Tuesday, November 15, 2011
On personality in philosophy, and once more on not liking Aristotle.
One of the things I've always loved about philosophy is how personal it is -- I mean that we all feel as though we knew many of the authors with whom we spend so much time. Some are naturals for perceived intimacy: the eloquent and prolific correspondent Seneca; Plato, arguably the single greatest contributor to literature ever; Augustine who puts his mind on display and practically pleads with you to riffle through the pages. Others offer themselves via a mysterious mix of writing style and idea patterns. There's dry, haughty Aristotle who only talks about aristocratic pastimes and occasionally says something that's not really a joke but you're pretty sure he thought it was; and airy, cocky Hume; Hobbes how self-satisfiedly sour; Spinoza whom you can see packing his straw-frail, ecstatic mysticism into bricks of theorems to build castles in the air ...It does prejudice one, though. Of course, thinking that women and non-Greeks are naturally slavish since congenitally missing the rationally commanding part of the soul -- when you've spent twenty years with Plato, who explicitly argues that slaves learn in just the same way as Socrates, whose republic contains no slaves and a ruling class whose women are on an absolutely equal footing with the men (though he does expect them to be fewer in number), whose Academy (supposedly) admitted female students! -- will tend to leave a bad taste in people's mouths regardless of their prior feelings towards you.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
On ways to look at Nellie McKay, in 13 parts.
Nellie McKay is an NPR listener's idea of what a young person should be like.
When I saw Nellie McKay perform in Seattle in the summer of 2008, she came onstage an hour late, alone with a ukulele, and played "Mother of Pearl." Then -- still solo on ukulele -- she played "Feed the Birds" from "Mary Poppins." There were tears in audience eyes.
Nellie McKay went to sleep in 1936 and woke up, confused but reenergized, in 2003.
I had always just assumed that Nellie McKay had attended Columbia, because she's so New York, and so smart, and so broadly educated, and her song "Columbia Is Bleeding" is so great. At some point I realized that I had no actual evidence for this claim.
Nellie McKay told us, at that same concert: "You guys, don't not vote for John McCain because he's old. Don't vote for him because he has f---ed up views on policy. But don't not vote for him because he's old. That's f---ed up." On at least four occasions through the evening, she complained of the heat, swayed dangerously, or gave signs of suddenly coming to consciousness after a lapse. She was wearing a red, fringed flapper dress and just coming off a stint in "The Threepenny Opera."
When Nellie McKay was born, three wise men made a pilgrimage to offer her mother gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and a well-thumbed edition of The Collected Witticisms of the Algonquin Round Table Set.
If Nellie McKay had a large enough lever and an outside vantage point, she could turn everyone on Earth into a vegan.
Nellie McKay has never met a piece of wordplay she can't find a place for.
If Nellie McKay and Stephin Merritt had babies together, they would be the people whose irony was least stably detectable ever.
Nellie McKay occasionally appears in completely bland Hollywood romantic comedies. No one knows why.
Nellie McKay goes too far because she can. Then she mocks you for thinking she's gone too far. Loser.
Nellie McKay's fourth album is a Doris Day tribute album. It's fabulous.
Nellie McKay thinks a work of art isn't finished until it's been sabotaged. Preferably by the artist.
When I saw Nellie McKay perform in Seattle in the summer of 2008, she came onstage an hour late, alone with a ukulele, and played "Mother of Pearl." Then -- still solo on ukulele -- she played "Feed the Birds" from "Mary Poppins." There were tears in audience eyes.
Nellie McKay went to sleep in 1936 and woke up, confused but reenergized, in 2003.
I had always just assumed that Nellie McKay had attended Columbia, because she's so New York, and so smart, and so broadly educated, and her song "Columbia Is Bleeding" is so great. At some point I realized that I had no actual evidence for this claim.
Nellie McKay told us, at that same concert: "You guys, don't not vote for John McCain because he's old. Don't vote for him because he has f---ed up views on policy. But don't not vote for him because he's old. That's f---ed up." On at least four occasions through the evening, she complained of the heat, swayed dangerously, or gave signs of suddenly coming to consciousness after a lapse. She was wearing a red, fringed flapper dress and just coming off a stint in "The Threepenny Opera."
