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.

The Three Taboos

Alongside the three transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we might set the three taboos: politics, religion and sex. This goes back a long way; the Royal Navy prohibited discussion of politics, religion or women at the officers mess going back to early in the 19th century. I'm not sure of the current etiquette in this area. Here at the Music Salon we avoid politics with the single exception of when politics threatens to invade the world of music and the fine arts. But I would like to just put a toe onto the dangerous waters of religion.

I recently had a discussion with two colleagues about religion. I'm afraid I rather heatedly pronounced that in my view this whole climate crisis was nothing but an ideological scam and it was "insane" for Germany, for example, to deindustrialize its economy trying to achieve net zero carbon dioxide. I will mercifully spare you the details. One of my colleagues, both of whom are very committed Christians, retorted that in her view it was equally insane not to accept Jesus Christ into one's life. Woo-hoo, that energized the discussion!

At one point, I made the slightly excessive claim that religion was nothing but a "category error" a technical term in philosophy taken from The Concept of Mind, a work of analytic philosophy by Gilbert Ryle. It is a category error to extend the idea of a personal deity to the universe. Well, maybe, maybe not. My real point was that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply beyond our ken.

But the truth is that my colleagues and I really are coming from two different traditions. When I am not engaged in an intellectual discussion, I have profound respect for my Christian and Jewish colleagues based on the view that anyone pursuing virtue is to be admired as it is not so easy in this world. I respect the traditions and literature of both those religions and have done a fair amount of reading of both.

I wanted to respond in a more thoughtful manner to the discussion so I got copies of the slim volume published by Hackett of the Five Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo). I accompanied this by a brief note saying that I both respected and was acquainted with the sources of their beliefs, but wasn't sure that they had much knowledge of the sources of my beliefs.

UPDATE: For some inexplicable reason, I forgot to mention that I gave these copies to my two colleagues--but I guess that was obvious.

It is my understanding that Western Civilization really derives fundamentally from two places: Jerusalem and Athens. For some reason, my early experiences with Christianity were not too inspiring, but over the years I became more and more attracted to Ancient Greece. Judaism gave us monotheism and a profound sense of moral duty while Christianity added the virtues of mercy, love and administration (borrowed from Rome). Sure, that's a grotesque simplification, but bear with me! Athens, on the other hand gave us cosmology, geometry, ethical reasoning, logic, history, aesthetics, comedy, tragedy, democracy, political science and a bunch of other things.

I chose Plato because his dialogues are a wonderful entry to the thought of Ancient Greece and Aristotle is just too difficult.

Musical Roots

Categorizing music is usually a futile and annoying pursuit so I am going to talk about some music without naming a style or genre. Last night I got the urge to listen to some music I haven't heard for quite a while--this is one of the good things about YouTube, you can indulge almost any urge. Here is what I listened to:

What these clips all have in common is that they are live performances with no lip-syncing, no backup dancers, no fancy pyrotechnics and, most importantly, they blend music traditions with creativity. One of the roots of Cream was the blues of Robert Johnson and the second and third clips also reflect that. PJ Harvey is a different kettle of fish, but her unique creativity also uses some traditional elements such as the driving energy of rock and roll. Jimi Hendrix also has some obvious roots, though he developed the electric guitar in new directions. I like this music because it is what I think of as the "real thing." These days one gets the distinct impression that the whole point of music is to attract listeners, sell tickets, influence fashion and most of all, make money. All that is ok, but it is not what I think of as the "real thing." And oh boy, do I ever want to avoid using the word "authentic!" But to me, the difference between this kind of music, which is just straight from the shoulder and damn the torpedoes, and the other kind of music, which is contrived, self-conscious, aimed at manipulating certain effects, insincere, phony and substanceless is perfectly obvious. And I don't think it is just a matter of taste, or is it?

What do you think?

On Movies

I used to love going to the movies. One place I used to live, the owner of one downtown cinema was a Shakespeare fan so every winter he would show a different Shakespeare film every Sunday matinee. Classics, of course: Polanski's Macbeth, Zefirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Olivier's Othello, Peter Brook's King Lear and probably a couple of others I have forgotten. There was also a small film festival where I saw a lot of European films like Devil in the Flesh and Fellini's Satyricon. In the 1980s there was a wonderful efflorescence of Australian film with Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Walkabout and others. But it was when I moved to Montreal that I really got to see a lot of films: because of the bilingual culture, there are first-run French cinemas, first-run English cinemas as well as repertory houses where I saw things like Last Tango in Paris, Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, Luc Besson's Le Grand Bleu and La Belle Noiseuse. I don't translate that last title because, like Les Misérables, there is simply no possible English version.

I saw La Belle Noiseuse, directed by Jacques Rivette, as a first-run film in Montreal in 1991 or 92. And I just realized that that was probably the last really great film I saw! Every few years I wander up to our local cinema, with very poor selection, to see the latest, but I don't even remember them. I saw 300 a few years ago... But while entertaining, that's not a great film. I watched the new Dune on streaming a few weeks ago and not only is that not a great film, it is as bad as the novel it is based on. I'm obviously not a Frank Herbert fan, though Hellstrom's Hive is interesting.

But back to La Belle Noiseuse. I just got the DVDs because I really wanted to see all of it again, this time with sub-titles because I can't follow the French anymore. This is a four-hour film that seems to swoop by in half the time. Some films, I am exhausted by the crappiness in the first five minutes and, honestly, most films I give up on three-quarters of the way through. The feel of La Belle Noiseuse is so different from movies today that it is shocking--at the beginning, shockingly normal. What happens in the first 53 minutes? Let me summarize: Nicolas and Marianne, a young French couple (he is a painter and she a writer) go to visit a famous, though retired painter, Édouard Frenhofer and his wife Liz (who does taxidermy). They are introduced by the art dealer Porbus. They have dinner and afterwards Nicolas and Frenhofer talk about reviving a long-standing but never realized project of painting "La Belle Noiseuse" but this time with Marianne (played by Emmanuelle Béart) as the model. And that's it.

