Critics Who Know Jack Read online

  There they were on Canadian TV sports channel TSN. At a certain point in the proceedings, Kapp offered Mosca a plastic rose as an olive branch and then called him a Son-of-a-@#@## or something to that effect. Mosca, seated with a cane he now uses for walking, swipes at Kapp and Kapp, full-standing, sucker punches Mosca as they scuffle in front of the live, laughing, yet somewhat shocked TV press crowd. It is always cool to see old guys go at it. In fact, Mosca had a career in Pro Wrestling (if you can call that kind of wrestling “professional”).

  How did these two arch-enemies get invited in the first place? They certainly had enough testosterone to still give it up so many years after the fact. The memory part was impressive. Like two tigers on each others’ turf. A vendetta of sorts. Even the American networks picked the story up in sound-byte images. Not for its sport but for its oddity. As if old men fighting was unique to the YouTube generation.

  Kapp and Mosca will never be representatives for dementia and Alzheimer’s associations. Their previous performances in TV commercials, whether great or poor (both are Hall of Famers), will never supersede this most recent altercation. The popularity of it. People who don’t even know Canadian football will remember only two old scrappers, ready to blow each other off the stage. Accidental Reality TV (as many ceremonies are shot live). But the same mindset that created these new programs allows for the celebration of male violence even in old age. Sports, because most coverage is live, is REAL TV.

  Take the World Cup of 2006. Italy versus France in the final. Not an exciting game on the field by any stretch. Italy versus Germany in the semi-final being the showcase game. Yet part way into the final, one of the greatest players to come out of French football, Zinedine Zidane, presented viewers with something exceptionally different. This captain of captains in what would be his last World Cup appearance took insult from the words of Italian player Marco Materazzi who had taunted him all game long. In a fluster of rage Zidane, the coolest of geometric midfielders, turned and head-butted Materazzi in the chest. The card held up by the official was so RED that the Italian diaspora around the world claimed victim-hood to the nth degree. “How could he? We have been abused! . . . etc., etc. . . .”

  Much is said on the field of play. Insults, taunts, racial slurs, even trips and violations by cunning athletes who attempt to do this out of the sight of officials. Yet with contemporary technology there are now three eyes: 1) The referee and linesmen working with him; 2) the stadium fans; and 3) the TV cameras broadcasting all over the world. (Note that video replays to contest referee decisions on the field are not yet permitted by the FIFA governing body). One could suggest that Zidane could have been more cautious about retribution for Materazzi’s insults. He could have aimed the ball at M’s head in the regular course of play. He could have clipped him off on a non-evident section of the field out of view of cameras and refs and officials.

  But no. To the pleasure of many, in total rage and spontaneity, he threw his full head into M’s chest. One had the feeling that, as Zidane threw his head forward, he had no regret. Surely France missed him dearly down to ten men when moments earlier they held momentum. But in that moment Zidane’s own pride and honour was bigger than his pride or honour for France.

  These incidents, the Kapp/Mosca kerfuffle and Zidane’s head-butt, give fans a drama of: See, they are just like us! They aren’t heroes! But the Greek, Roman and gods from various theologies and mythologies had fallibilities and maybe this is where the falling of present day sports heroes makes sense the most. And though Zidane chose to display the head of a Minotaur for that half-second, his clarity was our pleasure as much as our shock. Yet more than anything, the highlight reel ratings went through the roof. We don’t really mind foul play. Unless you are betting your house and family on a certain game. Then there is hell to pay a three-headed-dog.

  ONE

  T

  here is the concept of “one” as individual and the concept of “one” as driven by megalomaniac corporate “oneness.”

  As I sit in my study working at this text I look around the room and think of what identifies a person. There is a set of antique woods, four guitars, many, many books and CDs, magazines, paintings, photographs on the walls, etc. In the kitchen, many plates and the assortment of cutlery. And I think of repetition. And “ownership.” Then I throw my thought down the street to the main thoroughfare and think of the number of restaurants, convenience stores, ice-cream parlours, et al. I think of the numerous articles of clothing, shoes, boots, socks.

