First concert of the year.
The title the editors put on it is more enthusiastic than I intended to be. I was really looking forward to Lt. Kijé, which, despite its supposed warhorse status, rarely gets played. That was a real disappointment.
But I didn't intend to be unenthusiastic. What I was getting at in my praise of the orchestra's playing, but may not have expressed clearly - this review was written tucked into odd bits of time yesterday in between things like trips to San Francisco - was that they were securely in tune. Ensemble - playing together, and at the right moment - sometimes failed, but intonation did not. They're usually pretty good at that, but sometimes they bomb. None of that here.
Noting that there was no opening gala was not just to differentiate them from the San Francisco Symphony, but another delayed dig at the SJ Mercury reviewer several years ago who complained about their not having one. I'm happier without it.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, September 30, 2013
scena
Someone else will have to tell me if this is a normal sight.
Never mind why I was there, but yesterday afternoon I was walking down Maiden Lane in San Francisco, an alleyway famous for being lined with high-end clothing stores, most of which were closed on a Sunday. I don't get to that part of the City very often.
As I reached the end of the block, I could see, and hear, across Grant Avenue, a woman standing in the middle of the street at the start of the next block of Maiden Lane, not where I'd expect to see a busker. She was wearing a red-and-white stage dress, and she was singing something that I'd never heard a busker perform, an opera aria. It was Puccini's "O mio babbino caro." She may have been accompanied by a boombox, but if so it was inaudible across the street, whereas she was not. I stopped to listen. After going through it what seemed like 3 or 4 times (it's a short aria), she stopped. Applause from across the street.
Never mind why I was there, but yesterday afternoon I was walking down Maiden Lane in San Francisco, an alleyway famous for being lined with high-end clothing stores, most of which were closed on a Sunday. I don't get to that part of the City very often.
As I reached the end of the block, I could see, and hear, across Grant Avenue, a woman standing in the middle of the street at the start of the next block of Maiden Lane, not where I'd expect to see a busker. She was wearing a red-and-white stage dress, and she was singing something that I'd never heard a busker perform, an opera aria. It was Puccini's "O mio babbino caro." She may have been accompanied by a boombox, but if so it was inaudible across the street, whereas she was not. I stopped to listen. After going through it what seemed like 3 or 4 times (it's a short aria), she stopped. Applause from across the street.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
historical correction
I'm beginning to see this article defending Neville Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich cited with admiration as a audacious and compelling new interpretation.
It's neither compelling nor new, so let's have done with it. It is, simply, a restatement of what has long been known to historians as the "low case" for Munich, which is, "well, at least it bought Britain time to be more prepared for the war when it came."
The basic problem with this interpretation is that that's not what Chamberlain thought he was doing. When he came back to London waving his meaningless signed agreement with Hitler, he said he believed it was "peace for our time" and that's what he meant. Given the stakes at hand of peace or war, it would have been not just cynicism, but the criminal height of political irresponsibility, for him to have declared "peace for our time" if he was secretly thinking, "it will buy us a year to get readier for the inevitable war" and to have sacrificed Czechoslovakia, the only real democracy remaining in central or eastern Europe, on the altar of such a cold realpolitik. No: Chamberlain was a fool but not a criminal. He was sincere.
True that Britain was indeed better-prepared in September 1939 than September 1938, but not because of Chamberlain's calculations, and much of that preparation came after the invasion of Prague in the intervening March showed him how much he'd been fooled. And who was responsible for the earlier poor preparation? Well, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer - in charge of determining how much money the entire government raised and spent - and then Prime Minister for the entire previous seven years? Neville Chamberlain.
British military rearmament had been going on since 1932, but in a desultory, half-hopeless manner best illustrated by this warning given that year by Stanley Baldwin, Chamberlain's mentor and predecessor as Prime Minister: "I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through." In the event, it turned out that air defense was the turning point in winning the war, and that was done through a very late ramping up of defensive aircraft production. You can't be prepared if you take Baldwin's mournful view of military defense, and sharing it was the reason Chamberlain was so desperate for a peace agreement.
