I have just watched CNN for an hour, and I feel I must comment about it. There was a time, during the Iraq war, when I admired CNN and counted on it for reliable news. That time is gone. During the past hour, the best that CNN has been able to manage is an extensive coverage of the first openly gay professional football player, and an interview with disgraced LA Clippers owner, Donald Sterling.
In the first, openly gay anchor Don Lemon questioned a supposedly expert panel about the player's now viral kiss of his boyfriend upon learning that he had been drafted by the NFL. This incident, which ought to have merited a passing comment at most, was the subject of nearly half an hour of national TV time. The expert panel admitted, each in his or her own way, that they had never seen anything like this phenomenon, and, so, could not possibly be experts upon it. Leaving aside the point that this is now professional football player burst into tears and kissed his boyfriend, the fact that Lemon -- the same news anchor who asked a guest whether the missing Malaysia airliner could have been swallowed by a black hole -- felt that it deserved the nation's attention for an entire news program, when children are missing in Nigeria, innocents are being slaughtered in Syria, missiles are being launched in North Korea (over Stalinist prison camps), Vladimir Putin is trying to morph into a latter day tsar, and Democrats are refusing to participate in an effort to learn what really happened the day an American ambassador and three others were murdered in Libya, represents a new high in journalistic lows.
Then there was the continuing public pillorying of 80-year-old Clippers owner Sterling, who had the misfortune to make a damn fool of himself in an illegally tape recorded phone conversation with his girlfriend, who is less than half his age. I have read the transcript of that conversation, and if he could not tell that he was being baited and set up for exposure by a resentful mistress, he does not deserve to have a professional sports franchise, let alone two billion dollars. For those offenses he ought to be dismissed out of hand by the news, not to say by the NBA, but Anderson Cooper felt it was essential to scoop the other cable-gapers by interviewing the hapless octogenarian at length, and to the exclusion of all else that is plaguing our world these days. Who cares?! Sterling is a very foolish, fond old man, as Shakespeare said, who ought to resign in shame and be forgotten. But such is the fodder of cable news these days, which has such low standards that it cannot resist twisting the knife in any open wound.
Add to this the fact that CNN has striven almost singlehandedly to keep alive the missing Malaysia airliner story for nearly two months, pointlessly reporting every day and night that there is nothing to report, while parading the same "I really don't know anything new either" panels of experts. I submit that CNN, which has ceded its news pedigree to cooking shows and faux-documentaries in a feckless search for ratings, has ceased to exist as a serious source of news. This is news as social networking, hash-tag journalism, with stories driven by twitter. It is, quite simply, a bad joke.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Birthday logic
Another birthday has gone by, mercifully unnoticed. However, as I get older (and I am certainly doing that), I find that I appreciate the example and spirit of children more and more. I am fortunate in that I have an eleven year old, a fact which keeps me in touch with young children. I started, and mentor, a literary magazine at his school, and I work closely with the children in its preparation and publishing. We meet at lunchtime once a week, and, while in production, I spend hours with them at weekends. Doing so is more than enjoyable and rewarding; it is inspiring. This year, from a student body of some 330 children, we had over 1000 submissions, and reading them and discussing them with our staff of middle-schoolers was a real joy.
The imagination and native creativity of children far surpass those of most adults, whose consciousness has been narrowed and cowed by the exigencies of daily life and work. Somerset Maugham said that the writer is the only truly free person. Children are the free-est of the writers. Their imaginations can fly to any height or mold themselves to any conceivable (or inconceivable) shape or logic. They are as unrestrained as seagulls, or as the butterflies which seem to fascinate them so, and about which they often write.
This year, for example, we had a first grader who was asked to write about his fears. He stated that he feared only two things: swimming, "because it takes so much power," and... super-massive black holes. How he put those two things together defeats me, though I suppose both are powerful threats, one from the Rose Bowl aquatics center, and the other from interstellar space.
Another first grader wrote about the first Thanksgiving. The winter was so bad, she declared, that "only fifty-two and a half Pilgrims survived." Now, I suspect that I have met the descendants of that half-Pilgrim: they are liberals. And a pre-K child, perhaps four years old, wrote, as so many do, about butterflies; yet in her single paragraph essay, she managed to take the subject from monarchs to megalodons, a kind of pre-historic great white shark, apparently without any mental strain. I submit that no adult writer could have achieved this feat; certainly not with the ease and grace of logic that she exhibited.
Tolstoy famously asked: Shall we teach the children to write, or will they teach us? To me, the answer is obvious: we must go to school to them. However, I fear, we grown-up writers are far too wise, and life and our craft have made our imaginations far too ossified, to allow us to slip back gracefully into the fluid logic of the child. And literature is the worse for that.
The imagination and native creativity of children far surpass those of most adults, whose consciousness has been narrowed and cowed by the exigencies of daily life and work. Somerset Maugham said that the writer is the only truly free person. Children are the free-est of the writers. Their imaginations can fly to any height or mold themselves to any conceivable (or inconceivable) shape or logic. They are as unrestrained as seagulls, or as the butterflies which seem to fascinate them so, and about which they often write.