  Again, I think of ownership. I think of how identity is affected by what we own. Then I turn my mind to TV stations, the satellite channels, the competing interests of large corporations to centralize their advertising and marketing powers. Here, the concept of individual “one” begins to dissipate, fade out, get lost in a blur of everything-ness. And then the internet with its millions upon millions of appearances of one, one, one, claiming individuality yet delivering ad nauseam a drive of competitiveness for the best choice for “one’s” attention.

  So I choose to cut all down. One chair, one guitar, one pair of pants, one shirt etc. I don’t have any animals so I have no need to apologize to Noah. Speaking of which, what do we do with all the gods? From Mercury to Allah to Christ to Buddha and Zeus, Xochiquetzal and all in between? Everything becomes one and one is everything, right? I’ve heard that said but how does it really happen? Do I stop counting after the first number? It is easier to say: “I only want one egg.” But how do you deal with the fact there is more than one egg to have? Discipline? Fasting? Excluding? Focus? Denial? What does searching for “one” mean? What would drive that? Congestion. Too many choices. Someone’s insistence that there is a sense of “other” than which you choose?

  If we had one eye, we would be a Cyclops and that’s been done in mythologies past and bad B movies. There is no way to have “one,” be it an egg or star in the sky. But to sell the concept of “one” aggressively seems a violation of slowness and the sanctity of intimate relationship to objects desired or needed. This mild law the corporate world mocks yet wishes control over. From the legalities of logos to fear of lost identity one motivates most exchanges from the secular to the deeply spiritual.

  The Protestants believe that you should have a one on one conversation with Christ/God. Catholics on the other hand adore a union, except in the confessional. Pantheists and naturalists believe there is an ecology that harmonizes all into a holistic “one” or dharma. Does this idea of “one” have to do with momentum, keeping us from ennui and the great inescapable and existential sense of inertia that life offers at its most solitary density?

  Is it this “loneliness” that the corporations and sellers of near anything exploit in conscious and unconscious ways? The idea of corporation as religion is not a new one but it does seem to be on the rise. Dedication to a “brand” or philosophies of business practice. Belief in product and its “saviour” like qualities. Amazing sleight-of-hand and mind. An abundance of cleverness disguised as wisdom. A high degree of vulgarity unless you pay more and return to a concept of exclusivity. An illusion of being special or “one” of the few. Move from corporation speak to military for a half second.

  The idea of one is huge though there may be chains of com­mand. Even the concept or reality, if you like, of a bomb that can obliterate the planet though many can do it. And the idea of “one better” comes into the frame. “We now have a bigger and better and more effective bomb.” Is a bomb to be considered like a deodorant? That would sure take care of all the under-arm odour and clean away body hair for sure.

  ROY ORBISON

  Zimmerman Bob once said something to the effect that Roy Orbison, 1960s country and pop star, had a voice like an opera singer. If we take Zimmerman’s allusion to heart we see and hear a voice that uses octave dynamics unlike other singers of his genre. But the deeper aspect of his songs and voice (whether Z intended this or not in his comment) is the drama of emotion, the repetition of themes: love lo
st, existential loneliness, the beauty of love just out of reach. Except perhaps in his first major hit Pretty Woman in which the woman for some unknown reason (but maybe his purr in an earlier verse) decides to return and answer his plea for her company. Is this opera in its own way? I had the opportunity to feel this out first hand when a few years back I was commissioned by a local opera company to write a libretto for a fifteen minute opera.

  As I sat with director, composer and singers, I was first struck with how collegial all participants were. There was an aspect of fraternity, sorority and downright high school cliquishness to the endeavour and mood. Given this was not a full length opera and a couple of us were novices to the form, the in-knowing aspects of the company were distinct. The artistic director and company founder waved his baton like a British school master and was flattered when I called him “Good Master Dywane.” He ruled his roost.

