Experiencing the Big "O" (opera that is...)

Herr Wagner

As I noted in my last post, our son wanted to go to the movie theater recently where a live performance of the Metropolitan Opera was being broadcast in High Definition.

The opera was the second in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle which tells the story of the struggles between the gods and their relations with humans and the decline of the celestial order.

Die Walkure.

This opera is 330 minutes long, which includes two 30-minute intermissions. For the math challenged (sometimes me), that works out to five and one-half hours.


This sign is above Theater No. 5.
They must showing the opera here...

As I walked into the movie theater, I noted approximately 40 other brave souls. I noted too that the average age of these long-distance opera patrons was around 70. This was a big day for the senior discount! Maybe by the time you're retired you have nothing else to do with an entire afternoon of your life?

I reminded myself that my main goal wasn't to ponder the demographics and extrapolate the future of opera, but to make it through the entire performance. I had no expectation of anything other than a notable level of physical pain and psychic discomfort.

Such grim expectations appeared to be met as time passed and the big screen continued showing slides with info about upcoming opera productions. The big deal live feed for which we were paying $22 each brought us only the sounds of  the orchestra tuning up. No Maestro James Levine. No opera stars. No million dollar innovative set. No images live from New York City.

Then.

Oh no! What could this mean? It meant that we would sit where we were and be regaled with repeats of the previews and trivia about the Met's opera stars while we worked our way through a tub of buttered popcorn. Yes, eventually the curtain would open on Die Walkure.

Forty minutes late.

A thought flashed through my mind: "The opera should be halfway through Act One. But here I sit. Three hundred and thirty minutes left to go. I'm going to die..."

The Gods' Entrance into Opera
I'm not going to write a review of this production of Die Walkure. I'm sure those exist in many places and some of them are written by knowledgable critics and opera buffs. I only want to report on two things and then conclude with a flury of impressions.

1 - We made it all the way to the end! We had gone into the theater at 11 a.m. We walked out blinking into the sunlight at 5 p.m.

2 - We liked the opera! Crazy thing. My son and I are thinking about going back in November for the high-def screening of the third Ring installment, Siegried.


Impressions

Twaddle Time?
I wouldn't even consider attending a long opera sung in a foreign language if they were not subtitles. But early on, as the German coming out of the characters' mouths was converted efficiently into English, the words I was reading at the bottom of the screen gave me some cause for alarm.

Only after our hero gets his coveted drink of water
do things start to become interesting...

Our noble buff looking hero Siegmund collapses on the hearth at the home of the fair Sieglinde. The latter is stuck in a forced, loveless marriage.

We know from the first chaste but flirtateous glance what's going to occur. These two are going to get together.

Except there's no cut to the chase. Instead, for 15 minutes the would-be lovers sing to each other something like this while there's much pouring of liquids into vessels and into mouths.

Siegmund: I am faint! I am thirsty!

Sieglinde: You look exhausted. You have been pursued!

Siegmund: I've been pursued. Bring me water!

Sieglinde: I'll get you water! I'll pour it in your mouth!

Siegmund: Ah, the water is good!

Sieglinde, my sweet, the mead is awesome!
You're my sister, so let's get married!

Sieglinde: I can get you some mead! The mead will give you strength.

Siegmund: Ah, mead is good! I will feel strong!

Sieglinde: The mead I'm pouring from the horn into your mouth is like oil funneled into a 12-cyclinder engine. It is reviving you and your handsome body!

Siegmund: I'm feeling better now! It must be the mead!

Fortunately, the libretto's dwelling on minituae is temporary. The twaddle ceases as these two lock gazes (and soon limbs) and they move on to more important matters.

Through further vigorous singing exchanges Siegmund and Sieglinde discover that they are twins, separated in their youth when their mother was killed and their father had to flee. Now guess what? They really feel a kinship. So much so that Siegmund concludes that since Sieglinde hates her husband there's a perfect solution. They'll get married.

Instant incest!

Of course, this is Wagner and the "Sieg" twins are offspring of the god Wotan. Different conjugal rules perhaps apply?

Seriously, Folks...
The foregoing is the only part of Die Walkure I can make fun of. I found the rest of it riveting. There are only five main characters which means we get to experience them more in depth than  if they were being interrupted by singing choruses of happy townspeople and milk maids.

Wotan is a god who agonizes and is reluctant
to use his terrible power.

It is in this respect that viewing this opera in the theater is perhaps superior to actually being in the audience at the Met. The camera is able to bring us close-ups and different angles on the characters.

I felt like I got to know them.

I watched nuances of emotion flicker across their faces. Bryn Terfel's Wotan is nearly as conflicted as Hamlet when he is forced to apply the letter of the law to his beloved Valkyrie daughter, Brunnhilde.

And in a great high definition moment, Jonas Kaufmann as Siegmund drooled a long string of spit during his song immediately prior to his battle and death. He just kept on singing, spit and all, and I knew this singer making his Wagner debut was already a pro.

Brunnhilde the Valkyrie rocks!

But the real standout for me was Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde. She's a wild woman. A crazy red head. She's hot to trot onto the battlefield and do her Valkyrie job of inspiring warriors and, when they fall, she'll carry them to Vahalla where they will spend eternity serving the gods at their banquet table.
This daughter of a god has spirit, spunk, fire and mirth in her eyes.

