Professor Morrissey

The British pop media have been debating the incident in which Morrissey walked off the stage during a concert, because someone in the crowd had tossed a beer bottle on stage, hitting him on the head. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/nov/09/morrissey-walks-offstage The question was whether Morrissey was justified in refusing to continue the concert, thereby denying a crowd their 30-40 pounds worth of pleasure.

It is not too hard to imagine why Morrissey walked off the stage: he did not really want to be there in the first place. Twenty-five years after his youthful stardom, it must be no fun slogging around small venues in the north of England when you have become accustomed to Los Angeles. But the bills must be paid, and discs sold, so even aging dandies need to mount a well-lit platform to woo and wow the masses.

Professors can be a little like petulant rock stars, too, without the high pay, stimulants and groupies, of course. They, too, can grow tired of their audiences, they, too, can wish for anything but to teach the same course over and over again. Tom Jones may have enough work class grit in him to belt out "She's a lady" for decades on end, but lots of high strung professors get really sick and tired of teaching "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," or subject-noun agreement in both English and French. I bet even chemists run through the definition of a mole with the speed of Dylan revisiting an old tune.

But not all of aged stars, and professors, feel so. The key is never to blame the students—or the audience in Morrissey's case. It is a weary old saying but alas it is so: They are there to learn, as well as be entertained. That they can't properly form the passive voice should not be held against them. It is incumbent on professors to explain. And if they only know the lyrics to "Girlfriend in a Coma" and nothing else, then, sadly, Morrissey needs to show them once again how the song goes.

Instead of walking out on the crowd, you can turn your ire against the system that obliges you to teach the same courses over and over again. You can blame the university press that did not accept your manuscript last year. You can blame your spouse for not wanting to take that job in Oregon. Whatever you like, just don't blame the audience, even if they give you a hung-over explanation for why they did not turn the paper in on time. Beer bottles get tossed around on campus, perhaps not directly at professors, but some of it splashes out in the class room,--in the form of lethargy, lateness and all around ignorance. And in the end, professors have options old rock stars lack.

Plenty of old professors are pleased to have an audience. They may have no connection to the undergraduate life, but they are glad that folks are still showing up to hear them run through their greatest hits. Once they realize that the house in the Hamptons is not a natural born privilege, they don't mind singing "Luka" one more time-- with feeling.

Even though a make-up concert is the planning, http://www.nme.com/news/morrissey/48330 my analogy can only go so far: professors almost never leave a class halfway through their own lecture and Morrissey was always a bit of a whiner (unlike us academics).

Zaha Hadid

Went to the Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Always wanted to walk around one of her buildings, never made it to the fire station. And what an amazing treat this visit was!

There is all sorts of architectural theory that describes the connection between space and cinema, but this building does not leave the connection to chance; it is designed to bring the out the experience of walking through space as watching a move. Motion forward is like time unreeling on the screen. When you walk through the museum, you pass through galleries as if you were the camera capturing images.

The long staircases hold you in a steady line as you move up from one floor to the next. They are narrow and long, so that one wonders what would happen if the building were crowded. As it turned out, I was alone in the concrete cavern the morning I visited. A bright Sunday with no one else around; game day the young man at the entrance said. Indeed there were streams of orange glad couples heading toward the stadium, and no one turned into Zaha Hadid's museum.

So much the better

The place was spooky, like a fun house ride made at great expense with sophistication beyond anything the Jersey shore has to offer. But that is the thing about deconstruction in architecture—call it that for lack of more clever word. You keep comparing it to the set of Dr. Caligari. I almost felt I should have been dragging some damsel in distress over my shoulder as climbed up the stairs.

The curators certainly understood the fun house fright. The first floor showed the bubble gum tongue of Marilyn Minter, a huge tongue on a video licking a glass surface covered in bright sugar crystals. Between tongue, teeth, lips and bubble bursts, you had nothing on your mind but the bright-colored pleasures of the mouth.

Then the next two floors went pitch-black cinematic with dark, dark rooms at the end of the long stairs with Anri Sala videos splattering the reflected spot light off a cymbal. A huge wall of Keith Moon fantasy cymbal with drums set up around the place to hammer out there own beat untouched by human hands.

The drumbeat echoed through the cement rooms, a feeling familiar from walking around 3AM lofts full of bands. Made me think of Danceteria in the 80s but here every line of the room reinforced the disorientation. Remember it was Sunday morning 11:30, and yet the exhibition space made it feel like an all night disorientation, one in which you were remarkably lucid despite the drum banging out around eerie videos projected onto the walls. Incoherence very carefully crafted.

