Yearly Archives: 2007

September 2, 2007

Where I came from

Two nights ago, after some frustrated attempts at musical composition, I decided to see how efficiently I could simply take dictation from my mind. Automatic writing, except there’s nothing all that mysterious about automatic music. What I ended up writing was a long stream of just I’s IV’s and V’s (and one VI) and sounds like something out of an 80s kid’s movie. Which is sort of how these things always turn out for me.

I don’t think it’s arbitrary. Deep at the heart of my sense of music is the musical culture I experienced when I was young. I don’t consciously think about that music very often but it does tend to come to the surface when I’m letting things fall where they may.

On the one hand I feel like I came through my 80s childhood having become attached to a lot less of the pop culture than most of my peers. On the other hand I think maybe this stuff worked itself even deeper into me; I feel like a tune like this is still “what I’m made of” in some way, whereas everyone else seems to have long outgrown it.

I’m oddly getting a lot of satisfaction out of having written this. It feels like it gets at the essentials, which might be laughable but there it is; it’s true for me. Strange to realize that I am internally, forever, marked as a product of the culture of my early childhood, since that culture seems so distant now, even to me.

Also, stuff like this makes clear that while my conscious composing – generally derived from quasi-visual or abstract notions – is often a little pungent, my inner music box itself is not actually very sophisticated. When I shut up and listen to it, it only seems to know about a few simple chords, and in root position.

Again, you have to understand that when I wrote this, I was not trying to do a period pastiche. I was just humming what I wanted to hum.

Instrumentation was admittedly influenced by what it sounded like to me consciously.

Automatic melody

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August 30, 2007

Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 in C minor (“Organ”), Op. 78 (1886)

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1912)

Opus 78: Symphony no. 3, in C minor (“Organ”)

composed: 1886 (age 51)
published: 1886
first performance: London, May 19, 1886 (Saint-Saëns conducting the London Philharmonic Society)
dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt

Score can be studied, but not easily downloaded, here.

343 on the list.

Because of Babe (and, by extension, these dudes), I used to think of this as a piece with a sweet spot, a single sparkling moment at the top of the last movement, surrounded by satisfactory but unmemorable conventionality. I managed to think of it that way even after recognizing that the “sweet spot” is just one incarnation, neither the first nor the last, of a flexible motive that undergoes development throughout the entire symphony. The entirety of the piece preceding the sweet spot played as an elaborate anticipation of the sweet spot; the remainder as an obviously failed attempt to sustain its glory.

Now that I’ve heard the whole piece some twenty or thirty times, the sweet spot dims and takes its proper place in the form. It’s certainly not an unsweet spot, but it’s not the point of the piece either. Babe and I were partially right all along: yes, that moment is sort of a prophecy fulfilled, and yes, it’s sort of an announcement of victory. But the “prophecy” feeling is really only meant to function retroactively; the other movements really do stand on their own and don’t have any particularly anticipatory feeling to them. And the even more bombastic stuff at the very end is meant to trump the sweet spot. Which is very clear indeed when you’re listening to it straight through without any prior knowledge of “If I Had Words.”

Saint-Saëns’ reputation is for facility, in both the positive and negative sense. (Or can you only use “facile” in the negative sense, not “facility?” Well then, Saint-Saëns’ reputation is for being very talented but writing facile music.) But I’m not sure that reputation is borne out by this piece, which certainly feels craftsmanly in many ways but is hardly a slick, seamless piece of work. Throughout, he can be heard taking unusual risks, not all of which pay off. His struggles to achieve formal and aesthetic balance are fairly apparent; the piece does not “make it look easy.”

This sounds like a criticism but I mean it as a defense against the accusation that the music is superficial and glossy. I enjoy that the piece is actually a string of idiosyncracies, some of them awkward; it helps give value and definition to the passages that are both slick and conventional, and imbues the whole with a sense of human ambition that I find sympathetic, if not always necessarily successful.

He has some kind of big idea about how the four movement scheme has been subsumed into a two-movement scheme because the 1st and 3rd movements lead semi-smoothly into the 2nd and 4th movements; but the actual effect is fairly local and negligible, if you ask me. Maybe by having had no actual “big finishes” prior to the 4th movement, he thinks he’s justified a final mega-parade of big finishes. I’m not so sure.

The theme of the first movement seems like some kind of reference to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, not clear why. The syncopated effect in the strings starting on page 5, it would seem, is near impossible to play with exact precision. Or else conductors just don’t prioritize it – I don’t think any of the recordings I heard were able to keep that texture truly crisp. I can imagine that the rehearsal-time-to-impact ratio is much too high in almost every situation; I would therefore class this as poor judgment on the composer’s part. The second theme is weakish in the way that everything I’ve ever heard by Franck seems weakish; and the development, based mostly on transitional figures, verges on the dull. Then it suddenly lurches out boldly in a way that maybe it hasn’t earned. All that said, I have driven this piece deep into my brain and will cheerfully listen to the entire movement, humming the whole way through. It doesn’t really make a solid argument for or about anything but just listen to how vigorous those strings are! “If that ain’t a symphony I don’t know what is!”

The theme of the slow second movement (first movement part 2, in Saint-Saëns’ scheme), is both beautiful and “beautiful.” This is not the only respect in which it is comparable to Saint-Saëns’ mega-hit, “The Swan.” Of the two I think the present melody is superior. Actually, it sort of sounds like an inversion of “The Swan.” Has anyone else pointed this out?

The nicknamular organ enters in this movement for a unique atmosphere. An organ generally suggests worship and cathedrals and all that, but I don’t actually get that here. To me this is more like an intense lullaby, something so warm and soothing that it’s unearthly. The organ puts us not in a church but underwater, or in utero. The melody, in this context, is like the kind of too-simple tune that lingers from my dreams sometimes when I’m waking up – it seems more laden with emotion than something this bare has any right to be. I get this sense of “the uncanny within the mild and hummable” from Puccini, too, whose melodies this resembles. His supposedly “beautiful” tunes have an unnerving not-actually-casual quality; like someone has lifted up the skin of a salon song and we are looking at its concave face from the inside. Whew, how horrific.

I’m talking especially about the part of the melody at rehearsal “R” in the score. I wouldn’t be shocked if Saint-Saëns just meant this to be baby Jesus in the manger or something like that, but to me there’s something dizzying and dreamy about it. Although I suppose for a lot of people there’s something dizzying and dreamy about baby Jesus, too. Anyway, that’s probably the most successful movement.

It’s not like me to pick the slow movement!

The third movement (i.e. second movement part 1) is built on awfully thin material. I guess that’s how Beethoven scherzi are too, and I think Saint-Saëns had Beethoven very much in mind. The whole symphony is, and I’m not exactly making this up myself, a French composer’s aspiration to a more Germanic, Beethovenian form and tone. This third movement is where the borrowing feels most forced. The counter-material is of course the recurring motive from the first movement. Once you’ve noticed that – and you notice it immediately – the movement’s pretty much played all its cards. Then comes the zany trio, which seems to be built out of exploded bits of the rest of the movement. Program notes will invariably mention the appearance of a piano playing rapid scales, but will avoid talking about why this happens, because no matter how many times you hear it, it’s really, really nuts. I respect Saint-Saëns for doing this. Also, the swoopy second theme of the trio is delightful. Don’t know what it has to do with anything else but who cares. It’s comedic in a wry and graceful way and that comes as a pleasant relief.