When Brunnhilde is condemned by Wotan to become a mortal, nay, not just a mortal, but a mediocre woman who will have to serve as a doormat to an earthly husband, we can tell that she would prefer death. She then begins the greatest campaign in history to change a god's mind, even outdoing Lot's bargaining with Yahweh (Genesis 18).

Technology is Handmaiden to the Gods?
The final star of the show has to be designer Robert LePage's hydraulic moving, morphing, computer controlled set. Those involved with it call it "Le Machine." It is a series of planks mounted on an horizontal axis. As the planks spin into position and assume various shapes, projectors light them with computer generated images to give them the texture of tree bark, stone, animated fire, or whatever is needed.

Le Machine surrounds Brunnhilde with a flaming barrier
atop the mountain at the end of Die Walkure.

Le Machine is a big deal. Literally. It weighs so much that steel reinforcing beams had to be placed beneath the Met's stage. A space in the basement had to be created for the engine. It takes nearly 20 stage hands to run the beast.

Turns out Le Machine is a bit of a diva. It has malfunctioned and left the gods hoofing it off stage rather than climbing a stairway to Vahalla (Das Rheingold). It has tripped Brunnehilde (premiere of Die Walkure). It was Le Machine's fault that we waited 40 minutes for the show to begin.

Even as a technological skeptic, I was all right with Le Machine. There was a sort of cubism elan to it and, in the last act, a decided Salvador Dali-esque atmosphere. These different evocations of non-realistic art helped me slip into this surreal world of Northern gods in crisis. I also appreciated that the technology had been humbled; it wasn't perfect which made it, dare I say, almost human? Like a clanking R2D2. What's not to love?

As I see it, Wagner is all about excess. Excessive music, singing, costuming, and story-telling. So why not a gigantic, ultra-expensive Le Machine in the mix? It is all of a piece. The Ring operas are about the gods and the gods have created a gianormous mess with their philandering, quarreling and war making. Not unlike what we humans do, eh?

So the operas are a life study but it's not undertaken by staring into a puddle and counting paramecium. It's a plunge into a stormy ocean teeming with leviathans of drama and emotion.

If you're willing to get wet, I recommend it. - V.W.

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Climbing Mt. Met (an Opera Challenge)



Believe it or not, challenges don't come much larger than this.
We're talking Richard Wagner and Brunnhilde the warrior daughter...
a potentially life threatening combination.

 Challenges. I like them...

That's one reason why I try to write novels. In one instance it took me seven years and 1100 sheets of paper to get to the point where I reached the last sentence of the last chapter and I finally typed "The End." Now that's a challenge.

Challenges are also why I'm attracted to running even when my feet and bones try to tell me they're feeling old and they don't want to slap pavement and or beat a path along the trail anymore.

The truth is that the prospect of a greater than average challenge is what drove me to undertake The Van Winkle Project. I wasn't seeking to become a better person. I wasn't expecting exquisite insights. I just wanted to make my life more difficult...

So far, ugh, I'm getting what I asked for. This is hard.

Since I still have to deny myself for another four months, I find myself wanting to go the other way--as a sort of compensation for being deprived of the news, entertainment, sports and weather that I crave.

I want a challenge that is the opposite of Van Winklian self-denial.

I want to over-indulge. I want to pig out . I want to scoop up every single morsel. Gorge myself until it hurts. I'm not talking about food, though. I'm looking for something of substance that will stuff my empty brain and overload my senses.

Fortunately an opportunity has presented itself.

Die Walkure is an opera by Richard Wagner.I've decided to make it my fresh challenge, a temporary mountain to climb. Here's what I want to find out.

Can I sit through five and half hours of big men and large ladies singing and running around with swords while wearing breast plates and helmets with horns sticking out of them? Can I endure all that and not die of boredom? Can I even extract something valuable from the experience? Or is this going to be worse than a root canal?

The Details
Our son just turned thirteen. One of the ideas he had to celebrate his birthday was that he wanted a gift or activity that reflected his love of classical music.



This was my idea of a Wagner opera growing up.
Bugs Bunny in "What's Opera Doc?" Classic!

 
A few months ago he noticed at the local cinemaplex a poster for live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.

Yes, whenever the Met is performing an opera a person living out here in mesquite country can buy a $22 ticket and slip into an air conditioned theater and watch the same show as the tuxedoed and gowned ladies and gentlemen are seeing in New York City. Our version comes to us on the big screen in High Definition.

This sounded as if it had to be quite an improvement over the Sunday Texaco Opera my father used to tune into on our home radio/intercom system back in the days when we lived in Alaska. I suppose Dad felt a need to import some culture to the remote 49th state. All I knew was that the tinny intercom speakers in every room were blasting this exotic stuff. Opera!? I couldn't escape that awful singing in foreign languages!

Our son thinks he'll like the show, although he's not sure about the length. He's mainly excited by tales of the more than million dollar "morphing" stage the Met installed just for this production. "This could be cool, Dad!"

Yeah, son, but it's an opera...

My personal jury is still out on whether I like opera or not. This is why Die Walkure presents such an interesting challenge.

Wagner wrote the ideal music for fiery death descending
from the skies in Vietnam...

Rather than dipping my toe into the operatic waters, I'm going to dive in. We'll arrive at the movie theater at 11 a.m. and walk out at last at 4:30 p.m. Five and a half hours of Rick-hard Wagner! Total bombast! All of it courtesy of the artist who most inspired Adolph Hitler (ick). The man who gave us the perfect soundtrack song for the genocidal attack on the village in Apocalypse Now, "The Ride of the Valkyries."

