Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dcmusicbox@earthlink.net.
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July 30, 2010We're Sorry, Your Call Cannot Be Completed As Dialed
A legendary performance of Verdi's Requiem was recorded in Carnegie Hall by Arturo Toscanini, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the Robert Shaw Chorale, and soloists of the stature of Cesar Siepi (who died a couple of weeks ago). Now it turns out that two separate recordings were made, one by NBC and one by somebody in the audience; and Pristine Classical in France have combined the two to make a stereo recording from 1951. I haven't heard it, but knowing Pristine's ability to work miracles, I'm sure the new edition adds body and breadth to what was already a powerful experience.
Gotta tell Louis about this.
Oh, wait... I can't...
Somebody said that friends are God's apology for relatives. And now I'm corresponding with the beautiful Martha, Barbara's Costanzo's sister, who I knew many years ago in Kenosha. It was William Faulkner who said, "The past isn't dead. In fact, it's not even past."
July 28, 2010StuckIn the August 2 issue of the New Yorker, Keth Gessen writes about the traffic in Moscow. People have swarmed there from all over the former Soviet Union, looking for prosperity, and they all want cars. The first people to get rich after the collapse of Communism had nothing to do with oil, gas, or nickel; they were selling cars, and the city is in a more or less permanent gridlock. Last December, during a snowfall, an ambulance was stuck in traffic so long the patient died.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has been in power for 20 years. There is a Garden Ring within the city; Luzhkov has spent billions to to widen a beltway, the Moscow Ring Road, and completed a legendary Third Ring Road, which had been talked about for 40 years. They've all just filled up with traffic, so he has begun work on a Fourth Ring. Gessen writes:
The wise move would have been to invest in public transportation, to build up the city's justly famous but sparse metro network and bring back the trams that killed the literary editor at the start of The Master and Margarita; instead, Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro and actively hostile tro the trams. Public transportation is for losers.
I always knew that Russia and the USA had more in common than they wanted to admit.
July 28, 2010JobsworthsThe USA isn't alone; the European Union is in big trouble. From a recent issue of The Economist:
The barrier to reform has always been political, not economic. Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, put it best in 2007: "We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."
That just about says it all. If we promised the politicians enormous pensions to just do the right thing and then retire, that wouldn't work either; they like being in office. Electing them is like giving candy to a baby.
July 26, 2010Can You Tell Me Where We're Headin'?
Okay, we've all heard about the black woman, Shirley Sherrod, Georgia director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture, who was fired last week for making a racist speech to the NAACP that was not racist, but the very opposite of racist. All sides of the American debate agree that this was a disaster: Peggy Noonan wrote about it on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal (here), and both Frank Rich (here) and Maureen Dowd (here) wrote about it on Sunday in the New York Times. The ironies and failures multiply every time you look at it.
It was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack who fired her: I met Governor Vilsack a couple of times in Des Moines (it's a small town), and I will never forget the ovation he got when he entered the State Senate to make a State of the State speech about five years ago: everybody on both sides of the aisle liked this guy. But now he has screwed up big time in firing Sherrod, and of course the pressure came from the White House, and the irony there is that we have a black president, yet as Dowd points out, there was apparently nobody in the White House who recognised the name "Sherrod": Shirley's husband was a genuine hero, one of the original Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Era. Some racists.
The NAACP itself was blindsided and did not defend Sherrod at first. Sherrod had been speaking on the 45th anniversary of her father's murder by a racist thug, and telling the wonderful story of the development of her own consciousness; fortunately the elderly white couple at the center of the speech, Roger and Eloise Spooner, are still alive and came forward to tell how Sherrod had not abandoned them, but had saved their farm almost 25 years ago.
You couldn't have made this up, and it would be hilarious if it were not tragic, but the whole story pales, for me, alongside one simple fact. The United States government was stampeded by one of those talk-radio people, an ignorant racist blimp called Blankpart or Brightfart of whom I had never heard, and who YouTubed a small section of Sherrod's speech taken out of context and misrepresented it on the air.
Who the hell do we have to vote for to stand up to these morons?
July 26, 2010...Lincoln County Road, or Armageddon?
In the Times Literary Supplement for July 9, David Coward reviews four books about 18th-century French publishing, with an emphasis on scurrilious politics. In France, authors needed government permission to publish, while the English had abolished pre-publication censorship in 1695. Scoundrels and bare-faced pamphleteers published their stuff in London, where nobody cared what was written in French anyway. Two of the books are A King's Ransom: The life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, blackmailer, scandalmonger and master-spy, by Simon Burrows, and Robert Darnton's The Devil In The Holy Water: On the art of slander from Louis XVI to Napoleon. The long review is a rollicking good time. In France itself, where the free discussion of religion or politics was outlawed, pornography was one of the few means of self-expression, and the filthy stories about the famous reached fever pitch.
