Spidey vs. Sandy and Gooey

Of course you're all waiting with baited breath for Spiderman and Philosophy, the inevitable next step from Open Court after The Matrix and Philosophy, James Bond and Philosophy, The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, etc. There are already 30 of these titles, with more to come, including, for example, Johnny Cash and Philosophy (hello?) and Soccer and Philosophy (a sequel to Bocce and Philosophy, no doubt). Superheroes and Philosophy (Open Court, 2005) has a lead article by Mark Waid, a former neighbor and friend of yours truly, the squawcking blogger, but it is not a big Spiderman production. (Mark is basically a D.C. guy, as far as I know. As attested to by the collection of Batman lapel pins I think I still have from a box of stuff he gave me.) Spidey the comic book character is way overdue his own philosophy book, and even in his Sam Raimi incarnation is now as grown up as Frodo or Neo. So why not Spidey and Philosophy? Stick it next to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and you've got your summer reading.

But why do people keep throwing rotten tomatoes at Sam Raimi's new flick? Are they jealous that they didn't get to suspend Kirsten Dunst 80 stories above a Manhattan sidewalk and drop large vehicles in her general direction? I don't think so... No, it's a little more than that. True, part of the problem here is that the story is going off in more directions than the particles at FermiLab, including, yes, a particle accelerator that somehow turns Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) into a mass of loosely bonded silicon, a.k.a., the Sandman. And let's not forget the self-propelled rubbery black goop from outer space (Dark Matter, anyone?) that is on a mission to attach itself in some form or other to Our Hero (Tobey Maguire) and change him into a vindictive schmuck who alienates everyone from Girlfriend (not you, Owl - the almost as lovely Dunst as Mary Jane) to the whole of Gotham City (whoops, wrong comic; even wrong publisher).

And there are ten or twelve subplots to supplement these themes, keeping the viewer in a state of constant anticipation until the very end, when (as it turns out) none of them are worked out very well. Marko, for example, became a naughty bank robber in search of money to pay for medicine for his sick daughter, who appears early in the film; and then, as Sandman, he then joins up with a johnny-come-lately character called Venom to destroy Spidey; but the link between Marko's fatherly quest and Sandy's vengeance is awfully thin, and the unfortunate daughter drops out completely without resolution of her crisis. (I guess the kids who see this film are supposed to assume she just dies?) There are lots of other themes that sort of spin off the screen rather than leading to any useful fictional content.

Aside from the issues with the thematic content, the critics I read on Rotten Tomatoes were mostly riffing on a lot of technical issues with the special effects. But in my opinion the issue with them was not technical, but ontological. Sandy, for example, was technically well done; the problem is, what is he? He seems to accumulate body mass when he comes in contact with sand, and lose it in various ways, which include water, and, strangely enough, fire. Sand burns? At the temperature of lava, I guess, but from some ordinary scorchers that Harry fires from his flying skateboard? Maybe they were tactical nuclear weapons? Not too smart in the middle of Gotham City, Harry. But no matter what happens to Sandman, he always returns to good (?) old flesh-and-blood Flint Marko. The nukes hit the sand but missed Marko? Sometimes Marko seems to turn willfully into a sandstorm and drift away, as if he caught a tailwind and just sailed off. He comes, goes, falls apart, reappears - when he pounds Spidey he must be one pretty solid piece of beach, but then he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West. (She's just a bad dream after all, but... hey, Sandman, I get it, he's just here to put Spidey and his gal pal to sleep?)

In the end, this hunk of waterside real estate is so ontologically vague that you can't wrap your mind around him. You can say "lack of imagination", but I'll just come back with "imaginative resistance" - this character puts you in a foul mood that makes you not want to let him be. Too much work. Stick him in an hourglass where at least he's got some contours. I'm sorry, but you have to be able to get inside a character to appreciate it. When I try to get inside Sandman I just fall right out the other side and rush off to rinse my face.

Now, as for Gooey - he's just as vague, if not self-contradictory. Gooey begins life in the manner described above, a gelatinous black thing that resembles two large arachnids having sex after crawling through an oil slick on the way up from the sewer. It is not only self-propelled, but self-motivated, at least more so than some of the people in my office. For it wants to attach itself to Spidey, as if to a soulmate, and tracks him down, eventually wrapping him up in a black version of the famous red-and-blue Spidey costume. It then bonds with him - not emotionally - well, yes, emotionally - and causes him to seek revenge for his uncle's presumed death at the hands of Marko, to destroy the shards of Mary Jane's singing career, and to upend the hopes of aspiring cub photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) who wants to catch Spidey doing a no-no.

Time out. Said photographer plagiarized a photo and then doctored it to make it look like Spidey messed up. Why does it count as spiteful to set this guy on his ear? Anyway, so far Gooey is only a bit of obvious bad blood (people are not supposed to be vengeful, superheroes least of all) but things get very fuzzy soon enough. For one thing, Spidey's got a scientist friend who discovers that the jelly spider glop is a germ that can infect his blood. Right - so how is it that ripping off the black costume cures blood poisoning and its personality effects? Oh how symbolic, Spidey rips it off in a church, where some of it just happens to fall on the aforementioned would-be cub photographer. But since Cubby is already a vindictive bastard, what difference does it make? Well, never mind, he now turns into the Truly Evil Negative-Spiderman, so denoted by the fact that he has sharp fangs and is called Venom. How is it that the glop sought out Spidey like it was on a mission, but now it just happens to land a few floors below on Cubby, like some tar dripping from the roof on a hot day? Well, that's the last time we entrust an important mission to some semi-conscious gob of icky black latex.

