Sibelius' Second

The last two movements of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 in D. The magnificent finale begins at 5:50.

Last night Nat and I heard the Madison Symphony Orchestra play this work.

I guess that it's a testimony to the power and vivdness of this music that people have often felt a strong need to look for some extra-musical meaning for it. According to Michael Allsen's excellent notes for the MSO concerts, there is a long-standing story that Sibelius did confide a "program" for the symphony to a friend of his: "a vaguely defined set of impressions of Finnish culture and politics." Politics!? I find that it gives me images of far northern landscapes: magnificent wastelands of forest, rock, and ice. The anthem-like themes of the finale seem to cry out for words. The brass choir seems to be signing the praise of something or someone. But whom? What? Each listener must supply his or her own sacred object.

As Ayn Rand said in a very interesting if quirky essay, "Art and Cognition":

Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. The theme of a composition entitled “Spring Song” is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as “peace,” “revolution,” “religion,” are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waters” was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph—by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.

(HT for photo to the C. I. A.)

d'Indy: High on Mountain Air

I've been listening to Vincent d'Indy's Symphony on a French Mountain Air over and over lately. Here is the classic 1958 RCA recording of the first movement with Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer at the piano and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch.

What an adorable work it is! And it's not just pretty -- it has some depths to it!

I'm prejudiced, here, I must admit, because this work is about something that's dear to my heart: mountains, life in the mountains, and mountain-people.

All three movements are based on a single mountain folk song, though the first movement, roughly in sonata allegro form, has a secondary theme as well -- listen for it at 3:10, above. Liner notes sometimes quote music historian Julien Tiersnot concerning this body of traditional music:

The high mountains give to folk that become acclimated to their altitude something of the purity of their atmosphere. It seems as though there were in these mountain songs - they were generally songs of shepherds - something fluid, ethereal, a gentleness that is not found in folk songs of the plains.

I think I hear these qualities in this music. There is a another quality that d'Indy captures brilliantly: mountain life is tremendously stimulating. This comes out especially in the third and last movement (see below).

There are probably several reasons for this. The accelerated heartbeat caused by the thin air might be one. The spicy resinous tang in the air from coniferous trees is clearly another. And the air itself! It is thinner, and like the man said, is more pure: it holds less moisture and dust. There is less in it to filter out the sun's rays, so more of them hit you. On the other hand, water evaporates faster in the thin dry air. That is why mountain plants often have leaves that have evolved into thick pads or dwindled into needles -- like desert plants, and for the same reason: the plant is trying to avoid evaporation. On you, the effect of greater evaporation is a bracing feeling of coolness, at least on the parts of your skin that are shielded from the sun. Those that are not, are roasted with radiant energy. As you move about in the mountain light and air you experience a tingling barrage of sharp, shifting contrasts, so different from the muffling, lulling air of the plains. It wakes you up and raises your consciousness.

Is it a coincidence that the great drug producing regions of the world, whether the opium fields of Afghanistan or the marijuana patches of the Sierra Madre Occidental, are typically in the mountains? My friends the Tarahumara, famous for their use of peyote, are mountain folk. Mountains are naturally high, in both senses.

Here are the other two movements of the symphony:

Photos of d'Indy suggest, by the way, that, like Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, and this man, he was mildly acromegalic.

The Lord High Everything Else

I've been reading the text of Gilbert and Sullivan's great comic operetta, The Mikado, and I'm amazed at how good it is. Aside from being laugh-out-loud funny, it's a social and political satire, which gives it real depth.

One bit that really made me think is the dialog that comes in at the very end of the above clip. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner asks advice from Pooh-Bah, The Lord High Everything Else, whether he should raid the treasury for his impending wedding festivities. Because Pooh-Bah holds every office in the city except for that of executioner, he is unable to give a coherent answer. He continually qualifies, contradicts, or overrules himself in a comical process that obviously could go through cycle after cycle forever.

One of the most distinctive principles of liberal democracy is the notion that these jobs should all be held by different people, so that they can check and balance one another.

Hey, wait a minute! Doesn't that mean that a free society will be like Pooh-Bah: confused, unstable, unable to arrive at a final answer?

Yes! It does! But what's so great about stability? After all, what "stability" means is that we have an argument and then one party wins, finally and irrevocably, and gets to lord it over the rest of us. The Hell with that!

If freedom is good, stability is bad. Let Topsyturvydom reign!

The dialogue between Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah is considerably abridged in this clip. You can find the whole exchange here, at the end of "No. 5" (the fifth scene). Here is another clip, of Groucho singing another song from The Mikado, this time with his daughter:

Eating Animals: A Defense

My political philosophy class has been discussing Robert Nozick's ethical argument for vegetarianism (IMHO, the best such argument I have seen), so I thought I would repost this essay, which I posted when I was discussing the same argument, with another group of students, four years ago...

I didn't want to post on this question again until after I had finished talking about it in class. And the discussion went on for almost two fifty minute class periods -- way more than I originally intended. People had a lot more ideas about this than I thought they would! The other thing that surprised me was that no one (except for one student, who came up to me after class) tried to answer what I thought was ultimately the real question.

As you may not recall, Nozick asks us:

Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfortunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. ... Is there some principle that would allow the killing and eating of animals, but would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings?

I had thought this ultimately boils down to the question of how we should fill in the blank in this sentence: One may kill animals or impose unpleasant living conditions on them in order to provide _____ for humans.