Baumann notes that Germany was also much better prepared in 1939 than 1938, and tries to cut off the question of Germany's and Britain's relative preparation - it's been argued by others that a 1938 war could have been more easily won than the 1939 one was - by claiming that the British military thought it wasn't ready in 1938 but would be in 1939. I haven't come across that combination of views in all my extensive reading on the subject, and it certainly didn't influence Chamberlain's thinking.
The "low case" for Munich, the one presented here, really only works as an "every cloud has a silver lining" backup to the failure of Chamberlain's "high case" (the argument that he really had brought peace). You can say, "Well, Munich was a total disaster, but look at the bright side: it gave us another year to get prepared." That's pretty pathetic, and not a moral argument at all.
The reason that appeasement was wrong in Munich was not that you should never appease anyone's legitimate grievances, but because Hitler was unappeasable. After having already broken public promises, not to mention the Treaty of Versailles, by occupying the Rhineland and annexing Austria, he suddenly announced that the oppression of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs (which was at least 90% invented, and which, even if it did exist, he had previously ignored) was so outrageous that it must stop instantly and that the only solution was for Germany to annex the lot, which also happened to include all of Czechoslovakia's border defense and most of its heavy industry, and to do it right now.
Hitler acted this way as a deliberate ploy to stun everyone else into acquiescence, where a more reasonable complaint would have brought more reasonable consideration. His other tactic, which he also is on record as having specifically recommended to the Sudetens for their talks with the Czechs, was, once the other party has agreed to your extreme demands, to suddenly declare that that's no longer acceptable and up the demands. You can't negotiate with someone like that. You can't even say, "Tell us what you want and we'll give it to you," because they won't stick with it.
Chamberlain agreed to all of Hitler's demands of the moment, sacrificing Czechoslovakia's integrity without even consulting his supposed partner in the negotiations, the French prime minister (let alone the Czechs themselves, who didn't even have a seat at the conference), and in return received only a promise that this man who had already broken so many promises wouldn't ask for anything else. Hitler kept that promise for less than six months.
So let's apply this to the present-day claim by Republicans that to allow Obamacare would be like capitulating at Munich. When Obama began his negotiations by offering what Republicans had long said they wanted, a private-insurance-based health care system like the one they offered in response to Hillarycare in 1994 and actually enacted in Massachusetts, and then cut away provision after provision to woo Republican support which he never got, and once it was enacted without Republican votes, the Republicans started spouting Hitleresque lies as to its provisions, and then they demand more and more concessions, continually upping the ante, in order to prevent its implementation after it's been passed, even though they don't control all of Congress, let alone the Presidency, and then compare Obama and the Democrats to Hitler for not being reasonable, I think I know which side actually is the brazen Hitler and which the cringing Chamberlain in this metaphor.
It's neither compelling nor new, so let's have done with it. It is, simply, a restatement of what has long been known to historians as the "low case" for Munich, which is, "well, at least it bought Britain time to be more prepared for the war when it came."
The basic problem with this interpretation is that that's not what Chamberlain thought he was doing. When he came back to London waving his meaningless signed agreement with Hitler, he said he believed it was "peace for our time" and that's what he meant. Given the stakes at hand of peace or war, it would have been not just cynicism, but the criminal height of political irresponsibility, for him to have declared "peace for our time" if he was secretly thinking, "it will buy us a year to get readier for the inevitable war" and to have sacrificed Czechoslovakia, the only real democracy remaining in central or eastern Europe, on the altar of such a cold realpolitik. No: Chamberlain was a fool but not a criminal. He was sincere.
True that Britain was indeed better-prepared in September 1939 than September 1938, but not because of Chamberlain's calculations, and much of that preparation came after the invasion of Prague in the intervening March showed him how much he'd been fooled. And who was responsible for the earlier poor preparation? Well, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer - in charge of determining how much money the entire government raised and spent - and then Prime Minister for the entire previous seven years? Neville Chamberlain.
