Reminding Myself of a Certain Fisherman

The one who landed the Fish of all Fishes--the one which when freed grants wishes--I said to my computer this evening, "Well, if you can do Sammartini in the morning, let's hear you do Pietro Antonio Locatelli now!"  And so my head is ringing with the artfullest, tunefullest concerti grossi ever written.  

My reading meanwhile is much of Roberto Calasso these days, his ruminations on the modernness of history from Talleyrand to Pol Pot, his funny nuanced appreciation of what the Gods mean to us.  I dreadfully fear, or fearfully dread, since he has not got it that there is nothing in Freud, either of Truth or Interest, that Calasso may be a mere Postmodernist...but we shall see.   

No News Is Good News

Finding considerably less than nothing on NPR live radio broadcasts, I said to myself, "Damn it! I want to hear some--Oh, let's say Sammartini!"   So I googled "Sammartini, music online"--And Lo!  as I write, I'm listening to an original-instruments-and-(castrati)-voices, purely heavenly Il Pianto degli Angeli della Pace.  I exaggerate (solo pochissimo!) when I say there are castrati in this recording.  There is something odd about the few, suspiciously high, male-like voices I think I hear, full of character, distinctive; such as might resulted from castration--but it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.  Anyway, this is music I love--I scarcely knew when the name occurred to me that I would love it so much.   Once, long ago, living in penurious, splendid isolation (for a month--but oh how long a month lasted in those days!) in an apartment on Pine Street on Nob Hill in San Francisco, having only an f. m. radio, besides my books and journals, to occupy me--I heard a symphony of Sammartini's, and found it delightful and remarkable.  I was into Gluck in those days, and of course knew that he had been in some manner 'apprenticed' to Sammartini....

But shut up a minute!  This tenor aria--"Dal profundo de' squalidi Abissi"--impossible in the demands of range and agility to singers with normal genitalia, is sheer castrato tour de force. There are things about the 18th Century that I miss.  

So You Think You've Got Me Pegged

Much I imagine to the surprise of anyone who's followed my rants on music will be the following: (item) I saw Bobby Darin (by accident, you may be sure) on television, when I was about fifteen years old, singing 'Mack the Knife,' and I like fell in love.  Thereafter I could never get enough of that genial young man as an actor, singer, writer, composer:  I didn't even know that he had written 'Splish Splash, I was taking a Bath' and I loved it.  Think what you like.

(item)  Some fifteen years ago I accompanied Phil's first wife Anna in a Cabaret Act--We called ourselves "Lola Montez."  We performed all kinds of arguably popular or contemporaneous music--my favorites were Kurt Weill and wonderfully silly French Sixties Rock and Roll:  Our version of 'Le Jour où la pluie viendra' brought down the fucking house.  

Upon Reflection, However,

I perceive that it's not Alpha Centaureans who are determined that Earthlings not know of their existence--but our own "Security Agencies," who stand to lose all their power of secrecy,  violence and terror if the mere rumor or suspicion of a Galactic Civilization were to transpire.  And sure, the way the Hubble was "eliminated" bespeaks the hasty, atrociously clever "smart assness" of the CIA /FBI/NSA rather than the policy of a billion year old civilization. 

Reading now Postmodern Pooh--alternating between it and the dead-seriousness of George Perle's Operas of Alban Berg--I do indeed see a world at an end; a silly, ignominious, deliberately stupid, and a fatally, fatuously vainglorious little end.  In all of Postmodernism there is not a jot or a tittle of modesty, honesty, decency, or simplicity.  It is utterly and entirely a matter of fakery, ostentation, cowardice, and villainy.  With the single exception, perhaps, of Jean Baudrillard.   

