I posted an earlier piece on Scrollworks, an inspiring and genuinely good Birmingham arts organization. Al Letson, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio, just did a piece for Weekend Edition. I can happily promote this cause and enthusiastically recommend his story. Nice job, Mr. Letson. (link to the Weekend Edition piece)
Jeane Goforth deserves the good press.
I just saw Opera Birmingham’s performance of Faust. (My second opera!) As with most things, it’s not about what you might think.
“Did any human anytime ever just say what he or she meant? What would happen if we did?”
Snippets of this classic fable appear in everything from Harold Ramis movies to iCarly. We meet Faust in the first act. He’s a crusty old scoundrel. Antisocial, suicidal, and infernal. In cursing his plight and life, he carelessly asks for Satan. And gets him.
“Satan, come to me!” “Here I am!”
Mephistopheles offers Faust gold, glory, and power – you know the deal – in exchange for his soul. Faust, though, only wants to be young again, lusting for the caresses of young mistresses.
“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood – she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
Mephistopheles shows Faust a vision of blonde, beautiful Marguerite and he wants her.
“Lois looked edible, and you knew it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold.”
No stronger than his baser desires, Faust gives in to the devil’s pitch and his own lustful fantasies of bedding the blonde. He signs the contract. Satan keeps his end of the bargain and transforms him back into a young man.
“[He] told us about one of Plato’s dialogues, in which an old man is asked how it felt not to be excited by sex anymore. The old man replies that it was like being allowed to dismount from a wild horse.“ You know, “ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd.”
That’s the first act, but the opera isn’t really about Faust. It’s not about Satan, either. It’s about the girl. Kind-of like how the Star Wars franchise took twenty years to tell us that the story wasn’t really about Luke Skywalker. No, it was all about Vader.
“You are on an evil path.”
Like a Disney princess, Marguerite is the purest and goodest of good girls. Even her brother (and every cross-dresser in town) is completely in love with her. She’s beautiful, yet humble. Her flaw is just that she gets attacked by forces beyond her control. The first question newly-young Faust asks is, “Where’s the blonde?”
Mephistopheles contrives to have them meet and conjures a box of shiny jewelry for Faust to give. She is tempted by Faust’s jewels – aided by the devil’s enchantment – and falls in love.
“In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.”
The moral of the story: If he’s charming, irresistable, and brings expensive gifts, beware. He may have brokered a deal with the devil to get you.
“Don’t give that kiss, girl, until the ring is on your finger.”
Even though the magic of the devil backs Faust’s wooing, Marguerite still tries to resist. Faust claims love – though I don’t believe him for a moment – and Marguerite tries to think of a way to make sure. It reminds me of Meatloaf: “Do you love me? Will you love me forever?” “Let me sleep on it, baby, baby.”
“How can I resist such a temptation?”
It’s opera, so there’s fallout. She buys it. He beds her. She’s knocked up. After getting exactly what he was after all along, Faust R-U-N-N-O-F-T. I like to imagine him partying like Charlie Sheen in the time between acts. Marguerite is ostracized. Her brother damns her to hell. She kills the baby – yes, she kills Satan’s baby – and is put in prison. Faust feels guilty – not like real guilty – but kinda. Marguerite finally figures out that he’s a scumbag and dies, not damned at all, but forgiven and ascending to heaven in spite of the devil’s manipulation.
“With Satan, you should behave better.”
Let’s put in some straight talk here. It’s not about what you think it’s about. I’ve seen two operas and both were all about sex. Not love. S-E-X. Faust (Bryan Hymel) wants to score with a young blonde and – unless I’m missing something – it would be a mistake to play him any other way. No matter how much he rationalizes, I don’t buy that he’s in love. Sure there’s pretty music and pretty singing, but opera, funnily enough, is more like country music than some might care to admit. It’s about heartbreak and badonkadonk and drinking your troubles away.
