a fool in the forest

Mayday! Mayday!

Certainly has been quiet around here lately, hasn't it?

This weblog has been, I regret to say, on an unplanned and unintentionally lengthy hiatus, the consequence of a tumbrel-load of conflicting, largely professional, pressures that have kept me away from the much more enjoyable task of posting posts since early April.  These conditions seem certain to prevail until at least the middle of May.  Do, please, keep this Fool in your thoughts, your bookmarks and your RSS feeds until that time.

And now, back to work...

~~~
Illustration: August Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial (1891; bronze cast 1969), at Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire; original in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.  Photo via the National Park Service.

~~~
P.S., In honor of the day, here's Elvis Perkins:

"Theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party."

George Hunka makes a persuasive case for connecting the dots between Wagner and Beckett, with particular reference to the Met's recent production of Tristan und Isolde.

Here, the unexpected bond between Waiting for Godot and the endless Act II love duet in Tristan: 

As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech.  Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

The entire piece is worth reading if you fancy either Tristan or Godot or, as in my case, both.

~~~

For further reading:  No Beckett content included, but the related topic of how Time operates in Wagner came up just yesterday on Sounds & Fury.

A slightly shorter version of George Hunka's post also appeared on April 1 in the Guardian.  No joke.

Women Beset by Fools

Many thanks to all those who linked to or visited Tuesday's April Fool's Blawg Review Appendix.  That post provided the largest boost this site's traffic has seen since the last time someone put the "goddess of folly" in to a crossword clue.  Most gratifying, I assure you.

The seeds for the AFBRA's Punchinello theme were unexpectedly sown last week during a visit to The Getty with our eldest son.  The official reason for the trip was to take in the big California Video show, but one of the reliable strengths of the Getty lies in its revolving menu of small, specialized one-room exhibitions.  Just now, the Getty is celebrating ten years on its hill above the Sepulveda Pass with small showings of items added during the decade to three of its specialized collections: photographs, manuscripts, and drawings.

The selection of drawings is surprisingly fool-centric.  Among them is G B Tiepolo's 1731 "Punchinellos approaching a woman" ("on an especially lascivious and even sinister outing" say the curators) which I featured in the AFBRA. 

On the opposite wall from those nosy Venetians you will find this anonymous Design for a Quatrefoil with a Castle, a Maiden Tempted by a Fool, a Couple Seated by a Trough, and a Knight and His Lover Mounted on a Horse (ca. 1475-1490), after the Master of the Housebook:

This is a preparatory drawing for a stained glass window.  There is no indication whether the window itself was ever completed, or whether it still exists somewhere in Germany.  I would suppose not. 

Let's move in closer to the critical panel, shall we?

I like this one very much, and a key reason for my fondness becomes plain when you consider the Getty's description of the panel:

[A] maiden, accompanied by an eager fool, promenades through a forest.

We eager fools in forests must needs be watched.  (That maiden could learn a good deal from my wife about dealing with such suitors, especially if she chooses to keep him.)  This fool may be somewhat lascivious, and in danger of stepping upon or tripping over his lady love's gown, but he does not seem particularly sinister.  I am, however, rather concerned for his safety, as there appears to be an unknown assailant lurking behind him among the trees. 

This fool and his fellows from the Getty drawing collections are on display until May 4.

~~~

As part of its 10-year observance, the Getty hosts a weblog -- "A Different Lens" -- centered on professional and public reaction to the Center, its site and activities.   A recent post there features a nifty selection of photos from Flickr that show off the range of visual and textural stimuli to be found on the Getty grounds.   They make a nice addition to Rick's shots from last October; unlike Rick, none of these photographers captured the legendary semi-transparent child.

April Fool's Blawg Review Appendix 2008

The Welcome

Welcome! to the 2008 April Fool's Blawg Review Appendix. 

This is the quasi-official adjunct to Blawg Review #153, now appearing on my legal weblog, Declarations and Exclusions.  For the past two years, the post here has been termed the April Fool's "Prequel," but April 1st falls after Blawg Review Monday this year so I have renamed this the "Appendix."  Clear enough?  Splendid!  Let's move on.

The Pictorial Theme

Last year, our theme derived from the medieval Ship of Fools.  This year our Fool of choice is Punchinello, as embodied in two generations of 18th Century Venetian artistic foolery from father and son artists Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (father) and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (son). 

