2'23"

Georgia

2008-08-14T20:30:00.004-04:00

I interrupt this previously unannounced hiatus to inform you of this blog.

It's the blog of a musicology grad student in the midst of a research trip in Georgia. Not the state, the country currently being blown to smithereens. Fascinating stuff.

Working Vacation

2008-07-23T17:15:00.003-04:00

From top to bottom:
Roy Harris, Symphony No. 3 (1937)
Aaron Copland, Symphony No. 3 (1946)
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 (1937)
Leonard Bernstein, Symphony No. 2 (1949/1965 rev.)

Anti-Climax

2008-07-10T21:23:00.004-04:00

One of the things I love about Auden's The Age of Anxiety is it that ends with a literal anti-climax. The four characters, who have spent the evening drinking together, have retired to the girl's apartment for drinking and dancing. The two older men sense chemistry between Rosetta and the young naval recruit Emble, and leave them alone. After walking them out, Rosetta returns to find Emble passed out on the bed, and muses aloud:

Blind on the bride-bed, the bridegroom snores,
Too aloof to love. Did you lose your nerve
And cloud your conscience because I wasn’t
Your dish really? You danced so bravely
Till I wished I were. Will you remain
Such a pleasant prince? Probably not.
But you’re handsome, aren’t you? Even now
A kingly corpse. I’ll coffin you up till
You rule again. Rest for us both and
Dream, dear one. I’ll be dressed when you wake
To get coffee. You’ll be glad you didn’t
While your headache lasts, and I won’t shine
In the sobering sun. We’re so apart
When our ways have crossed and our words touched
On Babylon’s banks.

One of the interesting things about Auden at this moment in his career is that he was sleeping with a woman named Rhoda Jaffe. This was a rare occurrence for him, of course, and it didn't last long--one sometimes sensed that he enjoyed the affair mostly because he enjoyed shocking his friends with a brief stint of heterosexuality. But she also left an indelible imprint on The Age of Anxiety. The character of Rosetta is pretty clearly based on her, for one. And although Auden was always obsessed with psychological themes (his father was a psychotherapist, and correspondent of Freud's), Jaffe was obsessed with psychiatry, often doing multiple sessions with different doctors in a week. So the theory is that the specifically Jungian framework of The Age of Anxiety--each character represents one of the four differentiated functions of the Jungian psyche--is probably her influence.

* * * *
In other news, I've started work as a receptionist at my wife's veterinary clinic. On my second day on the job I had to put the body of a seventy pound chocolate lab, much beloved by its family, into a garbage bag and put it in the freezer. I've also learned the list of official vocabulary delineated by the corporate overseers who run the chain of clinics. They are not animals, they are "family members." We do not give shots, we give injections. Invoices, not bills. Medication, not drugs. Team leaders, not bosses. I'm a "Client Service Coordinator," not a receptionist. When answering the phone, physically smile so that the client can hear the smile in your voice. And yes, I wear nurse scrubs printed with cartoons cats and dogs, and white sneakers.

Beautiful Music

2008-07-02T20:42:00.003-04:00

Certain sectors of the musicological community have recently been discussing...wait for it....Beauty In Music. I will say, the musicological blog world might be small and unkempt. But at least we don't debate Beauty In Music.

On this blog, there shall be no debate about such things. I shall simply proclaim the truth: there is indeed beauty in music, and it sounds like this:

This performance, featuring the "Cold Song" from Purcell's King Arthur, took place six months before he passed away from AIDS in 1983.

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow
See'st thou not how stiff and wondrous old

Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath
Let me, let me freeze again to death.

Reviewing the Review: O'Hara and Logan

2008-06-28T20:22:00.008-04:00

There is an interesting review in the Sunday Times of the new Selected Poems of Frank O' Hara, written by William Logan. Typical of Logan, the overall tone is snide, and, I would also say, a bit homophobic. Take his final summary of the poems chosen for inclusion in the volume:

In his best poems...O’Hara found something beyond that terrible vacancy he was trying so hard to fill. (His best poems are rarely his most characteristic or frenzied.) The style, though at times foolish and self-parodic, remains fresh 50 years later. However much these poems live in the world of Lowell’s “tranquilized ’50s,” their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies — and these were O’Hara’s virtues — give us as much of a life as poetry can.

There is a long tradition of criticizing the work of queer artists along these exact lines. The common accusations are of being insufficiently serious, and of not working hard enough. O'Hara, Logan tells us, was "preoccupied with the trivial." His "physical world is curiously impoverished." O'Hara "refused to apologize for his narcissism, his comic pretensions, his sometimes insufferable archness." And of course, my favorite line: "What O’Hara most objected to about poetry, however, was the hard work." Not to belabor the point, so to speak, but this approaches cliché. There is a way in which the central aspect of homophobic critique is a revulsion at any absence of procreation, or at least metaphors of procreation, in the artwork of a queer artist. Heaven forbid that an artist should step outside the framework of bourgeois domesticity. Rather than interpreting or even just simply noting O'Hara's approach--which these quotes describe accurately enough--Logan has to pass negative judgment in moral terms.