Detecting Centaureans

I've spent the whole morning reading the Allen Report, officially titled the Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report, plus just about everything available in the Wikipedia about the Hubble Telescope, past, present, and putative future.  Everywhere in the amazing story of How the Agents of the Imperial Galactic Command Post of Alpha Centauri Hobbled the Hubble Space Telescope are Lacunae--gaps, places where relevant documentation has simply disappeared. NASA's authorization (in fact, stipulation) of backup testing procedures, the accreditation (if it ever existed) of the one work-in-progress testing procedure that was used during the polishing of the main mirror--and much else besides--simply vanished.  Now, to a would-be detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, this is exciting stuff.  When things vanish, in a consistent and significant fashion, as has so much of the documentation, work reports, etc., of the grinding of that crucially distorted main mirror, one is able to conclude a couple of very interesting things:  (1) The resulting spherical distortion was deliberate; and (2) those working to produce it were, at many levels, a conspiracy.  From this it needs but a little examination of who had responsibility for what:  And voila' specific persons, and numbers of persons, both at NASA and at Perkin-Elmer suddenly emerge as instrumental--and, certainly, looking over Lew Allen's career (first NSA director ever to testify before Congress) I would think it likely that he is a key member of the Centaurean Conspiracy; perhaps even a Centaurean himself.  But I'm not saying who yet; because I don't know who yet--but already I discern them in outline.    

The Philosophy of Science

Don't laugh.  I actually took such a class in that last dream-like, sweetly chaotic year before I got my BA.  It satisfied, as I recall, some Science Credits and some Culture Credits at the same time. I took it Pass/Fail so it didn't mess up my GPA (which on graduating was a Magna cum Laude-ville 3.92).  Anyway, I took it, and insofar as it was about science, I loved it; and insofar as it was about Feminism, I purely loathed it.  Thus on the one hand I got to know what Bohr and Heisenberg said to Einstein, and what Einstein said to them; and on the other hand I made the acquaintance of such flickering corpse candles as Luce Irigaray, Thomas Kuhn, and Mary Shelley: Frankenstein was required reading.  The topic assigned for our term paper was "Describe the influence of Feminism on Science."  So, in piping pomo fashion I chose for my text Ariel's dream-speech from the first Canto of The Rape of the Lock:  "Hear and believe!  Thy own importance know/ Nor bind thy narrow views to things below./ Some secret truths, from learned pride conceal'd/ To Maids alone, and Children, are reveal'd."  I passed the course, but what the prof thought of my paper I never knew--and he refused to give it back to me.  

I Assert/Refute It Thus

Ayn Rand got some things exactly right.  Nobody, I think, ever caught the hideous, half-ghoulish, half-pitiful character of collectivist theory and collectivist theorists quite as brilliantly as she did. Nobody else ever described quite so incisively as she did the mingled obscenity, helplessness, cruelty, and resentment of those who hate and fear rational thought and individual freedom and integrity; those who make an ethos of "intersubjectivity" and "compassionate vulnerability," and who mock the "Myth of the Isolated Mind."  I relished it when I saw this monstrous vitiosity exposed in Rand's romantic/realist novels--particularly in Atlas Shrugged; notably in the characters of Lillian Rearden and James Taggart, if memory serves after so many years.   And that was pretty much all that interested me as a teenager.  As for the collectivist threat to my own sanity and integrity--thanks to the classlessness and individual nurturance of my upbringing--I had vanquished most of the ideological Dragons of Religion and Received Authority by the time I was twelve years old (in just the way that Althusser, Foucault, Gramsci, et alii have maintained that it should have been impossible for me to have done--see blogs April 9 through 11, 2006, and 11/27/07 and 12/4/07); such that, when it came time for me to face down the ultimate collectivist threat to my existence, military conscription, in my twenty-first summer, I was conspicuously well armored, and sailed through the encounter unscathed (see blogs May 10 and 11, 2006).

Aliens Among Us

It's a little game I play with myself, called:  Spot the Alien Intervention.  It doesn't have rules so much as premises:  

                    1.   The sun, solar system, terrestrial planets, life-itself are not unique; and represent the normal and usual evolution of (Type G, Early F, Late K) stars in the galaxy and in the universe.                                    

                   2.   Life evolves spontaneously wherever there exists sufficient molecular complexity in a sufficiently stable environment for biological replication to occur.

                   2a.  Complexity of replication, over time, always results in the evolution of intelligence; the more complex, the more intelligent. 

                    3.    The older the star system, the sooner life, and intelligence, evolve in it.

                    4.    With the evolution of life, and intelligence, comes inevitably, in time, the discovery of the means of inter-stellar space travel.

                    4a.  The discovery of the means of inter-stellar space travel begins first with the evolution of an intelligence capable of understanding either (1) that inter-stellar space travel is possible (based upon such proofs as it might possess due to the carelessness of visible, or detectable, inter-stellar space travelers); or (2) that it might be possible under certain conditions, given adequate means of propulsion and protective encapsulation.

