a fool in the forest

In Which American Music is Performed by Various Canadians, Englishmen and, in Some Few Exceptional Cases, by Certifiably Actual Americans

2009-07-04T07:20:00-07:00

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

For the Fourth of July, some American Music, beginning with as credible a pair of rock'n'roll Brits as one could desire -- Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson -- performing Hunter's "American Music," a song I must confess I would never have heard of but for the Google as I was putting this post together:

Ian Hunter - American Music

But today is America's holiday, so we must not let our former colonizers have the last word. We need to turn to someone closer to home, someone who but for not being an American would certainly Be An American. I refer of course to the great Neil Young, who continues against all odds to Rock in this our Flawed, but ne'ertheless Free, World:

Hold! Enough of these foreigners! (And no, that's not a cue to insert a Foreigner clip, although this one is rather amusing.)

Let's conclude this post with the real "American Music", from The Blasters, circa 1985, when the band still included both Alvin brothers. Direct from the Middle of America -- Champaign, Illinois -- and direct from the original Farm Aid concert, The Blasters!

"They wanna hear that sound, live from the U.S.A." Indeed they do, as do we all.

A fine Fourth to each of you! Feel Free!

~~~

Your Our Tax Dollars at Work

2009-06-06T21:21:21-07:00

If I were asked to trace the precise moment they lost me, it would have to be the loving closeup of the prosthetic racing leg at 0:16.

"Let's be completely honest" in the first few seconds runs a really close second.

In the immortal words of Sheridan Whiteside: "I may vomit."

~~~

Update [mere moments later]:

Seriously, my head is in danger of going full Cronenberg each time I watch this.

[Insert inarticulate, gurgling scream here.]

~~~

Further Update [30 minutes or so after that}:

Even more seriously, this ad would not be running at all but for its creators' confidence that the American public might be swayed by it in a useful way. Each time I watch it -- and the fact that I keep returning to it is not a healthy sign -- I find even more to be amazed by: the fallen hockey player, the charging thoroughbreds, the surging bean sprouts, the "Extreme Home Makeover"/barnraising, the solar panels and wind turbines, Joe Louis, and the gol-durned Moon Landing, all in one glossy, toxic package.

Sure, its only hope is to sell some of your neighbors a car -- and to sell all of us on a multi-billion dollar charitable donation to a wallowing leviathan -- but this spot cannot but reminds me, in a kinder-gentler way, of the classic and still kinda creepy indoctrination sequence in Alan Pakula's [mysteriously hard to come by ] The Parallax View (1974):

Of course, I may be overreacting.

~~~

If Arranging Philip Glass for Marching Band is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right

2009-06-04T07:44:10-07:00

Those who think that the music of Philip Glass is just tweedly-deedly argeggios, repeating incessantly all tweedlily and deedlily and arpeggiotically and then doing it again with incessant repetitivity again, and again, and then again, and yes I said yes, again --

A which some of his very best music is, actually,
A not that there's anything wrong with that

-- have not paid sufficient attention to his Symphonies.

In particular, Glass's Symphony No. 3 for strings has become, over the past year or two, one of my favorite orchestral works ever. In its structure and approach, I hear the Glass 3rd as a contemporary echo of/rejoinder to Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

A"The apotheosis of the dance! Thumbs up! A non-stop rollercoaster of whiz-bang orchestral action!"

-- R. Wagner on the B7

The Glass 3rd is written for strings and strings only. It is not meant to be performed by a high school marching band. And yet, what is not meant to be may be, mayn't it? It may.

Here we have the final movement of the PG3 arranged for and performed by a high school marching band, to wit, the Bloomington North Cougar Marching Band of Bloomington, Indiana. No strings are attached.

It is quite wonderful.

The Cougar band's repertoire also includes a selection from PG's score for The Hours, which sounds a bit more obviously Glass-y:

Fight fiercely, Minimalists!

~~~

For further reading:

Philip Glass is interviewed by Nico Muhly for the Guardian and reveals himself to be a bit of a copyright miser.

~~~

The Mathematic Circus of the Modern Night

2009-05-29T22:25:05-07:00

Eh bien, mon prince, I embedded Florent Ghys' splendid appropriative repurposing mashification of The President of the United States -- "We'll Invest in What Works" -- below. Today, two more of M. Ghys' efforts.