Darnton is intrigued by the broader implications of the phenomenon, by the way the scandals give ordinary people reductive images, as though they were folk myths. Coward writes:
By turning Richelieu into a bogeyman or by making Marie Antoinette a Wicked Queen, the scandalmongers pushed history and literature into anthropological territory. It was, of course, a denial of the truth and reason and the defeat of the Enlightenment, and Napoleon finally turned the tide only by reimposing strict censorship. But we would at our peril ignore Darnton's modestly expressed reminder that, in our world of instant, global communication, where scandal is circulated at the speed of light, the personalization of politics has become more insidious, more reductive and more dangerous than ever.
July 26, 2010Music: A Stylistic and Aesthetic Pluralism Emerging?Guy Dammann, in the Times Literary Supplement for July 16, writes about the 63rd Aldeburgh Festival. Pierre Boulez came this year. Benjamin Britten is still seen as Aldeburgh's guiding spirit, while he and Boulez were a world apart; as Dammann puts it, "They didn't so much consider each other's music as beneath contempt as not consider it at all." But the polarization of contemorary music is yielding.
This is not to say that musicians aren't stilll capable of politicizing their listening, or of being made angry by a composer's perceived "selling out". It is simply that the idea of artistic progress has moved far beyond its once narrowly policed borders, just as the idea of the past--an awareness of which is always keenest in those anxious to leave it behind--has relaxed its grip on the present.
I think the same thing is true in all the other musics, Jazz, Americana, what you will. The finest artists are not intimidated by the past or the future nowadays, but draw their inspiration wherever they must. There is always good music out there, but you won't hear it in the shopping malls.
Some of Boulez's music was played at Aldeburgh this year, and some of Elliott Carter's, too. Dammann makes an interesting distinction. Carter, who will soon be 102 years old, has set five poems by Marrianne Moore, in "What Are Years?" for chamber orchestra and voice. "Sung with mouth-watering precision and feeling by Clair Booth, Carter's music seemed as glorious at that of Bach's Mass [in B Minor], heard the night before."
...couched in a weekend of performances of Boulez's works, the brief Carter interlude also served as a reminder of the key differences between the European and North American experiences of modernity. The former's heavy gaze on the imploded certainties of history is shot through with barely concealed agonies, whereas the latter is often suffused with quiet delight, as if the moderns' great crisis of subjectivity might, and should, be looked on as an opportunity rather than an occasion for terrible doubt.
July 26, 2010Gimme Everything on a Plate! I Want It! It's Mine!
On Highway 22 between Whitehall and Allentown in Pennsylvania there is a billboard paid for by a personal injury lawyer who promises to "work hard to get you the settlement you deserve." Bill Phillips, author of fiteness books, has a new one called Transformation, on the cover of which he promises "the life you deserve". Countless snake-oil salesmen in mega-churches, insurance companies and banks (ha!), car dealers, etc offer us the life, happiness, security, whatever, that we "deserve".
Is not life itself the greatest blessing of all? How many of us get through it without making plenty of mistakes? Am I the only one who thinks that if most of us got what we had coming, we might be in deep trouble? But we think we are entitled; indeed, we live in the age of the entitlement.
There is no such thing as an entitlement. My insurance coverage, whether on my car, my health care or whatever, is what I have contracted for. A nationwide single-payer health care system would have the potential of being the fairest and most economical; if we do not have it, that is because the politicians we have elected cannot or will not deliver it. Social Security is not an entitlement: it is a deal we have made with ourselves, the most successful, popular and cost-efficient government scheme ever devised: we pay in, and later we get a pension back out. (I am getting a reduced Social Security because I was out of the country for many years, and not paying in. I am not complaining.) It is not the fault of the people taking part in the Social Security system that governments both Democratic and Republican have been stealing the money for generations.
I don't know where the word "entitlement" came from, but it would be a good thing if we all stopped using it. Fat chance. It's a handy word for ideologues of every stripe to throw around, even if it doesn't mean anything. Epecially if it doesn't mean anything.
July 24, 2010Willem Breuker (1944-2010)The Dutch reedman, bandleader and composer has passed away. Continental music will miss his zest, his broad horizons, and his unique sense of humor. Read about him and the Kollektief here.
