The Parrot's Lamppost

While My Guitar Factory Gently Weeps: The Government and Gibson

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 05:42:00 +0000

Great news, folks: there's a convenient new way to get a complete list of conservative media in the U.S.! Just Google "Government raids Gibson guitar factory". Yes, they are all there, from The Wall Street Journal and Fox News to Human Events and the American Family News Network (AFN), lining up with all the music blogs to show their outrage at the Obama administration's attempt to enforce the Lacey Act, which (in effect) regulates the importation of endangered rainforest wood species. Those cruel, senseless feds jacking up innocent people at a guitar factory. For shame!

Could they be upset because, according to the Christian news service OneNewsNow, Henry Juskiewicz, the CEO of Gibson, "has a long history of supporting Republican candidates"? Which of course demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government targeted Gibson to intimidate Juskiewicz from making his game-changing contributions to the Republican cause, whereas the liberal Democrat Chris Martin was spared the raids as a sort of musical salute to his politics.

Or are they genuinely concerned about the overextension of federal authority in sending armed marshalls to the workplace? Funny, then, that their heartstrings didn't get equally bent when the government stepped up raids of factories suspected of employing illegal immigrants. I wonder what's up with them? Isn't a raid a raid? Isn't the evil Obama administration the evil Obama administration? Aren't overzealous federal marshalls Public Enemy #1 ever since Waco? Yet somehow, the rightwing noise about the Gibson raid is as deafening as 20 Les Pauls at maximum volume on 100 Marshall stacks... while they managed to maintain a calm disinterest in the illegal immigrant raids (note that that last phrase can be parsed two ways).

The author's Gibson Custom acoustic

Actually the gaggle of googled Christian rightists just want to get a litle mileage out of the fact that the "victim" in this case is Gibson, the known and loved maker of Les Pauls and Hummingbirds, not to mention a couple of LG's and ES 335's I've owned (and loved). Anyone still on the fence about Obama - that is, anyone who has not yet decided that he is ruining the country through his liberal policies (as opposed to the folks who think he is ruining the chances of turning the country around through his concessions to the radical right) - must surely be persuaded by his callous and uncalled for raid that he should be dumped. "Vote your musical tastes!" is what the message seems to be. (If I were to have followed that advice a few years ago, for example, I never would have voted for Bill Clinton - not a Fleetwood Mac fan, as I have no doubt confessed elsewhere in blog posts past.)

Gibson was accused of violating the Lacey Act, which bars the importation of products that are not in compliance with the export laws of a foreign country. This led to a raid in 2009 in connection with Gibson's obtaining ebony from Madagascar. It's not that the wood has been shown to violate laws of harvesting in Madagascar, but that Gibson could not properly verify the source as legal. Though Juskiewicz feigns a certain amount of bewilderment about the government's case, it is laid out pretty clearly in a Justice Department document that is available online:

A second civil forfeiture action... remains ongoing. The action involves wood materials seized from the premises of Gibson Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the affidavit of a USFWS Special Agent in support of that forfeiture, on September 28, 2009 Customs and Border Protection reported the import of a shipment of Madagascar ebony wood at the Port ofNewark, New Jersey. Immigration and Customs Enforcement notified the USFWS Special Agent of the importation that consisted of 5,200 pieces of ebony, sawn sizes, and 2,133 pieces of sawn Madagascar black ebony, sawn sizes, with a total value of approximately $76,437.59. The shipment was exported by Nagel GMBH and Company KG (Nagel) of Hamburg, Germany to its U.S.-based affiliate, Hunter Trading Company (Hunter) of Westport, Connecticut for its customer, Gibson Guitars of Nashville. CBP notified Hunter that the required Lacey Act declaration had not been submitted upon importation and an employee of Hunter subsequently submitted a declaration for 1,664 cubic meters of ebony, sawn sizes, and 700 cubic meters of Madagascar black ebony, declaring the country of harvest for both as Madagascar.

Since at least April of 2000, the Republic of Madagascar has had various laws that restrict the harvest and export of ebony wood. In 2006 a Madagascar Interministerial Order was entered that required all existing, legally harvested stocks of ebony wood to be declared to the relevant office of the Madagascar Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests. Any ebony not declared under that order is subject to seizure by Malagasy authorities. According to the search warrant affidavit in the public record, investigators have been unable to discover any authorizations for exports of unfinished, semi-worked, or sawn ebony to Nagel from Madagascar since at least September 2006. The Special Agent also examined 2008 inventory records of existing stocks of Madagascar ebony maintained by the Madagascar Ministry 102 UNITED.of Environment, Water and Forests and was unable to find any stock of Madagascar ebony wood recorded for Nagel's supplier.

The Defendant Property in this forfeiture proceeding is identified as ebony that originated in Madagascar. The USFWS Special Agent averred in an affidavit in the public record that he believed the Defendant Property was exported from Madagascar and imported into the United States in violation of 16 U.S.C. § 3372(a), prohibiting the import of a plant product taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of an underlying foreign law and imported without the filing of a Lacey Act declaration and was therefore subject to forfeiture under the Lacey Act. It was also alleged that the Defendant Property is subject to forfeiture for being involved in a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 545, that is, the fraudulent or knowing importation into the United States of any merchandise contrary to law or the receipt, concealment, purchase, or sale of such merchandise after importation, knowing the same to have been imported or brought into the United States contrary to law. Gibson Guitars has filed a claim in this forfeiture proceeding and moved to dismiss the forfeiture complaint. Briefing in the case continues.

That is not so difficult to understand. There was a large shipment of undocumented ebony imported from a country where the law requires documentation for export. The subsequent declaration by a Hunter employee is suspect because records in the country of origin make no mention of the shipment. It is not to Gibson's advantage that the current government of Madagascar is not recognized as legitimate by most world bodies. That is one reason that other companies backed away from Madagascar imports before Gibson did. With an illegitimate government ruling in the shadow of the military it is more difficult to determine the legitimacy of exported natural resources. For the right "fee", corrupt officials might permit the removal of natural resources without the proper documentation. One motivation for the Lacey Act was to prevent companies from skirting the law in just such circumstances. It says, in effect, that though you might be able to get around the foreign law overseas, you'd better be able to document compliance with it when you get home. There seems to be a legitimate question as to whether the wood shipment was okay by Madagassy standards, and therefore sufficient cause to seize and hold it.

Gibson claims on their web site that the Justice Department has still not pressed charges in the case, though they continue to hold the materials obtained in the raid. But if you grant that in spite of Madagascar politics the wood should have been documented, then it is hard to see what they are doing wrong. They are entitled to seize the shipment until and unless Gibson can document the provenance of the whole shipment, not just some fraction of it. Though rainforest lovers will no doubt observe that you can't grow any ebony trees from 7300 sawn pieces, so merely seizing them does not do much to solve the problem.

The reason for the recent raid seems to be in doubt, as Gibson claims that the wood seized was from India. In a video posted on their web site Juskiewicz says that there are "similar laws in India". From his discussion and some posts on Gibson's blog, their story appears to be that the JD thinks Gibson may have violated Indian laws concerning the export of unfinished wood products, not that Gibson purchased illegally harvested endangered species in India. The products in question are fingerboards made of Indian rosewood. The fingerboards are "blanks" which have been carved and partially finished by Indian workers. They are then given a final finish, fitted with frets and set on a guitar neck by workers in the U.S. According to Gibson, the Indian government considers the export of these semi-finished "blanks" to be in compliance with their export laws, and the U.S. is interpreting Indian law in a way that is not supported by India.

Though the two charges - illegally harvesting endangered wood species and illegally obtaining wood products that are not completely finished - are not clearly distinguished in either Gibson's press release, their published statements in the media, or Juskiewicz's press conference video, it seems likely that at best, the government has a case here that jumps headlong into gray areas of the Lacey Act, and possibly that the recent raid was conducted in frustration over their inability to come up with hard evidence that Gibson violated the law in the Madagascar case. The fact that Gibson works closely with the Rainforest Alliance and Greenpeace, and that their wood is certified by an independent industry oversight group (the Forest Stewardship Council) adds to doubts that there is wrongdoing worth prosecuting on Gibson's part.

But that is a long way from the outright abuse of federal power that Juskiewicz alleges: “We feel totally abused. We believe the arrogance of federal power is impacting me, personally, our company, personally, and employees here in Tennessee. And it’s just plain wrong.” But if the government does nothing in a case like this it renders the Lacey Act largely ineffectual as a tool to protect endangered species and prevent illegal logging. No one who cares about the environment should want that.

Into the genuine confusion of this case (or cases) steps the radical rightwing media, suggesting that Gibson's status as the maker of the guitars that produced some of the world's best-loved music automatically means that the U.S. is wrong, overbearing, and possibly singling out a Republican CEO for his political views. Playing to the crowd, the WSJ and others make sure to invoke the alleged plight of the itinerant busker with a piece of mahogony in his 1958 Martin and no documentation of the guitar's age. Give those Obama marshalls an inch and they'll take your ax" they seem to be saying. Check this out:

Lady Antebellum guitarist Jason ‘Slim’ Gambill says: “I think its terrifying for musicians to know that they could be going through an airport and get stopped by a customs agent somewhere overseas and have someone say ‘I’m taking this because it might have potentially something illegal that was, you know, harvested, 60, 80 year ago and I’m taking it because now it’s a protected wood. It doesn’t make sense.” (Cited on Gibson's blog.)

Yo, calm down Jason. You have a wild imagination, dude, if you think that all these customs officials are standing there with a copy of the Lacey Act just waiting for someone to walk through the gate with a guitar. That is so far from a customs agent stopping a shipment of more than 7300 pieces of wood it's not even funny. I wouldn't give the redstate types who are trying to get mileage out of this the satisfaction of thinking they've got guitarists the world over worrying about getting their vintage instruments appropriated at the airport. (Anyway, what's up with the "customs agent somewhere overseas" thing? Since when is France or Egypt enforcing the Lacey Act?)

Hands off the Brazilian rosewood fingerboard on my 1970 Gibson ES-335!
(Though I don't really believe they're coming to get me. And besides,
I'm just guessing it's rosewood. What else would it be?)

Now we've got to deal with the mom-and-pop thing, since the rightwing media are doing their best to play this up into a classic David-and-Goliath story. Gibson Guitar Corporation is a highly profitable conglomerate which does not only make fine wooden instruments to play on back porches in the Ozarks. Gibson has acquired top music and electronics brands such as Epiphone, Dobro, Baldwin, Chickering, Wurlitzer and Oberheim. They make consumer electronics lines, fashion lines, video games, jukeboxes and run a variety of other enterprises including even ice cream parlors. In an interview with BusinessTN in August 2007 Juskiewicz stated an intention to take the company public and even to advance into the Fortune 500. Don't imagine that's going too well given the state of the economy since then, but the point is that this is not just yer innocent little craft shop cobbling away to make fine instruments. In the same BusinessTN interview Juskiewicz claims revenues of close to $500 million. Poor little abused guitar maker.

Speaking of abused, I doubt that CEO Juskiewicz is a regular reader of Glassdoor.com, the employer ratings site. Check out the comments on Gibson. The company gets an embarrassing 1.8 (out of 5.0) rating. The preponderance of reviews, from what I can see, give them the lowest available rating (1.0). A good number of complaints mention "the CEO" (that would be Juskiewicz) specifically, and some suggest that he regularly reminds employees how easily they can lose their jobs. This casts a different light on the words of employees cited in interviews and in videos about the raids posted on Gibson's web site: "Randy Ferrell, a final assembly worker at Gibson, says that the raids make him very concerned about lay-offs and that the company may be forced to close its doors because 'If they take our wood away and we can’t work our ownership has no choice.'" What exactly is the value of testimonials by employees with an axe of the nonmusical type hanging over their heads?

So, ye buzzards of the right, buzz off. Or should I say, pluck off. Gibson is not exactly your local candy store, Juskiewicz is not the down-home small business owner driven to poverty by the federal bureaucracy, and the feds, though very likely heavy-handed and lacking solid proof of an intention to break the law, are not chasing down paper tigers in the Malagassy jungles, but attempting to enforce an act with important consequences for biodiversity and other ecological benefits.

Wherefore all this rumination on guitars and rainforests? Well, it raises the interesting question of whether a company that is part of the supply chain for the production of art should be held to a different ethical standard than other companies. My opinion is that it should not, but the standard itself should include caveats about the nature of the enterprise. Were ebony, mahogony and rosewood merely in short supply, there would be a reasonable argument that guitar and piano manufacturers should have access to them at the expense of, say, the makers of tourist trinkets or bookcases for luxury apartments. That is part of what it is to have standards, to make judgments about what is and isn't an appropriate way to use a valuable resource.

But that does not mean we should simply look the other way when art-related manufacturers utilize rare resources. This is what the rightwing media are counting on, that our sympathy for the great music made on Gibson instruments will automatically cause us to shift the blame onto Obama, first of all, and zealous environmentalists, second. But we should not dance to the beat of their drum. By and large, guitar makers have managed to get by and make great guitars in spite of the restrictions on rainforest woods. Let's hope Gibson works out this issue with the feds, but let's not go jumping on the big bad federal bureaucracy just because some Fortune 500 wannabe cries foul.

The Tommasini Ten

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:24:00 +0000

What? Two classical music posts in a row? Since when did the Parrot get such an urbane bug in his tropical ear? Well - when a leading NY Times music critic like Anthony Tommasini indulges himself and his readers in an exercise like "name the ten greatest composers who ever lived" the Skeptical Parrot cannot resist the challenge.

First, I imagine a scenario like the following: The Times editor sits everybody down in a big conference room and says: "Okay, now, you all know that newspaper readership is declining, and our future (and yours) depends largely on the success of the web site. So everybody's got to do his or her part to build our web presence. I need all writers to have at least one proposal for how you can contribute to this on my desk by tomorrow morning." Not having a heck of a lot of time to brainstorm, the music critics come of with various "best of"-type ideas. And though the notion of a "ten best" classical composers is as nutty as a Gesualdo slumber party, it seems likely to get enough people anxious that their presonal favorites will be passed over that lots of people will appear to be interested. And when Tommasini duly reports the "more than 1500 informed, challenging, passionate and inspiring comments from readers of The New York Times" the only rational response from said editor would be "way to go, Tony!"

But while Tommasini and his readers may have had their fun, the entire exercise lacked one thing from the start: criteria. Rather than offer X, Y and Z as the criteria of greatness, and then engage in a fact-finding study as to who best fulfills them, the crtieria got hauled out here in half-baked form, hidden under the tones and rants of subjective impressions and assessments of individual accomplishments. Only by such constant tipping of the scales one way or another did Tomassini end up with a list in which, for example, Bartok is included but not Handel, Haydn, Grieg, Mahler, Tchaikovsky or Schoenberg; Verdi is in, but Vivaldi, Schumann, Dvorak, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt and Elgar don't make the cut. Tomassini does not so much as apologize, in his final essay, for the fact that he couldn't squeeze Mendelssohn into his list; after all, he is only the composer of the world's most popular violin concerto, two of the most popular symphonies, some of the greatest works of chamber music, the Elijah oratorio, the Hebrides Overture and Midsummer Night's Dream Overture (including what is perhaps the world's most frequently performed piece of classical music, the Wedding March) and the Songs Without Words for piano; and, since Tommasini likes to refer to extra-musical facts about his choices, he is also largely responsible for our current appreciation of Tommasini's #1 composer, J.S. Bach. Not enough, apparently, to place him above the illustrious Bartok, whose influence on anyone or anything is debatable and whose quality is as uneven as that of many other 20th c. options.

What sort of nonsense is denoted by "top ten classical music composers in history"? I can't even begin to imagine. There is a sort of grudging consensus among classically trained musicians that from the Baroque on, J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart and L. van Beethoven are the three greatest composers. Beyond that, there is a slightly less firm consensus that Handel, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms make the cut. You get Chopin, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Mahler in the late romantic contingent. And in the "be fair to the 20th" category it goes without saying that Debussy (whose most importat works were writtne after 1900), Stravinsky and Schoenberg had the biggest impact (though "greatness" at this point already depends more on "admirable" than "lovable"). So there are your "top sixteen classical music composers in history" and I did virtually no work to arrive at it. You want to cut, then you cut the late romantics and Schoenberg because they are more controversial than the others (or in Chopin's case, more limited in range of composition). Now you've got eleven, a nice prime number. And if anyone wants to challenge this, I'm just going to say: "Look, I have my personal favorites too. For example, Purcell, Teleman, Bruckner and Elgar definitely make my pantheon. But I am not talking about personal favorites, I'm talking about consensus. And that, I can virtually guarantee after almost half a century of appreciation, study, training and performance of classical music, is what I just said it is. So there you go."

Someone will no doubt be inclined to respond like this: "Yeah, but even if you're right, the consensus is wrong, because so-and-so is really greater than so-and-so". In that case I'm going to ask for your criteria for greatness; and you may find that once you state it, and apply it consistently, people who you don't want to be on your list will be, and others who you want will be excluded. And that is no doubt what would have happened with Tomassini's list if he hadn't been backing up his choices with an ever-changing arsenal of justifications for the people he included. Each choice is secured on somewhat different grounds. By such methods, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of classical music can produce and back up a list of his own and write off Tomassini's arguments. What is the value of that exercise?

The fact that Tommasini came up with so many of the consensus guys I just mentioned shows perhaps that they are the ones who get on the list by any reasonable standard. But Tomassini goes even further than identifying the 10 "greatest" composers; he actually goes so far as to rank them in order! Here's his list: (1) Bach (2) Beethoven (3) Mozart (4) Schubert (5) Debussy (6) Stravinsky (7) Brahms (8) Verdi (9) Wagner (10) Bartok. The reasons for these rankings probably belong in a joke book: Wagner, for example, was an anti-semite and therefore ranks behind Verdi as a composer! Sqwuakkk! Beethoven beats Mozart because Tomassini thinks he is more daring, or something like that. Brahms slides down, apparently, because he tried to walk the line between conservatism and the progressive pull of the Romantic. (One might just as well say this is why he should slide up, but why argue with such wily logic?) It's all very silly, but hey, it sure pulls readers into that web site. They all want to have their say. And so do I. Oh sorry, I didn't play by the rules and posted this on my own site. Well, you're free to use the permalink at the top.

So here are a few of my non-"Comments".

First, Bela Bartok is not even on my list of top ten post-Romantic pre-War 20th century composers. Of course the caveats are necessary to exclude not only Mahler, Elgar, Rachmaninoff and Sibelius but also Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage and other great figures of the second half of the 20th century from consideration for this very exclusive list. This seems fair since the late Romantics would win hands down and the post-War period is still being evaluated. The list would then go as follows (in no particular order): Schoenberg, Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Copland, Barber, Vaughan Williams. Is Bartok next? Maybe; for Bluebeard's Castle, Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta, the 2nd Violin Concerto, and some of the quartets (though the middle ones get him negative points). The problem is that few of those pieces really send me as much as the best ones by the other guys. But he tried harder, I have to admit that. Another BB, Tommasini's favorite Benjamin Britten, never impressed me much. Good thing I'm not a Big Berg fan or BB1 would slide below AB, who's definitely in front of BB2. According to BP (the Brooklyn Parrot).

Next, by what logic, exactly, is all the classical music prior to Bach somehow dismissed from this exercise? Or does "history" begin in the late 17th century? Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin des Prez and Palestrina were each, in their day, considered among the greatest composers of all time; and history, I think more or less backs up this judgment. Shame on Tomassini for agism. Byrd, Dufay, DiLassus, Gabrieli and a few others may also deserve consideration.

If consistency is a criterion of greatest, as I think it should be, there are only, to my knowledge, two composers who never wrote a mature piece that is beyond criticism: Bach and Brahms. Beethoven's execrable Wellington's Victory and one or two other late pieces bar him from this list. Mozart's juvenilia can be discounted by virtue of the "mature" clause; but his ridiculous parlor music output of divertimenti and serenades, with one or two well-known exceptions, take him off the table. I will admit that I can't actually name a Schubert piece I dislike, but of his many quartets and piano sonatas, I think they do not all rise to the level of the greatest classical music. Chopin is probably beyond criticism, but as I said, the fact that his output is all but limited to solo piano music and a couple of concerti means he should not be compared with composers who tried and consistently succeeded at a variety of musical expressions. Handel is a serious possibility; though with over 200 vocal works, of which I am terribly familiar with exactly one, it is hard to pretend that I really know much about Handel's consistency. (It is interesting to note that though he does not make Tommasini's list, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are all on record as considering him their master. Go figure.) And that's about it for composers who even might be perfectly consistent at a very high level.

Now let me return at last to my own "favorites" list. First, let me say this: Telemann wrote more works than any other composer; he wrote over 2000 cantatas alone, which amounts to a cantata a week, every week, for 40 years, in addition to at least 1000 other pieces. Neither I nor, I think, any other living person has heard even a majority of Telemann's music. I have, however, heard quite a bit of it, and I think it is fair to say I have not only never heard a bad work, but never heard a work that is less than fully satisfying, original, and stocked with passages of great beauty. I think it is at least possible that by some criteria, such as quantity of consistent high-quality output, Telemann deserves to be called one of the greatest composers of all time. Next, though his output is much more limited in quantity, I find Henry Purcell's music to be of such unearthly beauty that I could listen to nothing else for weeks. He has a permanent piece of real estate in my Composers' Heaven. Staying with the English for a minute (who grossly overvalue their dry, unadventurous types like Britten and Frank Bridge and undervalue more interesting figures like William Walton and Michael Tippett) I find Edward Elgar's music to be the equal of any composer from the 19th century on. Of his many underrated pieces, the String Quartet and Violin Concerto stand out to me. Again, I have never heard a less than completely satisfying piece by Elgar. He's in my Top Whatever list, by almost any criteria.

Moving right along, while I recognize that Anton Bruckner had his less than stellar moments - the 2nd and 6th symphonies primarily - I find several of his symphonies so deeply moving that upon the 100th hearing they still reduce me to tears. These would include the First, Third, Fourth, Seventh and Ninth at least; while the Fifth and Eighth are almost at that level, and even the Sixth, surely an imperfect work, contains many passages of beauty. My admiration for him is so high that even his "student" symphony, "#0" so-called, I find as satisfying as many composers' mature works. He is among my top 5 symphonists, for sure. Next, anyone who underrates Ives is a fool; the Concord Sonata alone is enough to label him a musical genius, and when you add his greatest orchestral works, his string quartets and violin sonatas, and some of his best songs and piano works, Ives has a secure a place in the Top Whatever as anyone.

I am also going to put in another plug here for Paul Hindemith. Ever since my high school orchestra took up his small, hauntingly gorgeous piece called Trauermusik I have loved almost everything I've heard by Hindemith. His Symphonic Metamorphoses is the greatest orchestral theme and variations I known; his Violin Concerto is extremely underplayed and should be hauled out regularly; his more well-known works like the several Kammermusik pieces and the Mathis der Maler symphony are also brilliant. (I will admit that his setting of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is a bit challenging, but I think it will eventually reward repeated listenings.) That said, other than Stravinsky, Prokofiev is surely the greatest tonal modernist of the 20th century; how there can even be a doubt about it is beyond me. I love much of Shostakovich's work, but he is surely not very consistent and tends to get in a rut. Prokofiev towers over Bartok, IMHO; I would say that even his film scores are superior to almost anything Bartok ever wrote, to say nothing of his magnificent symphonies, ballets, concerti, violin sonatas, piano works, etc. Head and shoulders over Bartok, and most other 20th century tonal composers.

The French don't get much respect in classical music; between Dufay and Debussy they are practically ignored. But I think Ravel is almost as great as Debussy. His influence on modern music is, in my opinion, vast and little appreciated (except by film composers!) and his output of great works is considerable. I happen to be a Faure fan; he is perhaps too subtle to get a lot of accolades, but pieces like the Requiem and Piano Quartet are some of my favorites. And I wonder at the fact that Saint Saens does not get much attention; though he was very uneven, and could be borderline kitschy, his output as a whole includes a remarkable amount of memorable music. Lastly, Sibelius seems not to be getting his due in the discussion. I don't have to go through the list of his enormously popular and beautiful works, but I would say at least that the 2nd Symphony is one of the most profound pieces of instrumental music ever written.

Okay, I'm done. What does all this prove? There is no such thing as the "10 greatest classical composers in history". There are a couple, maybe three dozen composers who have made classical music what it is, and without whom it would be a musical genre of very modest interest. There is really no whittling it down to "10 greatest"; the best classical composers are great for many different reasons, and which reasons trump other reasons will always be a very subjective affair. My top-16-by-consensus is about as good as you can get; and the fact that the favorites I just listed are not among them only further demonstrates that when you change your criteria to accommodate the people you like, the list is limited only by the broad class of composers who have written several great classical works. So let that be the epitaph for top-10 lists in classical music. At least until I need to attract more people to this web site.

The Trouble With Tosca

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:43:00 +0000

If one's answer to the question "What's in a name?" is anything other than "nothing", one is probably best served by not having the name Bondy in New York Cty right now. This year one such unfortunate has managed to get himself fired from a top City job; that would be "Joel" Bondy, who is at least unofficially accumulating much of the blame for what has become known as the CityTime scandal. But my concern right now is with another Bondy, the almost equally maligned Luc, who last year offered us a new Met production of Tosca, the Puccini opera that has managed to stay in the forefront of the repertoire in spite of its rather dubious dramatic premise.

Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops.

Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.

No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.

But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.

What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.

But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.

The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.

Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder - in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.

Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.

So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.

In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.

Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.

Assitance for Terry Jones

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:15:00 +0000

Wanting to do my part to rid the world of outdated religious mysticism, fanaticism and hypocrisy, not to mention help heat the atmosphere with some badly needed carbon, I thought I'd perhaps consider a few bibles to burn while Rev. Terry Jones rounds up Qu'rans in Florida. (Please take the time to click on that link, where you can see how many people "like" this hate page.) After a quick 'Net search I came up with several bibles that the world could surely do without:

1. The Shooter's Bible: "Stoeger Publishing has released the 97th Edition of the Shooter's Bible, a 578-page reference volume featuring contributions from GUNS Magazine contributing field editor Sam Fadala." Then again, maybe burning is the wrong way for this book to meet it's maker. Perhaps death by firing squad would be more appropriate?

2. The Bootstrapper's Bible: "Available to you once again! There's never been a better time to start a business with no money. This manifesto will show you how." A financial suicide manual by any other name is still a financial suicide manual, right? Let's burn the damn thing and get it over with!

3. The Idiot's Bible: Hey, if the Wall Street Journal says it's the idiot's bible it can't be all bad. Or can it? According to pundit Mary Anastasia O'Grady, this is the name given "in free-market circles" to a book by "Uruguayan Marxist Eduardo Galeano" entitled Open Veins, which dares to blame the developed countries and multinational corporations for plundering resources in Latin America and contributing to the economic underdevelopment of the region. An unthinkable proposition, which has nevertheless been thought and documented in thick volumes by several authors since the 1970's. Commit it to the flames, as Hume said, for it contains nothing but lies, distortions, and unpleasant claims about the primary audience for the WSJ.

4. The Swing Trader's Bible: And I never even realized that Wall Street was so enamored of bibles! Here's a Wiley publication by Matthew McCall and Mark Whistler, which putatively "provides traders with different strategies to capitalize on market fluctuations". Funny, I always heard that market timing was a sure path to self-destruction - sort of on a par with starting an uncapitalized business. Somebody tell these guys about dollar cost averaging, and let's send up some smoke signals with this tome.

5. The American Patriot's Bible: Here's a book for all patriotic Americans who would like to replace the current, outdated Constitution with one that discards the principle of separating Church and State. All in favor say "Oy!" Not that the book says explicitly to dump the old James Madison text, as far as I can tell from perusing the web site, but since its premise is that "It's impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" one is hard-pressed to put any other interpretation on it. Perhaps Rev. Jones would agree. But I thought the biggest issue with Islamic culture was its tendency to do exactly what this book counsels, albeit with the Qu'ran rather than the Bible itself: Shari'ah law is precisely a religious foundation for criminal law based on the Holy Qu'ran and the alleged sayings and doings of Mohammed. If you're going to burn Qu'rans, certainly you'd want to throw a few of these into the bonfire.

Now I know that some of you will be disappointed at the absence of a particular bible that is a bit more like the Qu'ran than those I've mentioned. The problem is, they're not flamable. Don't believe me? Open up one of them and read about Shadrack, Mishack and Abednego and then tell me you can just throw gasoline on a stack of Bibles and watch 'em burn. Ain't gonna happen. Wait, isn't that story in the Qu'ran too? I think it involves the prophet Abraham there. Oh, Rev. Jones, you'd better think twice about this. God might just take it the wrong way!

P.S. - L'Shanah Tovah, Rev. Jones. Er, ‘Eid Mubārak.

Mosques, Communities, Domes and Minarets

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:45:00 +0000

This letter was sent via carrier parrot to the NY Times following the Imam's Op-Ed piece on Wednesday:

In his Op-Ed column "Building on Faith" (9/5/10) Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf repeatedly refers to Cordoba House as a "community center", referring to "a swimming pool, classrooms and a play space for children." Thus he avoids characterizing it as a mosque.

But the term "community center" seems far more neutral than is justified. It was earlier reported that Imam Feisal is already holding worship services at the site; and one rationale offered by Cordoba House proponents is that the existing mosques in downtown Manhattan are overcrowded. Cordoba House will now have a "separate prayer space" for Muslims; presumably it will continue to feature services led by the Imam. It is not clear how this would differ from a mosque, albeit with various secular spaces attached.

There is another reason to be skeptical about the inclusiveness of Cordoba's "community". One of the "two fundamental commandments" that Cordoba House will be built on is "to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds and souls". Imam Feisal more than once appeals to "our fellow Muslims, fellow Christians, and fellow Jews". Indeed he now refers to "separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths", though he previously spoke only of a "meditation room, where people of any faith can pray or meditate" (http://cordobainitiative.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/what-is-prayer-space/). The building sounds increasingly like a religious institution, with a clear bias toward specific faiths and an overall Islamic function. It is not like the 92nd Street Y, which has no specifically religious spaces or functions at all.

Whether or not you believe that Cordoba House should be built at a greater distance from the site of the 9/11 attacks, the issue should not be decided by misrepresentations regarding the nature of the project.

Probably too long for their sound-bite aesthetic, but who knows.

I do have a word on one other looming issue, of perhaps more obvious aesthetic import than some others I've discussed in previous posts on the mosque issue. It has been vociferously denied that the non-mosque-to-be would have any cupola domes or minarets, thus attracting attention to its Islamic function. But I want to propose that it also should not have a prayer hall facing Mecca, or be constructed on the symmetircal model, or use any ceramic tiles, or indeed stones or other building materials typical of Islamic architecture. In fact, I think Park51, the developer, should be required to go to the Wikipedia page on Islamic Architeecture, page down to the section on "Elements of Islamic Style", and make a checklist of all the features to avoid so as to make the building look pretty much like a New York office building, or, say, a Burlington Coat Factory store. That would take care of the problem.

Or, alternatively, they could do what I suggested before: build a secular building with no religious function at all, make it a strictly educational shrine to the more historical, humanistic and inclusive features of Islamic culture, serve some of that great middle eastern cuisine in their restaurant, set their beautifully tiled pool in a typical mosaic pattern, and build all the minarets and cupolas they want.

As I've said before, Osama bin Laden is a despicable human being, but a great architecture critic. Nothing Park51 could build could possibly be more offensive to the eye than those two featureless obelisks that ruined the NY skyline. As far as I'm concerned they can build cupolas and minarets into the design of the new WTC as long as it's appealing and blends well enough with the environment.

All of which is to say: neither the presence nor the absence of Islamic architectural features moves this issue one way or another. It is an aesthetic issue, but not primarily that kind of aesthetic issue. It is a matter of the feeling associated with knowing the function of a building. It could apply to building a new British Petroleum office tower on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, which would be pretty offensive even if it didn't look like... hmmmm... Salisbury Cathedral? (Well, there is no British architectural style, so there goes that analogy!)

BTW - Please try to ignore the ridiculous Google ads at the left. The idea of Google's AdSense software is to automatically match the ad to the content of your blog. But it is so far from doing that that I expect to remove it shortly. Meanwhile, try to pretend it's not there.

(Update 12:03 a.m. 9/10/10: Removed link to NY Times article from title link and put it in the post; minor text change.)

Twin Mosques Take (Away?) Two

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:00:00 +0000

I leave for one week and the dung hits the proverbial fan - all because of my Parrot's Lamp post. Or so in my delusions of avian grandeur I would like to believe.

What happened? President Obama inserted himself into the mélée, striking another blow for a "right" to practice religion that was not being challenged, at least not by any of the respectable voices in the debate. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin count as "respectable" for these purposes insofar as they do not propose that no mosques should be built anywhere or declare that Islam is a "gutter religion" (does that phrase ring a bell?). But Obama had clearly not read The Parrot's Lamppost until after he was attacked for his stand, or he would have been clear from the beginning about the distinction between "right" and "ought" on which we harped at some length. Instead, he pontificated à la Bloomberg to the effect that "I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country" (NY Times 8/14/10 A1). As the Times correctly interpreted it, the comment was a defense of "the right of a Muslim community group to build a mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan" (8/17/10 A26).

What if nobody was actually saying they don't have that (legal, constitutional) "right" to build the mosque there? (In a building which has now apparently grown to 15 stories, replacing three older buildings?) No matter; interpreting his own phrasing literally, rather than the way he actually meant it, was a sufficient dodge to get him out of hot water. Thus Obama backtracked the next day with the claim that he "was not commenting... on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there"; i.e., more or less what the controversy was actually about; but was rather "commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding"(NY Times 8/15/10); i.e., on what was never at issue in the first place. An astutely imprecise formulation, "the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there" avoids referring directly to putting a mosque there, and restates the issue as one of making a decision to put a mosque there. No matter, after finally having read our Why Not Twin Mosques? post, and having fully grasped the distinction we drew attention to, Obama took the opportunity to pretend that he himself was making this very distinction betwen what one has a right to do and what one ought to do. Better late than never.