First, "Clignotants" ["Blinkers"], shot in and around the brickbound streets of Bordeaux. Beyond the music, which I am digging quite completely for weeks now, I am particularly fond of the illuminated cadeusis that crops up at 5:39 and that gets its close up right around 7:11 in this clip:

Next, the piece that was my own first discovery of les plaisirs Ghysien. itsnotyouitsme is the performing combination of NYC composer/ violinist Caleb Burhans and composer/guitarist Grey McMurray, and their debut EP release Walled Gardens is well worth your while. This is Florent Ghys' one man version of the highlight of that collection, "we are malleable, even though they seem to own us." As I have commented at Vimeo, this version may actually excel the excellent original. Just watching it play out is pure pleasure:

~~~

Supplements and Afterthoughts:

An excerpt from a performance of "we are malleable . . ." by its creators can be seen/heard here, and the entire original version can be streamed at New Amsterdam Records, an entity that is itself deserving of a separate post sometime.

Post title derived from Joni Mitchell's "The Jungle Line" (The Hissing Of Summer Lawns). Her word is actually "circuits" rather than "circus," but that's how I've always heard it and that's how I'll always like it. I can't find a ready link to the original version, but you can hear Leonard Cohen intone it -- and prove again, if proof were needed, that Joni Mitchell is in fact a poet -- in Grammy-winning tandem with Herbie Hancock, here. (That version is very good. I miss, though, the looped Burundi drummers of the original recording, one of the very first effective uses of sampling and a sound I still sometimes hear in dreams.)

Ah ha! Here they are: Les tambourinaires du Burundi.

~~~

Memorial Music

2009-05-25T00:29:00-07:00

Our American Memorial Day is not a day dedicated to Memory generally, but to the particular memory of those who have died in the armed service of the nation. To honor the military dead with a piece inspired by a dedicated pacifist is not the most obvious gesture, but pacifism recoils from war precisely because those very dead are the end product of every war, won or lost, just or otherwise.

So, for this Memorial Day, I offer up Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, here performed by the self-conducted Boston chamber ensemble A Far Cry:

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Messing About in Boats with Death and All His Friends

2009-05-20T16:33:00-07:00

Modern's a still-birth that was born after it died in 1939 --
Or was it '45? --
And we've been attending the longest saddest funeral in history,
Without even knowing.

-- "7 Middagh," Gabriel Kahane

Last July, I enthused enthusiastically over the announcement of Long Beach Opera's 30th Anniversary season. On Sunday afternoon, that season came to an end with the performance of a double bill of one-act operas in the former #5 boiler room (now a 3-story atrium/exhibit hall) aboard the Queen Mary. My high hopes for LBO have by and large been fulfilled -- as I reported previously here and here -- and this concluding program, while arguably the weakest of the three, was still satisfying in the "interesting work interestingly staged" way one hopes for with Long Beach Opera.

The two works on offer have in common only that each is an opera and that each was written in 1943. Beyond that, their origins stand as mirror image versions of musical life under the Third Reich.

I. The Emperor of Atlantis

Viktor Ullmann composed The Emperor of Atlantis in the ghetto/ concentration camp at Terezin, or Theresienstadt. Many of those imprisoned at Terezin came from the vigorous Jewish cultural community in and around Prague, a community in which Ullmann had achieved significant success and in which his librettist, the 25-year old playwright and artist Peter Kien, was a rising star. The SS administrators permitted a varied and active musical and theatrical life within the camp, but only for the cynical purpose of being able to hold Terezin up to the world (and to Red Cross inspectors) as an exemplar of the "humanity" with which the Reich was treating the transported Jewish populations. The unsavory truth was never far below the surface. The original production of Emperor of Atlantis was abruptly banned when SS officers witnessed a dress rehearsal and caught on at last to the work's patently subversive message. Virtually all of those involved in that production, including Ullmann and Kien, were transferred to Auschwitz in October 1944, where most either died or were killed within days.