British military rearmament had been going on since 1932, but in a desultory, half-hopeless manner best illustrated by this warning given that year by Stanley Baldwin, Chamberlain's mentor and predecessor as Prime Minister: "I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through." In the event, it turned out that air defense was the turning point in winning the war, and that was done through a very late ramping up of defensive aircraft production. You can't be prepared if you take Baldwin's mournful view of military defense, and sharing it was the reason Chamberlain was so desperate for a peace agreement.
Baumann notes that Germany was also much better prepared in 1939 than 1938, and tries to cut off the question of Germany's and Britain's relative preparation - it's been argued by others that a 1938 war could have been more easily won than the 1939 one was - by claiming that the British military thought it wasn't ready in 1938 but would be in 1939. I haven't come across that combination of views in all my extensive reading on the subject, and it certainly didn't influence Chamberlain's thinking.
The "low case" for Munich, the one presented here, really only works as an "every cloud has a silver lining" backup to the failure of Chamberlain's "high case" (the argument that he really had brought peace). You can say, "Well, Munich was a total disaster, but look at the bright side: it gave us another year to get prepared." That's pretty pathetic, and not a moral argument at all.
The reason that appeasement was wrong in Munich was not that you should never appease anyone's legitimate grievances, but because Hitler was unappeasable. After having already broken public promises, not to mention the Treaty of Versailles, by occupying the Rhineland and annexing Austria, he suddenly announced that the oppression of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs (which was at least 90% invented, and which, even if it did exist, he had previously ignored) was so outrageous that it must stop instantly and that the only solution was for Germany to annex the lot, which also happened to include all of Czechoslovakia's border defense and most of its heavy industry, and to do it right now.
Hitler acted this way as a deliberate ploy to stun everyone else into acquiescence, where a more reasonable complaint would have brought more reasonable consideration. His other tactic, which he also is on record as having specifically recommended to the Sudetens for their talks with the Czechs, was, once the other party has agreed to your extreme demands, to suddenly declare that that's no longer acceptable and up the demands. You can't negotiate with someone like that. You can't even say, "Tell us what you want and we'll give it to you," because they won't stick with it.
Chamberlain agreed to all of Hitler's demands of the moment, sacrificing Czechoslovakia's integrity without even consulting his supposed partner in the negotiations, the French prime minister (let alone the Czechs themselves, who didn't even have a seat at the conference), and in return received only a promise that this man who had already broken so many promises wouldn't ask for anything else. Hitler kept that promise for less than six months.
So let's apply this to the present-day claim by Republicans that to allow Obamacare would be like capitulating at Munich. When Obama began his negotiations by offering what Republicans had long said they wanted, a private-insurance-based health care system like the one they offered in response to Hillarycare in 1994 and actually enacted in Massachusetts, and then cut away provision after provision to woo Republican support which he never got, and once it was enacted without Republican votes, the Republicans started spouting Hitleresque lies as to its provisions, and then they demand more and more concessions, continually upping the ante, in order to prevent its implementation after it's been passed, even though they don't control all of Congress, let alone the Presidency, and then compare Obama and the Democrats to Hitler for not being reasonable, I think I know which side actually is the brazen Hitler and which the cringing Chamberlain in this metaphor.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
two museums
Today was Smithsonian Museum Day (and it probably still is, if you want to bestir yourself and go somewhere). So we collected our free ticket and went downtown to the San Jose Museum of Art. The current exhibits were worth the ticket price.
I liked best the video installation of a long series of shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly from sea level and mostly in the fog. Very restful, and accompanied by recorded ambient music that sounded like a collaboration between Stephen Scott and Ingram Marshall, but wasn't.
