If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
PODCAST: Whit Stillman on ‘Metropolitan,’ a Christmas Movie (SONNY BUNCH, DEC 16, 2023, Bulwark Goes to Hollywood)
This week I’m thrilled to be joined by Whit Stillman, the director of, among other features, The Last Days of Disco, Barcelona, and Love and Friendship. He’s on the show today to discuss Metropolitan and the way it has been embraced as a classic Christmas movie, as well as the evolution of the indie film business over the last 40 years or so.
Santa Claus and Science: On imagination, faith, and the natural fancy of children (G. K. Chesterton, December 20, 1935, Commonweal)
Fourth, what do our great modern educationists, our great modern psychologists, our great makers of a new world, mean to do about the breach between the imagination and the reason, if only in the passage from the infant to the man? Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms of fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live; in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief?
The Spiritual Architecture of Handel’s “Messiah” (Paul Krause, 12/24/23, Voegelin View)
Classical music, by contrast, especially the Baroque style to which Handel belonged, is different. On this note, Gregory Athnos, the great music professor and conductor, offers readers an introductory overview of Handel’s greatest triumph.
Unlike the pop music that Scruton derides as distraction and not having much of a purpose beyond that, Athnos writes, “At the center of the [Baroque] doctrine was the belief that composer could create a piece of music capable of producing a particular and specific involuntary emption/spiritual response in their audience.” The transcendental feeling and experience we have listening to classical music is not accidental. It is intentional. What undergirded the Baroque spirit was an understanding that the beauty, power, and passion of music expressed and communicated deeply interior and spiritual truths to its audience. And this is exactly what Handel set out to achieve with the help of Charles Jennens in composing “Messiah.”
Soy Califa! On Dexter Gordon’s Life and Music: a review of Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon by Maxine Gordon (Alex Harvey, December 22, 2023, LA review of Books)
WHEN DEXTER GORDON played the role of Dale Turner, a fictional, self-destructive saxophonist living in Paris, for Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film Round Midnight, he drew on his experience as an African American jazz musician exiled to Europe. The emotional intensity of his performance gained Gordon an Oscar nomination, but it wasn’t straight autobiography. In the figure of Turner, Gordon created a composite persona, based on the stories of Black American artists, who had been marginalized in the United States and sought respite from the racism they had experienced. Writers such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes, along with jazz musicians like Sidney Bechet, Ben Webster, and Bud Powell, found not only deep respect for their artistic talent in Europe but also some refuge from white hostility. Gordon knew he had the ability and the chance to embody this experience in Round Midnight, as he acknowledged:
There was a sense of responsibility in this film. […] I felt like I represented all these hundreds of cats. Not that they’d all been to Europe, but they were all jazz musicians who’d paid their dues and got no admiration and got no remuneration. […] [W]e were able to enlarge the character of Dale Turner. There must have been 100 personalities in him. All my heroes.Round Midnight reads like a valedictory statement, since Gordon died only four years later. But the story of Dexter Gordon isn’t only that of a long career spent exploring jazz’s possibilities, or a matter of honoring an extraordinary generation of musicians. To mark the centenary year of this great Black musician, one who was formed and nurtured in Los Angeles’s thriving African American jazz community of the mid-20th century, it is important to affirm Gordon’s continuing relevance. His story goes to the heart of contemporary America and the way “it embraces and also pushes away brilliant creative Black people,” as Maxine Gordon, scholar and widow of the musician, puts it in her 2018 book Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon.
He also has a turn in the best Crime Story arc–Moulin Rouge–which has one of the greatest endings in tv history.
We Need To Make The Moral Case For Immigration: The Democrats are considering implementing Trumpian new immigration restrictions. This is utterly unacceptable and should shock the conscience. (Nathan J. Robinson, 12/18/23, Current Affairs)
Immigrants are often politically expendable; because they can’t vote, it’s easy for politicians to sacrifice them. And when there are waves of migrants to cities, it’s easy for politicians to demagogue on the issue and say: look at this disaster, this crisis, we must get rid of these people, we need to empower the state, we need to build a wall.
We need to fight this fear-mongering aggressively and to stand strong for the rights of our undocumented sisters and brothers. Bridges not walls. If it’s tough for cities to accommodate the influx of migrants, the solution isn’t to send those migrants back (they wouldn’t have risked the journey if they didn’t have good reason to leave). The solution is to figure out how to accommodate those migrants. In other words, let’s begin from the presumption that we are a humane country, a sanctuary that welcomes those in need. And let’s figure out how to best act on that principle. The policy response to new waves of migration should not be to try to stop it, but to make the process as smooth as possible for both the migrants themselves and the communities they join.