This may sound unappealing to some readers, but you should realize. I'll try most anything once. What's the downside for a writer? None. As I tell my creative writing students, 'If something you do turns out badly it's ultimately to your advantage. Now you have something really interesting to write about."

I know this opera will be an interesting experience. What I don't know is whether I can make it to the end without drowning in the sheer excess. Come back for the next post to find out how we fared. - V.W.


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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Reading Stone!

The following is true.

It does not amount to news or entertainment which keeps it in the safe zone, i.e., it is not a blatant violation of The Van Winkle Project. What I'm about to reveal has been a fact for a good long while, although it's either gone unobserved or not often remarked upon.

That makes this piece of information akin to "history." It's something I found in a 1995 book that perhaps you might be interested in knowing about, especially, if like me, you are somewhat fixated on writing and good books and rock 'n' roll.

Here's the book...

Next item. Do you recognize this face?

With its deep canyons tracing out the evidence of a cigarette and drug fueled life lived at mach speed, one might say this is every rock 'n' roll guitarist's poster child. Any bad boy Van Halen or Slash or Flea who ever put his fingers on the frets has had to measure himself against this gold standard of decadence and pure riff generating genius.

Of course, we're talking about Mr. Jumping Jack Flash himself, Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

But did you know something else? This is the face of a reader of books.

Keith Richards has long been a bibliophile. He may have turned the pages of lots of women in his nearly seventy years of life, but he's loved many more books.

You see, Mr. Richards collects books. He's built libraries to house his collection. Most importantly, he enjoys spending hours in...reading.

And perhaps you thought I was going to say "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll"?

Give Him Shelter and a Good Book
As I was perusing my recently acquired used copy of the above-mentioned lavish coffee table book, I found inspiring information about how to create and maintain one's own collection of cherished books. There were also profiles of individuals who had made a library a part of their lifestyle.

This was where Keith Richards entered with five strings and an "open book" tuning.

Sure his home library is messy, but he is a Rolling Stone...


Of course, as a man of wealth and taste, Richards has lavish homes around the world. However, his home in Connecticut, where he spends a short while each year, is different. He had a octagonal room built just to house his books.

Keith's collection includes some leatherbound classics his wife gave him, books on art, and his favorite subject, military strategy and history.

According to Keith the screaming adulation directed the band's way whenever they're on stage gives him pause. He tries to understand it through his reading:

   "I'm interested in how people can fall for dictators, and in the origins
   of the mass psychosis they provoke. That's what I do for a living,
   after all. Time to go to the office--go out in front of hordes of
   howling people!...You become part of the mass hysteria.
   You forget yourself in the moment. Is that what Hitler experienced?"

Honky Tonk Books
According to Keith, it's not so surprising, that someone in his business would sustain a life of reading. He points to all the boring travel and the hours cooped up in a hotel room before playing a show. It's perfect for passing the time with a good book.

My favorite quote by Keith: "One must always handle a book with respect. I never read one with sticky fingers."

No, wait. I made that up. But the rest? It's true and you can check it out. See here. - V.W.

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Clifford Brown, A Life in Jazz (Black History Month - Part 2)

Life is odd. Horrible things can happen (like my ancestors owning human beings as slaves, see previous VWP post), but from such horrible things sometimes quite different states of being emerge. Unambiguously good things.

Like jazz.

If African-Americans had never been loaded aboard slave ships and brought to a distant land, if they had remained just what they were, Africans, who would have invented this most American of music?

And without jazz I wouldn't be telling the story of quite likely the greatest and least known trumpeter of all time.

Clifford Brown.

MY MUSICAL MELANGE
Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky. This was the music I grew up with. My father wanted his sons to be exposed to the best of culture, and in the Western world, European classical music was considered to be at the pinnacle of the human effort to turn instruments and notes into compelling sounds.

My first musical love...classical music.

Our father purchased stacks of RCA and Columbia Masterwork records at what happened to be a propititious moment. He could still get his boys' attention by dropping the needle on, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

A few years later, though, the British Invasion of rock 'n' roll roared ashore in America. Our ears tuned into a new sound. Goodbye, Ludwig. Roll over, Beethoven!

Oh, I still liked, even loved, classical music, but it took a backseat in my musical interests. Rock music was so much more dashboard and steering wheel direct. For starters it was louder and the singers sang words about what was on their minds.

Classical music, on the other hand, was more of an extended impression of a feeling, that gradually unfolded and shaped the listener's soul over time. Why a symphony might require an entire forty minutes of listening! Rock music tended to serve up three-minutes doses of sound that gouged, carved, and stomped the psyche in satisfying ways.

If classical music was courtship and seduction and love letters written back and forth, rock music was a vivid one-night stand, a sudden jolt of a drug to the head...

But where was jazz in those days? Actually, we were living in the golden age of it, the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I had no idea. I heard jazz, in a degraded or altered form, and no one told me that was what it was.

Call it jazz...because it sorta is.

Jazz was in Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther Theme". It was in every other note of the elevator music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It was even in the only instrumental The Beatles ever wrote, the blues inflected "Flying" on their Magical Mystery Tour album, and in the lonely saxophone wail of "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

And why was it I loved the massed brass, and most of all the horn solos, when I sat down and listened to the Blood, Sweat and Tears album or one of those classic numbered double albums by Chicago--I, II and III?

