Arts, Briefly

The "Arts, Briefly" column in today's New York Times reported three bits of news I found interesting:

• Brian Wilson (of Beach Boys fame) has been entrusted with the unfinished musical works of George Gershwin, and is expected to produce a new album. He will presumably take the Gershwin fragments and fill in the blanks with his own words and music. Now that should be an interesting album! http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/arts/music/09arts-GEORGEGERSHW_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=arts%20briefly&st=cse
  
• Andrew Lloyd Webber has composed a sequel to his world-famous musical Phantom of the Opera. As it happens, Phantom is not my cup of tea. Still, it is the longest-running show in Broadway history and all that. That makes me at least a bit curious about the sequel.
  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/theater/09arts-PREMIERESARE_BRF.html?scp=1&sq=arts%20briefly%20weber%20phantom%20sequel&st=cse
  
• Big news: Warner Bros is supposedly developing a pilot for a new Dallas series!! The new show, which would air on TNT, would focus on the sons of J.R. and Bobby Ewing (namely, John Ross III and Christopher). Now it may not make it past the development stage — and even if the pilot is made, that doesn't mean the series will be picked up — but it's still exciting to think about. Just imagine the special guest appearances! Maybe (even if they only shoot the pilot) they'll finally get Pam and Bobby back together...
  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/arts/television/09arts-WHORESHOTJRD_BRF.html?scp=1&sq=arts%20briefly%20dallas&st=cse

Remastery

I was at a Starbucks, and they started playing a big block of Beatles songs. I knew they must be playing the fancy new remastered versions: after all, they sell the remastered CDs at Starbucks, and the music they play is the same music they sell at the counter. I sat up in my chair, started listening carefully, eager to get my first taste of the new remastered sound, curious as to whether I'd be able to tell the difference.

Of course I'm not totally sure, it could just have been my imagination, but I felt like I really could hear the difference. There were some lyrics I thought I heard more clearly in Drive My Car; there was an "Oo-oohh" from John that I thought was more prominent in I Feel Fine; in the chorus of Run For Your Life, I thought the lead vocal part stood out more (rather than just blending with the back-up parts); the Ooh-oohs in Michelle were clearer; in Yesterday, I didn't notice any specific differences but I thought Paul's voice generally sounded even cleaner and clearer than usual.

I'd be curious to read what others have said about the new versions, to see if their impressions matched mine. Even more, I am excited to hear more!

Swift Emotion

Today we were in the car and I was flipping through the radio stations. I landed on 100.3, the one that plays all the current pop hits. A song was ending, a song I didn't know, and I said out loud, "Why aren't they playing ― something I like?" I was thinking of a particular song but I couldn't remember the name of it or how it went.

And then, as soon as I said it, that song ended and the next song came on:

You're on the phone with your girlfriend, she's upset
She's going off about something that you said
'Cause she doesn't get your humor like I do

That was the song I meant, the one I wanted to hear. It wasn't a big coincidence: they play that song a hundred times a day, so any time you turn on the radio you've got a pretty good chance of hearing it. Still, in the moment it was striking that I asked for the song and it came on right away.

I'm in the room, it's a typical Tuesday night
I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like
And she'll never know your story like I do

I taught drama at a camp this summer, and on the last day we had a talent show where the kids performed their dances and their skits. The show was in a big gymnasium, and when I showed up that morning you could feel the last-day-of-camp vibe in the air. Bittersweet: the end of summer. Kids and counselors were bopping around, playing ball, practicing their dances, and the radio was playing.

But she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

When the chorus started, almost all the girls in the room and some of the boys ― kids aged five to ten, and counselors who were 15, 16, 17 ― sang along:

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you
Been here all along, so why can't you see
You, you belong with me, you belong with me

The sound of a hundred voices singing, and the end of summer. It was odd, hearing nine- and ten-year-olds singing out about unrequited love along with high schoolers. What did the younger kids think about love, what had these teenage girls already suffered? Was I feeling this tenderness in my heart because of them? How naive they were, to get so passionate about such a typical pop song, full of cliches? Or was I moved by the song? Did it make any difference?

You, you belong with me, you belong with me



―

600

So I read Archie #600, the first installment in the much-hyped six-part miniseries called The Wedding.

It is being marketed as Archie's final decision, the end of the eternal love triangle: Archie, Betty, Veronica. Of course we all know they couldn't really end it; we know they'll somehow hit the reset button at the end of the miniseries, so life in Riverdale can go on as usual. If there's no love triangle, there's no story.

As it turns out, the comic itself doesn't even pretend that the change will be real or permanent. The marketing campaign suggests they'll really get married, because (of course) that's what grabs everyone's attention. But it is clear right away, even in the first issue of the miniseries, how they will hit the reset button.