July 18, 2010The Health Care Debate is Far From Over
Remember during the health-care debate when all the American so-called "conservatives", like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who should have known better, were talking about the government's bill "pulling the plug on Grandma"? Well, Britain, with its National Health Service, a single-payer system which is nothing more than a big group plan, leads the world in the quality of care it provides dying people.
That's according to The Economist, hardly a screaming socialist rag, in fact much the best of the weekly news magazines. The Economist Intelligence Unit looked at factors including public awareness, access to painkillers, doctor-patient transparency, financial burden to patients and government-led national palliative care strategies. In Britain there is a well-established network of hospices as well as strong government support for end-of-life care; in the USA the financial burden on patients is impossible. There is government-funded hospice care through Medicare and Medicaid, but Grandma needs to give up curative treatment to get reimbursements for the hospice. It is the system we already have that wants to pull the plug on her.
In the "quality of death" index, Australia came in at no. 2, New Zealand no. 3, and the USA no. 9.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's ever-reliable uber-capitalist Daniel Henninger is outraged that President Obama has made a recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). After nearly 18 months in office, dozens of important Obama appointments are still gathering dust in various committees, so in this case he has made a recess appointment, and I venture to suggest that Henninger is mainly outraged by Berwick, the appointment/confirmation system in Congress being pretty dysfunctional nowadays anyway. Henninger devoted most of his column Thursday to quoting Berwick:
"A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing--control supply.
"The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.
"Health Care is a common good--single payer, speaking and buying for the common good."
And so on, for 16 or 17 column inches, each little paragraph out of context. Obviously Henninger thinks he is helping Berwick to hang himself with his own rope. The problem is that Berwick is right about it all.
Health care is always and everywhere rationed. In the system we have now, people with enough money can go to the Mayo Clinic and stay as long as they like, soaking up all the health care they want, while people with no money can't even get their teeth cleaned. Some of us think the rationing should be done differently, but disagreeing with people like Henninger is like playing chess with a pigeon. He knocks over the pieces, craps on the board and flaps back to the flock to announce victory.
July 18, 2010The Quality of Journalism is Sometimes Strained
Nearly 40 years ago, on a streetcorner in Madison Wisconsin, an attractive young woman of my acquaintance handed me a left-wing commie pinko socialist tract. It didn't take long to read it, a summary of a recent news item. A young man was wanted by the police, who ascertained that he was holed up at his mother's house, and since he wouldn't come out, they had to wait outside for a while, which the tract described as a 'seige'. The outrage was about the bad guys (cops) beseiging a house where there were innocent people ensconced, some of them children (all of them African-Americans, as it happened). The sheet was badly written, not proofread at all, and badly printed. It did not tell us what the young man was wanted for, nor did it tell us whether anyone was hurt in the 'seige'. I began to explain to my nubile friend that she wasn't going to convert anybody with such a poor product, but she huffed, "Well, if that's the extent of your politics," and flounced away, breaking my heart.
That's what commentary was often like in the hippy era, but I am occasionally reminded of this long-ago incident by today's media. It's too bad the quality of the Wall Street Journal's newsgathering is not matched by the quality of its punditry. It is one thing to disagree with Daniel Henninger, as I can be relied upon to do, but another when the paper leaves out the facts entirely, printing pure propaganda.
Not long ago they printed articles about a Canadian gentleman who needed a hip replacement, and wanted the high-tech type of replacement developed in the last few years in Birmingham, Alabama, in which the ball of the femur is resurfaced with metal. The procedure is more expensive than the standard hip replacement, which itself is one of the most successful invasive surgical procedures ever devised. The Canadian health-care system refused to provide the high-tech procedure, so the gentleman purchased it privately. (He must have had a bucket of money, and that's the way health-care rationing works.) The WSJ hoped that this would convince us that a nationalized or "socialist" health-care system is no good. In fact, Ethne and I had looked into all this a few years ago, because Ethne needed new hips. (She was virtually crippled with arthritis, but she is now happily gardening on her hands and knees again.) We discovered that the new procedure is worthwhile for young people only: the relatively small number of younger patients who need hip replacements, because of accidents or early-onset arthritis or whatever, might need to have it done again when they get older. For people who are already getting old there is no point in the extra expense.
The Wall Street Journal neglected to tell us how old the Canadian gentleman was, or what reason the Canadian health-care system gave for turning down his request. So we learned nothing.
