♬ Genre, I'm Only Dancing ♬

"The Ambassador" Presents His Credentials [Re-Post]

[Gabriel Kahane brings the staged and expanded version of his album The Ambassador to UCLA on Friday and Saturday evening. I will be there the second night, having snapped up a ticket at the first opportunity. For the occasion, I am reposting my review of the album, which was and remains my favorite recording of 2014. This post originally appeared June 25, 2014, under the title "High on a Hill in El Dorado", at a fool in the forest.]

~~~

With so many others here, I am in Los Angeles but not originally of Los Angeles.

We come from other places—Detroit, in my own instance, and that rather a long time ago—and we stay. Los Angeles holds us and often as not it wins us over. Los Angeles is all about winning you over: it presses and prods and wheedles and it wants to be loved and wants to be seen as glorious, but in some sense the dark is always near at hand and in some sense we are always whistling in it.

Or, in the alternative, this—

Los Angeles is the Willie Loman of cities: liked perhaps, but not well liked. In Los Angeles, it seems we are constantly passing and fading and going and gone and, as we pass and go, we are insistent that attention must be paid.Gabriel Kahane has paid attention.

The ten songs comprising The Ambassador behave like the cast of a Robert Altman ensemble piece, each on its own trajectory, intersecting without consciously interacting. That, and every ending is a just a stop, ambiguous and unresolved.

In what may be a backhanded tribute to the "Maps of the Stars' Homes" long sold on L.A. street corners, The Ambassador ties each of its songs to a specific street address. [There is a lovely and informative online map available for perusal.] Something of a roving ambassador himself, Gabriel Kahane arrives in the album's first track, wanders up and down upon the southern California earth, and finally departs eastward via "the hall of the lost" in L.A.'s Union Station.

In "Black Gardens", we meet Kahane much as he is portrayed on the album cover: standing in the Hollywood hills looking down over what he "once called the selfish city" (in the Joan Didion-inspired "LA" on 2011's Where Are the Arms). He promises to "pull back the curtain" and to share "the sounds/of history as it drowns" below him. The drowning becomes literal in "Union Station," which envisions the city slumping beneath the Pacific, Kahane (or a version of him) diving down to assume his seat on the last train out.

In The Ambassador's other songs,characters who are patently not the songwriter also frequently look down from high places, whether from those hills ("Villains", "Slumlord Crocodile", "Griffith Park") or from atop buildings ("Bradbury"). 15-year old Latasha Harlins, shot and killed by the owner of the "Empire Liquor Mart" in the days immediately after the riots/uprising of 1991, floats "up to the corner/Just above the ice cream/And the frozen food" to look down on her own lifeless body before drifting further up to become "friendly with the clouds/That cover Southland". The high places offer some modicum of refuge: Los Angeles, at ground level, is presented as a troublesome town.

The movies are another informing metaphor. "Empire Liquor Mart," the longest and most elaborate of these songs, is structured cinematically with enough jump cuts, flashbacks, deep focus, and montage to fill a reel of Citizen Kane. "Veda" is a waltz-lullaby from the point of view of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce; "Bradbury" draws on Blade Runner. "Musso and Frank" evokes film noir in general and Chandler's Phillip Marlowe in particular. "Villains" takes time for a critical consideration of "action movies of the 1980s,/particularly Die Hard."

"Ambassador Hotel" explores that grand old property erected on Wilshire Boulevard in Hollywood's early days of glory, Mary Pickford frolicking on the broad lawn. The song picks up at the opposite end of the hotel's arc, however, on the night before it closed forever in 1989, the night watchman looking back on its history and on its role as the scene of Robert F. Kennedy's murder on primary election night in 1968. There is, as it happens, hardly a song here without a death in it.

The most common Los Angeles tropes appear here as if glimpsed in a distorting rearview mirror. The beach, for example, is not a home to surfers and bikini babes, but the site of a mystery man disposing of funerary ashes. Our "cardiac traffic," it seems, will survive even a nuclear blast.

So why spend time in Kahane's sad, selfish, and potentially lethal city? For one thing, the music in this place is really good. If a song can choke you up a little, these songs will do it. If music can make you smile with its cleverness, these songs will do it. As he has demonstrated with his prior recordings and in the musical February House [which itself includes a jaunty paean to southern California for Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears], Gabriel Kahane is scarily adept in sophisticated pop songcraft. However deep the going gets, music and lyrics stay light on their feet.

It all sounds very good as well. Jointly produced by Kahane with his core band—Casey Foubert, Matt Johnson, and longtime collaborator Rob Moose—the songs are recorded and mixed with a space and clarity of detail evocative of the transparency for which the southern California light, on its best days, is justly famed.

Los Angeles is an unsettled, "make your own adventure" sort of a place. Whatever anyone says about this city, your results will assuredly vary. Gabriel Kahane's Los Angeles is not the same as mine is, or as yours would be if you were here. Perhaps the point of assuming the varied characters of The Ambassador is to suggest that Los Angeles is always playing a role, the real thing unknowable even to itself beneath its layers of artifice.

Whatever: this is a deep and memorable album, and I recommend it unreservedly.

Incidental Note: I have a sentimental attachment to the Ambassador Hotel, having begun my career practicing law a few short blocks away in the years before its closure. I later knew a man who had done quite well for himself in the 1970s operating an art gallery in the hotel's lobby; he put the money into more art and the occasional race horse.

If there is ever any call for a sequel, the Ambassador's subsequent life would easily fill another song. Today, the site is occupied by a school named after Robert Kennedy, only echoes of its silhouette and of the facade of the Coconut Grove nightclub still recalling the grand hotel. The old Brown Derby restaurant, located across the street, closed before the Ambassador did, and its distinctive hat-shaped shell was rudely transplanted to perch atop the strip mall that took its place. After the Ambassador was closed, it took an additional decade of litigation before the L.A. city school district could acquire the land. For much of the 1990s Donald Trump, of all people, was one of the owners, regularly announcing grandiose plans to erect the tallest building in the world on the spot.

The tallest building west of the Mississippi was and is the Library Tower downtown, a block from which I had my office at the turn of the current century. The tower is generally reported to have been given serious consideration as a target for the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. So much for the comfort of high places.