Tiepolo patris was internationally successful, particularly as a painter of elaborate religious, mythological and allegorical frescoes.  Tiepolo filii grew up assisting his father, but his own career took him in a smaller scale and often more secular direction.  Both men at one time or another devoted time to the depiction of Punchinello (or Pulcinello), the tall-hatted, long-nosed stock character from the commedia dell'arte.  Domenico grew so partial to Punchinello that he produced well over one hundred drawings and paintings depicting the character's birth, life, death and beyond.  A smattering of both artists' pulcinellalia is spread about the grounds of this post for your perusal, pleasure, and bewilderment.

The Selection-of-Posts Theme

The posts selected for inclusion in this Appendix divide, like Gaul, into three parts: 

First, we look to recent posts from lawyers or law professors who write about Something Other Than the Law.  That "Other Than" has been the focus of this weblog for almost five years now, and it was the subject of an expostulation of mine last week in a post at Decs&Excs:

The practice of law does not take place in a vacuum, but in a vast and multifarious Real World full of fellow human beings and of social, economic, political, natural, and cultural tidal forces, and the practice can only gain from the attorney's engagement with that larger context.  Also, writing about All That Other Stuff is frequently just more fun than writing about the law.  So, while there is undoubtedly ample room for additional well-written law blogs, there is even more room in this world for well-written, lively non-law blogs from well-rounded, lively lawyers.  Heed the call!

The Anonymous Editor of Blawg Review suggested I follow up on that thought here, and I am nothing if not biddable in this regard.

Second, we turn to posts that while law-related are nonetheless . . . odd, or foolish, or otherwise appropriate to the First of April.

Third, and to conclude on the lowest note possible, we ask the sensitive and tasteful to avert their eyes and their mice as we link several posts found or submitted this past week that qualify as Naughty or Rude or Potentially (or Actually) Offensive.

Part the First: Lawyers Getting Away From the Law

New Orleans' Ernest Svenson, better known as pioneering blawger Ernie The Attorney, has spent the past several years writing much more about Life than Law, but the life of the Legal Blogger remains a major concern.  This week, he noted the important lessons go-go-go bloggers might draw if they would but recall how the tortoise beat the hare.  Quoth Ernie:
 

The mainstream media has been serving us 'stupid pie' for years. . . . [A]las, it appears that popular bloggers with continuous partial attention disorder are doing the same thing.

David Giacalone of f/k/a ["formerly known as" ethicalesq and/or shlep] is a long-time denizen of the non-law weblog world (and a longtime friend of this weblog, it must be allowed) with an almost punditry-free emphasis these days on the art of haiku.  Every so often, however, he cannot resist weighing in on a legal story, as when he takes us all to task for ignoring the case of the "toilet paper check."  {For what it may be worth, David, it sounds like a proper negotiable instrument to me.]

David has also held forth recently on subjects as varied as spatulas and the Ides of March.

I started reading Doug Simpson's Unintended Consequences several years ago when it was still a more-or-less conventional insurance/risk management weblog.  More recently, it has converted wholesale into a thoughtful site devoted to climate change issues.  This week, by way of example, Doug reported: "Study documents hotter, drier American West due to climate change.

Also on the environmental front, Leon Getter's SOX First blog -- which is not about baseball standings, but about the Sarbanes-Oxley law -- points to a Winston & Strawn paper on the Carbon Principles being proposed by a number of large lenders, calling for the imposition of "enhanced diligence" in the disclosure of the potential climatic impacts of borrowers' projects as a condition to obtaining funding.

Donn Zaretsky's Art Law Blog manages to have it both ways: It's about Art and it's about Law!  Sort of my idea of heaven, but that's just me.  This week, the intriguing case of Robert Schoenberg's trash, in which Donn points to the Where's Travis McGee blog to ponder "Who owns it?"

Mad Kane is a self-described "recovering lawyer," posting satirical verse and political comment.  This week: a versificated sneer at the great State of Colorado, which decrees that even fictional characters who smoke can't smoke indoors.

Part the Second: Legal Oddities and Eccentricities

I am sure that Brett Trout of BlawgIT would like you to read his sound and sober proposals for Your Corporate Blogging Policy, but you know and I know that what you really want to see today is Brett's take on the Top Ten Wackiest Patents in the World.   

[For unfathomable reasons, Brett's list is missing the highly practical Walking through Walls Training System.]

At the California Punitive Damages weblog: A New York Court Holds no Punitive Damages for Bed Bugs. I still get hits on a regular basis from this four-year old bedbug post.

At Prof. Shaun Martin's California Appellate Report, an insurance coverage case involving the surviving members of The Doors and this practical observation:

Even if you're a stud, sometimes you've simply got a case that's wrong on the merits.

Evan Schaeffer does not post as often as he once did at The Legal Underground (emphasizing instead his solid, if less eclectic Illinois Trial Practice Weblog) but this week he compiled links to his classic series: TYPES OF LAWYERS Nos. 1 through 17, inclusive.

