Two Brothers, Both Out of Line

OK—of course it’s got a liberal slant; it comes from Robert Greenwald, the same guy who brought you “Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price,” which trust me, didn’t provoke cries of joy in some executive offices down there in Bentonville, Arkansas.

But it’s what we have on David and Charles Koch, the oil-baron billionaires who have contributed millions to various causes and groups that in turn have subverted our political process.

That was the nice way of saying it.

The real way?

The Koch brothers have bought the government, and are fucking the environment and us.

You could look at my state of Wisconsin, for example, and the enormous amount of money that the Koch brothers have spent. How much? Well, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, which the Koch brothers founded and (presumably) still fund, said that the group had contributed 10 million dollars “in 2011 and 2012 on TV ads, direct mail, staff and other expenses to support reforms made by Walker and the Legislature.”

Or look at the recall election in Wisconsin: Scott Walker raised 30 million to retain his seat; his opponent raised a bit under 4 million. Or so said Debbie Wasserman, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman, three days after Walker, a Republican, beat Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett.

But was it true? A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article says no—the Koch brothers gave no money to Walker directly. So they’re in the clear, right?

Who knows? Because Americans for Prosperity “as a tax-exempt ‘social welfare’ organization, AFP does not have to disclose its donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that tracks money in politics on the national level.”


The article goes on to say that Americans for Prosperity has received funds from other sources than the Koch brothers, but is that the point? Who cares what rich, libertarian, fat cat puts up the money? The effect has been the same everywhere.

And that is, you say?

Well, first you have to control the dialogue—so you create a playbook. And in Wisconsin, it was all about creating jobs. Excellent—and what was the obstacle to job creation? You guessed it—that stifling state government, with those pesky regulations on pollution, or worker safety, or collective bargaining, or health care or whatever. You just had to get enough people to say the words, “stifling government,” and those good Wisconsin dairy farmers got it into their heads—Scott Walker was going to go right down there to Madison and put that crazy legislature in shape.

Well, he certainly did. You know how that worked out—the first state in the union to allow unions for public workers became the first state in the union to ban them. But was that all? No, because what worked its way into Bill 11, in the year 2011? Well, we have this, on the bottom of page 23….

.                 1  16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling,

.                 2  and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the

.                 3  department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may

.                 4  contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without

.                 5  solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best

.                 6  interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or

.                 7  certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to

.                 8  purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is

.                 9  considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification

.                 10  of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).

 “With or without solicitation of bids?”

“No approval or certification of the public service commission?”

OK—let’s be fair; apparently the bill failed. And I have spent thirty minutes looking for the same language in the bill that did pass, Senate Bill 10. And what can I tell you? That, according to Wikipedia, the bill, which was the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, and which caused the massive demonstrations in the state capitol, ‘authorizes the Department of Administration to sell state heating plants. The proceeds from any sale, net of remaining debt service, would be deposited in the budget stabilization fund.’[4][8][9]

I should, I really should wade through the Wisconsin Repair Bill to find out—was that language above incorporated into the Repair Bill? But then I wonder—I’ve checked both the Wisconsin State Journal and the Green Bay Press Gazette—and got a nearly identical quote: “The bill authorizes the Department of Administration to sell state heating plants. The proceeds from any sale, net of remaining debt service, would be deposited in the budget stabilization fund.”

What accounts for the curiously similar language? Well, the Press Gazette comes out and says it: information provided from the office of Governor Scott Walker. Who presumably provided the same information to Wikipedia.

Well, guess what? Apparently the provision of selling the state heating and cooling plants didn’t make it through the legislature. And how do I know? Because, according to the Journal Sentinel, the provision is back!

When Republican Gov. Scott Walker set off a political firestorm two years ago by unveiling a bill to impose restrictions on public sector unions, one piece of his proposal didn't become law.

That proposal - to sell off state-owned power and heating plants - could get resurrected this month when the governor announces his proposed 2013-'15 state budget.

Wisconsin Energy Corp. Chairman Gale Klappa has been signaling to company observers for months that the proposal would return. Last week, state Sen. Robert Cowles (R-Allouez) announced during a public hearing, "It's coming back."

