Perfect Combo - Zen Box and Source Song Festival

Not quite sure what to do with ourselves after a month of serious choral singing, we decided to spend some time listening to other people sing. The McPhail Center for Music happened to be hosting a week-long festival called Source Song. Many of the events were workshops and master classes designed for advanced students and professional singers, composers, and accompanists, but some of the evening recitals were free, the programs looked enticing, and best of all, they were only an hour long.

I'm a big fan of the art song, whether it be eighteen-century Italian, nineteenth-century German, or twentieth-century French. In the first place, the naked human voice is a lovely instrument, and due to that fact, even the most astringent modern compositions for voice can hardly avoid being lyrical. It also seems that the poems chosen for text often take on added depth or poignancy in a musical setting.

One added feature of these recitals was that they started at 6:15. This meant that we could park down near the river—plenty of meters available at that time of day—and check out the Happy Hour at Zen Box Izakaya, which runs from five to six.

The items we sampled at Zen Box were uniformly fresh and tasty, from the Moyashi Itame (Bean sprouts, carrots, onion stir-fry) to the Age Gyoza (crispy pot-stickers with Kamikaze sauce). I loved the Daigaku Imo (fried sweet yams) and the Chicken Kara-Age (boneless pieces of fried chicken Japanese style). The seaweed salad tasted like the salad they serve on the pier in Morro Bay, California (that is to say, very good) and the Chashu (flame-grilled pork belly) was like limp flavorful rounds of thin bacon sitting in a bowl of rice covered in citrus soy.

The wait-staff at Zen Box all wear t-shirts and headbands, as if they've just stepped in from the rice paddies, or were trying out to be extras in The Seven Samurai. The house wines and sake are served in beakers from which you can refill your little shot glass again and again.

Refreshed and invigorated by an array of bright but not overly spicy flavors, we walked a block and a half to the McPhail Center, stopping along the way to plug a few more quarters into our meter.

The McPhail's Antonello Hall is one of my favorite venues. The chairs aren't great, but the theater space is smallish while opening out to the city via an enormous window behind the stage. The wood paneling on the walls is an added pleasure.

And we were in select company—among the privileged few.  There were eleven artists set to perform (including the pianists, of course), and by my count, there were thirty people in the audience. If we add to the list of artists the four composers in the audience who stood up to receive a share of the applause as their presence was acknowledged by the singer on stage who'd just performed their work, then the ratio between artist and listener becomes more balanced yet.

We ducked into the recital hall too late to read the program, and throughout the set I was thinking that these students were very talented indeed. Only later did I learn that they'd flown in from Maryland, Philadelphia, Delaware, and North Dakota. (Maybe she drove down.) They'd come to study with the composers and vocalists involved with Source Song, including French baritone Francois Le Roux and Russian baritone Anton Belov. It was great fun listening to them sing.

The recital we attended that first night was devoted to compositions by living composers from Minnesota, but thinking back on them now, I couldn't tell you anything much about stylistic differences between composers or individual pieces. The personalities of the singers made a much stronger impression, not only though their voices by also through their choice of clothing, their postures, and their facial expressions. The next night we returned again to hear the same vocalists perform Brahms, Wolf, deFalla and other venerable composers.

Superficial impressions: One soprano had a confident bearing on stage, a warm tone, curly black hair, and great strength in the upper register, but I was troubled by the glittery collar on her black dress. Another had stout legs and bold posturing, but her voice seemed to be beaming from outer space, pure and clear, and the variety of expressions that passed across her face as she sang was extraordinary. One had a pinched and plaintive face that came to life when she sang Poulenc.  And another had the appearance of a well-heeled former soccer mom who'd taken up a new career to find fulfillment—and discovered she had the pipes to pull it off.

Whether it was me, or the hall, or the Daigaku Imo, I don't know, but I also found the pianists very pleasant to listen to. Rather than focusing intensely on their own expressive power, they were focusing on something less predictable—the vocalist's pace. And freed of the burden of relentlessly carrying the tune, they could let the textures flow.   

We ran into our friend Athena Kildegaard after the performance, and I asked her if she might, by chance, be related to the Anika Kildegaard who had just sung so beautifully.

"She's my daughter," she said proudly. "But did you happen to see the recital Wednesday night by Francois Le Roux? I don't speak French, but it was magnificent."

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I have the compete songs of Faure and Poulenc on eight CDs. How would you like I burn you a selection? "

"That would be great," she said. 

And so I did.

On Singing in a Choir - Oratorio Society Summer Chorus

Sure, I can belt out "Blue skies, shining on me" from the stern of a canoe, and I can sing "Away, away, with rum, by gum" around a campfire with the best of them. But singing in a choir, in parts, is not something I have done or had a burning desire to do in recent years. But Hilary thought it might be fun. Perhaps a church choir—though we haven't been to church in years—or one of the many local choral societies.  

On our first foray into that realm together—a December sing-along Messiah at Central Lutheran Church downtown—I got caught up in the majesty of standing in the midst of a few hundred powerful voices, even if mine wasn't one of them.

