Broadway on 45th Street

Enjoyed the chance to catch up on some Broadway shows I'd been wanting to see--two plays, two musicals. No, I didn't make it to The Book of Mormon, perhaps because my friend who has enough connections to get tickets, mentioned he had been offered two for $360 each. But two good plays--Other Desert Cities and Seminar--made the trip worthwhile.  While I remain a believer in the concept of musicals--having seen as my first the original production of West Side Story--the two I saw were both worth seeing but not top drawer--Follies and Bonnie and Clyde.

Other Desert Cities opened last season in a limited run at the Beaumont, Lincoln Center, to raves that precipitated its transfer to Broadway--Booth Theater, this fall. It's by Jon Robin Baitz, who's written a number of plays produced in New York and whose work I've been wanting to see. Bang-up star cast features Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Judith Light, and Rachel Griffiths. They are all superb.  Channing has chosen to focus on the stage as opposed to making many movies, and her experience now shows--she holds the stage when on.  No one has ever faulted Keach's work--it's a bit of a shock to see his white hair but here's one of America's classical actors, in that he's done Shakespeare on stage and many movies as well, working as well as ever.  Griffiths is Australian and has done lots of tv, such as Six Feet Under, and is up to the demands of her part, which ignites the play. 


Baitz's play is a mix of great laugh lines and moving drama. It's a generational conflict, of course, but more than that, as the characters don't stay put into any stock slots. It also presents some political issues but not at the expense of either the play's own integrity or the quality of the drama. This is not at all a political play of the Waiting for Lefty variety--where the cast leads the audience out of the house shouting "Strike!" Not even close--which I'll limit myself to praising if only for the sake of the play's merits.


Seminar is in part a vehicle for the talented Alan Rickman, who is perhaps best known for portraying the most interesting character in the Harry Potter series--Snape, as to whose side he's on we are not sure until the climax. Here he's playing a bit of a set part--the veteran writer and critic teaching four neophytes how to write successfully.  Of course he's brutal in reviewing their work--sort of a combo of the late H.R. Trevor-Roper and Simon Cowell. But the students play tricks on him too and he's fair enough to recognize really good work when he sees it. Rickman's character also has a past which returns to bite him, but he shows more than one side of his character, a tribute to him and the playwright, Theresa Rebeck. 

Last weekend's Times had a piece about the play and the character played by Lily Rabe who has some feminist leanings in the play. The play is better for the lack of stridency in her character who again is multi-faceted. The article made a big deal about what I found to be only slightly more than a throwaway line. The play on the whole is good and raises good issues as to both character and writing.


I've never been much of a Sondheim fan. Yes, I saw Sweeney Todd years ago but missed most of the others. I wanted to see Follies because it seemed to be about a group of women and the men who are with them who all have to face dealing with the world post-life as a chorus girl on the greatest of Broadway stages. I left with mixed feelings--as always with Sondheim, you don't walk out humming any tunes. The characters do assume three-dimensional shapes, however, and the whole show leaves you with more than just wistfulness. There's even some fun in the sort of vaudeville final section.


Bonnie and Clyde was slammed by the Times's critic (after I had gambled on buying tix early) and will be closing this weekend.  Frank Wildhorn, the composer, apparently has had bad luck with the critics--I'd love to know how he continues to get financing--but the show is nicely done. It's just lacking some oomph--probably it is more accurate to the real life story than Arthur Penn's truly classic movie but Penn understood that the story of the two bank robbers' romance wasn't enough as stated to carry the plot. And my only complaint with the male lead was that he seemed very short--images of Warren Beatty in the movie of course kept flashing before me.

Always Some Sad Story in Philly

Even if you're appalled by the Penn State and Syracuse spectacles, the one that took me by surprise was this morning's disclosure in the New York Times that ancient scribe Bill Conlin, 77-year-old sports columnist for the Daily News, Philadelphia version, was being accused of molesting kids and women decades ago, and had quickly retired.   It does figure that it happened in Jersey, right--somewhere across the Delaware River, where there were no great sports venues except for the late Garden State racetrack and where, of course, the Statute of Limitations has run for the ink-stained wretch--one of the women is 47 and lives in Atlantic City. All you can say is that it figures.

This probably happened because of the way these cases have of emerging after a few big ones break the ice--and these were big enough to just about sink Penn State and St. Joe Pa himself. The Syracuse incident should have readied us as the trail proceeded from the previously pure precincts of State College to the always delightfully sleazy 'Cuse and from there on to Philly--about as quickly as the old Syracuse Nats of the NBA became the Philadelphia 76ers al lthose decades ago. 

Philly was the sports town with no illusions and hardly any heroes. Guys like Bill Conlin made their name by being bottom-feeders--no one could be more cynical than writers in the eternal city of losers. He may even have been the one to suggest--when they were looking for a name for a new stadium that they settle for Losers' Field. I remember the News's series of "our tainted superstars" that detailed the disappointment visited upon the always-ready-for-the-worst Philly fan by the likes of Dick Allen, Wilt, Timmy Brown, and endless others.

The annual triumph of futility over the Phillies, Eagles, and Sixers was only vitiated now and then by the rise of the Broad Street Bullies--the Flyers, and occasional bursts into sunlight by the likes of Villanova, or if you really are from Philly, Philly Textile.  No one gave these Philly sports writers much thought because they were always locally-oriented--no one within living memory there had ever been syndicated--and all they wrote about were endlessly varying accounts of losing.


Penn may have dominated the Ivy League often in the two major sports--sorry Cornell hockey fans but in the U.S., it's still football and basketball. But the Philly sports press stopped following Penn when the great Big Five basketball rivalry hosted by the Quakers at the fabulous Palestra faded after the schools started playing their home games at home.  It probably would take the second coming of Chuck Bednarik to gain the attention of the local writers.


I always thought Conlin was a stitch--a guy covering losing teams with a million laugh lines. Maybe the end came when the world turned upside down and the Red Quakers (Phillies) escaped their association by name with a cheap cigar and became a perennial major league baseball contender and Conlin even made it into the writers wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The oft-disappointing Iggles also began behaving like a winning franchise, occasionally threatening to get into recent Super Bowls. 


Basketball, though, was the great Philly sport--back when I would take the train to spend afternoon and evening at Palestra double-headers during the Quaker City Tournament, now defunct, deader than even the truncated Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden. The announcing style perfected by salami purveyer Dave Zincoff, the P.A. announcer for the Sixers in the days of Hal Greer ("Gree-ee-ee-ee-er") or Wilt ("It's a Dipper Dunk") was imitated by the Palestra mike-wielders to stir the crowd as the St Joe's human hawk flapped his wings doing figure-eights around the court during timeouts.


Through it all, one could always read endless words in print by Conlin and his fellow hacks whose attitude captured the city's sports mood--we can't really be winning. So I shouldn't be too shocked by these latest revelations.  Besides, while Penn State could never be ignored because (1) the Nittany Lions tended to win and (2) they had loyal alumni in Philly as they do everywhere else in the Commonwealth, this all happened in Jersey, years ago.  So we probably have Joe Paterno to thank for this story. Had the scandal not broken in his domain, we probably never would have heard about this story.  And you don't need to read Conlin to find that out.

 

Wine, Women & Song

My experience with opera transmitted live on a movie screen has been excellent if until now, a bit limited. For reasons not worth going into, I've seen the Met's HD transmissions on Saturday afternoons three times--for the first three operas of Wagner's Ring. Since they show upcoming performances--their version of Coming Attractions trailers--I feel like I've seen a whole lot of operas this way but actually it's only been the first three Ring operas. In case you wondered, we'll get Goetterdaemerung this spring.

But yesterday I saw and heard nothing less than opening night at La Scala at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring.  It was Don Giovanni and it was easily the best production, at least the most enjoyable one, of that opera I've experienced. First of all, the cast was glorious: Peter Mattei was the Don, Anna Netrebko Donna Anna, Barbara Frittoli Donna Elvira, and Bryn Terfel as Leporello. Everyone else was just as good and Daniel Barenboim was the stellar conductor.

Half the fun, of course, was watching all the high-fashion Milanese crowd in black ties and long gowns--even a white tie or two. The new President of Italy was standing in what looked like the royal box. Any European operatic production worth its salt will push the envelope in terms of new and different staging: this one was no exception. Characters come out into the front of the orchestra and run back past the first row up onto the stage. The style was sort of modern dress, with the inevitable capes and cloaks and finery that could put you right back into the original production of the opera in the 1790s.

The performances were so good that you actually could focus on points like Donna Elvira's seeming endless loyalty to the Don, no matter how badly he treated her; whether the ending as played made sense--the Commendatore appearing more in person than as statue and reciprocating the Don's stab of the opening scene; Anna Netrebko's amazing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, especially when Donna Anna affects large movie-star-style sunglasses; and all the stage tricks that director Robert Carson conjured up for us.

As with their Figaro, Mozart and da Ponte did not shrink from controversial subjects. The Don has to get his just deserts in 1930s Production Code Hollywood style, and I assume this was as de rigeur back when they opened this opera "out of town" (Vienna being both the imperial and musical capital) in Prague. Whether there was more meaning in having the Don materialize in the final scene--the one following his direct descent into Hell--when the characters all proclaim their noble intentions: Elvira will go to a convent, Leporello promises to find a better master--is hard to say.