When Nellie McKay was born, three wise men made a pilgrimage to offer her mother gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and a well-thumbed edition of The Collected Witticisms of the Algonquin Round Table Set.
If Nellie McKay had a large enough lever and an outside vantage point, she could turn everyone on Earth into a vegan.
Nellie McKay has never met a piece of wordplay she can't find a place for.
If Nellie McKay and Stephin Merritt had babies together, they would be the people whose irony was least stably detectable ever.
Nellie McKay occasionally appears in completely bland Hollywood romantic comedies. No one knows why.
Nellie McKay goes too far because she can. Then she mocks you for thinking she's gone too far. Loser.
Nellie McKay's fourth album is a Doris Day tribute album. It's fabulous.
Nellie McKay thinks a work of art isn't finished until it's been sabotaged. Preferably by the artist.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
On an oddity of Georgian and Regency prose.
A grammatical oddity of Georgian and Regency English literary prose, that is. Namely: they do weird things with comparatives and superlatives.
Jane Austen is incredibly careful to put solecisms in the mouths of the John Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the world and never into Catherine Morland's or Fitzwilliam Darcy's. Incredibly attentive to colloquialism, and scornful of those who depend on it overmuch -- think of Thorpe's "famous" this and that, of Maria Lucas and Lydia Bennet starting every other sentence with "La!," of Mrs. Elton's being always quite excessively shocked, and of the occasional "power of" xyz (where we would be more likely to say "heaps of"). Her narrators don't speak like that. Sometimes they speak strangely to us who would never use "eat" as a past participle ("when they had eat and were done..." and such), but perfectly grammatically for the time. Yet her fine speakers don't seem to distinguish comparatives and superlatives clearly as such. Oh, sure, comparatives are still used to compare -- you see "A is better than B" and not "A is best than B" -- it's not all the way to speaker incompetence. But over and over, "which [of two] was the handsomest," "whether A or B were tallest," when comparisons of two just can't take a superlative as we speak, not without a context strongly suggesting generalization they can't. You could say, "Which do you like best?" of two things without paying or drawing attention to their number, but "which of these two do you like" will always end in "better." Not so for Jane Austen. Very interesting!
And on the other hand the narrator of Pride & Prejudice definitely says "either of A, B, and C," when for us "either" can never branch into three, no matter the context. Very odd!
And for the Georgian:
"On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons."
That's from the Brobdingnagian section of Gulliver's Travels. So for Swift "whether" was the right way to say "which (of two)" in more cases than we would say it in. We'd say "do you know whether you are going or not?" or just "I don't know whether you are going?" And we'd say "do you know which of those you want?" or "which do you want?" or "I don't know which." But we would never say "I don't know whether." In Greek or Latin you can do that with the "whether"/"which (of two)" words, so perhaps that's the source of his comfort. But Gulliver's Travels is pretty far from fussily written. So maybe you could actually say that then! Wouldn't that be interesting?
Jane Austen is incredibly careful to put solecisms in the mouths of the John Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the world and never into Catherine Morland's or Fitzwilliam Darcy's. Incredibly attentive to colloquialism, and scornful of those who depend on it overmuch -- think of Thorpe's "famous" this and that, of Maria Lucas and Lydia Bennet starting every other sentence with "La!," of Mrs. Elton's being always quite excessively shocked, and of the occasional "power of" xyz (where we would be more likely to say "heaps of"). Her narrators don't speak like that. Sometimes they speak strangely to us who would never use "eat" as a past participle ("when they had eat and were done..." and such), but perfectly grammatically for the time. Yet her fine speakers don't seem to distinguish comparatives and superlatives clearly as such. Oh, sure, comparatives are still used to compare -- you see "A is better than B" and not "A is best than B" -- it's not all the way to speaker incompetence. But over and over, "which [of two] was the handsomest," "whether A or B were tallest," when comparisons of two just can't take a superlative as we speak, not without a context strongly suggesting generalization they can't. You could say, "Which do you like best?" of two things without paying or drawing attention to their number, but "which of these two do you like" will always end in "better." Not so for Jane Austen. Very interesting!
