Oh, the Humanity
Have the headlines got you down? Worried about wildfires and flash floods and smoke? In a panic over Putin? Discombobulated by DeSantis?
Do not despair, friends. Distractions await—even for those sophisticated “we-don’t-own-a-TV” types. “Hate-Watching” is so….MTV’s The Real World. Welcome to the restorative world of Hate-Reading.
Today, I take as my text The New York Times Style Section. You may find other refuges from so-called “hard news,” but let’s start here.
I.V. Hangover Cures. “I can’t be down for a day: I can’t miss a day of work and just stay home and do nothing.” That’s from Gabriel Boxer, a lifestyle influencer otherwise known as The Kosher Guru. After a hard night of drinking and…um…influencing, he hires a nurse to administer an anti-hangover IV drip. Burning the blog on both ends? No problem for the Boxer! Full of vitamins and, maybe, um, Alka-Seltzer (?), IV drips have become de rigueur at upscale bachelor and bachelorette parties, luxury cruises, and music festivals. Says one CEO of a hydration company: “It’s like, ‘Look at me. I’m pretty bougie. I don’t need to sit and suffer.” So all you bougie-adjacent aspirants, drink up and get your venipuncture groove on!
Men’s Midriffs. Hey guys, still have that box of t-shirts you saved from high school? You know, the souvenirs from the REO Speedwagon concert and that old “I Survived Camp Wanapasaki” shirt—size Medium? Well, wear ‘em if ya’ got ‘em! Thus spake the NYT Style section and assorted fashionistas: “Men’s Middles Are No Longer Under Cover.” After all, you’ve liposuctioned…er, I mean…worked hard to sport those killer abs, so show them off with a cropped shirt that tells the world: “I’m an outie!”
Bridal Swimsuits. Big, flouncy wedding dresses are just fine for nuptials that take place on, say, floors or otherwise solid ground. But who wants to wear a $30,000 gown while your future hubby escorts you into the shallow waters of Cabo San Lucas. Enter La Chenille Bridal Bikini! To meet the growing market demand for weddings on the waterfront, fashion houses are now offering “hand-embellished” bridal swimsuits that run up to $1200.
Freckle Tattoos. I know we’ve all been through some of that ho-hum eyelid microblading to enhance our baby blues, but did you know you can surgically etch chemical pigments into other parts of your face? Move over Pippi Longstocking! Artificial freckles come in assorted colors and, of course, you can custom design your own personal array of blemishes. Are you an Aries? Constellations are an option! They last from one to two years, so you can always change them to keep up with the zit-geist—I mean, zeitgeist.
The Classical Experience
Consider the classics. Not as in, “Oh, that was classic!” But in the musical sense—classical music, presented live in a concert hall.
The Fine Arts Quartet: Ralph Evans, Efim Boico, Gil Sharon, Niklas Schmidt.
Compared to today’s entertainment options, it remains refreshingly simple: The musicians take the stage, they play some music, the audience responds. There are no fancy lighting effects, no chit-chat from the stage or “You Rock!” outbursts from the audience. The performers generally wear nondescript, formal clothes and sit in nondescript chairs. The audience generally follows certain unwritten rules: applaud when the musicians enter, stay silent through each piece (including the pauses in between the movements), wait to applaud until the performers relax after playing the final note. To date, classical music audiences are not known for bouncing large beach balls around during the finale of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
I thought about these differences after last Sunday’s stunning performance by the Fine Arts Quartet in Milwaukee’s Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts.
The music was exquisite—a well-known piece (Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major—the one with two cellists) and a rarity (Ernest Bloch’s Quintet No. 1 For Piano and String Quartet). The Bloch (composed in 1923) was tense and visceral, featuring bravura playing by the quartet and guest pianist Wu Han. The Schubert, considered one of his masterpieces, stately and symphonic in texture, but charged with sunny life.
Hearing music like this can be transcendent, but it is also hard. For performers, of course. Musicians like those in the FAQ have devoted their lives to their music. But it can also be a challenge for audiences. Unlike most plays or ballets, there is no story to pull you along. If you want to attend to the music in a deeper way, you need to hear the way melodies are repeated or transformed or be attuned to the way the composer moves into different keys.