Almost no one tried to answer this question directly. There were some attempts to reject the question. One person suggested, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Malebranche, that animals simply don't have mental states. (This is a philosophy class, after all!) Another suggested that since eating animals is an activity that rests on pain and death it is morally tainted and the question of whether there is something good about it that is good enough to justify the death and pain involved is simply inconceivable. Another wanted to divide the question (killing animals raises different issues from making them suffer). Others had skeptical doubts about whether we can know the kinds of things that would be required for answering this question. There was also a lot of discussion of side issues that popped up here and there. I declared that eating at MacDonald's is immoral, "unless the alternative is starving to death," and some wanted to defend MacDonald's. And so on.

I'm sufficiently impressed with the fact that almost no one filled in my blank that I offer my own attempt with some hesitation. I assume the reason for this is that it seems like an impossible task. Which of course is Nozick's point.

The one student who came up after class suggested trying to use John Stuart Mill's idea of higher and lower pleasures. Also, he suggested changing Nozick's question: What if hitting the cow is the only action you can ever perform? This is roughly the sort of approach I would take. I guess my question would be: What if, if people didn't do things like this to the cow, the game of baseball would be wiped off the earth? That of course involves values (and even pleasures) that are very different from the pleasure of swinging the bat.

Nozick's question (or more exactly his principled refusal to answer it) supposes that the value of Peking duck is simply a pleasure, conceived as a mere sensation, like the sensation in one's muscles while swinging a stick. It ignores the existence of cuisine. Cuisine is a rich, complex artifact of human history, like baseball. And like certain other rich, complex artifacts of history, it produces results that in some sense are like works of art. Results like Peking duck. The pleasure of eating it, I submit, is in a completely and qualitatively different category from the pleasure of swinging a stick. Peking duck is an ancient dish. Like all high art, it was originally meant only for the rich and powerful few but now, thanks to the miracle of democratic capitalism, is available to all. It originated during the Yuan Dynasty (coinciding with our High Middle Ages) and was perfected during the Qing Dynasty (late nineteenth century). I would say that it is a thing of beauty, except that for some reason we reserve this word for the sense-modalities of sight and sound, rather than taste, smell, and textural discrimination.

Of all the great cuisines on earth, only one of them as far as I know is "vegetarian" in any sense of the word. This is one of the cuisines of India (which has an ancient tradition of not killing animals). And it is very far from being vegan. It swims in milk, cream, butter, ghee (clairified butter), and yogurt. All of the other great cuisines -- French, Italian, Japanese, the regional cuisines of China and Mexico -- are very meat-centric.

If we all became vegans today, many of the great ideas of Escoffier, Carême, and the achievements of thousands of unsung geniuses who have created the cuisines of the world, would be wiped out overnight. This would be a horrible loss to the human spirit.

Of course, something that you could call cuisine could continue to exist. But the loss would still be horrific. Consider again Peking duck. Recipes for Peking duck focus on the skin. Some call for inflating the duck's skin with air (one reason for leaving its head on). One often sees directions like "hang in a cool, windy place for six hours." The point is to achieve a certain level of crispness and in some cases a jewel-like glaze.

You just can't do that with a pumpkin. Or boiled barley. Or tofu. Forget it!

So I'm not sure exactly how I would fill in my blank, but it's obvious there are lots of ways that include eating Peking duck but exclude hitting the cow.

But there still is an important moral residue to the exercise that Nozick has let us into here. The way we treat animals does have to be justified -- which means we have to treat them in justifiable ways. And that doesn't include just any old thing. The chance that what we do to animals is justified is increased if we increase the probability that the bad of what we do to them is less than the good of what we get out of it. This probability is increased if we depress the badness of the bad. Which means treating animals more humanely. It is also increased if we enhance the goodness of what they do for us. There is a moral responsibility on us as cooks to make the most of our animal ingredients. The next time you bite into a bland, gray fast food hamburger, remember that some cow died so you can do this. Did that cow die in vain?

New Edition of Huckleberry Finn Cuts the N-Word ...

Language warning: Offensive words will be mentioned, though not used, in this post.

... and, as this article explains, we don't mean "nonesuch." It replaces all 219 occurrences of "nigger" in the book with "slave". It also replaces "Injun" with "Indian".

The responsible party is Alan Gribben, a professor of English at the Montgomery campus of Auburn University.

One of the arguments in favor of the Bowdlerization that I have seen attributed to Prof. Gribben is, in my humble opinion, shockingly silly. In the above-linked article he is quoted as saying "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." He says he is simply "updating" the book. This seems to mean that, because language changes, Mark Twain should be forced to speak our way.

Prof. Gribben is a teacher of literature: his job is to educate young people in the way others use the English language, especially people in the alien, sometimes-creepy world of the past. The soul of this process is the student extending her or his mind to see things from the other person's point of view. This is especially important when the other person seems off-putting to us and, yes, that includes people who have bad thoughts and do wrong things. There are several sorts of reasons why this mind-expanding process is crucial, and some of them are ethical reasons, having to do with respect and the overcoming of arrogance.

A more serious argument is one that has the sympathy of the author of the above article. Gribben's main concern, obscured by his talk of "updating" Twain, is that schools, out horror at fictional characters who casually say "nigger," are taking it off reading lists:*

... if this puts the book into the hands of kids who would not otherwise be allowed to read it due to forces beyond their control (overprotective parents and the school boards they frighten), then maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge.

It's unfortunate, but is it really any more catastrophic than a TBS-friendly re-edit of "The Godfather," you down-and-dirty melon farmer?

There is an interesting issue here. How is replacing "nigger" with "slave" so that more schools will assign Huckleberry Finn different from replacing "motherfucker" with "melon farmer" so that "The Godfather" can be on a station that children might see?

