Recommended:

Garbo Laughs, by Elizabeth Hay

Hay’s second novel is not at all like her first (A Student of Weather), except that it, too, is beautifully written and thoroughly engaging.

The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard

Leonard changes his venue (from Detroit and Miami to Oklahoma) and his period (from the present to the 1920s and 1930s), but it’s the same old Elmore. That is to say, a ripping good read.

Lunch at the Picadilly, by Clyde Edgerton

The “dark side” of Clyde. A rather more realistic view of old people than than one gets in Edgerton’s earlier novels (as I remember them).

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

A funny, sad tale of interlocking mysteries, with a semi-hapless hero and a great supporting cast. Brits do it best.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

Inferior to McEwan’s Atonement, but “inferior” is a relative thing. McEwan is such a good writer that I can still recommend this short romp through London’s music and journalistic scenes.

A Desert in Bohemia, by Jill Paton Walsh

A novel of ideas, which also features compelling characters and dramatic tension. Along the way, Walsh — who may be an idealistic socialist, for all I know — lays bare the hypocrisy and brutality of state socialism as it was practiced behind the Iron Curtain. Yet another brilliant Brit.

What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), by Zoe Heller

A creepy, clinging narrator and a self-centered protagonist. A match made in a sadist’s heaven. More brilliant Brit prose.

I noticed that as I was scouring the Internet Movie Database for movies to add to my Blockbuster.com queue I eschewed films starring Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Mitchum. Perhaps it’s because I tend to dislike the melodramatic, unrealistic movies of the late 1940s and 1950s, which was when Douglas, Ford, Lancaster, and Mitchum became stars. But even their later films don’t appeal to me. I’ll have to give it some more thought. Stay tuned for a P.S.

UPDATED 07/15/05

I have been building my queue at Blockbuster.com by searching the Internet Movie Database. In the process of searching, I’ve updated the lists of movies I keep there.

Here are my IMDb power-search criteria:

• English language (I’m finding subtitles hard to read)

• Made between 1910 and the present

• Minimum of 100 voters (persons rating a movie)

• Exclude all movies in all of my IMDb categories (see below)

• Rated between 7 and 10 (where 10 is the highest rating) by persons aged 45 or older

And here are my IMDb categories and the numbers of movies currently in each one:

Blockbuster Queue — This category comprises the 158 titles on their way to me or in my queue at Blocbuster.com.

Must See — There are 65 movies I’d like to see that aren’t yet available (a few new movies, but mostly titles from the 1930s to 1960s).

Don’t See — This category (currently 941 titles) comprises movies I’m not interested in, or that I have rented and rejected, even though they meet my IMDb power-search criteria.

Seen — These are the 1,883 titles (good, bad, and indifferent) that I can remember having seen* in almost 60 years of movie-watching. Most of the titles are feature films, but the list does include about 80 notable TV miniseries, such as Bramwell; The Forsyte Saga (original and remake); The Sopranos; and Upstairs, Downstairs.

Related post: A Week in the Making…Now Showing on Your Computer Screen…”The 325 Greatest Movies of All Time”…
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* IMDb has ratings for 1,851 of the 1,883 titles on my “Seen” list. The average rating for my titles is 7.1 (out of 10) as of 11 p.m. CT on 07/14/05. The average rating for the 105,886 IMDb titles with ratings (as of the same time and date) is 6.1. Pickiness pays off:

Here’s a scholarly take on “modern” music, by Miles Hoffman, violist and artistic director of the American Chamber Players, and music commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition. It squares with my amateur musings, which are here, here, here, and here. Some excerpts of Hoffman’s long and insightful essay:

The primary proposition in defense of avant-garde music of the relentlessly dissonant and persistently unpopular variety has always been that, through exposure and familiarity, we often come to appreciate, and even love, things that initially confuse or displease us. Here what we might call “the Beethoven Myth” comes into play. “Beethoven was misunderstood in his time,” the argument goes, “but now the whole world recognizes his genius. I am misunderstood in my time, therefore I am like Beethoven.” This reasoning, unfortunately, has been the refuge of countless second- and third-rate talents. Beethoven ate fish, too. If you eat fish, are you like Beethoven? But there’s a much graver flaw in the argument: Beethoven was not misunderstood in his time. Beethoven was without doubt the most famous composer in the world in his time, and the most admired. And if there were those who didn’t “get” his late string quartets, for example, there were plenty of others who did, and who rapidly accepted the quartets as masterpieces….

Have I exaggerated the intensity of the distaste that so much modernist music has aroused? No, sad to say, not if we keep certain factors in mind. One is the strength of the needs, the intensity of the desires, that we fulfill with music. Our expectations of music—expectations of the type nurtured, reinforced, and satisfied for generation upon generation—are enormous, and enormously important to us, and when those expectations are disappointed, we take it very badly indeed….