                   5.    Inter-stellar space travel is, therefore, presumed to be a fact of life and a modus vivendi for all (Type G, Late F, Early K) star-systems older than 4.6 billion years old.  

                   5a.  The nearest star-system, therefore, in which inter-stellar space travel has evolved is Alpha Centauri.

Now I will quote a little bit from the article entitled Alpha Centauri, A Candidate for Terrestrial Planets And Intelligent Life (Last Update October '97 - new update currently in preparation), whose address I show below (but cannot make "live"--God damn the whizzes at Google Central who make editing one's blog insuperably difficult!):

     "Alpha Centauri is a special place because it may offer life conditions similar to our solar system.  A star must pass five tests before we can call it a promising place for terrrestrial-type life (1.  Main-sequence longevity.   2.  Spectral type: G, Late F, Early K.   3.   Stability.   4.  Age: more than 4,500,000,000 years old   5.  Heavy elements:  at least 2% metals)....Comparing with our system we see that both Alpha Centauri A and B might hold four terrestrial planets each...and both might have one or two planets in the Life Zone where liquid water is possible.  

      "....It is interesting to note what NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin declared in 1992: 'Imagine if spectroscopic analysis revealed a blue planet with oxygen atmosphere just 4 light years away orbiting Alpha Centauri.  The demand to build a warp drive would start right away!' [See Premise 4a. above]  When will we know whether there are really planets at [sic] Alpha Centauri?  Actually, the Hubble Space Telescope is checking for their existence...."  

     Out of the mouths of nerds.

     Now, as to the promised evidence of Alien Intervention:  Note that the foregoing giddy little effusion was written eleven years ago (with its precious information about the probable number of terrestrial planets within what distance of both Alpha Centauri A and B), saying that our incredible Hubble Telescope was even then being trained on these almost certainly inhabited stars...And with what result?  No one knows.  In fact, it turns out that there was something--oh so slightly miscalculated about that Hubble Telescope focal length..from the very beginning....Oh well, they've sort of fixed it.  Well, kind of.  They still can't see any planets around Alpha Centauri A or B--But how about those Deep Field images!

http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/schatzer/Alpha-Centauri.html

 

                    

                    

Shakespeare's "Birthday"

Somebody decided, sometime in the 18th Century--for a whim, or for no reason, or for a wrong reason--that today, the first day of Floreal in the Revolutionary Calendar, should be Shakespeare's birthday.  There are, actually, now't I think of it, reasons not to be assigning the Bard an arbitrary birthday.  Nothing wrong with his being a Taurus, keeping Johannes Brahms, Marcus Aurelius and the present monarch of England company: great artists all.  But he just feels to me somehow more of a universal sort of genius, with a peculiar diamond-bright, petal-dewy Englishness that makes me think Aries like Leonardo, or Pisces like Michelangelo.  And I think that every time I hear that today is his birthday.  

In Paraguay now, Fernando Lugo--still a Bishop, because Ratzinger, ever the twisted and evil "ex"-Nazi, and of course hating Lugo's "Liberation Theology" (by which is meant, in South America, anything to the left of Augosto Pinochet), has steadfastly refused to laicize Lugo, hoping thereby to make his candidacy illegal under the Paraguayan Constitution--has won the Presidency of Paraguay, thereby wresting (we'll see about that, of course) power from the party of the most blackly villainous oligarchy in all of South or Central America--the Colorado Party, of Stroessner et al.  Known as "the Priest of the Poor," Lugo is proceeding very cautiously, scarcely daring to say more than "poor relief" in a country where 90% of everything is owned by less than 2% of the population.  No wonder Benedict XVI hates him so much.  God damn the Pope!

Meanwhile, to the north of Paraguay, in the Santa Clara lowlands of Bolivia, Evo Morales is facing a secessionist revolt (Who wants to bet me that the CIA is funding and fomenting the whole thing?) of the predominately White, non-Indian landlords of that region, who wish to split off from Bolivia, taking the oil and gas fields with them, thus plunging the largely Indian rest-of-Bolivia into chaos and poverty.  God damn the CIA! 

Guess who President Morales is having extended, much-downplayed, behind-the-scenes talks with?  I'll give you a clue:  It's the same one that President Lugo is consulting with, all the while saying he isn't.   Well,

If you guessed Cesar Chavez, President of Venezuela, you guessed right.