On the sleekly redesigned Overlawyered, Walter Olson reports on efforts to enjoin the apocalypse.

Lawyer Advertising redux: "Have you ever done anything stupid?  GET MONEY NOW!"

Lawyer Advertising redux redux: The sequel.

Part the Third: Lawyers and Naughty Bits

NSFW -- Professor Shaun Martin of California Appellate Report noted an unfortunate milestone: the California Supreme Court's first reported use of a certain well known but particularly nasty 12-letter Oedipal pejorative [but the Justices were just quoting the defendant, so that makes it all all right, right?]

Double-plus NSFW -- Another Donn Zaretsky Art Law Blog pointer, this time to Rita Tushnet's 43(B) Blog and a post on artist Adam Connelly who "paints pictures of pornographic images, pixellated so that it's our minds, not the paint, providing the salacious details."  There's an example, but it won't harm you as long as you stay very close to the computer screen.  Contrariwise . . . .

Legal tabloid Above the Law (which has driven a slew of traffic to our Blarrgh Review, thank you very much) posts an extremely rude story involving deviant wombats and vowel shifts.

New horizons in employee management (at Ohio Employer's Law Blog): Plaintiff's history of homemade porn is not fair game in harassment suit.

New horizons in employee management, too?  I have no response to this: "Whips and chains: not even in your spare time, please."

Of related interest: Amber at Prettier Than Napoleon demonstrates convincingly that lawyers really need a better class of sexual fantasy.

~~~

Enough!  I have done, for this year, with this April Fool's extravaganza.  Thank you all for joining in.  Do drop by again sometime soon, eh?

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

~~~

Illustrations via:

Patricia's Palette Mural Blog: Tiepolo's Pulcinella.

Commedia by Fava

National Gallery of Art

Getty Museum

Prepare to Repel B'arders

On my legal weblog, Declarations and Exclusions, I am once again pleased to host an edition of Blawg Review, the carnival of law-related bloggers and blogging.  Blawg Review #153 is a "themed" version, driven on this occasion by matters generally nautical and specifically piratical. 

Decs&Excs commonly concerns itself with the law surrounding insurance, and the combination of insurance and piracy inevitably leads to Terry Gilliam's stand-alone introductory piece from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life,

The Crimson Permanent Assurance!

 

Tomorrow, as on the last two Firsts of April, this Fool will be hosting a Blawg Review bonus edition right here.

Squirrels Without End, Amen

This Fool now continues his policy of countering Rabbitist Hegemony by the annual posting of an Easter Squirrel.

Although they have fallen far out of fashion, domesticated squirrels seem to have been common household companions of young men growing up in the years before the American Revolution.  Two years ago, I posted John Singleton Copley's 1765 portrait of his young stepbrother in the company of a chained and rather put-upon looking little squirrel.  Copley was entrenched as a Bostonian before he emigrated to pursue a thriving career as a portraitist in London, but in 1771 he made a professional jaunt to New York.  Among the commissions he received on that trip were a trio of paintings of members of the Verplanck family, one of which provided Copley the opportunity to revisit his squirrel theme:

John Singleton Copley, Daniel Crommelin Verplanck (1771), from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My first thought on seeing this picture was that young Daniel Verplanck was rather a small boy, or else he kept company with rather a large squirrel.  The Met's curators are suitably impressed by Daniel's fuzzy friend:

Daniel attended the city's best schools and his parents passed on to him their taste for the finest of everything; his portrait exceeds theirs in grandeur, in keeping with their high expectations for him.  He wears a stylish suit with a brocaded vest and sits on a porch amid imposing classical columns.  His remarkable pet squirrel, which Daniel has apparently civilized through careful training, holds onto his leg without inflicting pain.

As indicated by the fact that they were commissioning Copley portraits, the Verplancks were well established by 1771.  They continued in prominence at least into the mid-20th Century when they did what prominent New Yorkers do: donated their portraits to the Metropolitan Museum.  Copley's portraits of Daniel's father, Samuel Verplanck, and of his uncle, Gulian Verplanck, share a wall in the museum in their very own period room.   (The room is closed to the public until later this year, but you can still take a Virtual Reality Tour.)  After the Revolution, Uncle Gulian was a Speaker of the New York State Assembly; Daniel himself grew up to serve in Congress.  Should you find yourself up the Hudson Valley near Fishkill, you can visit the Verplanck family estate, Mount Gulian.

It may surprise you to learn that the role of Daniel Verplanck and his Remarkable Squirrel in American art history does not end in 1771. Some 188 years later, Joseph Cornell rediscovered the plucky pair and promptly did with them as he did with so many other cultural referents.