Well, I set out to tell you the news—the power of the Koch brothers is sufficiently strong to get PBS to not air a documentary called Citizen Koch. So that means you have to organize a group to show the documentary; that’s a trifle harder than putting your finger on the remote.

It’s now 2:29—I have spent a good four hours digging around, investigating the Kochs. And guess what?

I’ve barely started….

I invite any reader.

http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/highlights-of-gov-walker-s-budget-repair-bill/article_3d93e6aa-363a-11e0-8493-001cc4c002e0.html

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20110216/GPG0101/110216041/Read-summary-Gov-Scott-Walker-s-budget-repair-bill

A Genius on Top of the Heap

Why do I never hear anything but Johann Sebastian Bach?

At least, that’s the way I frequently feel when I’ve just heard Bach. And the funny thing is that I never feel that way about any other composer. Yes, I can’t imagine a world without the Beethoven string quartets, and I would miss sorely the Brahms’ symphonies. But if I had to take only one composer to the famous desert island, there’s no question who it would be.

Among musicians, this is hardly a radical statement. In fact, most musicians would say exactly the same, and I’ve never met a musician who didn’t like Bach, or was indifferent to him.

What’s surprising about Bach is how little anybody knows of him, and how, in general, unpleasant a man he must have been. As you can hear in the clip below of John Eliot Gardiner, a clinical psychologist brings in a list of symptoms of a personality disorder, and reads them off: deeply suspicious, feels that others are after him, feels surrounded by enemies, refuses to believe that he may be wrong. That’s Bach completely, says Eliot Gardiner, or words to that effect. And what is the disorder? Paranoid Personality Disorder.

Well, he didn’t have an easy life—he lost both of his parents when he was nine, and had to go off to live with an elder brother. As well, he did poorly in school, and may have been bullied; there was also a cruel schoolteacher. But he pulled himself together, got a scholarship as a chorister, and then set out to study.

Everybody in the family was a musician—in his part of Germany, the name “Bach” was virtually synonymous with “musician.” But in a letter written by his son, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, the names of Johan Sebastian Bach’s teachers are written and then drawn through. Did the son remember—his father wanted to appear as if he had had no teachers, as if he sprung fully formed on the world?

And nobody can say that he was a particularly happy or pleasant employee—he was complaining constantly about one thing or another: the quality of the musicians who would play his works, the living conditions, having to teach Latin to the school boys. In his first or second job, in fact, he simply got up and left, walked a couple hundred miles to go see the great Buxtehude, and stayed four months. Oh—and this was without permission.

He composed an insanely hard passage for the bassoon, and then abused the poor bassoonist, calling him the equivalent of a “prick.” So the bassoonist, with friends, jumped Bach, who drew out his rapier in self-defense. It was either this, or a dispute over wages that landed Bach in prison for a month.

Bach had twenty kids—only ten of whom made it to adulthood. And his first wife, to whom he was devoted, died before him. His second wife, Anna Magdalena, was both a musician and bore him 13 children.

So it doesn’t seem that Bach had much pleasure in his life. Yet however difficult an employee he may have been, there’s no question: he delivered the goods. And so frequently, Bach surprises by being “cheeky,” as Eliot Gardiner puts it. Check out the clip below….

But then, Bach can grab your heart and absolutely wring it of every last drop of blood. And nowhere he does he do it more effectively than in the aria Ebarme dich, mein Gott from the St. Matthew Passion. Here, Peter has betrayed Jesus, and the violin and alto trade long, agonizing lines. Here’s the German text with the English translation:
 

Erbarme dich, mein Gott,

Un meiner Zähren willen!

Schaue hier, Herz und Auge

Weint vor dir bitterlich.

Erbarme dich, mein Gott.

Have mercy, my God,

For the sake of my tears!

See here, before you

Heart and eyes weep bitterly.

Have mercy, my God.

Lastly, there’s often a glorious, triumphant quality to Bach—a jubilant quality that no other composer can match. As nowhere does Bach do it better than in one of his last compositions, the Gloria from the B Minor Mass. And the Et in Terra Pax that follows?