So now, wearing the black-spidey costume, Cubby goes for Spidey's throat, but ends up... well, I can't give away everything. But of course he gets nailed, and not by antibiotics either. Gooey's morphology thus includes black goo from planet X, a gelatinous web that wraps itself around Spidey, a Spidey costume with personality flaws, a Venom costume with periodontal problems and an attitude, and finally some inanimate form that the world doesn't have to worry about anymore. Thanks, Sam - what's up next, the Pastrami Sandwich from Hell?

So there you have the real reason Spiderman 3 is a mess: ontological ambiguity! It ain't the technology, folks, it's what you do with it. Though the movie has its moments of visual interest, and occasionally tests our creativity in figuring out how Spidey will get out of this or that mess (literal and figurative), it is basically about two over-morphed bits of material and a bunch of loose ends.

Oh, did I mention the parallel jewelry thing? In a touch that makes the whole story just shy of Pynchonesqe ersatz non-randomness, Spidey (that is, Peter Parker) often clutches an engagement ring his aunt gave him, which he hopes to lay on Mary Jane, while Sandy clutches a locket his daughter gave him. I'll be darned if there isn't some good old-fashioned aesthetic device being offered here, but either its point is lost in the miasma of conflicting expectations and hanging judgments, or it's like I said, a Pynchonesque device to make us look for connections that just ain't there. True, we get forgiveness on various levels (have to, Spidey gave up the black goo in a church, after all!) and a few other sort of obvious emotional plays, but the overall feeling is not redemption, and there's too much baloney for any clear sense of resolution. Maybe Raimi should have tried a Fellini ending, with all the misfits and materials and biohazards meandering into a ballroom and doing a hora or something. It would not have solved either the ontological problems or the tangle of threads, but it would have been a substitute for closure - about the best that could be achieved under the circumstances.

Oh, did I mention the bit about the pseudo-romance with Peter's classmate...? Harry's effort to avenge his father's death...? The butler who tells him how Dad really died...? The truth about how uncle was really murdered...? Auntie's counseling of Peter's amorous adventures....? The editor who wants to prove that Spidey is a fraud...? Oh, what the heck, just go see the movie, you know your kids are going to drag you there anyway. What do kids care about ontology and thematic dissipation? No more than they care about the banality of the dialogue. And neither should you, if you're just out for a night of glitzy fun. Just don't plan to take this film seriously.

Weick in Marx in Soho at Vox Pop in Brooklyn

That's a lot of nesting up there; but this is a Parrot's hangout after all!

Speaking of hangouts, where might a couple of feathered friends bide their time on a Saturday night (or just about any other) without straying too far from the nest? The local Dunkin Donuts? Unfortunately, in this neck of the woods, in can come to that. You see, this is the heart of Multicultural Brooklyn, where speaking Parrotese does not necessarily put you in the minority. Indeed, most businesses around here shut up as tight as a vulture's... err... grip, come sundown on Friday, and stay that way until pretty late Saturday night at the earliest. Though the Parrot shares some DNA with these folks, we do not appreciate the Friday/Sat night morgue routine (we could always touch down in Greenwood Cemetery if we were into that), so we are apt to take wing and find more welcoming venues.

And venue is just what we find when we drop in to Vox Pop, the only place this side of Park Slope that qualifies as a genuine Coffeehouse. Only this is not your run-of-the-mill yuppie joint with the $2.50 cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Well, okay - I guess it is about that much for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. That's the funny thing about Vox Pop, the name of which is short for "vox populi", the Voice of the People. I know, it sounds like a leftie tabloid from the '30's (or '60's). Which is, roughly what it is - updated a bit. The place was started a couple of years ago by Sander Hicks and some friends, though Sander is definitely the main presence there. Nothing if not a risk taker, Sander took over a small storefront on Cortelyou Road, a commercial strip that had all but faded into oblivion; where the one bookstore in the entire neighborhood could not make it, where you could count at one point 12 hair salons, 4 dry cleaners, and not one restaurant you'd want to stick your beak into. Now, I don't want to use a hysterical term like "renaissance", but there has been a noticeable pickup of commercial activity on this strip, which sits smack in the middle of a neighborhood full of expensive Victorian homes and not a few large apartment buildings. You'd think somebody would figure out that this is a potential goldmine - at least, it would be, if there were enough going on there to deter the locals from heading to Park Slope every time they need a toy for their kids or a Fine Dining Experience.

