The above is by me. It's the famous Billie Holiday tune. Last year, I read Donald Clarke'sBillie Holiday, Wishing on the Moona loosely organized biography with extensive interview transcripts from people who knew her, transcripts Clark inherited from someone who had started the interview process shortly after her death. It's a great read, but not a happy one. She was a force of nature, and the world didn't treat her well.
One of the main contributors was Jimmy Rowles, the great pianist. He's probably not much remembered. Here's his picture:
Bart’s CD Cellar in Boulder is closing. Apparently it hasn’t been independently owned for awhile. Whoever they were sold out so a chain and the chain is having bank problems. Even though Bart’s remains profitable it couldn’t be saved or corporate couldn’t be bothered.
Barnes and Noble moved to its new “super store” but the CD section is maybe 20% of its non-super self. (The department has been cut in half but is still kind of decent.)
There’s a lot that could be said about this and Don Pareles says a lot of it in today’s Times. But I don’t see how anybody can earn a living in the music business – anywhere on the food chain.
I’m not sure I’ve accomplished much, but I am certain that getting three people started on Proust counts for something. I’ve been randomly re-reading and just finished the account on the narrator’s grandmother’s death, which is the first section of Part II of The Guermantes Way. It’s only 31 pages long.
Now Remembrance of Things Past is certainly not an easy read and getting started is something of a long haul. Seemingly hundreds of pages elapse before anything happens, including the famous madeleine. Unfortunate, perhaps, because Swan’s Way is actually the most conventional novel of the group.
In any case, Proust has a reputation for being obscure, hieratic, tenebrous, gloomy, perverted and metaphysical in the worst way. Yet after reading the section on the grandmother’s death, harrowing as it is, the term that came to mind was Mozartian. Or maybe de Ponteian. The ensemble effects and the acute characterization of the different social classes, the telling details, the deftly drawn supporting characters, the phenomenal craftsmanship, the humor and pathos all could come right out of Figaro. As could the exceptional tact and delicacy of sentiment.
Proust, like Wagner, whom he admired, is not generally amenable to being excerpted. The notion of time become space is central both. Likewise, both achieve their greatest effects by making us wait and both are unreasonably demanding of our time.
But if you want to get a sense of the humble, domestic pleasures of classical narrative to be found in Proust’s great work, check out the mere 31 pages I’ve selected for your consideration
The above image is the cover of "Paintings in Proust" which includes reproductions of all the (real) paintings discussed in the book. It went out of print almost immediately - I suspect the London publishing house had financial trouble. But it's available now for around $30. Buy it.
The uninitiated should know Proust knew a great deal about painting and wrote about it extensively in his book. The "unreal" paintings are those painted by his characters.
I just saw Avatar which I was predisposed to hate. Because James Cameron is such a huge corn ball. While the some of the aesthetics are annoyingly Maxield Parrish, the dialog dreadful and the world-view thuddingly Manichean, I came away marveling and touched. You can read the reviews over at moviereviewintelligence, but I was struck by two comparisons that I haven't seen anybody else make.
First, Hayao Miyazaki. There are many Miyazaki tropes: fantastic flying machines, fully realized imaginary animals, luminous floating seed-pods, ecological apocalypse. The forest reminded me the one in Princess Mononoke. Cameron's film lacks the moral complexity and generosity of the anime masterpiece. But he shares Miyazaki mastery of action and motion. In fact, with Avatar, Cameron joins the ranks of Miyazaki, Peter Jackson and Kurosawa in directing large action sequences.
Second, Wagner. Really, Wagner really can't be staged. If only someone would give Cameron or Jackson or Guilermo del Toro $200 million to produce the Ring, I'd be very happy.
The thing I liked most, in a way, was seeing Segourney Weaver in her Avatar body looking like a 19 year old college student with dreads and a little red "Stanford" t-shirt. The promise of art is deathlessness and this giant popcorn entertainment delivers a strange jolt of rememberence.
