Firefox 3.1beta3 and open web multimedia

Mike Linksvayer, March 12th, 2009

The third beta of the next version of the Firefox web browser is now available for download. For the approximately half of you reading this in a Firefox browser, the next version of Firefox will be (because the beta already is) much faster and more awesome all around (and will be released as version 3.5 to denote the significance of improvements over Firefox 3). You can help ensure the release is even better by using the beta. For the rest of you — now is a good time to get with the program.

Perhaps the most exciting feature in the future Firefox 3.5 for the commons is built-in support for the new

Aim and influence

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.[

Creative Commons Japan Seminar, Tokyo 2007
Creative Commons - Get Creative.ogg
Play video
An animated film covers the basics of why Creative Commons was formed, what it does and how

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely".

Creative Commons works to counter what the organisation considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past" Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions more

How about ignoring Norrington?

Come on, folks, let's get serious! A to-do about Sir Roger's anti-vibrato movement (or lack of movement, as the case may be)? Don't we have anything better to talk about? Or is it a question of arts journalists frantically searching for copy in August?

Anyone who has read Styra Avins's informed and informative writings on the use of vibrato by Joachim and other string players in the second half of the nineteenth century will know that Norrington's latest campaign is largely baseless or part of an ongoing PR parade -- if not both -- just as anyone who has delved into Beethoven's conversation books will know that the way Norrington straight-armed his way through the recitatives in his recording of the finale of the Ninth Symphony went against the composer's instructions.

Among "authenticists" and "non-authenticists" alike, there are musical and unmusical performers: neither camp has a corner on the sensitivity market. Sir Roger can huff and puff all he likes about this or that offense on the part of the non-authenticists, but, to my ears, he belongs squarely (an appropriate adverb if ever there was one) among the unmusical authenticists.

Time out

The long hiatus in this blog is a result of a lot of other work, intense heat in my fifth-floor, under-the-roof walk-up Manhattan apartment, and sheer lethargy.

I've gradually been looking back over some of the performances that I attended during the 2007-08 New York musical season, but I'm taking time out to talk about a few CDs that have recently come to my attention. I'm prompted in part by Tony Tommasini's evocative New York Times article (June 8) about the wonderful American pianist William Kapell, who died in a plane crash in 1953, at the age of 31. And Tommasini's article was prompted, in turn, by RCA Red Seal's new two-CD album, "William Kapell Rediscovered." The recordings heard on these discs were made during live concerts in Australia that took place during the months immediately preceding this amazing artist's death.

I am ashamed to admit that I had paid very little attention to Kapell's recordings until 1998, when RCA issued a nine-CD set devoted to nearly all of the pianist's recordings known at that time, but once I had made his musical acquaintance, I was hooked. Rare are the performing musicians who make you feel not only that they have thoroughly understood the works they are interpreting, but also that they are "speaking" them directly, creating them before your very ears. Maybe you don't agree with this or that detail, or even an entire interpretation; nevertheless, you are swept along by the conviction, honesty, and communicative mastery that have gone into what you are hearing. This is the feeling I have when I listen to Kapell. Take, for instance, Chopin's Barcarolle and E-flat Major Nocturne, Op. 55 No. 2, in this new album -- which I would urge every young pianist to acquire: you feel at every moment that this music is in Kapell's bloodstream, as if Chopin had told him what to do with every nuance in tempo and dynamics, every accent, the shape of every phrase. Afterward, you may ask yourself why Kapell didn't make more of a certain climax, why he slowed down at a certain point -- and these issues do count, for anyone who cares deeply about musical interpretation. But you remain awestruck by the fanatical care with which every detail has been worked out, in itself and in relation to every other detail, and by the apparent spontaneity of the result. So also the performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev in this remarkable valedictory album.

An exceptionally fine recent CD is a Harmonia Mundi release containing the Jerusalem Quartet's interpretations of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" and Quartettsatz. This is ensemble playing of the highest order: tremendous intensity combined with great interpretive intelligence and unity of intent, not to mention the striking virtuosity of each player (Alexander Pavlovsky and Segei Bresler, violins; Amichai Grosz, viola; and Kyril Zlotnikov, cello). There is a tendency toward exaggerated dynamic contrasts -- even more superfluous in this highly dramatic performance than they would be in blander versions; nevertheless, this is a CD that everyone who loves these astonishing works should have.

Two other string ensembles that I've listened to with pleasure lately are the Moscow and American string quartets, performing music by the American composer Curt Cacioppo on the somewhat out-of-the-way MSR Classics label (easily available through amazon.com, however -- as are several other recordings of the same composer's music). The two-CD album also contains performances by the Friends Chamber Group and by Cacioppo himself at the piano. I've known Cacioppo since we were kids studying with the same piano teacher, back in the mid-1960s. He went on to study with Leon Kirchner and other masters, and he has taught for many years at Haverford College, where his interest in Native American music spurred him to establish a Native American Fund and a related social justice course. His works have been performed by the Emerson Quartet and other eminent musicians. This new recording is made up of viscerally and intellectually stimulating compositions influenced in subtle ways by Navajo, Hopi, and other Native American music. Cacioppo has a unique creative voice that deserves to be heard.

I note that "Roger," commenting on an earlier blog entry, protested my description of the "constantly shouting" Joseph Calleja as Macduff in a Met performance of Verdi's Macbeth this past spring and attributed my words to "ignorance," rather than allowing for a difference of opinion. A musician who attended all the Macbeth rehearsals and performances wrote to me privately that he found Calleja "'promising' but green and monochrome, and does he think he always has the melody?" And yet another musician, who was sitting next to me at the performance I attended, had a more negative opinion than mine of Calleja. So that makes at least three ignoramuses. I have no idea whether or not "Roger" is ignorant or knowledgeable, but he must have learned about democracy by reading Mein Kampf.