Get the Fuck OFF Me! Dissevering Gay from Lesbian:

"Gay (male) and Lesbian (female)" are always yoked together as sharers of the same community resources and meeting centers, linked together as part of the same student organizations at the high school and university level, and treated academically as the same branch of psychology--as if these two very different, and in most things mutually antagonistic, genders, sexualities, sensibilities, lifestyles, philosophies, and world-views had anything whatsoever-the-fuck to do with one another!  Who*, besides heterosexist, heteronormative lesbophobes,  homophobes, and just plain all-around clueless bigots, could suppose for one fucking minute that, because lesbians fuck other women, and gay men fuck other men, they must partake of one similar "homosexuality"?   Has it not penetrated that, "in the homosexualities we see the divergent characteristics of the sexes at their most extreme"?

*  Queer Theorists, that's who.  

  

I should have listened to myself

I am suffering quite an Embarras de Maupin.  I have now--I think it's five or six--several well-worn (he's very popular) volumes of Armistead Maupin's Tales and More Tales of the City checked out from the Hawaii State Library--some from as far away as Hilo on the Big Island--and I find I cannot bear to read them:  Maupin is--as I said before (see blog, Being a Snob, 3/28/08) that I somehow knew he was--effeminate, in the bad old sense of being unduly concerned, overly, rather nastily, preoccupied with women, and a palpable closet heterosexist to boot; his few gay characters (painfully, to a discerning sensibility, denatured) are sort of thrown in as window-dressing, or couleur locale. This in what purports to be a sort of portrait of San Francisco in the 1970's and 80's!  In short, Maupin is another pussy-man--gawd 'elp us all.  And his stories go way more into the characters and physical natures of women than I will ever willingly go--unless they are fabulous monsters of evil like Racine's heroines, or tragic examples of the anatomist's art like the heroines of Flaubert, Zola, du Maupassant, or Gide; or, alternatively, like the purely human constructions of Mme. de la Fayette, Henry James, Goldoni, or E.M. Forster.  Otherwise, puh-leeze:  I do not wish to learn that women defecate, or that, if they're fat, they have to beat the boys off with a stick (and what a stupid, insulting, heterosexist, masturbatory fantasy that is!--Pussy-men are so vile, so unconsciously demeaning, in the stereotypifying that they don't even realize they're permitting themselves!).   How right I have been, all along, "with the jaw-set and the eyes-glazed of one ignoring a fart-joke or a fart," to have "turned away from all reading and discussion of Maupin and his impious, presumptuous profanation."

That said, I have been enjoying a veritable smorgasbord of Frederick Crews:  what a dainty feast is Postmodern Pooh!  What an exquisite thrill to have Erik Erikson and Earnest Hemingway, among others in the crtiticism, so neatly, almost gently, eviscerated!  And in the latter case to have the judgement of Gertrude Stein confirmed, with all its sly, triumphant mockery!  Both Gertrude and Alice really, really despised (and enjoyed despising) the young Mr. Hemingway.  As do I.

And, of course, it's always a pleasure to be reading the memoirs of the Princess Der Ling.  The mingled squalor and luxury, refinement and savagery, of the last years of the Imperial Chinese Court are endlessly fascinating.  One or two of the princess's books I read long ago, serendipitously, as a fifteen-year-old.  Fifty years ago I found her memoirs more nostalgically enchanting than I do now, because I have grown over the years less tolerant of cruelty and quicker to detect it: Princess Der Ling, for all her magnificence, her keen appreciation of beauty, and the extreme subtlety of her sensibilities, was (I now perceive) not a kind person; and her first impulse at witnessing someone else's misfortune (especially if they were a eunuch) was to laugh heartily. She's perfectly up-front in fact--thinking no evil--about her cold and vicious class-hatred of eunuchs.  She seems to have thought of them as a sort of rat-people.  Of course that's what everybody thought.  I remember a blog which I can't find right offhand, back in the late spring of 2006, in which I copied out the Empress's misgivings about having an Englishwoman hanging about in Her Court:  "Suppose she were to see a eunuch being punished.  She would think that we were barbarians...."  