The first thing to say about this is that our culture at present does not treat these two cases alike. Gribben is innovating. So it is at any rate not obvious that they are alike.

Second, there are a couple of obvious differences between the cases. One is that the controversial one is about education. If you can't see how that makes a difference, please re-read the third paragraph of this post. (And don't skip anything this time.)

The other obvious difference has to do with the point of the Bowdlerization in each case. In all of them we are, like the original Bowdlerizer, trying to protect someone from something. There are reasons to protect small children from a too-early exposure to a) sex and b) violence. Do these reasons apply in the Huck Finn case?

I don't think so. For one thing, students are not going to be reading Huck until high school, when they are plenty old enough to handle "nigger," along with material that is more shocking than that. If I were showing "The Godfather" to a high school class in film history or film criticism, I would think it is very important that "motherfucker" stay in the movie, along with ever shot in all the gruesome murders. (Again, see third paragraph.) If a student convinced me that s/he is really too sensitive for this sort of material, I would let them do an alternative assignment. As to the film itself, either show it or don't show it. Teaching a mutilated version of "The Godfather", just because of the rough language and shocking violence, is not a legitimate third alternative.

In addition, it makes a big difference what you are protecting people from. In the "Godfather" case we are protecting children from a too early exposure to certain things, mainly violence. "Motherfucker" is violent language, intended to hurt and shock. The thing about the use of "nigger" in Huck Finn is that it doesn't seem to be used in that way at all. It just feels like it to us. What we are protecting people from is the effort of moving from "to us" to "for them." In other words, we are protecting them from having to learn something. Teachers should not be protecting young people from things like that.
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* Notice that these two arguments, both of which are attributed to Prof. Gribben in the press, lead to completely different conclusions. If the Updating Argument is right, then the old "Huckleberry Finn" is unsuitable to the Brave New World of the 21st Century. It has simply become a wrong book. Down the memory hole! On the other hand, if the Reading List Argument is right, then it only follows that we can Bowdlerize the text to protect the delicate sensibilities of American teenagers. [Insert snarky comment about American teenagers here.] As far as that is concerned, maybe the old version can stick around, to be read by adults who can take it. So, maybe -- not down the memory hole.

Rock and Roll vs. Collectivism

This is an interesting Soviet propaganda film. Back in the day (the date is not given) young Russians would hang out behind the giant Gum (pron. "Goom") department store, selling pirated records of American rock 'n' roll music. They had figured out how to duplicate them by making impressions into discarded X-ray plates.

This little film is an attempt to shame these youngsters out of participating in this fascinating -- and of course forbidden -- little sub-culture.

What I find interesting is the nature of the argument they give: Aren't you ashamed of yourselves -- doing this instead to being out there building a hydroelectric dam "for the people"!

This is why that system was doomed. No system can survive if the source of motivation upon which it relies is the willingness of the people to devote their lives to an anonymous herd of strangers.

As long as people retain a shred of self-respect, they will devote their lives primarily to their own happiness and to that of individuals they actually know and have some reason to love.

Denis Dutton, RIP

I just heard from Noël Carroll that Denis, an old friend of mine from college, died yesterday. The last I had heard from him was a month or so ago, when his cancer had re-emerged and he had gone back into chemo. I had expected this, but not so soon. He had been struggling with the disease for some years. Cheated the Old Man out of several more, he did!

Soon after graduate school, Denis made the unusual career move of relocating to New Zealand, so our contacts were sporadic for a long time. I once asked him how he liked living in this dinky, middle of nowhere country. He said there were advantages to living in a small country. For instance, he knew is own Prime Minister -- personally. (I now think all countries should be small.)

For at least twenty years, we never met face to face. Then about ten years ago we met up again at a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. At dinner with Robert Solomon (now also forðférde, or "journeyed forth," as my pagan ancestors used to say) we talked about Denis's remarkable career to date. Soon out of graduate school, he rounded up the few distinguished philosophers who had discussed the presentation of philosophical ideas in literary works (Peter Winch and Stanley Cavell prominent among them) and with their support founded the journal, Philosophy and Literature. To this day, it is the only journal I know of dedicated to this subject, one that is dear to me, as you may know.

Years later, he scored another and greater triumph, with Arts and Letters Daily, sometimes called "the greatest web site in the world). If you go there quickly, you can find links to many obituaries for him in the left column.

At these ASA meetings, he had recently sold the site to the magazine Lingua Franca, and was managing it as their employee (along with performing his more conventional academic duties). Not wanting uncouthly ask how much dough he got for it, I said that, gee whiz, I bet they paid him a tidy sum. He just said, "How do you think I could afford this suit?", pointing a thumb at his lapel. I had no idea what a thousand dollar suit would look like, but this nonetheless made his point pretty effectively.

At dinner with Bob Solomon, though, he was in a glum mood. His whole career has been based on the ideas of others, he said. He was little more than a conduit through which others communicate. Nonsense, we said. You've found something, something important, that you do better than anyone else. How many can say that?

When we had lunch the next day, he told me about some new ideas he had been working on, involving the remarkable persistence of some visual motifs in the most popular landscape paintings, and the possibility of explaining them via evolutionary psychology. Within a few years, he had produced a book that created something of a sensation in the artworld. It is one of the very few books of real philosophy that in my lifetime has had a strong effect outside the tiny world of academic philosophy. Conduit indeed!

He had climbed his last mountain!

In the last message I got from him, he didn't seem to be much happier than you or I would be to die while still in his prime. But I'm sure he realized that he had lived a very full life. Full to overflowing.