But this production was continually both fascinating and challenging, and musically superb. It's part of the Opera in Cinema series--a series of opera and ballet productions from Europe that hasn't gotten anything like the publicity the Met's Saturday series has had. It deserves more--even if most of us would have trouble getting to a noon performance (apparently the opening night at Scala starts at what seems like an early hour of 6 P.M. for Europeans) on a Wednesday.

The Federal (DHS) Crackdown

It's too bad that one needed to consult The Guardian, the great English newspaper, to find out what the U.S. press has apparently ignored: that last week's crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street protests all over the country was coordinated by the Federal Government through the Department of Homeland Security.  I've listened to people I know well denounce the camps as counter-productive or even pick up the line put out by the right-wing radio mob that these people are just a bunch of unkempt radicals. 

There was some reaction against the Chancellor of UC Davis  when the campus police proceeded to pepper-spray supine and unresisting students. It's appalling to me that we accept this kind of conspiratorial suppression by our government. Where are the Second Amendment stalwarts when the authorities truly have gone out of control?

The Guardian columnist had it right, I'm afraid.  All of the politicians are bought and paid for. So are all administrations. And even when the New York Times finally gets around to covering the sordid record of the New York police in beating up reporters and other neutral onlookers, it limits its coverage and opinions to that narrow bit of self-protection.

I doubt I would ever join one of the Occupy camps.  But they are protesting the right things--the giveaways to the rich, the banks, and the well-connected.  We have lost much of what we supposedly believe in when we fail to defend the rights of these people. We have created a monster--a Department of "Homeland Security" that acts like the secret police we denounce in totalitarian countries.  It absorbs a huge budget we cannot afford and wastes billions on adding yet more expensive devices at airports with domineering agents who harrass travellers and have never been shown to have detected a single terrorist.  


It has come to pass that in enabling the authoritarians among us to establish this order of things we have truly allowed the terrorists to win.

J. Edgar

What might most astound J. Edgar Hoover were he alive today is that until Clint Eastwood brought out his new film, J. Edgar, many people, especially those born during the last 40 or 50 years, would have no idea who he is or was.  This, of course, was a man who was arguably as powerful as any during much of his 48 1/2 year reign as Director of the FBI. The picture, by the way, is excellent, with Leonardo di Caprio giving a good rendition of the short, bulldog-type that Hoover was and Armie Hammer probably a good deal more attractive than was Hoover's longtime chief aide and likely lover, Clyde Tolson.

Roger Ebert rightly commends Eastwood for avoiding the temptation to make the movie salacious.  After all, we really don't know the truth here anyway. But we do know that Hoover was monomaniacal and managed to hold on during seven presidents because he had dirt on all of them. Leaving aside his total wild-eyed attitude toward Communism (and all leftists, for that matter), Hoover had some good attributes in his early days. He was honest and the Bureau of Investigation he found was a sewer of corruption which he cleaned up. He was an early advocate of forensic scientific crime-solving and established the FBI's fingerprint system.

After that, it was mostly downhill. He was a publicity nut and staged arrests to get the coverage. He provided support for movies and radio and TV programs that built his image. And perhaps most interestingly for Washington types, he was the consummate bureaucrat. After all, every year he argued and usually got a bigger budget allocation by pointing to rising crime. But he balanced what might sound like an indicator of failure by then showing that the FBI had caught more criminals every year.

Most fascinating of all was his relationship with other men with big jobs and big egos. He seemed to manage every presidential transition by showing the slightest bit of whatever dirt he had in his secret files. He correctly sensed that Richard Nixon was never to be trusted even if they shared many political positions. One question I've always thought about and which neither this film nor any other source has ever answered is how the great man of integrity who happened to be Attorney General in 1924 (because he was Calvin Coolidge's college classmate) felt about his protege, Hoover, twenty years later, after Harlan Fiske Stone had gone on to become Chief Justice (he died in 1946). Did Stone, one of the great liberal (Republican) justices, ever pick up on Hoover's increasingly evil character?

It's hard to realize today how many famous people Hoover either conned or scared into shilling for him. Quentin Reynolds and Don Whitehead were only two of the great reporters who put out glorious puff pieces in their books about the FBI. And while he was in power, few questions were ever asked about his priorities in law enforcement. He avoided going after organized crime, because he feared his agents would be corrupted. As the Department of Justice's successful war against the Cosa Nostra after his death has shown, he was wrong about that. He instead always went after the Communists. It took us years to learn (Sam Roberts's book, The Brother, is on point here) that while Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty, the crime was hardly the "crime of the century" as Hoover labelled it. After all, the Russians already had what they needed from Klaus Fuchs to make the atomic bomb.

Fortunately the laws were amended after Hoover's death to ensure we'd never have such a long-tenured FBI chief. And there is a lesson in his life, only it's far more complex than these stories normally are.

Lucia Remains Indestructible

It had been a long time since I last had seen Lucia di Lammermoor,  a gem of the late bel canto school that has long been a staple of the opera repertory since Donizetti composed it in 1835.  I suppose it's pretty awful when you can't recall who you heard sing it at the Met some years ago, but I know it wasn't Joan Sutherland. I would definitely have remembered her.

Despite the idiotic plot--even by opera standards--the opera works.  Perhaps it's because in addition to the very famous Mad Scene (best described as the next-to-last scene because they mess around with how many acts there are), the composer wrote a whole bunch of other wonderful melodies that allow each of the four principal voices a chance to shine. I was lucky enough to go twice, once for the dress rehearsal and then with friends from out of town for a regular performance a week later.

The opera is based on Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, a potboiler of the 19th century which, I learned from the program, was based on a real story, which is too bad, because the events are grim--a young bride forced into marriage against her will with a rich guy to save her brother's estate which he stole from the tenor with whom she is in love--get it?   The performances I saw were balanced--sopranos were good, including in the slightly differently orchestrated Mad Scene, where an ancient instrument called a glass armonica was used instead of the traditional solo flute accompanying the coloratura in her trills and scales; second tenor was better than the first, but first baritone, Michael Chioldi, who plays Enrico, the miserable brother, was superb, a fact missed by the Washington Post, which spent most of the review decrying the production.

The production presumes a ruined estate so it is spare but with all kinds of unnecessary effects added in, apparently to distract you from the plot.  There's a bed for the girlish Lucia which looks like a crib and they appear to tie her up at one point; there are also unwarranted hints of incest and the ending, where the tenor commits suicide, is confused. The music is so good--I've been humming it for the past two weeks--that none of that matters a bit. One can't say that there's much humor in this kind of opera, but I never see it without reflecting on how the wedding has to be the worst one ever, and the luckless wealthy bridegroom seems so cocky and confident--and totally unaware of what awaits him the moment he reaches the wedding bedroom.

In

Siegfried

It has seemed that the only times I've attended the Met Opera HD live broadcasts in movie houses have been the broadcasts of the Wagner Ring operas. Saturday we went to see Siegfried, for the first time managing to cadge seats at the Mazza Gallery theater in DC--probably got tix because it has become popular enough to take over two separate theaters in the complex on Saturday afternoons.

For the Ring opera, it helps that Rheingold is short and Die Walkure is highly exciting, culminating in a third act that opens with the Ride and proceeds to Wotan's Farewell and Fire Music. The fourth and final opera, Goetterdaemerung (literally translated as "getting darker of the gods") also has some memorable music, with Siegfried's Rhine Journey and his death procession and the marvelous redemption-themed music for Brunnhilde as the cycle comes to its rousing finale (the stage directions call for Valhalla to crumble and the Rhine to overflow its banks--nice easy matters to include in a production). Siegfried, the third of the operas, is the problem one.  It's very long--running yesterday from shortly past noon until after 5 PM--sometimes it even runs longer.  The music does not have the memorable parts mentioned for the other operas.

Yesterday, however, it came brilliantly to life.  The Wagnerian tenor was the cover who rsoe to stardom, Jay Hunter Morris, and he benfitted from playing the first act opposite the veteran Gerhard Siegel as Mime, the evil dwarf.  The two of them made the opera come alive, culminating in the end-of-act Forging Song, when Siegfried remakes his father's famous weapon. In the second act, the new Siegfried had the wonderful Eric Owens making a brief appearance as the most evil of the dwarves, Alberich, and then the encounter with Fafner, the giant turned dragon.  It was satisfying to see him appear as a true dragon rather than the rather abstractly-formed creature he has been designed to appear as in past Met productions.

On to Act III, when Wotan, the central character of the first two operas and much of this one, finally bows out after realizing that he has been unable to fulfill his own goal of preserving the gods and the world as he knows it. I thought I knew the Ring pretty well but I learned from his encounter with Erda the earth goddess that she had consorted with him to produce Brunnhilde. And then Siegfried finally encounters Wotan in the latter's last appearance and shatters Wotan's mighty spear just as it had broken Siegfried's father, Siegmund's sword in the great fight in Die Walkure.