~~~

Additional photos (i.e., photos other than the album cover) are by the blogger. This post is based upon repeated listening to a purchased copy of The Ambassador CD.

Antoinette of the Spirits, or, The Beaumarchais Strategem [The Ghosts of Versailles, Los Angeles Opera]

A magpie's trove in a hall of mirrors, its shiny borrowings gleaned across space and time and worlds natural and supernatural: John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles is now on offer as part of Los Angeles Opera's sprawling "Figaro Unbound" initiative, with two performances remaining. It is a rewarding thing to commune with these spirits.

New York's Metropolitan Opera commissioned Ghosts to be premiered in 1983, for the company's 100th Anniversary. In light of the occasion, it was to serve not only as an opera in its own right, but also as a gala opportunity to showcase a number of the Met's then-reigning and rising stars. The enormity of the resulting piece was such that the Met itself has yet to revisit it—a planned 2010 revival was scrapped when the U.S. economy went reeling downward—and such other productions as have been attempted (in Chicago and St. Louis) have been of reduced or chamber versions. The current production in Los Angeles is the first to take on the complete version since its premiere.

The institutional neglect of these Ghosts is unfortunate because Corigliano, with a meticulous tightrope-walk of a libretto by William M. Hoffman, devised a piece that can stand solidly as an opera, as a love letter to all opera, as a spectacle, and as emotionally resonant theater. Ghost story, opera buffa, love story, melodrama, pageant and more: Ghosts is a bumblebee, a creature that should not fly but does, an edifice that should collapse of its own weight and yet floats off to the Empyrean when all's said, as lightly as a Montgolfier balloon (the concluding image in this production).

The plot? It's complicated, even by 18th century opera standards:

The audience in the material world is made privy to events in the spirit world, possibly going on at this moment. The ghosts of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and others of the French court, executed by the Revolution, languish and are bored. With them is the ghost of the equally dead, but not beheaded, Beaumarchais, the author of the Figaro plays, the two most popular of which—The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro—served Rossini and Mozart as fodder for equally popular operas, which will themselves be returning to the L.A. Opera stage in short order.

For the love of the mournful Marie Antoinette, Beaumarchais grandly proposes an entertainment, a new recounting of further adventures of the beloved Figaro and company.  By this means, the poet announces, he will do more than merely amuse. He proposes in fact to Change the Course of History and to permit the Queen, whom he loves, to escape her rendezvous with the guillotine. The living audience watches the dead audience watching fictional characters tampering with actual history in an opera within the opera. 

