Spies Like Us: Skyfall and Argo

(reflections on two movies, SKYFALL directed by Sam Mendes, and ARGO, directed by Ben Affleck.)

Affleck in ARGO; Bardem, Craig and Dench in SKYFALL

How refreshing it is to see two Hollywood movies that focus on personal struggles and leave the rest of the planet intact!   I once counted three different versions of the apocalypse during previews, before the feature film handed me a world-wide conspiracy that would end life as we know it. But let us give thanks this Thanksgiving for two tension-packed spy movies that give us more character than CGI effects. 

SKYFALL focuses on just a handful of characters.  Daniel Craig as James Bond has a face worth the close attention.  Craggy and a little goofy, it's the face of a boy in middle age, registering amusement, determination, fleeting self-doubt, and hurt disillusionment, even in the absence of dialogue.  Bond's boyhood is emphasized throughout this movie.  His past figures importantly in the plot, and he shares the film's focus with the character he jocularly calls "Mum," Judi Dench as "M."  She is the object of a personal animus from the villain, played by Javier Bardem, who tries to seduce Bond away from her. 

Director Mendes gives us lots of action choreographed for story first, spectacle second.  We get lots of laughs, including the chuckles of recognition whenever there's reference to a Bond trademark -- girl, the line "Bond, James Bond," the car, the gadgets, and the martini, the cocky theme: they're all here.   But affection and sympathy are the main line through the story, the action being incidental -- where other movies have been the opposite, injecting sympathy at intervals to relieve the monotony of mayhem. 

ARGO tells a real spy-story, the de-classified account of how six Americans made it back home from Iran via Canada in 1980.   Comic - book style story boards remind us how the US and UK raised up the Shah in 1952 to reclaim oil fields that a secular, democratically-elected president had nationalized, how the Shah enforced his regime, and how the religious revolution led to bloody and violent recrimination.  Seeing the storming of the US embassy from the inside, we appreciate how it feels that forces beyond anyone's control are engulfing the mild-mannered personnel inside.   Director Affleck thus gives us a broad view of how Iranians have legitimate gripes against the US, but we also see American individuals doing their best -- low-level diplomats, high-level bureaucrats, and humane soldiers. One officer goes out alone, unarmed, to "reason" with the mob, a valiant effort that fails. 

After that tumultuous start, Affleck draws us into the true story of how a CIA agent named Menendez comes up with a plan to rescue the Americans.  Estranged from wife and young son, he has his brainstorm when he shares a long-distance moment of bonding with his son, watching a sci - fi movie together.  He concocts the scheme of rescuing the Americans by posing as Canadian producer of a sci-fi film to be called "Argo."  How he convinces the Brass that this is the "best bad idea they've got" and how he convinces dubious Hollywood professionals (played by John Goodman and Alan Arkin) to commit to pretending to make a movie that will never exist, make for high comedy.  Even then, we get one of the many touching moments in the movie -- when Arkin, as a director, dubious about the plot, glances at a TV clip of a blindfolded hostage, and his humanity overrides skepticism.

The rest of the movie is about relationships and trust.  Besides Affleck and his collaborators, we see the six Americans, holed up in the Canadian ambassador's residence, barely holding up under the pressure of hiding, watched with suspicion by their Iranian housekeeper.  Menendez as movie producer "Harkins" has to win them over, and then teach them to act.   Tension builds, even though we know how the story turns out, because new obstacles arise as the moment of escape approaches.  The pace quickens as we jump from locations around Tehran to offices in DC and a movie set in Hollywood, watching members of the team fight for the success of the mission.

The whole story is so unlikely that laughs come easily, even in the midst of real-life tension.  Iranian guards, earnest and frightening, are also fascinated by the sillly sci-fi story.  There's an extended sequence juxtaposing two media events across the globe:  a trumped-up reading of "Argo" by actors in cheesy Star Wars ripoff costumes alternating a reading of a revolutionary's indictment of the US. 

A student of mine recently disagreed with me when I said "the incidents of a story are nothing; it's about character." He said, "Wrong, incidents are everything."  In these movies, the incidents certainly had me kicking the railing in front of me at the local multi-plex, but characters and their choices are what remain with me.

Little Women, Big Voices

(reflection on a performance of LITTLE WOMEN, a musical.  Book by Allan Knee, Music by Jason Howland, Lyrics by Mindi Dickstein. Production at The Walker School, Marietta, GA, directed by Mrs. Katie Arjona.  I saw the show at its opening, November 1, 2012.  Pictured:  Alex Catlin as "Jo" and Eleni Demestihas as "Aunt March," a screen cap from YouTube.)

More than the story, more than the songs, it's the sound of LITTLE WOMEN that has stayed with me since I saw it opening night.

As "Jo," the ambitious and loving eldest sister, senior Alex Catlin warmed the room with a pure, golden tone.  Whether she was singing all the parts in an imagined "operatic tragedy," mock-Donizetti in a duet with overbearing "Aunt March" (played by Eleni Demestihas, whose Broadway contralto voice brings to mind Kaye Ballard), or Jo's personal declaration of independence and ambition, "Astounding," Miss Catlin's voice was a supple instrument that expressed her character's thoughts.   (I heard her in a preview performance when a technical glitch prevented the orchestra from playing the first few bars -- and Alex was poised and pitch-perfect singing the part, as if it had been written a cappella)

The director, Mrs. Katie Arjona, chose this show because, in her words, "This year, we have the girls who have the pipes for it."   How right she was!   Each of the other leading women had distinctive sounds that reflected their characters.

Georgie Wilkins as frail "Beth" sang with a silvery sweet sound, affecting in "Some Things Are Meant To Be" about leaving life young, and delightful in a pastiche parlor duet, "Off to Massachusetts." Seated at a piano with elderly Mr. Laurence (Alex LaDue),  they began their relationship with that song -- we never see them together again -- but just their harmonizing generates a sense of mutual affection.   That's the magic of musical theatre!

As the mother, Rachel Novak responded to a letter from the absent father in the song "Here Alone" with a mature sound and quiet passion, more feeling than the absent patriarch deserves.  Younger sisters Meg and Amy (Shannon Keegan and Liane Houde), possessing strong voices with wide ranges, blended with the other women in a quartet early in the show that cast a glow over the whole evening.  The audience knew, even if the story turned out to be a bit thin, the evening would be beautiful.

Credit goes to vocal director Samantha Walker, who coached these young voices since September, teaching them technique to support the sound and to smooth out the highs and lows.   Individually, the men blended well with the powerful-voiced women in their characters' lives.  Senior McLain McKinney played the role of young Mr. Laurence (a.k.a. "Laurie"), a mostly comical juvenile role.  McKinney projected exuberance, whether he was dancing (and boxing!) to attract "Jo's" attention, or standing still to receive her scorn.   Junior Matt Zibanejadrad played "Professor Baer" with a strong voice and a slight German accent, generating sympathy for this stodgy character in his solo "How Am I," a self-disgusted response to Jo's question in a letter, "How are you?"  The youngest singer in the bunch, freshman David Simpson, sang a vocally demanding duet with Shannon Keegan, "More Than I Am," and the two of them sang this rangy ballad with more self-assurance than we would expect, and made us believe that their relationship was going to grow and last.

When the whole ensemble sang together, as in "The Weekly Volcano Press," counter-melodies intertwining and voices blending in rich harmony, they generated a wonderful sound. 

In the school's production, all of this was made clear with staging by director Mrs. Katie Arjona on a vast two-tiered set by designer Mr.  Bill Schreiner.  The set efficiently suggested a number of different Victorian homes merely by re-positioning a staircase, a bookcase, and some furniture.  

Heard but unseen, the orchestra supported the cast's luscious voices and brought different colors -- solo strings and sunny brass -- to the mix.  Mr. Todd Motter conducted the orchestra and also cued the singers via closed-circuit video monitors concealed in the "footlights" of the stage.

Who Puts the "Oh!" in Otello?

(reflections on the opera OTELLO, libretto by Arrigo Boito, music by Giussepi Verdi;  Met Opera HD broadcast Oct. 27, 2012: starring Renée Fleming, Johan Botha, Falk Struckmann.)


John Botha and Renee Fleming in Act One; Falk Struckmann in Jago's "Credo," Act Two.

Which is harder to believe: that Othello should, in just one afternoon, grow murderously jealous of angelic Desdemona; or that he ever loved her at all?  Yet we do believe both propositions, against our better judgement, and we're moved to pity and terror by Shakespeare's Othello. When that happens during a performance of the opera Otello, is it because, or in spite of, the amendments of the librettist and composer?