No surprise, then, that Emperor of Atlantis is all about death. The titular Emperor decrees worldwide, total war -- literally a war of all against all -- and commands every citizen be armed and instructed to go forth and kill whoever he or she may find. Death himself is so incensed by this that he withdraws from the world, refusing to permit anyone to die. As he points out, Death is not the cause of suffering and pain, but the one who ends suffering and pain. (There's no talk of an afterlife in Ullmann's Atlantis.) The situation becomes untenable in the end and the Emperor and Death strike a bargain: Death will return on condition that the Emperor be the first recipient of "the new Death."

Ullmann's score is very much of its era, all angles and jazz nuance one moment, lushly late Romantic the next -- or as lushly romantic as one can be with an ensemble of just 13 instruments dictated by what happened to be available in the camp, including saxophone, banjo and harmonium. The opera is episodic, moved along through its seven scenes by the narration/chorus of The Loudspeaker. Other than the Emperor, the characters are more symbolic than not: Death, Harlequin, two Soldiers (one male, one female), and The Drummer, the personification of the erotic appeal of war.

The logic behind conductor/director Andreas Mitisek's approach to Atlantis was less than clear. The performers, in period dress, straggled in with luggage as if for a sea voyage. The set consisted of two sets of bunks reminiscent either of steerage or of the dormitories of Terezin. Death was in evening wear, the Drummer in underwear. There was a good deal of declaiming when characters weren't miming killing themselves or others. Kien and Ullmann's opera is declamatory in much the same way as Brecht & Weill's collaborations, and the work itself ultimately carried the day. The cast drew mainly on Long Beach veterans from this and earlier seasons. Standouts included Peabody Southwell as the Drummer and Dean Elzinga (Hagen in the LBO micro-Ring) as an earnest and irritable Death. Ms. Southwell, a fine singer and a gifted singing actor, is my nominee for Long Beach Opera MVP this year, having appeared impressively in all three of the season's productions. I hope we will be seeing and hearing her again soon.

II. The Clever One

The Nazi regime's relations with Carl ["Carmina Rosanna Buranadana"] Orff were as cordial as its dealings with Ullmann were hostile. Although never apparently an active member of the party, Orff accepted its praise and support, much as Richard Strauss did. Orff was far less concerned with ideology than he was with advancing the career, reputation and well being of Carl Orff. (Alex Ross provides a good thumbnail sketch of the Strauss-Orff problem in the larger context of the war and the Holocaust here.)

Orff's The Clever One shows no signs of having been composed in the middle of a world war. It is a bumptious and delightful folk tale from Grimm, in which a clever king is out-clevered by a peasant's daughter not once, but twice. Rogues and vagabonds scheme to defraud one another, characters are tossed in and out of jail, but justice and true love ultimately prevail. The insistent rhythms for which Orff is so well known abound, and the jokes are genuinely funny. If Philip Glass had a sense of humor in his music, he would likely produce something resembling The Clever One. (Which raises the larger question: why is there so little contemporary comic opera? It's all gloom, doom and Engagement with the Burning Issues of the Day all the time. Britten could do comedy, but what major composer has done it successfully since, or shown interest in even trying? And no, The Fly doesn't count. There's a difference between comic opera and a bad joke.)

Long Beach Opera's perpetual budget constraints became a virtue in The Clever One, with a set consisting mostly of three large rolls of white paper suspended above the stage. Drawn on, written upon, cut open to make doors and windows, used for shadow projections, they provided all that was needed in the way of scenery.

The cast brought infectious enthusiasm and a lyric zaniness to the proceedings. Particularly welcome was the return of LBO veteran Suzan Hanson as the titular Clever Woman, bringing wit and a welcome grace to the smartest character in the room. Roberto Gomez, who has made a specialty of royalty this season as Montezuma in April and as Ullmann's Emperor on this occasion, charmed as the slightly vain King, clever but not quite so clever as he had thought. Undeservedly obscure -- Andreas Mitisek reported prior to the performance that it has been mounted previously in Los Angeles only once, by a visiting company from San Francisco in 1956 -- The Clever One provided a properly happy ending to one of the most satisfying Long Beach Opera seasons yet. I am already itching with anticipation for whatever the company announces for its next season.

~~~

Bonus Bass/Baritone Content:

In 2005, the BBC produced a documentary musical memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, filmed at the sites of the horrors. The program included this segment, filmed at Auschwitz, in which Gerald Finley -- currently most associated with the eponymous role of J. Robert Oppenheimer in John Adams' Doctor Atomic -- sings the Emperor's final aria, submitting himself as first recipient of the return of Death to the world, leading to the final chorale, set to a repurposed version of Luther's Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.