Then comes the sweet spot (at page 126) preceded by some flagbearers and a guy on a unicycle, which starts us off into the final movement, the most ambitious and sloppiest of all. It took me several listens to realize that the movement is in totally standard sonata form and that the “sweet spot” theme – which, incidentally, is in a flowing 9/4, where it makes sense, and not the confusing quirked-up 4/4 of the reggae version – is actually recapitulated later (just after “AA”). But during the recapitulation, it’s intentionally hobbled – he kicks the legs out from under it so that it flops over prematurely each time it’s stated. This presumably is to maintain a sense of suspense until the very end, which is attended by gargantuan bombast. The whole movement is bloated, and then it ends with a tiered celebration of ascending bloat, a finale that’s very hard for conductors to pull off. There’s a metrical experiment of sorts going on, where the pulse gets only slightly broader while the notation gets vastly broader, and that seems to confuse musicians. The only conductor I heard who had the ending fully in hand was von Karajan.

Dubal’s recommendations were

M. Dupré, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paray: Mercury 432719-2
Raver, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernstein: CBS MYK 37255
Alain, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Prêtre: Erato 2292-45696-2

And my favorite recording of the piece overall was indeed the Paul Paray / Detroit one, which I found appealingly direct throughout. The Bernstein / New York recording isn’t particularly distinguished. I couldn’t find the Prêtre / Vienna recording anywhere – here begin my struggles with Dubal’s frequently obscure recommendations – though I did end up buying another Prêtre recording of the same piece, in confusion. Different performance, and not a spectacular one either.

My second choice, and maybe it would be my first choice if I really side-by-sided them, is Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And third comes the von Karajan, which is cold but in a suitably Beethovenian way, and stands head-and-shoulders above the rest in terms of making sense of the score on the whole. He cleans up every mess with ease.

Again my favorites were the oldest two.

Overall review of the piece: This piece is flawed in several ways, and it saddened me when I read that Saint-Saëns said something like “I did things there I will never be able to do again.” Why didn’t he keep aspiring onward in this direction? I think he would have in fact done better the next time around. The piece is full of appealing details and for all its shortcomings, I’ve made friends with it. I’m just not about to open up to it; I have smarter friends for that.

Beth, I can tell you, didn’t like it.

In the order they appear above, with dates of recording. Many of these album covers (and Dubal) name the organist like he’s an important soloist but please. There’s nothing soloistic about it. So I don’t name the organists below.

Orchestre symphonique de Montréal / Charles Dutoit. Decca 475 7728 7 DOR. 1982.
Detroit Symphony Orchestra / Paul Paray. Mercury Living Presence 432 719-2. 1957.
Berliner Philharmoniker / James Levine. Deutsche Grammophon 419 617-2. 1986.
Berliner Philharmoniker / Herbert von Karajan. 439 014-2. 1981.
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra / Lorin Maazel. SK53979. 1993.
Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire / Georges Prêtre. EMI 5 74753 2. 1964.
New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein. CBS MYK 37255. 1978.
Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse / Michel Plasson. EMI 5 56362 2. 1995.
Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch. RCA 09026-61500-2. 1959.

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August 8, 2007

Dispatch from MU 786.4-A

Remember this? Well, I kept going for a little while there. That was the first score on the shelf – these are the second through eighth. This has been sitting in the hopper for some months now, I guess because I thought I might continue further at some point. Ha! Better that I don’t.

Here’s what there was.

Jean Absil (1893-1974): Feeries pour piano, op. 153 (1971) (age 78)
There’s one more Absil to be had here. This consists of six miniatures: Lutins, Elfes, Korrigans, Néréides, Choéphores, Farfadets. Internet tells me these are, in order, Imps, Elves, Goblins, Nereids (Sea Nymphs), Choephori (The Libation Bearers in Aeschylus??), and Leprechauns. These are as a whole better than – but very, very similar to – Alternances. Very low on melody. Seems to disprove my theories as to the meaning of the title of Alternances, since there’s just as much alternance here. Just a habitual style at this point in his life, I guess. Mildly colorful ideas given unimaginative treatment seems to be his thing; miniatures about elves were an appropriate project. But even these are ultimately pretty bland. Again, something old-mannish seems to have happened to him in estimating performance time – 17 minutes, it tells me, but I get absolutely no more than 14. No commercial recording exists, as far as I can tell.

Joseph Achron (1886-1943): Statuettes, Op. 66 (1930) (age 44)
This is one of the intriguing publications of New Music, Henry Cowell’s score periodical with that lovely front cover design. Statuettes comes to us as the October 1931 issue. Achron was and is best known for “Jewish” works, but this, as far as I can tell, isn’t one. It’s a series of seven miniatures, all based – perhaps a bit too directly – on a the same four-note chord/motive. The idiom is sort of generic “modernist,” with an overall debt to Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives and some of the Scriabin miniatures, but a fair bit less emotive than either of those guys. It’s sort of like something someone’s grandfather wrote, poking at the piano in the den. The writing is somewhat primitive and doesn’t immediately offer signs of life, but on the second try, there turns out to be a modicum of charm and thought here. Statuettes presumably because these are meant to be like little angular totems carved out of hard wood, with mildly forbidding expressions, appropriate for placing on the windowsill over the piano in the den. The two really fast ones are harder than the rest and need practice. There is a commercial recording available of this piece, and from the samples I found online it sounds like the guy did a fine job of making it work.

John Adams (1947-): Phrygian Gates (1977) (age 30)
About as successful and prominent a piano piece as has been written in the past 30 years. Several commercial recordings. Heck, this piece even has its own official web page at the composer’s site. This is 22+ minutes of pretty ripples, arranged so that little insignificant things are constantly happening to hold the attention of, if not the listener, at least the performer. It’s monotonous, but a monotony to which taste has been conscientiously applied. Some parts are more fun to play than others; some parts are more fun to listen to than others. I’m not sure there’s any reason why it has to be this long, except maybe just to assert that “even a ripple piece can be monumental.” I guess I don’t have a problem with that, but it doesn’t in itself mean a lot to me, either, so maybe it should have been half as long. The last section is weaker than the beginning. I’m not sure the whole piece adds up to anything more than the sum – or series – of its parts, but a lot of those parts are pleasant. At least to play, and therefrom to imagine. I’ve heard a couple recordings and nobody seems to get it quite right. I remember playing through this score on high school afternoons for the soothing pleasure of all those rolling waves that had been worked out in advance for me. Also the hypnotic, DDR-like challenge of trying to break and reform all the mildly irregular patterns exactly as instructed, as they each arose in the chain – like performing a very very long magic spell that doesn’t do anything. It’s also a little like watching running water – fascinating and touching but content-less. Anyway: endless rolling landscapes are a legitimate source of imaginative pleasure to me, and I guess a lot of other people, since this piece keeps on going.