What is shocking? No spandex costumes or special effects where characters are thrown hundreds of feet with no injuries. No quipping. In fact, this could be any dinner with perfectly ordinary, though artistic, people. This could even be any dinner in any century almost because, except for one scene a minute long when Nicolas talks on the phone--an old-fashioned handset--there is nothing that is not age-old. The fact that this ordinary dinner is shot in a leisurely, ordinary way is actually shocking since we are so used to movies that are mannered and artificial to an extreme. Then comes the first drawing scene which you can watch for yourself, it starts around 53:30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEiZvDY1uPw&t=6s

It's incomplete, but watching to the end of the clip will give you an idea. It says that this is "part 1" but it is really just the first half of part one. This is the only film that actually gives an accurate representation of the act of creation: the scratchy pens, the elusive washes, rubbing with the fingers, the almost random strokes and then, magically, out of nothing, suddenly we see a face... Sure, we see Mozart composing in Amadeus, but frankly, it's a put-up job with no resemblance to the real thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2pyEvp8ls

All movies about classical music, without exception, are romanticized bunk, including Amadeus, though that is the best of a bad bunch. I don't know films about painting very well, but it is probably a similar situation. La Belle Noiseuse is a great film and watching it we realize just how rare great films are these days...

Update on Tár

The film Tár fascinates me because it seems to deal with a lot of important issues and questions. Unfortunately, because of where I am, I'm not sure I will be able to see the film anytime soon. There is a lengthy review in The New Yorker that is frustrating because after reading it (or most of it) I still have no idea of the truth of the film, whether it is moral crap or not, whether it captures any reality or not. The writer seems to go to great lengths to prevent any such evaluations.

Is the movie saying that if we cancel the greats, we’ll be left only with mass, technology-driven culture? That there is only a superficial difference between a cosplaying fan and a self-mythologizing artist? That Lydia is already in Hell, playing to an audience of demons? That she possesses true artistic purity, because she loves conducting enough to do it at such a debased level? That she has no financial choice? That in being forced to really sublimate her ego, she might find renewal in music, instead of in power? These questions came to me later. In the moment, I registered only an enormous gulf. Lydia is still engaging in the act of making art. But the artist—that is, the person who knows she is connected to others—has separated herself with great success. She’s never been so untouchable.

Uh-huh, well I imagine watching the film might answer a few of those questions! The New Yorker is so attuned to the cultural moment that their writers regard with horror the idea of any kind of plausible evaluation of artistic quality. Waaayy too many other considerations to interpolate. A long while back I commented that Alex Ross would probably rather stab himself in the ears with knitting needles than actually criticize a piece of contemporary music. That principle still seems operative at The New Yorker. Or, heck, in most media and popular culture.

Have any of my readers seen the film and would like to comment?

Short-Squeezing in the Cave: An Epistemological Meditation

Every now and then I get inspired to do a post that is, how shall I put this, "out there." Way out there. It's all part of the magical charm of The Music Salon that sometimes we not only go off the rails a bit, we actually forge our own rails.

I was reading a Wall Street Journal story about the recent short-squeeze frenzy on Wall Street where a group of small retail investors actually shook the hedge fund world to its foundations leading the most unlikely pair, far-left Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AND far-right Senator Ted Cruz to make similar supportive tweets for the little guys. What is this, Alice in Wonderland? Not only that, but the WSJ titled its story GameStop, Bitcoin and QAnon: How the Wisdom of Crowds Became the Anarchy of the Mob which is way too prolix for the sober Journal.

In this case, their method was buying shares and options of GameStop in order to squeeze short sellers who were betting the stock would drop. The result was a buying frenzy that lofted the stock’s value into the stratosphere, well beyond any price at which it reflected a plausible future for the fundamentals of GameStop’s business.

Let me try and explain that a bit. You can make money in various ways in the stock market. Leaving aside the complicated situation with options, you can either buy a stock with good prospects, watch it go up, and then sell it at a higher price, or you can sell a stock (that you have borrowed from a brokerage) that you think has poor prospects (like GameStop), watch it go down and "cover your short" by buying shares at the lower price so as to return them to your brokerage. In both cases you pocket the difference. Using call or put options is a way of leveraging your profit--or loss, of course.

Now the situation with GameStop and a few other small companies or companies on the rocks like AMC, the cinema chain, is that some hedge funds had shorted the stocks so thoroughly that the stocks were as much as 140% short! This means that there were more shares sold short than actually existed. There really ought to be a regulation against this. But the consequence was that the hedge funds that were short the stock were uniquely vulnerable because if the stock started climbing steeply, they would have to cover their short at a higher price, i.e. lose money. You can only borrow shares to short temporarily (I'm ignoring margin rules here, which vary). Somebody noticed and shared it with a whole bunch of small investors over the internet who started furiously buying the stock. It doesn't take much to send a stock like GameStop soaring: today it is up 400% at this writing.

On a personal note, I once saw a stock that really was an absolute no-brainer: during the carnage of the Internet Bubble in 2000 shares in Salon, the media company, actually dropped to as low as they could go: one penny a share. I looked at this and thought, geez, buy those shares and if it goes to two cents tomorrow, you have a 100% profit! So I thought about buying a few hundred thousand shares. Alas, way back then, buying large quantities of shares involved very high trading costs, so I gave up the idea. But now, Robinhood and even big guys like Charles Schwab have NO TRADING FEES. And this definitely contributes to the frenzy.

I left a comment on the above story:

I have this strange mélange of images: a lonely hermit, solitary in his cell trading GameStop shares in his Robinhood account. It is like Cistercians of the Strict Observance all of a sudden had fiber optic connections. What a weird situation epistemologically. The Internet is reality while the ordinary physical world is almost irrelevant. Reminds me of the short story from 1909 by E. M. Forster: "The Machine Stops."

It also reminds me of the Plato's Allegory of the Cave where people cannot see the world as such, but only shadows on the wall of their cave. It is an image that seems ever more relevant today. The Internet in all its glory is still just digital wisps, like shadows on the wall of a cave. We only glimpse reality at a distance. The only reality that we are really sure of is that of our immediate surroundings. And these days for most people, those immediate surroundings are our own homes that we occasionally venture out of. So we spend all of our time in our own little caves, looking at shadows on the wall over our iPads, laptops or computer screens.

