Category Archives: Older Stuff

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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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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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 12, 2007

Absil: Alternances, Op. 140 (1968)

So bear with me here – I went to the music library and went to the piano section (MU 786.4) and checked out the FIRST score. In shelf order. Still with me?

The first score of the thousands in MU 786.4, at least on Thursday, was Alternances, Op. 140, by Jean Absil (1893-1974).

It’s remarkable, if unsurprising, just how much of the music that has ever managed to get published and shelved in libraries is nonetheless completely forgotten. The fact that 90% of the books in the library are obscure and unloved is less specifically imbued with pathos, for me, than the fact that 90% of the music in the library is obscure and unloved, which is somehow quite moving.

Getting out and playing the alphabetically-very-first score is a typically arbitrary/systematic/arbitrary move on my part, but it’s also sentimentalism: I am likely the first person ever to embrace and consider this score – this piece of art, this expression from a fellow human being! – for its distinction of being the very first volume on the shelf. A meaningless distinction, but an obvious one. One that you’d think would at least partially have saved this one piece out of thousands from being completely forgotten. But it hasn’t at all. But now I’m here, lavishing attention on it.

Jean Absil (1893-1974) was a prolific, fairly prominent Belgian composer of the twentieth century. Prominent for Belgium. Look, they named a school after him. Si ce portrait vous ressemble, vous avez l’esprit “Absil” !

He’s no Truid Aagesen but he’s definitely one of the top contenders in the “first in line” game. In general, Adolphe Adam usually wins that one, his alphabetic predecessors, Absil included, being too obscure for most purposes. If the playing field is big enough to include Absil, he’s also got to watch out for Karl Friedrich Abel – not to mention Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco, though the Dall’ is a wild card that sometimes puts him out of the running altogether.

But this time Absil won, more power to him. Alternances is a late work, written when the composer was 75, but he seems to have been quite productive in his last years, turning out about 50 of his 162 opuses after the age of 70. Fluency of output like that, especially in an old man, seems to have meant, at least in the twentieth century, that the pieces themselves will be seen as statistics rather than known on their own terms. This is certainly the case with the later output of, say, Hindemith and Milhaud, and others who “just kept writing” – I mean, nobody knows the pieces at the bottom of this list. Some of Absil’s earlier output is known and recorded. But not known to me. And this piece, Alternances, so far as I can tell, has never been commercially recorded.

It’s got a lot in common with Milhaud, actually, with whom Absil was friends. As with Milhaud, the overall affect is easygoing and the impetus is generally improvisatory. Or exploratory. The sounds are all familiar and unexceptional Frenchy sounds; all deeply anachronistic by 1968 but I don’t have a problem with that. The piece is a continuous string of very mildly linked episodes, potentially suggesting four movements (Andante/Vivo; Con fuoco; Allegretto; Molto vivo e leggiero) fused together. But the first of these four sections follows a meandering path within itself, and the second one has some problems that I’ll talk about in a second, so the effect is a bit vague, for me, until the second half of the piece. Then things get a bit better. The third section – marked Allegretto but he surely intends something more languid – makes a bit more sense to me. It’s sort of song-like (or flute-solo-like) and has some nice features. And then the finale is a perpetual motion toccata thing, much in the mold of several Ravel finales, with a satisfying 7/8 groove. It has some problems working everything out within the restrictive texture it sets up for itself, but there are several fun effects at the very end and I’m sure it could be sold as exciting in concert.

Many details, as well as the overall sound and formal approach, reminded me of Roussel’s Sonatina (1912), which is, despite being written 56 years earlier by a less mature composer, a more assured and more interesting piece. Absil’s piece is far less muscular and flirts throughout with the danger of being too thin and too loosely knit to hold our attention. Furthermore he seems to have made some miscalculations. On the title page it says circa 14′ but, having played through the whole thing several times, trying different tempi, I cannot for the life of me make it last longer than 12 minutes, and that only by making everything too slow for my taste. The section marked “con fuoco” sounds stupid (totally senza fuoco) played slow – and yet the slow tempo seems to be necessary not just to match the overall duration, but because he throws in a few nasty bars of 16th-notes in the middle of the section that simply cannot be played to tempo unless the rest is slowed down to a drag. Maybe I’m just not getting it. But I think I am.

The weakest aspect of the whole piece is that it relies far too frequently on boring sequential repetition of static material. The sequences are always very short, but still. One of the classic earmarks of second-rate-ness.