If it is headed towards "renaiassance" (or, ironically, gentrification), Vox Pop will have had a lot to do with it. To start with, they did an amazing, and amazingly quick, job of turning the space into a warm, welcoming little java joint - not crowded or cramped but a real homey feel, helped along by lots of natural wood grains. Kids dig Vox Pop (there's a play area); so do adults. So do parrots. But this is not yer ordinary Starbucks wannabe. They sell books, which seem to have 2 main themes: radical rock music, and radical politics. They have readings (by, you guessed it, radical writers), and they do self-publishing. They have music in the evenings, not all radical, but much of it inspired by either the Clash or Pete Seeger, depending on which night you happen to walk in. And they sell food. None of it cheap. They do have "free wifi" - the scare quotes indicating that "free" is to be interpreted here as meaning "please spend $6 an hour or else..." Or else what? Who knows, I guess you become a Vox Populi Persona Non Grata, at least if you speak Latin. The Open Mike is also free, but the 2 beers to cover the minimum will cost you $10. (Pay to Play, is that what it's called?) Well, let's put it this way - if you are already one of the converted, consider it a contribution, to whatever cause Sander happens to be promoting at the moment. And if you are not, I don't think you could stand the heat for very long. The Parrot long thought he was redder than a scarlet tanager, but at Vox Pop we have to perch in the loft to avoid getting into a harangue with some "9/11 Truth" type (a cause Sander actively promotes), or someone who wants Ralph Nader to run again. All the same, better this than listening to the discourse on the other side of the fence. (Question regarding evolution and Sam Brownback: does the evidence suggest that he more likely evolved from Neanderthals or Cretins? Could it be his ancestors were the evolutionary fork that leads to both? This would explain his position on Darwinism.)

So where was I? Vox Pop, the radical coffeehouse that is going to revive Cortelyou Road, expand into all major U.S cities within two years, and capture 10% of the multibillion dollar coffee market by selling Fair Trade coffee and locally brewed beer... Or not, but I am damn glad they started here. And one of the latest reasons I'm glad - I was starting to talk about what I did last Saturday night, wasn't I? - is Marx in Soho, the one-man, one-act play by Howard (A People's History of the United States) ZInn. Incidentally, he's the guy who wrote A People's History of the United States. Like Vox Pop, Zinn dared to tread where few had gone before, writing a lengthy, detailed account of U.S. history as seen not from the vantage point of the elite few who directed the show but the dispossessed, disenfranchised many who actually (come to think of it) built this country. And interestingly enough, he also wrote some plays, including this one. It has not been produced very often, at least until Robert Weick took it upon himself to learn the demanding solo part and promote the show to college campuses, small theatres, and radical coffeehouses like Vox Pop (possibly a class of one).

So what is it? Alright, I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise one thing - you won't like tune out, log off, turn on the parrot filter, etc., until you give the idea a chance. Okay, ready? Here it is: Marx comes back from the dead to deliver a critique of contemporary Western society. All right, are you still with me? Good, because it's not quite like what it sounds. A little, but not cloyingly so. Marx comes back, for sure, granted a one hour reprieve by the Opiate of the People (Opius Populi?). And he does give us plenty of reason to believe that were he alive today he would bore us with what we already know if we are not comatose, that profits mean more than people under capitalism, that the Imperialist West supports its standard of living with wars to keep the Oppressed Nations down, that we stole half the country from Mexico, that America was built by immigrant labor who we repay with racism and immigration quotas, and other true clichés. (Dear Mr. Sarkozy, friend of the U.S., enemy of all that post-colonial riffraff that is filtering into your country, please focus on the "true" (vrai)", not the "cliché (cliché)".) But luckily for us, and for the possibility of this play getting performed without coming off preachier than an Easter sermon by Cardinal Egan, this is not what Mr. Weick spends the hour or so talking about.

In fact. Marx seems to have more to say about his boils than about politics, and even more to say about his wife Jenny and their daughters (mainly Elizabeth, though I think he had about 11 in all) than about his boils. He spends several amusing minutes discussing the slovenly persona of Mikhail Bakunin, the Godfather (ooh, would he hate that!) of anarchism. And he talks about the Paris Commune in terms that still manage to be moving 135 years later. There is a lot of history going on, good for the classroom crowd - especially today, when you can't assume that the average, educated 19 year old has the faintest idea what Marxism, communism, socialism, or just about anything else (other than iPodism) means. Marx of course decries the distortion of his views in the hands of the Soviet regime. He lambasts Stalinism (not necessarily by name) and declares (as did the historical Marx) that "I am not a Marxist" (though I can't say that Zinn's script brings out the meaning of this utterance very clearly).

In the end one is glad to have happened to be in Soho (sort of) when Marx dropped in. The performance alone was well worth the price of admission, which included, for $23, a politically correct burger, a small salad, and a damn good pint of some dark amber Dogfish Ale, which I must admit may have enhanced the play without any extra work on Zinn's or Weick's part. Typical Vox Popitis - Sander managed to get an article about the event published in the Times, emailed his constituency, and then had a line of patrons waiting for that PC burger, forcing them to start the play about 40 minutes late. When I came to buy a ticket a few days earlier the only staff person at the store had no idea there was a play, how to buy a ticket for it, how to handle the various discounts, or what the price of coffee is in Nicaragua. (Okay, I didn't ask that - maybe she did know.) Considering they run a printing press and have done performances before I thought it was a little odd that they didn't just print up some tickets. Oh well, organizing the revo takes a lot of energy; ditto organizing to become the third biggest brewed coffee retailer in the U.S. Anyway, what do I care - I'd ten times rather have Vox Pop with all their little quirks and growing pains that Barstucks with their dirty bathrooms and overpriced pastries. More than that, it is the fact that they never uses their spaces, of which they have sometimes three or four within a few blocks, for anything like a musical presentation or a reading or just about anything other than pulling in every possible yuppie, not to mention the occasional emerald-plumed biped in search of an oatmeal cracker. Suggested corporate slogan: "Not A Coffeehouse (Just a "¢offee Hou$e)". Vox Pop fills a cultural vacuum created by the demise of the coffeehouse, be it a folk club, a chess bar or a poetry salon. They've become a neighborhood cultural institution in a little over a year, and I daresay it is awfully refreshing to sometimes find oneself politically to the right of a small business owner. It ain't no Utopia, or they'd give me that pot of fresh brewed tea for being a nice guy. But it's way cool, I mean awesome, groovy, whatever.