It is as if we are inside a giant machine that is feeding information to us. What if, one day, The Machine Stops?

And now for our musical connection. The link above is to the Wikipedia article on the prophetic short story by E. M. Forster written in 1909. About the same time, Schoenberg was undergoing a crisis in his life and out of it came one of the first atonal compositions, his String Quartet No. 2, here performed by Ann Moss and the Hausmann Quartet:

UPDATE: I should perhaps mention what is so risky about shorting stocks. I have done it myself in the past, but only on rare occasions. If you buy a stock in the ordinary way, which is known as being "long" a stock, the most you can lose is the value of the stock. If you buy 100 shares of a $5 stock, the most you can lose is $500 if it goes to zero. BUT, it is different with a short position. Say you short a hundred shares of a $5 stock and a bunch of crazy guys on the internet bid that stock up to, oh, $200 a share? If you have to cover your short, i.e. buy shares to return them to your broker, then you are going to be out, not $500 but 195 X 100 or $19,500. Theoretically, there is no limit to how much you can lose on a short! Which is why some big hedge funds just lost billions of dollars.

Rewiring Our Brains?

 I'm sure you've seen the claim that this-or-that is "rewiring our brains"? Leaving the faulty metaphor aside, our brains are not "wired" in the first place, I think this is one of those terribly useful claims that usually comes with an ulterior motive. You know, like:

"all we need to do is spend just a little (or a lot) more money on the (homeless, war on drugs, war on poverty, healthcare, national defence, climate change ...) and the problem will be solved"

Uh-huh. What's really weird is that voters keep believing this stuff. Some of them, at least, the rest know that their government jobs depend on it.

But back to that "rewiring the brain" stuff. You know it is complete nonsense, right? But if you are reading about listening habits on Spotify, or the new fad of bullet journaling, or work habits, or work environments, or a host of other things, they always seem, mysteriously, to be connected with someone trying to sell a new book, project, product, program or website. You need this to

• rewire your brain!
• stop your brain from being rewired!
• rewire your brain in a better way!
• to help others rewire their brains!

It reminds me of the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up."

No, you can't rewire your brain and therefore neither you nor anyone else has had their brain rewired because that is just a stupid metaphor. All this boils down to claims about a different way of thinking about things. And just about the most salient truth of recent decades is that since education has been rotted from within by post-modernists, there is damned little thinking going on in the first place. If that is what is meant by "rewiring your brain" I think that we should go back to the older word for this phenomenon: ignorance. Oh, yes, and that explains voting patterns as well.

Now that we have that figured out I think we have the right to listen to some Bach. This is the Netherlands Bach Society take on the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Bach. And it ain't gonna rewire your brain!

Aussie TV

My latest discoveries on Netflix are Aussie tv series. I have sampled Swedish and Finnish crime dramas, a Serbo-Croatian newspaper drama, action series from Israel and Turkey, a Russian show about a detective with an exceptional sense of smell, and one show about disaffected youth in Rome. None of them caught my fancy. But then I had a go at an Australian tv series and got hooked. So far I have not found one not worth watching.

Pine Gap is a one season show that takes place on a high-tech intelligence facility run jointly by the US and Australia in the Aussie outback. It just aired in 2018 so there likely will be more seasons coming out. It involves international intrigue and romance.

The Code also involves high-tech espionage, but it is more personal centered around two brothers, one of whom is a journalist and the other a brilliant, high-functioning Asperger's personality who can do just about anything with computers so he usually has to be kept away from them! Somehow he lands a gorgeous Iranian immigrant girlfriend. The three get mixed up in corruption in high places. Two seasons and well worth watching.

Secret City I have just started watching. It also involves corruption in government and stars a journalist. The amazing architecture of the Parliament House in Canberra, where much of the action takes place, is almost another character:

Click to enlarge

Wanted is my favorite so far. It follows the adventures of two women, one hiding out from the authorities after she killed her husband in self-defence, and the other the sheltered daughter of a wealthy businessman. While coincidentally waiting at a bus stop together they get mixed up in illegal drug deals, corrupt cops, and end up wanted, on the run and, of course, best friends. Three seasons and still going.

What all these series have in common is interesting and believable characters which seem to be rare in US tv these days. Plus, NO SUPERHERO COSTUMES AND NO CGI SPECIAL EFFECTS. If I see Thor throw his hammer one more time, or Iron Man rocket into the sky or Captain America do something really ludicrous with his shield I swear I'm going to hurl...

UPDATE: Just watching Season 3, episode 5 of Wanted and there was a little bit of dialogue that captures rather nicely the Australian view of things: the two leads are still on the run, on foot, and they come across an abandoned barn at dusk where they decide to hole up for the night. One character looking dubiously into the dark barn says "Do you think there'll be rats?" to which the other replies, "Not if there's snakes." Yep.

A Review of Netflix

I have had less exposure to television than most people I think. We didn't own a television until I was nine years old and it was a black and white that received one channel: the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Even as a teenager we still only had three channels and they went off the air at midnight. I left home at eighteen and never owned a television until I married at age forty. So, apart from a few visits home at Christmas when I saw A Christmas Carol every year, I didn't see much television! At age fifty I canceled my cable and gave my television to my maid.

This doesn't mean I am completely unaware of television. Along the way I ended up watching a few series with interest, among them Homicide: Life on the Street, a gritty police show set in Baltimore, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and, oddly enough, Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. As movies seem to have gotten a whole lot less interesting (I can think of few things more boring than interminable fight scenes between "superheroes" larded over with gratuitous special effects and CGI), television seems to have gotten more interesting with good writing and intriguing characters. Most of the characters in the blockbuster films seem two-dimensional. Shows like The Sopranos (which I never got into) and Game of Thrones (which I did) are quite compelling viewing.

