a fool in the forest

Cronenberg and Shore's Fly is Open

The opera adaptation of The Fly, last mentioned here on June 1, received its world premiere in Paris last night, ahead of its September U.S. premiere through Los Angeles Opera.  The Guardian has the most detailed English language report from the scene so far:

The illustrious Théâtre du Châtelet has witnessed an array of artistic endeavours in its time - it is where Stravinsky unveiled Pétrouchka to the world, and Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau's Parade received its world premiere.  Classical drama, light operetta, Russian ballet and even contemporary music have all played their part on its stage.

Body horror, however, has not.  Until now.  Last night an eclectic crowd of thousands gathered for a bizarre spectacle: the world premiere of David Cronenberg's operatic remake of The Fly. . . . [w]ith a score written by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore, an orchestra conducted by tenor Plácido Domingo, and Cronenberg himself directing . . . .

A substantial photo spread accompanying the story provides the first clear views of the tenorial nudity and grotesquery to which Los Angeles audiences can expect to be treated in September.  The Guardian piece is more report than review, but suggests the work was received with only modified rapture:

'Honestly, I'm not as enthusiastic as I'd expected to be.  It was a little static, a little heavy.  Some scenes were magnificent - others lacked rhythm,' said Marion Millet, a young opera fan.

Another, Pascal Aubry, agreed: 'I liked the singing, and direction was strong; but the music was a let-down,' he said. 'It was really lacking, more of a distraction than the music of an opera.'

In a similar vein, Le Monde in its July 4 edition does not rush to embrace Shore's score:

Mais Shore n'est pas Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), qui dans sa première carrière, en Autriche, avant celle de musicien de film pour Hollywood, était fêté comme un nouveau Mozart et dont l'opéra Die Tote Stadt (1920) est encore fréquemment représenté. Shore est peut-être plus proche de Bernard Herrmann (1911- 1915), le musicien d'Hitchcock, qui ne réussira pas totalement son passage au monde du lyrique avec ses Hauts de Hurlevent (1951), un opéra post-romantique aux proportions wagnériennes.

Shore se situe à un niveau d'inspiration bien moindre. Si son écriture est loin d'être aussi imbitable que celle, pour le concert, d'Ennio Morricone, le résultat sonne comme un devoir, pâteusement orchestré, couvrant souvent les voix, d'un élève moyennement doué d'Arnold Schoenberg.

[Rough translation:

But Shore's no Korngold, who was hailed in Austria as a new Mozart and whose opera Die Tote Stadt is frequently revived.  Shore is perhaps more like Herrmann, Hitchcock's favorite, who had less than total success with his post-romantic, Wagner-scaled Wuthering Heights.

Shore is less inspired.  If he is not so inappropriate in the concert hall as Morricone, the result is still something of a chore, his orchestrated chatter [?] sometimes covering the voices in the manner of a moderately gifted student of Schoenberg.]

Zut alors!  [Rough translation: Oh, snap!]