Plenty of Democrats will be all too happy to sell out immigrants. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, for instance, has supported new migration restrictions, declaring that he is “not a progressive.” (Previously he had declared: “I am a progressive.”) I have no doubt that Joe Biden will embrace Trump’s policies in the name of “compromise” (he previously kept Trump’s asylum restrictions in place, after all), and will help lay the groundwork for Trump’s massive arrest and deportation program during a second term. This should scare us, of course, but I also think we should not be hesitant to make the argument that restrictions on migration are morally the wrong way to deal with people “heading north to escape gang violence, poverty and natural disasters.” Let them in. At least 98 percent of Americans are immigrants or the descendents of immigrants. Many of those ancestors came at a time when there were no border restrictions at all, and anyone was invited in. We’re a richer country now than we ever were then, so there’s no reason we can’t integrate new people (nobody worries that we’re too “full” for people to have more babies, but immigrants are just “babies from elsewhere” and do not hurt the country just as having children doesn’t hurt the country). We should be a pro-immigrant country focused on legalizing the existing undocumented population (so they don’t have to live in constant fear) rather than finding ways to reduce the U.S. population through migration restrictions.
All Joe had to do was not be Donald and he couldn’t even manage that.
With ‘White Christmas,’ Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby helped make Christmas a holiday that all Americans could celebrate (Ray Rast, 12/19/23, The Conversation)
Berlin’s inspiration for the song came in 1937, when he spent Christmas in Beverly Hills. He was near the film studios where he worked but far from his wife, Ellin – a devout Catholic – and the New York City home in Manhattan where they had always celebrated the holiday with their three daughters.Being apart from Ellin that Christmas was particularly difficult: Their infant son had died on Dec. 26, 1928. Irving knew his wife would have to make the annual visit to their son’s grave by herself.
By 1940, Berlin had come up with his lyrics. In his Manhattan office, he sat at his piano and asked his arranger to take down the notes.
“Not only is it the best song I ever wrote,” he promised, “it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.”
Berlin had connected his lonesome Christmas to the broader turmoil of the time, including the outbreak of World War II and fraught debates about America’s role in the world.
This new song reflected his response: a dream of better times and places. It evoked a small town of yesteryear in which horse-drawn sleighs crossed freshly fallen snow. It also imagined a future in which dark days would be “merry and bright” once again.
This was a new kind of Christmas carol. It did not mention the birth of Jesus, angels or wise men – and it was a song that all Americans, including Jewish immigrants, could embrace.
Berlin soon took “White Christmas” back to Hollywood. He wanted it to appear in his newest musical, one that would tell the story of a retired singer whose hotel offered rooms and entertainment, but only on American holidays. He titled the film “Holiday Inn” and pitched it to Paramount Pictures, with Crosby as the lead.
PODCAST: Murder in Boston Podcast (HBO and The Boston Globe)
1989 Boston. The crack epidemic is raging, the murder rate soaring, and white flight has taken hold. Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol, are carjacked, drawn deep into a dangerous “inner city” neighborhood, and allegedly shot by a Black man. All of Boston – and the nation – is gripped by the hunt for the suspect. What follows will reveal truths about the city… and ourselves. Presented by The Boston Globe and HBO Documentary Films, Murder in Boston: The Untold Story of the Charles and Carol Stuart Shooting is hosted by Adrian Walker who, along with a team of Pulitzer-winning investigative reporters, unveils explosive new findings and change the narrative of a story long cemented in the city’s lore. The HBO Documentary Series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max starting December 4.
…we are still who Charles Stuart thought we were.
On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — A Landmark Book on Opera in Performance (Joe Horowitz, 8/26/2018, Arts Journal)
During the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, when classical music was a lot more robust than nowadays, High Fidelity was the American magazine of choice for lay connoisseurs and not a few professionals. Its opera expert, Conrad L. Osborne, stood apart. “C.L.O.” was self-evidently a polymath. His knowledge of singing was encyclopedic. He wrote about operas and their socio-cultural underpinnings with a comprehensive authority. As a prose stylist, he challenged comparisons to such quotable American music journalists as James Huneker and Virgil Thomson—yet was a more responsible, more sagacious adjudicator. In fact, his capacity to marry caustic dissidence with an inspiring capacity for empathy and high passion was a rare achievement.