The title, I assume, refers to the various figures involving alternation of the hands, which are prominent in several places, as well as to the general alternation of different types of material as the piece progresses (perhaps also alternation of augmented/chromatic harmonies with modal ones, as established at the beginning of the piece and emphasized toward the end).

So on the one hand, I’m saying that this is a mediocre and troubled piece. And I think that’s true. But on the other, let me say that my sentimental side also is touched by the fact that this TOTALLY OBSCURE WORK is far from worthless. The last two sections have their share of genuine charm. More to the point, I had a perfectly good time spending a few hours with the piece and getting to know it.

What does this mean, that even the mediocre isn’t so bad, and that even the better-than-mediocre is doomed to languish in anonymity? Nothing I didn’t already know, but there it is again.

To celebrate its brief time off the eternal shelf, and to nominally offer this sad visitor from the realms of oblivion a tiny chance to live a little more, I here offer up to the internet a scan of the score.

Absil: Alternances, Op. 140

This is a violation of Belgian copyright and I will gladly remove this file if contacted by CeBeDeM, the Centre Belge de Documentation Musicale – or, tell you what, I’ll remove it if I see that more than 10 people have downloaded it. Friends, if you enjoy Alternances by Jean Absil, please purchase a copy – currently on sale for EUR 9,12 (~ $12.30). Plus shipping from Brussels, mind you.

Here is the midi I produced the last time I played it through. As I’ve said before about such things, this is far from a good listen. But it could be a helpful guide to the score. I don’t recommend listening to this UNLESS you’re using it to follow along with the score.

It is possible that my dad will do this, or that he will start it and then stop it because it is boring; it is also quite possible that nobody will do this. But I do not discount the possibility that a complete stranger will listen and follow along, just as I, stumbling unpredictably into the ghost-town-quiet websites of anonymous nobodies, have clicked on their links with genuine interest and sympathy, if not necessarily admiration. And if Jean Absil (1893-1974) benefits from it, who can say that I haven’t done good here.

Alternately – ! – if nobody ever listens to the mediocre thing I offer them, I am in that respect in the good company of Jean Absil, and the whole crowd behind him in line.

This is the new social reality that the internet puts us face to face with. We the people are like unto the millions of unknown books at the library, shelved alphabetically because any other system would get out of hand. Google can direct us to one another but we no longer can; we are greater in number than our hearts can carry.

Si ce portrait vous ressemble, vous avez l’esprit “Absil” !

This is what I’ve been recently saying to the two people I talk to in real life. I want to write about it eventually; obviously this isn’t the place but all this talk about Absil and websites going unread put me in mind of it so I let out a few cryptic sentences. More to come someday.

Alternances will go back to the library on Tuesday. Wish it well!

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May 11, 2007

Canon perpetuus

The reading-the-western-canon-randomly project is going really well for me, so naturally I thought to apply the same technique to other cultural lacunae.

We had some discussion about doing this for the visual arts but that becomes difficult twice over – 1) because apart from some blatantly commercial “The 10,000 Grrrrrrreatest Paintings Ever!” compendiums, there don’t seem to have been many attempts to articulate an Objective Master List of important artworks; 2) because it’s not clear what degree and depth of exposure ought to be considered satisfactory.

I was coincidentally thinking about this while thinking about jigsaw puzzles. The kind of intimate feeling I get for the geography/personality of a jigsaw puzzle image, while solving it, is a depth of engagement I rarely if ever reach at the museum. Solving a jigsaw engages the analytical/creative side of aesthetic perception – sort of a cheap and stupid way to simulate the process of painting the picture yourself. In sifting and sorting the pieces you end up having to recognize color relations and their significance, formal relationships, proportion, detail, etc. This is not the case with paint-by-number or tracing or any other common crypto-creative task I can think of. Art-school-style copying by sight obviously gives valuable access to the thought and craft behind the painting. But I think maybe jigsaw puzzling, being utterly non-technical, requiring no thought about paint itself, might actually have a more direct relationship to the task of viewing and understanding the finished art.

Maybe not – anyway, so the visual arts are still a bit up in the air.