On the other hand, a far less distinguished voice - the blog/online press which calls itself GetReligion.Org put the point succinctly: "...ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain — unnecessarily — and that is not right." I have some reservations about this formulation, but I will get to that later; substitute "mosque" for "Islamic Center" and it makes exactly the point I made at the beginning of the previous post.

Meanwhile, the political fray expanded, with light and dark being shed on both sides. Rick Lazio, in a memorable fit of opportunism, stated (alone among major public figures) that the issue is "one of safety and security" (NY Times 8/14/10 A15). What planet is he from, exactly? Oh, Long Island that explains it! (LOL) Perhaps he thinks a group of bearded Muslims are planning to march in their bathing suits from the pool directly to the new WTC in a suicide attack? Maybe they'll be storing dirty bombs in the cafeteria? (Not in a Halal cafeteria they won't!) For the substantial majority of people who oppose the idea of building a major mosque there, losing the love of Lazio and his ilk would be about the best thing that could happen.

Newt Gingrich, not satisfied with the reasonably moderate comment I quoted in my previous post, blurted out that "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington"; though he might have actually said "a site", as in the next brilliancy prize: "We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl harbor." (NY Times 8/17/10 A12). 'Scuse me? First of all, does anyone have the "right" to put up a sign, or a site, next to either of these places? If he is talking about the moral right to create provocations near national memorials, obviously no one has the right to do it, whether they are Japanese, Nazis, or anyone else. If he is talking about the legal right (the illustrious former history professor is no clearer about this distinction than the general run of political windbags) then again, rights are governed by the laws and Constitution and in the same sense that Muslims have the right to build a towering mosque near the WTC site, others have the right to build things that we might consider provocative. Second, is the Holocaust Museum the site of a terrorist attack on Jews, or is it, as I suspect, an arbitrarily located building? Newt's analogy seems to be completely off. Third, by "the Japanese" does he mean Japanese-Americans, the appropriate analogy to the Muslim-Americans who want to build Cordoba House (CH)? Because if he is suggesting that Japanese-Americans have any different rights regarding the Pearl Harbor site than the rest of us that is beyond the pale of legitimate democratic discourse in this day and age; just as it is beyond the pale to suggest that Muslims because they are Muslims have less rights than the rest of us. Obviously Mr. G. has resumed his role as chief demagogue and is unable to back up his opinions with anything like a reasonable argument.

Unfortunately, such bottom-feeders are drawn to any populist cause that thrives partly on narrow prejudices; and there are plenty of those in the air around the mosque issue. We must therefore follow the advice of Benjamin Constant on having unwanted political allies: "If I happen to agree with them on a single point I grow suspicious of myself; and in order to console myself for having seemed to be of their opinion... I feel I must disavow and keep these false friends away from me as much as I can." (Cited by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958, p.79.)

Of less my less comtemptible, if not always commendable, political allies, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, Gov. Basil Paterson, Rabbi Meyer May of the Wiesenthal Center, and Archbishop Timothy Dolan have all put in a plug for moving the center to another site that would not raise so many hackles, and Paterson and Dolan have offered to mediate the issue. Unfortunately, to date, the CH backers have not given anything like a positive response, even when Paterson said he would help locate a new site. This is rather troubling; the more Imam Rauf and his backers insist on a defiant stance in the face of overwhelming national opposition, the more their own stated ideals of reconciliation and interfaith harmony are compromised. There is a point at which you must say: "I still think you are wrong and we are right, but for the sake of compromise, to avoid ongoing discord, and in consideration of the feelings of those who were directly affected by the attacks, we will move it to a more neutral location - especially since it does no harm to the purpose of our mission." Still waiting to hear that sort of sentiment emerge from the builders and backers.

Be that as it may, other things have come to my attention since I wrote my first post, and I think they deserve more of a focus than they have been getting. In my previous post I cast aspersions on the claim by Imam Rauf that the Cordoba House "is not a mosque". A building devoted to Islamic worship is a mosque, by definition, and mosques have always had a community function as well, as do many Jewish and Christian places of worship. So I suggested that Rauf was just dissembling about the building.

Since then I have read some Muslim blogs which suggest otherwise. For example, the Cordoba Initiative (CI) itself maintain a blog which includes two posts about the status of the building. In these posts they describe the building as being, by religious as well as practical standards, unqualified to count as a mosque, pointing for example to spaces for musical performance and a restaurant. In addition, they assert that there will be an ecumenical "prayer space", though it is not completely clear whether the "prayer space" for Muslims is to be separate from this or if this is the only prayer space. Even so, I think I underplayed the fact that a "prayer space" to a Muslim need not be in a mosque; and therefore, a building containing a prayer space for Muslims is not necessarily a mosque. The question is actually quite open, I think. Is the center going to be a space for religious sermons by the Imam, or other Islamic leaders? Will religious services of any sort be held at CH? The fact that it is led by an Imam and not, say, by a professor of Islamic history or (imagine...) someone with experience running Islamic cultural centers suggests that its overall guidance is religious, and that it will support more religious functions than prayer alone. That in turn suggests that it is, after all, a mosque of some sort; and the report that he is already holding "services" of some sort in the building lends more weight to the idea that it is in fact intended to be a mosque, with the usual functions of one. "Come to hear my sermon on Sufi Islam" is a quite different invitation from "Go pray to whomever you want in room 1241b". Furthermore, the rationale that the center is needed because the downtown mosques are overcrowded pretty much undermines the argument that it is not really going to be a mosque.

But it is worth inviting Rauf and the CI to answer these questions before we decide. Of course, if he is as cagey about this as he has been about other things, the likelihood of that happening is slim. But he should seriously consider it. I stated pretty plainly that I had no objection to an Islamic cultural center near the WTC, and that the significance of a mosque is very different from that of a purely educational and cultural institution. And even if politicians of various stripes are not as impressed with the distinction as I am, I think it would be far less comfortable for most of them to oppose it than to a oppose a mosque. Islamic culture has a lot more to it than religious worship or proselytizing, and if you take the latter out of the mix, it is hard to see anything objectionable about putting such a center anywhere at all. The 9/11 attacks, and all the other manifestations of Islamic radicalism that I discussed, are defended by radicals based on concepts that are part of religious instruction, debate and training. It may not be the interpretation of Islamic law and religion that is most widely supported, but it is pretty hard to write it out of Islamic religious doctrine altogether (see below). That is why building a mosque, whoever may currently be its guiding light, is the wrong signal to send at "ground zero". But no such argument attaches to an institution devoid of explicit religious doctrine, and dedicated solely to entertainment, education, and dialogue.

Thus it seems to me that the author of another Muslim blog has a valid point in suggesting that much of the current debate may be attributable to Rauf, the CI and their associates missing opportunities to get their message out in the strongest way possible. (Indeed I want to refer readers to this post as one of the most intelligent things I have read in this entire debate.) If so, then not only did I underestimate the significance of this question, but the entire national debate has been completely skewed.

In any case, I really don't see why the "community center" must have the function of providing even a "prayer space", much less expanding the mosque acreage of downtown Manhattan. Granted the existing mosques in the downtown areas are insufficient; but why does this space next to the WTC have to be the particular site on which additional "prayer space" is to be located? Build the community center, exactly where they want to build it, and move the divisive "prayer space", which is the reason the project has been branded as a mosque in the first place, to another location. Then the CI gets everything it allegedly wants: an impressive new community center, and a nearby mosque that expands the available space for Muslim worship and services. Frankly I can see nothing wrong with this alternative from any reasonable ideological or emotional perspective.

But I still maintain that building an Islamic religious institution there is morally problematic, and that you cannot reasonably expect people to completely dissociate the 9/11 attacks from Islam in general. There is an understandable desire of reasonable, democratic and humane Muslims not to be associated with the acts and religious views of those who are called "radical". But this is made difficult by the fact that the radicals claim to have as much textual support for their views as the moderates. Like those who argue for a "strict interpretation" of the U.S. Consitutition, they often take intolerably reactionary positions. But one cannot say that strict constructionists therefore fail to uphold Constitutional principles, nor that Islamic "extremists" fail to be Muslims. To uphold the principles of Islamic texts is to be a Muslim, so there is no room for a distinction between "real Muslims" and those who hold strict interpretations of Islamic texts.

The following post at Islamonline.net is a good example. While virtually all scholars agree that whipping is specifically sanctioned by the Qu'ran (80 lashes for a married man committing adultery, 100 lashes for an unmarried man), the practice of stoning is said to be sanctioned by the Sunnah, in which the actual day to day practices of the prophet Mohammed are (allegedly) recorded. Those who say that stoning has no textual basis in the Qu'ran are either reinterpreting, revising or disregarding the Sunnah. Since we cannot, unfortunately, form our opinion of Islam on the basis of taking sides in scholarly debates among its proponents, we cannot really decide whether Osama bin Laden is more or less representative of Islamic thought than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. All we can say is that we'd rather the latter prevailed than the former.

You can see here just how fine-grained the debate is. But the important point for us is not whether the Sunnah are an authoritative basis for Islamic law or not. Public whipping, a primitive, brutal and perverse form of punishment last used here in the slave system, is carried out in countries not known for their radicalism (e.g., Singapore). It is explicitly condoned in Islamic texts, and is barbaric enough to put in question whether strict Islamic law is within the bounds of civilized practice. And this carries over into concepts like Jihad, which in one interpretation justifies acts like 9/11, and on another is supposed to indicate a purely ideological struggle. Maybe both interpretations are possible, and the real issue is, which do you want to prevail? We cannot simply claim the mantle of Islamic scholarship and insist that what millions of Muslim people and thousands of clerics believe is not representative of Islam. And members of the Muslim faith cannot expect us to do that, either. We can say whose views and practices we prefer, who makes more sense to us from a modern point of view, but not who is right. No one is right. But some very scary forces have been gaining the upper hand over the last few decades and putting an indelible stamp on the religion.

The only alternative for contemporary religious practice is to reject the idea that modern legal, social, criminal, international or any other system should be based on what the Qu'ran, the Bible, the Talmud or any other ancient religious text has to say. But this is not what most moderate Islamic voices are saying. They believe that the rules and practices in the Qu'ran, Sunnah and Aditha have some validity just by virtue of being in the Qu'ran, Sunnah or Aditha; anything else is heresy. But I think that the price you pay for looking to ancient texts as a guide to how we should live today is to either buy into absurd anachronisms or become a hypocrite who picks and chooses but pretends to respect the texts.

In any case, "radical" or not by textual standards, the so-called radicals are anything but an isolated group of extremists. The recent NY Times articles on the Taliban-organized stoning to death of a young couple in Afghanistan and the suicide bombings in the Muslim-dominated Russian republics are only the latest reminders of this. According the Times, though the stoning was organized by the Taliban, more than 200 villagers took part in this barbaric act, including the father of the male victim. Moreover, the action was approved ex post facto by the head of the local Ulema (clerical) council; and the national council, which consists of 350 clerics from across the country, recently called for a strict implementation of Shariah law. The Times reminded us of another gruesome case of a widowed Afghan woman who got pregnant and was then given 200 lashes and shot to death. The Time magazine story on a woman whose nose and ears were sliced off as punishment was another reminder. Then came the story of a request to Saudi hospitals to damage the spinal cord of a man who had caused the paralysis of another man in an attack. The reminders of barabaric practices by Islamic authorities, done in the name of Islam and given textual support in Islamic law, could be offered on a daily basis if the media had nothing else to write about.

Neither non-Muslims nor moderate Muslims should kid themelves about the influence of radical Islam or its claim to represent the true Islam. Stonings, whippings and maimings are of a piece with suicide bombings and Fatwas calling for the death of novelists. The connections are deep and ineradicable: in essence, the refusal to endorse the separation of church and state (or even church and judicial process), the attempt to legislate personal morality, a theory of punishment that takes the body as an object for the infliction of pain and disfigurement, and a belief that the most brazen acts of terror, murder and torture are justified if given a religious gloss. This entire ideology has to be disowned, and only the spiritual, cultural and humanistic aspects of Islam preserved. Otherwise we can never really separate Islam-in-general from radical Islam. It is no dullminded bigot who sees a connection between the version of Shariah law implemented by the Taliban, the Iranians, and the Saudis, and the willingness to carry out suicide attacks in the name of Allah. Therefore, no mosque at the site desecrated by one such attack.

In spite of all this, there is a ray of hope, and this leads me to another point regarding the CI's sales job on its center. A NY Times op-ed piece by William Dalrymple drew attention to the particular situation of Sufi Islam, its antagonistic relationship to the radical trends, and its generally liberal and ascetic and universalist outlook. Though I am no expert in comparative religion, it sounds like Sufism is roughly analogous to Kabbalistic Judaism, early Christian mysiticism, and Zen Buiddhism. The interesting point, and one that has hardly even been mentioned, is that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an exponent of Sufism, and the CI is positioning itself and its Sufi outlook as just the voice of reason and moderation that the U.S. needs to communicate with Islamic regimes and organizations throughout the world. Thus they have formed ties with the State Department, and Rauf is now embarking on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East on their behalf - as he has previously done for the Bush administration. (It is interesting, to say the least, that Bush sent off a diplomat who had previously stated that U.S. policy was "an accomplice" to the 9/11 attacks, but no one ever convicted Bush or his cronies of either intelligence or consistency.)

Whether or not Sufism is a natural choice for Islamic diplomacy, it does seem to be the case, from what I can gather, that Sufism represents a form of Islamic belief that is open to liberal, democratic, humanitarian values, and has no interest in the extremism that has proliferated throughout much of the Arab world (and some of the non-Arab world - Iranians, Malasian and Indonesians are not Arabs). There does not seem to be much hope right now that Sufism will become the dominant trend, or even a particularly strong one, in international Islam. But the fact that it is the guiding ideology behind CH has been heavily underplayed, to the point of making one wonder if some of the project's more acerbic critics are either ignorant or trying to suppress it. And Rauf has typically been nothing if not ascetic himself, failing to reframe the issues in this light, or to divulge any details of his current diplomatic trip, just as he felt he did not have to discuss the funding sources for CH or engage with criticism of his comments after 9/11. Too bad - there could be a lot to say on behalf of supporting moderate Islamic voices. Explaining Sufism to the public and saying why it stands diametrically opposed to acts of violence in all forms would go a long way to calming the waters around the CH issue. It could at least show that an Islamic cultural center near the WTC site is unobjectionable and perhaps even a bulwark against the likes of Al Qaeda.

Although I have surely tested my readers' concentration (as usual) I cannot help adding one last comment. On Friday the Times published an article containing interviews with Muslims living in New York City (some of whom I probably stand in line with at the local fruit and vegetable markets). I am not going to characterize any of them as wholeheartedly agreeing with my position. But many of the comments suggest that there is a more sober, practical and non-ideological attitude toward the project in the Muslim community than there is among the more bellicose white liberal voices in favor of it. A typical comment: "If they want to put it 10 blocks away, that's fine; I believe in compromise, too." (NY Times 8/20/10 A1) Can somebody please hold community board elections so I can vote for this guy - or others who expressed similar views? It is a typical foible of the left that when abstract principle clashes with personal sensitivity, the latter loses every time. This is one reason why ideologues of any stripe are dangerous when they obtain a platform and a little bit of power. I have taken many hours out of my days for the last few weeks defending the idea that rights are a red herring here, and the real issue is one of sensitivity and sensibility.

This, in the last analysis, is a question of the aesthetics of architecture. Every new building is in a public space; every new construction project is conceived and realized in a political environment. The aesthetics and politics of architecture are always interwoven; you cannot appreciate a building that has damaged your sense of the proper use of space, that is out of proportion to its perceived legitimate purpose, that mocks the social ecology of the neighborhood. These are the things we need to consider in approving or disapproving a piece of architecture. The "right" to build doesn't even enter the picture, and had no place in this picture from the beginning.

Why Not Twin Mosques?

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:03:00 +0000

The subject of this blog is culture and the public function of art, and I generally focus on the New York scene and riff off what's going on here. We've been pretty quiet for awhile, but what better opportunity to get back in the swing of things than a a national debate on a Mosque to be built near the former site of the Twin Towers. A work of architecture devoted to a branch of culture, with a distinct political twist: that is our very bread and butter here at the PL. We always have some political twist as well; in this case, it is safe to say that the political is going to be more primary than in other discussions.

To the enormous consternation of some of my close family and acquaintances, I have said that the mosque should not be built. In that very phrase, and what it means, resides the crux of at least one major misunderstanding that has guided the entire debate. A sad spectacle for a philosopher: two sides, intending to engage one another, and each missing the target through the utter confusion of concepts. What to do, except, we pray, show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Issue #1: Right and Ought Are Two Different Concepts! Let us begin, then, with the following utterance of the illustrious Mayor Bloomberg, who was said to be on the verge of tears, so ardently did he support the plan to build the Mosque: "We do not honor [the first responders to 9/11's] lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting." So strong, indeed, are the emotions around this issue that my argument may at times devolve into certain tangential points, such as the fact that the "first responders" died trying to put out a fire and rescue people, partly as a result of a badly inadequate communications system; they did not die defending anyone's "rights". Be that as it may... Here in a nutshell is what has caused perhaps 75% of the hysteria and misunderstanding in the debate. To wit: neither I nor anyone I have heard or read about denies that the Cordoba Initiative has the RIGHT to build a mosque on the site in question. "Right" is a legal and constitutional concept, which inscribes in the law certain basic protections that are said to be inherent in the person. Rights protect minorities from majorities, individuals from higher powers, when the majority or power might otherwise ride roughshod over the rest. One of those rights is religious freedom, which by any reasonable interpretation includes the right to build houses of worship. There are limitations to every right, of course, but only an extremely narrow conception of Islam would hold that that religion, practiced by well over a billion people and in nearly every country in the world, stands outside the realm of legitimate religions. Muslims have a right to build houses of worship wherever anyone else has a right to build them, period. Anyone who denies that is a scoundrel and no pal of mine.

"Ought" is not a synonym for "right". "Ought" is concerned with what people should do, not with what they have a right to do. At almost any moment of the day, in the life of almost any human being (or organization), there exist inumerable possible actions that one might take, and has a right to take, but that one should not do because they are morally wrong. I might attempt to seduce my best friend's wife later today; or find a complete stranger in the street and tell him that his house is on fire and his children are dead. I might promise to mow my neighbor's lawn if he lends me his car when I have a flat, and then returning from the garage, I might thumb my nose at him, laugh at what a sucker he is and walk away. To my knowledge, I have a clear constitutional and legal right to do these things; and just as clearly I should not do any of them. Equally, if you were aware that I intended to commit such acts, you would have no legal obligation to stop me; but you might well have a moral obligation to do so, or at least try to dissuade me.

The problem is that rights are laid out in very broad strokes - they have to be, or they could not have the force of constitutional mandates. Morality, on the other hand, speaks to what we should or should not do in any particular situation. It does not necessarily provide us principles in advance; it is rather an obligation we have to consider the justice of our actions in each and every case where matters of justice might enter into the picture. Right does not track morality; it only determines at a very general level what permissions are granted to us. Should those permissions conflict with other things we want to preserve, a decision must be made. The right then no longer holds complete sway, and we have to figure out how to proceed.

This distinction has sadly been lost throughout the debate. It surfaced, however, in a letter to the Times today in which the Anit-Defamation League defended its position against a Times editorial supporting the mosque: "We have not denied the right to build the mosque on the site. We simply appealed to the initiators to consider the sensitivities of the victims and find another location." Therein lies the whole of the legitimate opposition: to make a moral appeal to the Cordoba Initiative and its leaders not to build a mosque in that location.

Issue #2: Radical Islam is not a negligible fringe movement but a substantial international trend within Islam. Supposing ourselves to have established that one can make a legitimate moral appeal on an issue without suggesting that anyone's rights be violated, the argument then changes direction. Fine, some say, you can ask that, but why should anyone grant it? We know that the 9/11 attack was a heinous act from which the victims and their families have suffered greatly; but, to quote the Times editorial, "The attacks of September 11 were not a religious event. They were mass murder. The American response... was not a war against Islam."

The right/ought confusion is perhaps a subtle one; but the confusions here are not subtle, and it is hard to see them as innocent. The attacks were indeed not "a religious event" if by that we mean something like the the Jewish Day of Atonement, or perhaps the suppression of the Albigensian heresy; but they were events done in the name of religion. Indeed, outside of major territorial conflicts (and even in some cases including them) there is more mass murder committed in the name of religion than for any other reason, by far. So the meaning of "not a religious event" is a bit too refined to have any real substance. "Religious events", sadly and to the great detriment of humanity, include an untold number of acts of mass murder, not to mention every other form of abuse. Acts undertaken in the name of religion, by members of a single faith, with the explicit or tacit approval of leaders of that faith, are religious acts, like it or not.

The point here does not depend on Osama bin Laden personally representing Islam, or his explicitly tying the attacks to Islam, or to the great battle against Western corruption of the Islamic world (though he certainly has made such claims on more than one occasion). It does not depend on 9/11 being a legitimate expression of Jihad, or on the meaning of Jihad being a literally physical fight against all non-Muslim societies. (Not that the history of Islam lacks evidence to support that contention.) There are a great many Muslims who deny that bin Laden has any particular expertise with regard to Jihad or Islam in general, and who say that on their understanding of Islam such acts would never be condoned. (There are passages in the Hadith, for example, which suggest that Mohammed counseled his followers not to deal with people harshly. Of course, their is also an evident and widespread practice of doing just that in countries which implement strict versions of Shariah law.) But bin Laden did not come from nowhere; he is not a single, isolated, extremist voice within a placid Islamic world. He was supported by Saudi Arabia. He and Al Qaeda were harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were tolerated by Pakistan, Yemen and other Islamic nations. They have found supporters all over the world. And their stated political goals are shared by many Muslim groups (and only by Muslim groups) throughout the Middle East: by Hezbollah and Hamas, by factions in Yemen, by the ruling party in Iran, and in many other places. (Oddly enough, Iraq is probably one of the places they are least welcome.) Not coincidentally, many of these same groups espouse a particularly conservative brand of Islam. There is, in other words, an undeniable link between the source and inspiration for the 9/11 attacks and the espousal of radical Islamic ideas. Anyone who defends Islam by writing off bin Laden as a crank with no real base is not being honest. It is like saying that Jerry Falwell is not a real Christian. He may not be the voice of Christianity you would like, but he is the voice of Christianity we got. Ditto for radical anti-abortionists: to deny that they are acting in the name of Christianity when one of them murders an abortion provider is ridiculous. To deny that they represent Christianity when the Pope belches anti-abortionist propaganda across the world, equating it with murder, is almost as absurd. We cannot whitewash Islam by hauling out scholarly works and showing that bin Laden doesn't know his Qu'ran. He a big part of what Islam is in the world; and it's the world we are primarily concerned with, not the word.

In light of this - a great deal of which everyone knows, not least the Times and Michael Bloomberg - to argue that the 9/11 attacks were just a random act of mass murder, or, slightly more coherently, an act of pure politics with no reigious component at all, is just sheer deception and demagoguery. It is one thing to remind people that such radical ideologies are not expressive of all versions of Islam, nor even, most likely, of a majority version of Islam. But to say it simply has no relationship to Islam, or is a fringe movement with no base of popular support, is just wrong; indeed, almost willfully blind. Who is bin Laden, and who were his 19 henchmen, anyway - members of the Palestinian forces carrying out an official military mission? Emissaries of the Palestinian Resistance? What were these people doing, thinking they could intervene in this conflict in this way? Were they like the lincoln Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, selflessly helping out a just cause in the face of overwhelming force? Nobody hired them or asked them to intervene on behalf of the Palestinian cause. What were they driven by if not religious solidarity? And weren't they promised a bevy of vestal virgins in heaven for their service to Allah? Sometimes I really do wonder about people on the left, and their ability to bury their heads in the sand in support of an ideological view about tolerance and rights. There can be absolutely no doubt that the destruction of the Twin Towers was intimately and inextricably tied to one very strong conception of what Islam is and what it ought to be doing in the world today, and no amount of scholarship or empty phrasemongering is going to change that.

To hold, therepore, that building a large mosque right next to the site known as "Ground Zero" (a slightly bizarre appelation) is not offensive because the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, is nothing more than a rhetorical sweep of the hand, an attempt to befriend a certain (hopefully dominant) trend within Islam by denying that Islam is anything else than this more humane, tolerant ideology. You can't change the world, unfortunately, by wishing away the parts you don't want to see.

One further point must be made here. People who see the 9/11 attacks as connected with Islam are not simply reacting to verbal statements made by the perpetrators. They are seeing it on a continuum with a practice of suicide attacks that are endemic and almost unique to the Islamic world. The attacks are launched in and around Israel, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union, and in many other Islamic areas, always by people inspired by Islamic leaders and told that they woud be rewarded by Allah for their acts. Other than the Japanese kamikazi attacks in WW II, it is hard to think of another example of such tactics. To say that suicide attacks by a group of all Muslim individuals has nothing to do with Islam or religion is not even a comprehensible position, much less a correct one.

Furthermore, all these acts are seen as being on a continuum with a broad lack of respect for human life and for the bodily integrity of individuals. Thus you see in various places throughout the Islamic world the practice of beheading enemies, severing limbs as punishment, stoning people to death in public, brutally whipping people (including women) in public, and other such acts that are shocking and abhorrent to the moral conscience of the modern world. This is not to deny that at one time, similarly brutal acts were committed in Western societies too, and may still be by isolated individuals and even covertly by arms of the government. We cannot forget that Hitler committed far worse terrors than any Islamic leaders, that forms of torture are practiced behind closed doors in U.S. police stations, that waterboarding is part of the legacy of the worst President in recent U.S. history. The difference is that such things, when they come to light, are considered deviant. The response in the U.S. to discovery of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib was one of almost universal condemnation. Whereas one sees government-sponsored public torture as a matter of course in a number of Islamic nations or territories (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, etc.).

So I think the effort to dissociate Islam from the terrorist attacks fails. There is a multifaceted association between the 9/11 attacks and Islam, the Islamic world, and Islamic culture. Those who are trying to paint a rosy picture in order to deny the association of Islam with the attacks will fail to win over the U.S. public, who have seen or read about enough of what I have just described to know what is going on. We must avoid using this against the more humane, wordly, pious and beneficent currents in Islam -which, once again, may still be the majority, and which deserve our tolerance and indeed support. But to deny it outright is an enormous mistake.

Issue #3: The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Lining up against the mosque are a list of Republican ideologues, from Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin to Rick Lazio, as well as various opportunistic Republicans who have a campaign axe to grind. Whereas all the sane and lovely people who favor building it are Democrats or liberals of one stripe or another (Bloomberg, the Mayor by, of and for the rich, has been perversely canonized as a liberal for the purposes of this discussion). Opposing the mosque is therefore reactionary and wrong, Q.E.D. Similarly, the community board that voted overwhelmingly in favor of the mosque, and the Landmarks Commission that has approved it, are said to represent the true voice of the people and of the democratic spirit.

But I have to politely demur from all this. Even a paranoid has enemies. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. A lot of these Republicans are pretty much stopped clocks, in my view; there ain't much going on upstairs except kneejerk opposition to all perceived enemies from without and within. That their ideological blinders should occasionally intersect with a political truth only shows that one might occasionally have the right position for the wrong reasons. And what I would less enthusiastically call "kneejerk liberalism" might have a much more benign internal logic, that of defending basic democratic rights, which occasionally intersects with an incorrect and pollyannaish line. The conservatives also have a not-very-well-hidden agenda in arrousing anti-Muslim sentiment: not just rally-round-the-flag patriotism but using Islamic terrorism as a wedge to undermine privacy and civil rights. It's not like someone just alerted us to this yesterday, thanks. But I have never, will never, adjust my views to espouse something false because someone else who espouses something true is a reactionary jerk with an immoral agenda. That would be unphilosophical; it is also spineless and thoughtless. We need to uphold the truth and do it for correct reasons, not phony reactionary reasons like pushing through the next version of some anti-immigration law or preparing the ground for the next federal attack on privacy. (Unfortunately that may well come from Obama and not the Republicans, but that's another story.)

As for the execrable, racist, bigoted trash that has been quoted from various mosque-opponents around the country, to the effect that we should oppose the building of any mosque, anywhere in the U.S., that all Muslims are terrorists and that they should be swept into the sea (as unfortunately the PLO at one time suggested should happen to the Israelis) I have only the utmost contempt. If anyone suggests that opposing the construction of a major Islamic house of worship right next to the World Trade Center site somehow leads inexorably to, or is on a continuum with, extremist views like that, I can only say that I fail to see how it does, and that I am extremely comfortable taking the one position and rejecting the other outright. The burden of proof is on them to show how these apparently quite distinct views are actually the same, or brands of the same thing.

Issue #4: A mosque is a mosque is a mosque. Or to put it in a perhaps more enlightening way, a mosque is an Islamic place of worhsip, by defnition. Any place that is set aside as an Islamic place of worship is a mosque, and by Islamic law, once it is a mosque, it is always a mosque and cannot be any other kind of space. Non-Muslims may be invited into the mosque; they are, however, guests, and have no inherent right to enter it. It is true that the traditional function of the mosque has always been to function as a community center; it is said that Mohammed condoned the use of the mosque as a treasury, as a place to give shelter, as a place to mete out punishment, and perhaps other uses. But all those things are peripheral to its function as place of worship.

Now it seems to me that there are various levels of dissembling going on at the Cordoba Initiative and among their supports. First and foremost, the leader of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has stated in a public speech, broadcast in video on the CI's home page, that the building they plan to build "is not a mosque, this is a cultural center". This claim casts serious doubt on the integrity of Imam Rauf, because he knows better than anyone that the intention is that the building will contain a place of worship, and that it is not a matter of how many square feet are devoted to worship; it will be understood and seen as a mosque with the traditional peripheral functions of a mosque. Indeed, one argument that has been offered for building it (I can't locate the source for this right now - possibly the community board hearings) is that the Muslim population in downtown Manhattan has outgrown the existing mosques there. Indeed, it was reported a few days ago that the Imam is already holding services in the new building, which means, technically, that it already is a mosque, and is to become an elaborate and impressive one.

It is disappointing to hear those who point to the Qu'ran to defend moderate versions of Islam nevertheless ignore the fact that a mosque which also functions as "a cultural center" is a mosque in Islamic law, and in fact, is as traditional conception of a mosque as there is. I cannot therefore abide the mendacity of stating that because it is also a community center, it is not really a mosque. That is pure rubbish, and the comparisons to the 92nd Street Y, which Rauf has used to defend the conception and location of the mosque, are also dishonest: there is no place of worship at the 92nd Street Y; it is a not a synagogue, by any definition. Now, it may be true that some Jewish and Christian representatives are to be on the board of Cordoba House. The only person currently listed on the board of the CI is Rauf himself. Randy Benn, identified as an Elder of the Presbyterian Church of Northern Virginia, is listed as a policy advisor. No Jews are listed as belonging to the CI in any capacity, and no board is listed on the page for Cordoba House, though apparently some rabbis have been approached.

The idea of including Jews and Christians in the project may seem extraordinarily liberal, but only to those who do not understand that Islam has always seen Judaism and Christianity as kindred religions; the Qu'ran itself contains retellings of numerous stories from the Old and New testaments, while rejecting Christian idolatry and some other aspects of the older religions. The fact that CH would include Jews and Christians in leadership is interesting, but not startling. What would be startling is if they put some Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and other pagans up there too; but I don't think you are about to see a "community center" quite so inclusive. It is a mosque, with the traditional function and ideology of a mosque, and others are invited to participate (even to swim in their pool? wow!) at the discretion of the Imam.

If the Cordoba Initiative wants to build a real cultural center, a secular institution without a place of worship, nothing and no one is stopping them. Remove the place of worship and I withdraw my opposition instantly. A mosque and a cultural center are totally different kinds of symbols. The latter is not a monument and factory of Islamic belief but an invitation to explore a people's history. The former is an arena of contention for any faction whatever, a forum for all elements however radical. It is like the difference between a sword and its sheath. The fact that the CI insists on building a mosque in spite of the obvious symbolic value of a building on that site, and refuses to build a true cultural center while saying that they are, is a sign that they are not dealing honestly with the public.

Issue #5: Try a little tenderness. Why, after all, is there a legitimate, non-bigoted, politically neutral position opposing the building of the mosque? Tying together what we have said above, a criminal act of terrorism with an unmistakable Islamic component was committed on 9/11, It was an enormous, if temporary, victory for the most radical brand of Islam; it destroyed, in a dramatic way, a complex that was in many ways a symbol of the West and what it represents to the backward, hateful, intolerant elements in the Muslim world. It was not primarily an act of defense of Palestinian interests; it was a statement that the U.S> and the West should get out of the Middle East altogether and let the radicals continue their frightening expansion of influence, along the lines of the Iranian Revolution. This in-your-face attack on Western values and influence is indelibly stamped with the thumbprint of Islam. Erecting a mosque - one that will be notable for its size - directly at the site of the attack has enormous sybolic value, and has the effect of gloating - a sentiment that has been expressed from time to time by the most radical Islamic opponents of the U.S.

That Americans should be sensitive to this is not surprising. But there are still thousands of people who were directly affected by the attacks, either through having lost someone, or having been injured, or having lived in the neighborhood, or like myself, having simply been on the way to work and seen the buildings burning and the human bodies falling from the windows and having swallowed the blackened air. (There are a great many other stories of exposure of one sort or another - too many to go into here.) It is not an exercise in community-building or reconciliation to sweep aside the feelings of these people and erect a mosque in a building that was actually part of the damaged site (the landing gear of one of the planes went through the roof, shutting the Burlington Coat Factory store that was there before.)