The strangest exhibit was an entire hall taken up with thousands of photographs of roti, Indian round flatbread, cut into shapes representing the phases of the moon, grouped in frames by months. It looked like this. The artist, who is from India - thus, I guess, the roti - decided in this way to represent the span of his late father's life. What (I thought) a gigantic waste of time. But, it turned out, not the waste of the opportunity to give an astronomy lesson. "There's 22,000 moons," said a handy docent to me, brightly. "You mean individual days, right?" I said. "Not 'moons' as in lunar cycles," pointing to two consecutive full moons on the wall, "because there wouldn't be that many." She looked doubtful. "Well, the father lived 62 years," as if that were the number of lunar cycles. "But a year is a solar cycle, not a lunar cycle," I said, and suddenly I was off into a lesson in calendrical astronomy, with lots of hand gestures, about lunar phases and tidal lock and answering her questions whether everybody on Earth can see the Moon at the same time (no) and whether the moon shows the same face and phase at one time to everyone who can see it (yes) and she was just fascinated that I knew all this stuff and I was thinking it would be good for a docent at a display of moon phase photographs to know it too, and then she asked how old I was when I learned all this. I said maybe eight. "And you still remember it? I sure didn't go to a good school." But I said I didn't learn this at school. I learned it from reading books by Isaac Asimov.
One museum I've wanted to get to for a long time that wasn't on the Smithsonian list was the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco. So I bit the bullet and went there on Thursday before a concert. Let me tell you, this is some detailed museum, at a level I thought they didn't make any more in these dumbed-down days. Its subject is the life of Walt, and walking through it is like reading a richly-illustrated pictorial biography, with audio and video supplements. Even without taking everything in, I was there for over three hours.
Though the museum reminds you that it's a project of the Disney family and has nothing to do with the company, it has a lot of stuff that could only have come from the company or with its permission: original drawings by many staff artists, video clips, one of the original multiplane cameras, a huge - maybe 15 feet across - scale model of Disneyland, as far as I could tell as it was a few years after Walt's death. The weight of the company becomes particularly apparent when you get to the post-WW2 period, when Walt ceased being merely a successful entertainment executive and became a media mogul. Though he still inspired and oversaw everything, with a few exceptions the company products ceased being his personal projects in the way the early cartoons had been, and his life split into two parts: the company, and the private hobbies (he collected miniatures and ran a large toy-sized train, big enough to sit on, through his front yard) and vacations he took to get a break from the office.
There's some things the museum doesn't tell you, like when was the last time Walt picked up a brush and animated something himself. My guess from the evidence is, sometime not long before 1930. But it does tell a lot. You can hear the crossness in a recording of his voice as he tells of how his brother Roy, who ran the financial side, made him show the unfinished Snow White to a banker who might lend them the money to finish it - Walt hated letting outsiders see unfinished work - and how Roy contrived not even to show up for the screening. And then, way down the exhibits, the chortle as he tells of making Mary Poppins, 25 years later, with greater financial ease than any of their earlier big pictures, "and Roy didn't even make me show it to any bankers."
It also discusses the 1941 strike. This is unusual. Most material I'd previously seen on the strike takes the viewpoint of "Strikers: Good. Management: Bad." while previous Disney hagiographies have ignored its existence. But this shows both the anti-Disney view, including discussing the firing of Art Babbitt and showing some of the angry cartoons the strikers drew, and Walt's view, which he presented in a HUAC hearing a few years later. Basically Walt opposed unionization because he felt the union had been taken over by the Commies. The only really chilling item in the whole museum was at the end in someone's obituary for Walt, mentioning casually that he supported Republicans like George Murphy and Ronald Reagan because he believed the Democrats had been co-opted by the Communists.
But, though it's possible to read between the lines here and there, the tale is mostly celebratory and sympathetic. To read the museum's account, the 1920s in Disney's career consisted of Walt and Roy repeatedly dreaming up things that were good and real and true, and then evil bankers and distributors and middlemen would steal away their money, their ideas, their cartoon characters, and their animators. On the personal side, there are a lot of home movies from this period, but they're interesting because they're of this period. Disney was a pioneering moviemaker; he had film cameras at his disposal. (Many of his 1920s movies were mixed animation/live action.) Very few other people were taking home movies as early as he was; even fewer were taking color ones as early as he was.
Fascinating place; I'd recommend it.
