from the South Bay
From the Sad-but-True department. Leave it to the NYT to highlight the problems LA theatres face in the aftermath of COVID and bearing the brunt of the ills of the gig economy. Uber and Lyft skate while tiny arts orgs have to conform to new wage laws while trying to reopen. Whatever Dr. Soon-Shiong may have done for the LA Times, his inaction on the sacks of filth at his arts and culture desks is unpardonable.
“Nevertheless, she persisted”
“And still, [she’ll] rise”
As did her party, in standing ovation. Snopes weighs in on the latest media victim from the party of personal responsibility. The QOP appropriates, corrupts, and weaponizes anything and everything it touches. The slide continues abetted by the invertebrate from Bakersfield.
On inauguration day, a large chunk of America unclenched and exhaled for the first time in four wretched, miserable years. Five if we count the rancid campaign of naked bigotry and full throated lies that preceded and presaged the disaster of 45.
We now have some sanity in the ship of state and can hope that any honeymoon lasts long enough to get people vaccinated, businesses restarted, and the arts out from under hiding. Even before COVID, anything on the finer side of life was ignored at best and ridiculed at worst under the moron of Mar-a-lago. Many of us who eagerly awaited 20 January and some sign of support to the better things woke up to surprise and not a little disappointment at the overwhelmingly pop-culture besotted inauguration that actually occurred. The shark sandwich playlist promised much and delivered nothing.
“Whether you are a country soul, a jazz enthusiast, a hip hop head, a classical sort, or just love that old-time rock and roll, music clarifies, inspires, unites, and heals.”
— Inaugural Committee CEO Tony Allen
Us “classical sorts” got jack shit, not even the ubiquitous OFFS not-him-again Yo-Yo Ma bowsynching to Copland as in 2009 although the equally overexposed Rénëê Fleming was said to have sung at one of the side events. The rest, excluding Bob Marley, was as America-centered and nobrow as anything the MAGA movement could scrape together, excepting of course getting the performance rights. The perpetually inept LA Times arts and culture department, or at least one of its representatives, thinks things are looking up. This schlemiel, a tv critic no less, views the cultural future as the wasteland of the Discovery Channel, Bravo, History, and TLC which at one time actually had some decent programming but which long ago sold out to the perpetually dropping lowest common denominator. It might get better for the arts but it is more likely that the arts will just get redefined just as science was for ‘The Science Channel.’
What galls about the 46-0 shutout is that the United States does not lack for options. Copland and Gershwin are overplayed but we have Ives, Joplin, and Gottschalk. Dvorák was inspired in Iowa, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky lived out their lives here (as did Schoenberg but let’s stay within realistic limits). Hell, John Williams or Peter Schickele could have done something if asked. And, if all of that is still too off-the-radar, there’s good ol’American John Philip Sousa transcribed by good ol’ American Vladimir Horowitz. One pianist, one piano – saves on cost and brings everyone to his or her feet. Regardez from the Hollywood Bowl in 1945.
Youtube Channel: Michael Brown
These guys were popular when I was in high school 137 years ago. Twentytwenttwenty four hours to go and I’d like to be asleep until it happens.
Youtube Channel: 86thegrouch
The US smugly denounces corruption in other countries, the poorer the better for the sanctimony. Yet in the hopeful coda to a cancerous career, 45 is expected to issue some 100 pardons on his last full day of his unsanctified, cursed term. His remaining handlers are said to be profiting handsomely from many paying top dollar to get their cases reviewed.
Some 42 years ago, WKRP in Cincinnati featured another corrupt, smarmy con artist – an ex-wrestler now in religious raiment fleecing the faithful. The staff ultimately manages to get the Reverend Little Ed Pembrook off the air until he promises to reform. Which he does, only to find another angle as grifters large and small usually manage to do.
That series had an hell of a first season which also included the legendary Thanksgiving episode with live turkeys dropped from a helicopter as a publicity stunt.
Youtube Channel: Benjamin Smith
Monsaingeon’s wonderful Richter documentary features the legendary pianist accompanying Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Hugo Wolf’s ‘Feuerreiter.’ I don’t like vocal music much but the piece came to mind today and I searched for the lyrics. The first stanza is a knockout and the rest could be ripped from the front pages if front pages still existed to be ripped.
