Deceptively Simple

"Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman"

Woody Allen did the world a favor when he decoded, in Annie Hall, the personal ads in the New York Review of Books: "Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy." David Rose performed a similar service when he edited the 2006 collection of personals from the London Review of Books, They Call Me Naughty Lola. A little help can be necessary in translating those from the current issue, so the editors of DecSimp are here to help. They say the classical audience is on the older side, so maybe this one is just for the elders.

"AFFECTIONATE [I kiss back sometimes], SENSUAL, very attractive [Humble!], well educated [I stayed awake in college], slim, elegant, green eyes, 55 [recently], loves all things Irish [Catholic], seaside living [I rent a houseboat], travel [in my houseboat]. Ready to relocate [just have to fire up the houseboat]. Seeks tall, trim, content [but still ambitious], accomplished man [I will ask to see your Nobel Prize], 50-63 [under 45]."

"SMART AND BEAUTIFUL [they are not exclusive, you sexist pig], yet unequivocally cute. Playful intelligence [smart but can laugh], international sophistication [I own a beret], Best-selling Boston author [I once read my poetry at Barnes and Noble], media commentator (MacNeil/Lehrer, Nightline, NPR) [I yell at the TV and radio]. Known for laser-like intellect [I like Star Wars] balanced by warm heart and disarming ability to laugh at herself [I fall down frequently]. Ivy educated, Ivy professor [I tend plants]. Slender divorced brunette [not bitter at all!] with expressive sexy eyes, head-turning presence [like The Exorcist, but with less vomit]. Ardent about politics, media, technology, the arts [I like dystopian contemporary opera]. Delights in great theater, favorite destinations, and close friendships [I will sit in the dark with friends in faraway places]. Urban explorer [I have no sense of direction], loves to get lost in new cities [Didn't I already say that?], but remains addicted to staring at the water [It's so calming] from my Cape Cod vacation home [I'm loaded, fellas] and to Boston pleasures—the new ICA, breakfast at the old Ritz, Widener stacks, O Ya, Sel de la Terre [Do not call it Beantown]. Seeks really smart, physically fit, sophisticated man, 47 to 64 [You'd better be George Clooney], Boston/New England/NYC strongly preferred [Snob].

"HANDSOME [if you like George Will], HUMBLE [I have a bow-tie collection], sensual, submissive [into bondage], magnanimous WM Manhattanite seeks lasting [bondage-intensive], loving [tie me up] relationship with attractive, strict [with rope! now!], but affectionate [And let me go the first time I ask], under 50 [22] female. Photo please [show me your hotness]."

"MILLIONAIRE MANHATTANITE MAN [and Fritz Lang fan], 62 [65], unconventional [sextuple divorcee], adventurous [here's to Lucky Number Seven], with interests in film, food, travel, and the pleasures of life [dinner and a movie, maybe stay at a bed and breakfast]. Seeks classy lady [no divorcees], 30–55 [22], for love and more [riding a tandem bicycle]! Manhattanite, artist preferred [I am demanding]. Photo, phone a must [I will stalk you]."

The Yardstick

"One trusty measure of every culture war is the outrage over what the other side is teaching the children."-James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, 2003.

"What's Rondo?" or The Nomenklatura

Discussions about what keeps people from listening to classical music generally pick up on the attributes of live concerts---the musicians' formal dress, the formality of concerts, the stuffiness and religiousity of concert halls, concerts starting too early or too late, being expected to dress up, and on (and on). Anything unique to the music itself tends to be left out, and that's a shame, because I think a pretty strong case could be made for listeners having a hard time finding a way in to classical music simply because of what pieces of music are called. The naming system of classical music is so far removed from popular music, or any other art form, that it's difficult to get a grip on what you are about to hear.

"And now, for my next trick, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun"

Looking like a not-so-distant cousin of Lou Harrison, this YouTube guy ("Handsplay") turns in precise renditions of classical staples whistled through his hands. Thanks to the meticulous JF for this one, of the Overture to The Barber of Seville, complete with trills and ornaments, and some neat-o octave displacement at times. Intonation this good could displace a lot of professional flutists.

"There was no excuse for being late in the Stone Age."

There are two performers I can think of with the force of personality and skill to hold the attentions of thousands of people over the span of an evening, all by themselves. One is Keith Jarrett, and the other is Eddie Izzard. Both create and sustain a dazzling pace of invention, and when it works, as it did with Jarrett's most recent solo Chicago concert and Izzard's Saturday night performance at the Chicago Theatre, you leave in a state of dazed amazement. (And if you weren't there on Saturday, omg you don't even know.)