I wish I could say that Logan was himself being flip or attempting to reproduce some sort of camp humor. But I don't have that sense; I think rather that he really does object to O'Hara's breezy manner. Perhaps he's jealous, which you will understand if you ever read Logan's own ultra-laborious poetry. I'm just not sure how useful a review is that points out that a prolific poet wrote some poems that aren't good. He does, after all, praise quite a bit of his work, and considering that O'Hara died at the age of forty, I'm not sure what the big problem is.

Anyways, I just want to leave you with one of O'Hara's greatest poems. This is the "Salute to the French Negro Poets," from 1958, where he famously links together the common struggle of colonialized people at home and abroad in what is an essentially anti-identitarian politics. Texts like these are why I love working on the 1950s. Read it aloud, and I dare you not to be moved by the last line.

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets

from near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call
To the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow
upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather

one who no longer remembers dancing in the heat of the moon may call
across the shifting sands, trying to live in the terrible western world

here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious, this may tendentious but it’s lyrical

which shows what lyricism has been brought to by our fables times
where cowards are shibboleths and one specific love’s traduced

by shame for what you love more generally and never would avoid
where reticence is paid for by a poet in his blood or ceasing to be

blood! Blood that we have mountains in our veins to stand off jackals
in the pillaging of our desires and allegiances, Aimé Césaire

for if there is fortuity it’s in the love we bear each other’s differences
in race which is the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles

standing in the sun of marshes as we wade slowly toward the culmination
of a gift which is categorically the most difficult relationship

and should be sought as such because it is our nature, nothing
inspires us but the love we want upon the frozen face of earth

and utter disparagement turns into praise as generations read the message
of our hearts in adolescent closets who once shot at us in doorways

or kept us from living freely because they were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life

the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are.

Blogging by Bullet Points

2008-06-24T10:12:00.008-04:00

In lieu of actual blogging...

Proposal To Re-Name SF Sewage Plant after George Bush. Utter brilliance. And it looks like they collected enough signatures to get it on the ballot.
What's Obscene? Google Could Have the Answer. A lawyer defending a porn site in court is using Google Trends to show that the local "community" (Pensacola, Florida, in this case) is actually an avid consumer of pornography. The notion of "community standards" to define obscenity has always been intellectually bankrupt. How exactly do you define a "community," and how can you objectively know what its standards are? Well, the answer is, most communities, no matter how you define them, love their porn.
The First Amendment [pdf]. Neely Bruce, a former undergrad professor of mine, set the Bill of Rights to music, in the style of Sacred Harp singing. You can download and perform the First Amendment for free. Anybody here in Philly want to give it a go?
Cody's, Landmark Berkeley Bookstore, Closes. I cannot tell you how tragic this is.
I agree pretty much entirely with GayProf's review of Sex and the City. I do think one strength of the movie was its honest depiction of the psychic damage of betrayal, a subject which features so prominently in mass culture but is always either too sugar-coated or too black-and-white in representation. But beyond that, I didn't find much redeeming value. Remember back when women talking and socializing without men was considered threatening? We used to have lesbian separatism; now we have women coming together for the purpose of talking about men. or buying things with imaginary money.
I recommend reading Dean Dad's two recent posts about the salary disparity between the tenure track and the adjunct class, and also Dr. Crazy's two rejoinders, and especially the often brutal comment threads associated with all of these posts. As a non-anonymous current adjunct, I'm not going to comment myself. But I think this discussion is one of the most important ones in academia right now. The issues are of course different in musicology--unlike English or History, there is not very much part-time employment in our field. Some, but not tons, and therefore I would hazard a guess that a much greater percentage of actual Ph.D.-holding musicologists (rather than moonlighting performers) are in tenure-track positions compared to other disciplines. That's a good thing in many respects, but it does present challenges to those who are, like myself, currently in a rather liminal state. Okay, maybe I will actually do a real post on this subject; stay tuned.

And finally, something to whet your appetite for a future post:

June 20

2008-06-20T23:51:00.006-04:00

Today is the 61st wedding anniversary of my maternal grandparents.

They sure don't make 'em like that anymore.

That Ol' Time Black Music

2008-06-19T13:26:00.001-04:00

According to the proclamation of our much beloved president, the month of June in the year 2008 is Black Music Month:

For generations, African-American artists have created music that communicates across racial boundaries and expresses both joy and sorrow. When facing the cruelty of slavery and injustice, African Americans lifted spirituals to the heavens, bringing comfort to troubled souls. These timeless declarations of hope and faith evolved into the more modern genres of gospel, blues, ragtime, and jazz, and they are given voice in the musical genius of Scott Joplin, Marian Anderson, Eubie Blake, and Mahalia Jackson. During the Civil Rights era, African-American musicians such as Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, and Ruth Brown conveyed the struggles of their communities while bringing people of all backgrounds together. Today, this music continues to inspire America's citizens and advance its creative spirit.
[...]
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2008 as Black Music Month. I encourage all Americans to learn more about the history of black music and to enjoy the great contributions of African-American singers, musicians, and composers.

Who knew that Georgie was such a musicologist? Of course, like many musicologists, he seems more interested in dead musicians than living ones; not a single person named in the proclamation is still alive. And while I don't want to disrespect the late-career work of some of those named--who can forget Ruth Brown's cameo in Hairspray--I think it's fair to say that George Bush hasn't liked Black Music since about 1970 or so.