Wow! The Nobels Give the Prize to Someone Who Deserves It!

The 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is one of my favorite living authors: Peruvian expat Mario Vargas Llosa. Here is a student at Princeton University, where Vargas Llosa is currently a professor, blogging about his addressing some students about the award:

I just returned from attending the reception in the Chancellor Greene Rotunda honoring Professor Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I am still fighting an overwhelming sense of wooziness from having just observed history in the making. As I stood listening intently to Professor Llosa’s words, I could only marvel at how beneath his humble, sophisticated demeanor, there exists this remarkable internal landscape of profound wisdom, astute intelligence, and unbounded passion. Professor Llosa is the embodiment of an individual who dares to exercise the freedom to think independently and to follow the pathway paved by his ideas, as evidenced in his writings on freedom and his decision to run for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. In witnessing Llosa speak of the importance to read with a voracious appetite, I was moved by the profound power of ideas. Llosa described reading as one of the greatest pleasures life affords us. To carry on the message, propitiously in time for midterms but also for life....

I couldn't have said it better!

I would describe his aesthetic as nineteenth century realism updated with a post-modern sensibility. His works are often big, epic in scope, thematically ambitious, and yet absorbingly narrated. Well-known factoid: about a quarter century ago, he underwent a sort of political conversion, instigated by his young son Alvaro, from collectivism to individualism. Afterward, he had a heated encounter in the Mexico City Opera House with collectivist Gabriel Garcia Marquez which ended with Vargas Llosa punching Marquez in the nose.

Every ten years or so, he publishes a collection of essays that are very much worth reading. One essay I remember especially fondly was written the day he finished reading the complete works of José Ortega y Gasset (and I thought I was a big fan of Ortega!). He says it is a shame the twentieth century did not place him in the position occupied by Jean Paul Sartre. One reason Ortega would have been a better choice: mejor prosa.

Update: I told the above story about the Mexico City Opera House from memory. I've since found out that the incident occurred before V-Ll's conversion. Neither man has ever divulged the cause of their quarrel, which seems to have been personal and not political. Further, the blow was to Marquez's eye, not his nose. We at E pur si muove! are zealous to avoid becoming a source of misinformation, like so much of what you see on the web.

Bob Dylan: Another Racist Exposed!

A comment in Obama's interview with Rolling Stone last week raise some new interest in, of all things, Bob Dylan's political views. Speaking of Dylan's appearance at a White House concert commemorating the civil rights movement, the POTUS said:

He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to for that. ... Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him.

Here is an article that recounts two possible explanations for this strange phenomenon -- a celeb who's not gaga for Obama, who doesn't go for O, who doesn't doff his fez for the Prez. How can we explain this?

One Dylanologist (an actual word!) says that Dylan is clearly a "racist" who "hates blacks." The evidence? He decodes the lyrics of Dylans songs, offering for instance this hermeneutical nugget:

And he says, “the pump don’t work, ’cause the vandals took the handles.” The pump, pumping money into the economy, giving blacks money, doesn’t work ‘cause the vandals, the liberals, took the handles. The ax handles, like Lester Maddox used to give out pickaxe handles in his chicken place to beat blacks so the whites can beat up blacks over the head with them. Get it?

The interviewer says "Yeah." My sentiments exactly, if by "yeah" you mean "you're insane."

Another Dylanologist avers that Dylan is simply way less leftist than people think and probably is not a fan of Obama's policies, offering as evidence Dylan's explicit statements. For instance, speaking of his political views during the hippie days in his autobiography, Dylan says: "My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater ..., and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody." Chronicles (Simon and Schuster: 2004, p. 283).

I have to vote for the second interpreter. I never much cared for the old "intentional fallacy" idea, which entails that the artist's explicit statements are irrelevant to interpreting a work of art. I once heard John Searle call it "the intentional fallacy fallacy." Right on, John!

On the other hand, the intentional fallacy, or something like it, is a pretty handy idea if you want to find "racism" in everyone who does not worship at your altar.

I admit that there are some hidden meanings and ominous signs in the world, but people who do a lot of decoding are almost always charlatans or paranoiacs. At their most sinister, they try to "expose" your hidden meanings in order to prevent people from hearing what you are explicitly saying in plain English. When they do that, they become character-assassins and enemies of open discussion.

More Balderdash from George Bernard Shaw

As a lagniappe following my most recent post, here is a miscellany of Shaw quotes that are obviously not true:

Defending his vegetarianism: "Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay." If this means anything, it means that there is more nutrition in an acorn than in an equal amount of sheep tissue. Of course, the reverse is true. The reason a buried sheep doesn't do anything is that it is not a seed. On the other hand if you bury a fertilized sheep ovum in a sheep uterus, it explodes into something far more good to eat, and good for you, than a tree.

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." It is impossible to exaggerate how fatuously stupid this comment is. Under what conceivable interpretation are Islam and Buddhism the same? Yet this perfect piece of ignorance is endlessly repeated by Shaw's spiritual brethren.

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." As a teacher, I resemble this remark. ... Seriously, if you can't do it, how could you teach how to do it? I think this obvious falsehood is repeated so often because it is a perfect model of sparse, severely economical wording, not because it is true.

"[Brahms' German Requiem] could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.” Once again, this is very cute, but that doesn't make it just or true.