Now, to get back to the Marx-Zinn-Weick connection, though the play was definitely entertaining, and Weick's performance top notch, there were things I missed. In the brief discussion session afterward, my question was: when do we get the second act, in which he tells us how socialism is really supposed to work? Aside from that, I was kind of surprised that the only references to 20th century socialism were some digs at the easiest target, the Soviet empire. What about China, Cuba, or Yugoslavia? What about Chile under Allende, Grenada under Bishop, the Prague Spring - are there no models worth praising? If not, then that is a bigger problem for Marx than boils or Bakunin: it's like, you all screwed up, if you had only done it the way I said... And what way is that? Zinn's Marx tells us very little about socialism "as it was supposed to be", actually. You would think this Marx would have a thing or two to say about his vision, even if it were straight out of what the historical Marx said in his Critique of the Gotha Programme and a few other works. Because it is fine and dandy to say, "You see, capitalism still stinks!", but if every attempt to institute socialism since the Paris Commune stinks too, you need a little more than that or you're just getting a stream of hot air. Which is fine for a parrot, but the flight-challenged spectator might not be so thrilled.

I'm dead serious (so is Marx, for that matter, but nevermind) - I think Zinn should write a second act. The play is far from losing our attention by the end, at least with Weick's capable handling of the part. And now that he's memorized all that.... a second act, in which we actually get a sense of the man's vision, seems like it's waiting to be written. Aside from that, I was a little surprised that this Marx, who shows up clutching a wad of contemporary newspapers, has so very little to say about contemporary social problems. Other than one or two passing gestures about the environment there is nothing about this most urgent of political issues. What would Marx think of a European Union? Computers? The Internet? Okay, maybe it is safer not to weigh him down with ad hoc advice on every issue under the sun. And the focus on his own time and immediate surroundings seemed appropriate. As a historical play with a few passes at contemporary updating, it works fine. Be that as it may, having gone this far, I would have donned my Dialectical Materialism Thinking Cap and given my audience a more robust sense of the man's continued relevance.

But all of our Avian Advice aside, this was a surprisingly enjoyable theatrical experience, supported by an excellent one-man perofrmance and I'm guessing a wee bit more than a pint of Dogfish Ale. And now that we know about the ale, the old Wingtipped Minstrel just might pop in to the Open Mike pretty soon. Better plan to walk home, can't afford to get points on my flying license.

Get Jazzed at Bar Next Door

It's actually downstairs from the restaurant La Lanterna di Vittorio, though perhaps it is technically next door. You can practically fall into it if you happen to hit a slick spot on the sidewalk at just the right place. An almost literal hole in the wall at 129 Macdougal Street in the West Village, the "Bar Next Door" is one of the coolest jazz spots I've found in a city that does not exactly lack for cool jazz spots. They say that the house was built by Aaron Burr, I guess while he was taking time off from target practice. It definitely has that old, authentic look, with all sorts of funny little doors and closets. Owl and I were wondering what the long horizontal closet near the door might contain. Whatever it contains now, my bet for the original use is firearms. Why do bad things happen to decent folks like Alexander Hamilton and other rich brats get to fulfill their Presidential ambitions? History is so cruel...

Anyhow, this hobbit space below the restaurant was big enough for one rather tall and stout fellow who blew a mean tenor sax. Joel Frahm has apparently been around the NY jazz scene for a long time, and has just recorded a CD with members of Stan Getz's old band. But Tuesday nights he performs here with his own trio, which included Joel Martin on bass and Pete Zimmer on drums this week. These guys cooked up a concert that handed us, over the course of two sets, a wide variety of classics and originals - there was some Monk, some Bird (the Parrot is loving it so far!), some standards, some originals, probably some Getz though I didn't recognize it. (Frahm offered an original which I thought he called "Jobimiana", or something like that, but I can't say it set of the bossa nova bells in my head. Nice tune though.) This was relatively conservative material, but Frahm's treatment of it was exquisite. He is equally at home hanging on a slow bluesey tune with lots of breathy bends or doing lightning runs that make you wonder where he found all those notes. No technique for its own sake here. Free jazz is not his bag and you won't hear him pushing a reed hard enough to make it screech. But he has an original style that is hard to characterize and easy to admire; his lines are unpredictable even if the basic material is pretty well known.

Zimmer and Martin are no mere rhythm section but a couple of extremely talented musicians in their own right. It takes a lot to get me to really listen to a stand-up bass solo, but I was digging every note that Martin played when he took his breaks. ("Digging" here means "liking", for any overly web-savvy cranks out there. One "digs" in a hole in the ground, and "diggs" in a Web 2.0 media site. I was in a hole.) Zimmer is one of those jazz drummers who insists on being as much a part of the music as anyone else, and his contribution to the overall sound was immense. This is a group of musicians who it is almost insulting to call "professional", as that sounds a little like "competent". The fairly conservative tonality of the music at times makes you think of these words, but I would rather say that whatever can still be milked out of post-bop mainstream jazz, these guys are doing. Those who can't take anything less challenging than an Ornette Coleman concert should stay away. I'll be back though; this is serious music done with consummate taste and style.