Librettist Arrigo Boito telescopes Shakespeare's first couple of acts into just a few dozen lines of sung verse.  A composer himself, he minimizes words to maximize opportunities for his musical collaborator. I don't have the script in front of me, but the entire script for Act One goes something like this, minus repetitions and details:

CHORUS:  O, it's a terrible storm at sea. (Great storm music) We pray that our commander Otello will survive. (storm music subsides, and martial music begins)
OTELLO:  We defeated the Turks.  Now celebrate.  My captain Cassio is in charge. Come, Desdemona, let's go to bed! (she goes with him silently, smiling and beautiful)
JAGO:   (to Roderigo) If you want Desdemona, help me to disgrace young Cassio, whom Otello preferred for captain over me! I'll get him drunk.  You pick a fight with him.
CHORUS:  Let's drink. (rousing drinking song) 
CASSIO:  My head is spinning.
JAGO:  Have more!  (His music snakes down a chromatic scale in a strange braying way. It's wonderful and creepy.)
RODERIGO:  [Insult]!  (Roderigo's fight with CASSIO becomes a general riot)
OTELLO:   (storms on with Desdemona, in bed clothes) Stop!  Cassio, you're demoted. 
(Everyone leaves, and Cassio exits, ashamed, watched by Desdemona and Jago.  Desdemona remains for long duet with Otello)  Remember how we met, Desdemona?
DESDEMONA: I loved you for your adventures as slave and soldier. 
BOTH:  I love you.  I always will. 

Boito sets everything up in just those words, while Verdi can sweep us along with storm music, dance music, fight music, and this great love duet. It ended, if I heard it right, with the lovers chanting in something close to monotone, while a bass droned underneath, and the upper notes of the orchestra pulled farther upward, straining the chords to an uneasy effect as the lovers sing of their eternal devotion.

In the scenes that follow, Boito preserves swaths of Shakespeare's dialogue, but he hands Verdi and the singers a couple showstoppers that only opera could devise.  There's Jago's "Credo," when he snarls that he believes in a god of destruction, and after death?  "Nothing!"  The music (and singer Falk Struckmann) dismiss all notion of afterlife or meaning with a wave of music - a contemptuous gesture. 

The temptation of Otello is chilling and hilarious, too, as Jago disturbs the trusting Otello's faith with nothing more than hints, mostly echoes of Otello:  "What do you think?" asks the general.  Jago echoes, "Think, my Lord?"  Once, Otello even mimics Jago back at him, tune and all -- getting one of the few laughs in the show. 

There's a quartet, as Jago fights with Emilia on one side of the stage while Otello wonders if, being a black man and a foreigner, he doesn't understand these subtle Venetians.  Here, by skipping all of Shakespeare's Act One, scenes 1 and 2, Boito sacrifices one of Iago's most effective insinuating lines:  "She did betray her father, marrying you" [and may betray thee].  Johan Botho, in the title role, effectively communicated Otello's bewilderment and self-doubt here, allowing us some sympathy with him later.  Yes, he's stupidly convinced by a flimsy piece of "evidence" -- that damn handkerchief supposedly given to her supposed lover Cassio -- but he also feels as if his great love and trust have been betrayed by a cabal of "super-subtle Venetians" (as Shakespeare put it).

In Act Three, Boito includes the horrible moment when Otello seems to ask Desdemona's forgiveness: "Forgive me," he says, and the music softens as Desdemona approaches him, "I mistook you for that whore of Venice who deceived Otello." Following Shakespeare's "Willow Song," Desdemona sings "Ave Maria," beginning as a monotone chant over turbulent music, deepening into an aching, hopeless prayer.  Renee Fleming is a beautiful woman who projects intelligence and goodness, but it's Desdemona's own intelligence and innocent trusting courage that comes through, no matter who plays her. 

These characters, this situation, these emotions, all shot through with Jago's vicious creativity, constitute a loom where actors, directors, and composer Verdi can spin their magic.   It's an ugly story, hard to swallow, hard to watch, but somehow worth the discomfort. 

O Praise Hymn: King's College Sings "Best Loved Hymns"

(reflections on a recording by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge of "Best Loved Hymns" from The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church, selected and conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Notes by Cleobury and Richard Abram.  Issued by EMI recordings, 2001. Also, Vaughan Williams on Music, by David Manning. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, displayed on Google Books. (p. 32). Reflections on the Hymnbook itself.)

If director Stephen Cleobury had asked for my favorite hymns from the Episcopal Church's 1982 collection, my list would've matched the program for his CD of "Best Loved Hymns."  Unfamiliar to me when the hymnbook was new, some of these songs affect me now as old friends.  Hearing Cleobury's choir sing "The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended," its tune gently rocking up and down like a lullabye, I recall how singing it by candlelight at Sunday evensong brought serenity to this young teacher, who always came to the service anxious about Monday morning.  But there are other features of these songs to love, and perhaps I can help some hymno-skeptics to listen to them the way I do. 

First, however, we must acknowledge a cultural prejudice.  There's a presumption that fast music is "happy" and slow music must be "sad."  Our culture has forgotten how a deliberate tempo can express a wide range of emotions that aren't in the vocabularies of my seventh graders today.  Serenity, contentment, yearning, wistfulness, resolve, and reverence require explanation.  Unless the reader understands how music can be solemn without being sad, then the discussion has to stop here.

If you're still with me, you may already understand that hymns are not "slow" in a strict sense: they just lack the rhythm track that fills between beats in pop music.  For example, both Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and this recording's stately performance of Herbert Howells's "All My Hope on God is Founded" move at 120 beats per minute; Jackson merely squeezes more syllables into each measure.  Hymns are often much "faster" than pop music where chord changes are concerned. We  are used to pop songs that repeat bass lines every four measures under three chords, or even two chords. We should appreciate the frequent changes that Vaughan Williams makes in every measure of "Come Down O Love Divine," relaxing the tension at the end of each verse, as on the phrase, "Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling."

If we think of melody as the lines of a drawing, then chord changes fill in color.  Herbert Howells (d. 1983) shifts harmonies frequently under his tune for "All My Hope on God is Founded," words by Seymour Bridges (d. 1930). He named his tune Michael, for his young son who died around the time of this song's composition in 1930.   (Tunes exist independently and are traditionally re-used for other words.  For example, the tune for "God Save the Queen" is used for "God Bless our Native Land" and "My Country 'tis of Thee").  Howells shifts to unexpected chords out of the home key while we sing that "change and chance" undermine our expectations,  and even "tower and temple fall to dust."  Howells' harmony comes back to the home key under the reassurances of the verses' final phrases: "Christ doth call / One and all; / Ye who follow shall not fall."  

Here, we should also appreciate the craftsmanship in the words of these hymns.  Notice, in the Howells, how the concluding clauses click in place with the added third rhyme: ...call - all - shall not fall.  This last line of all gives us a bonus with wordplay on "fall" and "follow."  An earlier verse makes a lovely theological point, too: "From His store / Evermore / New-born worlds rise and adore."  An alert choir director can find songs to relate to the readings for any Sunday -- even when the text is about Jesus as priest "like Melchizedek!"   The words often develop complex ideas in three or four verses, densely packed with meaning.

John Ireland (d. 1962) also uses harmony to paint such a rich text for "My Song is Love Unknown." The verses by Samuel Crossman (published 1664) reach their climaxes in lines about Christ's suffering, emphasized by inner rhyme:

...O, who am I

that for my sake,

my Lord should take

frail flesh and die? ...

..."Crucify!"

is all their breath,

and for his death

they thirst and cry....

Here, as in Michael, the harmony unsettles us.  The hymn, in both words and music, expresses reverence and reassurance, tempered by resignation and regret. Happiness? Sadness? We're way beyond those categories.

We can also appreciate artistry in the melodies themselves.  The tune we know as "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" by Joachim Neander (d. 1680) is danceable in a vigorous 3/4 time.  Neander works variety into the melody, while still repeating enough to make the song "catchy."  The first line starts low and leaps up a fifth to "the almighty," slopes down in small steps and then up again in a "V" pattern. The second line repeats the pattern, but the third line inverts it, starting high and dropping down, then stepping up and down ( ^ ).   The step-by-step motion continues in the last line, sloping upward ( / ) before settling on the home note, right when words reassure us that God "sustaineth" or "doth befriend" us. 