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Sehet ihr am Fensterlein
Dort die rote Mütze wieder?
Nicht geheuer muß es sein,
Denn er geht schon auf und nieder.
Und auf einmal welch Gewühle
Bei der Brücke, nach dem Feld!
Horch! das Feuerglöcklein gellt:
Hinterm Berg,
Hinterm Berg
Brennt es in der Mühle!
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See, at the window
There, his red cap again?
Something must be wrong,
For he’s pacing to and fro.
And all of a sudden, what a throng
At the bridge, heading for the fields!
Listen to the fire-bell shrilling:
Behind the hill,
Behind the hill
The mill’s on fire!
— Translation by Richard Stokes
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The story canters on and it doesn’t end well for our redcapped protagonist. There’s a rough (and admittedly forced) parallel in Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’ where a King-in-mind-only abdicates to eventual academe, a hapless assassin, and his own hand.
He never would have reached the western coast had not a fad spread among his secret supporters, romantic, heroic daredevils, of impersonating the fleeing king. They rigged themselves out to look like him in red sweaters and red caps, and popped up here and there, completely bewildering the revolutionary police. Some of the pranksters were much younger than the King, but this did not matter since his pictures in the huts of mountain folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could buy worms, ginger bread and zhiletka blades, had not aged since his coronation. A charming cartoon touch was added on the famous occasion when from the terrace of the Kronblik Hotel, whose chairlift takes tourists to the Kron glacier, one merry mime was seen floating up, like a red moth, with a hapless, and capless, policeman riding two seats behind him in dream-slow pursuit. It gives one pleasure to add that before reaching the staging point, the false king managed to escape by climbing down one of the pylons that supported the traction cable.
Regrettably our national fire is more of the Wolf stripe. The mill burns to the ground with untold consequences to the many where Nabokov’s paler flame is shaded to only take the life of Kinbote/Botkin. We are left to wonder and fear whether a “a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus” is in our futures.
Hear Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore perform it below with evocative added graphics and translation followed by a rehearsal of the same piece with Richter.
Youtube Channel: FiDiTanzer528
Youtube Channel: kadoguy
45 isn’t a king but acts like one on television. L’état c’est lui, a petulant whiny child beheading his enemies with multiple wives and obsequious servants flattering before fading into the desperate end.
It is time, long past time, for this rancid wannabe to make a real exit.
Youtube Channel: City Garage
No, not that Epstein, this one. No, not that Barr, this one. There’s a lot of spleen being vented over both of these punchbowl turds. The cut-price John Simon is enjoying a brief death-rattle courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that went for clicks and got more than it could have imagined. It gave some temporary visibility to the polyp in the bowel of Phi Beta Kappa, his one-time and twenty-four year employer, which has joined in the denunciations without actually saying his name.
More pressing is the matter of 45’s head henchman, lap dog, and supposed top law man in, of, and for the country. He joins a long and sordid list of ejecta – a mob of serfs and idolaters that sullied the nation’s house and halls before getting the heave-ho for being insufficiently abject, corrupt, or both. The problem before us is that every one of these jackholes from Tillerson to Bolton to Esper has been replaced by someone worse. On top of that, the dearly departed suddenly become forgiven and their rationalizations smoothed over into recantations. Mea culpa, mea ass. They are still the same sleazebags that they were status quo ante only butthurt that their craven agendas ran into 45’s excrementally bigger ones. There are still five weeks to go until regime change is formalized through inauguration. We cannot breathe easier until then and possibly after.
Youtube Channel: Armando Hasudungan
We laughed at Senator Blutarsky, we chuckled at President Biff. Couldn’t happen here until they did.
Here’s a look at White House strategy and until it is over, it isn’t.
Youtube Channel: Movieclips
Stoppard’s occasionally engaging and frequently frustrating play puts two minor characters from ‘Hamlet’ in a universe where physical laws don’t apply, free will is an illusion, insanity is the norm, and a hideous fate inevitable. Sounds eerily familiar.