But in honor of George Bush's Black Music Month™, I'd like to relate an anecdote from this past weekend. We were driving down to DC, and stopped at a Maryland rest stop for bathrooms and coffee. I went into the Starbucks to order myself a grande non-fat dry cappuccino, and Mary a grande non-fat triple latte. A song, no doubt carefully chosen by a corporate puppetmaster back in Seattle, came over the in-store stereo:

I watched as one of the baristas began nodding her head and mouthing the words. I glanced to my left, and saw that the soccer-mom type was unconsciously bobbing her head a bit. A glance to my right, and a big beefy guy waiting for his drink was ever so gently twisting his hips in time to the music. Then I realized that literally the entire store was dancing to this song.

Jazz might be America's Classical Music, but Motown is What We Listen To. Is there any other single repertoire of music so universally popular? Sure, there are exceptions, but I can't think of any other tunes that retain hipster cachet across racial lines while still managing to assuage baby boomer nostalgia in a non-threatening manner. I can read about Motown in a hipper-than-thou hip hop magazine like Wax Poetics, but I know all of the tunes from listening to my parents' oldies radio stations growing up.

As a grad student, I spent one spring immersed in this music as a teaching assistant for our department's course on "Motown and Soul," taught by my esteemed adviser. The music only gets better the more you listen to and study it. And if very few of my students knew, coming into the class, that the Supremes were actually black, well, that's more testament to Berry Gordy's genius for creating music that anyone could project themselves onto.

So one wonders why Motown isn't part of the George Bush's Black Music Month™. I have no doubt that he himself listens to it, since everyone does. Perhaps, he is intimidated with Barack Obama's Motown-heavy playlist. Maybe there is still a frisson of oppositionality at work in what was, after all, the largest black-owned business created at the height of the civil rights movement. Maybe not. Because I also remember that scene in The Big Chill, where the friends hear this song and begin to dance, just like the crowd at Starbucks. And then I read the excellent Wikipedia entry on "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," and learn that it was similarly used in the movie Remember the Titans as example of racial healing. And since both of these examples make me roll my eyes, I begin to wonder: everyone loves Motown, but why, exactly? Maybe a white guy like me loving Motown is sort of like the George Bush Black Music Month™ theory--black music is great, as long as it is history.

This sort of back-and-forth agonizing probably isn't fun to read, but it's something I think all scholars (should) go through. It is always fraught to analyze people who are different than yourself, and of course anyone who looks at music in the past is necessarily looking at music by people different than themselves. But that difference is especially fraught when it happens to encompass one of the most anxious binarisms in American history, Dubois's black-white color line. A year and a half ago, I blogged elsewhere about how it was difficult for me to understand the attraction of Sonny Til, the handsome lead singer of the Orioles. (I've since figured it out, thank you very much; read my diss for the answer.) Just recently, some anonymous commenter happened upon that old post. After some interesting points, he concluded, "If you can't dig what I'm telling you - maybe you just ain't tan my man!" And you know, he's right. Not in some biologically essentialist way, but in that Sonny Til's attraction was so rooted in its context--race is one, but others as well--that it was really hard for me to appreciate it.

Now, I'm a neurotic musicologist, so these are the sorts of things I think about. But to get back to Motown, I really do wonder what attracts people to it. Great tunes, of course. But as I tell my students: tell me more!

A Few Presidential Thoughts

2008-06-17T11:46:00.006-04:00

Now, I love me some Barack Obama. But if he is finding that his position on gay marriage (opposed, but willing to leave it up to the states) is essentially the same as John McCain's, then...well, I am disappointed.
John McCain is 72 years old. All four of my grandparents are older than John McCain. And unlike John McCain, all of my grandparents retired in the 1980s, when knowledge of computers for work was not yet obligatory. And yet, somehow, not only do all four of my grandparents know how to use computers, all four of them read my blog. One of my grandmothers is even on Facebook. So what's the problem, Johnny Boy?
Apparently Cindy McCain has trouble not plagiarizing recipes. While annoying, it does make me realize that one of the few positive effects of a Hilary Clinton nomination might have been that Parents magazine could have realized that presidential spouses have skills besides baking cookies.
A six percentage point difference is not "a small lead." 51-48, now that was a small lead. 50,456,169 to 50,996,116, now that was a small lead. But 48% to 42% is just...a lead.

My New Calling

2008-06-12T18:48:00.003-04:00

As a 1930s wife, I am
Superior

Take the test!

When the questionnaire touched on matters of child-rearing, I just mentally substituted our dog. For example, for "Saves punishment of children for father at night," I put yes, because my wife is the Mabel disciplinarian. I just can't say no to my precious baby.

Cage Returns

2008-06-10T10:39:00.005-04:00

It's been interesting to read Kyle Gann and Brent Reidy on their past experiences studying John Cage. I've often thought that Cage is something of a gateway drug for musicologists, at least those studying the recent twentieth-century. I know so many other scholars my age who began their careers studying Cage before moving on to other things.