~~~

Long Beach Opera photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, via the OC Register. "Carmina Burannie" cobbled together by the blogger.

~~~

Sérénade pour le commandant en chef et contrebass

2009-04-29T21:23:42-07:00

If only every presidential speech came with Minimalist continuo, what a wonderful world it would be:

From Bordelais composer, multitracker and videauteur, Florent Ghys.

~~~

Ad Vitam In C

2009-04-24T11:02:00-07:00

Per Alex Ross, this year marks the 45th anniversary of the composition of Terry Riley's In C. I am mightily fond of Terry Riley's In C. I have six different versions of it living on my hard drive, and there are more out there.

For a while earlier in the year, In C was your Best Entertainment Value in the Amazon MP3 store, which offered the seminal original record (I still have my old Columbia vinyl copy) as a single 42 minute track for 99 cents; then, for a week or so, it was available for free; today, sadly, it is priced as an album at $9.99. iTunes is similarly priced. There are several versions -- the best of those being a performance by the Bang on a Can All Stars, the strangest being a feedback-drenched electric guitar version from Japan's Acid Mothers Temple -- at EMusic, downloadable as single tracks and therefore cheap cheap cheap. Amazon is still offering the great early Riley double-header of A Rainbow In Curved Air & Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band for a mere $1.98, though it's rather a different sort of a beast than In C. But enough of base consumerism! Let's move along.

Like the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, In C exists principally as a set of instructions. (The score and instructions can be downloaded as a PDF here.) A group of musicians, the size and makeup of which is whatever the players decide it will be, work their way in sequence through 53 brief musical motifs, all in the titular key of C. Riley sees 35 as the optimal size of the ensemble, but allows for wide variation. Each player may repeat each given segment for as long as he or she wishes before moving to the next. Throughout, at least one player maintains "The Pulse," a steady stream of eighth notes played on the high C's of a piano or mallet instrument. The piece ends when the last player stops playing the last segment. While the element of spontaneity makes every performance different, the core structure produces performances in which the essence of In C is almost always recognizable. when Terry Riley unleashed it on the world, it served as catalyst for much of the music -- Philip Glass, Steve Reich and more -- that is typically, lazily, lumped together as "minimalism."

The 45th anniversary will be marked this evening by a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring a very large and varied ensemble centering around members of the Kronos Quartet and divers figures of prominence in the New York New Music scene. Below is a rather different version for quite a small group of performers that I just discovered, uploaded a few days ago.

This 55 minute performance -- a bit on the long side for In C, which tends to clock in around 40 minutes or so in most renditions -- comes from the closing night of the 2008 Tone Deaf Music Festival in Kingston, Ontario. The performers are the self-described Canadian "nerdgrass" band, The Gertrudes. In C does not usually feature banjos or accordions, but this version does. It turns out to work perfectly well that way.