Sublime. 

Bach died at the age of 65, probably because of two botched operations to attempt to restore his failing sight. And the question remains—did he know how great he was? Was he aware of what he had accomplished in his life?

This man, surrounded as he thought by his enemies, would be compared to Shakespeare in literature and Newton in physics. And guess what?

It’s hard to believe that anyone will ever topple him from top of the heap.

Why?

It was long, said Susan—over an hour long. But it was worth it, she said; she also said that most of the people who needed to hear it would be turned off in the first ten minutes.

I only made it halfway through….

And no, the problem wasn’t the length; the problem was the speaker, Matthew Vines. He’s 22, good-looking, articulate, thoughtful and…

…heartbreaking.

Why? Well, he has gone on a two-year quest to reconcile his—OK, our—homosexuality with the Bible. So that meant taking two years off from school—which happens to be Harvard—to read the Bible and study what biblical scholars have said, and are saying, about the Bible.

Why do all this? Because he’s a native of Wichita, Kansas, and was raised in a good Christian home. Oh, and apparently nobody was talking about homosexuality—either at home or at church. And there didn’t seem to be many gay people about, from his description; it was quite 1950’s….

OK—that’s the first problem. I am 57, Vines in 22—when I was his age, the year was 1978. Stonewall took place in 1969, and all throughout the ‘70’s the gay movement was emerging and then growing. And you’re telling me there are no gay people in Kansas in 2013? I looked it up—Wichita has 380,000 people, and is the 49^th largest city in the US. And not one of those 380,000 people is gay?

It may be that this is something that we—who have come out to our families and our bosses and to the world in general—need to remember. There are a lot of people who have never met a gay person—though they’ve met many a closeted homosexual. And there are a lot of places where being gay is…well, almost not an option.

And Wichita may be one of those places; here’s what the Wikipedia article said on Vines:

After accepting defeat in his attempt to convince his family's local church leadership that they misunderstood what the Bible states about homosexuality,[4] Matthew and his parents decided to cease their membership. Matthew reportedly is Presbyterian.[5]

Right—so that wouldn’t be a problem for me; I would have given the church “leadership” a pronated middle finger and hopped back to Harvard. But for Vines—and for many, many other gay people raised in very religious households—that wasn’t and isn’t an option. Another thing for jaded, out gay people to remember.

So Vines spent two years reading and writing, and eventually delivered the hour-long talk below. And what’s the focus? Explaining the six references to homosexuality in the Bible, and then arguing that “the Bible never directly addresses and certainly does not condemn, loving, committed same-sex relationships."

There are moving moments in the talk; as you can see in this quote from The New York Times:

“Falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen to a gay person,” Mr. Vines says early in the video, “because you will necessarily be heartbroken, you will have to run away, and that will happen every single time that you come to care about someone else too much.”

Vines then tackles the six references to homosexuality in the Bible—and that’s when it was over for me. Because we start out with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then have this, from Genesis 19, about Lot and the two angels disguised as men:

But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

6 Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him 7 and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

Vines gets down to work, busy to explain why the passage is not a condemnation of homosexuality. And here I confess—I listened, understood, and accepted the validity of Vines’ argument. I also thought it was completely crazy. Why?

Because in the entire argument, Vines never takes on what seemed to me the most outrageous part of the tale: a father perfectly prepared to throw two of his daughters to the dogs disguised as men, rather than two male strangers. Oh—strangers who are “angels” and are not on record for saying, “what the fuh, dude? You’d do that to your daughters? No friggin’ way!” and turning him to stone. (Right—I just reread the thing, and it’s possible the angels, inside, didn’t hear Lot, outside. But still….)

Look—if we are attempting to derive a moral code from this story, and if this story is indicative of the rest of the damn Bible, we’re screwed. Because as someone put it recently, the God of the Old Testament is in a really terrible mood most of the time.

The New Testament is supposed to be better—but can’t we just say it? The Bible is a morass of conflicting texts and messages written decades after the death of Jesus (in the case of the New Testament). It can be and is cherry-picked to anyone’s liking.