I liked best the video installation of a long series of shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly from sea level and mostly in the fog. Very restful, and accompanied by recorded ambient music that sounded like a collaboration between Stephen Scott and Ingram Marshall, but wasn't.
The strangest exhibit was an entire hall taken up with thousands of photographs of roti, Indian round flatbread, cut into shapes representing the phases of the moon, grouped in frames by months. It looked like this. The artist, who is from India - thus, I guess, the roti - decided in this way to represent the span of his late father's life. What (I thought) a gigantic waste of time. But, it turned out, not the waste of the opportunity to give an astronomy lesson. "There's 22,000 moons," said a handy docent to me, brightly. "You mean individual days, right?" I said. "Not 'moons' as in lunar cycles," pointing to two consecutive full moons on the wall, "because there wouldn't be that many." She looked doubtful. "Well, the father lived 62 years," as if that were the number of lunar cycles. "But a year is a solar cycle, not a lunar cycle," I said, and suddenly I was off into a lesson in calendrical astronomy, with lots of hand gestures, about lunar phases and tidal lock and answering her questions whether everybody on Earth can see the Moon at the same time (no) and whether the moon shows the same face and phase at one time to everyone who can see it (yes) and she was just fascinated that I knew all this stuff and I was thinking it would be good for a docent at a display of moon phase photographs to know it too, and then she asked how old I was when I learned all this. I said maybe eight. "And you still remember it? I sure didn't go to a good school." But I said I didn't learn this at school. I learned it from reading books by Isaac Asimov.
One museum I've wanted to get to for a long time that wasn't on the Smithsonian list was the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco. So I bit the bullet and went there on Thursday before a concert. Let me tell you, this is some detailed museum, at a level I thought they didn't make any more in these dumbed-down days. Its subject is the life of Walt, and walking through it is like reading a richly-illustrated pictorial biography, with audio and video supplements. Even without taking everything in, I was there for over three hours.
Though the museum reminds you that it's a project of the Disney family and has nothing to do with the company, it has a lot of stuff that could only have come from the company or with its permission: original drawings by many staff artists, video clips, one of the original multiplane cameras, a huge - maybe 15 feet across - scale model of Disneyland, as far as I could tell as it was a few years after Walt's death. The weight of the company becomes particularly apparent when you get to the post-WW2 period, when Walt ceased being merely a successful entertainment executive and became a media mogul. Though he still inspired and oversaw everything, with a few exceptions the company products ceased being his personal projects in the way the early cartoons had been, and his life split into two parts: the company, and the private hobbies (he collected miniatures and ran a large toy-sized train, big enough to sit on, through his front yard) and vacations he took to get a break from the office.
There's some things the museum doesn't tell you, like when was the last time Walt picked up a brush and animated something himself. My guess from the evidence is, sometime not long before 1930. But it does tell a lot. You can hear the crossness in a recording of his voice as he tells of how his brother Roy, who ran the financial side, made him show the unfinished Snow White to a banker who might lend them the money to finish it - Walt hated letting outsiders see unfinished work - and how Roy contrived not even to show up for the screening. And then, way down the exhibits, the chortle as he tells of making Mary Poppins, 25 years later, with greater financial ease than any of their earlier big pictures, "and Roy didn't even make me show it to any bankers."
It also discusses the 1941 strike. This is unusual. Most material I'd previously seen on the strike takes the viewpoint of "Strikers: Good. Management: Bad." while previous Disney hagiographies have ignored its existence. But this shows both the anti-Disney view, including discussing the firing of Art Babbitt and showing some of the angry cartoons the strikers drew, and Walt's view, which he presented in a HUAC hearing a few years later. Basically Walt opposed unionization because he felt the union had been taken over by the Commies. The only really chilling item in the whole museum was at the end in someone's obituary for Walt, mentioning casually that he supported Republicans like George Murphy and Ronald Reagan because he believed the Democrats had been co-opted by the Communists.
