San Francisco Opera: Pride Concert

I did not attend last year's Pride Concert at San Francisco Opera, but I did attend this year's, which was announced as the second annual. The very full house was very full of enthusiasm, & if I didn't quite share it, well, that's pretty much on me, now isn't it?

I make a somewhat snobbish point of not going to Opening Night at the Opera, but I imagine it's similar to this concert: there's a packed house, & a lot of buzzy energy & excitement, but it's not really of the "here for the music" variety, but more about a hoped-for "scene"; also, there are speeches! For someone who has devoted so much life & love to the theater, I acknowledge that it's weird that speeches from the stage cause me immediate distress, but, once again, that's pretty much on me, isn't it. So there were speeches. For anyone playing Buzzword Bingo, it took barely ten minutes before we heard "being your authentic self". Oh, & the performance start-time was 8:00 rather than the Opera's usual 7:30, for reasons unclear to me.

The performers were stellar: Robert Mollicone led the Opera Orchestra, with Sapphira Cristál as our masterly Mistress of Ceremonies, with vocal soloists Melody Moore (soprano), Nikola Printz (mezzo), & Reginald Smith Jr (baritone), along with a back-up trio (or, as I thought of them, the Pips), Sadie Cheslak (mezzo), Alexa Frankian (soprano), & Thomas Kinch (tenor). All were top-notch, & often even better than that. Their commitment & enthusiasm were palpable. There were many stylish & fun costume changes, especially from our Emcee, of course, & glitter & sparkles & vivid colors were everywhere – except, unfortunately, in the musical selections.

Not that things were all bad on that front. We started with a tribute to the late & much-loved Michael Tilson Thomas in the form of Agnegram, a lively & eclectic piece he wrote to honor a rich & I'm sure lovely Symphony patron, Agnes Albert. As with the other pieces I've heard by Tilson Thomas, it is entertaining but strikes me as a bit ramshackle & a bit derivative (in this piece I particularly heard echoes of, though perhaps I should say "an homage to", Charles Ives). I enjoyed it but was mildly surprised to realize in retrospect that it would turn out to be one of the musical highlights of the evening.

Mme Cristál was tireless & I think accomplished what she set out to do, which was offer inspiration & uplift as well as introductions & context. It was all more high-minded than I was expecting; I never thought I would long for a drag performer to be snarkier & smuttier. I thought some of the context given was unnecessary, but then perhaps I am not understanding who exactly the target audience was. I do think that if a San Francisco Opera audience, particularly one gathered for a Pride Concert, really needs to be told who Sappho of Lesbos was & why she is significant, then we should just give up on humanity. That explanation came as an introduction to Ô ma lyre immortelle from Gounod's opera Sapho, which is based on the familiar story of Sappho ending her life by jumping from a cliff into the sea over despair for a male lover, Phaon. Our emcee seemed to suggest that this story was something invented by Gounod, or the nineteenth century in general, to cover up the truth of Sappho's love for women. It was all done in that very knowing, mmm-hmmm, right, we know the real story way.

But this incident has been part of Sappho's life (or, more accurately, legend) since classical times. Even Ovid, a "queer" author only in the broadest sense but one certainly open to sexual difference & aware of varied sexual options, gives us this story. I don't know offhand what the story's source is (it certainly predates Ovid) & I assume it's considered an embellishment rather than a biographical fact, insofar as we can determine what those are based on the fragments & remnants of such a different time & place, but in a way none of that matters: it has always been part of Sappho's story, & nonetheless she was still identified strongly & mainly as a lover of other women, lending her name & her island's name to all her daughters.

Why does this matter, & why did Cristál's approach depress me? Because it just illustrates our need to put people into boxes & to keep them there. Sappho could be mainly a lover of women but also have an affair with a man without betraying herself (or, for that matter, us, as if it's any of our concern anyway). Oscar Wilde, after all, was married & had two children. In both cases, their basic preference is clear & defining: but why dismiss their other experiences, unless it's our need to categorize, to classify, to limit? Despite all of our talk about embracing the variety of our feelings & the individual's right to choose his / her/ their own representation, we still crave definite & defining answers to the often irrelevant question, What's going on down there?

Having said all that: Printz gave a stunning, passionate performance of the aria, & at the end the singer (or director E Reed Fisher, or both) had the wonderful idea of having them extend their blue garment & cape out into a Loïe Fuller-style serpentine dance, illustrating the waters swirling over the poet's head. Very effective! I've heard Printz in several performances recently, & they consistently dominate the stage.

This is not to slight the other singers. Before the Gounod we heard Melody Moore give a touching performance of Lucky from Stephen Schwartz's opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon. He's known for musicals, particularly Wicked (as well as Godspell & Pippin) & based on this aria & what I know of his other works, he's more at home in the world of musical theater. After the Gounod, Smith gave a probing rendition of Peculiar Grace from Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, an aria about the tricky expectations for & from a young Black man who is grappling with his sexuality. That was followed by Moore giving a wrenching performance of La mamma morta from Giordano's Andrea Chénier, which seemed to be on the program mostly because it appears in a pivotal moment in Philadelphia, a movie I had almost forgotten about (I've never actually seen it), about a man dying of AIDS. I wondered how many in the audience were familiar with this 33-year-old film. Like many of the pop-culture callbacks during the evening, this one seemed weirdly dated. Nonetheless I was glad to hear the aria, no matter what ushered it into the line-up. After that Moore & Printz gave us a lovely, lilting rendition of the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, & I am always happy to hear Offenbach, especially performed so beautifully; the sensual languor of this particular piece stood out amid the uplift & the anthems.

After the Offenbach, things got even more pop-centric, starting with Be the Change by Michael Abels, who worked with Rhiannon Giddens on the opera Omar (my thoughts on that opera are here). Omar,  I thought, was trying to do some complex & subtle things; this song, which the program book described as "in the spirit of protest anthems & communal uplift songs", is not. It's like a campfire song that high-minded counselors urge on those who find Kumbaya too emotionally complex to deal with. This was the first song on which the Pips joined in. The two women, Cheslak & Frankian, were quite enthusiastic; Kinch seemed a bit off the beat & a bit more tentative in his gestures, which I found quite endearing. I enjoyed the trio, a feeling in line with my experience throughout this concert of enjoying the performances more than what was being performed.

The thing is, I mostly dislike (often verging, I will admit, on hate), pop / rock / rap, & I resent having it forced on me, just because I have to live in the world: going to the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery store, on public transit, walking down the street, even just sitting in my own residence: other people's boring trashy taste gets forced on me at inescapable volume. I hate the attitude that we all need to genuflect before the (corporate-sponsored) altar of pop culture. A few years ago I was at a piano recital in which the jazz-influenced pianist performed some wonderful pieces & then, for an encore, did a Michael Jackson song. It deflated my evening immediately. Musically it was the least interesting piece he performed. And the attitude seemed to be that now that we'd eaten our classical vegetables, we'd get the sticky sweet pop treat that we were truly craving. It had all been so enjoyable up until then! (It doesn't help that Jackson is one of those 1980s cultural figures whose popularity I did not get then & continue not to get, along with Madonna, Keith Haring, Princess Diana, & probably others I'm forgetting.)

I stopped listening to pop music in the early 1980s, because I found it increasingly vacuous & irritating, like trying to live on nothing but Doritos. Sure, the occasional bag is fun, & they do have different flavors thanks to the wonders of chemistry, but on the whole, there's a lot out there that's more enticing, complex, & interesting, as well as more nourishing to body & soul. But despite switching the station decades ago, I knew many of the songs performed during this concert, which made me wonder what was guiding the repertory choices. Even I know there are more current pieces that would be worth doing for a Pride concert (surely at least one of the 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields could have made the cut?). Couldn't the choices have reflected a wider range of moods & decades?

We were given The Joke by Brandi Carlisle (& three others, according to the program book), sung by Moore. It's pretty much an "it gets better" song, & the refrain ends "I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends / And the joke's on them". Here's the thing: a movie, like any dramatic structure, including a concert program, is an artistic arrangement of the often perverse, nebulous, infuriating, & frustrating realities of life into a shape that we can find emotionally & morally satisfying. In other words, saying to me, "I've seen this movie & here's how it ends" is not persuasive, outside of the context of characters in a movie. The lyrics just don't hold up to even a cursory examination of how life really happens; they're about trying to jolly everyone into optimism by overlooking reality. We all know people who were bigots & bullied those who were seen as weak or different, & no, they did not always get their comeuppance, even in the form of a less than successful life. And anyone of a certain age knows people who made their little jokes & jabs about queerness when we were all young (& therefore more susceptible to jokes & jabs, & back when such remarks were more socially acceptable & prevalent, & when "queer", now reclaimed, was an outright insult), & now those same people, come each June, are wreathing their social media with rainbows & glittery unicorns & reposting Love Is Love memes. And they probably think they were with you all along. Sure, why not. Life is slippery & people are elusive &, as Didion reminds us, we all tell ourselves stories in order to live.