He put them in a box:

Joseph Cornell, Americana: Natural Philosophy (What Makes the Weather?) (ca. 1959), from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

And a particularly attractive Cornell box it is; also very Easter-like, what with the dove and rainbow and such.  Happy Easter to all.

~~~

For completists, here are links to all of our prior years' Easter Squirrel posts:

• 2007 [Hans Holbein the Younger]
• 2006 [John Singleton Copley]
• 2005 [Hans Hoffman]
• 2004 [Albrecht Dürer]

Sacre Bleu! Invaders!

I know, I know: on Life's List of Petty Annoyances there is surely a place for weblog posts on the lines of "those big-time bloggers have linked to this cool thing, but I told you about it way back when and I should get some kind of credit for that."  Prepare to be pettily annoyed.

Those big-time, high-traffic bloggers Instapundit and Althouse have linked to the "Human TETRIS" video.  My regular readers, if I had any, would know full well that I posted that same clip some three months ago.  With a better joke!  There ain't no justice when hifalutin blogging law professors can keep the little guy down like this.

Oh well: here's the same merry band in their performance of the immortal "Space Invaders."

The Original Human SPACE INVADERS

All of these human/game videos are product of the "GAME OVER Project" of Guillaume Reymond .   Bip!

~~~

Incidental Intelligence:  "Space Invaders" inspired an instrumental ("Space Invader") on the original Pretenders album, which will always be for me the First Great Record of the 1980's.  Per a 1995 Entertainment Weekly interview, that track turns out to have been an expression of technophobia:

Don't look for Chrissie Hynde lurking online.  'I've resisted the Internet and all that,' says the lead Pretender, a technophobe and proud of it.  'We named a song on our first album "Space Invader," because the guys were always on those machines at the studio, but I just noodled around the pool table and secretly regretted that the pinball machine had gone.  That's when old age started for me.  I even bought a little pocket computer to put my addresses in, but tossed it out and went back to the Filofax.  I know how to turn pages; I do it every day.''

It's a Gift

Si j'étais un homme, sans doute je ferais les choses que vous me dites, mais les pauvres bêtes qui veulent prouver leur amour ne savent que se coucher par terre et mourir.

[If I were a man, I would do the things that you say [and live], but the poor beasts who want to prove their love can only lie down on the ground and die.]

    --La Bête, La Belle et la Bête

Most men, confronted with their true selves, run away screaming!

    --Professor Engywook, The NeverEnding Story

The Infanta (Mary Dunleavy) and the Dwarf (Rodrick Dixon), amid choristers and courtiers.  (Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.)

Having no particular interest in the remaining productions -- Tosca and La Rondine -- my own Los Angeles Opera season ended this past Saturday evening, and ended well, with the double bill of Viktor Ullmann's The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug) and Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg).  There is one remaining performance of these paired productions (Saturday evening, March 8), and I will offer one word of advice for anyone with a remotely serious interest in music drama: Go!

This is the first fully-staged offering in music director James Conlon's "Recovered Voices" project, a multi-year initiative to rescue from obscurity works by composers who were directly affected by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.  (The recent Opera News article on Conlon and "Recovered Voices" is reproduced on the LA Opera site.)  Both of the composers on this bill came out of the fertile musical hothouse of Vienna.  Ullmann, living in Prague when (as Conlon put it in his pre-performance talk) "it was presented as a gift to Hitler," spent two years interned at Terezín, continuing to write, before his death at Auschwitz in 1944.  Zemlinsky -- friend and compatriot of Mahler, teacher and brother-in-law of Schoenberg, first lover of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (née Schindler) -- was able to emigrate with his family to New York following the German entry into Austria, but died there in 1942.

The Broken Jug is a 45-minute comic piece in which a corrupt provincial judge with a roving eye is unmasked by the testimony in his own courtroom.  Enjoyable to be sure, but ultimately no more than a lovely trifle.  The best part of the LA Opera production is probably the shadow play that goes on during the opera's overture, some of which can be seen of which can be seen at the outset of the video clip posted here.

The Dwarf is something else again, a sad and beautiful work of high musical and dramatic quality that deserves to have a place in the standard repertoire.  The opera is adapted from a story by Oscar Wilde, "The Birthday of the Infanta."  In both Wilde's story and the libretto by Georg Klaren, the Infanta of Spain is presented with a dwarf on her birthday.  The dwarf has no idea that he is misshapen or an object of mockery: he has never seen himself, and believes that the laughter that follows him everywhere is an expression of joy and pleasure at his presence, his singing and his dancing.  When he is stripped of his illusion and shown himself in a mirror by the unfeeling Infanta, he dies of heartbreak. 

