Adele

She just swept the Grammys tonight, getting the gold gramophone for all six of her nominations. For what it's worth, I send my own congratulations with everyone else. I think Adele is remarkable.

My first experience with her music started a few months ago. (She was already well into her heyday, but I had managed to remain totally ignorant of this new phenomenon.) I was having one of those days when you find out that your good friend is a junkie and has stolen your checkbook. Anyway, I'd landed into an exceptionally foul mood and was sitting on my brother's couch when he decided to strike up the old iTunes. The opening arpeggios of "Someone Like You" came through the speakers. I'd recently given my brother a Philip Glass album of solo piano music, and I thought this track was from that album. Then I heard that voice.

It's funny. Even though I was having an awful day, I was in a happy relationship at the time. But somehow the music transcended its theme of lost love and spoke directly to my more pressing circumstances. I wasn't pining after anyone, which is what the song is definitively about. For me, though, the song transformed into a balm for disappointment, shock, and grief. And that voice…

The toolbox I have for critiquing classical singers just isn't sufficient to talk about Adele. No one cares about her vowel quality, air support, or precision in intonation. All of that goes out the window. What Adele has is pipes in abundance and sincerity to boot. You believe that the emotions in her songs are fully genuine. And that emotional credibility is backed up by two of the richest and most expressive vocal folds on the planet. What sells me on Adele is that she does waver in her intonation, ever so slightly. It's gritty and it's real, and it's clearly not over-produced. I was disgusted that Katy Perry's flimsy "Firework" was even nominated to go up against the musical might that is Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Perry's static voice is but one cog in the well-oiled computer program that is "Firework." Maybe Katy really can sing, but we'd never know.

Also, let's just consider some of the lyrics from Katy Perry's chef d'oeuvre: 

Make 'em go "Uh-uh-uh"

As you shoot across the sk-uh-uh-y.

Boom, boom, boom.

Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon.

This is what Adele was up against. Because Adele's lyrics were so much better than what the rest of the pop world was spewing out, I assumed she was some kind of indie/underground singer until I saw 21 for sale in every checkout line of every store I went to during the next few weeks.

You know how the time flies:

only yesterday was the time of our lives.

We were born and raised in a summer haze,

bound by the surprise of our glory days.

I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited

but I couldn't stay away—I couldn't fight it.

I had hoped you'd see my face, and that you'd be reminded

that for me, it isn't over.

It's not Shakespeare, it's not The Decemberists, but it's good. It shows evidence that this woman has loved and lost and can eloquently express that experience in music and verse, which is more than I can say about Her Lady, the Dowager Duchess of Gaga and her insipid poker face. 

While I'm invoking the name of her Ladyship (can you tell I watched Downton Abbey tonight?), it's also refreshing that Adele has had so much success without putting on the persona of an over-sexed kitten. When it comes to female pop stars, it seemed like there was no escape from skinny, busty, big-haired bimbos. This may seem shallow of me, but I love that Adele is being accepted and adored primarily for being a musician and not a sex icon. Also, did you see her at the Grammys? She's adorable. Anyway, after years of having strippers parade as singers, it's a true joy to watch a consumate musician rise to her full stature and seize the airwaves.

Hopefully, Adele's career is just starting. Hopefully, this surge in fame doesn't destroy her as it has so many other great artists. Whitney Houston cast an ominous shadow over Adele's success tonight. My wish is that the last track on that fantastic album 21, "I Found a Boy," will be the overture to the rest of her career. It's a brilliant mixture of blues, country, rock, and folk—a playful and virtuosic lagniappe.

Romney's Mormonism

I should start this off with two disclaimers:

1—I still don't know who I want to vote for for president this year. Although I don't particularly dislike Obama, I think he's lost his steam. I know I don't like Gingrich.

2—I'm Mormon.

But here's the main point of this post: I read article after article about how Evangelical Christians say they have trouble supporting Romney because of his Mormonism. (Most recently, this one.) That is stupid. I'm trying to think of an analogy to illustrate its profound stupidity, but its stupid stupidness is hedging up my neurons.

Painting by J. Kirk Richards

Mormons are Christians


I am so tired of having to say this, largely because any argument to the contrary is so bafflingly stupid. The actual name of the church, which appears on all the publications and chapels, is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." Anyone who's even casually read the Book of Mormon knows that it is swarming with references to Jesus. In fact, it's not a stretch to claim that Jesus is what the Book of Mormon is all about. These are the last words of the Book of Mormon:

And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot.


And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen.


