Guest Post: Best of 2012 - Der Miksic

I did, watched, and played so many great things this year, it's going to be tough to contain myself to a manageable list. I fear I don't feel as strongly about any of my "Bests" as Der Koosh did about his best TV show, but I have significant affection for lots of stuff I purchased and experienced. Every time you pick a leisure activity, you're gambling with your time, and often your money... and I'd say that in 2012, I came out way ahead.

But how do I pick, goddammit? Take film... I've got a list of 50 or 60 movies I saw, and genuinely enjoyed, and it's tough setting my filter to exactly the right granularity. How much is enough enjoyment to qualify? And once it qualifies, is that enough? I think, in order to narrow it down, I'm going to write this as a list of discoveries... things that made -- not just a strong impression -- but an unexpectedly strong impression, things that I ran across while scanning outside the standard frequencies. That way, I'll avoid repeating the top entries in everybody else's top ten lists and best-of-in-history lists.

So that makes for a slightly more manageable question: what were my best discoveries of 2012?

The strongest, freshest cinema memory I have is Skyfall (discussed here), which destroyed most of my other in-theater viewing experiences this year. But that's not really a discovery, is it? I knew I liked Sam Mendes's eye for photography, and it was getting excellent reviews long before I got to see it. There's been enough tribute-writing on Skyfall. Same with the rest of the tentpoles... The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, Cloud Atlas. I guess I "discovered" a lot of older films, like Reds, Boogie Nights, and House of Flying Daggers, but generally, I appreciated them without really falling in love with them. To really qualify as a discovery, I needed to pick a film I'd loved unexpectedly, a film that stopped me for a second to ask for the time, and then charmed me into going home with it. It can't just be a film that the critics and the marketing teams threw at me like a mortar shell... I needed to think of a film that had discovered me. The only one that really qualifies is:

BEST MOVIE DISCOVERY

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (Guy Ritchie, December 2011)


In his second installment of the RDJ-as-Sherlock-Holmes series, Guy Ritchie found his stride. I wrote a whole blog post on why I think it's a strangely wonderful popcorn action flick, a sort of theater-of-the-absurd superhuman Victorian burlesque. I've thought about it from time to time since then, and I'm continually impressed by the way they handled the final showdown between Holmes and Moriarty: a whole physical exchange playing out in their heads, like they're supercomputers playing chess, anticipating every possible move, and computing every inevitable outcome. They treat choreographed martial-arts combat like a strategy game... an elaborate match in Starcraft or Risk... where the player that can anticipate the other's actions most accurately, project furthest ahead, and logically outflank their opponent is destined to be the victor. It's a stroke of genius that Holmes knows he can't win this fight, and a further stroke that he's only saved by the unexpected intervention of Watson (the kind of event that simply couldn't have been anticipated) -- in a way, this is an argument that friendship and the loyalty of his comrades is the wild card Holmes holds that breaks his stalemate with the evil Doctor.

Sherlock Holmes is the kind of under-the-radar discovery that I treasure as a niche media connoisseur. I didn't fall into it wholeheartedly, like I do with some highly-regarded films, TV shows, and video games... the merit of the film crept up on me and busted through my natural skepticism toward post-T2 action flicks. Few franchises can boast of that kind of hooking power, because so many franchises are already pre-judged by the blogomediajournosphere, and I just get to relax and watch for the things that other people really like about them.

For instance, take Game of Thrones and Skyrim. I had a wonderful, sublimely self-indulgent weekend over the summer, during which my wife and I watched the entire first season of Game of Thrones, in one straight shot. That's... what... 12 hours of dark, cynical fantasy produced by the nigh-insurmountable talent at HBO? And then, the next day, I spent the whole day playing Skyrim, which was one of the richest, most immersive interactive fantasies I've ever made the time for. That was my exhilerating, violent, escapist, clangy medieval weekend of 2012, and when I came out into the real world on Monday morning, it felt like a Jules Verne novel of the future compared to the Tolkienesque reality I had just left behind.

And yet, I'm not going to cite either of these as Best of 2012, because again, I didn't really discover them. The World discovered them. Skyrim has been a meme-factory and an outsized video game award winner, and Game of Thrones has everyone breathless for Season 3. You can't open a browser window without tripping over a Game of Thrones recap. Both of these were already tidal waves of enthusiasm... I just had to ride them into shore.

Nay, for Video Game, I'm going with something older, a sleeper hit that I'm still playing. It's been a fresh, rejuvenating balm for my couch-sitting time at the end of the day, and I've ripped through the game in a mere 10 days or so. My wife and I are addicted to it like you get addicted to a fun, cheesy anime series, so that you look forward every night to another couple episodes. It's not award-winning or iconic, but the people who have run across it love it, and I count myself among them. Ladies and gentlemen, it's...