Yes, more plot than you're looking to know. But the music always is the mightiest force on stage and of course, we finally return to the rock where Brunnhilde was left at the end of Walkure and get to hear tenor and soprano engage in the most wonderful love music since maybe Tristan und Isolde.  The Met broadcasts feature interviews with the principal cast members, which added to the experience immeasurably. I even got a kick out of the Forest Bird, represented by a three-dimensional figure and sung by an offstage soprano, which warns Siegfried of all the dangers posed by the dwarves and dragons roaming the set. On Sir Georg Solti's wonderful first complete recording of The Ring, one of the lagniappes was hearing Joan Sutherland sing the Forest Bird, sort of like Pavarotti doing the Italian Tenor in R. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.

The most marvelous result of this long afternoon's experience was to recognize the greatness of Siegfried, an opera often overshadowed by the others in the series. Partly this was due to the immediacy you get from the closeups of the theater broadcastand the quick understanding you get from the sub-titles.  Those together make it possible to savor the richness of Wagner's music and wonder as always how he did it (especially given his own miserable personality, as to which, see Deems Taylor's little masterpiece of an essay, The Monster.)

The Ides of March and Pauline Kael

Today I finally caught up with The Ides of March, the movie starring George Clooney and featuring Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Terrific picture, and all my D.C. political types tell me it couldn't be closer to the truth. Good entertainment and yet, you leave the theater with a better feeling for having seen it and received a good dose of reality as the political campaign heats up for us.

The Sunday Times had a front-page review by Frank Rich of a biography and collected writings of Pauline Kael.  Many will remember her as the very outspoken movie critic of The New Yorker back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  She had lots of faults--too cozy relationships with some movie industry types for one--but she also had an enthusiasm that is lacking in too many critics today. It turned out that her famous piece, "Raising Kane," about how Herman J. Manckiewicz deserved at least equal credit with Orson Welles for the writing of Citizen Kane, was actually filled with errors, some unintended but others either careless or worse.  Yet it did focus our attention on Joe Manckiewicz's oft-forgotten brother.  Movie critics now are sort of blah--they have little sense of the history of the medium and perhaps reflect what Kael just missed having to deal with: that movies too are largely aimed at teenagers. Kael really loved movies and in the end, that and a decent critical sense made her memorable.


The Ides of March was fun largely because it was a picture for grown-ups. We need many more like that.

The Greatest Game

Was it really the greatest game ever, the 6th game in St. Louis Thursday night? I recall watching the famed 1975 Game 6 when I was on a road trip in Jackson, MS--haven't been back there since. Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk. It did remind me of the game, I think involving the Angels some years ago, when Bob Boone got a hit when his club was also down to its last strike and it turned everything around.

It did show that baseball is in a class by itself when things like this happen. As it was, the game was not all that well played. Errors and mishaps made it seem like it was being played on Hallowe'en. But tension, excitement, hitters responding to the challenge, these all made it great. Forget about the bum performance of the managers, one overmanaging--not noticing he had used up his roster by the 9th, and the other sort of oblivious to the roof falling in on his club.

It was sort of wonderful that Pujols's performance in the earlier game where he tied Babe Ruth's homer record for a single Series game made such an impression that they continued to pitch around him and pitch to Berkman who was far more consistent. I know that good pitching always beats good hitting so it was good that there wasn't an overwhelming amount of great pitching--good pitching, yes.  I liked it when Freese reminded everyone that the best hitter fails seven out of ten times.


Baseball remains a fantastic game in spite of those who run it.  Here this wild crowd is packing the park in one of the great baseball towns and everyone, especially the players, are bundled up like Nanook of the North. And yes, they play these games so that an extra-inning extravaganza like Thursday's runs until almost 1 A.M. in the East.  Yes, it's nostalgia but I love remembering the days when the local luncheonette would fill in the line score after each half-inning in the front window of the store in the afternoons when the Series was on.


Not that I ever expected to be rooting for the Cardinals, the proverbial "other team" for any National League fan. You didn't have to be a Dodger fan--I wasn't--also to recall how the Redbirds and their fans gave Jackie Robinson the worst welcome. It was emblematic of those days when they were clearly the Southern team of baseball. But we won't go into who used to own the Rangers--and I don't mean Bob Short, whose name lives on in the book of  infamy reserved for franchise-movers like Lou Perini, Walter O'Malley, Horace Stoneham, Calvin Griffith, and Bob Irsay.  I don't include Bill Veeck, mostly because he was getting clobbered as the Browns owner and baseball wouldn't let the club move until he sold it.


But back to this year. What a great wrap-up to a good post-season! Lots of surprises, lots of unheralded operatives who rose to the occasion. And you even had the NL playoff between the two beer capitals of America. I was in Busch Stadium a number of years ago when Anheuser-Busch still owned the club and yes, this was the night that more people showed up than they had expected and yes, the night that Busch Stadium ran out of beer! They did respond to the need, however, rolling kegs across the floor to replenish the stands. Now that's focusing on priorities.

 

DeKooning

Had just enough time in New York City last Saturday on my way to New Jersey--true--to stop by the Museum of Modern Art to take in the massive Willem DeKooning show. If you bothered to know about art in the last half of the 20th century, you definitely heard about DeKooning. But until I saw this retrospective--the man lived from 1904 to 1997, and was seriously working from around 1940 until 1990--I merely had seen a few of his most famous canvases or pictures of them, such as one of the 'Woman' series of paintings.

It seems to me that he was both lucky and good.  The major works--the several series of 'Woman' pictures and a few others--stand the test of time.  They are still fascinating.  The luck part is that there were major critics who appreciated his style; in addition, the charges of misogyny, largely emanating from those same 'Woman' pictures, since they are mightily unflattering, on the surface at least, arose at a time when charges like that didn't carry the weight they seem to today.

He also had no fear about changing his style, sometimes abruptly.  He learned from different sources--some of his work drew on exposure to Japanese art and in his late years, he lurched toward minimalism with his canvases left largely white or painted white, with a few lines drawn on them. It's also helpful to his image that he painted a large backdrop for a friend's ballet production, based on one of his best works, and then got only the $50 from her which was all she could afford to pay him for the backdrop.

We often think about him as exemplifying the so-called "New York school" of abstract expressionism, whatever that may be. This show allows us to see him as an individual painter, moving quite bravely from style to style until he found one or more within which he felt comfortable. Yes, there are some of his paintings that are nearly totally abstract but many more that are not. So, for better or worse, he's not in the same place as Jackson Pollock, who is fascinating in his own, quite different way.

It happened that DeKooning had several solo shows at private New York galleries in the 1950s mainly, and they were wildly successful. It makes all the sense in the world that the Museum of Modern Art has mounted this great show that presents his whole career, which ran for a good 40-plus years.  He did move out of the city to the East End of Long Island--much as Pollock did--but fortunately for him and for us, he did not get run down on a highway before he could show us how many different artistic lives he would have.

Occupied

It was encouraging to see the spread across the nation of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Although I know that when it gets down to it, I will find myself ticked off at the left -- mostly for its legendary ability for self-destruction through internecine battling and its tendency to get totally stuck on non-critical issues, often of form rather than substance -- it's about time that we had some activity to counter the extreme rightward turn in the public space of the U.S., if not in the actual feelings of citizens.

Only Congresspeople who are bought -- as most of them are, dependent as they are on campaign funding, yet another right-wing value brought to you by our current Supreme Court majority -- could defend tax cuts for the very rich.  We know that trickle-down economics doesn't work, that giving rich people tax breaks doesn't create jobs in the U.S., and that while free trade is in theory a good thing, Democrats like Clinton and Obama negotiate trade agreements that give away the U.S. market, fail to protect labor -- the refusal of the Colombian government to act with respect to the murders of labor leaders and organizers is the most egregious violation that our free-traders wish us to overlook -- and merely encourage U.S. business to locate its production facilities anywhere but in the U.S.

I see working people taken in by the right-wing nonsense that tax cuts will create work.  Anyone who inveighs against Obama as a socialist has never met a socialist.  We have known since the 1930s that unregulated capitalism will fail us just as much as communism.  Now we are seeing the consequences. The very rich have the resources to use public relations and the media they own to con the suckers.

Even more laughable -- except for the fact that he is taken seriously -- is David Brooks' latest piece telling Obama he had better calm down.  The President acts far too cerebrally for his own good already. Brooks is just the same as any other Republican offering bad advice. Fight for craziness and you get taken seriously--the Tea Party. Fight for the 99% who don't get special preference in our society--the business-owned media stomp on you.

But it's still good to see some rising spirit from the protesters. Many of them are real people, not just people out to raise hell. My cousin's husband, Bill Davis, took some incredible pics of the crowd in Zuccotti Park. Maybe this is the beginning of something new, where we try to change the dire diagnosis of Yeats, totally on target until now that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. After all, he was a bit of a Fascist himself and somewhat pro-German, forgivable perhaps in even an Anglo-Irishman.

We'll Always Have Paris

Sometimes I’ve sent out some letters when I’ve travelled to off-the-beaten-path places. But it’s hard to write something like that when you go to the place that should remain the first-choice destination on anyone’s list: Paris. Forget anyplace else, none of them is in the same league. Yes, it’s expensive and it always has been, even when the now-gone franc was soft against the dollar.