While we are on the subject of unconventional versions of In C, here is a video trailer for a project I am looking forward to hearing later in the year. The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (of Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan) released a very fine recording of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians in 2007. This year, they are taking on In C in a series of remixes by a fairly dazzling array of remixers. It's got a Pulse and you can dance to it!

~~~

Let's All Vogue Like Die Vögel Vogue["I Kissed a Bird and I Liked It"]

2009-04-20T15:08:41-07:00

Some once-popular artists simply drift into obscurity. Others have obscurity thrust upon them. The German composer Walter Braunfels is one of the latter. Well known, popular, and highly thought of in the period between the two World Wars, he was unceremoniously stripped of his teaching positions and booted in to internal exile by the Nazi government in part because he was a half Jewish convert to Catholicism and in part because he had roundly snubbed the Nazi Party when it sought to have him write a party anthem in the 1920s. At war's end Braunfels found that while he was out the musical world had largely passed him by, embracing serialism and electronic experimentation and disdaining those who still adhered as he did to the more melodic models of The Two Richards, Wagner and Strauss.

For this season's installment of conductor James Conlon's ongoing "Recovered Voices" initiative, devoted to the rediscovery of composers whose creative lives were in one way or another opposed or obstructed by the Nazi regime, Los Angeles Opera has revived Braunfels' Die Vögel (The Birds). Written in the period before and after World War I, in which Braunfels served and from which he returned in a more dour and depressed frame of mind than he had left, Die Vögel was an immense success when it premiered in 1920, performed some 50 times in Munich and staged in many another opera house across Europe. Fame is fleeting, however, and Die Vögel fell from the repertoire quickly once Braunfels was denounced with other composers of degenerate, "entartete musik" in 1933. While his musical career never really recovered, Braunfels at least was still alive at the end of the war, unlike many others on that list.

Although it strays far from the original, Braunfels took his inspiration from Aristophanes' satirical drama, The Birds. As in the Greek original, two humans dissatisfied with their lives in the City make their way to the kingdom of the birds. They persuade the birds to fortify themselves so that, by preventing the smoke of sacrifice from reaching Olympus, they can rule over the gods. Unlike Aristophanes, however, Braunfels does not permit the birds and their human comrades to prevail. Although warned by a visit from Prometheus, himself no stranger to the consequences of thwarting Zeus, the birds persist in their rebellion, whereupon their great city is literally blown to the four winds. Duly cowed, the birds sing a hymn to the greatness of Zeus and the humans set out to return among their own kind. As a subplot, and as an excuse for some rapturous music in Act II, Braunfels adds a romantic mystical bonding between the Nightingale and the younger more sensitive human ("Good Hope") who carries a yearning in his heart as he sets out to rejoin the world of men.

Braunfels wrote the first act of Die Vögel before the first World War and the second upon his return from the front, and it shows. Act I is a lighter, more jovial piece, closer to the mocking tone of its Athenian forebear. Act II is almost a different opera, nearly twice as long as Act I and steeped in the heavier tones of Wagner and Strauss: the curious union of Good Hope and the Nightingale is pure Tristan and the warning lecture of Prometheus echoes the ominous pronouncements of Jochanaan in Salome. Braunfels was a very talented composer in veins pioneered by others, but he was not an innovator. Die Vögel even includes an old-fashioned second-act ballet, a feature against which Wagner himself famously rebelled when the Paris Opera insisted he include one in Lohengrin.

Other than the temple architecture adopted by the birds for their city, the design of the Los Angeles Opera production is more influenced by 1920s Europe than by the Greeks. The costumes of the humans are drawn from that period, and those of the birds echo Art Deco à la Erté. Only Prometheus fails to fit in: he resembles no one more than Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. The amusing ballet, celebrating the nuptials of a pigeon and dove and the arrival of their first clutch of eggs, would fit well in a Hollywood spectacle of the same era. Other than the dance episodes, the staging is relatively static. This may be a matter of safety and necessity, since the production shares the extremely steep raked stage being used for the LA Opera Ring and greater movement would likely risk the limbs and necks of the singers.

The review excerpts running in the print ads for Die Vögel all single out Conlon and the orchestra for praise, which is only right. In his chosen style, Braunfels devised large swaths of top drawer late Romantic music, and the Opera orchestra plays it as well, I think, as it can be played. The big Act II set pieces in particular -- Good Hope and Nightingale's meeting by moonlight and the warning of Prometheus -- strike home. The birds' closing grovel to Zeus is a bit turgid, but that is Braunfels' fault and not the orchestra's.

Die Vögel is more deserving of its obscurity than Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg), which was revived in last season's "Recovered Voices" production, but it does not deserve to disappear altogether. Musically, it has genuine merit and the LA Opera production demonstrates that it warrants at least occasional revival for reasons that go beyond historical curiosity.

Two performances remain -- April 23 and 26 -- and there are numerous tickets available at half-price through Los Angeles Opera itself (here) or through the Goldstar service (here), so anyone with even a remote fondness for German high Romantic opera, or for singing birds, should give it a go. Why, with those half-price offers, it's cheaper than a trip to Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room!

