Baby Music

There is a line of withering criticism in Harold Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers that has been scarred into my memory. Short and pungent, Schonberg's line writes off the entire twentieth century musical movement of minimalism—the movement that gave us Philip Glass and John Adams—as little more than (*gasp*) a "kind of baby music."

This line caused me instant grief and dismay, when I first read it. Because of course, I loved the first Philip Glass piece I ever heard, and have loved every other one since. How delightful!, I had thought. How palpably recognizable as music! If only all art compositions were this accessible. What an oasis we have here of simple repetitious pattern-making, after the great desert of 20th century atonal, twelve-tonal whatnot. 

I'm very angry about a beloved 1961 film

It is always an interesting experience to finally get around to seeing some famous, acclaimed, and beloved film and discover in the process how smug, awful, complacent, and dishonest it actually is. So it was with me turning for the first time to Blake Edwards' 1961 classic movie adaptation of the Truman Capote novella, with Audrey Hepburn, and with its heart-stabbing original musical number that brings unwilling tears to the eyes no matter how much one dislikes the rest of the film, and with very little else to recommend it. 

I'm not just talking here about the unwatchable racist and unfunny Mickey Rooney yellow-face scenes. Those are there, and they are just as terrible as one has heard, and they have already been justly criticized at length elsewhere; and anyways one might be able to suffer through them if there were something else in this movie that was tolerable to make up for them—as I fully thought and had been told there would be. There is not, as far as I can tell, apart perhaps from the inimitable transatlantic accent and rapid-fire diction of its heroine. 

Gaddis Annotations

As previously mentioned, I am making an attempt on the works of postmodern author William Gaddis of late, and—as forewarned in the previous post—next on my list was Gaddis' Carpenter's Gothic: his third novel, published in 1985, and thitherto his briefest. As others have noted, the book is a kind of condensation of the themes and obsessions that had appeared in his previous books (until, that is, these themes and obsessions were condensed over again in his posthumous Agapē Agape). 

I have not been tackling Gaddis's works in any kind of linear or chronological order—instead starting with his second novel J R, before moving on to his collected nonfiction, The Rush for Second Place, his short posthumous final novel, the aforementioned Agapē Agape, and coming round most recently to Carpenter's Gothic. 

Authors and Their Names

Authors and their names are confusing; no one would deny it. There's a Carver and a Coover, both of whose first names start with "R." There's a Joyce Kilmer, who wrote about trees, and a Joyce Cary, who wrote about the horse's mouth; and even though horses eat oats, neither of these individuals is Joyce Carol Oates. 

There's a Julian Barnes and a Nicholson Baker and a John Banville who will all be found rather close to one another on the shelf, at your local bookstore, and whose publication in later-20th century modern literary paperback format will fail to show much obvious visual grounds for differentiation. 

There's a Will Self, which sounds—and who sounds—like a Martin Amis character.

An exorcism

It was at some point in watching the images pour in from this weekend's MAGA protests in DC, reading about self-declared "Proud Boys" tear down and trample a Black Lives Matter sign, flashing each other three-fingered "white power" salutes along the way—any last flimsy pretense of there being a firewall between the President's MAGA movement and his most openly far-right, white supremacist supporters completely abandoned.... 

At some point in seeing this last most grotesque and dangerous mutation of the legendary Millennial unwillingness to grow up on display: these man-children who—as a friend of mine remarked with disbelief—"have named their group after a song that only appears in the Broadway version of the Disney Aladdin musical"... 

Be Secret and Exult/Mind the Merde

The other night, I happened to partake of a particularly delightful Vulture article by Rachel Handler, answering the questions that have crossed all our minds about the suddenly inescapable new series on streaming, Emily in Paris. The show—the latest from Sex and the City-creator Darren Star—has for whatever reason been aggressively marketed to me the last few months; each time I open Netflix its slick imagery and pastel colors confront me anew on the top banner. Either it's a demographic misfire, on the website's part, or it's a case of the algorithm knowing me better than I know myself—hard to say which. 

Probably the latter. Because, as much as I have managed not to watch the show, and promise myself I never will, it seems to have invaded my subconscious on the strength of silent imagery alone. I already found myself the other night waking from a particularly lucid nightmare—featuring me trapped in Paris, trying to buy something expensive at a clothing store, and discovering to my horror that my credit card had been declined. Whatever it is about this show that lodged in my brain, it is not something I have been able to assimilate to my conscious sense of self, but it appears to be potent nonetheless.