The official site for the Los Angeles Opera production has been updated since my last post.  It now includes a selection of new photos and production designs and a scene by scene synopsis of the grisly libretto.  The synopsis reveals that the story is told largely in flashback and that the chorus -- as Ghosts in the Machine -- does as promised sing "Help me, help me!" as the tale begins.  Single performance tickets are now available.

~~~

Illustration: "Intermezzo" by Flickr! user Selva, used under Creative Commons license.  Guardian link via Idolator.

They've Got an Uninfringeable Urgh! (Devo Makes Plans for "New Wave Nigel")

In April, during the most recent season of American Idol, McDonald's restaurants offered a series of product tie-in "Happy Meals" containing small toy figures representing various popular musical genres.  USA Today provided this description at the time:

None of the toys is patterned directly after a specific Idol, yet a couple of the names are oddly suggestive.  You'll pick 'em out -- the genre-specific lineup of toy characters comprises Disco Dave, Rockin' Riley, Lil' Hip Hop (surprised there isn't already a rapper by that name), Hippie Harmony, Country Clay, Soulful Selma, Punky Pete and New Wave Nigel.

Here are three of the figures -- Nigel, Selma and Pete -- courtesy of Flickr! user DaylandS:

Notice anything, hmmm, familiar about young Nigel? 

It is difficult to miss that his jumpsuit and his ziggurat-emulating head gear -- indeed, even his choice of fashionable eyewear -- resemble nothing so much as the ensembles commonly sported by the members of Akron, Ohio's gift to American music, Devo, two of whom are seen here courtesy of Flickr! user zioWoody:

Now, as you might suppose, those trademark Devo Energy Dome hats are, well, trademarked.  And copyrighted. 

And what do we do when we want to use someone else's trademarked and copyrighted work in a large scale product promotion? 

We ask and obtain permission, don't we?  We certainly do. 

Unless we are McDonald's. 

In which case, we can expect to find, as McDonald's has done, that the be-domed and bespectacled holders of the intellectual property rights in question will make a speedy transition from jumpsuits to lawsuits:

Devo bassist Gerald Casale -- who designed the trademarked energy dome headgear-- is quoted as saying, 'This New Wave Nigel doll that they've created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed, and it's copyrighted and trademarked.  We're in the midst of suing them . . . they didn't ask us anything.  Plus, we don't like McDonald's, and we don't like "American Idol", so we're doubly offended.'

None of the available reports sees fit to give more details of the litigation, such as identifying the court in which it has been filed, so I am unable to give you further details on the allegations or procedural status of the case.  Since making the statement quoted above, however, it seems that Gerry Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh and company have been directed by the Court to withhold comment until the case reaches its conclusion.

In the meantime, if you want a "New Wave Nigel" to call your own, there are still a handful of the figures available on eBay -- although in light of the latest $61M judgment Louis Vuitton obtained against eBay for serving as a conduit for counterfeit goods, who knows how long that will last?  (Of course, these aren't counterfeit fake Devo figures, they're real fake Devo figures.  So the cases are clearly distinguishable, are they not?  Discuss.)

Perhaps inspired by this litigation, Mark Mothersbaugh has created a limited edition image entitled "Devo and the Docket."  Only six signed and numbered originals exist.  Slightly more numerous but still limited (edition size < 100) is the genuine "Devo and the Docket" t-shirt.  It's what all the most nouvelle vague IP lawyers will be sporting this summer.

~~~

For further study:

• View Devo performing "Uncontrollable Urge" in both jumpsuited and Energy-Domed versions.

• So far as I can determine, Soulful Selma's geodesic hairstyle has not yet triggered an infringement action by the R. Buckminster Fuller estate.

Baby, Won't You Come On Back With Me to My Swingin' Legal Pad?

Via the New York Times by way of Idolator, it's:

• [Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics in Legal Writing, 64 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 531 (2007)

This ostensibly scholarly article by Alex B. Long, formerly of the Oklahoma City University School of Law, now of the University of Tennessee, examines at length -- well, exactly what the subtitle says it examines at length.  It includes a completely unscientific chart purporting to demonstrate that Bob Dylan is the most quoted songwriter in legal opinions and scholarship.  It also includes, at footnote 198, the only manifestation I have yet seen in a law review article of the idiomatic expression, "Buwah ha ha."

In this anecdote early in the piece, Justice Alito meets The Boss:

Aside from aiding a writer in the quest to communicate about a particular issue, the use of popular music may also humanize an individual in the eyes of others.  During the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings, for example, the news media enthusiastically reported that the conservative Alito was a fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Not willing to cede his blue collar bona fides to the likes of Republican appointee Alito, Senator Richard Durbin took things a step further by using a line from an interview with Springsteen against Alito:

They once asked [Springsteen]: How do you come up with the songs that you write and the characters that are in them?  And he said, I have a familiarity with the crushing hand of fate.  It's a great line. I want to ask you about the crushing hand of fate in several of your decisions.

The article concludes with an unexpected discussion of The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks."  "'Teenage Kicks'," observes the professor, "has universality and verisimilitude to burn, but it’s unlikely anyone is ever going to use it to advance any sort of argument in legal writing.  [Footnote 273: Other than me, I mean.]" 

Since Everybody Who Is Anybody -- blogospheric worthies the like of Harry at Crooked Timber and Ed. at Blawg Review -- has been linking to performances of the The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain over these past 48 hours, I will jump at this opening go there as well.  Ladies and gentlemen, the UOGB's rendition of the aforementioned "Teenage Kicks":

This is pretty good stuff, but it is as nothing compared to the Orchestra's brilliant rendition of David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" -- a song that goes uncited by Prof. Long, notwithstanding the lyric that advises us to "take a look at those law men beating up the wrong guy."

Catch a Waveform and You're Sitting on Top of the World

There are posts that get started but that slide into a state of anomie and incompleteness.  They sit round their blogospheric waiting room, waiting, until their author stumbles upon them again, asks brusquely what exactly they think they are doing cluttering up the joint in this fashion, and tosses them unceremoniously out into the twilight. 