Both the story and the opera are rich in themes typical of Wilde: beauty as a double-edged sword, the disjunction between appearance and inner reality, decadence and innocence.  Klaren's text takes several liberties that actually serve to heighten the Wildean quality of the piece.  The Infanta of the story is only twelve while her operatic incarnation is turning eighteen.  Wilde's dwarf is younger too, a sort of "wild child" found by shepherds in a forest; Zemlinsky and Klaren make him more of a sophisticate, a genuinely talented singer with a mature and yearning soul, captured and kept by the captain of a Spanish ship for ten years before being sold to a Sultan, whose gift to the Infanta he becomes.  In consequence, the Infanta of the opera is more knowingly cruel than her prose counterpart, especially when she spurns the sensitive dwarf's pleas for love and reassurance, to fatal effect.

Zemlinsky's music is in the lush, intelligent late Romantic idiom of Richard Strauss.  (Zemlinsky conducted the Vienna premiere of Strauss's Wilde opera, Salome.)  There is enough dissonance sprinkled about to let us know we are dealing with a 20th century piece, but color, melody and emotional punch are the orders of the day.  It is as smart, elegant and dramatically effective as the best of Strauss.

The LA Opera production is all that Zemlinsky might have wished.  The look of the production is inspired, as was Wilde's story, by Velazquez's great Las Meninas, and the action plays out in an opulent palace room lined with sliding mirrored doors, which inevitably surround the sorrowful dwarf with the truth of how others see him.  (The set's initial resemblance to a really swanky hotel elevator lobby was quickly forgotten once the drama began to unfold.)  The Spanish court is in blacks, whites and grays, with red and pink trim for the cyanide layer cake that is the Infanta.  The Dwarf is in rich orange and gold, like the blood-orange of which he sings.

The singers are all, thank goodness, strong singing actors who do not succumb to the curse of "park and bark."  As he should, Rodrick Dixon as the Dwarf dominates from the moment he emerges from his gilt gift box.  Susan B. Anthony is touching, and was enthusiastically received, as the ineffectual Ghita, the Infanta's maid who protests against the cruel trick her mistress proposes.  Called upon to glitter and be gay while calmly destroying her new "toy," Mary Dunleavy glittered gaily as the Infanta.

The Dwarf is easily one of the two finest productions LA Opera has offered this season, essentially tied in my mind with the company's tremendous, under-attended, Jenufa.  There were a number of cameras at work around the Pavilion Saturday night, which suggests this production may see release on video.  Better yet, one hopes that some old bel canto warhorse can be kept in the stable in a season or two, so that the poor Dwarf, like Tinkerbell, can return to the stage revived by well-earned applause.

Tie Goes to the Dumpster

Los Angeles is better known for tight abs and botox than it is for tuxes and bow ties -- but we were supposed to have had a truly Enormous sculptured bow tie to festoon a space in front of the Disney Hall.  To be created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, "Collar and Bow" was to have been erected in 2004 and was to have looked something like this:

In July of 2006, when I wrote about it here, the project was well behind schedule and plagued by technical difficulties.  Today, that space in front of the Hall remains unoccupied and pedestrians can still pass without fear of being crushed by falling neckwear.  The Tie exists, but it rests in a storage yard in Irvine and looks like this:

The Tie in Exile -- Los Angeles Times photo by Don Bartletti

In the past year, as reported on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times, "Collar and Bow" has gone from highly public art work to the subject of a highly public lawsuit against the artists, designers and fabricators involved in its making and unmaking:

The damages, Music Center attorney David Lira said this week, come to more than $6 million, including payments for the sculpture, additional money for consultants and $600,000 that the Music Center plowed fruitlessly into reinforcing the sidewalk in front of the Frank Gehry-designed hall at 1st Street and Grand Avenue so the ground could support the heavy steel objects that never arrived.

Like the Tower of Babel and other unfinished works, "Collar and Bow" may simply have been Too Big, its creators' ambitions outstripping their ability to deliver it into the real world:

The sculpture was conceived a decade before Disney Hall's 2003 opening.  Oldenburg and Van Bruggen had been toying with the idea of a giant bow tie, and their friend Gehry thought that a swanky collar and tie, looking as if they had been tossed on the sidewalk by some colossus, would sound a playfully artful keynote for concertgoers and passersby.

The architect suggested increasing the sculptors' initial 35-foot-high design to 65 feet.  In May 2003, the Music Center contracted with Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's company, Storebridge, to create "Collar and Bow" for $2.2 million and deliver it by Aug. 15, 2004.  Donations of $1.85 million from Music Center patrons Richard and Geri Brawerman and $1 million from the J. Paul Getty Trust were expected to cover the cost.