A few performances to remember - 2

The first installment of my backward glance at the just-ending New York musical season was all about the Met. This time I'm thinking about some of the events that I attended at Carnegie Hall in 2007-08 -- first and foremost, Andras Schiff's four magnificent recitals (two in October, two in April) that covered, more or less chronologically, the first 17 of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas.

Schiff often does "bulk programming" of composers -- cycles of works by Bach, Schubert, Bartok, and others. Although I am sure that he has been familiar with the Beethoven sonatas since student days, he waited until he was about 50 (he was born in 1953) to consider and then perform these monuments of the keyboard repertoire as a single corpus.

Which is not to say that he places these monuments on pedestals. On the contrary: his interpretations are characterized above all by enlivening freshness -- a freshness that can be achieved only by artists who are willing to contemplate a work from every angle and, for each detail, to discard one solution after another until they hit upon the one that seems to fit most naturally into the whole concept. Intellectual rigor, emotional intensity, and musical imagination abounded in all of these performances, which were conveyed with the tremendous conviction and technical security that are part of this great artist's basic equipment. I am already looking forward to the remaining four recitals next season.

Among other fine piano recitals at Carnegie this season, Radu Lupu's January appearance was memorable for a brilliant performance of Book I of Debussy's Preludes. The following month Alfred Brendel movingly performed a mixed program (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert) as part of his final American tour; he will retire completely from the concert circuit next January. In March, Emanuel Ax, whose artistic growth in recent years has been practically exponential, gave outstanding performances of two Beethoven sonatas (Op. 2, No. 2, and the "Appassionata") and Schumann's Humoreske and Papillons. And in April, Leif Ove Andsnes presented a mixed program of which the highlight, as in Radu Lupu's recital, was a series of luminous interpretations of Debussy's Preludes -- in this case, a selection of eleven pieces from Books I and II. Far less successful, to my way of thinking, were recitals, in Carnegie's beautiful, mid-sized Zankel Hall, by Stephen Hough, who played on the surface of Mendelssohn's Variations serieuses and Beethoven's Sonata Op. 111, and Till Fellner, whom I had heard play beautifully in Switzerland a few years ago but who now, in a strange potpourri of a program (Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Holliger, Ravel) seemed intent on demonstrating that he isn't "merely" a serious, Central European pianist but also a brilliant virtuoso. Virtuosity and depth ought to be mutually beneficial, but in this case the former often seemed to have been achieved at the expense of the latter.

I apologize if I'm boring you, but my enthusiasm for James Levine's work in the Met's pit this past season was carried over to his Carnegie concert appearances. Particularly noteworthy was a program in October by the MET Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall: the first half consisted of amazingly accomplished performances of complex works by three living American masters -- Elliott Carter (nearly 99 at the time), Milton Babbitt (91), and John Harbison (a babe of 69), all of them present at the event -- and in the second half the same three composers became Soldier, Devil, and Narrator, respectively, in an exhilarating interpretation of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale; the narration, rewritten for the occasion, was witty enough that it would surely have won the composer's approval. I confess that I still can't get the hang of Babbitt's works, but the soprano Judith Bettina deserved a medal, at the very least, for her virtuosic and virtually non-stop traversal of his densely packed, 22-minute The Head of the Bed. In January, the same ensemble, again under Levine, played six Second Viennese School works, including Berg's Chamber Concerto, with pianist Yefim Bronfman and violinist Gil Shaham, and Schoenberg's Pierrot luanire, with soprano Anja Silja, with polish and conviction. The following month, Levine and the whole Met Orchestra gave a shattering performance of Webern's Six Pieces, Op. 6, at the start of a memorable concert that also comprised Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, with Brendel (a few days before the aforementioned recital); Berg's Three Pieces, Op. 6, and the final scene from Salome, with Deborah Voigt in top form.

Also in February, two concerts by the Chicago Symphony under Pierre Boulez included the New York premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Osiris, which I found hard to fathom (the limitation is mine, of course), and music by Bartok (the Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida, in a performance that began too preciously but intensified from movement to movement), Debussy (all three of the Images), Berio, Berlioz (Les Nuits d'ete, beautifully interpreted by Susan Graham), and Stravinsky (the 1911 version of Petrouchka). I doubt that I will ever hear clearer, more luminous, or more brilliantly executed performances of the Debussy or the Stravinsky, and yet both suffered from that lack of forward movement that afflicts Boulez's interpretations when he seems to be concentrating more on bar-by-bar sound than on a work's overall architecture: you can't see the forest for the trees. It was like listening to a brilliantly analytical rehearsal rather than to a completely communicative performance.

In November Zankel Hall was the site of a fine performance by the Zehetmair String Quartet (Mozart, Hindemith, Schumann), but the most remarkable event that I witnessed there this season was the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble's performance, in January, of Boulez's Le Marteau sans maitre and sur Incises under the composer's direction, and with a pre-performance conversation between Boulez and Ara Guzeliminian, Carnegie's former artistic administrator. To my taste, sur Incises is a much more attractive work than Le Marteau, which has become a classic of the 20th century's avant-garde; in any case, both were played with apparent ease by these virtuosic young musicians from all over the world, under the nearly 83-year-old master's guidance.