Put this first: By the time Izzard had gotten 45 minutes into this two-hour show, titled Stripped, I was hoarse from laughing. He goes back to basics and the comedic standbys that stood him so well in his earlier shows Glorious and Dress to Kill, and finds new jokes to mine from Noah and the Flood, jam, and giraffes. And, of course, this being 2008 and creationism and atheism and religion being such perennial hot topics, evolution and intelligent design become props. ("I have only two criteria for intelligent design to be valid," he said Saturday. "That it display intelligence and design.")

Along the way, he also had to comment on the difficulty of learning Latin ("those noun forms...masculine, feminine, neuter...bisexual, transgender...slightly camp?"), why Xerxes in 300 was a fool for having two leopards on a leash ("If they're constantly trying to go that way for food, and they don't get it, they come after you"), Wikipedia ("Some of this stuff is wrong"), giraffes hiding from a tiger that found its way to Africa ("Your iPhone GPS is for shit"), Americans' infatuation with attractive members of the royal family ("'Oh Diana Diana Diana!' You'd better hope Prince William never comes over here"), the Stone Age ("cutting edge at one point"), dinosaurs singing hymns (they were created by God), the digestion of cows, the function of the human appendix ("I'm for grass! That's asparagus, gigantic grass, really! Put it in here!"), why it was better to be a hunter than a gatherer ("How many berries have you picked? Seven"), the fashion habits of hunters ("always going hunting in their underpants. They looked fantastic"), and PCs versus Macs ("I think you start the PC with a handcrank. You put on a 78 and Caruso starts singing"), and a brilliant set-piece in which Izzard explains using no less than FIVE languages (English, Spanish, Latin, German, and French), that Hannibal is coming over the Alps on elephants. ("Um, monsterium über den Alps.").

The Stone Age bit led into a rumination on the relative ease of living at that time. You could not be late, since there was no traffic. ("I slipped on some grass.") Later on, everyone had to notice that "Steve" had better tools, and everyone needed to get with the program or risk being left behind.

Soooooooooooooo, yeah, it was a many-spendor'd thing. And while he impersonated God as in earlier shows, God did not speak in the voice of James Mason (which you can hear here). But God does come in for some criticism, largely for spending much of the Earth's existence tapping buttons and saying, deadpan, "Volcano. Volcano. Giant dragonfly. Volcano. Meteorite." Jesus then says, "You can push other buttons, Dad." And then we get Charles Darwin, who, as Izzard says, "wrote that book we all know, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, You." Monkeys were outraged, we're told. Charlton Heston was sentenced to two movies. There's also a huge problem with the Ten Commandments, Izzard maintains, since you really only need the Golden Rule, and all the others follow. ("Do you want to be killed? 'No.'") Except for coveting your neighbor's ox, which makes no sense at all, since it negates the entire capitalist system if desire is removed from the equation and people are barred from wishing to augment their holdings. (Somehow, this is funny.)

Eddie drops the transvestite outfits for this show and tour, too, as has been widely discussed. He opts for a super stylish look of jeans and tails over a t-shirt, though, a look that has yet to be successfully pulled off by anyone other than Izzard. There's also a goatee in the place where several layers of makeup would normally be.

There were a pile of jokes about Noah and the Ark and shipbuilding and boat-building and the difficulties of getting two of each kind of animal onto such a boat ("Mr. Giant Squid is looking for Mrs. Giant Squid, since he ran out of towels"). The tigers keep eating the other animals as soon as they board, and so forth.

This all withers on the screen, I know, I know, and goes over with real comedy only when accompanied by Eddie's miming of the animal action, and sound effects. A hunter clocking a bison ("or is it a buffalo?") in the head with a stone gets a mighty wallop, much louder than the mere punches the hunter had been landing, and a pre-lingual man tries to explain religion through a series of grunts and hand gestures (like stroking a big beard), and the hunter then ends up skinning the bison while it's still alive. ("I was only stunned.")

Despite this withering, we can thank YouTube, and the scores of Eddie fans who ignored the No Videotaping policy and taped away to their hearts content. You can see their riches (rim-shot) here, and while the sound quality is for crap, it gives you the slightest sense of what it was like to be there, watching, in Boston.

Where would he be without anthropomorphism? What would happen if he couldn't imagine, then impersonate, what a dinosaur would look and sound like going into church? Then rising to sing "All Things Bright and Beautiful" in a voice as sweet as a choirboy's? It doesn't scream "comedic gold," but it had 3,600 people screaming that night, and maybe that's good enough. No, it surpassed good enough. It was sublime.