The illustration at the top of this post of the sculpture in place comes from the website of one of the defendants, Westerly Marine, which provides this description of its fabrication:

The monumental artwork is made of aluminum, structural steel, stainless steel, then bonded with epoxy film, vacuum bagged and cured.  The final finish will be painted with polyurethane enamel.

Although he was instrumental in starting the project and in expanding it to its gargantuan final scale, Frank Gehry is not a party to the "Collar and Bow" litigation.  He is, however, the target of a lawsuit on the other side of the country, relating to MIT's allegedly leaky Stata Center buildings.  The Disney Hall itself has not been without practical problems: one side of the building had to be sandblasted after completion because Gehry's signature highly reflective steel cladding threatened to roast the neighbors.

Filed last February, the "Collar and Bow" case is now scheduled for trial in Los Angeles Superior Court in mid-October.

For a last look at what might have been -- for better or worse -- here is a pristine 1:16 scale model of the work that was on offer in 2007 at London's Waddington Galleries:

[Cross-posted to Declarations and Exclusions.]

Music for Money, Symphonic Division[with special guest: Leopold!]

Gimme a country where I can be free;
Don't need the unions buryin' me.
Keep me in exile the rest of my days,
Burn me in hell, but as long as it pays:

Art for art's sake;
Money for God's sake . . . .

-- 10cc, "Art For Art's Sake" (1975)

Tim Cavanaugh, writing on the Opinion L.A. weblog earlier this week, posted an odd little item drawing on a 2005 survey that purported to identify the ten most financially successful orchestral composers.

George Gershwin, the sole American, heads up the list -- which is unsurprising but seems slightly unfair, given that his financial success was much more dependent on his masterful popular songs than on, say, the Concerto in F.  Italians are well represented (Verdi, Rossini, Puccini and Paganini all make it) as are Germans/Austrians (Johann Strauss, Handel, Haydn) and Russians (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff).  The French are shut out.

Cavanaugh notes the survey not for aesthetic reasons but for the light it may shed on relations between free markets and classical music:

Why is this interesting (to me at any rate)?  Because longhair music is pretty much universally recognized as an art form that can't compete in an open market and must be supported through royal or (these days) public patronage.  Yet this list is remarkable for the lack of patronage its members enjoyed.  All but two of the composers on the list date to the industrial revolution or afterward, and the two who came earlier than that — Haydn and Handel — did plenty of lucrative for-profit work in Britain, which boasted the most liberal economy in Europe.  Verdi, Rossini and Puccini were all piece-work producers who were less interested in pleasing the royal ear than in filling up the house with paying customers.  Paganini and 'Waltz King' Strauss were expert self-promoters and brand builders, Rachmaninoff made much of his fortune on recordings and performances, and Gershwin made it to the top of the list strictly by producing music for a large popular audience.  I'm not sure he ever got a dime of public support.

More interesting to me than the libertarian economics is Cavanaugh's use of "longhair" to refer to Western classical music.  That was formerly a settled usage -- hifalutin' intellectuals had a reputation for flowing locks by the mid-19th century, and the term's specifically American use in connection with classical music seems to have originated in the 1930s -- but it fell out of fashion by the 1960's when long hair on men became a token of being one of Those Dirty Hippies who didn't much care for the classics but have since grown up and taken over the government.

So, harking back to that older usage, do I need any further excuse to offer up "Long-Haired Hare," a short documentary that takes us behind the scenes of Bugs Bunny's famous appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the 1948 Hollywood Bowl season?  No, indeed I do not:

Why Save Face When You Can Sleeveface?

Sleeveface
[slēvˈ fās] (verb) --
one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion;
in French: "pochettes de disques à face humaine"

~~~

Illustrative Examples of the Genre

Here's one my lady wife may appreciate:

She may also enjoy this appropriation of Mr. B. Manilow.

Here's one for Rick:

You can see that this technique works somewhat better with real 12" LP covers than with CD packaging.

And here's one that may tickle the fancy of Miz Cowtown Pattie and others of the Texan persuasion:

The pigtails are a particularly nice touch.

Many many many more examples can be seen via the flickr Sleeveface Pool.   

Sleeveface weblog link via Stereogum, which helpfully observes that

. . . sleeveface is really difficult to do with illegal MP3s.  Legal ones too, actually.