For me, the Carnegie/Zankel season ended pleasantly on May 11 with a concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Douglas Boyd and with Dawn Upshaw as the fine soloist in some Stravinsky songs (Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont and Three Japanese Lyrics), Ravel's Three Poems of Stephane Mallarme, and Osvaldo Golijov's not terribly effective arrangements of four Schubert lieder. (Why has there been a resurgence of interest in old and new orchestrations of Schubert's songs? No matter how skillful the arranger, the pieces simply don't sound as good with orchestral accompaniment as they do in the original voice-and-piano blend created by the composer.) The other works on this program were Dvorak's Serenade for Winds and Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite (1949 revision), deftly and arrestingly executed by this fine Minnesota ensemble.

A few performances to remember - 1

i have been remiss in updating this blog because I was participating in a seminar on "The Musician as Listener" at the Orpheus Institute in beautiful Ghent, Belgium. I discovered that in addition to van Eyck's celebrated altarpiece in the cathedral, Ghent has a lovely art museum that contains first-rate works by Bosch, Brueghel, van der Weyden, van Dyck, Rubens, Hals, Gericault (one of the extraordinary portraits of mad people that he was working on when he died), Corot, Courbet, Rodin, Redon, Ensor, Kokoschka, Magritte, and many others. And of course I had to devote a great deal of concentration to the task of stuffing myself with Belgian chocolates.

But back to musical matters. As New York's 2007-08 musical season draws to a close, I would like to take a backward glance at some of the performances I attended this year. In this blog entry, I'll limit myself to a few of the 14 or 15 Met productions that I observed.

Two new productions -- Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth -- were memorable above all for the conducting of James Levine. This statement may cause some surprise, because the Donizetti work in particular and to some extent also Verdi's earliest Shakespearean foray are considered primarily "singers' operas" rather than "conductors' operas," and most of the critics' attention in both cases was understandably focused on the singing and the new productions. Certainly Natalie Dessay was remarkable as both singer and actress in Lucia (as also in Donizetti's La Fille du regiment toward the end of the season), but her voice is not a huge one. Levine not only balanced the orchestra to match the soprano's capabilities -- a relatively easy task for any competent opera conductor: he actually adapted the dynamic levels of the entire opera to Dessay's resources, so that the orchestra wasn't suddenly playing noticeably softer for her. That, my friends, requires large quantities of experience and intelligence. And it means that one of the golden rules for singers -- The Softer You Sing, The More Clearly You Must Enunciate -- was also being obeyed by Levine and his magnificent orchestra. The Lucia production, directed by Mary Zimmerman and designed by Daniel Ostling, had its beauties (the wintry first act, for instance), but it was marred by numerous absurdities, of which the most noteworthy was the photo op for Lucia, her family, and the wedding guests, who mugged calmly while singing the grandiose, emotionally charged sextet in Act II. This error of judgement made me think of the Italian director Giorgio Strehler's statement to the effect that you can stage a great work as arbitrarily as you like, but please remember that your miserable ideas will look very, very small next to the work itself. The production's other principal cast members (Marcello Giordani as Edgardo, Mariusz Kwiecien as Enrico, and John Relyea as Raimondo) did not match Dessay's technical level, but all were well prepared

Strehler created a brilliant production of Verdi's Macbeth at La Scala in 1975; the setting was medieval but highly stylized, and every movement the singers made had a reason for existing, By contrast, Adrian Noble's new Met production, set in modern times, teemed with visual effects that, to this audience member, seemed largely gratuitous. With the exception of the young tenor Dimitri Pittas (Macduff), the principal singers (Zeljko Lucic and Maria Guleghina as Macbeth and his lady, respectively, and John Relyea as Banquo) were unexceptional; once again it was Levine's handling of the orchestra and the entire ensemble (including the chorus, excellently prepared by Donald Palumbo) that made these performances worth hearing -- truly dramatic, and with none of the heavy-handedness of Claudio Abbado's conducting of that way-back-when Scala production. A later run of Macbeth performances had a less worn-out-sounding Macbeth (Carlos Alvarez), a dramatically intense but vocally rough Lady (Hasmik Papian), a magnificent Banquo (Rene Pape), and a constantly shouting Macduff (Joseph Calleja), but the ensemble was, if anything, even more dramatically convincing than in the fall.

More specific highlights of the Met season, for this listener, were the singing of Susan Graham and Placido Domingo in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride and of Anthony Dean Griffey and most of the other cast members in Britten's Peter Grimes. A serious disappointment, on the other hand, was Karita Mattila (an artist I greatly admire) in the title role of Puccini's Manon Lescaut -- a role that simply does not lie right for her voice. And I confess that I would rather spend a week in jail (if I could have writing materials with me) than listen to another performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. I tried -- I really did -- but I found it a crashing bore. For me, however, the season ended wonderfully with Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, splendidly sung by the amazing Susan Graham and the rest of the cast (Ramon Vargas, Tamar Iveri, Heidi Grant Murphy, Anke Vondung, and Oren Gradus), incisively conducted by Harry Bicket, and still beautiful to watch in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1984 production.

Mutatis mutandis: Muti goes to Chicago

I've looked up a note I wrote to myself on June 22, 1976, after having observed Riccardo Muti (who was then not quite 35) rehearse the orchestra of La Scala. Bear in mind as you read the following excerpts from those hastily jotted-down pages, that I myself was active as a conductor at the time, although at very modest levels, and that I had previously followed the rehearsals of George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Karel Ancerl, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Karl Boehm, Carlos Kleiber, Georges Pretre and many other conductors.

"I had heard many good things about him [...] and was prepared to shake my head and wonder what all the fuss was about - as is usually the case. I am delighted that the reverse is true: I feel that he has not been praised highly enough.