Movies would be easier to manage systematically, of course – and god knows there are enough lists out there to work with – but 1) I don’t feel like my movie intake needs any kick in the pants like this, and 2) I’m not as convinced as I am in the case of literature that my experiences of “great” “important” movies have been genuinely more valuable to me than my experiences of the lesser stuff. This is odd, come to think of it. With literature there’s really no question that my sense of whether something is “good” and whether I’m glad to have it in my life are basically linked and proportional. Movies I’m less sure. It may simply be that my exposure to “art” movies has been too limited, in proportional relationship to multiple viewings of Back to the Future, to affect my overall sense of what movies are and ought to be.

Also came across this when I was looking into the issue, wherein Paul Schrader says he started to write a film canon book and then got disenchanted with the idea that it should exist at all. Eh. I’m not gonna get into it here, but despite my distaste for Bloom’s idea that his canon is “for real” in any sense, lists are valuable, as my exercise shows, and a well-made list of film worth seeing would be appreciated.

Okay, anyway, so the one that I am, in fact, currently taking on, is music, by which I’m talking about classical music – by which I’m talking about, if you insist, “Western” classical music, which is what you absolutely already knew I meant.

There are a bunch of “canon” type lists out there about classical music, but many of them list recordings rather than works, since these books are written for the “just tell me what to buy” market. As far as I can tell, the only pretentiously high-minded Bloom-style effort is David Dubal’s The Essential Canon of Classical Music, which satisfies me in terms of being both grandiose in its claims and also attempting to be evenhanded in representing the long-term cultural consensus rather than anything snootier. I.e. it includes Carmina Burana.

Of course if you look too close at any such list, the arbitrary nature starts to become apparent. So, having looked it over initially, I’m not going to evaluate any more. I have a list, and it has 750 works on it – which is a nice big round number.

Beth’s joining me on this one, by the way.

The rules are: once a piece comes up, we have to listen to it attentively, in its entirety, at least 3 times. That may seem easygoing but it’s nothing to snort at in the case of Parsifal and the like. But I’ll be honest with you – that’s just there so that Beth can stay in the game and so that I can move on fairly quickly in case of something really desperately unappealing. My actual personal goal is to listen to a piece until I know it and get it to my satisfaction. In my case I’ve found that this generally requires at least 9 listens.

What with ipods and the subway, though, this is actually a snap. Much easier than reading German poetry on the subway, which I have found is impossible.

The first Essential Canonic Classical Musical Work has been completed and will be written about someday soon, now that I got this intro out of the way.

I make a lot of hurdles for myself.

February 11, 2007

Salonen: Piano Concerto (2006-2007)

Esa-Pekka Salonen (1958- )
Piano Concerto (2006-2007)
Yefim Bronfman, piano
New York Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen

[Now with sound clips! Climax? of the first movement]

World premiere! Well, last week it was.

Didn’t really do it for me, nor, I think, for the composer or the soloist or anyone else involved. There was a little interview session prior to the performance and a Q&A afterward, and the feeling in the air was, “The piece isn’t terrific but the commission has definitely been fulfilled.” Bronfman couldn’t be brought to say much at all about the piece – though I thought his performance was strong. I’ve seen him perform once before and heard several of his recordings and have never been particularly impressed, but this time I was. Of course, there was less occasion for him to attain clarity here. Or at least I was less aware of what sort of clarity I could hope for from him.

The piano part certainly seemed to be full of difficulties. Not clear to what end. The piece was imitative of a thousand things from the repertoire and didn’t have much in the way of form beyond the list of consecutive episodes that constituted the composer’s program note. Motivic unity is not form; the fact that one section develops a previous section or is derived from the same material is not a reason for that section to exist. The piece seemed to want to be a guided stroll past a series of landscapes, possibly fantastical ones – several references to sci-fi imagery in the descriptive notes – in other words, a piece that’s going to live or die on the strength of its color and variety and mood, forget form. If that’s the choice you’re making – and I generally have no problem with that choice – then your superficial effects had better be really good, and these were only so-so. It didn’t help that John Adam’s Piano Concerto (Century Rolls) is built on very similar lines (even in some of the particulars), out of very similar materials, and gleams and pops and whizzes that much louder and brighter. And I don’t think that’s his greatest piece. But in the game of superficial panache, he’s just much more practiced.