"I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age." Again, GBS has it bass-ackwards. As Nietzsche pointed out, the champion of chameleon religions is Christianity. During the Enlightenment Christians were rationalists, during the Romantic era they were soulful and idealistic. In the twentieth century they got into existential anst. What is the essence of Christianity? There's not much to it, really. On the other hand, Islam does not assimilate, it does not accommodate, and it does not negotiate. Like it or lump it, it is what it is. It's "appeal to every age" is its integrity, not the accommodationism for which he idiotically praises it.

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." This would be right, except that he probably means it as a reason for robbing Peter.

"My specialty is being right when other people are wrong." This shows that truth, too, can stand on its head.

The Contemptible George Bernard Shaw

I saw a performance of Shaw's Major Barbara(1905) in Spring Green Wisconsin Friday night. What a charming production it was! And what a colossal jerk and fool Shaw was!

The great H. L. Mencken, author of the first book on Shaw ever published (1901), later wrote a classic essay on Shaw called "The Ulster Polonius" (August 1916). In it, he wondered how Shaw's pamphlets and play "kicked up such a pother" despite the fact that that, like most plays, his works consisted mostly of platitudes (a thesis Mencken also applied to the plays of Ibsen). Why all the fuss, he asked? The answer, he said, was fairly simple. “[Shaw] practices with great zest and skill the fine art of exhibiting the obvious in unexpected and terrifying lights.” Nearly all of Shaw's premises, despite his horrific tone, were really "bulletproof."

Viewing the denouement of Major Barbara, I could only wonder what premises HLM was thinking of. Adolphus decides to take over Undershaft's munitions factory because he has decided that the only way to really improve the world is to kill off the privileged elites. His fiance, Barbara, gives up working to save the souls if the poor, on the grounds that poor people can't be sincerely interested in virtue and goodness. From now on, she will preach to the comfortable inmates of Undershaft's manicured company town.

Bulletproof? Bah! Both their ideas -- that of Barbara as well as that of Adolphus -- seemed to me obviously wrong. As the last act slowed down to make Shaw's didactic points, I made a mental list of other things that Shaw was either obviously or demonstrably wrong about:

We should all be comfortably prosperous, because that will free us to be good. This will surely happen if the government micromanages the entire economy. The Soviet experiment is a good example of this and will succeed. Meanwhile, the unfit and feeble-minded should be "humanely" put to death (see above video).* And nobody should be vaccinated. By the way, the Americans should abolish their constitution because it prevents the "good" FDR from doing more or less whatever he wants.

It can't be a coincidence that one man was so consistently, horribly wrong about so many important things. There must be some explanation -- maybe some killer premise that implies all the rest. I don't know enough about Shaw to say what the explanation is, but something tells me there has to be one.
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* On the other hand, Shaw was a vegetarian because he did not want people to "murder" innocent pigs and chickens.

Is this Classical Music's Golden Age?

This is one of those weird debates, acrimonious and nasty, in which I fundamentally disagree with both sides. Traditionalist Heather MacDonald wrote this essay, which ticked off modernist Greg Sandow. (Here is her reply.)

Her idea is basically this: Classical music is flourishing today as never before. The standard of performance is higher, there are more performers, there are more works available, audiences are more sophisticated, than ever before. You even have instant access, she points out, to beautiful performances such as the one I've embedded above. Classical music is in a new golden age.

There is a huge gulf between the way this person thinks about the arts and the way I do. Look at it this way. The reasons she gives for thinking the music is flourishing are: a) the performers of the music, b) the conduits by which the music is communicated to the audience, and c) the audience that listens to the music. What is missing from this list, class? Anybody? Anybody?

That's right! The music!

Here is an analogous argument: Dodo birds are flourishing today. More museums have dodo bird exhibits than ever before. Their quality is higher than ever. You can even see stuffed dead dodo birds on the internet! For free! So don't give me that stuff about how the golden age of dodo birds is dead and gone, pal. You're full of crap.

Okay, that's a little silly. Here is a closer analogy. Poetry today is flourishing. There are more volumes of old poems written by dead people than ever before. Previously unknown old poems are discovered and published every day. And they are embalmed in such beautiful editions! You can even read old poems by dead white guys on the internet!

I have been told that the most recent piece of classical music to become an established part of the standard repertoire is Strauss' exquisite Four Last Songs, which was composed in 1948. If the last poem with that sort of status were that old, no one would be giving an argument analogous to MacDonald's that poetry is flourishing.

I guess the reason it is possible for an intelligent person to give an argument like MacDonald's is that she doesn't think of classical music as an art like poetry or painting. What she means by "classical music" is something like the world of people who collect antiques, old coins, or classic cars. It so happens that the world of classic car collecting is flourishing. There are several shows every year in my area. More classic cars are being restored and displayed every year. It's really cool. But the giant automobile with tail fins is not flourishing. It is as dead as the dodo.

And so, it breaks my heart to say, is classical music.
______________________________
BTW, here is a more professional performance of "Cum Dederit Dilectis" than the one to which she directs us:

R and R

This is a scene cut from the original Fantasia.

David Kramer posted it over at LewRockwell.com with no explanation except for a title: "American Popular Entertainment, 1940."

Yes, vast, profound changes have come since then, changes in popular taste and in the practices of artists. The latter changes of course had a lot to do with the triumph of artistic modernism.

Anyway, enjoy this little key-hole view of what popular culture used to be like.

BTW, for you non-birders out there, the bird depicted above is the great white heron, which is actuallly the same species as the great blue (Ardea herodias). Great whites are only found in extreme south Florida, but we have plenty of great blues here in Wisconsin, including a few who do their fishing in a pond a half a block from my house.