"[...] He knows exactly what sound he wants and he knows exactly how to get it - and this not only in regard to the general, overall picture (which he never loses sight of) but in regard to every detail. His mastery of the score is complete, his ear absolutely first-rate, and his way of dealing with the orchestra just right - firm, always demanding the best they can give, but totally unauthoritarian. His attitude in front of the orchestra is unegocentric - it is that of working towards a common goal, and he never loses sight of that. He has the ability and self-possession of a Szell or a Boulez, but far greater naturalness and humanity than the former and a sense of conviction that the latter seems to be lacking in a considerable chunk of the repertoire. [...] And as much as I admired Carlos Kleiber's work here earlier this season, I must say that I think Muti's natural gifts, certainly insofar as balance, intonation, and sheer memorization of detail are concerned, are greater than Kleiber's. They both communicate enthusiasm to the orchestra very well, but in completely different ways. Kleiber is more 'personal,' one has more of a sense of his own psychological make-up [...], whereas with Muti what radiates is more a sense of drama [...]. Muti seems more a phenomenon of nature."

During the intervening 32 years, I have had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of opportunities to observe Muti at work in Milan and elsewhere, in the opera house and concert hall, and my initial impression of his complete seriousness, competence, and musicality has remained unchanged. Do I always, automatically, agree with his repertoire choices or interpretations? Of course not. But what is most important in conductor-orchestra relationships is the feeling on the part of individual musicians that the person in charge is guiding them expertly and with conviction - that that person can be trusted completely to do the job in an outstanding way and can therefore communicate the need to do likewise to the people who are playing the instruments. Over the last three years, watching and listening to Muti work with the grateful and enthusiastic Orchestra Cherubini (a youth ensemble) in the small town of Piacenza, Italy, was an absolute delight, and then observing him electrify the New York Philharmonic - which, like most other first-rate professional orchestras, can often be ungrateful and unenthusiastic, usually with good reason - was simply amazing.

As a New York resident - and despite my esteem for Alan Gilbert and high hopes for his forthcoming tenure with the Philharmonic - I am sorry that Muti will be diminishing his appearances with the local band, but at least we will be able to look forward to frequent visits by him with the magnificent Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Lovecat

Among the many absurd and badly paying jobs I've had--ghostwriting a mail-in Ph.D. on economics, wrapping holiday Crate and Barrel purchases in enough paper to have kept little Jesus warm, translating Richard III into easy English--one I recall without shuddering is as an all-purpose office assistant to some all-purpose Israeli émigrés in the Bay Area. Their various schemes included buying rundown apartment buildings, renovating them for cheap, and then renting the units at a steep markup. This being only a few years after the quake of '89, another project was to retrofit houses to withstand the next big quake. (Retrofitting, said my sister, a structural engineer, is pure construction quackery.)

The Ashkenazis owned the apartments and fomented the plans, while the Sephardis did the dirty work, as they always had, they said--these swarthy, stocky, beautiful men whose families arrived in Israel from Egypt and Morocco or merely stayed put in what they had known as Palestine. Up until the late '60s, the Sephardis were called blacks--after the American situation--and were kept down.

They taught me modern Hebrew parables--there are hundreds, as you might expect, redolent of desert, with abundant stone and bird. In exchange, I vetted their theories on American women. Their main evidence was an advertising executive who lived in one of the renovated apartments. She had slept with one of them, and quickly got tired of him. He was outraged: How could a person treat sex so casually? How could it mean so little?

Which somehow led to cats--what was wrong with them. Cats, as opposed to dogs (read Israeli women?), would never do anything for you: no fetching of slippers, no ingratiating wagging of tail. The arrogant bastards lived entirely for themselves.

I am not a "cat person," as people like to put it, any more than I'm a "people person," so I knew what the man meant. I have witnessed many a cat get what she wants while remaining largely impervious to the person giving it.

But not Noodles, not Lump-Lumps--not Alfredo Fettuccine Scherr, who died on July 17 after a run of sixteen years.

WHENEVER WE WENT TO THE VET, I'd exclaim, "Isn't he beautiful!?" and the doctor would say yes--what choice did she have? But she also said, unprompted, "What a good cat. What a sweet cat."

Isn't he beautiful?!

Alfredo was impressionable. He was responsive. He ventured into territory he would never entirely understand simply because it was where I was.

For example, there was the dance. It began 12 years ago, with him meeting me at the front door and racing through our railroad apartment to the bedroom in the back, where he executed quasi-Aikido rolls that finished with his bunny feet flopping up into the air as he landed heavily on his side. He did this one move until he calmed down enough to let me rub his belly. Within a month I could summon the belly-rub desire with, "Do the Dance, Alfredo. Do the Dance." In the weeks before he died, when he hardly had a belly to rub or much to feel pleasure about, he was still falling to his side to await my giant hand.

Unlike his human, Alfredo was taciturn most of his life. Other than squawking at the birds when we lived in an apartment level with a wild garden (Did he mistake himself for a bird or hope to trick them?), he mainly communicated by the distances he kept, plopping himself down just out of reach or way out of reach. He wanted attention, but not so much as to be pounced on. Once he hit middle age, though, and his bones began to creak, he came closer and learned to rant. Stationed next to my desk so I wouldn't miss a word, he'd start off mildly but soon be overtaken by a juggernaut enthusiasm that rolled on for whole minutes: a cat rendition of me.