Le Stragi di Perugia dagli Svizzeri del Papa, il 20 di Giugno, 1859

Funny thing how these things you think you know get all uncertain and hard to pin down when you start pursuing them.  Did Pio Nono, or did he not, order a band of his loathly Swiss mercenaries under the command of Colonel Schmid[t] to rape, loot, and murder the old men, women and children of Perugia on June 20th, 1859 (the young men being away at the wars in Lombardy)?  Did they not massacre some 12,000 Perugini?  That's what I learned in Perugia when I lived there in the summer of 2001.  But just now, googling the matter, it seems that there may have been some exaggeration--perhaps.  Certain it is that the Wicked Beast subsequently exalted Colonel Schmid with a Papal Order (need one remind us of the Ordo Draconis=Dracula?).  "And," innocently ask official Catholic Historians, "would the Pope have done that if Colonel Schmid had had the blood of 12,000 non-combattant Perugians on his hands?"  No question but that the rumor of the massacres in Perugia, exaggerated or not,  spread like wildfire in Umbria and the Marches, causing particular execration of Papacy and the ultimate victory of the Revolution.  But still....

Here Comes the Pope

When an evil man like the Nazi currently occupying the Papacy comes calling, the first impulse is to hide the spoons.  The second is to wonder why--Oh right, it's all about money, isn't it? America is the Whore of Rome's big Cash Cow.  You forget how a thing like that could be, with Little Bush's determined rapine of the middle classes, the sinking dollar, the general vast besmirching and discrediting of Amerika that's gone on in the almost-a-decade since the neo-cons took charge. But one in three of us is raised Catholic; one in four still keeps the faith of their fathers--that's still about as many Catholics, over-all, here as there are in Europe.  So Cash Cow milking-time it is (Plainly, hiding the spoons is a good idea).  

Meantime, that monster of plutocratic, CIA-backed corruption, Silvio Berlusconi, is about to win general elections in Italy (again!).  I doubt that it's a coincidence (Berlusconi's victory and the Pope's visit, I mean).  Funny-odd and funny-haha (continuing to read about us Transcendentalists) is Margaret Fuller's watching Pius IX turn into the Beast whose Svizzeri would go on to sack Perugia.  I don't know if she was thinking "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints!" but she might have been.

Long Talk with Phil this Morning

The eleven hour time zone difference is just perfect for long cozy chats, he settling down of an chilly spring evening there, moi rising here of a tropical summer morning.  We talked about Utrecht, where he has recently been visiting, its founding in the 7th century, its being where the famous treaty that ended the War of the Spanish Succession was signed (in 1713).  Then idly allowing our thoughts to wander we harked back to Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle in the early 80's, and curiously while we chatted I googled Hunthausen--and lo! the person who did him in (virtually got him excommunicated) was none other than that nasty old villain, then Cardinal, Ratzinger, with that infamous homophobic screed on the doctrine of the faith.  Well, well, well.  Then we talked about Margaret Fuller's bisexuality, Thoreau's and Whitman's gayness, and the abomination of Jeffrey Weeks'  Foucauldian social constructionism, and Phil's rising career in popular German rock/light opera, singing in the light/rock opera company of the talented and prolific young composer Joachim (Joschi) Kottmann.   I've googled him and he's definitely a Light, or a Presence, in the Deutsche Kunst of Today.   I couldn't be prouder of the (not so young any more) Phil Phillips if I'd given birth to him myself. 

Lovely Rainy Day

With the determined kind of air about it that lets you know that this is only the first of a predicted three days of Heavy Rain.  The birds are loving it (you can tell by their Rain Songs) and I am feeling oh so cozy, deeply secure, like any native of the Pacific Northwest feels when it rains. Catching up on my reading: the Transcendentalists, by one Barbara L. Packer, is the best book I've ever read on the subject, bar none, both in grandly comprehensive understanding of its subject, and in the tart, dry, savorous perfection of its prose--all the better because I had thought that this kind of excellence, on this subject,  was unattainable by any woman (Pace Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Helen Waddell).

There are items of interest in the news, not all of them reported in the same place, though obviously they are connected.  I'll make a couple of connected paragraphs of them:

1.  The top four generals of Ecuador's despised-and-feared Military have resigned, along with the Defense Minister, following public criticism by Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, of the military's subservience to the CIA, particularly during the recent murderous incursion into Ecuadoran territory by Colombian Para-Military Forces, led and participated in by the CIA. It has been established that one of those killed during the raid was an Ecuadoran citizen.  Correa's popularity among the people of Ecuador has "spiked" to an unprecedented level.

