Mark Likes Music

Two responses to  Grantland 's broadside against Zooey Deschanel's national anthem  bring up a problem that confounds everyone concerned with analyzing music: the difference between a transitory live performance, where an audience measures success in that moment, using a set of expectations conditioned by context; and t a recording of the same event, a mediated experience that listeners experience individually, over and over again. Jason Heid, on Dallas's D Magazine  tells us what it was like to experience Deschanel's rendition at the game : I was at Rangers Ballpark for Game 4 last night, and loved the sense of melancholy with which Deschanel infused the familiar song. It felt almost like a funeral dirge, and I mean that as a high compliment. It was quite different from what we normally get at these games: when some mid-level country music or top 40 star is trotted out for a serviceable, but instantly forgettable, performance.  A reader of Andrew Sullivan's...

Relax, guys. On  Grantland, Jay Caspian-Kang and Natasha Vargas-Cooper rant over this : Here's a sample: Where have our divas gone? There is no strife in ZoZo’s lily-white aesthetic. No sex, no violence, just tweeting. What a tepid and sniveling symbol she is. She has nothing to draw on, nothing to find resonance in. She’s not even fit for our time. Give us a beleaguered icon. Someone trying to maintain their imperial draw even though they’ve grown bloated and waterlogged with age. I want to hear the sounds of a woman who has known loss and triumph, not the pubescent squeaks of a flinching sitcom star with cute bangs and a stupid blog.   Very classy. There have been far worse renditions of our national anthem , and many better. If you can stand reading their childish drivel, Caspian-Kang and Vargas-Cooper have their own best-of list.

A few responses to NPR dropping Lisa Simeone's World of Opera because of her involvement in organizing protest s in DC, and her firing as host  of Soundprint  for the same reason: On his Baltimore Sun blog, David Zurawick says that NPR has a code of ethics and needs to enforce it. Libertarian website Reason thinks that the lengths NPR goes through to prove its objectivity only emphasizes its editorial bias; better just to acknowledge it and let its employees be Prius-driving, yoga-loving, liberal lunatics.  WDAV in Charlotte, which produces World of Opera , is sticking by Simeone. The station is keeping her as host, and will start distributing the show directly to stations beginning on November 11.  WDAV blog commenters seem pleased.  James Fallows of the Atlantic has some responses from Davidson College alumni on WDAV's support for Simeone . (WDAV's studios are on the campus of the school. FAIR found her firing "absurd."  On a related note, Michel...

The so-called "crying Indian" ad is the most famous (or infamous) example of a patronizingly essentialist view of American Indians as environmental augurs : I think Koyaanisqatsi is another. The only words you hear in the film are Hopi. Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance," and the chorus that is part of Philip Glass 's score intones three tribal sayings that can be interpreted as being warnings about the impact of human actions on the world. It's certainly not mean-spirited but can nonetheless be as limiting and de-humanizing as any cowboy-movie stereotype.

Look what was in my mail today: I'll probably just stay home; I can watch the movie for free on YouTube . By the way, Philip Glass's 75th birthday is coming up on January 31, in case you're wondering why you're seeing so much of his music programmed this season. 

Well, at least it's not an orchestra this time . As reported in Digital Music News and the UK's Daily Mail ,  UB40 recently declared bankruptcy . Lead singer Ali Campbell left years ago, alleging that the group's management mishandled the group's finances; I guess he was right. Digital Music News points out that UB40 probably enjoys a "healthy royalty stream"--they've sold, apparently, 70 million records--but I don't think anyone in that band ever wrote his own song. A couple of their famous covers:

Gin and hot water seemed to be the cold-weather drink of choice for Dickens's lowlifes in Oliver Twist . Mr. Bumble drank it, and so did Sikes. Fagin served it to Oliver. Now that the nights are getting nippier, I thought I'd try it out. Let me tell you: gin and hot water is awful. It tastes like warm nail polish remover. Adding lemon juice helps, but not much. I found a recipe on Epicurious  for a gin toddy that might be good. I'm reading Treasure Island now, so I guess I'll be drinking lots and lots of rum soon.

Love it or hate it, Koyaanisqatsi is now available to stream for free on YouTube . The commercial breaks are jarring, but it's a great, free way to get your Philip Glass fix at work (or at home). It's also on Hulu .

In this short promotional video for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philip Glass talks a little bit about his increasing interest in  the classical-music tradition  as a source of inspiration: This has been going on for a while. Some people love his symphonies, string quartets, and the like; others don't. Back in the fall of 2010, Robert McDuffie toured the country with Glass's nod to Vivadli,  American Four Seasons . In the Chicago Tribune , John von Rhein called it ,   "a Glass half empty." Mike Paarlberg  loved the piece , mostly for not sounding like Koyaanisqatsi . Across the pond, two different reviewers for the same paper had very different opinions , as Richard Guerin points out. In the London Telegraph, Ivan Hewett hailed American Four Seasons as "classic art"; Michael White called it "unmitigated trash." Here's the last movement. Decide for yourself: