I can handle rampant CTA failures. I can handle earthquakes. I can handle cougars. I can even handle coyotes with the desire to wander into Quizno's. But I cannot handle alligators in the Chicago River. I'm laying 10-1 odds on sharks in Lake Michigan in July, who will feast on coelacanths, also recently discovered in the area.
Classical-music documentaries tend to do well at the Gene Siskel Film Center (AKA "the Siskel," AKA "the film center"), and another opens today for a week-long run. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts was directed by Scott Hicks, who also did wonders for honest portrayals of a concert pianist who loses his mind in a creepy hotel and murders his family in Shine. (I haven't seen Shine. That may not be an accurate description.) Anyway, Glass: A Portrait reportedly takes a homey view of the composer, and, in the words of the Village Voice is "a stupefyingly dull portrait."
Also at the Film Center is an ongoing retrospective of film noir from the Fox studio entitled "Dark Corners." While a severe work/life imbalance kept me from the first two offerings, one of which featured Lucille Ball, I'll be at the rest of them. Last night's Thieves' Highway, directed by Jules Dassin in 1949, doesn't seem to warrant David Thomson's scornful appraisal of his overall output, but give me corruption, fast-talking women, bumbling crooks, and a nice guy who's just trying to get ahead, and I'll forgive a lot. Maybe there's a reason his movies from the '40s are included, and not those from the '70s...
The news that New York City Opera commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain last week, to premiere in 2013, created some fairly predictable snickering and water-cooler discussion about what incoming NYCO general manager Gerard Mortier was thinking. What got me wondering, though, was something a little less gasp-worthy than a short story and Oscar-winning film about two guys who got it bad for each other than those two little words, short story. Can an effective opera be created out of something so slender?
Continue reading "Short story : novel : : opera : ...opera?" »
" 'Imagine if a president had stood before the first graduating class of this academy five decades ago and told the Cadet Wing that by the end of the 20th century, the Soviet Union would be no more, communism would stand discredited and the vast majority of the world's nations would be democracies,' Bush urged graduates at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago."-quoted in today's Washington Post.
If Dwight Eisenhower had stood up in front of the Air Force's most recent graduates in 1958 and told them that the Soviet Union would not exist in 50 years, one of two things would have happened. Khrushchev would have taken this statement by the leader of the Allied forces in World War II to be a declaration of war and possibly started hurling atomic bombs aross the ocean, or the Air Force's own generals would have thought that they were suddenly going to start dropping atomic bombs on Russia in a couple hours. There are probably other possibilities, but those are the two that spring to mind.
This was also the year that Martin Luther King, Jr., published his first book and the NAACP began sitting in at lunch counters, so it's possible that Eisenhower may have had, you know, the present on his mind, and not what may or may happen around the Berlin Wall (which hadn't been built yet) in 1989. 1989 is, of course, 31 years after 1958, and the nuclear escalation may have been even swifter had Eisenhower used that number. So while I can imagine what would have happened had Eisenhower said it, I'm glad he didn't, because the result is the stuff of nightmares.
The solo violinist is pulling the tourniquet tight around her bicep before shooting up prior to the Brahms on the second half, the clarinets are passing around dime bags to get through Bartok a week later, and...no, just stop.
Anyone who went to music school can tell you stories of depravity that will make you doubt the future of humanity, but this notion of classical musicians living lives of Hendrixian excess is just funny. Of course, anyone who went to college can tell you similar stories. The only difference is that the music-school ones implicate more sopranos on a percentage basis.
And so once again we get this headline of musicians doping it up with Inderal, a heart disease medication that salves adrenaline-addled nerves. And then Blair "Mozart in the Jungle" Tindall steps in to the breach to say that musicians use beta-blockers to enhance performance and aren't a bunch of junkies. This being the same Tindall who's responsible in no small part for planting the notion of competitive musicians reduced to drug addiction in the public mind.
"Today, I drink alcohol on a social basis, as well as beta blockers," Tindall wrote in the Guardian. I never took beta blockers, but I've never heard of them being ingested in a drink, or taken socially, for that matter. I admit I lead a sheltered existence.
So here's the thing: Normal people use drugs. Musicians are not normal, but they also use drugs, which makes them like normal people. They also take a (legal) drug that eliminates some aspects of human physiology which make it difficult to do their jobs. They also blow off steam (and how!) to get away from the stress of that job, and for the simple fact that blowing off steam is fun. Many normal people do this, I think it's fair to say. Musicians aren't all heroes, they are people.
Just drop this brain-dead non-story. "Musicians take drugs," is not a story. "Accountant takes drugs," also less than interesting. Had Arthur Rubinstein been arrested at Heathrow with a kilo of cocaine in his luggage, I might think this was more interesting. But he wasn't, and it isn't.
"Suddenly my heart again goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if I myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if I could, I would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, 'It's okay. I got away. It was goddamned close, I'll tell ya. It didn't get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But I made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do.' Only there's no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry."—Richard Ford, Independence Day, 1995. (You'd better buy it in that sweet $22 Amazon deal with its precursor, The Sportswriter, thrown in. $22 worth of enjoyment can be had in any random 22 pages of either book.)
Discussions about what keeps people from listening to classical music generally pick up on the attributes of live concerts---the musicians' formal dress, the formality of concerts, the stuffiness and religiousity of concert halls, concerts starting too early or too late, being expected to dress up, and on (and on). Anything unique to the music itself tends to be left out, and that's a shame, because I think a pretty strong case could be made for listeners having a hard time finding a way in to classical music simply because of what pieces of music are called. The naming system of classical music is so far removed from popular music, or any other art form, that it's difficult to get a grip on what you are about to hear.
Looking like a not-so-distant cousin of Lou Harrison, this YouTube guy ("Handsplay") turns in precise renditions of classical staples whistled through his hands. Thanks to the meticulous JF for this one, of the Overture to The Barber of Seville, complete with trills and ornaments, and some neat-o octave displacement at times. Intonation this good could displace a lot of professional flutists.
