger. … They’re extensive. They require a lot of work, including rebuilding I-walls with T-walls. That strengthens the foundations of levees.” I’m sure we’re all glad to have that cleared up.

It’s a real concern of his, that people work hard, because if they’re working hard then progress is being made. Or something. It also establishes their bona fides, because if they weren’t serious, good people, they wouldn’t be working hard. They’d be slacking off, goldbricking, and generally goofing around. Lost in this chain of reasoning is that it is possible to work hard and get nowhere, work hard and reach a dead end, work hard and fail miserably. Even evildoers work hard, after all.

Did Bush work hard at Harken Energy, or later as a shareholder of the Texas Rangers franchise? As governor? Maybe he did. Maybe that’s where he learned the value of hard work. But it sounds more like something he reaches for when he has nothing else to say, something to accompany a slap on the back or a shoulder punch, a good-ol’-boyism he picked up in Midland. What puzzles me is how his advisers can have such a set of tin ears that they don’t hear that this meaningless verbiage is evidence of a mouth stuck in fifth gear while the mind spins helplessly in neutral.

It’s great that our President read Camus’ The Stranger on his vacation, but when he latches onto the Hard Work mantra he seems a lot more like the one of crowd described in the Texas saying “You buy ’em books and buy ’em books, and they just chew on the covers.”

2006-08-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

Power to the Pols

If Joe Lieberman wins the election in November — and I sincerely hope that he doesn’t. I can’t decide if he’s a schmuck or a putz. — it will go a long way to proving a long-held contention of mine, that the Democratic Party’s decline began when the party bosses turned over the power of selecting candidates to the party’s rank-and-file. Case in point: John Kerry. Primary voters decided he was more electable than the other candidates. It was his gravitas, it was reported. Well, the gravitas thing may have worked on the floor of the Senate but it didn’t play so well in the rest of the country.

Of course, there were several other factors that kept Kerry from winning, and he certainly didn’t lose by much. Among the factors working against Kerry were the Vietnam War issues that he didn’t address adroitly enough, his too-heavy reliance on advisors, and ballot measures tailored to bring cultural conservatives to the polls, but the bottom-line issue, in my opinion, is that voters didn’t like him enough to repudiate Bush. The primary voters were wrong again.

From what I saw, Edwards had the charisma and the message, as well as the fire and the quick-wittedness, to take on Bush-Cheney-Rove but apparently he was seen as not seasoned enough. It’s a damn shame. So if Lieberman wins (a poll last week gave Lieberman 45% to Lamont’s 43%, with the rest either undecided or for Schlesinger), maybe it will be time to start a discussion about giving political professionals more control over the candidate selection process.

UPDATE: Call it a psychic reading or a strange coincidence but as I was writing this post a ruling in a similar situation was being handed down in New York. According to The New York Times (N.Y./Region, August 31, 2006), a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled on Wednesday, August 30, that the New York State system of choosing State Supreme Court judges based on nominating conventions was unconstitutional. The ruling upheld a lower court decision ordering that primary elections be held until a new system is set up by the state legislature. “Critics have long contended that the practice effectively robbed voters of their say in who made it to the bench,“ reporter William K. Rashbaum wrote.

It’s a lovely sentiment but I’d be astonished if most voters, even educated, politically savvy ones, were dedicated enough and had enough time to research who would make the best judges, on the State Supreme Court or any other court, for that matter.

2006-08-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

T’aint Funny, McGee

WARNING: Spoilers abound.

Where did I ever get the idea that Transamerica was a comedy? Blame it on the TV ads, which featured Felicity Huffman (Bree Osbourne) delivering what were the only funny lines of the movie, and the premise, which I picked up from the reviews—pre-op transsexual bails her (unknown to him) son out of jail and with only a week before her final operation, drives from New York to L.A., reuniting with their families along the way. Supposed to be a lighthearted look at the travails of gender dysphoria in 21st-centuryAmerica, the movie turned out to be not a comedy at all. Yes, there were some amusing lines, but they were never laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, it didn’t play all that well as a television viewing experience, though it was, overall, effective and consistently interesting.