The other complaint was that the French, and especially Parisians, were rude and wouldn’t speak English if it killed them. The first charge was never really true, since practicing la politesse, such as saying “Bonjour” upon entering a shop, did and does inspire a friendly response. I first noticed during a very brief stop a few years ago that an amazingly greater number of locals now would speak English, and without sneering. My French remains good only at the reading level; no one bothers to correct my pronunciation any more: sometimes they play a new game by responding in English to my sorry spoken français.

The French way of life begins, for me, with the edibles. Start out in a boulangerie and enjoy the freshly-baked croissants, or brioche loaves, or plain, unvarnished baguettes. I just had a croissant here—a pretty good one—and it wasn’t even close. Either in the same place or in the patisserie down the street, move on to something major, like an apricot tart or millefeuille, a.k.a. Napoleon.

Some might suggest that the French can’t grill the way we can; you’ll find out that that’s erroneous when you sample a perfectly-cooked entrecote (usually ribsteak) or côte de boeuf (better roast beef that you’ll get in England, land of the rosbifs), as tender as a Peter Luger steak. I dined in a very famous bistro and enjoyed the classics there: soupe a l’oignon, complete with the melted cheese and bread; perfectly-cooked cocottes, or nuggets, of lotte (monkfish); and, to conclude, the obligatory profiteroles, the puffs of puff pastry filled with ice cream and topped with chocolate sauce. As one friend with me put it, chocolate sauce makes anything superb.

Less fancy spots also excelled. A fine bar (fish similar to sole) gave way to my knife slicing into it as one would with Dover sole. A Rue Mouffetard joint produced a more apple-oriented tarte tatin. And then I passed a fruit and vegetable emporium which featured in front as its lead items, girolles—the orange trumpet-shaped wild mushrooms, and figs. I didn’t manage to order one of those three-story towers of shellfish but some oysters at an unpretentious café on the Place de la Bastille were fresh and delightful.

There were all kinds of other favorites I never had time to order. No rillettes—the fattiest, roughtest and most wonderful form of paté; some nice cold cuts and cheese on a plank but few of the other delights of the charcuterie. Brought back the obligatory jars of Hediard mustard and jams but an Albert Menes clementine corse en tranches (marmalade of clementines cut in slices) I found at the Monoprix brightened every breakfast.

No Michelin stars graced the portal of any place I visited: no matter. So if I had sampled the simple life, la vie des français, that was just fine. Returned to the Louvre after a quarter-century mainly because most other museums are closed Monday. Saw the fabled trinity of Winged Victory, Mona Lisa, and Venus de Milo (latter only by accident on the way to the café) but then wandered through room after room of Rembrandts and Rubenses and two lovely Vermeers. Plus the attendant who directed me to Gericault’s Raft of Medusa and several of his equestrian paintings—there are even fewer of his works extant than of Vermeer.

Disappointments—of course. We had tickets to an opening night of a new ballet at the Palais Garnier—the fabled Paris Ópera—and it was cancelled by a strike of technicians. Mark it as put paid for my labor sympathies. Yet the opera house invited all of us (I had to go there to get my refund—in cash, no less.) in—those who showed up in black tie expecting a performance and those of us who knew none would occur—inside for champagne and canapes anyway. And the Musee Carnavelet—the museum of the history of Paris—is renovating the wing which has Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom. Never had to wait more than a few minutes at most for any of the many Métro trains I boarded.

There’s so much more, of course. I steam when I hear someone in the U.S. joke about “freedom fries” and obnoxiously remind them that yes, the French were right about the Iraq war while our government lied to us. David McCullough’s new book chronicles how Americans travelled to Paris de rigeur in the 19th century. A final tip of the chapeau to our oldest ally, who could teach all of us quite a bit on the subject of how to live if only we let them.

They Didn't Believe Me

Tonight was when another of a wonderful series of musically-illustrated talks about Broadway composers at the Smithsonian featured Jerome Kern. Yes, there were plenty of other fantastic songwriters in the first half of the 20th century--many Jewish, like Kern and Irving Berlin, and some not--like Cole Porter, but to me, Kern stands out because his songs are just "so wonderful" like Bill in the song of that name. Reciting a list of them just confirms my feeling: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Ol' Man River, Make Believe, Bill, A Fine Romance, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Who, I've Told Ev'ry Little Star, Look for the Silver Lining, How'd You Like to Spoon With Me, All the Things You Are, Long Ago and Far Away, Yesterdays, I'm Old-Fashioned, I Won't Dance, She Didn't Say Yes and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man.

There were more--about 700 published and maybe a total of 1300 or more. If you're at all like me, you probably never thought that all the ones named were Kern's. They are part of our culture, to the extent that we continue to have one. With Kern, it was almost always the songs. Most of the shows they came from are forgotten--deservedly so, for most of them.

For Kern, the composing apparently came easily. Once he convinced his father that he was not cut out for business--sent to purchase 2 pianos, he bought 200, he studied music and gradually broke into show business at a funny time--the 1910's, when vaudeville was in its glory and minstrel shows still toured the land. Operetta ruled Broadway until World War I squelched it and Kern joined up with two talented Brits, Guy Bolton and the renowned P. G. Wodehouse, who provided book and lyrics to the series of Princess Theater musicals he composed in the teens.

These were a shift from the over-produced opulence of Ziegfeld and the operetta-like corniness of much of Victor Herbert. Kern always kept spinning out the songs and he kept doing it for both Broadway and after sound arrived, Hollywood. He did die rather dramatically at 60, had lived a pleasant and highly successful life, married once and stayed married to the end, and was a noted book collector, who rather presciently disposed of a fantastic collection in January 1929 for more than $1 million, quite a sum then.

But there was one more thing. He wrote his finest score for the musical that changed the whole Broadway world. This was Showboat in 1927. I saw it last year, in a local company's production, and all the defects came out. It was always too long. Many of the characters are caricatures. Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics were a cut above an oeuvre I've never been all that sold on but there's some corniness left. The show was based on Edna Ferber's novel, the lady who gave us Giant and Cimarron and Ice Palace. The topics that amazed the public then--miscegenation, racism, adultery, abandonment--leave us somewhat nonplussed today and the piece can come off as heavy and tedious, if not embarrassing: take the part of Queenie, originally played on stage by an actress who used the name Aunt Jemima, and yes, that's who she resembled. Really.

Until you get to the music, that is. And it's the music that makes us realize that none of the rest really matters at all. Robert Wyatt, the musicologist who puts on these programs, had some fantastic sound and video clips. The ones with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and Billie Holliday singing Yesterdays are fabulous, but then there are the ones from the original Showboat. First comes Aunt Jemima doing Queenie's Ballyhoo, which sets the stage for Helen Morgan with Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and finally, majestically, Paul Robeson, who actually joined the cast later, in 1928, singing Ol' Man River. All of my reservations were swept away by the glorious rhythm and swell of Kern's music--once again, it's the songs, stupid--in all of those and if Robeson's bass baritone doesn't bring tears to your eyes, stay home.

Solving the Structural Problem

The President did come up with some good moves in the big bag of tricks he unloaded at the joint session last night. As one of the comments in today's Washington Post put it, it was a real stemwinder. It was what he needed to do and he did it. Yes, he presented a package that in itself and especially with his presentation would be nigh unto impossible for anyone rational not to accept, and yet...

No, I'm not disappointed that he didn't come out with all barrels blasting, which is what I had been hoping he would do. But he was a step ahead of me. He saw that he had to do things differently from the past--not turn it over, as he did with health care, to Pelosi and Reid. This is the kind of package he should have been putting together from the start, instead of letting himself get rolled by both parties and giving in all over the place.

Sure, it may notwork, but he's got them on the defensive. Maybe the Democrats will start giving him a little support for a change. I put a clip on Facebook of FDR speaking in 1936 about how the Republicans promised they would do everything better--the man's absolute glee in painting a glorious satirical picture was sheer joy. Obama had it all perfect for a change--now he just has to maintain the front without caving.

The structural problems would challenge an FDR or a TR. Place the blame where it belongs: Reagan, who suckered the middle and working classes into voting against their interests, and led them down the damn-the-government blind alley, and Clinton, who fell right in with his Wall Street pals and the Business Roundtable in pushing globalization without any real guidelines.

So now we see every major former U.S.-based manufacturer sitting across the border in Mexico or in Shenzen, a stone's throw from Hong Kong. That's where all the manufacturing jobs are. If all of these traitors got taxed as they deserve, and found out that it wasn't automatic that you could sell in the U.S. market, we could easily balance the budget etc. etc.

Those jobs aren't coming back because both parties are bought and paid for. Any stimulus will help--again, especially if it isn't just a pure giveaway to special interests, which happened the last time he turned it over to his Congressional partners. Yes, the stimulus worked and would have worked better if it had been allocated more rationally and to projects that could get moving. Because of that built-in drag, and the corruption, Krugman was right in saying it needed to have been bigger.

But as long as the corporates are insulated from the effects of their greed, don't expect much change real soon in the economy. Despite that grim picture, for once Obama did the right thing, though, and did it well. It may presage a better time for everyone in 1992. After all, we had Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith and Huey Long in the 30s, too, just like the crazies today--who control the GOP--who want to go back to 1900 or earlier, much less trash Social Security. Huey's problem, it should be noted, was his dictator-like approach that made Louisiana then almost a totalitarian state, not necessarily what he was trying to do. That's the side of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men that sometimes gets lost: that Willie Stark started out really trying to help people.