Paul Adams (?-?): Folk Rock for the Student Pianist (1966)
This is a funny item, in my opinion mis-catalogued. This should be with the pedagogical piano books in 786.3. It’s the 1966 equivalent of From A Wigwam* except these pieces are meant to trick kids into thinking they’re playing the popular-style music they so enjoy. It’s funny because the pieces are so remarkably bad. Not only are they as bad as most pedagogical pieces, but they’re embarrassingly square attempts to capture things on the piano that were never going to sound good on the piano – 1966 things that were pretty corny even in their competent commercial forms – and because they’re weird in ways that only Paul Adams himself could ever explain. Why does one of them (“You Distant Star”) have the following lyrics, to a bizarre, near-Shaggsian melody?

I see you now
I know you are
You seem so strange
so very far
(x2)
Oh, come back home
You distant star
(x2)

Far out. The rest are straight instrumentals. The first one is called “Goin’ Bats” and is a copyright runaround on the “Batman” theme, though Adams still manages to sneak in some wrong notes. Some other titles include “Barrels of Beetles,” “Monkey Business,” “Discotheque A Go Go,” “Space Echo,” and “Rock Bottom.”

To further everyone’s musical education, I here offer the score of “Rough ‘N’ Tough,” with all due apologies to Mills Music and to Mr. Adams, wherever he may be.

Richard Addinsell (1904-1977): Warsaw Concerto (arr. by Henry Geehl) (1941) (age 37)
An imitation of Rachmaninoff, of course, but done with absolutely no taste. As evidenced, for example, by the 14 consecutive C minor chords with which it begins. It’s hard to believe that this is “the popular Warsaw Concerto” about which I’ve heard so much. As a stand-in for classical music in a movie called Suicide Squadron (USA) (new title), it’s fine – potentially even effective. In snippets, maybe. But why would anyone want to listen to this or play it in its arbitrary concert entirety? The whole thing rides on the melodramatic force of a couple big chord changes, but they’re the Max-Steiner-iest sort of hack. The voicing is thick and lazy, like someone demonstrating a tune they’ve just thought up before actually working it out. The themes die out after just barely a phrase and then have nothing to do but repeat immediately, several times. And the business between the themes is just the foggiest sort of impression of the kinds of things that go on in classical music. The whole manages to remind one of the distant, abstract concept of stirring music without being even remotely stirring music. And even given that lowly goal, it could be a lot better.

Richard Addinsell: Theme from the Warsaw Concerto (1941)
This is even worse. You’d think an abbreviated version would work better than the original, but it doesn’t.

Samuel Adler (1928-): Bridges to Span Adversity (1989) (age 61)
For harpsichord. Two short movements. What little I know of Adler’s music seems all the same – shapes and noises from the field guide to 20th-century shapes and noises, bouncing around, but to no end. I can’t tell you why these doodles doodled the way they did and not otherwise and I’m not sure he could either. More importantly, they don’t sound like anything much so one’s hardly motivated to go in search of sense. A few nice touches in the mix are nicely canceled out by a lot of pointless business. This is the sort of thing that looks like it might be fun, when you see the score – a lot of clean but irregular rhythms. But that in itself isn’t music, and here it is indeed in itself. Sort of seems like the biggest compositional choices here are the scoring and titling, and the notes themselves are just a way to make sure the piece includes some notes. That may be unfair but, you know, I think a composer should aim to leave his listener convinced that that’s not the case, and I genuinely wasn’t convinced. Now that it occurs to me that Mr. Adler might, conceivably, see this, I feel like I owe it another look before I post so dismissive an appraisal. But sorry, I already returned it to the library. You can listen to the recording and decide for yourself. It’s the last two sound samples at that link.

* By John Thompson (1889-1963).

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July 23, 2007

Brahms: Sonata No. 1 in E minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 38 (1862-5)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Opus 38: Cello Sonata no. 1, in E minor

composed: 1862-5 (age 29-32)
published: 1866
first performance: Leipzig, January 14, 1871 (Emil Hegar, cello; Carl Reinecke, piano)
dedicated to Josef Gänsbacher

The classical music canon thing got off to a superb start with the number 324, which you know as Brahms: Sonata No. 1 in E Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 38 (1862-5).

I’m not sure what I’m looking to get out of this exercise – cultural literacy, I guess, whatever that is – but part of me is just rooting for each piece to be good, for its sake, for my sake, and for the canon’s sake. No question this piece is good. A fine way to push off on this journey.

The piece as a whole has a nice dark cello-y quality, and also a simplicity and openness that suits the instrument more naturally, I think, than the higher-strung passionate stuff that often gets written for it. The cello as a very graceful bear, rather than as a very heavy bird.

There are three themes in the opening movement and they are all excellent. The first in particular is beautiful and well-balanced and very satisfying. Brahms’ melodies never swoop or feint, they’re very forthright about the way they navigate the harmonies – everything lines up very precisely – and yet he manages to create all kinds of gentle subtleties. If you look closely at any bar or two of the score, there is nothing but clean, hard craftsmanship. But somewhere beyond that, something more tender and mysterious is going on. The secret seems simply to be taste and care; truly fine craftsmanship is more than the sum of its parts. This is exquisitely demonstrated in the coda of the first movement, where, within a very simple texture, the music calmly leans back slightly, and suddenly something incredibly poignant seems to be happening. Something sad and important that explains and answers everything that’s gone before. That music can do things like this at all is always remarkable, but what impresses me here is that it’s being done with no fancy shading – all clean corners and everything out in the open.

This is what impresses me about Beethoven, too: the suggestion of curves and shadows using only straight lines and primary colors. The excerpt above reminds me a little of this – the music progresses geometrically but the emotions experience some kind of non-Euclidean bend; the straight line that feels like a tensed bow. In Beethoven this sort of thing is even more pronounced because his straight lines are really, really straight. When he fails to create that transcendent effect, he writes incredibly inane stuff.* Brahms is much more versatile, and could do the fancy stuff too, when he wanted, but he usually doesn’t need to. His line is just pliant enough; no more, no less.

The second movement is the least ambitious of the three, which is customary. The fairy-tale delicacy is more compelling in the B section than the A: my only real dissatisfaction with the entire piece is with the first melody in the second movement, which doesn’t convince, especially when placed in such an exposed relationship to its accompaniment. In particular, there’s an awkwardly resolved and very un-folksy tritone in it, which could easily have been avoided. But the B section is a graceful, amusing combination of mystery and smarm.

The third movement stands slightly apart from the other two – the “age 29-32” above means that when Brahms was 29, he composed the first two movements (along with a slow movement later discarded and now presumed lost) and then three years later added this finale, which is rather more intricate and forceful than what precedes it. Appropriate for a last movement; but – and maybe this is only because I’ve been tipped off to the compositional history – to me it feels a little like a departure rather than just a finale. It’s a busy contrapuntal treatment of a triplet-y theme:

For what it’s worth, say all the liner notes, compare this theme from Bach’s Art of the Fugue:

Bach’s theme, however, starts with a pickup quarter note on the fifth of the scale, which clearly identifies the downbeat. In Brahms’ version, it is very hard to hear (or to play so that one hears) the downbeat on the first note, since the heavy falling octave places such a strong emphasis on the second note, and then the falling fifth in the second bar reinforces it. Even now, having come to know this piece very well indeed, I still tend to hear most recordings as

which is rather less satisfying a theme, especially as the movement progresses, because its harmonic shifts, no longer aligning with the barlines, are hardly as propulsive. But Brahms is in a sense working against himself here, so the duty of making this “read” properly therefore falls on the player. Most recordings I heard, however, did not fight the fight well enough.

