Deceptively Simple

Drill, baby, drill

When symbolism works, it really works. The examples that grab me the most and focus my attention are those that explode into my mind and expose exactly what's going to happen next. I recently finished watching the first season of The Wire, and the lead-up to the murder of one character in it is mirrored on an episode in Saul Bellow's 1970 novel Mr. Sammler's Planet. The TV series is set in Baltimore among the police, courts and drug dealers of 2002, and the novel is in New York of 1970, among a family of Jewish professionals and professors. Completely different milieus, but both Bellow and the team of David Simon and Ed Burns, who wrote the TV teleplay, find a clear metaphor for human well-being---the inside of a building, the pipes and wiring hidden behind the walls. (Spoiler alert: I give away a key plot point to Season 1 below. Chances are you're hipper to pop culture than I am, and don't need an alert, but I'll provide it just the same.)

What happens in Mr. Sammler's Planet is this: Fairly early in the novel, Sammler's surgeon nephew Elya Gruner has gone into the hospital and is diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. Much of the rest of the book is spent with philosophical discussions between Sammler and the other characters, with episodic larceny and an occasional eruption of violence sprinkled in. As it progresses, Gruner's condition doesn't improve, they go back to the hospital to visit him, talk and talk and talk, etc.

Then, one evening. the family is in Gruner's attractive mansion when they notice water pouring down the stairs. They wonder if the tub has been left on and has overflowed, and decide it's coming down too quickly. After that, it's a short investigation before learning that a worn-out pipe in the attic (the highest point in the house...) burst, and has been spraying water everywhere. "Listening, they heard a sound of spraying abovce, and a steady, rapid tapping, trickling cascading, snaking of water on the staircase," Bellow wrote. It takes another 70 pages, but at this point, we know that Gruner's own aneurysm will take him with it.

In The Wire, we get clued in to a teenager's fate, instead of an old man, and he's murdered instead of dying in a hospital. The 16-year old drug dealer Wallace returned from hiding, and the bosses of his drug ring don't believe he can be trusted anymore. We watch the belief in Wallace fade at the same time as the police are preparing another move against those who will order the boy's execution in the episode "Sentencing."

The building in question is the one that houses the operations center of Avon Barksdale's drug ring. The police have decided to plant monitoring devices inside, and enable themselves to have audio and video feeds of the discussions taking place within. As this is progressing, we see Wallace hanging out with his friends. Eventually, the police have set up in the building and unpacked their tools, and any doubt the viewer has about Wallace's fate begins to plummet. Then, a detective sinks a drill into a wall in close-up, a bunch of drywall shavings pour out, and we know that just like that wall had a hole driven into  it, so will Wallace.

(Aside: I absolutely loved that little guy, played by Michael B. Jordan, and was heartbroken when he started using drugs in the middle of the season. I started mad-texting a friend to tell me that the kid turns out ok, and she refused to do it. He got himself cleaned up, the police started looking after him, and I thought it would work out, and then felt my heart drop and my insides twist up as he was killed. For a fictional TV series to have this effect...I don't know, they must have been doing something right.)

So that's symbolism and that's foreshadowing, and it's great storytelling, and writers who can ratchet up the power of a death, which already is fairly potent, are playing with some very powerful toys.

Campy noir distance terrorists

Those who doubt that Chicagoans willingly distance themselves from William Ayers need only peruse Netflix, and look at the most popular titles for my (adopted) hometown, as of yesterday afternoon (click on image for full display):

Yes, we're deep into learning more about the Weather Underground, campy movies turned into campier musicals, long-distance running, and noir classics. The fey, fast-talking revolutionaries of Chicago have great endurance, knowledge of explosives, and talk outside the corners of their mouths. Watch it, kid.

Wanna know how she got these scars?

Time Out Chicago, DecSimp's former enabler, has outdone itself with the Halloween special by Web Behrens. It's a how-to, but like the best how-tos, it's enjoyable to read regardless of whether you actually take the author's advice and follow through on the concept.