The Woman with the Veil

She was about to leave the country. I realized suddenly that Sunday was my last chance to see her, perhaps forever, so I got in my car and drove to Milwaukee.

I'm referring to Raphael's great portrait, La Velata ("The Woman With the Veil"), which has been touring the US this year, Milwaukee being its last stop. (Click to enlarge.)

It was displayed in a darkened room with dark blue walls. The only other objects in the room, other than two wooden benches (which I had to use after a long stretch of standing and staring) was a sign: PLEASE SPEAK SOFTLY.

Sadly, it is now on its way back to Italy. If you want to see it in the flesh, you now must go to the Palazzo Pitti, which has been the painting's home since the Medici got Matteo Botti's entire art collection in exchange for paying off his substantial debts.

No image of it that I have seen does it justice. One thing that surprised me on seeing it in person is the glowing beauty of her dress, and explosion of silk that seems to defy functionality. It's as if Raphael is boasting, "... and her face is still the center of interest."

A fascinating tradition says that the model for the painting was the love of his life, Margherita Luti, who was even more likely the model for the painting traditionally known as La Fornarina (illustration to the right). She was the daughter of Siennese baker. (The traditional title of the painting could mean "The Baker's Little Daughter.") In an aristocratic system such as theirs, marrying a baker's daughter would be a career-destroying move. So they lived in sin for years. Or did they?

I'm told that representing a woman as veiled was a traditional way of indicating that she is married. Was La Velata Raphael's way of celebrating their secret marriage? X-rays reveal that La Fornarina originally had a ring on her finger, which was later painted over. According to art historian Maurizio Curuz, four months after Raphael's untimely death someone identified as the "widow Margherita" entered a Roman convent, and disappeared from history.

It's not very surprising that there are other paintings for which Signorina Luti may well have been the model. They include "The Madonna of the Chair":



... "The Sistine Madonna":



... and "The Triumph of Galatea":

Why Don't I Like Naked Love Scenes in Movies?

According to this story, the actor Neil McDonnough (I know him from the memorable series, Band of Brothers) has been fired from ABC's new series, Scoundrels last week for refusing to do an explicit love scene with Virginia Madsen.

The reason? He's a family man and a Catholic, and he's always made it clear that he won't do sex scenes. And ABC knew that.

I'm not quite sure why, but I've never really liked explicit sex scenes in a legitimate narrative film. They have always given me this slight cringing feeling of "too much information." By "legitimate narrative film" I mean to exclude hard core pornography. That I actually don't mind at all.

Is this an unusual reaction? I really don't know for sure. I notice that, even in this age of anything goes, full frontal nudity is still rather rare in American movies. I'm told that it is much more common in European movies, but I would be willing to bet that most of the film industries in the world fall far short of the European in this respect.

W. C. Fields famously said "never work with children or animals." The obvious reason for that, I suppose, is that you never know what the damn things are going to do next. Another would be that, as long as you are on screen with a kid or a hippopotamus, the audience will not be looking at you. They will be looking at the kid or the hippo.

Sex, for human beings, especially in cultures that still have some standards of modesty in dress and behavior, is emotionally extremely powerful. If you put full frontal nudity on screen, you had better be sure that this person's pubic hair is the most important thing in the shot, because the audience will be unable to see anything else. Similarly, explicit eroticism is tremendously distracting from everything else.

In pornography there is of course nothing to be distracted from: no plot development, no characterization, no interesting dialogue, no symbolism, no subtle emotional cross-currents, etc., etc. Hence there it works completely differently. In fact, the material that would be so distracting is the very thing you are there to see.

Speaking of working with kids, take a look at this clip, from the British TV series, "Outnumbered":

Some Like It Hot

Here is a slide show of never before seen photos from the set of Some Like it Hot, surely one of the greatest comedies in film. They were taken by a journalist who visited the work in progress at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego.

They make curious viewing, if only because they are in color and the movie itself was black and white. It's a little like seeing what it would have been like as a color film.

It really is a perfect movie -- everyone in it is the greatest at what they do and at the top of their form. Monroe especially was never better. And what a love-goddess she was! Sexy but not skeevy -- that's right folks, it can be done!

Writer/director Billy Wilder was always one of my favorites. An Austrian Jew, there is something deeply Viennese about his point of view: "Situation hopeless, but not serious." Behind his gloom there is always something of the light-hearted spirit of Viennese operetta.

Remember the last line in the movie. Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), on being told that his new wife not only has loose morals and drinks too much but -- is a man! "Well," he says, "nobody's perfect!"

I once heard Bill Rothman argue that Wilder's work is cold-hearted and devoid of compassion. I think that's how it looks if you miss the humor in it, the Viennese fatalism-overcome-by-humor.

One of the things that are funny about the last line is that it implies that being male is an imperfection, a theorem that the film has esatblished by that time with almost mathematical certainty.

Wilder takes the corniest comedic trick in the book -- men in drag, the stuff of desperate-for-a-laugh USO shows -- and turns it into a vast scherzo of variations on gender, gender boundaries, and above all gender as a boundary. Es lebe die Kunst!

Free Concert

I posted this last weekend, but I am repeating it here as a reminder of the concert this weekend. More recent posts are below.


On Sunday the Madison Community Orchestra will be giving a special concert. (I will be seen buried in the middle of the second violin section.) This time we will be performing several pieces with a soloist, a young local soprano who has already gotten a surprising amount of exposure, Emily Birsan.