Which brings me to the other component of this project – the actual recordings of the pieces. David Dubal, whose list the project follows, provides several recommendations for each piece. In this case his list (which is the list for both this sonata and the Cello Sonata No. 2, Op. 99) reads:

Du Pré, Barenboim: EMI Classics CDM 63298
Ma, Ax: RCA 09026-61355-2
Rostropovich, Serkin: Deutsche Grammophon 410510-2

As you’ll see in the links, those first two are out of print, luckily replaced by newer issues of the same recordings. Seeing as the book dates from 2001 when this was probably already the case, one could say that this is a count against Dubal. But whatever. More on this issue as regards later pieces.

For this piece, the immediate resources of two public libraries and the internet provided me with many options, including all three of Dubal’s suggestions; see below. The very first one I listened to was the Ma/Ax RCA recording, which is extremely warm and beautiful in terms of sound and surface; Yo-Yo Ma’s cello is probably the prettiest of anyone’s I heard. But there were a number of passages – particularly in the last movement – that I still didn’t really understand after listening to this recording repeatedly, and the performance consistently gave me some wandering attention problems. A little too much of a warm bed.

The Du Pré/Barenboim performance has much more drama in it – the score is far more “performed,” not just rendered in attractive sound – but sometimes to the point of obscurity. What was she getting so worked up about, exactly? It wasn’t always clear. Only one of the confusing passages was resolved for me.

The Rostropovich/Serkin recording didn’t add much to either the surface or the sense of the piece. Surprisingly uninvolving.

And then there are all the others… so let me generalize very broadly: Big name musicians, especially in the last quarter-century, tend to play with a reserve – or is it an over-confidence – that neglects to come down on one side or the other of the “big choices” that pieces present. I suspect that in the case of, say, Ma and Ax, there is considered thought behind the performance – it just ends up canceling itself out: “Great music is so rich – let’s exercise our maturity and sophistication by embracing all its ambiguity and not rob the listener of any listening possibilities by force-feeding them anything – let’s just make the music sing for itself.” Akin to declaiming Shakespeare in a rich sonorous voice without actually acting, because actually seeming uncertain, say, would be a disservice to the grand poetry of uncertainty.

To me this is, no matter how well-intentioned, a big mistake, and is also a convenient mask for artistic shortcomings. Is it really a gift of trust to the listener to allow him to make the interpretative choices? Or is it just wimpy?

I’ve been to a bunch of high-profile classical concerts in the last several years, and it seems like common to nearly all of them was the tendency toward the least possible “acting” – just the facts, ma’am, along with a requisite smattering of mannerisms meant to suggest thought and emotion, and, let’s not forget, greatness. A bit like this:

TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION, WHETHER TIS NOBLER, IN THE MIND, TO SUFFER, THE SLINGS AND ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE? OR, TO TAKE ARMS, AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES AND BY OPPOSING, END THEM? TO DIE TO SLEEP, NO MORE, AND BY A SLEEP, TO SAY, WE END THE HEARTACHE AND THE THOUSAND NATURAL SHOCKS THAT FLESH IS HEIR TO, TIS A CONSUMMATION, DEVOUTLY, TO BE WISHED…!

And then the cultural elite jump up and braVO, braVO!

Okay, so that would be a particularly bad one. Most of them, actually, are more like

To be or not to be, that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And to one degree or another, these recordings (and the recordings of pieces to come later in this project) generally give me some of that effect. But, and this is interesting, the older ones don’t; it’s a recent phenomenon. The Du Pré/Barenboim one that I said had more “acting” in it was from 1968. And the recording that ultimately I liked best, that stood out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of telling a story, playing the role, was the 1964 Starker/Sebok performance, the earliest one I was able to get my hands on. Definitely my recommended first choice of these. Starker may not have the polish of Yo-Yo Ma, but hearing from the piece itself, as it were, more than makes up for it.

But there are still some things that I didn’t understand until seeing the score (PDF here), because nobody, not even Starker and Sebok, really “explained” them. Namely, the passages in the third movement where the counter-melody figure (see the left hand at bars 5-6, above) metamorphoses into the second theme (i.e. bars 53-64, look in the score). Pretty much every pianist seems to get distracted by the doodles in the right hand even though the left hand is obviously in the lead, and then they completely restart the argument in midstream when the texture changes at 61. And then, am I crazy, or isn’t the left hand at 65-68 the first three notes of the theme? Nobody brought that out. If anyone knows of recordings where the performers really make this part of the piece work, I’d love to hear them.

Anner Bylsma / Lambert Orkis. Sony Classical SK 68249. 1995. Janos Starker / Gyorgy Sebok. Mercury Living Presence 434 377-2. 1964. Colin Carr / Lee Luvisi. Arabesque Z6748. 1999. Jacqueline Du Pré / Daniel Barenboim. EMI Classics 5 86233 2. 1968. Yegor Dyachkov / Jean Saulnier. Analekta 2 3167. 2002. Lynn Harrell / Stephen Kovacevich. EMI Classics 5 56440 2. 1996. Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. RCA Red Seal 82 876 59415 2. 1985. Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. Sony Classical SK 48191. 1991. Mstislav Rostropovich / Rudolf Serkin. Deutsche Grammophon 410 510-2. 1982. Heinrich Schiff / Gerhard Oppitz. Philips 456 402-2. 1996.

In the (random) order they appear above, with dates of recording.

Anner Bylsma / Lambert Orkis. Sony Classical SK 68249. 1995.
Janos Starker / Gyorgy Sebok. Mercury Living Presence 434 377-2. 1964.
Colin Carr / Lee Luvisi. Arabesque Z6748. 1999.
Jacqueline Du Pré / Daniel Barenboim. EMI Classics 5 86233 2. 1968.
Yegor Dyachkov / Jean Saulnier. Analekta 2 3167. 2002.
Lynn Harrell / Stephen Kovacevich. EMI Classics 5 56440 2. 1996.
Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. RCA Red Seal 82 876 59415 2. 1985.
Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. Sony Classical SK 48191. 1991.
Mstislav Rostropovich / Rudolf Serkin. Deutsche Grammophon 410 510-2. 1982.
Heinrich Schiff / Gerhard Oppitz. Philips 456 402-2. 1996.

* I was going to put a link on “stuff” to this but I just played through it again and, you know, it has its redeeming qualities. Ain’t no “transcendent meaning,” though, that’s for sure!

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July 16, 2007

Blade Runner (1982)

directed by Ridley Scott
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
after the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick

Another one that I saw not so much because I wanted to see it, but because everybody else has seen it, and enough is enough.

