SEEING STARS

posted by James Reel

    Salon.com’s tech blogger, Farhad Manjoo, has an interesting article on ratings bias, and why all those user-driven Web sites featuring one- to five-star reviews aren’t reliable. The story contains a nugget that applies to professional criticism as well as amateur contributions; referring to the head of one popular review site, Manjoo says, "Stoppelman and others at Yelp also have another bit of advice about star ratings—that it's wise to look past them and to judge a product or a place according to the people reviewing it, not how many stars it gets. It's the people, not the stars, who shine on Yelp.” Ditto for the professional critics in newspapers and magazines; you should always consider the credibility and peculiar personal tastes of any critic when you read a review. And never, ever look only at how many stars are awarded; the written reviews are far more informative and important than some silly graphic device.

SPOLETO OPERA

posted by James Reel

    A week and a half ago, I dropped in on the Spoleto Festival USA, in conjunction with a meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America. I saw two of the festival’s opera productions, which on musical grounds were mostly solid, and occasionally impressive (aside from Karen Huffstodt’s faux-Brünnhilde hooting in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). But these works are more interesting to consider, I think, in terms of their success—or lack of it—as theater.
    Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1758 utopian comedy L’Ile de Merlin emerges from the dusty vaults with a mild inherent problem: There’s very little direct conflict to challenge the main characters. But that’s not the sort of story this is; it’s more of a Gulliver-style satire of 1750s France, in which our two heroes find themselves washed up on a strange island where philosophers are jovial, lawyers are honest and lovers are faithful—quite the opposite of the situation back home in Paris. The heroes encounter one unusual character after another, each explaining a different aspect of the island’s society. Most of the music is original, but in some cases Gluck borrowed popular songs of his day—think John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera—and gave them new lyrics that parodied the original texts. Who knew that Gluck was the Weird Al Yankovic of his time?
    Today’s American audience is not likely to recognize any of those old pop songs, and the structure employed by Gluck’s librettist, while common to its genre, can seem creaky and less than involving to people who prefer plot-driven, sex-and-violence Romantic Italian opera. So Spoleto stage directors Christopher Alden and Roy Rallo decided to run the opera through with 21st-century irony. Our two heroes are modern-day slackers draped over a couch, the philosopher arrives in a happy-face costume, and so on. This is well and good, but Alden and Rallo make the fatal error of mocking not just the opera’s conventions, but its very convictions. The directors don’t trust utopias—after all, Nazi Germany was supposed to be one, at least for the “Aryans”—so there’s something sinister about the smiles permanently affixed to the faces of our heroes’ love interests, Stepford Wives in the making. Most damaging is the directors’ treatment of one scene in which an island inhabitant tries to impress his point upon the visitors by repeating it—but in a more florid, crowd-pleasing manner. That is, after all, how the da capo aria was supposed to function back in the day. But instead of indulging in the expected pyrotechnics and ornamental flights of fancy, singer Richard Troxell is directed to bellow and huff in the most disagreeable manner imaginable. And our heroes like it, for some reason. Now, if the passage had been turned into an all-out punk rock performance, we could understand why the slackers are won over. But what the directors give us is just pointlessly ugly. This is the very definition of a Eurotrash production: not necessarily one that transfers the work to an alien setting, but one that contradicts and subverts the musical and dramatic texts themslves. In the end, Alden and Rallo couldn’t even bring themselves to do that anymore; they simply ran out of ideas and let the opera sputter out on autopilot.
    In contrast, Spoleto’s problem with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny had nothing to do with the stage direction of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, although I do wish they’d had a freer sense of fun. No, the trouble lies with composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht, who suffered from a Teutonic insensitivity to dramatic scale and pacing.
    Mahagonny is a pleasure city founded by a trio of crooks; alas, they’ve set up so many rules that the fools they’re trying to bilk don’t have enough fun to stick around and put up with the high cost of sin. But then arrives our doomed hero, Jimmy Mahoney, who diagnoses the town’s trouble and inspires the crooks to institute a “do what you want” policy. Do what you want, as long as you pay for it. If you don’t pay, the penalty is severe, unless you bribe the judge. This is Jimmy’s downfall, but even as he is being executed, the city descends into chaos, apparently the only logical end of unchecked capitalism.
    Now, Weill was not a composer to unleash a torrent of music to guide the course of a drama no matter how little textual support he had, so he had that advantage over Wagner and Strauss. Weill had the opposite problem: He tended to lock himself into a particular song form and follow its structure to the end, even if the textual variety couldn’t really justify it. (And for Mahagonny he provided mainly a procession of dirges, which makes for a very long three hours in the theater.) Weill, at least, could inject harmonic and timbral variety into just about anything, so the real fault here lies with Brecht, operating at his most didactic. For example, in the “new” Mahagonny, the men sing of the four essential pleasures of life: eating, lovemaking, fighting and drinking. Brecht then constructs an elaborate scene devoted to each of those pursuits, when a succession of little blackout routines would have gotten the point across much more effectively (and more in keeping with the quasi-vaudevillian nature of life in Mahagonny itself). In a dark social satire like this, I’d much rather be skewered than bludgeoned. (Oh, there was one nice little knife twist: Spoleto charged as much as $125 for a seat at this anti-capitalist opera.)
    I can’t help thinking of something Hilton Als wrote about the American painter Winslow Homer:

Surely what we value in Homer is that he reminds us how deep and rich the effects of straightforward narrataive can be in pictures if it is made simple enough. Narrative in writing can take any amount of digression, because we read in sequence and over time, but a single stray incident in painting spoils the whole, which arrives all at once, in a moment of vision. Homer is at his best as a storyteller, and his real genius lies not in sublimation but in abbreviation: he has the gift, perhaps not so weird in the land that invented Morse code, for telling a big story in a minimum number of pulses.

DR. PANGLOSS, EDITOR

posted by James Reel

    Hank Klibanoff, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's managing editor for enterprise, tells Alex Ross that he’s shocked—shocked!—by the uproar over his paper’s plans to revamp its arts coverage, requiring respected critics to re-apply for jobs that may or may not involve substantial criticism: “I really thought the arts community would be pleased to hear that we'd be writing more about artists, their lives, arts institutions, behind the scenes, etc.” Well, the arts community will most certainly not be pleased if serious criticism is going to be supplanted by puff pieces about over-exposed soloists, feel-good stories about cute kiddies at the symphony, and “reviews” by newbies who aren’t equipped to pass informed judgment on professional artists. Alex Ross seems mollified that the Atlanta paper is sorting things out properly, but it’s still up to Klibanoff and his colleagues to prove they’re not making the same blunder that’s already been made by many other papers, including those right here in Tucson. You can find the full Ross-Klibanoff interview here.

THRIVING

posted by James Reel

    From the Washington Post:

    A bunch of European composers who haven't had a hit in decades have been very, very good to radio station WETA.
    Since dropping news and talk programming for classical music in January, the Arlington public station has seen its fortunes soar. Ratings have more than doubled since the switchover from BBC and NPR reports to Bach and Brahms concertos. And perhaps just as important to WETA (90.9 FM), pledge contributions from listeners have been gushing.

    This is very nice (read the rest here), but let’s not forget that the purpose of public radio is not to earn big ratings and make lots of money in pledge drives. It’s to serve the otherwise unserved, and, frankly, that’s not an inherently lucrative or popular mission.

BLOGROLL UPDATE 2

posted by James Reel

    Once I catch up on a few things I left in-progress last week, I’ll fill you in on a couple of performances I attended last week at the Spoleto Festival USA. I was there to attend the annual meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America, and found time to chat about blogging with a couple of colleagues. One of them was Janelle Gelfand of the Cincinnati Enquirer. She asked if I might link to her blog, joking that her employment probably depends on the number of page hits she gets. At least I think she was joking; at a Gannett paper, you never know what management will do to maintain its unconscionable 28-percent profit margin. Anyway, you can find Janelle’s blog here, and on the blogroll at the right.

AMERICAN DREAMERS

posted by James Reel

    No blogging here recently, because I’ve been scrambling to meet end-of-month deadlines a little before the end of the month; at lunchtime today, I’m off on a short visit to Charleston to attend a conference of testy music critics and sample the Spoleto Festival USA. And that means no blogging until I’m back on duty next week. As a stopgap, here’s something from the archives of a long-gone e-zine I columnized for. With the presidential primaries underway, I thought it might be a good time to dredge up a little literary essay about American dreamers. Please note that I wrote this about 10 years ago, so anything the essay claims to be “recent” or “current” is most assuredly not.