In my definition of a comedy, physical violence immediately disqualifies a movie or play, and Transamerica has a couple of scenes that go right over the line that separates funny from serious. In one, a character is knocked out, and kicked when he’s down, if I remember correctly. In the other, a punch to the face leaves an ugly red bruise.

Also keeping Transamerica from being a comedy is its muted quality, which comes from Bree’s character. Huffman’s performance is impressive but Bree is, frankly, not all that much fun. Sweet, thoughtful, mysterious, even, but her lid is on pretty darn tight. Huffman is convincing, without question, especially after seeing her in “Sports Night,” which was about as far from Transamerica as you can get. The same could be said of “Desperate Housewives,” of course.

Her family also sabotages the comedy, while posing a serious plausibility problem. Her over-the-top domineering mother (Fionnula Flanagan) and nebbishy-though-apparently-successful father (Burt Young) made my teeth ache. From what sitcom planet did they descend? The tattooed and pierced sister (Carrie Preston) must have been left on their doorstep by escapees from a desert commune. The scenes in Phoenix may have been dramatically necessary but were largely wince-inducing.

Another problem was that as Bree’s character unfolded during the film, we learned precious little about her. It was as if the screenwriter found her transsexuality fascinating but beyond that couldn’t figure out what made her tick. Bree works as a waitress in a small L.A. Mexican restaurant and does telemarketing at home, she went to college for about ten years but never graduated, and she’s half Jewish (her father, so it doesn’t really count). She had a girlfriend in college, when she was Stanley, though she described it as “sad” and “Lesbian.” No friends, apparently, and she doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or outside interests.

Bree’s clothes are conservative and her speech is guarded. When she first meets Toby, her son (Kevin Zegers), and he thinks she is a Christian missionary it’s completely plausible. Perhaps a scene in church was cut, along with scenes with friends, as slowing down the action. The result is that Bree is revealed piecemeal and whole aspects of her character are unexplained. There’s her sly, even sarcastic, humor that slips out at times and seems to be a remnant of a cynical youth. When she says she’s happy or that everything’s fine, it is clear that she isn’t and it’s not. Maybe, we think, the operation will fix that (pun intended).

Probably the most interesting change Bree experiences in the course of the movie’s 103 minutes is the development of her parental instinct. When she first hears about Toby’s existence, he’s little more than a minor detour on the path to the operation. By the time they get to Phoenix (cue Glen Campbell?), Bree is thinking of how she can guide his life, couched as a corrective to her own growing up. As the movie ends, she’s trying to teach him how to behave like a grownup; his grudging response suggests that he could allow her a place in his life, though she may not get to be quite the mother she’d like to be.

The Hollywood expression “Give the puppy a limp” seems to apply to Transamerica. Supposedly, a producer is telling a screenwriter how to make a character more appealing. “Give him a puppy,” the producer says. “Give him a limp.” “Give the puppy a limp?” the confused writer asks. “How the hell do I know?” says the producer. “You’re the writer. You make it work.” Bree got the puppy (long-lost teenage son who’s a hustler) and the limp (pre-op transsexual), and Felicity Huffman delivers a bravura performance, but it still leaves Transamerica as a good movie that falls short of claiming those extra Netflix stars.

19 July 2006

2006-08-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Criticizing the Critics

I’d like to revive something the late critic B.H. Haggin used to do: criticize the critics. For the most part, critics don’t acknowledge the existence of other writers in their pieces, aside from the occasional vague reference to other opinions. It’s a professional courtesy not to question another writers’ opinion, I think, a sort of honor among thieves. However, I’m not a professional and I can say whatever I please. The July 10 issue of The New Yorker had a couple of choice places to start this project: “Farewell Symphony,” Alex Ross’s encomium on the departure of Daniel Barenboim from the Chicago Symphony, and “Westward Ho!,” Joan Acocella’s paean to Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky.