My first encounter came in high school, in the summer between my first and second years. I was spending four weeks on the campus of Cal Arts, down in Southern California, at a state-run summer program for artistically minded high school students. I was there for creative writing, actually, but on the first night I went to a concert that was billed as "A Tribute to John Cage." I'd never heard of him, but was interested enough in anything self-consciously avant-garde to attend. It was organized by the pianist Gaylord Mowery, and on the second half of the program he announced that he was going to play one of the most beautiful pieces of music written in the twentieth-century.

It was, of course, 4'33", and the audience of precocious little would-be artists was entranced. The canonical interpretation of the work is that you are supposed to be listening to the sounds of the environment, but that has never been my own experience of 4'33". Rather, for me it has always been about the people around you. It's a chance to notice those sitting next to you, to listen to their breathing, and, for me, without getting too misty-eyed, it's a rare chance to enjoy silent companionship with strangers.

Since then, Cage has always been an important part of my life. My first tentative efforts at musicology as an undergraduate were on Cage, and I wrote more than a few seminar papers on him in graduate school. Finally, last year I wrote a sixty-page long dissertation chapter on the historical premiere of 4'33" in 1952. Since then, I've been busy with other chapters and projects, but no doubt I will return again.

But as both Gann and Reidy hint at, a longterm relationship with Cage can be problematic. In the first blush of romance, the attraction is all about the purity of his aesthetic. If you grew up in a world of classical music, he seems so utterly radical and right. I don't think it is a coincidence that Gann and I both discovered Cage as teenagers, a time in your life when it is particularly important to be 100% correct, and self-righteous about that fact. A lot of scholarship out there, particularly the early stuff, more or less takes this approach. In fact, up until James Pritchett's book, almost all "scholarship" on Cage was actually just interviews with the man, or collections of his writing.

Since his death, and since Pritchett's important book, there has been a fair amount of actual musicology on him. I don't want to name names in a laid back forum like this, but unfortunately much of it is pretty bad. In all the worry over whether or not he was a composer or a philosopher, scholars seem to have forgotten that focusing "just on the music" doesn't mean you should leave all of your critical faculties at home. The great thing about working on Cage is that his career intersects all of the big issues in twentieth-century music, and yet most seem content to leave him safely ensconced his own little musical bubble. George Lewis's influential essay is a positive example of what can be done if one does not buy into the mythmaking: Lewis asked the simple question, "hey, does race have anything to do with why Cage hated jazz so much?" Of course it does! Lewis might not have the perfect answers as to as why it does, but man, you should see how angry Cage people get when such things are suggested. Similar flareups always happen when you bring up the fact that Cage was gay, or had control issues, or liked flannel pajamas. Any suggestion that Cage was a human being has tended to be rebuffed.

Ultimately, these sorts of political issues are why many people, as I say, started out working on Cage and then move somewhere else. This is true for me as well; after all of my time working on him (eight years, yikes!), he's only one chapter of my dissertation. It would have been very easy for me to do an entire dissertation on him, but I found the discourse of Cage scholarship to be an unproductive world for a young scholar. I still want to contribute, of course, but it's not a place I want to call home.

Jury Duty in a New City

2008-06-04T20:07:00.004-04:00

There's been a spate of jurisprudential duties in my circle; a friend in LA a few weeks ago, my wife last month, a friend here in Philly just last week. Like celebrity deaths, jury duty seems to come in clusters, and today it was my time to go.

Living in Philadelphia, you come to assume that anything related to municipal governance is going to be a complete and utter disaster. This is the city that barely has recycling, where most neighborhoods don't have street cleaning. A city that tried to become the first WiFi city in the country only to fail to the point where the private company contracted to provide the service is pulling out its routers and going home. A city where a steady string of leaders have been the target of FBI corruption probes, and where most intersections need to have a sign instructing "Wait for Green" in a futile attempt to corral some of the world's most incompetent drivers. It's a ridiculous excuse for a city, lovable in its constant failures.

But apparently, one thing this city does well is jury selection. My friend Ray, who recently served as well, put it well when he pointed out that if you spend your life waiting for Septa trolleys, it is a major surprise to show up for jury duty and be served free cinnamon cake by friendly clerks. I kid you not, the room was spacious, with plenty of comfortable seats, clean restrooms, vending machines, free coffee, and a table full of snacks. Directions were given clearly, and one of the judges came down to give us an inspirational speech in a thick South Philly Italian accent.

Ironically, I did jury duty in Los Angeles, just before moving, and that was a miserable experience. In Los Angeles, I showed up at 7:30 am to a courthouse, waited until lunch, and then was moved to a courthouse twelve miles away in Inglewood. No transportation provided, they just assumed everyone had a car. There, we waited for five hours before being told to come back again the next day. Then, we waited all day long with absolutely no information, and in an miserably hot cramped room, before being told in severe tones that that because we had complained amongst ourselves about the situation, we had irrevocably tainted our pool and they would have to impanel a new jury.

So yeah, Philadelphia jury duty rocks. And as Ray pointed out, it's one of the few times you have a group of people made up of genuine Philadelphians without suburban interlopers. It was a congenial group, with lots of discussion of the primary results and a bit of flirting. When the clerk called out a funny name, people would give a good-natured chuckle. When the clerk announced "Barbara Bush," everyone burst out laughing. When she called "Cornelius Cardew, Jr.," I think I was the only one to snicker.