Speaking of drinking, this performance had some wonderful little moments. Mephistopheles (beautifully played by Kirk Eichelberger) turns water into wine in front of everyone. Also, he makes a surprise appearance out of an onstage coffin and gets the biggest laugh of the night. I didn’t expect for the pipe organ at Samford’s Wright Center to get any use, but it was appropriate and worked. Lastly, I’m not sure if the rest of the audience knew it was happening, but Opera Birmingham used the Samford A Cappella Choir in the balcony for, at least, the final act – behind or above the audience on the floor – and creating a sophisticated, lush, and celestial experience. Absolutely A+. I wish I could push a button and have it play again.
Sincerest thank yous to John D. Jones and everyone at Opera Birmingham.
Choral music isn’t the kind of thing I normally seek out, but I got two separate invitations to see the Magic City Choral Society in the two days approaching their free Hollywood Holidays Christmas show. I figured it was some kind of omen or something, and the concert was free, so I thought I’d try something new.
The arts can be like vegetables or other difficult foods. You should give something a chance every once in a while, even if you think you don’t like it, even if you used to not like it, and even if, before that, you didn’t like it either. Who knows, your tastes may have changed. Nowadays, I’ll even eat squash and sweet potatoes. But okra is still out.
People who stand for an idea that has energy connected with it, that’s power. – Jerry Brown
It’s obvious that the Magic City Choral Society has been a labor of love for Dr. Joseph Paul Dease, Karen Musgrove, Jamie Whitehurst and others. It’s a not-for-profit community-based choral organization that was founded in October 2006. The men’s chorus now numbers close to 90 and the women’s chorus is approaching 40. Twice a year they hold open rehearsals for new potential members.
The men’s and women’s choruses are open without audition to any adult male or female. They believe that musical performance is a behavior that can be taught. If you have the desire to learn and the patience to persist, you will be provided the tools to have a successful choral experience. In other words, you don’t have to already know how to sing. (Next open rehearsals: January 17-18, 2011)
In yet another radical – and completely punk – idea, all Magic City Choral Society concerts are free. Non-mainstream, inexpensive, do-it-yourself, and low-fidelity… Hmm… What we have here, folks, is a punk choral movement.
The fact that [Sid Vicious] could not do something correctly – yet still do it significantly – is all that anyone needs to know about punk rock. – Chuck Klosterman
That being said, it was unusual to meet this group for the first time while singing mainstream or classic tunes, including an audience sing-a-long with Frosty and Rudolph. I’m already on record as usually preferring punk rock to Silent Night. Traditional Christmas celebrations can feel like a strange blend of sleepy, comfortable warmth and unnatural, constrictive horror. Christmas may have the sweetness of sharing a warm blanket, yet ache with the recurring thought of being completely alone. Silent Night and Sleigh Ride both offer the promise of completeness, yet remind me I haven’t yet got it. It’s a struggle to stay in a White Christmas state of mind.
The MCCS did a good job, it’s just that I’m still too . . . umm . . . something to really appreciate many choral performances. Maybe more importantly, they looked like they were having fun – chorus is an excellent social activity. I believe wholeheartedly that people have a need to sing or do other art socially. It’s just harder to translate well for non-participants. Especially for those of us who also like to sing, it’s difficult to sit in the audience and just watch. I’m always interested in promoting free events, though, and I hope someone invites me to the next performance.
If you’re curious or interested in watching, listening, or participating, you can hear three samples from the Magic City Choral Society Men’s Chorus here – and the CD is available for purchase. Merry Christmas and Happy 2011!
I realized that it had been a while since I messed around with any new music, so I spent time this weekend learning some new songs. What does everyone else do when it’s cold and dark?
Here are links to the imperfect, one-take, edit-free .mp3 versions, if anyone might be interested in downloading them and listening along:
“Well, I’ve always got time to listen to a good story.”
I was unexpectedly invited to the Virginia Samford Theatre last weekend to watch The Dill Pickers Old Time Radio Show, featuring Kathryn Tucker Windham. Even though I was one of the youngest, non-grandchild members of the audience, I enjoyed the performance. The band did a good job and said: “Sharing the stage with Kathryn is always the highlight of the year for the Dill Pickers.”
The reason is because Kathryn Tucker Windham is a treasure. Even at 92, she is a talented storyteller. It’s becoming a lost art – a person who is talented and charismatic enough to get and keep your attention through words alone. She’s also a good sport and an amazing cultural asset for Alabama.