One more song from the latter half of the show: Gender Binary (F*ck You) by Ryan Cassata, performed by Nikola Printz. Why the dainty fig-leaf of an asterisk in the title (as printed in the program book)? If you're going to sing Fuck, why not print it in a straightforward way? The asterisk is a nod to a transgressive power that that word lost years ago. While agreeing wholeheartedly with the intent & spirit of the song (which fights back against all kinds of insistence on fitting people into pre-made gender boxes: so see my comments above on the story of Sappho & Phaon), the message, though Printz's fiery performance really put it across, is pretty basic & fairly crude & simple. It's coming from a punk-rock attitude, but, again, punk was around when I was still listening to what I'll just call pop music, & it all seems too dated to be genuinely shocking.

Most of the songs were enjoyable, though not really engaging to my ears: the ones I haven't mentioned so far were Constant Craving, made famous by k d lang, sung by Moore & Printz; How Will I know, made famous by Whitney Houston, sung by Smith & the Pips; I Can Only Be Me, made famous by Stevie Wonder, sung by Printz; Any Love, made famous by Luther Vandross, sung by Smith & the Pips; Let It Rain, made famous by Tracy Chapman, sung by Smith (this one stood out, in a good way); & a finale sung by everyone, a medley of Greatest Love of All, Everybody Rejoice (A Brand New Day), & I'm Coming Out.

The focus was solidly on songs that might be called "anthems", songs that offered uplift & positivity. These were songs in which uncertainty ends in true love & rejection is a fear but never a reality. This was not a night for ambiguity, broken hearts, & never ever quite fitting in. Sure, I get it: we're all under siege by the ascendant reactionaries & fascists & just by life in general, & maybe uplift is called for. I would have hoped that an audience at the Opera would be given repertory that is of greater musical interest, but perhaps others found this program just the thing to give them the strength to go out & fight, or at least to dance into Pride weekend in the rainbow-bedecked foggy city. I would have preferred another approach. I'm usually reluctant to say that an artist should have given us something different from what he / she / they chose to give, but: couldn't whoever put the program together find some material that was more interesting & varied? some standards to repurpose, something by Cole Porter, or Rodgers & Hart, or even Rodgers & Hammerstein (I'm thinking of We Kiss in the Shadows from the King & I)? A simple gender-flip in the singer can give a new & refreshingly queer slant to even a familiar song (here are links to YouTube videos of Aaron Tveit singing Mein Herr from Cabaret & As Long As He Needs Me from Oliver!). Couldn't we have had even one song, just one little number, by the late &, as is increasingly obvious, very great Stephen Sondheim?

After two solid intermissionless hours of uplift, I have to say the audience was as enthusiastic as ever, heading into the lobby for the after-party, the throbbing monotonous thumping of which further depressed me. Nothing can send me racing for the exit faster than the presence of a DJ.

I don't understand what it means to live "authentically" (before anyone tries to explain it to me: I understand what it means in this context; it means not hiding basic facts about your gender & sexual identities – but I find authentic & authenticity slippery & problematic words, &, particularly when it comes to our sexualities, I question how much we need or should show to others). I don't really like uplift: I just see too many other possibilities. I don't really believe in daily affirmations (maybe I should try them?). I dislike being told that I'm oh so special (or that, in a nod to the latest pop-culture inevitabilities, being different is my superpower), because that's just the nice way of telling me I'm a weirdo & a freak who doesn't fit in with others. I don't believe in "communities" based on coincidental characteristics. And as always when I say things like this, I need to add that I do not think that feeling this way makes me "better" than anyone else. I don't regret going to the concert. You go so you can know, & now I know. Many others seemed to be perfectly satisfied with the bill of fare, & I'm always glad when people enjoy themselves, as long as I can get to the exit.

the awful truth

The Kardashians are one of those pop-culture things I know about mostly through parodies, though I do also get updates from the hilariously named "Scoop!" section of the SF Examiner (a right-wing rag which I see because it is literally handed to the commuter crowds as they exit the BART stations, and which I take because it is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks, making it an excellent addition to the home compost pile). Anyway, yesterday's "Scoop!" quoted one of those inevitable "insiders" on the bitter fall-out from Kim Kardashian's brief marriage to someone named Kris Humphries:

"He tried to control Kim by bringing her down," said the source. "He would say
truly terrible things. One time, he said she had no talent and her fame wouldn't
last."

The brute! I'm sure she's extremely talented at . . . whatever it is she does. Apparently the "insider" repeated this "truly terrible" remark without laughing.

The moral, which like most morals depends on where you're standing, is either that you should avoid your own blabbing "insiders" or that reality stars can't take too much reality.

if Pluto is not a planet, how can these people be stars?

My television addiction, Dancing with the Stars, premieres tonight (I think), but I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m not watching this season until Bristol Palin, and her accompanying familiar of a mother, are both gone, gone, gone. It’s not that I have anything personal against America’s Luckiest Unwed Teenage Mother – I’m benevolent enough to hope her children grow up in a country that soundly rejects Bristol’s smug, ignorant gorgon of a mother and her ilk – but I’m starting to wonder about the casting on that show. They’ve had the loathsome Tucker Carlson; they had the criminal thug Tom Delay, who should have been two-stepping in federal prison, and now this. I find it difficult to believe that the far-reaching tentacles of ABC/ESPN/Disney can’t find enough vaguely remembered Disney channel stars, middle-aged boy band singers, Olympic athletes on an off-year, reality stars (make that “reality” “stars”), or former cast members of Melrose 90210 to fill out the roster. What’s with all the right-wing scum?

I realize the definition of “star” is pretty loose here: I’m perfectly prepared to find The Situation unexpectedly charming, and that vacuous girl from The Hills (that doesn't narrow it down, does it?) surprisingly inoffensive; if they want Americana, that’s fine, they can always bring back Buzz Aldrin, if only to continue their challenging game of working “American hero” and “walked on the moon” into every single reference to him – besides, he has the distinction of being the only contestant who’s had an opera written about him; I’ll even put up with the passive-aggressive narcissist Kate Gosselin, who does wooden pieces denouncing the paparazzi who invade her privacy, and who can currently be seen posing in a bikini on the cover of People of her own free will; I’m willing to accept that young woman who got dumped on The Bachelor – I forget her name, but they kept talking about how she was “humiliated on national television” – sweetie, you were humiliated on national television the day you first appeared on The Bachelor to begin with – but I draw the line at Palin and her pack of parasites. Why can't I watch my little TV dancing show without a constant reminder of how rotten in so many ways this country is? Someone tell me when they’ve crawled back under their rocks. Until then, I’ll guess I'll watch Derek, their best choreographer, on YouTube.

Don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me

And here’s a special St Valentine’s Day half-price heart-shaped box of links for my readers, starting with some hilarity from the Onion.

I had more or less forgotten the day until the Opera Company of Philadelphia sent me an e-mail urging me to “treat my Valentine to Turandot!” I sometimes wonder if Marketing Departments ever bother to look up the plots of the operas they’re trying to sell. On the other hand, maybe they’re just having their little joke: marketing + bad love choices = St Valentine’s Day! At least it wasn’t The Rape of Lucretia, which I am going to see in June, by the way.

Here’s something else to look forward to: a DVD release of Messiaen’s St Francois d’Assise! This production is from De Nederlandse Opera (which recently brought us the first official recording of Dr Atomic, thereby retaining European supremacy in recording modern operas) and stars Rod Gilfry, and I have to admire a singer who can portray both Stanley Kowalski and St Francis.

And the line-up for the next season of Dancing with the Stars has been announced, and though I realize “stars” is being used loosely (I wasn’t really expecting Brad Pitt to suit up), I don't know who a lot of these people are. That's not that much of a problem, because really, what do I care? And at this point the professional dancers are better known anyway and on the upward curve of their careers (some nights it's like watching multiple little versions of A Star Is Born). But seriously – Denise Richards? You have to worry a little when Charlie Sheen is the mature, responsible partner.

The worrisome trend to me is the boast that there are several “real-life couples” on the show, since there seems to be an increasing emphasis on "relationship drama" rather than, you know, "dancing." Maybe the ratings got a big boost when viewers were wondering if Derek Hough and his partner from a few seasons back (sorry, I can't remember her name, and all this searching and hyperlinking is wearing me out) were dating. I liked her until she had a teary-eyed meltdown over the criticism of her hip movement. I'm a weeper myself, and granted she was at a severe disadvantage next to Derek’s serpentine hips, but, you know, keep it together. And she really did need to work on her hips.

Since then we’ve been treated to an increasing number of emotional outbursts, the most inexplicable being Lacey Schwimmer’s announcement that she just couldn’t keep on trying to please Lance Bass, who seemed fairly mild-mannered and tractable. Given her announcement that he was her teenage crush, I’m thinking he was just the victim of her issues, but maybe she was reacting to stuff we hadn’t seen. Or maybe not, since he seemed as befuddled by the surprise attack as the viewers were. There was a priceless shot of his sad blank face looking slightly puzzled when she stormed out. But full points to them for dancing to “I Kissed a Girl.” Witty choice!

I assume the “relationship counselor” who came to talk to the finalists was just a joke that didn’t quite work. Poor Cody Linley, bursting into tears. I was both amused and creeped out to hear him mention that there was a website dedicated to his eyebrows. I do know people with an eyebrow thing. Not to mention any names, of course. His Hannah Montana co-star Miley Cyrus is seriously creepy – she was shown greeting him at her "Sweet 16" birthday party in Disneyland, and I thought I was watching a 45-year-old divorcee trying to pick up her son’s naïve high-school teammate.

