Music in the park

Classical music of all kinds nowadays is supposedly elitest.  But chamber music is the elite of the elite, often shunned even by those who may enjoy a Beethoven symphony or a Strauss tone poem.

The Seattle Chamber Music Society performs both a summer and a winter season for those who enjoy "that sort of thing."  Its summer season, concluding this week, consists of twelve chamber concerts, performed over a four week period in the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall.  Tickets are $48, considerably more than a movie or a baseball game or other form of entertainment.  Even so, most or all performances are sold out.

But the Society also performs an occasional, free outdoor performance.  Tonight was such a night, and a beautifully warm and balmy night it was.  The concert took place in the outdoor theater area of Volunteer Park.  The area was crowded with viewers -- often barefoot and in shorts, sitting on blankets and camp chairs, sometimes eating picnics while they listened.  They didn't find themselves patronized by small orchestral versions of the William Tell Overture or the Nutcracker Suite.  Two distinct quintets of performers played meatier stuff -- Mozart's Clarinet Quintet and Beethoven's String Quartet in C major.

Because the performance was outdoors, amplification was necessary.  Obviously the sound lacks the quality of an indoor performance in a hall with excellent acoustics.  But the sound quality was quite good under the circumstances.

The crowd was hushed and attentive, even rapt.  Some of the younger children were running around the fringes of the audience, but no one talked, no one laughed, no one (so far as I could tell) texted or emailed, no one even chewed loudly.  It was an excellent audience for two excellent, well-received performances.

So much for "elitism."  Chamber music may not be to everyone's taste, but given the opportunity many will willingly listen and enjoy it, especially in an informal setting.  Thanks to the SCMS for giving us this opportunity.

Looking back

Thomas Cole: "Voyage of Life"

I've held seven American passports in my life.  That's not quite as bad as it sounds; passports used to be valid for shorter periods than they are now.  Still, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my first passport at the age of 20.

Some author -- I wish I remember who -- wrote that few things are so depressing to an older person as to examine and compare each of his passport photos, studying them in chronological order.  Yup -- been there, done that.  It ain't pretty.

I was reminded of my passport photos -- although as documentation of the process of growing up, rather than breaking down -- when I saw Richard Linklater's film Boyhood this past weekend.  With amazing persistence, he filmed his movie over a twelve year period, while his star, Ellar Coltrane, aged from 6 to 18.  The boy's aging is seamless.  As one scene moves to the next, Ellar gradually grows older.  All his life, Ellar will have that movie as the ultimate in home movies of his childhood -- a more sophisticated evidence of the aging process than is my succession of passport photos.

And -- totally unrelated causally to my viewing of Boyhood on Friday -- I've spent this weekend reviewing decades of my photographic slides, posting representative samples on Facebook.  A week ago, I ordered a scanner to digitalize slides, and it arrived on Friday.  Having a new toy has filled my life with new purpose, you betcha!  At least until I get bored playing with it.

In any event, posting slides taken over the decades -- but mostly during my twenties, thirties and forties -- has given me another form of the Boyhood "passage of years" experience.  Fortunately for my viewers, most of the photos aren't of me.  Many are of friends with whom I've traveled and hiked.  Many also are of relatives as small children, relatives who have since grown up into parents who have their own pages on Facebook.  Many of the photos, sadly, are of relatives who are no longer with us. 

Regardless of each photo's subject matter, the swift passage of time is an obvious, if unintended, subtext to my Facebook gallery.

But I'm not depressed.  I enjoy reviewing my photos, sharing them on Facebook, and reading the comments they elicit.  Other people often see different things in photos from those you, the photographer, see.  And even if the changes to myself and to my friends aren't always encouraging (or flattering), they're certainly always interesting.  If time is a rapidly flowing river, which we navigate as we head for the open sea, it would be a waste to lock ourselves in our stateroom, refusing to observe how the scenery changes as we pass through it.

As any traveler recognizes as he mulls over his travels -- there's no such thing as a "bad trip," even when the destination is disappointing.  All travel is fascinating.  And especially, the great voyage of life itself.

"Horrendous brutality"

The State of Arizona took nearly two hours to kill convicted murderer Joseph Wood by a combination of drugs that were never intended as agents for human extermination.  The "botched" execution, if that's how it can be described, most probably marks but one more step along the path to eventual abolition of the death penalty.