But I still resist broadcast television as I find it simply unwatchable. The commercials, especially for the networks themselves, and the plodding, repetitive news shows, are unbearable. Netflix is a different animal however. Visiting a relative a year or so ago we ended up watching a couple of seasons of The Last Kingdom on Netflix. The story of the conflict between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons in Dark Ages Britain was not bad at all. When I was staying at an AirBNB apartment in Montreal in September I noticed that there was an active Netflix account so I started watching. No Game of Thrones, of course, because that is on HBO, but a wealth of other stuff, including all the Star Trek spinoffs. After a couple of days the account expired, but by that time I was hooked so I took the plunge and signed up. Back in Mexico I am still watching.

Much of what is on Netflix is mediocre or not to my taste, but that still leaves a lot of interesting stuff. The movie selection I don't find too interesting as it is skewed towards current movies. Netflix' idea of a "classic" is something filmed in 1995! There are some popular series like Friends and Breaking Bad (which I also never got interested in) and some Netflix originals like Jessica Jones which I did get into. The whole Marvel Cinematic Universe of which it forms a part is on Netflix and I watched most of the movies which are ok if not really great. Some of the TV shows like Arrow and Daredevil are probably more interesting. I often wonder if they don't have to be more creative on television because they don't have the huge special effects budgets. Nothing ruins a film more than excessive special effects: case in point, the Matrix sequels.

Some of the most interesting discoveries are television series that are not American. There is an interesting series called Crossing Lines with Donald Sutherland and a cast of European actors that chronicles the story of a (fictional) investigative team working for the International Criminal Court at The Hague that is well done and refreshingly different from a typical police procedural. I also just discovered a fascinating series called El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time, in Spanish with English subtitles) set in Spain that is a fascinating blend of science fiction and history. Think Warehouse 13 but more interesting and with better acting. In an abandoned building in Madrid there are the offices of a secret government ministry whose task is to safeguard the history of Spain. Deep below ground are hundreds of doors, each of which offers access to a different place and time--restricted to the current territory of Spain. The primary team of three investigators consist of a 21st century Madrid paramedic, a late-nineteenth century woman university student and a 16th century soldier from Seville. You have to suspend your disbelief in the fact that they can Skype between different eras (in exchange you get to enjoy the 16th century soldier asking "what's Skype?") but the characters are interesting and likable and how can you not love a police department whose sketch artist is Diego Velázquez! There is a scene where he goes to Barcelona in 1899 to get Pablo Picasso's signature which they need to forge a receipt for La Guernica. It is fun to watch him lure Picasso into praising Velázquez' painting Las Meninas as a work of genius. Honestly, where else on television would you have two characters discussing a 17th century painting at some length?

Velázquez' Las Meninas (the painter is depicted on the left)

I don't know how much Netflix skews its offerings according to where you are, perhaps the Canadian ones are different from the Mexican ones, but if you can find El Ministerio del Tiempo in your region, it is worth a watch. You learn a bit about Spanish history and literature as well in the series though no musicians are mentioned so far. Don't get on the wrong side of the Ministry as their incarceration cells are in an 11th century dungeon!

Future Movies

Before I get into more science fiction TV series, let's have a look at some science fiction movies. They have been around for longer than I've been a viewer, but a lot of the early ones are really just B movies with some blob from outer space. Of course occasionally you get a sexy babe from outer space rather than a blob, which is rather nicer. I'm thinking of Lifeforce (1985), of course. But first-rate science fiction movies within my viewing lifetime really started with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which began the never-ending race to see who could come up with the best special effects. For 1968, it is pretty impressive. Planet of the Apes, the kind of brilliant reversal that science fiction is known for, dates from the same year. The next really big year was 1977 which saw the arrival of both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The former, of course, launched that multi-billion dollar franchise that we are still plagued with. It sure started with a bang, but it gets less and less interesting with each film. Close Encounters is an example of the bane of science fiction films: the triumph of special effects over, well, everything else.

Another trend, towards dark, gritty dystopian futures, was seen in a couple of films by Ridley Scott: Alien (1979) and Bladerunner (1982). These are both pretty good. In Alien instead of having the blob from outer space terrorize us on Earth, we go to its planet so it can terrorize us there. Bladerunner is a brilliant film with a distinctive look that launched a whole genre of dark, depressing films in which humanity's future is bleak.

The computer revolution led to science fiction films in which the blob from outer space becomes the computer hiding next door or, as in The Matrix (1999), the computer that is secretly running the universe. This film also had a distinctive look in which every character is so cool it is actually physically painful:

The two sequels are perhaps the best illustration of how the excessive use of special effects in the form of computer generated imagery (CGI) is the best possible way to destroy a franchise. My aversion to both James Cameron's bloated epics and environmental hysteria meant that I have successfully avoided seeing Avatar (2009), so I will pass over it in silence. The niftiest science fiction film I have seen recently is Ex Machina (2015) and not just because of the presence of the Schubert late Piano Sonata in B flat major, D. 960 in the soundtrack (actually, playing on a sound system in the foyer, so diagetic). Here the focus is on the characters and the special effects, while very well done, do not dominate.

Speaking of bloated, the two worst trends I can see are the massively overdone film epics based on fantasy novels of which the prominent examples are The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter films. Yes, excellent originals, but the film versions, especially of the Tolkien, are grotesque distortions. Of The Hobbit we will not speak. The other horrific trend is the superhero film based on comic books. Please, no more! These combine the worst aspects of overdone CGI with stiff, stilted writing and pasteboard characters. Two of my previously favorite directors, Joss Whedon and Luc Besson, have been sucked into this morass, likely never to emerge.

I know I skipped over the vast majority of films, but this is, after all, just a blog post. Oh, hey, I should mention that The Martian (2015) was an excellent science fiction novel and a pretty decent film as well. It managed to avoid most of the politically correct pitfalls in favor of a compelling narrative.

Veering into the Future

One of the themes mentioned in the header to this blog is "popular culture" which often means that I say unkind things about popular music, as in my post on The Tyranny of the Backbeat. But probably my favorite popular culture is science fiction, especially the science fiction of television series. So, combining two hobbies, science fiction and aesthetic criticism, here is my survey of science fiction in which I give sketchy and eccentric coverage of a whole lot of shows and films and books.