A Few Days in Mizzou

This week I was out in southwestern Missouri, getting into some hilly country that's part of the Ozarks. Most of my time was spent visiting people in courthouses but I had time to sample three major features of the region. One was the reasonably well-known "strip" in Branson, reputedly where middle America goes to be entertained.

If they do, many are likely to be disappointed. In the early days there, names like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson did perform but now the whole place is bogus, filled with impersonators and reconstituted singing groups from long ago, such as the Platters, who may have one of their original members still on hand. There are souvenir joints and fast-food places and other turisto specials galore.

I'm someone who has frequented almost every kind of show you can imagine--from summer stock to circuses to rodeos to amateurs doing Shakespeare and yes, the Rolling Stones--and I'm leaving out the worlds of opera, jazz, chamber music, musical comedy, and film. A few weeks ago I happened to drive down the Las Vegas Strip, also a place with tack aplenty but also some genuine headliners and real names on the marquees.

But the other two local specialties were more fun. In Springfield is the still-being-constructed Bass Pro Shop World, which must be the biggest hunting and fishing emporium anywhere. On my way to meet some people at a restaurant contained within the walls--and named Hemingway's, naturally--I must have passed displays of every kind of gear and outdoor clothing imaginable, and and then a few more. Finally, I heard some shots and yes, there was an actual shooting gallery right there in the midst of the sales floor.

Finally, my local colleagues, well, they were down from the state capital but they know the area, had little trouble convincing me to dine early that evening (5:30 so we wouldn't have to wait too long) at the original Lambert's "the ThrownRolls place" which is located, appropriately, in Ozark, Mo., with two other outlets in Arkansas and Alabama. Lambert's holds 700 diners at a time, gives you a choice of barbecue offerings, such as ribs or pulled pork or catfish, or country ham or meatloaf, or in my case, pot roast (o.k., they call it roast beef). Servers turn up with "passarounds" beginning with their famous fried okra and then black-eyed peas and other sides, some coming with the meal, such as fried apples and cucumbers'n'onions and every kind of potato.

The piece de resistance, however, are the hot rolls. Apparently, someone once shouted to a waiter to throw him one, so now, young men move down the center aisles with barrows and toss rolls out to those who can field them, much as those cheerleaders flip t-shirts out nowadays at major league baseball games. Yes, the food is of the volume-over-refinement sort but it's mostly good old basic American favorites. I'd go back in a heartbeat--if I still have one after this outing.

The Star of Page One

If you've seen the film about the N. Y. Times called Page One, you've been introduced--almost personally--to a well-travelled veteran who now is a media reporter for them named David Carr. Much of his appeal arises from his checkered career--on papers from one in Minneapolis to the Washington City Paper (for which he appears in a ski hat adorned with its logo) and off the job from his past attraction to crack and his years as a single parent.

His big story in the picture is uncovering the almost idiotic leadership that bought and bled the Chicago Tribune until it went into bankruptcy. With careful inquiry, he found that at best the managers only knew what they had picked up working in radio and at worst they carried on as if what was once (self-described as) the World's Greatest Newspaper was a fraternity party complete with sex and booze.

I should have expected that when I picked up the Times today, he would be breaking yet another great story that required a lot of work. Trying to find out if Rupert Murdoch's minions in the states had engaged in conduct just as atrocious as had their colleagues on his U.K. enterprises, Carr set his gaze on a company that dealt with one area of advertising. It had come to dominate its field, however, by pulling every conceivable violation of antitrust and through behavior that was strikingly anti-competitive.

The Justice Department regional antitrust office had recommended prosecution and denial of permission to acquire its major competitior. Strangely, and leaving no paper trail, the front office of the Antitrust Division in Washington had instead cleared the merger. It turns out that the then-head of the division was none other than my old law school classmate Joel Klein, until recently the generally-regarded as successful reform-minded Chancellor of New York City's public schools. Joel was hired upon leaving the NYC school system by none other than...Rupert Murdoch.

OK, and the Carr story tells all sides, Klein's division some time later denied some Murdoch outlet permission to acquire something else. But there's no good explanation for this decision, especially since no one will talk even now, and the federal prosecutors who decided not to pursue the case in New Jersey now work for Gov. Chris Christie, who was then the U.S. Attorney there.

As my old friend and fine journalist himself, Don Kaul, said (as the title of one of his books), "they're all in it together." Carr's story certainly leads one to that most reasonable conclusion. By the way, the movie, which generally was well done, was at its best when it showed Carr and a few other media reporters and editors at the Times encountering the classic kind of theory-mongers who turn up on panels in New York and D.C. It may be, as these types have it, that newspapers really are over the hill, but you have to hope there will always be intrepid reporters like Carr and some place for them to practice their skills.

The Tales That Keep On Telling

It's been a few years since I've attended a performance at the Wolf Trap Barns out in the other Vienna, the Virginia one just past the Capital Beltway. But Friday night was the premiere of the Wolf Trap Opera Company's production of The Tales of Hoffmann, with three performances to follow within the next week. Suffice it to say that for its amazingly lively and enduring music, plus the overall fun associated with Offenbach's grandest opera--mostly he wrote lighter fare for the 1870s Paris equivalent of the Broadway musical stage--Tales remains one of my true favorites, even if it's name weren't close to mine own.

This company features young, up-and-coming singers, all of whom were marvelous. Before the performance, the producer gave a pre-show talk, explaining about the fairly well-known history of how companies keep re-inventing this opera. Offenbach needed a few years to round up backers and finally got them--Opera-Comique in Paris and a major theatre in Vienna--but he died in 1880 before the opera opened.

Since he was operating in those times much as modern Broadway composers--taking numbers out of his trunk and inserting them, even if used in previous work, where deemed appropriate--there is no authoritative version sanctioned by the composer. Letters and other written items have appeared during the next century, so many that a major revision of the score has been almost completed. This advanced version is what Wolf Trap used and it shows major improvements from the tradition Choudens version.

Wisely, the new version keeps all the numbers that Offenbach picked up from his earlier work. These include the most famous tune in the opera, the Barcarolle, and the wonderful bass aria, Scintille Diamant, as well as the peculiar septet at the end of the Venice act--where the six characters are joined on stage by the chorus to make up the septet.

The character of the Muse, who here decides to disguise herself as Hoffmann's companion, Nicklausse, has also been enlarged and especially at the end, made far more meaningful. Hoffmann actually decides not to leave the beer hall with his anamorata, the opera diva Stella, because he realizes that his three fateful loves in the opera are combined in Stella, to his detriment. Instead, he accepts the Muse who has made clear to him that his destiny is as a poet to commit his experience to verse and history. It's hard not to feel this is a better end for the opera that the old one of seeing him pass out drunk just before Stella appears so that her departure with the villain is perfunctory.

All the singers were fine, and quite tall, including Hoffmann, whom I've been used to seeing as a more diminutive type. The soprano who played the largely trouser role of Nicklausse and the Muse, Catherine Martin, was lovely in both voice and appearance. The villains, played as is the tradition by the same bass-baritone, were well-performed, save for one missed note in Scintille.

Other changes are less momentous. Schlemil loses his aria in this version as well as his shadow. And the modest production by the Wolf Trap company lacked some of the accoutrements of the major houses--no entrance or departure by Giuletta in a gondola, for example. Spalaanzani's workshop was not adorned from top to bottom with wheezing machines of all kinds.

But these singers, this version, and the pleasant house made for a charming evening with one of the most enjoyable operas in the repertoire. There are two more performances next Thursday and Saturday, and Friday night they will present an evening of E. T. A. Hoffmann's own music, as befits the man who was novelist, short story writer, poet, and composer in addition to being the hapless romantic chronicled by this irresistible opera.

The Straits of Georgia

The Straits of Georgia are really an inland sea, separating Vancouver Island, on which the British Columbia capital, Victoria, is located at the southern end, from the mainland, where the large city of Vancouver stands. We had occasion to see all these amazing places during one of our typical long-distance, short-stay trips last week and weekend. The objective was to attend a "handfasting" ceremony on Denman Island, which is a modest-sized island halfway up the east, inside coast of Vancouver Island.

The ceremony has some Celtic antecedents, I'm told, but is tantamount to an engagement with many attributes of the actual wedding. We were invited by a good friend whom Eileen met during her junior year at LSE and who showed us some less visible and highly interesting attractions in Ottawa, where he lives, last summer. One of his sisters has lived on Denman for more than 30 years so he and his bride, both embarking on matrimony for the second time round, chose to celebrate there. Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all, with the bride attired in a Russian peasant dress true to her origins and our friend in full Scottish regalia, which was based on his mother's birthplace.

We broke up the trip with some time in Victoria, oft described as Canada's most British city, and ended up with a stay in Vancouver, which has some similarities to San Francisco in its hills and cosmopolitan character. Both cities have magnificent museums where we focused largely on the major anthropological collections of indigenous peoples of the Canadian Northwest. The Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria has the usual wide range of totem poles and implements, but especially noteworthy is the lodge of a Kwakiutl chief, famous as the site of the most expansive potlatches. In Vancouver the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia has an even more impressive collection of house and totem poles, kayaks and canoes and implements of all kinds, and the fantastic yellow-cedar woodcarvings of Bill Reid and other modern practitioners of the traditional arts.

