funny things about the em dash

according to “the elements of typographic style” says this about the em dash:

“belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.”

now i’m wondering about victorian typography.

nico muhly, doveman, sam amidon and nadia sirota at le poisson rouge

near the end of the first half of last night’s performance, as he was fiddling around again–adjusting instruments and himself, nico muhly commented on the critics’ obsession with categorizing his music as classical, or not. if there is an arctic breeze blowing on your sheet music while you play, he said, it is not classical music. so, it is not, he said.

there is the expertise and the knowledge of classical (and medieval) music. he creates a classical context. his technical skill, which is apparent immediately even from the way he touches the keyboard(s). if a novelist referred to shakespeare, homer and virginia woolf while constructing an elaborate narrative out of complicated, language full of meaning, that novelist would be literary. nico muhly is a classical composer, in that sense.

what i think (and you didn’t even give me two cents, although i’ll take them if offered) is that the performance baffles everyone.

after the break, muhly and sirota came back to play piece written for her (viola)(or maybe it was after they came back again, post-doveman solo), and muhly told us (the audience) that someone asked him if he was wearing a cape (liberace!) and he answered it wasn’t a cape, it was a RECTANGLE of FABRIC, and he liked it very much. there was this ease, some showmanship (liberace! again), this chumminess (so charming) between all the musicians that was very unlike the formal presentation of most classical music. sam amidon (my new favorite voice–raw and sweet) also told a funny story about a clap-on dinosaur, but then he was much folkier, in that he had a “twang” and he told narrative stories in a fairly straightforward manner (very american and accessible of him).

what i remember from an early review i read of his music:  the critic wanted to predict that muhly would have a long career of large classical proportions as long as he lost (in essence. i forget the exact words) the histrionics. the comfortability of his performances, then, has unsettled. why is that? to be classical, to fit into that category, requires the performer to follow a certain etiquette? then all the loftiest arts are the most formally conventional? (haven’t we overturned that one? do we need to keep overturning that one?) i think muhly thinks this is what is classical music too.

then i thought about my favorite performances (music):

1. gogol bordello. brings the circus to you.

2. stephin merritt. like the unicorn in a swiftly tilting planet. opens his mouth and music comes out. a human pipe organ (even if he did insult one of my friend’s bands and a twee showcase years ago. he could’ve left, instead he made them very very late. this makes enjoying him my guiltiest musical pleasure.)

3. einsturzende neubauten. like watching boys busily playing on the playground.

4. belle and sebastian. shockingly musically complex, but sounds so simple recorded.

5. laurie anderson. because she was first. i was in high school and went with a random guy, who i never saw again (but i cut his hair in my bathroom before the show. i cut a stranger’s hair and then saw laurie anderson with him. i wonder where he is now?) i had not thought of the performance of music as something that was being worked out in front of me before–it was just a live version (and not a good one without all the electronic smoothing) of the recording. not after anderson. i wish i could go back and see the sugarcubes when i was 16 again, knowing that.

6. the boredoms. more ecstatic energy on one stage than i have seen before or since.

but he really is not a pop musician either, though the performance was more pop than classical. his music is not only technically complex and situated in relation to other classical music, it dealt with subject matter other than cute boys and girls, paying the rent, sexxxxx, self-involved misery or any other popular subject matter, but instead with more universal and existential concerns. maybe. i liked best (i think. it’s a blur of aural pleasure.) the last piece, which was about a story muhly’s parents told to him at bedtime when he was young–one that terrified him and has lingered on. it’s something that shaped him, this story, and he reshaped it into a stormy and sad piece for us. how personal mythology shapes cultural mythology (the culture of this kind of music listener?). there were also the piece about or for couple who get married and move away from new york (it’s true and strange. is new york then just the modern equivalent of a finishing school. we all come here to learn how to be smart and witty and cultured and then get married and move to the suburbs/ruburbs to have a house, kids and dinner parties?) a more “adult” subject? but then sex is also an adult topic, so i am only revealing my own snobbery. but still.

i prefer not to make predictive statements, but i am pleased to see what i think is a period of performative creativity all over the place.

i’ll add in links later.

l’haine

i was talking about this film again yesterday and got a little thrill again. it is so very expressive of desperation and youthful wistfulness and finally, inescapability. the three lead actors are vincent cassel, hubert kounde, and said taghmaoui. they are three young men in a housing project just outside of paris who are reacting to the beating of their friend by the police. they are, essentially, trying to make something different happen. i cannot say enough that this film is so worth watching.

i came to this film entirely because i have admired vincent cassel since “read my lips.” (and a quick aside to say that the director, jaques audiard, also made “the beat that my heart skipped”, which is also worth seeing.) he’s excellent at playing characters who are both cruel and falliable, human. now i will be looking for more of his films.

hubert kounde was the doctor in “the constant gardener” and coined the word “parkour“. a performance of which can now be seen in car commercials on television. urban restlessness and invention.

back to the film–another adjunct where i teach uses “crash” to illustrate aspects of post-colonialism in her composition class (ethnic diversity, racism, class and so on.) a far inferior film. we discussed the relative merits of exposing college freshmen to difficult foreign films that may be more artistically beautiful versus domestic films which may more effectively raise the issues we wish to discuss. i suggested that she see l’haine, and i would always try for the more difficult film first. (i did screen “the gleaners and i” by agnes varda in a freshman composition course. i forget the themes i was considering. see varda’s “cleo from 5 to 7″ if you’ve never.)

this is too many digressions, even for me.

this is charming

telescopic text.

you have to go to this page….

i miss spain.

lorca.

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
Y el caballo en la montaña.

a sore shoulder

a subject that interest me–how bodily feeling is attached to emotional feeling. i don’t mean the direction relationship between, for example, physical pain and emotional pain (my shoulder aches and i am faintly anxious) but in less obvious, or more surprising ways. does manipulating the body (myself or another person) draw out a memory?

link to this week’s “speaking of faith” with eckhart tolle. he speaks about something he calls the “pain body.” i am curious, but also skeptical. inevitable, i am always skeptical of anyone who professes knowledge of how another person’s mental landscape is formed and how it changes. i would only speak for myself.

i have been meaning to read “the body in pain” by elaine scarry. since i have just finished the delicious “ship of fools” by katherine ann porter, perhaps i will actually read scarry’s book.

not that he looks like he is in pain, but john coplan’s self-portraits impressed me immediately as revealing something truthful about the body and consciousness. maybe i was just started because he’s old (i hope i am not so obvious.)

i have also

I, now thirty-seven years old

in perfect health begin
Hoping to cease not till death.

thinking about

these poems:

mark strand “keeping things whole“

may swenson “birthday”

h.d. “heat“

and

john keats “ode on melancholy“

there is something about absence or loss in each, but i am still working with them. what am i missing? grapes? voids? that the presence of one thing either highlights or obscures another? relations between things. joy or pleasure in the presence of loss or sadness? how do i make this clearer, for freshmen?

The Elephant in the Village of the Blind

I am, at the suggestion of my mentor but not without resistance, reading The Norton Anthology of Literature in preparation for the English specific GRE. The first story in the anthology is “The Elephant in the Village of the Blind” and, when i read it, i realized that

Letter on the Blind for Those Who See by Javier Tellez, which I cited as one of my favorite pieces in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is an interpretation of the same story. Of course, once I went to the Whitney’s page on Tellez, I saw that I could have known this before if I had followed my admiration with curiosity.

I will, however, choose to see this: A good artist can provide a good story in any medium. And, I can recognize a good story when I see one–maybe it is the right decision to pursue a phd in literature. (Always equivocating.)