This year, for example, we had a first grader who was asked to write about his fears. He stated that he feared only two things: swimming, "because it takes so much power," and... super-massive black holes. How he put those two things together defeats me, though I suppose both are powerful threats, one from the Rose Bowl aquatics center, and the other from interstellar space.
Another first grader wrote about the first Thanksgiving. The winter was so bad, she declared, that "only fifty-two and a half Pilgrims survived." Now, I suspect that I have met the descendants of that half-Pilgrim: they are liberals. And a pre-K child, perhaps four years old, wrote, as so many do, about butterflies; yet in her single paragraph essay, she managed to take the subject from monarchs to megalodons, a kind of pre-historic great white shark, apparently without any mental strain. I submit that no adult writer could have achieved this feat; certainly not with the ease and grace of logic that she exhibited.
Tolstoy famously asked: Shall we teach the children to write, or will they teach us? To me, the answer is obvious: we must go to school to them. However, I fear, we grown-up writers are far too wise, and life and our craft have made our imaginations far too ossified, to allow us to slip back gracefully into the fluid logic of the child. And literature is the worse for that.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Rutting at Rutgers
I was a student for many, many years. In college and in grad school, I was proud of my status as student -- I thought it one of the highest callings of humanity -- and I took my role very seriously. My goal was to learn as much as I could from as many thoughtful people as I could find. It didn't matter to me who they were nor what their backgrounds; it mattered not at all whether I agreed with them or not. In fact, I rather sought out people with whom I disagreed, to test the validity of my ideas and take the risk of acquiring new ones that might change my point of view. This, to me, was what a student was and did. A learner.
Today I was both dismayed and disgusted by the news that Condoleezza Rice has been obliged to decline her invitation to speak at the commencement ceremony at Rutgers University. This, as a result of a protest by a minority of students whose voices were more active than their intellectual curiosity. It was, ostensibly, her role in shaping the U.S. invasion of Iraq that prompted the protests, and the craven response by the faculty and administration which enabled it. This is, or ought to be, viewed by anyone who values free speech, as a disgrace of the first order.
Through years of post-secondary education, both in this country and in France, I had been forced to listen to the ranting, often hysterical, of leftist professors, while I was simply trying to construct for myself the best education I could manage. I will state frankly that many of my professors in college and grad school were socialists, indeed, some even communists, but I endured their strident, irrelevant and occasionally insulting diatribes for the sake of learning what they might have to teach me that would be of value to me in my later life. I recall distinctly a professor of cinematography at the Paris Film Conservatory, a self-professed communist, who was in the habit of singling me out, as the only American at the school, for particular disparagement. I endured it all in silence, because he was a good film teacher, and I needed to learn from him how to calculate the hyper-focal distance of a lens, and how properly to roll up the cable of a 1000 watt light. These things he did teach me, but with a gratuitous condemnation of the Bill of Rights in between.
My favorite professor of all was a far-left socialist who taught Russian Literature. In his classes I was much more interested in his views on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than I was in those on the Polish labor movement or American imperialism. I valued what he had to teach about War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, and not what he personally believed about American capitalism. I craved to learn from him about literature, and I ignored the political propaganda that came with it.
In my decades of education, I learned to filter out the politically-driven nonsense and focus on the pedagogic core. Much of what my professors said -- even those I most admired -- was nonsense-inspired ideology, but that did not mean I did not listen, and think, and debate, and absorb. Because that is what a student does -- that is what a student is. A learner, above and before all else. And it was for this principle -- the right to listen and debate and be exposed to every point of view, regardless of what those in authority believed -- that I, and many others in the student movement of the Sixties and Seventies, fought and sacrificed for, and strove to establish as a vital principle of academic freedom.
Now, in the twenty-first century, to hear that a student body refuses to listen to someone with whom they disagree is repugnant to me. Do they not understand that, during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, and the era of Watergate, we fought for the right of students to listen to opposing points of view? That some of us put our freedom, and even our lives, on the line so that others might be exposed to unpopular speech? Do they not understand that their intellectual and spiritual predecessors in protest fought for the right of free speech and discussion, even, as at Kent State, at the point of a bayonet and bullets?
These so-called students at Rutgers, who have said to Condoleezza Rice: We do not want to hear what you have to say, and we do not want anyone else to hear it either, are backtracking. They are undoing what we, in the generation of the students' rights movement, sought to create: the right to be heard no matter how much we, or our superiors, might disagree. These alleged students at Rutgers are not progressives -- they are fascists; they are not new millennials, they are Mussolini. They represent everything we in the Sixties and Seventies, whom they claim to admire, fought against. They are the enemy.
Condoleezza Rice is a woman of extraordinary accomplishments: a concert pianist who has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, a Phi Beta Kappa, a professor at Stanford, the first black woman Secretary of State, a personage admired around the world for her achievements. Whether or not you agree with her foreign policy decisions in the Bush administration, any intelligent person must bow to what she has achieved though her race, her gender and her politics were against her. I say to the so-called students at Rutgers: No matter what you think of her foreign policy decisions, this is a woman from whom you can learn -- this is a human being whom you, as students, ought to hear.
Now, on the question of who you would invite to your precious commencement (which you have already discredited), I would ask the following:
Franklin Roosevelt prepared, and Harry Truman carried out, the nuclear bombing of Japan. Would you allow them to speak?