Alex Kozinski, the conservative chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a well-publicized dissenting opinion to an order denying a procedural motion, ignored the specific legal issue before the court and delivered a philosophical dissertation on the nature of the death penalty itself:

Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful—like something any one of us might experience in our final moments.  [citations omitted]  But executions are, in fact, nothing like that.
They are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality.  Nor should it.  If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.
If some states and the federal government wish to continue carrying out the death penalty, they must turn away from this misguided path and return to more primitive—and foolproof—methods of execution.  The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos.  And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps.  The firing squad strikes me as the most promising.  Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time.  There are plenty of people employed by the state who can pull the trigger and have the training to aim true.  The weapons and ammunition are bought by the state in massive quantities for law enforcement purposes, so it would be impossible to interdict the supply.  And nobody can argue that the weapons are put to a purpose for which they were not intended: firearms have no purpose other than destroying their targets.  Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood.  If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.

Judge Kozinski states eloquently the mental processes of those supporting the death penalty. 

The traditional reasons given for criminal punishment, including the death penalty, are:
1.  Retribution
2.  Deterrence
3.  Incapacitation
4.  Rehabilitation
Studies have shown that the death penalty doesn't deter.  It obviously can't rehabilitate.  It certainly does incapacitate, but so does life imprisonment without possibility of parole.  This leaves retribution as the sole objective.

Judge Kozinski may (or may not) be hoping that his vivid description of legal killings -- "the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad" -- will crystalize in the public mind exactly what executions do, and thus lead to public revulsion.

Maybe.  But every time someone is arrested for murder, or even for much lesser offenses, I see an outpouring of on-line sentiment for punishments far more exciting and gruesome than death by firing squad.  "Death is too good for him/her," is the predominant theme.  If the accused is a young male, one commentator after another rejoices over the possibility that the accused will be subjected to repeated rapes once he's inside prison walls.  For sexual offenses, castrations in novel and blood-curdling fashions are strenuously and lovingly recommended.

Punishment by the state was originally designed as a substitute for private "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" reprisals by the victim's family. These reprisals often led to lengthy blood feuds that interfered with the king's desire for a stable civil society.  The only legitimate justification for preserving the death penalty, in my mind, would be an analogous attempt to satisfy the overwhelming desire for revenge represented by these disembodied internet voices, voices that howl for ever more blood and pain and long, lingering deaths.

But I suspect that these internet voices represent a small but noisy subset of the entire population.  I hope so.  I would be nervous if I felt I were rubbing shoulders daily with the shuffling zombies from which these voices seem to emanate.

The death penalty serves no legitimate purpose in a civilized society.  Few countries that we consider "developed" still feel a need for capital punishment.  Even in America, it is only in certain states -- states whose identity you can predict without much thought -- that the death penalty remains popular and frequently used.  We don't need to submit to the peculiar -- in every sense of the word -- tastes of those elements of society.

"With Aspect Stern and Gloomy Stride"

On Friday, a friend and I attended the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society's production of The Mikado.  The Society has produced a G&S comic opera each year since 1955.  Of the seventeen operas, The Mikado has been the most produced; this year's was their tenth production.

This year's production was perhaps the best and most enjoyable I've ever seen done -- of The Mikado or of any of the other works in the G&S canon.  The singing was excellent, the acting hysterically funny, and the staging beautiful and imaginative.  The cast, director, and orchestra received a standing ovation.  Everyone left smiling and talking happily.

But not "everyone," apparently.  On Monday, the Seattle Times carried a lead article by Sharon Pian Chan on its Opinion page.  The article was entitled "Yellowface in your face."

Ms. Chan compares the opera's use of white players to play ridiculous Japanese characters with allowing a white actor to portray a black character  "with shoe polish smeared all over his face."  She objects to black wigs and white face powder, bowing and shuffling, and fans a-fluttering.

"The Mikado" opens old wounds and resurrects pejorative stereotypes.

The caricature of Japanese people as strange and barbarous was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

With all due respect to Ms. Chan's sensitivities, and with due respect for the painful fact that Japanese-Americans living in  the Seattle area were major victims of the World War II internment -- someone needs to get a grip.  And a sense of humor, which is another way of saying "a sense of proportion."

As the column writer herself observes, W. S. Gilbert's libretto was intended as a pointed satire of political and social foibles in Victorian England.  Mr. Gilbert had never visited Japan.  Both he and his audience would have considered any claim that The Mikado was an effort to present an accurate portrayal of tyranny in then-contemporary Japan to be every bit as absurd as a claim that Shakespeare's The Tempest was an attempt to illustrate the difficulties facing poor souls shipwrecked on Bermuda.