Over the course of the 1980s, High Fidelity gradually disappeared, and so did C.L.O. He devoted his professional life to singing, acting and teaching. He also, in 1987, produced a prodigious comic novel, “O Paradiso,” dissecting the world of operatic performance from the inside out.Then, a year ago, he suddenly resurfaced as a blogger, at conradlosborne.com—a voice from the past. Incredibly, the seeming éminence grise of High Fidelity was revealed to have been a lad in his 30s. And now, in his 80s, he has produced his magnum opus, Opera as Opera: The State of the Art—788 large, densely printed pages, festooned with footnotes and endnotes. It is, without question, the most important book ever written in English about opera in performance. It is also a cri de coeur, documenting the devastation of a single precinct of Western high culture in modern and postmodern times.
Essentially, Tom Wolfe on opera.
MORE:
Interview: Why ‘Opera As Opera’ Author Conrad L. Osborne Asserts That Artform Is In Creative Decline (David Salazar, 12/23/18, OperaWire)
It all starts with the repertoire. Osborne posits that the main staples of the operatic canon start with the major works of Mozart and stretch through until the operas of Richard Strauss; he calls this the Extended 19th Century or “E-19 for short.” Osborne does note that many operas from before and after this period have become part of the repertoire, but in his view, these works are the ones that are part of the “renewable re-affirmability that sustain our operatic institutions.” Moreover, he notes that operas of this period showcase similarity of content in terms of the music, plot and themes they tell, even if there are marked differences of style throughout the period.In his view, there is a general “flight from E-19” with new operatic creators placing more emphasis on theory and philosophy with regard to how the artform is created, de-emphasizing the narrative roots that were at the core of major staples.
In musical terms, he points to the “atonalists and serialists, creating a whole new language that forbid diatonic melody and sought to express things in different way.”
The idea was taken up by the musical intellectuals, pedagogues, and institutions, leading to the idea that “simple, expressive melodies” were outdated for expressive purposes.
“And if you did [use melodies], then it had to be so harmonically disguised that the listener couldn’t pick up on it anyway,” he added.
“That’s a central problem as far as opera is concerned,” Osborne further opined. “The singing-actor is the center of the operatic experience and characters are expressed through their individual vocal achievements. If you don’t have melody to sing or take advantage of how the voice has been developed over 400 years or so of operatic history, you don’t have much of anything at the center of the form’s expressive possibilities.”
He noted that the result is opera getting built up of other things.
“Modernism is built up of materials and structure. The content is not the subject. The subject is the materials.”
He referenced the idea that in modern art, the subject of the painting is not what is being depicted, but the paint and canvas itself. In music, the harmonic structures, rhythm, and instrumental timbre are given preponderance over melody in modernism.
The decline of beauty: Why has the concept been rejected by the art world? (Pierre d’Alancaisez, 12/18/23, The Critic)
Ask the contestants of Family Fortunes about the purpose of art, and the concept of beauty is sure to top the list. A kindergartner, likewise, would display an instinctive understanding of the word. In exhibition writing and art criticism today, however, it is as though beauty never existed. Tate wouldn’t dare describe a painting as beautiful, and any artist trying to market their work in such terms would be cast out as an amateur. To speak about beauty today is to be reactionary, without the redemption once offered by thinkers like Roger Scruton. In contemporary art discourse, the concept of beauty is essentialist and deterministic and thus of no use.
In our time of general abolition, there may be convincing arguments for the museum’s war on old ideas. But, as the critic Dave Hickey noted already in the 1990s, beauty has been out of favour in the art school for so long that hardly anyone remembers why. Yet, even now, the assault on the beautiful continues. In The Cult of Beauty at London’s Wellcome Collection, beauty has a problem: we have been “obsessed” with it for over three centuries. From Nefertiti to TikTok, the exhibition questions “the influence of morality, status, health, age, race, and gender” on the notion of beauty before dismantling it to make way for a “more inclusive” version.
It is the morality they rebel against.
An Introduction to Vince Guaraldi, the Jazz Composer Who Created the Best Christmas Album Ever, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Open Culture, December 18th, 2023)
When A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired 58 years ago, few had any confidence that it would be a hit. Its story and animation, bare-bones even by the standards of mid-nineteen-sixties television, made a positive impression on neither CBS’ executives nor on many of the special’s own creators. They didn’t expect that this very simplicity would turn it into a perennial holiday favorite — nor, presumably, that its soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio would become one of the most beloved Christmas albums in existence. Now that we’re well into the season when the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas is heard every day in homes, cafés, and shopping malls all around the world, why not get an introduction to Guaraldi, the man and his music, from pop culture video essayist Matt Draper?