This weekend they were at it again. Their Senior Economics Writer, Stephen Moore, wrote a profile of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate in Nevada running against Harry Reid for the U.S. Senate. Ms. Angle is one of those who thinks that extending unemployment benefit "only incentivizes folks that could work" to stay home and collect the benefit. Mr. Moore writes, "Not too many Republicans even in safe seats are willing to speak that truth." What truth is that? That the jobs are out there, and 10% unemployment is a myth? They should try explaining that to my son and his colleagues, a dozen or so skilled craftsmen thrown out of work last year when Wells Fargo yanked the rug out from under Kinter Construction in Des Moines.
But more to the point, Ms. Angle says she became an activist when her son was "held back" in kindergarten over 25 years ago. We are not told why the six-year-old was "held back". My brother want to kindergarten in Kenosha Wisconsin over sixty years ago, and then the local schools would not accept him in first grade because he was so young; having been born on 2 January, he fell outside their guidelines. (So my mother sent him to a parochial school for a year.) How old was Ms. Angle's boy? Maybe the local education authority in Nevada in 1983 was being heavy-handed, or just plain wrong. But if we are not told why the kid was "held back", we are not being convinced of anything.
On the other hand... Semi-retired actor Richard Dreyfuss gave a commencement address at Lehigh Valley University on Friday, the Morning Call reports, and he didn't reach the audience. "We're making ourselves stupid," he said. "We don't teach reason, clarity, logical thought--you don't think you have any power, so therefore you don't." But the kids were slipping out the door as soon as they could, during the question-and-answer session.
Maybe shoddy journalism will work just as well today as it did nearly forty years ago.
July 18, 2010Shame on DeltaEthne has been in Iowa this week, attending a jamboree of the Seed Savers Exchange. She was due back at 6:45 this evening, almost four hours ago. The aircraft was moving toward the runway in Des Moines when it was called back to the terminal; four people were kicked off so that four crew members could get on. This made the flight late to Detroit. Even so, they had a tail wind and almost made it; perhaps the reason the gate in Detroit was closed promptly was that Delta had already given away Ethne's seat on the next flight before she left Des Moines.
The first I knew something was up was when I received an email here at home from Delta about her rescheduled flight for tomorrow. Clearly they thought Ethne was just going to roll over for this shabby treatment; they didn't know our Eth. She put up a fuss, and she has a boarding pass, and she'll reach the Lehigh Valley airport just after midnight. I hope.
July 14, 2010Louis Costanzo (1940-2010)
One of my oldest and closest friends has been killed in a car accident. Louis Costanzo and I met nearly 57 years ago at McKinley Junior High School in Kenosha. Another old friend from those years, John Sobott, wrote, "I remember Louis from band, and his clarinet. Always smiling and happy." In this picture we are clowning around in rural Wisconsin in the early 1970s, and he is uplifting me, as usual.
Louis and I had music in common. In Miss Jeffery's home room I discovered that Toscanini was Louis's lifelong hero, and he was impressed that I had a complete set of Beethoven string quartets (a box of 10 LPs by the Pascal Quartet, never reissued on CD, I don't think). We took records out of the library and spent a lot of time at each other's houses, listening to music. We never stopped joking about a 45 EP of Strauss waltzes played by Mantovani that we kept trading to each other, trying to get rid of it.
The Costanzos had a big console radio and on a good evening we might get WFMT from Chicago. Louis's mother's pizza was out of this world; his dad was quiet, with a friendly smile, and worked at American Motors, like almost everybody in Kenosha. Louis was the baby of the family. His sister Rita was (is) a doll; I kind of had a crush on her. His brother Michael was (is) the kind of man whose friendship is gentle and steady.
My friendship with Louis was in fact a connection to the large Italian-American community in Kenosha, and I got a refreshing perspective on it when I made my own first visit to Italy in the 1980s. I was then living in England, where, in the early evening, all the young people were indoors watching Australian soap operas on TV; in Italy all the young people were out in the street at that hour, promenading in their nicest casual clothes, and they were all happy, the sleek ones and the chubby ones alike, chatting, joking, flirting, having a coffee or a beer. The Italians in Kenosha were like that.
Louis was like that.
After high school we lost touch for a while, as I served my time in the car factory and he served in the U.S. Navy, seeing the world as a ship's photographer. But we both ended up in college in Wisconsin. In the house in the picture at the top of this blog page there was an old upright piano that Louis had donated; a couple of my flatmates played a little. We visited each other frequently. Louis had married Barbara Kotz, from Kenosha, and they had two daughters. For a while Louis taught high school, but hated it; then he worked for 3M (I think) in Minneapolis, then became a freelance technical writer, successful at that until he retired.