In two verses, this writer underscores the basic tenants of Christianity: We're saved by Christ's grace (if we accept it) because he died for us. We'll be resurrected and brought back to God. Now I'm sure some theologian will take issue with the wording, but I would hope that any honest Christian will agree that Mormons and Evangelicals share the same fundamental belief and hope in Jesus of Nazareth.

Doctrinal Differences


I won't pretend that there are no differences between the theology of Mormons and Evangelicals. Mormons believe in an embodied Jesus and an embodied Father. Thus, it becomes hard to believe in the traditional idea of the trinity where all three Gods are one God in substance. But really, who cares? I mean, I care when it comes to the theology, and I have my reasons for believing what I do, but when it comes to public policy, isn't such a difference enormously inconsequential? But believe it or not, this difference is why the majority of Evangelicals think Romney's Mormonism is fundamentally non-Christian. Well guess what, the idea of the trinity (whether it's right or wrong) didn't develop until centuries after Jesus and the apostles (AD 325, in Nicaea). So I guess John, Paul, Peter, and Jesus weren't Christians or suited for public office.

My point is this: to non-Christians, the doctrinal disputes between Mormons and Evangelicals are irrelevant. What would they care if one faction thought God was corporeal or incorporeal?

Mormons' Political Activism


Some people say that they're concerned that Romney would take all his orders from Salt Lake, were he elected to the presidency. With the notable exception of Prop 8, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really isn't politically active. The First Presidency has issued church policies on abortion and welfare, but as a rule they do not support particular parties or candidates. But do you know a church that does issue political mandates all the time? The Roman Catholic Church.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the Catholic Church. I actually have a lot of Catholic envy. But the truth is that they are aggressively political. And Newt Gingrich, whom the majority of Evangelicals support, is Catholic. Whether he's a good Catholic or a really practicing Catholic is another question.

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them


This is a harsh thing to say, especially since I've never been married, but seriously. Gingrich. Thrice married. Twice unfaithful. If Evangelicals are really interested in electing someone who lives a Christian life, shouldn't Gingrich give you pause? I mean, we can't know the heart of any candidate, but we can observe some outward behavior and make an educated guess. And I'm not saying that Romney is perfect or even that he's never had an affair, but we have no evidence to believe that he has. While Gingrich…is Gingrich.

Being Critical

So I got a job a few months ago as a classical music critic. It's an enormously fun gig. I get free tickets to things, and then I get paid to write about my experience. After attending a slew of concerts, ballets, and recitals, I've been thinking a good bit about the methods and process of reviewing a performance and a composition.

In all honesty, Roger Ebert is my model for criticism. Without a doubt, he is the most successful film critic ever. He's had a long-running TV show, he's reviewed thousands of movies, and he was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer. But perhaps most surprising and impressive is the enormous impact his blog has made on the internet. Once he made an off-hand comment about how video games can never be art, and all the nerds of the world rose up against him (including me). Sure he can turn a phrase, but I would argue that there's something in his method that makes him stand out. I'll catalogue what I've noticed about his reviews:

1) Ebert is generous. Although Roger has been known to pan a movie, he consistently rates movies higher than other critics. And even when he hates a movie, he will often look for some redeeming quality. Take his infamous review of North:

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.


But then in just the next paragraph, he writes:

Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are "This is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "The Princess Bride," "Stand by Me," "When Harry Met Sally" and "Misery." I list those titles as an incantation against this one. 


"North" is a bad film—one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover—possibly sooner than I will.


As I've begun writing reviews of performances, I've found myself in an awkward situation. I often know several of the musicians involved in the production. I'm closely affiliated with BYU, which is where I do a lot of my reviewing. Because I know them and because I'm a musician myself, I know how much work goes into even a very bad performance. And so I try to be generous. The hardest review I ever wrote was for the worst performance I've ever been to. Here's the rub: you have to be honest. If you're not honest, your readers won't trust you and will stop reading. But you should always remember that you're writing about the artistic oblations of humans—not abstractions. Most people deserve to be treated as such and not as an opportunity for target practice.

Also, no performance should be guilty until proven innocent. As I listen with an ear more tuned to the positive, I find myself discovering new beauties in pieces I have heard many, many times. I consistently find new eloquence in worn passages.

2) Ebert writes in the first person. I think this just makes sense. When people read reviews, in their heart of hearts, I don't think they're expecting a definitive, impartial assessment on whether something was artistically acceptable. Readers want to hear an informed opinion, and opinions, as well as how those opinions have been informed, are ultimately personal. It would be deceptive, for example, if I didn't let readers know about my own experiences with the Dvorak cello concerto when I sit down to write the review.

