The Fredösphere

Read to the end of Jonah Goldberg's linkfest and you'll find this intriguing offer:  send the guys at maopost.com a photo of your face, and they'll photoshop you into your very own Chicom propaganda poster.

You really ought to check out the posters.  (And the captions.)  Look at the smiling faces.  Gosh, but communism makes people happy!  The kitsch is in such pure form, it cries out for this kind of ironic treatment -- and yet, one feels the pang of conscience.  I have opined on this precise subject before, but to summarize:  Mao's revolutions killed people.  Lots and lots and lots of people.  Has enough time passed that we can start having fun?  One can't help making the Hitler analogy:  would similar fun be possible if it were the Nazis instead of the communists?  If we're talking pure farce, the answer is apparently yes.  If it is light-hearted nostalgia, I suspect the answer is no.

A pianist at a wedding reception I attended recently got me wondering.  She played all the standards, a long list, with hardly a mistake all evening.  I can hardly fault her for her choices, the occasion calling for the familiar.  She did tend to plow through them with a combination of aggressiveness and thoughtlessness that I found strange and even strangely fascinating, but then I've only heard each of those tunes ten thousand times, probably not nearly the number she has.

What I really don't understand is that she played them loud, really loud, on a small grand with the lid up, in an acoustically live room big enough only for about eight tables.  While she played, conversation became serious work (and I am a guy who is easily daunted conversationally when thrown into a group of strangers).  I found myself sinking into my shell, annoyed and distracted, until a break in the music enabled me to reconnect with the people sitting next to me.

Here's my question:  is there really anyone on earth who likes conversing in that kind of environment?  I realize some people must think people like it, since bar owners deliberately create it.  Help me out here, people.  Situations like this leave me bewildered about the motivations of my fellow human beings, and tempted to question if I really belong to the same species.

Have you heard of The Adventures of Prince Achmed?  The wifeösphere and I are working our way through this silent German film from 1926.  Called the first feature-length animated film (take that, Snow White!), the visuals were realized by manipulating paper cut-outs silhouetted on colorful backgrounds.

When movies include puppets, the standard response is to joke about the "wooden" acting.  A film that depends on silhouettes alone to hold your attention for 66 minutes had better make them gorgeously detailed, and Achmed does just that.  It's quite astonishing how well the small details and gestures communicate character.  Certainly, by 1926 standards, this is an engrossing movie (and that remains true even though the film we have today is a degraded and incomplete copy of the original).  See it for historical or novelty-seeking reasons if you like, or just watch it for pure enjoyment.

I must mention the film's creator was an avant-garde artist named Charlotte Reiniger, who was only 23 at the time the film was made.  What an achievement.  If only Hitler had ambitions to make Germans into superior animators instead of superior athletes!  Charlotte Reiniger would have become famous, Leni Riefenstahl would have been forgotten, and Walt Disney would have become a Nazi.  Oh, wait.

My friend John loaned me His Majesty's Dragon, an alternate history wherein the Napoleonic wars are fought using dragons as well as armies and frigates.  It's a lot of fun, and I recommend it.  The dragons are intelligent and can speak, so great opportunities arise for fascinating human-dragon relationships.  Author Naomi Novik exhibits a woman's keen eye for such relationships.  Beyond that, I noticed a tendency for the narrative to follow a simple cycle:

1.  The main character has a conversation.
2.  The main character spends time alone, ruminating on the meaning of that conversation.
3.  Back to #1.

To me, the effect of this is to feminize the male characters.  I certainly don't spend that much time analyzing relationships.  On the other hand, maybe those men out there who are politically and socially more adept than I (there are a few of those, I believe) do spend the time.  In any event, I wouldn't even consider this a flaw in the book; just something I noticed as being unusual in the nerdy, introverted world of speculative fiction.

The wifeösphere and I enjoyed watching Anatomy of a Murder over the weekend.  I'm a sucker for any courtroom drama, but I found Duke Ellington's music incongruous.  The wifeösphere found Jimmy Stewart's folksy, rural manner unconvincing.  I, who find Stewart usually insufferable for just that reason, didn't mind him here.  I almost, almost understood why so many people find him simpatico.  The best part of the movie (for us Michiganians) is its Upper Peninsula setting.  I wonder if any other state boasts a hinterland so starkly divided from the "mainland" both geographically and psychologically.