Did I say the space was intimate? It is small enough that you might find yourself trying to get a seat where you are not staring down the horn of a sax or clinking your glass against a snare drum. Small but not uncomfortable, even at my table right next to the door. The cover is only $8; a 10" thin crust pizza is a bit more than that, but worth it. You can order from the full La Lanterna menu, but Owl and I stuck with pizza, salad, beer and desert, which came out to about $70 with the cover, tax and tip. Not too bad for dinner and a concert for two. My only complaint was that there was no beer on tap; but the waiter brought my Sam Adams in a tall glass so I never saw the bottle. I guess that is the next best thing to being on tap!

There may be some sort of folk music renaissance going on in New York, but there is no jazz renaissance. To my knowledge, the jazz scene never died in order to be reborn. It was great to find it so richly alive in a cave below Macdougal Street, a place I have passed many times without realizing there was life, music, beer and (perhaps most importantly) blueberry pie within. You want the "real New York"? So go to the Empire State Building! Or get hijacked into some underground hole at the Parrot's Lampost. Squawck!

Parrot Catches Butterfly

Not that I haven't been out and about or anything, but my last post was 3/3, and this was supposed to be a biweekly blog at least. On 3/14 I was busy working on a review of the Met Opera's production of Die Meistersinger, which you shall have, by and by, though I realize it's tacky to retro-blog. (Hey, I started a piece on the world championship chess match before I even started this blog, and I'm still looking for an excuse to post that one!) Maybe I'll get you some notes on the Edward Scissorhands production at BAM, which stands for Brooklyn Academy of Music (not a kick in the gut from Batman).

Anyway, the interruption was mainly courtesy of the IRS, which treated me to an audit right before I had to do my 2006 taxes. FYI, if you happen by mistake not to report the sale of thousands of dollars of mutual funds which netted you roughly $7.00 in profits, the IRS will bill you for taxes on the entire amount of the sale - on the reasonable assumption that you paid less than a penny for the entire lot. Well, I sent them some documentation; let's see if they're any smarter than the NYC Department of FInance, which has so far taken a year and a half to consider the documentation I sent them showing that they are billing me for a ticket on a rental car which I had already returned. Am I just a magnet for this stuff, or does it happen to everyone?

The rest of my time was eaten by my divorce case, about which the less said the better. Then again, I'll say this at least. You may have heard about Judge Garson, the Brooklyn divorce court judge who was just convicted of taking bribes to fix cases. You might wonder, how could he get away with that for so long, wouldn't someone recognize that his decisions are totally biased and prejudicial? The answer is that none of his decisions stand out as being especially bizarre in the context of the arbitrary, demeaning and irrational nature of the entire divorce system in this country (and New York State, which has a particularly medieval set of laws, rulings and assumptions). One of my former co-workers was a victim of Judge Garson; it took him 15 years to get a divorce from a woman who (according to him) was committed to mental institutions, destroyed his software business (took a magnet to all the disks) and scratched up his new car, among other things. No matter - I've spoken to people who took six, ten, twelve years to get a divorce, and didn't have Judge Garson. He fit right in: arbitrary, unfair decisions based on fallacious reasoning. Shouldn't he get a promotion to the Court of Appeals instead of a jail sentence?

Well, I'd better segue quickly into my topic, before I write a book on how the courts deal with family relations. Luckily, segueing (ha!) ain't hard to do, as you know if you've ever seen Puccini's ever popular Madame Butterfly, as I did Friday night at the NYC Opera. The opera is based on the story of Mr. Pinkerton, an American sailor in Japan who obtains a 15-year-old Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San, from a marriage broker, and then leaves her for three years to go to back to America, where he marries an American woman. The subtle but crucial premise of the dramatic action is that abandonment in Japan is divorce; which does the work of making it legal for the opera's antihero, Mr. Pinkerton, to marry another woman, and also puts in perspective the faithfulness of Cio-Cio-San, who refuses to take another husband or believe that her American lover has left her. Owl, who shall henceforth be referred to as Fragrance of Verbena (one of Pinkerton's pet names for his Japanese wife) had more than a little sympathy with the betrayed lover; Parrot had to convince Owl that not all Americans are Pinkertons. (Fragrance of Verbena's Mom had already warned her not to get involved with an American Monk parrot, or she would be deceived; little did I know that my potential future Chinese owl-in-law was an Italian opera buff!) Well, there are plenty of dramas which explore the theme of substituting pretense or imagination for reality; it usually doesn't work out too well, though it tends to be in the nature of who we are.

Another theme here is the fundamental lack of understanding between cultures; Pinkerton clearly thinks it is just in the nature of Japanese society that he can break a contract without consequences; and though he finds this odd, he is happy to utilize it to further his own life goals, which clearly include from the outset marrying an American woman when he gets back to the U.S. He is just thrilled that he can, for instance, break his lease on the house he rents for himself and Cio-Cio-San, as well as walk out on her when he is ready. But as it turns out, Japanese culture depends on trust, something he does not understand much about, and when he returns and finds out the damage he has done, he is mortified and suggests that his own life is ruined too. Nevertheless, one thing he tries to do is make good on his obligation to the 3-year-old son he now finds out he has. Unfortunately, his way of doing this is to take the son away from the mother who can't really support him; a gut-wrenching transition that goes quite badly here - as it does, for example, in Citizen Kane, but not in the ludicrously underplayed scene in The Pursuit of Happiness - and results in the suicide of Cio-Cio-San. For while the father acts responsibly in the limited way he can, the mother makes the much more difficult decision to assist the son's departure by removing herself from the scene, so he will not regret having to leave her. And this, it seems, is the ultimate thing that Pinkerton does not understand about Japanese culture - that it is better to die with honorable intentions than to live in dishonor, having been abandoned by a husband and failed to provide for one's son. Thus the opacity of the norms and morals of another culture leads to demise on both sides.

It is not without some irony that the cultural disparity is played out in part by Cio-Cio-San's rejection by her uncle, a Buddhist priest, who condemns and essentially excommunicates her for rejecting her own religion and culture. What a depressing lesson for our own situation today, where the sense of an irreconcilable clash between Western and Eastern (in this case Islamic) culture is upon us all. Utlimately, methinks this is overblown a bit. Fragrance of Verbena grew up in a city of moderate size some 10,000 miles away from here, in a nation that practically defines the idea of "difference" when it comes to culture and history. But Fragrance of Verbena's main difference from American women, as far as I can tell, is in the way she pronounces "Louis Vuitton", "Cartier", and "BMW" (did someone say "Maclaren"? Sshhhhhh.....) and the place where she would prefer to have her house with the two-car garage (Bay Ridge vs. Park Slope, maybe). Or to put it another (perhaps more palatable) way - fundamentally, everyone wants a life that is satisfying and social relations that involve mutual repsect. Pinkerton did not fail to understand that he was violating someone's trust by marrying under false pretenses; he was even informed of this by his friend Sharpless, the American consul. It is an idea built into Western marriage contracts and practically every other contract; the difference is only in having a legal superstructure to enforce it. For her part, Cio-Cio-San had every right by Japanese custom to take another husband, but refused to recognize the reality of her situation. Ultimately, it was not culture clash that was to blame, but the failure of the parties to make choices based on inferences that were easily available to them. Well, easily? Perhaps not. Negotiating the waters of cultural difference can be challenging, but what I am suggesting is that there is no real opacity, except the opacity of one's own stubbornness. Ideological difference is real, but for the most part it is rooted in things we all know about one another. Anyone with an inkling of the history of the Middle East should understand, for example, that the forcible overthrow of one religious power center, and its replacement by a competing one, is going to solve no problems whatsoever, but will certainly create more grist for the fundamentalist mill. From Ireland to Israel to India to Iraq, it is not some opaque and incomprehensible difference of culture that underlies the trouble we see; it is a more basic lack of respect and equality of opportunity that one side fears from the other, usually not without some justification. Madame Butterfly suggests that cultural identity is important, but it also suggests that the real problem is a lack of will to follow the system one's own culture provides for recognizing the difference between right and wrong, reality and fantasy. "Islam is a religion of peace", someone was recently quoted as saying in the Times. So be it; and I assume this applies to both the Sunni and Shi'ite interpretations. For more than four centuries, Western systems of international law have recognized the difference between just war and war of aggression, between legitimate intervention and violations of national sovereignty. So there is the basis for international peace, and cultural opacity is a flimsy excuse for not being able to achieve it.

The role of Cio-Cio-San was sung by the impressive Shu-Ying Li, who not only provided a convincing account of the vocal challenges but offered a compelling character portrait of the innocent but dignified Japanese bride. Christopher Jackson's Benjamin Pinkerton was strong enough as a carrier of melodies, but it is hard to imagine a less moving dramatic performance. One could hardly believe that this is a man in the grip of love (at the beginning) or despair (in the final act). I admit that from the front of the fourth ring, without opera glasses, it was a little difficult to make out facial expressions. But this is not a film with close-ups after all; stage acting should not depend on that. There was little difficulty in recognizing the nuanced movements of Matthew Surapine as the marriage broker Goro, or Mme Butterfly's delicate movements (even if they perhaps drew more on the Beijing Opera tradition than Japanese culture, not to mention Puccini, Giacosa or Belasco). Jackson's awkwardness with the dramatic aspects stood out to me and detracted from the overall production. Neverthteless, from a musical point of view it was superb, with some of the arias being carried off with piercing intensity. One quartet (I guess - I believe there were at least four vocal lines going on) in Act III was particularly beautiful. The orchestra received a well-deserved burst of applause when they stood at the command of the capable conductor, Atsushi Yamada.

But the real discovery, to me, in the production, was the voice of Keri Alkema, who played the devoted maid Suzuki. Though the part is relatively small, from her first note to her last I had the impression of being in the presence of a truly exceptional mezzo, with a tone rich and strong enough to practically dominate any scene in which she appeared. I hear Wagner or Strauss... almost too much for Puccinin. As far as I can tell from the program notes, she has mostly performed with the Chautauqua Opera. Any chance of a move to the Big Apple, Ms. Alkema? I mean, nothing against upstate, I know they have the oldest continuously operating opera company in the U.S. (or something like that) but I would really like to hear that voice in a lead role some time.