Then we heard from our friend Debbie that the Oratorio Society Choir was sponsoring a Summer Chorus (along with the U of M's School of Music) that might fit the bill. Auditions were not required, though the promo literature made it clear that prior experience singing in a choir was essential. The commitment would consist of two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals twice a week for a month, followed by one Saturday dress rehearsal with full orchestra and a performance later that same evening. Could be done.

To my mind the crowning virtue of the program was the repertoire—opera choruses!

I hadn't sung in a choir since my teen years, so I sent the organizers what I considered to be a delicately phrased email. My question was this:  If you loved opera but hadn't sung in a choir in forty years, weren't good at sight-singing, and didn't sing very loud at any rate, would it be appropriate for you to sign up?

The reply was pleasant and to the point. Sight-singing wasn't really required because they would send you Youtube videos of the choruses and Mp3 files of your specific parts to listen to. Nor was it important that you sing loud. (Probably just the reverse!) In short, if you could read music, carry a tune, and were willing to put in the time (and send in the entry fee) you would certainly be welcome to participate.

Thus I found myself one hot summer evening sitting on a chair in a large rehearsal hall at the University of Minnesota with 150 strangers. Hilary had also signed up, and so had Debbie, along with her daughter, and Becca, another good friend, so there were a few friendly faces in the crowd. I learned via Facebook that the sister of a friend was singing across the room in the soprano section, and I went over to chat with her during break once or twice. And I soon made the acquaintance of Doug, a mild-mannered man sitting next to me in the back row.

After a few relaxing warm-up exercises that first night, we dispersed into "sectionals," where the first thing we did was divide ourselves into 1s and 2s. When asked, I reported that I was a "tenor 2." I had no previous knowledge of this concept, but figured lower was the better place to hide. In the only choir I'd ever sung in there were only two tenors—me and my dad; dividing us in two would have been easy, but it probably wouldn't have been a good idea.

That first night the tenors and basses went over a few of the pieces in the program with Alex, one of the student conductors, at the piano. We were asked to sing a crisp "pom-pom-pa-pom" rather than the words in the score— S’intrecci il loto al lauro. This made it easier to move ahead without struggling with the Italian, and also more difficult to swoop lazily up to the proper pitch. "Hear the note in your mind," Alex advised us, "so when you open your mouth, it comes out clear." Easier said than done.

Later that evening we regrouped with the altos and sopranos, and several other grad students also took a turn at the podium. I was immediately impressed with how cheerful and competent most of them were.  I believe they may have learned this from maestro Matthew Mehaffey, who had a buoyant sense of humor and a vast assortment of one-liners, always delivered in a cheerful voice. "Don't sing it like you heard it in the movies; sing it like it's written on the page." "That was fair: Now sing it with your 'pretty' voice." "I'm getting paid to do this, and when you don't sing at my tempo, it hurts my feeling." "Altos, you have a whole measure to take a deep breath; don't wait 'til the last second."

Though I'm sure Matt had used many of these lines before, he was also clearly adept at developing humorous remarks on the spot to sugar-coat the bitter pill of any and every suggestion for improvement--and there were many.    

A key element of these rehearsals was to avoid wasting time. We were advised not to ask questions among ourselves; it was a distraction to others. And we were advised not to ask questions of the conductor, either. There wasn't enough time. They'd be available during breaks to help us with whatever questions we had.  

The rehearsals invariably started slowly, but then went by in a flash, and afterward, as we walked with our friends across the pedestrian bridge from Ferguson Hall to the parking lot through the warm summer night, I was twice as alert and not nearly so tired as when we'd arrived three hours earlier.

At the second rehearsal I was distressed to find that Doug, who had been sitting beside me the first night, was down in the third row. "What are you doing down there," I lamented. "I was leaning on you all the way."

"No, I was leaning on you," he replied, and we both laughed. (At the next rehearsal Doug was gone.)

I was now sitting next to Tony and Dale, who were long-time buddies. They were cordial but mostly interested in talking to one another rather than me. Little by little I gained Tony's ear, and that was important because he was an experienced singer. In the course of later rehearsals I learned that he used to rebuild pianos for a living and was once a choir director himself. So when Lukas, the German specialist among our student conductors, would slow the music down and then say, "Put a fermata in there," I would glance over Tony's shoulder to see what he was doing. I know what it means to slow down; Tony knew what a fermata looks like.

One thing I found it hard to accept was how high Tony was singing the first few bars of Wagner's "Treulich Gefuhrt." The note was a D above middle C, eventually rising to a G. Tenors could not be expected to sing that high, could they?

Working it out on a piano when we got home that night, I discovered that he'd been right. And a little online research led to the discovery that tenors are expected to sing far higher than that. I started to wonder if perhaps, over the years, I'd become a baritone.