~~~

Photos: Robert Millard, via Los Angeles Opera.

~~~

Animations of Mortality

2009-04-17T07:45:20-07:00

Man does not live by serious, sophisticated music alone. No, sometimes man lives by peppy, poppy, non-serious music. And sometimes man lives by the animated videos that accompany that peppy, poppy and/or non-serious music. Such as the three exemplars below, which I offer for your Friday or weekend consideration.

First in line, with the most prominent pedigree, is the newest from Moby, "Shot in the Back of the Head." There is shooting involved, and a head, as well as a severed arm. Head and arm apparently find romance in an otherwise dark and harrowing world.

Moby has written that his forthcoming album, wait for me, was inspired by a speech he attended on creativity and the marketplace. The speaker was director David Lynch. Moby thereafter prevailed upon Lynch to create a video for the initial track from the album, and Lynch thereupon created this:

Batting second: Devo.

Akron's finest dystopians are reportedly midway through the writing and recording of their first proper album in some 20 years, and are teasing their believers with a new video, "Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)." Yes, more gunplay and more visions of life in an unsettling urban realm, with topical references ["Don't Taze Me, Bro!"], a dollop of tawdry role-playing sexuality, and some of those irritating inflatable advertising wiggler things thrown in for spice:

In search of a final animated treat we turn north to Toronto and the widescreen piano pop of Brad Lyons and Carly Paradis, doing business as Oceanship. For the video to accompany their song "Hotblack," Lyons and Paradis turned to Israeli animator Ofir Sasson, who produced a largely hand-drawn tale of love, lust and betrayal as a starring vehicle for the ever-popular Wolf and Sheep. It is what you might have gotten if Warner Brothers hired John Cheever to write a "reboot" of the Looney Tunes franchise.

It ends in tears. Firearms are again in evidence, as is the inevitable long, slow fall from a cartoon cliff. The song, with a swooping "nah-na-na-na" chorus, is easily the best one included in this post. (Although it is embedded below, I recommend watching this video in its largest and clearest size, here.)

Enjoy your respective weekends, folks.

~~~

Title reference: a now out-of-print book by Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam.

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The Infernal Retinues Surface

2009-04-15T07:00:00-07:00

Our National Anthem of the Day:

Taxman -- George Harrison and Eric Clapton (live)

And for the young people (as Ed Sullivan used to say), an alternate version:

~~~

Photo: "Have you paid your income tax this month?" (Accra, Ghana 2001) by flickr user Walt Jabsco , used under Creative Commons license.

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An LA Times Story With a Familiar Ring To It

2009-04-13T14:50:32-07:00

Christopher Smith of the Los Angeles Times went to see Los Angeles Opera's Walküre the other evening, and lays claim to an Important Insight into its director-designer's methods:

I was equally eager to see director Achim Freyer's staging and designs, which have led critics, bloggers and impassioned local Wagnerians to whip themselves up to near-hysteria.

An incomplete list of comparison points for the design of the opera mentioned online include 'Star Wars,' a carnival, 'Wheel of Fortune,' the circus (both the regular and Cirque varieties), puppet shows and 'The Twilight Zone.'
But the opera was less than 10 minutes old when I realized it was I who had discovered the true, secret coda [sic] powering Freyer's vision. A post-performance trip to the Internet confirmed this revelation, which is clear, indisputable and undeniable, and which you can see above [in Smith's post].

(Emphasis added.)

If you click through to discover Smith's Revelation, you may wonder along with me whether his "trip to the Internet" might have included this revelatory, if unacknowledged, blog post.

