What I'm Reading/Watching

First, what I'm currently reading:

This book, that I just finished this morning, is known particularly as the target of a vile attack. Wikipedia informs us:

In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government, and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including an attempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

I doubt very much the Ayatollah read a word of the book. It is a difficult read with a wealth of terms from Indian and Islamic culture, a wealth of characters and an extremely tangled narrative. That being said, it is a formidable piece of writing. The only work I could compare to it, though utterly different, would be James Joyce's Ulysses.

I read this book way back in the 70s and re-reading it now, it seems utterly different. Told in first person narrative, it is an observation of the life of an underachieving misfit, Holden Caulfield, who just got kicked out of a private high school and  is wandering aimlessly. He pretty much hates everything. One online critic thinks that the book captures the nihilism and malaise that infects current culture even though it was written just after the end of WWII, a time of optimism in America. Or maybe it is just the story of a jerk. That's my impression and I'm 4/5ths of the way through.

I'm rather a fan of Japanese culture and lately I've been delving into novels. I've read two by Yasunari Kawabata and, on the recommendation of another online critic, I'm just starting this one by Osamu Dazai. There are a couple of others, Yukio Mishima and Kazuo Ishiguro, that I am likely to look at. After that I am probably going to re-read St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler to see if Canada has any culture after all.

Ok, culture. After living nearly three decades in Mexico I have come to the conclusion that Mexico has a great deal of history (the small city where I live is 500 years old and the ruins of older civilizations go back to 1500 BC with the Olmecs) and a great deal of culture. Canada, on the other hand, has very little history and almost no culture. Let me defend that statement with a little video by Canadian commentator J. J. McCullough:

Yes, he does have a really exaggerated Canadian accent, but if you scroll to the 16:37 mark he tells us about Vincent Massey who between 1949 and 1951 headed a Royal Commission on the Arts which noticed that while Canada was, in the wake of WWII, a significant world power with growing prosperity, it had very little in the way of culture (outside Quebec, that is, more on that later). So the recommendation was to set aside $100 million to support the arts. That doesn't work of course. Culture is not something you sprinkle on a people like a condiment. Culture has to come from the people in my view. So what happened then and is still happening now is that government bureaucrats give money to their allies, friends, cliques of the well-connected and a couple of artists just for show. Genuine creative artists will see virtually none of it.

Quebec is a bit of an exception as they do have a local grassroots culture. If you make a list of non-popular Canadian musicians you might come up with Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Leonard Cohen, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and most recently Angine de Poitrine. With the exception of Glenn Gould they are all from Quebec.

Speaking of supporting Canadian culture, this is a nice satiric summary:

https://x.com/SatireSquadHQ

Actually, Canada does have a culture, but it is largely an imported one from the various peoples that have settled in Canada. But a lot of it doesn't survive the first blizzard, so it is more like faint wisps of European culture spread rather thinly. Again, with the exception of Quebec.

Finally, a fragment of a movie review. Lately I've been collecting a few DVDs of films worth having. The Seventh Seal, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Le Grand Bleu, Fanny and Alexander and lately, Ben-Hur from 1959. Apart from anything with Bill Murray I'm not a big fan of American cinema, but this film is widely admired. I won't go over the strengths of the movie--it won eleven Academy Awards--but I would like to share the oddities. Here are some things that you don't find in more recent movies: an orchestral overture before the film starts and another orchestral piece at intermission. This is thinking of a film as being vaguely like an opera. The soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa I found rather over-ripe. I like slow-paced French films, but I found this film to be excessively turgid with so very many long, long shots of the lead actors just standing there emoting soulfully. One very interesting oddity is that the protagonist, Ben-Hur is Jewish, something you would not encounter in contemporary film for political reasons. But the aspect that I found most curious was the religious one. The film takes place at the same time that Jesus is traveling in Judea and delivering his Sermon on the Mount. We never see his face, but he crosses paths with Judah Ben-Hur on a few occasions, once bringing him water. We also see his progression to the Crucifixion which Judah accompanies. What is the purpose of this, inserted into what is basically a story of vengeance? Well, it is essentially to make it not a story of vengeance and forgiveness. Judah never forgives the Roman responsible for the imprisonment of his mother and sister where, abandoned in a dungeon, they contract leprosy. The divine intervention is that during the Crucifixion a gentle rain falls on his mother and sister whom he brought out from their isolation in a leper colony, and they are miraculously cured of the disease so removing the need for forgiveness.

Divine intervention, a miracle, essentially ruins the moral quality of the narrative. The old name for this is deus ex machina and for me it is always a cheat and a disappointment. But that may be just because I am not religious. Another film where I thought the moral structure of the narrative was ruined is Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank's character is paralyzed through the vile action of an opponent, but the story from then on is about her acceptance and request for a merciful death when morally it should be about the punishment of the one who caused it. Or so it seems to me.