The story begins with the gang's graduation from high school. Already we know we have departed from the regular continuity of Archie comics: these stories take place in a world of eternal high school. They're not supposed to graduate! Archie, being in a contemplative mood, takes a walk and finds a mysterious street called Memory Lane; but instead of walking down memory lane (into his past), Archie strolls up the lane, into the future...

And before any future events start occurring, Archie comes to a fork in the road. Go left, or go right. He chooses a side, follows it to the end ― and the story begins.

So, at the risk of being overly explicit, there are three separate framing devices indicating that this story takes place outside the normal continuity: 1) we're in the future, and all the characters are graduating from high school; 2) Archie goes from the future to the future future, by traveling up a road that represents time; and 3) he chooses one of two paths, establishing that this is only a possible future future.

All this made me feel comfortable. They had duly reassured me that this is purely an imaginative exercise, that no implausible twists will be required to bring everything back to normal.

From that point, I enjoyed the story. I liked seeing the characters as adults. I liked watching Archie's decision to propose. And, most of all, I liked a full-page collage that showed all the different characters buzzing about the news of their engagement:

Congratulations! That's wonderful! ― but what about Betty?

Did you hear? Who told you? ― does Betty know?

I'll send an e-mail blast! Maybe I'll leave Betty off the list...

I know they'll hit the reset button before long. In fact, Archie's engagement to Veronica will probably last three issues at the most; after that, he'll try going down the other path and we'll get to see his engagement to Betty; and then, of course, he'll wake up from a dream at the end. I know it's not real, I know it's only a comic book.

And yet ― What about Betty? How is Betty doing? How did she take the news?

― heartbreak.

Regarding Michael

Growing up in the 80's, I was one of the few kids who did not like Michael Jackson.

At first, I was just oblivious: I didn't watch MTV or listen to the radio. To me, Michael Jackson was just one of those things other kids talked about while I spaced out and thought about something else. Then, as I became more aware of who he was, my main emotion was disgust. That image of him on the cover of Bad, with his oily-looking hair and skin, just creeped me out and I couldn't believe anyone found him tolerable, let alone attractive.

Little by little, much of the world came around to the same conclusion. As he surgically chopped away at his face until there was virtually no face left, apparently lightened his skin (no one seemed to buy the official explanation, that he suffered from a bizarre skin-lightening disorder), and ultimately became mired in child molestation scandals, the mob of haters grew.

Meanwhile, I was moving in the opposite direction. First of all, I became more aware of his work. Once my initial, childish reaction of physical disgust had gone away, I was able to see beauty in the way he sang and moved. I don't think I had even understood, as a child, that the solo artist Michael Jackson was the same person whose sweet, pure voice I always liked in songs by the Jackson 5.

More importantly, though, and ironically, public revelations about Michael Jackson's creepiness actually made him less creepy to me. Or let me put it this way: as I began to understand how truly pathological and damaged he was, I came to appreciate the tragic element in his life story. He was not merely creepy. He was a total mess, a monster, twisted and tortured and brilliantly talented.

The funny thing is, and I don't know if this is an unusual thought or if I'm just stating the obvious, his weirdness and his twisted sexuality ― the sexuality of a man at war with his identity as a male, as a black person, as a grown-up ― were always a part of what fueled him, what made his movements so fascinating. Even before he was famously creepy, everyone could see there was a unique and crazy energy there.

Obviously, he was also tremendously, awesomely talented ― I'm not trivializing that. But he wasn't just good at singing or good at dancing; there was something otherworldly, unnerving, surprising about his whole essence. Something that made the world stop and take a look at this guy.

Unbound (Part I)

I was raised a Romantic. I don't mean that I was raised to believe in love, though that is true too. I mean I grew up with views on humanity ― and God ― that were something like the views of the Romantic writers. In theory, at least, I adored humankind and nature and the universe; and I despised the traditional notion of God as an authoritarian ruler, a monarch.

This was always a little different from strict, rationalistic atheism. There was room in my worldview for mystery, even mysticism. In my family, paganism and humanism and Christian (or Jewish) mysticism and even a little self-worship were all welcome at the party. What I rejected was not God per se, but the idea of a God who was separate from us. (In the lingo of religious scholars, God had to be immanent rather than transcendent.)

Likewise, the Romantics never intended to take away all the world's mysteries and replace them with atoms and molecules. Rather, they were rejecting the cold rationalism of Christians like Descartes, hoping to escape into a wilder, more mystical space.

When I was fifteen, I worked for a long time on a play called The Indictment of Yahweh, a retelling of the biblical story (Old and New Testaments) of man's fall and subsequent redemption. As the title suggests, the play was a frontal assault on traditional faith, a catalogue of God's crimes against man. How arrogant, to want men kept away from the Knowledge of Good and Evil! Or, if that knowledge must be kept from mankind, how unfair to put the apple tree there as temptation! How cruel, to wipe out the whole world in a Flood! And so on, and so on.