~~~

Photo credits:
Olivia Newton John, Physical, by flickr user jeanieforever;
King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, by flickr user
Leo Reynolds;
Willie Nelson, Greatest Hits, by flickr user unsure shot. 
All photos used under Creative Commons license.

~~~

UPDATE [030608]: A fine French selection of sleeveface, via escapegrace.

O Tell, Otello: Verdi'd It All Go Wrong?

Ian Storey as Otello, Mark Delavan as Iago; Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.

Los Angeles Opera's new production of Verdi's Otello has drawn responses ranging from lukewarm to actively hostile.  Mark Swed's view of opening night for the Los Angeles Times was decidedly mixed:

For all the company had accomplished by producing its first Otello out of nothing [21 years ago], the orchestra and chorus back then could hardly approach the sheer visceral power of this opening chorus, one of the most dramatic in all opera.  Swept away by it all, I was ready to believe we had entered a new era.  Then I opened my eyes.  And, shortly thereafter, my ears.

Health problems meant the company was obliged to trot out a substitute Desdemona for the opening.  When the intended lead returned, so did Swed, and felt an eensy bit better about it though his praise was still faint:

There is still lots wrong, even embarrassing, with this Otello, but thanks to [Chilean soprano Cristina]Gallardo-Domâs it is no longer a disaster.

Elsewhere, Christian Chensvold complained of "the combination of a beauty-deprived score by Verdi, unexciting production values, and an emotionless portrayal of the tragic hero by Ian Storey . . ."  (He had more positive things to say in that same post about the concurrent "Recovered Voices" double bill, on which I will be better able to report after I see it next Saturday.)

I caught up with Otello last night and, really, it is not nearly so bad as all that.  In fact, its virtues, which are largely musical, overcome its most glaring weaknesses, which are largely scenic.

Where lies the scene?  Cyprus, ostensibly -- Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito dropped Shakespeare's Act 1 altogether, so we never get to spend any time in Venice -- but a Cyprus that is oddly, and literally, off kilter.  Designer Johan Engels has devised a strange and troublesome curved and canted stage floor with a pair of large boxy tunnels for entrances and exits at right and left.  The inspiration seems to be a ship's keel, drawing on Otello's storm-wracked arrival by sea as the opera opens, but the sandy color scheme and the Cypriots' desert-ready apparel combine with the arc of the floor and an odd blue neon rear wall (representing the sun-sparked Mediterranean, perhaps?) to produce the impression that Otello has been dispatched by the Doge to oversee an abandoned skateboard park on Tatooine.  Alan Rich declared it "an authentic visual plague" and I suspect it may account singlehandedly for an increase in the company's workers' compensation premiums as singers and choristers struggle to get through the run without falling over.

The star of the evening is the orchestra and music director James Conlon, delivering an account of Verdi's score that is stirring and propulsive but also remarkable for transparency of tone and attention to detail.  That means, as I suspect Maestro Conlon might protest, that the star was actually Giuseppe Verdi, whose score does just about all that can be done while still being an Italian opera.  The thunderous bits were properly thunderous, but the quiet beauties of the Act 1 love duet and the achingly sad pre-murder meditations in Act 4 were most memorable.

Among the singing performers, this production belongs solidly to Mark Delavan's Iago, an utterly unapologetic and gleeful villain.  Boito provided Iago with an explanatory speech denied him by Shakespeare: Iago is a proto-Nietzschean nihilist who ruins lives because he can and because "death is the end and Heaven is a lie."  And while he is going about his nefarious business, he has a darned good time, thank you very much. 

Desdemona is a smaller, more reactive role, but I am hard put to imagine how Cristina Gallardo-Domâs' performance of it could be improved upon.  I am generally reluctant to go mooning about over sopranos, but it is tempting to make an exception in this case.  Ms. Gallardo-Domâs sang Cio-Cio San in the Met's new production of Madama Butterfly earlier this year.  Although I am on record with the view that seeing Butterfly once in one lifetime is entirely sufficient, I would make an exception if she were to venture that role here.

And what of Ian Storey's Otello?  Frequently more than adequate, but not dominant in the greater scheme of things, perhaps because of the strengths of Iago and Desdemona.  Otellos in general are so easily played upon by Iago that the character always risks coming off as something of a dupe, and for much of the evening Storey fell prey to that risk.  It must be said that he finished well, however, and that this Moor's last sigh when all became clear was moving and effective.

Last night's performance was in competition with the Academy Awards -- which, before the advent of the Kodak Theater, were frequently distributed in the very Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where we sat.  Oscar did not seem to have diminished the audience by much, and I was pleased to note that the average age of the attendees appeared to skew rather younger than is usual for opera.  Statistical fluke or hopeful sign?  Only time will tell.