Practicing at home proved to be more difficult than I expected. The Mp3 for the grand finale of Aida, to take an example, started at a place where we weren't actually supposed to sing. They'd included the solo part.  The score for Pirates of Penzance had about twelve staffs, and I had no idea if I was supposed to be singing the Tenor, the tenors, or the chorus of pirates. And the two tenor lines in Tannhauser's "Pilgerchor" were both on the same Mp3 file, making it difficult to hear the lower line I was supposed to be singing. (Admittedly, it all became easier once I figured out that on the score the second tenor part was marked with staffs pointing down rather than up.)

At times it seemed we lived in a madhouse, with Hilary pounding out an alto line on the piano in the living room and me in the office, two closed doors beyond, trying to figure out how to parse "Gloria all’Egitto, ad Iside, Che il sacro suol protegge!" among fifteen notes of varying length and emphasis.

Somehow, everything became easier once we'd reassembled with the group. In part this was because we were once again focused on very small sections of a score, but it was also sometimes easier to find the correct path with confidence in the aural context of the fuller harmonies all around you. And who knows? Maybe the at-home practicing also made a difference.

By the end of our second rehearsal, the complexity of the task ahead had largely been revealed. We were set to learn eleven choruses. And it wasn't merely a matter of hitting the right notes. Phrasing (in German, French, or Italian), emphasis, dynamics, diction, mood—they all needed to be attended to, as well as the vocal "sound." The appropriate staffs of my score were soon highlighted in yellow. I scribbled Ks over the Italian "che"s, and "oink" above the German "euch." The pages were littered with "stop," "go to the top of 13," "breathe," "staccato," "quick page turn," "same as soprano end-note here," "dramatic volume," "sing piano, but with fortissimo consonants," and numerous other bits of advice, some of them incomprehensible to me now.    

Several of the student conductors were with us during the last part of the third rehearsal, listening, conferring. As it came to an end and I walked slowly down the risers, I had a vision of Matt, the Oratorio Society's director, pulling a few twenties out of his wallet (my entry fee) and handing them back to me.

"You did your best," he'd say in his kindliest voice, trying for once to suppress his exuberance, "But we really can't use you. It's not working out."

No such event took place, and in time things started to gel a little. Or so it seemed to me. At the next men's sectional, I had the good fortune to be joined by one of the graduate students. He strode up behind me and took the empty chair next to mine. "What section is this?" he asked quietly. "Second tenor? Do you mind if I join you? I don't really have much to do tonight." He had a beautiful voice and with his help I made my way for the first time fairly convincingly through the rich inner textures of Tannhauser's  "Pilgrim's Choir."

Had he been sent to check me out? To help me along? To blot out the singing of Brad, the eager but fidgety  baritone to my left? Maybe he was telling the truth, just killing time.

When the rehearsal was over, I said, "You can sing with us any time." He asked me if I was in the regular Oratorio Choir (I had to chuckle at that) and when I told him I hadn't sung in a choir in forty years, he asked, "Are you enjoying it?" And I found myself answering, "It's a riot."

Of course, many members of this ad hoc summer choir were seasoned singers. Quite a few were members of the regular Oratorio Society Chorus. Hilary was sitting next to a woman who sang regularly  in the Twin Cities' Women's Choir. Tony's friend Dale had sung for years with the Edina Choir. I learned by chance from the tenor sitting in front of me that seven members of his church choir had joined up. These were the people that moved the music ahead and gave it body.

Yet there were certain places where everyone sounded terrible. For example, in the finale to Act II of Borodin's Polovtsian Dances, there's a lot of shouting and fascistic, march-like exclamations, with everyone blaring out "Fearless, mighty, ruthless warrior, Hail!" The "Hail" is held for three and a half bars on a dissonant triad. Then, after a two-beat rest, the tenors and basses come in with "Sing his praise,"  starting on A-sharps an octave apart. That A-sharp is somewhat out of context harmonically with what has come before, and no one seemed to know quite where it was. A few courageous voices forged boldly ahead with rough approximations while the rest of us limped along behind, but the little phrase "Sing his praise" ended up sounding hesitant and slightly pathetic rather than boisterous and celebratory, as if they were being sung, not by enthusiastic followers but by salaries apparatchiks.

However, the next day I downloaded that piece as performed by Torgny Sporsen, Neeme Järvi, and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. I wanted to burn a CD of the choruses included in the program, and I owned most of them, but not the Borodin (and not the Wagner). As I listened, it occurred to me that the Gothenburg Chorus didn't sound so hot on that passage, either. Indeed, listening to the choruses on my CD from Aida and Nabucco, I came to the conclusion that many professional choirs sound like holy hell when you really stop to listen.  

I shared that theory with Tony at the next rehearsal and he politely rejected it with a shake of the head. "It's not easy to record such things," he said, "but you can tell a good chorus when you hear one."

As a sentimental aside, I ought to mention that Borodin's Polovtsian Dances holds a special place in my heart. When I was a wee lad, my parents would occasionally build a fire in the fireplace on a winter night, put that LP on the hi-fi, and turn out the lights, at which point my big brother and I would dance in front of the flames. That's one of the most peaceful and enchanting memory from my early childhood. And even today, the tuneful sections of that piece sound lovely to me.