At one point in the program note he says that something happens “accompanied by a very lightly scored orchestra.” It wasn’t “very lightly scored” at all! Only by the standards of this constantly thick-textured piece, maybe. Trends in both classical and pop music have definitely driven the contemporary composer to believe that a big part of his job is arranging the dense web of the orchestra, and I certainly appreciate a nicely worked-out texture – but actually it takes much more craft and taste to let the the instruments be exposed in their simplest guises. Endless orchestral busywork starts to seem like a way of avoiding the strictures of that craft. Another sign is overuse of tuned drums, which are, to me, just a big traffic sign that advertises “the clamor of modern orchestral music!” and little else.

Salonen had a section he called “Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds” – i.e. an idyll by and for robots – which is a promising enough musical concept. I just didn’t think his synthetic folk music or his artificial birds were particularly striking. Whereas the mechanical nightingale in Stravinsky’s Nightingale – created much more simply and efficiently than this thick-textured thing – delighted me the first time I heard it. Casting off form might seem to be freeing – he talked a lot about the ideal of a piece developing organically – but it actually just places even greater stress on the quality of your musical surface, and more formal import on its subtleties. This surface just wasn’t handled with as much control as it required.

I can now add several more things, because I have obtained, er, a reviewer’s copy of the score. One: that this piece has the telltale signs of having been composed on a synthesizer and then orchestrated to match. Two: that the chords that come off as copies of Scriabin, Messiaen and Ravel are actually spelled all funny, because they’ve been obtained by some quasi-modal procedures, which makes the imitations both more and less frustrating. Less, because they seem not to be conscious imitations after all (as the New York Times assumed they were). More, because what’s happened is he’s set up some pseudo-system to make his piece have its own peculiar “sound-world,” as they say, and then, letting his ear guide him through the chords it produces, has ended up choosing the ones that are familiar from other music. Basically he tried to do the kind of scale-as-harmony-as-melody thing that Scriabin did, but without the extreme rigor or the maniacal quality. But those are exactly what make Scriabin’s music work. Instead we end up with something that sounds like John Adams, but less well-orchestrated and with even more noodling, if you can believe that.

Another thought, thunk both at the concert and again upon study of the score – there are thousands and thousands of ways to deploy the composer’s toolbox to “develop” material, and most of them absolutely unfollowable. To disguise some piece of music such that people can’t recognize it is the easiest thing in the world; in fact it will happen whether you like it or not unless you are very very careful and make only the slightest movements. The contemporary composer’s need to show that he’s done hard work and created a complicated, priceworthy, thing tends to drive him to deploy trick after trick after trick, like a movie progressing from a dream sequence directly to a flashback directly to a montage directly to a movie-within-a-movie. Much harder for everyone is to maintain a narrative that can be followed, and then, when it is followed, reveals something that interests people. Easy, and tired, to say that that’s old-fashioned. It very obviously isn’t, it’s just harder.

I don’t believe that composers, writers or other artists now are less talented or stupider than artists of yore – I just think they’ve been prodded and taunted with a bunch of imaginary nonsense that they spend all their energy trying to duck out from under, and it doesn’t take long for all that twitching to become second-nature; unshakable even after someone points out there’s nothing to duck. I think everyone’s shell-shocked by this phantom idea that some damage has been done to the human spirit that must be given its due. That’s some rather extravagant self-pity modern man has going. Yes, we may have the threat of actual self-annihilation whirring somewhere far over our heads, and there’s definitely something grotesque about the falseness and noise that technology and commercial culture have imposed on the world – but please, this means that wanting to look at a painting is now naive? Unless the painting somehow excuses itself? Who made this up? People who lived through the Peloponnesian War probably said, “I saw so many atrocities; Nothing will ever be the same – no more sculpture of Aphrodite in the garden – we know more than that now, our souls are forever fractured.” But that’s just individuals being traumatized, not society. Plus, society seems to put itself back together pretty fast. Why does this wounded sense of lost innocence have to live on forever in the arts? Sitting in the concert hall, having to think about all the reasons why this piece was what it was rather than one of the myriad things we all know to make sense – I have to say that I felt no communal awareness of the uniquely contemporary absurdity of the human condition – I just felt a weary, dutiful openness to nonsense.