“The impressions we have of a people or a place stem largely from the images of artists . . . .” That’s a quote by Bill James, a good baseball writer – no, just a good writer – who is discussing the struggle between the locals’ view of a place and the prevailing “New York” or media view. Because I think it’s relevant and important, I’ll digress entirely and let him speak for me (though he’s speaking of Kansas, not Alabama, we have a similar obstacle), direct from his 1986 Baseball Abstract (and I’ll assume that he’s a good enough guy not to sue me).
“I live in Kansas. Eastern Kansas is not flat; it rolls gently, much like Massachusetts, so that in driving through the country one has the experience of passing through a series of vistas, each covering a quarter of a mile to three quarters of a mile of road time. It is a very beautiful area, so beautiful that when I am required to drive through it daily I grow to enjoy the experience more and more, watching the subtle and sudden changings of the colors in each landscape. The grainfields leap from dark black to brilliant green in days when the crop first appears, fade day by day into a more muted green, then suddenly turn brown or gold or a mixture of colors when the crop ripens. . . . The farms are all small and much of the land is unworkable, so that a wooded area provides a backdrop for almost every field, and each field is divided by one or another kind of fence and small road for the farming equipment. A hundred kinds of wildflowers grow beside the roads, and the colors of the trees change, and the houses change, and the skies change, and the earth changes, and the cows and the sheep and the horses grow up and move around, and the creeks come up and settle back down so that the landscape each day seems different and more graceful than it did the day before.
“In spite of this, by some bizarre trick of fate, this area has been chosen in the nation’s consciousness to represent Nowhere – an ugly, barren, empty, square space from which people come but do not return. In movies, people who come from nowhere come from Kansas. This perception is so strong that people who come here often see nothing except what they have been taught to expect, and learn no more of the area around them than a man driving across an Apache reservation picks up of the Apache language.
“[I] had a meeting in New York with a man [who] began the meeting by telling me that he had been to Kansas, several times, and regaled me with a few stories about what an awful place it was. It seems he was quite offended by the fact that we don’t have any buildings higher than 28 stories. Another time . . . a network sports personality asked me where I was from, and upon learning that I was from near Lawrence, Kansas, informed me that he had once spent an evening in Lawrence and that there was nothing to do there.
“Of course, it isn’t every New Yorker who will do this, but a small number who make a deep impression. I always wonder, when this happens, whether if I was black or Jewish these people would take the same opportunity to make use of a few ethnic slurs, or if I was from Bophutswana if they would tell me how insufferably hot and fly-infested it was in Bophutswana. . . .
“[T]he way that people see Mississippi largely originates in the work of Faulker, Eudora Welty and a few other creative people. It is an unfortunate fact that this area has not been well or honestly served by the nation’s artistic community. To give you just a couple of examples, you might remember a song that was made popular by Art Garfunkel a few years ago . . . I think it was called “My Little Town”:
“And after it rains, there’s a rainbow,
And all of the colors are black,
It’s not that the colors aren’t there,
It’s just imagination they lack . . .
“That song was written by Paul Simon, a great artist, an enormously talented and intelligent man, who incidentally was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, still lives in New York City and frankly knows as much about people who live in small towns as a meadowlark knows about the feast of the epiphany. If, in fact, he were to live in a small town, he would discover that one of the great pleasures of living there is that small-town people have wonderful imaginations, probably because they don’t live under the minute-to-minute pressures that city life puts on a body, occupying the mind so fully that it cramps the imagination. . . .
“If you’re illiterate, don’t go to movies and never leave the state, I suppose that all of this doesn’t get to you, but if you’re an active, reading person the naked prejudice directed at you begins to lose its charm after a while. . . .
“With enough repetition this becomes profoundly irritating, but it is also profoundly trivial; the only real cost of it is that at an impressionable age, young Kansans or young Missourians will sometimes believe the lies that are told about them – just as young black people or young Jewish people will develop negative self-images if the slanders directed at them are not effectively countered.”
Thanks to Kathryn Tucker Windham and The Dill Pickers.