I became a science fiction fan in my early, early teens when I discovered the young adult science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. His series of books, written largely in the 50s for teen readers, have stood up so well that they are popular with people of all ages even today. Every time I make a major move, which involves whittling down my library to something transportable, I find that, after a while, I have to replace my shelf of Heinlein books. Of course, now, with Kindle, this won't be necessary. Here are some books worth reading:

• Red Planet, in which a young man encounters authoritarian bullying and prevails
• Citizen of the Galaxy, in which a child is kidnapped into slavery and ultimately escapes and rediscovers his true destiny
• Starman Jones, in which a young man escapes from an ignominious existence to discover his true potential
• Podkayne of Mars, in which a young woman goes to Venus for a nice vacation and ends up with more than she bargained for

There are a lot more good stories. But I want to mention his even better adult fiction:

• Double Star, a novella in which a hack actor steps into a role of unexpected magnitude
• Starship Troopers, in which the future of war is outlined along with an exploration of moral truth
• Glory Road, possibly the best fantasy adventure novel ever written, and it starts on a French nude beach
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, probably Heinlein's best novel in which a one-armed tech guy, an aging political radical and a computer end up launching a revolution

There are a number of other outstanding science fiction authors like Larry Niven (Ringworld and The Mote in God's Eye with Jerry Pournelle), Keith Laumer (A Plague of Demons), Frederik Pohl (Gateway), and Joe Haldeman (The Forever War), but Heinlein seems to stand up the best.

Now on to film and television, where science fiction has had a lot of success. The classic series is Star Trek of course with the original series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The three seasons are available on DVD with improved special effects and many of the episodes stand up pretty well. They used a lot of good writers and explored a lot of interesting themes. The weak points are some over-zealous scenery chewing and a future in which socialism seems to have triumphed! The only actual capitalists in the whole Star Trek oeuvre (including all the spin-offs) are the Ferengi who are given a very negative depiction (except for, occasionally, Quark, on Deep Space Nine). Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the most annoying of all the spinoffs with its moral smugness, socialist economics and lack of decent villains. One longs for the rich Corinthian leather of Khan in the original series and the movie The Wrath of Khan. Speaking of annoying, a remarkable number of characters on Star Trek: TNG are consistently annoying: Wesley Crusher, Beverly Crusher, Deanna Troi, William Riker, Guinan and even Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Why do I say this? I think it is the constant moral smugness and really awkward and stiff writing. Plus, just weirdnesses like how could you possibly cast an obviously Scottish Shakespearean actor as a Frenchman? Star Trek spinoffs like Voyager were often plagued by political correctness. If I see Captain Katherine Janeway attempting to demonstrate her leadership with one more pointless hand gesture or end an episode by staring into the camera with her trademark teary-eyed puppy-dog expression, I think I might lose my lunch. Mind you, adding Seven of Nine to the cast pretty much saved that franchise. Deep Space Nine had its moments and Benjamin Sisko made for a pretty good lead character. Any show that casts the luminously beautiful Terry Farrell has to be doing something right. I had hopes for Enterprise, the Star Trek prequel, and it had its moments as well, but it was really sunk by the fatal flaw of no interesting bad guys. The Xindi are just a clutch of pasteboard villains. The best character on this show is Dr. Phlox who gives us a delightful cock-eyed take on human eccentricities.

Well, this is running on a bit long and I have probably insulted enough of your favorite shows and characters for today. I am going to have to get to those other fascinating science fiction series like Farscape, Babylon 5, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and Stargate on future posts.

Music is a TARDIS

A what? I wonder how many Whovians are in my audience? The TARDIS, as all watchers of Doctor Who know, is a vehicle and stands for:  Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It looks like a police phone box from the 1960s:

It's both a spaceship and time machine and yes, it's a lot bigger on the inside ("Is it?").

I was putting together a concert program the other day and realized that I think of music as being a bit like the TARDIS: it takes you places in both space and time. Here, have a look at the program I came up with:

Music from the Golden Age of Spain

Diferencias sobre “Guárdame las vacas” ........…  Luys de Narváez
Canción del Emperador …………………..……   (1538)
Baxa de contrapunto ………………………….

Fantasía X ……………………………………..… Luys Milán
Fantasía del quarto tono ……………….……….   (1536)

Music from 18th century Saxony

Siciliano ……………………………………………… J. S. Bach
Andante ………………………………………………  (1685 - 1750)
Prelude  ………………………………………………

Music from 20th Century Spain

Tiento antiguo ………………………………… Joaquín Rodrigo
Nocturno ……………………………… Federico Moreno Torroba
En los trigales ………………………………… Joaquín Rodrigo

Music for Violin and Guitar

Octatonic Fantasy (2017) …………………… Bryan Townsend

Four Pieces (2013) …………………………… Bryan Townsend
1. Strange Romance
2. Cloudscape
3. Xitango
4. Surreal Reel

Except for the last group, they are all times and places you could go to with a TARDIS. But here is the cool part: with music you go to these places with mood, emotion and atmosphere, not jammed into an economy seat on an airplane.

Let me see, I have some of these as clips. Here is "Surreal Reel" from the last group:

Genki Sudo and World Order

I admit that my tastes in popular music are eccentric. I tend to tune in and out of popular music--I missed most of the 70s through inattention but paid some attention during the 80s when I enjoyed The Police, Talking Heads and David Bowie. Then I tuned out again. Lady Gaga almost pulled me back in with "Bad Romance" which I still think is a great pop song. But she didn't follow up with anything I found interesting. But these days, we can discover not only the mainstream of pop music, but also some that comes from elsewhere. South Korean pop had a big hit a while back, but let's try and forget about "Gangnam Style"!