2.  "ABC has two stories on President Bush's polar [I think what is meant is bi-polar] behavior over the last two days.  On Tuesday, the President had tears streaming down his face during a ceremony for a Navy Seal who had given his life in Iraq....Today, for the third time in recent months he publicly reflected on his drinking problem*...."  In a not unrelated statement on Chris Matthew's Morning Show, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan said: The latest revelations on the torture front show the memo from John Yoo...means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon.  They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes."  "Really!" said Matthews, and went to a commercial.

And when I have required some Heav'nly Music, which ev'n now I do...

The quote, of course, is from Shakespeare: The Tempest, Prospero's farewell to his art, which has gone humming around in my head for some fifty years now; along with "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it," from Marlowe's the Tragickal history of Dr. Faustus.  The straight on the one hand; the gay on the other.  How do you know that Ferdinand and Miranda are a heterosexual couple (even though Miranda's a boy in drag); while Faust and his "sweet Helen" are two queers?  Presumably, if you're straight, you don't--can't--know it (see blog 2/28/08, and: "There's no Gaydar for Heteros, but there are Straight Signals," by Tom Zoellner: http://www.blacktable.com/zoellner040715.htm). Maybe it's not important--until you get to Edward II (Marlowe); but then you must understand that Henry, Isabel, and Gaveston are three males--and it won't work if Isabel is played by a woman.  The intrusion of actresses into the performance of pre-Caroline theater, inappropriate enough in Shakespeare, is the utter ruination of Marlowe.  In English letters, Marlowe is the first, and still the most beautiful, instance of Gay (totally Male) Sensibility.  But oh how wearying the prospect of explaining this to those who have not already grasped it!--who are still sucking air at my disqualifying even the Honorable Mrs. Siddons--even Dame Judith Anderson (whom I have seen playing Lady MacBeth--She was superb!  Majestic!)--as interpretresses of the Bard!  Why, oh why, do I even think to call halt to the Feminist Juggernaut?  Oh well, why not?   I write, not for the present, but for all time:

When the Golden Age--whereof London in the 1590's, Paris in the 1780's, and San Francisco in the 1970's were Delicious Foretastes--returns to dwell in Earth forever, with Peace, and Joy, and Liberty for All, then will all the conventions of all the arts be understood and honored--at whatever cost or loss to any particular class, group or sex--; including that most basic of conventions of: the representation of female characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by boy-actors.      

Stranger than Fiction

Two or three items in the world news today that set one a-wondering--in reverse order of interest:

1.  Cokie Roberts, noted Media Whore, "News Analyst" for NPR, said yesterday on television that:  "Americans [including Cokie Roberts] agree with Senators McCain* and Graham, that withdrawal [from Iraq] is a bad idea, and that they want to stay until we win...."  "Win"?

*Republican John McCain [quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 4/7/08]: "It [would be] 'imprudent and dangerous' to leave the combat zone too quickly."   "Combat zone"?

2.  An inquest jury has found that:  "Princess Diana was unlawfully killed due to 'gross negligence' of driver Henri Paul* and the paparazzi...."  The coroner at the inquest, Lord Justice Scott Baker, said that the princess's former butler, Paul Burrell, had lied** at its hearings.

*  There's a surveillance tape of Princess Di and her heavy-hung, rich boyfriend leaving their hotel just before the "accident," in which there is also, happenstantially, a very interesting close-up of Henri Paul: Paul is clearly drunk or drug-impaired.  My first thought was, "Well, obviously, when you're working for a swine like Dodi Fayed and you're drunk, you can't just say, 'Sorry, Mr. Fayed, I'm too drunk to drive tonight,' because he'll fire you.  And unless you fuck up too bad, chances are he won't even notice that you're drunk--a man with all that high-cost nooky on his hands isn't going to be paying much attention to the help."  My second thought was darker, less distinct, and creepier:  "That was drug-impairment, not drunkenness. There was something in Paul's demeanor which suggested deliberation and purpose.  He was scared by something that he had to do--but more scared of what would happen if he didn't do it."