And best of all, I was impaneled for a civil trial that settled before we were even called in, and I was done by noon. Philly rocks.

How To Lose Gracefully

2008-06-01T09:44:00.011-04:00

I like to think that I have backed more losing candidates than most. My own personal genealogy of support in the 2000 presidential campaign went something like this:

November 1999: I enthusiastically join the board of the nascent Connecticut for Paul Wellstone committee.
January 2000: Wellstone drops out, I cheerfully switch to Bill Bradley. Much campaigning ensues.
March 2000: Bradley loses badly on Super Tuesday, and the writing is on the wall. I begin migration to Al Gore, although I am privately bitter at some of Gore's dirty tricks.
Fall 2000: Somewhat reluctant, but sincere, campaigning for Al Gore. Wrote self-righteous op-eds in student paper about subject. Directed my energies towards a congressional candidate (who then lost, of course), since Connecticut was firmly Democratic for the presidential line.
November 2000: Voted happily for Al Gore. Bush won.

My pattern was most obvious in 2000, but just about every presidential election for which I was a sentient human being went down more or less like that. Jesse Jackson in 1988. Tsongas in 92. Nader in 96. Dean (with qualms) in 04. So, to summarize, I know a thing or two about how to back a losing candidate.

It sucks. No doubt about it. Most of us who worked on the Bradley campaign are still bitter about Al Gore eight years later; he can win as many Nobel prizes as he likes, but I'll always think of him as something of a jerk. There is a generation of Bradley supporters, largely people my age who were in college at the time, who checked out of active Party politics after that election. I did. So I can sympathize with Clinton's supporters, many of whom feel bitter and disempowered. I don't blame them if their heart isn't in the fall election. Losing sucks; it makes you feel both stupid and unappreciated.

But if you, dear abstract Clinton supporter, even THINK about voting for John McCain this fall....well, I'm not sure such people exist outside of the Clinton's politicking machine and the fantasies of a bloodthirsty mainstream media. But if you do exist, dear sir or madam, please ask yourself if you are supporting McCain because you like him better than Obama, or fundamentally distrust Obama, or whatever it is--or if you voting for McCain just out of spite, to make yourself feel better. If the latter is the case, well, from one loser to another, stop being so goddamn selfish.

As for me, I can say that it feels absolutely fantastic to be winning for once.

Thursday Questions

2008-05-29T11:53:00.007-04:00

Would anybody mind if I blog once a week? It's not that I'm busy--although I am--it's more that I'm lazy. I have lots of trenchant political commentary on the primary I could blog about, but frankly, I have too much commentary to distill down to a blog post. This is what happens when you work at home, and spend all day listening to CNN in the background and checking in at Daily Kos every five minutes.

A few questions I'm asking myself these days:

Who would want to recall from me the transcript of the 1949 HUAC hearings on "The Negro in the Communist Party"? It's not that I mind returning it, as I've finished that chapter, but I'm curious who else at UCLA is interested in the subject. It is actually a very interesting hearing, held in the wake of Paul Robeson's famous remark that if the United States ever went to war with the Soviet Union, African Americans wouldn't fight. In response, the HUAC committee subpoenaed Jackie Robinson, who rejoined, "yes, we would." Good stuff. Earlier in the hearing, one "expert witness" testified that the reason there were few black members in the Communist Party was because strong black women kept their more shifty men in check. You can bet I get a lot of mileage out of this comment in my chapter.
If I work as a receptionist at my wife's vet clinic, will I lose all self-respect? Not because of the nature of the job, or the nepotism, but because I would have to wear nurse scrubs printed with cartoon cats and dogs. On the other hand, it fills in some financial holes until I start adjuncting in the fall.
When did Hillary Clinton become the symbol of feminism in this country? I would write a 5000 word blog post on this subject, but it just makes my blood pressure go up unhealthily.
Why was I previously unfamiliar with Roy Harris's Third Symphony? It's a beautiful piece. I knew of it abstractly, before, but as it is relevant to my Bernstein chapter I found a score and sat down for a listen. Lovely!
I've been helping a friend copyedit the bibliography for her book, on a fifteenth-century topic, and I've got to say: thank goodness we twentieth-century Americanists don't have to deal with the gnarly world of fascimiles, twenty-volume multi-year editions, nineteenth-century reprints, and paragraph-long titles. They might get disciplinary capital and the ability to give a paper at AMS whenever they want, but at least our footnotes are a lot neater.
Is my Fu-Wah tofu hoagie ready yet? I hope so. West Philadelphians will know of this delicacy. I know the idea of a "tofu hoagie" probably sounds disgusting--it did to me--but it is one of the best things you have ever tasted, and only costs $3.50.

Confessions of a Newly Suburbanite Griller

2008-05-22T19:51:00.005-04:00

West Philly was the original suburban development of Philadelphia, its gigantic Queen Anne-Victorian manses hurriedly thrown up by mid-nineteenth-century developers, proto Toll Brothers mowing down the landscape offering city dwellers the promise of rural peace and lots of square footage.

West Philly doesn't feel so suburban today, but we still have front porches and back yards. Our apartment is on the ground floor of a garish blue-and-pink late Victorian, and includes a large back porch that opens up into a little backyard. It's a lovely porch, and came complete with a hammock, a boarded-up jacuzzi, and our landlord's gigantic grilling machine.