Another thing they need to stop doing on that show: having the little kids dance. Yes, these kids know it’s a competitive field, which means sometimes they lose, but no one that age needs to lose on national TV before millions of viewers, especially if they’re not just watching, they’re deliberately choosing to reject you. (Or maybe the viewers don’t vote on the little kids – I always leave the room during that part, so I really don’t know. I should probably get Tivo.) It’s the difference between playing sandlot baseball and playing in the Little League World Series on ESPN.

Another thing they should never do again: Cloris Leachman. It wasn’t so much her limited dancing skills as her constant need to be the center of attention that really annoyed me. My jump-the-shark moment with her was when Cody and Julianne were being interviewed after their dance (poor Cody! that kid was abused a lot) and Cloris came over and started pawing him. Possibly she just thought he was a camera. I’m sure the audience would have been equally delighted if those had been, say, Mickey Rooney’s liver-spotted claws caressing barely-legal flesh. But we all know that old women aren't rude, self-centered, or camera hogs: instead, they’re feisty. That's a pretty absurd and condescending attitude, especially toward a woman who made movies with Mel Brooks, but she certainly took advantage of it. When she finally left she announced to Carrie Ann, “I know you didn’t mean what you said” (referring to her comment from the week before that it was sad to see Toni Braxton leave when she was starting to improve, just so that Leachman could continue flopping around, though she phrased it more gently than that). Guess what, Cloris? She did mean it.

But the most painful moment of all was when Carrie Ann made Susan Lucci stand up and say, “I’m a good dancer!” or whatever empowering you-go-girl nonsense she made her repeat. I thought this was an incredibly degrading thing to do to a woman of her professional standing and, how shall one say, life experience. But improved self-esteem (justified or not) was a leitmotif with several of the other women. Strangely, the only man who was treated to these little confidence-building discussions was Lance Bass, which of course had absolutely nothing to do with his position as the only openly gay contestant.

Well, I do really enjoy the dancing. And I even like the Superstars of Dance segments; most of them, anyway. I think I was a little misled when they started off with Alvin Ailey. I wasn’t exactly expecting Pina Bausch (though that would be fun) but maybe Mark Morris. . . . But I’m very naïve about these things. When I heard that there was a movie coming out named Gigli, I assumed (as one naturally would!) that it was about Beniamino Gigli. I thought Ben Affleck was kind of odd casting. In my defense, there have been movies about Caruso, though it’s not much of a defense since Caruso is a very different sort of cultural figure; it's like Carreras and Pavarotti.

In any case, here's one more sweet link for you, before we toss the empty heart aside (empty except for the sour quince log, of course): Defamer’s pairings of the upcoming DWTS cast and some of the great choreographers. That's entertainment!

the real deal

I’ve noticed for quite some time now that “passion” is a buzzword these days the way “ambition” was back in the late 1980s: both are deeply ambiguous qualities that are nonetheless presented as simple and unambiguously positive. “Passion,” in fact, has become such a cliché that I merely note its presence, since it has no real meaning anymore; I know most people mean “the thing that makes me interesting” but what they are actually describing is usually “the thing that makes me especially loud-mouthed and ignorant.” Last year I was living in fear that during job interviews someone would ask me the latest inane and fashionable question, “What are you passionate about?” Would I then be true to myself – to my passion – and blurt out the truth: “Avoiding conversations like this?”

“Authenticity” is now a rising buzzwords (or an emerging one, to use another buzzword); I’m hearing and reading it more and more these days. Again, since it is an ambiguous word used without ambiguity, I’m not sure what it means – what true purity and actual Reality are meant. Thoughts of authenticity and even of passion were floating cloud-like through my mind over the past few days, as I began the giddy autumn round of theater-going.

Nothing (except possibly a free ticket in premium orchestra, and even then only with a stun-gun) could induce me to go to Opening Night for either the Symphony or the Opera. I like to think I’m an open and democratic guy, but in my heart of hearts I have the snobbish conviction that the people who go to these things, like Catholics who only go to mass on Easter or Christmas, only believe in social obligation rather than in music. But I can catch the gala spirit, which is one of the reasons I very much enjoyed Angela Gheorghiu’s recital at Berkeley on Saturday. For someone who has only previously appeared in this area once before, she certainly received the ovation of a much-loved star, and she certainly knew how to milk it, which was charming in its way.

It’s a really lovely voice, though at times not quite powerful enough to rise above the orchestra (I was in the front row, but my balcony friend had the same opinion). The Puccini arias – Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta from Rondine, Un bel di, O mio babbino caro as an encore – came off best, I thought; her Pace, pace mio Dio, one of my all-time favorite arias from one of my all-time favorite operas, lacked the umber shades I wanted, but then I have heard Leontyne Price sing the aria live (in recital, several times).

The odd, somewhat incoherent program varied the celebrated opera arias with orchestral interludes from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, which sounded splendid and precisely flowing; what a pleasure to hear them sounding so good, and to hear the overtures to Figaro and Cenerentola and the intermezzos from Manon Lescaut and Cavalleria Rusticana without the chatter of those who are only waiting for the big arias (so good job by the Berkeley audience on this one!).

The orchestral interludes also allowed Gheorghiu time to change from her white gown to her black one and then to a red one – that’s three gowns for a total of eleven vocal pieces (counting the three encores); that’s 3.6 songs per gown, which seems like a high ratio, even for a diva, and despite my enjoyment I couldn’t help feeling we weren’t quite getting full value for our gala-priced tickets, with only slightly more than an hour of music (including the orchestral pieces). The ruched black gown was so tight that, in my humanitarian way, I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, and therefore sing, in it. She did succeed, and it turned out to be an interesting sight, like watching the buffer baritones sing shirtless: you got to see what muscular movements produced what sounds (and I didn’t realize those vibrated on the high notes – I love sitting in the first row!).

The “popular songs” – “popular” meaning “not operatic arias”; you’re not going to hear Curtis’s Non ti scorda r di me or Delibes’s Les Filles de Cadiz blaring from an iPod on public transit, unless you're next to a conservatory student, or hear them sampled by rappers keeping it real – were less interesting to me, though Gheorghiu sang them with as much conviction as the meatier arias. And I’m just not sure that a Romanian soprano is wise to risk I Could Have Danced All Night to an American audience. That’s one of the few songs I actually like from My Fair Lady (the other is On the Street Where You Live, thanks for asking). My dislike for that particular musical predates my becoming aware of what seems to be a critical consensus that it is “really” a Viennese operetta, proving once again that Viennese operetta is a genre to which I have an instinctive aversion. You’d think Romania being close to Vienna, at least physically, would help out, but I couldn’t help recalling Audra McDonald’s performance of that same song in that same hall last June; she had an easy mastery of the style and sold it (and even conducted a sing-along) in a way that Gheorghiu didn’t quite manage.

Somehow, despite the lovely evening, and my enjoyment, and the audience’s vociferous happiness, I can’t quite listen to Gheorghiu without a certain ironic distance. The grand diva mannerisms, like her somewhat studied on-stage flirtatiousness, seem slightly too calculated. That makes them oddly endearing in a way – she wants so much to have the audience adore her like an old-fashioned grand diva – but also makes her seem to be more in the service of La Gheorghiu than of la Musica, makes her seem not quite to have a deep musical intelligence – I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw doing this type of mixed-bag program. Have I heard too many stories about Gheorghiu’s backstage antics? That arm upraised in triumph at the concluding high note – both arms for a really big finish! – with each repetition it seemed less like the spontaneous exultation of the triumphant athlete that a successful singer is, and more like a gesture calculated to convey the Diva manner. I’d entertain the thought that the old-fashioned Diva cannot be regarded without irony these days, but I don’t think that’s true: Callas reigned in the 1960s, and that’s not a decade that, as it is popularly conceived, seems congenial to her form of the Divaesque. I’ve heard great divas, and I’ve heard great singers, and they move you to a place beyond ironic distance.

Friday night I was at Thick Description Theater’s second show this season, Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul. I didn’t find it as completely successful as their production earlier this year of Blade to the Heat (next up is The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, which I’m really eager to see), though it’s quite entertaining and sustained my interest for its (almost) 90 minute running time. Domingo overcame a slightly halting start, and his charm and energy and presence can carry you past the holes in the concept. But afterwards, waiting for the bus and then the BART train, my doubts loomed larger and I felt that the piece could have used some further work. (Though I should point out that a lot of the audience felt differently – the woman behind me, giggling constantly and chewing gum, was not the only one singing along – is this what it’s like to sit through Mamma Mia!? Anyway, she seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.)

It’s an autobiographical one-man piece about growing up black and, it turns out, gay in Philadelphia in the late 70s. The running theme that ties it all together is soul music. That felt a bit contrived to me. For one thing, that wasn’t the music Colman himself favored as a boy. He keeps asserting that the soul music of the late 70s is his music, the music that created him, but if there’s a moment when he really takes it to heart, we’re not told. The closest he comes is going with his sister to an Earth, Wind, and Fire concert, and realizing how much it unites the black audience.