He also learned late along to wonder about the Great Beyond--or at least the hallway. No matter how much I might try to disguise it, he must have sensed that I didn't always leave the apartment reluctantly. Sometimes when he was at loose ends--when the je ne sais quoi of contentment had escaped him--he'd remember the bolted door and make a dash for it, impatient to wander under the flickery florescent lights and sniff. (Watching him down the hall, I was struck again by how big he was: softer than a fox and not so high, yet at least as long. At night in bed, though, his size was never in doubt, especially when there were three of us. Spread out stiffly wherever you were hoping to put your arms, your legs, your feet, or head, he became unrearrangeable: a lunk.)

Two and a half years ago Alfredo developed chronic renal failure. This progressive kidney disease is nearly synonymous with old age in cats, so many of them die of it. But in the meantime (anywhere from six months to a few years), the cat feels pretty good as long as he's eating and drinking. The problem is, he experiences hunger as nausea and doesn't want to eat. Alfredo, once an avid diner ("He chomps like a dinosaur," complained a friend), would hardly touch food or water on his own.

So after trying all sorts of fussy-cat foods, I fed him myself. I'd snatch him off the bed, where he assumed a defensive crouch as soon as he saw me coming (when I waited too long, he'd take the position unprovoked), and carry him into the bathroom. Wrapped in a towel and held between my legs, he'd down droppers of imitation fish-milk with smacks and gulps and grunts and sighs. We reminded my mother of the Madonna and Child. I thought Fern and Wilbur from Charlotte's Web was more like it, but it did feel special.

IN THE LAST MONTHS on the way to the bathroom, he fell into flamenco deep song, where the keening descending chords expire in an exhalation of despair. If he was silent, I'd start us off--and Alfredo, king of suffering, would sing louder and longer to drown me out.

My life revolved around twenty-seven droppers a day, five to seven at a shot, timed as well as my work would allow to keep his nausea at bay. I had a job away from home now that often held me late; on the subway back to Queens, I scrawled my schedule on the backs of envelopes:

feed alfredo
pet alfredo
do stretches
feed alfredo
dinner
feed alfredo
bed

It was the job I resented, not the feedings. After a meal Alfredo sat sphinxlike on our mattress, his eyes half-closed in pleasure. I lay face down with my nose pressed against his side and wreathed my arms around him; he draped a paw over the closest arm, as if to say, You are mine.

It is possible that a person trapped in such close quarters with me for sixteen years would also eventually have shown he felt my love, that I mattered, that I had touched him: proof that I am not alone. But it probably wouldn't have been so clear. Person-to-person love can seem awfully like self-duplication or self-betrayal--and vice versa. With Alfredo, there was no danger of getting mired in a hall of mirrors: however many of my habits he took on, I would never mistake him for me. It's a wonderful paradox that, in being so alien, an animal allows you the same unself-consciousness he glories in. You can tell you've touched him, but you don't worry about the you or the him. And he lets you find yourself in him without you even knowing it's you.

Alfredo changed me--the ideas I live by. More and more, I imagined the luxurious fruitlessness of lying all day on bed or carpet, in soft holes in backyards, on piles of dirty clothes in closets that reeked of cat at his mustiest, with nothing much to think about or worry over. My wretched food would be provided for, and the special lady's enormous face would rub against my whiskers. Shaded in melancholy, Alfredo proved the perfect source for daydream: I wouldn't have to relinquish my muddy mix of feeling to be in his place.

But he couldn't have said how he felt, like I can. It's an old question, what humans gain from our keen consciousness. And for me it's had a particular New York cast to it for the last ten years. I moved across the country, to a room with a view of pigeon-shitted brick, because I didn't want to be an office assistant for scheming Israelis forever. I wanted work that mattered.

Now that I'm older and more defeated (that's a New York state of mind, too), I'm not sure any work could matter as much as a big, soft hole.

The month Alfredo died, I added another absurd job to the roster. The week at the office ends with the usual ritual questions about what you're doing this weekend. People understand that those two leftover days may say more about you than anything over the last five. When, a few Fridays ago, a colleague asked me, I said, "I'm going to lie around with my kitty."

Books and flowers

Wood engraving by Raoul Dufy from my namesake's bestiary poems, subtitled "Procession of Orpheus" (1911)

Notes on ballet events long past

William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar," performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders at the Lincoln Center Festival in the company's U.S. debut, late July. I was particularly struck by the choreographer's deftness at fomenting spectacle. The guy's a theater animal! a genius showman!--whatever his avant-garde ambitions. Why does no one talk about this?


The royal court, an Olympian, and bongo teen spirit mashed together in "Impressing the Czar"


Europeans and Europhiles tend to focus on Forsythe's deep meanings--his subversions of ballet convention, of theatrical convention, of narrative, of capitalism, of what have you-- and applaud him for his wisdom. Not finding much wisdom, his fellow Americans (the guy's from Manhasset) deem him a fake. (His ponderous program notes don't help.) They especially take issue with his torquing of the ballet torso, contending that it's not an evolution of classical symmetries so much as their destruction.

But with the slippery, smooth Royal Flanders dancers, you can see his love of ballet--of its flight, in particular. The Belgians' arms extend from their backs like wings, evoking the infinity lines of tiled Eastern arabesques.
And the way Forsythe keeps the action moving--his masterful, cinematic capacity to get us to follow the frames of action he has envisioned, no matter how much action is transpiring at once--is exciting throughout.

Act 1 (pictured above) recalls Balanchine's "Nutcracker" party scene--our gaze somehow lured first to the naughty boys, then to the docile girls, then to the serving maids and the grandparents, even though he has none of the focusing advantage of a camera, only a magician's knack for attracting the eye or letting it wander--except Forsythe's configurations are more unruly and the clans more motley.

