July 2011 Archives

Yesterday The New York Times ran one of its more mystifying pieces of music journalism, not to mention music journalism journalism. Headlined "Rock Chronicle Inspires Battle Over Its Legacy" (the url features the equally catchy tag "the-future-of-creem-magazine-is-complicated"). Not that I was sorry to see my old stomping ground, the anti-Rolling Stone yclept Creem, referenced positively in the newspaper of record. But having watched from afar for several decades as various fast talkers promised to revive the mag only to disappear into who knows what legal limbo without compensating the poor saps they'd convinced to give them work up front ("pay on publication," we've all heard that one), I couldn't see how this chapter of that story got on the first page of the arts section. Even crazier, it took up most of page seven, including a VERY LARGE portrait of fast talker Jason Turner, photographed on a West Village/Soho corner because his office is, to use his coy term, virtual. As the writing strongly implied ("coy" is the writer's word) and the reporting pretty much established without actually saying so, the chance Turner will ever oversee a new issue of Creem is--well, I'd be happy to bet him a grand against it if he can put cash up front in a properly administered escrow account.

The author is James C. McKinley Jr., who recently seems to have been augmenting Ben Sisario on the paper's pop news beat. I hadn't previously noticed his name, so I looked him up, and found an explanation of sorts. On July 15, McKinley picked up an AP item and wrote a brief story assertively and optimisitically headlined "Creem Magazine to Publish Again." I presume that to avoid running a correction, which wasn't quite justified, the Times instead gave this fantasy a full page of its precious real estate. C'est la vie. A few corrections are in order, however. As I hope someone has told the Times by now, Lester Bangs was not the first editor of Creem. Dave Marsh was. And though this is a somewhat more interpretive matter, Bangs never "threatened in print to stab James Taylor for writing touchy-feely songs." He merely described what was explicitly a fantasy (not in Creem, as it happens) in which he ran Taylor through with a broken Ripple bottle. That's different. Don't give McKinley any stories about hip-hop and violence, OK guys?

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als reviews the Broadway revival of "Master Class" (The New Yorker)
Laura Bleiberg on Miguel Gutierrez's "Heavens What Have I Done" (LA Weekly)
Larry Blumenfeld on jazz festival tensions in New York (The Village Voice)
Robert Christgau reviews four related music histories (Barnes and Noble Review)
Robert Christgau on Jill Scott, Dave Alvin, and Serengeti (Expert Witness)
Laura Collins-Hughes on the State Dept. embracing foreign artists (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews the RSC's "King Lear" (The Village Voice)
Will Hermes on Blake Shelton's "Red River Blue" LP (Rolling Stone) 
John Horn on producer Bret Saxon: unlucky or a fraud? (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Project Nim" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on who deserves Kennedy Center Honors (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on Lucian Freud (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein on "The Invisible Line" and "The Clamorgans" (Miller-McCune.com)
Julia M. Klein reviews Roy Rowan's "Never Too Late" (AARP.org)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Captain America: The First Avenger" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews the Aussie thriller "The Reef" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on who deserves Kennedy Center Honors (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on the death of Amy Winehouse (NPR)
Ann Powers on the Feelies (NPR)
Craig Seligman reviews Sapphire's "The Kid" (Bloomberg News)

And in print:

Mark Rozzo on a road trip in a 35-foot RV with his five-year-old daughter; a visit to the best restaurant in the world, El Bulli; and Amanda Foreman's "A World on Fire" (Town & Country)

When last I mentioned Ellen Willis's name in these precincts it was to announce and recommend the celebration of her rock criticism at NYU April 30, keyed to Out of the Vinyl Deeps, the collection edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz, which I also recommended at that time and recommend again right now. My plan at the time was to come home and post about the conference that very weekend. But that proved more difficult than I'd anticipated, for two reasons. First, the conference was less wonderful than I'd expected. Second, it was more momentous for me than I'd expected.