Here’s Your Hat. What’s Your Hurry?

In my opinion, Daniel Barenboim is one of, if not the, least talented musicians before the public today. Clearly, since he’s music director of the Berlin State Opera and principal guest conductor of La Scala, many other people don't share this opinion, and it’s true that I saw this view first expressed in Haggin’s writing, but nothing I’ve heard in all the years since has changed my mind.

Take, for example, his contribution to the 30^th anniversary celebration of Live from Lincoln Center recently broadcast on PBS. In the madly kaleidoscopic segment of concerto performances, Barenboim’s few measures stood out for the leaden quality of the playing. There was no phrasing, musicality, or even interest in what he did. He looked the part but based on his playing he could just as well have been some guy from the audience in a tux, called up at the last minute to take the place of an indisposed soloist.

I have to think audiences respond to his bella figura. Just listen to the Mozart Two Piano Concerto in E-flat, K.365, he recorded with Vladimir Ashkenazy in 1975, my exhibit A of Barenboim’s astonishing shortcomings as a musician (available in Decca/London’s Mozart Piano Concerto box set). Ashkenazy’s entrance after the orchestra introduction is everything it should be: beautifully played, tastefully phrased, technically secure. Then Barenboim comes in and instead of answering it in kind, produces an elephantine response, painful to hear.

Another recording of the Concerto is available on the BBC Legends label (BBC 4037-2), taped live at a Proms concert with Barenboim conducting the English Chamber Orchestra and Sir Clifford Curzon playing the other piano. Listening closely while following the score to keep track of who was on which piano, it was clear that Barenboim’s playing was consistently less sensitive, less interestingly phrased, less varied than Curzon’s. It’s not always out-and-out bad, which surprised me, but it isn’t really good. It is Curzon who I wanted to hear more of, who made Mozart interesting and engaging. For example, in the solo in the last movement that starts at measure 113, Barenboim’s playing isn’t cleanly articulated, especially the dotted notes. Sometimes he’s just sloppy, as in the sixteenth-note runs at measure 418 in the same movement.

There’s also a video of the same Concerto with Barenboim and Sir Georg Solti, who plays the first piano part and conducts the English Chamber Orchestra in a 1990 performance. It is also available on CD (Decca Eloquence 476 2451). I was only able to watch a few minutes, but I would recommend it to anyone who would like to see Barenboim in action. Perhaps you will hear that he uses only three dynamic levels: forte, mezzoforte, and pianissimo. Compare his playing to Solti’s, who shapes the melodic line by varying the dynamics. Barenboim does precious little within the phrase and waits until the end to dramatically reduce the volume to a whisper. The Live from Lincoln Center clip suggests that his playing hasn’t changed in more than 30 years.

I would say that Barenboim’s leaving Chicago would be cause for celebration, but that wasn’t why Ross wrote his piece. We are told that the performances Barenboim conducted over three valedictory days were variously “grimly eloquent at the outset and electrically triumphant at the end” in Beethoven’s Ninth, “vividly executed” in Carter and Boulez, and contributed to an exit that “could not have [been] more graceful.” But read between the praise and you will find these cavils:

“The Mahler Ninth felt like a recapitulation of Barenboim’s Chicago career. The first movement was rocky at times, orchestra and conductor never quite settling on a central pulse—that stuttering-heartbeat rhythm that signifies the composer’s knowledge of his own approaching death. [A questionable assertion, but let it go for now.] Yet the playing was passionate in the extreme. There was an engaging wildness in the middle movements, together with more disagreements about tempo. (Some musicians have long been frustrated with Barenboim’s habit of setting new tempos on the spur of the moment.)”

“I had an adverse reaction when I first heard the great Chicago orchestra under Barenboim, a decade ago. There was a crude and chaotic quality to the sound: you could still hear the vehement aesthetic of Georg Solti, Barenboim’s predecessor, but it lacked Solti’s precision. Barenboim conducted with a broad beat, trying at times for profound effects that either he was unable to articulate or the orchestra was unwilling to execute.”