In dancey Act 2, titled "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and regularly presented by American troupes as a stand-alone piece, dancers on the stage's shadowy margins evoke the action at centerstage like an echo fading into silence recalls the instigating shout. The eerie effect is to soften the proscenium's hard edges so you imagine feathery versions of this beautiful, hypermute dance floating out into the city like deja-vus.

The final scene effectively takes the piss out of Nijinsky-Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," with men and women--dressed alike as dumb, disobedient Catholic school girls--doing a funky circle dance (aptly dubbed Bongo Bongo Nageela) around the prone figure of one mythical Greek figure you probably haven't heard of, Mr. Pnut.

Of course, the program notes make huge claims for Forsythe--that he's resurrecting and simultaneously dismantling the history of Western dance. But for me, "Impressing the Czar" doesn't stand up under much analysis. Except for "In the Middle," the evening's piece de resistance, in which the effulgent stream of movement hides vortexes of invisibility (just as in Thom Willems's Sound of Noisey score there are moments when the sound gets sucked into a vacuum), the main virtue of the evening-length work is how fun it is: no mean feat.



Veronika Part in "La Bayadere," American Ballet Theatre, Monday June 23. I'll get in trouble for this--especially after ballet fans praised Part so highly--but when someone (a colleague I am friendly with, Laura Jacobs) puts out the critic's equivalent of a fatwa --"Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her," from a New Criterion essay excerpted here on husband James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog -- how can I resist?

I think I understand why critics are so divided, with Jacobs and Joel Lobenthal of the New York Sun loving Part, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times and Robert Gottlieb of the New York Observer despising her, and many of us somewhere in between. It's because she is being divided. She's a lyrical, non-actorly dancer in a company that specializes in story ballets.

She's got one texture, one setting--a very lovely legato--whether she's playing a doomed temple dancer or a teenage princess. Part is always more herself than she is a vessel for the role. That's not a fault in itself--Nureyev was like that too--but I do think it's why critics object to her. (People objected to him too, and he was greater.)

You could divide people--and among them, critics--into those who are impressed with artists who make us conscious of their style and those who are not: those who love the verbal acrobatics of a Nabokov and those who prefer the self-effacements of a Willa Cather.

Me, I'm probably closer to the Cather side--convinced that personality and style per se (it probably never is per se, but people speak of it as if it were) are overrated, in art as in everything else. Still, Part has impressed me in lyrical roles, where no acting is required. Though she dances Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" and "Mozartiana" slowly, she's musical enough to justify the tempo, and the texture this leisurely pace enables is delicious.



American Ballet Theatre's "Giselle," Monday July 7 at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Nina Ananiashvili as Giselle, Angel Corella as Albrecht, and Gillian Murphy as chief Wili, Myrta. I've seen "Giselle"--and especially ABT's stirring version--many times, but only on this sultry summer night did it occur to me that Giselle is making a double sacrifice when she rescues Albrecht from the clutches of the Wilis--the tribe of once jilted maidens, now spirits, who dance to death any man wandering into their woods after dark. (How does Giselle save him? She gets him to dance with her until dawn.)


The choreography for the corps is so strong and was so well delivered July 7 (led by Melissa Thomas and an astounding Zhong-Jing Fang, whose arching back created a maelstrom of conflicting feelings with every arabesque) that they became a sisterhood: a positive thing in itself, whatever its purpose. Once she's finished saving her lover, Giselle won't ever belong. For a ghostly eternity, she will be a pariah to the women and apart from the man. That she will always be in his heart hardly matters since it won't be within reach.

The sisterhood, with deputies Melissa Thomas and Zhong-Jing Fang in front

As lead Wili Myrta, Gillian Murphy underscored how much these women had lost. In her opening solo, she introduced the tribe with a steely chill: after bourreeing in and out of view like the wraith she is, she stopped dead in a perfect 90 degree arabesque, sharp and fine like a sword. But the bourrees, and the arms she wreathed around her torso, were so soft and sensual that you heard the music's pathos. Murphy brought into focus how Myrta's lethal resolve arises out of great disappointment. (This is what an actor-dancer can do: illuminate the story.)

I was also struck by the symmetry of Giselle and Albrecht's romanceful dancing in Act I. It's rare that a ballerina and her cavalier perform the same steps. He's usually consigned to the heavy lifting that allows her to float, plus some big jumps and turns. But in this 1841 ballet they leap and hop together. It's such a nice Romantic touch, that despite the unevenness of their stations (he a prince, she a peasant), in love they dance alike. Forward to the Revolution!

Even in the tag-team endurance test that makes up most of Act II, Albrecht and Giselle do versions (inversions, really) of each other's steps: her ghostly two-footed hops (up and up and up and up!) and backward-moving ronde de jamb hops echo his cabriole beats and forward slides into assemble-entrechats. In the final moments, when they have come full circle, they return to mirroring each other. They once played together without a shadow of doubt. Now again there are no doubts, but many shadows.

Nina Ananiashvili came into her own in the second act. She was bright, soft, determined, and a bit frightened by her own ghostly shell. Angel Corella has always been spectacular in the final scenes, but it was hard not to giggle when he'd throw himself recklessly into a turn and still manage a kabillion revolutions before the bar of music was out. You weren't watching Albrecht, desperate for his life. You were watching cocksure Corella. Now when he's closing in on dawn, he doesn't look like he could get up and run through the whole trial again. And when Giselle leaves him to make his way back to life, it's not a moment of triumph or defeat but of acquiescence: he's alive, but the woman he's finally convinced he loves is gone. As the curtain falls, Corella looks out at us without relief or hope and walks with a steady, slow gait toward the lip of the stage.