As he flips through the family’s old vinyl LPs in a crate on an old record player (the show’s madeleine dipped in tea, and one of the few props on the mostly bare stage, along with some family photographs on the back wall), which he discovered abandoned in the basement after his parents moved out of their now crack-destroyed neighborhood, he comes across the Carpenters album that belonged to him – it gets a laugh, being the square white music among all the soulful black acts, and it’s also an early indication that he’s, you know, “different,” but I wonder why an old Carpenters album should be any sillier to us than an old Earth, Wind, and Fire album. And why should his practicing Beethoven on the violin – Beethoven, of all the soul-searching and soul-creating heaven-stormers – be used as evidence of his effeminate, nerdy nature? It’s the standard pop culture link between classical music and the effete, decadent, and esoteric (just as discussed by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise). Why should Beethoven be any more alien to his soul than to any contemporary American’s?

I was reminded of a novel I read quite a few years ago, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, about a well-off middle-class black widow who has to discover her “real identity” by abandoning her comfortable life and discovering her “cultural identity” in the happy and musical poverty of the Caribbean islands. But nothing in that life is what she has actually lived, and she actively resists it in the beginning – so in what sense is that way of life her “authentic being,” in a way that the comfortable middle-class existence she really lived is not? Why should she allow the sentimentally summoned “ancestors” to control her self-identity? (Try to imagine a novel about an Irish widow who discovers that she no longer needs the nice house she and her husband worked for, because what she really truly needs are the sod huts of her suffering ancestors, with their requisite rich poetry (at least according to the stereotypes) and empty stomachs.)

It’s a way of defining one’s allegiance to and identity with a group with which one might have little in common, but to which outsiders insist you belong: you embrace and celebrate the limitations. Domingo mentions that his mother encouraged his classical studies and love of art, and used to put Leontyne Price on the record player on Sunday evenings, until his stepfather said he wanted to hear music that “sounded black” (an interesting sidelight into the various types of racism Ms Price had to face during her great career, though that’s not the point that’s being made here). I had the feeling that what we were seeing here was simply the exhaustion of Otherness – that, worn down by the constant consciousness of his race in a racist society and his sexual orientation in a homophobic society, Domingo decided, based on the importance of soul music to his family, that declaring it important to him was his way of belonging not only to them but to the larger black community. I guess it’s a standard need to define oneself by a group or groups, whether or not the groups really want you, but why shouldn’t he include the Carpenters and Beethoven in the music that defines him? Why limit himself to his family’s or his society’s limitations? Why not include his mother's definition of "music that sounds black" as well as his stepfather's?

Domingo convincingly and swiftly embodies the different members of his family, though some portraits are less successful than others. His sister – a proudly loud-mouthed chainsmoker who makes a point of blasting her music to annoy people – is given a moment at the end, after we also hear that she battled drug addiction for years, when she says she feels like the B side – the flip side of the hit, the side that never gets played – and that maybe that’s why she’s so loud. Well, sure; there’s a certain poignancy there, but also a fairly obvious motive, and as someone who has ridden many buses and trains with people who make a point of being inconsiderate to prove that they exist and are important, it’s the adolescent obviousness of the motive that makes such behavior so incredibly annoying. It would be sentimental of me to pretend otherwise. I can’t muster too much sympathy with that sort of self-indulgence.

But the portrayal of the mother and stepfather are particularly interesting and moving, and the emotional high point of the show – the moment when the use of soul music didn’t seem like just an arbitrary gimmick to tie loose scenes together – is when both parents are slowly dying, each conscious that both are slowly dying, when the mother encourages her husband to sing Gladys Knight’s You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me the way he used to. It’s a deeply personal moment, painful and beautiful. There are other moments, however, when the personal moments are, to be somewhat harsh, less interesting. That’s a hazard in telling your own story. I’m sure it was profoundly significant and moving to Domingo when he came out to his family and they accepted him, but from a theatrical point of view it’s a story we’ve seen too many times before, and it feels a bit dated – though of course he’s talking about a couple of decades ago, and that’s already another era.

And there is a certain celebration of datedness here. At the end, we find out about a younger brother, who hasn’t been mentioned before, and he explains that when the parents moved they left the LPs in the basement, hoping some other family might enjoy them, because they had bought all the old music on CD at Virgin Records years before. This is meant to be sort of a comic moment, and the solution to the mystery of how his parents could abandon their past, but as soon as Domingo mentioned the abandoned LPs at the very beginning of the show I had already thought, well, they probably replaced the old albums with CDs. Times change and so does technology.

There’s a certain amount of dwelling on telling ephemera of the time (certain types of colored aluminum drinkware, certain ways of doing one’s hair or entertaining oneself) that can seem like easy nostalgia, a shared identity of age that really only seems shared. Except for a brief dismissal by the stepfather, there’s no mention of rap music, which has been around for decades now (and is also used by many as a signifier of black identity, and as such, like rock and soul, is quite popular with the corporations trying to sell us stuff). Despite his repeated assertions that the music made him, this piece isn’t really about that specific music – it’s about what was playing on the radio when he was young, when people he loved were still around to enjoy it.

Then the evening before that (we’re back to Thursday now) I went down to Davies for the San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra had recovered splendidly from the exhaustion of Opening the Season the night before. I did see a few women whose hilariously grotesque costumes made me think the Season Opener might be a two-day affair. It was a great beginning for the real start, the musical start, of the Symphony's exciting season, even though Tilson Thomas insisted on picking up the microphone before opening with Ligeti’s Lontano. He proceeded to talk mostly about Stockhausen. OK, he wasn’t quite as disjointed as I’m making him sound – his point was that Ligeti was trying to create with an orchestra the sounds and textures that Stockhausen created electronically – but did this gorgeous swelling beast really need to be defanged with the little lecture, putting it all in perspective? Let the gorgeous sounds speak for themselves. Ligeti and Berlioz, much as I love the recordings of their music, really strike me as two composers whose works have a different quality, more vivid and detailed and ravishingly alive, when heard in person. I'm glad San Francisco Symphony is including more Ligeti in its programming; the Requiem is coming up later in the season.

The gaminesque Labeque sisters, Katia and Marielle, then played the Poulenc Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra. I haven’t heard les Labeques all that often, but I’ve always liked them, mostly because I remember reading a review in the Boston Globe (probably by Richard Dyer) that mentioned they were one of the few soloists he had ever seen return to the hall after their part of the program just to listen to the rest of the music. The Poulenc is a delightful mélange, and it reminded me of the story that John Adams wrote his Chamber Symphony while studying a Schoenberg score and hearing a Looney Tunes cartoon that his son was watching in another room – not because of those specific influences, but just because of that free-ranging grasp of different styles, from knotty to nutty. Throw in the Prokofiev 5 after the intermission, and that’s a nice evening. I was glad that in the Prokofiev Tilson Thomas avoided his tendency of late to smash things out. I thought it was really nicely balanced.

At home on Saturday, killing time before the theater – which is basically all I ever do – I dug into the CD pile and pulled out a recent release of Porgy and Bess – a recent release, but an old performance (brought to me like Alcestis from the grave), featuring Leontyne Price and William Warfield in the leads. It was the touring version which gave Price her first big break, though after that I don’t think she sang Bess much, no doubt to avoid being racially typecast. The opera underwent some adaptations and adjustments during and after its first run, and there were several versions floating around until the Houston Grand Opera revival in 1976 sort of set the text. This version differs slightly from the now familiar one not only occasionally in text but also in feel – the drums have more of the African sound so familiar to us nowadays from our world-music CDs, and there’s a jazzier feel all around, and not just because Cab Calloway plays Sportin’ Life. Porgy and Bess was the first opera I ever saw, so I have a special fondness for it, and though many consider it the Great American Opera I know that others dismiss it, partly based on its mixed-culture origins. Whatever its impurity, to me it creates its own cultural field, and is deeply moving, and a beautiful thing.

I'll to the well-trod stage anon

So we all know the ironic paradox of capitalism: when you have a job you have money but no time, and when you don’t have a job, you have time but no money. Yet somehow, in my talented way, I’ve ended up with a job and no money. Ideally, that would be the other way around. Could there be some link between this state and the fact that I’ve had a month or two of being at the theater three to five nights a week? I suppose I can’t blame all my money woes on plumbing disasters and unexpected root canals. So here’s the blogging corollary to the paradox, at least for theater-goers: when you are out attending things to blog about, you don’t actually have enough time left to blog about them.

Also, I have to admit, I was glued to Dancing with the Stars on my few free evenings. I’m guessing this show is a huge hit now, since I see it cited more and more frequently as evidence that The End Is Near, which is utterly ridiculous. Salon.com had an article a couple of weeks ago about how great it is to watch your pennies in the grocery store and just generally not need things; I can see the beauty of a St Francis approach to life, but to me this article already had too much of a whiff of “poverty might be fun for a while” – and it sure can be, when it’s voluntary – and when the writer listed the hit status of DWTS as evidence of cultural decline – there was only one other example given, equally flimsy, so much so that I can’t even remember what it was – I just didn’t bother reading any further, so though the writer continued to have spiritual epiphanies while choosing the less expensive bag of dried beans, I can’t tell you what exactly her revelations were. Even Joan Acocella, whom I normally love, wrote an oddly sour and, to my mind, uncomprehending article about DWTS in a recent New Yorker. You want cultural decline? How about the inexplicable success of Madonna, who can’t sing, can’t act, can’t dance, and isn’t even very attractive? She’s the Ronald Reagan of pop. Both blights arose at the same time; both had, as their only discernable talent, a kind of genius at manipulating the always gullible media and public perceptions; and both of them had voices that made me run across the room to shut off the TV or radio. I clearly was not seeing, or was not susceptible to, whatever was charming the rest of America.