Combine this year's favorite Halloween costumes:

 

To be ideologically fair, I think it would also be fun to combine the Joe Biden look with Brad Pitt from Burn After Reading, since both are thin white dudes and both have a rare gift for malapropisms.

 

Sarah Palin, lounge singer

The poets have gotten a hold of Sarah Palin, witness Hart Seely in Slate, and every joker who can strum a guitar seems to be giving it a shot at parodying her (I've almost scratched my ears out with a trowel in the course of this exercise), but you gotta give credit to the jazzers. Pianist Henry Hey figured out that Sarah Palin was actually channelling a hip, spoken-word vibe as she was interviewed by Katie Couric, and a not a lost, get-me-out-of-here one. View and hear the result here.

A plug, vol. 2.5

 

Video footage from the CSO Resound's latest release of Shostakovich 4 can now be viewed on the album's page on Amazon.com, and the dedicated CSO Resound Store at the online merchant can be found here. We will not rest silently and let certain critics get all the credit for dragging classical music into the future.

Previously: A Plug, vol. 2.

ALL ONE

A couple of weeks ago, in late September, the Secretary of the Treasury floated a $700 billion plan to bail out the financial sector. The plan eventually passed, but not before the House of Representatives shot it down, almost gleefully, after many constituents wrote and called to say they would never give money to Wall Street, or support a giveaway to executives who had proved they couldn't be trusted with money, or that it was simply a step down the slippery slope to socialism, and therefore verboten. The next day, the markets came crashing down, and those same complainers realized almost over night-less than that, actually-that their simple refusal to help out the financial sector actually did have an impact on their lives. Their outlooks were so narrow that they couldn't or didn't realize that their savings were bound up in the drama playing out in Manhattan and Washington.

This blinkered, myopic view of how the world (and money) operates isn't unique to our time, of course. The U.S. tried to stay out of what it considered European land wars longer than was wise, but we eventually came 'round and decided that we wouldn't stand for that sort of thing, after an interval of a few years passwd and the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor. But today, we are in a world where it is easier than ever to avoid thinking about the connections we have to one another and to (relatively) distant events, it's easier to avoid different points of view, and the result is that those connections have serious consequences when they're avoided.

Of course, it's easy to get boxed in to thinking of oneself as "Southwestern homeowner" or "Midwestern soccer mom" and not "Wall Street investor." If you don't closely follow your 401(k), 403(b), IRAs, or other savings plans, you start thinking of those simply as spaces you throw money into each month, and the number goes up or down, but usually goes up. You forget that those accounts are sliced and divided several ways among several stocks, bonds and other investment tools, and you lose sight of your own personal stake in the market's well-being, and it becomes easy to start scapegoating those money-managers and bankers who follow this stuff up to the minute.

No one consciously puts those labels on themselves, I don't think, but they're in the air nonetheless, and some of us wrap them around ourselves as a form of protection. There's a good reason for this, and it's this: Every one of us is a member of a minority. By going tribal and deciding to join with others who are somehow similar to you, the world becomes a smaller place.

We may not be a member of a racial minority, or a gender minority or a national minority. But simply by virtue of our interests, you join a group, and that group is going to be smaller than the larger culture. It can't help but be otherwise, and yet, if we lose sight of the fact each one of us falls into larger groups, it takes a minor catastrophe like the plummeting stock market to make us realize that we, ahem, do.

Me (and this being a blog, it's virtually by definition all about me), I studied classical music, and if you want to separate yourself from your peers, there's not much that'll do the job quicker than studying a musical genre that teaches you words like Adagio, sordino, and genre. At the same time that I was a musician (and I'll always be one in one form or another), I was an avid reader, a Chicagoan, a runner, a writer, and a whole host of other things that labels could be attached to, up to and including the labels that lay bare your family status (brother and son, and so on).