Still is, in fact, so I'll be brief on those two points before putting the crucial fact indicated in my title in the public record. In the matter of wonderful I'll just say that when I report on such ecumenical conferences I always tend to say the same thing--that the journalists smoked the academics. At this one, the academics were great: Willis's husband Stanley Aronowitz on her political ideology, Michael Berube on her aesthetic ideology, Daphne Brooks unearthing a photograph of a college-age Willis with Lorraine Hansberry in a valiant attempt to address the inconvenient fact that Willis's rock criticism was very light on African-American music, and ringer Scott McLemee of the National Book Critics Circle explaining why Willis's pop bent was preferable to Susan Sontag's elitism. With one major exception, the middle-aged journos were fine too. But the young critics Nona brought together were for the most part distressingly ignorant, and I'll leave it at that. I could write reams about any of this stuff, in part because rock criticism is a big deal to me and--to get to momentous--because Willis was such a major figure in my own life, as hours of discussion afterward made all too clear. But for now (and maybe forever) I'll let it be. Except for that one thing.

Nona W. A. got something wrong in her introduction, and now I see it popping up in reviews of Out of the Vinyl Deeps. I consider it important enough to have made it the focus of my own brief talk at the conference, so I want to repeat now: Ellen Willis's first piece of rock criticism, her monumental and still resonant essay on Bob Dylan, was not initially published in the nine-issue "counterculture" magazine Cheetah, where this budding left-feminist intellectual was second in command. It was first published in Commentary--as of late 1967, when it appeared, not yet fully transformed into the loathsome vehicle of neocon belligerence we have come to studiously ignore and/or know so well. I was involved in how this happened, but I'll let that be too. The reason I think it's important is that it illustrates how fluid the culture of the late '60s was. First, this young Marxist-libertarian hybrid is so palpably intelligent and as yet unformed that she not only gets an assignment from a Commentary all too aware that there's a youth culture out there it had better get a grip on, but then publishes an essay that compares Bob Dylan not, as Ellen used to say, to Robert Burns, as Commentary presumably hoped, but to Andy Warhol, an artist it is safe to guess everyone there loathed. Then, this cheesy "counterculture" magazine seeded with Diners Club money (credit cards! that might be an idea!) publishes a slightly revised version of an essay that had already appeared in one of America's most highbrow outlets.

I'll close by observing that it wasn't "magazines" that made these assignments. It was editors: first Marion Magid, who from what I read proved a total Podhoretz loyalist but had something resembling an open mind at the time, and then Larry Dietz, who had the chutzpah to hire this hyperintelligent woman (Willis, not Magid) when he inherited his cheesy-mag-he-tried-so-hard-to-make-not-cheesy from an earlier e-in-c who took too many drugs. When Dietz emailed me about Willis's book a month ago, I saw that even he had forgotten that the Dylan essay first surfaced in Commentary. But when I reminded him, he agreed that this was a telling and truly remarkable detail--the chopped walnut on the cheeseball, so to speak.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Francis Davis on Bill Dixon's "Intents and Purposes," reissued (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews the Broadway revival of "Master Class" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews Peter Brook's "A Magic Flute" (The Village Voice)
Sara Fishko on Marshall McLuhan at his centenary (WNYC)
Edward M. Gómez on Japanese modern-art studies (The Brooklyn Rail)
Matthew Gurewitsch discusses the nature of the libretto (Parnassus)
Matthew Gurewitsch reviews a Salzburg "Elektra" on DVD (Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on Carmageddon (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on design and security in D.C. (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "A Better Life" (The Washington Post)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell on racist fallout from Potter review (CinemaDope.com)
Karen Michel on the new documentary film, "Project Nim" (NPR)
Ann Powers on listening on long drives (NPR)
Ann Powers on Black Eyed Peas-inspired vitriol (NPR)
Marcia B. Siegel reviews Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot (The Boston Phoenix)

The San Francisco Bay Area is a major center for early music, but it's also, in the end, a rather tiny population cluster, compared to places like London and New York.  This means there are fewer musicians to fill the many available slots.  So when we Bay Areans attend baroque concerts, we are likely to see some of the same performers over and over, populating the stages of entirely different performing groups.  This is actually a good thing, in that it a) enables us to see our best performers repeatedly and b) gives a kind of intimate, homey quality to the various concerts.