John F. Kennedy got us involved in Vietnam, disgraced the presidency with his sexual profligacy, and brought us to the brink of World War III in Cuba. Would you allow him to speak?
Bill Clinton presided over a war in Yugoslavia, launched a cruise missile attack on a baby formula factory in Sudan, and had against him credible allegations of rape. Would you allow him to speak?
Of course you would. And that fact reveals the essential hypocrisy of your protest, and the naked cowardice of the professors and administrators who have allowed you to prevail: Condoleezza Rice has the temerity to be a black woman who is also a conservative. And it is for that you will not forgive her, and for that you will forbid her even to speak at your temple of learning. You are not students: in the words of Holden Caulfied, on whom you cut your cultural teeth, you are phonies.
Today I was both dismayed and disgusted by the news that Condoleezza Rice has been obliged to decline her invitation to speak at the commencement ceremony at Rutgers University. This, as a result of a protest by a minority of students whose voices were more active than their intellectual curiosity. It was, ostensibly, her role in shaping the U.S. invasion of Iraq that prompted the protests, and the craven response by the faculty and administration which enabled it. This is, or ought to be, viewed by anyone who values free speech, as a disgrace of the first order.
Through years of post-secondary education, both in this country and in France, I had been forced to listen to the ranting, often hysterical, of leftist professors, while I was simply trying to construct for myself the best education I could manage. I will state frankly that many of my professors in college and grad school were socialists, indeed, some even communists, but I endured their strident, irrelevant and occasionally insulting diatribes for the sake of learning what they might have to teach me that would be of value to me in my later life. I recall distinctly a professor of cinematography at the Paris Film Conservatory, a self-professed communist, who was in the habit of singling me out, as the only American at the school, for particular disparagement. I endured it all in silence, because he was a good film teacher, and I needed to learn from him how to calculate the hyper-focal distance of a lens, and how properly to roll up the cable of a 1000 watt light. These things he did teach me, but with a gratuitous condemnation of the Bill of Rights in between.
My favorite professor of all was a far-left socialist who taught Russian Literature. In his classes I was much more interested in his views on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than I was in those on the Polish labor movement or American imperialism. I valued what he had to teach about War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, and not what he personally believed about American capitalism. I craved to learn from him about literature, and I ignored the political propaganda that came with it.
In my decades of education, I learned to filter out the politically-driven nonsense and focus on the pedagogic core. Much of what my professors said -- even those I most admired -- was nonsense-inspired ideology, but that did not mean I did not listen, and think, and debate, and absorb. Because that is what a student does -- that is what a student is. A learner, above and before all else. And it was for this principle -- the right to listen and debate and be exposed to every point of view, regardless of what those in authority believed -- that I, and many others in the student movement of the Sixties and Seventies, fought and sacrificed for, and strove to establish as a vital principle of academic freedom.
Now, in the twenty-first century, to hear that a student body refuses to listen to someone with whom they disagree is repugnant to me. Do they not understand that, during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, and the era of Watergate, we fought for the right of students to listen to opposing points of view? That some of us put our freedom, and even our lives, on the line so that others might be exposed to unpopular speech? Do they not understand that their intellectual and spiritual predecessors in protest fought for the right of free speech and discussion, even, as at Kent State, at the point of a bayonet and bullets?
These so-called students at Rutgers, who have said to Condoleezza Rice: We do not want to hear what you have to say, and we do not want anyone else to hear it either, are backtracking. They are undoing what we, in the generation of the students' rights movement, sought to create: the right to be heard no matter how much we, or our superiors, might disagree. These alleged students at Rutgers are not progressives -- they are fascists; they are not new millennials, they are Mussolini. They represent everything we in the Sixties and Seventies, whom they claim to admire, fought against. They are the enemy.
Condoleezza Rice is a woman of extraordinary accomplishments: a concert pianist who has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, a Phi Beta Kappa, a professor at Stanford, the first black woman Secretary of State, a personage admired around the world for her achievements. Whether or not you agree with her foreign policy decisions in the Bush administration, any intelligent person must bow to what she has achieved though her race, her gender and her politics were against her. I say to the so-called students at Rutgers: No matter what you think of her foreign policy decisions, this is a woman from whom you can learn -- this is a human being whom you, as students, ought to hear.
Now, on the question of who you would invite to your precious commencement (which you have already discredited), I would ask the following:
Franklin Roosevelt prepared, and Harry Truman carried out, the nuclear bombing of Japan. Would you allow them to speak?
John F. Kennedy got us involved in Vietnam, disgraced the presidency with his sexual profligacy, and brought us to the brink of World War III in Cuba. Would you allow him to speak?
Bill Clinton presided over a war in Yugoslavia, launched a cruise missile attack on a baby formula factory in Sudan, and had against him credible allegations of rape. Would you allow him to speak?
Of course you would. And that fact reveals the essential hypocrisy of your protest, and the naked cowardice of the professors and administrators who have allowed you to prevail: Condoleezza Rice has the temerity to be a black woman who is also a conservative. And it is for that you will not forgive her, and for that you will forbid her even to speak at your temple of learning. You are not students: in the words of Holden Caulfied, on whom you cut your cultural teeth, you are phonies.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
The Porgy Perplex
Last weekend I attended a pre-opening performance of the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess at the Ahmanson Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Though I had sung tunes from the show to my eleven-year-old when he was little, I had never seen a live production of it. And so, when it moved here from Broadway, I took him to see the source of the singing which I had once inflicted upon him.