It is of no help that as a matter of historical record, Muslims have previously built large mosques on the site of military victories. This effort smacks of a kind of stealth "victory mosque", whether or not that is the intention of Imam Rauf and his supporters. It is additionally of little comfort that the Imam has refused to quell suspicions that the funding for the mosque is coming from radical Islamic governments, such as Saudi Arabia. This only adds to the sense that there is an agenda other than bridge-building here.

If the Islamic community wants to build bridges, the right way to go about it would have been to make their contacts first, and determine a neutral and convenient place to site the mosque. And even if that moment had passed, they should have responded immediately to the discomfort in New York City and across the world and offered to locate it elsewhere, rather than standing on ceremony about their rights and attempting to paint the mosque as a not-mosque. They should have done this even if they thought the opposition to the location was wrongheaded or discriminatory, if for no other reason than that conceding on this point would have demonstrated beyond all doubt that their agenda was solely one of improving mutual understanding. That would have shown a true intention to go down the path of reconciliation and enlightenment. Instead, they have chosen to fight. That is very unfortunate. This particular location has no inherent importance for the community center, while it has tremendous importance for the victims of 9/11. The harder the CI fights to locate it there, the less reason there is to trust their stated intentions. In fact, I wonder if having one mosque there is really enough. Perhaps they should build another one right next to it. Why not the Twin Mosques, I mean cultural centers? In fact, maybe that should be the 9/11 memorial, and we don't need that below-ground pit they are planning to install? I don't know why any of the proponents of the mosque should have a problem with this. After all, if you like the idea in the first place, then two mosques are better than one.

(Please note: I am leaving on vacation and will not have internet access for a few days. I have not had time to do as much fact-checking and editing as I normally would for a post this long and controversial. I regret any factual errors or typos that may exist above, and will correct them when I return. Also, I encourage your comments, but it may take a couple of extra days to read and post them. Thanks for your patience.)

ABBA Daba Doo: A Hard Look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:11:00 +0000

So where has the great green ornithological wonder been hiding all this time? Flying north to avoid global warming? Apparently our Brooklyn parrots are smarter than the average bird. Of course there are a few other reasons, like building my own web sites, which will eventually house this and my other blogs, independent of Googleplex, which is looking more like the ("Don't-be") Evil Empire with every new privacy invasion and copyright issue. (Plus I hate their crappy editor, which manages to screw up font selections constantly; and the fact that I have to sign in with an email address I haven't used in years. On the other hand I give them some credit for standing up to the Chinese censors - a calculated business decision not without some moral weight.) I've also been writing a bit of fiction, with a view to not only becoming the new Hemingway (or should I say Flaubird - didn't he have a parrot anyway?) but possibly making some actual money from my enormous literary talents, though those two goals are to some degree in tension. But before I get into what brings me back to this fabled forum, let me just deal with one practical note.

Due to a rash of the most execrable spam directed at this and some of my other blogs, I have had to move them all to a "moderated comments" policy. I consider this less obnoxious than the little box with the warped and partially obscured random words for you to attempt to decipher. But it may take some time for me to discover your comments and publish them. My policy here, as elsewhere, is to publish every relevant comment, regardless of point of view, unless it descends into vitriolic personal attacks, racist remarks, threats and the like. So please continue to contribute to discussions here, only try to be a little patient as I sort through the dross of autogenerated idiocy to get to your remarks.

So what am I doing fluttering around this blog again? Well, right now, I'm listening to a two-volume collection of ABBA's greatest hits. Does that give you a hint? Anyone who knows my taste in rock from previous PL posts might be a bit surprised. But don't worry - I didn't pay for it, at least. Nor did I pirate or bitstream it; it's all legit, thanks to Lala.com, which I figure I'd better get the most out of before Apple sinks their claws into it. And why exactly would listening to these palindromatic popsters constitute getting the most out of anything? Because they're now one of the benighted members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that well-known bestower of historical significance in the realm of popular music, and I am (or thought I was) woefully ignorant of their artistic accomplishments. As you probably know, the fabled Swedish blondes and their ex-husbands have landed the high honor of a plaque on the wall, and a bio on the RRHOF web site. Worldwide recognition was not exctly something they lacked before (unlike some of this year's other inductees) having long since inundated every disco from Brooklyn to Byelorussia with their, um, infectious melodies. So it must be the plaque, the renewed publicity, the... approval of Jann Wenner? We'll get to that.

My first reaction to hearing of ABBA's induction was probably similar to yours: Squawck! I mean, Yauwnnn.... But feeling the mantle of responsibility land once again on my shoulders as I began to write, I thought to myself: what if these people are actually right? I mean, what if for all these years I have simply refused to recognize the importance of ABBA, their great contribution to Western popular music? Indeed, do I even know enough of their songs to pass a judgment? Just because they did "Dancing Queen" doesn't mean they're all bad! So I listened, and found to my surprise that I actually know many more of their songs than I knew I knew. I know "Waterloo", though I could not have named it if my avian life depended on it. I didn't know it won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest until I read it in the RRHOF bio; this, in the Parrot's pecking order, is actually a more significant recommendation that inclusion in the infamous Hall. The chorus is more than a distant echo of the verses of The Foundations' 1968 hit "Build Me Up, Buttercup" (it's the harmony to it, basically) but let's not pretend it isn't catchy. I also know "Fernando", and can't even imagine where I might have been exposed to it so often as to remember it after all these years. I have to admit I actually kind of like it. I know "Take a Chance on Me" and a couple of other bits of trite dance hall trash. I know "The Winner Takes It All", or at least, it sounds a lot like three or four songs I know. In general, though, I must admit that I don't even know most of ABBA's numerous top five UK hits. Or I didn't. Now I do. And sad to say, my impression is now confirmed that in spite of a couple of decent early singles, they are a veritable demiurge of formulaic pop tunes, with vapid lyrics and minimal harmonic interest. Their singing seems to disdain real emotion, their production qualities come down to a guy with a sequencer and their instrumental capabilities are all but nonexistent.

So can 50 million ABBA fans be wrong? Oh, I think there are probably a lot more than that out there. (Including some very big ones over at Rolling Stone magazine; but as I said, we'll get to that later.) So who am I to say they're wrong? They're right, after all; just as the Mozart freaks are right. If you want something to flow in one ear and out the other without requiring much processing inside, a steady diet of ABBA and Mozart is just what you should be taking. (Don't get me wrong, please - archaeologists exploring my desert island are going to dig up quite a few late Mozart CD's; but they'll be digging a long time before they find any ABBA.) But this is not mainly about ABBA; it's about what ABBA represents as an inductee into the Hall - the closest thing we have to a standard of significance for rock music.

To see what I men, compare the following news: just a few days after ABBA was iducted, who suddenly passed away at age 59? Alex Chilton, leader of The Boxtops and longtime vocalist, whose influence and artistry were attested to by many later and more famous rock stars. Chilton will never experience the belated recognition that Iggy Pop has just received. But he arguably should have been honored long before the idea of inducting ABBA had even entered anyone's head. Though well known for only two early hit singles - "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" - those recordings are for many people much more what rock is about than all of ABBA's million-sellers put together. "The Letter" came out in 1967; Chilton was 16 years old, and had a number 1 hit in the greatest year ever for rock music. (The year of Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Surrealistic Pillow, Disraeli Gears, and a whole lot more.) The song must be one of the most memorable recordings in all of rock; endlessly covered by later artists, it seems to have lost little or nothing after 43 years on the rock circuit, and a good deal of the credit for that goes to Chilton's gripping vocals. Chilton went on to become an influential guitar player as well, and, with or without his later band Big Star, is usually counted as an important influence and early practitioner of both punk rock and alt-country. That looks to me like one guy who was a big force in three major developments in rock music; an accomplishment that has "hall of fame" written across it in gold letters.

Just weeks before "The Letter" started climbing the U.S. charts, across the Atlantic the new group Procol Harum had released "A Whiter Shade of Pale". How do you capture the importance of a 4-minute single on pop radio that was #1 for six weeks on the UK charts in a year that was almost unbelievably loaded with brilliant examples of rock music? One fan has tracked down 900 cover versions of "Whiter Shade of Pale". A Procol Harum fan site cites an article stating that the song is the most played single ever in the UK. (The source for this is British "performing rights group" Phonographic Performance Ltd, which is actually an industry group, so I'm not sure how objective this claim is.) If Procol Harum had done nothing else, they would have earned a key place in the history of rock and roll for this song. Interestingly, though, the importance of the song is not merely in the sales it generated, but in other groundbreaking features: its Bach-like organ introduction, the interestingly obscure but poetic lyrics, the slow, dreamy, almost drunken vocals, and the fact that other than The Doors' "Light My Fire" it was about the longest single released at that time. These qualities can each be traced to important developments in rock. (To name one less obvious one, it was the first of a slew of extremely popular slow, moody tunes that topped the popularity charts in spite of more upbeat competitors - think "Color My World", "Let It Be", "Candle in the Wind", "Free Bird", many others). But Procol Harum, in the course of things, did much more than that: pioneering the use of a full orchestral sound, with Robin Trower taking the possibilities opened up by Hendrix's guitar style in new directions, they helped lay the foundations for the era of progressive rock that dominated the early 1970's. Procol Harum never achieved the level of popularity of groups like the Rolling Stones or even The Doors, but anyone who understands a bit about the history of rock and roll should know that their importance far surpasses their record sales. (For my two cents on the royalties dispute over AWSOP see my earlier post on this subject. In spite of the Parrot's loud squawking, this absurd decision has been upheld by the highest British court.)

Neither Alex Chilton nor Procol Harum have been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nothing in that fact says much about Chilton or Procol Harum. But it says everything about the RRHOF. The choices have not been made on the basis of influence or historical importance in any sense; or perhaps the better way of putting it is that to the extent that these factors have played a role, it has more often led to serious errors of judgment than to something that might help the public appreciate under-recognized figures, or less understood lines of development.

Take for example the inclusion of Jelly Roll Morton. He was an early jazz influence - but certainly not an early rock influence. Every form of African-American music from the mid-19th century on was an influence to some extent in every form of popular music in the 20th century. But no rock artist was particularly influenced by Jelly Roll Morton, nor even the early urban blues artists. I have two histories of rock and roll (including the Rolling Stone history!) which do not so much as mention his name, and three histories of the blues, none of which considers him particularly important. He was an early transitional figure between blues and jazz and not particularly relevant to rock and roll. The RRHOF bio even overstates the general consensus on his influence on jazz, and makes no attempt to link him directly to rock. There are quite a few other jazz figures in their list, on very lame logic. Billie Holiday's "exquisite phrasing and tough-tender persona influenced the likes of Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, among others". Excuse me? I find it a bit difficult to come up with one vocal quality in common between Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, but these folks are telling me that Billie Holiday influenced both of them? In any case, it doesn't really matter if she did or not: merely having an influence on someone's vocal style is not enough of a connection to put someone in the RRHOF, otherwise there could be hundreds of unrelated artists equally worthy of inclusion.

Speaking of which, Frank Sinatra is not in the Hall. He actually had several major hits on rock radio, and it's hard to believe his style didn't influence numerous later artists who are in it. He was still a force in popular music when rock was the music of the day, unlike Billie Holiday; and he was more revered by many rock fans than a host of lesser singers who were getting AM-radio play and were offered up as rock artists, from Englebert Humperdink to Burt Bachrach. Frank Sinatra is not in the RRHOF; but Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey and Miles Davis are. Hmmmm... Maybe Chuck Berry belongs in the jazz HOF? Chubby Checker, who popularized the dance most closely associated with R&R, is not in the HOF. The Weavers, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Kingston Trio, The Lettermen - those folk groups were the immediate predecessors of the American rock group; not one of them is in. Yet Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers were admitted on their own. The idea seems to be: let's recognize every major American music trend in the first half of the 20th century, and then later on maybe we'll recognize the people who all those rock musicians actually knew and heard before they became rock musicians.

So where is the logic, oh tastemakers of the Great Hall? There is none. Though if we look the ABBA choice right in the face, along with others included for nothing more than having a lot of hit records (Billy Joel, Bob Seger, Madonna and AC/DC for instance) we may just have to admit that the one criterion that plays an outsized role is record sales. I can't honestly say that it is the only or even the main criterion. After all, Frank Sinatra did sell quite a few records. Celine Dion has sold about 200 million records, but she's not there. Oops, wait a few years please. She has technically been eligible for four years, since her first recording came out 29 years ago, in 1981. But she didn't release a record in English until 1990. There are no inductees in the RRHOF who did not record primarily in English. So give her a few years and I suspect she will be in like Flynn. ABBA, on the other hand, has been charting since the 70's, and occupies the noble position of being just behind The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson in total sales. Now, I'm not saying that sales are not a legitimate criterion to consider. Sales indicate popularity; popularity is sometimes an indicator of quality; though often not. It does suggest a high level of exposure and recognition, which may indicate influence and importance. On the other hand, it may not. It's hard to know what ABBA's influence might be, but I suspect it is less than that of The 1910 Fruitgum Company, pioneers of bublegum rock. Along with The Archies (actually just a bunch of studio musicians), The Jackson Five, The Cowsills, The Osmonds and various other "family" groups who were knocking on ceilings in the late sixties and early seventies, these fruitie types offered a watered down version of what had mainly been gritty, black and white working class music. IMHO, ABBA, in spite of a few catchy tunes (or because they were nothing but catchy tunes) contributed very little other than to take this trend and offer it up as discotheque fare. Not that it was actually disco in its classic form, but it was danceable and bouncy even when the subject was not exactly uplifting ("The WInner Takes It All"). They did not start or significantly expand anything I consider to be of much value in rock, they merely plied the lighter side of pop tastes for a string of hits.

The artists who precede them on the album sales list clearly did something important; many of the artists who follow them clearly did. Queen is next, and though they may not be my favorite group (love Sheer Heart Attack, other than that they're not my taste), they obviously took rock vocals to a level that has rarely if ever been equaled, and they helped make the extended composition a standard of FM radio fare. Someone please tell me about ABBA's similar accomplishments. They were not exceptionally good singers, their instrumentals were forgettable, their songs not pathbreaking in any sense I can think of. For light rock I'll take The Carpenters or Hall and Oates any day. Neither of them have made it in, and I doubt it would look quite as bizarre if they did. ABBA simply represents the dumbing down of taste to the lowest common denominator, diminishing everything that was vibrant, experimental, original or challenging in 1970's rock. They were about as responsible for this as their RRHOF mates Fleetwood Mac, a group that at least had earlier (pre-Buckingham/Nicks) incarnations which would never have gotten in on the basis of album sales, but perhaps deserved to be there for one reason or another. But for ABBA, sales and Top 5 hits are the beginning and the end of what anyone can say about their place in the history of R&R.

Although record sales are clearly a major consideration for entry into the Hallowed Hall, the bigger impression is that the criteria are just haphazard and arbitrary, putting in question whether there are any criteria at all. Consider the Hall's own description of their decision process: "Criteria include the influence and significance of the artists’ contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll." So, that is about as vague as you can get, and gives the nominating committee the flexibility to pick just about anyone they like, and ignore anybody they don't like. As a result, you've got a lot of tangential "early influence" type inductees who really had very little to do with rock; lots of sidemen, blues players, impressarios, gospel singers, and country influences, and yawning gaps in actual rock and roll. Bill Monroe is considered a rock influence in this ever so vaguely delineated hagiography, whereas in fact it is not likely that bluegrass had very much influence even in country rock, as it was quite a while before it even had much influence in country music. Charles Brown was a great blues pianist; I was fortunate enough to see him perform live, a treat I picked for my 40th birthday; but he had almost nothing at all to do with rock and roll. On the other hand, the Rev. Gary Davis, a player who directly influenced numerous major R&R artists (a short list would include Jerry Garcia, David Bromberg, and Jorma Kaukonen) has unaccountably been overlooked. A less obvious, but extremely interesting early urban blues figure would be Tampa Red, who not only inspired some of the bluesmen who inspired rock (including Muddy Waters and Elmore James), but played a style that is oddly modern and upbeat in a way that clearly anticipates rock and roll. Yet he is missing.

So, for that matter, is Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, whose songs provided early material for Elvis Presley, as well as influencing a number of important urban blues artists. While we're on the subject of important early performers who also wrote hits for major rock artists, Arthur Alexander has not even gotten his due in the arbitrary and capricious Hall. Early pop/rock artists who did no more for the medium than 100 artists who are not in have apprently been inducted on no other grounds that that they happened to be early. Thus, I don't need to question the contributions of Gene Pitney, Dusty Springfield or Ricky Nelson to raise an eyebrow that they, and quite a few others like them, are in the RRHOF, when a large number of later artists who were more influential are not in. Ricky Nelson, but not Lou Reed? (To pick a name out of a hat.) Be serious. Better yet, Dusty Springfield but not Neal Sedaka? He not only contributed to her career but had a major, lengthy career of his own, involving artists from The Monkees to 10CC and many more.

The early influences also seem to be more like obvious names to drop than interesting connections. Everyone who had one or two memorable early hits - Frankie Lyman, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, Bill Haley, Richie Valens - has been duly voted in. Perhaps one or two memorable hits in the 50's is sufficient to claim importance. But if so, why not one or two hits in the 60's? That's when rock really took off and became a major cultural force. There were lots of two-hit wonders then, and some of their songs are as memorable as "Rock Around the Clock" and "Teenager in Love". I've already mentioned The Boxtops, but I could name dozens more. Rather than that, why not pick three: Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels, The Left Banke, and The Foundations. Each, to my recollections had two major hits. Those hits were not just good songs but sounds that we will never forget; and I'll bet a whole lot of people a generation or more younger than me know the bands and would recognize the songs they are famous for. Why are they any less worthy of commemoration than the 50's groups?

Then again, there are groups that had a hell of a lot more hits than that, and were inlutential in some notable way, who are still not in RRHOF. I mean, how can you not have Gerry and the Pacemakers in the RRHOF? They should have been among the first ones, one of the most important Mersey Beat groups, a movement that changed R&R history. Tommy James and the Shondells practically defined sixties acid pop, and to my mind did a lot to make new kinds of sounds acceptable to a wide audience, moving the whole mainstream forward. Almost every one of their hits contained prominent, interesting new uses of keyboards, reverb, rhythm, drums, etc. Where's The Association, with their harmonies second only to The Beach Boys in the 1960's, not to mention several of the most frequently played singles in the history of rock? The Monkees were the first group to use a Moog synthesizer on an album, among other things. Their history alone, from a manufactured t.v. pop group to an independent progressive pop quartet on Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, is enough to mark them as significant - at least since Ricky Nelson's trajectory seems to make him worthy of HOF immortality (read his bio on the RRHOF web site). Paul Revere and the Raiders wore outrageous costumes long before David Bowie or Kiss; they also had five Billboard Top 10 and thirteen Top 25 hits, and 4 Gold albums, and were Columbia's top selling artist for a while (I imagine Dylan has long since surpassed them). More interesting is that they were hard rock pioneers, spinning serious guitar solos as early as 1965 and later becoming a kind of retro icon for punk rockers. Next up: I'm not sure what's the best way to defend the view that Steppenwolf should be a first round pick for the rock HOF; maybe because "Born to Be Wild" is a strong contender for the anthem of a generation; because "Monster" was rock music's most powerful indictment of the political direction of the country; because they have one of the four or five best live albums ever; or because they too were a group whose style looked forward to the hard rock of the 70's. Whatever, it seems pretty obvious to me that Steppenwolf means every bit as much to rock history as many rock artists of the 50's, and much more than most of those "early influences".

But at least quite a few 60's bands are duly represented: just look at the "B" list - The Band, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfied. Entire trends, however, are barely represented if at all. It's nice that Iggy Pop and the Stooges finally got in; they were a key source for the punk movement. But even before them there were historically important artists who deserve recognition in this regard, e.g., The Troggs, Marc Bolan (T Rex), and Père Ubu. Early eighties post-punk groups are eligible, but all I see in the Hall are a few of the big hitmakers (The Police, U2). The highly influential Joy Division is MIA, and so are The Alarm, The Jam, Joe Jackson, The Psychedeic Furs, The Cars, The Knack - not to mention all the 2 Tone and Ska bands (The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat), Rock Against Racism (TRB and others)... the point is, this is a very important era, a turning point in the history of rock with a variety of manifestations, none of which are represented, just the hitmakers. British folk-rock - Donovan, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Renaissance, etc - is not represented at all, in spite of influencing so many major 70's bands, including Led Zep and Yes. Does this make any sense? Influential guitarists like Roy Harper and Bert Jansch have been passed over, but Leadbelly and John Lee Hooker are there. I think the Hall managers have their priorities completely skewed; you should recognize the people who directly influenced and played rock first, then go and collect the distant cousins who neither knew or cared much about R&R.

I could go on. In fact I will. Let's talk about some of the most influential trends in the history of rock - trends which I will quite frankly say that I don't personally like very much, but whose importance is hard to deny (a hell of a lot harder than that of ABBA). No one person ever invented any form of music, but Barry White came darn close to inventing disco. In any case his influence is undeniable. But as another hugely influential unrecognized group once sang, "he's not there". You won't find Gloria Gaynor, The Hues Corporation, or Diana Ross (as a solo act) in the RRHOF. The Jacksons are in there only insofar as they extend the biography of The Jackson Five. Donna Summer has been denied entry several times. No sunshine for KC and his band either. Forget about The Tavares or the Pointer Sisters. Funk, somehow, is worthy of respect - not only James Brown but Parliament-Funkadelic squeezed in. Marvin Gaye was thankfully worthy of admission. So it is clearly not a matter of excluding artists on the notion that later R&B is not rock. I was never a big disco fan, but to deny that it was a major force in the broader concept of rock music that includes soul, funk, and hip hop is just nuts. I thought I was an ideologue, but if I were in charge of a public-facing institution like the RRHOF I like to think I'd try to be objective. The razor-like excision of disco is just vindictive, whether you were ever a fan or not.

On the other end of the spectrum, let's talk "heavy metal". AC/DC happens to be in the Hall; by no surprise, they are something like 7th or 8th in the list of best selling groups of all time. But they have no other business in the HOF. They were not one of the pioneers of heavy metal, and I doubt anyone could show that they influenced other heavy metal bands more than Kiss or Aerosmith, both of whom were founded the same time as AC/DC but released albums earlier. (AC/DC did not release any notable albums until several years after they were founded.) Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple, MC5, Grand Funk - they belong in the HOF as the early explorers of what became heavy metal. Of course Led Zeppelin is in; who would pay any attention to this museum if they weren't? But they should not be there for their illustrious place in album sales, nor for the popularity of "Stairway to Heaven", but for their virtually reinventing hard rock in 1969 and leading the way into the next decade; for expanding the instrumental sound and introducing radical new techniques on both guitar and drums; and for many other qualities. What similar contributions has AC/DC made? I know - they pioneered a new vocal sound in which the human voice is made to sound like a parrot struggling to escape the talons of a hawk? Sorry, that doesn't strike me as a significant accomplishment. The RRHOF bio of Metallica has one thing more or less right: Black Sabbath "invented" heavy metal (not quite, but close) and Metallica "redefined it in the Eighties". So what exactly did AC/DC do besides sell a lot of records? Probably less than Ozzy did in his solo career. "Huh?" you say, Ozzy's not there? Sacrilege, to an awful lot of rock fans. But neither are Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motorhead, or Motley Crue (sorry, metalheads, for dropping the cute little umlauts over some of those names) - all of them eligible for many years. Guns 'N Roses? You'll have to wait a couple of years, their first album came out in 1987. But I wouldn't be surprised to see them get in: they're just behind AC/DC and Metallica in heavy metal album sales. (Discounting Zep and Deep Purple as not "pure" metal.) So what will that prove; that the rulers of HOF have carefully considered the merits of any of these bands? Doesn't look that way to me.

More than anything, I am shocked at the total lack of respect for progressive rock in the inductee list. Sure Pink Floyd is there, but not for Atom Heart Mother, I suspect. Genesis has just been admitted; again, I suspect that Phil Collins's contributions have more to do with that than Peter Gabriel's. Just guessing. But to me, a Rock Hall of Fame without the Moody Blues, Yes, King Crimson or Jethro Tull is a complete joke - and all of them have been eligible for more than 15 years. (I could shorten that and say that a Rock Hall of Fame without Jethro Tull is a complete joke, even if progressive rock never existed - since I consider Tull to be far from a pure prog band. But I digress.) That says to me that there is an ideology keeping these bands out. And I can go a bit deeper, because I think prog is so important that I'm not sure some lesser-known prog groups shouldn't be in there. If popularity and album sales are the criteria, then perhaps a group like Gentle Giant does not belong in the Hallowed Hall. But there's a long list of prog rock artists doing highly technical, rhythmically and harmonically complex songs, and I'll bet nearly all of them have been influenced to one degree or another by GG, who did it before any of them. (Not that I'm ignoring Zappa's role here.) I'm not so sure that even groups like Rush didn't get something from them. Can't prove it without a lot of research but my ears tell me so.

Last and certainly least, I hate to mention this, but there's a slew of late 70's groups that I can't stand, and I'd be happy to hear that the guardians of rock's kingdom can't stand them either. But again, if there's a reason for keeping out the likes of Rush, Styx, Journey, Toto, Foreigner, Boston, Kansas, Steve Miller and a crapload of other late 70's/early 80's pseudo-progressive pop, I'd like to see the criteria. Arguably, those groups defined everything in rock and roll in that era that was not punk or "new wave". There are some dim signs that taste has at least some influence in the choice of inductees, e.g., the fact that Steely Dan has been inducted and Rush has not. Then again, Bob Seger has been inducted and 10CC has not; there goes that theory. Anyway, I'm not in favor of a rushed journey down the Styx, but if we're talking about impact, we will be forced to admit that those groups more or less absconded with the FM airwaves for a decade or so.

I'm going to stop, eventually. In fact, I'm not even going to mention several other important trends in rock, all pre-1985 and therefore eligible, which are pretty much unrepresented in the RRHOF, such as glam (Roxy, Bolan, Dolls) or jazz rock (BS&T, Chicago, Soft Machine) or fusion (McLaughlin, Corea, Coryell) or euro (Kraftwerk, Focus, The Fixx) or... Well, either I'm going to stop, or perhaps the RRHOF team should start - recognizing that they have managed to ignore most of what is really significant in rock, while compiling a list of distant predecessors and pop stars. No, they have not ignored history altogether; they have made their motions in the directions of The Clash, David Bowie, and other artists who are not simply popular but seminal. But they have turned their backs on so much else, while digging into the jazz and blues archives and the interesting sidemen and the gurus of one sort or another, then adding numerous artists whose contributions are little more than a list of hits.

Now why is all this? A friend of mine has a simple answer: "Jann's club", he calls it - a short way of saying that Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, controls the Hall's membership list according to his own personal taste. Is it true? Hmmmm.... Take a look at Roger Friedman's critique of the 2007 nominee list, if you have the patience to read any more HOF critiques after my longwinded diatribe. (Okay, it's on Fox. If it makes you feel any better, Friedman was fired soon afterward for reviewing a pirated copy of the film Wolverine, and pointing out to readers how easy it was to get hold of. Wonder why Fox might have cared so much about this...) If you don't like that, take a look at some of the comments about Wenner to the same effect on his Wikipedia page.

One comment there, cited from a New York Post interview with Peter Tork, is worth noting: Tork says explicitly that Wenner has personally kept The Monkees out of the RRHOF over the worn-out criticism that they didn't play the instruments on their first two albums. On the first album, that was by understanding with producer Don Kirshner. The second, however, was released without The Monkees' prior consent to this arrangement. In any case, the criticism is not only unfair but ignorant. It's unfair because any number of Motown groups and quite a few rock bands who are in the RRHOF (e.g., The Beach Boys) did not play many (or in some cases any) of the instruments on some of their albums; the use of anonymous studio musicians backing major rock groups on albums was extremely common in those days. And it's ignorant because in fact, The Monkees did play their own instruments in concert, on Headquarters, and to a large extent on Pisces Aquarius Capricorn & Jones and their later albums; because Peter Tork is widely known to be a top notch musician who could have played any instrument in the band and then some (and in fact did play a guitar part on their first album, alongside James Burton); and because Nesmith was not only a competent guitarist but an excellent songwriter with a career that dated from before The Monkees existed. What Dolenz lacked in drumming ability he made up in unique vocal qualities that created the sound of some of the most memorable hits of the 60's. The Monkees may have suffered from the discrepancy between their t.v. show personas as rock stars and their early acceptance of studio backing on the albums; certainly to hold this against them at a time when we have a much broader perspective on the whole era is ridiculous and vindictive.

Wenner's Wikipedia page contains another paragraph with a list of groups he is said to be responsible for keeping out on the basis of personal taste. According to Friedman, "Wenner’s nominating committee consists largely of his current and former employees from Rolling Stone (Nathan Brackett, David Fricke, Jim Henke, Joe Levy, Brian Keizer, Toure, and Anthony DeCurtis). But they have little say over who really is inducted." There are lots of people questioning the objectivity of the Hall's criteria. The Hall's Wikipedia page has more examples of the criticism of Wenner et al., and this Rush fan site has a page of quotes from a variety of rock legends doubting the value of its choices. When The Sex Pistols were inducted, Johnny Rotten wrote a letter calling the Hall "a piss stain" and "urine in wine" and refusing to attend the ceremony. Complaints about RRHOF are usually paired with complaints about Wenner, and often target the overdependence on record sales as a criterion; here's another example. Dig around, you'll find comments like this for most bands that have been snubbed, with especially heavy emphasis from progressive rock and heavy metal fans, who know from the pages of Rolling Stone how much Wenner dislikes those trends. It's hard to find an authoritative source to confirm Wenner's autocratic control of the nominating process, and there certainly are counterexamples to the influence of record sales (another: Chicago has never gotten in) but I have not been able to find anything, by Wenner or anyone else, providing evidence of the diversity or objectivity of opinion among the RRHOF crowd.

And what none of the comments about Wenner point out (which it is therefore my duty as a blogger to do) is that if he has any influence there, much less controlling influence, it is a depressing comment on this personality cult that he has managed to have himself elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Yes, shocking though it may seem after what we have just said, the ever opportunistic Wenner, with the help of colleagues who "have little say over who really is inducted", has granted himself not only rock immortality but a glowing biography, in which the only thing that is understated is his role in the RRHOF itself: "He was in on the ground floor with a small group - which would become its board of directors - that began planning the institution back in 1983, and he remains vitally active in its operation to this day." Vitally active indeed!

In short, the RRHOF is not really the generally recognized standard of excellence, influence, or importance in rock. Though it may have begun with a variety of industry heavyweights counterbalancing each other (Ahmet Ertegun was part of the lineup at first, and one source says that his departure was the beginning of Wenner's total reign) it is widely believed to have long since become a personal playground for one outsized personality and a number of his sycophants. And that is a shame, because so many of us believe that rock is one of the most important musical art forms in history, with tremendous variety and vitality, and no sign of its diminishing after half a century (indeed I see signs that it is once again in a phase of expansion and new forms of expression). It deserves a serious institutional standard for its history and iconography, not a cabal of self-indulgent arbiters whose criteria for admission are fuzzy at best and seriously flawed at worst.

So, how could we fix the Hall of Errors? Well, clearly I think there are certain inductees who should not be there at all right now: virtually all the jazz artists, some of the blues, folk and country artists, all rock stars whose sole contribution is a lot of hit singles, possibly some of the less important divas and crooners from the 50's and early 60's. The problem in a nutshell is that there are certain artists whose absence virtually leaps out at you, having been eligible in some cases for as long as 15 years or more, and without any rational explanation of why ABBA or Bob Seger should be there and not them, it puts the whole project in question.

So here, then, is a LIST: call it the NPRRHOFM! (For the acronmyically challenged among you, that would be "Neglected Potential RRHOF Members".) Now, please note: this is not a list of my personal favorites. Far from it: anybody who knows my tastes knows that I can't even listen to half the groups on the following list. Never particularly liked The Strawbs, Roxy Music, or Mott the Hoople. Hate Kiss; not a Sabbath fan. Grand Funk and Queen each have one great album (Closer to Home and Sheer Heart Attack), the rest of both is almost unbearable. Chicago, Alice Cooper - a few songs here and there that I can get into, that's all. I could also offer you a list of favorites who I would not include at this point: Nektar, The Fixx, The Parachute Club and the Gang of Four, for instance. In short, I'm wearing my objectivity hat here (clearly an unknown piece of haberdashery at Rolling Stone) and trying to identify groups I think are important enough in some way to be clear choices for the Hall. My choices are all made on mainly historical grounds, which I would define as:

(a) Influence: artists who were widely admired, imitated or looked to for inspiration among other important artists who came later. (Examples: Alex Chilton, Iron Butterfly, Laura Nyro, The Flying Burrito Brothers)
(b) Defining role for an era, sound or trend: artists whose overall style or sound, or some aspect thereof, is a touchstone for what became a recognized rock trend or genre. (Examples: Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Moody Blues, Blood Sweat and Tears)
(c) Important representative of sub-genre: artists who may not have been the first or only examples of their particular form of rock, but who are widely considered one of the most important representatives of that form (Examples: The Replacements, Tommy James and the Shondells, Boston)
(d) Originality: artists who stood out as unique in some generally admired way. (Examples: Tim Buckley, Jimmy Buffet, XTC, The Smiths)
(e) Key contributions: artists who don't fall into any of the first four categories, but who either took some critical step that expanded the horizons of rock, or created tracks of extraordinary quality (whether or not recognized in popularity or sales), or made very admirable technical innovations, or some similar important contribution. (Examples: King Crimson, 10CC)

I think most of the groups on my list actually have a foot in more than one of these categories. If this or some similar list of criteria were used, I suspect that a lot of the members of RRHOF would not be there, and a lot of others would. But let me say this, by way of charity: I am not against adding a category "(f): Major hitmakers", and bringing in some of those groups at a later time. It is the vindictive excising of really obvious choices like Jethro Tull and the casual inclusion of popular but otherwise unremarkable groups that exercises me. After due recognition has been given to the people who are actually important to the history of rock, let us open the gates to the people who merely wrote some catchy tunes with good hooks and made million$ from them.