Last night I attended the opening night concert of the American Bach Soloists' summer festival, now in its second year at the lovely main concert hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  It was an all-Bach program, but in particular, it was an all-chamber program, so there were never more than a handful of musicians on the stage at once.  These included Katherine Kyme, familiar to me mainly as one of the two violinists in the excellent New Esterhazy Quartet, but here appearing as a guest violist with the ABS; Tanya Tompkins, who is known throughout the Bay Area for her fine solo performances on the baroque cello and who normally performs with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; and the marvelous Elizabeth Blumenstock, for many years the lead violinist with Philharmonia Baroque and a frequent guest soloist at ABS concerts.

The first three pieces on the program were a sonata for violin, cello, and harpsichord; one of the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello; and a sonata for oboe and harpsichord.  All three were performed against a wooden screen that separated off the majority of the stage from the audience and made the subdued baroque sound completely audible.  (This was especially important in Tanya Tompkins's terrific but often very quiet performance of the Sixth Cello Suite, performed on an unusual five-string cello which was even smaller than the average baroque cello.)  All throughout these pieces, I was idly wondering how the stagehands were going to clear away the screen and add twenty seats in the brief moment between the penultimate piece on the program and the listed finale, which was the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. 

Well, they never did clear away the screen.  They simply moved the harpsichord back a bit and added stands for four standing and two sitting musicians.  The Brandenburg concerto was played with only seven performers: one violin soloist and one flute soloist, a harpsichord for continuous backup and one brief solo, and four intermittent backup musicians, who included one other violin, a viola, a cello, and a violone (which, to the amateur eye, closely resembled a double bass).  This meant that every musician's sound came through clearly and individually, so that you could choose to follow any performer's role and hear it as a single line of music before returning to the closely woven group sound that they were all creating.  It was almost like listening to a string quartet, but with the added richness of a full concerto.  Suddenly I realized why most previous live performances of the Brandenburgs have sounded muddy to me -- there were just too many instruments onstage!  In this seven-hundred seat hall, with its excellent acoustics and attentively silent audience, seven was the perfect number of players; and I felt, for once, as if I were getting the Bach masterpiece in exactly the intimate form it was meant to take.

The premiere of Alexei Ratmansky's two-act comic ballet, The Bright Stream, signaled that a new day had dawned for the Bolshoi Ballet and that Ratmansky was a major choreographer. That was 2003. By January 2004, Ratmansky was installed as Bolshoi artistic director. With five new and re-staged ballets during his tenure there, he delivered a shot of emergency adrenaline to the still-stodgy Moscow behemoth. This being the Bolshoi, however, a coterie of sullen dancers treated him and his new works as though they were foul-tasting medicine. Give us Spartacus, or give us death. Something like that.

Ratmansky's two-act Bright Stream is a reworked version of the "lost" 1935 original, which had choreography by Fyodor Lopukhov, a full-bodied score by Dmitri Shostakovich, and a story set on a idealized collective farm. Unfortunately for everyone involved in creating the original, Stalin deeply disapproved, and the ballet was banned. Shostakovich never wrote another ballet. Lopukhov was blacklisted for years, while poor librettist Adrian Piotrovsky was arrested and died in captivity.

Ratmansky kept the libretto and score, and simply (not so simple, really) added new steps. Southern Californians first saw it during the Bolshoi's 2005 U.S. tour. The Bright Stream was clever, funny, gentle and musically astute. It was contemporary, yet had a direct link with Russia's grand and complicated past.

Ratmansky left the Bolshoi for American Ballet Theatre in January 2009, but it didn't add Bright Stream to its repertory until earlier this year. The company opened at the LA Music Center last night (Thursday) and is performing it through Sunday, during the dreaded "carmageddon" weekend. More on that later.