This isn't it, but it looks a lot like this one. I guess technically it's a "smoker" or something? Anyways, it's ours to use, if I remotely knew what I'm doing. Now that spring is here I have cooked two meals on it, both successful thanks to the careful following of recipes and online grilling guides. The first meal was a big chunk of beef (pre-seasoned, sue me) from Trader's Joe, paired with asparagus we bought that afternoon at the Clark Park farmer's market, and which had been picked on a Mennonite farm the day prior. That was good.

This was the first picture I got when searching Flickr for "men cooking." Incidentally, there is actually an entire Flickr community called "Special Men Who Cook For You." ("Pic's [sic] of nude men which displays [sic] good taste/artistic is [sic] more than welcome. ") Whatevs, but when I went to Target to buy some implements for grilling, I was shocked by the size of grilling utensils. They are huge! The tongs looked like they were designed for picking up small poodles, the spatulas like you could use them as a diving board. Why is that? You know, the grill gets hot, but not so hot that you really have to stand ten feet away from it and prod your meat from a distance. I can barely fit my poking fork into our not-so-small grill. The answer probably has to do with phallic anxieties, but that seems so...obvious.

Anyways, I bought the smallest pair of tongs I could find, and tonight managed to make some hamburgers on the beast. I have to admit, I don't quite feel some primal masculine urge to roast meat over fire. I definitely enjoy cooking outside; it's lovely to be on our back deck with a Yuengling and a warm breeze. But I miss the proper gas burners of our kitchen, and the easy access to cupboards and a variety of pots and pans. It's not that I am a very good cook, but it seems actually a little wimpy to me, to use a grill. It's like, if you're not actually going to collect kindling out in the woods and make a campfire and cook over it with MSR pans, you might as well cook like a normal human being in the kitchen. A Weber on a back deck is a measly little simulacrum for the actual meat-over-flame cro-magnon experience, and no gigantic spatula is going to cure that.

Frida Kahlo

2008-05-16T11:59:00.004-04:00

Left to right, that's Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and André Breton. How much would you love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation?

This photo was taken by Fritz Bach in 1938. Trotsky was living with Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Breton was visiting from Paris--this is the famous trip where Kahlo was "discovered" as a kind of homegrown surrealist. The photo is part of the touring Frida Kahlo Exhibition, put together by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and currently in its last weekend at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

It's a pretty good exhibition. I'm not enough of an expert on Kahlo to know if her art was well-represented, (haven't even seen the movie) but from my sketchy knowledge it seemed like everything I expected to be there was there, and appropriately contextualized. The real gem is that that the curators display, apparently for the first time in public, a series of candid snapshots that Kahlo had given to a friend for safekeeping. They are revelatory, showing Kahlo and her international circle of modernist friends in intimate and revealing moments. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. You read about how painful her life was, with constant surgeries to deal with damaged caused by polio and a childhood car accident, but it is harrowing to see photographs of her body trussed up in a hospital bed. I particularly liked the pictures of Kahlo and her beloved Xoloitzcuintli dogs.

The show moves next to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Check it out if you are in town. It was insanely crowded here in Philadelphia, so advance tickets might be in order.

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008

2008-05-13T19:41:00.003-04:00

Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

Gossip Girl and Varèse

2008-05-13T08:38:00.006-04:00

Apologies for not liveblogging Gossip Girl last night. I did watch intently, but was also cooking dinner (salmon and orzo) at the same time, and did not have enough hands to run over to my computer and write pithy comments. A few random thoughts:

I'm still not satisfied with Georginia's character development. It's not enough for her just to be a psychotic stalker and nothing else. I'm concerned that when we finally learn her motivation, it's going to be stupid.
The guy Serena killed/let die "would have died anyways"? Now that's a cop-out if I ever heard one. And why didn't we get to see her apologize to the family? Yet another example of how the character of Serena never really has to face any consequences for being really annoying.
Still very pretty though.
The gossip around Gossip Girl is nearly as good as the show.
As a musicologist, I would like to point out that Rufus's music does not at all sound like it came from the 1990s. Also, has Lisa Loeb been shilling that same song for the last fifteen years? Poor thing.
Why was Jenny not in this episode at all? Or gay Eric? Weird.

Sometimes I worry that my blog is not serious enough, and therefore I will never have academic employment. So here's Varèse's Poème Electronique. If you don't enjoy it, you are a bad modernist subject.

Shake Those Hips, Lenny

2008-05-09T12:04:00.005-04:00

I write from the Library of Congress, where I am spending a rainy afternoon perusing the mammoth Leonard Bernstein collection here. I paged the wrong box of correspondence, so while I wait for the right one I'm idly leafing through random letters. I love working at the LOC--comfortable chairs and free wireless.

One discovery: in 1989, Bobby McFerrin sent Bernstein a James Brown mixtape, with the instructions to "put it on when your hips get stuck." That's a vivid image.

West Side Stories

2008-05-08T14:32:00.002-04:00

There is an old truism about Golden Age Broadway that when a show is about some exotic location or historical period--the kingdom of Siam, say, or the Salem witch trials--the intention is actually to create a metaphor for some contemporary situation. Thus The Crucible is actually about McCarthyism, or Camelot about the Kennedys, or what have you. When we watch these shows, we see ourselves.