Here, then, is the list. I could entertain the thought of removing some of them after hearing arguments from the field, but I'm putting in bold the artists I think it is really bordering on the absurd to keep out at this point. Add your own in the Comments section, and try to observe the criterion of 25 years since their first released recording, as I have:

A - Arthur Alexander, The Association
B - The Boxtops, Blood Sweat and Tears, Tim Buckley, Bad Company, Blue Oyster Cult, Jimmy Buffet, B-52's, Boston
C - Alex Chilton, Chicago, Canned Heat, Alice Cooper
D - Rev. Gary Davis, Neil Diamond, Donovan (Leitch), Deep Purple
E - (Empty for now)
F - The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Foundations
G - Grand Funk, Gentle Giant, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Guess Who
H - Roy Harper, Herman's Hermits
I - Iron Butterfly
J - Jethro Tull, Joe Jackson, Judas Priest
K - King Crimson, Kiss
L - Love
M - The Monkees, The Moody Blues, John McLaughlin, Mott the Hoople, Motorhead
N - Laura Nyro
O - (Oops, can't think of any)
P - Procol Harum, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Psychedelic Furs
Q - (?)
R - Tampa Red, Mitch Ryder, Todd Rundgren, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, The Replacements
S - Neal Sedaka, Steppenwolf, Sonny and Cher, The Strawbs, The Specials, The Smiths, Donna Summer
T - Tommy James and the Shondells, The Turtles, 10CC, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
U - UB40
V - (Vote for your favorite)
W - Johnny Winter, Barry White
X - XTC
Y - Yes
Z - The Zombies, Warren Zevon

Double Standard? Deaccessioning in Art and Music

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:01:00 +0000

Everybody who follows the art world at all knows that the National Academy museum in New York has been coming in for merciless criticism over its sale of two Hudson River School paintings to raise money for basic operating expenses. The Association of Art Museum Directors has prohibited its members from entering into any collaboration with the NA. The so-called "deaccessioning" of holdings to pay operating expenses is like the cardinal sin of the museum community. And there are some good reasons for this; for example: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising; (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings; (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution - a slippery slope, so to speak; and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support.

Whew! Plenty to be concerned about, there. The NY State Legislature has even begun to consider a bill that would legally prohibit deaccessioning to pay operating expenses. And though I personally doubt they would be able to prevent such sales, which can be executed under a variety of pretenses, there are more than enough examples to worry anyone who thinks that important collections have a life of their own and need to be preserved. In 2005 the New York Public Library sold a large number of paintings, including another Hudson River School work of inestimable cultural value to the area and the institution (Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits"). It ended up in the hands of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who also wished to denude Fisk University of half their interest in a world-class collection of Georgia O'Keefe paintings. With the full complicity of the university Board, who pleaded financial distress, she hoped to stash some of them in her Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. If Arkansas travellers can smuggle some artworks out of the NYPL, maybe we can kidnap some backporch country fiddlers and move a couple of swamps to Queens? (What's that you say - Queens already has enough swamps?) And in what must be the Nightmare on Elm Street of deaccessioning, Brandeis University recently announced that they would close the highly regarded Rose Art Museum due to a budget shortfall, and use the money to improve "arts education" (there's plenty of art in Beantown, they reasoned, so who needs this particular collection?)

And now for something not completely different: everybody who follows the music world knows that in 2007 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sold its recently acquired collection of classic Cremonese instruments. All sorts of shenanigans accompanied the acquisition of the instruments in 2003, including a gross overestimate of the value of the collection by the seller, Herbert Axelrod, questions about the authenticity of some of them, and doubts about the appraisal process. What is not in question, though, is that the NJSO in one leap became an orchestra renowned for its string sound (something it took the Philadelphia Orchestra many years to achieve), and the repository of a substantial share of the greatest violins ever made. Yet in 2007 the orchestra sold the collection to pay down debt and support future operating expenses. The collection, some 30 historic string instruments including several Stradivaris and del Gesus, was purchased by hedge fund managers Seth and Brook Taube. The twin bankers, whose Columbus Nova Partners fund was allegedly closed for poor performance, helped themselves to two Strads and gave the orchestra a 5-year loan on the rest.

For this act of deaccessioning, the NJSO was not roundly criticized in the press or condemned by their peers. No professional organization said, "okay, don't lend these guys any instruments". They were not censured by critics or made the goats of music bloggers. So - double standard, or what? Think about it. A museum's "product" is the display of art. An orchestra's "product" is the performance of music. The art that a museum collects gives it a particular strength, or personality. The orchestra's strength or personality is more complex, and depends on the type of music it performs, the skills of its players, and the personalities of the conductors it has had; but the instruments it acquires and uses are definitely a part of the mix, and perhaps the main component of the tonal qualities of its sound. Many orchestras will purchase or commission instruments according to certain principles of sound or taste. So the presence of 30 of the world's greatest string instruments on one stage is not exactly a minor aspect of the orchestra's sound. Replacing them with other, more modern and less sonorous, instruments is comparable to to the Metropolitan Museum saying, "You know, we could really fix the bottom line here if we just get rid of these Rembrandts and Vermeers and pull up some of that French neo-classical stuff out of the basement".

Now let's go back to some of the arguments against deaccessioning in the museum world: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising (this would see to apply equally well in the music world); (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings (contribution of instruments may be a less typical situation in music, but the argument is equally coherent when it applies); (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (less compelling in this case, since this particular collection was acquired all at once and deaccessioned fairly quickly) (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution (ditto for an orchestra with a collection of fine instruments); and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support (no question the same applies in this case, in spades).

In fact, let's be blunt, the Axelrod transaction put the NJSO on the cultural map for the first time in its history, allowing it to compete for audience with the far more famous orchestra across the Hudson, and was an important factor in their ability to lure a world class conductor, Neeme Jarvi. And let's not forget, the National Gallery sold off two major paintings, and had plans (apparently now abandoned) to sell off a few more; whereas NJSO sold off what was essentially the single most important physical component of its sound!

But there are other facts that make this decision more complicated. Bringing the sound of the rest of the orchestra in line with what amounts to one of the most resonant string sections in the world certainly would take a concerted (nyuk nyuk :-) effort. I suppose the storage, security and insurance costs must be considerable. The sale was executed only a few years after the purchase, before one could say that it was part of the NJSO tradition. And of course one can now add the standard recessionist logic, in-these-difficult-times-one-must-be-prepared-to-make-tough decisions: if they had not sold them when they did, would they be able to survive a major economic crisis?

All this, however, doesn't quite cut it as a reason to sell off the collection for operating expenses. For one thing, by the time the 5-year loan is up, the orchestra will have been using the collection for about 10 years. Those years will have been the ones in which the orchestra first drew serious attention in the music world, gained new status and audiences, and perhaps even lured a few of us across the river to check out the new sound. (I admit I have not gone to hear them yet, but it's been on my agenda. Like going to the Barnes Collection before they deaccession their original quarters. Even the Parrot can't take wing and fly to every worthwhile cultural event in this area.) Furthermore, none of these excuses would have been accepted in the art world as a reason to sell holdings in order to pay debt or operating expenses. That is considered just bad management, selling what will attract people tomorrow in order to pay what you owe today. Fool's gambit, is the thinking over in artland.

So what to make of all this? My basic instinct is that all the arguments and assumptions aren't getting to the heart of the problem, which seems to always lie a little below the surface of the institutional fracas. What it's about is that in a world where more and more people are willing to trade slot cars for video games, guitars for Guitar Hero, real life for Second Lives, real books for Kindles, real friends for Facebook "friends" and real thought for Twitters, cultural institutions have by default been saddled with the incredibly serious task of reminding us that our longstanding cultural traditions are actually still just as important as they always were, indeed moreso. They are, like it or not, responsible for reminding us that this painting, that building, that piece of music, are part of who we are - as persons, as New Yorkers (or even New Jerseyans, I guess), as Americans, and why we should care that this is so. It is to our collective benefit, as I see it, that certain things which have inherent value and help define us should simply persist; that they don't just go away and turn into something else, become virtual or get replaced with some cheapened version after dumbing down the audience so much that they barely notice the difference. This is the burden that our museums, publishing houses, orchestras, landmark commissions and other cultural institutions have to bear. To protect what is there, sometimes for no more than the simple reason that it has been there for a long time, and that the place where it is is admired partly because this or that symbol is there and carries with it the sense of place and of tradition, is a responsibility of those who are entrusted with our cultural heritage. And that includes not only museums and libraries, but universities, who merit additional calumny for pigheadedness in posing a false dichotomy between a cultural trust and the bottom line. (Ultimately you can thank Reagan and his "revolution" for this, as that is the source of the ideological migration of university boards from seeing financial accountability as serving educational goals in the broadest sense, to seeing it as a justification for stripping away tenured chairs and academic freedom, as well as abandoning cultural leadership.)

I would say this preservationist sensibility even applies to something like Yankee Stadium, which, if there weren't plenty of other reasons to question the value for the City of replacing it, ought to have been preserved for no other reason than that it is one of America's historic ballparks and has been associated with one of America's most historic baseball teams. (I didn't ask whether you like them; I'd probably say the same about Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, FYI. Squawck!) The point is, it is incumbent on every cultural institution to be a sort of levee against gratuitous change; to the extent possible, the only change should be in the direction of enrichment of what is there already, not the utilitarian swapping of art or instruments or other cultural treasures for short term gains.

Do I think that any institution that ever sold anything to pay expenses should be condemned? No. If the question is really survival in a diminished form rather than disappearance off the face of the earth, we may have to accept the smaller loss. But even that is not an absolute truth. The O'Keefe paintings were given to Fisk wth the express mandate that they may not be sold - ever. It appears that the intent here is simply that the works shall not be used as collateral, regardless of the circumstances. This is not in the least mitigated by the shool's economic plight, and O'Keefe's heirs were right to sue to recover the works. (Though the judge's decision that the university must neither sell them nor return them was, at least for the time being, the best solution.) Moreover, to say that survival is really at stake reqires being intimately familiar with the finances, fundraising history, and possible alternatives for an institution. When I was a student at the Mannes College of Music, there was an effort to merge the school with the much larger Manhattan School of Music uptown. This was supposed to be an effort to "save" the school; it's financial condition was allegedly deteriorating, and Manhattan would have the resources to support much of Mannes and its staff. To make a long story short, the Board of Directors that made this decision was sued, removed by the Court for failure to carry out their fiscal responsibilities, and replaced with a new Board that was actually committed to the school. The merger effort was a kind of deaccessioning, not just of the building, which was soon abandoned anyway, but of the musical traditions that informed the school since it was founded. Mannes has a distinctive theoretical tradition and pedagogical philosophy, and this would have been diluted at best, or in all probability swallowed whole, as it was effectively collapsed into the Manhattan School curriculum. Ultimately, a much less toxic merger with the New School allowed Mannes to maintain its independence and musical traditions while obtaining the financial resources of a major university.

So, it is far from clear that every time an institution's board jumps up and says, "Sell, sell! We are deeply in debt!" everyone must pull out their handkerchiefs and weep for the troubled institution, or look the other way while they pawn their prized possessions. The presumption should not be one of innocence, but of guilt: boards are a mixture of wealthy, well-meaning and committed individuals, and lazy, rich, obstructive, neurotic and self-interested attention-getters and status-seekers. No one can know who is winning at any given moment, but when the Board says they just can't raise enough money or hire competent enough managers to keep the institution going without deaccessioning, it's time to be suspicious.

And it is not only lack of fundraising initiative that should be looked into. In the case of the National Academy, part of the story was the temporary replacement of the museum's Director with someone who had nonprofit management and fundraising experience, but no experience in the art world. The problem only intensifies when the board is responsible to a higher entity like a university, whose primary mission is not that of the cultural institution, and whose financial goals may at times conflict with its commitment to cultural goals. For any number of reasons, our instinct should be to keep things where they are. That won't always be right, and it won't always be possible, but we should have to be thoroughly convinced before we give up the principle and accede to deaccessioning.

So, there you go: another art-and-the-public-interest post from your friendly local Parrot. If I didn't have two other blogs, three or four books to write, an album to record and a fulltime job, I could get used to this. Or maybe I could deaccession one or two of my six lives and learn to focus. It is tempting.

The Examined Film: Review of Astra Taylor's "The Examined Life"

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:28:00 +0000

"The place of philosophy in modern public life" - that is the phrase I remember catching my attention from some web site for this film (though it is not on this one), convincing me that this must be an important film, and one that neatly intersects my mission here. Would that that impression were justified by what I just saw at the IFC theater in Manhattan. After 20 years as a professional philosopher - a bit more studying some of the leftist literature that informs some of the subjects of this film - my reaction was to wonder if it could possibly have been as dull for those viewers not already saturated with the intellectual content conveyed here.

Let me first say this: I have known, or met, philosophers who I would not hesitate to spend hours listening to; chewing the fat with over a beer; or just passing the time with in idle conversation that might range from Quine to Brahms to memorable camping trips. I do not limit this class of people to my personal friends or classmates. I mean people, for example, like Sidney Morgenbesser (a true character in the best Socratic sense) or Marx Wartofsky (who was really the last Renaissance man), both unfortunately resting in Plato's heaven, or David Pears, to the best of my knowledge alive and well and living in England, any of whom could hold court or be the subject of anecdotes for hours on end. I mean people like Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam, Eddy Zemach, Bas van Frassen, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Toulmin, or indeed the Brooklyn native who made the phrase "the examined life" famous as the title of one of his books, Robert Nozick. I don't mean that these are my favorite philosophers - not by a long shot, in many cases - but they are people I have met or heard and who I know can hold the attention of of an audience, have interesting things to say on many subjects, and might just convince a film audience that there are philosophers, neither superstars, crackpots, nor stuffed shirts, who are capable of taking them on a tour of reality or morality that goes just a bit deeper than what they are used to. They speak with passion, humor, and erudition, without being pompous, boring, obscure or intentionally asinine.

But it seems as if Taylor was not looking for good film subjects, but rather for philosophers who fit a certain conception of who would have something to say to a mass audience: feminists, multiculturalists, Marxists, gender theorists, literary theorists, African-American philosophers, or animal liberationists. Forget those stodgy, mainstream Anglo-American analytic types, who would want to hear them? And actually, that's largely true - who would want to hear most of them? But then again, who would want to hear a Continental or Marxist philosopher, or some slightly outré ethicist, who is trying to sound very important and relevant and only succeeds in restating their well-worn theories (because it is all they really know how to talk about)?

That, unfortunately, describes quite a bit of what Ms. Taylor captured on film. Here is Peter Singer walking ever so appropriately down Fifth Avenue, commenting on the wildly extravagant designer items, then standing in the Diamond District, etc., and calling forth references from "Famine, Affluence and Morality" and Animal Liberation that he has been working for about 35 years now. There is Martha Nussbaum going on, predictably, about Aristotle and virtue and feminist ethics, with about as much connection to the audience as a passing cloud. Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire (with Antonio Negri), ponders his failed revolutionary impulses in the 1980's and sets about thinking, in terms no more enlightening than the average activist's park bench conversation, how one can be pro-democracy and pro-revolutionary, or how one can be revolutionary at all in the face of global capitalism. Yawn. In his book, if I have gleaned his views correctly (I have not read it, but I've read several discussions of it), Hardt says that globalization is, in spite of itself, the crucible in which the new democratic society will be born. This is just an updated version of the old "revisionist" idea about how democratic socialism will come about (not a "communist manifesto for the 20th century" as it is sometimes called), but more on that later.

Though other reviewers have been duly reverential towards the sequence in which gender theorist Judith Butler takes a walk, goes shopping, and meditates on bodies and movement in the company of the filmmaker's physically impaired, wheelchair-bound sister Sunaura Taylor, while trying to say very meaningful and supportive things, I found it artificial, cloying and in some spots bordering on condescending. You cannot somehow normalize physical impairments that affect a small portion of the population by meditating on the limitations of bodies in general; all you can do is encourage those unfolding social and scientific developments that give people with physical limitations greater degrees of physical and social freedom, and permit them to participate in ever greater degrees in the type of activities that most of us consider normal, and rewarding. And you don't need a philosopher or gender theorist to do that, just a reasonably sensible and sensitive person. But more than that, in my view, the only dialogic stance that truly delegitimizes and undermines discrimination and prejudice against physically disabled persons is to treat them as exactly equal partners in respect of that asset which is not disabled, i.e., their minds. And that is not what I heard here; rather, I received the impression of a philosopher utilizing a dialogue with a disabled person to create a platform for her own ideas about bodies and movements. At other points she seemed to assent to what Sunaura Taylor said with benign reassurance but little critical consideration. Throughout the conversation I felt a lack of give and take, as if there had been a pact not to challenge one another's presuppositions, or engage in a real exchange of views. Perhaps this reflects the caregiver view of ethics, which is at the heart of the feminist approach, and emphasizes allegedly female virtues of nurture and loyalty to the circle of human beings closest to you. But respecting the dignity of persons also means not patronizing them in the way we patronize children and others for whom we are responsible. The responsible caregiver, be it a mother, nurse, social worker or home attendant, must limit the respect they show for the dignity and independence of the person in their care. Otherwise they will not be effective when they need to make decisions on that person's behalf. That ethical model does not work for normal adult relationships.

Other sequences in this film involved a pretty dry, academic set of thoughts from Avital Ronell, an NYU literary theorist who could not resist the urge to drag Heidegger into the proceedings, ending up sounding like she did not quite get this idea of philosophers (we are applying the term loosely) standing in front of a camera and saying something to a mass audience. As for Slavoj Zizek, who makes an appearance in this film after having a Taylor film of his own, he comes off as a slightly incoherent nutcase who enjoins us to love the piles of garbage among which he has chosen to be filmed for his sequence. Indeed, we are to despise the notions of nature and ecology and embrace filth and excess as the key to overcoming global warming and other environmental threats. This is the type of philosopher who should be kept as far from public view as possible, lest the world at large confirm its prejudice to the effect that philosophers are people whose job is to confuse others by arguing that absurd things are true. Be that as it may, I think there is something resembling a coherent point underlying Zizek's charades, only it would be a minor miracle if anyone understood it from this film. Again, I'll come back to this later.

I have left two people for last: Kwame Anthony Appiah, on whose contributions I'm afraid I can't comment because they came at a time when I had briefly given up trying to prop my eyelids open; and Cornell West, whose wide-ranging and wildly intertextual remarks provided the one bright spot in the film, though their import seems to have passed by most of the reviewers and for that reason probably a bit of the audience as well. While ranging over the history of art and ideas from Plato to Goethe and on through Charlie Parker and the Beatles, West focused his remarks primarily on the idea of life as a space between nonexistence and death, and emphasized the ways in which we give that brief flash of spirit some meaning and make it worth holding onto. Taylor wisely edited West's engaging remarks into several sequences, interspersed around the others, which at least broke the monotony of the other lifeless talking heads as they either failed to focus or rehearsed well-worn ideas in stiff language. While West's parts may not have been perfect, especially for indulging in a lot more references than necessary to make his points, he at least gave a hint of what a philosopher can do when he has a command of popular as well as intellectual culture and has actually thought a bit about life, death, and our place on earth.

While Zizek did display a certain fervor, what really attracted our attention with him was waiting for a payoff that never came, as he tried to convince us that trash on stilts is way cooler than ordinary waste and pollution. Personally I find it extremely unfortunate when philosophers stake out baldly idiotic positions to demonstrate that philosophy can see deeper into the nature of reality than ordinary common sense. It can, but that ain't how. But let's try to tie things together a bit, because there is a little more here than mere antics for the sake of getting attention. We can start by going back to Hardt and his globalization fetish. Since at least the Utopian socialism of the 19th century, there has been a way of thinking about the good (social democratic) society as a kind of algae, or mold, that under the right conditions grows outward from one or more initial sites until it swallows everything in its wake. The Utopian societies were supposed to do this, spreading socialism by example. Then Eduard Bernstein contributed the idea of capitalism "evolving" into socialism. Karl Kautsky conceived of an "ultra-imperialism" that spread peace due to its very reach. Even Lenin suggested that in the globalization of finance capital, the organizational framework of socialism was being incubated in the womb of international capitalism. But Lenin, unlike the others, never imagined that this globalization of capital would just roll over into socialism without a violent revolution.

The core idea that seems to be repeated in Hardt's view is that the endless penetration of capitalism into every corner of the world, and the ever-growing neural network of connections between people and nations, is destined to finally evolve into a vast world culture in which war, racism and other conflicts are submerged in the interest of the great global leviathan. But while these conflicts are removed, the fundamental exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie remains - a kind of 1984-ish dystopia in which the underlying injustice of the whole system is hidden beneath the surface of harmony and uniformity. Hardt's and Negri's main contribution seems to be the idea that we can push this capitalist leviathan to the brink of self-destruction by pushing the democratic logic it hypocritically represents as its own as far as it can go. (This too is not a very original idea, but never mind.) Thus they suggest certain key democratic demands we can make within the framework of capitalism to help the system undermine itself.

So what does this have to do with Zizek? Well, first, he wrote a lengthy article about Hardt's and Negri's book in the journal Rethinking Marxism, in which he accused them of not going far enough in rejecting the logic of capitalism. Zizek suggests that operating within the framework of demands that can be accommodated, if not entirely met, by capitalism itself is self-defeating. He therefore finds it unhelpful for revolutionaries to associate themselves with the progressive movements that capitalism (as the classic Marxist analysis has it) allows to flourish in order to "blow off steam". Environmentalism, as perhaps the movement of the moment, plays into the hands of capitalism by suggesting some sort of idealistic return to nature. Instead, Zizek thinks (not that his ideas are very clearly formulated, but this is the general drift) we should force the issue, let the contradictions of capitalism increase and destroy it from the inside. You see, it is essentially the same kind of Hegelian line, the new form of Being incubating within the old and then splitting it into opposites, the class struggle finally revealed for what it is. In a moment of inspired obfuscation and trendiness he somehow imagines the World Wide Web as the modern counterpart to Lenin's idea of capitalism preparing the framework of the new society and the seeds of its own destruction within itself. Okay, that's about as hip as Herbert Marcuse finding the source of socialist revolution in the student and intellectual movements of the 1960's.

Anyway, what I wanted to show is that Zizek's ultimately loony love affair with garbage follows the logic of a well-worn idea from the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism nourishes the germ of its own destruction within itself. From there it is an easy (but to me, long discredited) step to the idea that a true revolutionary should help capitalism make itself as bad as possible - love those discarded spring water bottles, my friends, rather than protesting them, for they are the spring of self-destruction of global capitalism, or something like that. I guess I should be honest and say I'm doing a lot of interpreting here. Zizek himself tends to stick to safer ways of putting his views, emphasizing that revolutionaries should reject the invitation to engage in the liberal-democratic critique of the shortcomings of "bourgeois democracy". But to give him credit for not being a self-contradictory lunatic means to take his views to be something like this. (I do wonder if he would tell us to love all those nuclear missiles too. I think Zizek's philosophy contains the seeds of its own destruction too.)

Okay, so much for political theory, which is not exactly in short supply in The Examined Life. But there is an aesthetic point here too. Zizek's rants about the virtues of garbage fit into a worldview that is just one step beyond that of Hardt. And this view obviously suggests that the various feminist, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, post-colonial politics of the other interviewees are just what capitalism needs to continue to dominate us. The filmmaker, however, being apparently no less naive about political theory than philosophy, fails to give the audience any clue that this is the case. So while the rather boring and pedantic pastische of left-liberal interventions based on Continental and feminist philosophical trends is disturbed from within by a philosophical and political rift, this is not even visible to the audience. There is, in effect, an intellectual fight going on here, with Zizek on one side, most of the others on the other side, and Hardt sort of moderating with a foot in both camps, but it might as well be one loose chain of vaguely related thoughts on ethics and society for all we can tell from the film itself.

It would be unfair not to mention that Taylor does attempt to use some aesthetic means to liven things up, encouraging constant movement during the interviews and letting the camera capture dozens of naturalistic images along the way. At its best, it gives us the impression that the generally ordinary landscapes trodden by the film crew and its subjects (few scenes other than those of the dump are more exotic than Central park) are as teeming with life as the philosophers' heads are teeming with ideas. Too bad the gulls and turtles are so much more interesting than most of the ideas that one wants to resist the camera's return to the philosophical promenades.

Another point, no more positive (I guess I am not feeling very charitable today, in case you hadn't noticed) is that Taylor makes only the most limited effort to guide or draw out the philosophers in ways that might get them thinking outside their predefined, well-rehearsed boxes. All I can really recall her asking, in various ways, is whether philosophy is a search for the meaning of life. The answer to this question was actually supplied so well by Cornell West that she should have left it alone for the rest of the film. The truth is, few philosophers know what to say to that question, because "meaning" itself can have so many meanings that it is not even clear what the question is. Is the "meaning" of life like the meaning of a sentence? of a work of art? of an act or event? Is the question implicitly asking if I believe in god?

My advice is, don't ask that question unless you are prepared to give a philosophical answer to the reply, "What kind of answer are you actually looking for?" Otherwise it is sort of a blank check - "say something, anything, about the meaning of life". And if I were to give an immediate answer to that, it could only be that in itself, it means about as much as a pointless film. Because either no one is directing it, or they are doing it without any clear sense of overall purpose. Which, I guess, is as good a place as any to end this review.

(Note: This post was originally published on Friday 3/6/09 at 2:06 a.m. After re-reading it I felt that it was much too sloppy, both in editing and expression of ideas. It returned to Edit mode after about 48 hours online. It is now republished with substantial alterations, mainly intended to clarify many of the original points.)

Remembering 40 Years of Good Times, (during some) Bad Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:39:00 +0000

Okay, so I said I'd talk about Coldplay. We're getting there - I mean, at least it's a band widely accused of having plagiarized a cut or two. But, disappointment to follow: I'm not going to talk about Led Zep's plagiarism, not even after hearing Bert Jansch play what must be the original version of "Black Mountain Side" a year ago or so. Zep's alleged plagiarism of Willie Dixon and others is old news. So are their other alleged nefarious misdeeds, like beating the crap out of one of Bill Graham's concert managers. In fact I think I've mentioned them before in this blog, so why beat a dead, er, whale? Besides, after watching Jimmy Page pop out of that bus at the Beijing Olympics and perform the next to impossible task of convincing us that we should pay any attention to England after that phantasmagoria of sporting prowess and technical wizardry, I am inclined to let the past be the past.

But not quite. Today, you see, is the 40th anniversary of Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut album. (I know, you thought Eponymous was by R.E.M.; and I thought R.E.M. was something you do in the middle of the night.) After spending the day discussing with my brothers whether this was the greatest post-Beatles album of all time, I could not help but want to add a few thoughts to settle the matter. I'm sure my brothers will agree wholeheartedly that this is the end of it. Not that I dare look at the comments for a year or two.

Actually I don't really want to settle whether this is the greatest post-Beatles album ever. (It's not technically post-Beatles, because Abbey Road and Let It Be had yet to come out, but we all know The Beatles were pretty much history by the end of 1969, the year Zep I was released.) There are, for those of us inclined to discuss such things, a few contenders for the crown - Dark Side of the Moon, being a prime candidate, maybe The Yes Album or Close to the Edge, maybe In the Court of the Crimson King. (If I have to say who the bands are you probably won't appreciate this post much. Please move to the next one, where I promise to mention Coldplay at least once.) Not too many more options, though if you want to push it you could maybe make a case for Born to Run or Never Mind the Bullocks or Nevermind (hey... never noticed that before). No question, though, Zep I is sort of in a class by itself, and all I want to talk about here is why it made the impression it did.

And, let's just say, it did - indisputably, indelibly, left an imprint the size of a cattle brand on the belly of rock music. For me, it was the first album that created a sort of mystical communion with the music: lying behind a bar at my summer camp when I was 14 years old, in a kind of makeshift isolation booth with some pillows on the floor and a set of Koss headphones, I and everyone else on the staff spun it on a reel to reel, vying nightly for a chance to listen. There were other albums - Wheels of Fire, definitely, I think maybe Days of Future Passed was among them, and CCR's Bayou Country (the one with "Proud Mary") but the album that summer was Led Zeppelin. Nothing compared.

And that alone is amazing. This was July-August of 1969. I'm not sure of the exact release dates, but among the other albums that came out that year were In the Court of the Crimson King, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, On the Thresshold of a Dream, The Band, 2 or 3 of CCR's best albums, Live Dead and Aoxomoxoa, Clouds, Crosby Still and Nash, The Soft Parade, Hot Rats, The Velvet Underground... and that is really just a snapshot. To say nothing of the equally unbelievable output of 1967-8. Yet, coming at the tail end of what my be the three greatest years ever in popular music ("may be" is a concession to objectivity; shine a light in my brain and you're going to see something like "without the slightest shadow of a question, the 3 greatest years that ever were or will be in popular music" - but I have to be more objective since I'm pretending to be a sort of journalist here) Led Zeppelin demanded and got your undivided attention, from the two opening beats of "Good Times, Bad Times" to the last bowed elephant whine in "How Many More Times". Why? What was so special? I suppose this has been answered before, but I don't really care; I'm going to answer it again.

Start with this: those two opening beats - what are they? Where on earth did they come from? What can you compare them to? Nothing, really; but here's what comes to mind: Bill Haley bursting out, "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock!"; the first guitar chord in "A Hard Day's Night"; or Mick Jagger insisting, "What a drag it is getting old..." at the beginning of "Mother's Little Helper". If not that, then the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael"); or the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("Let us go then, you and I..."). Or, the best analogy I think: the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The point is, it is absolutely as dramatic a statement as you could make, and they did it with two beats. No other album or song intro quite like it in the history of music.

And what happens next? Well, they build. The two beats (dunk-dunk) develop a tail in the form of John Bonham's tap, tap, tap. Then the taps double (dunk-dunk tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap). Then they add a dotted note, and finally, after a perfectly crafted 2-bar drum intro all hell breaks loose. And here already you can pick up, if you are alert, what will be one of the defining aspects of this album: the drums have become an absolutely equal, in fact essential, part of the music. This is not to diminish the brilliant work that had already been contributed by such percussionists as Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, Mitch Mitchell, Dennis Wilson, Spencer Dryden, Corky Lang and of course Ginger Baker. Ringo's brilliant work on "Come Together" - a lesson in how to make a "rhythm section" into the essence of a song - came out later the same year, but he had made himself an essential part of other Beatles tunes, starting at least as far back as his dynamic fills in "Boys". Baker and Moon were perhaps the closest to breaking out of the backup role and putting the drums in a place of prominence. But with Bonham and Zep the job was completed, and it was not limited to this song or that, it was a totally defining component of the band's sound. Oddly enough, one of the few songs on which Bonham would ever play a straight backbeat was "Kashmir" - perhaps their most "progressive" tune, where the 4/4 backbeat is intentionally at odds with the 6/4 of the meter hammered out by the guitar and keyboards. Never mind the introduction of 30-minute drum solos, the doubling of the bass drum, or other of Bonham's innovations. By the time he provided that slightly off-center 2-bar lead-in, you could pretty much say that rock had entered a new era.

That was only a part of what happened with Zep I, though. The next big story has to be the voice of Robert Plant. Throughout the album, on nearly every cut, Plant's voice is an instrument. Just as the drums have jumped out from behind the curtain and become an instrument, so has the voice. It is no longer confined to singing. It is not confined, period. It sings, it screams, it wails, it whoops, it slides, it practically fornicates with the rest of the sound. It imitates the guitar, the guitar imitates Plant, they go back and forth - "imitates" is a lousy word here, because this is not "imitation" as in a Bach fugue, but a real blending, melding of voice and instrumental sound, until you cannot tell them apart. There are some nice harmonies here, and the singing itself is comparable in emotional quality only, perhaps, to that of Janis Joplin. (I Got Them Old Kosmic Blues Again, Mama was yet another great 1969 release.) But the story here was not just the singing of the lyrics, but the use of the voice as yet another new instrument.

This alone would be enough to turn a page in rock history. But of course, there was Page and his guitar. For one thing, there could be no question, none whatsoever, that this was the most aggressive guitar playing ever seen. Clapton was great, and those who hold him in higher esteem than Page - for his incomparable tone, his clean and graceful lines, his taste, not to mention the incredible double solos on Wheels of Fire - certainly have an argument, just as there are plenty of people who would rate John McLaughlin higher than Larry Coryell. For me, I like something who takes chances, and gets away with them, brilliantly in most cases, even if he sometimes falls, misses a couple of notes, makes some unpleasant noise. Page took chances no one even thought of taking before, and the result was - well, just listen, if you haven't recently, to the solos in "Good Times, Bad Times", "Dazed and Confused", and "Communication Breakdown", for instance. Paganini, the great 19th c. violinist, was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the way he did. Page's solos have bat-out-of-hell quality that has been imitated about a billion times by now, but no mere technician can play rock and roll the way he did. I remember a friend of mine at the time dismissing Page as not very clean, and holding up Alvin Lee of Ten Years After as a better guitarist (Lee's work on the cut "Going Home" is justly famous.) Be that as it may, nothing Alvin Lee, or Zappa, or Jerry Garcia, or even Jorma had done would influence the style of rock guitar playing the way page did. He showed what could be done, in a way that only Jimi Hendrix had done before. If you wish, you could say that Jimmy perfected what Jimi had started. And it all came together, a mature, new, challenging sound, on the band's debut recording!