Gilbert's Japan was a fairytale setting, just as fanciful as the Black Forest settings in the Grimm's fairy tales.  The faux-Japanese setting looks like a fairy tale world, and is received by the audience as a fairy tale world.  This production even incorporates a line in the traditionally improvised patter, "I've Got a Little List," that observes the absurdity of American actors with fake British accents, pretending they are Japanese.

Asian-Americans may still face problems in America, but those problems have nothing to do with a perception that they are "strange and barbarous."  A more serious problem may be one once shared by American Jews -- a concern by universities that they are being offered a greatly disproportionate percentage of freshman admissions.  This is a fairly "high class" problem, one not shared by "strange and barbarous" peoples.

As one re-reads the entire Chan article, one begins to suspect that alleged slander of the Japanese isn't her real concern.  She suggests that the Society work with local Asian-American theater groups to "re-interpret" and -- presumably -- supply the cast for The Mikado.

We are beyond the point, I like to feel, where blacks and Asians are unable to perform white parts.  I recall, as just one example, that young boys of all races have performed the title role in the Broadway production of Billy Elliot -- the story of a Geordie-accented boy in County Durham.  It's a little late in the day to be upset by white actors portraying Asian characters -- or who use makeup in so doing.

Go see The Mikado for yourselves.  Enjoy it and don't feel guilty.  You aren't being racists in so doing.

Once was enough

So many bright, young, hopeful faces! 

As I walked across campus this morning -- one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation -- I luxuriated in the relatively calm and relaxed ambiance of the summer quarter.  Plenty of summer college students, but in nowhere near the numbers seen during the normal academic year.

More noticeable than enrolled students were their even younger peers, kids gathered in groups, or walking with parents, or out on their own -- singly or in pairs.  They're recognizable, even apart from their obvious youth, by the excitement and curiosity on their faces. 

Who are they, I wonder?  Most, perhaps, are newly admitted students, already visiting the U Dub to get oriented for fall quarter.  Some may be the happy beneficiaries of "thick envelopes" from several colleges -- doing a little comparison shopping before making a decision.  Many are still younger -- high school or even middle school students -- brought by parents or as part of school groups.

Do I envy them?  Of course.  I envy them the way I envy a traveler I see setting out on a new journey.  So many experiences lie ahead; so many interesting things to learn.  And, of course, I envy their unthinking confidence that a nearly infinite number of days and years lie ahead of them, time to accomplish all their dreams, time to waste if they choose, with infinite time still to spare.

Would I trade places with them?  A difficult question, because I recognize how their apparent bliss can deceive.  Recall what it was like to be 18 years old.  Or 22.  Yes, you had the entire world open before you, and seemingly limitless time to work your will upon that world.  But what was it you wanted to do?  And how did you go about doing it?

I struggled with these questions longer than most, but they are questions most of us struggled with to some extent.  The curse of having heard teachers, year after year, speak of your "great potential."  But potential to do what?  How does an 18-year-old assert the self-control necessary to focus on a single objective, when he can't decide whether the objective is worth the effort required to attain it.  Or whether he, whatever his perceived "great potential," has the actual ability to attain it.

Especially, now that he finds himself in college and surrounded by clever classmates, most of  whom also have "great potential."

My fear -- and I suspect most of my classmates' fear -- was that I would totally fail to live up to that "great potential" -- in the eyes of others or, even worse, in my own eyes.  I was haunted by the words of Holden Caulfield's teacher, in Catcher in the Rye:

“I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . . Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.

"It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?”

Oh, Holden knew what he was driving at, all right, and so did I.  He was attempting to draw a picture of the secular hell of wasted lives, the hell to which young guys who didn't live up to their "great potential" were presumably assigned.

I know better now.  That hell exists, all right, but a little indecision and fumbling around at the age of 20 doesn't suffice for perdition.  There are second acts in American lives -- sometimes third and fourth acts, as well -- despite what F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us.  You can explain that to a college-aged student, and he may understand you, and he may even agree.  But he agrees with you theoretically; he agrees with you insofar as what you say applies to others.  For himself, if he is the worried sort I seem to have been, he foresees only a One Act Play, one chance to get it right.  He may grant himself an extra year or two beyond 22, but if his career isn't well on its way by the age of 25 -- he sees himself flipping paper clips across an office at best, or more likely living unemployed in his parents' basement -- or in a cardboard box.