This is such a post. 

Most of its content was compiled almost precisely one year ago, and has been loitering about ever since, tossing the occasional recriminating glance in my direction.  I refuse to bend to the conventional wisdom and peer pressure that would impose arbitrary and outmoded notions such as "timeliness" and "relevance" and "being remotely interesting to anyone but myself" as standards, so here we go.  These are the mostly music-related items that were catching my eye this time last year:

• The Believer offers the tale of Rick Wakeman and the mighty Birotron.  (Via the inexhaustible 3quarksdaily.)  That article led me eventually to the Streetly Electronics Mellotron Tape Library, your source for all things Mellotronic.  That site features an array of playable samples of Mellotron noises, famous and infamous, including one of my longtime favorites: the horrifying massed brass sound that opens Genesis' "Watcher of the Skies" -- "one of the choice numbers with which Mellotron Bores insist on depressing their audience".

• Theremins! 

This version compares well with the original.

Lovely to discover via the plainly visible logo in that video, that quality Theremins are manufactured by MOOG, itself the great original popularizer of electronic analog synthesis.  The Moog Theremin is not to be confused with the rare and exotic Uma Theremin.

• Via Said the Gramophone, Michael Barthel's exhaustive, insightful and highly amusing analysis of Leonard Cohen's  "Hallelujah" and exactly how the song -- especially in its Jeff Buckley incarnation, which itself is really a cover version of John Cale's cover version of Cohen's original -- became such an inescapable shorthand for melancholy sincerity.  Filmmakers are in this, as in so many things, the root cause of all our sorrows:

The first significant use of the song in a soundtrack was, somewhat logically, Cale's version in Basquiat (1996), followed by, totally illogically, Cale again in Shrek (2001).  While it seems clear that the gradual revision of the song is what made it appealing as a soundtrack device, it's also possible that when directors saw that the song was so potent, it could impart gravitas on a cartoon Ogre voiced by Mike Myers, [they realized as well that] it could make even the shallowest character seem tragic.

* * *

What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time.  Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement.  But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places.  In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."

There are useful charts, a video demonstration of the aforementioned "sad montage," and a delightful reimagining of the song as a sort of call-and-response beach blanket rhumba.

• Oh joy!  The Oxford American's annual Music Issue is was out [this time last summer], sporting a fine spooky cover photo of fine spooky Thelonius Monk.  Among the sample articles [still] available online:

• A profile of the MP3 blog-bundling site, Hype Machine.

• Everything (and more!) that you ever wanted to know about the process of recording Blonde on Blonde.

• Oh, sure: this Idolator post by Andy Beta arrives in the guise of a serious consideration of the film music of Toru Takemitsu, but you know and I know it's really just an excuse to post clips of some of the steamy bits from Woman in the Dunes.

This concludes today's rummaging though the lumber room.  Thank you.  Drive safely.  No, wait, I nearly forgot!  This just in:

im in ur yootoob, playing ur theremin

More Songs About Birding and Floods

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton"

Otherwise interesting people* -- presidential candidates of world historical importance, for instance -- often prove to have disappointingly pedestrian tastes in music.  On the other hand, musicians who have the good fortune to be interesting people* in their non-musical lives frequently make equally interesting music.  One such certainly is Jonathan Meiburg, leader of the band Shearwater, who when not writing, singing, recording, performing, etc., is a seriously well qualified ornithologist.

Birds, with much of the rest of the ancient and natural world, feature throughout Meiburg's work, from his band's seabird-derived name to song titles (e.g., "Fierce Little Lark") and album titles such as that of the freshly released Rook.

Musically, Rook picks up where the last Shearwater record, Palo Santo, left off.  I liked Palo Santo very much indeed back in 2006, but Rook is bidding fair to become an even bigger favorite.  Lyrically, Meiburg's songs remain steeped in the non-human parts of the natural world, but not in a sticky-sentimental way.  Perhaps I am only seeing this because I posted about him over the weekend, but there is something of William Blake running through many Shearwater songs: mankind as being in the world but not quite of it.  (Matador Records has posted the complete Rook lyrics [PDF, with sea monsters].)