~~~

Photo: Placido Domingo, as Siegmund, is stabbed in the back; it runs in the family. Photo by Monika Rittershaus via Los Angeles Opera.

~~~

Please Don't Squish the SquirrelPlease Spare a Fish for the Swan

2009-04-12T07:00:00-07:00

Time once again for the fool in the forest Easter Squirrel, the sixth in our recurring series. This year, we turn from purely pleasurable paintings of squirrels to the more practical, and pianistic, purposes to which our perky pals can be put.

As decoration for an early Victorian piano stool, par example. This squirrel-emblazoned stool, of English manufacture circa 1850, is in the collection of the Bowes Museum, located in the market town of Barnard Castle, County Durham, in the northeast of England.

While the beadwork nut gatherer on the seat is clearly a proper English red squirrel, the institution in which this squirrel is housed has a suspicious Francophile quality to it. The Museum was founded and built by a successful English businessman, John Bowes, with his wife Joséphine. Mr. Bowes met the future Mrs. Bowes in Paris in 1847, where the lady was an actress, Joséphine Coffin-Chevallier. They were wed in 1852. Mrs. Bowes was an amateur painter and lover of the arts, and she persuaded her spouse to embark on a project to bring the benefits of the arts to the presumptively unenlightened folk of County Durham. To that end, the two traveled and collected widely, and oversaw the design and construction of the Museum building, modeled on the style of a French chateau and claimed to be the first major British building constructed using metric rather than imperial measures. Sinister, indeed.

The prize of the Bowes collection is a wondrous 18th century automaton, The Silver Swan. Mark Twain mentions having seen it, at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris, in Chapter XIII of The Innocents Abroad:

I watched a silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes -- watched him swimming about as comfortably and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweler's shop -- watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it -- but the moment it disappeared down his throat some tattooed South Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their attractions.

The Swan is currently undergoing extensive conservation, as well as being studied to better understand its workings and perhaps to figure out exactly who constructed it. Some glimpses of the Swan in action can be seen in this informative video on the conservation project:

And here is one of the Swan's complete daily performances, shot by a visitor to the Museum over the heads of numerous other visitors to the Museum:

From a squirrel to a swan, and on, and so on: a happy Easter to you all.

~~~

For completists, here are links to prior years' Easter Squirrel posts:

2008 [John Singleton Copley and Joseph Cornell]
2007 [Hans Holbein the Younger]
2006 [John Singleton Copley]
2005 [Hans Hoffman]
2004 [Albrecht Dürer]

~~~

Kunsten å koke et eggy-wegg

2009-04-11T08:30:00-07:00

Easter means, inter alia, eggs. As a reader service, here are some suggestions for preparing eggs in a variety of styles and textures, with and without their shells.

You have heard, perhaps, of Scotch eggs, reputed to have been invented not by Scots but by the wily London merchants at Fortnum & Mason. A Scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg encased in a layer of pork sausage, breaded, deep fried and eaten cold, calculated to reinforce every unfortunate opinion Dr. Johnson ever uttered concerning the Scots. But how, you may ask, does one properly hard boil those eggs in the first place? For that, we must turn further north than Scotland and look into Norwegian eggs or, more accurately, the University of Oslo's "Kunsten å koke et egg" ("The Art of Cooking an Egg") which explains, in Norwegian, how to achieve exemplary results when boiling one's eggs. If you don't read Norwegian but are able to convert sizes and temperatures to metric terms, the site provides a clever Flash-driven tool, shown below, to determine precisely how long to boil your particular egg to achieve perfection:

Whatever you may think of Scotch eggs, there is one anglicized Scot who knows a thing or two about the culinary arts, famously hot-tempered chef-restaurateur Gordon Ramsay. Here, in his more charming mode, Chef Ramsay demonstrates how to prepare perfect scrambled eggs:

I had rather assumed that he simply glared at them and they scrambled themselves. Viewers of the US version of Hell's Kitchen can only shudder when Chef Ramsay compares scrambling eggs to making risotto.

The cooking of eggs for a full English breakfast requires the steady and attentive hand of a live chef, and should not be entrusted to unreliable, or mechanized, kitchen staff:

Let's see now. Scotch eggs. . . English eggs . . . Norwegian eggs . . . What more do we need before we conclude? The answer is obvious:

Swedish eggs!

Bon appetit and Happy Easter.

~~~

Photo: "Eggy-weggs" by Flickr user cbcastro, used under Creative Commons license. "Eggy-weggs" is a service mark of Alex DeLarge.

Sources: University of Oslo link and Gordon Ramsay video via lifehacker.

~~~

The Deaccession Will Not Be Televised

2009-04-07T13:54:30-07:00

Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times is vigorously displeased with a lawyer who writes about art. The lawyer in question isn't me.

I've more to say on the subject at Declarations and Exclusions.

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