By the time we'd entered the fourth and final week of rehearsals, I was confident that the concert would go okay, that no one was going to kick me out ... and that I still needed to work on quite a few things.

As we began to rehearse larger segments and then entire pieces, things started to sound better. (Or could it be that things sounded better as the conductor less often stopped us to fix things?) But just when all seemed to be going well, yet another complication was added. During the last Wednesday rehearsal, several of the conductors made it clear that they expected us to look at them, more than occasionally, rather than at the notes and markings in our score.

How were we supposed to follow the notes, remember the weird phrasing, and make use of all the scribbling on our score, if we were looking at them? But of course it was necessary. They were providing the tempi, signaling the crescendos and the dramatic delays. The final touches of expressiveness came from the conductor's gestures. If you weren't paying attention, you could screw things up big time.

"I would rather that you mispronounced every Italian word while looking up, projecting your voice, and sharing your enthusiasm with the audience," Matt told us, "than sing every word perfectly with your nose buried in the score." This is something you tell the choir on the last day of rehearsal, not the first.

On the Saturday morning of the performance Hil and I were back at work at our parts. A few lines of Italian were still bothering me. They appear at the start of a movement, when I should be looking at the conductor, but they still weren't matching up very well with the tune, though at our previous rehearsal, Catherine, one of the student conductors, had made it clear we should long since have memorized the passage.

I typed out the phrases, and then highlighted the points of emphasis.  

"sembra una vedova che al-fin si togli-e i bruni panni ond’ e-ra involta."

An even more phonetic rendering would have looked like this.

sem-broo-na vey-do-va Kal-fin-si tow-ley-ee ...

But time was getting short, the lines amounted to about five seconds in a ninety-minute performance—and I was getting a little sick to my stomach. So I decided to drop the effort and read a book for a while.

When we arrived at the theater that afternoon, whatever butterflies I'd experienced fluttered off for good. It was fun sitting in the empty seats of the theater watching Matt, Alex, Catherine, and others rearrange the kettle drums and move the music stands here and there. The performance was still six hours away but there was already a hint of electricity in the air.  

Orchestra members started to arrive, among them my friend Dave, a trombonist who performs regularly with the Minnesota Opera. We got to talking about the Borodin piece, the shouting harmonies of which I characterized as "Sythian." I was thinking less about the Sythian mode than about Prokofiev's bizarre and seldom-performed Sythian Suite. Dave is an expert at sustaining a conversation on the strength of half-truths, puns, and imaginative digressions and he asked me where the Sythians came from. I replied "central Turkey," though it occurs to me now that "central Asia" might have been a better response. Dave had just finished reading a book about the origins of the fez, and  we were on the verge of extending our conversation in new directions when the time came to take our seats for the final rehearsal.

I was relieved to find I was still seated in the back row next to Tony and Dale, with Brad the Baritone to my immediate left. (During rehearsals Brad and I had always had a chair or two in between us.) I'd gotten to like Brad during our month of singing together. All the conductors knew him because he sang in one of the university choirs, and he told me he also gave saxophone lessons to kids. I was especially pleased to note that the tie he'd chosen for the performance was much louder than mine.  

Tony had looked a little bedraggled at some of the rehearsals but he now looked well-rested and sharp. "I enjoy the rehearsals a lot more than the performance," he told me with a sigh. I also learned that he'd once taught English in Thief River Falls, though he was now in IT. When I mentioned that I edited and designed books for a living, he said, "You should talk to Dale, here. That's what his daughter does."

Leaning over I said, "Dale, what's your daughter's name?"

When he told me I said, "I've known Kelley for years. She was with Beaver's Pond, then went to Lerner, as I recall. She even brought an intern over to the house once—I'm self-employed—to introduce her to a 'designer' at work."

Small world.

Such incidental familiarities may be uninteresting to a seasoned vocalist, but to me they were important, in so far as I had no idea how I was actually doing; rehearsal time is largely spent singing or listening and responding as a group to bits of advice. Personal interactions are only likely to take place with the people you already know and the people sitting next you.

In the end, I found that I enjoyed the rehearsals, but perhaps enjoyed the performance even more. This may have been because during rehearsals, one part of your brain is removed, gathering information about what went wrong and how little things can be improved upon. During the performance that chunk of brain power is released from such tasks and can turn itself toward the job at hand—singing expressively. If you flub a line or lose track of a pitch there's nothing to be done but move on ahead, and that's a liberating feeling. Most of the things I'd learned during rehearsal seemed to be coming back to me unbidden (though all the pencil markings helped) as part of the natural flow of the music.

The addition of an orchestra didn't hurt either. The soloists and conductors in tuxedos gave the event a touch of class. And with seven hundred people in the audience, I couldn't help feeling that, aside from being a lot of fun, what was about to take place was really going to mean something, with everyone contributing freely, anonymously, to a single powerful and pleasing effect.

