Behind the Scenes at the World Cup

Anybody who has read this blog will know: I don’t get the whole thing about sports. As proof of this, I report my initial reaction to one of the first games of the FIFA World Cup, which I saw on Father’s Day at my in-law’s house:

“The problem could easily be solved—and it surprises me that no one has thought of it—if the two teams would just cooperate. Whoever happened to have the ball at the moment would be perfectly free to put it wherever they want, included in that little netted area. That done, they would give the ball quite courteously to the other team. That way, everybody would be happy, and the scores would be phenomenal—can you imagine it? You’d have games with scores of 333,633 versus 975,813—and the crowd would be delighted, because apparently the big deal is to shout “GOALLLLLLLLL!” So the entire country would get laryngitis and could stay home in bed sipping hot tea, and resting their vocal cords—a nice bit of secondary gain. So who wins? Well, we total up both scores, and if it’s larger than a set amount, both teams win!”

Guess what?

Liany, Raf’s sister and a Montessori teacher, absolutely loved it. But the rest of the family?

Well, they were acting a bit more like the crowd that—inexplicably—had gathered in the lobby of the Fine Arts Cinema, which has a little café and, more importantly, a large screen television. And it was standing room only—every chair was taken. By chance, just when we arrived there, the Argentinians scored a goal, and the crowd erupted. Given that we were there to watch an opera, it wasn’t necessarily a god sign.

“Marc,” says María, a 20-year old who works at the café, “do you ever get the feeling that it’s just too much, the world? The corporations and the news media control everything, and the little people of the world are forced to pay more and more and are being manipulated by the media into being silent and thinking they’re happy….”

Was it time to sneak in the backdoor of adulthood and tell her that every generation has felt that way, has wanted to change the world, has been idealistic, and when she was older….

No.

I had spent twenty minutes, you see, watching the goings on in the slum, or favela, of Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, which in fact is getting a little ethnic cleaning done to it while the rest of us are enjoying the World Cup. Consider this quote:

In a bid to try and make the country appear much more socially acceptable to the influx of oblivious visitors and dignitaries who will be flying to the country to watch the games, the Brazilian authorities have forcibly evicted thousands of people from their shanty towns and gunned down others on the streets indiscriminately.

It is estimated that at least 40,000 poor people have been gone (sic) missing from the militarized favelas; while kids were killed with impunity in the ghettos which were then occupied by the police, who, according to insiders, later bragged about the amount of people they murdered.  

Or consider this:

Some in the stands vented their frustration by cursing President Dilma Rousseff, whose government footed a good chunk of the tournament’s $11 billion cost. Rousseff, who’s seeking a second term in October, can at least boast that the event came off without a hitch, contrary to what many expected. “People will be in a bad mood for a few days, but the Cup won’t decide the elections,” says João Augusto de Castro Neves, an analyst with Eurasia Group, a political consulting firm that gives Rousseff a 70 percent chance of winning.

I consider María, sitting in front of me: she’s not sleeping well, she’s not eating well, she’s depressed and anxious and worrying about what will happen in Puerto Rico. The effect of the economic crisis is beginning to be felt: the electric company has until the end of the month to figure out a scheme to restructure its debt, and if it doesn’t? Will they start selected blackouts, as rumored? Cut payroll, as feared? Who doesn’t have a relative working for the government? She talks about her fears, and soon is in tears; I get up to get a napkin. Later, in gratitude, she’ll bring me coffee.

I consider the people of Maré, who are getting used to the police bursting into houses and shooting anybody who might be a drug dealer. The people who have been displaced in order to have the stadia for these games built. Oh, and was there a report that stray dogs had been killed because it would be unsightly for the tourists? Think I remember seeing that….

Being an adult gives you experience, so I can trot out the speech that my mother once gave, about seeing so much progress in her life. Especially in civil rights, and rights for LGBT people, we’ve made real progress, if looked at over the decades. So I tell María that, and she looks unconvinced.

I’m not convinced, either. Both of the young women who spoke with me today had the same desire: to change the world. That’s good—I felt that way too, and most days still do. Everybody should want to change the world, especially at age twenty. I did.

The difference?

I believed I could do it…. 

Ring! Salt Lake Speaking….

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’m definitely having a better Monday morning than are 12 old men in—presumably—Utah*.

These guys have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there was no possibility of dissent.

So that meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark Twain, one of the earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on the Book of Mormon?

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. 

So all of us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball, the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!

But the 70s must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her shelves? Not likely.

So change, when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?

Someone invented the Internet.

Which one person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking, the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers, writing blogs.

Yes—it seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I teach it—but Wikipedia does:

The Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on Mormon issues.[1] The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.

So on 17 March 2013, Kate Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.

Hmmm—let’s see: who was it that said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?

Answer—Victor Hugo….