  Brought in an a stage director who had read my script/libretto a month or so beforehand and had nothing good to say about it. His claim to expertise was having sat on a North American Opera panel and having produced other “shows” across the continent. So if two people can form a cabal, these two managed it, including their administrators. The stage director’s comment on my text was that there was not enough language that allowed for operatic movement. That the work was slight and had to be re-written to suit the needs of operatic performance.

  The text I had written was about two women meeting at a Salvador Dali exhibit somewhere in a mid-Atlantic city. The subtext included a storyline about their cheating husbands. My intent was to challenge the manner in which art is perceived and the pretensions involved in the process for the two characters and any like them across the arts. And to underline the pains of truth (their cheating husbands) that existed for them and the dynamic that comes to light when the suppression of unhappiness meets absurdity and surrealist expression. When I wrote the stage director back I underlined the above and his response was something akin to “My God! I didn’t see that. Yes! Yes, that’s amazing!” And with that I was hired on with enthusiasm.

  Each morning before I arrived for rehearsal I would sit with my guitar and play out a few of my favourite songs. And some of my own, composed during the last half year. I did this as I was on schedule to record an album of original pieces and also to get myself away from the heavy focus of the text I had written and how to improve it some before the singers got a hold of it. I italicize singers because they were also required to be actors. Around the same time my sister had mailed me a collection of Roy Orbison’s greatest hits for my birthday and I loved putting it on to just get my mind in a freer place and enjoy great pop songs of old.

  As for the text I was writing, I had been interested in Brecht’s theatrical writings — and the Theatre of the Absurd and surrealist literature — and wondered how I could write a text that couldn’t be ruined regardless of bends and twists adaptation of my words could bring from composer to stage director to singers. So as I would step away from the desk and make a good cup of espresso, I would listen to Roy and how he seemed to do it all so easily. The voice lilting just at the right moment and the great guitar grooves that moved around his vocal. It reminded me of drama. How drama could be created in three minutes. How to translate that into text you only had fifteen minutes for. (Longer than a pop song yet shorter than a theatre piece.) And I thought about the afore­mentioned words of Bobby Z in a recent issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. There I was, trying to fuse all this together for the perceptive eyes of opera audiences.

  The composer was insistent that we begin our session (we met separately a few times before full cast) with a bottle of wine. This could be four in the afternoon. Seven at night or most intriguingly, at nine in the morning. Always a drink needed to begin his scoring to my text and words.

  My idea was that he write something jazzy and bluesy to fit the aura of a contemporary art show. Something hip-sounding and on the cool side. A way of setting up the tension in the subtext. You know, everybody knowing and smug and at ease with their sense of themselves — but underneath it all these women are close to ruin in spirit and mind. What better way to take perception to another level than introducing Dali and his painting “The Temptation of Saint Anthony.” In this work, Dali has elephants on stilt-like legs and St. Anthony is holding back temptation. To me, the temptation was to see things differently. I believe that is what Dali is saying through biblical metaphor. Not so much the traditional temptation of the Saint, but the temptation for viewers of the work to see things from another perspective.

  So Roy Orbison was a simple balance to this pretty heady stuff. And of course because I had a composer who needed to drink more than compose, or needed to drink to compose, I loved the Roy moments before sessions began. And the simplicity of his effect stayed with me day in and day out. As we sat in rehearsal I watched the singers hit their notes and get in tempo and mood. The gap was in performance of character. One woman was written as a sophisticated lady with tiny binoculars for opera viewing strung around her neck that she used for gallery visits. She was the older of the two and had befriended the other woman at a social gathering. Yet the woman she invited was what you would call a “soccer mom” and when she visited the gallery she wore field binoculars. The kind you would bird-watch or attend sporting events with. The dichotomy in the two characters would show and allow the variations in perception and grow into the absurd nature of the text so as to allow the power and reality of the subtext to have substantial effect. I.e.: one could laugh at the absurdity of their perceptions and on the other hand, empathize with the truth of their confusion and heartbreak due to their husbands’ philanderings.