There's a different way to balance repetition and variety in the lovely folk tune Slane, to which we sing the words "Be Thou My Vision."  There's a catchy little slide that we do going down on the word "my" (sung "my-y vision") and up on "o" (sung "o-o Lord").  That's the song's hook, giving us something familiar while the melody changes with each phrase. At "Thou my best thought," we get two of those little hooks in a row signalling the climax at our highest note ("Thou my-y be-est thought") before we settle down to where we started.  So the melody, prase by phrase, tends upward, never repeating before it relaxes at the end.  But we recognize the hook wherever it happens, and each phrase picks up where the one before leaves off, so the song has a unified feeling.  Reaching upward and upward, then falling like a sigh: it's a musical metaphor for yearning.

Some Episcopalians complain that the hymns "aren't familiar," but Vaughan Williams, writing in the preface to a hymn book of 1909, faced the same complaints.  He pointed out then that the "familiar" tunes hadn't been familiar for long, all being less than fifty years old. The program for this CD spans 400 years, so that we are hearing music that worshippers have sung all that time, with words that go back much further.  Here's something else to love, then: When we sing, we share "one body, one blood," and one voice, in time as well as in space.

Listening to the CD reveals something else to love.  Even at our thinnest, on bad days, our choir reminds me how these songs sound in halls such as King's College, where the sounds fly to every dark corner and glowing window of a vast space, and pauses bring the flying notes back down to human level. Reverb captures the feeling on CD, and I can't help but think both of God's transcendance and his immanence when I hear both the grandeur and the silences in these recordings.

Chet and Bernie Alone: A Fistful of Collars

(Reflection on A FISTFUL OF COLLARS, by Spencer Quinn. Atria Books, 2012.)

Bernie Little is a private eye, veteran, ex-cop, and dog owner; Chet is his partner, his good-natured and highly distractable chronicler, and his German shepherd.  They are the central figures in A Fistful of Collars, latest in the crime series by Spencer Quinn -- pseudonym for an author successful in another genre (but that's all I know) -- and, while the twists and turns of plot are interesting, it's still the company of the narrator that makes this book such a pleasure.

The plot here involves a macho Hollywood star named Thad Perry, filming a Western outside of Hollywood.  Bernie is hired by the Mayor to keep an eye on the notoriously irresponsible star.  Characters from earlier novels make memorable appearances, here:  Suzy the reporter, Leda the ex, and Charley the young son -- who "dies"  on camera for the corny Western in a scene that was, for me, most memorable in the novel.  When Bernie has to dogsit for an ailing neighbor, we finally get to meet Chet's best dog pal Iggy, who has always been seen through a pane of glass up to now.    

In this novel, though, the supporting cast seems more peripheral.  Breaking a pattern set in earlier installments, Quinn keeps focused on the central plot, and he keeps the two guys together.  It feels good.

Quinn manages to give us humor and pathos at the same time. Here's Chet's commentary about Bernie's reaction when Suzy moves away:

I moved closer to Bernie.  He gave me a nice pat. His gaze was still on the empty intersection down the street. I let that slip from my mind and just concentrated on the pat.  You can feel things in the hand of humans, things that are happening deep inside them. I felt what was happening inside Bernie.

The only unpleasant thing about the novel is that Quinn early on foreshadows a confrontation between Chet and a scary, much larger, canine.  I had this feeling of dread as I started each new chapter!  I'll just say, I finished the novel feeling great.  That's the great benefit from seeing the world through Chet's eyes.   

Aurora Theatre's Intense Betrayal

Opening scene of "Betrayal" at the Aurora Theatre, from the theatre's Facebook page.

The Aurora Theatre north of Atlanta has just opened a run of Harold Pinter's 1977 play Betrayal.   The characters -- married couple Emma and Robert, and Robert's best friend Jerry, her lover -- can't always tell what the other characters are concealing, but we in the audience can. Pinter puts us in the know by presenting scenes from 1977 backwards to 1968, so that we can "fact check" characters' recollections.  The dramatic irony and the characters' second-guessing each other make for a funny and intense experience, as layers of emotion underlie every second.  Betrayal is so funny, but so intense, that my friend Susan and I were relieved that it lasted just 75 minutes.  

Pinter once distinguished two kinds of silence, the speechless kind, but also the kind that covers feelings by "a torrent of words."   For much more on Pinter's technique, see my blogpost "A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter".  Here, I'll review particular's of Aurora Theatre's production.

We're treated to virtuoso acting, understated to give each nuance a highlight.  For example, in the opening scene, Tess Malis Kincaid ("Emma") and her real-life husband Mark Kincaid (as the ex-lover "Jerry") each has to repeat the line "How are you?" several times, during different "rounds" of dialogue -- the scene being structured like some martial arts match.  The first time, they ask, "So how are you?" to open the conversation.  It's old friends, meeting each other on uncertain terms, falling back on polite formulas.  Another time, it's a show of deeper concern.   Later, the question "How are you?" seems to be asking something more like, "How do you feel about us?"   It's a testing of the state of the old relationship.  

Mostly sitting at a cafe table, the actress worked the tiny space given her.  Her hands on the wine glass sometimes clutched, sometimes caressed, and sometimes explored the surface.   Her head bowed when Jerry turned to refill the glasses.  That's at the end of "round one," and she seemed to be struggling to find a way to communicate, or to discern, what she wanted from Jerry. But she faced him again, smiling.

For his part, Mark Kincaid's "Jerry" seemed to be keeping a safe distance from the fight, actually pushing his chair back from the table, smiling a lot.  It's only when Emma revealed that her husband had learned all about their old affair that Mark Kincaid became animated, a clue to where "Jerry's" strongest feelings and deepest vulnerability lie.

Later, with Jerry watching, Robert unleashes one of those "torrents of words" on Emma, and his words are weapons.   Director Freddie Ashley has staged this so that Anthony Rodriguez ("Robert" and also Aurora's Producing Artistic Director) commands stage center.  Jerry stands stage right, at Robert's back; drink in hand and smiling.  Emma sits on the far left end of the sofa, legs crossed, also drink in hand, smiling.  Interrupting a little dialogue between the men about who buys lunch after the next squash game, Emma suggests that she might come to watch and buy lunch for both.  Robert starts small -- "you have your game, then your shower, then your pint" -- and becomes increasingly animated as he develops his topic: "You've been at battle, you've been at it."   By the time he says that a man "doesn't want a woman in the locker room" or even "within a mile" of the squash game, Jerry and Emma are both receiving his barely-concealed hostility behind tumblers and their frozen smiles.  

We know what Robert is thinking:  his wife's lover has gall to come visiting them to flirt with her.  Emma is in agony.   At the start of this scene, when Robert called up to her to come on down, "Jerry's here," her response, off-stage, was, "Who?"  (after a pause, natch).   Meanwhile, Jerry is simply clueless.  Does he rise to the implied challenge to defend Emma's honor?   He fails to do so, and is out the door moments later.  For the audience, it's chilling and hilarious at the same time.  There's a coda:  In silence, Emma collapses, crying.  Robert slowly comes over to her, lays his hand on her shoulder -- comfort?  possession?  It's somehow both -- and they embrace.

The rest of the show is filled with so many moments similarly rich with nuance, that discussing them makes for great conversation hours and even days after seeing the show.  

We loved the set, by Isabel and Morley Curley-Clay.  At first glance, it's a high-ceilinged interior.  But on second look we see mismatched doors, window frames superimposed on mismatched windows, empty picture frames superimposed on others -- the effect being to show us several similar interior spaces superimposed on each other:  restaurants, a hotel room, and two families' living rooms.  Wall panels opened to admit sliding beds, sofas, and a wet bar.

The production as a whole, like Pinter's script, is elegant, understated, and efficient.

The Holy Longing: Spirituality Needs Community

(Reflections on THE HOLY LONGING: The Search for Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser. New York: Doubleday, 1999.)

Ten years after I first read this book, I can attest to its staying power. Early on, Rolheiser tells of a frightened little girl, dissatisfied with reassurance that"God is with you." The girl needs "someone with skin on!" Rolheiser impressed upon me that I and every member of the church serve as Jesus, his spirit "with skin." We are the body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:27), he writes, and this is "no metaphor" (249).

Likewise, as part of the body, I have no choice but to be involved, whatever I may think of certain aspects of the institutional church or fellow parishioners.  Ecclesia (translated "church") he says, means being "called out," or "roped into service" the way a bystander becomes involved when there's an accident. He cites the notorious Genovese murder which neighbors witnessed, each assuming that someone else would do something to stop the perpetrator (122).