I was starting to hear the music I was destined to fall in love with.

JAZZ TRUMPET'S MISSING LINK
Decades later I probably listen to more jazz on a daily basis than any other kind of music. I'm no jazz expert, but I like how jazz shares with classical music the idea of being a musical impression of an emotion. I like too how, unlike classical, the musicians have the freedom to solo and display their technical virtuosity as well as express how they're feeling while the tune progresses.

I'm still making discoveries in jazz. Like the trumpeter Clifford Brown aka "Brownie."

For me it's like finding out that between Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms there was another equally great composer, but somehow I never heard of him until now.

Of course, anyone who is very conversant in jazz will have heard of Brownie, but the casual jazz listener not so much. In fact, no one even assayed a book-length biography of the man until 2001.

It's not that Clifford Brown didn't have the chops to match Miles Davis. He did and then some. It's not that he didn't play with the greats of his time like Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins, He did. It's that he died young. Way too young.

Brownie was just getting started.

ON THE CUSP (OF GREATNESS)

It is the summer of '56 and it is Clifford Brown's wedding anniversary. Normally he and his wife LaRue travel from gig to gig together. They have a baby this year and they would even bring the baby along.

In those days the jazz musician typically traveled by car. It's a hard way to make a living even if you're 25-year-old Clifford Brown who is seen by critics as the next great jazz star. He already has an album whose title sum up the possibilities:

New Star on the Horizon.

Brownie doesn't take wife LaRue and baby Clifford, Jr. on the trip on June 25, 1956. LaRue goes to her mother's house because she had never met her grandson. And it is her birthday. Yes, she and Clifford had married on her birthday two years earlier.

The birthday party is being held at the home of saxophonist Harold Land and his wife. Land isn't in the current incarnation of the Clifford Brown quartet, but he remains a close friend. Someone comes over and says there's a call for LaRue at her mother's house down the street.

THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
Brownie has been playing at Music City, a jazz club in Philadelphia. After the show the band packs up, drummer Max Roach and Sonny "Newk" Rollins, the saxophonist in one car. Brownie travels with his pianist Richie Powell (younger brother of the great pianist Bud Powell) and Richie's wife in the other car. They hit the road, caravan style, Roach and Rollins in the lead car.

The band is headed to Chicago for more music making. Brownie and the Powells are riding in Brownie's 1955 Buick.

It is raining as June 25 heads toward June 26, 1956.

After midnight, Brownie's car stops off on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford, PA to buy gas. It's the last time Brownie and the Powells are seen alive.

Nancy Powell, who is now driving, misses a curve, smashes through a guardrail, and the car falls down a 75-foot embankment.

The rain continues to fall.

"...BROWN IS BEAUTIFUL." - Kalamu ya Saaam, poet/author
If Clifford Brown had lived, then what? For one thing, I wouldn't be writing a blog post about him in 2011 anymore than there's a need for someone to post about Miles Davis and what a great jazz musician he was. Everyone with even passing familiarity with jazz would know the name.

Brownie's solo for "Daahoud"

Brownie only had five years in which he recorded and played and positioned himself in the forefront of the future of jazz. It is an amazing accomplishment that is validated by the recordings. Sometimes Brownie's playing is, no other way to put it, jaw dropping the way you listen to a Charlie Parker sax solo and wonder how any human can have the breath and finger speed to produce such sounds. Other times, with the riotous bebop pushed to the background and replaced by a ballad, Brownie is simply moving and soulful.

He could do it all. Always his horn playing is impeccable and intelligent and commands my attention.

But there's one more thing that's always mentioned about Brownie. In an age when many jazz musicians followed the Charlie Parker model of dissipation--burn bright and burn out young--Brownie was a clean living family man. He didn't touch drugs. He was gentle and kindly. This is not myth making. It's what all those who knew him said upon learning of his death. The world had lost a great jazz musician and a great human being.

CODA? NOT QUITE
There were tapes in the trunk of the 1955 Buick that took Brownie to his death. He liked to record his rehearsals and gigs on his own reel to reel machine. Only one of the tapes was labeled, which means that as the tapes have finally come out on CDs in recent years people are left to guess where and when Brownie is playing. But what really matters is that he is playing. He will keep on playing. That's my definition of classical. - V.W.

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The Best Super Bowl Halftime Show (That Never Was)

It's not fair to be too hard on the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. You must consider how far this activity had to come in forty-five years to arrive at the present moment.

In 1967 at Super Bowl I the crowd and TV viewers "thrilled" to the trumpet sounds of Al Hirt and the marching bands of two colleges.

Al Hirt was so "big" they brought him back (with Carol Channing)
for SB VI in '72. Love that Goodyear blimp about to bomb his head...

This pattern of featuring marching bands along with an artist whose LPs resided beside your aged aunt's and uncle's record player next to key albums by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Nelson Riddle persisted for years.

This was the other, older side of America. As far as it was concerned rock 'n' roll had never been invented.

The Super Bowl show was stuck back in the Big Band Era (Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald) or Broadway or tourist schmaltz (Pete Fountain, Carol Channing).

We can only be thankful we were somehow spared Andy Williams and Pat Boone.