That's all well and good, but it all hinges upon one word that is rather fraught with ideological implications: "we." Who is the "we" in a broadway audience?

I got to thinking about this because Mary and I were in NYC recently, and went to go see In the Heights, the new (to Broadway, at least) musical based on a Hispanic neighborhood in Washington Heights. I'm not really going to review in detail here. The quick rundown is that In the Heights was written by a twenty-seven year-old New Yorker named Lin-Manuel Miranda while he was a sophomore in college. It had a very successful run off-Broadway, and now just opened, with some revisions, at the Richard Rodgers Theater. Miranda himself still stars as Usnavi, a Dominican bodega owner. The music, I feel qualified to say, is outright amazing. When I first heard that it was a "hip hop musical" it's safe to say that I was concerned, but I was completely won over by the musical experience. Often when commercial music theater attempts to use "youth music" it sounds forced. I tend to think it is a matter of tempo more than anything--I love Rent as much as the next artsy suburbanite, but the painfully slow tempos of Larson's "rock music" always make it clear that you are in a very different musical world. At its best moments Miranda's music--and credit equally goes to the music director and excellent pit orchestra--pops along as if unaware of the millions of dollars in revenues weighing upon it. The result is energetic and immensely appealing. Everything else about it is great too, and I hope that next time you are in the city you should run over and see it. If you want to read a real review, try here or here.

In the Heights comes five decades after the definitive Broadway portrait of Nueva York, written by a queer Jew from Boston: West Side Story. West Side Story cheerfully participated in the traditional exoticist Broadway style. When the idea was suggested to Bernstein, he was thrilled to have the chance to play around with Latin rhythms, even if, truth be told, most of them still sound like Stravinsky. Originally the musical was actually to be called East Side Story, since the Bernstein and Co. assumed that was still where the Puerto Ricans lived.

So if "we" all had a great time watching Puerto Ricans fight and dance on stage, what happens with Puerto Ricans themselves go from being the object of a musical to being the creators? Well, one thing was very obvious to me Saturday night: the majority of the audience at the Richard Rodgers theater was speaking Spanish to one another during intermission.

This causes consternation to some people. The critic Terry Teachout, for one, had some praise for the musical, but decided that it rang essentially false:

Mr. Miranda is clearly a very talented young man. Why, then, did he settle for this casserole of warmed-over Disney slathered in hot sauce? It occurs to me that the answer may have something to do with his background: Mr. Miranda's father is a political consultant and his mother a child psychologist, while he himself directed "West Side Story" as a senior in high school, then attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Might all this explain why his cheery portrait of street life seems the least little bit faux? Stew, by contrast, drew forthrightly on his experience as a middle-class black kid in Los Angeles to write "Passing Strange," every bar of which rings true to life. I liked "In the Heights" more than well enough, but I have a sneaking feeling that a show about the real Lin-Manuel Miranda might have been a whole lot more interesting.

I'm not even sure where to begin taking this apart. Let's start with the judgment that In the Heights should have hewn more closely to autobiography. Needless to say, that's an unusual aesthetic standpoint with which to judge Broadway musicals, a genre not known for its unsentimental portrayals of gritty realist subjects. Teachout's favorite musical, after all, is Sweeney Todd, which I sincerely hope is not the product of autobiography. Teachout himself makes much of the fact that he himself moves articulately in several different social worlds--small town Missourian living on the Upper West Side, conservative critic in the liberal world of the arts--so one might imagine him to be sympathetic to an artist moving between worlds, and not being confined to his or her origins. But Lin-Manuel Miranda bugs him.

Well, I'm going to say something unpleasant about Teachout: I suspect that the reason In the Heights rang false for him is because the characters in the show did not do drugs, were not criminals, had upwardly mobile class aspirations and were generally good people. In Teachout's world, Lin-Manuel Miranda's parents were well-to-do, therefore Miranda is unqualified to write about Hispanic life in Washington Heights.

The fact is, cloying sentimentality aside (and there is plenty of it!), Miranda is writing autobiography--or at least as autobiographically as Meredith Willson did with regards to River City, Iowa. As the observant might have noticed from Teachout's mini-biography, Miranda and I went to college together. We were in fact classmates. We didn't know each other, and I admit that I didn't go to the production of In the Heights he did our sophomore year because I thought the idea of a Wesleyan student doing a "hip hop musical" sounded ridiculous. But I can at least vouch for the fact that he is indeed Puerto Rican, and is indeed from the Washington Heights/Inwood part of the world. And I hate to break it to Teachout, but there are many people like him in Washington Heights.

The problem, I think, is that In the Heights does not match Teachout's own fantasy about what Hispanic life in Washington Heights is like. And this, I would argue, is because Miranda's musical does not go out of its way to speak to Teachout. Unlike the Jets and the Sharks safely performing a knife-fight ballet to Stravinskian rhythms, the cultural difference of In the Heights spills into the audience, and for many a "typical" Broadway audience member there is the shock of recognizing that perhaps this musical is not speaking to me.