I must not fail to mention the ultimate yooper movie, Escanaba in da Moonlight.

Hey!  How come Orthodox priests never condescend to bless American satellite launches?  (Hat tip to Colby Cosh.)

Why do I relate to these Asperger's-y outsider artists?  Why am I not more disturbed that I relate to them?  Here's the latest:  Gilles Tréhin and his imaginary city of Urville.  Here's more.  (Hat tip to Gravity Lens.)

"Wiry guy with a beard."  Yes!  That's a brilliant observation.  Head-smackingly brilliant.

Isn't that metaphor mixed?  TV producers are hard at work "erasing the smell of sci-fi."  Also, a timely warning about the danger of turning yourself into a plant.  (Thanks to Gravity Lens.)

Finally, a question to mull over the weekend:  why don't we ever hear of myths about tornadoes among the native Americans of the great plains?  I would expect that tornadoes are common enough, yet unusual and impressive enough, to generate the kind of cultural presence of which myths are made.  So, why no tornado god?  Or am I wrong -- did they have tornado gods?  With a Wicked Witch of the West thrown in, just for good measure?

James Panero (r.r.) passes on a startling thesis:  painters take their cues from composers:

[Paintings by Aurthur Dove and Willem de Kooning] speak to the unrecognized wisdom of my departed mentor Kermit Champa, who maintained that advanced music brought about the birth of modern painting. Both de Kooning and Dove, who became premier abstractionists in their respective generations, were influenced by sound and recorded music. De Kooning purchased a hi-fi early in his career that cost his savings. Dove noted that “I should like to take wind and water and sand as a motif and work with them, but it has to be simplified in most cases to color and force lines and substances, just as music has done with sound.” The silence surrounding these abstractions amplifies their lapping, aural effects. De Kooning titled one work from 1975: “Screams of Children Come from Seagulls.” Now there’s the anthem of an endless summer—and in music, modern life, and the printed page, the call of aesthetic salvation.

I would like to believe in music's preeminence among the arts, but my natural modesty makes me doubt.  Perhaps what he is talking about is specific to the modernist period.  To believe that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music is a mistake only a modernist would make.

On the other hand, it brings to my mind a tag line used by Andrew Stiller of Kallisti Music Press.  Maybe I remember the quote with such fondness because it was teasingly juuuuust within reach of my piecemeal knowledge of Latin.  Maybe I like the way it reveals the orderliness of the classical and mediaeval mind.  Or maybe I simply love the majesty of the sentence:

Ut Sol inter planetas, Ita MUSICA inter Artes liberales in medio radiat.
-Heinrich Schütz, 1640

Search the web for it if you must, but you should really figure it out on your own.  Believe me, you can translate it.  Latin lies deeply embedded in your consciousness, in your DNA even.  You might say it is right there in the middle of the double helix, shining forth.

Charles T. Downey's review of Paul Revere's Ride by David Del Tredici made me promptly download the thing from iTunes, mainly because I hoped to find Downey's mixed review unjustifiably snobbish.  However, I think he got it right when he called the work "a fun and wild ride, if not particularly musically nourishing."  You can't help imagining, when hearing the siren, that Paul Revere's ride occurred in an ambulance.  Which is sort of cool, but still.  How perfect that this piece set a poem by Longfellow, a poet I'm inclined to defend, and yet, who embarrasses me a bit too often to make that defense easy.

Meanwhile, Der Drübermensch, the master manipulator, came downstairs late last evening with a book in his hand.  "It's time to study German!" he announced, knowing I would be unable to enforce a bedtime.  We worked through a couple of pages of sentences, with him taking a stab at the pronunciation.  We came across this sentence:

Ist das Kunst?
Is that art?

