2022 is the 100th anniversary of the opera by Alban Berg, Wozzeck. This is likely the most influential opera of the 20th century and there have been several articles commemorating it. The New York Times has an interesting one on the power of the orchestral score: When the Orchestra Is the Star of the Opera.
“Wozzeck,” particularly in concert, is a study in orchestral sound, and this ensemble did justice to both its crushing density and eerie lightness — sometimes both at once, as in an early interlude layering pale strings and whispering but denser brasses. This wasn’t a shattering performance, but it was a dazzling one.
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From Slipped Disc we learn that CURRENTZIS PROJECT IS SHELVED BY MUNICH.
The Bavarian State Opera was planning a production with Teodor Currentzis and his Putin-bank funded Russian ensemble MusicÆterna.
Suddenly, that does not look like such a good idea.
"It is with great regret that we have decided, in consultation with Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis as well as our Munich and international co-production partners, to postpone the new production of (Georg Friedrich Haas’s 2016 opera) Koma to the Ja, Mai Festival in 2024 …"
I don't know that Currentzis' ensemble is funded by a Putin bank, but it would not be surprising if it were. It brings us back to the age-old question of the relationship between aesthetic objects, their content and their social context and it prompts me to wonder if we can turn it around? Are we supporting crappy pieces of art simply because they are supportive of (or propaganda for) things that we perceive as socially desirable? Fill in your own examples.
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Also from Slipped Disc: GERMAN MINISTER: WE WILL NOT STOP LISTENING TO TCHAIKOVSKY AND READING CHEKHOV.
Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth spoke at last night’s Ukraine fundraising concert in Berlin.
Among other things the Green politician said: ‘Music is the most effective, the most radical contradiction to war…
‘We must contradict this deadly, this unbounded madness, as loudly and as audibly as humanly possible. Precisely because we cannot stop the aggressor, because we cannot stop Putin, because we have no means of ending this criminal war in Ukraine right now, we need these widely audible signs of solidarity with the Ukrainians…
But: ‘We will not stop listening to Tchaikovsky and reading Chekhov. I don’t want to imagine a world without Russian culture, without Ukrainian culture, without our culture and therefore I oppose anyone who tries to instrumentalize or boycott culture. It’s the culture that makes us human.’
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From that cultural resource, the Wall Street Journal: NYU Shakes It Off With Taylor Swift Class
The class was the idea of Ms. Spanos, an NYU alum. She pitched a list of musical megastars she could focus on, including Britney Spears, Janet Jackson or Tina Turner. Ms. Swift was at the top, she said.
NYU said students, many of whom want careers in the music industry, were expected to develop their writing, critical thinking and research skills, but also learn about Ms. Swift’s creative process and her business sense.
“Taylor Swift is one of the leading creative music entrepreneurs of the 21st century,” said Jason King, chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, NYU’s music program. “I would love for them to walk away from the course with a deeper understanding of who Taylor Swift is and why she matters to the history and study of recorded music.”
Hey, I'm the guy that delivered two papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer at an academic conference in Huddersfield, Yorkshire a few years ago, so I'm all on board with the study of popular culture.
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Piano prodigy, 7, says learning music in lockdown made her happy
Yanran from Bristol started to play the piano in 2020, when she was just five-and-half-years old, learning to read music before she could read her storybooks.
Since then she has passed her Grade 1 exams, won a competition, taught herself to compose music and taken up the violin.
Her father, Yuxing, a senior research scientist for an aerospace company, and mother, Huamei, have no musical background and are astonished at her progress.
I think the message here might be that the hustle and bustle of our daily lives might be standing in the way of the focus needed to develop new skills.
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Alex Ross' new piece at the New Yorker is Revisiting Verdi’s Political Masterpiece.
An argument can be made that the greatest of Italian opera composers wrote his masterpiece in French. Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” the anomaly in question, is now playing in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera, with the original French text supplanting the Italian translation that had been used in previous stagings at the house. Although there is little point in debating whether “Don Carlos” outclasses “La Traviata” or “Otello,” the work is certainly Verdi’s most formidable political creation, standing alongside Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” as an eternally topical study in the delusion and desolation of worldly power.