Vines is 22, and has spent two years of his time on this project; he has set up an organization, The Reformation Project, to attempt to change mainstream Christian churches to become more open to gay people. Had he stayed in Harvard, he would probably be graduating in six months. Instead, he has a book coming out early next year, and has created the viral YouTube video below. He’s never had a boyfriend, and wants to save himself sexually for his future husband.

Early in the 2008 Democratic Party campaign, I remember hearing a debate of democratic candidates, all of whom were asked by a member of the audience: Do you believe that every word of the Bible is true? And will you say so publicly?” “

It was delicious; it was ridiculous. The politicians weaseled—nor was it good enough to say that the Bible was the most important, the most meaningful, had been the lifeline when I was sinking in sin and despair…. No, that man wanted to know: WILL YOU TELL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT EVERY WORD IN THE BIBLE IS TRUE!

They caved, of course. They had to. And so all these intelligent, bright guys with their legal degrees from Harvard and Yale looked the man right in the eye and avowed, yes—every word in the Bible was true.

My problem? When are we ever going to stop being nuts? I don’t want to go all Dawkins—there’s a lot of good stuff, like the beatitudes and the whole life of Jesus, in the Bible. But there’s a lot of bunkum, too.

And why do we have to pretend there’s not?

And why does a bright, earnest kid have to take two years out of his life in his twenties, to wrestle with the Bible, to take passages and turn, twist, explain? I looked at him as I would one of my children, and…

…my heart broke.

Paid Too Much (reposted)

I wrote this exactly one year ago today. Here it is, once again. Enjoy!
------

Samuel Barber, 1910 to 1981. Well, those are the official dates. But Barber poses a question. What happened to him from the fiasco of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1967 and his death in 1981?

“His last years were beset with depression and alcoholism,” says WikiPedia.

Right, the last fifteen years of his life—and what should have been the culmination of his creative life.

My impression was that he had created most of his work early, and then burned out. But in fact, it’s not true. Up until the early 60’s, Barber composes steadily, slowly, and richly.

Richly being the operative word in at least two senses. The guy didn’t seem to need money. Yeah, he taught for a couple of years at Curtis, where he had studied. But he hated it, so he quit!

Why doesn’t that sound familiar?

He was what used to be called comfortable—an amorphous term that might mean anything from loaded to able to slide by to the end without having to worry. Parents were from West Chester, and Gian Carlo Menotti, with Latin volubility, described it as a cesspool covered with a thin but unbreakable layer of gentility. Drinking, incest—the old story.

At age 9 or so, he writes a letter to his parents, saying “don’t tell me to go play football.” He’s already sure that he’s a composer.

Or was he? At Curtis, where his parents sent him as a high school student (guess they got that message…), he also excelled as a pianist AND a baritone. But composition won out.

He also was good with languages, which is why Curtis asked him to befriend Menotti, who knew Italian and French, but no English. So they spoke French together.

Well, I wonder about all of this because Eric, a Facebook friend, posted a clip of Leonard Slatkin conducting the famous Adagio for Strings. If you have a quarter of a century to spare, I recommend it; it’s about as slow as evolution.

Still, it was a thing to hear, this morning at four AM, when I arose with the violent urge to eat…yes, coffee ice cream. 

Later in the day, I began to worry myself about Barber. The Adagio is the most famous by a light year of his work. It’s the only piece most people will ever know. Yet it’s comparatively early. What would it be, to be known for this single piece, and have the rest of your work ignored?

Well, I was forgetting Vanessa, his first opera, which was a spectacular hit. Right—not on the order of Les Miz, but the operatic equivalent. The piano concerto was well received, the violin concerto as well.

And then came the fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra. The production was terrible; parts of the score were written almost hours before the performance; the orchestra and chorus was unprepared. Apparently, the performance, which was to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, was filled with hotshots (Imelda Marcos was there!) who couldn’t have cared less. It was broadcast on radio live, and you could hear stage hands shouting “go” or “move it.”.

Here’s Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, on the ordeal:

“Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).

Savvy readers of this blog will pick up a little fact more important—sorry, Leontyne!—than Price being trapped in a pyramid. Go back, and check that little fact thrown away in a relative clause.