A COMMUNITY OF DREAMERS

    THE AMERICAN DREAM CAUSES US much tossing and turning, for we are by nature a restless people, and our dream suffuses our waking hours even more than our sleep. For about a century, Americans have conjured a cultural vision based on conflicting notions of egalitarianism and material prosperity. Egalitarianism, because democracy implies community rather than hierarchy, and universal opportunity for personal success. Materialism, because our economically stable, ostensibly egalitarian society measures success that way.
    Yet there is more to our dream. Within this grand vision of a common life lurks a peculiarly American preoccupation with the individual mind and heart. It's a question of uniqueness within community—how can we fit together while setting ourselves apart from one another? Therein lies the dream's inherent tension.
    Two fairly current books, when read in tandem, provide a masterly analysis of our cultural ideal and its individual realizations. Each pursues one of the opposing forces in the American Dream to its logical extreme.
    The more recent treatment of this subject is the 1996 novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize. It begins as a Horatio Alger story: boy of humble means makes a name for himself through wit, strength of character and some luck. But by the end it seems to have been hijacked by Jorge Luis Borges; as Martin Dressler's dream expands, it can be conveyed only through fantasy and symbolism.
    The tale begins in the 1880s. Martin is a child working in his father's modest Manhattan cigar store. As time passes, Martin finds lowly work in a fine hotel, moves up through the ranks and learns the business, saves his money and gradually builds a chain of restaurants, and finally is able to buy a hotel of his own, a microcosm of the world.
    But Martin is restive within the limits of a traditional hotel. He builds bigger and more complex edifices, culminating in the high, wide and deep Grand Cosmo, which integrates living quarters with shops, theaters, amusements, freak shows, wonders and elaborate indoor re-creations of natural settings. It is the whole world in a single city block. One can't help thinking of the latest synthetic pleasure palaces erected in Las Vegas, but Millhauser is writing less about today's America than the genesis of today's America.
    The second book under consideration is This Boy's Life, a 1989 memoir by Tobias Wolff. With the unity, detail and grace of a novel, it recounts the second decade of Wolff's life, in the late 1950s and early '60s. He dreams of living in a more stable, affluent household and schemes to create a bigger, more complex Self, integrating a respectable way of life with a dynamic personality. But Jack, as this boy insists on being called, fears that he is unworthy of success, for he is a liar, a vandal and a petty thief contending with a loving but unconventional mother and a self-absorbed, intermittently violent step-father.
    Both Martin and Jack are first-class American dreamers, but Martin dreams himself into a world of parable, while Jack dreams himself out of hard reality. Martin is optimism; Jack is, if not pessimism, at least self-doubt. Martin devises building projects of such magnitude that they border on tools of social engineering. Jack's reveries are entirely personal—being adopted by strangers he sees on the street, or running into his estranged, distant-dwelling father. He indulges any fantasy that would offer him better circumstances in which to be a better person:

I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn't help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade.

    While Martin strives to reproduce the world in perfect miniature, Jack strives to produce a perfect little self, a combination of privileged lineage and good character traits that would lift him out of his squalid, mean, lower-middle-class circumstances. But the ideal Jack is a creature solely of the imagination; Martin feels confident that he can shape at least a small bit of the world, but Jack finds himself constricted by the world around him:

Unlike my mother I was fiercely conventional. I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters....And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that...away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy.

    Both characters learn that, if the customer is not always right, at least the customer is easily manipulated. Martin Dressler quickly grasps the value of advertising and marketing, with help from a marketing genius named Harwinton. Martin insists that every venture combine convenience, comforting familiarity and exciting innovation in a balance that will intrigue rather than overwhelm the customer. (His downfall is forgetting the part about not overwhelming people.) Jack Wolff learns how to adopt a persona for every occasion, an approach that will get him through encounters with tough kids, kind teachers, do-gooders and ill-wishers. In lieu of finding anything interesting to say about his true self, he learns the value of a well-crafted lie, going so far as to plagiarize his first confession.
    Martin is diligent; Jack is negligent. But something about both boys—their looks? their manner?—attracts people who can help them. Martin realizes this vaguely but never analyzes it; Jack fails to recognize this at all, being certain instead that intelligent or sensitive people will instantly perceive his fraudulent nature.
    Still, Jack aspires to be—or at least to appear to be—the ultimate homo sapiens, the thinking man, the man of wisdom, someone respected for the intangibles of mind and character. Martin, on the other hand, is the classic homo faber, the man who builds, someone whose sense of worth lies in his tangible accomplishments. Neither is firmly grounded in reality. Images of sleep and dreaming permeate both books.
    In Martin Dressler, New York City is described as "a fever patient in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams." Martin's success hinges on the breadth of his imagination: "It seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile." And toward the end, he begins to wonder if he "dreamed the wrong dream."
    In This Boy's Life, the dream images are more subtle: "Most afternoons I wandered around in the trance that habitual solitude induces." This is when Jack imagines better parents—strangers—snatching him away.
    And yet what ultimately saves both Martin and Jack is an awakening to reality. Reflecting on the imminent failure of his magnum opus, the Grand Cosmo, and why he so deeply cares about it, Martin contrasts himself with the advertising whiz Harwinton:

As an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was God.... But of course God could not believe in the Grand Cosmo, just as He could not believe in the universe, a blankness without meaning, except as it streamed from Him. For only human creatures believed in things: that much was clear.

    Then there is Jack, unmoved by a priest's attempt to talk some sense into him: "He believed in God, and I believed in the world." Accepting the world, just as it is, turns out to be the most courageous act. For although it teaches us that the grander notions bound up with the American Dream are impossible, perhaps undesirable, to realize, it gives us a firm platform on which we may, ever so tentatively, remake ourselves.
    Martin's version of the American Dream—to co-opt, to synthesize the whole world into a compact, controlled "Grand Cosmo"—must fail, because however morbidly fascinating and excessive the dream may be, people will ultimately sense its synthetic nature and reject it. Even Martin Dressler acquiesces to its failure, and reconciles himself to the real world.
    Young Jack Wolff's version of the American Dream will succeed only when he learns to reconcile individuality with social exigency. After trying to create himself from scratch to escape an unpleasant situation, he realizes much later that such situations are only transitory:

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

    Such knowledge comes to us slowly, individually, through diverse momentary setbacks and petty victories. This is the knowledge that enables 260 million sometime dreamers to coexist as a practical community of Americans.