Prop 8 Trial Reënactment

There’s a group that has begun to produce a professionally-acted reenactment of the whole Prop 8 marriage trial (Perry v. Schwarzenegger) using official court transcripts as their “script”. This is after a live broadcast on YouTube and simulcasts at Federal courthouses around the 9th Circut (Portland, Seattle, LA, etc.) was blocked by the Supreme Court through appeal by the defendants (the pro-Proposition 8/anti-gay marriage crowd).  I think the very existence of this reënactment shows why the Supreme Court was on the wrong side of both public opinion and history with that decision. It’s also disastrous for anti-gay marriage groups.

It’s been 30 years since the creation of C-SPAN. There is plenty of back-door dealing and secrecy in politics, but people by and large expect that when the government is actually conducting its business, there will be a record and there will be audio and video. The courts have been largely absent from this shift in democracy, and there are some good reasons for that. I’m certainly not in favor of cameras in criminal trials, for example. I also understand the danger that, with greater access to courts, judges could become more partisan. But when cases are this important, –potentially creating a new application for constitutional rights– especially at the appellate level, I think it’s better for democracy that these trials be open.

For most of the court’s history, the barrier to this kind of transparency has been cost. Transcripts were costly, newspaper space was expensive, and the internet –a universal platform for nearly-free broadcasting– was science fiction. Times have changed, however, and the benefits of court camaraderie and objectivity don’t outweigh the secrecy that is unbecoming to a democracy.

The motion to block the YouTube broadcast was filed at the request of the defense. They were trying to protect their experts from public scrutiny, as well as shield memos from the Proposition 8 campaign from being read in court and available on YouTube. By blocking that broadcast, they created the need for this reenactment, and therefore lost all opportunity to appeal to the public through their legal counsel. I’m not suggesting that the reenactment team is intentionally or unintentionally trying to twist the transcript through their actors, but now the only video of the trial is that which is provided by supporters of the plaintiffs. In trying to hide, they lost all ability to spin the narrative.

Modest Mouse

There’s video up at the Disney Parks blog of a scoring session for one of their new live shows at California Adventure in Anaheim. It’s a reworked version of “Night on the Bare Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky, which was used for one of the segments in Fantasia. That piece has always fascinated me because of the dramatic difference between the circumstances in which it was written and the place it occupies now in our culture. The piece was reworked over and over again by Mussorgsky, and it was never played during his lifetime (in fact, the arrangement that is usually played in concert and in Fantasia was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov). He is remembered only for “Night…” and Pictures at an Exhibition, and yet the music of this fairly minor and obscure Russian composer is heavily promoted by the Walt Disney Corporation, and people who have never gone to a classical music concert can hum its theme. It’s deeply tragic that the composer of one of the most widely recognized piece of classical music never heard it performed.

There are other examples of this. “A Lover’s Concerto” was a hit in 1965 for the girl group The Toys (it was later recorded by The Supremes); it’s a fairly literal translation of the Minuet in G Major from the Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach. I was playing some Brahms, and one of my friends recognized the Violin Concerto from There Will Be Blood. I guess the strongest example is Also Sprach Zarathustra, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On a more current front, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has blogged (in a post focusing on David Byrne and Los Angeles Opera’s staging of The Ring Cycle) about a Bach 12-tone phrased used as the opening of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video.

New Gorillaz Track

Even though their marketing campaigns and style seem to be aimed at 13 year old nerds, I have a deep and abiding love for Gorillaz, and any Danger Mouse produced project in general. I seem to like most Damon Albarn projects as well, so perhaps it’s this convergence that inspires such devotion. What I like most about Danger Mouse, and a small number of other artists (the Andre 3000 side of Outkast comes to mind), is the futuristic way that his music sounds by virtue of it’s complete disregard of genre and style barriers. Songs like “Ghost Train”, “Dare” or Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” and “Gone Daddy Gone” are uncategorizable. Their music is permeated with energy, the styles that they borrow from are many, and every time you listen to it, there’s something you notice for the first time.

The first thing I noticed about “Stylo” (featuring Mos Def and Bobby Womack) the first single (or at least the first released track) from their new album, Plastic Beach, is that it’s relatively downtempo. On the last two albums, the first singles were epic, frenetic songs (“Clint Eastwood” and “19-2000″ from Gorillaz; “Feel Good, Inc.” and “D.A.R.E” from Demon Days), and while “Stylo” has a propulsive beat, it doesn’t command the same attention as those other singles.

The second thing that jumped out at me was that Damon Albarn is actually singing on the album. He seems to have abandoned the Garage Band megaphone distortion that was really effective on the Gorillaz albums, but is now becoming an Albarn cliche.

I was actually a little bored with the track, but that all changed when Bobby Womack started singing. There’s something about the soaring, powerful voice singing above an unchanging, metronomic beat that amplifies the drama of the vocal line, and also changes the beat into a subtle antagonist. It reminds me of both B.B. King’s sample in Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” and the sample of the preacher in “Help Me, Somebody” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. In that moment, it captures the simultaneously despairing and joyful pathos that I’ve come to associate with Gorillaz.

Confessions of a Boy Toy

There’s an ominous post up at Confessions of a Boy Toy titled “The Last Confession.” If this is the second-to-last post on that blog, I will be very sad. I can’t really defend the writing as anything but gay escapism, but I don’t think I need to. The sad fact is that most gay romance movies are really, really bad. When you think about how many movies are based around standard boy-meets-girl, “meet-cute” stories, it’s sad that most LGBT romances are so mediocre.

CoaBT fills that void for me, as well as the long tradition of gay literature. Literature is free to be erotic without being ponographic, and I will miss the Boy’s writing.

Google Wave “killer app”

I don’t want to come down too hard on Google Wave. It’s in alpha release, and the biggest problem with it is that people don’t have accounts. Nevertheless, I haven’t really been checking it because after a flurry of sandbox-like posts, there wasn’t much activity.

I decided to start a Wave with my LOST watching buddies, all of whom are all around the country, and it’s been working out so far. My plan is to set up a wave for every episode this season. My friends on the East coast can use it like a chat room while watching it live, and I can check it after I watch the episode and participate in the post-mortem, even if nobody is still online.

My Favorite Spam Message Ever

I have no idea where these spammers gleaned their text from, but it reads like avant garde, stream of conciousness prose poetry. I think it’s great.

Nk and yellow costumes, drinking champagne and eating sandwiches, and being waited upon by footmen in livery. It was the interval between two
events of the race meeting, and beyond the labyrinth of vehicles there
was a line of betting men in outer garments of blue silk and green
alpaca, standing on stools under huge umbrellas and calling the odds to
motley crowds of sweltering people on foot. “Men and women,” he began,
and five thousand faces seemed to rise at the sound of his voice. The
bookmakers kept up their nasal cries of “I lay on the field!” “Five
to-one bar one!” But the crowd turned and deserted them. “It’s the
Father,” “Father Storm,” the people said, with laughter and chuckling,
loose jests and some swearing, but they came up to him with one accord
until the space about, him, as far as to the roadway by which carriages
climbed the hill, was an unbroken pavement of rippling faces. “Good old
Father!” and then laughter. “What abart the end of the world, old gel?”
and then references to “the petticoats” and more laughter. “‘Ere, I’ll
‘ave five bob each way, Resurrection,” and shrieks of wilder laughter
still. The preacher stood for some moments silent and unshaken. Then the
quiet dignity of the man and the love of fair play in the crowd secured
him a hearing. He began amid general silence: “I don’t know if it is
contrary to regulations to stand here to speak, but I am risking that
for the urgency of the hour and message. Men and women, you are here
under false pretences. You pretend to yourselves and to each other that
you have come out of a love of sport, but you have not done so, and you
know.

Extremely Quick Book Reviews

The Children’s Book A.S. Byatt

Set in the years before World War I, this book chronicles the lives of a group of children related to Olive Wellwood, a children’s novelist. By turn family drama, historical fiction, and disturbing fantasy, this meaty book rewards perseverance and has one of the most emotional (and shocking) endings I’ve ever read.

Pros: The plot is extremely well crafted; only at the end did I understand some of the subtext of the beginning chapters. Again, one of the best endings I have ever read. Although it is not consistent, some of the characters are deeply and realistically developed. It never feels underwritten, everything gets enough space.

Cons: It’s a hefty 688 pages (2.2 pounds, according to Amazon) which isn’t bad in itself, but I feel like some sections could be tighter. The historical fiction is a little weak, there are a couple sections which read as a long list of names, places and events. Perhaps I would connect with it more if I were English.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian Sherman Alexie

This YA novel takes place during part of a school year as Arnold (Junior) Spirit transitions from his Washington reservation school to the white school in the nearby town. He has to deal with family, community, personal relationships, athletics, and good old-fashioned nerdidom.

Pros: Junior has a strong and memorable voice. The book reads quickly. Alexie does a good job of portraying the difficulties of code-switching between two different societies. Extremely funny.

Cons: Slightly underwritten. I wish that it was a little longer, or that Alexie had dug in a little further.

