Movie: The Ten Commandments
If I ever were able to write an opera – and let’s be
perfectly clear, if I wanted it to be any good it would take me until I’m sixty
if I started tomorrow and until ninety to produce – the first opera I’d ever
write is the story of Moses in Egypt. No, not the Book of Exodus, instead it
would be the C. B. DeMille Hollywood perversely sexed up yet tortuously boring
version which is inculcated into every Jewish kid’s lexicon from the time he’s
five until he can recite the whole movie at his Bar Mitzvah.
Let’s be perfectly clear. The Ten Commandments is an awful,
awful movie. It’s very nearly unwatchable without copious doses of liquor – and
yes I’ve learned that the fun way; when I was about 23, some friends of mine
and I watched the whole 220-minute monsterpiece which I could barely sit
through when I was six and took a shot every time a character said the word
‘bondage.’ At least one of us threw up (I don’t remember who).
But let’s be perfectly clear. The awfulness of The Ten
Commandments is of a particular time and place that has completely vanished
from any modern sensibility. C. B. DeMille made this move, his last, in his
mid-70’s. He grew up an upper-class kid in the late-19th century, an
era of Empire and Great Power Poltiics when electronics did not exist and the
most feverish pitch of excitement was made through gigantic displays like the
circus or the imperial army drill. It’s a sensibility as alien to us as James
Cameron’s movies will in all likelihood be to our grandchildren. A
certain type of person, perhaps a particularly authoritarian one, would
respond to DeMille’s gigantic displays of coordination even in our day.
So let’s be perfectly clear. I can’t stand the agonizing
loftiness of this movie where everybody speaks in a Hollywood’s vision of the
King James Bible and the special effects are not even as effective as a B-Movie
thriller. If I have a soft spot in my heart for it, I can’t even call my love
for it ironic. It’s simply a cornerstone of my life, something I first watched
when I was three or four and which I could never imagine my life without.
Finally, let’s be perfectly clear. If I ever tried to make
an opera out of it, it would fundamentally be a popera in which the slaves sing
gospel and the taskmasters sing heavy metal. The spirit of The Ten Commandments
– with its notes of freedom and shaking off oppression – is entirely
contemporary and is why the story of the Exodus still means something to billions
of people. The problem is that the sensibility of The Ten Commandments – the
gigantism, the loftiness, the sluggish pacing
– was dated by the time DeMille’s career began.
Classical Music: Mahler’s 9th Symphony -
(Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic, which premiered
the work 100 years ago this week, perform Mahler 9 in this live recording – two
weeks before the Anschluss.)
It’s honestly not one of my favorite Mahler symphonies (3,
4, 1, 7, DLVDE, 5, 9, 10, 6, 2, 8). I love all 11 of Mahler’s Symphonies (and
he wrote 11), but while some of them touch the kind of universality you find in
Mozart and Beethoven, there are also symphonies which settle either for a kind
of doom-and-gloom or a theatrical bombast which we’re supposed to interpret as
profound. Less great Mahler is still greater than nearly any other orchestral
composer, but by his own standards, perhaps most of Mahler’s later works were
not quite as meaningful as the ones which came before.
It doesn’t help that a kind of DeMille-ish sanctimoniousness
has come over many Mahler performances in recent years; for the most part the
tempos get slower and slower, the playing smoother and smoother. Even at his
most classically balanced, Mahler is not a composer who wrote anything by
half-measures – too few artists attempt the very peaks and valleys of creation
which you find on every page of Mahler’s scores, and if the listener doesn’t
feel that overflowing diversity of vision, it’s not a true Mahler experience. As
in so many performances of classical music, audiences would be a lot more
inspired by sloppy playing if it had more commitment and character.
One of the biggest problems with Mahler 9 is that Mahler
didn’t live to hear it performed. All of Mahler’s earlier symphonies underwent
a trial-and-error process in which he revised his scores from performance to
performance to get precisely the effect he wanted. And as I think about it, my
real trouble with Mahler 9 comes from the first movement, often hailed as
Mahler’s single greatest composition. I love the other three movements, but the
first never does enough for me. It has too many inner voices and too many
clumsy transitions (which seem undeliberate) for the ear to follow. Conductors
don’t help matters by slowing the tempo down so we can hear everything. A great
performance of the first movement, of the
type one finds from Abbado, Barbirolli, early Bruno Walter, Szell, Kubelik, Hermann Scherchen (and now
Jukka-Pekka Saraste), has performers who understand that this is every bit the
manic Mahler of the early years and there should be no trace of church-like
solemnity. All those inner voices are not meant to be heard, they’re meant to
be felt. The first movement is every bit as much a fist-shake at the heavens as
anything in Beethoven.
Last year, I wrote about Johnny Cash and compared Mahler 9
to his America IV. Both are dirty, almost shitty mud-wrestles with death, but
by the end the listener can detect a kind of peaceful transcendence – as though
the musician has resolved that he can’t triumph, and peacefully starts his
journey into the beyond. It’s only twelve years after what Leonard Bernstein
termed the ‘Century of Death’, and perhaps because of the dark experiences of
the 20th century we’ve managed to overrate Mahler 9 a little bit.
It’s a wonderful piece of music, and it’s not a work completely about death,
but it doesn’t embrace life in the way the very greatest music should. If I
want an overwhelming spiritual experience, I go to Mahler 3.
TV: Louie
I just finished watching Louie’s third season premiere. Or should I say, I watched half of it because I accidentally pressed a wrong
button and it took me at least ten minutes to figure out how to correct
whatever I did. What I saw was what exactly what I’ve come to expect from the
show – which is that I have no idea what to expect. What I can say is that Louis
CK clearly looks older; he’s even more bald, his ghoti is greyer, his skin hangs
further off his face. And true to form, he’s letting us see every bit of it.
I’ve been planning on doing a long post on Louis CK for most
of the time I’ve been doing the 800 Words thing. There’s a lot to say that I’ll
hopefully get to by the end of Season 3, but no comedian seems to play a truer
version of himself than Louis CK. He routinely exposes parts of his private
life onstage to which no person in his right mind would ever allude, but the
reason his talking about his personal life seems so dangerous is that we can
all relate to it. In doing so, Louis CK says all the things about our own lives
that we’re afraid of other people knowing.
I read an article the other day on Slate (I think) which
claimed that Louie is the best show on television. I don’t know if I’d go that
far, but the writer made the best possible case: think of all the TV shows you
watch – now think of how many in which you have absolutely no idea what’s going
to happen from episode-to-episode. No matter what the show is, 99.9% of them
have a genre and a style, so even their surprises aren’t all that surprising. The
plots of most shows are either linear or surreal, which mean that you
ultimately know exactly what kind of sensibility the show will give you. But
occasionally, and I mean really occasionally, a show comes along that expands
the Universe – TV’s that is. The universe of Louie is so large that literally
anything can happen from low comedy to high tragedy, linear realism to the most
surreal turns, and yet it all feels truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows.
Every episode is completely different from the one before, every moment of
every episode can be completely different from the one before. In this way,
Louie is truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows. But when I think about that
question, the only TV shows I can come up with which can do what Louie does are
The Simpsons and I, Claudius. Is Louie really that good?
...Maybe….
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