Well, Parrot just spied a bright red bird darting from a Brooklyn tree and is off in hot pursuit. Just a friend, Fragrance of Verbena... oh, you don't believe me? Betrayed as Mom predicted by a cynical American! Well, you can change her name but she's still as wise as an Owl. Anyway, what's a scarlet tanager doing in Brooklyn? Must have been my imagination... which I should not mistake for reality. At least while I'm awake.

Playgiarism, or Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hatto

Remember Ervin Nyiregyhazi? Of course you do, even if you can't pronounce his name. He's the child prodigy pianist of the early 20th c. who suddenly disappeared from the scene in the 1920's, and re-emerged 50 years later to be recorded and acclaimed as one of the greatest pianists of all time. Here's a typical accolade: "Nyiregyhazi possessed a bigger tone than either Hoffman or Horowitz", says Gregor Benko in his notes to Nyiregyhazi's 1977 release of Liszt performances. Big tone or not, if you listen to these recordings with more than half an ear it's hard not to notice that a five decade sabbatical takes its toll on one's technique, or at least one's memory. There are enough wrong notes to make Artur Rubinstein look like a perfectionist, and plenty of tempos, dynamics and other features that have at best a rather insecure relationship to the score. Nor is the quality of the recordings quite up to showing off the alleged tone. (I haven't heard the CD transfers; possibly they were able to recapture some of what was lost on vinyl.) But the heck with all that; the emotional power of these performances does, in the end, emerge, and one is left with the impression of having been dragged through the dirt for one's own good. For all their flaws, we are happy to have these unexpurgated recordings of the septagenarian Nyiregyhazi - even if we are thereby occasionally forced to try pronouncing his name.

"Joyce Hatto" is name that even the phonetically challenged should not have much difficulty pronouncing, and a name that will always live in quotes - scare quotes, that is. Hatto was a concert pianist who became ill with ovarian cancer in 1976, at the age of 47. The good news is that she lived another 30 years, and passed away only last year. The bad news is that she was in pain much of the time, a fact that apparently marred all her later recording efforts with grunts and groans. Marred? I can't say that Toscanini's recording of the Verdi Requiem is exactly enhanced by his shouting instructions to the orchestra at various points, but this is not going to keep it from being one of the greatest recordings of all time. Were a few grunts and groans so bad? We'll never know. For it seems that her husband and recording engineer, William Barrington-Coupe, took it upon himself to deliver to us the expurgated Hatto, and replaced first the moans and groans, then the less perfect takes, and finally entire pieces with digitized, highly edited passages from other recordings. In the no-holds-barred (or is it no-bars-held-back?) world of disco and hip-hop this is called "sampling"; in classical music it is referred to by the classical name, plagiarism.

The deception, as is so often the case with plagiarism, was originally not without some twisted justification. Mr. B-C was concerned that his wife's virtues as a pianist had not received their due, and his desire to record her in her best light was frustrated by her unfortunate health issues. His determination to slog on in the face of reality caused him to slide down the slippery slope from applying musical bandaids to lifting entire recordings without credit. Thus is the road to moral turpitude spliced with Bach inventions.

It is one of the great mysteries of nature and music that so many wonderful musicians, and particularly pianists, live on and continue to make great music well into their 70's, sometimes 80's, occasionally 90's; and then there is Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who played his last recital at 99. So when B-C offered the world a series of technically brilliant recordings of a vast portion of the piano repertoire supposedly made by Hatto in her 70's, it was not exactly like the world turned upside down. I heard Guiomar Novaes perform in her 70's, and if memory serves me correctly she played, in addition to the usual helping of Chopin and such, some incredibly difficult set of variations on the Brazilian national anthem by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The putative Hatto recordings were stunning, but B-C must have known that the classical world would not find their authenticity suspect on that basis alone.

No, what happened was that a Gramophone reviewer stuck one of the recordings on his PC, and was surprised to find that it automatically downloaded playback info for another recording of the same piece. Apparently Mr. B-C had the technical chops to edit the timing and tonality of some of the lifted material to match Hatto's original tracks, but insufficient acumen to deal with the world of Media Player or iTunes! Just as students who plagiarize papers by downloading text from the Internet are often easily caught by teachers who have learned to use the same search engines they used, this technologically knowledgeable plagiarist was caught up short by the latest media technology. Technical tests by recording engineer Andrew Rose confirmed the aural impression that the recordings were indeed plagiarized.

There have been previous instances where classical recordings were long attributed to the wrong person, the most famous being a recording of Chopin's first Piano Concerto by Halina Czerny-Stefanska, another perhaps under-recognized female pianist that was mis-attributed to Dinu Lipatti. This was apparently an error, though. At this point, the entire set of Hatto recordings is suspect, and may constitute the most extensive case of plagiarism and consumer deception in the history of classical recording.

Although B-C states that he has "closed the operation down", "had the stock completely destroyed" and that he is "not producing more" (NY Times 2/27/07 p.E3) his claims for Hatto's recorded legacy can at this moment still be found on the web site of his tiny record label Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings. This should remind us that he stood to profit from his misadventures, and could still do so if curiosity and speculative collecting are enough to generate a few sales. To my mind this casts some doubt on the bit about helping his wife win a well-deserved place in piano history; at the very least, one would normally recognize an additional motivation in generating profits. Who knows how much stock he really had, or has; only a few days earlier he had publicly denied the plagiarism allegation, and then he has suddenly obliterated every remnant of his work of many years? We have a right to be skeptical. And while he may deserve some sympathy for his predicament, and claims he is "tired" and "not very well", my feeling is that it is a bit too soon to let this go. "Now I just want a little bit of peace", says Mr. Barrington-Coupe. "Now..."? Having endured a whole week of criticism after years of plagiarism and piracy (he was actually engaging in both at once, a relatively rare situation) he just wants a little peace?