I have to admit that I have warmed to Ross' contributions over the last few years. I used to shake my head at the inevitability of his aesthetic judgements--in one place I averred that he would rather drive knitting needles into his eardrums than say something critical about a piece of contemporary music--but either he has gotten better or I have gotten more tolerant.
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And to the envois! Even avoiding the repetitive stories about who was accused of what by whom, there was a fair amount of interesting material this week. First up, Wozzeck of course. This is the 1970 film version with English subtitles:
Finally, Verdi, Don Carlos. This is the Barcelona production from 1997 in French, part one:
17 comments:
While I really enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer up through season 3 I thought (and think) the show should have ended with Buffy graduating from high school. As a deliberately glib typological gloss on the castes of public high school being full of evil hierarchical strata it was a funny show. Once it began to veer into self-seriousness from season 4 onward the show began to be less interesting. By the time Whedon was working on Dollhouse and The Avengers I concluded he was a one-trick pony who basked in the halo effect of his writing for actresses who were better than the lines he wrote for them.
So the recent demise of Whedon's reputation may have been both overdue and inevitable.
I keep hoping Wozzeck will get a staging somewhere in my area.
Swift isn't a favorite of mine but compared to all the four-chord soul-bros on the radio I can tune her out if the song doesn't win me over.
Alex Ross may be staking out a path that, as John Borstlap has put it, involves not writing something that could end up in a new version of Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective. Having read Ross for years I think what makes him rewarding is that he avoids vituperation because he tries to consistently stake out his takes on old stand-bys he admires (Wagner (who I still loathe) and Sibelius (who I think is okay) but it's when he goes out of his way to highlight music by far more obscure composers like the Swiss composer Frank Martin that I appreciate his accentuate-the-positive approach. And I'll hardly fault him for liking Bjork. :)
If there's a contemporary writer on the classical music scenes who seems aware that there are ways classical and pop can interact with each other who has mainstream standing in music journalism Ross is probably the writer. Gioia kind of has that role on the jazz/pop side but I think his master narrative stances stymie his approach. That's a point where Ross' resistence to casting his ideas in terms of a grand narrative on "how we live" or "state of the art" that I appreciate because guys like Lebrecht can't resist sharing their tastes as intrinsic to "state of the art" assertions.
What examples are there of crappy music that "we" are supporting because it advances social goals?
To that I'd say the trouble in the question "Are we supporting crappy pieces of art simply because they are supportive of (or propaganda for) things we perceive as socially desirable?" is that it's not framing the question in terms of "socially desirable" but in terms of 'crappy pieces of art'. But since I happen to admire animation as an art form I could side-step the question of "crappy" and point out that whether good or bad there's a tendency in animated series for kids to skew in one of two basic directions: cartoons targeted at girls have female protagonists whose challenge is a combination of learning clear communication and emotional regulation (Princess Unikitty, yes, I'm using very specific examples). Ladybug defeats Hawkmoth in part because of her capacity for emotional self-regulation, unlike the super-villains who become tools for Hawkmoth because they don't know how to avoid being controlled by their emotions. By contrast, cartoons whose target demographic are boys tend to feature challenges that involve problem-solving on the one hand and the regulation of physical force on the other (pick any random superhero). Batman has served as a useful focal point for both and the late Adam West's Batman vs Two-Face is as good an example of any--plus it has the advantage of being a Batman movie a kid could watch, unlike the new Zodiac/Seven Batman film that just came out.
But are superhero stories crappy because someone like Justin E H Smith says they are? If he turns around and extols Paula Abdul songs is there some kind of double standard where pop music is granted a clemency that Smith won't extend to cinema? I think the underlying challenge may be that we live in such a media-saturated era that if people stake out a highbrow/lowbrow antagonism across media and genres they need to have an explanation why. Roger Scruton was just highbrow for highbrow's sake, even his nice words about Beatles songs showed he deferred to their indisputed canonizatio (though he didn't get around to the King of Pop). Superheroes might be the Westerns of our era and, if so, I prefer them to cowboy and Indian films for blatant reason that I grew up the son of a Native American and found depictions of Native Americans ambivalent at best.
Which gets around to what might be the bigger question lurking behind the question, are the perceived sins of genre the perceived sins of people groups and is that a fair way to approach the issue?