Zeffirelli wrote the libretto.

What?!

Franco Zeffirelli?

Why did Barber permit it? His reputation was secure, and his finances as well. Why did he accept this commission when he knew that Vanessa had taken him five years to write, and he needed to produce Antony in two? What was he thinking of—the sharp, gifted man who was, by the way, acutely sensitive to text?

It almost seems a death wish, in fact, it all but literally was. He ended his decade-long relationship with Menotti, he drank heavily, he fell into depression. A friend who was in musical circles in the 70’s in New York told me that his parties were, well, both famous and infamous.

As I read about the Adagio, I came across a perceptive article entitled “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.” The author disputes the common theory that Barber’s homosexuality had anything to do with his deep melancholy. Menotti was welcomed by Barber’s parents, friends, associates. They lived together for many years. Why should it matter, then?

But I wonder. A highly sensitive man, who has fought and suffered and lived a quiet, seemly life—a life worthy of West Chester, Pennsylvania—hits the 60’s and what happens? His world, for which he has paid dearly, collapses. Women are burning bras, not taking Valium washed down with vodka. Blacks are demanding jobs other than porters on the railroad.

Gay men are holding hands on the street.

He had paid too much, gotten too little.

Wouldn’t you reach for the bottle?

"Strange, but the Adagio in the string quartet version becomes both more personal and almost redemptive at the end...."

Musactivism

Well, I found out about the site just as everybody else did—by watching a man named Matt confess that he had killed a man by driving drunk, and he was going to plead guilty and pay the price. And so I went to the website and checked it out. And there was Matthew Cordle, 22, starting right out by saying, “I killed a man.”

Then, his pixilated face appears, and he tells the story—he struggles with depression every day, and sometimes he drinks just to get out of his head. So on 22 June of this year, he was out drinking with friends, go shitfaced-drunk, and was driving on the wrong side of the highway, causing a direct collision. Vincent Canzani, 61, the driver of the other car, lost his life.

Half way through the video, Cordle introduces himself and shows his face unpixilated. And he admits that he consulted attorneys, who told him that they could manipulate the system enough to get him either a reduced sentence or off the hook completely. But Cordle says no, and then writes his promise on the little promise cards that the website provides, “I will take full responsibility for what I’ve done.”

So why is he doing this? First, in order not to disgrace the memory of the man he killed. And second, so that he can beg everyone—don’t drink and drive.

Well, the video got over two and a half million hits on YouTube, one of which was I, and then the news came out.

Cordle pleaded not guilty.

Because of a technicality. It turns out that in order to get a random judge, Cordle needed to plead not guilty initially. Later, he could change his plea—and he promised he would.

And in fact he did, on September 18. And here’s what CNN reports:

Cordle will be sentenced October 10. Ron O'Brien, the attorney who is prosecuting the case, told CNN that Cordle faces a maximum sentence of 8½ years in prison for his charges.

All right—that’s Cordle. Now—what’s the deal with the website, becauseIsaidIwould.com?

It was set up by Alex Sheen, as a tribute to his father, who died of cancer, and who had a particular talent—he kept his word. And so Alex gave up his day job, and started doing various projects. He decided to send fifty kids with cancer to Disneyland—instead, he was able to send one hundred kids. Then there was the decision to walk across his home state of Ohio. Why? As a tribute to the three victims of Ariel Castro—who had been held in captivity and sexually abused for ten years. And then there were the two guys he ran into, who were actually walking across the United States, to raise awareness of human trafficking. According to their Facebook page, the two—Shannon Sprowal and Jay Atlas—are today in Colorado, but expect to get into New Mexico tomorrow. Here’s the link to their page.

Alex hit on the idea of promise cards—here are some samples:

So here’s the deal—you make a promise, you write it down, and you give it to someone who will care for it. Then, after you’ve fulfilled your promise, you ask for your card back, as a reminder that you are a person of your word.

Alex, by the way, will send you ten promise cards free; alternatively, you can print your own from the site.

