This is one of the joys of The Wikipedia Age: finding unexpected facets to an artifact of popular culture that had previously seemed to be completely catalogued and encased. During this year’s Tony Awards, for example, Paul Shaffer introduced a performance of his song “It’s Raining Men” from The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, and talked a little about his own early days on Broadway. I’ve long known that Shaffer co-wrote The Weather Girls’ disco classic, and I’ve long known that he was one of the many future stars who cut his teeth on the Canadian production of Steven Schwartz’s Godspell. But when Shaffer mentioned on the Tonys that he’d worked with Schwartz on Broadway in ’74, I went to Wikipedia and learned about The Magic Show, the breakthrough stage vehicle for beloved ’70s magician Doug Henning, which originated in Toronto as Spellbound, a show produced by Ivan Reitman, with a book by David Cronenberg and a score by Howard Shore. (The production reportedly changed dramatically once Schwartz got involved.) It’s like “Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon,” remade not as a party game but as a way of seeing formerly remote entertainers as enthusiastic artists trying to make the most of their shot in the spotlight.
How crazy does this project sound, on the basis of personnel alone?
The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fictionauthor Stanislaw Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.
Telling of humanity’s encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox’s 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.
Now Bill Johnston, a professor at Indiana University, has produced the first Polish-English translation of the novel. It has just been published as an audiobook download by Audible, narrated by Battlestar Galactica’s Alessandro Juliani, with an ebook to follow in six months’ time. Lem’s heirs are hoping to overcome legal issues to release it as a print edition as well.
The reason why I, and I imagine most, know of Solaris is through its 1972 movie adaptation of the same name. That film is regarded as a cinema classic, and it is astonishing to me that a book, both highly esteemed as a classic of mature science fiction and as the inspiration for another classic piece of art, managed to escape for so long (50 years!) without a proper English translation. The rest of the Guardian article makes clear that the mistakes in the translation are far from esoteric; in the game-of-telephone translation dialogue was reduced to narration, scientific points were reduced to gibberish, and a couple of passages came to mean the opposite of the corresponding passage in the Polish original.
Because I have a near-comic inability to keep myself from tying everything to classical music, I want to draw attention to a Bach organ prelude that appears several times in the 1972 Solaris. The prelude is Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I call to you, lord Jesus Christ); it appears in the opening credits, at the end of the film, and I believe once more in the course of the film. The video I’m embedding is actually a piano transcription by Ferruccio Busoni. Vladimir Horowitz is the pianist.
I don’t have a sentimental attachment to Muppet movies the way that many of my peers do. I’ve actually never seen the classics, only Muppet Treasure Island and A Muppet Christmas Carol. It’s easy to be cynical about the way that the Muppet properties have been put through the Disney marketing machine, like Winnie-the-Pooh (both sets of characters and stories were conceived independently, then bought by the DIsney Corporation). If any project has a chance, though, it’s something like this, where a dedicated person with a great affection for the material (in this case, Jason Segal) works hard to bring new life to it. After all, the Muppets are only a hop, skip and jump away from the Dracula musical in Forgetting Sarah Marshall:
By now, I’m sure that you’ve all seen that Clarence Clemons, saxophonist for the E Street Band, has died.
Clemons seemed to be a character out of a storybook — or better yet, a widescreen movie about the triumph of a romantic gang of rock ’n’ roll renegades. Wildly popular among fans of the E Street Band, he was the sort of larger-than-life figure to whom legends accrued. Recognizing this, Clemons and Springsteen did much to play up those legends: “Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales,” Clemons’ 2009 autobiography written with Don Reo, combined genuine reflections with fiction in an attempt to capture the mythical quality of the musician.
Springsteen’s oft-told story of his initial meeting with Clemons felt Biblical: with a lightning storm raging outside, the Big Man tore the door off an Asbury Park club, strode onstage, and made magic. (Springsteen would later immortalize this meeting in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-out,” a song on “Born to Run.”)
Was this embellished? Most likely. But reality never seemed quite big enough to accommodate Clarence Clemons.
I can think of no better way to celebrate his life than with some of his music.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band burn down the house with “Badlands”
I was not a particularly diligent or present student in my freshman year Greek culture/literature/philosophy class. I don’t want to defend my own ignorance, but the abstraction of the philosophical texts always bored me. I was never so bored as when the philosophers turned to music. Greek philosophers were big on creating taxonomies of music, to reduce music to the level of science in which specific musical scales and rhythms produced a quantifiable effect in the listener. For example, this dialogue from Plato’s Republic:
And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the sound, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful: and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justify blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.
Yes, he said, I quite agree with you in thinking that it is for such reasons that they should be trained in music…
Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor the guardians, whom we say that we have to educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnanimity, and their kindred, as well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations, and can recognise then and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study.
I think if there is one consistent pattern that emerges at times of musical conflict, from the rise of polyphony in the 14th century to the popularization of jazz, rock and hip hop in the 20th, is that abstract discussion of the moral dimensions of music usually serve to reassure the status quo that they are good people because they listen to music that the status quo likes, and other people are bad people because they listen to music that the status quo dislikes.
Still, it’s hard for me to not be outraged on a moral level at the use of music to manipulate people in a context like this:
Once I get over the disgust I feel for the cruelty of this pastor, I start to notice everything else that’s fucked up about this video.
I’ve written before about how distasteful I find the Christian music industry, and Protestant “worship” music. And this must also resonate somewhat in the culture, because that piece, “Keith Green and the Commercialization of Christianity” is one of the most read posts on this blog, and I get traffic every week from people Googling “commercialization of Christianity.” This video shows that style of music at its worst–a cynical tool to increase the emotional stimulation of a group of teenagers.
As I wrote before, the emergence of “Contemporary Christian Music” in the 60’s and 70’s through figures like Keith Green, the Jesus People movement, and Maranatha! Music was a genuine attempt to try and praise god in the musical language of the culture. Although I am no longer a part of the church, I think that’s a fine and noble goal. Somehow in the past 50 years that has morphed into musically bankrupt and calculatedly manipulative aural wallpaper.
I know that this church does not give a fuck about my opinion, but I feel like it takes all the power away from the video for this just to be any church and this just any pastor in anyplace. The video is Pastor Damon Thompson at the Ramp in Hamilton, Alabama.
hammer & jack 