And on the other hand the narrator of Pride & Prejudice definitely says "either of A, B, and C," when for us "either" can never branch into three, no matter the context. Very odd!
And for the Georgian:
"On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons."
That's from the Brobdingnagian section of Gulliver's Travels. So for Swift "whether" was the right way to say "which (of two)" in more cases than we would say it in. We'd say "do you know whether you are going or not?" or just "I don't know whether you are going?" And we'd say "do you know which of those you want?" or "which do you want?" or "I don't know which." But we would never say "I don't know whether." In Greek or Latin you can do that with the "whether"/"which (of two)" words, so perhaps that's the source of his comfort. But Gulliver's Travels is pretty far from fussily written. So maybe you could actually say that then! Wouldn't that be interesting?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.
I don't know anything about dance. I barely made it through the obligatory years of childhood ballet, and I can't tell a rumba from zumba. But I go to the ballet from time to time, and I have seen a lot of musicals -- some on the stage, some independent, some foreign, some more recent, but mostly, as with my movie knowledge in general, Hollywood productions from before 1960. I was raised to. My little sister claims to have thought, in the first grade (c. 1995), that Fred Astaire was the biggest movie star in the world; certainly she earned a laugh at Madame Tussaud's by asking where they kept their waxen Fred Astaire. ("In the basement, maybe, if it's still around ...") I've seen most of the movies whose songs reappear in "Singin' in the Rain," and been baffled on Broadway to see numbers from "Gold Diggers of 1933" (I think ... I think "We're in the Money") appear in a production of "42nd St." Of course I have seen movie musicals from the '60s and '70s -- the memorably bad "Daddy-O" (MST3K), "Don't Knock the Rock," and "Don't Knock the Twist" (TCM) besides "Jailhouse Rock" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Producers" and "Cabaret." But "musical" isn't a genre, unless (and maybe this is so) a single formal constraint can make a genre. Maybe any book whose plot depends on a crime is crime fiction, whether it's spooky, cozy, or lurid in tone, whether the prose is lush, spare, unprepossessing, funny or not, demanding or not, whether the story revolves around plot or character or atmosphere or message or something else, whether we know whodunit from the start or not until the last paragraph on the last page, whether it's an investigator's-eye or perpetrator's-eye-view, whether the end frightens, unsettles, baffles, or reassures us. And maybe "Duck Soup" and "Some Like It Hot" and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Team America: World Police" do belong to the same genre in the way relevant to this discussion. Maybe "The Long Goodbye" is sufficiently haunted by its theme music, or "Psycho" and "The Graduate" and "The Big Lebowski" sufficiently dominated by their soundtracks, to count, or border on counting. It's okay with me. But I'm talking about Hollywood musicals of the so-called Golden Age. The kind that flourished under the studio system, and at MGM in particular -- from "The Jazz Singer" through "The Bandwagon." The kind Busby Berkeley choreographed, the kind that produced long-term star pairings like Maurice Chevalier/Jeanette MacDonald, Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy, Ruby Keeler/Dick Powell, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse. The kind you associate with Lena Horne and Judy Garland and Howard Keel, with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, with Warren & Dubin and Rodgers & Hammerstein or Hart. The kind whose lavish choreography and intimate musical confession we most often see, now, in Walt Disney products. The kind "Singin' in the Rain" epitomizes and glamorizes. You'd know it when you saw it.