When in 1988 at Super Bowl XXII rock 'n' roll finally arrived it came in the form of (hold your breath) Chubby Checkers. The Super Bowl's entertainment was literally almost 30 years behind the times.

The Up With People Era
When the Super Bowl folks finally realized, "You know we need to have something to pull in the younger generation," they just didn't get it. They brought out Up With People. They thought "Well, this group of clean-cut kids with major orthodontic smiles are young and they'll appeal to Grandma and Grandpa, too."

That was the problem.

Up With People (whom I'm sure are lovely and very "up" people) had its genesis as a singing group that recruited youth from around the country and then the globe. They sang in, no surprise, an upbeat fashion.about those great themes of the sixties: love, peace, and togetherness, but they did it minus the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The very name of the group was a reaction to the sixties' youth movement that chanted "Down with the establishment!" "Down with whitey!"

These kids asked us to think UP!

They would first appear at the 1976 Super Bowl X and make three more appearances.

I'm sorry to say, UWP was the musical offspring of Al Hirt and Carol Channing. If any person under 30 was watching the Super Bowl by 1980 the song that came to mind as halftime approached again was "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. This song was already a rock 'n' roll relic, but it startlingly conveyed what was wrong with the Super Bowl musical fare.

Halftime show? Are you kidding? It's always the same drivel!

A Change is Gonna Come
In 1990 it seemed the NFL finally awoke from their cultural coma. They must have said, "The masses are restless. They're fixing snacks during halftime and not watching the show and the commercials. We need an injection of youth and acts that are actually still on the charts, not on the easy listening radio station."

You want youth, the NFL was going to give you youth: The New Kids on the Block. Now that's young!

Yeh. So was the Partridge Family.

But the next year it was Gloria Estefan. Hey, Gloria is on the charts! And she's from Miami and the Super Bowl that year was in...the Minneapolis Metrodome. Well, I never said it made complete sense.

Then came Super Bowl XXVII in the Rose Bowl. Michael Jackson. True it was 1993 and Thriller and Bad were distant memories, but MJ always was tabloid fresh as befits a global celebrity. And since at the Super Bowl the quality of the actual music at halftime show will always be handicapped by the need to set up quickly in the middle of a stadium, it helped that Michael could dance. Like no one else. May he rest in peace. There will never be another one like him.

The one and only.

Evolution Super Bowl Style
By now the Super Bowl powers that be had the memo in hand. They had to feature either current charting popular acts or classic rockers. The music should be loud, energetic and gaudily presented.

So they brought on country music stars. Then they visited the other side of the pop charts and gave us Aeorosmith, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Boyz II Men, various Motown stars, and Phil Collins.

In 2002 they brought on the rock band best suited for a 9/11 tribute: U2.

Bono, the Irishman who is an American patriot.
You've gotta love it...especially at such a preeminently American event.

Can you say HUGE? This is the kind of thing people would tune in to see.

In 2004 the halftime show discovered one other thing. The performance should not be sexy. Justin Timberlake gave the tug that was watched and talked about around the world. That oh so convenient "wardrobe malfunction."

At the moment the nethermost point of Janet Jackson's 38-year-old, pierced mammary gland touched the humid Houston night air some portion of America was scandalized. The rest was "tit-i-lated" but to no avail. An FCC fine followed. Everyone except nursing babies would forthwith be protected from visual collisions with female breasts. So this sort of thing wasn't going to happen again.

Like a bandage dressing the flesh wound, Paul McCartney arrived the next year. Legend! Former Beatle! Superstar solo artist! It was milk and cookies pop (during the most glib moments) and, come to think of it, closer to Up With People than some of us Beatle worshippers might feel comfortable admitting.

There's a shadow hanging over Sir Paul...
but he still believes in yesterday.

But Paul made it safe to watch the Super Bowl halftime show again. Bring on the Stones, Prince, Bruce, Tom Petty and...

Who Are They?
Last year I decided to watch the halftime show out of a sort grim respect for a rock band that once was the most iconoclastic and innovative that ever burned up a stage or smashed a drum kit. The Who.

Before: The greatest rock performers of all time...

Of course, when only two of the four original members are left, I think truth in advertising means they ought to add another character to their name...The Who?

After (40 years): 1/2 a Who and Who Cares?

The constantly changing lights on stage were the best part IMHO. The music was loud, but the band, like all others before it, opted for a medley of hits.

In the interest of total candor I must say that I strongly dislike medleys of hits. I've heard the song being played multiple times, perhaps hundreds (that's why it's a "hit"), and now the band deigns to play a short snippet and then segue into the snippet of another hit and another.

Medleys? Ugh. I feel like I'm listening to a machine that's slicing and dicing music. It's just an exercise.

Sure, within its medley The Who(?) played about two minutes and 15 seconds of "Won't Get Fooled Again," my favorite song back in my bell bottom jeans day. But that means 5 minutes of the greatest rock 'n' sturm and drang ever penned was lopped off. Won't get fooled again,  indeed. Which leads me to propose a constructive alternative.

