Achieving maximal performance

Frog-jumping contests!

Closing tabs

I liked Stephen Graham Jones's All the Beautiful Sinners, although I wouldn't have minded it being a bit clearer at times - there are places where we are just confused rather than poetically oblique/ambiguous in our comprehension about what is going on. Similar DNA to Joe Hill's book, I think, though with different landscapes and long histories.

Have spent morning tidying and packing. I dislike the amount of organization required to leave town, but on the other hand my apartment would probably be an archeological tip of papers and books if I didn't regularly have to clean it up before travel. Trying to gear up for a run on this rainy day, but I fear I have missed my moment, it's absolutely pouring again - it might be I should take the cue from the heavens and have another rest day.

Miscellaneous linkage:

My old schoolmate Nathaniel Frank on Niall Ferguson and homophobia. (Via Katherine B.)

Young singers mangling the Great American Songbook.

"CSI: Monk Seal"?

Animals riding animals! (Via Sarang.)

Banana beta-blocker

At Boston Magazine, Jennie Dorris on one professional percussionist's attempt to survive the audition process for the Boston Symphony.

I must say

that I am mighty tempted to secure a seat for one of these Ring Cycle series in the spring.  I don't know Wagner's music well at all, so it is more a program of self-education than of true self-lavishing pleasure, but it seems as though it might be worthwhile, and I do not know when I'll have such an easy chance again.  I have a ticket (up in the very highest, farthest-away seats, through bargain CU ticket-purchasing!) to the Philip Glass Satyagraha for later this month, I might scope out which of the not-quite-cheapest-but-not-so-expensive seats would seem an improvement on the basics if I were to go to Wagner - there are operas I will see from the furthest distance and steepest and most vertiginous seating (namely, anything Mozart), whereas Verdi et al. I will only see from lavishly expensive seats paid for by someone other than myself.  Wagner might fall somewhere between the two.... On the other hand, there are the HD simulcast performances also, where (as it has been observed) one can slip out to use the bathroom and get a drink of water...*

(It was this NYT review of Siegfried that made me think of it.  It is a minor point, but Eric Owens was my Philadelphia contemporary and the star student of my oboe teacher Susan Simon: I didn't know him in those days other than in passing, i.e. at Settlement music recitals, but he was one of those incredibly talented multifaceted musicians who you are not at all surprised to hear years later praised in print in the most glowing terms...)

* (Actually I have looked up the text of the FT interview with Thomas Larcher that I had in mind, and it is more vivid than my paraphrase: “If a four-hour Morton Feldman quartet is performed in a concert hall, you start thinking after 90 minutes ‘Well, I really have to go to the loo’. And after two and a half hours it’s martyrdom. But if you’re listening to the recording at home, while lying in bed and smoking some dope, it can be great.")

"My panache"

I saw this performance what was probably later the same year when it moved to New York (it was my Christmas present, my mother and I went up on Amtrak to NYC for the day - a sort of extravagance we never did in those days! - to see the pair of RSC productions, Derek Jacobi in Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac). I've seen only a handful of things since that could claim to match it, I'd say...

A perfect evening

My brother Michael and my adopted grandfather Gene joined me for the really lovely evening of music that was Nico's "conspiring" with Gotham Chamber Opera at (Le) Poisson Rouge. I really like going to stuff at that place: it is intelligently and comfortably cabaret-style, with lots of bathrooms and food and drink served at the table (the wait staff couldn't circulate so well in this configuration as in some others, so there were delays in table-clearing and follow-up, but nothing to mar the very substantial pleasures of the ear that were on offer). I had in the end bought tickets for all three of us, but the press agent had invited Gene to attend, and had reserved for us what were probably the best seats in the house: we were about ten feet away from the piano, with a very direct view of Nico or whoever else was sitting at the keyboard and performers standing close enough that you could see the amazing vibrations of the glottis (?) that characterize operatic singing.

A couple arias from the Dark Sisters opera (it is the most amazing music, I can hardly wait to hear the whole thing again in November), set into selections of all sorts that highlighted various aspects either of Nico's choral writing or of the singers' strengths: the first bit was Purcell's "Evening Hymn," the last was the evening song from Philip Glass's Satyagraha, a revelation to me (I had never heard it before!). One of the other highlights was a really extraordinary performance of Ravel's sonata for violin and cello by Yuki Lee Numata and Clarice Jensen. I am not a lover of the violin, really, but I was blown away by Numata's performance - she is incredible, definitely a performer to watch for...

(The opera company director Neal Goren accompanied many of the singers, which I think is rightly his prerogative but which caused me to reflect that he played the piano like someone to whom the modern instrument is wholly foreign, he must have trained as an organist rather than a pianist - definitely a thumper rather than a stroker of the ivories - the shortcomings were particularly clear in the aria from Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione, with terrible approximate bashings-out of notes and wild thumping just behind tempo!... Really in NYC you can almost certainly find on every street corner a superb accompanist who could do a good job with this sort of thing on short notice, but I guess it would give a different character to the evening, so it seems a fair trade-off.)

This side whimsy

I thoroughly enjoyed Misha Glouberman's collaboration with Sheila Heti, The Chairs are Where the People Go, after an initial round of disappointment that came to an end when I realized that it was completely unreasonable of me to expect this book to be exactly like and as good as Georges Perec's "Species of Spaces". I think it was the book's title that made me feel I'd be getting something so much along those lines: and no, it is not as good as that paragraph I just linked to indeed or that whole work, but it is very much worthwhile nonetheless (Perec sets an impossibly high standard).