Inevitably, however, we return to the fact that there’s something basic to human nature in the perception of “pleasing sounds,” and in the strength of the tonal structures that begin and end with those sounds. Blue has remained blue to us over the centuries, and yellow yellow, and salt has never started tasting like sugar. With or without physics, consonances are consonances because to most people they sound good, and we abandon them at great risk. History will say—history says now—that the 12-tone movement was ultimately a dead end, and that the long modernist movement that followed it was a failure. Deeply flawed at their musical and philosophical roots, unloving and oblivious to human limits and human needs, these movements left us with far too many works that are at best unloved, at worst detested. They led modern classical music to crisis, confusion, and, in many quarters, despair, to a sense that we’ve wasted decades, and to a conviction that our only hope for whatever lies ahead starts with first making sure we abandon the path we’ve been on.

From a distance of centuries, knowledgeable observers can usually discern when specific cultural developments within societies or civilizations reached their peaks. The experts may argue over precise dates and details, but the existence of the peaks themselves is rarely in question. In the case of Western music, we don’t have to wait centuries for a verdict. We can say with confidence that the system of tonal harmony that flowered from the 1600s to the mid-1900s represents the broad summit of human accomplishment, and that our subsequent attempts to find successors or substitutes for that system are efforts—more or less noble—along a downhill slope. [But the joy of “serious” music began to diminish around 1900, when many leading composers (e.g., Mahler and R. Strauss, following the lead of Wagner and Bruckner), began to deploy tonality in pretentious, ponderous, and dreary works: ED.]

What lies ahead? Nobody can say, of course. But with the peak behind us, there’s no clear cause for optimism—no rational cause, anyway, to believe that another Beethoven (or Berlioz or Brahms…) is on the way. And even if he were on the way, in what musical language would he write when he got here? The present is totally free but totally uncertain, the immediate past offers little, and the more distant past is . . . past. And yet, irrational creatures that we are, we keeping hoping for the best, and it’s right that we do. We owe it to Music. The good news is that there are many composers today who, despite the uncertain footing, are striving valiantly, and successfully, to write works that are worthy of our admiration and affection. They write in a variety of styles, but the ones who are most successful are those who are finding ways—often by assimilating ethnic idioms and national popular traditions—to invest their music with both rhythmic vitality and lyricism. They’re finding ways to reconnect music to its eternal roots in dance and song.

Rhythmic vitality and lyricism. That’s what it takes, and that’s what’s been missing from most “serious” music for the past 100 years or so.

I first saw Walt Disney’s rollicking Dumbo in the 1940s. I’m sure that the “pink elephant” scene gave me nightmares. Dumbo is an early pearl in the string of Disney’s greatest animated features:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Pinocchio (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Song of the South (1946)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)

I include the ponderous Fantasia only because of its visual effects. The rest are good old-fashioned packages of fun, produced by the best animators ever to have been assembled in one studio. You can skip Fantasia, but if you haven’t seen the others — ever, or in a long time — don’t delay. Put them on your DVD wish list today.

Click here for Marian Anderson‘s 1941 recording of Georg Friedrich Händel‘s “He shall feed His flock,” from the Messiah.

And here for a 1930 recording by Ezio Pinza of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s “Fin ch’han dal vino,” from Don Giovanni.

Pasquale Amato made this recording of “Largo al factotum” (Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Giaocchino Rossini) in 1911. It’s as clear as a bell, and almost as thrilling as this 1917 version by Riccardo Stracciari.

The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares), a French-Canadian flick that shreds socialized medicine and leftist politics with wit and bittersweet humor. A must see. I’m surprised that it wasn’t banned in Canada. (Caveat: in French, with English subtitles.)

Tyler Cowen celebrates Pierre Boulez:

Today is his eightieth birthday, here are some appreciations and critiques. I side with George Benjamin:

…a rigorous compositional skill is coupled to an imagination of extraordinary aural refinement. Pli Selon Pli, Eclat/Multiples, the spectacularly inventive orchestral Notations, Explosante-Fixe – these are among the most beautiful works of our time. Boulez’s music has a very distinctive flavour – a love of rare timbres and spicy harmonies, a supreme formal elegance and a passion for virtuosity and vehement energy. The polemics that periodically surround him obscure the intensely poetic source of his musical vision.

But it’s not music. As Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, says:

Boulez arrived in Paris from the provinces in 1942….As a Schoenbergian atonalist,…he…found himself dissatisfied with twelve-tone music as it was then practiced. He was bothered by the fact that Schoenberg had radicalized harmony but still treated rhythm and form in traditional, even hackneyed ways. So he began working toward the idea of “serialism,” in which durations, dynamics, and instrumental attacks were organized along the same principles that governed the twelve-tone series. He achieved a mode of writing that was, if nothing else, internally consistent….

Even in the fifties and sixties, as Boulez abandoned strict serialism and began to write in a more fluid, impressionist style, he remained a composer of vibration, activity, unrest. He set the profile of “modern music” as it is popularly conceived and as it is still widely practiced—a rapid sequence of jabbing gestures, like the squigglings of a seismograph.