We met some friends in the lobby after the performance and I was pleased to see that even Sheila, who sang opera professionally in Germany for twenty years, now gives voice lessons, and refers to herself as "hypercritical," claimed to have loved the show.

"I cried all the way through Puccini's 'humming chorus,' " she said. In fact, her eyes still looked a little moist. Maybe the encore sing-along of "Va Pensiero" had also gotten to her.

     

Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

The focus of this rambling treatise disguised as a cultural critique is the relationship between the is and the ought. Susan Nieman explores the works of Kant and Rousseau, Hegel and Hume, in her efforts to describe how our view of “real life” takes shape, how it’s challenged by cruel experience, and how we ought to respond to that challenge. Half Enlightenment philosophy and half developmental psychology, and liberally strewn with clichés about the nihilism and disillusionment of today’s youth, Neiman has a very simple piece of advice to give us—acknowledge the logic of the real, without abandoning our pursuit of the ideal.

Good idea. As a small way of putting the pursuit of the ideal into effect, let me suggest a few ways that her own book might have been improved.

1) Much tighter editing. There are long passages that introduce us to elements in a philosopher’s thought or biography that have no bearing on the issue at hand. It were as if Neiman had written a term paper about Rousseau’s Emile and decided to include the entire thing as a means of padding the book. The presentation would have been more compelling if a hundred pages had been cut.

2) Better philosophy. Neiman is a devout Kantian, and she accepts many of Kant’s odd notions uncritically. For example, the idea that space and time are categories of the human mind, rather than aspects of the world outside out heads; that causality is a necessary principle of understanding; that a categorical rule can be a foundation for ethical behavior. It might have been a better idea for her to use Kant as an example of the delusional thinking that can make it difficult for individuals to open themselves up to the adult world. Kant’s eloquent Scottish predecessor David Hume made two important observations that Kant found it impossible to accept: that life is inherently unpredictable and morality is based on feeling more than on logic.

In light of Neiman’s affection for Kant, it comes as no surprise to find that she misrepresents the theories of his successor Hegel entirely. This is singularly unfortunate, because Hegel’s description of what he calls “the phenomenology of spirit” dovetails nicely with Neiman’s own theories concerning how the developing consciousness comes to grip with “the real.”

Neiman describes the contrast between the two positions in one place as follows:

Hegel, like Leibniz, has the curious effect of bringing us back to the place where we accept the given as given, not because we have followed the Stoic’s advice to detach ourselves from it, but because we have understood something about the nature and necessity of the given itself. For Kant, by contrast, philosophy’s role in helping us grow up is precisely the opposite. It will not console or sooth you; it is practically guaranteed to make your life harder. For the real is not rational, and reason’s task is to make sure we never forget it.

Neiman’s basic mistake here is to imagine that when Hegel refers to “the real” he’s talking about our day-to-day understanding of the life going on all around us. Not so. For Hegel there is only one “reality” and it’s a dynamic one: spirit. Spirit moves though history, and wherever we come upon it—in a noble act or a stunning work of art—we make contact with “the real.” Similarly, our own actions become “real’ only when they’re inspired.

Hegel recognized that we’re seldom entirely satisfied with the things we do, and rightly so. Our actions never fully achieve the desired effect. Thus his philosophy describes the workings of “reality” as a restless and energetic dialectic between thinking and doing fueled by “spirit.” Hegel’s message is the same as Neiman’s, except that it focuses less on glib abstractions and more on genuine historical manifestations of the ideal becoming real. For Hegel, as for Neiman, "growing up" entails participating, forging ahead, strengthening our affections and advancing our ideals, mindful of our failures and inadequacies and reshaping our efforts in light of them.

3) Broader range of reference. Neiman fails to duly appreciate that from the aesthetic (rather than the ethical) point of view, the world can appear quite lovely just as it is. Children appreciate things, of course. Learning to deepen our appreciation as life as it becomes more troublesome and complex is another important aspect of “growing up.”

Neiman does advise us to read Middlemarch, limit our time on the Internet, and consider travel a part of our education. Such platitudinous recommendations are spread throughout the book—so much so that they begin to sound like the lectures we received at the kitchen table from Aunt Betty, who dropped out of grad school to raise a family but doesn’t mind sharing a word of advice from time to time. The only thing missing is the cherry pie.

A book so heavily laden with errors, blindspots, and truisms would not have been worth mentioning, except that Neiman’s pursuit is basically a noble one. At one point I pulled my copy of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics off the shelf to double-check one of her references and was led to a useful passage exemplifying Kant’s failure to come to grips with Hume’s attack on induction.

To give Neiman credit, she’s trying hard to make some important ideas intelligible, ignoring the quibbles of her academic colleagues in an effort to enrich the lives of common readers like me.

The single worst element of the book is the cover, over which the author perhaps had no control. It shows a cluster of colorful but faded balloons, as if from a child’s birthday party. It’s easy to imagine a bevy of twenty-somethings in a New York marketing department discussing how to make what is essentially an erudite exercise in intellectual history look like a critique of societal ills on the order of David Brooks’s recent forays into that realm. Words in the title such as “subversive” and “infantile” are likewise designed to pull us in.