But, though it's possible to read between the lines here and there, the tale is mostly celebratory and sympathetic. To read the museum's account, the 1920s in Disney's career consisted of Walt and Roy repeatedly dreaming up things that were good and real and true, and then evil bankers and distributors and middlemen would steal away their money, their ideas, their cartoon characters, and their animators. On the personal side, there are a lot of home movies from this period, but they're interesting because they're of this period. Disney was a pioneering moviemaker; he had film cameras at his disposal. (Many of his 1920s movies were mixed animation/live action.) Very few other people were taking home movies as early as he was; even fewer were taking color ones as early as he was.
Fascinating place; I'd recommend it.
Friday, September 27, 2013
more tv premieres
Two shows that frequently feature two characters talking over each other. Is that a thing now? Thank ghu for close-captioned subtitles, or else I wouldn't be able to make most of them out.
Agents of SHIELD. I don't follow the Marvel-verse, so I felt completely at sea for at least half of this. I only watched it because it had Joss Whedon's name on it. I was expecting clever, but what we got was: not clever enough. Clark Gregg was what he was as Leonato, the only other role I've seen him in: the straight man.
Speaking of casting, Skye would have been a perfect role for Eliza Dushku. She would have been more grounded, less the flaky airhead. That she didn't get to play this, but was saddled with Dollhouse's Echo, a role entirely ill-suited for her, is a shame.
Verdict: Maybe.
The Crazy Ones. You know, ever since I saw the first season of Mad Men, which is just about the only part of Mad Men I did see, I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there were a TV show that actually was about an advertising agency?" (Since Mad Men ludicrously hardly even tried.) Well, now we have one.
Starring Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar: it's like one of those weird food combinations that actually works. SMG gets to be the wet blanket without sounding like she's whining about it, which she did too much of on Ringer.
I didn't get all of this one either, but at least B. was there to tell me who Kelly Clarkson is.
Verdict: Sure, I'll keep trying this show.
Agents of SHIELD. I don't follow the Marvel-verse, so I felt completely at sea for at least half of this. I only watched it because it had Joss Whedon's name on it. I was expecting clever, but what we got was: not clever enough. Clark Gregg was what he was as Leonato, the only other role I've seen him in: the straight man.
Speaking of casting, Skye would have been a perfect role for Eliza Dushku. She would have been more grounded, less the flaky airhead. That she didn't get to play this, but was saddled with Dollhouse's Echo, a role entirely ill-suited for her, is a shame.
Verdict: Maybe.
The Crazy Ones. You know, ever since I saw the first season of Mad Men, which is just about the only part of Mad Men I did see, I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there were a TV show that actually was about an advertising agency?" (Since Mad Men ludicrously hardly even tried.) Well, now we have one.
Starring Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar: it's like one of those weird food combinations that actually works. SMG gets to be the wet blanket without sounding like she's whining about it, which she did too much of on Ringer.
I didn't get all of this one either, but at least B. was there to tell me who Kelly Clarkson is.
Verdict: Sure, I'll keep trying this show.
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Thursday's concert was organized like an old-fashioned instrumentalist recital. The biggest piece (in this case Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, with Emanuel Ax) was in the first half, along with a semi-hefty opener (Mahler's Blumine, a movement he deleted from his First Symphony, and which should have stayed forgotten). The second half was a series of six short pieces by different composers, which MTT insisted on playing together as a suite, without breaks for applause between them.
It wasn't exactly a collection of bonbons or encores. Five of the six were wistful, mostly quiet. They were all played exquisitely well, and most of them expressed the quiddity of their composers with profundity. Our Town was intensely Coplandesque, Valse triste graciously Sibelian, and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (a piece not played here since Beecham did it 60 years ago) richly Delian. The only problem was that it was a little jarring turning from the quiddity of one composer directly to that of another.
Interesting concert. Ran long, despite the nominal 36-minute span of the six-piece suite.
It wasn't exactly a collection of bonbons or encores. Five of the six were wistful, mostly quiet. They were all played exquisitely well, and most of them expressed the quiddity of their composers with profundity. Our Town was intensely Coplandesque, Valse triste graciously Sibelian, and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (a piece not played here since Beecham did it 60 years ago) richly Delian. The only problem was that it was a little jarring turning from the quiddity of one composer directly to that of another.