She'll be singing three arias:

"O Mio Babbino Caro," from Gianni Schichi, by Puccini
"Ach, Ich Fuehl's," from The Magic Flute, but Mozart
"Je Veux Vivre," from Romeo and Juliette, by Gounod

Above is a video of another soprano, Haylie Westenra, singing the breathtaking Puccini aria. I couldn't find one of Ms. Birsan. We have rehearsed with her and I can tell you that she has a very sweet voice and is a natural and charming actress.

We will also play some rousing orchestral show pieces:

Overture to The The Merry Wives of Windsor, by Nicolai
Bacchanale from Samson and Delila, by Saint-Saens
March Slave, by Tchaikovsky
Slavonic Dance Op. 46 No. 8, by Dvorak

All the orchestral pieces have long been favorites of mine, an "O Mio Babbino Caro" is by far one of the most beloved arias in the world.

By the way, Marche Slave has what is probably the most thunderous of Tchaikovsky's many uses of the Russian national anthem, God Save the Tsar. The tune was routinely omitted when the work was performed in the late Soviet Union.

It'll be a fun concert -- come and meet us!

The specifics:

Madison Community Orchestra
Blake Walter, Conductor
Sunday, March 28
3:00 PM
Mitby Theater
3550 Anderson St.
Madison, WI 53704
Campus of Madison College (formerly MATC)
madisoncommunityorchestra.org

Admission is free
Free refreshments will be served after the concert

Below is yet another soprano singing the Gounod.

Until the Light Takes Us

Our son, Nat, insisted that we see Aaron Aites' and Audrey Ewell's "Until the Light Takes Us," so we did. Wow. It's haunting, beautiful, and disturbing all at once. The core of the film lies in the contrast between two strange and brilliant musicians: Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes of the one-man band Burzum, and Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell of the equally distinguished Darkthrone. They were among a tiny group of very young men who, circa 1990, originated what is probably the strangest musical style to currently enjoy a mass audience: Norwegian Black Metal.

As Fenriz tells us early on, he and Varg parted ways years ago: he went more and more into the music as music, while Varg focused more and more on "the politics." If you think that "politics" here means something like joining the Social Democrats and participating in democratic elections, you couldn't be more wrong.

The one most disturbing aspect of the film emerges in Varg's disquisitions as he sits in a surprisingly gemuetlich cell in Trondheim maximum security prison, where he was at the time serving a sentence for first degree murder and multiple acts of arson (church burnings). (He was released on parole after the film was completed.) It is disturbing because I find myself irresistibly drawn in by some of his statements. In this film we get a Varg's-eye-view of Varg, and it is strangely attractive. He is often insightful, eloquent, even funny. Then I am brought up short by reminders that there is something seriously wrong here. I think many people would have the same experience, though the aspects they find seductive will no doubt differ from one viewer to another.

I find myself seduced by his blistering attacks on Christianity's 2,000 year history of destroying indigenous cultures all around the world, often by very brutal and arrogant means. But some of his reasons for rejecting Christianity seem inescapably racist to me.

Christianity, he says, is a form of Judaism. In his view, Christians are Jewish heretics. Basically, this is correct. But what follows from this? Judaism, he believes, is "a Middle Eastern religion," and in Norway is simply a foreign imposition. We have our own gods, he says, like Odin, Freya, and Thor.

After 1,000 years of Christianity, including 500 years of Lutheranism, what would it mean to say that Yahweh is a foreign god? Obviously, he is thinking that history and culture are not what is decisive here. What matters is aspects of a people that persist throughout that length of time and do not change. That, of course would be their racial characteristics. He is attributing ethical and religious characteristics to a race, and that is exactly what racism is.

Of course, loving a race you think is good is not the same thing as hating a race you think is bad. I would imagine some of Varg's fans would lean heavily on that point.

Below is Burzum's only music video. The lyrics:

When night falls
She cloaks the world
In impenetrable darkness
A chill rises
From the soil
And contaminates the air
Suddenly...
Life has new meaning.

Note: Burzum and Dunkelheit both mean "darkness," though not in the same language.

Avatar vs. Ben Hur

A comment someone made on an earlier post about Avatar suggested to me the idea that it might be interesting to compare these two films, thinking they might reveal something interesting about the filmic cultures of their times. Both were huge eye-popping spectacles that relied heavily on special effects. Both were sufficiently in tune with their times to win many Academy Award nominations and make tons of money. Both were frankly mass entertainment and not high art, but both had some pretensions to moral seriousness. I re-watched Ben Hur. Here is part of what I came up with.

Ben Hur is a movie with a clear moral and thematic center. The very first words we hear are those of a voice-over narrator (he turns out to be Belthasar, one of the Three Magi):

In the Year of our Lord, Judea - for nearly a century - had lain under the mastery of Rome. In the seventh year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, an imperial decree ordered every Judean each to return to his place of birth to be counted and taxed. The converging ways of many of them led to the gates of their capital city, Jerusalem, the troubled heart of their land. The old city was dominated by the fortress of Antonia, the seat of Roman power, and by the great golden temple, the outward sign of an inward and imperishable faith. Even while they obeyed the will of Caesar, the people clung proudly to their ancient heritage, always remembering the promise of their prophets that one day there would be born among them a redeemer to bring them salvation and perfect freedom.

There are two groups of characters: the Romans and the Jews. The clash between them is consistently depicted as a clash between ideas: the Romans represent power and the Jews represent freedom. The main dramatic conflict is between two former friends: the Roman Messala, whose first lines declare that he is "in command," and the Jew Judah Ben Hur, who eventually tells Messala, "I tell you the day Rome falls there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before!"