Prior to the album's release, two officially sanctioned tracks were circulating fairly widely, including this vision of a planet suddenly and spontaneously unfeathered:

• Shearwater - Rooks [MP3]

On those same lines, Jonathan Meiburg's thoughts on the idea of the end of the world feature prominently in a Dallas Observer interview published today:

'I think the end of the world is mostly a fantasy that people have indulged in as a way of relief from what's actually going on, which is endless change without much of a beginning and without much of an end.  I think people long for an eschaton, some dramatic event that will end everything.  I don't think that's in fact what's gonna happen; I think things are just gonna keep changing.  And the record is, in some ways, a way of trying to address that and acknowledge that and, just for me, kind of come to terms with it.  Especially having worked on these studies in these really out-of-the-way places and seeing little brief glimpses of the world as it was before we were everywhere, eating everything.  And that world is almost gone, and it's gonna continue to disappear.'

Poof!

~~~

Also available: Five streaming selections from a mid-May Shearwater performance on the University of Minnesota's Radio K.  Of particular note is the song identified as "South Col," but which is not "South Col" (an instrumental) at all.  The song is actually "North Col," which otherwise appears only as a bonus track on the vinyl edition of Rook. The band's Radio K set also includes a fine performance of "The Snow Leopard," which with its perpetually-circling piano chord sequence is my current "first among equals" of Rook's songs.

Illustration: "Windswept rook" by Flickr! user foxypar4, used under Creative Commons license.

This post's title reference is explained, for all you young people, here.

~~~

*  No, I really can't use the phrase "interesting people" without immediately and reflexively thinking of this and this.  It's a generational thing, I think.

Drive-In Saturday:Cocteau D'Or

Shredded morsels of Luis Buñuel [Un chien andalou, L'Âge d'or] and Jean Cocteau [Le sang d'un poète] tossed in a piquant Gotan Project vinaigrette:

Via Yashar Ahad Saremi's Xuxanov, a weblog of which I would say more if only I could read the ancient and honored language in which most of it is written.

~~~

Recommended for the weekend:  If you are looking for some fine, free American music to download -- music fraught with sin, redemption, and recreational vehicles -- you can not do better than the recently posted Daytrotter session with Jim White, of whom I once wrote:

If Flannery O'Connor had a brother, and if Flannery O'Connor's brother had a band, then Flannery O'Connor's brother and his band would probably sound something like Jim White.

Scary Mouche, Scary Mouche!(Will You Do the Fandango?)

The world premiere of composer Howard Shore's opera adaptation of B-movie horror classic The Fly is set for July 2 at the Théâtre du Chatelet, Paris.  The libretto is by David Henry Hwang.  David Cronenberg will direct, with physical design being handled by much of the production team that collaborated on Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the film, for which Shore composed the score.  Placido Domingo conducts -- which is not necessarily the first choice on the list of things you want Placido Domingo to do, but by golly it's a free country.

Los Angeles Opera co-commissioned the work and will present the U.S. premiere in a series of performances beginning on September 7.  I am given to understand that the original plan was for Los Angeles to have had the World Premiere, this past season.  This did not occur.  You know how these things are.  Let's move on.

The production now boasts a stand-alone web presence at www.theflytheopera.com, including a promotional video -- with an actual MPAA "PG " rating attached, because parental guidance is so important in opera -- with plenty of commentary by Mr. Shore, smatterings of the music, glimpses of sinister scientific equipment of which no good can come, and the lead baritone or his equivalent doing some serious wire work, clambering about upside down and getting in touch with his inner insect. 

(There is a good quality streaming/podcast version of the same video at the Théâtre du Chatelet site as well, but some French person keeps talking over Howard Shore's explanations, for the better understanding of his fellow French persons who are not so fluent in English as they would have you believe.  Truth be told, the singers seem to be singing in French as well, in all versions of this video, even though the Los Angeles production will be in English.  It is all quite confusing, really.  It is, I submit, a good thing that Music is an International Language.)

This could be quite interesting, or an utter fiasco, or just "meh."  Time will tell me and, when the time is right, I will tell you.  Bzzz.