For myself, I don’t believe we live in an infantile age. On the contrary, I’m often flabbergasted by the depth of insight on display in a wide range of print and online publications and also by the weight of moral concern evident in even the most casual Facebooks posts. “Spirit,” Hegelian or otherwise, continues to percolate through events, and young people continue to surprise their elders by the freshness of their perspectives and the wisdom of the choices they make.

Would young people be better off if they read Kant and Hegel? I doubt it. Would they be better off after reading Neiman's book? Perhaps.

About Elly - Country Weekend Goes Bad

One of my favorite film genres doesn't even have a name, but we can call it the "country weekend" genre. In such films, family members or friends of long standing go on a short vacation together, share some meals, wine, and conversation, along with perhaps some shocking revelation or illicit encounter, and return home, their lives changed in ways they never could have anticipated.

The classics in the genre include Betrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country, Mikhail Mikhalkov's Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, Claude Sautet's Paul, Vincent, Francois and the Others, and Renoir's seminal Rules of the Game. American attempts would include The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven, and Kenneth Bragnaugh's Peter's Friends might also qualify, though I haven't seen it.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi explores these themes in About Elly, during which three married couples make their way to the Caspian Sea from Tehran for a holiday weekend.

The film starts out with a flurry of activity as the group, traveling in several vehicles, stops for a picnic, and it remains confusing as they arrive at the resort only to find that due to a reservation mix-up, they must accept accommodations in a spacious but seriously rundown seaside villa rather than a more comfortable and secure unit.

Several of the women are virtually indistinguishable to the foreign eye, and it took me quite a while to sort everyone out, but it eventually becomes clear that along with three married couples and several children, another woman has been invited. This is Elly, the kindergarten teacher of Sepideh's daughter. Sepideh is eager to introduce Elly to Ahmad, a recently-divorced friend who's also been invited. 

And therein lies the crux of the drama. To circumvent Iranian legal restrictions on unmarried couples traveling together, Sepideh tells the proprietor of the resort that Elly and Ahmad are newly-weds. As the day progresses, Elly and Ahmad become the butt of numerous wisecracks and knowing smirks and glances. The married couples think this is all in good fun. (Of course, the men will be sleeping in one room, the women in another.) And Ahmad, who finds Elly appealing, is also quick to join in the humor, but Elly finds such over-familiarity embarrassing.

As the group tidies up the villa and prepares the evening meal, there's plenty of dancing and raillery, and even a lively game of charades, though tensions are building below the surface. Why did Sepideh invite this woman, if she's going to be so shy? And why did Sepideh do such a bad job of booking the reservation?

Shohreh is not happy about being so close to the water, which her children find irresistible: They'll have to be watched continually. One of the vehicles gets stuck in the sand. And to top it all off, the next morning Elly decides she wants to go back to Tehran. Sepideh insists that she stay.

By this time, in the midst of all the swimming, the meals, and the volleyball, several marital spats have developed, and the ugly patriarchic underpinnings of Iranian culture have begun to strip the weekend of its remaining vestiges of fun.

And then, Elly disappears.

I don't mean to give away the second half of the film, but Sepideh is eventually forced to admit she knows more about this mysterious Elly than she's let on. The police, the owners of the resort, and a few new characters become involved in a quest to determine what happened to Elly, and who she really is. A good deal of tension develops and recriminations start flying in every direction before things finally get sorted out. Along the way director Farhedi raises a host of troubling questions about honor, lying, and social solidarity.

Unfortunately, they're the kind of questions we can't discuss without giving away too much of the plot.

About Elly makes a good companion piece to Farhedi's subsequent film, A Separation, which deservedly won the 2012 Oscar for best foreign film. It's equally intricate, well-acted, and unpredictable, but slightly less brutal.    

Bastille Day Meditations

At a time when the Eurozone is fraught with stress, Iran has cut a nuclear deal with the West, China's markets are tanking, a Serb has defended his Wimbledon title with force and his character with a healthy dose of small-town charm, a new pentaquark particle has been discovered, and the Americans are sending a spacecraft alongside a planet so far away that it only circles the sun once every 250 years, Bastille Day arrives—and none too soon.

Unlike the slightly frantic and explosion-centered Fourth of July, Bastille Day has become a more broadly international, non-religious, open-ended celebration of personal liberty, artistic expression, social indulgence, and community values—all the things that make civilized living worthwhile.

Though their political clout has diminished considerably since the nineteenth century, the French maintain a certain cachet as a culture in which nature, life, and work sit in easy harmony with one another.

At the warehouse where I used to work,  members of the receiving department used to celebrate Bastille Day with strong, fresh-roasted coffee, croissants, and marmalade. Year in and year out, we would invite someone from another department—invariably a woman who could speak French—to recite a poem by Apollinaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, or some other deranged poet. Those days are long gone, but I can nevertheless offer a reading of my own, chosen less for substance (I don't know French) than for brevity.