All of which is to suggest that figuring out which social goals would be up for discussion might be an important preliminary to what arts may or may not be crappy in the promotion of said social goals. I don't think the music of DSCH is precluded from being art because he had to work with and around the dogma of socialist realism, for instance. By the reverse observation, Aaron Copland's Americana bids don't work just because they try to embody "America". I prefer Monk, Joplin, Ellington, Brubeck and Joseph Lamb and Charles Ives to anything by Copland (and, of course, 1920s to 1940s era blues).
Weeks, like last week, when I put up a Friday Miscellanea and it DOESN'T spark any comment whatsoever, I feel I have failed somehow. So this week seems to have been more of a success. First, Joss Whedon: I partially agree with your take Wenatchee, Buffy went a bit astray in Season Four, but I think it came back strong in later seasons. And the spinoff Angel was brilliant in a lot of ways. Also, the unjustly canceled Firefly was a remarkable take on science fiction. But I completely agree that his work since, Dollhouse and the Avengers for example, has been very disappointing.
Ethan, it is often very hard for us to see examples in areas close to us. But the sycophantic pieces Shostakovich had to write for Stalin are a good example far from us. Closer to home, there are some pieces inspired by environmentalism that I think are weak musically. Some pieces by R. Murray Shafer, to choose a Canadian example.
Wenatchee again, yes, I can see how the way I framed the question might be annoying if you don't believe that crappy music can even exist. I think it does, though. The mention of Scruton recalls to me a brilliant passage in one of his books where he simultaneously praises the Beatles and disses U2 in a very amusing way. Oh, and if we are looking for an example of a sacrifice of aesthetic quality for social desirability, might not the Ghostbusters revival be a good example?
Hollywood is making more movies aimed at girls because they belatedly realized that girls also buy movie tickets. They are also making more movies aimed at non-white people for the same reason. However cynical their motives are (and they are 100% cynical, always), I generally am finding the movies that my kids watch to be vastly better than the ones that I watched as a kid, not (only) because they are less sexist and racist, but because the standards for writing, acting, music, cinematography and so on are just higher across the board. The original Ghostbusters is great and everything, but it's an outlier.
it's not that I can't imagine crappy music existing, I certainly can, it's that the question of what music is crappy has a lot of components. Scruton, for instance, tended to dismiss Hummel as vapid and Beethoven as profound but Hummel's music isn't bad music and I would surely take Hummel's music over Scruton's compositions. As Lydia Goehr, if memory serves, put it once, Scruton acts as though his principles informed his taste when his taste may have informed his principles.
I don't think it's a problem that Scruton could distinguish between Thelonious Monk and other jazz composers but I do think it's a problem that he often used aesthetic ruminations as cover for making moral appraisals of how good or bad the aesthetic value of a musical work might be, such as going into how erotic narcissism pervades Scriabin. Okay ... but Scruton still doesn't convince me Wagner's worth the trouble. Scruton has no rebutta l or answer for the question as to why art has to be "numinous" rather than "functional". For all his going on about music that we dance "with" or "to" he's pervasively down with actual dance music compared to "listener culture" music like the Romantic era canonized warhorse rep.
Shostakovich would be a great example of someone who wrote great and awful music but maybe that could be a series later?
Scruton on the Beatles vs U2 or Nirvana, however, is easily explicable by his reflexive siding with the already-canonized, though. Then he'd turn around and say Hummel was vapid and shallow whereas Beethoven was profound on the basis of ... what? I've read Scruton for years and he manages to hew closely to reception history. There were people who thought Beethoven's music was bombastic and indulgent and those people were wrong based on ... what? That gets to one of the things about assessing whether music is crappy or not, based on what criteria?
If there's more than one approach then something that's a failure according to one parameter can be successful by another. With my background in choral singing I found Beethoven to be insufferable even though I dig many of his piano sonatas. Villa-Lobos could do no wrong for me writing for the guitar but his piano music has tended to bore me.
Scruton's temptation to go for zingers that work for people who already agree with him is something I've written about in other settings but it's one of the big shortcomings in his Aesthetics of Music. That and for all his shade thrown at Adorno or Schenkerians none of his actually good ideas would've shown up had he not read Zuckerkandl (Schenker fan) and Adorno. He may be the classic conservative whose aesthetic dogmas are indebted to ideas promoted by leftists, a bit of a nod to Jacques Ellul's observation that conservative mythologies tend to use the revolutionary ideals of dogmas from earlier generations of liberals or leftists in the book The New Demons.