It was a very good production. The voices were uniformly wonderful. Bess was the highlight of it, her voice full, moving and operatic in quality; Porgy's was rather less so, but it, too, was clear and emotive. Also, the women who sang Serena and Clara were exceptional. The dance numbers suffered from the fact that the Ahmanson stage was too small to allow them to breathe properly. However, they were done in a spirited fashion. The acting was of a high quality across the board, and the orchestra, while understaffed in my opinion, did well.
I had read that the show has been controversial from its inception, having been denounced even by black singers and actors, some of whom refused to participate in it. However, it received a new life, and a new respect, when it was revived in the Seventies, and it is now considered an established part of American musical literature.
I must say that there were moments even in this new-millennial production when I understood the original dissension. Especially in the dance numbers, one could see vestiges of stereotyping that must have been more pronounced in earlier stagings. One of the dances in particular - a funeral dance - was reminiscent of arm-waving, hip-strutting voodoo dance, which I found discomforting. I cannot imagine why the performers agreed to do the number this way; why they did not insist on something less cliched and more creative.
Beyond this, the cast did a very good job of keeping the tone dignified despite the archaic language, and concentrating on the emotional power of the story and the music, while deflecting attention away from the 1930s racial ethos which lurks behind the text. Still, there were moments, as in 'It Ain't Necessarily So,' when I felt that more energy and mischievousness were called for, and I found the villain, for all his physical bulk and booming baritone, to be a bit over the top. Nonetheless, when he was killed, the audience actually cheered - the highest accolade for any stage villain.
Having seen it live on stage in a first-rate production, I find I have mixed feelings about Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin's music is of a very high order for what one could call a popular opera or an operatic musical. It combines European opera with folk tunes, jazz and gospel music in a way that is creative without being condescending. In the blending of traditional and contemporary styles, I was reminded often of Kurt Weill's Three Penny Opera. Porgy, I think, falls into that narrow niche between popular and classical, rather like Bernstein's West Side Story, for example, or his Candide. It is not Oklahoma, but neither is it Don Giovanni.
However, there can be no doubt that Porgy has benefited from the perspective of time: We now see it after eighty years as much a historical artifact as a brilliant work of musical theater. There is no question in my mind that if such a piece were written today it could not find a producer, and, even if it somehow did, it would be howled off the stage by the forces of political correctness long before history had a chance to decide on its social and artistic merits. In short, for all its virtues, Porgy would not be possible today.
It was a very good production. The voices were uniformly wonderful. Bess was the highlight of it, her voice full, moving and operatic in quality; Porgy's was rather less so, but it, too, was clear and emotive. Also, the women who sang Serena and Clara were exceptional. The dance numbers suffered from the fact that the Ahmanson stage was too small to allow them to breathe properly. However, they were done in a spirited fashion. The acting was of a high quality across the board, and the orchestra, while understaffed in my opinion, did well.
I had read that the show has been controversial from its inception, having been denounced even by black singers and actors, some of whom refused to participate in it. However, it received a new life, and a new respect, when it was revived in the Seventies, and it is now considered an established part of American musical literature.
I must say that there were moments even in this new-millennial production when I understood the original dissension. Especially in the dance numbers, one could see vestiges of stereotyping that must have been more pronounced in earlier stagings. One of the dances in particular - a funeral dance - was reminiscent of arm-waving, hip-strutting voodoo dance, which I found discomforting. I cannot imagine why the performers agreed to do the number this way; why they did not insist on something less cliched and more creative.
Beyond this, the cast did a very good job of keeping the tone dignified despite the archaic language, and concentrating on the emotional power of the story and the music, while deflecting attention away from the 1930s racial ethos which lurks behind the text. Still, there were moments, as in 'It Ain't Necessarily So,' when I felt that more energy and mischievousness were called for, and I found the villain, for all his physical bulk and booming baritone, to be a bit over the top. Nonetheless, when he was killed, the audience actually cheered - the highest accolade for any stage villain.
Having seen it live on stage in a first-rate production, I find I have mixed feelings about Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin's music is of a very high order for what one could call a popular opera or an operatic musical. It combines European opera with folk tunes, jazz and gospel music in a way that is creative without being condescending. In the blending of traditional and contemporary styles, I was reminded often of Kurt Weill's Three Penny Opera. Porgy, I think, falls into that narrow niche between popular and classical, rather like Bernstein's West Side Story, for example, or his Candide. It is not Oklahoma, but neither is it Don Giovanni.
However, there can be no doubt that Porgy has benefited from the perspective of time: We now see it after eighty years as much a historical artifact as a brilliant work of musical theater. There is no question in my mind that if such a piece were written today it could not find a producer, and, even if it somehow did, it would be howled off the stage by the forces of political correctness long before history had a chance to decide on its social and artistic merits. In short, for all its virtues, Porgy would not be possible today.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Dance,Dance and Dance
Tonight I went to see the Paul Taylor dance company at the Music Center in Los Angeles. As I have mentioned here before, I attend nearly all of the dance series at the Dorothy Chandler and the Disney Center, since I have come to believe that some of the most interesting and innovative things being done in the arts in this country today are occurring in dance. I had heard of the Paul Taylor company, of course, but I had never seen it, and so I was anxious to get tickets, since I had long read that Taylor was an innovator-cum-icon in the world of modern dance.