Page did more than just play fast solos, of course. He practically took the place of two guitarists, turning complex rhthms into leads and leads into the main backbones of songs. He moved beyond the reverb-and-wah-wah effects of the psychedelic era and challenged the echoplex to become part of the aural landscape. In spite of being the godfather of heavy metal, he brought in acoustic guitars with uncompromising fingerstyle technique that retained more than a bit of the feel of British folk music. Easy enough when you are helping yourself to a tune that Jansch had arranged, but "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" was to the best of my knowledge a Page original; and there would be plenty more folk material, from "Gallows Pole" to "Nobody's Fault But Mine". Here he was doing anything particularly new - Jorma's acoustic work, Harrison's sitar, and much else preceded him, but there had been a tendency to get away from it in acid rock. The concentration on both acoustic and Chicago-style urban blues brought a sense of roots-rock authenticity to Zep I that few recent groups could claim. Cream, for sure, The Beatles in their early days, Jefferson Airplane to some extent, maybe Canned Heat - but it was hard to miss the in-your-face attention to serious roots music on this album, even as it moved rock onto a whole new platform. At the same time, the technique of bowing the guitar, especially in "Dazed and Confused" and "How Many More Times", lent an almost surreal quality to the music, beyond psychedelic, not yet space-rock, but something totally futuristic and different and fascinating. "How the hell is he doing that?", was the natural reaction, and on finding out the answer - "I didn't know you could do that!" Well - there you go.

I have not even said a word yet about how Page played the blues. Perhaps because I don't have the words for it. Maybe that is best. There have been great blues players since - Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Thoroughgood, many others - but with all due respect, there are few recordings in the history of rock that even equal, much less surpass, the two (properly attributed) Willie Dixon cuts on Zep I, "You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Babe". You can laugh at Page's imitation of Chuck Berry's patented shuffle on stage, but I've heard, I think, every major urban blues guitarist before Page, and I mean from Tampa Red and Lowell Fulson to B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and nobody played the blues quite like that. Of course, they couldn't: because he didn't just play the blues, he used the most cutting edge electronic effects to their full potential, and achieved a new kind of blues vocabulary in doing so. Again, only Hendrix compares as an innovator. And if you have any questions about his taste, I urge you to jump a couple of disks forward to Zep III, put those headphones on, and settle in with "Since I've Been Loving You", one of the most tasteful blues recordings ever made, to my ears.

Have I missed anything? Yes, indeed; a quarter of the band, in fact. No, make that two-fifths, since he was not only the bass player but the keyboard man. John Paul Jones - what can you say? There are so many places where his playing is so crucial to the music, I could almost repeat everything I said about Bonham but substitute "bass" for "drums". Caution suggests that I should not, though: as great as he was, and as important as he was, there were too many others who pioneered that trail, not least of them Paul McCartney. I tend to think that if there is anything McCartney hadn't done with a bass by 1969, then Jack Bruce or Phil Lesh or Jack Casady had. But whatever: from the little fills in "Good Times, Bad Times" to the opening of "Dazed and Confused" to that enormous avalanche of sound that plummets into "Oh Rosie, Oh girl..." in "How Many More Times", Jones was there, a helluva lot more than just a solid bottom. Maybe he wouldn't prove his full mettle until "The Lemon Song" on the next album, but he was already in top form on the first one.

So, how much can you say about a single album? A lot, I guess, since I recently saw a series of monographs on various rock classics for sale in B&N, I think. Come to the PL, folks, we're better and cheaper. But it's time to wrap up, and say goodnight to what is certainly one of the monuments of rock history. There have been some other great debut albums - King Crimson and Blue Oyster Cult, for example. For the most part, though, when you think about it, it has taken even the greatest groups a couple of disks to work up to their full potential. That Led Zep achieved this earth-shaking triumph with their first recording is truly in the realm of the incredible, an Opus 1 equal to the best that anyone else has to offer. To do that and not be a flash in the pan, but go on to record another seven albums packed with brilliant material, that is a feat equalled only by The Beatles, to my mind - and Led Zep's first recording was a greater achievement than anything the Beatles did until at least A Hard Day's Night, if not Revolver. And with that I bid you goodnight.

Winter JazzFest Brings Parrot Out of Hiding

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:17:00 +0000

Well, I'm not going to make any grand announcements like "the parrot squawks again", because who knows, this could be a dead parrot bounce. But one reason I quit posting a year ago or more (I guess more) - aside from the big one of starting other blogs and not being able to keep them all up at once - is that I was getting away from the social issues I was really interested in and often ended up writing performance reviews - which was not the original point. And I really want to get back to the heavy stuff. But what always seems to drag me back to the flogosbeer is a good concert or cultural event.

Thus I find myself more tempted to talk about the Jazz Festival I went to last night, and some of the great performances I saw there - or should I say great performers - than about, say, the question of who Coldplay plagiarized, if anyone, or the death of the music industry, or whether Herman Rosenblatt is a horrible person for writing a "memoir" in which the main character (him) turns out to be partly fictional. So that's what I'll do, for openers, only I'll adopt an entirely new practice for this sort of post: keeping it down to what an ordinary person can read in 15 minutes. I know, I know, what an unreasonable demand to impose on myself, I should be more realistic... nevertheless, here goes.

So I said great performers, not always great performances, by which I do not mean that the performers were having an off night. But something was off - usually a microphone. Start with Will Calhoun and his Native Land Experience (which was actually the last act I saw): due to technical problems - which turned out to be a misbehaving mike cable - they ended up having time for only one full number, and then basically (as far as I could tell) improvised for 5 minutes until they were all but literally given the stage hook treatment. That one number (a fairly long one) pretty much brought the house down. And if the last 5 minutes was indeed an improv, it still blew away a shitload of performances by lesser groups. To their credit they attempted to make up for the fact that jazz fans stood around for half hour to hear one tune by tossing free CD's to the audience (sort of the like blasting teeshirts into the stands at a baseball game - of course, I was no more successful at being in the right spot this time than I was at the last teeshirt blast). Their one song, I have to say, left the impression that this is best damn fusion group I've heard since I saw Weather Report at Northwestern 35 years ago. This I say despite the fact that I was ever so slightly disappointed that Pharoah Sanders didn't make an impromptu appearance at the gig. Who'm I kidding? Myself, I guess, but not without cause. Will Calhoun, the incredible drummer (think Buddy Miles, Billy Cobham, Michael Walden, Alfonse Mouzon - that sort of incredible) for Living Color, as well as leader of his own band, recorded five tracks of his Native Land Experience album with Sanders. I saw the Pharoah, too, back in the good old Chicago days . It seemed like a reasonable miracle that he might grace me with his presence again. Alas, no Pharoah, and barely any Calhoun. Nevertheless, an amazing short concert.

Next, take the guy I happen to be listening to right now on Lala.com, Lafayette Gilchrist - incredible piano player, who reminded me of yet another decades-old Chicago-area music experience, Sunnyland Slim at (long-defunked) Alice's Revisited. (If you are getting the impression that the Chicago music scene left more of an impression on me than the illustrious faculty at Northwestern, you are paying attention.) Not that their styles are so similar, Gilchrist is quite modern, and not blind either, but both riveting keyboardists with a few similar moves. Anyway, Kenny's Castaways, the unlikely host of a third of this jazz festival (the others were Le Poisson Rouge, a big space in a charming basement direclty across the street from Kenny's, and Sullivan Hall, another oblong cave around the corner) obviously has little or no experience with acoustic jazz pianists, perhaps having had nothing softer than some alt-country grundge in 30 years, since the piano (such as it is) was miked about two feet above the keyboard, with the lid closed - the predictable result being that you could barely hear Gilchrist at all. Thus, as I was saying - incredible performers, not always great performances, when you take technical and other factors into account. Though, ignoring those factors, the performances that nobody heard were no doubt exceptional. Especially the ones that were merely underamplified.

We also saw (and for the most part heard) Theo Bleckmann (vocalist, in various popular and show tunes backed by expressionistic string arrangements), Jason Moran's Bandwagon (whose style I lack a ready vocabulary to describe, but much of it was impressive), Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely (not jazz, and a bit long on attitude for this sort of environment, but energetic, unapologetic and well-played soul-pop), a bit of Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio (very creative and refreshingly non-technical contemporary stuff with tenor sax or clarinet), and a dose of Tar Baby (very decent if not exactly earth-shaking post-bob jazz). All this for $25 and a tip for the Sullivan Hall men's room attendant. (I think they're practicing for the 4-star restaurant they'll be opening as soon as the economy improves, at which they'll serve cheeseburgers, onion rings and a goat cheese-mesclun salad with truffle oil).

The festival was sponsored by APAP - no, not Tylenol (I know some of you wiseacres who are not modern jazz fans are just waiting for an opening ) but the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. I'm assuming, from the crowds that packed nearly every concert, especially the later shows (it's the Village, after all) that the presenters made out like bandits, especially if everyone consumed as much alcohol as my small collective of five friends.

As I said, that's what I'm tempted to write about, but I'm not going to indulge myself. Except this time. Because there are issues of Great Social and Political Import that need to be addressed. Though another idea I had when I started PL was to talk about the arts in a context that related to NYC, which I guess I was a bit more successful at. So on that score the APAP Winter JazzFest is more relevant than, say, the question of whether Coldplay stole a riff from Joe Satriani. Nevertheless, see my next post...

Gil, the Phil, and Dudamel: Young Virtuosos Rock Avery Fisher

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:49:00 +0000

Last night I sat at the feet of two musicians who belie the idea that musical maturity is a function of age. Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezualan wunderkind, is 26, possibly going on 25. Although Gil Shaham is 36 now, he has been an artist of penetrating musicianship since at least Dudamel's age. The two were genuinely enjoying each other in a way that is hardly ever seen in the concert hall, and that enthusiasm permeated Avery Fisher; it was as if the whole place was filled with a vapor that made everyone giddy in the execution of classical masterworks. The two smiled, grinned, and all but laughed with each other throughout the performance, and none of it seemed staged, except in the best sense.

I may have been even more infected than others, sitting in the first row, a few seats to the right of Shaham. It is close to where I sat six years ago when I heard him play the Brahms Concerto, with Neeme Järvi conducting. Although it was only 2001, I went there expecting the Brahms performance of the century. I got it, of course - whether the rest of the century will prove me right remains to be seen. I went to last night's concert with just as high expectations, but with a difference. I had heard Elmar Oliveira play the Dvorak Concerto with the Philharmonic some 15 years ago (Leonard Slatkin conducted), and though he may rank slightly below Shaham in my contemporary violin pantheon, he is nevertheless a consummate musician and brilliant fiddler who never delivers anything less than an exquisite performance. So there was a standard to live up to here, both technically and musically.

I am happy to report that Shaham was more than equal to the task. It was not just the energy that the two youngsters brought to the Dvorak, or the terrific chemistry between them. Anthony Tommasini's summation of "lustrous tone, brilliant technique and sweeping energy" is accurate, but misses the true greatness of this performance. I know this concerto intimately, not only from numerous recordings (the epitome being David Oistrakh's definitive version) but from having played through the concerto myself many times, and studied parts of it. What Shaham brought to this piece was the ability to put a distinctive and convincing shape on every phrase, no matter how apparently insignificant; he brought out melodies, accents and phrasing that no one, including Oistrakh, seems to have realized were possible. Heifetz, and to my knowledge most other golden age violinists, never recorded this piece, and probably never toured with it. I don't know why, given its ravishing beauty and opportunity for virtuosity; perhaps they objected to Joachim's endless meddling with the part, leaving it a somewhat compromised instance of a Dvorak composition. Apart from Oistrakh there is a great recording by Milstein; but most of the attention has come from younger performers in the last 25 years or so. Without diminishing these other recent efforts (not to mention an impressive older one by Oistrakh student Viktor Pikaizen) Shaham's performance was an interpretation in every sense of the word, a musically controlled and suggestive reading that will stand (once it is, presumably, recorded) as monument on a fairly flat plain.

Apart from the power of his phrasing, his tone varied constantly - a controlled vibrato not only in quiet passages but wherever he deemed it appropriate, sliding effortlessly into a chain vibrato through the most romantic sections, and back again. I would rather call his overall tone velvety than "lustrous": his bow, which he seems to keep very tight (the stick looked almost straight to me from certain angles, though I suppose it wasn't quite) slides like mercury across the strings, never giving a hint of the least contest between the two. (And yes, he does use a shoulder pad, the kind that lies across the back of the fiddle attached by grips on either side - for those violinists out there who wonder about such things.)

A human being is not a machine, and if someone wants to point out an octave that was not quite perfect or a note slightly out of tune, they may do so. But there were many arpeggios executed with the brilliance of a Heifetz, including the melismas at the end of the opening phrases, which Shaham did not try to contour very much but rather treated as flourishes. If I disagreed with anything in his interpretation it might be that, but what he did was effective in that it moved quickly to the more important parts of the score. And the very difficult last movement, which require incredibly precise intonation in the delicately orchestrated main theme, was carried off with masterful left and right hand technique.

One thing that bothers me a little about Shaham, and I think it was the same with the Brahms performance, is that in the more technical passages he tends to hover near the conductor, in such a position that very few can actually see him execute his runs. While it speaks well for modesty, and perhaps more to the point, ensemble, it deprives the spectators of being witness to a technique as formidable as any modern violinist can offer. The Dvorak in particular has no cadenza, so there was precious little opportunity to witness his mastery of left hand pyrotechnics. He may have his reasons, and it is surely unfair to ask any musician of his depth to show off mere technical prowess for its own sake. In any case, the technical power of his playing came through, at least from the first row, aurally if not always visually.

I arrived a little late and missed Dudamel's performance of Chavez's Symphonia India, though one can now not only hear it through speakers but watch it on two large television screens. The piece is a bit frenetic for my taste, but certainly an interesting spectacle, and brilliantly orchestrated. What I heard and saw suggested a performance that brought out the best in the work.

The war horse, both literally and figuratively, last night, was Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Written near the end of the War, after the unbelievable devastation and hardship wrought by Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, but also after the decisive defeat of the invading forces and at a time when Russia and socialism seemed victorious and ready to rebuild, this piece has an unsettled, propulsive force that carries through almost from beginning to end. Dudamel, conducting this complex, 43-minute work without a score, practically leaped off the podium in his drive to wring every ounce of excitement from the piece. The orchestra responded with a technically brilliant and dynamically charged performance, which featured at one time or other nearly every section and instrument, often in counterpoint that was meticulously navigated by both conductor and players. I have seen some recent examples of this sort of urgency with the Philharmonic - Kurt Masur's performances of Ravel's La Valse and Bruckner's Third Symphony come to mind - but never have I seen it carried off with quite such consistent a sense of sonic energy combined with near-perfect ensemble. Percussion and brass were particularly tight, and the very challenging string parts betrayed hardly a flaw (and I was sitting a few feet from the center of the first violin section).

Anyone who says that Dudamel cannot build a climax needs to have their head examined. On the other hand, as Tommasini points out in his review, there is a point at which the bottomless pit of energy takes something away from overall architecture. If Dudamel's youthfulness shows anywhere it is here. One could surely have asked for more nuances in turning on the heat, a more measured buildup in the second movement, for example. But It is all too easy to miss the mark this way. I have heard this happen too; Masur's version of Bruckner's Fourth struck me as way too careful. Dudamel clearly understands that classical music can strike potential new audiences as simply boring, and is fighting like hell to show that it rocks. Good for him; perhaps an audience, once brought to the table, can be trained to adjust its sensibilities and appreciate subtlety as well as excitement. Meanwhile, he delivers plenty of the latter, and at least in the more pensive third movement, quite a lot of the former too.

Comparisons with the young Leonard Bernstein are obvious, and fairly apt; Dudamel literally dances to the music. The power of his conducting style perhaps comes from the fact that he uses not just a baton but every part of his body to signal to the orchestra. If some conductors make you wish you could find a beat somewhere, this one conveys it with baton, left hand, head, chest, hair, face and feet - these parts often moving in different ways to signal different entrances or aspects of the music. To anyone who has not seen him, I recommend you shell out at least once for a front orchestra seat. (Okay, I didn't - I bought a rear one because it was all they had left, and moved into an empty seat in the first row. But don't count on doing that!)

One sad note: apparently Dudamel received the privilege of using one of three batons of Bernstein's for his NY Phil debut. Such was the vigor of this maestro that near the very end of Tuesday's performance (the fourth in six days) the baton cracked, sending a large splinter out into the audience. Dudamel finished the piece with a four-inch stick in his hand. Though the music hardly suffered, history suffered. I suppose it can be repaired, since audience members kindly passed the broken end up to the stage at the end; reminding one of a story I heard about Casals, whose cello bow once flew out into the audience, and was carefully passed forwards row by row, as he sat bowless and mortified on stage. Great chance to practice your pizzicato...) The Philharmonic Society should not be upset, though. Perhaps this was part of the magic of generational change, like Harry Potter's wand. Though the object is gone the spirit of Dumbledore has clearly passed to a new generation, much to everyone's benefit.

Controlled Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:01:00 +0000

Anton Corbijn's first film, Control, had its penultimate evening last night at the Film Forum, and winding our way there through the all-hallowed masses in Greenwich Village, it seemed like a damned appropriate thing to do - notwithstanding the fact that it was actually a birthday event for the plumed blogger. Punk, drugs, suicide, convulsions - what could be more fitting than to be here, while the throngs of devils, clowns and less describably costumed souls meandered the streets and made Sixth Avenue virtually impassable?

It is understandable, though not exactly mandatory, that a noted portrait photographer would break into cinema with a black and white film. The colorlessness is also reminiscent of the two-tone punk aesthetic that Joy Division, I suppose, had something to do with, though I don't think of them as being either specifically two-tone or musically in the center of the punk rock sound. In retrospect they seem very much a part of that late-70's British underground sound, regardless of their predilection for a more spare way of filling the sound space than the gritty 3-chord noise of the Clash or Sex Pistols. But the B/W choice for the film seems to have more to do with the emphasis on spiritual penetration and personae (indeed it occasionally reminded me of the Bergman film Persona) than on punk or new wave clothing styles.

Was it effective? Very. In fact, my guess is that the film would not have been half as powerful in color. There are moments of extremely bare emotion, where every shadow (especially those under the eyes of Sam Riley's Ian Curtis character) counts towards the intimacy of the frame. In an odd way, the film's colorlessness also reminded me a bit of A Hard Day's Night, which has moments, at least, that also resemble a blank stare into the eyes of youths whose extraordinary creative energy only partly masks their troubled souls. Not that I think the soul of the young Paul McCartney was half as troubled as that of Ian Curtis, whose suicide at the age of 23 puts an expectedly somber ending on this bit of musical history. But you know, British band, coming up from the underground club scene, Liverpool accent sounds a lot like Manchester accent... whatever. In any case, Corbijn makes full use of his photographic skills here, setting up virtually every frame in a poetic and meaningful way, using still shots to great effect, and generally giving us a bit of an arthouse experience.

And he gets an extraordinary performance from his actors - the appropriate angst from Curtis, industry-specific deadpan from his band, and an outrageously cocky and very funny managerial sideshow from Tony Kebbell as Rob Gretton. I'm surprised he hasn't received more notice for his performance in this film; his perfectly timed delivery made for some major laugh-out-loud moments as well as serving as a kind of - well, control - on the band's (and the film's) constant tendency to slide off into despair and self-negation. Not that his wit or resourcefulness alone can prevent that, but without it there would have been no film - and possibly no band. Samantha Morton has gotten a lot more recognition for her excellent portrait of Curtis's wife Deborah, whose memoir about him indirectly led to this and other recent attention to the Joy Division episode in British rock. Her plain prettiness and working class innocence makes an excellent foil for the tortured self-indulgence of her ascending rock star husband.

In the end, though, this was a film whose individual aspects are somewhat more impressive than the whole. The film's story line attempts to juxtapose the meteoric rise of Joy Division, at least within the world of underground rock (hmmmm, meteor.... underground rock... must be a way to abuse this metaphor a bit more, but I haven't got the time) with the love triangle between Deborah, Ian and his new flame Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), and to paint a picture of his decline centering around the emotional difficulty he faced in dealing with his early marriage and fatherhood. Or rather, it tries to negotiate that duality and at the same time throw in his battle with epilepsy and the pressures of fame, touring and all that (see my previous post, "Cinema Rocks"). The key shots are all there, the themes are competently articulated, the acting is good - yet it all seems to come down to an excess of sympathy for someone who largely faced the kinds of difficulties that millions of other young men face without hanging themselves from a ceiling rack. What kills Ian Curtis, according to this film, is quite clearly not the pressure of the rock lifestyle or his drug abuse or epilepsy (though that is strongly emphasized in the film) but his torn heart, which cannot completely abandon Deb or their daughter nor break up with the comely Annik. And that is just a bit too pathetic. Get over it, you want to say - you screwed up having a baby too early, now do the best you can for the wife and child and get on with your life. Also, try to stay off the booze and keep working on finding the right epilepsy medication, like the doctor suggested. Can't handle that? Maybe there's something deeper going on. But the superficial emotional situation is not quite up to the climax of suicide.

We do get a bit more, though, and that returns us to one of the film's more commendable features, the on-stage movements of Sam Riley, which more or less perfectly counter-exemplify the title. For Curtis's mock-dancing is so clearly out of control, yet gives you the sense of someone who thinks he is in control, or at least does not quite know that he's out of control, but has in effect so totally merged with both the rhythm and mood of the music he has written that he no longer has much of a self to distinguish from the utterer of the lyrics. This, and its contrast with the normally staid and measured, if someone spaced-out individual off stage, makes for the film's deepest insight into the character and his dilemma; and the epilepsy serves as a kind of metaphor for the inability to separate the ordinary person who ha to deal with the common difficulties of life from the artist and musician who is completely absorbed in the music. So the fits at home remind us that the person is, at bottom, the man on stage, only offstage, and that he cannot control who o what he is even if it means collapse. And when the fits move onstage, and he has to be carried off by band members, this similarly tells us that the cracks in his personal life cannot fail to intrude into the realm of artistic expression.

Finally, then, the movie succeeds in being at least as schizophrenic as its subject was epileptic: succeeding, failing, but succeeding again. If it does not get a perfect score (on the Tomatometer or elsewhere) it is nevertheless likely to be the best biopic we get about this relatively minor band. All in all, a pretty good addition to the annals of rock cinema, and one worth catching if it comes o your town. Especially if it shows on Halloween.

Cinema Rocks

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:07:00 +0000

Martin Scorsese, coming hot off his Dylan documentary No Direction Home (not to mention his embarrassingly belated recognition by the illustrious Academy for one of his second-rate films, since they missed his masterpieces) has another rock film, about the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light) due for 2008 release; and yet another in the planning stage, this one on George Harrison. Todd Haynes has a Dylan film too (I'm Not There) which stars six different actors (and actresses! - Cate Blanchett) as Dylan. There are two (count 'em 1-2) films coming out about Joy Division, the short-lived but allegedly influential 1980's "post-punk" band. (Everyone after the Sex Pistols was post-punk, so the appellation is kind of meaningless.) One is Control, a biopic (which does not rhyme with "myopic") by photographer Anton Corbijn; the other is a documentary by Grant Gee. Peter Bogdanovich's latest picture show is about Tom Petty, a 4-hour (r u serious?) documentary that is, according to the Times (which has also noted the proliferation of celluloid rockers) not expected to do much for the theatre industry but should sell like hotcakes to TP fans. David Leaf's 2006 film The U.S. Vs. John Lennon was part of another tide. Need I mention the formulaic Dreamgirls, all but a Diana Ross & the Supremes bio? In 2005 there was James Mangold's Walk the Line, a biopic about Johnny Cash. The year 2004 brought around the late release of some fabled archival footage of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and others (Bob Smeaton's Festival Express), andTaylor Hackford's Ray, the Ray Charles bio. And so it goes, as we drill back in time, passing through documentaries and biopix of the Sex Pistols, U2, Richie Valens (go ahead, sing it.... dadada dada la Bamba...), The Doors, The Band, Elvis, the Talking Heads, Kurt Cobain... If I appear to have shorted the films on musicians of the female persuasion it is just that I was thinking rock, but we can always throw in Coal Miner's Daughter and Lady Sings the Blues (and Walk the Line is almost as much about June Carter as about Cash), not to mention the largely forgotten film The Rose (1979), a Janis Joplin biography starring - Bette Midler? (Hello in there... casting, I mean; anybody home?) This off-the-cuff list, you will notice, includes only films with some claim to biographical content, not mere concert films like Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same. (Anybody who calls The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense "mere concert films" will be appropriately calumnied and vilified, not to mention having their MTV signals jammed.) There are many more that I have not mentioned; quite a few I had never heard of before, such as the Y2K TV film bio The Beach Boys: An American Family, and a 1973 eponymous Jimi Hendrix bio.

Now, all I want to do here is muse a bit about the following question: Why is it that the lives of rock stars (and popular music stars in general) make such appealing subjects for films? I mean, if you think about it, who really cares about the troubled lives of rock musicians, who generally abuse their bodies (and sometimes those of others), manifest antisocial behavior, rise to stardom on the strength of their musical talents, and then quickly die, wither, or fade? Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit; certainly not all popular music stars following this course. There are probably more living than dead rock musicians from the '60's. But given the average life expectancy today, the fact that we even have to pause for a moment over the truth of that statement is indicative of the problem. We all know that a very high proportion die young - the fictional group in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony even made a game out of naming them, and that was in 1980! Before John Lennon, Mike Bloomfield, Bob Marley, Harry Chapin, John Belushi, Felix Pappalardi, Dennis Wilson, Peter Tosh,Jaco Pastorius, Nico, Roy Orbison, John Cipolina, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Fogerty, David Ruffin, Frank Zappa, Freddie Mercury, Harry Nilsson, Tommy Boyce, and Jerry Garcia, and tons of others (according to this list) died premature deaths. A few of these folks succumbed to heart failure, AIDS or cancer in their 40's or early 50's; the rest all ended their lives with drug overdoses, murder, suicide, or transportation accidents. Are they models to follow? Are they heroes to canonize? Are they tragic figures whose lives are worth dramatizing?

If you said "all of the above" you were at least partially right, in my opinion. Models, not for their drug habits or sex lives, but for their obsessive dedication to an art form (which is the only kind of dedication worth talking about). Heroes for their mostly subversive versions of the Horatio Alger story. Tragic, because many of them followed a predictable and perhaps inevitable arc, from anonymity to fame to precipitous decline. Does this mean Britney Spears is going to be the subject of the next big documentary? Too soon to tell, but I wouldn't write it off. Today, she may seem a little ridiculous, along with Lindsay and Paris and the other bad chicks. And that seems beneath the dignity of anything with tragic pretensions. But go see Walk the Line, if you haven't already, and then reconsider the question. Jim, Janis and Jimi all imploded, and though I suspect the great Janis and Jimi films are still waiting to be made (Oliver Stone got the not-likely-to-be-surpassed Jim Morrison flick, The Doors) they all have their tragic sides.

That is, if you think of them potentially ascending greater heights, but for their swift descent into self-destructive addictions and in some cases sociopathic narcissism; consider the ingeniously disturbed Syd Barrett (careful with that ax, indeed). And who doesn't? Who doesn't think that Jimi Hendrix, for example, would have become an even greater artist had he had time to mature? But the tragic ending is built in, in a way (as it must be, to be really tragic): the same impulse that results in a maniacal devotion to rock and its possibilities, and rockets the owner to fame, makes them indulge in the temptations that success proffers, and suffer the numbing schedule of the touring musician. Always under pressure, always looking to the next gig, homeless as a vagabond, in bondage to a recording company (often with the profits from at least one or two albums written off to bad contracts), constantly having to negotiate with the endless list of self-serving personalities in the music industry, herded together in something closer than a marriage to band members they would not even want to date, and surrounded by people whose adoration blurs the line between true friends and sycophants, the young successful rock star may be open to anything that promises a night without stress, panic or depression. At the same time, as money pours in, so does the opportunity to spend it on designer drugs, wild parties and the like. Why not? Haven't I earned this? Don't I need this? Could this really hurt me, after I have risen from dank basements to the Garden and the Bowl? Personally, I have only glimpsed the very edges of this life, but it is all too easy to comprehend.

The grizzly list above stars mainly rock musicians who died premature deaths between 1980 and 1995. Rockers are famously careless with their lives. But the list could be expanded a bit to include Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Stan Rogers, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Watson, Kate Wolf, and many other too quickly departed people of a gentler and less flamboyant persuasion. One does not want to casually throw cancer victims in with drug abusers and suicides, but the high mortality rate of all but classical musicians is very striking. (Then again, classical conductors and pianists bend the average the other way; more than one classical pianist has given a 90th birthday concert, and at least one - Mieczyslaw Horszowksi - gave one at 100.)

But it is not my intention to paint everything an artificial black in order to promote a theory of why cinema loves rock. The innumerable Dylan bios, literary and cinematic, are not chasing a tragic figure, but rather an enigmatic one. Dylan has famously proclaimed how little he is understood by the Dylan observers. So, may way ask, who does understand you, Bob? Presumably, the answer would be "me". Or would it? No one would expect Dylan to be self-effacing at this point; but would he be honest? Surely anyone who understands himself doesn't have to reinvent himself every few years. As a bluesman; then a left-wing folkie; then a rocker; then a country star; then a Jesus Freak; then an eclectic guy who'll do anything from blues to cabaret to political broadsides. The question for Todd Haynes is: are you sure six is enough?

Dylan is probably the most eulogized living personality - ever. Elvis received plenty of attention in his later life, but a lot of it was negative. The Beatles fly together in the popular imagination, with the partial exception of John. But Dylan is the lone subject of epic biographies, film after film, endless interviews, articles and commentaries. Why? It is sometimes said that the more obscure the philosopher, the more ink will be spilled trying to figure him out, and the more famous he will become. This at least fits the picture of Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and plenty of other leading lights. (Though it does not explain why Fichte or Ernst Bloch failed to reach the highest rank.) Dylan steadfastly refuses to reveal the "real" Dylan - maybe there is none. Haynes's film title reflects this. One begins to suspect that nobody understands Dylan because there is no Dylan. Thus the search for him has all the mystery and excitement of Moby Dick, and is more about the searcher than the searchee. And plenty of writers and filmmakers want to play Captain A-rab.

Speaking of folkies, in 2005 the film rights to a biography of Tim Buckley (d.1975 @ 28, OD'ed on heroin, alcohol and barbiturates after a grueling tour) and Jeff Buckley (his son, d.1997 @ 30, accidentally drowned in a Tennessee river) were acquired; I haven't heard anything more about the release, though. Apparently Jeff is the main subject, and Tim is seen in flashbacks. These guys came and went too quickly, though Tim released quite a few albums before he died. His Hello Goodbye is about as prophetic a title as Jeff's best song and line, "Oh, it was so real" (on Grace). I have to ask myself a question: why do I feel a rush of excitement, even a twinge of impatience, at the prospect of seeing a movie about two musicians who I basically know from one album each? Who cares? Lots of people OD'ed like Tim, or accidentally drowned like Jeff. I could say: because I'm a musician too, so I can relate. But let's try something bolder: almost everyone envies, on some level, the artist who throws everything into his music, who manages, even once, to express himself in an adequate way, and to reach a mass audience even for a moment. We admire it, are jealous of it, because there is some urge to do the same thing, in some way, which we suppress in order to be real people. We would not want society to consist mainly of Tim and Jeff Buckleys, of Phil Ochs (a folk suicide, subject of the biopic Chords of Fame), of Dylans, much less of Jim, Jimi and Janis. We are not all ready to throw normalcy to the winds and sail off with these characters. But we admire them for having the guts to do what we know we could not have done. When I think about the film, what I feel is a kind of awe at the vision and energy behind their music, and their ability to put it into my head; and I guess I have desire to live vicariously through them, both to understand where that energy came from and to learn by quasi-experience how to avoid their downfall.

Incidentally, want to check a video of Tim Buckley performing one of his songs live? Please pick up - are you ready? - the Rhino DVD The Monkees: Our Favorite Episodes. You may think this is out of character, but the Monkees as a group were far more interesting than they usually get credit for, not least for their contribution to the rock video format. Keep in mind that when "The Monkees" show came out, rock film consisted in not much more than Bye Bye Birdie, some Elvis beach flicks, and A Hard Day's Night. The group had to somehow transition back and forth between the musical personae, the actors and their characters. To my mind, they managed it better than a lot of amateurish, lip-synched rock videos today. Granted they had the resources of a major TV studio. But my impression is that The Monkees themselves were major creative forces in everything they did after their first two albums. There is a lot of improv in the TV episodes. Davey I saw as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway production of Oliver, before he was a Monkee, and he was a powerful stage presence. We have focused on one paradigm, the documentary or biopik which follows a more or less tragic curve. A second is of course the rock comedy, which is almost never biographical, but loosely follows the foibles of either a fictional band, or a real one in fictional situations, with real rock musicians as actors. This is exemplified particularly in Richard Lester's Beatles films. The Monkees focused this into a 30-minute format. There are probably plenty of other candidates in this category; can't think of them right now. (I'm sort of ignoring the obvious and overdiscussed stuff like Spinal Tap and Rocky Horror, as well as the films that star rock musicians in other roles - Tom Waits (Down By Law), John Lennon (How I Won the War), David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth), Mick Jagger, Madonna, etc. Not to mention that allegedly lovable flick with Beatle-song backdrops throughout, a silly idea whose time has gone.)