Plus, readers want to know that the critic is a human. Should one write entirely in the third person, one would run the risk of sounding like one is thinking that one is thundering down from Olympus. This leads me to my next point.

3) Critics should allow themselves to be swept away by the experience of what they're reviewing. Roger Ebert is a great movie critic because he loves movies. In his articles, you can sense his love for well projected images, for certain actors and directors, and for the whole process of sitting in a dark theatre and watching a movie. If you do not love music—love hearing an orchestra tune, love getting lost in the sound, love the passionate nonsense of notes—you should not review music. If you go into a performance looking for ways to put it down, no one will want to read your reviews. While it's true that negative reviews are often fun, readers know when the writer is a jerk.

4) Ebert is a great writer. I don't think this is the only reason behind his success, but it certainly contributes. When he writes a scathing review, he does so in such pithy, clever ways. I cherish the conclusion of his review of The Village:

Eventually the secret…is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.


And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.


This is so much better than the myriad reviews online which just said, "Teh ending was stupid!!!!! I want my money back!!!!!!!!!!" But it ultimately doesn't give any more information or insight than those multitudinous outpourings. It's just more artful. He's capable of artful writing largely because that man reads so much. Actually, I've never seen him read, but unless he's totally lying in all of his blog posts and his memoirs, he's spent his time in the pages of the masters. Spending time with the best workers of your craft is vital no matter what your field.

Anyway, hopefully by the end of this post you'll see why I take issue with this quote from an otherwise great movie, Ratatouille:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.


I disagree with all of this. I doubt it was written by anyone who ever seriously reviewed a work and had their byline attached to that review. Being a critic is not easy—you have to be more aware of nuance than the rest of the audience. A large part of the job is seeing and hearing what others do not. And I certainly do not "thrive on negative criticism." If I had my way, I would never write a negative review. I don't like going to bad concerts, and I don't like rubbing it in the performers' noses. Also, I don't think criticism is meaningless. I think it's dialogue, and although it can't exist without the subject of its criticism, what's the point of creating a work or performing a piece if no one responds to it? Would Beethoven's nine symphonies mean anything if no one ever heard them? No.

The Aeneid (Book I, 88–101)

I'm taking a Latin poetry class, and one of our assignments was to translate this passage from the Aeneid. So I did:

In a moment, the torrent tore
away the beams of midday sun from
widening Trojan eyes, and
darkness loomed over the deep.
Suddenly the scene seared with
lightning pouring down from heaven—
thunder ripping through the ether.
Death’s pale visage
leered at the ships from every side, and
a hoary lapse of fear
gripped miserable Aeneas,
filling his joints with ice.
His hands raked the heavens, and
with weary words he wept:
“O, you happy men of Troy
who greeted final darkness
where first you saw the sun—
to die at the feet of your fathers
and the mighty Teucrian gate.
O, Tydides, fiercest of the Greeks,
was your sword so cruel, so hateful
that its point would not find my breast?
O, Ilium, was there no room for my corpse
in your blood-drenched clay?
Would that the soul sprang from my body
where now lies mighty Hector,
slain by Achilles’ hand.
Or I might have slipped into Death’s current
by the banks of familiar Simoeis,
where now the shields, swords, and limbs
of those many mighty men
have withered into rust and ruin."

Here's a translation of the same passage from Project Gutenberg:

And heav'n itself is ravish'd from their eyes.
Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue;
Then flashing fires the transient light renew;
The face of things a frightful image bears,
And present death in various forms appears.
Struck with unusual fright, the Trojan chief,
With lifted hands and eyes, invokes relief;
And, "Thrice and four times happy those," he cried,
"That under Ilian walls before their parents died!
Tydides, bravest of the Grecian train!
Why could not I by that strong arm be slain,
And lie by noble Hector on the plain,
Or great Sarpedon, in those bloody fields
Where Simois rolls the bodies and the shields
Of heroes, whose dismember'd hands yet bear
The dart aloft, and clench the pointed spear!"

I like mine better for a few reasons. One, although this guy uses a lot of the same constructions as Vergil (admittedly more than I do), he doesn't use the same poetic devices. I'm much more free with my syntax and diction, but I play with aliteration and stress, which were two of Vergil's most frequently employed devices.

Two, the Aeneid does not rhyme. My translation doesn't rhyme. Instead, I use accentual verse, which is the form ancient English poetry took. Mine is more English than his. Also, I think it works better for modern audiences, since rhyming verse is currently out of fashion.