“Pride filled Barenboim’s voice as he declared that he had gained that trust—for much of his tenure, there was resistance from factions in the orchestra—and that he had just received the unofficial title of Honorary Conductor for Life.” [Perhaps he just wore them down over the years.](italics mine)

I’d suggest that Ross was really hearing Barenboim’s conducting in those passages, but that over the years he let down his critical guard. When Ross says “although [Barenboim] had gravitas even in his youth, something in his work has deepened,” it is more likely only Barenboim’s acting ability that has deepened over the years. I don’t think musicality can be taught to an unmusical person, any more than someone can be taught to be a good writer.

The fact that Ross takes Bruckner’s symphonies seriously is further proof that he’s reacting to Barenboim’s stage gestures and demeanor since Bruckner is a prime example of a composer whose chief ability lies in creating impressive sounds that don’t add up to anything. A hit single, a guitarist friend once told me, has to have a sound and a hook and Bruckner’s symphonies have both. Unfortunately, while he wanted desperately to write symphonies, he couldn’t assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. But there are those, like Ross, who are convinced he was a worthy successor to Beethoven and predecessor to Mahler. He characterizes Bruckner as “a composer who carved out his music as if it were cathedral limestone.” To my ears, the cathedral is imposing, all right, but it is hollow inside, which perfectly describes Barenboim’s playing and conducting.

Alex Ross seems like a really nice guy, which is not the first qualification I think of in connection with criticism. When I read his blog, The Rest is Noise, I get the sense that he’s a big ole’ classical music fan who wants to do his best to encourage composers, musicians, and listeners to get out and write, play, and hear more music. Now that’s a great attitude and essential in keeping the business going but I think a critic better serves music and the music business if he starts out committed to the belief that guiding readers to the most accurate and most exciting performances of the best music is his primary reason for writing.

A Direct Line to Heaven

Alexei Ratmansky’s choreography may not be on the same level as Barenboim’s conducting, but it is not at all the great white hope of Russian dance that Joan Acocella thinks it is. “Russia is in the torturous process of catching up with twentieth-century modernism, from which it was isolated for more than half a century, and Ratmansky was made by God to help it do this,” she said. God? Really? Who told her this?

Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons was part of the New York City Ballet’s latest Diamond Project, a program that commissions new ballets for the company. Acocella starts her piece with a perceptive critique of the Diamond Project and its latest products, a mixed bag at best, she says. I saw just one other of the seven pieces, Christopher Wheeldon’s Evenfall. It was on a program with Robbins’ Ma mère l’oye and Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco (to Bach’s Two Violin Concerto) and in that company it didn’t stand a chance. (Well, with the Balanchine at least. The Robbins is entertaining but embarrassingly sentimental.) After seeing Evenfall and a subsequent performance of Klavier I’m starting to wonder about the fuss that’s been made over Wheeldon. Evenfall did not hang together at all. It looked like an homage to Balanchine, using Bartók instead of Stravinsky, but it made me think that maybe Balanchine was right not to set a ballet to Bartók. Acocella summarized it as a piece “in which women in filigreed tutus bent over and stuck their butts up in the air to Bartók’s beautiful Piano Concerto No. 3.” Fair enough.

But then she goes right off the deep end with Ratmansky’s Seasons. It clearly touched her at some profound level but the work itself doesn’t live up to her reaction to it. At its best it was reminiscent of Robbins’ piano ballets, and come to think of it, at its worst it was too. To start with, there were the costumes. The five couples came onstage — strolled onstage, to be accurate —in simple costumes reminiscent of Russian peasant dress. “Wass very Rooshian,” I told a friend. “Wass all very Rooshian.” The couples were color-coded and the women wore a version of the traditional headdress, though it was not decorated as in the traditional peasant style. Finally, we have an answer to the crucial question Steven Sondheim raised in “Ladies Who Lunch”: “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

As the couples stroll onstage they greet each other, talking about something or other — the harvest, perhaps — before they start to dance. In the ballet’s 12 sections the couples enact stages of the peasant year, accompanied in five of them by a singer. The music, by Leonid Desyatnikov, was dissonant sometimes, melodic other times. Acocella heard “not just folk material but also jazz and Steve Reich—and Stravinsky” in the music, making for a curiously mixed bag at best. It was not, apparently, composed for the ballet.