BEST VIDEO GAME DISCOVERY

Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, 2008. For the Playstation 3)


I'm currently in the middle of watching Band of Brothers, and I'm ashamed to admit: it's competing directly with an under-the-rader video game for best war-themed thing in my life right now. Valkyria Chronicles is a cinematic anime-style war game that takes place in an alternate-universe World War II, a clash between The East Europan Empire (the generic communo-fascist autocratic bad guys) and the Allied Federation of Western Europe. Err, Europa. Or whatever it is. You are a native of Gallia, a small country in the North, that's bearing the brunt of the clashes between the two world powers. You are a lieutenant in the Gallian militia, commanding a small squad of soldiers from your tank-cum-command-HQ, and of course, your personal quest to defend your homeland becomes bound up with the war that's swept over the continent. The whole thing is romanticized as a war of tyrants versus freedom-loving natives, but there are also overtones that this is a war of natural resources. This whole world runs on something called Ragnite, and as luck would have it, Gallia is rich in the stuff.

The plot is fluff, with all the subtlety and gritty realism of Shonen anime, which is to say, none at all. Lots of primary colors and simplistic emotional cues... you don't consume this type of stuff for its psychological depth. What Valkyria Chronicles does that's so fantastic is very primal, just like that anime-style storytelling... it provides a buoyant cinematic experience as we follow the characters through their heroic journey, and it provides a visceral, often frustrating tactical combat experience, padded with extensive cut-scenes. The gameplay combines leveling and inventory management (a concept familiar to RPG players) with turn-based overhead war simulation, giving it the feel of the Warcrafts and Starcrafts, or the Warhammer tabletop games, but with a more intimate, microcosmic feel to it.

There's a KEY difference between those games and Valkyria Chronicles, though. In all the War-(etc) games, you generate troops by the dozens or hundreds and send them to war in droves to be mowed down by war machines. Each figure is a generic plastic or pixellated copy of some standard type. In Valkyria Chronicles, you assemble a 20-person regiment from among 50 or so recruits, and every single one of them has a unique face, body, name, and brief backstory, including variations on skills, merits, flaws, and relationships with the other cadets. You then send these 20 hand-picked soldiers into battle in groups of 4 to 10, and try to coordinate their battlefield maneuvers under heavy artillery and sniper fire.

If you're like me, you'll spend a few hours just browsing through your troops and reading their short biographical snippets. Then, when you send them into combat, you'll start developing relationships with them... you'll rapidly identify Catherine as your best sniper, you'll find Rosie and Ted effective but annoying with their snarky banter, and you'll be shocked and happy when Dorothy manages to pull off an objective without stumbling into enemy fire. When you're deploying these soldiers to their positions, you will call them by first name. And then, rarely but occasionally, they will DIE ON YOU, on the field, and you'll never be able to use them again (without starting the game over from scratch, at least). Most annoyingly, this often happens with your favorite characters, because they're the ones you feel you can rely on... the first you put into dangerous situations.

It's not the game of the century. Skyrim is a vast, bold, complex, and intensely immersive experience, and if I was magically forced to choose one game to play for the rest of my life (WHAT CRUEL GOD WOULD MAKE SUCH A DEMAND?!?), I'd choose Skyrim over Valkyria Chronicles. Still, Valkyria Chronicles has been a refreshing discovery, and from here on out, it will serve me as a go-to example of creativity and elegant execution of a video game experience.

As long as we're talking about the continuum of reference to reality... wait, you didn't realize we were talking about that? Band of Brothers as drama via pseudo-documentarian reenactment? Valkyria Chronicles as fantasist revision of 20th century military history? Anyway, it leads me pretty directly to my next choice for this list, which is: Best Literary Discovery in the wide world of Fiction, wherein I happen to have chosen another drama of characters and emotions known to recorded history. I ran across this book via the NYRB Classics list, and picked it up because it related to some academic interests of mine. It was everything I could have asked in a random book choice.

BEST LITERARY DISCOVERY: FICTION (WITH A FACTUAL GLOSS)

The World As I Found It (Bruce Duffy, 1987)


The World As I Found It is a rich retelling of the life and times of Ludwig Wittgenstein, weaving together his younger days as a brilliant student at Cambridge, his troubled relationship with his father in the context of his brothers' suicides, his aesceticism and eventual service in World War I, and the professional and academic relationships that shaped his life. Bertrand Russell becomes a key POV character, acting as a mentor and a foil for Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore is the third player in this philosophical trio.

The historical arc of The World As I Found It is epic, weaving through London and Vienna and Paris as Europe swings from optimism and enlightenment to war and self-destruction. It is the breeding ground for heroes and villains and soldiers and sadists, people driven by ambition, moral righteousness, compassion, and love for their homelands. What makes Wittgenstein such a fascinating figure against this background is the fact that he is a creature -- indeed, a behemoth -- of ideas: pure, neuron-twisting, intensive treatments of the fundamental meaning of truth, and existence, and knowledge as a determining factor in the human condition. I have read a lot of cerebral literature, and I've never read any book that demonstrated so viscerally the obsessive, gut-wrenching power of philosophy in the mind of its luminaries. If you ever wanted to know what it takes to be a true pioneer in philosophy (and, by analogy, in any field whatsoever), this book will show you: you have to be able to cheer, weep, and rage against nature because you've found some clever solution to some arcane paradox, or because that paradox has reemerged as a knot in your most elegant proof.