I don't want to get drawn into a debate on the value of Scruton's aesthetics, for two reasons: I haven't given it a lot of study and what I have looked at I didn't find too interesting. He can be pretty entertaining, though.
You keep pointing to the lack of criteria or asserting that there are no aesthetic criteria, but I tend to disagree. Let's take your example: I agree with you as regarding Beethoven's choral music vs his piano sonatas. Why? Because, oddly enough, while Beethoven was masterfully able to get instruments to "speak" in an expressive way, he often wrote for the voice in an awkward and strained manner. This is pretty much an objective fact, though of course there will be those who disagree. Just compare Beethoven's production of songs with that of Schubert. There is no real consensus on much of anything in the arts--except maybe on the value of Bach?
While there may not be much juice in a dissection of Scruton, surely it is worthwhile talking about aesthetic value? For me the philosophical problem is that aesthetic value in music, for example, is a very specific phenomenon while philosophy deals with abstract principles. Reading Rosen on classical style you notice over and over again that the virtue and aesthetic power of, say, a Mozart piano concerto, comes down to the individual way it handles the harmonic and contrapuntal principles of the language. In other words, the aesthetic virtue is related to the creative individuality. This should come as no surprise. Another delightful irony is that Haydn, the supposed creator of the first movement sonata allegro form, never actually writes one that follows all the rules! Every example, again, is an individual creative solution.
Ethan, sometimes you sound like an advocate of what is known as "Whig history"! The recent history of popular culture is one of a progression from a dark and terrible past to a glorious present and counter examples are mere "outliers."
I'm not suggesting that there aren't aesthetic criteria at all, I've been working from the idea that there are multiple grounds for making aesthetic appraisals and that we should be more clear what standards are being used. The vocal/instrumental fracture in Beethoven is just one of the easier examples to cite because a composer who is successful in writing instrumental music can be middling at best in writing vocal music whereas composers who are great at writing songs may stall in writing large-scale instrumental forms. Ellington was a master of short-form music but his essays into large-scale forms stalled. I make an exception, for instance, for the revised Black, Brown & Beige because I think he succeeded there (and it hardly hurt that he enlisted Mahalia Jackson in the revised version). Now had Ellington never ASPIRED to writing a long-form composition his shortcomings wouldn't be an issue but because he DID I think we can say that he failed to write large-scale musical forms in ways that other jazz composers like George Russell did not (I think George Russell's piano concerto for Bill Evans basically holds up even if he hated how badly he felt that recording was engineered).
Sonata forms were in many ways a post hoc explanation of what theorists thought Haydn was doing, which is why I've found there's no substitute for studying Haydn's works. The gap between what music students are told Haydn was supposedly doing and what Haydn actually did has been a source of unending fun for me. If we discover that in a slow "sonata" movement that a Haydn piece abandons any and all transitions that sets up a precedent from which someone who wanted to write a sonata form using, say, more pop-song based materials, could draw some inspiration. Although Hepokoski & Darcy's work is heavy reading and gets a bit esoteric, I have found combining their general formal observations with steeping myself in Haydn and Clementi and Hummel scores (and some Beethoven, sure) has helped me think of ways to write sonata forms for guitar using ragtime and blues themes rather than galant style themes over the last ten years.
So, no, I've never pointed to a "lack" of criteria, I've been hammering the point that there are multiple criteria and that success on the basis of one can be failure on the basis of another. Think of Ted Gioia's idea that we should try to look for convergences or "musical universals". I don't think the latter exist and the history of tuning systems proves that, but convergences "can" exist if artists go to the trouble of creating them but that's where endless recourse to reception history and criticism on the pop/classical sides of scholarship tend to preclude such convergences being observed on the one hand or being created on the other. I.e. these conversations tend too quickly to devolve into pissing contests between guys like Scruton and advocates for pop music. I'm not a partisan of highbrow or Wagnerian/Arnoldian art-religion. I'm too steeped in the Reformed traditions of Christianity to ever go that route. Paradoxically it means I don't have any problem with Ewell's suggestion that we say Beethoven was a better than average composer and leaving it at that. :) That's not a sacriligous suggestion to me.