Vancouver also boasts its own Shakespeare Festival, called "Bard on the Beach" since the plays are presented in large tents on one of the beaches along English Bay. Mostly because we had just seen a magnificent Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington--which even made the anti-Semitism of the play comprehensible--we opted for Henry VI: The Wars of the Roses, which is a combined version of the three Parts of Henry VI, not one of Shakespeare's most-performed works. The acting in the Douglas Campbell Theatre (named after one of the mainstays of the Stratford, Ont., Festival) was superb--the play is very rough even by Shakespeare's standards with all sorts of deaths, usually enacted onstage but the convoluted plot explains what the Wars of the Roses were all about and, perhaps most critically, is vital to a full comprehension of the next play (in historical if not written sequence), the great Richard III.

By the end of the play, Richard already dominates the proceedings. Henry VI also features one of Shakespeare's most-quoted lines, uttered by Dick the Butcher, supporter of Jack Cade's rebellion, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!" It's probably impossible for Shakespeare's intent to catch up with the common use of the phrase--as in Coriolanus, Shakespeare did not usually have a high view of common people and here he was emphasizing the disorder and riot that accompanies popular rebellions.

We probably were on more ferries than I'll take for the rest of my life, but another one took us from Denman Island to Hornby Island, which has a music festival ranging from classical quartets to rap, and a wonderful pub with another fantastic sea view, called The Thatch, where we enjoyed a spectacular sunset. I remain enthralled by the Northwest generally, by the combination of huge Douglas firs and amazing waterscapes. Even during our brief stays in Seattle, where we began and ended our trip, there was no rain.

Lots of salmon at table, of course, and in Vancouver, deliciously creamy black cod. Our B&B on Denman offered the inevitable and highly apopreciated hot muffins. Probably our favorite meal was had at Camille's in Victoria, where they seemed to have the finest hand at cooking the salmon just right, and then ending the trip out in the sun on a deck overlooking Puget Sound at Ray's Boathouse, hosted by Ken Lambert, photographer extraordinaire for The Seattle Times.

G&S Favorites

Happened upon a recent posting through my law school classmate Claude Scales' wonderful Self-Absorbed Boomer blog that posited Three Little Maids From School as the writer's favorite Gilbert & Sullican song, or at least his favorite from The Mikado. If ever there was a subject that oozes the old warning de gustibus non est disputandum (there can be no reasoned argument over taste), it's probably G&S preferences.

I'm sure there are some who would opt for Here's a Howdy-do or even the whole first act intro of the Lord High Executioner, much less the title character's My Object All Sublime, but to me, it's no contest. There's beauty in the bellow of the blast opens what must clearly be the essence of G&S, most notably when it moves to the chorus:

If that is so,
Sing derry down derry
It's evident, very,
Our tastes are one
Away we'll go
And happily marry
Nor tardily tarry
Till day is done!

To me, hearing that fetching tune immures me in the absolute core of G&S and a smile comes upon my face whenever--especially in the overture to The Mikado--the orchestra bursts into the irresistible bars. Not that my joy has anything much to do with the ridiculous plot that finally finds the former Lord High Executioner pleading for the hand of the Gorgon-ous daughte-in-law-elect, a role that usually is the fate of G&S contraltos. It must be the lightness of the moment and the total improbability of the match that summoned up Sullivan's catchiest music.

It ranks as singing in the shower music with the whole run of the Fourth Act of Rigoletto, starting out with La donna e mobile and progressing through the quartet Bella figlia del amore. If you really feel a need to lighten your day, try singing all four parts--tenor, soprano, baritone, and alto--had Verdi not banished Sparfucile the assassin (self-described and so listed in the dramatis personae) from the stage moments before, we would have had a bass on hand for a quintet.

Yet my favorite moment from that opera is the closing cabaletta of the Third Act (both these acts move up to Two and Three, respectively, when most companies now combine the brief first act with the second in performance) when the soprano and then the title-role baritone are reflecting Verdi's fondest pairing--daughter and father--contrasting love and vengeance as they sequentially end the singing and the act with high notes. In my recording Sutherland and Milnes are glorious as they hold the notes for just the right length (unlike Pavarotti's delightful but over-the-top endless final note in La donna), a task made easier by their location in the studio and not the opera house, where often as the curtain comes down during those last high notes, unrestrained audiences obscure the final sound with premature applause.

It's fun to recall my absolutely idiosyncratic choices for sheer musical delight: Wagner of course presents problems because he repeats some of the incredibly fantastic moments for what might to some seem like light years. But if I had to pick something, it would be Wotan's Farewell and Fire Music from the final act of Die Walkure. Sometimes I wish these all could be repeated in encore style much as is the tradition with Never Mind the Why and Wherefor from H.M.S. Pinafore. Now that was a show I first saw when quite young and untutored at summer camp, with my first girlfriend no less singing the role of the Boatswain--it probably explains my fondness still for altos, if not He Is An Englishman.

The Case That Will Not Die

Much to your surprise, that was the title of a book, one of many, about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. As with the Rosenbergs, the best assessments today come down with the conclusion that one was guilty, the other wasn't. I'm glad the one they still say was innocent was Vanzetti; after all, he penned that fantastic letter, the one with "I might have lived out my life, standing on streetcorners, talking to scorning men, I have might died unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. The taking of our lives, a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler, all. That final agony is our triumph!"

And of course, the Rosenbergs, where it now appears pretty clear that Julius was a spy and they went after Ethel to try to turn Julius. Sam Roberts' book adds, of course, that what Julius stole, the Russians doubtless already had, through Klaus Fuchs, a far more sophisticated spy as a physicist himself. And also that (1) the Rosenbergs did not get a fair trial and (2) the death penalty was unjustified even if you are not opposed to capital punishment because the crime was hardly the Crime of the Century (J. Edgar Hoover's appellation) since Fuchs had stolen the major secrets.

All this brings me to what I have studiously avoided to the extent possible these past weeks--the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. What a simple, easy explanation there is: the prosecution failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. End of argument. All the rest is persiflage: yes, she was a bad mother, she lied, she didn't do much after her child went missing for a month. All likely true, but beside the point. It should take an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence to prove a crime of malicious intent--I think of that English case where they did manage to prove the murder when there was no body, no corpus deliciti, because they closed down every other rational explanation.

The TV "experts" of course staked their reputations on her being found guilty. Thus all the yelling and screaming by people as to whom there's little reason to watch or listen. I see people online saying they watched the whole trial and "read between the lines." Reading between the lines fortunately has not yet become part of our system of justice...yet.

I don't even think this was an O.J.situation: where that rarest of rarities--a really competent defense goes up against an inept prosecution--made the difference. Here, the prosecution only had circumstantial evidence and got cocky. Normally, the system gives the prosecutor theedge; we tolerate this because many more defendants are guilty than are innocent. But our system is designed to make it harder to convict an innocent person--and tell me you want to be judged by jurors who "read between the lines" instead of listen to the evidence and listen to radio screamers or TV ones rather than listen to what goes on in the courtroom.

Sacco-Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, inmy view, help make the case against the death penalty--being right 50% of the time isn't good enough to justify killing people in the name of the law. And when you see the kind of representation that Texas historically provided indigent defendants, for example, you're hard put to defend capital punishment purely on grounds of getting the right person.

But we live in a country where Texas decided, and this Supreme Court let it get away with, not complying with international treaty obligations. The treaty says a U.S. court must ensure that a foreigner gets to see his consul when accused of a crime here. You're in some other country's jail and they say you don't get to see the American Embassy rep or a lawyer or anyone because Teas didn't allow Mexicans to see the Mexican Embassy rep. Both Bush and now Obama are trying to keep Texas for executing yet another defendant who did not get that right. The Supreme Court let itslide, saying Congress has to act and now that's what's happening. But until they do, we are becoming America the outlaw.

Magisterial Writing

Despite a huge backlog of really fine reading matter waiting for my attention, I found myself drawn to an old paperback on my shelf of the seemingly last collection of the writings of Janet Flanner, the longtime New Yorker Paris correspondent, who wrote under the pen-name "Genet." (Yes, I know the second e should have a circumflex but this program being what it is...)

This volume of her uncollected writings followed what would have seemed to have been a complete gathering of her articles contributed over 50 years in four previous volumes. It was published in 1979. Reading these pieces--many of them were written on reporting trips to Germany before and after World War II, with side trips to Vienna and Warsaw after the war--makes one remember what great writing is like. Her prose always has a knowing, commanding tone without acting like it does. But it grabs you and holds you, just as her seemingly numberless Letters From Paris did every time The New Yorker arrived with one of her pieces, almost every month or more frequently.

In this particular collection, you get to read a famous early profile she wrote in the early 30s of Hitler, and then a post-war account of the Nuremberg trials, along with side trips to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival and Vienna for a description of how the state opera carried on postwar without its own opera house. Lastly, there are several pieces from Italy in the very early 50s. All superb, of course, but probably the perfect subject for such a magisterial writer--and I use the word to mean one with great authority or assurance--was the writer Thomas Mann, resident in the U.S. after fleeing Germany in the late 1930s. Flanner, whose elegant style makes one forget at times that she was born an Indiana Quaker, takes the full measure of Mann the individual as well as the famed author.