(There was also a Q&A after the Saturday show in an alley, apparently, and I must not have enough Izzard points racked up to know about it, to my shame, but there is video from it, with surprisingly good sound. "You try to go through your entire brain.")

Somewhat gratifying

James Fallows has kept up a wordcount that would drive most journalists insane (or at least, me in my former life, had I even tried to generate something like his output), working as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, at least four books, and writing dispatches from around the world for The Atlantic. So it shouldn't come as a shock that his Atlantic blog has archives dating back from May, 2008, to December, 0000. Yet, it does. It also comes as a bit of a relief to discover a blank screen when you click on December, 0000 AD, and that he wasn't there to cover the birth of Jesus:

Brain linings

Several noteworthy things worth checking out:

Nico Muhly shudders. I think I had one of those Muhly shuddering incidents after finishing all 60 hours of Six Feet Under.

The Augusta Chronicle staff wrote a touching editorial about the death of David Reader, nicely outlining the importance of orchestras in smaller communities.

I found the comics by Cyanide and Happiness here at complete random, and my mind is considerably more twisted because of it. (NSFW, possibly)

Big, hulking Josh Kosman loves him some Anthony Trollope.

Few things give me more joy than my tickets to see Eddie Izzard Saturday night. Expect a fan's review shortly thereafter. Here's Eddie talking about the importance of a career, and bees.

Show some respect - updated

***Update 5/13/08***: The Augusta Chronicle now reports that a 16-year old suspect has been charged in Reader's murder.  Earlier today, the paper wrote that a 19-year old suspect was being searched for. Several comments on that story have been flagged and removed. There are more that should never have been allowed, including one accusing Reader of being a drug dealer. Let he who is without blame cast the first stone, y'all.

Thanks to those who have written after finding this blog through Reader's tragedy, and my condolences for your loss.

**Original post** Earlier today, the most-discussed story in the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle was "Cellist, 26, is shot to death in his car." David Reader was the principal cellist of the Augusta Symphony Orchestra and was found dead with two gunshot wounds in his chest. "Discussed" is a relative term that doesn't always connote an examination or a debate, and the headline should have read "Cellist shot to death," but let's leave that second infelicity aside, since it didn't lead to accusations that Reader was a drug abuser who should've known better than to buy drugs.

Soon after it was posted, the commenters began claiming that Reader should not have been in the apartment complex at that time of night ('round midnight), that he should have expected to "get bitten" if he hung out in such a "snake pit," and another supposing that he may not have been buying drugs but leaving "his mothers or babies mothers house" [sic, applied to almost every word, including the pronoun,  in that last quotation].  Then there were those who tried to show pity for dealing with his "demons" and how sad it is that people have to deal with that sort of thing.

Again, the papers' editors should take a stand and declare anonymous comments off-limits. The Chronicle's comments policy states that the paper cannot monitor every comment, and there is a feature in place for readers to flag appropriate commentary. But the paper asks, with a completely straight face, for readers not to post material that is

"defamatory, threatening, disparaging, grossly inflammatory, false, misleading, fraudulent, inaccurate, unfair, contains gross exaggeration or unsubstantiated claims, violates the privacy rights of any third party, is unreasonably harmful or offensive to any individual, community, association, group or business." (emphasis added)

But beyond that, it's simply disrepectful. What possible purpose is served by letting readers air their theories and feelings on how a murder victim died? I know a lot of musicians, and I know a lot of drug abusers, but I can't imagine that allows me or anyone else to claim that their deaths could somehow be justified. The police now think that Reader was involved in a drug sale that went bad, but it almost doesn't matter. His reputation had already been shot, and more than twice.

I could write more about this, but it's just too depressing to contemplate. I know it will never hold up in court, but I propose these new, streamlined guidelines for reader comments:

1) They have real names attached.

2) They assume the privacy of private citizens covered by the newspaper is as valuable as their own.

3) If the above aren't followed, two burly men will come over to your house. One will hold you down, and the other will surf for child pornography, entering your credit card number and email address as necessary, until the FBI arrives.

-----

I know I haven't been blogging much lately. It's been a little crazy around the office, you may have heard. But I'll do my darndest to get back to the music-blogging soon, and not play media critic or architecture photojournalist so often.  Proof? Flight of the Conchords video right here. Yes, Bret does got it going on.

The boys in the quarterly magazines

Apropos of nothing, really.