The other thing slowing me down this particular week is that I’ve finally put down the buggy whip and pushed aside the bear-grease pomade in order to install DSL on my home computer. I was assuming that my dial-up connection would work until I actually installed DSL, but as with so many assumptions, I was wrong. So I’ve had no home Internet for almost a week. I guess I can file that under “poverty might be fun – and spiritually uplifting! – for a while”, but I really just want my Internet back. And I haven't even been home to reap any spiritual benefits from all the free time I would supposedly gain, and which I would probably need to spend doing housework anyway, my abode having reached a state that even I consider disgraceful. I plan to install DSL this weekend, and then launch a YouTube orgy. Yes, if you’ve sent me a video or link to a video anytime since, oh, forever, I will at last be able to watch it. I don’t know why it takes me so long to do these things. I don’t really like gadgets and really dislike setting them up. I just don’t even know where to begin with most of them. (So big thanks once again to CMB for helping me out here.) It doesn’t help that once I actually realize it might be a good idea to read and follow the instructions, they usually turn out to be in diagram form. Last time I was forced to add staples to the copy machine, I not only cursed like a drunken sailor’s even drunker parrot, I accidentally smashed two staple cartridges before getting my third and final cartridge correctly inserted. The key was figuring out that they had four different diagrams, and I was using the wrong one. That was one of the keys, anyway. I still don’t know why they had four different diagrams. I’m just pretending the whole thing never happened.

One thing I can do is alphabetize, so you’ll notice I’ve re-arranged the blogroll. To dazzle the simple natives with my high-level skill, I ignored introductory articles while alphabetizing (so that, for example, An Unamplified Voice is under Unamplified, not An). Don’t let anyone ever tell you that a degree in English is not useful! You’ll also notice a few new blogs there, so check them out, and thanks to those bloggers for adding me. (If you link to me and I don’t know it, please let me know and I’ll add you.)

There’s I’d Rather Be Sleeping (But Opera Is Keeping Me Awake), which you can find to the right under Opera Is Keeping Me Awake. Susan is a super at the New Jersey opera and mother of a young son as well as a person with a job (I know! I get exhausted just reading about it!), and she’s a fellow Nathan Gunn fan, so there are lots of NG links, including some of those YouTube things I will finally get to see, though if I now have the capability, something even newer must be just around the bend, which I will learn to use in about five years.

Opera Tattler is another Bay Area blogger who reviews performances and their audiences, which I love, because it makes me feel I’m not just an unrecognized Louis XIV who wishes to banish all those strange beings with their rustling programs and inane whispers. I’ve occasionally thought about writing a concert review that was all about the audience noises rather than all that racket on stage: “The piece began, conventionally enough, with a tremolo effect in the lower mezzanine, though the orchestration was varied from the conventional seat-shifting and program-rustling by the addition of an amusingly pizzicato purse-zipping. After an almost concerto-like interlude for solo cellophane-wrapped hard-candy, the piece concludes with a rousing fugue for hacking cough that uses the spatial arrangements of the hall to intriguing effect. I would be remiss not to mention the fine job done by the poignant whispering chorus of possibly senile but certainly dithering gray-haired ladies. . . .” This is how I entertain myself, in lieu of punching people (or working on my anger issues). I hope audiences will behave better knowing that OT is on the QT, marking their transgressions.

Also check out a singer’s life as lived by Anne-Carolyn Bird, and don’t think I haven’t been wishing for weeks now that I could hear her sing Cunegonde at Wolf Trap. Candide is one of my favorite musicals (a term I will use here for the sake of convenience, since I’m only minimally interested in arguing what square peg fits into which round hole). I once saw a performance at the Huntington Theater in Boston in which the actor playing Candide gave such a wonderful reading of the line, “I cannot believe that I have just killed two men! I – who have a heart that is filled with love!” that my abrupt and fortissimo laugh made him, for just a split second, go out of character. One of my favorite theatrical memories, and oddly enough I've seen performances that omit the line; such is the complex textual history of Candide. . . . Anyway, you can also read about the Bhakti Project here. And you can look for her in the forthcoming recording of the Wolf Trap-commissioned Volpone, set by John Musto to Ben Jonson’s play as adapted by Mark Campbell, and don’t think that last summer I wasn’t wishing I could hear that. I checked Amazon to see if the recording was listed, but all they offered me were copies of the play and, for some reason, T-shirts from American Apparel. But from what I hear, Volpone is an outstanding addition to the admittedly small yet semi-distinguished company of Ben Jonson operas. Poor Ben Jonson! Swamped by Shakespeare even as an opera source. Maybe there’s a forthcoming version of The Alchemist or Every Man in His Humour, but somehow I think not. It’s actually difficult to find a collection of his complete plays– I haven’t managed to – and if you discount the occasional used copy of the now ancient two-volume Everyman set, with the tiny tiny type and the abbreviated speaker names (why did they ever do that?), it’s well-nigh impossible. Did Jonson foresee his fate when he wrote that WS was “not for an age, but for all time,” or did he just think to himself, “Nice phrase! Top that, dead William!” Jonson was prodigious as a sudden-springing mushroom after rain, but he’s competing with a mushroom cloud.

Tyger Tyger burning bright, Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but not so much at my house. Christmas ornaments, being shiny, fragile, all about aesthetics, often expensive, and essentially useless, are the kind of thing I’m simpatico with, but this year I didn’t even put the tree up, so I will not be hanging that shining star upon the highest bough any time soon. I thought the weekend after Thanksgiving was too soon, since we still had a week of November to go, and then I came down with The Head Cold That Would Not Die on top of everything else, and it seemed that my little energy and less time should be directed elsewhere, and the moment slipped by. I don’t even get a real tree, which requires coordinating efforts with someone who can drive; I just lug the box up from the basement and put the tree together. Only God can make a tree my ass. (It turns out I’m allergic to pine anyway. I once washed the kitchen floor with Pinesol and couldn’t breathe in there for a week afterwards. Who knew it actually contained pine?)

So an artificial tree is definitely the way for me to go, and artificial seems suited to the season anyway, though this summer I did discover the joy of chopping down real trees. I suddenly noticed that the industrious squirrels had planted a walnut tree by the side wall and, under cover of the lemon tree, it had gotten so tall it blocked the light from my apricot trees. I could either spend $25 on an axe now or put off dealing with it and spend hundreds of dollars later for professional tree removal. Down I went to Home Depot and got my axe, and I discovered my inner pioneer. If I didn’t love trees so much I’d be on a bare lot right now. Some of my friends had a very odd reaction to the axe. I would mention buying it as one of several things I had been up to lately, but that’s the only thing they would mention in their replies, with strangely hostile comedy. I don’t know why exactly. Either it conjured up an image of can-do masculinity not usually associated with me (and you know how people love to keep others in their niches), or they just did not like the idea of me with sharp weapons to hand.

Until three days before Christmas, when I received another from a depressed friend, I had received exactly one card, though I have to say it was from the people I’ve had the deepest, most prolonged relationship with this year – my plumbers. Santa is flying through the air, his sleigh laden with sinks, hot water heaters, and other plumbing paraphernalia – the artist was too tasteful to include a toilet, but euphemistically in its place is a line for snaking out the sewer pipes, a sight I became all too familiar with this year. My traditional Christmas wheat seeds didn’t sprout, except for one or two sickly pale sprouts, which clearly were not going to stand up to the gummy mold taking over the bowl. So there was no greenery to decorate the nativity scene, which stayed boxed anyway. Even Macy's Holiday Lane, with which I have a childish fascination, ended up disappointing me; by the time I got there ready to buy, all the Eric Cartman ornaments were gone, and so was most everything else. The mess around here is depressingly lacking in seasonal glitter.

But I have been listening to lots and lots of Christmas music, for which I have a weakness, and not just Handel or Heinrich Schutz, either. I have piles of it (though at least one pile seems to have disappeared into the general mess – that’s the sort of thing I should be working on, and that’s why I didn’t put up the tree – and it bugs me because I know L’Enfance du Christ is in that pile, and I’m on a Berlioz kick). Many of them are of the “opera singers do Christmas” variety (and who would miss out on Callas’s beloved Christmas album? Has any singer ever surpassed La Divina’s piercing rendition of Rudolph’s anguish?), though I range into other fields. I’m always on the lookout to add a few new Christmas albums each year. I saw one on Amazon that was credited to Twentieth Century Masters. I was eagerly expecting Milton Babbitt’s “I Don’t Care If You Listen to My Variations on Frosty the Snowman” or, at a minimum, Philip Glass’s Little Drummer Boy, but the CD turned out to have performances by Alvin and the Chipmunks and suchlike. I resisted the temptation. But when I finish Cairn’s Berlioz biography, my next music book will be The Rest Is Noise, and believe you me, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an appearance by the Chipmunks.