Not in any kind of radical way, of course. The politics of In the Heights, such as they are, are mostly a rather tepid multiculturalism. But at the same time, there's a lot to be said for allowing a new generation of American theatergoers a chance to see themselves in a Broadway musical.

How To Give Money To Higher Education

2008-05-06T19:32:00.005-04:00

Are you rich? Like, really rich? Do you want to use your excess money to help higher education in this country?

Here's one suggestion: This is the right way to do it. This is the wrong way.

Thank you.

Gossip Girl Liveblogging: Episode 16

2008-05-05T20:15:00.016-04:00

Warning for West Coast devotees: spoilers ahead.

8:59 Finally! Serena's big secret is not entirely unexpected, but it's a little dramatic. I really hope that Gossip Girl doesn't become The OC post season 1, or Friday Night Lights season 2, with the constant jumping of sharks. It used to be that television series had one jumping of the shark; Josh Schwartz has developed a narrative approach wherein an episode isn't complete without a whole school great whites flopping about.

8:54 "Serena Van der Woodsen, if you don't tell Dan, I will!" That's what I am yelling at the television right now.

8:45 I just love the actresses who play the little minions of Blair and Jenny. They are the oddest looking little creatures. Also, Eric Van der Woodsen: the Michelango Signorile of Upper East Side prep schools. I love him.

8:37 Ha, called it!

8:35 I just find the character development with Georgina a little...undercooked. It's fine for it to be a mystery, but we need some better clues as to why she is so hellbent on destroying Serena.

8:31 Worse analogy for virginity ever. I'm not even going to repeat it.

8:28 I like Michelle Trachtenberg much better with red hair. And what is with all the evil gays?

8:15 Loving the constant allusions to actual real world gossip. Especially after reading this article. Show creator Josh Schwartz planting gossip items about the actors to compliment plots on the show? Brilliant! Baudrillard would approve.

8:08 I predict that Jenny's boyfriend Asher will make a pass for little Eric. You read it here.

8:02 Did Dan and Serena ever talk about the fact that she was horrible to him last week? They just "got over it"? God I hate her. Although, she is very pretty.

LOL Pretension

2008-05-05T13:22:00.004-04:00

I didn't make this, and having stolen it from somewhere a few weeks ago, unfortunately don't remember where it came from. (~~If you know, tell me!~~ Figured it out!)

(For those not implicated in the idiosyncrasies of the New York art world, that's Matthew Barney, an artist whose trademark is large sculptures made of vaseline.)

The Nearest Book

2008-04-28T17:27:00.005-04:00

When the other Phil tagged me for this meme, I had just finished cleaning off the table upone which I dissertate. So I went for the first book to catch my eye when I looked over the nearest bookshelf.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The result is a blast from the past: Michael Warner's anthology Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. The meme directs me to a passage from Steven Seidman's essay "Identity Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes."

In these debates, the privileging of sexual object-choice for defining sexual identity and the notion of a unitary gay identity came under assault. These battles varied somewhat between the lesbian and gay male communities. In the lesbian context, protest was aimed at the ideological prominence of lesbian feminism and its cultural-feminist variant.

Tag, you're it! Yes, you.

This passage, and the essay from which it comes, is not particularly interesting. But I have a tremendous amount of affection for the Warner anthology. I've blogged before that 1990s queer theory is the theoretical repertoire that feels most authentic to my sensibility. I love the stuff, in all of its occasionally-problematic-but-always-passionate glory, and this collection perfectly encapsulates the moment. All the usual suspects are there: Eve Sedgwick ("How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay"), Cindy Patton ("Tremble, Hetero Swine"), Douglas Crimp, Philip Harper, Andrew Parker, and so on and so forth.

I think I bought my copy of Fear of a Queer Planet when I was a junior or so in college. After a year of experiencing the omnipresent rejection of the job market, it's both pleasant and poignant to remember that time, when I was choosing to embark upon this whole thing in the first place.

In other news, I just cannot handle Serena in Gossip Girl these days. I'm about ready to start wishing Dan would get together with Vanessa.

Henry Brant

2008-04-28T11:54:00.005-04:00

One of the happiest moments in my life was in 2002, when Henry Brant was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Six years later, there is word that Brant has passed away. As Kyle Gann says, it's a little hard to know what to think exactly of Brant's music. He wrote enormous music, too big for most concert halls, and certainly too big for a CD. His music dealt with space, usually involving many musicians or ensembles positioned carefully around a particular environment. The work honored by the Pulitzer folk was Ice Field, which involved 100 musicians sprinkled around Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

I saw Brant once, in 1998, my first semester of college at Wesleyan. Neely Bruce had arranged for Brant to come to campus for a performance, and to pick up an honorary degree. The degree was awarded at the fall convocation, for which Brant did an outdoor performance of some piece (my recollections aren't more specific) that involved bits of gamelan scattered around the audience. Later that night, he did a more formal concert indoors that made considerable use of various world music ensembles at Wesleyan. It was noisy and chaotic, and lovely. He was this little wizened old man, constantly wearing a funny little sun visor, bobbing around the place with a big grin. I wish I could be more analytical about the music, and say something more concrete about the carefully attuned spacial dynamics. But you know, sometimes it is just fun to listen to a pile of noise, and be cheerful about it. The fact that he was awarded a Pulitzer before he died makes me think better of the world.