Well, I made a promise, and I feel bad about not keeping it. I said that I would play an hour of Bach suites and ask for donations to four wonderful charities, which the philosopher Peter Singer has identified as the most efficient and effective. And best of all, by contributing to these charities, you can make a tremendous difference. Here’s what Singer has to say:

However, it is also possible to make extremely effective donations towards the world's poorest people. Because they have so little money, every dollar you give can make a tremendous difference — especially if spent on the world's most efficient aid programs. Read on to see just how much you could achieve and how little it would really cost you. 

And here are the charities:

Against Malaria Foundation. Why? More than a million people die each year of malaria, 70% of them are kids under 5. A 3$ net can prevent the disease—and 100% of your money goes to the nets. Best of all, you can see where your nets are distributed. Here’s the website: http://www.againstmalaria.com

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. The initiative aims to control and then eliminate the parasitical disease schistosomiasis, which afflicts more than 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Untreated, schistosomiasis leads to kidney, liver, and spleen damage; 76 cents will provide a dose of the drug needed to treat and cure. Here’s the website: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto

Deworm The World. 600 million kids around the world need to be dewormed; less than fifty cents is all it takes to treat one kid. This organization has treated 40 million children in 27 countries. Best, treating kids leads to significantly improved school attendance—a nice added benefit. Here’s the website:   http://www.dewormtheworld.org

Project Healthy Children. The project aims to confront malnutrition by food fortification, essentially supplying the vitamins that you and I take for granted. But a child goes blind every minute—80% of them because of vitamin deficiency. Zinc deficiency kills 800,000 children a year; Vitamin A deficiency kills 2.5 million children under age 5 every year. Here’s the website:  http://projecthealthychildren.org  

And here’s the promise I made in that blog post of 30 June 2013.

I’ll play Bach suites once a week in the café where I am spending so profligately my money. I’ll put up a little sign announcing the charity of the week, and ask for donations.

Let’s call it musactivism….

Ritorna, Ritorna

It hit yesterday, not Tuesday. On Tuesday, I had been remarkably buoyant about the government shutdown; yesterday, I was completely in the dumps.

Nor has it been a particularly good week for anyone who cares about the arts, especially music. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra lost its conductor, who had taken the orchestra to Europe in his first season, and where they were received with raves. Carnegie Hall shut down, due to a strike by stagehands, one of whom makes more than $140,000. Lastly—and this one really hurts— New York City Opera closed down. No—not temporarily, for good.

I lived only briefly in New York City—perhaps two months—and I don’t recall ever going to City Opera. But I knew the story, here told in Slate magazine:

Many of my friends were culture vultures, and culture, high culture, nosebleed high, was being made here. … The Metropolitan Opera, across Lincoln Center's plaza, was stupid. It was stodgy. It was fat, old people with fat, old money. At the New York State Theater you saw hot guys in full leather gabbing about Bev's Violetta in La traviata, or Samuel Ramey's naked chest in Boito's Mefistofeles. You met your friends there at intermission, sometimes a dozen of them. There were no cellphones, so you talked to people. Opera was high art that sometimes dickered with the dirt, but it had to remain high. It was where kings and the common people mixed, under the eyes of Phoebus Apollo, god of light and music.

It was also where young singers got their break; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

During its nearly 70 year history, the NYCO has helped launch the careers of many great opera singers including Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Plácido Domingo, Maralin Niska, Carol Vaness, José Carreras, Shirley Verrett, Tatiana Troyanos, Jerry Hadley, Catherine Malfitano, Samuel Ramey, and Gianna Rolandi. Sills later served as the company's director from 1979–1989.[4] More recent acclaimed American singers who have called NYCO home include David Daniels, Mark Delavan, Mary Dunleavy, Lauren Flanigan, Elizabeth Futral, Bejun Mehta, Robert Brubaker and Carl Tanner.

It was also a company that took risks. Let the Met put on as many La Bohemes as they needed to make rich bored businessmen remember their first loves at Yale—City Opera caused talk and suspicion, championed new and American works, wasn’t afraid to get scrappy. In 1991, in the very worst of the plague years, how did Violetta die in La traviata? How else—of AIDS, of course.