Four Halftime Shows We'd Like to See

1. A man or a woman on a stage with just an acoustic guitar. Twenty minutes, 3 soul-stirring songs. Your nominations for this person are now being accepted.
2.  A band that plays an extended version of a familiar hit song for 10 minutes, then has the nerve to send the lead singer to mic to announce, "This is a new one we just wrote. We want to play it for the first time." 
3. Ice skaters. Why not? If we can send men to the moon and back, we can create a large rink quickly mid-field (and do a better job than the Teflon one they set up in front of Gloria Estefan in '92). And ice skating always looks good on TV.
4.  Up With People. Did I just say that? Yes! Why not bring back the original performers, now graying boomers in the their golden years. Because, you know what, after all we've been through with this show, maybe they won't seem that bad. And I just bet some of them can make some fancy moves with their aluminum walkers and canes.



The Up With People Super Bowl Challenge:
"Let's get UP! tonight!"



- V.W.

The Eroica Meditations

Happy 240th!

These days in lieu of paying attention to the news I find myself taking note of significant dates in history. I figure if as long as I'm Van Winknled I can't quite live in, respond to, and comment upon the present, at least I can happily romp around in the distant past.

Today happens to be one of those days when long ago something significant happened, although at the time it wasn't news to anyone except a man and woman of little note.

Two hundred and forty years ago, in Bonn, Germany, a son was born. The parents named him Ludwig.

This was the same name given to their first child who had died young. It was also the name of little Ludwig's grandfather, a Court Capellmeister.

In his early years the fact that the boy was Ludwig Van Beethoven meant nothing to the world. He was just another kid in Germany. We know what church he was baptised in, what houses he lived in, but little else about him caused ripples until he took up a musical instrument. By age 8 we have it recorded that he gave a public concert in Cologne. Now it was becoming clear. He was a child prodigy. The next Mozart!

Another good reason to check out garage sales.

I learned these facts and more from a large book I bought at garage sale years ago. Produced for the Beethoven Bicentennial in 1970, it is filled with reproductions of period documents, original musical scores in the master's hand, and paintings of key historical figures and sites.

This book is the closest thing I know of to a Beethoven scrapbook. Buying it at the garage sale for a buck was an easy decision. After all the time I've spent listening to  Beethoven's music, how could I not want to know more about the man behind it?




Some of the first LPs we owned

Begin With the Ears
When I was a first grader my father did something quite remarkable for a former Oklahoma farm boy supporting a wife and three young sons on an entry-level accountant's salary. He went and bought us a Hi-Fi.

The Magnavox unit, a large piece of cherry wood furniture, was roughly the size of a kitchen cabinet. It contained an automatic record changer with a tone arm that weighed approximately 2 lbs. and an AM/FM radio. In its guts were glowing vacuum tubes.

The man at the music store knew we would need music to play on our new record changer. My father had heard and liked some classical music when he went to college, so the man suggested the Nutcracker Suite, Rhapsody and Blue, and the 1812 Overture. We stacked up the records. I sat back in my child's rocking chair. Immediately I was overwhelmed by the rich monaural sounds pouring out of the 12" speacker behind the gold and fabric grill. But the best was soon to come.

Beethoven.

Over the years there would be many discovered treasures. The Pastorale. The. Eroica. The Ninth. The Appasionata. The Emperor. The encounters with Beethoven's music would be spread out over time, but the effect was always the same. The music left me searching for words to describe something so titanic, so emotional, so true.

How to Achieve Greatness

One day, several years and several houses after the hi-fi, a piano showed up. This was how it seemed to my brothers and me. Our parents would later claim they ran the idea past us, but I don't recall seriously contemplating what was suddenly about to be required: I was going to have to take piano lessons.

Truthfully, this seemed a little nerdy and what for? Neither of our parents played any kind of instrument. Sure, I liked to listen to the music on the hi-fi, but my early years of playing the piano was the furthest thing from that kind of music making. I played simplistic ditties or boring measures from the Czerny book, all of it resounding in a clanging cheap fashion on the Wurlitzer upright. To obtain such aural miseries I had to practice a half hour every day when I would rather have been reading history books or chasing horned toads in the dirt.

This was not a happy time.

Then we moved to Alaska and I finally got a better teacher who 1) had a baby grand piano which actually could be made to sound amazing during my lessons, 2) challenged me to reach a level of proficiency where I could some play music I cared about, and 3) made me meet the highest standards of technique and interpretation. I was still no Horowitz, but I now hated practice and lessons only 70% of the time instead of 100%.

For each lesson I received a grade on a scale of 100. I usually made a low 90. After so many lessons with a cumulative score of something or other, I qualified for a prize in the form of a miniature statue of a famous composer. Actually, this wasn't particularly motivating. Especially after I acquired all the major composers. Years later I threw away almost all of these plastic blandishments. But I kept Beethoven.

Not everyone can be a Schroeder (sigh).

Looking back, I realize my piano lessons weren't all for naught. They taught me that greatness begins with practice and excellent teachers. Even someone with the genius of Beethoven did not form himself without help.

I learned from the bicentennial book that as a child, Ludwig studied for two weeks with the mighty Mozart. Soon after that he had a year of lessons with the great Franz Joseph Haydn. After that he studied with other notables in Vienna who at the time were considered the very best. By his teachers Beethoven was challenged and he was encouraged. This is what good teachers do. The rest, of course, is up to the pupil. Does he or she have that mysterious quality that we think of as a "gift" or "talent"? Will he or she make the most of it?

The answer for me was no and no. But by the end of the my piano lessons I could limp through Fur Elise and I could play with feeling and satisfaction the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Sometimes if you can't be great yourself, you have to settle for touching the hem of the garment.