Rolheiser begins and ends his book with discussions of eros, a Greek word that has come to be associated in our culture with "genitality."  In Rolheiser's world, "sexuality" includes the pride and pleasure of a grandfather in seeing his grandchild -- what we might call a broad view of the term.  In his final chapters, Rolheiser cites the root of the word "sex" ("secare," to separate) to show that sexual desire is just one aspect of the "holy longing" to be part of God and part of others' lives. Augustine, that recovering libertine, had the same insight:  "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in You" (5).

Rolheiser emphasizes another Greek word, sarx, used by Jesus at the institution of eucharist -- "unless you eat of my body, you shall not have life within you."  The word suggests all the unpleasantness that we associate with bodies, unlike the word "soma" which conjures a Platonic perfect body in the abstract.  For Rolheiser, this means that Jesus demands that we partake of the bad with the good, or fail to be Christ's followers .

He aims to give us a "spirituality," but he eschews the popular notion that "spirituality" is some private, personal communing with the divine.  It's ministering to others, preparing others for death (as the woman anoints Jesus for death p. 134), and working alongside others for justice that consitutes true spirituality.  

His bottom line is that "spirituality" is meaningless apart from "organized religion."

Of related interest:  My reflections on Rolheiser's Sacred Fire.

Primer on America's Middle Class

I heard a primer on the term "middle class" on PRI's Market Place on Friday (9/20/2012). Reporter Krissy Clark interviewed Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States.

America's original "middle class" corresponded to the "yeoman farmers" of English tradition.  With some property, some education, and a stake in their communities, they were the citizens who would vote, stand for elections, serve in juries, and make our Constitution work.  The United States cultivated this class by intentional policies starting with public education in the Northwest Ordinance (pre-Consitution), Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, and the Homestead Act -- long-considered but only enacted during the Civil War, in the absence of Senators who foresaw that a giveaway of our vast western land would dilute the power of the slaveowning aristocracy of the South.

According to Lind, the shift from farm to factory early in the 20th century brought new policies meant to support the new middle class consisting of blue collar workers and small-scale entrepeneurs.  These included Labor reforms, Social Security, government involvement in the home mortgage service, and the GI bill. 

But America no longer makes things, and corporations do the bulk of our farming.  Writes Clark,

We’ve got a void where the bulk of the middle class used to be and we haven't quite figured out how to fill it.  Both visions -- of education and entrepreneurialism -- can be inspiring, says Lind. The problem, he argues, is “the math simply does not work.”

And he means the math on both sides. On the one hand, only about 10 percent of Americans are self-employed. On the other hand,  70 percent don’t have college degrees. So, the bulk of Americans won't be owning small businesses or becoming white collar professionals with B.A.s anytime soon.  (from the story at marketplace.org)

For the foreseeable future, the bulk of Americans will work in restaurants, retail, and hospitals. Pay in the service economy isn't enough to achieve the security and comfort central to our idea of "middle class."

Will we have that core of people with a stake in stability, an interest in government, an awareness of civic responsibility?  Will the vast majority of people feel they have no stake in the status quo, and no hope of climbing up to the plateau where the middle class used to be?  Hamilton, Washington, and their crowd feared that possibility in 1787; FDR feared in 1933 that America might go communist or fascist. 

Hearing Clark's story, I'm reminded that propping up the middle class is as traditionally American and conservative as any policy can be.  Republicans needn't get so prickly about "class warfare" when talk turns to income distribution, 1%, 47%, "Nickled and Dimed," etc. 

NPR's real bias

The radio program "On the Media" aired this week highlights from a series of programs examining the charge that NPR is biased towards liberal positions.  The highlights of the highlights for me were these tidbits:

• studies that compared NPR news programming to other sources found that NPR more frequently sited right-leaning sources (i.e. those self-identified as conservative and sited most by Republicans in Congress) than liberal ones at least 55% to 44%, both when Republicans dominated Wasington in 2003 and when Democrats did in 1993.  In the same study, the Wall Street Journal sited liberal sources much more frequently.
• an extended set of interviews with an evangelical conservative listener to explain his perception of bias led to his keeping a journal of bias.  In the end, he admitted that the reporting was uniformly fair, high quality, and interesting.  He was willing to allow that his own sensitivity was causing him to hear a "tone" of liberal bias in the voices and questions of interviewers.  He sited Michelle Norris's question, "Can the nation afford that right now?" about a proposal to suspend corporate taxes.  Commentator Ira Glass suggested that she would have asked the same question to a proposal to increase spending, and he theorized that the same question from a FOX news anchor would have been perceived differently.
• polling of media consumers revealed a 2-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans listening to NPR, compared to 4-to-1 for New York Times, and other higher ratios.  The outstanding result in that study was in the response to questions about why consumers are attracted to certain media outlets:  news accuracy?  in-depth stories?  commentary?  entertainment?  variety?  Only NPR was consulted for "all the above."  Also unique was the finding that 10% of each age category listened to NPR.
• regarding the percentage of air time devoted to gay marriage, abortion, and other perceived liberal causes, coverage was two to three times more frequent on conservative programs (presumably because dramatisation of wedge issues attracts audience.)  While other media covered wedge issues of American politics, NPR was covering international stories and policy debates.
• Coverage of the Obama administration was more neutral on NPR than other outlets, and much less frequent than on conservative outlets.

My own sense is that NPR is biased in two ways:

First, Reporters, commentators and interviewers search diligently for some common ground where opponents can meet with civility and goodwill.   This summer, for example, I was delighted to hear Romney's lead economic advisor say straight out that the candidates differ by degree, only:  a little more taxation one way, a little less spending the other.  Obama is not a socialist, he said, and Romney would not abandon the needy.   The voices I hear on NPR are unfailingly civil, if not downright convivial. 

There is another bias in the way that stories play up any angle that gives us a narrative of a small David facing a giant Goliath, whether it's a community of poor people against a giant corporation, or a small company against government regulation:  I've heard both.  Goliath always gets equal consideration, however. In another way, NPR favors the Davids of the world by devoting equal air time to interviewing up-and-coming popular artists, elucidating "classics," and bringing obscure artists and thinkers to light.

While I'm on the subject, I've come to rely on the program "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" for laugh therapy when the news has added stress to the week.  Listening on a long bike-ride through urban neighborhoods of Atlanta yesterday, I laughed out loud when Peter Seigel emphasized the amateurish quality of the repugnant video that provided pretext for anti-American violence last week.  "Reviews all over the world were uniformly negative," he said.  "Saudi Arabia gave it two thumbs off." 

To the Seventh Grader Who Knows Everything

You can figure math problems. You know where babies, rocks, diseases and planets come from.  You've read every kind of literature.  You can write paragraphs and read musical notes.  You know about ancient Egypt and Colonial America. Goodness knows, you can work your way around electronic devices.  Now you wonder why you have to face another decade covering all the same basic material.

I wonder what you would say to Ronald, a student I taught around 1985 in Jackson, Mississippi.   Kids were talking about their travels to Paris, Colorado, and Disney World.  Ronald announced that he had never been outside of Jackson's city limits.  That wasn't far:  you can drive from one end of Jackson to the other on I-20 in about five minutes.

His classmates were incredulous, then pitying.  He didn't mind.  "I've seen pictures of all those places. I know the facts about them.  I can see them on TV."  But what about the experience of going there, they asked? "Riding in a car is no big deal. I can get foreign food at the Mall." As for the fun things, like rides at Disney World, he said, "I've been on roller coasters at the State Fair.  I get the idea."

What would you say to him?  Doesn't he have a point?  You could say that a picture of the Eiffel Tower doesn't give you the feel for what it's like to round a corner and see it loom before you, or to hear what's behind and beside you there.  You could point out that visiting where the language and customs are different gives you a new perspective on yourself. But whatever they said to Ronald, he remained unconvinced.  "You have some souvenirs," he'd say, "but the experience you talk about is all in your head, now, isn't it?  You might as well have gotten it from books."  (I may need to explain: The internet did not yet exist.)

Ronald is to you what you are to your teachers.  You think it's enough to know the facts about history and science; you think that sounding out words is "reading," and you think that arithmetic is math.  But your teachers have "been there," and they share experiences of the mind that you cannot conceive.  Their world is layered with meanings that come from memories of history, science, and art.  To us, math isn't just useful; it's beautiful.  To us, Lincoln and Juliet aren't just their character sketches; we know them and talk about them the way you talk about your best friends. 