The accompanying drawing showed a chicken beholding a canvas covered with shapeless blobs of color and a line of chicken tracks running from bottom to top.  You know, some of that modern art you hear about.  Der Drübermensch didn't get the joke -- his generation will live blissfully unable to appreciate the controversy involved, now that the wackiest abstractions show up routinely, even decorating advertisements for mundane products.  I tried to explain to him that some people think art needs to represent real live objects.  He impatiently pointed out, "that picture represents chicken footprints!"  Well, yes, but ... oh heck, it's late; go to bed, kid.

Speaking of modern art, do not miss your chance to become Jackson Pollock.  That is an order!  (Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.)

I've been a good boy today.  First I ate stewed spinach for breakfast.  Then I visited my proctologist for a regular exam.   Next, I vacuumed my driveway.  Finally, I listened to Peter Maxwell Davies' Into the Labyrinth.  This music is one experiment in a long struggle to unlock music from the prison of tempo.  The resulting music is never exactly either fast or slow; merely nervous or enervated.

By the way, Davies' Sinfonietta Accademica, written in the same year of 1983, and on the same disk, is radically different in temperament.  It's anything but academic, and dares to frolic a bit.  This is the Davies I'll be spending more time with.

The wifeösphere has begun to exercise her long-atrophied movie selection muscles and, on the advice of a friend, sat us down in front of The Three Faces of Eve.  It's the classic multiple personality disorder case study, and since Alistair Cook tells us from the beginning that everything is true, we must believe it.  It perfectly illustrates the Freudian model of mental disorders springing from childhood trauma.  It's somewhat sad to watch the psychiatrist yakking away in their regular "therapy" sessions, while he waits for the right combination of circumstances to trigger the moment of redemptive self-revelation.  In fact, the film depicts the patient clearly predicting, perhaps even controling, the timing of the cure; the psychiatrist's role is partial at best.  The surprise at the end -- a flashback to the moment of trauma -- is funny and horrible, all at the same time.  (Well, I suppose I should say it is funny if you happen to be me.)  A simple good-bye kiss has never seemed so sinister.

In other movie news, Chanticleer is featured on the soundtrack of Nacho Libre, of all things.

Here's a bit of miscellaneous weirdness:  in my first attempt to type "vacuum" in the first paragraph above, I spelled it "facuum."  I guess my latent Germanness, several generations removed, has found a way to express itself.  Perhaps the notorious experiment of Emperor Frederick II was not so wrongheaded after all.

When I was a kid, I invented an imaginary country called Kuba, located in Branch County, Michigan.  Through an improbable series of events (I imagined), a group of Turks, sent by the Czar of Russia to explore Siberia, blunder across the ice of the Bering Straight during a blizzard, and end up settling down in southern Michigan.  This happening several centuries ago; I can't remember exactly how long, but it definitely predated the European exploration of the New World.  Because of a long string of (again, improbable) bureaucratic bungles by the U.S. government, Kuba's continuing existence has never been noticed by the outside world, and a certain cultural tendency within Kuba toward isolationism prevents it to this day from drawing attention to itself.  The three main religions of Kuba are Orthodoxy (nominally subject to the Patriarch of Moscow), Islam, and a weird expression of Protestantism that developed independent of, but (coincidentally) at the same time as, the European variety.  The men of Kuba wear the Arab headdress, for no justifiable reason.  Kuba's size is measured in acres, and its population in the hundreds.  I used to have a map.  It's Grand Hotel is the tallest structure in Michigan (except that it's not in Michigan, it's in Kuba -- but never mind).  I could go on.

Now, meet the Khazars, a group of Turkic nomads whose ruling class converted to Judaism.  Truth is stranger, and all that.  The article fails to mention how many of the Khazars ended up settling in southern Michigan.

At least one other person has imagined a country called Kuba, which was the name of a real kingdom in central Africa.  Further searching of the web for "kuba" gets you to this piece by Theodore Dalrymple, England's chief pessimist.  Let us fervently hope Dr. D.'s anecdotal evidence is not representative, else England is doomed.

Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright.  Now imagine him as a vicious, murdering tyrant, a worker of black magic, a priest of a creepy druidical cult, someone who never wears a pork-pie hat.  Yes, I know it's difficult; the mind rebells at the part about the hat.  But give it a try.  Maybe this spellbinding graphic novel called The Architect, freely available on the web, as of yet incomplete, will help you.  (Note, there's a bit of salty language; I'd say the rating rises to PG-13 in places.)