Before last Sunday’s concert, Steve Basson offered a pre-concert lecture, as he has been doing for Milwaukee concerts for years. A former principal bassoonist with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, he talked about the third movement of the Schubert quintet, comparing it to other “trios” from Haydn and Mozart. He used diagrams of the movement’s structure and played recorded examples to illustrate his point. It was serious musicological stuff, and around 150 people listened carefully.
For the last few decades, the people who run arts organizations have talked a lot about enhancing the “experience” of going to a performance. Always facing the challenge of “getting butts in seats,” they dabble in multimedia, create beautiful and comfortable spaces to hang out, offer cocktails that people can sip while watching Swan Lake. They fret over parking.
It’s a hard job keeping the arts afloat, particularly in Wisconsin, where public arts funding is minuscule (ranked last in the nation). The people who came to this concert—most of them of a certain generation—didn’t read about it in People magazine or hear it touted on morning talk shows. There aren’t a half-dozen ESPN-style cable channels devoted to reviewing a play-by-play account of the Allegro ma non troppo. There were no t-shirts for sale.
People came to this place on a beautiful Sunday afternoon because they love this music, and know that with each listening, they’ll perhaps understand and love it a little more. And that’s an experience to be celebrated.
Lucinda Returns
“Give me one more taste of my lost youth/Then it’s last call for the truth.”
—Lucinda Williams, “Last Call for the Truth.”
From someone who suffered a stroke a few months after her last album release (in the fall of 2020), that’s a wry and harrowing sentiment. But Williams isn’t one to dodge the real stuff of the day-to-day. In her new release, Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart, she finds joy in looking back but never loses the existential edge of peering into the future. She gets some help from Bruce Springsteen and Patty Scialfa, who sing background on a few songs. But Williams’s gravelly wisdom is always in the foreground, and it speaks as if she is truly delighted to have weathered the storm of the last few years, and is back to telling stories about this sweet old world.
The Summer Knows
There are summer books—books suitable for summer reading (but see my caveat about the so-called “beach read”)—and there are books about summer. One of the best is Tove Jansson’s lovely novella, The Summer Book, a collection of vignettes about a 6-year-old girl’s stay with her grandmother on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. With prose as clear as a quiet mountain brook and a wide-eyed love of the natural world, Jansson’s snapshots of an idyllic summer (but one ripe with some pretty serious questions) are a perfect accompaniment to a glass of iced tea in the shade. Here’s an excerpt:
Sophia asked her grandmother what Heaven looked like, and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by on their way to the village. They stopped to look. It was very hot, the road was white and cracked, and all the plants along the ditch had dust on their leaves. They walked into the pasture and sat down in the grass, which was tall and not a bit dusty. It was full of bluebells and cat's-foot and buttercups.
"Are there ants in Heaven?" Sophia asked.
"No," said Grandmother, and lay down carefully on her back. She propped her hat on her nose and tried to sneak a little sleep. Some kind of farm machinery was running steadily and peacefully in the distance. If you turned it off--which was easy to do--and listened only to the insects, you could hear thousands of millions of them, and they filled the whole world with rising and falling waves of ecstasy and summer. Sophia picked some flowers and held them in her hand until they got warm and unpleasant; then she put them down on her grandmother and asked how God could keep track of all the people who prayed at the same time.
“He’s very, very smart,” Grandmother mumbled sleepily under her hat.
“Answer really,” Sophia said. “How does He have time?”
“He has secretaries….”
A New Leaf
Walter Matthau and Elaine May, with Alsophila grahami.
For those summer nights when lying in a pasture isn’t possible, might I suggest curling up with a comedy that hasn’t lost its charm or edge in the 50 years since it’s been released. A New Leaf, written, directed and starring the great Elaine May, is a gem. Based on a story by Milwaukee native, Jack Ritchie, it pairs a bankrupt millionaire (Walter Matthau) with a socially awkward and very wealthy botanist (May). Their whirlwind romance generally involves botanical field trips, not exactly familiar territory for the polo-playing, Ferrari-driving Matthau. Full of dry wit and crack comic acting by Matthau, May, James Coco (remember him?) and Jack Weston, it’s a sunny summer treat.
Have a great week.