Wendy Whelan was the featured soloist, though Jenifer Ringer, a wonderful dancer, was also in the cast I saw. Whelan returns at the end in white, which is the color of a wedding gown but also — gasp! — the color of a shroud. Also very Rooshian.

To Acocella, Ratmansky “takes on the great themes—love, grief, marriage, death—and looks them straight in the face.” But there’s a Marie Antoinette-playing-at-being-a-shepherdess quality in a work choreographed by the director of the Bolshoi Ballet and danced by some of the world’s most sophisticated ballet dancers for a New York City Ballet matinee audience that takes as its subject the life of rural Russia. At the same time, and I realize this sounds completely contradictory, it is very New Masses: The simple peasants are closer to the truths of life, love, and death than we decadent bourgeois and we could learn so much from them if we would only take the time to sit at their simple, peasant feet.

What’s fascinating is that Acocella sees the ballet clearly but, bless her, she takes it seriously. Also, she has the advantage of program notes that translate the texts of the songs. Here she describes one of the sections, quite accurately:

“The ballet wears no tragic mask. The dancers often do regular, unsentimental, ‘street’ things. They run around; they knead charley horses out of their legs; they chat with one another. Even in the most mystical passage, nothing gets too heavy. Here is the lyric:

“For you, the body, there is but one lot . . .
To go under the earth, to feed worms.
And me, the soul, I’ll go repenting.
I went near Eden, I didn’t get there . . .
Our Eden, it’s a mighty merry place,
Birds are singing, flowers are blooming,
Oh, on the flowers angels are sitting.

“To this song Jenifer Ringer enters, her expression rapt, her arms groping. She is searching for something—Eden, heaven—and everywhere she turns she comes up against some obstacle. Three men partner her, but they are not men; they are just the arms that support her quest, and block it. In the ballet’s most beautiful moment, the men become the angels on the flowers in Eden. They sit on the floor in a neat little row, and she steps into their hands, then onto their knees, as she walks out into the air, into the void. ‘I went near Eden, I didn’t get there’: she doesn’t get there, but no tears are shed. The whole thing, as serious as it is, looks like a children’s game, which I think is what Ratmansky is saying about the hope of heaven. The thought is Russian, the manner Western. The casualness is a bit like Jerome Robbins’s. Still, you are stabbed in the heart.”

Or else you’re not. As for the ballet’s “most beautiful moment,” didn’t Paul Taylor do the same thing in Esplanade 30 years ago? “No new steps, only new combinations,” Balanchine said. And sometimes not even that.

Acocella may have let her head get ahead of her critical gut with Ratmansky but she was right on the money the next week in “Secrets,” her review of Diana Vishneva in American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle. (See sidebar, below.) I’m not sure which New Yorker critic Edward Gorey was talking about when he said, “She knows who danced Giselle in 1897 but she can’t see what’s in front of her face,” but on the evidence of this piece he wasn’t referring to Acocella. (That would leave Arlene Croce as the next most likely candidate.)

She saw the performance with Angel Corella as Albrecht; I saw Vladimir Malakhov a few days earlier. The effect was the same: “a show that left people sitting dazed in their seats afterward.” In the second act pas de deux, the Met audience was as quiet as I’ve ever heard them, transfixed by the dancing of the two principals. They slowed the tempos w-a-a-y down and turned in a breathtaking performance. Here were the true “angels on the flowers in Eden” of Russian Seasons.