Your teachers offer you experience in the world of the mind.   They tell you that it's worth working to get there.  You say, "I don't need it."

Like Ronald, you just don't know what you're missing.

Kiss of the Spider Woman: The Musical We'd Expect from Kander and Ebb

Brent Carver and Chita Rivera, original cast, 1992
(photo from www.chitarivera.com)

A cast of energetic actors with fine voices fully inhabited their roles in this 1990s musical.  At the intimate King Plow Theatre, they performed on a versatile multi-level representation of a penitentiary.   The story is direct and relentless:  Valentin, a leader in an underground movement to topple the (unnamed) country's despotic regime is thrown into a small cell with a pederast Molina.  One is a man's man; the other is flamboyantly effeminate, so of course, we wonder if they will become friends, or more.  The plot ramps up a notch when the sinister warden orders Molina to extract information from his new roommate. Molina's frequent escapes into fantasies of screen idol Aurora give the audience exuberant musical numbers to enjoy between scenes of suffering, degradation, and violence.  In her role as "The Spider Woman," death personified, Aurora seduces Molina from the first song, promising "pain will cease" and "I can bring you peace."  Everything at this final preview performance was exactly right.

So why was the applause for each number merely polite, and why did my mind wander so often?   What more could we want from the show?  The material, admirably well-made, let down the actors and the audience.  How?  I kept wondering.

My friend Susan may have identified the problem right away.  She came to the performance recalling the movie starring William Hurt as Molina. (1985) .  At intermission, she asked, "Why does this story need music?"  I suspect that Kander and Ebb kind of skirted that question because they saw such a tempting opportunity to use musical numbers in the way they did in their breakthrough show CABARET, to mirror grim reality with ironically cheerful numbers.   Besides this, the story and setting gave the songwriters -- pigeon-holed as the guys who wrote snappy ironic pastiche for Cabaret and Chicago --a great reason to write full-throated ballads and anthems.   These are the outstanding numbers of the show.   In "Dear One," Molina's mother and Valentin's beloved Marta sing a tender double duet, their voices overlapping in canon like waves of constant longing. All the prisoners join in Valentin's fierce anthem of hope for the Marxist future:

Someday we'll be free
I promise you we'll be free
If not tomorrow
Then the day after that...
Or the day after that.

The late Fred Ebb's choice to build his lyric on that plodding phrase "the day after that" demonstrates his artistic integrity.   How effective would it be if rough-hewn Valentin and his uneducated cohort of "the people" sang with Ebb's trademark snap and polish?  Even so, there's a strong undercurrent of despair in the song that belies the explicitly hopeful lyrics, as the day of arrival recedes further away with every repetition of "the day after that, or the day after that...."  It's a wonderful marriage of form and content.

My own restlessness during the show may have something to do with the fact that, leafing through the lyrics printed with the original cast recording, back to front, I ran across several variations of the same sentiment in different numbers:  somehow... someday... sooner or later... there's going to be good times... so I wait to [get] over the [prison] wall...someday you'll believe the lie..."Someday you'll hear a cry."   Whenever the chorus of men geared up to dance behind "Aurora," I thought, "Well, here's another number to express what we just heard expressed, but with skin, kicks, and big high notes."

Every scene and song felt like exactly what we've come to expect from the creators Kander and Ebb, Terrence McNally and Harold Prince.  Insofar as that means efficiency, integrity, ingenuity, and an arc of story that brings characters to confront the lies they've believed (such as Valentin's prejudices against Molina), that's a great thing.  But we come to art hoping for more than we expect. 

(Reflection on KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, book by Terrence McNally, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, based on the novel by Manuel Puig.  Originally driected by Harold Prince.  Produced in Atlanta this month by Actors Express.)

Partners Across Party Lines: The Presidents Club

(reflections on The President's Club, by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy.  Published by Simon and Schuster, 2012.)

(Notice who set himself apart from the others!)

The Presidents Club is an informal fraternity with unwritten protocols that have been honored for over sixty years by Republicans and Democrats both.   There's even a clubhouse, though it's only a suite of "shabby" rooms near the White House reserved for ex-Presidents' use. Focusing entirely on the relationships of ex-chief executives to President-du-jour, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy reassure us in these rancourous partisan times that it's been this bad before, and that good sense and common courtesy often transcend party.

Beside the burden of life-and-death decisions, they all have in common the experience observed by a "senior advisor to three presidents."  He writes,

When you get in, you discover nothing is what you expect, or believed, or have been told, or have campaigned on.... It's much more complicated. Your first reaction is, 'I've been set up.'  Second is: 'I have to think differently.'  Third is: 'Maybe they had it right.' And it isn't long before they ask, who am I gonna talk to about this?"  (8)

Similarly, Henry Kissinger heard a warning from his aide Daniel Ellsburg, who had worked for Johnson. A new President and his advisors will be exhilarated by revelations.  This turns quickly into feeling foolish for all the things said by the ignorant candidate, and then contempt for all the mavens who criticize without knowing what the President knows (272). 

Among the surprises in the book is the emergence of Herbert Hoover as a model of unselfish service and bankable competence. Demonized by Roosevelt -- who comes across as charismatic, erratic, and ruthless in this book -- Republican Hoover was rehabilitated by the Democrat Truman's sending him to Europe to administer relief after World War II.  The two men became friends, and Truman called upon him again to head a commission to re-organize the vast array of redundant Federal agencies that had sprouted in World War I and grown during the years of New Deal and World War.  Hoover's plan won near-unanimous bi-partisan approval in Congress, and his reforms continued to earn praise and thanks on into the 1960s.

Another surprise is the portrayal of Eisenhower, superficially sunny and personally cold, petty, and vindictive. Championed unabashedly by Truman, Eisenhower turned on Truman in the campaign for Republican nomination, starting a feud that would last until Trumans and the Eisenhowers shared coffee after Kennedy's burial (159).  Over those years, Truman attempted many gestures of reconciliation and support, all received coldly or even returned with insult.Truman's correspondence with him at this time is terse, anger seething under the two men's civility. "I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us," writes Truman, "From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be! / Sincerely, HST" (81). Ike denounced that note to others, but did not reply.

"No man is less loyal to his friends" than Eisenhower, Kennedy observed.  Eisenhower shafted his loyal and subservient Vice President Richard Nixon at the Republican national convention in 1959, saying this of the eventual nominee: "I am not dissatisfied with the individual that looks like he will get [the nomination]" (107). 

Partisanship was so ugly in the early 1960s that Eisenhower could believe that his Democratic successor had engineered the Cuban Missile crisis to influence the next month's midterm elections (David Eisenhower, p. 147).  The insouciant younger President referred to Ike as "that old a------" (105), but summoned him for consultations and reassuring photographs of the two men together after JFK's Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Ike chided Kennedy for the loose organization that enabled unspoken understandings to be so badly misunderstood, and Kennedy learned his lesson.  He was much more careful during deliberations about the missiles in Cuba.

Ike also opposed Senator McCarthy, not so courageously as he should have done.  Truman was infuriated by Ike's failure to defend former Secretary of State George B. Marshall from McCarthy's "communist" label.  Campaigning in Wisconsin, Ike prepared a denunciation of McCarthy and "disciples of hate," and the text was made available to the press, but then Ike omitted the paragraph out of deference to McCarthy's popularity in his home state (85).  There's a comical photo of McCarthy grabbing Eisenhower's hand for a shake, while the President, looking away, tries to dissociate himself from the lout (after p 182). 

About the Presidents of my own lifetime, there were fewer surprises.  LBJ's abuse of power gave him intelligence that Nixon secretly encouraged South Vietnam's president to wreck LBJ's peace agreement in 1968 -- helping Nixon to win the election and prolonging the war six years.  LBJ couldn't reveal what he knew without accepting blame for domestic spying, and Nixon could have been accused of outright treason.  I knew all that, but not the extent of Nixon's fixation on the physical file containing that information.  He told his men to do anything -- burglary, whatever it took -- to get that file.  Thus, Watergate.

I was also amused to learn that LBJ had taken Nixon on a tour of the White House, pointing out to the incredulous newcomer how tape recorders were scattered throughout the place, even under the guests' bed in the Lincoln room.  Nixon was horrified, and had all these discarded -- until his mistrust of media led him to install a new system, to ensure accurate quotations and proof for what he would write in his memoirs.