Two anecdotes and then I’ll stop, I’ll really stop. 1) During the Q & A, a guy asked whether he had been right in hearing “Gershwin and American jazz” in the piece. Salonen said that he had two answers, the first being some chat about his experiences with America and L.A., the second being the laugh line: “Why not?” I recount this only to point out that “why not” might be down-to-earth but it’s still on the defensive. The Q & A guy had obviously been happy to recognize Gershwin sounds; there wasn’t the slightest hint of animosity in the room toward the idea of using those sounds in a piece. But that animosity was somewhere, lurking, and Salonen couldn’t help but direct his answer at it. Or, rather, he directed his answer conspiratorially at the audience, as though maybe we were all going to sneak out of class while the teacher wasn’t looking. Who is this teacher?? World War II? World War I? Snap out of it!

2) During the initial interviews, the man behind me, one of the hundreds of aging, practiced orchestra-goers that made up the bulk of the audience, muttered “Bullshit!” angrily under his breath. It wasn’t clear what was being objected to – Salonen was in the middle of saying something about trying to let music grow rather than force it into a form. I suppose the man might have thought that compositional approach was bullshit, or maybe that metaphors in general were bullshit. But I think it’s more likely that he came prepared for some kind of bullshit, was eager to call it by its name, and just jumped the gun a little. This is a perfect example of what happens to criers of “wolf,” e.g. the past 50 years of art. Something something, in a crowded theater, something something. Okay, the end.

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July 26, 2006

Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror (1997)

directed by Charles Cecil
written by Dave Cummins and Jonathan Howard
story and design by Charles Cecil, Dave Cummins, Jonathan Howard, and Steve Ince

developed for PC and PlayStation by Revolution Software
published for PC by Virgin Interactive Entertainment

~8 hrs

Another ridiculous piece of pulp from the waning days of the computer adventure game. As usual, I played it in search of pearls of game design, plot design, or puzzle design. But there were none to be had. I’m currently trying to piece together a pulpy Indiana Jones-type plot of my own, and my specific hope was that this game would spark some thought processes in that direction. But it didn’t.

I don’t need to complain at any length about the difference between junk and careless junk, because I have before. This was careless junk. The plot and game elements seemed to have been thrown into a salad spinner and left where they landed, then stitched together using the laziest possible game design. That is to say, a lot of “conversations” – click on the icon of an object or person you’ve encountered to ask about it. About 50% of the spoken dialogue in this game is myriad variations on the classic line “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that!” – one per object per speaking character. When games went “talkie,” few game designers seemed to have considered that it takes a lot longer to listen than to read, and that listening to half-assed dialogue being spoken slowly is a huge drag compared to speed-clicking through half-assed printed text. The sub-adolescent sub-greeting-card sub-Bazooka-Joe “cracks” about every stupid object in the game – that underpants are a recurrent source of humor ought to give you a sense – are incredibly wearying, not to mention embarrassing, when performed by actual humans. A further source of weariness is the incredibly, infuriatingly slow walking animation that propels your character from one point of interest to another. Of the 8 hours that I’m estimating to have spent with this game, the majority of them were spent watching my choices play out in excruciatingly uneventful detail, one foot in front of the other, or else listening to every character in the game say, about every object in the game, “Gosh, a newspaper article about an upcoming total solar eclipse? I wouldn’t know nothin’ about solar eclipses!” This problem of “what do you actually do” is fundamental to all story-meets-game productions, but by 1997 there was enough accumulated wisdom on this subject that the designers should have known far better.

The actual downright incoherence of some sections of the game is evidence, to my eye, that this product was rushed to market, or else the budget was reduced after the design phase. Both the introduction and the ending are animated sequences that felt like just slightly less than a bare minimum, as though most of the storyboard had been pared away in desperation. At some points, a thing we haven’t yet heard about is suddenly assumed to be common knowledge: evidence of either a cut section or insufficient playtesting. Either way, shoddy stuff.

Plot: When the solar eclipse comes, an evil Mayan god will be released from a SMOKING MIRROR where he’s been imprisoned for centuries, and destroy all mankind, and that’s what the evil smuggler/general wants because he’s crazy or something. There are several sacred stones that can stop it from happening, and then the bad guys kidnap you because you have one, and then you get away, figure out what’s going on, find the other stones – one was buried by a pirate, the other is in the British Museum – and stop it. Hm. In summary it sounds almost like it works. But I assure you it doesn’t. The causal linkages suggested by my summary are not actually part of the gameplay.

The evil god, when he appears briefly in the final animated sequence, looks like Skeletor, which is to say not even remotely Mayan. That’s the last straw!