And through each stage you walked along a narrow path, as if you were in a fun house cart running along a track. Your every step anticipated by the design. Look here at the opening that makes three dimensions seem flat, Turn your head to see the vertiginous depth next to the staircase . Right away you realize how the corners of the open space are meant to confuse your sense of up and down, horizonal and vertical. Your perceptions are tampered with. We can easily compared the place to a Borromini church or Piranesi drawing but that does a huge disservice to the way the building grips your body whole like it were King Kong and you Fay Rey. There is no piety left to preserve here, no sense of symmetry to recover after it has been manipulated. You dance with the building, only with skill and experience can you stay ahead of its diva angles. For it never wants to overwhelm you, but it does expect a lot of turns, like a partner who knows the song far better than you, but who kindly grants the illusion that you are making the decision to spin and step.

WPSU Fund Drive

The most fearsome plague has descended upon us: another public radio fund drive. But this time don't just cave in. Don’t let the guilt trip take a bite our of you, don't automatically surrender to the threat that if you don't pay up, all you will have left is Rush Limbaugh and Christian rock on the dial.

Put your diva on, get a little radical—tell the whiners what you think, really think of their performance, all year round. How many times have you said you cannot stand one more "This I believe" segment. The national broadcast gave it up months ago, but here in Happy Valley we continue to be smothered with sentimental clichés.

Are you worried that Christine Allen's voice is not squeaky enough? You want to hear a women with an even higher pitch? One that will send dogs howling?

Do you think the folk show should be even goofier?

You want to hear more experimental jazz but not at ten in the morning, but perhaps at night after a whiskey?

Tell the programmers. They will trot out endless testimonials about how important NPR is, yet nary a voice mentioning how easily they cave in to perceived right-wing criticism. Sometimes the cosmopolitanism is unbelievably bland. To say nothing of the classical music selections organized around the birthdays of famous composers. Perhaps you have heard that Mozart overture 10,000 times already and you would not mind something else.

We live in a small town, there aren't that many people writing checks, you can have some influence. Maybe add a little heft to this tepid public radio station called WPSU.

New Decade Named

So the decade we are concluding has a name stuck to it, the 'noughties', a tag grounded in the two zeros of each year, but suggesting both nihilism (an old boyish favorite of mine) and mildly provocative behavior. The pretty English lady up the street likes to use 'naughty' a lot, so I have gotten used to seeing it in print, and this swift summary of fashion tries to herd all the naughtiness into a string of styles. The best thing about the Guardian's fashion history is the narrators voice--it speaks with fey ironic certainty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audioslideshow/2009/oct/20/review-decade-fashion

Lou Mastroianni

One of the weird things about growing up is watching how the past gets recycled. Today's NY Times video is on Fellini's La Dolce Vita. But before it comes on we hear a video clip of a band singing "All you need is love" for an advertisement. Then on to Marcello Mastroianni, who is presented as one of the great screen actors. If somewhere in your adult life, you discovered that life and marriage was not so simple, you watched Fellini, maybe more than once. So as someone who has run through all the Mastroianni and Deneuve and everyone else, it is more than a little distressing to see the NY Times explain, again, how excellent they all are. Is there some automatic erase function in culture? Nevermind remembering Homer, can we not remember the early 60s? The first time this phenomenon hit me was reading the New Yorker. They had an article in which they mentioned Lou Reed. But they could not just say, Lou Reed says . . . . Instead they wrote "the singer, song-writer, Lou Reed says. . . " As if Lou Reed were the same as Paul Anka. As if he needed an introduction. Did anyone reading the New Yorker really need an explanation as to who Lou Reed was? Apparently some (young) editor was concerned, and out of that little concern, I grew worried that Lou Reed, for all is obnoxious ego, was no longer self-evident—much like Italian cinema.

Time's a Revelation

In contrast to Allison Kraus's big time pop sensibilities, I always thought that Gillian Welch was the grad student, who tried not only to capture the tone of small town country music recording, but who wanted to write lyrics from within the consciousness of rural folk who had not yet caught up with modernity in the 1960s. So when I drive to the country to bring my daughter to a party in a new house with old furniture to meet a mother who speaks slowly to the sudden crowd of parents in her living room, I know that Gillian Welch is right to sing her cautious songs about that new fangled music. There are folks in long country roads who still hold onto their parents' way of talking. They may not sing that way much, except in church, but Gillian Welch moves us to listen like the young girl that the country grandmother of the country mother once was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_7Lr5Rb3Y

Drummers

As a boy in the 70s I thought that the guitar solo was the most important moment in a great song, ok, given the cult of Jimmy, Jimi, Pete and Eric that was unsurprising, but now it seems that that the drummer is carrying the song, at least in British bands. Was it started by the Libertines, in a fine Clash remake, wherein the drums and the charismatic leader singer carry the whole effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2oTuxXjbO4

We know that U2 have relied on bass and drum forever, but the Arctic Monkees are also completely dependent on their banging drummer. No more Stairway, its all in the pounding as shown in their celebrate video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF978AgLyaY

The Arctic video for Crying Lightning is, on the other hand, just an awkward copy of the Pogues' adaptation of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, something like Stonehenge on a boat