~~~

Of Related Interest:

Out West Arts has not written up Otello yet, but did spend time with James Conlon over the weekend as the Maestro did double or triple duty by conducting not only the Opera orchestra but the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well.  This very positive post -- "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" -- does a good job of highlighting just how important Conlon has become to this burg:

The really unexpected part is this – in this town that Salonen built where anxiety is widespread over his pending departure despite all the big promises of a Dudamel-filled future, Conlon has stepped in and quietly become the next major driving force in the musical life of this community.  In less than two years he has developed a beloved following from both local audiences and (I’m told) the musicians playing under his leadership.  He has laid out an agenda that he has so far delivered on with fairly good results across the board programming both more Wagner and overlooked German repertory for LAO.  He is truly excited about what he is doing and is eager to share it with audiences here personally. For example, he’s been doing most of the pre-opera talks of the projects he’s involved with himself and he’s as likely as not to make comments from the stage before his Philharmonic appearances. . . .  He attacks everything with gusto and I for one am thrilled about what he’s done so far.  We are lucky to have Conlon here right now.

The list of folks who are thrilled with what Maestro Conlon is up to is a long one, and you can count me in on it.  For all that he is obliged by management and market forces to pile on the Standard Repertoire each year, he has a demonstrated interest in obscured/less frequently mounted works.  Now, will someone please take his hints -- I've heard him drop them in it least two of his pre-performance talks now -- and let the man conduct a production of Pelleas & Melisande around here?  Please?

JoC = PPfNP

Some 30 or 40 year old records earn repeat listens by being comfy old things and some earn them by remaining permanently fresh.  Nick Lowe's 1978 solo album is a fresh one, in every way. 

Just reissued in an expansive 30th anniversary edition on Yep Roc, it is like Tim the Enchanter: known by many names.  The first version was released in the UK as Jesus of Cool, and the Yep Roc reissue uses that original title.  Apparently concerned that American sensibilities would be offended in those innocent pre-Andres Serrano days, Columbia retitled the US version Pure Pop for Now People and released it with slightly rejiggered song selection and sequencing. 

The two editions' original covers and song lists can be compared and contrasted here [UK] and here [US].  The US rear cover is reproduced above.

The 21-song Yep Roc reissue provides all of the tunes that appeared on either version, rounded out with seven additional B sides and other rarities.  In our digital shufflizing age, listeners can sequence the songs to recreate either of Lowe's quirky twins, or just run randomly through the treasure house.  (Having finally compared the two, I think the US version gets the nod as ever so slightly superior to its British cousin.)

Although I enjoyed it hugely when it first came out, it has been nearly 25 years since I last listened to PPfNP.  On being reintroduced, it remains a feat of musical legerdemain rarely surpassed.  Lowe's great trick was to put together a collection that celebrates and subverts simultaneously: he clearly loves radio-friendly 2:50 pop songs with a passion, but has no illusions about the cynical and mercenary nature of The Business that doles them out. 

"I can't believe they've let me make this fabulous fabulous music!" says Dr. Nick. 

"And I can't believe you yokels are falling for it!" smirks Mr. Lowe.

Some random remarks on selected selections:

• One of the best decisions made for the US version was to start off with the high-velocity "So It Goes" rather than the more openly sarcastic "Music for Money."  "So It Goes" is one of several songs here that still seem to understand how the world goes, even though it goes rather differently thirty years on:

In the high-rise sit the heads of our nations,
Worthy men from Spain and Siam;
All day, discussions with the Russians
But they still went ahead, and they vetoed the plan...

Bonus points for timeliness this week go to "Nutted by Reality" in which Lowe reports:

Well I heard they castrated Castro
Because he was the People's friend . . . .

Extra bonus points for the still-accurate summation of artist-company relations, accompanied by an arrangement that somehow cross-breeds "In My Life" with "Lay Lady Lay":

I love my label, I love my label, yeah,
And my label has high hopes in me . . . .

• "Marie Provost," drawn from one of the lurid anecdotes in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, is still a macabre little gem, especially as the massed "whoo-ah's" swell behind the chorus:

She was a winner
Who became a doggie's dinner --
She never meant that much to me.
(Oh, poor Marie.)

• The influence of Tommy James and the Shondells seems to be all over this record, which I had never really noticed before.  In "Tonight," in particular, Lowe out-Tommys Tommy, producing an utterly perfect "we're just two kids in love and nothing else matters and gosh the stars are purty" number that is either the only 100% sincere song on the album or else a joke far too subtly cruel for me to penetrate.

The entire reissue package can be streamed to your desktop from the Yep Roc site, here.  Also available for purchase or download via Amazon, eMusic, and of course   .

Learn again, or for the first time, to love the sound of breaking glass.

• Of related interest, from late 2006: this fool's previous Lowe point.