Most of the movie is about the production design, which is pretty impressive, in that comic book way. This particular brand of “wet grimy computer buildings” has pretty much gone on to become its own pulp industry. I don’t know that it all stems from this movie – probably not – but the movie is certainly a major milestone in the cultural development of “wet grimy computer buildings,” and it did come off as an important “text” to know, in that respect. Blade Runner may not contain the entire genome of futurist urban sci-fi noir, but it’s early enough and famous enough that I’m tempted to take it as spokesmovie for the genre.* Tempted, but not convinced, because it wasn’t that good. The conceptual (and visual) space in which the movie takes place has obviously been assembled with love, but the plot and pacing seem to have been worked out with relative disinterest, or perhaps in confusion. The noir playbook seemed to have been on hand but unread. Harrison Ford apparently has said something disparaging about the movie to the effect of “I played a detective who didn’t do any detecting.” He’s right – it’s not a mystery movie. It could maybe have been a sci-fi movie, but since it’s played as a mystery movie, it ends up not really being an anything movie. I haven’t read the Philip K. Dick original, but I gather that it’s not nearly as “noir” as this movie attempted to be. There’s an inherent worldview conflict between Dick’s swirling paranoid mysteries and noir’s weary hardened grimness, and it wasn’t resolved. By the time the bad guy was trying to kill our hero, then saving his life, then dying quasi-tragically, I knew we had truly lost our way – the movie didn’t know what it was about.

I saw the “Director’s Cut” version, in which one is supposed to wonder, at the end, whether maybe Harrison Ford is himself a doomed android. That this suggestion is neither surprising nor interesting – basically, it’s just another option out of the box of fictional options – is evidence that the movie hasn’t done its job.

The first shots are long-shot miniatures of the city, spewing industrial fire and looking generally like cyber-hell. Vangelis is on the soundtrack making his synth go “vwaaah.” We are meant to be awed by this vast alienness. This endless nightmare is now the world: VWAAAAH! It made me happy, somehow. Movies nowadays try to pull that kind of fantasy establishing-shot awe all the time, but they never manage it with as much force as they did back then. For one thing, miniatures and matte paintings are scarily tactile in a way that CGI will never be. For another, what then was an actual motivated directorial idea (“Let’s start with an awe-inspiring shot of the whole city”) is now enacted only as a category of cliche (“Let’s start with one of those awe-inspiring-shot-of-the-whole-city things.”) This silly example maybe informs the old question of whether it’s arbitrary to value creative ideas more when they’re new than when they’re widespread and familiar – sometimes the familiarity is not just historical fact but also inherent in the execution. That is, it’s not just that we get numb to things as they become customary – they’re actually handled differently. In this case I think the most quantifiable differences were that the shot was held much longer than it ever would be today, and that the soundtrack went straight for the gut of “cosmic awe” in a way that, I think, contemporary audiences would consider embarrassing or over-the-top. That’s most likely because neither they nor contemporary Hollywood believe that anyone will experience actual raw naked awe by just watching a fantasy movie. That’s an old-fashioned kind of goal. Old-fashioned like 1980.

I don’t know if you were aware, but Daryl Hannah has designed two board games.

Cover of the first edition of the book upon which.

* Always shocking to realize that a thing made since my birth was an “early” example of anything.

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June 29, 2007

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

written and directed by Steven Spielberg

This movie is pretty nuts. As I said at the beginning of this entry: when I was a kid, movies made sense to me only as pure successions of events and feelings – the way a pop album seems to make a vague and misty kind of overall “sense” after you get to know it. My example there was The Empire Strikes Back, which, upon adult review, revealed mundane and rational efforts toward sense-making and reminded me how much was lost on me as a kid. Close Encounters, I find, has gone in the other direction entirely – what intuitively made color-and-sound sense to me as a kid now seems bizarre because I can get nothing else out of it – it refuses to reveal any other kind of sense. If you stop to ask why anything in this movie is happening – really, almost anything in the movie – you find yourself faced with a strange and potentially disturbing fog. All roads lead back to the senses.

I nowadays find it essentially impossible not to ask “so what am I seeing, here” about things I see in movies. It’s not a conscious choice, it’s just how grown people react to stimuli. Short of being 8 years old, I’m not sure how one is supposed to re-attain the placid state of unquestioning acceptance that the movie requires. Only an 8-year-old can comprehend the conceptual chyme of He-Man or Pokemon without concentrated effort; it comes down to the ability to ignore implications. If you ignore the implications and stick to what’s happening in front of your eyes only, Close Encounters can be experienced as a reasonable succession of related events, and to the degree that they are individually interesting to watch, it’s a fun movie. But it doesn’t add up, intellectually speaking, nor – and this is what’s weird – does it even make sense as pulp. What genre of pulp is it?

The final scene seems clearly to be saying something heartwarming about brotherhood and “we’re all in this crazy universe together; re mi do do sol = love.” And the rest of the movie leads, more or less, to that scene, but it in no way lead to that message – it’s full of other, completely contradictory stuff, like the horror scene where the sky breaks into Melinda Dillon’s house. “Come in through the door! Come in through the door!” Fun to watch but absolutely unrelated. As is the main Richard Dreyfuss story of life-discarding obsession, which our hero follows to its ultimate conclusion, stepping off the planet forever. Towards what? Something transcendentally wonderful, apparently – Verklärung of some kind, the creepiest possible prize. He’s taken into the heart of mystery without it becoming unmysterious, which might mean something to us as viewers (in that sound-and-color sense) but is simply impossible for him. The absurdity is made clear by that ridiculous extra scene they added to the 1980 version, where you get to see what it looks like inside the spaceship: Looks like the rest of Roy Neary’s life is probably going to be terrifying and incomprehensible! Follow your dreams, kids! At the climactic moment, the music blossoms into “When You Wish Upon a Star” – but who said anything about wishing? He got zapped in the head! The movie wants to be about the magic and wonder of wishing, the feeling of wishing – but not wishing FOR anything.

Maybe in its objectless sense of yearning and its completely diffused generic spirituality, the movie is an unintentional metaphor for the formless discontent in the heart of the American middle class. (Or maybe everyone in contemporary society! I only know about the American middle class.) After all, we’re meant to understand that Roy Neary has, in fact, made a wish – because he’s explicitly shown to be a middle-American everyman, so he must of course have made the vague wish that every middle-American everyman makes: to maybe be rich and famous or something, I dunno. Or, like, to cure cancer, or like, fly on a UFO, something like that. I definitely want something, but I seem to have food and shelter and a job and a family and a train set and Goofy Golf, so that can’t be it, but I swear there’s something else I want. Maybe it’s to leave my wife and kids and drive through a fence with the single mom from down the street. Whatever it is, it’s real, real important and I don’t have it yet.

The movie is the fulfillment of that exact fantasy – that SOMETHING will finally happen, and it will be glorious, and important, and mean something – in all its lack of content, and that lack of content is what disturbed me this time. The big number at the end of the movie is a musical conversation between the aliens and the people, but the people do not actually participate, nor do they know what they’re saying! The computerized keyboard somehow starts to handle our half of the dialogue for us. One of the technicians comments, “It’s the first day of school, boys!” But of course neither he nor anyone else present is learning anything, or even obliged to pay attention. Someone else asks “What are we saying to each other?” I don’t know, man! I really don’t know! It’s a sequence about the joy of communication with ABSOLUTELY NO COMMUNICATION! Right now this somehow seems deeply sad to me.