When I was visiting from England, we always tried to see each other. I remember my first visit to the home of Barbara's parents, Mr & Mrs Donald Kotz, just off Library Square in downtown Kenosha. It had been a few years, and when I walked in, a beautiful teenaged girl raced across the room and gave me a big hug: it was Lucia, who knew that her dad and I had been besties for a long time.
Barbara and Louis came to visit Ethne and me in England in the early 1980s, when we lived in Teddington, Middlesex. Louis always had a wonderful sense of humor; my poor mother-in-law, who lived with us, had none. She always liked to be the center of attention, and Louis did not pay her enough court. Louis had a beard then, and so did my brother; Tessa had no idea who Louis was, and had never met my brother, but she decided that my brother was the rudest man she had ever known, and Louis got a get-out-of-jail-free card!
We visited Louis and Barbara in Minneapolis; by then their girls were away at college. Later, when my father died in Kenosha, my mother and I were invited to the Kotz's house again, for a social evening that my mother deeply appreciated. Still later, when Ethne and I lived in Texas, one of Barbara's sisters came to visit us. Always there was a connection.
The years went by. We tried to cheer each other up when we had the middle-aged blues. I tried to turn him on to the symphonies of Robert Simpson; he tried to teach me something about computers; sometimes we were hopeless students, but we had each other. He was moving from Michigan back to Wisconsin when his car went off the road; just a few days ago he emailed that he was going to miss the radio stations in Michigan, and I was telling him about piano recitals at Muhlenberg College, walking distance from our new home in Allentown. I needed to ask him about Riccardo Muti, and if he ever heard Gianandrea Noseda conduct. But I can't, now.
This loss is affecting me more deeply that the loss of my parents, or of my brother. My son David has a nice line in hard-nosed understanding; he said on the telephone, "Well, you knew your brother was a crackpot, and we expect our parents to peg it sooner or later..." Now I know what it's like to lose a friend.
The funeral is this week, and I can't go. Can't afford an airplane ticket at short notice; my truck is probably not up to a round trip of 2,000 miles; Ethne is away on business and we don't even have anybody to look after the dog: all the kennels around here are booked up. So I am doing things around the house, working a few hours at Barnes & Noble, faced with all the ordinary banality of life, and I keep having this feeling that there is something terribly wrong, and about every ten minutes I remember what it is. Louis is gone. Grief is a fog of unbelief, yet I know that I cannot imagine what his lovely Barbara and their daughters, Lucia and Anne, must be going through.
Goodbye, old pal.
July 14, 2010Louis, Lucia, Anne, and Barbara
The Costanzos, once upon a time (seems like yesterday). The kids seem to be saying "Cheeese!"
There will be more happy times: Lucia is married to Ken Mennen, and they have two lovely kids, Alexander and Iris; and Anne is pursuing a career; they are just as beautiful now as they were when this picture was taken. And we will all have our memories of the irrepressible Louis. Long may the tribe increase!
July 14, 2010Obama, a Socialist? Get Outta HereThomas Frank's column in the Wall Street Journal today is one of the best opinion pieces I've seen for a long while. "Obama and the Pink Scare" is about a recent survey in which 55% of the people said that they thought the president was a "socialist". This is while a lot of Democrats complain that he isn't "liberal" enough, but of course most Americans wouldn't know a socialist if they saw one. Frank points out that if Obama were a socialist in the Western European sense, he would certainly have pushed for single-payer health care. Here's a money quote:
Many Americans, in my experience, think ["socialist"] means someone who supports basic welfare-state provisions like unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security--a standard by which socialism is immensely popular and most politicians fit the description.
There's no link, unless you subscribe. Which isn't a bad idea.
July 14, 2010Don't Applaud, Just Throw MoneyThere was an article in the WSJ the other day about greedy copyright holders, and there are some letters today from some of us. I am reminded that several years ago a lecturer in England wrote to ask me if she could assign my book, The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music (which you can read for free elsewhere on this site) to her students, and of course I was pleased and said yes, never thinking that I would be paid anything. But thanks to the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society Limited, I have been earning several hundred dollars a year from it. I had forgotten that no school or library in Europe can copy or download copyrighted material without paying for it.
This of course is in "old" Europe, silly socialist Europe, where Mickey Mouse hasn't been copyrighted for centuries to come.
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