Burning Down The House

Another New Yorker critic in that July 10 issue was Hilton Als, who wrote about Richard Greenberg’s The House in Town, presented by the Lincoln Center Theater. Als took his review as a springboard to psychoanalyze Greenberg through his characters, a temptation critics often give into. In the climax of the review, Als condemns Greenberg for projecting his fears of contemporary Manhattan women on the play’s protagonist. That’s a serious charge, but if we take it at face value, we’re facing the slippery slope of assuming that a character’s moral shortcomings are a reflection of the writer’s neuroses. Is Sweeney Todd about Hugh Wheeler’s difficulties with authority figures? Moving away from the theater, what does that say about the screenwriters of Heathers (Daniel Waters) or Mean Girls (Tina Fey) and their views of women?

Critics are a lot like families: You can’t always live with them and you can’t shoot them. If only they agreed with us more often.

Sidebar: Thinking About Giselle

Giselle is quite a dichotomous little ballet. The first act is stereotypical, colorful, and melodramatic, while the second act is Romantic, monochromatic, melodramatic, and moving. It is also fascinating, and it is still influencing ballets today.

As the American Ballet Theatre program notes point out, Giselle is the oldest ballet still in the active repertory, premiered in 1841. The current ABT production, however, owes more to a Petipa version reset by Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1987. If the structure is reminiscent of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, with a first act in which the story is set forth with more mime than dancing and a second act which is nearly nonstop dancing, that may reflect more of the Petipa/Maryinsky influence than surviving aspects of the original 1841 version. Also familiar from Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty are the royal characters who parade around in lavish costumes attended by a stage full of courtiers, the young prince with an attendant who has not independent life of his own, a unison dance for demi-soloists (think of the “Dance of the Young Swans” in peasant costume instead of tutus and feather headpieces), and a curse. In Giselle, it is Giselle’s weak heart instead of a fairy with a grudge but the plot hinges on it just the same.

Giselle’s determination to dance despite the fate that awaits her may have inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, published in 1845, reworked in the 20^th century in Powell and Pressburger’s movie, made just over 100 years after the ballet. (And doesn’t Victoria Page’s ghost appear at the end of the film? I’m not quite sure as it has been several years since I last saw it.) The twist that Andersen introduces to the story of the demonic shoes is that in Giselle it is the men who are danced to death by the women, spirits who have killed themselves after being jilted or betrayed.

Another aspect of the ballet that has resurfaced in modern times is the interplay between members of the corps, who wave to each other as they enter, cross the stage, and exit. The intent is to establish a sense of community among the dancers before the action takes place before their (and our) shocked gaze. They are surrogates for the audience, most of whom are unknown to each other before they take their seats in the theater. This interplay was a central motif of Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering and the subsequent dances he created to Chopin, as well as Goldberg Variations and even Ma mère l’oye.

Closely associated with Robbins as this vocabulary was, after Peter Anastos’ wicked satire, Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet, it might have seemed like choreographers would leave it strictly alone. However, Alexei Ratmansky’s commission for the New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project, Russian Seasons, shows that even today they find it just as appealing.

29 June 2006

2006-08-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Pandora Opens the Box

Feeling out of touch with current music? I sure am. Some time around 1995, I mostly stopped buying new pop, rock, and country CDs, in part because I ran out of space to store them but also because I lost interest in trying to follow popular music. Most of what I heard sounded like stuff I’d heard before, only not as good. NPR is all right as far as it goes for hearing new music, but it barely scratches the surface of the thousands of CDs released each year. If that describes your situation and there isn’t a good rock radio station in listening range—there isn’t in New York City—and you can spend some time at the computer, I’d suggest that you point your browser to Pandora.com, a high-tech way to hear music you’re likely to like.

Pandora is the computer equivalent of a friend with good taste, a site which takes your favorite groups or musicians and creates a personal radio station that programs them and musicians like them. Pandora uses the 423 criteria devised by the Music Genome Project to categorize and organize popular music to select other songs and performers that share those criteria. The more musicians you input, the more songs it selects. Or you can listen to your friends’ stations, or the most popular stations.