When I was in high school I came up with this thing that seemed pithy at the time, possibly because I was in high school – that Close Encounters was Old Testament to E.T.‘s New Testament. Certainly the Jesus/E.T. parallels are blatant enough – healing powers, message of love, dying to save Elliott and then being resurrected and returning to the heavens while spiritually remaining “right here” – not to mention Peter Coyote’s character being named “Dr. Pontius Pilate”*. The Close Encounters/Old Testament connection that I saw at the time was only that the aliens, like the God of Abraham, are totally unpredictable and not above shock and awe tactics in pursuit of goals that only they can fully comprehend. E.T. comes in the form of a little man, more or less, whereas these gods summon clouds and pillars of fire. But now I see a further connection – that the ominous and inscrutable character of the Old Testament God arises from the choppy synthesis of the Old Testament itself – separate stories with quite different conceptions of God all rammed together – and that Close Encounters operates the same way. What mystery it contains arises from its being a fairly addled movie.

In the bonus materials, Steven Spielberg, interviewed on the set of Saving Private Ryan (1998), clearly wants to distance himself from the younger person who made Close Encounters, and who thought it was an important movie to make. He seems about as embarrassed as one could be about such a phenomenonally successful and beloved movie. Which is to say slightly embarrassed.

It’s okay, Steve. You don’t need to be embarrassed. Nobody’s paying close attention to it and I promise I won’t try to ever again. As color and sound it’s still fun. It’s more like a music video than a movie, in some ways. All that pointless forward momentum and those empty climaxes – that’s what music is. It all quite resolutely signifies nothing and who says that can’t be satisfying?

Maybe it sounds like I say that, but I don’t. Oh wait, I sort of did up there, didn’t I. When I said that I’m not 8 years old and can’t watch it like that anymore. Yeah, but maybe I can if I’m sleepy.

* Joke.

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June 26, 2007

Quickie about all human affairs

So this is what’s been in my head for the past few months. These three entries plus this one plus various history-related projects have all led me to the following, here stated efficiently because I’ve already done the rambling at those various linked entries:

The essence of the human cognitive advantage is the mental model of the world. This model is, at ground level, a hard-wired thing that evolved biologically. Above and after that, it’s a subconsciously learned thing that evolved culturally. Above and after that, it’s conscious knowledge, not evolved but rather acquired, evaluated, and revised intentionally.

The capacity to contain and employ the upper layer of this model – “conscious thought” – is part of the biological advantage, but the thought itself is not. Self-governing thought, in fact, has its own kind of power, an exponential capacity for capacities.

As I see it, the human species is in the midst of an accelerating crisis – accelerating much in the same way and for the same reasons that techological development is accelerating – wherein the conscious component of the model outstrips and discredits its own foundations, and thus itself. Like a fractal bent back on itself, sawing at its own thick roots with a bazillion infinitesimal teeth.

“Science” is a method for isolating the versatile, self-governing part of conscious thought from the roots that extend downward toward the underlying hard-wiring. It has allowed us to determine many things that are objectively true but would nonetheless have been rejected by our biologically inherited model of the world. This kind of conflict is possible because, of course, the evolutionary processes that led to our underlying model put no premium on truth, only on efficacy. Our mental foundation is just stuff that happens to work for monkeys.

That we now know this, know that we are born suckers, so to speak, is causing tremendous upheaval. Social movements form to deconstruct cultural models now known to be flawed, with no real hope of replacing them; backlash then warns that we’re tearing down our own humanity, which is absolutely true and very frightening – and nonetheless no defense of flaws, of suckerdom, because our need to be right is just as fundamental as our need to be a part of something. This process of self-discovery and informed deconstruction – and in its wake either fear and mourning or else replacement by loopy ineffective manmade crap – is now a constant feature of human life, applicable every two minutes and relevant to everything – politics, daily life, the core (“spiritual”) experience of human existence. And this leaves most of us feeling unhinged and desperate, which is bad news for everyone.

But regardless of what the pope or “conservatives” or whoever else says, there’s truly no turning back, nor was there ever a possibility of avoiding any of it; it was always inherent in conscious thought. Inevitable.

I know this is has probably been said many times before, and I know it sounds both simplistic and more than a little sci-fi when I actually put it in words. But I believe it.

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May 31, 2007

Ammons: Collected Poems (1972)

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)
Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972)
396 pp.

Roll 8. 2448: A.R. Ammons: Selected Longer Poems, but it’s preceded by Collected Poems so we go with that first. Dug out of the Brooklyn Public Library closed stacks again. It turns out it’s still in print, though. In a nice-looking edition, too.

About Ungaretti I said that my acclimation to poetry may well have to be a harsh dive into cold water, but that all the same, I doubted anyone would have recommended that I start with Giuseppe Ungaretti. I can, however, imagine that someone might have recommended I start with A. R. Ammons. I’m glad I read this, I enjoyed reading it, and I think I’ve made some definite poetry progress.

This was poetry not as “great art,” but as someone’s habit. It was like thought, the way that a diary is like thought.

That poetic language can actually resemble thought more closely than prose – because the human mind is loose even though reason itself is rigid – is something that has taken me some getting to to get to. Maybe poetry is out of fashion because in these scientific days we need better indoctrination in the difference between mind and idea. Poetry seems to me to be more about the former, in an era that heavily emphasizes the latter. Perhaps the language of psychology passing into common parlance – or something like that – has de-aestheticized* the inner experience. We tend to see the haze within quasi-scientifically, as something to be sorted and known accurately from without, if possible. Or ignored.

Earlier (like, pre-19th century) art is not particularly interested in the individual, and on the other hand, the “Romantic” idea of portraying nightmares and passions seems awfully self-pitying and counterproductive compared to Dr. Phil and Oprah and so forth, whose message of common-sense reasoned self-possession I wholly endorse, irritating and shallow though it may be.

This is exactly what I did not know about art until quite recently, then: the dividing line – that there is, or can be, a value in knowing the inner experience as is, consolation in recognizing it in art, and also value in this kind of knowledge without framework, without ground rules. That knowing what it is like to be alive is knowing something real, even if we can’t say what exactly we’re talking about. That it is possible to traffic in this kind of knowledge usefully and discriminately, even if sub-rationally. That poetry could be a real tour of real places, despite eschewing reason, because the interior life is both real and unreasoned. And that language, being in its strictest form a record of reason, must be handled specially and abnormally to accomplish this task for which it isn’t quite cut out. You have to package the not-quite-reason in sloppy poetic chunks of words or else it won’t survive being expressed.