Let's have some religious music: Hildegard von Bingen.

 

Today's Listening: Prokofiev

This is Russian pianist Alexei Sultanov, piano

Live at the 11th International Tchaikovsky Competition - Round 2

Moscow Conservatory, 199

Russia in the last fifty years seems to turn out more great pianists than anywhere else.

Mexico City

 

The Angel of Reforma

I just spent a few days in Mexico City over Easter and I enjoy it more each time I visit. It is such a large city--around twenty-three million people--that it takes a while to get comfortable with it. I guess I am slightly comfortable with a few colonias in the centre: Polanco, Condesa, Roma and Chapultepec. With Uber it is dead easy to get around. A car will pick you up in three or four minutes and take you anywhere in the central part in fifteen minutes for about 120 pesos.

Mexico City has some fine, world-class museums like the National Museum of Anthropology which has important artifacts from all the important civilizations of Mexico: Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec. Alas, apart from a few codices from late in pre-Columbian times, we have no written records, no Herodotus, so the innumerable stone sculptures and temples remain mute. The Museum of Anthropology is huge with an enormous fountain in the forecourt:

Here is a particularly famous item, the so-called Aztec calendar stone which is actually a sacrificial altar.

But there are many other museums like the Frida Kahlo residence, the Soumaya museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and so-on, something like a hundred in total. In recent years Mexico has become more and more well-known for its gastronomy and there are several Michelin star restaurants in the city. But since there are roughly fifteen thousand restaurants all together, there is something for everyone. And no, that doesn't count the street-food a favorite of Anthony Bourdain. I had a lovely lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Presidente Masaryk, surrounded by flowers:

A very famous shopping Mecca is the Palacio de Hierro which has nearly every luxury item you can imagine from Hermés scarfs to Russian food:

Yes, they have an entire floor devoted to gourmet food, not quite as good as the KDW in Berlin, but pretty good. An entire floor devoted to men's fashion--I was there to buy some Florsheim shoes:

And many floors devoted to women's fashion. I stayed in a modest hotel in Roma Norte, venturing out of Polanco where I usually stay. Roma Norte has become a destination for many American digital nomads who can be found clustering in lovely little coffee shops where you can sit for hours with a single latte.

That was I think the best iced latte I have ever had. It even came with tasting notes. Right in front of my hotel was a lovely small park, frequented by dog-walkers at all hours. It had an interesting fountain with hundreds of jets of water that acted like an outdoor air-conditioner.

The hotel offered a pretty good breakfast, though not to be compared to the huge buffet one finds at the Hyatt Regency in Polanco:

This is about the sixth or seventh time I have visited Mexico City and it is a favorite destination. It doesn't have the incredible art museums of Madrid or Paris, or the wealth of music performances of Vienna or Berlin, or the architectural beauty of Florence. But it has a bit of all those things in its own unique way--and at a fraction of the cost!

Friday Miscellanea

 

Italian commedia dell'arte costumes

From reading people like R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History) and Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) I have the sense that trends in history and the arts are often a fusion of the old and the new. Look at Neo-classicism in music, for example. So when I encounter something so radically new as the Quebec group Angine de Poitrine that I put up this week (and that everyone and their dog seems to have posted a reaction to), after noticing what is new: the costumes, the quarter-tone guitars, the intricate looping, the irregular time signatures and so on, the next thing I notice is that there are historical precedents for all this. The illustration above is meant to show that their costumes might be influenced by the commedia dell'arte costumes (just add polka dots); the use of quarter tones goes back a hundred years or so, I recall using tape loops in a 20th century performance practice class in 1976, fifty years ago; and irregular time signatures go back at least to the Rite of Spring composed in 1913. I'm also intrigued that their looping structures might have some relationship to the medieval isorhythmic motet! But what we might most deeply admire is that Angine de Poitrine have managed to make quarter-tone music addictive!

* * *

Students cram in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw as musicians play

AMSTERDAM (AP) — From the stage of Amsterdam’s historic concert hall, violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou look out over row after row of young faces illuminated by the glow of laptop screens.

The plush red seats of the Concertgebouw’s main auditorium are occupied by students cramming for upcoming exams and finishing dissertations as classical music fills the hall.

The students aren’t being rude by ignoring the musicians. At this event, they’re meant to be studying — and the music is intended to assist rather than distract them.

The study sessions were first organized during the COVID-19 pandemic by Entree, the youth association of the Concertgebouw, to help students improve their concentration and introduce them to the charms of classical music.

AP correspondent Karen Chammas reports a well-known classical music venue in Amsterdam has found a new way to attract a younger crowd.

They have been a hit ever since.

Seems like a great idea. My only quibble is that this encourages passive listening, which I'm not a fan of.

* * *

Crrrritic!

What do we even need music critics for, anyway? Do they add anything of importance to the musical landscape, or are they just arrogant, carping malcontents who exist to take potshots at the great artists of the day? Wouldn’t things be better if the entire enterprise were to simply disappear?