Interesting concert. Ran long, despite the nominal 36-minute span of the six-piece suite.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Worse than the East Lansing Mythcon bathrooms. Another trend to deplore, from people who apparently wish us to believe they think it's actually a good idea and not a form of psychological torture.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Say! I like green eggs and ham!
Ted Cruz has been getting a lot of amused chuckles for reading Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham on CNN as a bedtime story for his children in the course of conducting his filibuster on Obamacare. (It's not the strangest thing that has been read during a Senate filibuster. Al D'Amato read the phone book. Huey Long read his favorite recipe for potlikker and encouraged his audience to clip it out of the Congressional Record the next day.)
It's what Cruz said afterwards that gets me.
One other point. Though not totally deaf to the nuance of the story, Cruz's reading is rather dull, bland, and hurried, not helped by the fact that, at the moment, he had virtually no live audience and that not very responsive.
You want to hear a good reading of excerpts from Green Eggs and Ham?* Friends, from a memorial broadcast after Dr. Seuss's death, here is the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
*Pages 40-41, 46-59, 62. What?
It's what Cruz said afterwards that gets me.
"'Green Eggs and Ham' has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamcare debate," Cruz said after he finished, to a few audible chuckles from the Senate gallery.This proves that Princeton and Harvard do not equip the student with reading comprehension, if that student is a big enough jerk. The moral of Green Eggs and Ham is 'How do you know you don't like it if you haven't even tried it?'
Americans "did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare either," he added. "They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse."
You do not like them.Isn't that the Republicans' actual fear, that once the public tries Obamacare, they'll like it, and then refuse to give it up?
So you say.
Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may, I say.
One other point. Though not totally deaf to the nuance of the story, Cruz's reading is rather dull, bland, and hurried, not helped by the fact that, at the moment, he had virtually no live audience and that not very responsive.
You want to hear a good reading of excerpts from Green Eggs and Ham?* Friends, from a memorial broadcast after Dr. Seuss's death, here is the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
*Pages 40-41, 46-59, 62. What?
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
breaking late
It's only quite recently that we've begun hearing comments, all of them highly favorable, about a TV show called Breaking Bad, even though it's been on the air since 2008. I had not come across references to it before, though I knew its lead actor, Bryan Cranston, from a couple of movies.
So we borrowed the DVDs of the first season and watched them. The shows that B. was watching new at the time this one first appeared, like Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone, which I tagged along with for a few episodes, were surreal in a hallucinatory way, which I found disagreeable. I liked that they were strange, but not that they didn't feel grounded in anything.
The first episode of Breaking Bad begins with a scene as bizarre and surreal as anything I've seen on television. A pair of men's trousers floats through the quiet desert air, then lands on a dirt road where it's instantly run over by an RV proceeding at breakneck speed, driven by a man wearing nothing but his undershorts and a respirator. The RV runs off the road and gets stuck in a ditch, the man stumbles out and hears sirens approaching, and the scene keeps getting weirder for a couple minutes until it cuts off at a point of high tension.
Then the show does something I really wasn't expecting. It goes back in time and slowly, methodically, and clearly explains the background to everything weird you've just seen, including the airborne trousers. Even more amazingly, the explanation a) not only makes sense, but b) doesn't undercut or special-plead anything away.
In other words, it properly grounds the weirdness. However, then it ceases being weird. This is a grim drama, with distant humorous overtones, but without being at all actually funny, about a man who steps deliberately into deep trouble. So far it's like Fargo, except that Fargo's protagonist is a hopelessly incompetent nebbish. Except for those overtones, Breaking Bad is more like A Simple Plan, the movie in which Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton are hunters who find a crashed small plane with a huge load of money in the snow. As with Plan, in this story the protagonist has control over his situation and some wits at his disposal, but not complete control, or complete knowledge, and it's in that gap that the complications arise.