The music is continuous, with a few seconds of silence between the cuts. Information about the artists is accessible through a link under the album art or generic image that appears as each song is selected. If you really like something you hear, you can order it from Amazon or download it from iTunes.

To create my station, Music-o-Rooney Radio, I started with Marshall Crenshaw, then added Thelonious Monk to spice up the mix, and Chris Hillman to expand the selection to the country-bluegrass universe. Adding Chris Hillman to the roster brought in a heavy bluegrass representation, as well as some alt-Country artists, which is fine but I’d like to find a way to make it more of an occasional thing. Those major keys and modal progressions are hard to resist, though.

The resulting mix included some artists I’d never heard of, though they’ve been around for decades: John Strohm, who was in the Blake Babies in the late 1980s and is now an entertainment lawyer; Sloan, which is a group, and Dan Colehour. I don’t know if I’d buy CDs by any of them but the tracks were good, interesting, and I was glad to hear them. Their songs were chosen, Pandora explained, because they feature “a subtle use of vocal harmony, meandering melodic phrasing, major key tonality, melodic songwriting and many other similarities identified in the Music Genome Project.” “Meandering,” I guess, is the opposite of “monotonous.” I don’t know, I just think it’s interesting.

On the jazz side, Monk brought in Steve Lacy, whom I’ve known about for years, and Elmo Hope, whom I can’t have heard much though his name is familiar. Then the jazz cuts disappeared for a while. It seems like Pandora concentrates on one genre at a time; the rotation through your favorites isn’t as random as it might be. Jazz seems to be less well covered than rock or country. Pandora doesn’t have any Dave Frishberg or Roberta Gambarini, though I was able to add Fats Waller. A somewhat annoying aspect of the jazz selection is that you can’t get discographical information. Want to know who’s playing on that track? Well, you can see the CD it’s drawn from and maybe figure out who the musicians are and when it was recorded, but mostly you just have to enjoy the playing.

To give an example of what Pandora is like, turning on the radio today loaded jazz for the first eight selections. Starting with Louis Armstrong, moving through Eddie Lang, Coleman Hawkins, and a track from Freddie Redd’s music for The Connection, the jazz set ended with Charlie Parker’s Ornithology. The next track was Marshall Crenshaw’s Calling Out for Love (At Crying Time), one of my favorite songs but jarring in that context. If I were going to try a segue like that I’d have done an ID, recapped all of the tracks I’d played, and added an intro to the new segment of pop, Western swing, bluegrass, and alt-Country. Maybe Fats Waller’s It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie would have been a better lead-in but that’s what you get when a computer program is the DJ.

An in-depth article about the Music Genome Project and Pandora can be found here: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2006-01-11/news/feature_1.html

2006-08-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Call It What You Will
One day when I was otherwise unoccupied at a temp assignment, I came up with some titles for Weblogs. Since I have no use for them, I’m sharing them with the world.

Being Obstructionist (an accusation Hyacinth Bouquet sometimes levels at Richard)
With Castanets Blazing
Crammed With Incident (the first of a series inspired by The Importance of Being Earnest)
Something Sensational
Comment on the Platform
Ready Money
Oddities and Curiousities
Aged in Wood (an homage to All About Eve)
Picking Oakum Underwater (a riff on S.J. Perelman's description of writing as a cross between picking oakum and eating a banana underwater. )
Foul Copy
Slug Read Blues
Cold Read
Any Old Iron?* (first in a series inspired by The Highly Esteemed Goon Show)
A Crack in Eccles’ Skull
Who’s a Charlie?
Back From the Dead (“Minnie Bannister, back from the dead!” “Yes.” “How long are you staying?”)
Legion of the Bored
After That, Everything Was Wonderful (said by a friend of a friend when recounting a date that had gone well)
Summer Shutters (Eddie Cantor’s comment on seeing a Native American’s costume in Making Whoopee)
An Exclusive Postcode (Hyacinth again, describing the block where she and Richard live)