Astonishing, really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women (also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And why were we all vigiling?

OK—return to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath, here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders called her in for a trial yesterday.

Except not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church transfer her records there.  Here’s what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:

I beg of you not to impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.

In theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing, to do with it.  But it is interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to another blogger, John Dehlin. Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….

Well, if the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?  Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!

Easy for me to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with her loved ones. If not, not.

The church asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life? Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know in a day or two.

Why do I think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?

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*Ever faithful to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average age is 78.3….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29

Third Shade of Grey—Latin Influences

Well, Wikipedia says he’s South America’s best-known composer, and it’s arguably true. If someone tells you he or she knows only one piece of Latin-American music, you can be fairly sure it’s the Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5, scored for eight cellos and soprano. And yes, it’s a sultry, steamy affair, a bit more Brazil than Bach.

And also according to Wikipedia, the intention of the Bachianas Brasileiras was never to fuse the native music of Brazil with Johann Sebastian Bach, but to use some of the counterpoint and harmonic elements of the baroque period along with traditional Brazilian folk tunes.

And Villa-Lobos was colorful, to be sure, at least in his early days. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he ventured in his twenties out into the “dark interior” of the country, and came back with tales of near escapes from cannibals. He also, he stated, realized that he would never completely follow the European tradition in music: the folk music of his native land would always influence his work.

Don’t think, though, that this is a composer who is unfamiliar with the boulevards of Paris—he spent some five or six years there, working with Varèse, Aaron Copland, Milhaud (whom he had met in Brazil), Stokowski, and Pablo Picasso. So he got around.

Or tried to. At a later point, a military dictator blew in—they tend to in South America—and stopped all money from going out of the country. That meant that Villa-Lobos was stuck in the country, but not a problem, because he became the director of the Superindendência de Educação Musical e Artística—right, don’t have to know Portuguese to get that one—and also wrote the national anthem. He wrote sufficient amounts of propaganda that he soon was seen as reactionary, especially among the younger generation.

He also was no slouch at marketing himself, saying at one point, “I don’t use folklore, I am folklore,” and at another point, in reference to his tour of Europe, “I haven’t come to learn, I have come to show what I have made up to now.”

And this, then, is part of what he showed them….    

Not bad, hunh? Anna Moffo knows how to do it….

Now then, don’t imagine that Villa-Lobos is the only composer on the continent—there’s also Ástor Piazzolla, an Argentinian born in 1921 who spent most of his childhood in Greenwich Village and Little Italy in New York City. He was obsessed with his father’s tango records, and though he studied with a pianist who herself was a student of Rachmaninoff, he turned to playing tango when he returned to Argentina in 1935.

Like Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla gets around, eventually landing in Paris, where he studies with the woman who ranks as the all-time composition teacher of the 20^th century, Nadia Boulanger. He tries to impress her with his “mainstream” or “Western” compositions—Boulanger hems and haws. Then he plays her a tango, and she says, “hey, that’s it.”

OK—it’s like having the Delphic oracle give you directions for your life; he goes back to Buenos Aires and starts a group. And yes, he composes both tangoes and more mainstream works. And the tangoes merge elements of jazz, baroque music, and Western music—the moment I heard the piece below, I thought, ‘he’s had to have studied with Boulanger.’ Her influence is all over the place.

This piece, written in homage to his father after Piazzolla had learned of his death (Piazzolla was in Puerto Rico at the time), is classic….  

Of course, you really can’t talk about South American music without getting into Alberto Ginastera, also Argentinian but born of a Catalan father and an Italian mother. (Time out—the Italian influence is so strong that in Buenos Aires, Spanish is spoken with an Italian inflection. Oh—and what’s an Argentinian? An Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he’s an Englishman.)

At any rate, Ginastera studied at the conservatory, later studied with Copland for a couple of years, and finally ended up living and dying in Geneva, Switzerland. Notwithstanding, his music incorporates Argentine folk themes; much of his music, reports Wikipedia, “were inspired by the gauchesco tradition.” (Don’t know the term? Don’t worry, neither does the computer. The gaucho is the Argentine version of the cowboy….)

Ginastera got noticed by people other than classical music freaks when the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer took the fourth movement of his first piano concerto and adapted it. A member of the group ran down to Argentina to clear it with the master, who responded “diabólico”. It was one of those moments when knowing Spanish (or English) would have helped—Emerson left the room crushed, not knowing that the Master, as his wife would write, had felt “you have captured the essence of my music, no one has ever done that before.”

Right—you know what’s coming.... 

Sorry, I can’t, I just can’t leave you with that in your ears—Ginastera’s approval to the contrary not withstanding. So let’s cheat a bit, and give you a composition that, if not from Latin America, is at least Spanish and of the 20^th century. And if you’ve never heard Rodrigo’s Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez—get ready. It’ll change your life…..