These rhetorical questions, and the embittered perspective underlying them, have been around for a very long time — for all I know, since the modern practice of music criticism began in the early 19th century.

Sure, read the whole thing.

* * *

I am, inescapably, a critic myself which trait came to the fore a few days ago. I had attended a charity benefit and was seated next to an attractive and intriguing woman with whom I had a brief conversation. A few days later I asked a mutual friend about her. As she was single, my friend mentioned an event that the woman was going to be the star of in a few days. So we arranged to go as a group. It was some sort of St. Patrick's Day event so I was unclear as to what was going on. It turned out that the woman, let's call her Patricia, was the singer for a blues band with violin, guitar, saxophone, electric bass and drums. Ok, could be good. I'm actually quite fond of the blues. Alas, it was not so good. The drummer was a brutal, insensitive sadist, smashing his drums with great violence,  plus his snare was tuned to the wrong note, something I hadn't previously realized was possible. The violinist was a non-entity, the saxophone, guitar and bass were generic. But the singer, Patricia, was the real show. She's not actually a singer, more of a poser. She poses as a singer, and offers many poses on stage, wriggling her fingers at us, adjusting her fashionable hat and, most alluring, displaying pelvic thrusts to show her female strength. Alas again, the second song they chose to massacre was The Thrill is Gone by B. B. King, a truly great blues artist. That song has a unique nostalgic sadness, unusual in the blues. I massacred it myself when I recorded a version of it some fifty-five years ago! The excessively loud drummer really killed it, but he was aided and abetted by the singer, whom I doubt even knew all the words. This is what it should have sounded like:

 I had the great privilege of hearing him perform this song in concert in Montreal in 1990 and it brought the house down. I'm afraid that in future I will be unable to even look Patricia in the eye, let alone have a conversation.

* * *

Rather thin pickings this week, so let's move on to some envois. First up, if you haven't listened to Angine de Poitrine five times yet, you really should:

Here is the String Quartet no. 3 by Alois Haba, in quarter tones:

What makes the Angine de Poitrine use of quarter-tones so effective is the rhythmic energy and stepwise motion, among other things. Speaking of rhythmic energy, let's listen to Eight Lines by Steve Reich:

And that's it for one of the odder Friday Miscellaneas.

Today's Listening: Angine de Poitrine

 

The only place in Canada this band could have come from is Quebec. The name means "angina of the chest". Rick Beato, to stop people emailing him, just did a video on them. Yep, this is the music of the future all right. They call this "math rock" and if we had such a thing as a mathematically-trained rock musicologist, I'm sure she could spend many happy hours figuring out just what they hell they are up to. In the meantime, I find I can listen to anything presented with sincerity and conviction, as this is.

Oh no, Timothy Chalamet says we are beneath consideration

As the Wall Street Journal comments: How Timothée Chalamet Made Enemies of Opera and Ballet Stars 

Opera singers and ballet dancers found themselves at odds with a strange enemy recently after the actor Timothée Chalamet, in the final stretch of a hotly contested Oscar race, said that “no one cares” about the two art forms.

Read the whole thing for details and for counters from opera and ballet folk. I had to chuckle though because I think Hollywood is also looking down the barrel of nobody cares. The only Timothy Chalamet movie I have ever watched, I turned off about halfway through because, yep, I just didn't care. I am a movie lover, but I have very little interest in current movies. As I have expressed here before, to general agreement, my favorite move star is Bill Murray.

Really you have to feel sorry for all these young people in the culture business who, because of our flawed education systems, have almost no knowledge of the cultural riches of the past. If you know nothing about opera and ballet, of course you are not going to think much of them.

In one of my favorite episodes of Angel he takes his whole crew to see a performance of Giselle, thereby introducing not only his fellow characters, but the audience as a whole, to a romantic ballet. Knowing the history of art enriches everything you do. And vice versa.

What I'm Reading Now

 The quote I put up the other day comes from this collection:

I'm just about to start the last story, Death in Venice. After running across Molière mentioned in a hundred places it finally dawned on me that I should read him. He is rather like a French Shakespeare, roughly a hundred years later. And he only wrote comedies. I like comedies. The thing is that, in this translation Richard Wilbur sticks as close as possible to the poetic structure of the original, which means hundreds of pages of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. It is particularly fun when they are split between different characters. Like Cher or Madonna, Molière goes by one name.

And finally, I have returned to The Histories of Herodotus in the marvelous Landmark edition:

I set this aside for a few months, but I am glad to be back. Herodotus is the source of lots of delightful stories. For example, a Persian lord, in order to send a message with complete secrecy had a courier's head shaved and the message tattooed on his scalp. The he grew the hair back. He simply carried the message "shave the head of this courier." Another story is of a man given an important message that said simply "kill this man."