It’s lucky for me I like Christmas music, because it’s ubiquitous – even Noah’s Bagels was playing O Tannenbaum this afternoon. Before work this morning I was walking around the Embarcadero Center, and I heard version after version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, an odd choice for a mall since it is the most deeply melancholy of all Christmas songs, even in the dance remix version they were playing. I can only assume people are so used to the song they don’t listen to the lyrics anymore, or hear the melody once they’ve recognized the song. This year of all hopeless years in America it seems desperate to dream that next year all our troubles will be far away, and we should be so lucky as to muddle through somehow. I don’t know how shoppers hearing this song don’t end up in an embryonic curl on the floor, sobbing for their desolated lives. I’m guessing that’s not what the malls have in mind.

That’s why in malltown we usually get the bright tunes, always carefully secular (that is definitely not a complaint – it seems too grossly ironic to hear about the impoverished little child in the manger while you’re stepping over the homeless slumped in the odd corners so that you can reach the sales before they all disappear – the sales, that is; the homeless aren’t going away anytime soon). The problem, at least for those who pay attention to the music, is that most of the popular secular songs were written in the 1950s, so they’re filled with that decade’s creeping paranoia and barely repressed twisted sexual politics. You’d better watch out! You’d better not cry! (We’re all happy here in the Homeland!) Guess who’s coming to town – the big man in red who believes in the redistribution of wealth! He has you under total surveillance! In case you miss the point, he’s got that big Karl Marx beard, and if you’re bad you get a lump of coal – an obvious symbol of the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the crushing of the proletariat. But that’s better than the creepy sexual innuendo, sung by a child who doesn’t quite realize what she’s seeing, in I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, an unnerving song that is just a short step away from I Saw Mommy Blowing Santa in the Parking Lot for a Hit of Meth. Then there’s Santa Baby. It turned up on a “Cool Christmas” compilation I bought a few years ago. I listened to it again recently, paying special attention to the lyrics. It appears to be about a prostitute or upper-middle-class housewife of some sort who, in exchange for a variety of luxury goods, is offering Santa anal intercourse. Ho ho ho indeed.

Then there are all the songs about snow. I find these slightly disorienting in an area where the cold end of the year means that the golden hills of summer are glazed green by winter rains. In the short December days I don’t see my house while it’s light except for the weekends, so it wasn’t until I went out to sweep up the leaves last Sunday that I realized I still had roses blooming – lo, how a rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung! Although some of the cities around here are obviously arbitrarily named (Walnut Creek: neither a walnut nor a creek!), Castro Valley, where I grew up, is in fact a valley – kind of like Florence, only without the Renaissance – that once belonged to a ranching family named Castro. And only once, for one afternoon in my childhood, was it cold enough for something like snowflakes to fall. My mother put us all in the car and drove us up to the hilly part of town where it was coldest so we could watch the flakes fall. They melted away as soon as they touched the ground, and I feel like Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembering that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Years ago, when I heard the premiere of Harbison’s cantata for Christmas, The Flight into Egypt, he gave an interview in which he mentioned that his intention was to present the darker side of Christmas, especially in these times when the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. He makes a good point, but I wonder if he was mostly thinking of the secular songs that have taken over, by commercial necessity. Many of the old carols reflect a subtle disjunction between what is and what should, or could, be. They are filled with questions: What child is this? Yonder peasant, who is he? Who were the first to cry Noel? Mary, did you know? And what was in those ships all three on Christmas Day in the morning? Do you hear what I hear? And who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? They shift uneasily from place to place, imploring, commanding, seeking a different destiny: O come, O come Emmanuel; come, thou fount of every blessing; go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere; over the river and through the woods; field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star; hasten now, good folk of the village; I wonder as I wander. And they reflect the muted glories and hidden wonders in the mundane. All is calm, all is bright; how still we see thee lie; above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. So many of them emphasize how tiny and helpless the small child in the manger is. I think to take in the power of that image you don’t need to be a Christian of any sort, and in fact it might even help if you have no belief that the child is God or some variant thereof, but just a new generation of the dispossessed, born to the dispossessed.

No matter how filled with materialism, or even joyous celebration, your Christmas might be, at the day’s core is always the image of the vulnerable child, in the dead of winter. That might be why Christmas music elicits tears so easily. Perhaps the longing for a lost past is too overwhelming, or the longing for a redemption that has never arrived, unless the isolated moments of stillness are all the redemption we have. I’ve pretty much checked out of Christmas this year; the machine was just too much for me, though I’m trying to go pleasantly and decently through the days. I am a poor boy too.

hey there -- you with the stars in your eyes

I walked past a movie theater today and its marquee was advertising both the regular feature and the Friday night midnight movie, so it read:

The Jane Austen Book Club
Night of the Creeps

That is exactly how the previews for that movie make me feel!

In further blog-related hilarity (I’ve had another visit with the plumber, and this time he brought his camera guy, and when you hear “Sorry, but we may need to adjust the estimate” with a friendly clap on the shoulder, you start desperately searching for hilarity of any kind), I’ve finally had my first (to my knowledge) “Nathan Gunn naked” hit on Google, which seems like sort of an opera blogger's bar mitzvah. I also had “David Adam Moore shirtless”; Moore was Gunn’s replacement as Billy Budd in the Pittsburgh production I saw last May. I guess I’ll know he’s had his big breakthrough moment when the search graduates to “David Adam Moore naked”.

Next up on the opera front is the opening night (I know there are people who call these things “the prima” but I just can’t bring myself to do it; insidery jargon fascinates me, but the implication in using it is that you’re an insider) of Appomattox. On the bus last night I ended up talking to two ushers who had been at a dress rehearsal. I asked what they thought; the verdict was that one would like it if one liked Philip Glass. That’s about as insidery as I’m going to get. So let me talk about Dancing with the Stars, which I stumbled onto last spring several weeks before the finale, and to which I rapidly became addicted. This time around I was ready with my popcorn before the big opening night (the prima, as it were). Unlike a certain popular singing competition (yes, American Idol, I’m staring at you – don’t you ignore me!), it is pleasantly free of nasty undercurrents, and the judges actually say helpful things, as opposed to “I dunno, dawg – it was a little pitchy,” which is probably as helpful to the singer as it is clear to the audience. On Dancing with the Stars, the judges actually give useful, specific technical advice that helps the viewers understand what to look for, things like “you need to keep your shoulders back.” And they will praise whatever they can, even if it’s clearly a desperate reach (the only thing that really bugs me about the show is the audience booing at the slightest hint of criticism – maybe this really is the generation that received trophies just for showing up). Of course, there’s a difference between dealing with desperate unknowns hungry to break into pop music and established celebrities who are larking in a highly specialized art form. Still, in the words of the immortal Swan of Avon, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. I wish Bruno would tone down some of the Roberto Benigni-style effusions, but the judges usually make astute and even subtle points (again, what a contrast to the paradigmatic trio), as when they told Cameron Mathison that his classically handsome looks created expectations of perfection that worked against his beginner’s level of skill, or when Len told the Cheetah Girl (who initially bugged me but is now winning me over by quantum leaps) not to rely overmuch on her obvious skill at fast and flash. My preference for the constructive, technically clear approach as opposed to snark-and-stab may only be due to the intense tenderheartedness of my nature, however. I just don’t know if I have the emotional strength to deal with reality shows. I hated to see sweet Josie the swimsuit model leave after the first week, and not just because my favorite moment that week was when she said, “I think dancing is like this” and flung her arms out and her partner, who had already wittily described her as “deceptively unfit”, had to suppress the look of panic and horror on his face. (Possible runner-up moment: Jonathan “I’m the perfect gentleman of ballroom” muttering “cameracameracamera” to Marie Osmond, his chatty and easily distracted partner, during the opening pan of the cast – by the way, did anyone have to explain to her what Carrie Ann meant by calling her a “cougar”?) And then this week, continuing the ruthless purge of models, Albert Reed was booted. Like everyone else except Abercrombie cultists, I had to look him up when the cast list was announced. I like to think I don’t make assumptions about people, but I guess the surfer/male model combo did not lead me to expect his good-humored, low-key charm; that plus his dancing skills had me big-time man-crushing on Albert even before his elderly grandmother told him how proud his grandpa would be. Who could resist that? I was also amused by the two women from the audience who were so excited that he danced with an open shirt the first week: Ladies, being a surfer/Abercrombie model pretty much means that taking your shirt off is a major professional skill. Some day you will find out about The Google, and then you can learn all about it. (I was also amused to see that Cameron Mathison was working the open-shirt look the second week. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.) So once again I have to sit the nation down for a stern talking-to: America, just what the hell are you thinking? Do we have to have this conversation after every single election? You boot Albert and leave me with Wayne Newton? Not to be unkind since it’s the way of all flesh, but many of us watch these things on big-screen or even HD TV, and there are just certain people, iconic entertainers though they may be, beloved and worthy human beings though they undoubtedly are, who, um, are not at their scenic best on either big screens or high definition television. Yes, I’m a shallow man. A shallow, shallow man. No, I don’t really have a problem with that. Wayne Newton is also just a really clunky dancer. I realize there’s the Jerry Springer Memorial Spunky Older Guy Who Isn’t Very Good But Goes Farther Than Expected spot, but come on. Though I have to admit, I basically like Wayne, and am only reacting this way because of the Albert thing. And doesn’t Scary Spice need to go practice whatever it was the Spice Girls did for their big, long-awaited, much-anticipated, 38-second-sell-out reunion? But even her “look at me, I’m naughty” brand of faux-outrageousness is winning me over, or at least not causing me active revulsion as it did at first. And I wanted to hate billionaire basketball-team owner Mark Cuban, but I really can’t. That nice billionaire is just trying so darn hard! I think maybe I should always come in on these things towards the end, since the early departures are so painful for me to watch. I will probably get over the Albert thing (but can I ever really trust America’s voting again?) and learn once more to love, laugh, and tune in next week, only to find myself unexpectedly liking someone else who had put me off, and then I have to go through the whole "stages of grieving for reality-show stars who are better off than I'll ever be” thing all over again. All this sympathy for people I was cheerfully looking forward to hating and ridiculing reminds me of the great line from The Rules of the Game: “Everyone has his reasons; that’s the terrible thing about life,” which might be my favorite movie line of all time.