On the inner stage, it is some twenty years after Figaro's Marriage. Figaro, it seems, continues to serve Count Almaviva. The Count is engaged in a Pimpernel-like scheme in which a fabulous diamond necklace of the Queen's will be sold in secret to the English ambassador to Paris, during a reception at the Turkish embassy. The proceeds of the transaction will fund the Queen's rescue from imprisonment and her escape to the New World, specifically to Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Almaviva's trusted friend Begearss—in fact an unrepentant villain in the tradition of Iago—awaits his chance to betray the Count into the lethal hands of the Revolution. And, of course, there are marriages to be arranged or thwarted.

All goes as planned until Figaro, having snapped up the necklace during the  hubbub of the Turkish revels, rebels against his creator and refuses to use the jewels as intended to save the Queen. He will keep them for his own, to deal with his innumerable creditors. He has achieved Pirandellian self-awareness. He knows he is a beloved character—"Your Figaro!"—and that this is what his audience would expect of him and what he himself desires.

Outraged, Beaumarchais is obliged to invade his own fiction in an effort to reassert his authorial will. Ultimately, in an effort to persuade Figaro to return to course, Beaumarchais restages the trial of the Queen. Figaro relents, the dreadful Begearss receives his comeuppance, and all of the fictional characters are saved. The real/ghost Queen, however, elects not to change her own past. She finds that she is reconciled to history, and in the company of the loving Beaumarchais she achieves a sort of apotheosis.

Beaumarchais's proposition proves to be the same as Shakespeare's in the sonnets: that the love of a poet or artist may grant to the beloved, through art, a sort of immortality when life itself cannot. It is, perhaps, the only immortality there can be for such fleeting creatures as humans are.

This new Los Angeles production is directed by Darko Tresnjak, whose previous work with Los Angeles Opera has been as part of the "Recovered Voices" project, including Alexander Zemlinsky's marvelous, heartbreaking The Dwarf.   To the larger world, he may be better known as the recent Tony Award winner for directing The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Tresnjak's management of stage traffic alone is an impressive thing, given the multiple stages, nesting plots and large-scale set pieces Ghosts requires. The sets are looming and luxuriant, the costumes sumptuous, the spectacle fully spectacular. Ghosts is a madly overstuffed thing, scintillant of surface but secreting resonant emotional depths. Its every corner packed with detail, it resembles in many ways Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchhausen, not least in its pitting of love and the spinning of upwardly yearning yarns against political calculation and callous destructiveness. (That, and they both feature heads floating about independent of their bodies. But I digress.)

On a good night, the orchestra of the Los Angeles Opera is every bit the equal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, across the street. The Opera orchestra and conductor James Conlon are having very good nights with Ghosts, navigating a kaleidoscope of styles and moods effortlessly.

Among the singers, Robert Brubaker as the reprehensible Begearss is a highlight, earning a round of affectionate booing in his curtain call. In his company debut, Christopher Maltman brings dignity and scope to bear on behalf of Beaumarchais. Patricia Racette as Marie Antoinette, is noble and sad. The show-stopping cameo role of the Turkish singer Samira, written for Marilyn Horne, is taken up with infectious glee by Patti Lupone, her Broadway chops in full effect, ululating and schticking it up uproariously in the mad comic finale of Act I. 

The Ghosts of Versailles is not what Wagner had in mind when he imagined the "total work of art" [gesamtkunstwerk], but in this production it arguably qualifies: music, poetry, theatrical wizardry, all brought to bear in a consuming whole. Its satisfactions are many, and they linger—hauntingly—long after the curtain falls and the auditorium is emptied of the living.

~~~

Incidental Twitter notes:

Coups des têtes, Gentil coups des têtes: Antoinette et Monsieur Beaumarchais.... On site for "Ghosts of Versailles", @LAOpera .

— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) February 22, 2015

O! Citizens. The Lunatic Overstuffed Brilliance of @LAOpera's "Ghosts of Versailles" [Act I at least] Must Be Seen By You. A finest madness.

— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) February 22, 2015

The hour late, the revels ended, approbations galore to everyone concerned with @LAOpera's "Ghosts of Versailles". You made it new anew.

— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) February 22, 2015

Between @LongBeachOpera, @LAOpera, @industryopera, @LAPhil and more, Los Angeles is a total hotbed of *Opera by Living Composers* just now.

— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) February 22, 2015

 ~~~

The Ghosts of Versailles continues at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with performances February 26 and March 1.