As I wrote a while back:

What happened around 1900 is that classical music became — and still is, for the most part — an “inside game” for composers and music critics. So-called serious composers (barring Gershwin and a few other holdouts) began treating music as a pure exercise in notational innovation, as a technical challenge to performers, and as a way of “daring” audiences to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate nonsense). But the result isn’t music, it’s self-indulgent crap (there’s no other word for it).

Or, do you know what you’re saying when you say such things as “in vino veritas”? Find out by taking a 10-question quiz at BBC news. I got nine out of 10, and I chalk up my wrong answer to a teacher who, long ago, implanted it in my mind.

(Thanks to my son for the tip.)

Last August I wrote this:

What happened around 1900 is that classical music became — and still is, for the most part — an “inside game” for composers and music critics. So-called serious composers (barring Gershwin and a few other holdouts) began treating music as a pure exercise in notational innovation, as a technical challenge to performers, and as a way of “daring” audiences to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate nonsense). But the result isn’t music, it’s self-indulgent crap (there’s no other word for it).

Then, this:

My litany of off-putting things about most “classical” music written after 1900 should have included dissonance, atonality, and downright dreariness. Music can be serious, but it needn’t be boring or depressing or just plain unlistenable. But a trip through the list of 20th century composers turns up relatively few who wrote much music that’s endurable. Among the many 20th century specialists in sheer boredom or cacophony are John Adams, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, George Crumb, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.

Martin Kettle, writing in today’s Guardian, draws on Peter Van der Merwe’s Roots of the Classical: the Popular Origins of Western Music to make the following points:

[Van der Merwe] reckons that by 1939, the year of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the flow of music that is both genuinely modern and popular had all but dried up. Van der Merwe nods towards Khachaturian, late Strauss and the Britten of Peter Grimes – and, er, that’s it. For the general public, he argues, classical music ceased to exist by 1950.

There will be an interesting argument about when and where the line can be drawn. That it can be drawn somewhere (1940, 1950 or 1960 hardly matters) is, however, beyond serious dispute. At some point in the past half-century, classical music lost touch with its public.

At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory – often political theory – and away from its popular roots.

The pioneer figure was Arnold Schoenberg, with his theory of the emancipation of dissonance (which, as Van der Merwe cleverly points out, also implied the suppression of consonance). But it was after Schoenberg’s death, in the period 1955-80, that his ideas achieved the status of holy writ.

The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer’s lack of communication but the public’s lack of understanding.

Not surprisingly, the public looked elsewhere, to what we are right to call, and right to admire for being, popular music. This embrace started in the early 20th century with ragtime and jazz and reached its apex with rock’n’roll, whose great years belong to that same period, 1955-80, when modernism ruled in the academy….

Classical music survived, after a fashion. But it has less to say about today. It endures overwhelmingly on the strength of its back catalogue and performance tradition, not of any new creativity. Having failed to persuade the public to embrace modern music, it has sustained itself only by rediscovering the music of earlier epochs and – though this is arguable – by learning the lessons of the modernist deviation.

I would draw the line much earlier than 1950, and I would certainly exclude the ponderous pair of Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten from the list of “serious” composers who wrote in a popular style. Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904) was the last “serious” composer to do that consistently. After Dvorák, only George Gershwin succeeded very often in writing music that was both new and popular.

Can “classical” music make a popular comeback? Kettle has this to say:

[I]t is no longer anathema for composers to embrace popularity. The influence of American composers, for whom popularity is not a dirty word, and of composers from national traditions that survived the modernist onslaught (the Argentinian school, for instance) is perhaps a way forward. Van der Merwe, for one, believes that it is.

Classical music’s second coming, if it is to have one, could hardly be better timed. The popular music that once filled the place…vacated [by classical music] seems in turn to have largely burned itself out. Here, too, creativity is at its lowest ebb since the early 50s. The space awaiting good new music of any kind is immense.

But at least classical music has come up for air, and is asking the right questions. This is more than can be said of some of the visual arts, where the dislike of the public remains as striking and juvenile as ever. Even this, though, will not last. The need to create something beautiful that excites the public and goes beyond its experience is too strong to be frustrated indefinitely. It would just be nice to think it might resume in our lifetime.

It would be nice, but I’m not counting on it. “Serious” music and art are dominated by the academy. And the academy — for all its socialist cant — scorns “the masses.” Academicians (and their fellow travelers) would find it hard to maintain their air of mysterious superiority if they were to produce works that “the masses” could actually comprehend.

USA Today quotes that deep thinker of the Left, Linda Ronstadt:

“People don’t realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves,” she says. Of Iraq in particular, she adds, “I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”

A “new bunch of Hitlers” — what a thought! Next thing you know kids will be marching off to Bush Youth camps; Bush’s Brown Shirts will invade Hollywood and hang everyone — er, every liberal — in sight; and Ronstadt will be sent to a “rest home” for a nice, hot shower. Now, that’s Hitlerian, Linda. Get your terms straight.