This is where my limitations on this show also arise. I want to see a story like this as a movie, I want the movie to end, and I want to go away and shudder. I don't want a continuing series. Watching the seven episodes as if they were a single 5 1/2 hour movie - it ends on a tension point but not a cliffhanger - I liked that the show kept chugging along at speed and, unlike its RV, never ran into a ditch, a problem that killed Mad Men for me before the end of the first season; I liked that it had more space to explore various aspects of its plot than movies give, such as how to dispose of a dead body, a matter treated with a fine mixture of grue and a light touch; but it also had digressions. One whole episode, the one in which Jesse visits his parents, was essentially useless and could have been thrown away.
What's the problem? you might ask. Don't I like the stand-alone, non-arc episodes of Buffy? Yes, but there's two major differences. One is that Buffy, at least in its earlier seasons, was not so much about propelling the arc plot along that it felt odd to leave it be for a while. Not true in this intensely plot-oriented show. The other is that I liked the Buffy characters; I enjoyed spending time in their company. I don't like these characters, especially Jesse, whom I find basically annoying. To be fair, I don't think they're intended to be likable. But that does mean I want to see the movie and then go home, not to live in it.
Which is why, even though I was highly impressed by season 1 and enjoyed it, I don't think I'll be watching any more of Breaking Bad.
So we borrowed the DVDs of the first season and watched them. The shows that B. was watching new at the time this one first appeared, like Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone, which I tagged along with for a few episodes, were surreal in a hallucinatory way, which I found disagreeable. I liked that they were strange, but not that they didn't feel grounded in anything.
The first episode of Breaking Bad begins with a scene as bizarre and surreal as anything I've seen on television. A pair of men's trousers floats through the quiet desert air, then lands on a dirt road where it's instantly run over by an RV proceeding at breakneck speed, driven by a man wearing nothing but his undershorts and a respirator. The RV runs off the road and gets stuck in a ditch, the man stumbles out and hears sirens approaching, and the scene keeps getting weirder for a couple minutes until it cuts off at a point of high tension.
Then the show does something I really wasn't expecting. It goes back in time and slowly, methodically, and clearly explains the background to everything weird you've just seen, including the airborne trousers. Even more amazingly, the explanation a) not only makes sense, but b) doesn't undercut or special-plead anything away.
In other words, it properly grounds the weirdness. However, then it ceases being weird. This is a grim drama, with distant humorous overtones, but without being at all actually funny, about a man who steps deliberately into deep trouble. So far it's like Fargo, except that Fargo's protagonist is a hopelessly incompetent nebbish. Except for those overtones, Breaking Bad is more like A Simple Plan, the movie in which Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton are hunters who find a crashed small plane with a huge load of money in the snow. As with Plan, in this story the protagonist has control over his situation and some wits at his disposal, but not complete control, or complete knowledge, and it's in that gap that the complications arise.
This is where my limitations on this show also arise. I want to see a story like this as a movie, I want the movie to end, and I want to go away and shudder. I don't want a continuing series. Watching the seven episodes as if they were a single 5 1/2 hour movie - it ends on a tension point but not a cliffhanger - I liked that the show kept chugging along at speed and, unlike its RV, never ran into a ditch, a problem that killed Mad Men for me before the end of the first season; I liked that it had more space to explore various aspects of its plot than movies give, such as how to dispose of a dead body, a matter treated with a fine mixture of grue and a light touch; but it also had digressions. One whole episode, the one in which Jesse visits his parents, was essentially useless and could have been thrown away.
What's the problem? you might ask. Don't I like the stand-alone, non-arc episodes of Buffy? Yes, but there's two major differences. One is that Buffy, at least in its earlier seasons, was not so much about propelling the arc plot along that it felt odd to leave it be for a while. Not true in this intensely plot-oriented show. The other is that I liked the Buffy characters; I enjoyed spending time in their company. I don't like these characters, especially Jesse, whom I find basically annoying. To be fair, I don't think they're intended to be likable. But that does mean I want to see the movie and then go home, not to live in it.
Which is why, even though I was highly impressed by season 1 and enjoyed it, I don't think I'll be watching any more of Breaking Bad.
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