Three, my translation is more readable. It's still poetic, but when you're reading literally thousands of lines of verse, readability is only courteous.

That said, I'm quite a fan of his line, "Then flashing fires the transient light renew."

On Horror and Scary Things

When I was a tender lad of fourteen or so, The Ring came out. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I thought it was a Japanese cinematic remake of the Wagner opera cycle, so I hastened with my brother to go see it. Well, turns out the 2002 film has nothing to do with Wagner. It's terrifying. To date, I have never been more scared. And while I spent many a sleepless night recuperating from my fears, I started to wonder about what made things scary. What frightens us? I've been reading a lot of Poe recently, so I've begun to ask myself these questions again.

Drawing mostly on my experiences from The Ring, I decided that, like comedy, the core of horror lies in things being slightly off—just not as they should be. Things being out of place or fundamentally wrong is also the heart of farce. But unlike comedy, in horror this abnormality is sinister. In The Ring, we have a girl who is categorically evil, and children are not supposed to be evil. Jason should not be able to pop up behind someone without moving. When I was in college I discovered that Freud had beaten me to the punch, and what I had termed abnormality, he had already called Unheimlichkeit, or the uncanny. He talked about how there's nothing particularly frightening about a forest or a girl singing, but if you hear the voice of a girl singing in the woods, it suddenly becomes frightening because those two things don't go together.

Back in high school, I played with the idea of writing a screenplay about a little frontier town (I was definitely influenced by Shyamalan's abortive The Village) plagued by a subtly demonic solitary man. In the film, I would make sure that the exterior doors of houses opened outwards rather than in. I would make light do awkward things—darkness under lit candles, but light coming from the bottom corners of the room. I'd just do a myriad of things to make the scenes covertly eerie without ever showing anything gruesome or jumpy. I wanted to create a sense of continued anxiety through means that most viewers would be unable to identify. I still think it would make for a great flick.

Poe certainly has a great deal of that in his works. His characters stumble through looming, strange landscapes. They encounter maniacs and wastelands and deformities. They become obsessive over things that one should not care about. Poe is in full command of my abnormality and Freud's Unheimlichkeit, but Poe is also a master of what I'm about to term as silence, or what H. P. Lovecraft calls the unknown:

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." So Lovecraft begins his behemoth treatise on horror in literature. I'm going to argue that the unknown or silence is the companion element to Unheimlichkeit. Just as comedy and horror share abnormality as a premise, so adventure and horror share silence. I'm hoping that you've seen ABC's Lost. If not, go watch it; it's good times. You can talk about how people watched that show for the characters or whatever, but the real reason we came back for episode after episode was Lost's silence. The show was never better than when Hurley said to Jack, "We got a problem. The manifest. Jack, the census. The names of everyone who survived, all 46 of us. I interviewed everyone, here, at the beach. Got their names. One of them, one of them isn't—Jack! One of them isn't in the manifest. He wasn't on the plane." How is it possible that one of these people wasn't on the plane? It was the most gripping question on the show, but the writers answered us only with silence. In that vacuum of information, we project all the unspoken possibilities our subconscious can come up with.

But alas, we eventually found out who this "Other" was and where he came from. With the grand exception of the "numbers," Lost never learned to maintain its silence. The same is true of Sherlock Holmes. It's always a marvel when Holmes catches the villain until he explains how he came to his conclusion. At that point, the detective's methods become banal. What makes Gandalf such a great character? His silence. Within the trilogy, we never really know where he came from, how he does his magic, or what he knows.

All of those examples are from the adventure genre, but silence crosses over eloquently into horror. All the great monster movies show only glimpses of the actual monster. And just as a great organist never pulls out all the stops, the greatest horror texts always hint that the story has much more devilish underpinnings than we will ever know. Take "Paleman" from Pan's Labyrinth. Before we ever see him, we see an abandoned pile of children's shoes in his lair. Although context makes it clear that he's been eating children, the collection of shoes remains an enigma. Sure, you eat kids, but what's with the shoes? Where are the other clothes? It's a perfect combination of abnormality and silence. We never find out where Paleman came from or why he does what he does, but we're confronted with images that just aren't right.

I need to come clean on something. My term that I'm so proud of, silence, is lifted wholesale from a Poe story, and here I'll turn for my last example of silence. The story is "Silence—A Parable," and aside from the obvious SILENCE which comes in so prominently at the end of the tale, the story is enveloped in silence. We begin with silence. Who are these people? Who is the demon, and who is the narrator? We never really know. But the demon begins to tell us a story about a nightmarish landscape, and a man who stands there listening. The demon curses him so he hears only silence, and he runs off in terror.