American Ballet Theatre should do "Giselle" every summer. Though surely the ballet has survived because it is better than most from the Romantic era, it makes me want to see some others, even ones in at least irregular rotation, such as "La Fille Mal Gardee" (how is the version by Nijinska, that latter-day revolutionary?) and "La Sylphide" (which I've never seen ABT do, though know they have not long ago. Perhaps if their latest version isn't up to snuff, they could work out some sort of exchange with Nikolaj Hubbe, new Royal Danish Ballet head: you can have our best Fokine --"Petrushka" and "Les Sylphides"--for your "La Sylphide.")

I'm grateful for how much dance matters to the "Giselle" libretto and how the ballet spares us the divertissements of the late 19th century that neither advance the story nor its themes, as well as the rickety remains of imperial thinking, such as those balletified folk numbers that invite us to play kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses and imagine the world as our precious oyster. However much "Giselle" is a fairytale, the core of the drama is real--not just that an aristocratic cad takes advantage of a woman and a peasant, but also that desire isn't predictable, that he thought she wouldn't matter but she did; that he thought he knew what joy was, but he didn't, not until she showed up.

And it complements the other emancipations that Romantics wrote about, rallied for, or at least sympathized with: the idea of elective affinities--a wonder about the phenomenology of desire; the notion that feeling is inherently uncapturable and even unabatable, like the Sylphide whose dancing her lover James can't control without destroying her; the terror and triumph of the mob, the clan, the folk, the nation (a new idea, nationhood); the yearnings for nature, for natural man, for exchanging places with creatures (nightingales, sylphs, women and peasants [oops!]) who have no idea about this "I think, therefore I am" credo of the Enlightenment (without which there would have been no Rights of Man, sure, and the Romantics knew it): the Romantics believed in extending dignity even to those who didn't think, or at least not like them.

Granted, Petipa-Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," from the late 19th century, has all the supernatural elements of "La Sylphide" or "Giselle." There's a swan-woman, fickle royalty, the unpredictability of love. But this lady swan is a queen from the start. She's like Cinderella, who may look like a char girl but at heart is an aristocrat, while her wicked stepsisters are hopelessly bourgeois--gauche because striving. Odette the swan queen's evil double, Odile, is also ambitious. She has no idea how to be demure: she is a brazen hussy. Plus, those ballroom interludes of ethnic dances had long lost whatever sense they once had of celebrating nations budding out of fragmented former empires and became a memento to a Czarist audience who were voyeurs of the world.

I don't think it's an accident that you can trace the most glorious moments of the late 19th century ballets back to Romantic precedent: the morbid Kingdom of the Shades in Petipa's "La Bayadere," where the fickle warrior Solor dreams of an infinite peace far outside any kingdom's grasp (like Keats' anguished poet, De Quincey's opium eater, and the dejected Coleridge, seeing in the moon a "cloudless, starless lake of blue," Solor is half in love with death); or Lev Ivanov's chorus of swans in "Swan Lake" or snowflakes in "Nutcracker," who embody the grace where swan and dancer meet, where nature and culture merge; or the fairy solos at the birthday party in Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty," in which each fairy bestows on baby Aurora her own unique gift--as unique as each of our pursuits of happiness. Together the fairies' gifts make up a whole that is greater, even, than the sum of its marvelously idiosyncratic parts.


For your viewing pleasure, here are the final moments of ABT's 1977 "Giselle," with Baryshnikov as Albrecht, Natalia Makarova as Giselle, and Martine Van Hamel (who performs character roles with the company these days--and she's terrific) as Myrta. Baryshnikov interprets the ending very differently than Corella. He piles petals in his arms only to shed them like tears: life and happiness don't last is the tragic fact he can't get out from under as the ballet comes to a close.

Here's a minute of the audience going crazy at the July 7 curtain calls.

MORE on Foot: For more on the "terror and triumph of the mob," see Paul Parish's incredible post from spring 2007, in which he discusses ballets by Eugene Loring, Bournonville, Forsythe, and several other choreographers. Related is a multipart discussion between Paul, Brian Seibert, and me on the corps in Balanchine's "Serenade" (and the effect of the ensemble size in his "Liebeslieder Walzer")

jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology

I'll never know why didn't he snap up the vintage photo of Public School 238's eighth-grade graduating class. He had a really good reason to do so -- but maybe an even better one to leave it be.

Who can doubt that flea markets are museums?

Yard and garage sales are those museums' feeder galleries, and all of them provide a surprise immersion into the lives that neighbors past and present have led. Those of us who are hypnotized by these object lessons in popular culture also understand that the rich discards displayed for sale have soaked up buckets of emotional juice -- some actually vibrate with survival after years of use and handling.

You may be stopped cold by one of these items, petrified by its story.

Faithful yard-salers, even the most blithe or cynical, will recognize each particular madeleine, be it the ceramic ashtray identical to the one your dead father filled or the old postcard of a pastel hotel you happened to have stayed in when, as a tan young man, you discovered the salty taste of a stranger's kiss.

I can't remember at which parking lot or upon what lawn I found the sepia graduation photo of the "Class of June 1949, P.S. 238, Brooklyn," showing rows of boys in suits and ties and coy girls in cliche-prim white blouses. I do know that I bought it because it was my very own school, the one I attended from the first to the seventh grade -- at which time we moved abruptly from the tulip-lined plots of East 8^th Street to a raw, swampy development in Howard Beach, Queens, directly under the path of flights to and from Idlewild Airport. We learned to lip-read at our new apartment, because no episode of Gunsmoke or Alfred Hitchcock Presents could be watched without the deafening interruption every few minutes from the roar of a plane. Funny how you become accustomed to regular holes in a plot and learn to fill in the blanks. I was well-prepared for postmodernism.