If someone asked me what I thought was crappy pop music I'd say that I can tune out Taylor Swift but I loathe Jason Mraz, Vance Joy, X Ambassadors and varieties of the soul-bro singer-songwriters. It's not that I can't appreciate a shlocky power ballard, Steve Perry is an example of how to pull that off if that's what you want. Should he have spent half a century doing stuff like that? Eh ... most musicians and artists are likely to master just one genre in their lives, especially in a cultural setting where what you can even make money doing depends on mastering a market niche. If there's a difference between classical music and popular styles where I think the old patronage systems had fringe benefits it was that composers who got funding via thrones and altars could master specific styles that catered to social settings, whereas in pop music you have to master something in a genre that is likely to sell in a different way and the kings and regents of musical patronage are different now.
But having said that, a point that Elijah Wald has made about the history of pop music comes to mind, the reception history of rock journalism has been by males about 10% of the rock repertoire (the "not love songs" songs) whereas the history of sales shows that the other 90 percent of songs are love songs and that the music has been shaped by the listening and dancing habits of teenage girls, which Wald has argued is the more accurate course of the history of rock and pop music over the last century than the kind we have gotten from the rockist bros.
As always, amid the rich variety of your thoughts, I think we are basically in agreement. It would be so simple if we could just lay out what makes a good piece of music and leave it at that. Hilarious! But, as a matter of fact, it always comes down to the details.
Thanks for giving some examples of crappy pop music. I always have difficulty because I avoid crappy music so successfully that it is hard for me to recall examples. Yes, there are multiple grounds for making aesthetic appraisals and the wisdom consists in being able to choose the most appropriate ones.
No sacrilege in saying Beethoven is a better than average composer, nope. Could we say he is way better than average? Way, way better?
Another way of approaching the question is by asking what music do we truly loath and why? I used to do these micro-reviews of randomly chosen pop songs and I recall doing one of a Jason Mraz song. Don't recall what I said, but it probably was something in the neighborhood of saccharine and cliched.
I find it not easy to put into words those aspects of music I find particularly indicative of quality, but they often have to do with something we could call "energized meaning" which would be the opposite of what I often hear in lower-quality popular music and what I call "mindless thumping." This is also applicable to music performance and illustrates the difference between really musically aware creative performance and mere mechanical reproduction.
It's one thing to just use cliche lyrics and lean into them hard. Stevie Wonder and Steve Perry have written some of the most trite lyrics I've heard in my life but Stevie Wonder can sell "You are the Sunshine of My Life" by having musical moments that juxtapose whole-tone introduction with harmonically complex background. Steve Perry just come across as so sincere it's like he literally believes every cliche he's singing while he's singing it. Bono always sounds kinda sincere but without any musical complexity to offset that U2 arguably peaked at The Joshua Tree and hasn't done anything notable since. But I don't regard them as intrinsically crappy because bands that come from the post-punk and New Wave scenes can't be assessed as if they were falling short of being a progressive rock or art rock band like Yes, Rush or King Crimson etc.
At the risk of picking a high profile example of someone who isn't exactly "crappy" I can't stand Billy Joel because he falls short of being Bob Dylan in his would-be lacerating observational songwriting and yet as a pianist who made a bid at rock he also falls well short of Stevie Wonder and Joel comes across like the bitter straight would-be Elton John to me for some reason. "Your Song" is as trite as possibly could be but it works because John has a gift for matching musical sentiment with someone else's textual sentiment, what a music teacher of mine once said was "there is a time for delightfully trite ... if you can actually get trite to work." Some artists do! Or, back to Stevie Wonder (or even Duke Ellington) you can be a trite lyricist and all is forgiven if the musical realization of the lyrics reveals that there's more to the words than how they read off the page.
at the risk of giving a personal example, I heard so many soul-bro ballads from roughly 2017-2018 I felt obliged to satirize them, writing a song where the lyrics highlight the musical cliches as they're being used.