Her 1947 "Letter From the Ghetto" recounts conversations with the few surviving Polish Jewish leaders, who are wondering why the U.S. was taking quite good care of former Nazis it deemed of possible use in the already incipient Cold War, while denying entry to the Jewish refugees who might quite justifiably have been given the unused German and Austrian quotas from the war years as an easy bureaucratic device. Everywhere she went she seemed to put her finger on the key issues that others missed amid the turmoil of largely destroyed Europe.

She wrote with the ease also that came from knowing everyone who mattered in Paris. Her obituary of Margaret Anderson, who ran The Little Review, and her review of the memoirs of Sylvia Beach, who published Joyce's Ulysses when no one else could or would, are magnificent, especially as she knew the subjects well. Probably to me the capstone was a 1975 piece that summed up the "years alone" Alice B. Toklas spent in Paris after Gertrude Stein's death in 1946. I don't think I've ever seen a more comprehensive summary of both the difficulties of the survivor and the sheer amazing quality of her story.

It's Bloomsday

For those who find Joyce endlessly fascinating, yesterday--June 16--Bloomsday as it's called--remains the great day of the year to deal with all things Irish, beyond March 17, which, so far as I have gathered, is hardly celebrated in Ireland save for pleasing tourists. But this was the day--June 16, 1904--Joyce picked to be the time of his great novel, Ulysses. Everything occurs within the 24-hour span. Apparently, it was the day he met his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.

What is it about Joyce that is so compelling? Ulysses, of course, is the definition of a tour de force. First of all, he sets up a wonderful, often satirical parallel with Homer's original. Joyce, raised a Catholic but an exile both from religion and his homeland for most of his life, understood what it meant to wander as Odysseus did; in Joyce's case it was from Rome to Trieste to Zurich to Paris. It was not a romantic journey, either, as he struggled to make a living while writing his masterpiece(s). So Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, encountering everyone from a bile-spouting editor who rejects his ad canvassing (Aeolus), to observing a girl on the beach (Nausicaa) to an encounter with a blind, bigoted old soldier (Cyclops). He befriends a young man in search of himself, Stephen Dedalus, sort of a stand-in for Joyce himself, and who may become a surrogate for Bloom's deceased son, and finally Bloom manages to wind up first in the last night thoughts of his wife Molly, who has committed adultery in their house that very afternoon.

It is the richness of life that Joyce captures, including the ads of the day, references to the art and music of the ages, and even some arcane satire of Irish intellectuals discussing Shakespeare. Some of his parallels with the Odyssey are fantastic--the enchantress Circe appears in the form of bawdyhouse madam Bella Cohen. Nor does Joyce shrink from including all thoughts, many uncensored, including the scatalogical and the sado-masochistic, contrasting the vision of Bloom engaging in voyeurism as he gazes upon a group of young women on the beach while bringing himself to climax with the sublime yet wordly measures of Mozart's DaPonte operas, for which Joyce reputedly enjoyed exercising his tenor voice.

If you couldn't get a bad childhood memory out of your system--consider Father Dolan, who punishes the young Stephen in the preceding set-up novel for Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, only to appear hundreds of pages later in the dream sequence of Nighttown popping out of a jack-in-the-box to remind Stephen that he remains "a lazy little loafer." The quotidian discussions of a group of men put together in a carriage to ride to a funeral become timeless in Joyce's hands.

You somehow keep reading while realizing that the master has been engaging in wordplay among multiple languages. Each chapter is written in a different style--from the headlines describing the scene in the newspaper office to the dramatic events in Nighttown written as a play. In one chapter, he provides a complete history of English language and literature. Another chapter is written in imitation of the catechism Joyce learned as a boy.

While some have told me of the even greater wonders to be found in Finnegan's Wake, where Joyce seems to have sought to invent his own language, I find his last work virtually impenetrable. I know every time I pick up Ulysses, though, at any page I will discover things I never noticed before.

Pomp and Circumstance

My daughter Vanessa was awarded her Master of Public Health degree recently at a nice ceremony the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. She was part of a rather large group of MPH candidates, other health-related masters, and PhD and DPH recipients. It was noteworthy to me because she had worked very hard in an intensive one-year (eleven-month) program that effectively compacted two years of work into one. She also took even more of all the science courses her mother and I never went near.

The large complement of degree candidates did remind me of the late Georgetown President Father Healy's comment upon awarding 616 J.D. degrees to Eileen's class at Georgetown Law just a quarter-century ago, when he preceded his conferral of those degrees with the introductory "With fear and trembling for the future of Western civilization..."

I'm hoping she finds something she enjoys by way of work--even though the common parlance these days would have it that new graduates had better be satisfied with getting a job. Until proven otherwise, however, I have great confidence that with some application on her part, she will wind up with something she will enjoy as well as earn a paycheck. At a time when many also are questioning the value of much that is labeled higher education, it struck me that she did get reasonably good value for her year's investment at Hopkins. She threw herself into both her coursework and her required project work and I suspect made the most of the bargain of getting all this in one year.

She also enjoyed living in the Mt. Vernon section of downtown Baltimore and frequented some of the more interesting eating places and entertainment venues there. In honor of her getting her MPH, her friend Dave's birthday, and our 41st anniversary, we celebrated at Woodberry Kitchen, an excellent restaurant that focuses on locally-grown and natural ingredients, which has become common, of course, but also presents a varied and stimulating carte de jour. Best of all was a selection of four varieties of revived local Chesapeake Bay oysters followed (in my case) by perfectly-braised veal accompanied by farro and wild mushrooms. By the by, in case you're interested in who serves what I regard as the tastiest mussels in the area, I heartily recommend Granville Moore's, a old barely-renovated bar on the now-being-redeveloped H Street, N.E., near the Atlas Theater complex.

The commencement remarks by the incumbent Maryland Secretary of Health (and recently interim head of the Food and Drug Administration) were, most significantly, blessedly brief. I might have found the address at the overall Hopkins commencement the next day on Homewood Field, the university's lacrosse citadel, worth hearing as they were delivered by the editor and columnist Fareed Zakaria, who had written only days before an enlightening column on why Obama was right on about the Middle East. But mine was the only vote favoring attending the big ceremony, as it seems the MPH crowd figured they had all sat through both their own ceremony, and no more than a few years ago, their own undergraduate commencements.

In a strange sort of way I tend to like commencement ceremonies, despite the ludicrousness of much of the content. I sat through two of them at Cornell--for my graduation and Vanessa's-- where headline speakers are never on hand because the university generally grants no honorary degrees and the university's President delivers the commencement address. I can't say I recall much of either talk. I think this year's convocation speaker was Rudy Giuliani, whose shelf sell date has clearly expired.

I also missed my "second commencement"--from law school, mainly because I hurried back from Reserve basic training to complete my degree one semester late in January; I did get a copy of the program from that following June and I think the lead honorary degree was given, in Harvard's infinite wisdom, to the Shah of Iran. But probably my first introduction to the general zaniness of these occasions was when a more knowledgable (musically, that is) high school classmate mentioned to me that the recessional, Berlioz's Marche Hongroise (Hungarian March), being played at the end of our ceremony came from a scene in his now-more-often performed opera, Le Damnation de Faust, when the condemned march into Hell.

Opera All Over

This turned on to be my week for opera. Saturday afternoon we once again
went to The Met at the movies and saw the live transmission of Die
Walkure in wonderful HD, sound, and close-ups. It was a marvelous
performance and even the Met's crazy, pricey new set (the 40-ton monster) was
better than in Rheingold last year. Eva-Marie Westbrook in her Met
debut was a charming Sieglinde and Jonas Kauffman a stalwart Siegmund. Once
again Bryn Terfel brought off his portrayal of Wotan well. I think I enjoy the Walkure Brunnhilde the most and the slimmed-down Deborah Voigt gave it
plenty of personality. Everyone's voice was brilliant--and I even found
Stephanie Blythe, a very very large woman in the old Wagnerian tradition, fit in
as Fricka. I think I forgot how exhilarating the whole opera is, so that when
Act III begins with the famed Ride and by the time it ends with the glorious
Fire Music, you are already won over and in fine spirits.

An added
fillip comes with the immediate interviews right as the leads come off-stage,
done in this instance by none other than Placido Domingo. It humanizes the
performers. And then there were the previews of the 11 operas the Met will
broadcast to the theatres next season. What could be better than to end it with
Nathalie Dessay (if memory serves me right) bursting into the Sempre
libere from Traviata?

We actually got to the theatre late
and had to sit up front. But the seats were very comfortable and leaned back
quite far, so they turned out to be excellent. Even though we were late, the Met
was later. The computer controlling the 40-ton monster set went on the blink and
it was not until about a half hour later that the performance began.