Ford was kind to Nixon, and his decision to pardon his disgraced predecessor is now seen as a wise one -- something I agree with, but I'm surprised to hear that it's now the consensus. I love Ford's comment, "If politics isn't compatible with compassion, there's something wrong with politics" (310).

I witnessed Nixon's efforts to restore his own reputation, and had a sense of how this led to his overtures to all his successors, accompanied often by back-stabbing comments in the press.  Evidently, Clinton called on Nixon for advice many times, having the ex-President enter the White House after dark, from the back.

I knew about Ford's and Reagan's mutual disdain. 

The fact that Clinton, W., and Obama all feel fondness for George H. W. Bush is news to me.  I love the anecdote about how Bush I's shmoozing with Clinton during a visit led to W's message, "Tell 41 and 42 that 43 is hungry".

The one I haven't mentioned is Carter, and it is a surprise to me how his much-publicized missions to North Korea and Iraq reduced his successors to apoplexy.  He comes across as the one whom no one likes. It's "treason" said Bush's men, and he's a "treasonous p---k" says a Clinton aide (440).  He negotiated a nuclear treaty live on CNN news without consultations.  His efforts in Haiti worked out well, though, when he suddenly cut loose from diplomacy and screamed at the military dictator, "Resign or you and your children will die (446)!"

Overall, I found confirmation of my sense that Presidents haven't much leeway for their decisions.   The human interactions are a pleasure to read about -- these presidents being for us, at least since the days of FDR's fireside chats, almost a part of the family.

Fixing the "Fixed" Mindset

(Reflection on MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. New York:  Ballantine Books, 2006.)

Early in the book The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, the author recalls a neighbor who was "good at" mechanical repairs.  Peck expressed admiration for that talent and told him, "I can't fix anything."  The neighbor said, "That's because you never take the time to understand."   Peck was stung, and later remembered those words when a woman couldn't start her car.   Peck crawled under the steering column and took time to examine the starting aparatus until he recognized that an important wire was disconnected.  He connected the wire, and the car started.

The story illustrates what author Carol S. Dweck would call moving to a "growth mindset"  from a "fixed" one.  Peck had thought that ability or disability was "fixed."  That's why Peck makes "growth" the centerpoint of his psychology.  He defines "love" as "seeking to encourage growth in oneself or another."  Peck's book -- and that particular anecdote especially -- had such an impact on me during my first year of teaching that I've internalized a great deal of it.  I think of those car wires nearly every week of my life when some problem arises.

So I'm on familiar ground when Carol Dweck divides the world in categories of those who believe that everyone has the capacity to grow, and those who believe that talents are "fixed" at birth.   The genesis of her book was an encounter with little children who laughed at failure and persevered.

The "fixed mindset" is something I battle in my most troublesome middle-school students.   Dweck shows how such students blame their teachers for any poor performance on their part (76), avoid challenges that threaten their self-images as "smart" or "good at sports" (176),  and derive satisfaction from seeing the failures of others (234).

Here, Dweck is preaching, not just to the choir, but to the preachers.  Still, she has us imagine some "dilemmas" that got me thinking.  Suppose Elizabeth, a nine-year-old gymnast, fails to win any ribbons at the meet.  "What would you do if you were Elizabeth's parents?" she asks.

1.  Tell Elizabeth you thought she was the best.
2.  Tell her she was robbed of a ribbon that was rightfully hers.
3.  Reassure her that gymnastics is not that important.
4.  Tell her she has the ability and will surely win next time.
5.  Tell her she didn't deserve to win.

The first four answers are familiar to me from parents' responses -- sometimes directed at me, the mean drama teacher who didn't "give" so-and-so the desired part -- but I hesitated to choose number five.  Dweck gives a more diplomatic way of saying it, that the other kids worked hard for what they got, and that she can do that, too, if this is a goal she really cares about.

She gives great examples.  John McEnroe, raised by a fixed-mindset father, admits that he never enjoyed tennis, as he blamed others for failures (189).   Music teacher Dorothy Delay breaks a teenaged former prodigy of habits that earned early praise but hindered further development (42, 190).   Author Betty Edwards gets great results in just a week by helping fearful artists to take time to notice shape and shadow instead of rushing to draw what they think they're supposed to draw (68).  Broadway composer Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers, spent much of his life avoiding situations where his musical talent might not measure up to the "genius" level (73).  Of course, there are teachers who get great results -- following great effort -- from "problem" classes.

Wondering how to break kids of their "fixed" mindsets,  I was struck by Dweck's common-sense observation to teens, that "nobody laughs at babies and says how dumb they are because they can't talk."  She explains how babies' brains "grow" with exercise, stimulation, and challenges.   She tells of the seventh grader who started crying during her presentation, saying, "You mean, I don't have to be dumb?"

I do have a bad habit of exclaiming, "You're a genius!" when someone makes a breakthrough, and that's a no-no in Dweck's book.  The child becomes fearful of failing to live up to the moniker.  Rather, I should say to young writers, "Your brainstorming paid off!  You found the solution to that problem!  You've pulled together your resources to make something exciting!"

While my colleagues all try to work from the "growth" mindset when they deal with our students, many have fixed mindsets regarding themselves and  other disciplines.  They say, "I can't draw, I'm not musical, I can't get into Shakespeare, I can't write, I can't do math."   That kind of thinking may be an obstacle to a goal that we all share, to create cross-curricular, cross-divisional collaborations.

I wonder, do major religions reflect this wisdom?   Does God treat His creatures as capable of growth, or does he condemn and reward them based on their innate qualities?  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses chooses the oldest, or youngest, or smallest, or sneakiest to become His instruments of salvation.  The whole concept of "salvation" implies a belief that people can grow beyond their seeming weaknesses and failures.  In the Christian Scriptures, St. Paul develops the idea that God works through "weakness."  Interpreters have long ignored that aspect of Scripture to emphasize that certain ones are "chosen" or "pre-ordained."  Others focus not on growth but on forgiveness, as if growth isn't the point.

Buddhism and Hinduism both teach physical self-disciplines by which one grows through stages of life (or even stages of new lives) to reach a state of non-growth -- completeness or "oneness" with the Universe.

Dweck's book is not exactly a revelation, but thinking about these issues is certainly a good thing for a teacher to do, one week before school starts.

Treasuring Playwright Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard ca. age 60; Now 80, "more adventurous than ever"

An interview with playwright Athol Fugard, aired today on public radio's "Tell Me More,"  reminded me: this guy is my favorite playwright, bar none!   How could I have forgotten?

The easy answer is, as the world's most effective witness to the personal effects of South Africa's white supremacist apartheid laws on blacks and whites alike, Fugard receded in our consciousness when Nelson Mandela went from prison to the presidency.  I don't remember the details of what I read or saw back in the 80s -- Boesman and Lena, Statements..., My Children! My Africa!, A Lesson from Aloes -- and I can't recall when I've had an opportunity to see a play of his since the early 90s.

But the value of his best plays depends no more on events at the time of their composition than does Lincoln's rhetoric or King Lear.

In fact, it was as if I had the privilege of acting a new Shakespeare play when I first read through Fugard's two-character play Blood Knot.   It was at Duke back in 1981, and my fellow drama major Brad had asked me to learn the part of the white-skinned brother.  He said little as I read that part aloud, side-by-side with the charismatic black actor Erik who was to play the dark-skinned brother.    Never leaving the little hut they share, passing only the time it takes to perform the piece, talking only to each other, they take the audience to different places and times.   Fugard's characters role-play to make memories come alive.   The brothers recreate their boyhood fantasy of an adventure in a car early the play; the play reaches a violent climax when the white-skinned brother fantasizes of "passing" for true white, lording his power over a black beggar -- his brother.    So much art in the composition somehow felt like real life, intensified by compression.  That's poetry!

I read other scripts and his notebooks, too, to learn how he did it.  His ideal, he wrote, is to achieve a unity of meaning and action. As any good realistic playwright would do, he embeds memories in dialogue early in the play.  By the end, the characters have enacted some new, more powerful version of past events.  Memory and action reinforce each other and resonate with subtext.

I do recall two of Fugard's other plays in more detail.   First, there was the autobiographical Master Harold and the Boys, which starred Matthew Broderick on Broadway with the two original South African stars, and won Tonies all around.  He wrote it to expiate deep-seated guilt and shame, Fugard writes in a preface to the published script.  The "boys" are the grown men who worked for his mother.  The older man was like a father to him, Fugard's own father being an alcoholic, absent and ineffective much of the time.  But the white boy one day took offense and pulled racial rank on the older man, who left in anger.   (The next part is painful to recall, even for me.)  Fugard took after him on his bicycle, and, when the man turned his face towards him, a face expressing relief and forgiveness and love, the boy spat and rode on.  In the play, the incident is re-cast in a way that makes it even more painful to watch.