These identities sneak up on you. I've resisted saying I'm a runner, even though I just ran my second marathon last Sunday, because I feel it's too limiting. Still, while waiting for a friend to pick me up over the weekend, I found myself absentmindedly stretching my calves on some nearby tree roots. These little acts that you start doing unconsciously are the outward sign that your body and neural circuits have absorbed the lessons of that activity, and are a way of maintaining your readiness to undertake them. "Stretch your calves," my unconscious mind was saying (very softly), "because you're going to be running soon." Musicians do this stuff all the time without noticing it, playing passages silently as they tap on tables. Or maybe that's the OCD.

The point is that this nichification of identities is not only self-defeating, it's society defeating. Instead of understanding in a vaguely Chaos Theory-related sort of way that everything we do has an influence on someone else, and that distant decisions made by others will affect us sooner or later, we get boxed in and isolationist. There's this kooky Dr. Bronner who makes Castile soap with his philosophy printed on the label in 8-pt. type that's really, really hard to read in the shower. His philosophy is that we're "ALL-ONE-GOD-FAITH" and "ALL ONE OR NONE." I don't know if I'd go quite that far, because there's a whole heck of a lot that does divide us still, thank goodness. Sarah Palin likes shooting moose, and I like watching Deadwood (NSFW), and we can both keep those passions going without harming or upsetting each other. And if she's elected and somehow contrives to ban the watching of quality TV shows on DVD, we'll have words, and I'll wish I paid more attention to her speeches where she was calling down the thunder on Ian McShane and David Milch. Until then, though, we'd all do well to remember that we're all connected, and in more ways than we realize.

Couldn't make it up if I tried

For those of us with mild, low-level obsessions about the best-selling classical albums on iTunes, we are often confronted with the User Review. I love User Reviews, since good ones drive sales, and negative ones at least generate interest, and the occasional all-caps SHOUTING MATCH between the opposing camps. Better to have people talking about you, as I say. That being said, I do love this review of the current occupant of the #1 spot, Mozart for Your Mind-Boost Your Brain Power.

Writes Ashly K:

Best Kept Secret Of College Students! (5 Stars)

My mother sweared by this as she was in med school. Now that I am in college, I too swear by mozart for the mind.

I am not a fan of silence, and love the quiet, perfect atmosphere this CD sets up. Really does help you retain, read, write...all of the above. A MUST for college students.

This is bar-none the BEST $9.99 you will ever spend for yourself...enough said.

Here's hoping that Mozart helps her out with the mind/brain question, correct verb tense, prepositions, and this capitalization for EFFECT business.

"Git yer brandin' iron and slap 'VP' on 'er"

In the ironical country mode of the Magnetic Fields, circa Charm of the Highway Strip, come David Bashwiner and Jason Warshof with their new smash single "Lipstick on a Pig." The cast includes a mandolinist in a Santa Claus beard and Majel Connery, whose Opera Cabal ensemble has figured muchly on this blog and in Chicago, singing back-up in a faux Sarah Palin get-up.

The Hold Steady

The all-new Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs report is out, and DecSimp is holding strong and maintained its/my spot at #10, having weathered the traffic downturn that accompanied going from journalist to record-label honcho* in February rather well. Go take a look at the other blogs that are there; good ones abound.

*Grandiosity alert

Just a bad dream

"In addition to the nightmare-works, most of which are written in a style that can only be called the stupid style, there are the nightmare-men. We have the nightmare-orator who buttonholds you at the street corner or clamps you to the drawing-room mantelpiece in order to saturate you with his doctrine; the nightmare who proves to all comers the superiority of Oriental music over ours; the old theorist who finds mistakes in harmony wherever he looks; the discoverer of ancient manuscripts that make him fall into ecstasy; the defender of the rules of the fugue; the man who worships exclusively the 'limpid' style, the 'sense-of-form' style, the good-and-dead style, the enemy of expression and life; the admirer of organ music; of the Missa Papae Marcelli, of the Missa l'Homme-Arme, of the chansons de gestes. All these people are the greatest nightmares you could name." —Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, 1854, translated by Jacques Barzun