So, no.  I've been there once.  That was enough.  When we say we wish we were 20 again, we mean we wish we had young bodies and many years lying ahead.  But we assume that we would know then, in that second childhood, everything that we know now.  That we would know we were about to make the right decisions and enjoy reasonably successful careers and lives.  You give me all that, and sure, I'd go back and do it again. 

I wouldn't dread the hours of study, the writing of long term papers, the studying for tests, the tolerance of intolerable roommates.  Those were the easy costs; now they sound almost fun.  But it's the psychological stresses resulting from an almost existential fear and uncertainty and self-doubt that I'm not willing to experience again.  When I consider those particular stresses, I agree with singer Maurice Chevalier when he sings:  "I'm so glad I'm not young anymore."

Tiny soaps

I guess it was those bars of soap that first alerted me.

I buy packages of bath soap, maybe ten bars to a package.  I won't tell you the brand, except that it's a four-letter word beginning with "D," and that I'm glad I use it and wish everybody did. 

A couple of years ago, I noted that the bars had begun presenting a more esthetic, scupted appearance.  But then I also noticed that the sculpting was actually a concave excavation.  The soap company had shaped the bars so that there was less soap in each bar, although the overall dimensions, as seen in the outer wrappings, appeared no different from before.

How odd, I thought, that a soap company would save a little bit of soap on each bar, just so they could, presumably, not raise the price.  Of course, most people don't use a bar of soap down to the last cubic centimeter -- they toss it and open a new bar.  So the company not only saves costs on each bar, but induces buyers to throw out a greater proportion of the soap they purchase than they would otherwise.

A bit cheezy, but I shrugged it aside and bought more soap.

Then came the toilet paper issue.  This month, I've noticed that toilet paper now comes in smaller rolls.  Not smaller in size per square, thank God, but smaller in diameter per roll.  Again, another apparent attempt to hold down the price of product per unit by decreasing the amount of product per unit.

Where will it all end?  Salespersons with straight faces selling face cloths to us as "bath towels"?  Cologne and shaving lotion in perfume bottles?  Children's paper scissors advertised as home barbering scissors?  A pint of beer with only 14 ounces? (Oops, they do that already.)

Toothpaste comes in varying sized tubes, so it's difficult to know whether they have been reducing those sizes.  So far as I've noticed -- not that I'm all that observant when it comes to tubes of tooth paste -- they haven't.  But, as tooth paste manufacturers cast envious eyes on recent doings in the soap and toilet paper market, surely the temptation will exist?

You know those little "travel size" tubes that meet TSA airline regulations for carry-on bags?  Will those eventually be described as "jumbo size"?  Sort of like olives, where "large" means small, and "jumbo" means medium?  Or, inversely to women's clothing sizes, where a size 12 steadily grows larger to meet ever larger women.  (As Wikipedia warns, in giving dimensions of women's sizes:  "These charts are significantly smaller than many current US clothing companies.")  But dress sizes face different consumer hopes and fears -- an American woman's  hope is to buy less goods per dress unit, not more. 

In general, the trend, even as we grow larger and larger in body size, is to provide less and less per unit for products to wash, dry, and otherwise pamper those plump bodies.  Like many others, I suppose I'll gradually just stop my comparison shopping, my studying the "price per ounce" information provided by the supermarkets.  I'll just throw stuff on the counter, swipe my Visa card, and close my eyes when my purchases are totaled.

It's better that way.  When you know you're playing a game that's fixed, you ultimately lose interest in the details of how your loss has been accomplished. 

The Maltese Falcon

Between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m. this morning, I read the final chapters of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. 

I'd seen the 1941 movie a couple times in the distant past, but I doubt I would ever have read the book if the Sunday New York Times travel section hadn't carried a first page article entitled "San Francisco Noir."  The article led the reader around and about the not-so-noir streets of the modern city, seeking out the locales that Hammett identified so carefully by street and address in his book.  The article was profusely illustrated -- some photographs atmospherically noir-ish, others not so much.

I learned to love San Francisco before I ever really knew it, from reading Herb Caen's books (e.g., Baghdad by the Bay) as a teenager.  Then came years of college in the Bay Area, and later a short period as a member of the working classes, living on Sutter Street near Gough.  If I weren't loyal to the Northwest Corner today, I'd be living in "The City."  Assuming I could  afford it.