The Economist magazine calls it their Technology Quarterly, but much of its content is sci-fi and futurology, as my friend Evan pointed out.  There are articles on Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, space elevators, and Babel fish.  Great fun.  An article offers three rules of thumb for spotting a vision of the future that has half a chance of coming true.  Another describes the field of artificial artificial intelligence, which seeks to solve problems difficult for present computers by luring many human minds into taking a stab at it.  Find a way to dress the problem up as a video game, put it on line, and suddenly, pimply-faced adolescents can start earning money in a way indistinguishable from goofing off.  Let it be!  Music intelligence systems can identify hit songs more reliably than experienced executives in the music biz:

To the human ear, music has changed a lot over the years.  Music-intelligence software, however, can reveal striking similarities in the underlying parameters of two songs from different eras that, even to a trained ear, seem unrelated.  According to Platinum Blue's software, called Music Science, for example, a number of hit songs by U2 have a close kinship to some of Beethoven's compositions.

Let it not be!

So much bloggable material, so few electrons.  I knew it was going to be a good day when I heard a nice rondo broadcast on local classical radio; it was one composed by Johann Joseph Fux.

The New Criterion informs us, in an article about founding father the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, that actress Reese Witherspoon is his direct descendant.  Which brings us back to the movie Walk the Line, which I discussed yesterday too critically.  The truth is that I can't get that story out of my head, which is always a sign of greatness.  You really should see the film.

My friend John noticed this story of two teens whose Hitler quotes prompted the recall of the school yearbook, and groveling apologies from the Principal.  Thus, the march to purge high school life of all offense continues.  Sigh.  I was fortunate to attend public school in a more, dare I say, liberal environment.  As a freshman, I appeared in the school's variety show in a skit as a southern judge dressed in a KKK outfit.  We all spoke with thick southern accents, thus the bigotry was undeniable, if aimed in an unexpected direction.  Nevertheless, I recall maybe one or two comments expressing mild surprise we got it past the censors.  Our small, Midwestern town almost never saw minorities in those days.  I recall only one black student appearing briefly in our school system in my entire time there, and we promptly elected her student body president, thereby exercising the ghosts of segregation once and forever, or so we believed.

Connoisseurs of modern-day school politics are directed to find further reading in the WSJ "Zero-Tolerance Watch."  Or read the story of "Joseph K."

Meanwhile, Sony Pictures wants to hire Tim LaHaye to produce a sequel to The Passion.  "Oh, this will be bad," indeed.  And don't miss Steve Martin's Script Notes on "The Passion."

I've got more, but that's enough for today.

We watched Walk the Line over the weekend.  Hoo boy, that was painful.  You watch Johnny Cash make a hash of his life, one foolish mistake at a time, and it feels like torture.  How fortunate we are to have performers like Cash, willing to live out in the public eye what for the rest of us must be merely thought experiments:  well, whaddaya know, a life of drugs, fornication, and lonely road trips punctuated by sycophantic crowds wouldn't be so great after all.

The wifeösphere observed that the movie does not fully explain the appeal of Cash to June Carter.  I would add that I didn't get Cash's appeal as a singer, although I hate to criticize Joaquin Phoenix or Reese Witherspoon, who obviously put a lot of talent and work into their roles.  Roger Ebert disagrees, calling the performances "dead-on."  Stephanie Zacharek at salon.com calls Phoenix's performance "a dream version of Cash" and says the man was too big to fit into one movie, which seems right.  Maybe Eberts' long-time fanboy relationship to Cash's music warped his judgment.

In retrospect, it seems improbable that Cash and Carter would tour with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley; how did the stage manage to support all those titanic egos.  Waylon Payne is obviously having fun in his role as Lewis; the first shots of him at an upright piano, sweaty, manic-haired and limp-wristed, paint a complete picture of a decadent, narcissistic -- and huge -- talent.  (The actor, Waylon Payne, has lived his whole life marinated in the country music scene.)  Elvis, on the other hand, is a cartoon:  we see him on stage just a few seconds, and his experimental hip spasms have all the sex appeal of a pinned-down, vivisected frog reanimated by the current from a hand-cranked electric generator.  Shamefully, I know what I'm talking about, thanks to a 9th grade biology class.