That photo, though of a much earlier class, still pushed me to recall the names of my teachers: third grade's plump, encouraging Mrs. Horween; the disgusting Mr. Barash, who clipped his nails at his desk and never answered questions; the wondrous Miss (Jane) Costello, whose clearheaded kindness and direct intelligence I will never forget. You probably don't care to read about how she passed around Halloween apples with hidden coins stuck in them, pennies in the large ones, nickels in the littlest, to make her modest moral point. I can still hear her calm voice, see her generous gray-blue eyes. That's my treasure, not for sale.

Selling Day

So, the photograph under glass in its ridged wooden frame is propped against a box on a lawn, part of our yard sale, along with more than a hundred material friends.

The day, hot as blazes, goes by quickly as folks stroll among the stuff. Some shoppers are grim, even offended. "That '10' is dollars? Should be cents!" one shouts, referring to a Mexican tourist-ware candelabrum of inlaid brass. Others are genial and happy to finger whatever's in front of them.

An older man and woman come by. They are somewhat sloppily dressed for their age, though their car is hybrid and expensive. She picks up a single dish with an ugly floral rim and turns it over. "I know who designed this. Now what was his name?" she asks aloud. I had a dollar on it, a steal.

Her companion lifts the school photo.

"That's from Midwood, Brooklyn," I say from my aluminum chair.

"I know."

How does he know?

Robert Kusmirowski, Unacabine, 2008

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

In a truly contemporary, interactive institution, one should be able to choose the soundtrack of one's experience. So Out There must therefore ask, what exactly would you, kind reader, wish to hear spoken from beneath the Unabomber's various floorboards?

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

More links

Norman Lebrecht

Strange radio noises in HollandMake of this what you will:

Concertzender victim of its own success

Hello Norman,

A bizarre situation has developed in the Netherlands. Everywhere in the world, classical broadcasters are shutting down, because of dropping listening figures.


In the Netherlands however, the Concertzender, who you might
know because of its internet channels, has to shut down
because it has become too popular...

Dutch Public radio hosts the Concertzender, and working with 150
volunteers and a handful of paid staff members, they operate on a basis of 500.000 euro a year. Cable companies in the Netherlands are now opting to broadcast the concertzender, instead of the non-classical Radio 6. Instead of looking for a good solution, the co-ordinator of radio 6 just wants to pull the plug from the Concertzender...

To make things even weirder, a message explaining the situation with a call for support had to be removed from the homepage. A small flood of support letters came in, prompting the board of management of the Dutch public radio to postpone their decision. Because the Concertzender has also a large
international following, could you please write a mail to:


http://www.concertzender.eu/?language=en


I hope I can count on your support!!
http://www.adsvv.com/contactus.html
---------
--

Franco tells all
An afternoon with Zeffirelli in the garden of his Roman villa, a stone's throw from the Cinecitta studios, brought back memories of a bygone age when directors flitted easily from opera to film and back.

Franco was brought into the business by his lover Luchino Visconti but soon cut a dash in his own right. He talks to me uninhibitedly about growing up a bastard, fighting with the partisans, seeing Mussolini hung in the piazza and making his mark on showbiz with Maria Callas, Jesus of Nazareth, Silvio Berlusconi and a cast of thousands.

Hear him on The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 next Monday, and streamed all week on-line, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/lebrechtinterview/


If you're quick about, you can still catch last week's rare and unbuttoned chat with Christoph von Dohnanyi.

In a critical condition (5)
When the versatile writer Alan Brien died in May this year, obituarists reminded us that he was the first person to be hired in 1960 by the new-founded Sunday Telegraph, in the post of drama critic. 'On this we can build,' the editor is supposed to have declared as, around Brien, he formed a team of witty, incisive and never-too-sententious Sunday writers.

Couldn't happen now, I hear you say. No paper would ever construct itself around an arts critic, and no critic could ever be held to personify a newspaper in the way that Brien did, or Neville Cardus on the Manchester Guardian, Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Pauline Kael on the New Yorker, and others of a golden age.

Or could it? We keep hearing media executives talk of innovation when they mean sackings - the latest to use this euphemism is the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, where 550 jobs are about to go.

But innovation is not made overnight. It comes from the experience and wisdom of newspaper veterans who have seen it all before and know what works and what won't. Getting rid of good critics is a symptom of media death wish. It declares that a newspaper has no sense of its past, present or future, and no conversation with its readers.

A newspaper that cherishes and promotes its critics - as The Scotsman does, for instance, during the Edinburgh Festival - offers readers a reliable benchmark against which they can measure their own reactions and opinions to things they have seen and heard. The Scotsman deploys its critical team strategically in festival time as a way of setting itself apart from the range of free newspapers that flood the city streets.

In Salzburg, likewise, the local Nachrichten is read more closely during festival time than any of the national or international papers because its critics provide a clearer context day by day of events in the present festival against triumphs of the past. Their value cannot be measured purely in payroll terms.

True, few critics these days have the fame or clout that Brien, Cardus and Reich-Ranicki did in their pomp, but arts critics still form the thin blue line between a newspaper of value and a throwaway sheet.

They can be, in the public perception, the soul of a newspaper or at the very least its conscience. Executives who ignore that truth will follow the critics they fire very rapidly onto the nearest dole queue.