The previous game, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars – or, as I bought it on its US release back in 1996, Circle of Blood (awesome!) – suffered from the same slow-walking, lame-talking problems, but the whole production felt much more cared-for, and the plot progression managed to be genuinely entertaining. The third game in the series (Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003)) improved on the walk-cycle annoyance with a newfangled, fairly attractive 3D engine, and managed to keep the comedy at a good solid 12-to-14-year-old level – and, most importantly, it had a sense of atmosphere. Ridiculous as the word “taste” is in these surroundings, it really comes down to taste. Some of this crap is the good stuff and some isn’t. Is a skeletal Mayan god trapped in a magic mirror more stupid than a Templar conspiracy to harness cosmic energies? Absolutely it is.

What’s the lesson to learn here? That in writing my own bit of junk, I should be careful not to confuse the dumb with the merely stupid. Harder than it sounds! My sympathies do go out to Charles Cecil and company. But they failed. I guess the moral should be: Stupid is fine, but when in doubt, be smarter.

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July 25, 2006

Harry Potter and the [Several Things] (2000-2005)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)

by J.K. Rowling

Goblet of Fire, book four, was the best one. It had the feeling of being really comfortable with its own terms, like a sitcom that’s finally hit its stride.

There’s that comfort-pleasure we get from fictional characters being recognizably themselves; the warmly, status-quo-affirmingly formulaic joke that’s supposed to elicit an “Oh, Chandler!” Not the most edifying sort of pleasure; there’s something sleepy and doughy and stupid about reassurance-entertainment. It’s like the heat rising off a sleeping person’s body. But it is nonetheless a very desirable commodity, and it is not easily earned.

Though in our desperate need for comfort we sometimes try to snatch it out of thin air. This guy who visited my roommate in college actually said, with fond exasperation, “Oh, [Chandler]!” about a friend of ours that he had not yet met. I am tempted to use the word “American” in talking about what’s so sad about this pathetic over-readiness to be sleepily comfortable with a sitcom-life, but I don’t really believe in making pronouncements about national identity like that. Still, I bet they don’t do that sort of thing in China. For example.

In re: the fifth book. The first time I read it, I think I was dismayed by what seemed at the time like a nerdy, undeserved emphasis on characters less essential, less earned. Just like my impatient annoyance as a third grader finding that “Eowyn” and “Theodred” and so forth, introduced long after exposition time had come and gone, were actually going to figure in the plot. As if! Furthermore, my degrading memory had wiped away several secondary characters, especially those introduced in book three and then played down in book four, like “Sybil Trelawney” and “Remus Lupin.” It’s dismaying to return in search of the warm sitcom glow and realize that you’re watching an episode from that off-key season where they have a monkey.

On this read, however, “Cornelius Fudge” and even “Bellatrix Lestrange” still meant something to me, and as a result the book seemed less arbitrary and, you know, Trekkie. Nonetheless, by book five, a calculating soapiness has crept into the plotting. I’m not complaining about the kids flirting and dating each other – that stuff’s fun, particularly when it’s indulged at length in the sixth book – I’m talking about the main storyline, which becomes increasingly crabbed and finicky as the series plays out. Considering that she started with the broadest possible mythical strokes – young chosen one vs. legendary evil – she’s certainly worked herself into a lot of loopholes and thumb-twiddling. The recurring and confused issue of House-Elves typifies the way she’s maybe let her imagination run in too many different directions at once.

This state of affairs is reinforced, if not actually worsened, by book six, in which she systematically demystifies the bad guy and literally breaks the threat into a series of technicalities. It’s too late to be disappointed at this turn in the series, which has been happening gradually all along. Like I said about book three, it feels like she’s constantly working out clever solutions to having been backed into a corner. There are worse forms of entertainment. For my part, I find this sort of plotting inspiring to read – if I ever have to solve these problems, it tells me that there are always solutions and everybody will love them even when they’re complicated. Plus, the very ubiquity of the franchise makes it exciting to find out what happens next, since it involves us in a worldwide phenomenon – another “American” line of reasoning, there.

This last book owed the most obvious debt of any of them to The Lord of the Rings, if you ask me. I could swear it included a couple of shots described directly from the recent movie versions thereof. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; fantasy is all in good fun and good fun is community property. But it’s more satisfying to tour this funhouse when you can’t still hear the echoes of the group in front of you, if you know what I mean.

Hey, you know what was pretty good when I was in fourth grade? Those Lloyd Alexander books.

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