There is one Japanese group that are so unusual that I find them interesting. I have mentioned the leader, Genki Sudo, before, but it was a while back and I find they have a bunch of new videos out. The group is called World Order and this is basically electro pop with dance. But it is the dance that is so original. Genki Sudo was, in his earlier life, a mixed martial arts champion. After retiring from that he published books of essays on Buddhism. A few years ago he started writing songs and lyrics and choreographing the videos. Here is a sample:

Unlike most music videos there are no special effects: what you see is simply the group, filmed live in various locations. Here is another, more recent video:

The music is pretty standard stuff, but I believe the elements of the choreography are somewhat unique and come from his background in martial arts. For comparison, here are some highlights of his martial arts career including both clips from various matches as well as his uniquely choreographed entrances to the ring, in costume. Blogger won't embed so click on the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwelV3fK0w0

None of the usual elements of dance are present in the World Order videos, but there are a host of arm-movements that seem derived from martial arts. The other remarkable element is the strict discipline of the dancers either moving in total unison or in strict sequence. Here is another video with an interesting political subject. That phrase on the sheet of paper at the very end, "we are all one" is from Genki Sudo's Buddhist belief and he often held up a banner to that effect at the end of his matches.

So there you go, another group of artists showing that the world of music and dance has a multitude of houses.

An Anniversary

This is the 20th anniversary of the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, in contrast to so many other television shows, actually stands up pretty well. The Spectator has a couple of essays devoted to the show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer transformed pop culture and Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me the man I am.

Joss Whedon’s generation-defining TV hit debuted 20 years ago tonight. Its anniversary is being marked by the fans who adored it and the critics whose cool detachment it drove a stake through. It is fourteen years since Sunnydale collapsed into the Hellmouth and Buffy left the airwaves after seven seasons. But far from turning to dust, this unlikeliest of cultural landmarks has enjoyed an afterlife through graphic novels, fan fiction, merchandise, conventions and the long-running chatter about a Hollywood adaptation, a rumour that has proved harder to kill than the show’s durable lead. (She died twice.)

I only discovered the show after it was in re-runs. One day, by accident, I watched one of the early episodes from season six, when Buffy is actually dead and has been temporarily replaced by a robot (played, of course, by the actress who plays Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar). For some reason, probably the humor, I got the urge to watch more and finally ended up buying everything Joss Whedon ever did including Angel, Dollhouse, Firefly and even Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. What a remarkable congeries of creative genius! Of course nowadays his soul has been trapped in an urn by the implacable forces of Hollywood blockbuster commercialism...

But Buffy (and Angel) still stand out because of their brilliant originality, not because of their feminism or social justice or whatever. One of the remarkable aspects is the lack of moral relativism, though the moral ambiguities develop in interesting ways. There is always a price to be paid for evil. Angel has one of the most gripping finales ever with the remaining characters faced with an impossible battle they cannot win, but must fight anyway. Angel's last lines are "personally, I kinda wanna slay the dragon, let's go to work." Fade to black.

Out of many remarkable Buffy episodes, I think my favorites include the homage to Hollywood musicals, "Once More With Feeling" and "Hush" where the characters, for most of the episode, lose the ability to speak. One of the few clips available on YouTube is this one, from season five:

The context would help--for example, this scene plays better if you know just how truly insufferable Quentin and the Watcher's Council had been over the previous seasons--but I think it still comes across well. This is a writer's show: it's not about the special effects or the cinematography or all of the other things that distract us from the usual bad writing on television. It's about the writing and how brilliantly we can be fooled as to where the story is going. Whedon was a master at playing the varying conventions of drama, horror, action and comedy against one another and changing the mood in an instant.

Snobbism and Classical Music

I didn't have a "snobbism" tag until I created one for this post, but I'm sure the subject has come up. It is an awkward theme for me, because I suspect myself of snobbism sometimes. Here is a definition:

the double inclination to ape one's superiors, often through vulgar ostentation, and to be proud and insolent with one's inferiors. 

Well, that certainly sounds like a bad thing! But what is the difference between this and, say, admiring the work of outstanding composers? If I think Haydn was pretty great, in what way is this "vulgar ostentation"? The definition seems to recall an historical epoch when the middle class was trying to creep into the upper class by imitating their tastes. Does that go on any more? Last I checked, the tastes of the upper classes seem to revolve around Beyoncé. I suppose there was a time when nice middle class families had their children take piano lessons so they could lord it over the poor kids down the street. But isn't that all in the past?

Perhaps not, as I just ran across a blog post criticizing some typical snobbisms of today:

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the game driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences to their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something. This is a skin-in-the-game problem as the choices of the rich are dictated by others who have something to gain, and no side effects, from the sale. And given that they are rich, and their exploiters not often so, nobody would shout victim.

I once had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant with a fellow who insisted on eating there ... Dinner consisted in a succession of complicated small things, with microscopic ingredients and contrasting tastes that forced you to concentrate as if you were taking some type of exam. You were not eating, rather visiting some type of museum with an affected English major lecturing you on some artistic dimension you would have never considered on your own. There was so little that was familiar and so little that fit my taste buds: once something on the occasion tasted like something real, there was no chance to have more as we moved on to the next dish. Trudging through the dishes and listening to some b***t by the sommelier about the paired wine, I was afraid of losing concentration. I costs a lot of energy to fake that I was not bored. In fact I discovered an optimization in the wrong place: the only thing I cared about, bread, was not warm. It appears that this is not a Michelin requirement.

I have had that experience: a gourmet menu with wine pairings that was excessively complex and stressed externals (number of courses, variety of unusual ingredients and so on) rather than a couple of dishes prepared with real skill and attention.

There is a great deal of snobbism driven by commercial considerations. When people achieve a certain level of affluence they want to show it off in some way. As he says, they lose control of their actual preferences, replacing them with constructed preferences that ape their superiors. What do really rich people eat in restaurants? And the bonus is that you can lord it over the people who can't afford it.

Does this actually happen in the music world? There are a lot of things mitigating against it. For one thing, music for several decades now has been taken over by a very powerful populism: rock, pop and other genres all stemming originally from the music of the people: blues, jazz and country. Classical music, the music of the European aristocracy transplanted over most of the world by now, is pushed into a fairly minor niche these days, sociologically. If you try to lord it over someone by mentioning your taste for classical music, they are likely to laugh in your face! Though the other day a business client asked me my taste in music and just for fun I said: "agonized Russian modernism!" She replied "like Shostakovich?" So that was rather nice. But normally you are going to get perplexed confusion or a chuckle.