**Mr. Burrell said that the Queen told him, in a conversation several months after the accident, "There are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge."  He also said that Princess Diana's mother, Mrs. Shand Kydd, in a phone conversation that the princess had asked him to listen-in on on a phone extension, accused Diana of 'messing around' with Muslim men. "She called the princess a whore and said she was 'messing around with effing Muslim men.'" 

3.  All right, I did make this up (See blog 2/16/08).  My purpose was to destroy the Roman Catholic Church.  It makes you wonder, though, what Cardinal Schoenbrunn's purpose is.  VIENNA (Reuters) April 7, 2008 - Cardinal Christoph Schoenbrunn and curators of the Cathedral Museum of St. Stephan's have come under heavy fire, "a barrage of angry messages" from museum visitors and Catholic websites, for a retrospective [exhibit] honoring 'Austria's cherished artist' Alfred Hrdlicka.  The Church hastily removed a homoerotic version of the Last Supper [entitled 'Leonardo's Last Supper, restored by Pier Pasolini'] described by Hrdlicka as "a homosexual orgy of the Apostles" [which showed cavorting Apostles sprawling over the dining table and masturbating each other.  Hrdlicka says he represented the men in this way because there are no women in Leonardo's original painting]. But the protest has continued, much to the surprise [!] of the museum's curators.  The museum's director, defends both Hrdlicka's work and his decision to host the artist's controversial versions of Biblical imagery in a museum tied to the Catholic Church: "We think Hrdlicka is entitled to represent people in this drastic, carnal way," Bernhard Boehler said....He said that the museum never intended to offend people but that art should be allowed to provoke a debate.  "I don't see any blasphemy here," he said, gesturing at a Crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding His genitals [beating Him off?].  "People can imagine what they want to."  [And they do!]  Boehler says that picture drew particular criticism from some visitors, along with a sculpture of Jesus on the cross without a face or loincloth.  A communist and an atheist, Hrdlicka says, "if the Cathedral Museum is having problems now, it's not really my affair," and he praised the director for being "strong."  Boehler says the "debate" can be compared to the Danish Cartoon Row.  Indeed.

 

    

Reading 'The Second Sex'

a couple of decades ago, I was struck, first of all, by what a pleasant person Simone de Beauvoir seemed to be, and how reasonable.  I still couldn't (and can't) fathom her loyalty to, and obvious pride in, being the Significant Other of the weak and nasty--and, for my money, quite negligible--J.P. Sartre; charitably, I put her attachment down to the Madness of Love.  What, after all, appealed to me in de Beauvoir was her unaffectedly original view of herself and the world.  I was very interested to notice what she said about not being born a woman, but having become one.  "How odd," I thought; "I wonder if other women feel that way about themselves, and just don't say so?" And I didn't entirely forget about it, but sort of filed it away in the "Watch for Future Applications" file--and it did come in handy, as a critical insight in reading the next book of de Beauvoir's that I read, L'Invitée, a very depressing novel which is made much easier to bear as you read by keeping in mind that the plot, and the characters (even Sartre's*), are both real and semi-fictionalized constructs.  You might suppose that I would have realized that I was on to something.  

*  I didn't for a moment, however, doubt the literal truth of the account of Sartre's bummer of a mescaline trip; nor was I much surprised to learn that he was pursued for months (Who knows?--maybe for the rest of his life) by a giant blue lobster that only he could see.  Cold-hearted old hippy that I am, I believe that intellectual cowards and moral relativists, unable to bear the truth they apperceive of themselves under the influence of mind-expanding drugs, naturally take refuge in paranoia and persecution mania.  And I see, now't I think about it, that both Sartre's menacing "lobster" and Beauvoir's "constructed self" are similarly cowardly evasions of responsibility for themselves.  This had never occurred to me until I started reading about postmodernism.