The program began with seven members of the company dancing to selections from the Handel Concerti Grossi, which is among my favorite pieces of music. Now let me pause for a moment to speak of the Concerti Grossi. It was for pieces such as this that Handel was Beethoven's favorite composer; indeed, when, late in life, Beethoven was given as a gift the complete Handel scores, he wept openly. Listening to the music tonight, in accompaniment to the dancers, I was reminded of why this was so: the music is wonderful and varied, alternatively tender and playful, solemn, touching and antic. And the Paul Taylor dancers did it full justice in their interpretation, called Airs. The costumes were as simple and traditional as was the choreography, and it all worked beautifully. The dancers were skilled, well-trained and attractive. There was nothing to complain about, save a sudden slip by one of the females, which just served to remind the audience that the dancers, for all their grace and physical beauty, are, after all, human.
Second on the program was "Banquet for Vultures," a very dark and disturbing meditation on tyranny and the inevitability of war. A charismatic leader arises, sends all the young people off to war, manages to extinguish the last faint spark of hope for something better and more humane; and then another brutal tyrant is born, and the whole dehumanizing process begins again. One of the most interesting moments in this piece was the appearance of the second tyrant, whose tortuous pangs I initially took, in puzzlement, for death throes; but, it then became clear to me, were, in fact, birth writhing. All this was atmospherically rendered, with deep shadows and camouflage and candles, performed to a score that can only be described as sparse and strangulated.
Last on the program was a dance set to music from Smetana's "Bartered Bride," a piece I had often heard and never really liked. Paul Taylor, however, made me realize that the work does, indeed, sound like the buzzing of frantic insects, which is how he incorporated it. His "Gossamer Gallants" represents the fervent mating of insects, and, as planned, it drew a great deal of laughter from the audience. It was, in fact, delightfully silly, the men dressed as Mayflies and the women as, well, some female version thereof. The piece, with all its acrobatic and naughty momentum, served to remind us of the fact that when many species of female insects mate, they consummate the copulation by killing the males. (The equivalent of this in our society, of course, is the divorce court.) It was well and wistfully danced, and was, I think, the audience's favorite.
Overall, the Paul Taylor company's strategy was simple and effective: Make them admire you (the Handel), make them respect you (the Vultures), and make the love you (the insects). All that said, and though I enjoyed the evening, I found there was something trite about the choreography, something dated and predictable; not as if we had seen it before, but as if it presaged much of what we are now seeing and are likely to see in future. For all that Paul Taylor is hailed as an legend, his choreography struck me as comfortably conventional. (I was reminded of a recent reenactment of Nijinsky's choreography of the Rite of Spring, which played merely as ridiculous today, though it provoked a riot in the theater at its premiere in 1913.) Perhaps thirty years ago Taylor's choreography would have been cutting-edge fare; now it just seems adequate and quaint; enough, I kept thinking, to entertain the audience and justify the prices of the seats. It was more entertaining than, say, the Nederlans Dans Theater, whose work I found ugly and depressing, a kind of noir fraud; though not as quirky and delicious as the program of the Hubbard Street dance company of Chicago, which offered one original and clever surprise after the other.
I can't help but feel that Paul Taylor's company, with all its technical skill, unmistakable artistry and fine training, needs an injection of something new. Perhaps it is time, after fifty years of creative brilliance, for Maestro Paul to step aside, and let someone wholly new and eccentric take the reins - the young Matthew Bourne, whoever that may be. I am sure these marvelous dancers could handle it.
The program began with seven members of the company dancing to selections from the Handel Concerti Grossi, which is among my favorite pieces of music. Now let me pause for a moment to speak of the Concerti Grossi. It was for pieces such as this that Handel was Beethoven's favorite composer; indeed, when, late in life, Beethoven was given as a gift the complete Handel scores, he wept openly. Listening to the music tonight, in accompaniment to the dancers, I was reminded of why this was so: the music is wonderful and varied, alternatively tender and playful, solemn, touching and antic. And the Paul Taylor dancers did it full justice in their interpretation, called Airs. The costumes were as simple and traditional as was the choreography, and it all worked beautifully. The dancers were skilled, well-trained and attractive. There was nothing to complain about, save a sudden slip by one of the females, which just served to remind the audience that the dancers, for all their grace and physical beauty, are, after all, human.
Second on the program was "Banquet for Vultures," a very dark and disturbing meditation on tyranny and the inevitability of war. A charismatic leader arises, sends all the young people off to war, manages to extinguish the last faint spark of hope for something better and more humane; and then another brutal tyrant is born, and the whole dehumanizing process begins again. One of the most interesting moments in this piece was the appearance of the second tyrant, whose tortuous pangs I initially took, in puzzlement, for death throes; but, it then became clear to me, were, in fact, birth writhing. All this was atmospherically rendered, with deep shadows and camouflage and candles, performed to a score that can only be described as sparse and strangulated.