*From a favorite English music hall song, sung on The Goon Show:

Any old iron? Any old iron? Any, any, any old iron?
You look sweet, talk about a treat,
You look so dapper from your napper to your feet.
Dressed in style, brand-new tile,
And your father’s old green tie on,
But I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch and chain,
Old iron, old iron.
(Chas. Collins, E.A. Sheppard, and Fred Terry)(sheet music here)

2006-08-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time I: Love Potion #9

Love and Loss at 34th and Vine

One of my Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time is Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s Love Potion #9, recorded by The Clovers in 1959 (recorded on June 8, it was released in July on United Artists) and a bigger hit for The Searchers in 1965. The laidback-but-totally-in-control singing and instrumental backing epitomizes ’50s cool and Jerry Leiber’s lyrics never fail to knock me out. Take the first verse:

I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth
You know, the gypsy with the gold-capped tooth
She’s got a pad on 34th and Vine
Selling little bottles of Love Potion #9

The first great thing is that Leiber starts in the middle of the story. The singer doesn’t say what his troubles are, exactly, though we can guess they’re love-related from the name of the song. But there’s no lead in, no enumeration of what he’s been going through. It’s as if we were passing him on the street as he’s talking to one of his friends. A more linear writer might have started with a sad story of love troubles that led to the gypsy’s storefront but it would have been a less interesting song.

I told her that I was a flop with chicks,
I’ve been this way since 1956.
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign,
She said “What you need is Love Potion #9.”

Another great thing is the concrete images. The narrator has been a flop with chicks not for years but since 1956; Madame Ruth doesn’t work downtown, she has a pad at 34th and Vine (an intersection that doesn’t exist, at least not in Los Angeles); and she has not just one but a line of love potions, the most powerful of which is Love Potion #9.

Could Love Potion #9 be a sly reference to Chanel No 5, the famous perfume known by a number rather than a name? Chanel mentions on its Web site that the perfume’s packaging was added to the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection in 1959. It’s possible that the publicity around the addition gave Leiber and Stoller the germ of the idea for Love Potion #9.

After Madame Ruth diagnoses the singer’s love trouble she’s ready to supply him with the cure. And she is one funky gypsy. No FDA-inspected laboratory for her, she just takes all the ingredients and goes to work in the kitchen sink.

She bent down and turned around, and gave me a wink.
She said, “I’m going to mix it up right here in the sink.”
It smelled like turpentine and looked like India Ink.
I held my nose, I closed my eyes—I took a drink!

In contrast to Chanel No 5, which the fashion house tells us “launches with bewitching notes of Ylang-Ylang and Neroli, then unfolds with Grasse Jasmine and May Rose,” while “sandalwood and Vanilla round out the fabled composition with unforgettable woody notes,” Love Potion #9 smells like turpentine and looks like India Ink. This is clearly a desperate man.

The potion goes right to work. The next verse follows right after the bridge (the instrumental break comes after this verse) so we don’t lose any time in learning what happened after the fateful drink.

I didn’t know [if] it was-a day or night,
I started kissing everything in sight.
But when I kissed the cop at 34th and Vine
He broke my little bottle of Love Potion #9.

(On the album, the last two lines are “I had so much fun that I'm going back again, I wonder what happens with Love Potion #10.”)

It’s a wonderful image, the poor guy kissing everything in sight (not a cow, though, as some misheard), but isn’t a love potion supposed to make someone fall in love with you? I thought the deal was that you slip to it some young lovely and then stand back, like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Tristan und Isolde. Either Madame Ruth got some of the ingredients mixed up or the singer drank the potion he was supposed to give to the object of his desire. So if he was a flop with chicks before, he was damn sure going to be the same flop after he swigged down his bottle.

Love Potion #9 is poignant little story set to music. In close to 150 words and less than two minutes we move from passion to pain, hope to defeat. No one is changed, but maybe that’s the lesson: You won’t find love by drinking a gypsy’s cockamamie concoction.