Mercurial Personality
By the time he was in his early 30's Beethoven knew that he had a reputation for something besides being an incomparably gifted composer and performer. In 1802 he inked out the so-called "Heiligenstadt Testament" and he dealt directly with the issue of his terrible interpersonal relationships.

To those who saw the side of him  that seemed (in his own words)"quarrelsome, peevish or misanthropic" Beethoven wanted them to know that this wasn't the real him. Inside was a tender man with nothing but outpourings of affection for humanity. Why did he come off as such a jerk in person? There was a "secret reason why I seem to you to be so," he wrote.  Beethoven went on to reveal that for the past 6 years he had suffered from an incurable condition. It caused him to withdraw in an effort to disguise his disability. He described his life as a "miserable existence." Of course, all us know what he strove to keep secret in the early years of his life. The composer was going deaf.



First pages of Heiligenstadt Testament

The ensuing years brought more masterpieces, but no improvement in Beethoven's disposition. In 1825 he received a letter from a copyist he had been working with and whom he had criticized for performing his work poorly. This man, Ferdinand Wolanek, decided to return the scores and withdraw from the assignment after Beethoven called him a "Bohemian blockhead." In his letter to Beethoven, Wolanek defended his professionalism and stated, in essence, that Beethoven was impossible to work with.

Beethoven's reaction was to place a giant X across the front of the letter and write in large letters: "Stupid, conceited ass of a fellow!"

That wasn't enough. Beethoven scribbled over the margins of the letter: "So I am to exchange compliments with such a scoundrel who steals my money. Instead I should pull his ass's ears." He flipped over the letter and wrote still more invective on the back. In today's parlance, Beethoven went ballistic.

Beethoven answers his mail

Don't Roll Over Beethoven
As fascinating as the lives of artists tend to be, especially ones like Beethoven who struggled against afflictions and adversity, in the end I have to admit that the personality is not all that important. The main thing is the notes in the air or the paint on the canvas or the words on the page--how they impact my body, mind and soul.

Recently I've been reading a book that makes this point. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee (with photos by Walker Evans) Agee recounts how he and Evans went down to Alabama during the depths of the Great Depression and lived among poor white sharecroppers for one month in the summer. Their plan was call to America's attention the plight of these ignored and ragged people and their children by using a combination of striking black and white photos and exquisitely poetic prose.

Agee was particularly concerned that the resulting book might be wrongly received as an aesthetic object. He worried that people would thus sidestep the real purpose of the book which was to do justice to the people who were the subject of it and then move the reader to relieve their distress.

Early in the book Agee states that a disillusioning attainment to the level of "art" is what habitually happens to the best creative human expression. What starts out as what Agee calls "fury," something "dangerous" to our conventionality and pre-conceived ideas, is taken over by others and tamed. It is officially accepted, hung on the walls of a museum, it is played in the concert hall, it is studied in school. Agee calls this "castration."

Agee turns to Beethoven as an example. He suggests that if one wishes to get back to what the composer intended, he should take a recording of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, turn it up as loudly as possible, get down on the floor, and put his ear next to the speaker and stay there, completely concentrated on listening.

"Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is..."

I think that starts to get at it. Those are some of the words I couldn't find to describe what I was feeling all those years ago and, indeed, still feel today whenever I listen to Beethoven. Music like his changes how I receive and think about life. Beethoven in my ears leads me through a world that is simultaneously more beautiful and tragic than I normally recognize.

Surely, he has this effect on others, although not everyone, of course. In that way, Beethoven is a bit like religion. Only the faithful can believe in his version of heaven or his hell. Yet Beethoven does not need to proselytize with missionaries or priests or use manipulations by emperors or kings to win adherents to his "church." For more than two hundred years his music has gone out and found those who have ears prepared to hear.

For those the music chooses, the result is absolute devotion, an urgent wish to hear more, so they can feel connected to something larger that this "deaf" man heard more loudly than the rest of us ever have.

"Anyone who understands my music will never be unhappy again," Beethoven is reported to have said at one point. All these years later I think that's the one of the most intriguing claims I've ever heard and it's reason enough for me to keep on listening, keep on trying to understand. - V.W.

PS: Also, historically important, today is my wife's birthday. Happy birthday, darling! How lucky you are to share a birthday with Ludwig!

PPS: For anyone who is wondering, "eroica" is Italian for "heroic" and it is the title Beethoven gave to his Third Symphony.

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Midnight Mix Tape

Feets don't fail me now...

At 12 a.m. as our time zone crosses over into Sept. 11, I will take off running. Literally.

There's a 5K race "in the midnight hour" and I plan to be in it. Besides the opportunity to run at the strangest time I've ever attempted, I'm drawn to the symmetry of it all.

When the race horn blows and we set off I'll be a man who still knows something about what is happening in the world.

When I cross the finish line about 25 minutes later (I'm more determined than I am fast) I'll be completely Van Winkled.

Motivating Oneself to Move 

Nowadays I wouldn't think of running without having my MP3 player and headphones (Note to audiophiles: low-end ear buds don't pump enough bass to cater to demanding aural taste). I need music to take my mind off the inevitable pain.

Case in point: I ran in a race last weekend and I'm not sure I would have made it to the end if not for the fact that I was listening all the way to the performance The Pixies gave at Madison Square Garden during their 2004 reunion tour. When "No. 13 Baby" came on with the refrain "I'm in a state, I'm in a state," and Kim Deal's pulsing bass rattled my bones that's when I knew. I fired afterburners and got into my own state of, I'm going finish, I'm going to finish, finish this race no matter what.