Photos used by kind permission of Los Angeles Opera.

The blogger attended this performance as a Los Angeles Opera subscriber.

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

Oui, elle regrette tout [Thérèse Raquin, Long Beach Opera]

Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867) is lurid, unrepentantly tawdry, and a potboiler at its core, with all the lust, loathing, murder, desperation, and squalor that implies. It's trappings even include the visitations of an aggrieved and vengeful ghost. It would seem the sort of story destined from birth to find a place in the opera repertoire, and in 2001 composer Tobias Picker gave it one. Originally commissioned by Dallas Opera, and staged by San Diego Opera in 2008, on Saturday evening Picker's Thérèse Raquin opened the 2015 Long Beach Opera season. 

Zola offered his story as a realistic chronicle of squalid conditions and miserable lives in the Paris of his own moment. Director Ken Cazan maintains the Parisian locale, but moves the action forward some eighty years, to 1945-46 as the city, with the rest of Europe, struggles back to life from war and occupation. As conceit go it is a good conceit, and the mid-century look of the production also quietly evokes an American literary parallel: the novels of James M. Cain in which, as in Zola, characters are ground down by their own mistakes or, as commonly, by societal and family conditions they did not make, cannot control, and seem barely to understand.

Zola's tale is pitiless: Thérèse was left at the age of three to be raised by her aunt, the widowed Madame Raquin, whose life is otherwise devoted to ruling over her sickly son, Thérèse's cousin, Camille. It is foreordained that the cousins should marry. They do, and continue to live in the Raquin flat, where Thursday dominoes with the neighbors are the only unvarying variance in a dismal routine. Thérèse falls in with Camille's raffish office mate, the aspiring "painter" Laurent. Camille, inevitably, is murdered by the lovers: drowned in a boating excursion on the Seine. Laurent and Thérèse, still living off of Madame Raquin's widow's pension, marry and fall swiftly into debilitating mutual loathing and regret. Camille's ghost—given here an unforeseen Act II entrance worthy of Freddie Krueger—perturbs them mightily. At length, just as they are inclining to kill one another, they instead kill themselves. Tres jolie, non?

Gene Scheer is the librettist, and he has provided a clean, efficient tour through the necessary events of the tale. The libretto is structurally sound as can be, but Scheer has chosen, inexplicably and with surprising frequency, to set much of the dialogue as loose-limbed rhymed couplets. While Picker typically avoids lapsing into sing-song to accommodate the rhymes (except when some of the supporting characters are actually supposed to be singing wedding-night doggerel), the too-obvious rhyme frequently threatens to undercut the seriousness of the characters' situation.

Picker's score is also a clean and efficient thing, amply allusive without lowering itself to pastiche. Act 1, in particular, revels in evocations of Debussy and Ravel—Laurent's seductive anecdote of being "persuaded" to include a comely young woman in one of his pictures is a veritable  après-midi d'un  flâneur. The second act, post-murder, grows more angular, highlighted by Camille's "ghost aria," which borrows effectively from the bottomless melancholy of Peter Quint in Britten's The Turn of the Screw. If it is not pioneering, the music is rarely less than an effective carrier of the drama.

The cast in this production, the majority in their first appearance with Long Beach Opera, are solid as can be. As a character, Thérèse poses the challenge of being far more acted upon than active; Mary Ann Stewart is amply sympathetic against the odds, grasping for a personal freedom she can barely imagine. As Camille, Matthew DiBattista effectively contrasts an ineffectual lumpishness against a bitter last fight against death and, finally, an urgent and physical grotesquerie from beyond the grave in the showpiece ghost aria. Ed Parks's Laurent is less clever than he imagines himself, casually unfeeling when he imagines he is being most sincere; not a bad man, but a man who makes very poor choices.

Suzan Hanson captures the misguided strictness of Madame Raquin, who never acknowledges her smothering effect on those around her. When her character falls silent, victim of a stroke induced by the discovery of Laurent and Thérèse's guilt (and a brutal confrontation with Laurent), she serves as silent foil to the guilty and to the oblivious as the drama snakes to its end.

To their credit, Picker and Sheer have taken the supporting parts of the neighbors seriously, giving a fair portion of humanity to parts that could have been caricatures. Zeffin Quinn Hollis is the good natured gendarme Olivier, unable even to suspect the guilt of the killers, with Ani Maldjian as his touchingly rootless spouse. John Matthew Myers is the much-married, jovially clueless Monsieur Grivet.