the fat lady adjusts her cup and steps to the plate

A friend of mine once pointed out that I’m the only person he knows who critiques the performance of the national anthem at each baseball game. Here comes another shameful musical confession: I love the Star-Spangled Banner. I love that its tune is an eighteenth-century drinking song, I love that no one can remember the convoluted words, I love that it’s about Baltimore (the home of Cal Ripken, John Waters, crabcakes, and kickass collections of Matisse and outsider art), I love that audiences always applaud the wrong high note, and most of all I love that no one can sing it. A couple of years ago I was at the annual World Series party given by friends of mine and when Josh Groban didn’t even attempt the high note I announced that he was a pussy. Yes, beer was involved – kids, beer and baseball are a deadly mix! The woman sitting next to me, whom I didn’t know (at this point in the story a female friend of mine started laughing at me uncontrollably and justifiably; at this point in reality I thought to myself, Whoa! Dude! Slow down on the beer! They haven’t even thrown the first pitch!), explained that she didn’t mind that I used that word but she really objected when her boyfriend said things like “what a typical woman.” It became pretty clear that their whole relationship consisted of bickering, leading me to think that they’d be either married or split in a year; at the next year’s party he was there alone. Ironically I never think of “pussy” as a word referring to women, but only as one directed towards guys. I think this because it was regularly directed at me on the playground, which is why I do not have that boyhood nostalgia about baseball or any other sport (or nostalgia about boyhood, either). I recently heard Simon Williams give a fascinating lecture to the Wagner Society, and at one point, almost as an aside, he suggested that perhaps the reason opera audiences crave traditional realistic productions is that it reminds them of the ones they saw when they first fell in love with opera at a young age. This is an interesting theory, though I suppose there’s no way to test it outside of applying a universal madeleine, and it would go far to explain the infantile nostalgia of most opera audiences and why I lack it, since I was in my 20s before I saw much opera, and I saw about half a dozen offbeat works (Rameau’s Zoroastre, for one) and Peter Sellars stagings before I saw a mainstream, conservative, and entirely inadequate production (Rigoletto done by the Met tour in Boston). The theory also makes me wonder if future audiences raised on regie theater will grow up bemoaning the lack of on-stage defecation and the reluctance of the inadequate current generation of singers to perform in their underpants. Anyway that was around the same age when, to paraphrase one of Larkin’s essays, I realized it was not sports but other children I hated. In 1986, after another legendary Red Sox loss in the World Series, I saw that, contrary to popular belief, sports are not about winning but about loss, and I finally understood. As a resident of Boston, of course what the sports writers called the Carmine Hose, those poster boys for sports as loss, became my team, though I’m actually fairly casual about my baseball loyalties, another result of not being a boyhood fan. But I just can’t cotton to the Yankees. I finally saw a game on TV this season (more and more of them are only appearing on cable stations I don’t get, and that includes ESPN) and even though the Oakland A’s put their names on their home uniforms, the Yankees do not even put them on their visitor uniforms. Please. There’s a point where tradition becomes affectation and arrogance and then finally veers off into delusion (something proponents of “traditional” staging might remember).

I have been to one game so far this year. The Giants lost to the Dodgers and the Sippy Cups performed the anthem and Take Me Out to the Ballgame for the seventh-inning stretch. The audience didn’t seem to like them. I don’t know why. I thought they did a clever job within the limits of what they could do (no high notes here!). I did understand why the old man next to us looked pained at their rocked-up version. There’s always the next performance.

I can’t remember the anthems for the last games I saw live last regular season, but I remember the games. First the A’s played the Angels in one of the best games I’ve ever seen. My favorite Barry Zito was pitching, the post-season was at stake, the game was electric and ran into extra innings, and there would be a (literal) fireworks show afterward, and yet I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I was seated next to an enormously fat father and his adult son. The old man was bad enough, but then he switched (I guess so he could slop over into the aisle) and the even fatter son sat next to me. I’m not the slip of a lad I used to be and pretty much need the whole seat, but this guy was so fat he bulged over into about a third of my space so that I was sitting at a 45 degree angle most of the night. I could feel the damp heat rising from his body. I could also smell first the strong laundry soap he used, then the orange glop on his nachos, and then the nacho cheese gas he kept passing. I was with a friend and his six-year-old son and I tried suggesting that his son, being a small person, switch seats with me. My friend misunderstood and switched seats with his son himself so that I was now sandwiched between two grown men instead of one. (Later he explained that he was afraid his son would make some loud comment about the man’s size or smell; I had to admit he had a point.) If that game were on DVD I would buy it, but I was in agony during it and because it was such a good game it wasn’t until almost the very end that the stadium emptied out enough for me to move over a few seats. That’s the problem with living in the moment: so often the moment is just excruciating. We did reunite under more physically comfortable circumstances for a first-round play-off game, but Zito, pitching again, was having an off day and the whole thing was a bit of a letdown even before the A’s were eliminated.

I was thrilled that Zito joined the Giants, since I had feared he would jump to the Yankees. Perhaps he learned from others who made the switch and ended up the worse (hello, Jason Giambi). I opened the sports page one day last January and there was a full page ad from Zito thanking the players, management, and fans of the A’s and the journalists who covered them. I’ve never seen any player do anything like that. He also is actively involved in helping wounded vets and their families who aren’t getting the help they should from the government that put them in the line of fire. Very classy guy!

I also ended up at the Giants’ last regular season game. In the few days between my buying the tickets and the actual game, the Giants went from wild-card contenders to possible spoilers to a team just playing out the string, which means I overpaid for the tickets. I hear people complain about theater ticket prices, but a few days before the game I had paid around $60 to sit about five feet away from Dawn Upshaw performing at Davies Hall and I spent almost as much to sit about a mile above Barry Bonds, and that’s not so far from the usual price for those seats. Plus I don’t think Davies Hall charges as much for beer. It was a nice way to spend a sunny fall afternoon, but the Giants lost and when I got back home my neighbor, who was having a birthday party for his children, brought over a plate of food for me and told me that he was sending his senile father back to the Philippines. In my years in this house I’ve watched this old man get increasingly obsessive about leaves and greenery to the point where he physically attacked me while I was raking up my lawn. You don’t feel at your manly best knocking down an old guy, but then he’s not that much older than I am and I’m not going to be attacked on my own property. His son and I actually kind of bonded over it. I’m a quiet and considerate neighbor, I must say, and I have several times cut back my trees at great expense and I regularly sweep their driveway during my weekly clean-up, but I’m not willing to cut everything down and pave it over with concrete because of a nutjob’s obsession. What can you do with someone who goes out in a storm to sweep leaves? Are they that potent a reminder of impending death? I realized long ago that there was no real solution here, since basically this is an aesthetic difference: he wants to see completely bare concrete, and I think a few golden birch leaves are always preferable to dead pavement. My somewhat malicious diagnosis of Alzheimer’s turned out to be accurate, which added to the feeling of a season ending when I heard that his very patient son couldn’t take anymore. I did notice yesterday that apparently the old man is back, though he looks much deteriorated. It ain’t over till it’s over.

pop goes the weasel

I watched American Idol this week, after seeing nothing but the results show at V’s for what may be months, but she tipped me off to the premiere of a commercial done by David Mamet so I was once again snared in the web, semi-inexplicably, since I’m not much of a Mamet fan. Melinda and Jordin were my favorites, as I expected; everyone sounded pretty much exactly as I would have guessed, which made me feel I hadn’t really been missing much so far, though I was sorry to miss American Songbook week, since those are the only songs they do that I’m familiar with. The show makes for uneasy viewing, what with the endless kapok and the constant low-level, low-lying sniping among the judges and the contestants and slick Mr. Seacrest. Simon looked physically uncomfortable during some of the worse performances, and I can’t blame him. (Though I do side with the undistinguished Chris on his dispute with Simon about "nasally" as a distinct vocal style; I always describe the country music I do like as "the nasal, twangy old stuff.") Sanjaya seems to believe he’s in on the joke, and I don’t think he really is. I also noticed that when the bottom three had to stand on stage for the agonizingly prolonged period before hearing their fate as determined by the always astute American voting public, Blake and LaKisha held hands with each other but not Sanjaya. In any case he’s now gone, which is too bad in a way because I was hoping that during Sondheim week I’d get to hear him singing “I’m Still Here.” On the other hand, V’s theory that country week usually results in the premature booting of a black woman left us edgy about LaKisha’s fate, so Sanjaya’s farewell was a relief. Afterwards I channel-surfed and found the results show for Dancing with the Stars, another show I haven't really watched but which seemed much more enjoyable and good-natured all around. And that Apolo Anton Ohno is quite the charmer – I wouldn’t be surprised if agents were calling him about his post-Olympic career.