After a performance of The Road to Mecca by the wonderful Alabama Shakespeare Festival company, I thought that was the best of all his plays, and maybe the best play I'd ever seen.  Unfortunately, the memory has faded.  It concerned, not race, but age.  An elderly woman, living alone, showing signs of dementia, is pressured by well-meaning friends and uncharitable neighbors to leave her home and to cease and desist in filling her yard with idiosyncratic pieces of metal sculpture that she creates -- figures of her imagined "road to Mecca."  We never have to see her artwork to imagine it.   There is an incident that takes the choice out of her hands, involving an accidental fire. I've forgotten the details.  But I remember how she lit dozens of candles on wall sconces (more of her handiwork) that burned as the theatre's lights came down, and how Fugard's words made us understand that we were seeing the house as an image for her body, and the light as an image of her soul.   It worked, and it took our breath away.

Note to self:  Don't forget Fugard, and look for chances to see his work.  I hear that there's a cycle of his plays on display this month in New York at the Signature Theatre. 

Steve Reich's Drumming Live with Sonic Generator

Sonic Generator's setup at "The Goat Farm"

Atlanta musicians collectively known as Sonic Generator performed Steve Reich's "Drumming" last Friday night. Spokesman / drummer Tom Sherwood explained that this piece "blew open" his idea of what percussion can do when he was a student drummer years ago.  The musicians performed the piece free, for the audience's pleasure, and for their own.


Forty years after "Drumming" premiered, it still sounds fresh. 
But what you hear is not all you get when you see Reich's music live.  It comes close to being a piece of theatre.
 
First, there was the piquant setting (see picture). "The Goat Farm" is a hollowed-out, boarded-up old factory amid derelict buildings west of Georgia Tech.  I didn't see goats, but a pen warning "Bad dog!" borders the patchy grass parking lot.  For our comfort, a fan blew at the open barn-sized door.  Thankfully, the show started at 9:30, when the temperature had cooled a bit to a mere 85 degrees.  Seats filled quickly, so blankets were spread around the performing area for latecomers to sit.

There's no story or musical program, but we have a direct musical plan.  At first, it's audaciously simple to the point that a casual listener would call idiotic:  One drummer starts a beat on a snare.  Another joins him, then others.   Very gradually, with incredible precision and patience, the ensemble gradually shifts out of synch, then starts filling in spaces. Eventually (but not for a long time!) Reich brings in variety, as the ensemble moves to marimbas, then xylophones.  In some places, the beats are augmented by voice, flute, or whistling. For the grand finale, Reich integrates all the sounds. 

We didn't know the performers by name, but we got to know them during the music as if they were acting characters.  Sherwood seemed intense, almost grave. The most charismatic performer was the slightly built young man in a tee-shirt who began the piece.  He seemed sometimes to be in a trance as he gradually elaborated the beat.  His whole body swayed as he kept up the rapid-fire drumming.   But, as others joined him at the line of drums, he sometimes looked up from the drums to meet their eyes with a look of amusement.   Other characters joined in. A woman in a dark vest seemed to be self-assured and efficient; while a young man with hipster glasses would approach each musical entrance diffidently.   One vocalist seemed serenely involved in the music, while the other seemed unsure.  Other guys seemed to be buddies, shooting each other smiles as if there were some inside jokes going on.

I initially feared that a drumming marathon late on a hot Friday night might make me drowsy, but the stamina required of us and of the musicians was part of the experience.  We appreciated the musicians' concentration, and we felt tense anticipation as pairs of musicians would move into place, their mallets poised and ready to strike.  We wondered, "Will they ever all play at all the instruments at once?" and we felt satisfaction as the company moved towards that happy ending.

The audience jumped to its feet at the end, and there were smiles and exclamations all around.  Steve Reich's music has been marketed since the 1970s as avant-garde, austere, serious Art with a capital "A."  But, live, it's something close to comedy. 

Sonic Generator announces another performance:  Fritz Lang's classic movie METROPOLIS with a new musical score for sixteen musicians and electronic sounds, written and conducted by Martin Matalon.  It will be a free performance,  September 27, 2012, 8:30 pm, at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta.

Murals by Hale Woodruff: The Heart of Technique

On "teacher's day" at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, my friend Susan and I got a free pass to see murals created in 1938 by Hale Woodruff of Atlanta for Talladega College of Alabama, built for -- and by -- "freedmen" in 1867.   Thanks to the High's staff, we saw techniques that Woodruff learned from his teachers before he put them to use in works that expressed his own big heart.

Pride of place and publicity went to the first panel of one triptych, a life-size depiction of mutiny on the Amistad, ca. 1830.   Striking for the drama it depicts, the panel is also interesting for elements that we can trace back to Woodruff's student works exhibited in the ante-chamber to the murals. 

The human figures are composed in a swirl of action, reminiscent of a forest landscape that Woodruff painted years earlier, in which trees arch above and ground bows below to encircle the scene. Even the brush strokes swirl in a vortex.  In the Amistad scene, the effect is more complex, as the subgroup of men struggling left of center seems to be an eddy spinning off from the circular composition.  The black man facing front is modeled on a life-based portrait of Cinque, leader of the rebellion.  His face stands out in part because it breaks the swirling motion, and in part because of the intensity of his expression.

The black men's faces and their skin glow like burnished wood or copper.  That same warm glow is something that Woodruff used in the first painting of the exhibit, his experiment with landscaping a la Cezanne, in which clouds above and solid objects below all glow with the sheen of taffeta.

Burnished wood also comes to mind because the black men's faces resemble certain African masks, though without the full stylization seen in Woodruff's early Cubist experiment, a depiction of black men playing cards.  One gambler has the pronounced forehead and brooding face of an African mask, all the features concentrated in a small angle above the chin.

As in that cubist homage, different perspectives jostle up against each other.   The ocean waves and even the bow of the ship might be a 2D backdrop, and most of the actors seem to be lined up downstage.  Woodruff's Cubist experiment was jarring and unpleasant; here, the effect appears natural in the Amistad scene, and it invigorates the drama.

One black man stretches, dead, across the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. The image is reminiscent of some stark black-and-white prints exhibited in the ante-room.  They depict lynching, black prisoners at work, and shacks.  Considering the great size of his murals in the next room, it's instructive to see how Woodruff squeezes so much onto hand-sized pages. 

The other panels depict the trial, in which the Amistad rebels were found to be free men, unjustly forced into slavery; and the scene of departure, some of the men for Africa, and some for a new life in the western territory that would ultimately bring about the founding of Talladega College.

Another triptych shows the story of Talladega's founding.  These murals in the same style are less dramatic but more big-hearted.   Again, there's a backdrop, this one showing a sweeping view of cleared land and a horse-carriage racing away towards Ohio.  The most prominent figures are black men emerging from slave territory to the point where they can see Ohio and freedom.   One stands tall, his face expressing such gratitude and hope that our hearts go out to him; at his feet, another rests on one knee, eyes downcast, perhaps in prayer, or weariness, or in relief.   (Woodruff could not have anticipated that it's the same tilt of head and position of hands that we see nowadays wherever cellphone users are intent on texting.)  

Two other panels show freedmen enrolling at Talladega, and the construction of the library.  Especially in that last panel, Woodruff captures a great deal of action in one plane along with a spirit of hope and goodwill.

The High Museum pairs these glowing, feel-good murals with an exhibition of photographs taken around the American South during the past few years.  These, too, provoke smiles -- sometimes at irony, mostly at incongruities, and sometimes at appealing personalities that we can sense at a glance.  One that combines both personality and incongruity is a wooded landscape, early morning mist hovering above the long grass.  In the middle distance, a somewhat rumpled young man (just out of bed? or up all night?) looks away from us into the woods.  In the morning quiet, he carries a banjo.

Those Crazy Episcopalians

Bishop Michael Curry preached on "crazy Christians" July 7.
Photo from another occasion.

(reflections on responses to the national Episcopal Church's convention last week, with extensive reference to a post by Diana Butler Bass at "the Blog" at huffingtonpost.com.)