Power and freedom are connected in this film with other ideas. The Roman Governor Sextus tells Messala of a carpenter's son who "teaches that God is near, in every man." Messala replies with the authentic Roman view, that "there is divinity in only one man." Power means inequality, while freedom rests on the equalizing effects of Christian love.

Power also rests on fear. When Messala unjustly condemns Judah to the galleys and his mother and sister to a dungeon, he does so as a power play: "By condemning without hesitation an old friend," he says, "I shall be feared." In addition, just as freedom comes with love in this film, so power uses hate as a resource. As Quintus Arrius says to the enslaved Ben Hur: "Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength."

Such are the ideas expressed in Ben Hur. What about Avatar?

To tell you the truth, I wrote the above paragraphs six weeks ago, and didn't know how to go on. Since the Academy Awards are tonight, I thought I should force myself to finish this post. The best I can do, though, for Avatar, is a sort of laundry list of notions:

1. One should love one's planet (or, as in the case of Pandora, satellite).
2. Greed is bad.
3. Hunter-gatherer tribes are good.
4. Business corporations are bad.
5. Military forces are bad.
6. One should not take the property of others, at least if it is the collective property of a hunter-gatherer tribe.

Two things strike me about these two constellations of ideas. a) While the first group is at least half-way interesting and might deserve some further reflection, this is clearly not true of the second group. And that is because b) the second group consists entirely of cliches. We have heard them all a million times before and there is nothing interesting or clever about what Avatar does with them.

I am not saying that communicating ideas is something that any movie has to do. But if its makers do choose to do this, then standards of intellectual clarity, originality, and profundity come into play. Measured by these standards, obviously, Ben Hur kicks Avatar's butt.

Twilight Zone Episodes: MyTop 10 List

I don't take top ten (or top n, where n is any number) lists seriously (especially after the AFI's loathesome "100 Years, 100 Movies" list) but they can be fun to do. Here, in no particular order, is my attempt at a plausible list of the 10 greatest T-Zone episodes, presented in knowledge that there are many other possible "top 10" lists. Except where noted, all were written by Rod Serling. 

 1. "The Midnight Sun" (Season 3)

About this one, I have already written this: ... a brilliantly crafted piece, full of irony and surprises. The surprises begin immediately after the title, which suggests a land of frosty cold, but soon is revealed to refer to a world of searing heat, where the sun is so huge and bright it still lights the sky at midnight. They continue to the end, which is one of the best "twist" endings (Rod called them his "snappers") in the series. The closing narration is also mercifully free of any preachy or patronizing moral.

2. "The Eye of the Beholder" (Season 2)

The closing narration gives the impression that this episode is about relativism: what is ugly to the aliens in the story is beautiful to us. But a closer look at the dialogue suggests it is about race. At one point, the doctors tell the protagonist that if the operation fails they do at least have special places where people like her can live with others of their kind. Her response is the most emotionally intense line she says, delivered almost as a scream: "You mean a ghetto, don't you!?" Earlier in the fifties, Serling had written realistic teleplays for dramatic shows like "Playhouse 90," and had never been allowed to deal seriously with the subject of race, generally because a sponsor objected (God forbid cigarettes should be associated in the viewer's mind with something that upsets people!). Now that he dealt in fantasies and parables, he could discuss it to his heart's content.

3. "Walking Distance" (Season 1)

Rod Serling was an intense, chain-smoking workaholic. Two of the most heartfelt and personal episodes are about an overworked man who is overcome by nostalgia for the slower-paced, easier-living world of the past. The town that is walking distance from the hero's malfunctioning car is no doubt based on Serling's childhood home, Binghamton, New York. Note the original score by the great Bernard Herrmann.

4. "A Stop at Willoughby" (Season 1)

This is the other great flipping-out-from-overwork story. This one suggests, disturbingly, that actually being dead is better than living that way. Or maybe the idea is that this nostalgia for the low-pressure world of the past is actually a death wish and should be avoided. We report, you decide.

5 "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (Season 5, Richard Matheson)

Even more disturbing than the monster on the wing of the plane (at least for the viewer) is the possibility that no one will believe the hero when he says he has actually seen it.

6. "Nick of Time" (Season 2)

A marvelous parable about how irrational beliefs can be as enslaving as chains and bars, if not more so. A young man finds himself unable to disobey the advice of a fortune telling machine in cheap diner.

7. "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Season 2)

No philosophical point here, just a disturbing story about an airliner lost, not in space, but in time. I vividly remember seeing, probably on the original airdate in February 1961, a certain shot at the end of the episode. It turned out to be the most expensive piece of film made for a TV show up to that time ($2,500). It was a clay animation of a brontosaurus looking up from what was supposed to be New York city.

8. "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (Season 1)

Probably the original inspiration for this one was the idea, common among Cold War liberals like Serling, that right-wingers who make reckless accusations of Communist sympathies are playing into the enemy's hands. We must have national unity! Fortunately, because he was expressing himself indirectly through images and action, this little drama has a much wider and deeper application.

9. "The Invaders" (Season 2, Richard Matheson)

One of the "reversal of perspective" episodes, of which there are many. One remarkable thing about it: until the very end, it contains no dialogue at all.

10. "It's a Good Life" (Season 3)

Is it about life in a PC university? Or the constant pressure to be upbeat and optimistic? Or is it a nightmare vision of a world dominated by the young? All of the above and more!

That was fun, though I had to leave out some of my favorite episodes, including ones that I have written on for publication: "A Quality of Mercy" and "The Purple Testament." By the way, numbers 2, 5, 6, and 7 are discussed at length in "Philosophy in the Twilight Zone."