Last on the program was a dance set to music from Smetana's "Bartered Bride," a piece I had often heard and never really liked. Paul Taylor, however, made me realize that the work does, indeed, sound like the buzzing of frantic insects, which is how he incorporated it. His "Gossamer Gallants" represents the fervent mating of insects, and, as planned, it drew a great deal of laughter from the audience. It was, in fact, delightfully silly, the men dressed as Mayflies and the women as, well, some female version thereof. The piece, with all its acrobatic and naughty momentum, served to remind us of the fact that when many species of female insects mate, they consummate the copulation by killing the males. (The equivalent of this in our society, of course, is the divorce court.) It was well and wistfully danced, and was, I think, the audience's favorite.
Overall, the Paul Taylor company's strategy was simple and effective: Make them admire you (the Handel), make them respect you (the Vultures), and make the love you (the insects). All that said, and though I enjoyed the evening, I found there was something trite about the choreography, something dated and predictable; not as if we had seen it before, but as if it presaged much of what we are now seeing and are likely to see in future. For all that Paul Taylor is hailed as an legend, his choreography struck me as comfortably conventional. (I was reminded of a recent reenactment of Nijinsky's choreography of the Rite of Spring, which played merely as ridiculous today, though it provoked a riot in the theater at its premiere in 1913.) Perhaps thirty years ago Taylor's choreography would have been cutting-edge fare; now it just seems adequate and quaint; enough, I kept thinking, to entertain the audience and justify the prices of the seats. It was more entertaining than, say, the Nederlans Dans Theater, whose work I found ugly and depressing, a kind of noir fraud; though not as quirky and delicious as the program of the Hubbard Street dance company of Chicago, which offered one original and clever surprise after the other.
I can't help but feel that Paul Taylor's company, with all its technical skill, unmistakable artistry and fine training, needs an injection of something new. Perhaps it is time, after fifty years of creative brilliance, for Maestro Paul to step aside, and let someone wholly new and eccentric take the reins - the young Matthew Bourne, whoever that may be. I am sure these marvelous dancers could handle it.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Humbled by Hopkins
Every day I read an extract from the diary of my favorite poet,
Gerard Manley Hopkins. I invariably find that his diary entries are more linguistically sophisticated and more beautifully phrased than most writers' polished prose. I have been a professional writer for thirty-five years and have written millions of words, hundreds of thousands of sentences in several different forms and genres. Sometimes I allow myself to think
that I am a pretty good writer, and that I possess a broad and deep knowledge
of the English language. And then I read Hopkins' diaries -- not even his poetry -- and I am
humbled. Let me quote here a passage I read this morning, from March 12, 1870:
The next morning a heavy fall
of snow. It tufted and toed the firs and yews and went on to load them till
they were taxed beyond their spring. The limes, elms, and Turkey-oaks it
crisped beautifully as with young leaf. Looking at the elms from underneath you
saw every wave in every twig (become by this the wire-like stem to a finger of
snow) and to the hangers and flying sprays it restored, to the eye, the
inscapes they had lost. They were beautifully brought out against the sky,
which was on one side dead blue, on the other washed with gold.
Now, I submit that if any
other writer had managed that after three or four drafts, he would be proud.
But Hopkins does it almost unconsciously, instinctually, on every page of his
diary. This is a vision of Nature that no longer exists; it is an idiom of
insight that has been lost. Hopkins saw everything in Nature in
spontaneous poetic terms, and the reservoir of language upon which he drew was
bottomless. His work has shown me possibilities of English that no other
writer, including Shakespeare, has done, both in his poetry and in his prose. I always read his musings on poetics with awe -- I think he knew more about the structure
and movement of poetry than anyone who ever wrote in English.
Hopkins collected words from
everyday speech in the rural parishes to which he, a Jesuit priest, was
assigned. He records them, savors them, delights in them, and then he uses them
in his poems, which gives a variety and liveliness and freshness and
curiousness to his verse that few others achieve. His poetry, to my mind, is
all about rhythm, sound and meaning, and, above all, intensity of language. And
these, I think, are the qualities that mark great poetry. His verse tumbles
like freshets and rings like stones in wells and lilts and lofts like hawks on
thermals. Take these lines from one of his poems:
As kingfishers catch fire,
dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy
wells
Stones ring; like each tucked
string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to
fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one
thing and the same...
Now this poem, with which I struggled for many years, I finally concluded
was one of the best arguments for the existence of God I had ever found. Brilliant,
sonorous, beautiful and utterly persuasive. But it is the intensity of the
language that makes it unique and marks it as Hopkins. Also, of course, the
sentiment. Hopkins, being a convert to Catholicism and a Jesuit, felt a stranger
to his own family, his birth religion, and, since he was often stationed far
from home, to his native soil. Desperately he sought solace, and answers to his
most pressing queries: Where is God, Who is God, How is God manifest, How may I
know Him? Always he found the answers in an outpouring of his soul into Nature.
He was a poetic naturalist in very much the same way that Darwin was a material
naturalist, each looking for the truth in and of the world.
That he often despaired of finding it is painfully apparent in
some of his sonnets. Consider this:
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
…
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep….