As for the Mamet commercial, if I hadn’t known about it – well, if I hadn’t known about it, I wouldn’t have watched it, because of all commercials, those for cars are the worst (something about the automobile drains all humor from ad agencies and their clients) and that’s why God invented picture-in-picture. I’ve really liked some of Mamet’s plays (American Buffalo, of course the inevitable Glengarry), had mixed feelings about others (Oleanna – I know the professor is supposed to be arrogant, but meeting with that woman for a third time without at least one witness? Sorry – even though I can accept male/female twins being mistaken for each other, baby-switching at birth, and reunions after decades, that just stretches my suspension of disbelief to the snapping point), and disliked most of his movies (Spanish Prisoner and House of Games – does he marry women who can’t act, or can’t he direct them?). In the ad, two pretty but grizzled guys pull their cars up next to each other on a dark, rain-slick street and, in a brief dialogue filled with repetition and catchphrases, say that whatever brand paid for the ad is faster or something than some luxury car, and the whole thing seemed like a pretty concise parody of Mamet. When you develop a very simple, highly rhythmic form, its extreme stylization can end up making everything sound alike, or like self-parody. This is a problem with a lot of Hemingway and with some of the so-called minimalist composers. I hope they paid Mamet a lot and he enjoys the new vacation home or whatever, but lots of current ads are more clever and attention-grabbing, though crafted like the great cathedrals by anonymous artisans (I particularly like the ad for Jack-in-the-Box in which an emotionally overwrought wife angrily confronts her husband over the dipping sauce stain on his shirt and he insists that he’s innocent of dipper dining without her, and the stains are from his cheating ways with his secretary Jessica. It cracks me up every time, just like the card scene in The Lady Eve.) Of course, I’m still not about to eat at Jack-in-the-Box, so maybe getting my attention isn’t enough.

Since I’m dispensing pop culture insights today based on absolutely minimal viewing time, I have a message for the people behind All My Children: the Freddy is Zarf is Zoe transsexual plot just isn’t working (I almost put “is dragging on” but I’m too tasteful for such low humor), and ironically the reason is all about style. People use “soap opera” to describe a certain type of plot, mostly involving extravagant complications among a multi-generation extended family, but the Oresteia falls into that category too; soap opera is a style, not a substance. They have a flat, slow-moving, quasi-realist performance quality that plays off the twisting storylines (perhaps this is the effect Mamet is trying for, less successfully, with the roles his wives play). The Agnes Nixon soaps in particular have a history of featuring consciousness-raising “social problem” stories and treating them in an earnest tone that is far removed from shock and satire, no matter how bizarre the storyline. And this is where they go wrong with Zarf, the tormented glam rocker who thinks he might be happier as Zoe and has been launching into agony explanations for months in Pine Valley in a style that seems to be founded on some of the more hysterical Joan Crawford films. In other words, he’s being extravagant with extravagant material, so he doesn’t fit into an aesthetic that presents a subdued normality within an extravagant world. After a while the actor’s camp stylings, which work initially as parody, make him stick out in a world based on a completely different aesthetic, and since they stick out, the viewer becomes more conscious of a certain, shall we say, repetitious quality in them; camp is not a style that does slow-moving well. Ironically, I’ve worked with some people that I knew and some that I guessed to be transsexuals, and they’re pretty much like everyone else, only sometimes a little lumpier.

I am a pyrite god!

I'll get back to talking about opera shortly, but first: I was a little surprised the other day to receive an e-mail from Craig Cantin of American Idol Bloggers, inviting your humbly Reverberating Hills to become an Official American Idol Blog. ("Our intent is to bring American Idol bloggers closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community. Would you be interested in joining American Idol Bloggers ?")

Although making a positive contribution to the Internet community is the fondest desire of my heart, I wasn't really sure why they were asking me. It's not as if I've written lots of posts saying "OMG OMG OMG Simon was so mean to those ugly untalented freaks!!!!" or "What was Paula on? Bitch, please!!!" Was it my incisive comments on Schlingensief's Parsifal? or my love of Ligeti and Elliott Carter? Then I remembered that very early on I wrote a brief entry that mentioned AI, grandly proclaiming that it wasn't really my kind of music. Craig Cantin is one thorough researcher! Although it still isn't really my kind of music, I have a confession: I did end up watching it last year, if not faithfully then as regularly as I watch any TV show that isn't the Simpsons. This was partly because every Wednesday at V's house I was drawn into her sordid, degraded world of reality television (don't deny it, you know it's true) and partly because I was extremely sick with the flu one Tuesday and AI was the only thing I could follow on TV and I discovered that once you figure out the names and personalities you don't need anything else.

Also, I was intensely amused by V's Iago-like hatred (described by Coleridge as "motiveless malignancy") of Ace Young, last year's resident pretty boy. Normally she conveys a calm, rational view of the world's irrationality, as if she knows that, the Good Lord willing and with some hard work, she'll get those crops in on time and save the farm, once she's finished fixing the thresher. (If you're wondering where I am, figure that this charming Quaker farm in the Midwest is equipped with a drafty garret, in which you see a useless underemployed aesthete, shivering slightly and moaning softly as in a fog, having squandered everything on absinthe and Aubrey Beardsley prints.) That's why it was so funny to see her face darken as with a great cloud of locusts when he and his hair would come on screen, waiting for the right moment to unleash his high voice. And I'd say, "I see Ace is now wearing sleeveless shirts 24/7. Work those guns, babe!" She would bitterly say, "That because he should have been voted off weeks ago -- and he knows it! What is wrong with America?" I just don't know. I voted for John Kerry myself.

I also enjoyed the variations on a theme each judge worked on his or her individual trope: Randy's many ways of saying, "Dawg, you did your thing." Paula's many ways of saying, "I love you and whatever it was you did." And Simon's many ways of being "the mean one." He's clearly the only judge anyone really listens to or respects. Yet his advice wasn't really consistent enough to be helpful. For example, last year he kept applauding Chris Daughtrey for doing everything in his own style, until he started criticizing him for doing everything in his own style. Sometimes it all just seemed like filler between the commercials for Coca-Cola and Chevrolet.

I haven't actually checked out the American Idol Bloggers link. A further confession: there was a little sadness here, since about a month ago I had received a different e-mail, urging me to Make My Hollywood Dreams Come True!!!! by auditioning for AI. Clearly, with the tact and delicate insight for which network TV is renowned, they had realized that I really am more of an observer of life than a participant. It was sweet of them to try to keep me involved. But I had already thought about my audition. I had a song and everything.

I would sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)." Randy would say, "Dawg, you went up there, and you did your thing." Paula would pause, her eyes would fill with tears, possibly even induced by my performance, and say, "I just love who you are. I love it." There would be another pause, this time with a little more tension, and we would all turn to Simon. He would grudgingly praise me, and though he would add that "it seemed a little cabaret" I wouldn't mind, because I would mistake that for a compliment. And I would be America's Sweetheart.

Tale from the Crypt

Happy Halloween. I see the disadvantages of the holiday; as my oldest sister once said, “Why don’t we have a day when people don’t dress up like freaks and make noise?” but when I moved into my house about eight years ago I enjoyed handing out sweets; any other day of the year handing candy to stray children would get you arrested, but on this day this random act of kindness is beloved tradition. Or it was until the last few years. I had fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters, until one year I was calling the Dads up from the sidewalk and giving them candy and dumping bags into the hands of teenagers who weren’t even wearing costumes. I decided to give it up after that, so today I will simply post a tale of terror:

I read Campbell Vertesi’s recent entry on awkward uses of opera arias (link to the right, people!), which also refers back to an entry by the upstanding young men of Wellsung about an awkward experience with a chorus performing Salome and real-life fifteen-year-old dancers.

This put me in mind of a similarly scarring experience I had, though it doesn’t involve opera but rather opera’s stepchild, the musical (and not even opera’s stepchild: opera’s stepchild’s bastard offspring, sitting vacant-eyed and snapping gum on the steps of the trailer while waiting for Uncle Pa to bring home some road-kill squirrel for supper: yes, the rock musical). This was back in the 1970s, when many Catholic churches were making an ill-advised attempt to ignite interest among the young people (who were all the rage back in the day) by using pop songs as hymns.

Do you remember Godspell? Do you remember “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (“Him” being Jesus), which includes such lines as “and I’ve had so many men before / in very many ways, He’s just one more”? Well, you would never forget them if you heard them sung during mass by a chubby pubescent girl, awkwardly swaying in front of statues of the holy family.

I’ve been trying to think of something to add, but the renewed moment is searing my brain pan. Let me just say: Palestrina or silence, please.

Addendum: I've just been informed that "I Don't Know How to Love Him" is from Jesus Christ Superstar, not Godspell. Same difference, but I do like to be accurate.