Le Dromadaire

Avec ses quatre dromadaires

Don Pedro d' Alfaroubeira

Courut le monde et 'ladmira.

Il fit ce que je voudrais faire

Si j'avais quatre dromadaires.

We missed the Bastille Day parties in town this year, but on Sunday evening we wandered down with friends to the Dakota on Nicollet Mall to listen to the South Side Aces play the sprightly tunes of Creole jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

Tonight will be a quiet celebration: lamb chops on the grill along with grilled red peppers, carrots, and onions, and maybe a bottle of cheap Cote du Rhone. On the turntable? Accordionist Richard Galliano's new duo album, La Vie en Rose, with guitarist Sylvain Luc.

It's a nice album, but if it starts to sound a little too French, we can turn to a CD I picked up today at the library for a dollar—Art of Love: the Music of Machaut. The artist, Robert Sadin, was unfamiliar to me but the CD had been shelved in the "jazz" category. Listening to it on the way home from the library, it struck me as neither jazz nor Machaut, but some sort of African hodgepodge. Yet I suspect a lot of thought went into the arrangements. Glancing at the liner notes Sadin is quoted as saying: "Recent studies suggest that the performing style of the late fourteenth century was not as pristine or as 'classical' as once was believed. In any case, we were looking for a far-reaching, free-form approach to the music." Should be interesting.

I had gone to the library to pick up a book I'd requested, Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet. The introduction was by James Salter, who died recently, and as I read it I came upon a wonderful, and typically Salter-esque phrase. He's describing what it's like to visit Bonnet's 40,000-volume library:

"You recognize, with a kind of terrible joy, all that you haven't read and that you would like to read. Titles and names strike what can only be called chords of desire."

You can probably tell that I'm not getting much done today. But as a woman in Arles once told me, "aujourd'hui personne travail." I think it's the only French sentence I ever understood, and there's a story behind it, but I don't have time to tell it now.

The chipmunks are enjoying the ripening berries on the dogwood outside the bedroom window. And four full-grown turkeys continue to pass by regularly out on the front lawn. Today they remind me of Porthos, Athos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan.

Summer Reading

Does anyone actually go to a beach in the summertime to read? More likely the cabin in the woods, at least in this part of the country. In any case, it's a handy trope for gathering together a list of reading suggestions for idle summer evenings. Here are a few of mine.

Bears: a Brief History, by Bernt Brunner (Yale, 2007)

Everyone likes to talk about bears. And it seems everyone has a few bear stories to tell, though most of them center around unseen bears that wreck the bird feeder or a fear of lurking bears that, in the end, never show up. In this slim volume Brunner, a German, has gathered together a wide variety of information (and misinformation) from around the world about the animal that most closely resembles us—ursa major. The book is crisply written and rich in both folklore and historic illustrations. Opening it at random we come upon sentences like this one:

The moon was shining the night in January 1856 when Leopold von Schrenck, a Russian-German zoologist, geographer, and cultural anthropologist, and Carl Maximowicz, his colleague and illustrator, reached Tebach, a village in easternmost Siberia...

Easy to pick up, and easy to put down, Bears is a perfect woodland summer read.

The Witness of Combines, by Kent Meyers (Minnesota, 1998)

Meyers lost his father at age sixteen, and he lost the family farm near Sleep Eye, Minnesota, the next year because his father was no longer there to manage it. It was a sad time for Kent, though he didn't shed a tear until three years later, when he began to write about it. 

His descriptions of canning tomatoes, chatting about roses with grandma, fixing the hammermill, picking rocks from the fields every spring, watching cuddly little chicks grow up to become his father's birthday dinner, and other farm events, are vivid. 

He occasionally ends a chapter by spelling out simple notions that he's already conveyed effectively in images and sentiments, but such passages are rare and easily forgiven. Kent is trying to illuminate the bonds, and also the empty spaces, that develop between father and son, while at the same time conveying how rich an attachment to a piece of land can be, regardless of the labor involved—perhaps because of the labor involved.

The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution, by Ian Tattersall (Macmillan 2015)

It seems a week seldom goes by without some paleoarcheologist unearthing pieces of a skeleton that doesn't have an obvious place on the Hominidae family tree. Tattersall reviews the history of the field, reminding us of names we haven't heard since high school—Peking Man, Java Man, Piltdown Man—and tries to explain why it's been so difficult to modernize the nomenclature of the various branches of the evolutionary tree to more clearly suggest that homo sapiens is only one of many, rather than the final product of a single inevitable progression. Along the way he gives us detailed accounts of the most recent theories regarding the mechanisms by which life continues to develop, which are considerably more complicated (and poorly understood, even by the experts) than we tend to think.    

Ardor, by Roberto Calasso (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

Calasso has been writing about "the sacrifice" since 1984 at least (see The Ruin of Kasch) and in Ardor he returns to that theme, taking on an explication of the collection of pre-Hindu sacrificial hymns and rituals called the Vedas.