Last week my friend Steve confessed to an unhealthy attraction to the British national anthem.  Is it a coincidence that the anthem came to my attention again today?  The boys at WRCJ -- a team of radio geniuses, by the way; the world classical radio is lucky to have them.  Imagine if Howard Stearn spent more time with his hands on classical music and less time with them inside other people's clothing, or his own -- discussed the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's attempt to dump the English national anthem and choose a new national anthem specifically for Scotland.

It seems that "God Save the Queen" hits an awkward spot somewhere around verse six, wherein the English army is exhorted to crush the perfidious Celtic menace to the north.  The RSNO is asking Scottish visitors to its website to listen to, and vote for, one of five proposed replacements:

A Man's a Man.  The title has P.C. problems, but the text is a Robert Burns' fanfare for the common Scot, and might serve as a clarifying counterpoint in a country where the men where skirts.
Flower of Scotland.  Already considered by some to be Scotland's de facto national anthem, it wastes no time, gloating over England's retreating army in verse one.
Highland Cathedral.  Madonna picked this one as a wedding march, and the tune was written by two Germans; if that doesn't disqualify it, whatever would?
Scotland the Brave.  This is the one tune I recognize.  Additionally in its favor, no armies were massacred, or even described as being massacred, during the making of this song, which words were penned by, who else?  Robert Burns.
Scots Wha Hae.  Another example of Scots defining themselves mainly by their unenglishness (and, judging from the title, their contempt of English grammar and spelling).  A commentator at this website ominously says, "I will let the reader make up your own mind whether it is a poem of patriotism or something deeper."

A few days ago I mentioned my first fumbling attempts to become an accordionist.  It turns out, June is International Accordion Awareness Month, as NPR has noted.  (They also note the month's neat dovetailing with National Headache Awareness Week.)  Warning:  the background music is pure Cheese Whiz®.

The Standing Room reports on the accordion whoop-dee-doo held in San Francisco, the city in which the "piano-accordion" was invented, or maybe perfected or best promoted or something.  You can get your classical accordion links from accordionlinks.com (where else?) and your degree in accordion performance from the Royal Academy of Music.  Tchaikovsky may have been the first big-name composer to use the accordion, however sparingly.

Ol' Pastor Zender, now retired, preached on a lot of topics through the years, but one theme kept returning.  Repeatedly, he observed that our fundamental problem is that each of us wants to be God.

For those of us who aspire to be artists, this problem often expresses itself as narcissism.  I've always been a bit embarrassed that performers have the one job where it is expected regularly to receive a round of applause.  Isn't that just a little bit pathetic?  Do construction workers expect audience approval after each I-beam is set in place?

We want to be worshiped.  We want to be like Prince Philip of England who is worshiped as a god by a tribe living on an island in the South Pacific, who sent them a photograph of himself posing with a nal-nal -- a traditional war club -- held in the correct way but declining to wear the correct attire, which is to say declining to wear nothing at all except for a straw sheath around his ahem.

My buddy Steve, for reasons not clear to me, wants to find a recording of the British National Anthem, as arranged by Benjamin Britten.  (Yes, my Britten recording collection is vast.  No, not that vast.)  Specifically, he is talking about the arrangement described here:

I know of two arrangements of the National Anthem that deliver more than just the first verse: the arrangement by Benjamin Britten offers a very muted first verse followed by a rousing verse three (I first heard this when Mr. Welton played it to us in a Music lesson in about 1962; I was so moved by it that I spent precious pocket money on a copy of the record, which I still have).

I really don't know why Steve wants this.  Occasionally I'll hear him make sarcastic comments about the U.S. government, but he's no traitor, exactly.  Please let me know if you have any leads.

Mark Steyn explains how they make muzak:

I once went to a recording session for some elevator music, and what was interesting was that occasionally, as they were playing these watery versions of “Windmills of Your Mind” or “Bridge over Troubled Water,” the clarinet player or the trombonist would forget himself and accidentally start to get hot. And then the producer would stop the tape and storm into the studio and remind the guys to bland it all back down.