For the upcoming special running occasion I thought it might be appropriate to seek out songs with "midnight" in their title and lyrics. I won't be concocting anything fancy (such as a true mix which can be done with the cool $30 Mix Tape Portable DJ Mixer available from Urban Outfitters, pictured below). This is just old school, dig through my CD collection, rip the songs and sync them onto my player.

The Play List
In the Midnight Hour (The Young Rascals) 4'00":

A hard rockin' gem with a driving groove, though the obvious choice I have to admit is to go with the original artist, the late great Wilson Pickett. Here's the deal, though. In 1966 The Rascals (still "The Young" when they released this) produced an indisputably fine white guy cover. The bass absolutely crunches and the organ, not normally my favorite instrument, swells like an outbound jet cooking on the runway. Wow. Italian-American boys got soul, too.

After Midnight (Eric Clapton) 2'50":
Back when this tune came out I was living in Anchorage, Alaska. My best friend was a kid who was from California and he had come north bearing record albums. Hippie stuff like Country Joe and the Fish "Feeling Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." I sat in his parents' basement flipping through the intoxicating 12 x 12 stacks and I remember this one. A bearded E.C. in a cream suit sits in a chair with a Strat between his legs and a bunch of rolled up carpets to his left. This relaxed dapper man wasn't the same guitar god who wah-wahed us into ecstasy during his stint with Cream. Eric was into a new big band thing.

Still, like Cream, the music must have been pretty loud and the vocals poorly enunciated, because my friend kept talking about his favorite tune on the album, "Captain Midnight," until I finally corrected him by pointing to the track list. "Uh, I think he's saying after midnight." I do like the idea of an alternative lyric featuring Captain Midnight, however. If he were the basis of the song he would be the kind of dude who would throw a heck of a party. "Captain Midnight! We're gonna let it all hang out!"

Midnight Rider (Allman Brothers Band) 2'57":
I immersed myself in the double-disc pleasures of At the Filmore East and Eat a Peach enough times to etch them into my classic rock memory long before there was the term "classic rock." Much later I finally dug into the band's back catalog and discovered this highlight from the ABB's second studio album, Idlewild South. It has the greatest acoustic guitar riff to arrive belatedly to my ears. And there's something about that line and the way Greg moans it--"I've got one...more--silver dollah..." that manages to sound authentically Gothic southern bluesy and haunting.

The Midnight Special (Creedence Clearwater Revival) 4'11":
This song belongs to Huey Ledbetter better known as Leadbelly. Which gives me an opportunty to say that I'm in the camp that rock 'n' roll never would have happened period had African-American culture not been available to whites for them to feast upon and bend to their own ends. White kids (like me) at a particular historical moment badly needed liberation and joy, but I don't think we were capable of inventing the soundtrack for it by ourselves. So there's a debt as well as a theft. Call it the Elvis effect. The sad part is that many musical consumers never even find out about the original artist, the one with the darker skin. Of course, John Fogerty was talented enough that he hardly needed to rely upon covers (and, in this case, lyrics that are somewhat watered down from Ledbelly's) to fill CCR albums and sell a bi-jillion copies.

This song's lyrics remind me (if I'm paying attention) that there's a black man sitting in a prison cell who sees the light of the Midnight Special train rattling past and watches freedom pass him by. Still, the light shining on him is enough to cause him to dare to hope.

Burning of the Midnight Lamp (Jimi Hendrix) 3'38":
I'm a Hendrix fan, but this tune on Electric Ladyland never really caught my fancy. It's too anthemic and over-the-top dramatic, as if John Phillips Sousa had dropped acid. The wah-wah riff sounds more weird than compelling. Talking electric bagpipes? But hey, the song is about midnight. It's loud, too. I'm not going to drift off to sleep at the 3.5 kilometer mark when this one comes over the headphones.

Midnight Rambler (The Rolling Stones) 9'04":
The most obvious choice, I suppose, of the whole batch. Midnight is the time for creepin' and movin' and groovin' per the RS gospel, and the world's loudest rock 'n' roll band produces an irresistible rhythm on this one that's bound to give me a lift as I'm starting to fade. Of course, I'm going with the live version on Get 'Yer Ya-Ya's Out!'(though I've got to tell you there are even better performances of this tune out there on boots).

Introduction to The Sleeping Beauty (Peter Illich Tchaikovsky) 3'33":
Our son loves classical music. For him a massed orchestra is the sun, moon and stars and the entire musical universe. When he went looking for a classical piece to propel Dad on his midnight run he first came up with the "Moonlight Sonata." I decided to mess with his head: But what if the moon isn't out that night? So he dug some more among the stacks of CDs that litter our home and came up with this raucous orchestral warhorse. There's no "midnight" in it, but it does use musical speech to tell the story of a person who is asleep and awaits awakening. I can't think of a better way for newly Van Winkled me to come across the finish line.

I'm Only Sleeping (The Beatles) 3'00":
Wait! I need one more tune to for my cool-down. Let's go to the Revolver album where 44 years ago John Lennon sang the words of what could be my Van Winkle Project mission statement: Don't wake me...don't spoil my day, I'm miles away...floating up stream...keeping an eye on the world going by my window, taking my time...