~~~

Photo: "Enter: the Fly" by Flickr! user Lawrence Whittemore, used under Creative Commons license.

~~~

Related in Name Only: Two years ago, I posted an MP3 of The Singleman Affair covering Tim Buckley's "Buzzin' Fly."   It's still here, and it's still good.

The Clockwork Plywood Music Box

Whether in Anthony Burgess's novel or, more viscerally, in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, the pivotal sequence in A Clockwork Orange occurs when young Alex DeLarge is forcibly reformed from his evil and ultraviolent ways by application of the "Ludovico Technique," in which he is compelled while drugged and with his eyes pried open to watch graphically horrific films in order (so the theory goes) to develop in him a deep aversion to the degenerate behavior they depict.  The "therapy" is difficult to distinguish from torture and the worst of it all, for Alex, is that much of the process is accompanied by the music of his beloved Ludwig van Beethoven, for which he also develops an embedded, soul-consuming revulsion.

Another Alex, the New Yorker's Alex Ross in an online exclusive entitled "Futility Music," writes today on the uses and abuses of music as a tool of interrogation or even, depending on where the definitional lines get drawn, of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the detention facilities at Guantánamo and elsewhere:

In Errol Morris’s documentary 'Standard Operating Procedure‚' an American soldier talks about employing music as a means of breaking down the resistance of enemy combatants during interrogations.  They can withstand 'Hip Hop Hooray' and 'Enter Sandman‚' he says, but not country music.  Most audiences will laugh at the line, but may check themselves mid-chuckle, wondering what it means that Americans are deploying their favorite music as a way of tormenting people of another culture.

The relatively brief piece is worth reading in its entirety, as Ross does a reliably fine job of placing the U.S. government's current use of music as a tool of policy and coercion into a broader historical context.  Two of the links incorporated in the article also warrant following:

• Professor Suzanne Cusick's article in Cambridge University's Journal of the Society for American Music, based on first-person accounts of the interrogators and the interrogated, detailing the workings of the U.S. "music program."  [PDF version here.]

• World ORT's very thorough, and deeply deeply sad, site surveying Music in the Camps during the Holocaust. 
  
  • From that site: the page devoted to Victor Ullman, whose The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug) was featured this season in Los Angeles Opera's "Recovered Voices" project.

Memorial

The Wife of the Soldier
Bertolt Brecht

What did the wife of the soldier get
From the ancient city of Prague?
From Prague she got the linen shirt
It matched her skirt did the linen shirt
That she got from the city of Prague

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Brussels, the Belgian town?
From Brussels she got the delicate lace
Oh! the charm and the grace of the delicate lace
That she got from the Belgian town

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Paris, the city of light?
From Paris she got the silken dress
Oh! to possess the silken dress
That she got from the city of light

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Libya's desert sands?
From Libya the little charm
Around her arm she wore the charm
That she got from the desert sands

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Russia's distant steppes?
From Russia she got the widow's veil
And the end of the tale is the widow's veil
That she got from the distant steppes

~~~

Photo: South Boston War Memorial by Flickr! user Joe Dunckley, used under Creative Commons License.

~~~

If You Study the Statistics and Heuristics of the Mystics You Will Find That Their Minds Rarely Move in a Line

Since I mentioned him in yesterday's Erik Satie post, it is fitting that I should also mention that Brian Eno [in full, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno] had a recent and notable birthday: his 60th, on May 15. 

• A lovely little profile from the Independent can be read here. 

• In Chicago, they baked him a cake:

For my part, I take this as an excuse to post some performances of Brian Eno tunes by persons other than Brian Eno -- a man who is himself distinctly Other in many ways.

To begin, Jonathan Meiberg and Shearwater have been rumored to perform a steamy live version of "Baby's On Fire" (from Eno's classic Here Come the Warm Jets) but I have never found a recording to prove it.  There is, however, video evidence available from a performance in Chicago.  The audio quality is not the best, but the proper spirit is certainly observable.  I particularly like the use of the bowed upright bass to provide the necessary thrumming drone beneath it all:

Compare and contrast: Marc Almond (Soft Cell) performs a dance club version of the same song.  This is Wrong in nearly every possible way, and I do not endorse Reject and Denounce it:

Sean Moeller and company at Daytrotter are the source for two more live Eno covers. 

• First, Chicago-based Manishevitz, a band that has long carried its Eno-era Roxy Music influences with pride, performs "King's Lead Hat" -- everyone knows that the song title is an anagram for "Talking Heads," right? -- from Before and After Science:

• Manishevitz [on Daytrotter] - King's Lead Hat [MP3 link]

• Second, something rather more unusual: a cover version of a Brian Eno instrumental.  Uploaded just a few days ago, Montreal's Islands perform "The Big Ship," a piece I have always liked from Another Green World:

• Islands [on Daytrotter] - The Big Ship [MP3 link]

Happy birthday, Bre'r Eno.

~~~

Photo Credit: "Brian Eno's Birthday Cake" by Flickr! user chicagopublicradio, used under Creative Commons license.