A.R. Ammons himself, in fact, has a typical and lovely metaphor for this last notion in his Essay on Poetics in this very volume:

…
stop on any word and language gives way:

the blades of reason, unlightened by motion, sink in,
melting through, and reality’s cold murky waters
accept the failure: for language heightens by dismissing reality,

the sheet of ice a salience controlling, like a symbol,
level of abstraction, that has a hold on reality and suppresses
it, though formed from it and supported by it:

motion and artificiality (the impositional remove from reality)
sustain language: nevertheless, language must
not violate the bit, event, percept,

fact–the concrete–otherwise the separation that means
the death of language shows…

Which brings me to the book itself and how it relates. Ammons helped solidify my confidence in everything above because he is a modern-day American man, living, like me and my friends, within an essentially scientific philosophical framework, who is nonetheless writing from and about thought and experience, not rationality. In reading his musings about wind and sand and seeds and flowers, in terms of patterns and anomalies and larger patterns, in terms of vague general principles of perception and being like the one vs. the many, nexuses vs. peripheries… I recognized the quality and flavor of these thoughts, even in their specifics, and also while recognizing it, knew clearly (because Ammons knew it clearly) that this was not quite reason. That it was a sort of thing that lived in my head that was actually served better by loose, poetic language than it ever could be by straight talk. That was deeply satisfying!

Ammons’ poetry was also satisfying in itself. It was, at its best, a deep and analytic exploration of the kind of thought and experience that I found sympathetic in that long silent film of eddying water and swirling smoke I wrote about last year. His subject matter is mostly nature, observed with extreme care and precision, but the real subject is the same as his technique: meditation on the world. Which is where my mind goes when I meditate on nature – back in on itself, or down to the underlying forms – so I felt very much at home with these. When I understood them.

Of course they’re not all “good” in the sense of deserving isolated attention – there are hundreds of poems in here, most of them seemingly unrevised trains-of-thought – and that was actually reassuring and freed me to enjoy them more naturally. Reading the whole collection also meant gradually growing accustomed to the particulars of his semi-private language. The intended resonances of certain words within his language, such as “saliences” and “suasions,” only slowly became clear. I was okay with that; it was satisfying to know that I’d done it and gotten more fluent at it as I went, just as it’s satisfying to observe oneself getting better at any repeated task.

The poems are assembled in chronological order, but without identifying the original collections that are compiled here. The first 50 pages or so were less pleasurable early work in a different, more mannered style. That, ultimately, wasn’t a problem either – watching that style evolve and fall away over the years, as Ammons grew more and more comfortable just writing stuff down, so to speak, was in itself satisfying to observe.

One last thing I took away from this. There is art designed expressly to communicate with outsiders, and then there is art produced simply as a function of the artist, as a process. Outsiders are welcome but no special accommodations have been made for them. I have generally frowned at the latter; cutting the audience out of the equation seems selfish or at least self-centered. But having read this work, which was far closer to “mere process” than I am usually comfortable with, showed me that I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss art just because it seems oblivious to me and I’m implicitly expected to run out to meet it. Passing through these 400-ish pages was more like very casually strolling out to meet the artist by following the sound of his typewriter, somewhere near a suburban window in the late 60s, and finding, when I got there, that I approved of what he was doing after all. So there’s a moral there for me to take away.

Everyone always likes sample poems, right? I typed up this one even though it’s hardly one of his finest and isn’t totally characteristic either. But when I first turned to it in the book was one of the moments when I took the time to articulate some of the stuff above to myself. It’s a poem about lines, or rather about perceptions of lines. That I could nod at it and think, “yeah, he nailed it, lines are like that” struck me. There was absolutely no way to paraphrase in rational terms what I had nodded at – I was nodding at the recognition of the shared sub-rational mind. Ah-ha!

Lines

Lines flying in, out: logarithmic
curves coiling
toward an infinitely inward center: lines
weaving in, threads lost in clustral scrawl,
weaving out into loose ends,
wandering beyond the border of gray background,
going out of vision,
not returning;
or, returning, breaking across the boundary
as new lines, discontinuous,
come into sight:
fiddleheads of ferns, croziers of violins,
convoluted spherical masses, breaking through
ditchbanks where briar
stem-dull will
leave and bloom:
haunch line, sickle-like, turning down, bulging, nuzzling
under, closing into
the hidden, sweet, dark meeting of lips:
the spiralling out
or in
of galaxies:
the free-running wavy line, swirling
configuration, halting into a knot
of curve and density: the broken,
irreparable filament: tree-winding vines, branching,
falling off or back, free,
the adventitious preparation for possibility, from
branch to branch, ash to gum:
the breaker
hurling into reach for shape, crashing
out of order, the inner hollow sizzling flat:
the longnecked, uteral gourd, bass line
continuous in curve,
melodic line filling and thinning:
concentrations,
whirling masses,
thin leaders, disordered ends and risks:
explosions of clusters, expansions from the
full radial sphere, return’s longest chance:
lines exploring, intersecting, paralleling, twisting,
noding: deranging, clustering.

And now down here I want to recount one more thing. One day while I was reading this one on the subway (occasionally wondering what I would think of any other person that I saw reading such a thing), and half-musing about “what is poetry really” and “what kind of relationship can I or anyone else today really have with poetry” a guy with a sales pitch walked into the car and right in front of me started talking to us all by saying loudly, “Who here likes reading poetry?” Which seemed to me like a very strange coincidence, and for a second I considered holding out my book and saying, “look, I do!” But I didn’t. Nonetheless it seemed like what he was about to say was meant especially to encourage me that poetry was still alive and well. He continued, in a practiced stream of oration:

If you like reading poetry, you should check out my book, “Corner Stores in the Middle of the Block.” That’s my poetry book, that’s me on the front – and that [shifting his wares] is my novel, that’s me on the back. [on the front was a sexy lady] It’s called “Pretty Ugly.” You can get them from me or they’re also on the line at “Poetry Is A Live” dot com. That’s my book, there’s 38 poems in there. I have a poem that’s not in the book, and it goes like this: “If America became a cashless country / what would bums beg for?” I have another poem that I wrote for my sister, and it goes like this: “The difference between a pretty girl and a ugly girl is / ugly girl’s a better cook.” I have another poem, and it goes like this…”

and so on. If you go to “poetry is a live dot com” you can, oddly enough, see video of the guy bouncing around on the subway platform – i.e. more or less what I saw.

The only point of this anecdote is that at the exact moment that I was wondering whether poetry was, for want of a better word, alive, someone amazingly showed up to give me seriously mixed messages on that very issue.

* Maybe “de-personalized” or “de-humanized” would be a better way to say it – except those sound so bitter!

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May 22, 2007

Short Cuts (1993)

directed by Robert Altman
screenplay by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
based on the writings of Raymond Carver

This one’s just a two-word review: “Shit Cuts.”