Via internet, I heard a sermon on "crazy Christians" by Bishop Curry of North Carolina.  He spoke last week at the national convention of the Episcopal Church, where a large majority of delegates in both houses (lay and ordained) approved the blessing of same-sex relationships (though, pointedly, not "marriage").  While Bishop Curry said that we need more Christians who are "crazy" in standing up to accepted opinion (he mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jesus Christ), bloggers and pundits mocked the Episcopal church for sliding at last off its long slippery slope into the cold waters of crazy liberalism. 

Against the outrage and snickers, Diana Butler Bass suggests that the Episcopal Church is on the path to greater strength, while the conservative churches atrophy.   She repeats the commonly-held idea that liberal churches have declined while so-called conservative ones have bloomed during the past fifty years.   But, she writes, in the past decade, all denominations in the USA have been in decline.   Now, she says, Episcopalians may have an advantage: 

Liberal Christians experienced this decline sooner than their conservative kin, thus giving them a longer, more sustained opportunity to explore what faith might mean to twenty-first century people. Introspective liberal churchgoers returned to the core of the Christian vision: Jesus' command to "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself." As a result, a sort of neo-liberal Christianity has quietly taken root across the old Protestant denominations--a form of faith that cares for one's neighbor, the common good, and fosters equality, but is, at the same time, a transformative personal faith that is warm, experiential, generous, and thoughtful. This new expression of Christianity maintains the historic liberal passion for serving others but embraces Jesus' injunction that a vibrant love for God is the basis for a meaningful life. These Christians link spirituality with social justice as a path of peace and biblical faith.

Pastor Laurene Bowers wrote a book about bringing "post-modern" young adults into our churches a few years ago.  About her idea of "church," I wrote...

Church [according to Bowers] should be more than a school where the pastor teaches, more than a country club where the pastor is a sort of activity director, and more than a service organization such as the Kiwanis club. She writes:  "We embrace a relational theology through which being a disciple of Jesus means that we have signed up for service to be an instrument of God’s blessing through each other: We believe that God’s intervention can only happen through a human agent."  (from my blog post, Growth in Mainline Churches: Thinking Outside the Big Box)

This all makes perfect sense to me, but I know what friends of mine think, though they are too polite to say it:  The Episcopal Church is crazy, self-destructive, not even Christian anymore.  When we elected a woman to be our presiding bishop, a lot of that same sentiment was expressed, as by the exasperated blogger who wrote, "Are you kidding???" 

For my part, I'm too polite to say too directly what I think is crazy: to think that Christ, who served and befriended those whom his society despised, who read between the lines of written laws, and whose God was not limited to ancient texts, would ever recognize a church that defined itself in terms of what it stands against.

I am heartened to recognize my own church home, St. James' Marietta, in Bass's description of renewal within the church:

Unexpectedly, liberal Christianity is--in some congregations at least--undergoing renewal. ... Some local congregations are growing, having seriously re-engaged practices of theological reflection, hospitality, prayer, worship, doing justice, and Christian formation. A recent study from Hartford Institute for Religion Research discovered that liberal congregations actually display higher levels of spiritual vitality than do conservative ones, noting that these findings were "counter-intuitive" to the usual narrative of American church life.

1959 and Our Culture of the Moment

Jazz musicians really live "in the moment," responding to the immediate environment of sounds to invent new music on the spot.  As an approach to composition, both musical and literary, jazz holds together Fred Kaplan's book on 1959.  The chapters make a daisy chain of call and response.  For example, a chapter about Swiss photographer Robert Frank's off-kilter portrait of The Americans segues into a chapter about "off-Hollywood" film-making, linked by Frank's own foray into the medium.   A chapter on racism's outrages that made household names of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X in 1959, begins with a New York cop's beating Miles Davis, hero of the preceding chapter about how the freedom of jazz made it our best ambassador during the Cold War.  A chapter on "sick" comics is followed by the story of Herman Kahn, who did his own "stand-up" routine in 1959 to promote ways that the USA could survive nuclear holocaust and "win." 

"Living in the moment," like a jazz riff, keeps sounding in other chapters about novels (On the Road), poetry (Howl), art (solemn abstract expressionists inspire fun Rauschenberg, and then Kaprow's faux-spontaneous "happenings"), "sick" comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl,  and even about the A- Bomb and Cold War politics. 

Now, living in the moment has its appeal.  Religious writer Blaise Pascal reflected that his 17th century contemporaries failed to live at all because they clung to the way things used to be or they anticipated some future change.  Psalm 90 reads, "Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom," stating a theme that appears over and over again in scripture, that you can't count on tomorrow, so live each moment to the full.

Then, why should we spend any of our moments reading a book about history, or a novel, or a blog post?  Why write this stuff?  Shouldn't we all be out there doing stuff?   That's what the heroes of 1959 did.  Kerouac went on the road to write On the Road and only reluctantly took time to edit the thing.  Pollack and his contemporaries were "almost heroic" in their spontaneous "attack" of a canvas (Kaplan 166).  Lionel Trilling spoke out against this kind of ill-formed and careless spontaneity at the time, but his journals, published posthumously, reveal that he harbored envy of Hemingway, an earlier "in-the-moment"  artist, writing that Hemingway's life "which is anarchic and 'childish' is a better life than anyone I know could live" (35).

Following up on that striking confession, I found on the web a review by Allan Massie of a  book about Trilling by Adam Kirsch, containing this spot-on comment by Trilling:  the "contemporary American writer [senses] that he has been like the final investor in a Ponzi scheme, having bought into the venerable enterprise of literature only to discover that it is on the verge of default."  Trilling wrote that in 1952, and I tried to express the same idea about the futility of being an English major -- much less effectively -- in this blog a few years ago.  So, if the time spent composing, reading, and reflecting on literature is all wasted today, that's nothing new.

Massie goes on:

In [Trilling's] later years he became aware that “the case against mind is now being litigated in our culture”. The distrust of intellectualism promoted a loss of faith in literature, which is, “as he understood, fundamentally a loss of faith in a certain ideal of selfhood”. Instead, there emerged what Susan Sontag in 1996 called “the triumphant values of consumer capitalism”, in which “cultural consumption is used”, Kirsch writes, “as a basis – or perhaps, a substitute? – for identity”. There was an ever greater alertness to changing fashion, and a weakening of the position that “an actual response to art depends on discourse – not upon any one kind of discourse, but discourse of some kind”.

This is the take-away from Kaplan's book, that 1959 marked a tipping-point when crazy, youthful, spontaneous, and radical began to attract admiration away from responsible, mature and thoughtful. Born in 1959, I certainly have felt the tension between these two approaches to life.  I identify with Lionel Trilling, now that I've seen those journal entries.

And yet.  Massie quotes Margaret Atwood:  “History depends on the written word – electrons are as evanescent as thoughts.”  And a great deal of what Kaplan describes as ground-breaking in 1959 turns out to have been "evanescent," kept on life support by baby boomers in academia whose lives are invested in those ephemeral works that were cutting edge in their youth.  That's nothing new: Kaplan remarks that the "modern" art enshrined at the Guggenheim Museum was already old hat at the museum's opening, eclipsed by Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the museum itself.   It makes sense that what was created "in the moment" might not have a long shelf-life.  I suppose it wasn't intended to, either.

It's ironic that Shakespeare, who wrote 400 years ago, just for the next matinee, manages to go on creating moments for us to live in.   Yesterday, on the occasion of Peter O'Toole's retirement from stage and screen, National Public Radio re-aired an interview in which he casually remarks that he has memorized all the sonnets, and that they are by his bedside wherever he goes, constant companions through life.  He recited "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun," his voice highlighting contrasts and turns in the composition -- thanks to the time he put into analysis of the verse.   So all of us who heard it were able to catch what Shakespeare put into it, filling just that moment with a rich sense of life experienced vicariously.

Peace, Professor Trilling:  the time spent in reading, writing, and reflecting is what gives the moments of action their meaning.   If a tree falls in the forest with no ear to hear it, then the disturbance in the air makes no sound;  if Jackson Pollack captures his own "action" of hurling paint at a canvas with no mind thinking anything more than "Heck, it's just paint drippings," then his moments were meaningless.  Let us take time to make meaning of our moments, actual and vicarious. 

Doesn't "moment" mean "meaning?" 
Reflections on The Year Everything Changed: 1959, by Fred Kaplan. Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2009.  Also response to a review of Why Trilling Matters, book by Adam Kirsch.  Review by Allan Massie. "Does Lionel Trilling matter?" The Times Literary Supplement online. Published 1 Feb.2012. Accessed 11 July 2012.