The Vedic sacrifice was "an attempt to redress a balance that had been upset and violated forever" when humans began to kill and eat other animals. However, Vedic sacrifice was designed to exalt the act of killing and eating, rather than expiate the guilt associated with it. In any case, it took several forms: sometimes an intellectual dispute, and at other times merely the pouring of a few tablespoons of fresh milk on a carefully laid household fire to the accompaniment of ritual verses, some of them intentionally mumbled, others spoken aloud. A sacrificial plant, perhaps hallucinogenic, was also part of the scheme.

The book is riddled with both arcane information about the ancient Aryans and oracular pronouncements about the seams and fractures of life itself. For example, at one point Calasso takes up the evidently important issue of why a man should not be naked in the presence of the cow. At another he informs us how, in Vedic lore, the four phases of a household fire—first lit, burning, blazing, and reduced to embers—correspond to the divine forms Rudra, Varuna, Indra, and Mitra. 

In a later chapter, he explores the interrelationships described in various Vedic hymns between the Self (ātman), the "I" (aham), awareness (citta), intention (saṃkalpa), knowledge (veda), meditation (dhyana), and discernment (vijñāna).

Along the way he offers references to Parmenides, Schopenhauer, Kafka, and Ignatius of Loyola, among other thinkers, to clarify similarities and (more often) differences between Vedic and Western concepts.

Readers may find it difficult to keep their bearings in the midst of all the digressions, elaborations, and asides. But anyone who has enjoyed Calasso's previous books will be familiar with this method of criss-crossing the landscape of a foreign time and culture. (A more detailed review of Ardor is forthcoming in Rain Taxi Magazine.)

Time Ages in a Hurry, by Antonio Tabucchi (Archipelago, 2015)

Tabucchi is a master story-teller with a vast range of experience, and settling into this collection may remind readers of the pleasure they once took reading Henry James, Chekhov, or Proust.

The "method" of the collection might well be taken from the story "Between Generals":

I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself.

The stories this volume aren't thinly veiled autobiography, in short, but well-structured, keenly imagined narratives set in New York, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, and other locales. The common theme, if there is one, is aging. I don't mean decrepitude, but various forms of awareness that eventually life just runs out. Thus, in one story a man visiting a botanical garden feels a tramontana breeze that sets off some speculations:

He thought of the winds of life, because there are winds that accompany life: the soft zephyr, the warm wind of youth that later the mistral takes it upon itself to cool down, certain southwesterly winds, the sirocco that weakens you, the icy mistral. Air, he thought, life is made of air, a breath and that's it, and after all we too are nothing but a puff, a breath, then one day the machine stops and that breath ends. He stopped too because he was panting...

The story in question is actually a love story, a single, six-page paragraph of interior monologue. It becomes clear (sort of) that the garden holds romantic associations for the narrator. He sees, or hallucinates, a woman hanging clothes on a line. A boy arrives. The two embrace. She sings a song, which the narrator, now slumped against a wall, can hear:

I was in love with the air,

With the air of a woman,

Because the woman was air,  

I was left with a handful of air...

I could go on, but a more complete review can be found in the current print edition of Rain Taxi. It's lovely stuff, though Tabucchi often makes thing difficult by forcing us to ask ourselves: what part of this story actually happened, and what part draws on the narrator's memories and dreams? Andr more fundamentally, what is this story really about?

Charles Lloyd at the Dakota

Ninety minutes of jazz, no breaks between songs, a journey, a roller-coaster ride, an exploration of the psyche, a thumbnail history of jazz, an inventory of human emotions, an endless doodle—pick your cliché.  Never boring, often poignant, tirelessly lyrical, though occasionally irritating, especially near the end of the set, when I was dying for the band to come to the end of a cadenza, bring a number to its conclusion, wrap it up—and start a new one.

I first heard Charles Lloyd at the Guthrie in 1968. I wasn't ready for him then, couldn't get my bearings. A young man named Keith Jarrett was at the keyboard that night. Lloyd has had a long string of distinguished band-mates since then, including Michel Petrucciani, Bobo Stenson, Brad Mehldau, and Jason Moran. His current pianist, Gerald Clayton, is right at home in such company.

Before the set Lloyd said, "I never play clubs anymore. People are eating dinner, cash resister ringing..." He looked around, where many people were eating dinner. Then he added, "...but Lowell [Dakota owner Lowell Pickett], he really digs the music. I'd follow him anywhere." Then  he added in a kindly voice, "Don't worry, go ahead and enjoy your chittlins."

In response to the unending applause after the set, Lloyd came back on stage and delivered a rambling peroration touching on music, kindliness, barbeque sauce on corn-on-the-cob, GMO agriculture, and whether he should wear white socks at the upcoming jazz festival in Iowa City. The rhetorical style landed somewhere between Dave King and Maynard G. Krebs, and it added yet another dimension to an already sweet and genuinely exploratory musical evening.