I never felt the play was finished: it was a huge task, to move through the whole Bible and turn every major story on its head (although as I look at it now, I think the script is finished enough to be performed as is). But it is worth noting that Jesus ― God-as-Man ― was treated kindly in my story. (A touch of Gnosticism: Christ, the savior of mankind, is distinguished from the Demiurge who created the world.)

Also when I was fifteen, I wrote (co-wrote, with Jamie) a song called The Ballad of the Man Who Loved; the title character in that song, a folk singer whose magic voice freed people from "virtue and sin," was pitted against a God who wanted to keep people chained down. Again, God was the villain; but it was not an irreligious or unspiritual song. Rather, I was trying to lay out the true religion, the highest spirituality, which revered the divine in us and rejected any God that would smite or belittle us.

I was really preaching the same religion as Percy Shelley, but of course I had not read Prometheus Unbound.

Around the time when I went to college, I started to think a little differently. First, my philosophical views started developing. The main thing I had always rejected was a kind of dualism: the separation of mind and body, of God and the universe. Now I realized, by this method you could go directly from atheism to pantheism.

Think about it: if everything in the world is blue, then nothing is blue; in order to have colors, you need to have differences. If there is only one color, it doesn't matter much whether you call it blue or red. Similarly, if you reject dualism ― if there's just one kind of stuff that makes up the whole universe ― then it doesn't matter much whether you call it matter or God.

I started using the word God more freely. I was still using it to refer to the Great-Big-Everything, rather than a transcendent Ruler, but I was using the word in a positive sense now. I found that, when I came across the word God in Christian writings, I could take them to mean the immanent Great-Big-Everything ― and it usually made sense.

To be continued...

Two Contrary Impulses

People like me (and like Peter Von Brown, a new friend I met through blogging), who enjoy spending time in the worlds of fantasy, fairy tale, myth, children's stories, etc., typically have two contrary impulses: on one hand, a desire to let go of sense a little bit, and dwell where the rules of reality are temporarily relaxed; on the other hand, an impulse to systematize, to work out the exact physics of another world, to count every elf or fairy hiding under a toadstool or behind a leaf.

This is not just a peculiar quirk of mine; it's typical. This is why, when you read a work of fantasy fiction, you often find at the beginning a map of the imaginary lands described within. We want to be pulled out of reality, and yet we want to bring with us our civilized measuring tools. We want to leave this boring, grown-up, measured and scrutinized world, so we can measure and scrutinize another.

I say these impulses are contrary, not contradictory: of course the two feelings can coexist in relative harmony. But they're obviously pulling in opposite directions. And it is purely a subjective, aesthetic judgment whether we've gone too far in one direction or the other.

For instance: when I read those Peter Pan prequels by Dave Barry, I felt they were going rather too far in explaining how Peter Pan's magic works. Things like Peter Pan's immortality, eternal youth, and flight are self-explanatory: he will not stay on the ground, grow old or die, because he refuses to. It makes sense psychologically without needing a sci-fi explanation.

I was trying to think of a hypothetical example to make the point even clearer, and then the other day I was reading Harold and the Purple Crayon with Ben. Can you imagine if someone wrote a prequel to that, explaining why/how Harold's crayon can bring things into existence? His crayon brings things into existence the same way any crayon does (by drawing them); the fact that we see those things realized is not a magic feature of the crayon but a feature of the storytelling. I feel silly even saying it, it's so obvious, but then shouldn't it be equally obvious why Peter Pan can fly?

Once more, I do understand the impulse to explain. There's a pleasure in it. But then the explanation should be just as mysterious, just as bewildering, as the magic it explains. If the explanation is too pat, too satisfying, then the magic is removed. Maybe that's true in our world as well as in others, but that is a different story.

The Plan

BEN: Your ears should be on your head.

ME: Your ears are on your head.

BEN: (pointing to the top of his head) They should be on your head!

ME: On top of your head? Like a bunny's ears? We're not bunnies.

BEN: We should turn into bunnies.

Show

This afternoon I went to Music and Memoirs, a song-and-story event in the city, which was organized by my dad. It was a very interesting collection of material, especially since my father and my mother and I all shared memoirs. A collage of Pitt Stoller history.

Jamie and I did the same four songs we had done at the RNC 8 fundraiser, plus one more. This time, I'm pleased to say, I remembered all the words. I felt really good about doing Last Evening. And our rendition of Ticket to Ride is always a crowd pleaser! It's a pleasant stroll down memory lane when Jamie and I sing our old songs from 15, 16, 17 years ago, but he and I were saying (and it's true) that if we're going to keep performing then we really ought to have some new ones...

Music and Memoirs on June 7th

Jamie and I are playing some songs at this event on Sunday, from 4 to 6 pm, at the Indian Cafe in New York City. It's part of the Red Harlem Readers series, and is located at 2791 Broadway between 107th and 108th streets. Come and check it out!