Most attractive to me were the thoughts on groups and their working dynamics; Misha has had an interesting and unusual career thus far teaching improvisation and doing odd and highly imaginative sorts of classes, and his descriptions of this stuff really spoke to me. Interesting things to be gleaned here by anyone in education or the arts, I'd say, with particular focus on the productive tension between verbal and non-verbal forms of art, the nature of collaboration in a group and a cluster of related topics, including ephemeral art forms, games and the relationship between participation and performance (games and group dynamics being central topics of interest to me in BOMH). (Sheila Heti has done an interesting and imaginative job shaping the material into a book.)

Here's one of my favorite bits, a list of "some hard Charades clues" that emerged from years of teaching a workshop on charades (this is the sort of counterintuitive class in which Misha has specialized):

the Symbionese Liberation Army
Sum 41
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Guam
Being and Nothingness
Sometimes a Great Notion
the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century
Fletch
Soren Kierkegaard
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
the Koran
"Bootylicious"
"The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides"
E Pluribus Unum
Vinnie Barbarino
Koyaanisqatsi
Troilus and Cressida
the lambada
1984
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Mr. Snuffleupagus
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"
"Que Sera, Sera"
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Godel, Escher, Bach
Soylent Green
shock and awe
The Metamorphosis
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe"
trickle-down economics

Also, some very wise thoughts on conferences and why it is a pity that their current structure "doesn't just ignore the existence of the Internet, it ignores the existence of the printing press":

It's a medieval idea about how information should be disseminated--to imagine that if you want to know what someone thinks, you have to go sit in a room with them while they read out loud to you their thoughts. But at a lot of conferences that's the primary thing that happens.

Finding out what someone has to say in their paper isn't a reason to travel across the country and stay in a hotel room. A reason to travel across the country is to have conversations with people and actually form human relationships. Most of the stuff that happens at a conference not only does not help create that, it hinders it.

Frankenstein-level editing

At the FT (site registration required), Shirley Apthorp on two men's quest to reproduce Grieg's performances of nine of his own works:

And so Harrison, who harbours a lifelong fascination with old recordings, embarked on a project to reconstruct Grieg’s playing to the point that it was comprehensible for the modern listener. Digital remastering, he decided, would not do.

“When you first listen to it, all you hear is noise. There are various software solutions for noise reduction. But in the end, you can’t have your cake and eat it. When you take out noise, you also take out tiny bits of information, and it’s incredible how sensitive we are to that kind of information. The best computer we have is the human brain. So I decided to find a low-tech solution to a complex problem.”

In an age before mechanical repetition, before constant noise, before continuous acceleration, did people have a different sense of time? Grieg’s playing is a glimpse of an utterly different approach to sound in space. Pianists today are nowhere near as free with tempi, as improvisatory yet structured, as subtle.

"Now I know how Joan of Arc felt"

I read the first third or so of Patti Smith's Just Kids with increasing hardness of heart. I had thoughtlessly imagined I would love the book, but in fact I am not its ideal reader - I have never idealized Baudelaire and Rimbaud, I find Art irksome (as opposed to the hard yet playful discipline of craft or making things). Patti Smith seems to me to reside at the horrible intersection of the trajectories of Jim Morrison and Susan Sontag BOTH OF WHOM I LOATHE!

A good example of the sort of passage in the opening pages that just makes me shake my head and throw up my hands in temperamental disaffinity:

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world. Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck's children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

Robert responded as my beloved twin. His dark curls merged with the tangle of my hair as I shuddered tears. He promised we could go back to the way things were, how we used to be, promising me anything if I would only stop crying.

Ugh! It is intolerable!

I stopped feeling so antagonistic around midpoint, though. There are glimpses even in the first third or so of a more appealing insight and self-awareness (the description of her own response to seeing Jim Morrison perform is spectacular - "I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence" - and I also love the notion of Robert Mapplethorpe having to purchase the porn magazines he used for his collages while they were still sealed and returning to their room at the Chelsea hotel to "unseal the cellophane with the expectation of Charlie peeling back the foil of a chocolate bar in hopes of finding a golden ticket"). A bit more of a sense of humor develops as Smith narrates the trials and tribulations of her early attempts to perform before a crowd (it is not one of the more humorous books I have ever read, however, and it compares very poorly in this and other respects to Keith Richards' autobiography - the main mention of Keith Richards here, I note in passing, is in the admittedly compelling yet depressing and perhaps inadvertently hilarious scene in which Smith attains social prominence in the Max's Kansas City circle by giving herself Keith Richards' haircut!).

Patti Smith is an artist of the body, that is what it comes down to - she expresses her frustration with writing ("it wasn't physical enough"), it is force of will and personal charisma that lead to her success as a musical performer (and I still think that the cover of Horses is a greater collaborative creation than anything on the album - in the 1920s she would have been an Isadora Duncan, she is that sort of innovator). She says elsewhere of Mapplethorpe "Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph" - this seems to me a fair description. But the love for Mapplethorpe and the way the book works as an elegy, these are very unusual and striking, I will grudgingly admit that I was won over by the end...

Saturday link miscellany

What's wrong with No. 10 (the underlying link is highly worthwhile!).

Neil Gaiman on seeing the Dresden Dolls.

Laura Amy Schlitz remembers Eva Ibbotson (link courtesy of Dave Lull).

Speed reading

When I first got an invitation to participate in this event, I knew I had to be a part of it!

Sponsored by Cabinet Magazine, it's part of the Performa festival. Event description: "A 90-minute relay race of sorts, featuring 25-35 writers and artists who will take turns reading aloud short texts related to the theme of speed while running on three treadmills positioned side-by-side. The velocity of the treadmills will be controlled by the Speed Demon, the somewhat sadistic MC who will oversee the performance."

Saturday, Nov. 14 at 6pm at Definitions Gym, 19 Union Square West (at 15th St.) - note corrected time