All told Thérèse Raquin works well as an opera. If it's path through desperation and folly to death and confusion is not new, it is certainly well retold. As Bugs Bunny famously observed, "Whaddaya expect from an opera? A happy ending?" To which one can only reply in this case: Non, je ne regrette rien.

~~~

Thérèse Raquin repeats at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro on Sunday, February 1, 2015, at 2:30 p.m. Tickets available here.

Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

[As ever with Long Beach Opera, the blogger attended this performance as a subscriber, at his own expense.]  

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

 

Listening Listfully 2014 - Ars Gratia Artis

Time again for the annual ritual of Listening Listfully: cataloguing album/EP-length recordings released in the past twelvemonth that most particularly tickled my fancy. Personal favorites, as always, rather than "bests"—although I would maintain that everything here is genuinely among the best things of the past year, and not simply because I have enjoyed it. There are inevitably many records of quality omitted here, simply because I have yet to listen to them.

For 2014, I have reverted to dividing the larger List in two, very roughly segregating these recordings by application of that old fugitive, "genre". Below is the portion of the List that slouches roughly into the "classical" or "art music" category. The other portion follows, here.

The cut is very rough: Jacob Cooper's Silver Threads, for example, appears here because it is a song cycle for soprano, but could equally well be place on the other sub-List as my favorite ambient electronic album of the year (with Seaman & Supko's s_traits close behind). The No Lands and Wedren/Friedman records land here because of the ostensible "New Music" orientation of the New Amsterdam label on which they were released. The Bad Plus is Stravinsky, but also jazz, so could be over there rather than over here. Juice Vocal Ensemble enjoys the distinction of being the only artists appearing on both of the sub-Lists. Et cetera. Go figure.

I should have more extended comment on a number of these recordings before the year is out, leading toward my resolution to treat 2015 as The Year of Writing Musically.

Flawed, entirely subjective, and internally contradictory as always, here begins The List:

1    Andrew McIntosh – Hyenas in the Temples of Pleasure

2    Jacob Cooper – Silver Threads

3    David T. Little & Third Coast Percussion – Haunt of Last Nightfall

4    Gnarwhallaby – [Exhibit A]

5    Invisible Cities: An Opera by Christopher Cerrone

6    wildUp – Feather & Stone

7    Julien Labro & Spektral Quartet – From this Point Forward

8    yMusic – Balance Problems

9    A Far Cry – Law of Mosaics

10    Florent Ghys – Télévision

11    Spektral Quartet – Mobile Miniatures [ringtones]

12    Bill Seaman & John Supko – s_traits

13    R. Andrew Lee – Jürg Frey: Pianist, Alone

14    Inoo/Kallay Duo – Five Conversations About Two Things

15    Fifth House Ensemble – Excelsior

16    Giacomo Fiore – iv. American Guitars

17    Juice Vocal Ensemble – Laid Bare: Love Songs

18    No Lands – Negative Space

19    Brooklyn Rider – The Brooklyn Rider Almanac

20    Philip Corner – Satie Slowly

21    Craig Wedren, Jefferson Friedman – On in Love

22    Qasim Naqvi – Fjoloy
         Qasim Naqvi – Landscape Study

23    Hildur Guðnadóttir – Leyfðu Ljósinu

24    Gavin Gamboa – Transmogrificantus Octet

25    Martin Bresnick – Prayers Remain Forever

26    ensemble, et al. – Present Point Passed

27    Leah Kardos & Ben Dawson – Three Preludes

28    Anonymous 4 – love fail [david lang]

29    The Bad Plus – The Rite of Spring

30    Los Angeles Philharmonic/Orli Shaham – American Grace

31    Gavin Bryars Ensemble – Sinking of the Titanic [live 2012 Centenary tour]

32    Nico Muhly – Two Boys [Metropolitan Opera]

33    'In the Shadow of No Towers' [Mohammed Fairouz]

34    Lorelei Ensemble – Live. Know. Love.

35    Olga Bell – Krai

36    James McVinnie – Cycles

Listening Listfully 2014 - Ars Gratia Populi

And now another installment in the annual ritual of Listening Listfully: cataloguing album/EP-length recordings released in the past twelvemonth that most particularly tickled my fancy. Personal favorites, as always, rather than "bests"—although I would maintain that everything here is genuinely among the best things of the past year, and not simply because I have enjoyed it. The first ten items on each list are most especially strong, if you ask me.