The Maltese Falcon, published in 1929, dealt (as did Caen's later newspaper columns to some extent) with an earlier San Francisco -- darker, more mysterious, and definitely non-techie in a world where "Silicon Valley" was meaningless.  (Wasn't sand made of silicon?  Did the phrase mean a "sandy valley"?)

The story -- a detective story, for those incomprehensively unfamiliar with even the plot of  the movie -- is complex, entertaining, and unnecessary to describe here.  What fascinates me is the language of the novel, the descriptions of 1920s San Francisco, and the atmosphere of foggy darkness, both physical and moral, that the author constructs.

Hammett tells the novel from the point of view of Sam Spade, the detective, but he tells it from an observer's vantage point.  In other words, we learn every word spoken by Spade, as well as his most minute gestures.  But we learn nothing of what goes on inside his head aside from what we learn or can infer from those objectively described words and deeds.  Spade responds almost instantly to new events with clever improvisations.  Have these responses been simmering in his brain over a period of time, or are they truly spontaneous?  We have no way of knowing. 

Literature classes recognize the concept of the "unreliable narrator."  Here, the narrator appears totally reliable.  But he is reporting the assertions of Sam Spade, whose words are almost always intended to deceive and who -- for us as well as for his antagonists -- is thus totally unreliable.

Herb Caen first showed me San Francisco as a city of mystery.  I remember especially his tales of  Chinatown -- the narrow streets, the only half-assimilated Chinese residents, the sounds and smells of a port city, a little Singapore or Hong Kong.  I was disappointed when I first visited Chinatown as a teenager  to discover that -- so far as I could observe -- it was merely a small tourist area selling souvenir t-shirts and faux Chinese works of art. 

Hammett deals with an earlier era, an era to which, I like to believe, Caen was hearkening back -- an era when reality still approximated the exotic image.  A town of seedy detective agencies, borderline-corrupt cops, dark alleys, complicit hotel detectives.  An active port city with ships arriving almost daily from Seattle, San Pedro, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore; a port city that attracted active smuggling, and whose connections with the rest of the world were close commercially but distant in time.

One phrase from the novel itself haunts me with nostalgia:

After a leisurely breakfast at the Palace, during which he read both morning papers, ....

San Francisco today has one embarrassingly poor daily newspaper.  Imagine a time when it had two papers in the morning alone.  Spade's favorite paper was the Call.  That fact excites my own recollections of days when the city had, besides the morning Examiner and the evening Chonicle, a third, albeit second-rate, newspaper, the Call-Bulletin -- an obvious product of a merger that itself later merged into the Examiner, now itself defunct as print journalism.

And then there is the matter of noir, a term describing literature that emphasizes "tough, cynical characters and bleak settings."  Hammett's novel is an early example of the genre.  Spade is a tough dude, displaying few signs of emotion that the dispassionate narrator can report.  As the book begins, he is involved in an affair with his partner's wife, and shows shockingly little distress when the partner is dispatched during the first chapters.  He beds women simply to keep them happy and under his control.  He lies to virtually everyone as a matter of policy.  He scorns the cops.  He uses his fists without hesitation.  He is blandly homophobic, perhaps merely reflecting his times.  He violates his client's confidences, and induces attorneys and medical workers to violate their own.  He has no moral code, seemingly, except survival and the making of money.

And yet ... we regard him at the end as a somehow decent fellow at heart.

The bleak settings entertain me, perhaps, more than the cynical characters.  As beautiful and gentrified -- as comfortable, both physically and psychologically -- as San Francisco is today, something in me longs for the mysterious and dangerous city of my teenage imaginings.  The Maltese Falcon gives me that city, by chapter and verse, street name and building description.  It's all there to be reconstructed in our minds, at our leisure, in our own time.

Finally, a warning.  Once you've seen the movie, however long ago, you can't read Hammett's description of Spade without picturing Humphrey Bogart -- or of Joe Cairo without seeing Peter Lorre.  And similarly with the characters played by Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet.  Hammett was fortunate to have a movie that interpreted his novel so faithfully and well.  For us today, the book is a supplement to the movie, as well as the movie's being a supplement to the book.  A synergy between the two produces an enriched experience.

Thanks to the NY Times for leading me to the book -- even though I was forced  to turn on the lights at 3:30 a.m.to finish it off, to see the story to the ending I already knew and expected..