Here is my experience: there is a lot of false ostentation being flogged in the marketplace these days and a lot of people can't tell the difference. The difference with what, you ask? With genuine quality. Yes, there is such a thing, though there is certainly an ongoing effort to smudge or conceal this. People really are out there trying to sell you stuff that really isn't worth it and this happens on all levels from a Snapchat IPO that is likely a bust, to a poor quality hamburger at your local fast-food outlet, to a cheap pair of shoes from China that wear out in a couple of months, to a glitzy special menu at your local pretentious restaurant. We encounter poor quality every day.

But we also encounter high quality, though less often. That pair of Italian shoes that were comfortable, looked great and lasted a long time, that Canadian mining company whose shares just kept going up and up, that piece of technology that worked really well and didn't cost an arm and a leg, that great little restaurant that always had good food at a good price, and on and on. Quality and price are often not correlated. I used to delight in searching out wines that were really excellent and cost less than ten dollars. That was a lot more satisfying than paying too much for a disappointing premier cru château.

There can be false ostentation and insolence in classical music, of course. Just look at some of the publicity for solo artists and conductors. The audiophile who always mentions how much he paid for his speaker system is another example. But we also have unassuming artists of high aesthetic quality. Preferring to enjoy what they do is hardly vulgar ostentation, is it?

So I guess what I am trying to say is that you can genuinely prefer classical music without being a snob. All it really costs you is the time to sensitize yourself to a certain kind of musical quality. You don't have to spend a lot of money and you certainly don't have to lord it over other people. Though the urge to turn them on to a particular composer is always a lurking danger!

For our envoi today, let's listen to something by John Dowland, the great English lutenist at the end of the Renaissance. This is the "Tremolo" Fantasy played by Nigel North:

Beethoven in Havana

Over at Slipped Disc I ran into this arrangement of the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 as a rumba:

In the comments there we get the two typical responses: "it's fun and creative" versus "it's a vile, tasteless desecration." You might expect me to come down on the side of those who dislike the whole idea, but I have a bit more nuanced view. I don't think that we should be in the habit of thinking that any composer, even one as great as Beethoven, is not to be desecrated. A piece of music is not a sacred object. It is also kind of fun to hear this familiar music in a radically different arrangement.

But notice what happens when you alter Beethoven in this way: instead of the shades and hues of the original, we have the more one-dimensional motoric frenzy of Cuban dance. Nothing wrong with that, but it is like taking a colorful original and making a sepia reduction. It rather illuminates the quality of the original, doesn't it?

Or, in a more romantic vein:

Essentially, rumbaizing Beethoven takes a complex manifold of musical moods and gestures and turns them into a single mood.

Doctor Who?

If you don't know about the British television series Doctor Who, well, I wouldn't let that go on too much longer! In any case, here is a very enthusiastic orchestral and choral rendition of the Doctor Who theme for your listening pleasure:

Yes, ok, it does sound a bit like Carl Orff, what's your point? Now if you will excuse me, I seem to have misplaced my sonic screwdriver...

Vocal Coaching Lady Gaga

Ok, I admit it, I get a lot of my cultural news from the Wall Street Journal. Weird, huh? Today's piece is about Don Lawrence, the vocal coach who has been working with Lady Gaga this week to get her ready for the Superbowl on Sunday.

The most experienced coach at the Super Bowl on Feb. 5 won’t be worrying about his team’s passing game. He will be making sure his star student hits her high notes.

Vocal coach Don Lawrence is prepping pop powerhouse Lady Gaga this week for her performance at the Super Bowl halftime show—music’s biggest marketing moment, watched by more than 100 million television viewers.

“I’ve been planning this since I was four,” Gaga says in a halftime-show preview video. The 30-year-old singer never lip-syncs or uses backing tracks for her vocals, which has become common for high-profile events. Last year, when she belted out a blistering rendition of the national anthem at Super Bowl 50, CBS wanted an emergency backing track just in case. Gaga refused, Mr. Lawrence says.

I discovered Lady Gaga several years ago and actually liked a couple of her songs. She seems not only to be a real musician--no lip-syncing--but also a creative one. As someone said recently, when did it become ok to do mime in public instead of actually, you know, performing? Here is a little hint as to Mr. Lawrence's method:

At the heart of Mr. Lawrence’s approach is a centuries-old Italian technique called bel canto that he and his father modernized for pop singers. With the technique, Mr. Lawrence expands a singer’s vocal range, adding to the performer’s arsenal. For instance, instead of automatically switching from a chest-based voice to a head-based voice for higher notes, Gaga “has learned to take the ‘chest voice’ up—to high F or G above high C,” Mr. Lawrence says. That makes those higher notes more resonant.

So, I think that we would call his method "vocal technique" or what classical singers have been doing for a very, very long time. After all, technique is technique and if you want to use your instrument to its best, there are certain anatomical facts that are important. I suspect that a lot of pop singers have never really worked on things like breathing and how to use the diaphragm because they grew up using microphones and never learned how to project. My knowledge of singing is fairly limited, but I did study voice with a few teachers when I was young and have actually performed Schubert lieder in public.

There have been a few golden ages of singing represented by people like the castrato Farinelli who was employed by Philip V of Spain to sing the same three pieces every night. Then there was the age of Bel Canto as mentioned in the article, for whom the composers were Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.

This is Renee Fleming singing one of the most famous Bel Canto arias, Casta Diva from Norma by Bellini:

The Apocalypse is Nigh!

No, I'm not making a reference to tomorrow's US election, why do you think that? Rather I just ran across something that illustrates how our culture is fragmenting. Music can be an indicator of this. For example, on Slipped Disc I ran into a link to a music quiz:

Pit your brains against Jeremy Paxman’s University Challenge questions.