Every night, at bedtime, I spend a few minutes with the kids, giving them a Bible lesson.  Why do I do it?  Each day, I ask myself the question I strive to live by:  What Would Hitchens Do?

Oh please, oh please:  if we must be addicted, let us be addicted to this pill.

Another company lunch!  Another day without adequate blogging time.  We're heading over to La Shish, a Dearborn, Michigan-based chain with a newly-opened branch in Ann Arbor, just in time to coincide with the bad news about the owners' family.  Let's hope the denials are true; otherwise, just keep reinforcing those stereotypes, people!

On Saturday we hosted a recital for Der Drübermensch and some of his piano-playing home-schooled friends.  The event was satisfying on an artistic and social level.  Der 'Mensch demonstrated his newly-acquired performance skills (bowing, looking at the audience, announcing titles clearly, avoiding false starts) reasonably well.  Rehearsing the bows exasperated him:  "I'm not going to grow up to be an actor!"  Definitely true ... and yet, completely false; all the world's a stage, and all that.

Gotta go.  I'll try to bring back some grape leaves for you.

Last week, a streak of sub-optimal health left me with extra time for light reading.  Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna filled the time.  Although no one had particularly recommended it to me, I hoped I would enjoy its scenario, an alternate history wherein the Roman Empire endures to the present day.

Silverberg is quite the phenomenon in sci-fi publishing, although I didn't recognize his name.  Turns out he's authored a long list of books and won the Hugo and Nebula awards multiple times.  He must be great, no?

This book is a stinkeroony.  It's a bucket of sludge.  As I read each page, a perverse admiration for the man grew within me.  So little talent, so little effort, yet somehow he has built this fabulous writing career.  What an achievement!

Silverberg can't design interesting characters or plots.  His speculative ideas show evidence of very little thought.  What is the appeal of this guy?  I decided to find something from his earlier days, one of his more admired works.  I took home Nightwings, which won a Hugo award.  I read the first two paragraphs, and suddenly, I recalled a long drive to Florida years ago, when we filled the time by listening to books on tape.  Nightwings was one of those books.  I remember the same feelings, only stronger; the same disgust combined with a kind of admiration:  how did this pile of crap ever get published?

Here a particularly memorable passage from Roma Eterna:

I understood now what was meant when women said that Greek men make love like poets and Romans like engineers.  What I had never realized until that moment was that engineers have skills that many poets never have, and that an engineer could be capable of writing fine poetry, but would you not think twice about riding across a bridge that had been designed or built by a poet?

Ooooooookay.

An upset stomach has me spending a day at home with the kids.  The Maharincess is deep into a princess phase right now (and here, let me just observe that, although preschoolers are particularly famous for their impractical career aspirations, I believe the Maharincess' ambition to become a princess takes the cake) so she watched the Rogers & Hammerstein musical version of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews.  My goodness, but I'm amazed by its finely calibrated ability to annoy.  The thing puts me into a violent mood.  Which do I hate most?  Perhaps it's the philosophical pseudoprofundities ...

Do I love you because you're beautiful?
Or are you beautiful because I love you?

Or maybe the general atmosphere of smugness in the ballroom scenes.  And exactly what time and place serves as the setting?  It's as though, one day, all Victorians in the world simultaneously bumped their heads and forgot five centuries of technological development, forcing them to abandon gaslight, gunpowder, and steam engines.  Do I hate it because it's infantile?  Or is it infantile because I hate it?

Daniel Wolf is writing a set of preludes dedicated to friends he's never actually met.  One of them is for me.  It's consciously Lutheran, by which he appears to mean neo-baroque.  The treble voices proceed in dignified half notes while the peripatetic bass line nips at their heels.  Daniel:  flattery will get you ... everywhere!  I'll make sure this prelude gets a performance.

On the same day, practically, that Daniel sent me his prelude, I heard from a music director at a Lutheran church in Georgia.  She wants to use my "refreshing" psalm chants.  What a nice person.