For 2014, I have reverted to dividing the larger List in two, very roughly segregating these recordings by application of that old fugitive, "genre". Below is the portion of the List encompassing music that, like some high school sophomore of the 1950s, is essentially hip-to-be-hep-to-be-cool-to-be-Popular. The other portion of the List is here.

I should have more extended comment on a number of these recordings before the year is out, leading toward my resolution to treat 2015 as The Year of Writing Musically.

Flawed, entirely subjective, and internally contradictory as always, here continues The List:

1    Gabriel Kahane – The Ambassador

2    The Gloaming – The Gloaming

3    David Thomas Broughton and Juice Vocal Ensemble – Sliding the Same Way

4    Meshell Ndegeocello – Comet Come to Me

5    Ava Luna – Electric Balloon

6    St. Vincent – St. Vincent

7    Mr. Twin Sister – Mr Twin Sister

8    My Brightest Diamond – This Is My Hand

9    The NORTH Project – NORTH

10    Fripp & Eno – Live in Paris May 28, 1975

11    Sam Amidon – Lily-O

12    Smoke Fairies – Smoke Fairies

13    Damien Jurado – Brothers & Sisters of the Eternal Son

14    School of Language – Old Fears

15    Ellen McSweeney – The Wrong Idea

16    The War on Drugs – Lost In The Dream

17    Eno-Hyde – Someday World 
         Eno-Hyde – High Life

18    Quadraceratops – Quadraceratops

19    The Men – Tomorrow's Hits

20    Beck – Morning Phase

21    Joseph Arthur – Lou

22    Lorna Dune – Miamisphere EP

23    Anna Calvi – Strange Weather

24    Moodoïd – Le Monde Möö

25    Ramona Lisa – Arcadia

26    Richard Thompson – Acoustic Classics

27    Minus the Bear – Lost Loves

28    CFCF – Outsiders EP

28    Son Lux – Alternate Worlds EP

28    My Brightest Diamond – None More Than You EP

28    School of Language – More Fears EP

28    Gabriel Kahane – Haircuts & Airports EP

Genre, I'm Only Dancing

Although I have maintained a blog, and sometimes two, for over ten years now, I do not know that I can still consider myself a blogger.

A proper blogger, after all, may be recognized by the production of posts on a frequent, or at least regular, basis.

While my dear old fool in the forest blog sports roughly 1200 posts altogether, only ten of them have been produced in this calendar year. My legal blog, Declarations and Exclusions, is more or less officially dead, and has been for several years (other than to raise its head occasionally to mourn its own demise and the reduced state of legal blogging generally).

And yet, there is the urge to kick myself back into action. Hence, this semi-autonomous new outlet, intended to bring some surprise and refreshment in the hope of rekindling the old bloggy flame.

Although nominally a culture blog, a fool in the forest has focused almost entirely on musical subjects in recent years. This space will focus entirely on such stuff, initially cross-posting back to the foolblog.

Beyond the reports and reviews that have made up the bulk of posts in recent years, I am setting a challenge to myself to write at least a few more abstruse pieces, taking up perennial headscratchers such as 

• How do we (or how do I) listen to music?
• What do we talk about when we talk about style or genre or try to slot music into inflexible categories? Can it be done? Is there, more importantly, any purpose to be served in trying to do it? [You may well already guess my inclinations on some aspects of this.]
• Is [insert musical category] dead, or dying, and what does that even mean and if it is dead, or dying, or whatever, is that a cause for alarm, or what?
• How is it possible to write about music? How can it best be described or thought about or explained? And what are the mechanics of the marriage of music and text? As a self-styled "freelance librettist", that last particularly intrigues me.
• Why should you be listening to [this new thing that has set my enthusiasm to bubbling]?
• And so on.

For the most part, I will likely produce more of the same: the ramblings of an enthusiastic amateur, one whose substantive and technical knowledge incorporates more holes than a macramé sweater vest, but also one who wants to know more about what he doesn't know, wants to know what's new, wants to know what he likes, and is particularly interested in figuring out why he likes it. And why the reader should, as well.

As for this blog's name, it is a play on the title of an old (1974) David Bowie tune that was never included in a proper album but which has recurred, in multiple versions and mixes, on Best Ofs and as a bonus track for decades. A crafty bender of gender and genre himself, Mr. Bowie seems an appropriate Jean Genius Loci for this venture. 

And now, music....