https://youtu.be/3tQyBBSdBac
I was particularly set on sending up a tic I began to notice since the 1990s where dudes singing grunge or ballads would noodle around in a pinched narrow-range lower register and then kick it up an octave for the big climax and scream or squeak out the final verse-chorus to show how ardently they felt. It's not that nobody can ever use these musical tricks, it's that the lamer songwriters lean on those tricks in themselves. Prince could stay in a stratospheric falsetto for nearly all of "Kiss" and that's great because he played many instruments and could clearly sing in other ranges so his musical decision was one reflecting his aesthetic sensibilities and the range of his technique. Or as my composition teacher once told me, stripes on a canvas mean something when you can paint a landscape and a portrait but if that's ALL you can do they're just stripes on a canvas.
and to make sure the other half of the equation wasn't left out "Meta Torch Song" was complemented by "Meta Tear Jerker"
https://youtu.be/aCCFDAjD5jw
i.e. songs like "Dear Mr Jesus" or almost any random Sarah McLachlan ballad (think of the South Park "Crack Baby" ad satire and if you haven't seen it, well ... ).
I heard so many cloying and brazenly manipulative ballads from soul bros and pop sirens over the years I felt obliged to skewer them in song.
Kind of reminds me of the famous comment by Oscar Wilde on Dickens:
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
I don't have a universal theory of popular culture. I just know that I watched an incredible lot of garbage in the 1980s and that the stuff that my kids watch is better across the board. This is probably due to the effortless availability of everything. Like, I had a half a dozen VHS tapes that we watched endlessly, whatever crap was on TV, and whatever happened to be available at the local video rental place. My kids are selecting from (effectively) every movie that has ever existed, so they give up quickly on things that don't grab them the way that Moana or Frozen does.
For most of my life I didn't even own a TV and I haven't owned one for the last decade. But I do watch Netflix on my big iMac. The first time I encountered Netflix was at my sister's place in Virginia and she said, let's watch a movie on Netflix "they have everything." Wow, I thought, three cheers for streaming. But then I was astonished to find that when I tried to search for some of my favorite movies none of them were available. I subscribed to Netflix a couple of years ago because I was at an AirBnB in Montreal and got hooked on a TV series. I don't know about the other services, but the truth is that Netflix has a very paltry selection of what I would call film and tv classics and an enormous quantity of recent stuff of mostly poor quality. If you choose the genre "classic" in movies it only goes back as far as the 90s. If I were to name ten movies I think are really great, I would be surprised if more than one of them were on Netflix. They do a bit better with tv series like Friends, Dawson's Creek, Seinfeld and the various Star Trek shows.
When I lived in Montreal I really appreciated the repertory theatres - yes and the video stores where you really could rent classic movies.
in a commentary on discs in Batman: the animated series Paul Dini said that a strategic shift in the history of animation took place in the early 1990s when Lucas and Spielberg (and do I have to say more there?) decided to set up Amblin Entertainment to bankroll the production of animation that they believed should be a throwback/callback to the earlier Warner brothers cartoons but with more modern sensibilities. Thus Animaniacs, Freakazoid, Batman: the animated series and other early 1990s shows. Disney, for its part, rolled out Ducktales and The Simpsons also emerged. The post Cold War era of mainstream TV animation raised the bar at several points in ways that I think people can now easily (and correctly) take for granted. The cartoons have been getting better written and gotten better production values since 1990 compared to stuff from the 1980s where, on account of Reagan era deregulation, many cartoons like Transformers or G. I. Joe or Rubik the Amazing Cube or Pole Position (yes, there was that one) were basically paid advertisements for toy lines and games. Thanks to Generation X sentimentality and nostalgia those cartoons get remembered as "classic" but many of them were badly written, badly produced, and don't hold up over time.
For all the vitriol he's rightfully earned, Michael Eisner's stint at Mouse House showed that his affection for Hayao Miyazaki's filmography was sincere and especially for those of us on the West Coast getting exposure in the 1990s to anime gave us an epiphany about how animation could be far more than the stuff we had in the 1970s and 1980s. So, yeah, Moana is orders of magnitude better than just about any random thing that came out in the 1980s. I still think it was ghastly that the Academy picked Frozen of The Wind Rises for best animated feature but, hey, a whole bunch of us knew that was the only foreseeable outcome. But at least Persepolis and Ratatouille were nominated a few years earlier (I would've thrown in Satoshi Kon's gloriously weird Paprika but `twas not to be).
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