Ok, no idea who Jeremy Paxman is nor what the University Challenge is, but hey, I'm game. I rather like music quizzes as you can see if you follow those links. I even like to throw in the occasional pop question, just for fun. But what did I discover when I followed the University Challenge link?

1. a pop music question
2. a current literature question about pop music
3. a pop music question
4. an electro-pop music question
5. an Albert Einstein question that almost was about classical music
6. a classical music question!!
7. a pop music question
8. a pop music question
9. a jazz music question
10. a pop music question

I had to take the test as the only way to reveal the next question is to answer the current one. There were only two questions (nos 5 and 6) that had anything to do with classical music and I got both those correct. All my other answers were random as I hadn't the slightest idea. By sheer chance I also got number 4 correct, so, 3 out of 10! A pop music enthusiast might have gotten seven or eight out of ten, which was the desired result, I assume.

And this is a University Challenge? The thing is that there was a culture, which seems to be passing rather quickly these days, in which some knowledge of classical music was assumed for every educated person, while pop music was assumed to be too ephemeral to be worth knowing about. But now classical music is a tiny minority interest of no particular aesthetic heft or prestige about on the level of polka music or virtuoso accordion playing. But that is only from one point of view! From another point of view every major city in Europe and the Americas has an active symphony orchestra and there are quite a few chamber music series. A few major cities have opera companies. All these give frequent performances, often to sold-out audiences. But the existence of this classical music world is more and more a puzzlement to the mass media and mass culture generally. It still exists, though, which is why I say our culture is fragmenting because there are huge segments of our public culture for whom it does not or only scarcely exists.

The thing that deeply concerns me, and this does relate a bit to the impending election, is that there are vast and powerful forces that are working very hard to frame everything that we are required to think and required to not think. Music is just a tiny microcosm. But the idea that certain kinds of culture and certain kinds of ideas must be promoted while others are suppressed is manufacturing history rather than allowing it to take place. It reminds me of the Battlestar Galactica slogan in the opening credits: AND THEY HAVE A PLAN! That is, the cylons have a plan. The whole series descended into absurdity, but that ominous slogan echoes.

Yes, someone, or a whole bunch of someones, does indeed have a plan and they are executing it bit by bit. A great deal of what I consider to be the crucial elements of our civilization seems to be being put on the discard table, preliminary to being cleared away entirely. Classical music and traditional aesthetic objects generally, history, poetry, philosophy and so on are all on the list. I'm sure you can make your own list. It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't see the clearing away project to be entirely disingenuous. We are, I suspect, being lied to on a grand scale and constantly presented with falsehoods in order to manipulate public opinion. If a particular fact or event does not fit with the desired narrative then either it is not reported at all, much as classical music receives less and less profile in the mass media, or the truth is distorted out of all recognition.

But here is a ray of light that I find encouraging. The movement of mass media online has opened up the possibility of public commentary on the narrative. There are many, many occasions when a particularly biased story is answered by hundreds of comments that disagree strongly and present a more accurate version. You might check the Globe and Mail's comments for some examples. Of course, they are trying to figure out a way of preventing this while still pretending to have open comments and they close comments entirely on controversial stories.

I won't end this with one of my famously difficult quizzes--we are stressed enough! So let's just have some good music. This is the Piano Sonata No. 9 in E major, op. 14 by Beethoven, played by Grigory Sokolov in a recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 2002:

What is Best in Life, Conan?

It seems as if one of the few places that wisdom might be passed along these days is in popular culture rather than the traditional institutions of schools, churches and government. Wait, perhaps the churches are still in the game--I would be the last to know! Now why do I say such an outrageous thing? It seems as if instead of young people being given the riches of Western Civilization, they are instead being taught to revile them. Every significant figure in Western history, if he is white and male as most of them are (and why is that?) is condemned because of being a significant figure in Western history and white and male. As we are told over and over, the history of the West is a history of oppression, racism and colonialism. Oddly enough, while there are those things in Western history, the history of every other region and culture on earth has much more oppression, racism and colonialism! But magically, through some strange operation of multiculturalism, none of that counts, only Western culture has failings.

In order for this spectacularly massive lie to be sold to the younger generations, they first had to be made nearly completely ignorant of history. That was surprisingly easy and just took a few protests on campus while chanting "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go!" Of course this was preceded by decades of Gramscian softening up.

The result is a vacuous progressive monoculture that dominates government, media and academia. It is pretty significant in popular culture too, but there are little cracks where the truth peeks through. Let me give you an example with a famous clip from the movie Conan the Barbarian (1982) where Arnold Schwarzenegger explains what is best in life:

Just in case the accent was deceiving, Conan says that what is best in life is "To crush your enemies -- See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!" Sounds like fun! But there is actually an interesting point there. The question is "what is best in life" not what is most enjoyable or most pleasant in life and our tendency is to forget the difference. "Best" is a superlative deriving from "good", a normative term meaning what can or should be commended. It is not equivalent to the most pleasant or enjoyable. The truth of this is also in the film. Conan's most pleasant and enjoyable time is when he is reclining on fine furs, surrounded by bowls of precious stones, drinking wine and in the company of the very beautiful Valeria played by Sandahl Bergman. That doesn't end well, of course!! What is best in life is not to indulge in mere physical pleasure (I think Plato said something about that), but to be engaged, to be doing things, specifically, to be doing good things.

So if you ask me what I think is best in life, my answer is "To explore aesthetically strong and active music, to compose and play music, to write about music and to study through scores, recordings and books music of interest." Ok, it's a bit focussed, so sue me! One should add in a lot of other things like taking the opportunity to be kind, to spend time with friends and family and all sorts of other things that we commonly understand.

That idea, that I just put there, about "aesthetically active" is something that just occurred to me as I was listening to Grigory Sokolov the other day. What makes his performances so aesthetically energized? It is not that he plays faster or louder, it is that he activates the music in very profound ways. We hear all the different voices with great clarity, we hear the exact significant intensity of every harmony, we hear the acuity of the rhythm and we hear the notes and chords placed just where they should be aesthetically. And so on. Put into words, it is vague and fuzzy. But when you hear it done, it is perfectly clear and evident.