It is not a question of legal action, which one affected party (Robert von Bahr of BIS Records) has already declined to take. There is perhaps so little in the way of profit from these recordings (or should we call them "reissues"?) that suing for compensation may be a moot point. But this just emphasizes the difference between plagiarism and piracy. The issue with piracy, as with copyright violation, is denial of just compensation to artists, publishers, and others. No one objects to the fact that digital pirates distribute works more widely than would have been the case without them; they object to not making a profit from the distribution. The issue with plagiarism, which is not in itself a punishable crime, is strictly moral: credit was taken where it was no due, credit failed to be given where it was due, some number of public or private individuals were decieved, and the deception was carried out consciously and intentionally. If we let people like this off the hook so lightly, what do we do with the undergraduate who merely downloads a few passages off the Internet and submits them unattributed in an assignment? Smile and wag a finger, tut-tut-tut? Congratulate him on a heroic effort to hide his sources? Praise his integration of texts from three different web sites? No, we can't let the sob story about Joyce Hatto and her health issues cloud our judgment about long-term, systematic, commercial plagiarism. It is just not fair to the next student who gets an F for plagiarism in a college course if we let this infinitely worse case go with a shrug and a wince about Joyce Hatto's difficulties.

The Concert Artists web site sports bios of several other little-known artists, and we should now seriously consider whether there might be plagiarism issues in any other recordings presented by Concert Artist. The site is incredibly vague about exactly which artists it claims to have original recordings by, and which it merely distributes; I could not find a page with a catalogue other than works by "Hatto". But consider the Ozan Marsh page. This is a pianist who recorded, performed and taught widely, though he has little name recognition. According the web site, "Concert Artist was indeed delighted that this considerable pianist agreed to make several recordings for the label. His unexpected death [at age 71 - H.A.M.] robbed us all of a fulfillment of these fascinating plans. However, Ozan Marsh did complete some sessions and we are preparing these for eventual release on Compact Disc." I'm sure the classical world is all ears, waiting for the release of these "sessions" by a student of Rachnmaninoff, Horowitz and Emil Sauer who was considered a notable exponent of Liszt. What treasures might lie within? (Pyrite? Squawck!)) Hey, here's a thought. I have a 1975 release on ABC Westminster Gold by a pianist named David Bean. I know of nothing else by him and can barely even find a Google reference to him. But the recording, which includes Liszt's Mephisto Waltz and Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H, is in what I consider the unbelievable class; technically, at least, it blows away most other performances I've heard of these extremely difficult pieces. (And let me tell you, he has a Big Tone.) Now, it is highly unlikely that B-C has a copy of this disk. But for a small fee and a percentage of future "royalties", I just might be moved to part with it. It could be easily digitized using one of those new turntables that automatically commits your records to digital format. I'd just like to meet the person who is going to listen to these "sessions" and say, "Hey, that's not Ozan Marsh, it's David Bean!" Right... A pair of parrots will play the Liszt B Minor Sonata by hopping up and down on a Steinway before that happens. Damn, if I just knew a recording engineer with a proper British name (has to have a dash in it) maybe I could actually get some money for my vinyl collection (hopefully before I have to move again).

But seriously folks, what is there to learn from an aging recording engineer who lost his sense of propriety and passed off other people's work as his wife's? I return to Nyiregihazi and Toscanini. And Rubinstein, and anyone else who has proudly issued a classical recording that falls short of sonic perfection but offers a memorable performance. Had B-C really believed in Hatto, had he trusted her musical gift and spirit and believed she had to offer what he claimed she did, he would not have felt compelled to take that first step and patch over imperfections and groans. You can EQ groans to the level of a minor nuisance, and the listener cannot always distinguish between a background groan and a moment of musical ecstasy anyway. The music, if it belongs in the annals of piano history, would have found its way there. It is now impossible to know what Hatto's virtues really were, at least without going to the original masters (if they exist). And that is a disservice to an artist who was probably at least worth listening to.

This suggests another point about our values: we have come to have so much faith in the technology behind modern recordings, as well as films and other media, that it is not at all shocking to find an example of someone who thought the road to great music was using technical means to perfect the end product. Art is about the intermediate product, the human performance, and technology never was or will be more than a way to make it shine.
This applies to other musical forms, including rock, folk and country music. No one with any taste would prefer to hear the latest technically perfect junk from Nashville to a scratchy old Hank Williams or Buck Owens recording. Rock guitarists and engineers can now control every harmonic and timbre emerging from a guitar, and singers are expected to be almost mechanically perfect in intonation and ensemble. But this kind of stuff will never mean as much as an old Stones record where the voices are neither in perfect tune nor perfect time, and the guitar distortion is controlled mainly by the idiosyncrasies of the pickups and the amps. Get back to the core values of creativity, expression and meaning, and we will not be tempted to head down the path of Hattoizing recordings.