Via regular Expert Witness commenter Cam Patterson I learned of this remarkable column by Greg Thomas, consisting mostly of a conversation with Gary Giddins. I know both these jazz critics, Gary very well and Greg as someone I edited a few times in the '90s and stay in touch with. But it's been a long time since I've discussed this topic with either of them. As is relevant to mention, Greg is black and Gary is white.

The subject of the column is why the Jazz Journalists Association has never given a Lifetime Achievement Award to an African-American writer. Giddins makes three obvious suggestions: Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Crouch. Murray is now 95 and reportedly very frail, and I suppose the JJA could complain that he was never really a journalist--at best, an essayist, tsk tsk. Also, he has very conservative tastes--basically never adjusted to bebop. Who cares? Stomping the Blues is a profound and generative work, and he's 95. Get on it. Similarly, one could observe that it's been a long time since Baraka wrote much music journalism (and whisper that in addition he's an ideologue whose ideas are often, tsk tsk, questionable, plus we think he doesn't respect us, boo hoo). Who cares? He's Amiri Baraka, for Chrissake. He researched Blues People in Room 315 of the NYPL 50 years ago, and yeah, he got stuff wrong--while starting a crucial conversation that reminded white admirers of African-American culture that black people might have something of their own to say about these things. He's no spring chicken either. Get on it. And then, the very next year, my always contentious and often irritating old pal and editee Crouch. A curmudgeon, a player, a pain in the ass. Who cares? I would hesitate to account even Giddins a more broadly influential jazz critic in this period unless somebody came up with a metric now unknown to me. Get on it.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Robert Christgau on Teddybears, Shabazz Palaces, et al (Expert Witness)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews David Henry Hwang (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold on David Esbjornson's "Measure for Measure" (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne visits the Cy Twombly Gallery (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on releasing "Zookeeper" into the wild (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on "Cameraman" and cinematography (The Washington Post)
Lawrence B. Johnson on the Detroit Symphony Orchestra exodus (The Detroit News)
Lawrence B. Johnson on Michael Tilson Thomas' DVD Mahler tribute (The Detroit News)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Horrible Bosses" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on tepid fare at Wolf Trap (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews Peter Brook's "Magic Flute" (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on the jazz band James Farm (NPR)
Ann Powers talks about Beyonce with Renee Montagne (NPR)
Craig Seligman reviews Rachel Shteir's "The Steal" (Bloomberg News)

At our house (thanks to Netflix), we have just bid a wistful farewell to the latest season of "Mad Men." Reluctant to exit its high-gloss world, I recently scrolled through the online summaries of past episodes. Turns out I had forgotten a lot, especially the many affairs Don Draper indulged in before winding up Season 4 with a proposal. (Remember Sally's teacher? I didn't.)

Alas, however enjoyable they may be, synopses are about as satisfying as a box of Dots. I would direct anyone suffering from "Mad Men" withdrawal to the Maple stories of John Updike.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on first encountering "Gone With the Wind" (The New Yorker)
Hilton Als on gay marriage and homogenization (The New Yorker)
Larry Blumenfeld on growing pains in New Orleans (The Village Voice)
Timothy Cahill on the short film "It Is All One Water" (Art & Document)
Timothy Cahill on Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (Art & Document)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews Charles Busch (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Charles Busch's bedroom as theater (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews "All's Well That Ends Well" in the park (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Unnatural Acts" at CSC (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on counterprogramming with "Larry Crowne" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on acquiring "Page One" at Sundance (The Washington Post)
Julie Lasky on children's Alvar Aalto interpretations (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell reviews Tom Hanks' "Larry Crowne" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews Michael Bay's "Transformers 3" (CinemaDope.com)
Renee Montagne interviews Monica Ali about her Diana novel, "Untold Story" (NPR)
Ann Powers on our passion for TV's singing competitions (NPR)
Ann Powers on Ashton Shepherd's album, "Where Country Grows" (NPR)
Laura Sydell on EMI cutting ASCAP out of digital-rights negotiations (NPR)