Again it is not only the depth of the emotion and intellectual torment
that is striking, but also the breathless intensity of the language and the
outre quality of the images. Hopkins sees cliffs inside the mind, dizzying,
deadly, that those who never hung at their lips might dismiss, but not those,
who, like him, lived at that dreadful edge.
But that he did find comfort and consolation is unmistakable in
the later works, and, characteristically, he found it in Nature. In the poem “My
own heart more have pity on,” he bemoans the lack of spiritual peace and the
impossibility of achieving it:
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in a world of wet.
But then he takes pity on himself, urges his “poor Jackself” to “call
off thoughts awhile/Elsewhere…” and finds consolation in the imminence of God
in Nature
…whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you, unforeseen times rather – as skies
Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely mile.
Only Hopkins would have split the word “smile’s” between two lines,
and made of a single word his oft-used invocation of the piebald quality of sunlight on the aspects of the Earth. For me, this is one of Hopkins’ most
beautiful and reassuring images: The clouds part and sunlight (God’s smile)
dapples down the valley illuminating the traveler’s next mile.
Hopkins did find peace, in Nature and the poetic harmony of his
soul with Nature, expressed in a language so intricate yet so moving that, like
the gears and springs and levers of a fine watch, the product of the movement is an
awareness of the abstract but urgent truth of time.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Night and Day
I have been listening throughout the day to reaction to the Congressional Budget Office's report that 2.3 million jobs will be lost because of Obamacare. When I first heard this announcement I was not in the least surprised, and I assumed, as any reasonable person would, that this was a stake in the heart of this disastrous neo-socialist experiment. However, as soon as the report was issued, the Obama Administration went into full spin mode, dispatching spokesmen, not to deny the report, but to insist that the loss of 2.3 million jobs is good for the economy. This is in the spirit of such other recent absurdities as Nancy Pelosi declaring that Congress had to pass the Affordable Care Act to find out what was in it, or her assertion that continuing unemployment payments is one of the best ways to stimulate the economy, or Obama's monumental whopper: If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; which even the Washington Post admitted was the biggest lie of the year, thus branding Obamacare a fraud upon the public.
(We now know that Obama's decision to tell this bald-faced lie was a deliberate political calculation. There were discussions inside the White House about whether it might be expedient to tell the American people the truth - that chances were they would lose both their insurance policies and their doctors. But the political calculation was made that, if the president told the American people the truth, his bill could not be passed. And so he was instructed to lie, and did lie over fifteen times. {I am reminded of the rationale of the Nixon Administration bureaucrats: "I was not authorized to tell the truth."} And then, when his lie was exposed, what did the president do? He compounded the lie by insisting that he never said what he said over fifteen times; but instead he said something quite more nuanced and verifiable.)
The loss of 2.3 million jobs is good for the economy. Congratulations, America - we have now arrived at 1984 (albeit thirty years late): day is now night, black is now white, four legs are bad and two legs are good, the sow's ear has now officially become a silk purse. I actually watched Jay Carney, the official liar for the Obama Administration, insist that the fact that the Affordable Care Act's elimination of over two million jobs is a good thing for the economy, at a time when over twenty million Americans are out of work, real unemployment is over 13% (despite the Administration's persistent 7% lie), and workplace participation is at its lowest point in my lifetime. Watching Obama's spokesmen try to rationalize this point was a carnival in sophistry. While tens of millions of Americans are trying to find good paying jobs (or any jobs at all), the Administration, supported by the New York Times editorial board, is actually arguing that government mandated loss of gainful work is a good thing; that giving millions of Americans an incentive not to work is "liberating". Yes, the New York Times, in unison with the Administration's press releases, has trumpeted that millions of Americans who now are "trapped" in ill-paying jobs will be "liberated" by government subsidies to pursue their dreams to realize their full potential... in the arts. Therefore, I assume, burger-flippers will begin composing piano concertos, janitors will turn to their true vocation as abstract artists, and hotel maids will write lyric poetry.
This is insanity. An insanity inspired by Obama's incompetence and undergraduate obsession with pseudo-socialism. America is not and was never intended to be a socialist country. Nonetheless, Barack Obama, ignorant of the laws of economics and disregarding the intent of the Founding Fathers, is determined to make it so. That is why, despite the demonstrable disaster which is Obamacare, he will not admit its failure. Now, let me put this in quotidian terms: If your child had made a serious mistake, and continued to defend that mistake and attempted futilely to prop it up, and lied and rationalized it to you, and asked you to wait to see the eventual result, would you, as a parent, simply acquiesce? Of course you would not. You would demand that the child stop lying, admit the error, and undo the damage he or she had done. But the Obama Administration cannot do this. Instead, it continues to lie and equivocate exactly as it did on the Benghazi raid, the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, and on and on.
And the mainstream media, zombie-like, nods their hollow heads and absorbs these absurd rationalizations as if they were dum-dum bullets being fired at their undead carcasses. You say that Obamacare will kill 2.3 million jobs? That is good for the economy! You say that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration? Of course it was! You say that the IRS was not targeting conservative groups? Certainly!