"With the Governor unavilable, I sat down in New Orleans to await his return and meanwhile try to build up a frame of reference, as the boys in the quarterly magazines would say. Politics is to the conversation of Louisiana what horse racing is to England's. In London, anybody from the Queen to a dustman will talk horses; in Louisiana, anyone from a society woman to a bellhop will talk politics. Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon. The balance between Catholics in southern Louisiana and the Protestants in northern Louisiana is as delicate as that between the Moslems and the Christians in Lebanon and is respected by the same convention of balanced tickets. In Louisiana there is a substantial Negro vote-about a hundred and fifty thousand-that no candidate can afford to discourage privately or to solicit publicly. In the sister Arab republic, Moslem and Christian candidates alike need the Druse vote, although whoever gets it is suspected of revolutionary designs."---A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, 1961.

R.E.Memory

In the course of reviewing Oliver Sacks's recent Musicophilia in the New York Review of Books, the philosopher Colin McGinn, taking stock of how the music we hear nestles deep inside our neurological pathways, wrote that "[M]usical memory connects with our sense of self, since musical taste and experience are closely linked to personality and emotion. The music we remember is, without exaggeration, part of who we are." It's strange and a little unsettling to think of our personalities being shaped by the music we listen to, and yet, as I sit here effortlessly calling to mind the slow horn chorale near the beginning of Mahler's First Symphony, I know that it's true.

But as easily as that is conjured up, it's there, in my brain, without a lot of associations tied to it. I remember the different times I've heard it live, and the cities I was in, but when the piece starts it doesn't send me back to the first time I heard it. I sometimes wonder if this is what people really mean when they say that classical music is "timeless." It exists in a state that isn't fixed, that isn't final, and that performers are always trying to capture. Mahler's First Symphony doesn't live on an mp3 or a CD, despite what the CD's cover says; the symphony only exists when it's actually being played. The notes in the score symbolize Mahler's thoughts, and every performance is the orchestra's best attempt at realizing it. It's "timeless" only to the extent that, if orchestras still exist in 200 years, they will be no closer to giving an entirely true performance of the piece than at the premiere in 1884.

Contrast that history with my ongoing relationship with R.E.M. I can pinpoint my exact location for each time I first heard one of their CDs, which brings back, say, the smell of my first dorm room, or who I was with when I bought the CD. What's more, every time I listen to one of those discs, the associations come back with great intensity, and it's as if I'm 16, or 18, or 23 and living in Muncie, Indianapolis, or Bloomington all over again.

I bring this up because R.E.M. released Accelerate in March, and I of course went out and bought it.
It got me thinking back to when I was traveling with my dad through Illinois on a college visit. We were driving home, it was dark, and we stopped at a McDonald's. He dashed in to grab the food (I don't know why we didn't use the drive-thru), and I got out of the car with my Walkman. I had Out of Time in the machine, and "Country Feedback" came on. That twangy, relentless song, with Michael Stipe calling out "It's crazy what you could've had/I need this" with more remorse than I thought was possible at that age, did such a number on me as I contemplated my future, staring out into the dark night overlooking a cornfield, that I was basically speechless when my dad came back to the car.

I won't surprise anyone with the banality of this observation, but "Everybody Hurts" will always have a special place in my heart. About that consoling anthem, guitarist Peter Buck wrote that "This song doesn't really belong to us anymore; it belongs to everybody who has ever gotten any solace from it. The reason that the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers." It got me, and it got me good, and it helped me get through high school.

Where it starts to get interesting is that Buck wrote those sentences in the booklet that accompanied the 2003 collection In Time. A now-ex bought that for me - in the deluxe version, sweet thing that she was - but the effect was incredibly jarring. With all the songs gathered from several different albums, I was whipsawed from reminiscing about one album to another with every single track. The matter was confounded by the second disc, which consists of remixes (remices?) of other songs, so that the effect on a die-hard R.E.M. fan is to listen to the new versions while running a tape in your head of the original, and then you start thinking about what the original actually is, if it's what came out on CD, or what they play in concert, and before long it's on to the next track and all the accumulated memories you've piled on to that one. Someone will probably tell me that this is much easier to take with the aid of drugs.

This is a self-serving way to talk about music, I know. But it is how I listen to this band, and how they've become a part of my life. This isn't necessarily timeless the way that my experience with the Mahler was; it isn't that way at all, actually. R.E.M. serves as bookends and benchmarks in my life in extraordinarily specific ways. (The place I bought Up? The Barnes & Noble on the north side of Indianapolis.  The first time I remember listening to Document? Driving back from a high school swimming meet in Indianapolis.) I remember individual performances of my favorite classical works, and I vividly remember the first time I heard the classical artists whom I admire. But the music that they played and that I heard doesn't seem tethered to the experience in the same way. Maybe it's not that it is timeless, so much as out of time.