Whoring and Lusting after Romanticism mit Schlag

Naughty of me, but I still like the Brahms' cello sonata, Op. 99 (all of the Brahms cello sonatas, actually, and the violin sonatas).  How many long hours walking with it on my (clunky tape-player) Walkman?  Much of a life ill spent, but scarcely to be regretted. Never to be forgot: accompanying (the incredible how young) Phil on the piano in an all-Brahms (our portion of it, anyway) program--I've never before or since known such terror (well, maybe once before--see blog 12/4/07):  An audience of symphony conductors, professional classical musicians (more than one person there who made his living playing Brahms); being the second half of a program, the first half of which had been a world-class soprano, whose accompanist had just graduated from Juliard, singing Schumann like a goddamned angel.  Wondering "How the fuck did I get myself committed to a no-win, dead-certain come-uppance and crushing putting-down like this?"  [It was Phil's idea.  Being a beautiful young baritone with a gorgeous voice and a sympathetic command of German poetry, he needed, for both reasonable/professional and essential/personal reasons (he's a Leo), to exhibit himself to the finest and most scholarly musicians he could find an audience of.  We had been playing and singing Brahms' songs for about a year--for fun, I thought, and because they're so beautiful they make almost anything else seem insipid.  No pressure, no "goals," nothing on the horizon (I thought); just fun, and the joy of making beautiful music.  Then one day: "You know, we should think about performing these songs in public."  "Well, sure.  Why not?"  "A couple of months from now."  "Okay.  Any particular occasion, you can think of?" "Maybe."  So we started really practising.  No more, "Oh, that'll do for now."  Working, polishing, listening, criticizing--several hours a week.  I was really enjoying it.  Between us (Brahms' music is so interdependent), the songs took on entrancing shapes and moods--colors, almost.  Then we went back over them and pruned, eliminated, discarding anything that either of us felt was not perfect.  It was still fun, right up to the day, almost to the hour of the performance....]  Then, listening to the soprano and her divinely inspired accompanist knock off one jewel-like Dichterliebelied after another, I realized with mounting horror the magnitude of my temerity.  After the prolonged and rapturous applause died away, an expectant hush settled over the auditorium while Phil and I took our places, and began...I frankly don't remember much of the performance.  I was afraid, all through it.  Then it was over.  There was applause--lots of applause, warm and reassuring.  And then the very conductor of the symphony--a musician of genius--was holding my hand, in the touchy-feely way that European aristocrats sometimes have.  For about five minutes, clasping my hand between both of his hands, sweetly, ardently he told me what a wonderful, sensitive  performance I'd given--almost ignoring Phil, who was, however, standing beside me, beaming. It wasn't until I heard the recording of our performance next day that I realized:  We hadn't made any mistakes.  Not one.  Either of us.  

An Ass Bearing Books

Saw my doctor, talked with my case manager (if that's what she is) at the animal shelter. While I was there John B. came up to me to ask if I yet knew how to use my computer to make copies of CD's--He's been being quite insistent. Today, however, he indicated that it was more urgent than ever: He has just acquired "all the Webern symphonic works, all the Schoenberg piano music (including the piano concerto), and both Wozzeck and Lulu--very rare recordings." He'll make it worth my while, and give me copies of everything. "Look," I said, "you're hurting something deep inside me." After a little more cross-talk, he recommended that I at least read one George Perle's books on the subject of the "2nd Viennese School." So, saying "forsooth!" I've come here to the ever-lovely main state library, and, besides the two books by Armistead Maupin that I'd put on order, found a book each by Perle, one on Wozzeck, one on Lulu; as well as some wretched female's recent presumptuous book on Transcendentalism; and three heretofore unread, unheard-of books by the Princess Der Ling (What a woman! What a prose stylist!), that I had the ineffably snobbish delight of having brought up from the Closed Stacks. So I'm headed home, planning to stop on my way to withdraw some money from the bank, and purchase a money order at the 7-Eleven to pay my rent. Tomorrow I'm going to the beach at Kailua.

Coffee Ethiopean...Music?

Never heard this piece before--Ah, 'twas Handel, Concerto Grosso #12 (I thought I'd heard 'em all; but I was wrong).  The trouble with getting Handel (heretofore unknown, at that) first thing on your f.m. tuner is it spoils you for anything else--unless you're supremely lucky, as I have been, to find a Haydn symphony (the 'Farewell') on another station immediately afterwards. 'Tanyrate, the sweet and heav'nly things I've just heard (am still hearing) will hover o'er me like a Morning Dream for the rest of what is to be a busy day, distilling sublimity and repose amidst the madding toil and broil, with maybe just a smidgen of contemptuous indifference.  I have found that visualizing the Taj Mahal lowers my blood pressure; while dancing a mental menuet (Forward two steps; back one.  Forward two; back one....) lends grace and suavity to my demeanor.  The same way that staring at the middle of peoples' foreheads gives them the comfortable assurance that you're paying attention to them--a little trick I picked up from Le Misanthrope.