There must be some other angles. La Bamba is pretty good at showing not only the personal side of the story but the sort of social tragedy involved in the loss of a pop icon. Any great life cut short by forces beyond the control of the subject can be epic material. I have not seen The Buddy Holly Story, which was widely criticized for being very inaccurate, as well as unfair to The Crickets; nor have I seen Paul McCartney's alternative film, The Real Buddy Holly Story, which is supposed to be much better. It stands to reason that such a film could capture the "American Pie" tale with much opportunity for social insight. But again, the Holly-Valens tragedy is very much a direct outcome of the kind of life that popular musicians have to lead. The media tend to glamorize rock stars, with special emphasis on their money, social and sex lives, but the tale that Paul Simon tells in "Homeward Bound" is the reality that a lot more of them face: endless travel, loneliness, frustration, and that unsung tribulation, dealing with band members who are either not up to professional level, or impossible to get along with, or dragging every through the dirt of their own nasty habits. The drugs and sex mitigate this only to an extent. The pull of these pressures and dangers is so strong that it must be difficult to make a film that avoids the stereotypical path. Dreamgirls, for all its awards (and its embedded American Idol success story) struck me as a sanitized and formulaic picture with little to say. Walk the Line constantly threatened to degenerate into formula, but seemed to avoid it through the intensity of its character portraits, not to mention a couple of great acting performances.

I think there are many more great rock films to be made. There is no way that the existing stock has adequately explored all the sides of human emotion, greatness, weakness, humor and tragedy in the lives of popular musicians. Let us hope the films get deeper and more real rather than giving in to the temptation of easy hero-worship and superficial moneymaking through peddling the name of some cultural icon. And with that hope in mind, I end where I began: what could be a better opportunity for serious rock filmmaking than a Martin Scorcese flick on George Harrison? See you there.

Point and Shoot: Taro, Capa and the Spanish Civil War

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:05:00 +0000

This blog was originally conceived as being devoted to the arts and social issues, and if we have not always hewed perfectly to that course it is nevertheless the pole towards which we gravitate. Few art events could provide a more promising opportunity to emphasize this than the current show at the International Center of Photography (ICP), devoted almost entirely to photographs relating to the Spanish Civil War. That of course means the photography of Robert Capa, but importantly, in this case, the work of his partner Gerda Taro as well. (FYI, there seem to suddenly be about 50 sites presenting the same copy on Taro, all drawn from either a NY Times review or the ICP itself. One thing I can guarantee my readers is that any non-original text you find on this blog will be in quotes, with attribution. The lack of any real info about Taro on the web before this exhibit can be seen from her very short Wikipedia entry. That said, Google turned up a few European sites that I didn't check out but which might have info that pre-dates the exhibit.)

A far less well known figure today than Capa, the ICP documents her status as a highly honored photographer in her day. She did not survive the war, unfortunately, and as a consequence of that, and perhaps also owing to the tendency of art history to brush away all but the most prominent women, she quickly fell off the list of photographers who affected art history. (Even Capa is barely mentioned in Beaumont Newhall's THe History of Photography, so forget about finding her there.) It is rare, though not unheard of, that rediscovered artists in any medium turn out to be the equal of those whose names are well known. This is arguably such a case.

The point could not be made more clearly than by comparing Capa's most famous photo, "Death of a loyalist militiaman" (1936) with Taro's photo of the same year, "Republican militiamen training on the beach" which serves as the icon for this show. (Both photos are shown on the ICP web site; click on the "Exhibition Images" link under the Capa and Taro links above.) Capa's widely reproduced image captures an "essential moment" alright: taken a spit second after the man is fatally hit by a fascist bullet, he stands off balance, arms flayed, rifle just about to fall from his grasp, his half-turned face exhibiting the shock of his misfortune. To say it was a lucky shot would be a major understatement; it is a shot that hardly ever be equaled for its expression of how vanishingly thin the border between life and death can be. The feeling is only enhanced by the awareness that Capa had followed the group of men to their battle positions on the hillside, and taken shot after shot of them preparing for the confrontation. The sudden loss of one whose acquaintance he had undoubtedly made a short time ago only makes more poignant the simultaneous feeling of bonding and parting that we feel in looking at this picture.

All that said, from a compositional point of view, the picture is all wrong. I once said something like this to my uncle, the photographer Harold Roth, about a picture he had taken of a woman walking with a ram. He laughed and said something to the effect that "when you see a picture like that you don't stop to think about the nice details". So be it; Capa's photo is life, death and courage all in one. But the man is all the way on the left side of the frame, which leaves about 2/3 of a photo frame without interest or detail. One almost wants to crop it, at the risk of doing damage to the extraordinary candor of the piece. I do think there is at least some justification in not doing so, for the hill to some extent enhances the sense of falling; he leans back, as if in a futile attempt to defy gravity, and symbolically, death itself. All the same, one would not choose this composition if one had such a choice. One does not need so much unused space to make the point.

Now consider Taro's shot. Taken not in battle but during training exercises, it is one of the most perfectly composed pictures in the history of photography. A woman kneels on her left knee, facing to the right, her right foot on the ground so that her bent leg forms a perfect right angle. Her right elbow rest on the leg above the knee, her arm straight up, with the hand bent at another right angle. In it there is a pistol. Her head is positioned so that her eye looks right out over the barrel. That, in essence, is the shot. Can you picture it? Let me elaborate.

What you should be seeing in your mind's eye (unless you cleverly clicked on the link above to see the actual photo) is two images of a pistol: one, that of the gun itself, and second that of its owner. The woman's form almost perfectly mirrors that of the gun. This much is more than a neat formal trick, and is accentuated by various formal echoes that take advantage of the square format produced by Taro's Rolleiflex camera (about a year later she switched to the rectangular format Leica that Capa was using). But form follows function here: the woman's fierce concentration on the firing of that gun tells us that she has in a sense become the weapon itself; her mission, defense of the Spanish democracy, has completely absorbed her, effectuating a complete harmony of spirit and purpose. That is not all, though. She brings her eye down to just above the barrel, looking directly at the target from the gun's point of view; we feel the stillness she concentrates on her aim. This is the photographer portraying herself in her subject, so careful in her focus, so still as she opens the shutter. Point, and shoot. This photograph is almost too perfect to be a candid shot.

I am not suggesting that Taro's shot is somehow "better" than Capa's. Different kind of work, different motivation for selecting it for presentation. Most of what constitutes the "art" of photography takes place in selecting among shots already taken. The rest, historically at least, is developing, printing, cropping, touching up. It goes without saying that the taking of pictures is of great importance, particularly when working with large formats. But it is saying too much to call that the only critical step in the process. Every serious 35mm photographer produces numerous images that can be thrown in the sea; the first cut is the one that separates these from those worthy of presentation. Taro had some time to compose her shot, Capa didn't. They both understood that something special had happened and preserved these two amazing photos for posterity.

In fact, Capa's eye for formal niceties can be appreciated in another of his images from the Cordoba front (this one is unfortunately not shown on the ICP site). Entitled "Loyalist militiaman running with rifle", the formal element of the triangle formed by two rifles and a bent elbow lend a strong sense of composition to a shot that is otherwise all motion and emotion. Another exceptional shot is "Telephone call to army command" (Rio Segre 1938). Several military men sit around a table covered with a map, and one of them holds a telephone, whose wire snakes across the map. Here a combination of formal elements like lighting, shape, and diagonals serve to stimulate a sense of community among the participants; the phone line stretching across the map is highly symbolic, connecting the figures both with one another and with the outside world. This gives them a sense of imperviousness in their cocoon-like shelter. I can only guess how Capa achieved the lighting he did indoors; I don't believe he was using a flash (nor do I know if one was available to him for the Leica at that time) and I also doubt he had a tripod, though that seems less unlikely. But a time exposure would have resulted in more blurring than I recall in this picture. Sometimes photographers can't remember themselves how they got what they did.

Taro made conscious and careful use of the square format while she was using it. One idea dominates, though. She tends to find a line that divides the vertical space, not exactly in thirds, but in half, from what would be the left upper corner of the lower third to the right lower corner of the upper third (or vice versa). In "Republican militiaman with a group of boys" the children appear to form phalanx, surely not an accident. Later on, when she switched to the Leica, it seems that her formal arrangements became more diverse. In some cases she repeated ideas but arranged them differently. For instance, the square-format picture "Republican soldier stepping through a hole in a wall" (1937) is echoed later that year in the rectangular "Republican dynamiters". (Is that you, Robert Jordan? Perhaps the bell tolls for you, but you're never more than a shutter-click from eternity, if it makes you feel better.) Both are strong compositions, and suggest that stepping through that hole is as much a metaphysical and moral act as a physical one.

It would be impossible and pointless to try to convey the force of the many gut-wrenching scenes that came from both Taro and Capa. Taro's simple, eloquent "War orphan eating soup" could be plumbed for philosophical depth, but ultimately, it doesn't need to say more than meets the eye. Ditto Capa's shot of a refugee in Barcelona, waiting with her dog, having lost her husband and son. And of course the heartbreaking shots of the dead and wounded. Comparisons with the work of Salgado present themselves here, but I'm not sure where they lead. Salgado has practically redefined socially conscious photography as an art, in a way that some people find distracting from the content. I am of the opposite view, feeling that technical and formal precision can never do anything but add to the significance and merit of a photograph. Yet these refugee pictures could be summoned to the cause of the other side, if anyone so desired. In their unadorned simplicity and directness, they suggest a photographer making a friend and study of her subject rather than using them as material for a new work altogether.

It is the unique and crucial property of photography that its rendering of images constitutes a special kind of documentation, and that it can stand out by drawing our attention to either intrinsic or formal elements, or both. Famous images like the one of a woman screaming over the body of a fallen student at Kent State, of a child running from the flames of a U.S. Napalm attack in Vietnam (Hue?), or the shot of John Kennedy Jr. saluting at his father's funeral, bring out a kind of empathy that perhaps even being at the scene ourselves would not have done. (For this and many other reasons, I disagree with those who take photographs to be windows of a sort, "transparent" frames of reality; for if they were, knowing what we do of human nature, I simply doubt that they would have either the impact that they actually do have, or the formal coherence that reality never has.)

Capa survived this hazardous and heroic line of work longer than Taro did, and he lived to capture other essential images. It is shocking to consider that his blurry, electrifying D-Day pictures must have been taken in the line of fire, possibly in the water. Though it may sound like a cliché, after reading David Guterson's description of the landing in Japan in Snow Falling on Cedars, hearing my father's description of crossing the Rhine, and seeing these pictures, I feel as if I can almost recall having participated in a marine invasion myself, with blood swirling around me, my boots leaden with water, and shells grazing my whiskers. Through luck, skill, and pure audacity, Capa captured the war against fascism from its first great battle to the fight that would eventually end it.

For this alone he certainly deserves his places in photographic history. But the show reveals more. For those who are historically minded, his shots of "Zhou en-lai next to a portrait of Karl Marx" and "Meeting of the Executive Yuan, Hankou, China" (both 1938) place one almost voyeuristically at the very moment which would dramatically change the lives of a fifth of the world's people. To see Zhou there, and then, having grown up with the image of him as a central figure on the world stage, is to peek into a crystal ball that holds history as it unfolds. Did Capa to recognize the magnitude of the occasion? What incredible prescience if he did.

There are of course a great many photographers whose social instincts have led them to social documentary, from Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Mary Ellen Mark and Salgado. Capa and Taro stand out in the risk they took, but they are not alone in that either, the latest example being Kenji Nagai, the Japanese photographer who was killed in Yangon, Myanmar on Tuesday while covering protests against the dictatorship. It appears from videos that Nagai was intentionally shot by a soldier at point blank range, and left to die; a horrifying reminder of the power of photography to threaten even the mightiest and most ruthless of regimes. There is no question that since Vietnam, photographs have changed popular sentiments and indirectly changed the world. Capa and Taro had quite a following in their time, a 2-person Lincoln Brigade with the power to influence millions. It may have taken Pearl Harbor to force the U.S. to enter the war against fascism, but even though photography did not manage to win U.S. support for the first line defense in the war against Nazism (while both Hitler and Mussolini supplied Franco with troops, weapons and advisors) we should consider the less tangible role that Capa and Taro may have played in raising consciousness about the fascist menace.

The grisly aftermath of that menace is documented by Francesc Torres in "Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep", another exhibit at the ICP. In 2004, anthropologists unearthed a mass grave where some 40 Loyalists were massacred in the town of Villamayor de los Montes. Torres captured the work, skulls, spent shell casings and all, in vivid b&w, which ICP has considerately blown up to mural size and given its own room for our viewing pleasure. It hardly matters whether this is world class photography. For one other thing that this exhibition demonstrates is that photojournalism shades into fine art at certain dramatic points, organically as it were, without great leaps over hidden aesthetic gorges. Now it is documentary; now it is art - neither can be entirely stable without the other. Even our contemporary photographers who fetishize messy households and "mall chick" types have at least that most universal of documentary styles, the snapshot, as background to their efforts. In the face of an event so closely tied to the sordid history of the 20th century, Torres' work becomes something more than a photo op at a Spanish dig: it reveals the faces that could be us, one day, if we allow our own house to go far enough down the road of hysteria over national security and militarism as a means of diplomacy. And haven't we seen enough hints, from Guantanamo to the mass arrests at the last Republican National Convention, to make us pay attention to these chilling scenes? Generalissimo Cheney & Co., beware: we are armed with DSLR's, are apertures are wide, and even controlling the film supply won't stop us now!

(The ICP exhibit continues until January 6, 2008.)

R.I.P. Alex the Parrot

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:38:00 +0000

Not that it is exactly central to the topic of this blog, but having assumed, without conscious effort, the identity of our mascot, we cannot but say Goodbye to one of our own. Thus, Alex, the 31-year-old show parrot, who appeared with Alan Alda on PBS, passed away last week. Surviving Alex were several researchers, his distant cousins Arthur and Griffin, and not a few worms. (Well, I don't really know if this exceptional bird had a normal avian appetite.)

Alex, who was a veritable John Stuart Mill of jungle birds, apparrotly spoke seven languages by the time he was 11. Okay, four languages by 23. Well, not quite one by the time he was 30, but still.... He learned to identify colors, shapes, numbers, and textures by name, a little more than some art critics I know, and he could use certain expressions in contextually appropriate ways. For example, if my ex-wife walked into the room Alex might say, "Calm down!" Whereas if it were George W. Bush who walked in, Alex would probably go with "Pull out!" Rumor has it that he once told Noam Chomsky, "Generative grammar is a Platonist myth!", and Chomsky chirped back that Alex was using language laden with colonialist metaphors. To which Alex merely said, "Squawck!" An even more apocryphal story has it that unknown to Alex's researchers, the night porter was also striking up conversations with him, leading Alex to blurt out in mixed company, "Damn, out of toilet paper again!" People took a step back. (Note that these anecdotes have not been confirmed by authoritative sources and probably never will be, alas.)

Even what has been confirmed about Alex's capabilities has not been confirmed. For example, Alex supposedly uttered complex and emotionally appropriate goodbye statements. According to his obit in the Times (9/11/07 A23), the night before he passed away he told Dr. Pepperberg, "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you." Very touching, but Alex's Wikipedia entry, quoting his MSNBC obit, has it that Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Alex's trainer, said that herself, and the Winged Wonder replied "You'll be in tomorrow". The latter version is a bit less evocative, though a helluva lot more surprising, since it suggests that Alex was not only able to understand the perspectival difference "I" vs. "you", but infer from "(I'll) see you" to "You'll be in". (Maybe the NBC peacock was so jealous of Alex's plumage that he arranged to turn viewers' attention to his intellect instead?) Personally, I'll go out on a limb and say that even the illustrious Alex probably did not make inferences of this sort. At any rate, this is clearly not what we call confirmed. Wittgenstein no doubt had a good laugh when he thought up his remark about trying to confirm something by looking in two copies of the morning newspaper (apropos of verifying that you've remembered something correctly by looking it up in your own mind, or something like that). But is it really funny that the Times and MSNBC report contradictory versions of the same story? How well do they do when reporting on the war in Iraq?

(Update Monday 9/17/07: I received an email from Maggie Wright of www.AfricanGrays.com who replied on behalf of Dr. Pepperberg and confirmed that the final words were those printed in the Times. Halleleujah, there is order in the universe! (No, not because the Times got it right, because I got it right! Squawck! See also the latest Times stories on this subject, including an editorial on 9/12, and "Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End", on 9/11, not to mention a bunch of letters. And see this lengthy exchange on Slashdot while you're at it. Go, Alex! I can think of Presidents who got less attention when they died! Then again, I can think of Presidents who give a bad name to the word "birdbrain". And I now understand now why they say a bird in the hand in worth two bushes. Or something like that.)

But seriously folks - do parrots actually talk, or rather speak, or do they just imitate sounds, which happen to be words? One would assume that the Dr. Pepperbergs of the world are inclined to call it talking of some sort, or else why would they spend their time conversing with feathered bipeds? Yet Wikipedia also cites Dr. Pepperberg as calling it "complex two-way communication" - perhaps a reference to the fact that Alex still did most of his tricks in order to get a reward. Alex knew maybe 100-150 words, which to my knowledge is about 2900 short of basic minimum literacy. He could use individual words and a few expressions correctly, but a human being with that level of linguistic skill would be considered hopelessly mentally defective. One of the more interesting claims is that Alex could put together words to make new sentences, which is to say that Alex understood the concepts and not just the consequences of one behavior vs. another. Some concepts he allegedly understood are same, different, bigger, smaller, and number concepts up to six. Does this mean that if you showed him a big blue circle and a small red triangle he would say, "Blue circle bigger than red triangle"? Or would it be, "Red triangle smaller than blue circle"? No idea, but for a couple of cashews I'd try it myself.

Some people have their doubts about animal intelligence claims. "There's no evidence of recursive logic, and without that you can't work with digital numbers or more complex human grammar", the Times quotes former Psychology professor David Premack as saying. "Digital numbers"? Did he really say that? And he's talking about parrot intelligence? Squawck! (Please email me the next time you meet a nondigital digit, thanks. Or does he mean that parrots can only deal with Roman numerals? So they're no brighter than, say, Cicero?) The point about recursive logic sounds more important, but what exactly does he mean? Brooklyn parrots use only cursive logice: "Get the &%$#^*)& off my lamppost!", for example. Most other parrots don't even curse, so they surely can't recurse.

As for logic, that's a different story. Suppose you have just learned to say "Yellow banana bigger than round cherry". Then you learn, "Red cherry bigger than green pea", and finally "Green watermelon bigger than yellow banana". If you are an even minimally intelligent human you should now be disposed to say many other things, such as: "Yellow banana bigger than green pea", "Green watermelon bigger than green pea", etc.; and if you add just one or two more concepts, even some quantifications: "Some yellow things smaller than some green things", "Some things of same color different sizes", etc. This does not involve recursion, but mere generalization. By my lights, even that is too much for parrots - at least, the ones who don't write blogs. And for chimps and porpoises and other Highly Intelligent Creatures.

All animals use practical logic of a sort; animals can clearly learn, and all learning involves reasoning, albeit usually quite rudimentary, from instances to rules. That means the instances have to be seen as belonging to types, things that can have many particular occurences, and the animal has to apply the type to the individual situation and behave according to what happened last time the type was encountered. Once the bear gets kicked in the teeth by a moose he'd better reason "moose - kick in teeth - avoid hind legs". But this is all what we usually call inductive logic. As soon as we find an animal that shows even the slightest appreciation of deductive logic - that understands even the simplest Aristotelian syllogism (e.g., All men are mortal - Socrates is a man - Therefore Socrates is mortal) - we'd better call on the black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey to take us to the next stage of evolution.

Parrots get lots of media attention. There are the four who were allegedly being used last year by landlord Stephen Kates to drive the tenants out of his building on 18th Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan. There was the Science Times interview with Joseph M. Forshaw, a leading parrotologist. There are light rock stations spinning Margaritaville every few days. Now there's Alex - and his similarly trained but less talented buddies Griffin and Arthur. Pretty soon there will be a parrot candidate for President. Everyone else is running, after all, and for the most part they don't do much more than screech what they think the public wants to hear, like Alex did for his trainers. But Alex supposedly had an 80% accuracy rate in his trained responses. Perhaps Alex's untimely death is a blessing in disguise. Had Bush, Obama, Clinton, Thompson, or Romney managed to hire him as a PR consultant we might be treated to even more insincere, opportunistic speeches than we are now. I'm glad we have so many parrots in Brooklyn, and Florida, and not too unhappy that we have them in university research labs, as long as they're treated well. But D.C. area ecology is already unbalanced enough, creating odd evolutionary phenomena, such as hawks that suddenly turn into doves when they think public opinion is going that way. And vultures who feed on easy prey and then claim great victories against terrorism. No, it is a good thing that Alex never made it to D.C. At least his secret is safe from that jungle now. (Arthur, Griffin, don't get any ideas...)

Alaska's Hobo Jim

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:14:00 +0000

Hey, culture mavens, Parrot here, reporting from Alaska.

Huh? A parrot in Alaska? Why not, he asked; don't you all go to Amazon? Anyway, the Alaska coast is basically thousands of miles of rain forest, so Senor Parrot was right at home, shaking off raindrops for most of the last 3 days. And Owl? She just hooked up with her Great Northern buddies and everything was okay.

In our first 3 days out we saw a herd of mountain goats, half a dozen bald eagles, a moose family, lots of magpies, a couple of humpback whales, 2 orcas, several dozen sea lions, otters, a huge black bear (from a boat, thank you), jumping salmon and 3 chipmunks. Okay, the chipmunks weren't that exciting. We're here for another week and almost running out of new species to view. Well, no caribou yet, except on the ubiquitous Alaska wilderness videos they show here. On Friday we drove from Seward to Valdez (that's Val-deez, in case you've been saying it wrong since 1989, like me) taking our time to stop at a dozen or so scenic turnouts. The drives here are stunning, 3-5,000' mountains shooting up from the foot of every road, lush vegetation giving way to snow-capped angular peaks, endless rivers, lakes, falls, fjords. Ten miles or less out of any city here and you are in pristine wilderness. We've met lots of people who came to Alaska to visit and never left. No, their cars didn't break down, like mine did back Brooklyn, just in time for me to junk it and not worry about it for the 2 weeks I'm away. The place is addictive. Of course, it's still August. I don't know if a visit in January would be as compelling. Then again, meet the world's only skiing parrot.

With all this beauty I could easily write about the aesthetics of nature for a while. And there is plenty to consider here; for instance, the awesome experience of watching a glacier shed several tons of ice as if it were a dandruff flake, muddled by the contradictory knowledge that global warming is a great destructive force. But that is not actually the subject of this post. The subject, rather, is Hobo Jim.

Our first day on the road (that was Wednesday, August 22) was incredibly rich, but at the end of it, we arrived at the Hostel in Homer too late to eat dinner just about anywhere. The only place open, we heard, was Duggan's pub. "But they have real food, not just pub food." So off we went to Duggan's, looking for a quick and modest meal. (10:00 p.m. Homer time was already 2:00 a.m. Parrot time, so retiring sounded pretty good.) Well, first thing at Duggan's, there's a guy at the door collecting a $2 cover charge for live music. "We're just here for dinner", we explained, and he sort of grudgingly let us pass (it helps to be from Brooklyn sometimes). But the musician had already taken the stage (such as it was); every seat and table was taken except at the counter below the open window to the kitchen. We planted ourselves there and even got them to clean away the dirty trays.

We actually had the best clam chowder we've had in Alaska at Duggan's, and a delicious fresh halibut sandwich. If Alaska weren't named Alaska, and if there were not a competitor known as salmon, the state would surely have been named Halibut. Every port, every diner, every grocery store carries halibut, fisherman stand on docks and mud flats fishing for halibut, and it would not surprise me if the Anchorage City Hall were built in the shape of a halibut. It's tasty and very hardy food, a bit like swordfish but a lot cheaper and easier to catch. So we sat there and enjoyed our first real Alaska meal (breakfast and lunch were about what we would have eaten in Brooklyn) and listened, whether we liked it or not, to a guy who was billed as "Hobo Jim".

What happened as the night went on was as exciting as the scenery along the Turnagain Arm, our route down from Anchorage. First, being a bit of a songbird myself, I had to admit that the guy was good. In fact, the more he played, the more I thought he was not just good, but a unique and incredibly talented performer. And songwriter. Actually, it soon became clear that Hobo Jim was not some local yokel who picked up a guitar every once in a while and did the rounds of the Homer bars playing Dylan covers, which is what I expected. Instead, what we walked in on is an Alaska institution, the unofficial and possibly official state troubadour (he said something about being anointed by the governor in some manner or other, but I didn't quite catch it.) Everyone in Homer seemed to know him by name; he lives there, and it's not a big town, but I get the feeling he's known statewide. A native Alaskan in Valdez, our sea-kayaking leader, knew of him and lamented the fact that he never played there. It is not at all surprising that Alaska should have troubadours; the land and the waters are awe-inspiring, breeding a culture that is perhaps more well-defined than that of any single state in the "lower 48", and this inevitably makes its way into song.

Hobo Jim dramatizes the Alaskan life in song, somewhere between the way Woody did for the dust bowl and Jimmy Buffet does for Florida. Alaska has its own brand of seriousness and its own brand of humor as well. The serious side is captured in songs about the challenges of living in a place that is still perhaps 99% wilderness. Humor emerges naturally when we look at how we respond to these challenges, and catch ourselves playing at our own rituals. Jim brings this out in songs like "The Dramamine Fisher" and "Fishing Chickens". Logging, fishing, sailing, farming, building, hunting, mining, railroads, coping with the weather and travelling across the vast expanses - these are the stuff of folk song, and nowhere are they more the life and culture of a state than in Alaska. Hobo Jim (his real name is Jim Varsos) has written dozens of songs that give this life a voice. If he didn't exist Alaskans would probably have invented him.

As a songwriter he clearly has influences; not only Woody Guthrie, who he seems to admire a lot, but Bill Staines and particularly Stan Rogers. His song "The Lady Lee" immediately brought to mind Stan Rogers tunes like "The Wreck of the Athens Queen" or "Fogerty's Cove", while other tunes conjured up Staines' "Missouri Road Song", "The Faith of Man", and others. But this is not to say that Hobo Jim lacks originality; though he could be compared to everyone from Hank Williams to Gordon Lightfoot, with a slight emphasis on the country-bluegrass sound, he has his own unique voice, and a prolific one at that. His web site lists five recordings of original material, and a compilation from the first four. George Jones and others have recorded some of his compositions.

Hobo Jim plays a guitar style that most closely resembles bluegrass flatpicking, where the melody is sometimes picked out between chords by skillfully articulating individual notes on the downstrum while playing full chords on the upstrum, all at rapid speed. I have known others who can do this well (for example, my friend James Reams, a fine bluegrass musician from Brooklyn, Kentucky) but I have never seen it done with just a thumbnail, which as far as I can tell is all Hobo Jim uses. When not playing in this style he often does a vigorous strum in a manner not unlike that of Bill Staines. Of course he fingerpicks and plays some blues too, all with the clear mark of a seasoned professional. He played a lot of covers, including Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Gordon Lightfoot, not to mention a rendering of the national anthem. In 2004, Jim packed up his guitar and flew to Afghanistan to entertain paratroopers, many of whom were Alaskans. (Small planes are ubiquitous here, the only way to reach many parts of the state, and Alaskan bush pilots are famous for their pyrotechnics.) I don't see any recordings of the covers he played, but that would definitely get my attention. His version of Guthrie's "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" was the best I have heard.

Jim Varsos claims to be a redneck, but he claimed many things that had to be taken with a grain of salt. I didn't see any sign of redneck sentiments in his songs. Alaskans have elected mostly Republicans recently; both their senators and their governor are Republicans; so it would not be very unusual for them to elect a conservative troubadour. But I've never heard of a redneck sounding off about how listening to Woody Guthrie changed his life, playing Dylan songs to his heart's content, or singing about the plight of small farmers or Alaska's native peoples. I think this goes in the basket with his assertion that this was his last concert - according to some locals I spoke to, this is in the spirit of W.C Fields, who found it so easy to quit smoking he'd done it a thousand times. I hope that was not Hobo Jim's last concert. He must have meant "for this summer, in Homer". To my knowledge he was supposed to play at the State Fair in Palmer a few days later.

Anyway, Owl and Parrot finished dining on clams and halibuts, and Parrot went through one darn good pint of Homer-brewed porter, when Owl announced that she was done hooting for the evening. But Hobo wasn't done, and neither was I, so I drove her to the Hostel and came back, thinking I'd hear a few more tunes and maybe say Hey, from Brooklyn. Soon after I got back Hobo Jim said he'd play a couple more and then take a break. A break? He'd already been playing well over an hour, so the bar owner was definitely getting his money's worth. But apparently it was just another brick in the wall of grandiose humor, along with being a redneck and retiring; for he went on for more than a couple of tunes, and then announced again that he'd play two more and take a break. This went on, I kid you not, until after midnight. Keep in mind he was already on stage when we arrived some time after 9:30. Hobo Jim never repeated a song, but went on playing for over 2 1/2 hours. A good part of the time he was standing on a table; good thing the bar didn't have chandeliers, or who knows where he would have been playing. Nor did he seem to want to stop, but he outlasted the audience, which had begun to give up hope of cheering for encores and started to filter out the door. Close to 4:00 a.m. Eastern Parrot Time, the "final" Hobo Jim Varsos concert came to an end.

When I had entered Duggan's I was all but annoyed at having to listen to what I expected would be a night of bad covers or cliched country-and-western drivel. As I began to appreciate him I thought it would be nice to trade CD's if he had one. By the time he was done I had to mull over approaching someone who seemed so much more accomplished than myself as a musician. But shy parrots are hard to come by, and shy parrots from Brooklyn virtually extinct, so approach him I did. Actually I did was browsing his CD sales table, and asked him which he would recommend. There were six disks there and he picked out a compilation and his latest one. So I was ready to pony up the cash for these, and thrust my lonely CD at him (don't get me wrong, I'm quite proud of it, but while I should be the Official Brooklyn Troubadour, I'm just not) asking him to take it as a gift. Well, that was the end up the previous transaction. Hobo Jim sold me one CD, traded me one, and gave me all the rest for $5.00. This is Alaskan generosity; people will invite you over for dinner if you show an interest in them, or, as in this case, hand you their life's work in a picnic basket. Since then, Parrot and Owl cruised down the Alaskan highways with Hobo Jim crooning from the CD player.

Glaciers are amazing; mountains are amazing; rivers, oceans, wildlife, all are amazing. The Alaska pipeline is an amazing feat of engineering. Walking into a pub late in the evening, on a small road in a tiny town, in a state one third the size of the contiguous United States, and happening to discover there a world class local folk musician, is - squawck - amazing.

And yes, I did go back and pay the cover charge. If you ever get a chance to see Hobo Jim for $2, please go.

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Heres another Hob Jim web page FYI.

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This was originally posted a few days ago while we were in Valdez. We're back in Brooklyn now, where I have a high-speed connection, so the photos have now been added, as well as some changes in the text. (3:10 a.m. Monday September 3, 2007; 11:10 p.m. Sunday September 2, 2007 Homer time)

Dropping in on the Arts: Recent Films, Music, Art

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:11:00 +0000

El Parrotto has been the aesthetic butterfly as usual, dropping in here and there, and as usual, not able to find the time to write about it all. Well, here's a quick roundup, just so no one can say I dropped out of sight:

Films: A couple of weeks ago the Love Doves spent an evening taking in a 1 1/2 feature; the closest thing today to a double feature, since theaters don't exactly time things to encourage you to skip from one film to another. So first we saw Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, on the rationale that any film that gets a 91% positive rating from Rotten Tomatoes (that "e' does go there, doesn't it?) must be pretty good; and that The Forty-Year-Ol Virgin had some funny moments. Knocked Up also has some funny moments. It has some "poignant" moments. It has some overdone characters, the kind we have all met and hoped we'd never have to face in a movie. It has a pretty phony birth scene, with a baby that's way to big for a newborn and a doctor who doesn't bother to hold the baby upside down. It had some cliched scenes, including one in which Paul Rudd, brother-in-law of the "knocked up" Alison, does the "Honey I just needed some time for myself, that's why I lied to you" thing, and she comes back with the "You know what, I need some time to myself too thing, where did you get the right..." etc. (Want to see the real deal, where this kind of scene actually means something more than a replay of that too common marital tension? Then you'll have to find a production of August Wilson's Fences, because that scene is just too searing, and no one who sees it will ever forget the contrast between a motherless child and a "womanless man".) Okay, this flick has its moments, for a bedroom farce it reaches a bit farther than one might expect, dealing with abortion (of course she doesn't have one; you want a serious movie, or a comedy?), male bonding, geek culture (if that's what it's called) and a few other things. Basically, it's entertainment, go for a laugh, don't worry about people crunching on popcorn and guffawing in the wrong places. You want serious fare? Bergman and Antonioni may be dead, but they are more alive than most of what emerges from Hollywood.

After that the sneaky petes wafted into Rescue Dawn, about half way through. Holy Cinema, Batman - half a film by Werner Herzog was enough to redeem the night! I'm not even going to go into depth on this, since I did not see it from the beginning, but it could well be the best film ever made in this genre. Perhaps I should hold my ongue, because since since Stalag 17 and The Great Escpe I haven't seen too many POW films. But this has something of the underlying tension of Apocalypse Now, to which it owes a great deal but also contributes as a kind of brilliant afterthought. There have been a lot of Vietnam films, some by great directors like Kubrick and Coppola, but clearly there was room for at least one more. I need to see the first half, but since this looks to be well worth owning on DVD I might just wait.