Why does the listener flee? Why was he content with standing in this horrifying abyss before the silence? Maybe in silence we project the worst of what we are and think onto the emptiness. Maybe we're haunted by the fear that no matter what is lurking in the silence, it is not as awful as what we have buried within us. Or maybe it's the horror of being entirely alone in a hostile universe. Whatever the process is, our imaginations will terrify us much more than any input the storyteller could provide. This is the hallmark of Poe's brilliance—he leaves so much unspoken and unrevealed. His most eloquent voice is silence. After all, he wrote the first detective story, a genre built entirely on the concept of the silence and the unknown. I think that Poe was not only aware of the mechanics of literary silence, but that those mechanics are what his parable is all about.

Poe ends the story with a lynx emerging from the tomb. The lynx stares at the demon. It "looked at him steadily in the face." Why? We don't know. But there the tale ends, and all we're left with is silence.

Troilus and Criseyde

Before I took a class on Chaucer, I had no idea that he had written anything other than The Canterbury Tales. Don't get me wrong—I'm as big a fan of the Tales as the next guy, but they're incomplete, and Chaucer wrote some other stuff that I think gets neglected. I'm talking about Troilus and Criseyde. This is one of the few times when someone does a better job than Shakespeare at telling a story. Bill's Troilus and Cressida is not even on par with Chaucer's. It's also the only extended work Chaucer ever finished, and it's just some of the best poetry in English.

I'll admit that my first experience with Chaucer was fueled entirely by the language—not the poetry, not the symbolism, not the plot, but his particular dialect of Middle English. I was fourteen and thought I hated poetry. But it was just such a thrill to read through this foreign text and somehow be able to understand it. I read "The Knight's Tale" and didn't complain even though I thought the story was supremely boring. It wasn't until last year when I picked up Troilus and Criseyde that I realized that Chaucer was a great poet. I'm including some of my favorite excerpts:

"So aungelik was hir natif beaute,
That lik a thing inmortal semed she,
As doth an hevenyssh perfit creature
That down were sent in scornynge of nature."

"…And brende hym so in soundry wise ay newe,
That sexti tyme a day he loste his hewe."

"For nevere yet so thikke a swarm of been
Ne fleigh , as Grekes for hym gonne fleen,
And thorugh the feld, in everi wightes eere,
Ther nas no cry but 'Troilus is there'

Now here, now ther, he hunted hem so faste,
Ther nas but Grekes blood—and Troilus.
Now hem he hurte, and hem al down he caste;
Ay wher he wente, it was arayed thus:
He was hire deth, and sheld and lif for us,
That as that day, ther dorste non withstonde
Whil that he held his blody swerd in honde."

"And who may stoppen every wikked tonge,
Or sown of belles whil that thei ben ronge?"

One of my all-time favorites:
"That nyght bitwixen drede and sikernesse,
Felten in love the grete worthynesse."

"O ye loveris, that heigh upon the whiel
Ben set of Fortune…

"And as in wynter leves ben biraft,
Ech after other, til the tree be bare,
So that ther nys but bark and braunche ilaft,
Lith Troilus, byraft of ech welfare,
Ibounden in the blake bark of care,
Disposed wood out of his wit to breyde,
So sore hym sat the chaungynge of Criseyde."

"I, combre-world, that may of nothyng serve,
But evere dye and nevere fulli sterve."

Another one of my favorites:
"O ye loveris, that heigh upon the whiel
Ben set of Fortune, in good aventure,
God leve that ye fynde ay love of stiel,
And longe mote youre lif in joie endure!
But whan ye comen by my sepulture,
Remembreth that youre felawe resteh there;
For I loved ek, though ich unworthi were."

"Endeth than love in wo? Ye, or men lieth,
And alle worldly blisse, as thynketh me."

"Wher ben hire armes and hire eyen cleere
That yesternyght this tyme with me were?"

So…'bout 2011

You may have noticed that my blog was silent for a good two months. My personal and professional lives got out of control, and as a result my blogging suffered. I started two new jobs: one as a radio producer, and one as a music critic. Oh yeah, and I'm still a full time student.

If my absence made you totally distraught during the past two months, here's a link to all my reviews/interviews:


http://www.reichelrecommends.com/?author=233

Expect to hear more from me in 2012. I'm working on a few new compositions that look promising. I've also got a better grip on my life in general.

Cheers.