Bill Douglas hipped me this analysis of at Lester Young "Do the Math."
I can't tell you how much I admire El Ultimo Trago by Concha Buika and Chu Chu Valdez. Plus, it sounds absolutely sensational.
I've become fascinated by the music of Morten Feldman. The pieces are so long, nothing seems to happen: preeminent modernism but the antithesis of what we think of as modern.
Above is a video ofArturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Chopin. It is not, perhaps, the most compelling performance of the first Ballade, but seeing him play is wonderful. As a pianist I can tell you it is technical perfection: the stillness of the upper body, the posture, the position of the hands. Then there's the way he looks: perfectly tailored, impeccably trimmed mustache, the slightly raised eyebrows. The concert artist as matinée idol.
The piece itself is at the core of Polanski's "The Pianist." Adrien Brody's character plays it in the abandoned chateau -- or rather plays most of it, it's slightly abridged. None of the reviews I read comment on the centrality of Chopin to the movie. And Chopin is in a way the first musical exemplar of tragic nationalism.
Jeremy Denk has an illuminating discussion Chopin whom he defends as a "serious" composer. He says "I told Mitsuko Uchida once that I might have trouble choosing between Chopin and Schubert, and the storm that crossed her brow would have shut down the airports for days."
Uchida's a great musician and pianist. Her repertory is the epitome of the serious musician -- with serious meaning Austro-German. She's much more demonstrative -- showy -- than Michelangeli, but recording the Schoenberg piano concerto is about as serious as you can get. I would hate to think or her as a philistine, which is what Denk's report makes her look like.
Of course the discussion "Chopin vs. Schubert" is kind of like "Who would win, Predator or Wolverine?" So maybe her reaction was to how silly the question is.
In any case, Denk then proceeds to a very good analysis of the Polanise-Fantasy with excerpts from the score and sound snippets -- part of a larger argument for the importance of Chopin as a serious composer. It makes me want to hear him play the piece. I once heard Richard Goode, a close colleague of Uchida's at Marlboro and also echt serious, play it at Macky Auditorium in Boulder on a lovely spring afternoon with the sun streaming in and he played it very beautifully.
It does seem that pianists celebrated for their Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert do not excel at Chopin. Brendel, a very sober musician, recorded the Liszt sonata, but no Chopin as far as I know.
In any case, it's possible that today more pianists excel at Schubert than Chopin. Odd, because no composer is kinder to the pianist than Chopin.
Here is an extended quote from Theodore Adorno on Chopin, which makes the case better than anybody:
"Chopin's form is no more concerned with the development of the whole through a series of minute transitions than with the representation of a single free-standing thematic complex. It is as remote from Wagner's dnyamic thrust as from the landscape of Schubert....he (removes) himself , as it were from the flow of the composition and directing it from the outside. He does not high-handedly create the form, nor does he allow it to crumple before the onslaught of the themes. Rather, he conducts the themes in their passage through time. The aristocratic nature of his music may reside less in the psychological tone than in the gesture of knightly melancholy with which the subject renounces the attempt to impose its dynamism and carry it through. With eyes averted, lake a bride, the objective theme is safely guided through the dark forest of the self, through the torrential river of the passions. Nowhere more beautifully than in the A-flat ballade, where the creative idea, once it has made its appearance like a Schubert melody, is taken by the hand and conducted through an infinite vista of inwardness and over abysses of expressive harmonics where it finds its way to its second confirming appearance. In Chopin paraphrase and doubtless every kind of associated virtuosity is the resigned expression of historical tact."
Have you built your ship of death, oh have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.
Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace and your little ship
Of death, that will carry your soul
On its last journey, on and on, so still
So beautiful, over the last of seas.
When the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.
Oblivion, the last wonder!
When we have trusted ourselves entirely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of death
Into pure oblivion.
Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
With dim calm thoughts and quite hands
Putting its timbers together in the dusk.
Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That will spread in death to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship and its soul to the wonder goal.
Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
Then build your ship of death, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the last of seas.