In face of Obamacare's ongoing, monumental failure, I have come to agree with those commentators who have suggested that it was always intended to fail. And that, on the heels of that embarrassing failure, the federal government was always meant to race in and rescue the American health care industry with... universal, government-provided health care - the single payer system, of which Teddy Kennedy and Barney Frank and Harry Reid and other leftist politicians spoke in unguarded moments on open microphones. In short, that Obamacare is an elaborate charade being played out by the far left to guarantee that socialized medicine will become an inevitability in American life. That, it seems to me, was their intention from the beginning. Look at the numbers: the Administration boasts that six million Americans will obtain health insurance by March first (while claiming that 45 million had none - another lie); meanwhile six million people who had it have lost it (a net wash), and, when the employer mandate kicks in later this year, as many as sixty-seven million more will lose their policies, for a net loss of sixty-one million people. And so we will end up with ten times more people without health insurance than with it, as a result of a law that was intended, ostensibly, to ensure that no American would be without it. This is madness.
My fear is that the same electorate that would submissively nod its head when lied to on this monumental scale will meekly submit when the federal government declares that It, and only It, can save us from the overwhelming disaster which It inflicted on us in the first place, by assuming absolute control over the most intimate part of our lives - the quality of our health.
(We now know that Obama's decision to tell this bald-faced lie was a deliberate political calculation. There were discussions inside the White House about whether it might be expedient to tell the American people the truth - that chances were they would lose both their insurance policies and their doctors. But the political calculation was made that, if the president told the American people the truth, his bill could not be passed. And so he was instructed to lie, and did lie over fifteen times. {I am reminded of the rationale of the Nixon Administration bureaucrats: "I was not authorized to tell the truth."} And then, when his lie was exposed, what did the president do? He compounded the lie by insisting that he never said what he said over fifteen times; but instead he said something quite more nuanced and verifiable.)
The loss of 2.3 million jobs is good for the economy. Congratulations, America - we have now arrived at 1984 (albeit thirty years late): day is now night, black is now white, four legs are bad and two legs are good, the sow's ear has now officially become a silk purse. I actually watched Jay Carney, the official liar for the Obama Administration, insist that the fact that the Affordable Care Act's elimination of over two million jobs is a good thing for the economy, at a time when over twenty million Americans are out of work, real unemployment is over 13% (despite the Administration's persistent 7% lie), and workplace participation is at its lowest point in my lifetime. Watching Obama's spokesmen try to rationalize this point was a carnival in sophistry. While tens of millions of Americans are trying to find good paying jobs (or any jobs at all), the Administration, supported by the New York Times editorial board, is actually arguing that government mandated loss of gainful work is a good thing; that giving millions of Americans an incentive not to work is "liberating". Yes, the New York Times, in unison with the Administration's press releases, has trumpeted that millions of Americans who now are "trapped" in ill-paying jobs will be "liberated" by government subsidies to pursue their dreams to realize their full potential... in the arts. Therefore, I assume, burger-flippers will begin composing piano concertos, janitors will turn to their true vocation as abstract artists, and hotel maids will write lyric poetry.
This is insanity. An insanity inspired by Obama's incompetence and undergraduate obsession with pseudo-socialism. America is not and was never intended to be a socialist country. Nonetheless, Barack Obama, ignorant of the laws of economics and disregarding the intent of the Founding Fathers, is determined to make it so. That is why, despite the demonstrable disaster which is Obamacare, he will not admit its failure. Now, let me put this in quotidian terms: If your child had made a serious mistake, and continued to defend that mistake and attempted futilely to prop it up, and lied and rationalized it to you, and asked you to wait to see the eventual result, would you, as a parent, simply acquiesce? Of course you would not. You would demand that the child stop lying, admit the error, and undo the damage he or she had done. But the Obama Administration cannot do this. Instead, it continues to lie and equivocate exactly as it did on the Benghazi raid, the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, and on and on.
And the mainstream media, zombie-like, nods their hollow heads and absorbs these absurd rationalizations as if they were dum-dum bullets being fired at their undead carcasses. You say that Obamacare will kill 2.3 million jobs? That is good for the economy! You say that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration? Of course it was! You say that the IRS was not targeting conservative groups? Certainly!
In face of Obamacare's ongoing, monumental failure, I have come to agree with those commentators who have suggested that it was always intended to fail. And that, on the heels of that embarrassing failure, the federal government was always meant to race in and rescue the American health care industry with... universal, government-provided health care - the single payer system, of which Teddy Kennedy and Barney Frank and Harry Reid and other leftist politicians spoke in unguarded moments on open microphones. In short, that Obamacare is an elaborate charade being played out by the far left to guarantee that socialized medicine will become an inevitability in American life. That, it seems to me, was their intention from the beginning. Look at the numbers: the Administration boasts that six million Americans will obtain health insurance by March first (while claiming that 45 million had none - another lie); meanwhile six million people who had it have lost it (a net wash), and, when the employer mandate kicks in later this year, as many as sixty-seven million more will lose their policies, for a net loss of sixty-one million people. And so we will end up with ten times more people without health insurance than with it, as a result of a law that was intended, ostensibly, to ensure that no American would be without it. This is madness.
My fear is that the same electorate that would submissively nod its head when lied to on this monumental scale will meekly submit when the federal government declares that It, and only It, can save us from the overwhelming disaster which It inflicted on us in the first place, by assuming absolute control over the most intimate part of our lives - the quality of our health.
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