Then we played house and had a taste of Ratatouille. I tire of Pixar. Or maybe I just tire of ingeniously animated stories about little animals. I enjoyed The Incredibles; for an animated film about aging superheroes, it had more to say about real people than many Hollywood dramas. But after cute fish, sharks, rats, frogs, penguins, cars, robots, and who knows what other phylogenetic variations, I'm over it. Not to mention that Pixar is starting to look like Dreamworks which is starting to look like everything else. Really, I was out of patience before I saw Ratatouille, but I expected it to redeem the genre after all the glowing reviews. On the contrary, I felt a little like I did when I first saw Disney's Hercules. After a good if not brilliant run with Mulan, The Lion King, and Aladdin, Hercules came off to me as a classic example of a style that is used up and now has nothing left but to imitate itself. I'm afraid Ratatouille, for all its charm, its unlikely and original story line, its attention to detail and other good things, had much the same impact. For one thing, the story itself was both its greatest asset and its great defect. It took real energy to go along with each twist as the little rodent Remy works himself up to be the master behind the boy, Linguini. In the process one lost most of one's sympathy and identification with master Linguini; and, for all its animated vividness, it is beyond the call of duty to identify with a rat. (Maybe a pig; think of Animal Farm.) Maybe, after having seen more kids' movies than adult ones over the last 10 years, I'm just having an attack of adultitis. I even found the portrayal of restaurant critic Anton Ego a bit over the top (wasn't it supposed to be, you say? okay, it succeeded then)... not to mention that this is supposed to be Paris, but Ego's pompous, aristocratic airs are put over with the aid of a distinctly British accent! Well, kids won't know the difference, right?

You want a night's worth of entertainment? I suggest you catch a double bill of Knocked Up and Ratatouille. By the way, I don't usually comment on reviewers of films, but one thing I want to say is: the next time I read that a movie has "a lot of heart" I'm going to throw up directly on the newspaper (so I hope I don't read it next online...) Next, Ratatouille is not the only film that has been called "delicious", a self-negating adjective that is itself in bad taste. Finally, for now, be certain to avoid any movie that has ever been called "hugely entertaining", a nonsensical locution that suggests, if anything, an overweight comedian.

Music: As for other ventures, I lit on a gig by fiddler Jenny Scheinman, who holds forth at Barbès in Park Slope on Tuesday nights; but in truth, I didn't listen much, but had a rather good time chatting with my friend Jan, a journalist for the German magazine Stern who is on long-term assignment to the U.S. What I did hear was tasteful arrangements of what sounded like classic country songs; but I have to admit I was expecting a bit more fire, at this club that often features accomplishe jazz players. I was also unfairly comparing her to the ingenius violinist Alex DePue whose performance of Owner of a Lonely Heart at a West Coast club bowled me over. So we enjoyed the beer and the background music but the concert pretty much slid by without grabbing us by the collar and saying "Listen".

Art: Most recently - could something have actually happened tonight? - we floated through the window of China Square Gallery in Chelsea, for the opening of of a group exhibition of Chinese artists, many of whom also trained and/or live in the U.S. We loved the black pastel floral designs on black paper by Lin Yan, and Shen Chen's greyscale vertical brushwork that brought to mind bamboo forests, or traditional Chinese paintings of them. And I was greatly taken with a couple of Richard Tsao's pieces, colorful works with 3D elements that at first looked like distressed metal shards, an illusion I could not quite get over after reading that the medium was "water-based materials on canvas". All in all this was a very nice show with great variety and very professional crafsmanship.

So goes the roundup; what's next? Well, what would you say if you found a Parrot in Alaska? Because if I decide to bring my laptop that might be the site of my next post. And if not, then I will resume when I get back, in about three weeks.

Is Michiko Cuckoo? Is Laura Loopy? Literary Ethics Goes Public

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 03:41:00 +0000

The way the news has gone down lately, you would think someone really cared about the morals of authors, critics and other literary personae. The latest spark to ignite a prairie fire is the conviction of Laura Albert, the nonfictional being behind JT Leroy, who is the fictional author of the fictional work Sarah. As you undoubtedly are aware, one of the fictions jumped off the title page and signed a contract with Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, President of Antidote International Films, in which she gave no hint that she was fictional.

Michiko Kakutani, the illustrious senior literary critic for The New York Times, has also made news, offering a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hours before the enormous marketing machine behind its release had approved its sale. (I don't usually insert NYTimes links because they force you to register, but even though the URL includes "restricted" I was able to link to this review through Google, for whom the right to link stands slightly above, life, liberty or the pursuit of copyright in the moral order.) Moreover she mentioned that she had simply wandered into a NYC bookstore and purchased a copy! She was also the subject of a critique in Slate yesterday by Ben Yagoda (leave it to Slate to do a critic critique), who complains loudly that Kakutani either blows kisses or comes down with a blunt ax on books she reviews, not to mention indulges in even more pathetic uses of language than the two near-dead metaphors I just used. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. (Damn those clichés, they come so easily sometimes.) Recently, we had Mark Helprin whining on the Op-Ed page (May 20) that his family would not enjoy eternal profits from a perpetual copyright on his writings. Of course everyone remembers the plagiarism scandal of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, way back in 2006. Ms. Viswanathan asserted that her extensive copying from at least two other authors was "unconscious and unintentional", sort of like George Harrison's redo of "He's So Fine" as "My Sweet Lord". Which is a step up from the college President (don't have the notes on this one in front of me) who repeated the old platitude that he had failed to keep careful notes separating his own words from those of others. More likely his note taking was a little too careful. And the list goes on, especially if we widen the scope to ethics and fictions in general, which lets film and all its foibles sneak in. Thus ON 3/29/05 we had, for example, two headlines in the Times, "Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes" , and "Historical Epic Is Focus of Copyright Dispute" (p.E1). The former concerned the film Mighty Times: The Children's March, which won an Academy Award for Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson, and included fake-vintage footage of civil rights protests. The latter the film Kindom of Heaven, which was accused by James Reston Jr. of "stealing his research", according to the Times' Sharon Waxman, including "events, characters, scenes, descriptions and character tensions". Whoa, stealing character tensions, that's got to be up there with pocketing the Golden Triangle.
Bizarre and offbeat, you say; but it leads right back to one of the biggest recent literary disputes of them all, the claim that Dan Brown stole the "architecture" of his novel The Da Vinci Code from a nonfiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Micahel Baigent and Richard Leigh. Not a single passage was alleged to have been copied; rather, elements of the plot (maybe the "character tension"?) were allegedly conceptually lifted from one genre into another.

Dan Brown won the lawsuit filed by his accusers. Laura Albert lost hers. One thing joined the two outcomes in holy matrimony forever: the lawyers were the only real winners. Albert has been ordered to pay the plaintiff's lawyers some $350,000, while the plaintiff himself got $116,000. Nice work, guys, you earned it. Brown's lawyers were to receive their just deserts of 1.3m pounds. If I thought anyone were in doubt that the entire system of contract, copyright, patent, matrimonial, consumer and medical law (to name a few prominent areas) has as its primary purpose the enrichment of lawyers themselves, I would bring this in evidence... except that I might need a lawyer to do so. Luckily, no one in their right mind has such doubts.

But beyond the obvious cynicism of the system for redressing these alleged wrongs, there are some very funny lessons to be observed here. Consider, for example, what the world of literary morality might look like if most of these plaintiffs, or mere complainers, were right:

It would be okay to reinvent oneself as a fictional character, but wrong to be the self that has thus been reinvented.
It would be a sin to publish information about a book one has read if one is not supposed to have read that book according to the book's author and publisher.
It would be necessary to pay royalties to the heirs of John Milton before reproducing much of Paradise Lost; and indeed it might be possible to sue the likes of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, for stealing "architectures" or "research" or "character tensions" from Homer. (This situation should be found highly desirable in legal circles, as it would surely entail endless lawsuits to determine just who were the heirs of Homer or Milton.)

On the other hand, if some of the perpetrators here are within their rights, the world would look similarly interesting from a moral point of view:

Who needs to write when so many millions of pages of readily available text are just sitting there waiting to be put to use? Is this not a service to the original author? For nothing provides so much publicity as a plagiarism case, and nothing helps an author's popularity so much as getting the sympathy vote after a plagiarism scandal. Why has no one appreciated the service Viswanathan did for Megan McCafferty, who I surely never heard of until her words were honored by Ms. Viswanathan?
Why stop at faking vintage footage? Why not change the copyright date on the film to 1965? Why not get the winner of the 2007 Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King lookalike contest to put in an appearance? Why not carry subtitles: "The scene you are now seeing is really happening, or at least it was, or something similar was, or could have been anyway"? Zelig, anyone? (Excuse me, I meant Orlando.)

Well, I know what you thought: no parrot is going to self-incriminate by squawcking about plagiarism. And you are right to an extent. At least in this entry the main object of my interest is not plagiarism. Nor even lawyers. Nor copyright or patent or other illustrious institutions of intellectual private property. It is the self and its literary being.

First, Laura Albert. Apparently she is JT LeRoy, the author of Sarah. What was her offense? It was, first, believing that she was JT LeRoy. Well, she is JT LeRoy. Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. And somebody, I hope, is H.A. Monk, the author of this blog. Now, suppose Sam had signed a contract as Mark Twain, would that be a problem? No, you say (I hope). Because he in effect owns the being that is Mark Twain, who might or might not have written books in the first person, without any difference in the situation. Ralph Lifschitz can sign a contract as Ralph Lauren, can't he? Now suppose someone comes along and wants to do a film on the Ralph Lauren story. He siticks a contract under the nose of Ralph Lifschitz, who promptly signs his name as "Ralph Lauren" ( don't know or care if he had it legally changed; maybe it's a DBA name or whatever). The cameras roll up, the street signs go up, the food cart lays out its feast of grapes, Kool-Aid and liverwurst, and finally the director says, "Okay, let's start from the top. Ralph, tell us your story. Roll it!" (Archaic pre-digital-era movie language, but whatever.) There sits Ralph. He begins: "My name is Ralph Lifschitz. At some point I started presenting myself to the public as Ralph Lauren because I wanted to be a famous fashion designer, and I didn't think anyone would take me seriously with a name like Lifschitz which suggests I'm a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx." "CUT!" End of film. The Director resigns and goes off to do a documentary about Walter Carlos...

Now what, literally, is wrong with this picture? Nothing, really. The Director got what he signed up for, the Ralph Lauren Story. It's just that that story is one or two sentences long. Not Ralph Lifschitz's problem. So why did Laura Albert get sued? And why did she lose? Mr. Levy-Hinte, you see, the upholder of Truth, Justice, and the Hollywood Way, believes he was duped by Ms. Albert. You see, what he wanted was a film about the "real" JT LeRoy. When he discovered that there was no "real" JT LeRoy, he decided that instead of doing a two-sentence film about JT LeRoy he wanted to do a metafilm about Laura Albert. But Ms. Albert did not believe that she had sold him the rights to a story about Laura Albert. You see, Laura Albert is JT LeRoy, but JT LeRoy is not Laura Albert. The relationship is not reciprocal. She had sold the rights to an Albert-as-LeRoy story, but not to an LeRoy-as-Albert story. But the former story makes for a very short film: "Hi, I'm fictional. Bye." Whereas the latter is no film at all, because Laura Albert does not want to be a movie star playing herself.

Mr. Levy-Hinte may have a sense of justice, however distorted, but he has no sense of humor. You see, Jeff does not realize that he is a fictional filmmaker, at least as auteur. Every novel has a fictional author. The fictionl author is the voice from whom the story comes. Ms. Albert gave her fictional author a name - JT LeRoy - and a history and personality. Mr. Levy-Hinte may not have given his fictional narrators a name, but in his films he surely has fictional narrators. And if he has any business sense at all, he would surely jump on the first opportunity to sell the rights to the real story of one of his fictional narrators. Easiest way to make money in the arts, I bet. It is hardly Ms. Albert's fault if JT LeRoy's story is as thin as a crepe. And it is certainly Mr. Levy-Hinte's fault if he doesn't understand what a fictional author is. In fact, that gives me an idea. Mr. Levy-Hinte, if you're reading this: there is this very interested guy named H.A. Monk; he's actually part man, part parrot, and sits on top of a lamppost in Brooklyn observing the NYC arts scene. Then he gets in front of his laptop and, as H.A. Monk, pumps out verbose and little-noticed blog posts about his observations. For a cool $2 million I believe he would be happy to squawck on camera about his life in the urban jungle. Whaddaya say?

Turning now to Ms. Kakutani. Note that parrots and cuckoos have certain things in common, so perhaps this is not an unbiased judgment. But neither are any of my other judgments, so there you go. Monks and Monks also have something in common, a fact to which I call your attention only because a fellow Bloogle Gogger who signs his posts "The Monk" (I assume if it were a female she should sign it "Monkee") has posted a note on Kakutani's review in which it is stated that Kakutani has lavishly praised every one of J.K. Rowling's Potter books, including Deathly Hallows, and therefore ought not to be taken to task by Rowling, as she was, for ruining the experience of millions of readers. Now, personally, I disagree with the logic of my cousin. Rowling's complaint was, at least on the surface, on behalf of her millions of readers, not herself. The complaint should be taken on its own merits, which Monk(2) does at another point, by pointing out that reviews in the NY Times are rarely read by children. Touché. And I suppose it could be added that any adult who does not wish to have their entire life devalued by hearing something about the book before the official release date should simply not read it. But another point should be made: in fact, Kakutani's description of the plot is so minimal that only a complete idiot would find the excitement of the book to have been undermined by the review. The evil ones have infiltrated Hogwarts, some well known Hogwarts characters die, Hermione is missing, Harry leads the resistance. No point in reading the book now, right?

But the trouble with the criticism goes way beyond that. Aside from the fact pointed out by a Times letter writer that reviewers are not (better not be) beholden to marketing machines, there is the fact that the vast majority of readers will not read the entire book on the day (night) it is released, and after that there will be hundreds of reviews that can be read prior to reading the book if one so chooses. Keep in mind that film companies regularly schedule pre-release screenings for critics and other film industry types; all the secrecy about the HP release strikes one as nothing more than hype.

Kakutani consistently demonstrates in her reviews that no book worth reading can be taken at face value. Every novel has a meaning or meanings beyond the plot, character development, etc. There must be a reason why characters behave his way or that, why they are put in his situation rather than hat one. Thus for example she draws attention to Potter's struggle against "the temptations of hubris and despair". There are many other such observations in her review, and frankly, it is this, rather than blame or praise in itself, that will make or break Rowling's recognition as a writer in the long run. I don't hear anyone complaining that Kakutani revealed the deeper meaning of Deathly Hallows before the release date, even though that is far more important than who wins or dies. From this perspective, the complaints make the critic's critics seem vapid and clueless.

That said, I think there is something about the superficial aspects of the Potter books that must be said now that the series is over. Rowling has, as Kakutani points out, a brilliant sense of mystery, enchantment, diobolical plots and the like, as well as insight into the fears and passions of adolescents, professors and goblins. These are what give the Potter world its raison d'etre and make the books consistently worth reading. But, bottom line, I'm sorry to say, she is not a particularly good writer. There is little elegance or poetry to Rowling's prose. Having deeper meanings is important, but the means of expression is too. Here it is easy to see that Rowling is no C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps less of a writer in the fantasy genre than even Philip Pullman. Her work has intrinsic interest in almost every other way, but the basic quality of using the English language in elegant and ingenious ways is entirely missing. In short, she has no style of any great significance. I am surprised that Kakutani, who is never one to mince words, does not recognize this. Rowling is, you might say, a great author, but not a particularly notable writer.

But I digress. On the other hand, I'm done anyway, so who cares? All I really wanted to do was call attention to a couple of the current issues in literary ethics and look a little beyond the newspaper chatter. The two cases I have looked at are interesting because there are hidden conceptual issues that underlie the arguments on either side. To what extent does an author own her "self", and how many selves can she have? What constitutes deceit, and was Mr. Levy-Hinte deceived or did he deceive himself? Does an author's right to disseminate her writings include the right to ensure that no word will be spoken about her book's content prior to the release date? Does a reviewer have higher obligations than merely annointing or disparaging a work? Currently, most of the really knotty issues in literary ethics have been , obviously or not, around technology. For example, the existence of the Internet, and even more of Google, has given the issue of plagiarism a fresh urgency. But the discussion above suggests that technology alone is not the reason why literary ethics needs much more attention than its gotten. Maybe before we can understand the technological issues we need to understand things like the self and the dynamics of interpretation as they apply to literature. Which agrees in one way with the plenitude of issues I began with: we are pretty much still at sea, and have a long way to go.

NYC Radio: Jack Hits the Road

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:56:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of the two mouths who spewed an endless stream of dull, adolescent conversation and puerile sex humor, recently departed from WXRK, the unloved and in fact nonexistent "Jack" has hightailed it out of town, apparently back to Canada from which "he" was imported, duty-free. For those of you who are not NYC listeners (in all probability a highly favored status right now), "Jack" was the pre-recorded personality with the puerile, adolescent attitude (anyone notice a pattern here?) who would periodically interrupt WCBS's jukebox format with some snide remark, often about alleged skeptics regarding about CBS's format, and then, with equally annoying attitude, intone, "Jack-FM - playing what we want". Figure Napolean Dynamite after DJ lessons; that's about how this came across. Raise your hand if you thought it would last.

Going back a few decades, CBS-FM was once one of NYC's premier prog-pop radio stations, playing everything from the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull to Carol King and Elton John, but bringing consistent taste as well as quality to NY radio. There were more experimental formats - WXLR, if I recall, was one - but this was a station no reasonable music lover could complain about. At some point, CBS switched to an Oldies format, about which all that can be said is that "Oldies" never means a really creative sampling of older songs, but rather an attempt to mine nostalgia for well-known hits. This is necessarily an uneven format, since hits are of uneven quality. At some point around the turn of the millenium the format deteriorated further, and the selection of hits was reduced to early Motown with a few Beatles songs or other superhits thrown in. This format is what Jack replaced.

It is hardly surprising that Jack did not catch on, and in fact reduced CBS's listenership (and advertising revenue) significantly. But it is interesting to consider why. I suspect it was a nearly total disconnect between the music selection and the impersonal, mechanized, phony-DJ-with-attitude idea (which according to the Times was supposed to make someone think of an iPod Shuffle - as if that is really a rationale for a radio format). But the music selection, though far from exemplary, was much better than the parade of Motown hits, and indeed much better than the wider Oldies format of yesteryear. "Jack" actually pulled from a much wider playlist than any other oldies or classics format, and had a predilection for some groups that I feel are grossly underplayed in such formats compared to their quality, such as Steely Dan or The Fixx. "Jack" did not limit the selection to major hits, though most of the tunes were at least vaguely familiar. "He" had a disposition towards crisp, catchy tunes with hooks, but that left him very wide latitude to pick and choose. Not that there wasn't repetition; and indeed one could still detect a bit too much of "Hotel California" and the like, as if we did not hear enough of that incredibly tired stuff from the "classic rock" (or is it "Clearchannel rock"?) guys at 104.3. There was also a perhaps commercially wise but musically dubious effort to stick to early-80's disco on the weekend.

All that said, there was something extremely refreshing about the "playing what we want" idea. Playlists are exactly what is wrong with rock radio, be it contemporary pop (100.3), classic rock, country or just about any other format. Jack was a great experiment in widening the playlist so much that it almost disappeared. K-Rock, even with their all-chatter format on weekdays, actually experimented on the weekends with a very interesting contemporary mix.
That has now been quieted, along with the talking emptyheads, and the station has gone to an extremely careful and repetitious selection of new stuff that is even more conservative than their earlier hard rock format. And for CBS-FM, it is now Back to the Playlist: Oldies, slightly updated but still tired. And so ends a brief and occasionally interesting era of sort-of free form rock radio in NYC.

A few NY-area college stations still dare to spin "what they want" at certain hours; but with their limited reach, they provide few opportunities for quality or exploratory programming. WFUV, which at some point had potential as a folk/acoustic station, long ago went commercial, limiting its exposure of new artists and focusing on already successful, and largely electric, acts to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable from various "light rock" stations. WKCR gives us mainly jazz and some bluegrass and world music. I believe the nearest experimental rock station is Seton Hall's WSOU in Orange, NJ, though I can't get reception in Brooklyn; Fairleigh Dickinson's WFDU also provides some interest at the low end of the dial if you can get it. Other than that, it is pretty much a complete Radio Wasteland.

Almost. Strangely enough, it is 104.3 at night, with it's "Out of the Box" and "Underground Garage" shows, that still holds a few cutting edge cards now, as unbearable and stultifying as its daytime format is. That is something, but it ain't enough. What we need here is three things that we're not very likely to get, at least in a 24-hour station. One is a no-holds-barred experimental rock station that will give us everything from the latest progressive rock, in its various guises (see my previous post on the Book of Knots concert), to the more worthy alt-country happenings, to various interesting indie releases. Call this one WIND. And no, I don't mean Indiana. The second is a station that mines rock history for its 10,000's of extremely high quality but vastly underplayed cuts, be it from well known bands like Pink Floyd (when was the last time you heard "Atom Heart Mother" or "Astronomy Domine" on the radio?) to barely remembered groups like Family (their album Fearless is one of my favorite pieces of vinyl), from 60's garage bands (heard Bubble Puppy's "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" recently?) to some of the ingenious but rarely played cuts from contemporary groups like the Meat Puppets, Lemonheads, or Spoon. I could spin brilliant but virtually unplayed cuts by 10CC, Nektar and The Fixx for a couple of days without repeating anything. Spread that over half a century of rock history and you've got an almost endless supply of brilliant music, none of which has been overplayed by the 104.3 DJ's. Call this station WFRE. That's free, and without the attitude, Jack.

The third is a station that actually has some deep relationship to this country's musical traditions (other than jazz, which thankfully is actually represented in a couple of reasonable formats). I mean a station for which "country" means Hank WIlliams and Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and Johnny Cash and people who are their direct musical descendants. A station for which "folk" means Woody and Huddie and Pete and Bill (Staines - too bad I have to add that, he's fully their equal), and which plays some of the hundreds of high quality CD's released every year by acoustic musicians who look to them for inspiration. And which isn't afraid to play a scratchy old Big Bill Broonzy or Blind Willie McTell recording, or one by the host of worthy blues pickers who keep the tradition alive. Call this one WACU. Acoustic in spirit at least, because electronically amplified instruments are a kind of power center whose imperialistic tendencies we must resist, even if we love it as one form of expression.

For these stations to exist, I think the only hope is for some billionaire who actually cares about American music to buy out some media monopoly and play the stuff at a loss. Because one thing is clear: be it rock, country, or blues, what sells is obviously an extremely narrow spectrum of music that is constantly hammered into the heads of radio audiences through top-20 playlists and video channels. And that is a poor comment on us and our cultural bearings. A little paternalism can be a good thing, sometimes. Just give us some decent radio stations. The attitude needed to hit the road, but not the free format.

Prog Blog: Book of Knots at the Blender Theater

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 14:24:00 +0000

Lately the musical Monk and his friends have been exchanging views on the meaning of "progressive rock". The importance of this sub-genre of rock is adequately demonstrated by the fact that of all the uses of "progressive", only this one gets to be called just "prog", as if the social force of the music trapped the term and held it up as a prize. And the philosophical interest it has is like a model of the problem in philosophy of art in general: everyone thinks they know how to use it, but nobody knows how to define it. Which leads to the occasional battle of words: "that's not prog!". "Yes it is!". That's not art. Yes it is. You get the picture.

One thing most people agree on is that certain groups, or should I say groups of groups, constitute the paradigm or core cases of prog. Most of these bands hail from the early 1970's, though many can trace their origins as far back as the mid-60's. One contingent consists of groups which delighted the college crowd in the 70's, like Yes, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, ELP, Nektar, Klaatu and Gentle Giant. Then there is a frankly eclectic gang of lesser lights (including the so-called "Canterbury" groups) consisting of such names as Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Van der Graf Generator, Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream and several others known mainly to connoisseurs. And there are the contemporary "prog" (or "neo-prog") groups like Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree, Marillion and a number of Italian groups.

Yet even this - a mere sprinkling of the names who have been mentioned by one expert source or another as prog groups - overstates the amount of agreement. For example, in The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music, Bradley Smith offers numerous other names in his "canonic" top 100 prog recordings, but does not include a single album by Gentle Giant (most prog fans would stop speaking to him), ELP (most prog fans would have him drawn and quartered) or Nektar (which personally irritates me more than the other omissions). Genesis, and another leading light of prog, Renaissance, are represented only by live albums (what was he thinking/drinking? prog is the paradigmatic studio music). And the fights go way beyond this: Is Supertramp a prog or merely a pop group? How about David Bowie? What is Led Zeppelin's relationship to prog? What about Rush (I shudder, but some people consider them an essential prog band)? How important/influential are the numerous proggish bands from Germany, Italy and other non-English-speaking countries? Is Frank Zappa a prog artist or merely a quirky composer with as many different styles as albums? Is the contmporary prog-metal scene really prog or just very technical noise? Is psychedelic rock a form of prog, or prog a form of psych, or neither? Is prog a classification of bands, albums, songs, styles, or all or none of the above? The issues go on and on. And to judge from the literature on prog, of which there is a substantial amount (of extremely uneven quality) most participants are talking right past each other. Definitions of the genre fly through the air with the greatest of ease, all subject to easy refutation by simply pointing to a generally recognized prog group that doesn't clearly meet it, or a bunch of clearly non-prog groups that do. The various talking heads (not the group, who are not prog, but someone will mention them eventually...) do not usually address one another's opinions or engage philosophically with other views, but merely offer their personal visions of the genre. (For one very sane definition and list of key recordings see this article. Full disclosure: the author of the article, Ian Alterman, is not unrelated to one of parrot's cousin's grandmother's children, and the site is operated by our frequent musical correspondent and acquaintance, Dusty Wright. Anyway I don't completely agree with the definition or album selections, but I think they capture a standard and venerable view of the nature of prog.)

Rest assured, I am not going to settle any of this here. But the context is important, for on Friday night, a parrot looking for some spontaneous solution to the what-do-I-do-tonight dilemma was faced with at least two choices for delving into the music and escaping the email debates. Ozric Tentacles, a beknighted neo-prog group that has been doing its multimedia thing for a couple of decades, was scheduled to play at the Highline Ballroom; and across town, a new group of self-consciously arty rockers who call themselves Book of Knots was on the bill at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, a venue which (as the Gramercy Theater) recently did service as the film archive of the Museum of Modern Art. Eeny meeny miney mo.... not having enough toes, Parrot called his sibling, a parakeet who has written for ProgArchives.Com, one of the main prog rock sites in cyberspace. Parakeet was familiar with one highly rated Ozric album, which he considered unimpressive; and alerted me to the fact that they are almost completely instrumental, which is not bad, but I was not in the mood for a post-Tangerine Dream experience. Besides the buzz around Book of Knots was much more interesting: possibly a one-time-only performance by a collection of art rock types who were members of other bands, (Sleepytime Gorrila Museum, Pere Ubu, Skeleton Key, etc.) Moreover they were to be joined by various other known entities such as John Langford of The Mekons, who played an opening set, as did Carla Bozulich, who also appeared as lead vocalist in Book of Knots opening number. The group has just released its second album, Traineater, and may or may not continue as an ongoing entity, as the mood strikes them.

Now I will admit the parrot squawcked a bit when, after buying a ticket for an alleged 8:00 p.m. show, I discovered that Book of Knots was not going on until 11:00. (No warmup bands were listed in any of the announcements.) Bad as this was, what really infuriated me was the club policy of not allowing anyone to leave and come back. They give you a wristband if you want to order a drink, but they can't stamp your hand or something so you can re-enter? Obnoxious. I actually went to the ticket window and asked for my $22 back, to no avail. A chipmunk-faced young fan behind me chirped profoundly "Haven't you ever been to a rock concert before?" Hmmmm... haven't I seen Led Zeppelin four times? Haven't I played at CBGB's twice? Well, yes. Not to mention been to most of the major rock clubs in NYC several times. Mr. Monk Parrot reminded Mr. Chipmunk that he had had some 3 extra decades to collect nuts and seeds on the rock concert scene, but thanks for the input. (See, once in a while it helps to be older and wiser... like Owl, except she's not older...) But time went by rather quickly, with the warm-up sets and lots of newpapers to read. Before the Book of Knots went on I bought a can of Guinness. A sign above each of the three (3) bars at the Gramercy announces "one alcoholic drink per wristband". Does that mean one per bar? But I didn't notice anyone enforcing this by removing the wristbands after selling a drink. I can somewhat understand the sentiment, for I have seen a drunken Irishman pissing across the walls and sinks of a club bathroom like an out of control firehose (this at a Luka Bloom concert at Acme Underground, about when Chipmunk was learning to write) and have encountered a variety of unpleasantly inebriated individuals. I could maybe see a two drink limit, but one is a little ridiculous. Anyway, this can of Guinness ($7 with the tip) was completely flat, with an obviously broken carbonation device bouncing around at the bottom of the can. Parrot was not in a good mood. The place also had one 200-pound security guard to every five patrons, and closed off the entire balcony (the only available seating) for "VIP's and friends of the performers". They do have a kick-ass sound system and a pleasant lounge downstairs, which might or might not be enough to drag me back to this otherwise unfriendly venue.

Back to prog. Or are we? This is the question I was alluding to at the beginning. Here are a bunch of musicians who look and sound like artrock specialists. ProgArchives has an Artrock genre, but their top 100 albums of this genre include lots of Moody Blues, not to mention Rush, the former being as tonal and accessible as one can imagine, and the latter being merely annoying. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History is listed as one of the most popular albums on ProgArchives, but not as an artrock album. Prog is quintessentially the medium which allegedly lifted rock out of its dogmatic slumbers as a a mere form of entertainment and made it a genuine art form. Perhaps there are a hundred reasons to question this narrative, but it is a typical one, and it sometimes leads to prog being simply equated with artistic rock and roll. Prog is not written for dance halls; prog does not maintain standard beats or stick to basic blues progressions; prog often introduces unusual instruments, utilizes extended compositional forms, limits the use of improvisation with through-composed pieces or else extends it way beyond the confines of blues-based guitar breaks, and extensively manipulates sounds electronically. Prog was suppose to prove that rock is a form of art not inherently less complex or creative than classical music. All of which gives it a claim to being art rock pure and simple. In addition, prog lyrics are often as indecipherable as a Wallace Stevens poem, and the visions it produces, from apparently utopian to diabolically dystopian, are at least in some sense at odds with the contemporary social status quo, giving it some connection to not only modern poetry but progressive political views.

Nevertheless, the sounds which emerged from Book of Knots could arguably be called art rock, but not prog. Why? That is what is hard to say. When I got out of the concert I eventually ended up in a subway station, where I naturally applied the headphones and turned on my CD player (yes, I am one of the last people on earth without an iPod, though my CD player does do mp3's). By coincidence, or maybe not, the disk was a live Gentle Giant album. By even better coincidence, the next song up was A Free Hand. Had I recorded part of the concert by mistake? Well, not exactly, but all the elements seemed to be there: technically complex and well-orchestrated lines that sometimes touched on atonality, noises of various sorts (electronic or otherwise), rhythms dissociated from their metrical foundation, and vocals integrated as one more instrument in the mix. The lyrics are slightly offbeat, with meanings hinted at rather than spelled out. How different was this from the concert?

Well, a little. Book of Knots utilizes prerecorded soundtracks and in general uses the spoken word to great effect; their compositions are powerful but sometimes schizophrenic, with the quiet tinkling of plucked autoharps and guitars strummed below the bridge suddenly interrupted by tritonal outbursts from the entire group. Various string instruments are pulled in, more for their ability to produce a Webernesque texture than for melodic or harmonic uses. There was great beauty in many of these textures, and indeed in the unpredictable but usually very convincing vocal lines of these compositions (or dare I say "songs"?). All of this seemed to go beyond what Gentle Giant was doing, but not by much. Could it be that Gentle Giant is misclassified as a prog group and really belongs to a separate genre of art rock? I don't know. If you go this route you could end up casting early Pink Floyd and late King Crimson out of prog. Or, if you take the opposite tack, you could end up baptizing Zappa as a prog icon. I think what we have here is just a choice of linguistic paths: either you build out the artrock strands of prog and draw in groups like Book of Knots, which sound nothing remotely like Yes or later Pink Floyd, and call them prog; or you cut the thread where the symphonic aspects of prog trail off into noise and punk and atonality, and the textures go from the expansive synth/mellotron sound to industrial, aleatoric and elecronic. Either will do. Definitions merely reflect existing usage, as W.V.O. Quine pointed out long ago; they do not give you any sort of new information about a term, though they can serve as norms for using it once they are offered.

A few years ago I went to a "prog" concert at the Knitting Factory. There were three bands, can't remember their names unfortunately. One of them was not so different from Book of Knots, though not nearly as good. They seemed to mix aleatoric moments with more traditional ones, not unappealing but kind of an unnatural cross between the Paul Winter Consort and Jethro Tull. Another was so loud I had to leave - basically an extremely technical guitar player, backed by a bass as I recall. Other than the possibility of ear damage and another name on the Extremely Technical Guitar Player list I got nothing out of this set, but it did remind me that a great many heavy metal bands of the Metallica sort feature very technically accomplished players who seem to think that having the faculty of taste is a defect. Book of Knots loses little in volume compared to most of these bands, but to my ears
they are actually about music and not showmanship. Between their four or five guitarists, two fiddlers, numerous vocalists and percussionists, they manage to more or less consistently keep the attention on musical form and content and on the social content of the lyrics, and hardly even present technique for its own sake. Perhaps this should be part of the definition of prog, if definitions were at all useful here. Even with the guitar pyrotechnics of a Steve Howe or the drumming of a Phil Collins of the Shulman brothers' extraordinary technical facility, prog is decidely about the music.

What I could gather from most of the lyrics suggests that Book of Knots is currently oriented toward the industrial, with a number of them sporting suits and hair styles that brought to mind the bourgeoisie of the 1930's. In an equally outrageous suggestion of civilization and etiquette, a program was produced for the concert, in which they indicate that their second album was intended as "a tribute to the American rust belt". It seemed oddly fitting for this collaboration of otherwise musically employed musicians that after their hour-long gig they thanked the audience, and excused themselves from doing any encores with the polite admission that "we don't know any more songs"! Not even a cover of Free Bird?