Or consider the last opera that City Opera put on—typically, it was a new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage, a British composer about Anna Nicole Smith. Take a look—it’s about as far away from traditional opera as you can get….

It was always an opera house that was just getting by—but it was also an opera house for people who were just getting by. Which meant that a guy who was working in a record store, and living in a cockroach-infested studio apartment as he dreamed of making it on Broadway or writing the great American novel could go and watch stuff like this. (Warning, it starts off boring, but wow—does it heat up!)

OK—time to come clean: opera is an art form that, like ballet, inherently appeals to gay men. Is it the theatricality, or the artificiality, or the long and arcane history? Who knows, but if you hear two men arguing about who was better, Callas or Tebaldi—you can be sure. There’s probably a boa along with the jeans in their closet.

So what happened? That old devil—mismanagement. The old City Opera was in City Center. Then they moved to Lincoln Center, which was too expensive, and didn’t feel right. The Met—after all—was 60 feet away. And then the management decided they wouldn’t have a home, but use varying stages around the city.

It didn’t seem to work. As well, the opera had run deficits for years, as their new manager, George Steel, eventually realized. And then, they needed to raise 7 million bucks, and only got to one or two million, improbably through a Kickstarter campaign.

“Vienna spends more on its opera house than the US does on ALL of its arts funding,” went a line that was often repeated forty years ago when I was in high school. If it wasn’t literally true, it was metaphorically true. And when we do spend on the arts, we want to get something back, to make it pay. Mozart is good for the brain—all right, we’ll plunk down 18 bucks for a Mozart CD to play to baby.

But I think other cultures do it better, and smarter. I think of a story that—I believe—Frances Mayes wrote about. It was of an American soldier just after World War II had concluded. He thought he really should go to the opera, just to experience a taste of Italy before he returned home. He had, after all, spent the war seeing death, torture, carnage, deprivation, ruins, bombed-out buildings and shell-shocked, homeless civilians walking like zombies through the devastated cities. So he went to the opera…

…and had never seen anything so beautiful, or heard anything so magical. At the end of three hours of magic, he sat in his chair and wept.

And the Italians?

They quietly walked past him, each one of them stopping to place a hand gently on top of the young man’s head.

City Opera, ritorna, ritorna!

Cara sposa, amante cara,

Dove sei?

Deh! Ritorna a' pianti miei!

Del vostro Erebo sull'ara,

Colla face dello sdegno

Io vi sfido, o spiriti rei

Beloved spouse, dearest heart,

Where art thou?

Woe! Return to him who weeps!

O guilty spirits from thy Erebus beneath the furrows,

My face one of complete contempt,

I defy thee!

House of Turds

Well, the forts that guard the entrance to the harbor of the city of San Juan—those forts that have been open and operating for centuries—are now closed. Why? Because the national government is in a shutdown, and 800,000 people are stuck without a paycheck, all but essential services are cut, but guess what? Check out the cover of the Daily News:

Yes, the same congress that gave the middle finger to the 90% of the country who favor universal background checks for gun ownership has decided to hold the nation hostage. But let’s be real. What’s happening here?

Well, we can start with the fact that we’ve had gerrymandering of congressional districts. And what has that brought? The number of strongly Republican districts has increased, and the number of Democratic districts has decreased.

Then there are the various voting laws, the effect of which is to make it more difficult for young people, students, are minorities to vote.

But these are the symptoms—what really is going on?

“Is this about race?” asked Lady, the owner of the coffee shop I write in.

So I told her about José Serrano, who came out and said it frankly: there are people who have never accepted the fact that Obama is our president. And why is that? Pure racism. This is what Serrano told WKAQ 580, a radio station in Puerto Rico:

“‘Este grupo nunca ha aceptado que Barack Obama es un presidente legítimo, sí hay racismo, te lo dejo ahí. Hay un pequeño grupo que nunca pudo aceptar que él es un presidente legítimo y si les dolió que fuera elegido en el 2008, más les dolió la reelección’, subrayó el representante demócrata por Nueva York.”

“‘This group has never accepted Barack Obama as a legitimate president. There is racism involved there, I’ll tell you that. There’s a small group that has never accepted he’s a legitimate president, and, if they were upset by his election in 2008, his reelection upset them even more so,’ stated the Democrat for New York.”