A Lost Lady Willa Cather

Somewhere in between Henry James’ Daisy Miller and The Sun Also Rises, this is a novella set in frontier Colorado at the turn of the century. Spanning several decades, it is a long examination of the relationship between a young frontier boy and his infatuation with the titular lady, the most elegant and glamorous resident of the small town. Once her husband dies, however, a different side of the woman emerges, one much different from the idealized lady that the boy –now a man– imagines…

Pros: Good quality prose. Cather presents two strong and opposed sides of the lady and pulls them off with great style. Very antiquated and un-PC presentations of Indians and black people are given, as far as I can tell, without a hint of irony or critique, but Cather does a good job of showing the beauty and simplicity of the frontier West before it was ‘ruined’ by development and increasing population. Answers the question of what Daisy Miller might have become had she lived, married an Army veteran and moved to the sticks.

Cons: Although the lady is well written, our protagonist and narrator is both kind of bland and also removed from the action for the second half of the novel. There is a case to be made for the silent protagonist, however it is not made here.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon

Christopher Boone is a 15 year old English autistic boy. He discovers a heinous crime, tries to solve it, and finds out that the roots of the crime extend further into his life than he bargained for.

Pros: Haddon uses interesting and unconventional prose to great effect, like Jonathan Safran Foer (as an example of another good writer. See also Dave Eggers, for bad). Christopher is a narrator unlike any other, and his inability to use metaphor or lie means that the plot is tight and also makes poignant moments feel more real when they could feel trite.

Cons: I wish it was longer, but only because it was so good. It’s probably best exactly like it is.

The Blind Side Michael Lewis

As I wrote earlier, I was somewhat bothered by the excerpt of this book in the New York Times Magazine. I thought I owed it to Michael Lewis to read the book. I was happily surprised to find that most of the concerns I had about the article are not found in the book. In fact, the portrayal of the Tuohys are much more nuanced than in the article, and the description of Oher’s time at his high school is far less of a Cinderella story. On the other hand, this does make the changes made for the movie that much more disgusting. Also missing from the article/movie are the great sections on the history of the left tackle position and football strategy which tie Oher’s story into the history of the game.

Pros: Amazing story dealt with fairly; journalistic style makes it a gripping read.

Cons: By the end of the book I was sick of the Tuohys, Ole Miss, people from Memphis, football people and Southerners. The edition I bought had a picture of Sandra Bullock on the cover. I still could have used more of this story from Michael’s perspective.

Old Man Writes About Sex!

I’m a big fan of Roger Ebert, both in his writing style and (most of the time) his opinions. His blog, which started about a year ago as post-stomach surgery therapy, is interesting and features very close interactions between Ebert and his peanut gallery.

Anyway, there’s an entertaining post up right now about Ebert’s fondness for making out and groping. If that doesn’t gross you out right away, it’s funny (don’t forget to check out the comments section where Ebert is trying to set up his lonely commenters together).

Vampire Weekend: Contra

I spent a whole lot of time last weekend defending Vampire Weekend’s debut album to my friends, so I was really hoping that their new album would be something special. I just finished listening to their second album, Contra, with mixed-to-disappointed feelings.

I had heard that this album was California influenced, and I really liked their stylish mixture of African rock ideas and American punk pop. I was interested to hear new musical ideas incorporated into their sound. Instead, it sounds to me like they’ve retrenched that musical diversity into more Graceland imitation. I started laughing when “White Sky” began to play because it sounded like a Paul Simon outtake.

I think there are some real energy problems with this album. Part of the reason Vampire Weekend was such a good album is that all of the tracks had tremendous internal, propulsive energy that sounded –to me– punk-ish. That’s why the sound felt new. Contra dials down that energy a bunch. “Cousins” was released as the first single; likely because it’s one of the few songs with the energy of the last album (unfortunately it’s a weak song). This has consequences. It changes the style of the band. What sounded like reinterpretation of African polyrhythm now sounds like flaccid imitation. It also changes my perception of the lyrics: while they may be not significantly different than those on VW, they sound significantly more twee. On the first album, you felt that the precious lyrics were delivered as much with a snarl as a smile.

It’s not all bad. The only songs that make me want to skip them are “Horchata” and “Cousins.” “Taxi Cab” is a beautiful, downtempo, reflective song that would have been a standout if it was the only one of its kind on the album.

I’m not willing to go so far as to believe that Vampire Weekend was a happy accident, but I would like to see them branch out into different material, or explore more complexities if they’ve decided to stick with the same idiom.

A note on the blog

I finally edited my About Me page with a self-interview ala David Byrne. One of the nice things about blogging at this point in my life is that both my opinions and my aspirations are in a state of flux. The old page was embarrassing me, though.

I also posted the beginnings of a guide for people interested in seriously studying classical music. The internet is a playground and a treasure chest filled with music and information. I’m hoping to beef it up as I come across and remember other resources, and if anybody has recommendations, they are welcome to comment.