I do hope the group stays together, and does more concerts. While I did not find every moment of it pleasant, I could see this as a direction of sorts for rock that means something. I am not into noise. I do not like to attacked or annoyed, I like to be challenged. This was challenging but for the most part very enjoyable. I don't know how it translates to the recording, but I'm somewhat sorry I didn't buy a CD. From the experimental psychedelia of the 60's to My Bloody Valentine to contemporary art rock, some musicians have managed to tread a perilous course between complete alienation and pandering to popular taste. The best rock manages to push the boundaries while remaining enjoyable. Book of Knots pushes them very far but does not fall off the listening spectrum. That is an accomplishment, whether you call them prog, art, industrial, or something else.

******************************************************************

I think it is safe to reveal that there was another reason I chose to see Book of Knots rather than Ozric Tentacles. The reason's name is Frank, and the Frank who is the reason is (I suppose) the person who runs Frank's Pizza. A shop you can miss if you blink on a slow walk, it is located right next to the Blender (or Gramercy), at 23rd and Lexington Ave. For something like 15 years it has been recognized as the real deal when it comes to New York pizza. I've been to dozens (at least) of pizza parlors. (Ever been to a pizza parlor, Chipmunk?) I've been to Di Fara's, the best pizza this side of the local pig sty (finally shut down by the Health Department, thank god, but the pizza was in a class by itself: a gooey mix of buffalo milk mozarella and homemade tomato sauce on a thin crust). Frank's I discovered about 8 years ago. They almost never reheat a slice: the slices fly out the door faster than he can cook 'em. You don't order toppings at Frank's; you can, of course, if you want to ruin the best slice of pizza south of Central Park, but restrain yourself. Your body will survive a day without broccoli, and besides, tomato sauce is supposed to be good for your prostate - if you have a prostate, that is. The sauce is the best, with a bit of a Latin twist; the cheese fresh and generous, the crust just thick enough. Do I sound like a commercial? Okay, then here goes: Frank's is the best candidate I know for successor to (the real, original) Ray's Pizza. Grab a slice or eight and tell me you disagree.

Free Sounds: Richard Thompson in Prospect Park

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:02:00 +0000

The Times just did a piece on so-called "freegans", who furnish their apartments from sidewalk trash and dumpsters (er... like the rest of us... at least sometimes...) and eat discarded food from supermarkets (crows and vultures wouldn't object, but parrots are more picky). I was once told by people on the island of Grenada: "In America, people have more wealth, but they can still be hungry. We are poor, but never hungry. If we don't have food we go up into the hills and come back with food. You cannot do that in America." But it appears that even in the Urban Jungle it is possible. Think I'll go make myself some Dumpster Salad right now.

Whether or not that sounds appetizing, one thing New York never runs out of is free music, or music at such low cost it is free by today's inflated standards. Classical institutions complain that they cannot sell out concerts; but when even a decent 2nd balcony seat runs you $65 or so, and there is hardly a day without a free event worth attending, they have only themselves to blame. For example, in the wake of 9/11 NYC initiated a "River to River" festival, including numerous free outdoor and indoor concerts. Last year we heard Son Volt give a buttkicking performance right by the water. Parrot has still not gotten over the fact that he missed a free concert by Sonny Rollins at Damrosch Park last year, and possibly worse, one by U2 right here in Brooklyn. There is a ton of free stuff at churches, in parks and elsewhere. One of the best concerts I've ever seen was a free show by the Beach Boys in Central Park - must have been around 1976. One of the worst concerts I've ever seen was a free show by Jefferson Starship in Central Park - around the same time. Even before there were as many free concert series' as there are now, there was the Schaeffer Music Festival, where you could see Led Zeppelin (I didn't), King Crimson (I did), and many equally incredible bands for about $3 a pop.

Three bucks is what I paid last night to see Richard Thompson - it still counts as free because it was a "voluntary" contribution. Walking into the concert area Thursday evening I was immediately struck by three things, all related: a dense fog of cigarette smoke, an almost as pervasive atmosphere of beer-induced flatulence, and the largest crowd of died-in-the-wool baby boomers I've ever seen. It was a veritable sea of dressed-down late-fatherhood and former hippie-motherhood types, some toting tots, others who left their spouses home to spend quality time with their children, gently explaining to them that they probably wouldn't like this concert much anyway, it's kind of folk-rock and you're still into Aerosmith, etc.
It was like everyone there was between 35 and 55, looked it, dressed it, and damn well meant to let their vices hang out whether there happened to be second-generation types around or not. I had this feeling of being at home and being distinctly uncomfortable with that, but realizing that everyone else there probably felt the same way.

Why were the Beatle-boomers flocking to this? If you are anywhere near the age of the Blogging Parrot you were probably somewhere around a college campus when Fairport Convention was making a name for itself, holding its own against Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead and those other university icons. Indeed you were probably vaguely aware of a British Isles Folkie-Acoustic subculture that included groups like Pentangle, Fairport, Steeleye Span , Fotheringay and the Incredible String Band, and which surely influenced numerous "progressive" rock groups including Yes, Renaissance, Jethro Tull, Genesis and even Led Zeppelin. Bert Jansch, one of the Pentangle guitar wizards (the other being the great John Renbourn) was heard over the din of parrot squawcks in Brooklyn's Southpaw club last year, and played a piece that was certainly the predecessor to Jimmy Page's "Black Mountain Side". Richard Thompson was his counterpart in Fairport. He later went off as a duo with wife Linda, and Boomer knew about this phase of his career too; "Richard and Linda Thompson" probably rings a bell even for people who never heard a single song by them. Richard then continued sans Linda. Through all this you undoubtedly heard at some point about his reputation as a fine songwriter. You've heard a few of his songs now and then, but nothing since Fairport Convention ever moved you to go out and buy an album. Or you did, but you haven't listened to it in 20 years, minimum. But if you are true boomer you have probably at some point said to yourself, "I should probably check out Richard (and Linda? is he still with Linda?) Thompson before I get so old I lose my hearing." (Which should have happened at the last Mahavishnu concert you attended, but somehow it only left you with tinnitus for a week.) And all of a sudden here he is playing a free concert in Prospect Park, and you say to yourself, "I'll never forgive myself if I don't check this out". And since you hate to never forgive yourself, you check it out. That's why there seemed to be a quarter million flatulent children of the sixties, washing down their soy products with Sam Adams, at the Richard Thompson show on Thursday night.

Now to add a bit to the atmosphere, there was, shall we say, plenty of weather, almost all of it wet. It started raining as Thompson took the stage; it continued to rain; there was a cloudburst and many people fled; there were storm clouds that looked like ethereal black lions roaring down from heaven to consume a meal, periodically illuminated by red lightning. Thompson took a break, while we were drenched. It rained on and off through the whole show. And it's still two years before the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. But when all was said and done, and every metal chair had a puddle of water where a boomer butt had been, and the hill where families spread their picnic blankets was well washed of beer spills, Richard Thompson still played to a packed arena, and now it was not only appropriate but necessary to shout, dance, whoop, whistle and generally show that the world that no flash thunderstorm was going to deprive us of our Richard Thompson experience.

We were not disappointed: this was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. And among concerts that surpassed my expectations, it ranked even higher. No big surprise that Yes or Led Zep gave an incredible performance. But sometimes you go expecting nothing in particular, and leave with your jaw dropped and this feeling that you were just transported back to a time and place you thought you'd never be again, and a little guy inside you going, "That's it, I'm really going to start getting serious about playing the guitar again..." The closest comparable experience that comes to mind was - ouch, 13 years ago? - at a Woodstock 25th anniversary concert, the one right here in Brooklyn, at another longstanding free concert series near Coney Island. Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe McDonald and Melanie performed; but what blew me away was Canned Heat. Hot they were (he said in his best Yodaese), so much so that I could actually imagine this as a kind of spiritual return to Woodstock.

Thompson's show was of this order. To begin with, I can honestly say this: if you have the slightest inclination to feel that you know how to handle an electric guitar, please go see this man play and be disabused of such ideas. I think it was halfway through the show before I heard him repeat a single move. He does not so much play the strings as manipulate them. It is almost as if he discovered properties of a stratocaster that no one else is aware of, and he uses these properties to produce solos that defy all conventions except those of taste. Comparisons with Hendrix are begging to be made, but I'll stop while I still have some credibility. (Thompson did, however, place 19th on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Hendrix - duh - was first. The list is a bit of a joke, but I'll skip the diatribe on some of the ridiculous rankings, see for yourself.) Suffice it to say that without ever using technique for mere heroic ends alone, he manages to be all over the fingerboard (and beyond), massaging and coaxing the strings into slithering lines that seep out like the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning. (Parrots don't drink coffee but they can follow a warm scent nonetheless.) I will admit that once or twice his breaks went on a bit too long for their own good. It's also possible that on replay some of the guitar work would seem more standard than I've described it. But that doesn't change the fact that in the immediacy of the live performance context what came across was an endlessly inventive instrumentalist with an original style.

I should add that while he did not do very many acoustic numbers, the one or two that he did suggested that he would be as capable of keeping his audience on the edge of their seats in an all acoustic concert as he was with the strat. His one lengthy fingerstyle attack was like a guitar-picking master class.

As for the songwriting, it did not ake long to see where he's coming from. There is an Irish lilt to almost everything, but rhythmically he does such amazing things with this underlying material that it is all but cloaked. The words kept grabbing me like the guitar work - somewhat unexpected but almost always satisfying and provocative. He played several songs from his recent album Sweet Warrior, opening with the album opener "Needle and Thread"' we also got at least "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" (some controversy about this one) and "Bad Monkey". This CD is sure to find its way to my stacks soon. SInce I don't know much of his older material by name I can't tell you how much of it he played, but with rain breaks and all he was on for almost 90 minutes.

It would be criminal not to mention one of the most brilliant things about his concert" Thompson's band. Pete Zorn sort of defines the term "multi-instrumentalist", playing not only backup but extended solos on most of his instruments. These included at least mandolin, guitar, baritone sax and a couple of other horns (alto and soprano, perhaps). In additon he contributed the high harmonies, which rang out clear and accurate in spite of his years. I believe the drummer was Earl Harvin, though if so he cut his hair. (Thompson's introduction of the band members came at the very end, and was none too clear, unfortunately.) In any case, he had enough stage presence to play the concert on his own, technique to burn, and an uncanny ability to complement Thompson's unique style. I assume the bassist was Rory McFarlane (I don't know what any of these guys look like, and the web sites have limited information); again, whoever it was, he provided more than a solid foundation, posting a clean and flowing bass line that alllowed the songs and the breaks the freedom to move around as they wished.

As if to offer a grand finale as unusual as the rest of his work, Thompson broke a string near the end of his set, and someone waltzed out in the middle of his solo with a new instrument, placed it around his neck and remove the other, as he blithely carried on hardly missing a beat. During an encore I assume it was his son who was introduced as Timmy Thompson. THe younger folkrocker accompanied Richard on guiatar and vocals.

P.S. - I hope to upload some photos shortly; meanwhile, for a gorgeous photo of the concert please see the brief review at Majikthise.

Art Spaces: Soho, Storm King, Dia, MOMA, Serra

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Thu, 24 May 2007 02:58:00 +0000

Some rude pigeon pooped on Parrot's laptop, infecting it with diseases of the most various and unpleasant sorts. Five or six anti-malware program downloads later, the Winged Blogger is back in action, though not quite out of the woods. (My taskbar and start button only work now if I run a shareware program that fixes them every time I log in.) Parrot proposes to revive several levels of Dante's inferno for the people responsible for these nuisances: Level 1 for idiots who think it is just fun to write stuff that screws up other people's systems; Level 2 for adware and spam moguls and people who help them; Level 3 for Sony and Google and other MultiInational Information Control Freaks who invade your privacy for a living... Level 7 for Microsoft, who sells you junk that is susceptible to these invasions. Okay, I squawcked my piece.

A few weeks back the culture vultures lit down in Soho and did the 90-minute gallery tour. It wasn't planned that way - the plan was to do the 3-hour Chelsea gallery tour. But you know about the best laid plans of birds and men. Parrot, who is proud to be able to boast of being an art pro (sui generis, that is - squawck!) was fairly surprised to find that there are still 90 minutes worth of galleries left in Soho, which used to be the mecca of the contemporary art world until the Dia Foundation set up shop in west Chelsea, and everyone else followed. (At least I think that's what happened, but you can probably find alternate NYC cultural histories if you look around.) But there you go, more galleries than I could squeeze into a short afternoon.

Parrot first flapped into Lumas, a recently opened purveyor of photographic color prints in "affordable" editions. I particularly dug the Julia Christes and David Burdenys, found the Stefanie Schneiders a bit too emotionally distant, and hated the laminated surfaces of most of the displayed stock. More German photographers than you can shake ein dreipod at. The staff at Lumas is quite helpful and will engage you in conversation until you almost want to buy a photograph to make them happy. At the Multiple Impressions gallery on Wooster St. we admired the work of a young artist named Jennifer Scott McLaughlin. These days, if you want to invest in art, you grab somebody as they're heading out the door of an art school, still in cap and gown, with diploma in one hand and graduate project in the other, and purchase their best work for the price of a Korean car. Then you go home and pray for the next three years that somebody important discovers them. At Franklin Bowles galleries on West Broadway we were impressed with Gottfried Salzmann's washed and overlaid urban landscapes. No newbie he, but perhaps not as well known as he might be - none of the online art info sites I know of have him listed.

We hit a few other galleries, taking in everything from some fairly dull sculpture (but was it supposed to come to a point?), a bit of tromp l'oeuil painting that seemed to move with you as you passed by, and some neato-neo-surrealist stuff of a roughly Sgt.Pepper-cover sort. If the Boids had a few bucks to throw around we'd have come home with enough to cover the limited remaining wall space in our nest. Unfortunately, we have to leave art collecting to those who can afford it, at least until another thousand or ten people start clicking on Parrot's illustrious Lamppost, and the Googs start sending me some greenbacks. Wait a minute, I am a greenback...

Anyway, having caught the art bug (yum) we decided to take a longer flight. This time the birds were drawn to a Beacon, specifically that Beacon along the Hudson River where Dia has set up shop in a big old factory. Last year we winged it to the famous sculpture garden at Storm King, where we were primarily impressed by Mark di Suvero's delicately imposing forms. We liked di Suvero's idea that these towering sheet metal abstractions could repair man's damaged relationship to the environment, and perhaps even to one another. How, exactly, remained unclear, but I think it has something to do with the the fact that we can feel their tonnage as lightly as we feel a Calder mobile, poised vulnerably in their spaces and thereby establishing an equality with our fragile forms. Read Heidegger on technology and you might get a sense of how this could serve to halt our very concept of our own civilization and its endless quest to conquer the environment. (I really didn't set out to write about the Storm King trip, but it was one of the adventures that inspired me to start this blog. Took quite a while before the plan was realized.)

More or less across the water is Beacon. We lit on the Dia in the afternoon, and were barely in the door when we were confronted with two rooms next to one another, each about the length of a city block. These spaces contained Walter De Maria's The Equal Area Series, which consists of many pairs of two silvery shapes, a circle and a square, set one after the other. In each pair, the circle and square have equal areas. But the area of each set differs from that of the previous one, in such a way (according to the artist) that in one room, the pieces counteract the narrowing effect of distance, while in the other they enhance it. (I suppose if you make the unforgivable mistake of approaching the exhibit backwards the effects are reversed.) This opening salvo heralds one of the M&M themes of Dia: Math and Materials. Obsession with mathematical relations is everywhere, like you stepped through the door of a Pythagorean oracle. One artist after another is described as being "fascinated with numbers" or something like that, and the "conceptual" in their art is partly based on the philosophical that these mathematical relationships are solid and real and permanent, for all their abstraction. Like art. Tsa. (An expression one of my acquaintances used to use, meaning roughly "over and done with!" Parrots like expressions to be short and sweet.)

The mathematical theming of Dia's "conceptual" art is often reflected in the strongly geometrical nature of the works, which is nowhere more abundant than in Sol LeWitt's wall drawings. Sometimes entitled according their mathematical concepts, these unbelievably anal works cover entire large walls with finely ruled pencil markings. Ranging from simple ideas like "Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly" to complex concepts involving midpoints and arcs and whatnot, these works often shimmer with fantasized colors as our visual mechanisms try to come to terms with the unimaginable division of white spaces. Undeniably impressive, conceptual by definition, these works for me nevertheless seem closer to what is usually labelled "outsider art" - which is for the most part art by people with various DSM III illnesses - the ones who build incredibly detailed temples out of aluminum foil or cover the sides of barns with inscriptions that only they can decipher. One can imagine LeWitt, who has recently departed this life, trying in the next one to dig a hole to China with a spoon.

In fact, Michael Heizer has supplied Dia with something of a beginning to this project, a large space composed of four large, variously shaped holes in the floor. The holes might well be the result of surrounding another of Dia's illustrious art spaces with concrete - I mean Richard Serra's towering curved walls. These rusted metallic sculptures have become something of an artworld icon. Serra is touted as "a titan of sculpture, one of the last great modernists" - by no less than NY Times art critic Michael Kimmelman (6/1/07 p.E25). Serra is all over the place these days, with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), a large permanent installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (you know, the art space designed by that other ubiquitous supporter of steel prices, Frank Gehry) and plenty of recent exhibitions at major spaces like the Gagosian Gallery. Serra's work is sometimes explained in terms of its psychological origin, e.g., that he worked in steel yards. The artist himself has pointed to his experience seeing the hull of a ship raised as the origin of his ideas. That is interesting, but of course nobody outside the Duchamp school looks at rusted ship hulls as art, so the next stop is to talk about the fact that you need to move around in Serra's works to observe them, or that it is not physically possible to take in an entire work at once. "They're too complicated; from the outside you don't know what the inside is like, and vice versa", says Kimmelman in his review, adding that really "there is no inside or outside". That's good, but the same is true of the shell of a condemned building. Which might be made into art - through murals, graffiti, photography, etc. - but I don't think anyone is inviting graffiti artists to help out Serra's iron maidens.

What the critics are getting at is that Serra's work forces observers to use their imagination - to envision the work in their "mind's eye" even though it is right there in all its massive ferrous presence (or is it ferric? neither, I think; thank god for high school chemistry). As Kimmelman again puts it: "What matters in the end are your own reactions while moving through the sculptures, at a given moment, the works being Rorschachs of indeterminate meaning" (p.E28). But in my HO, for a leading art critic to write this without blinking is pretty scary. Because this applies to not only abandoned buildings but any object under the sun. This is Duchamp (or George Dickie) aesthetics on stilts: it's art if you put it in a museum, and it says whatever you make it say, and it means what you want it to mean. Okay, thanks, Richard, Mike... Aesthetic Relativism 101 is dismissed, see you next week.

This is not some isolated issue about the value of recent works by one contemporary artist. Serra's Tilted Arc (1981) is often pointed to as a turning point in the debate over public art. His description of the work matches pretty much what we have been talking about: "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_a.html) Serra's work was eventually removed and destroyed by court order. This criminal act of "justice" was clearly based on the idea that public complaints about the inconvenience of walking around Tilted Arc and other lowbrow issues carry more weight than our cultural heritage, even when ithe latter consists of several tons of steel. But the travesty of judicial idiocy and the closed minds of Federal Plaza secretaries do not settle the question: what is the value of this art? For if it indeed has no meaning of its own then I don't see why anyone should give a hoot whether it was removed or not. Somebody put it there; somebody can take it away. Why did they put it there? There had better be a reason.

This reason is not provided by the relativist idea that art is just a kind of prop that you use to "play games of make-believe", as Kendall Walton puts it. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a poem, "A Coney Isalnd of the Mind", which begins with a war image from Goya and then paints a picture of suburban post-War America in which he imagines the insipid images of billboards and superficial suburban bliss as a re-enactment of that suffering in a different form. A "Coney Island of the mind" is what Walton and Kimmelman seem to think art is; a Torqued Ellipse is a good place to play splatter-paint games with your imagination. But Ferlinghetti's poem suggests that Coney Island is a troubled place and the artist is not a roller coaster operator but a tightrope walker without a net: he is "constantly risking absurdity/and death/whenever he performs/above the heads/of his audience"; moreover he must do this "all without mistaking/ any thing/ for what it may not be" (#15). Roughly: art uses our illusions of who we are to reflect back to us who we really are: our sometimes ghoulish, soulless banality, our paranoia, our inhumanity.

Now my guess is this: Serra's superficial description of Tilted Arc does not reveal his true hand as an artist; that, rather, partly comes out in his response to its demise: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people" (same source). Certainly not from the 20th century onward. Art is not democratic, and it does not therefore suggest that whatever we think it means, then by definition, that's what it means. It is not an amusement park of the mind. It is a tightrope act, and with Tilted Arc, Serra did not so much fall as he was knocked down by the chorus of boos from people whose culture is defined by the Burger King across the street. But I don't know what poses the greater danger: these inanities from below, or the relativist interpretations from above. Serra's works are terrifying, they threaten to fall, they threaten to capture and destroy you, they separate you from your sense of direction and balance and purpose and wrap you in mystery. They are metallic forms of vertigo; they separate spaces from one another so that you cannot rejoin them with your senses, and the fact that you can do so with your imagination is small consolation for their disorienting message. They mean precisely what they are, and precisely not what you want them to mean.

But no great art is so one-dimensional as to have merely a negative meaning. In the fact that they do not fall, that they do not trap and destroy you, that they do, as Serra says, respond to changes in your viewing position, they reintroduce a kind of humanism just when it all seemed to be headed down a black spiral vortex. You can touch these works; you can smell them; you can even hear them. Consciousness is vast, strange, confusing; perception is local, tangible and more or less well-behaved. The small grain of truth in the relativist perspective is that it is up to each of us to take what opportunities we can to restore what we have lost. And what is that? Perhaps the innocence that fled as the modern era of communication, transportation, nuclear nightmare and genocide unfolded. Serra's sculptures are the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration, shards of our existence left when all is destroyed. But they are just as much the prevision of that event, allowing us to reflect on it before it happens. They are the walls that separate us but also the smooth curves that let us flow together; the shadow over us, and the noir film that still lights the theater - and which we can edit by wandering through the theater. Like Mark di Suvero, his enormous, desnse compositions can be taken to Coney Island, where they have no weight at all. They give us the present as it is, but also the future as it might be. The former we can't control; the latter is all up to us. (Anti-Relativism 201 is dismissed.)

Serra is one of the outstanding examples of the second of Dia's two themes, the aesthetic use of the sensual properties of materials. Throughout Dia we find materials speaking for themselves: piles of broken glass, enormous stones, the color variations of sheet metal and the tree ring patterns on plywood. Donald Judd is another highly influential exponent of this school, and he is represented here in part by an installation of plywood boxes. Their polished surfaces undulate with natural tree-ring patterns that seem to express some sort of pulsating energy inside. Having just bantered about Serra I'm not going to do Donald Judd right now (or maybe ever) but the two of them sort of lead the second pack: the material guys. And what does all this have to say? Think about it: you've got the math guys, and the material guys. Mathematical relations are usually thought of as being immaterial, but fixed, unchanging. Stone and wood and glass appear to be extremely hard, solid but in fact they are transitory. The fixed immaterial and the transitory material... what binds them together in Dia, the postmodern space par excellence? The fact that the artist submits, in part, to qualities that exist outside, beyond her control; and this is the window through which the observer, in all his relativistic exuberance, can enter and direct - up to a point. The observer can bind to the works through the universality or apparent permanence, but must then try to understand how the artist means to use these properties.

That is, if the "art" is really worth anything, the artist does not merely assemble and sign off. Something is being said here, otherwise it ain't art - or if you prefer, it ain't good art (and this sentence either ain't English or it ain't good English). One thing I insist on is that mere flowery descriptions of Serra and his aesthetic, or Donald Judd and his, or Gerhard Richter and his grey glass, or Robert Smithson and his, such as we find in much superficial art criticism and commentary, does not make it art/good. The works say something or they don't, and if not, goodbye. What they say doesn't have to be obvious, or discernible without the artist's input. Part of what made me appreciate the Di Suveros was a film on his work that was showing at the main building at Storm King. Di Suvero makes no pretense, as some artists do, that his work has no meaning. People have meaning; people who do art funnel their meanings through artistic expressions, and filter them through the conventions of the artworld. Never believe artists who says their work has no meaning; or rather, treat this pretense as just another part of their art.

I should not leave Dia without mentioning that there are some rooms there that do not seem especially indebted to mathematerials. Then again, paint is a material, a point that I'm sure is not lost on Donald Judd or his school. There are paintings here that appear to be solidly in the abstract tradition - a stunning space full of Agnes Martin's work, large, striped canvases of washed-out pastel colors, with names like "Love", "Happiness", "The Sea", and - most commonly - "Untitled". Sometimes life makes one want to just crawl inside one of these works and fall asleep. At the other end of the color spectrum lie the much smaller works of Blinky Palermo, whose installation consists of several canvases collectively entitled "To the People of New York City". Their iridescent reds and yellows (labelled "cadmium") bring to mind another straightedged homage to the Big CrabApple, Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie". I'm afraid I don't really see any conceptual relationship between these works and the Dia's M&M artists. Though there is plenty of bridge work: Warhol, for example, whose silkscreen method is in a way a median between the deliberate application of paint and the appropriation of existing materials; or the amazing chamber of John Chamberlain, whose metallic sculptures are largely obtained from automobile junkyards, but in some cases offer stunning bursts of color. Color here is not a property of the material - but then again, it is, insofar as the material is an already painted object. The colors appear to say: "We are not Art Museum Colors; we are not Mother Nature's Colors; we are Automobile Paint Shop colors! But we appear very natural, don't we? Are we worse just because we're different?"

Well, color is to mathematics as paint is to material. Or so it seems; but many philosophers, from John Locke on, have thought that color is merely in the mind of the beholder. That is, merely like beauty. A good, if somewhat relativistic, note on which to end this essay.

Spidey vs. Sandy and Gooey

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Alterman) — Wed, 16 May 2007 22:36:00 +0000

Of course you're all waiting with baited breath for Spiderman and Philosophy, the inevitable next step from Open Court after The Matrix and Philosophy, James Bond and Philosophy, The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, etc. There are already 30 of these titles, with more to come, including, for example, Johnny Cash and Philosophy (hello?) and Soccer and Philosophy (a sequel to Bocce and Philosophy, no doubt). Superheroes and Philosophy (Open Court, 2005) has a lead article by Mark Waid, a former neighbor and friend of yours truly, the squawcking blogger, but it is not a big Spiderman production. (Mark is basically a D.C. guy, as far as I know. As attested to by the collection of Batman lapel pins I think I still have from a box of stuff he gave me.) Spidey the comic book character is way overdue his own philosophy book, and even in his Sam Raimi incarnation is now as grown up as Frodo or Neo. So why not Spidey and Philosophy? Stick it next to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and you've got your summer reading.

But why do people keep throwing rotten tomatoes at Sam Raimi's new flick? Are they jealous that they didn't get to suspend Kirsten Dunst 80 stories above a Manhattan sidewalk and drop large vehicles in her general direction? I don't think so... No, it's a little more than that. True, part of the problem here is that the story is going off in more directions than the particles at FermiLab, including, yes, a particle accelerator that somehow turns Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) into a mass of loosely bonded silicon, a.k.a., the Sandman. And let's not forget the self-propelled rubbery black goop from outer space (Dark Matter, anyone?) that is on a mission to attach itself in some form or other to Our Hero (Tobey Maguire) and change him into a vindictive schmuck who alienates everyone from Girlfriend (not you, Owl - the almost as lovely Dunst as Mary Jane) to the whole of Gotham City (whoops, wrong comic; even wrong publisher).

And there are ten or twelve subplots to supplement these themes, keeping the viewer in a state of constant anticipation until the very end, when (as it turns out) none of them are worked out very well. Marko, for example, became a naughty bank robber in search of money to pay for medicine for his sick daughter, who appears early in the film; and then, as Sandman, he then joins up with a johnny-come-lately character called Venom to destroy Spidey; but the link between Marko's fatherly quest and Sandy's vengeance is awfully thin, and the unfortunate daughter drops out completely without resolution of her crisis. (I guess the kids who see this film are supposed to assume she just dies?) There are lots of other themes that sort of spin off the screen rather than leading to any useful fictional content.

Aside from the issues with the thematic content, the critics I read on Rotten Tomatoes were mostly riffing on a lot of technical issues with the special effects. But in my opinion the issue with them was not technical, but ontological. Sandy, for example, was technically well done; the problem is, what is he? He seems to accumulate body mass when he comes in contact with sand, and lose it in various ways, which include water, and, strangely enough, fire. Sand burns? At the temperature of lava, I guess, but from some ordinary scorchers that Harry fires from his flying skateboard? Maybe they were tactical nuclear weapons? Not too smart in the middle of Gotham City, Harry. But no matter what happens to Sandman, he always returns to good (?) old flesh-and-blood Flint Marko. The nukes hit the sand but missed Marko? Sometimes Marko seems to turn willfully into a sandstorm and drift away, as if he caught a tailwind and just sailed off. He comes, goes, falls apart, reappears - when he pounds Spidey he must be one pretty solid piece of beach, but then he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West. (She's just a bad dream after all, but... hey, Sandman, I get it, he's just here to put Spidey and his gal pal to sleep?)

In the end, this hunk of waterside real estate is so ontologically vague that you can't wrap your mind around him. You can say "lack of imagination", but I'll just come back with "imaginative resistance" - this character puts you in a foul mood that makes you not want to let him be. Too much work. Stick him in an hourglass where at least he's got some contours. I'm sorry, but you have to be able to get inside a character to appreciate it. When I try to get inside Sandman I just fall right out the other side and rush off to rinse my face.

Now, as for Gooey - he's just as vague, if not self-contradictory. Gooey begins life in the manner described above, a gelatinous black thing that resembles two large arachnids having sex after crawling through an oil slick on the way up from the sewer. It is not only self-propelled, but self-motivated, at least more so than some of the people in my office. For it wants to attach itself to Spidey, as if to a soulmate, and tracks him down, eventually wrapping him up in a black version of the famous red-and-blue Spidey costume. It then bonds with him - not emotionally - well, yes, emotionally - and causes him to seek revenge for his uncle's presumed death at the hands of Marko, to destroy the shards of Mary Jane's singing career, and to upend the hopes of aspiring cub photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) who wants to catch Spidey doing a no-no.

Time out. Said photographer plagiarized a photo and then doctored it to make it look like Spidey messed up. Why does it count as spiteful to set this guy on his ear? Anyway, so far Gooey is only a bit of obvious bad blood (people are not supposed to be vengeful, superheroes least of all) but things get very fuzzy soon enough. For one thing, Spidey's got a scientist friend who discovers that the jelly spider glop is a germ that can infect his blood. Right - so how is it that ripping off the black costume cures blood poisoning and its personality effects? Oh how symbolic, Spidey rips it off in a church, where some of it just happens to fall on the aforementioned would-be cub photographer. But since Cubby is already a vindictive bastard, what difference does it make? Well, never mind, he now turns into the Truly Evil Negative-Spiderman, so denoted by the fact that he has sharp fangs and is called Venom. How is it that the glop sought out Spidey like it was on a mission, but now it just happens to land a few floors below on Cubby, like some tar dripping from the roof on a hot day? Well, that's the last time we entrust an important mission to some semi-conscious gob of icky black latex.

So now, wearing the black-spidey costume, Cubby goes for Spidey's throat, but ends up... well, I can't give away everything. But of course he gets nailed, and not by antibiotics either. Gooey's morphology thus includes black goo from planet X, a gelatinous web that wraps itself around Spidey, a Spidey costume with personality flaws, a Venom costume with periodontal problems and an attitude, and finally some inanimate form that the world doesn't have to worry about anymore. Thanks, Sam - what's up next, the Pastrami Sandwich from Hell?

So there you have the real reason Spiderman 3 is a mess: ontological ambiguity! It ain't the technology, folks, it's what you do with it. Though the movie has its moments of visual interest, and occasionally tests our creativity in figuring out how Spidey will get out of this or that mess (literal and figurative), it is basically about two over-morphed bits of material and a bunch of loose ends.

Oh, did I mention the parallel jewelry thing? In a touch that makes the whole story just shy of Pynchonesqe ersatz non-randomness, Spidey (that is, Peter Parker) often clutches an engagement ring his aunt gave him, which he hopes to lay on Mary Jane, while Sandy clutches a locket his daughter gave him. I'll be darned if there isn't some good old-fashioned aesthetic device being offered here, but either its point is lost in the miasma of conflicting expectations and hanging judgments, or it's like I said, a Pynchonesque device to make us look for connections that just ain't there. True, we get forgiveness on various levels (have to, Spidey gave up the black goo in a church, after all!) and a few other sort of obvious emotional plays, but the overall feeling is not redemption, and there's too much baloney for any clear sense of resolution. Maybe Raimi should have tried a Fellini ending, with all the misfits and materials and biohazards meandering into a ballroom and doing a hora or something. It would not have solved either the ontological problems or the tangle of threads, but it would have been a substitute for closure - about the best that could be achieved under the circumstances.

Oh, did I mention the bit about the pseudo-romance with Peter's classmate...? Harry's effort to avenge his father's death...? The butler who tells him how Dad really died...? The truth about how uncle was really murdered...? Auntie's counseling of Peter's amorous adventures....? The editor who wants to prove that Spidey is a fraud...? Oh, what the heck, just go see the movie, you know your kids are going to drag you there anyway. What do kids care about ontology and thematic dissipation? No more than they care about the banality of the dialogue. And neither should you, if you're just out for a night of glitzy fun. Just don't plan to take this film seriously.