  Roy for me was the key to getting away from the bad performances and drunken composer. He was simple and emotive yet had the capacity to express joy even in his aloneness. And though Bobby Z’s comment on Roy’s operatic possibilities were somewhat over enthusiastic, I took the lighter part of Z’s rating and enjoyed the lilt and tone. Roy was never an opera singer and likely never could become or want to be one. Octave range is not enough. However, there is something about opera performers that hit all the right notes but can’t act their way out of a paper bag. You can hide this with costumes and sets and lights and good hors d’oeuvres but a bad actor is a bad actor whether in tights carrying Viking swords or any of the accoutrements the stage director deems necessary to move plot along. Rarely is a character in opera developed from the text inward.

  This is the antithesis of The Method of Stanislavsky or its Americanization by Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio. Opera acting seems more a vehicle for the voice and the music and, if lucky, the narrative. Opera singers are trained to sing. They lack training in acting except for gesture though occasionally the charisma of a certain singer can galvanize with raw energy and deliver character along with great voice. But most opera stars are not as interesting as the sets and small parts players who play ghosts, kings, queens, devils, fairies and farmers.

  In short, this is far from the nature of pop music and other forms where many performers have developed a keen sense of performance character. Notably Tom Waits moving through the underbelly of America and certainly Mr. Z with his many hats to match his various styles of writing and sometimes vocals. This is not to confuse two styles of music and performance but to underline that opera singers have a long way to go beyond gesture and superficial servitude to the music to engage an audience with any sense of character.

  This is what I was confronting with the opera libretto I was asked to create. Tepid acting and schoolmarm-ery direction. Thank god Roy was there in the morning. When I finally went to opening night the audience seemed to enjoy the work. It reminded me that all these works start with words and thoughts. The arts of acting and singing come later or in some cases (certainly this one) don’t come at all. But audiences can be polite. One reason being that when performance ends it is a relief to get up from those staunchy seats and race off to the bar.

  This is where I always found
my composer associate. Happily singing my praises as long as his glass was full. To him, opera was not only a chance to create but an opportunity to see what wine was being served. And so, no, Roy Orbison ain’t no opera singer but damn! — he’s good at what he does and I will never have to work with him to find out if the devil had him in the drink and helped his material happen or not. I suppose there’s a touch of judgment in all this. But whoever claims not to use judgment is more than slightly hypocritical and spends a lot of time doing nothing but sitting on a fence, being polite and praying for things to fall into their laps or onto their tuxedo lapels.

  LATE FOR THE SKY

  (Billy Joel’s The Stranger versus Travis Bickle)

  The heyday of American Realist film was the 1970s until mid-to three quarters decade and the arrival of the blockbuster, most saying it was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws that killed the form. A bit earlier in the decade we had the beginning of Martin Scorsese while later into the decade radio played Billy Joel’s The Stranger. This invited us to two new realities. One, the story of a crazed cab driver, ex-Vietnam vet who was out of place in big town New York (Taxi Driver). The other, a pop-ish attempt to appear hip and on top of everything from relationships to inner feelings to an over-view of the world around him.

  Billy Joel however gave us Piano Man in 1973. His one man piano and long narration of a night over a microphone playing songs to folks in the torpor of their loneliness came on the back of Harry Chapin’s long song Taxi. Two interesting perspec­tives from which to view life and create a song. Two fairly alone places in society. A piano man and a cab driver. As the decade moved along and success met Joel and Chapin faded into FM radio, a sense of realism seemed on the minds of many American film directors. However, this movement to realism for the most part began some years earlier with Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s road movie about the counter-culture. The odd-man-out, the marginal­ized anti-hero began to reappear with all the force of a new generation of Method actors following in the footsteps of Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Rod Steiger.