No, just kidding. But I do want to keep this short, and I wasn’t thrilled about this pretentious ponderous movie. All the Robert Altman movies that I’ve seen – which is only a few, but a famous few – have this remarkably dead, false feeling. The camera just sits there (except for when it occasionally careens around hyper-purposefully) and the actors go about their scenes like actors going about scenes. Maybe it’s supposed to play as a cool, literary distance, but to me it usually feels like the bread never rose. I see that things have been written, staged, performed, and shot, but I feel like they’ve been intentionally prevented from cohering to one another by any means other than pressure; that once they leave the frame, all the elements clatter back down on the table, totally inert. There’s no sense of a force of art or belief or anything that binds the actors to each other, to the sets, to the writing. There’s no stick in it. And given the kinds of things Altman does oh-so-intentionally – parallel stories rubbing shoulders, parallel dialogues rubbing shoulders – not to mention the fact that his movies, including this one, are so widely respected: I have to think that the loose, limp, humorless, ain’t-got-that-swing of every damn scene is somehow part of some kind of vision. But I don’t think it gets him anything; I think it’s just a mistake, a basic artistic shortcoming. The Player is good despite the fact that it feels like a world made of all soft-velcro, no hooks. Credit Thomas Newman’s score for submerging the whole movie in a vibe, any vibe, and thus saving it for the audience. Gosford Park was also dead on its feet, but at least had busy writing and production design that could be enjoyed nonetheless. What bits I was able to like about Short Cuts I liked similarly – only with a considerable handicap taken into account. As scenes played out, I was able to imagine how, in their original Carver short story form, they might have had some kind of edge. But as they actually stood, they had been completely defanged by the blandness that was in every frame. Nashville saved itself somewhat by having some really peculiar content; everything in Short Cuts, unfortunately, was really very straightforward. All the less reason that it should have been allowed to be so flagrantly slack. I’m all for leisurely pacing, but only when the film goes deep enough to sustain my thoughts over the long shots. Here each long shot was just a chance to ensure that the ball was good and dropped.

Lyle Lovett is in this movie as a baker. He supposedly acts testy and then cruel and then remorseful and maybe some other stuff, but you could have fooled me because it’s Lyle Lovett and he just looks like a banana bread the whole time. The whole movie was like that, Robert Altman apparently likes it – I mean, he cast Lyle Lovett! – and it’ll take a whole lot of Siskels to convince this Ebert that it’s anything but clumsy and deadening. And three hours of clumsy and deadening makes for a boring-ass movie.

Didn’t expect myself to be this negative! At the time I was open to it; I didn’t mind watching it. But in retrospect it really let me down. Let the record show.

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May 18, 2007

The Plague (1947)

by Albert Camus (1913-1960)
translation into English (1948) of La Peste by Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969).

Next roll: 1304. That’s The Plague by Camus. The first listed work by Camus, at position 1303, to which I would normally fall back, is The Stranger, but ha HA! I’ve actually already read The Stranger! Even by my most self-critical standard, I’ve read The Stranger – I read it only last year (since this site started!) and remember it well. In general, anything I read prior to graduating from college is going to be considered suspect, which means there are only a very few great books I’ll be able to check off this list. But this is one of them, and I got to it on only the 7th try.

Furthermore, a copy of The Plague, seen above, had already been sitting on my bookshelf, having been given to me for my birthday last year by my grandmother, after hearing that I had read and enjoyed The Stranger, which she had given me previously. And my roommate, helping himself to my books, had very recently read my copy of The Plague and strongly recommended it to me. And then the magic-number machine spat it out for me. Think of that. Which is lucky, since apparently I’m more likely to listen to random.org than to my grandmother or my roommate.

The Plague was excellent, a masterpiece. Very powerful.

This sincere praise is pretty bland compared to my elaborate whining about books I liked less, but that’s the way it goes.

The Stranger impressed me as an intelligent, memorable, well-conceived, well-controlled piece of work. But this was monumental in a way that the earlier work wasn’t – it felt important, which is a word I generally don’t feel comfortable applying to a piece of art. In this case I feel comfortable. The sense of moral purpose behind this work was intense, and the depth of thought justified that intensity.

It’s a commonplace to say that the function of art is to show us things about life, about the real world, but often this seems to be a bland justification after-the-fact for art that, in practice, feels like it has some other kind of aspirations. This was art that felt like it wanted to show me something about the real world, like the author was aware of the full scope of what he as a writer might try to accomplish morally – and was attempting it. I felt, in reading it, that the book wanted to convey a moral content more than it wanted to be, say, “intelligent” or “fine,” and that it only was those things – which it very much was – because they contribute to the power of the work as a whole. The ultimate purpose of which is moral.

It’s been hard for me to write anything here about the book in part because I felt obliged to summarize that moral content, and found that I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what had nonetheless struck me as vital and coherent in the reading. But – it is also a commonplace (common, anyway) to say that one writes a poem rather than prose because the specific intended “meaning” can only be expressed as a poem. And I think the same could apply here. The philosophical content of this book has been expressed as a novel because the novel conveys a whole that would have to be fractured to be expressed more prosaically. Inherently philosophical though that whole may be. The book is a vision rather than a message.

That said, there is at least one facet of the moral content that I can articulate (and I see that it again relates to the general philosophical line I’ve found myself on recently). That being: Life is meaningless and all our values, emotions, institutions, customs, etc. are illusions, flimsy constructions. And the clarity of this knowledge is of course a kind of horrible, inescapable, deadening sobriety for those who attain it. But, NONETHELESS, despite life’s being meaningless, we must continue to do good for one another. That it is possible to know that only we ourselves imbue all things with meaning, and still, in all clarity, believe that these meanings deserve to be honored.

I think this is about as vital a philosophical message as could be conveyed to modern times. The elephant in the room of our contemporary culture is that everybody already knows that ultimately everything is meaningless. Camus describes a society that resists and resists this knowledge as it is gradually worn down by indifferent nature (only his most intellectually inclined protagonists already know it). The society I live in, far safer and more affluent, nonetheless is much closer to the philosophical precipice at all times. It’s just sort of in the air, and we’re all pretty much braced to wince at – or shrug at – or in some cases, try to drown out by protesting – the sad but unsurprising news that we’re evolutionarily programmed to believe everything that we believe and feel everything that we feel, and that the indifferent universe discovered by science is the real bottom line. We would love to turn back from this knowledge to a time of real beliefs, but we can’t in good faith, because the arguments that got us here can never be erased and will always be rational. So we’re stuck here, and I think this new philosophical reality is, at some level, responsible for most of what ails the world today – because nobody can quite figure out what we’re supposed to do when we know that nothing is important important, “in the scheme of things.” But Camus, 60 years ago, was already showing us characters who are at that precipice, or over it, and who are driven to do good anyway. They believe that the meanings that we share, even though we invent them and know that we do, can still be worthy. This is a next step for all of us, a step that the human race as a whole must gradually take. It’s something that we can all nod at, but to feel it in the gut of the culture will take a long time.

I assume this is what is meant by the quote on the back cover, from the New York Times: “Of such importance to our time that to dismiss it would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.” That’s strong stuff but by the end I recognized the sentiment. I didn’t, by the way, think that this book about death and meaninglessness was “depressing.” Like I said, these days we’ve all kind of got that in our veins, between the lines of everything.* What was far more striking to me about The Plague was the fact that it knew this and was still hopeful, human-affirming. A grim and sober kind of hope – a mournful kind of hope – but extremely clear-eyed and thus more affecting than anything sentimental might have been.

I don’t always want all this in a book, and there are many sorts of things I often want out of a book that this did not provide, or provided only feebly. But what it was, it was with great force. Definitely one of the two or three best books I’ve ever read.

* Notice how I shrugged off The Floating Opera even as it said this seemingly shocking stuff, simply because it wasn’t well-written enough – nihilism itself gets a yawn, and trumping nihilism with more nihilism is just doodling.

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