Last night (Tuesday) Eileen and I took in the rarely-performed Iphigenie en Tauride, revived this season at both Washington Opera,
where we saw it, and the Met, for none other than Senor Domingo. This Gluck
opera once was a mainstay of the repertory but it has disappeared for many
years--the Met revived it a few seasons ago after a lapse since 1912. Gluck was
regarded as something of a change agent in opera, moving away from the trilling
of the early periods. He was a German composer working in Paris, so of course
there is a ballet (a requirement set by the Paris Opera in the 1800s) which is
more ludicrous than most of them. Mostly, however, the opera is very very
static. You do enjoy Patricia Racette's wonderful singing in the title role as
the priestess who was the sister of Orestes and Electra in the good old House of
Atreus. (Unhappy families can be unhappy in wildly bloody ways!) And it was
delightful when Domingo materialized as Oreste and just began singing in that
luscious tenor he still maintains at a good level at his advanced age. I think
the piece plays better as a Greek drama--it's not a tragedy, incidentally. A
friend with whom I spoke today told me she had seenit near Sparta at a
rediscovered ancient theatre and that it was wonderful in that original form and
forum.

The opera was popular 100 years ago at time the delightfully
mordant Saki referred to it in one of his most classic stories, The
Reticence of Lady Anne:
"The bullfinch lazily filled in the interval with an air from Iphigenie en Tauride.
Egbert recognized it immediately because it was the only air the bullfinch
whistled and he had come to them with the reputation for whistling it. Both Egbert and Lady Anne would have preferred something from The Yeoman of the Guard, which was their favourite opera. In matters artistic they had a similarity of taste. They leaned towards the
honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from the title. A riderless warhorse, for example, with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted, "Bad News," suggested
to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence."

P.S. Saturday night was a slight detour from the lyric stage to 1940s Hollywood as represented by the Berlin and Vienna emigres who wrote songs for the movies and the opera composer Erich Korngold who wrote the score for Errol Flynn's famous rendition of Robin Hood. I had not
heard about Friedrich Hollander, who wrote all kinds of wonderful songs but then there also were wonderful songs like "The Saga of Jenny" from the Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin Lady in the Dark, a fascinating musical play put together by the master showman Moss Hart. And what better to end the evening than a rousing run of "The Boys in the Backroom" by a singer mpersonating Marlene Dietrich?

Encamped in Canton

This has been an enjoyable couple of days based in North Canton, Ohio, which has several malls and about every chain store and restaurant in America. There's one nonstop each day each way between Akron-Canton airport and National. It's a small plane and given the various weather problems this week, it was running late Wednesday night so I arrived about 1 1/2 hrs late, which was no big deal as I had no plans for that night anyway. The Budget folks had closed and left me a sign telling me to pick up the car down the hall at Avis--but everything worked, including my being a Priority Club member at Holiday Inn, which got me a free breakfast each day here, assuming that was what I needed.

Thursday turned out to be a bit cloudy and threatening in the morning as I headed for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, about five minutes from where I'm staying. The Hall is pretty good--lots of memorabilia, good TV clips of famous plays and games, and good action photos and bios on the biggest stars, like the exhibit on all-time runners, which featured Jim Brown, Walter Payton, and Emmitt Smith. Records exist of all the ancient teams that were once in pro football like the Pottsville (Pa.) Maroons, who claimed they were robbed of the title in 1926.

I guess to me the only shortcomings were an overemphasis on historically-significant owners and commissioners, particularly Pete Rozelle. Just reminds you re the current labor situation that they see it more as a business and less as a game. At least they haven't removed O. J. Simpson's bust from the Hall of Fame but there's no other mention of him and rather minimal reference to one Howard Cosell, despite a large exhibit on Monday Night Football, where you have to look hard to find his picture.

Went onto Akron and visited Dr. Bob's House, where once resided the co-founder, with Bill W., of AA. It's on a red-brick street in an old middle-class residential section of an old city and actually, they're renovating the foundation of his real house, so you get to see his stuff moved into the house next door which is almost identical. I liked stuff like his old doctor's bag and Royal manual typewriter and that the woman on duty invites you into the kitchen for coffee on the house.

Decided I had the time to make it to Cleveland to take in the Rock'n'Roll Museum & Hall of Fame and the day cooperated, having become sunny and almost warm, if windy. As with everything else, it seemed, this museum was undergoing its first major renovation--lucky me. But they really do have tons of artifacts--clothing, guitars, letters, etc all associated with all sorts of performers and the interpretation given rock is a broad one. Some of the history stuff is fun--the re-creation of the Sun Records studio in Memphis (made famous in Million Dollar Quartet) and lots of stuff connected with the early rock DJ Alan Freed. Wonderful films and tapes all over the place and plenty of opportunities to stop and listen to artists of your choosing.

Best part I thought was a theater showing clips of the artists inducted each year. They put together great collages of the half dozen people elected each year to the Hall. Even exhibits devoted to Rolling Stone, all the many British groups beyond the Beatles and the Stones, Cleveland locals, Motown, Elvis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix etc etc etc. Could have spent a lot more time--and even enjoyed the store, particularly for the fantastically eclectic collection of CDs, DVDs, etc of groups and artists. Anyone you can think of that had any connection to pop music in our time is there--I got a kick out of finding CDs by Mama Cass, Jerry Vale, Pete Seeger, Del Shannon, and Dusty Springfield. The cashier pointed to one guy and said he's the one who picks out all the recordings they feature on sale.

I opted not to stick around Cleveland for an Indians-Royals game last night at Progressive Union Park (nee Jacobs Field). The Tribe has been winning like crazy--nine straight--but the fans haven't come back yet, as several recent games had attendance under 10,000. There's an Indians store right here in North Canton and I barely resisted getting a jacket with a huge version of Chief Wahoo, America's most politically incorrect mascot/symbol, on the back. Also held off at the Pro Football Hall of Fame store, where Raiders regalia kept jumping out at me.


Today at the 50th anniversary conference of the Horatio Alger Society, my reason for the trip, there were three presentations--one on an obscure author of boy's books set in Northern Maine, a second on the big four of boy's series authors in the 19th century--Alger, Oliver Optic, Edward Ellis and Harry Castlemon, and a last one on what universities were like in Alger's college days, viz., Harvard between 1848 and 1852.

Then we had the auction and I managed to get a couple of books I wanted. Prices were down largely because a couple of regular high rollers were not on hand--some of us wished we were buying the books now we acquired over the years. Last night I went out for dinner with Carol Nackenoff from Swarthmore and her husband Jim, who actually grew up here in North Canton! They wanted to go to a highly-regarded Serbian place in Barberton (about 20 minutes from here) that specializes in Serbian fried chicken! Like most Balkans cuisine, it was fairly heavy. Tonight's dinner was at a restaurant built in what was once the headquarters (next to the airport) of the 356th Fighter Group. Echt amerikanische but pleasant enough and I liked the old pilots club decor.

And tomorrow morning early I head out--it's been good.

Cornhusking

This was a very quick trip but even with one day mostly a rainout--leaving aside the hours I was working--some perceptions about Lincoln, Nebraska, came through. First of all, Lincoln isn't as small as I expected. It has a population that exceeds 250,000. The day we arrived, that was bolstered by the simultaneous arrival, almost all of them at our hotel, it seemed, of the annual state gathering of the Future Farmers of America, which is big stuff out this way.

Probably should have expected something like that when you decide to stay at the leading hostelry, the Cornhusker Marriott. The FFA members are high-school age, clean cut in their navy FFA sweater-jackets with gold lettering and black trousers or skirts. The room clerk was being thoughtful in asking us to wait for available rooms so she didn't have to put us "on a floor with the kids." We spoke to a few who had medals for raising dairy cattle.

The rain kept me from seeing the campus of the University of Nebraska across town but we met in a room of the skyscraper state capitol, which is quite a building in itself. It looks to be about 18 storeys high with a dome. Inside there is a marvelous three or four-storey open space with gothic stonework, rose windows, and mosaics, most devoted to agricultural themes.

In the main hall are sculptures of some famous Nebraskans, from George Norris, the U.S. Senator who may be remembered more for the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act than the Tennessee Valley Authority, both of which were his accomplishments; to General Pershing of World War I fame, to, of course, Nebraska's most famous literary figure, Willa Cather, and not to forget the immortal William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill. The Supreme Court sits at the end of one of the four corridors, a distinguished chamber featuring inlays and woodwork.

The prudent Plains denizens even anticipated the need for an intermediate court of appeals so built a notable chamber for it across from the Supreme Court's courtroom back when the capitol went up--in the 1920's, although the court itself didn't come about until the 1970s. Until that happened, it was used for legislative hearings.

The legislative chamber is close to the central hall and you will note I said chamber in the singular. There is a 40-member Senate which makes Nebraska the only state with a unicameral legislature. They got rid of the Assembly in 1934, in what was regarded as a progressive move supported by Senator George Norris; one major argument was that the conference committees that resolved differences in bills enacted by the two chambers met and acted secretly. It is surprising to look to the other side of the great hall at the center of the building and see only two small closed doors that denote where the second chamber once met. The Senators, by the way, are elected on a nonpartisan basis.

We stayed over mainly to meet with the Chief Justice and another judge leading the caseflow management effort who had been sitting in Omaha the first day. Our meeting place was a restaurant in an old house, nicely remodeled to serve its current purpose with much memorabilia -- mainly posters and lithographs -- befitting its name, Billy's. That, of course, referred to perhaps the most famous, if non-native, Nebraskan of them all, the three-time Presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, the Boy Orator of the Platte.