Well, although I am not especially interested with dance I find myself entranced by the dancing in many of these musicals. Of course I could never say no to a surreally symmetrical Busby Berkeley lady-flower transforming into an electrically-lit lady-guitar via overhead, underwater, and upskirt shots, of course, but what I want to think about here is dancing as acting, not dancing as auteur-ial vision. Berkeley has this way of using body parts, including even very close close-ups of faces, to distract from the humanness of wholes. When the dance does focus on a single individual, even she will be not whole and single but distortedly mirrored everywhere, as Ruby Keeler is in "I Only Have Eyes for You" from "Dames." There's something profoundly actor-undermining at work there. I'm sure the people who work on Berkeley's influence on the brilliant Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl have lots to say about it. Charming as Keeler is, and as good a dancer as she is, her dancing is dispensable. Not so with the kind of dancing I mean.
There is one paradigm of indispensable dancing in a Busby Berkeley movie: Jimmy Cagney in "Footlight Parade." He's featured in only one number, but while he moves Cagney is never not dancing. That his character is a workaholic dance creator is utterly plausible, since he seems even whilst immobile never not to be thinking of dancing. His dancing isn't as athletic as Gene Kelly's and it isn't as natural as Fred Astaire's. It isn't as abstractly expressive as Kelly's or as emotionally integrated as Astaire's. But it's extraordinary. As Garbo seemed simply to have more muscles in her face than other actors did, and finer-grained control of every visible bit of her, Cagney appears to have a double-jointed waist, if such were possible. His shoulders, hips, and feet can stand firm while everything in between jumps out. I once would have described the intense, effortless smoothness of his motion as "liquid." It isn't. Nor willowy. There's too much power there. He would clearly not bend with the remover to remove, nor alter when he alteration finds. He moves as though he were a set of muscles on an impossibly flexible skeleton. It's not liquid. It's serpentine.
I'm curious that he doesn't seem like a dancer when he plays a gangster. He's versatile enough, of course, but that kind and that degree of freedom of motion don't come and go with roles. And he did intersperse dance and criminal roles a bit throughout his career. But he doesn't seem interested in presenting dangerous grace in either sort of film. That might be a very great pity.
Well, although I am not especially interested with dance I find myself entranced by the dancing in many of these musicals. Of course I could never say no to a surreally symmetrical Busby Berkeley lady-flower transforming into an electrically-lit lady-guitar via overhead, underwater, and upskirt shots, of course, but what I want to think about here is dancing as acting, not dancing as auteur-ial vision. Berkeley has this way of using body parts, including even very close close-ups of faces, to distract from the humanness of wholes. When the dance does focus on a single individual, even she will be not whole and single but distortedly mirrored everywhere, as Ruby Keeler is in "I Only Have Eyes for You" from "Dames." There's something profoundly actor-undermining at work there. I'm sure the people who work on Berkeley's influence on the brilliant Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl have lots to say about it. Charming as Keeler is, and as good a dancer as she is, her dancing is dispensable. Not so with the kind of dancing I mean.
There is one paradigm of indispensable dancing in a Busby Berkeley movie: Jimmy Cagney in "Footlight Parade." He's featured in only one number, but while he moves Cagney is never not dancing. That his character is a workaholic dance creator is utterly plausible, since he seems even whilst immobile never not to be thinking of dancing. His dancing isn't as athletic as Gene Kelly's and it isn't as natural as Fred Astaire's. It isn't as abstractly expressive as Kelly's or as emotionally integrated as Astaire's. But it's extraordinary. As Garbo seemed simply to have more muscles in her face than other actors did, and finer-grained control of every visible bit of her, Cagney appears to have a double-jointed waist, if such were possible. His shoulders, hips, and feet can stand firm while everything in between jumps out. I once would have described the intense, effortless smoothness of his motion as "liquid." It isn't. Nor willowy. There's too much power there. He would clearly not bend with the remover to remove, nor alter when he alteration finds. He moves as though he were a set of muscles on an impossibly flexible skeleton. It's not liquid. It's serpentine.
I'm curious that he doesn't seem like a dancer when he plays a gangster. He's versatile enough, of course, but that kind and that degree of freedom of motion don't come and go with roles. And he did intersperse dance and criminal roles a bit throughout his career. But he doesn't seem interested in presenting dangerous grace in either sort of film. That might be a very great pity.
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