Television, Television, Classical, Jazz

Several weeks ago I asked my coworker Alex what he was listening to these days, since he has good tastes in music, and in answering he turned me on to Television, a punk-associated (if not quite punk) band from 1970s New York. I've been listening to their album Marquee Moon a fair amount since. It's good stuff: smart, incisive, and clean in the sense that it doesn't waste anything. I suspect that something in the way they often structure their songs on small, modular accompanimental licks appeals to my Bartok-addled musical mind, too.

I usually don't like non-acoustic music, even on CD, since the sound seems so artificial. But Marquee Moon has a really distinctive mix to it, where the drums & bass seem kind of washed out while the guitars & vocals are toothy & brighter. This is as satisfying as a well-balanced beer, probably one on the light side.

From the liner notes, frontman Tom Verlaine describes the final song in the album:

Verlaine's concept was a ballad with "weird chords, because the song before is like a '50s major-chord song, and I wanted this contrast. I heard some Stravinsky in the '70s 'cause some guy in a club said, 'God, you guys sound like Stravinsky.' So I went and bought three Stravinsky records for a dollar apiece, and I still had no idea what this guy was talking about, except for these weird chords."

Tom Verlaine is right: Television sounds nothing like Stravinsky.

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In terms of "actual" television, I haven't been watching much in the last several months, mostly since I don't actually own a television. But I've been watching Top Chef 3 this season, since some friends and friends' friends (largely an overlap with the folks I just went tubing with) have made a habit of watching it as a group on Wednesday night. Watching TV in a group setting, just once a week, seems healthier than the alternatives, even if it's just a reality show.

The series itself is fun (it's on Bravo); I'm perfectly happy to follow it & throw an hour a week at it, though I'm still a bit resistent to buying into it entirely. (Weekly: cooking challenge, judges' panel, eliminate one chef.) This is rigged to some extent -- a disclaimer before the show notes that the producers have some kind of invisible input into who goes -- and moreover it steers itself constantly into the bizarre negativity that has people doing fairly amazing things and constantly being taken down a notch for not doing it perfectly. (It still isn't as aggravating as the commentary during Olympic gymnastics, though. All that "her foot slipped, that'll cost her" talk while someone is performing near-impossible physical stunts drives me absolutely out of my mind. I hate Olympic gymastics commentary.) I think America has a love affair with seeing people unfairly getting taken down a notch.

Either that or people like to be snobs vicariously: you want the pleasure of turning up your nose at amazing food, but of course that's really hard to know how to do. So, in steps the teevee.

I've been cooking a lot more myself recently, which might mean that the show is making a subconscious impression on me. Either way I'm happy to be cooking again, since it was a New Year's resolution I'd been ignoring, and also since it's been about 3 weeks since I started, I think that means that it might be safely ingrained as a habit now. (I recall learning in middle school health class, or somewhere, that it takes 3 weeks to begin a good habit or end a bad one, as long as you're not talking about chemical dependency. If you learned it in middle school health class, it must be true!)

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The school music library cut back its hours this summer, so unlike last year I can't head over there after work to pop on big padded headphones and fill my head with obscure string quartets or whatnot. That's a shame: it's a comfortable and really attractively designed library space. On the other hand, one of our department's summer interns discovered that the University has a blanket subscription to the Naxos record label's online listening library, which means I can listen to all sorts of kooky stuff at my desk if I have mindless work to do. (At $15 a month for an individual subscription, or $25 for better sound quality, it actually wouldn't be that bad a deal, at least if you're in the position to actually listen to a lot of it. As far as the standard rep goes, they've got essentially all of it.) Some other independent classical labels are up on there too, notably Chandos.

Listening highlights from last week, in no particular order: Robert Russell Bennett's Suite of Old American Dances, a whip-smart wind band standby; Alfred Schnittke's sprawling, avant-garde First Symphony; a phase-y, parallaxing piano trio by Per Nørgård; flawed and neglected Symphonies No. 2 by Henryk Gorecki and Andrzej Panufnik; a vivacious early string quartet by Wilhelm Stenhammar; Samuel Barber's clangorous and crisply tart (respectively) Piano and Cello Concertos; a Danish new-music vocal ensemble's rendition of Terry Riley's "In C" (or most of it, before I had to go photocopy something); that one little Mozart chamber piece with the glass harmonica; the sweet parts of Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" symphony; "Hallelujah Junction," a recent John Adams two-piano throwback to early John Adams; Honegger's "Pacific 231," to go along with the morning iced coffee; and the last movement of Neemi Jarvi's Shostakovich 10, which I should really get on CD since it's the first Shostakovich recording I ever fell in love with.

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I recommended Toni Morrison's novel Jazz to Pete a few weeks ago, and in doing so realized that I didn't remember much of it. So I bought a copy and have been rereading it; it's really fantastic, a salacious but weighted winter tale from 1920s Harlem that dips back and back into the characters' backstory in 1880s rural Virginia. Realism only; none of the magical touch as in Beloved (that's the only other one of hers I've read); I prefer it this way. Morrison writes in incredibly fluid poetry, and she has a great touch for scene-shifting and point of view, too. The narration blends and weaves from a cryptically omniscient presence (who speaks conversationally like a knowing neighbor) to reined-in first-person streams of consciousness. Events are out of order, traced and retraced; one chapter relates a straightforwardly framed story and then immediately backtracks to tell it in a closer, more intimately detailing voice.

Give me smooth-cornered modernism any day: I love innovation employed at the sole pleasure of a beautiful result. Use the device and don't put too fine a point on it.

Following is a rhapsodic passage I'm especially fond of; I remembered it vaguely from the first time I read it, since I'd moved to New York recently and thought an homage to New York's starless night sky was the most perverse thing imaginable, no matter how well-wrought it might be:

But I have seen the City do an unbelievable sky. Redcaps and dining-car attendants who wouldn't think of moving out of the City sometimes go on at great length about country skies they have seen from the windows of trains. But there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless. Close up on the tops of buildings, near, nearer than the cap you are wearing, such a citysky presses and retreats, presses and retreats, making me think of the free but illegal love of sweethearts before they are discovered. Looking at it, this nightsky booming over a glittering city, it's possible for me to avoid dreaming of what I know is in the ocean, and the bays and tributaries it feeds: the two-seat aeroplanes, nose down in the muck, pilot and passenger staring at schools of passing bluefish; money, soaked and salty in canvas bags, or waving their edges gently from metal bands made to hold them forever. They are down there, along with yellow flowers that eat water beetles and eggs floating away from thrashing fins; along with slabs of Carrara pried from unfashionable buildings. There are bottles too, made of glass beautiful enough to rival stars I cannot see above me because the citysky has hidden them. Otherwise, if it wanted to, it could show me stars cut from the lamé gowns of chorus girls, or mirrored in the eyes of sweethearts furtive and happy under the pressure of a deep, touchable sky.

But that's not all a citysky can do. It can go purple and keep an orange heart so the clothes of the people on the streets glow like dance-hall costumes. I have seen women stir shirts into boiled starch or put the tiniest stitches into their hose while a girl straightens the hair of her sister at the stove, and all the while heaven, unnoticed and as beautiful as an Iroquois, drifts past their windows. As well as the windows where sweethearts, free and illegal, tell each other things.