There’s no ideology here. What is this? The terrified reaction of a bunch of rednecks who know that their world is vanishing and cannot cope with a world in which the straight white male is no longer supreme.

They know something else.

They know that they can get away with this. Why? Because the people back home will think them heroes, and the big money from special interest groups will keep flowing. In fact, they love the fact that they have shut down the government. Why? Because that’s exactly what they want—a minimal federal government that won’t interfere with them as they foul the environment, enrich the already too rich, and screw the poor.

The corporations and special interest groups have bought the statehouses.

And now they’ve shut down the federal government.

Not Your Average 11-Year Old....

I decided not to let it in. Yes, it’s totally stupid; yes, it’s destructive; yes, it’s unnecessary. But this pretty little head decided not to stress out about the government shutdown. And guess what? I also decided that if all the wise heads in Washington couldn’t avert a shutdown, then I might as well shut down too. So I went to the beach this morning, lolled in the water, and watched green palms float against an azure sky. Shutdown!

And yesterday? Well, I discovered the first opera that Mozart ever wrote—a 70-minute affair all in Latin on the story of Apollo and Hyacinth by Ovid. Mozart wrote it when he was eleven, but as the conductor, Ian Page, pointed out, you stop thinking about that. Why? Because, as you can hear in the clips below, the music is terrific. 

I came upon the opera because I had spent part of the afternoon with Philippe Jaroussky and Nuria Rial, two tremendous young singers who work remarkably well together. Jaroussky, at age 35, is in his prime as a counter tenor—and he’s thoroughly in charge of his voice, which is gorgeous. And he seems to be one of the golden boys for whom everything came easy: he started singing when he was 18, and by 20 he was a professional. And his career has soared. And just to prove how spectacularly unfair the gods can be, Philippe happens to look like this….

OK—full disclosure: all of this would be enough, ordinarily, to make me hate him. But I’m over it—I told you about that beach, didn’t I? And in many ways, not to have struggled and flopped—as I certainly did, and both—is to have missed out on some good lessons.

And yes, for anyone wondering—Jaroussky sings on my team….

And Nuria? Well, she’s Catalan, and is utterly expressive in renaissance and baroque music. And with that Jackian sense of fairness that increasingly is coming out, here she is:

At any rate, I spent yesterday afternoon busy with Rial / Jaroussky, listening to this really smashing concert. And why not? The world was spinning out of control, crisis was imminent, the wolves were howling at the door. Why not spend the afternoon with some extraordinary musicians playing some ravishing music?

In fact, I’m giving you, dear Reader, permission right now. Cancel your life for the next hour and a half, put your index finger on that arrow, and surrender to some of the most beautiful music I know. And no—don’t feel guilty! Call the boss and lie outrageously—invent an excuse. Consider all the time Victorian ladies spent having sick headaches—whole days prostate! You can take an hour and a half….

You know what? In the scope of things, not much matters except for art and music. In a hundred years, no one but a few scholars will know about the great shutdown of 2013—and very few will care. But people will still be listening to Mozart and Monteverdi, and reading, of course, Life, Death and Iguanas.

And you know what I like? These musicians just don’t force it—their playing is as free and effortless as it looks. It’s the best thing about baroque music; you don’t have to work that hard, you don’t have struggle to be heard over 100 musicians behind you, twenty or thirty of whom are blasting brass players, as you labor away at the Dvorak concerto.

Which is what I felt yesterday, as I toddled my way through a Bach suite. I remembered Joyce DiDonato working with a young singer, and telling him, “don’t worry about making a big sound, just think about creating the conditions to make a big sound….”

Right—as a very bad Buddhist, I got that. Which is why yesterday I was listening to the resonance of the instrument, and not trying to make any sound louder than that resonance. Why? Because as long as the instrument is resonating, the sound is free, and is just as loud as it needs to be. 

I played half an hour, and then put the instrument down. I’m halfway to where I was in my prime—in a couple of weeks I’ll be there. Let them buzz and do, as the poet said—I’m shutting down!