The history and power of ideas was really a thing for me this year, I guess, given my pick for my next category. It's a series of lectures that described a broad cultural movement in European intellectual history, which I knew was interesting, in a detached academic way... but I didn't realize it could FEEL so interesting in words. That is, until I discovered:

BEST LITERARY DISCOVERY: NON-FICTION

The Roots of Romanticism (Isaiah Berlin, 2001, adapted from his 1985 lectures)


I played another excellent game this year, Team Ico's classic Shadow of the Colossus, and as I was playing, I had an intuition that this game sort of mirrored the way Romantic thought in European culture was turned inside-out into the pseudo-heroic military aggression of fascism. So I picked up some books on the subject and started reading. The best one, by far, was a series of lectures by eminent cultural historian Isaiah Berlin, transcribed and edited into six chapters by Henry Hardy, called The Roots of Romanticism. I was excited to read up on this, but I didn't anticipate discovering one of the most engrossing non-fiction books (at least for my tastes) that I've ever run across.

In these lectures, Berlin was tackling an incredibly complex topic. Romanticism was a movement that developed over 150+ years, spanning all types of art, and seeping into the values of all of European society, to varying degrees based on the locality. It's full of contradictory impulses, and its implications have burrowed so deep into Western culture that it's hard to separate the Romantic ideas from basic conventional wisdom about creativity and individuality. Berlin starts with an incredible historical knowledge, an understanding of all the core thinkers and marginal critics of the Romantic movement, including its precedents and eventualities, and he takes this ridiculous volume of facts and names and dates and generalizations and shapes it into something like a silhouette. After reading through a few chapters, we can step back and see where the Romantics came from -- the frustrations of German intellectuals, the resentment towards French vogue, the historical trauma of the Thirty Years War -- and we can see how this developed into something that was simultaneously transgressive and traditionalist, soaringly hopeful and morbidly cynical and paranoid. Berlin weaves his history from the words and accounts of a whole cast of intellectuals, and he renders Romanticism in both its complexity and its comprehensibility.

Berlin's prose is kept very conversational, and this is part of the book's appeal. His digressions and elaborations play out like a measured soliloquy, and he capers deftly between hard facts and informed interpretations. Like some of my other list-picks, Berlin expertly evokes the subtle life of the ideas he is exploring, convincing me every step of the way that they were both personal and universal, resonant and disruptive enough to shake the whole world at the outset of the 20th century, and echoing even into our own time. It was what I needed for my paper (let me know if you want to read it), but it was also just a great, edifying read.

Finally, following awkwardly behind all my self-consciously offbeat choices for the other categories, I've got a fairly obvious pick for television. I've watched a lot of good TV... some Mad Men, some Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, Dexter, the 1994 ABC miniseries of Stephen King's The Stand, and whole seasons of Project Runway, American Idol, The Voice, and The X-Factor. There were high points and low points in every show, but none of them really called out to me or worked much seductive magic. For this category, I have to give a fairly predictable shout-out, and it's almost as much a nod to last year's season as it is a genuine endorsement of this year's:

BEST TELEVISION DISCOVERY

Homeland (Showtime, 2011-2012)


I've been a little hot-and-cold on Homeland in recent weeks, but the show's first season and a half were so brilliant, it has an enormous amount of credit to burn with me. The show exhibits a lot of the same merits as Louie, its "comedy" counterpart: it keeps a genre in its purview (in this case, the spy thriller genre), but it defies convention so aggressively, with such grace and self-awareness, that it becomes a category unto itself. I know lots of people who kept wanting Homeland to give them big twists or shocking reveals, and this expectation ramped up as the final episode of the first season approached. Would we learn the identity of a mole in the agency? Would Carrie turn out to have been faking her illness? Did Brody have multiple personalities? And Homeland just laughs at us: in real life, these official mechanisms are so complex, the loyalties sorted out and anticipated so far in advance, that there are no redemptions or sudden twists or moments of catharsis. Instead, there are unplanned contingencies and bad decisions and lucky breaks, everything with its procedure, all depending on the relationships and professional commitment of a network of well-connected people.

In this byzantine bureaucratic universe, the characters of Carrie and Brodie and Saul get to emerge in all their grace and inadequacy and doubt. Carrie herself is a beautifully-rendered high-level operator who draws on a sort of intractable confidence at pivotal moments, and her bipolar disorder is written with sensitivity and subtlety. Like any disease, it affects her performance in unpredictable ways, occasionally giving her what seems like a distinct cognitive advantage... but the writers know that it's not the mania that makes Carrie a brilliant analyst, but her deep, sensitive knowledge of her subject area, and her ability to focus and communicate. Carrie's bipolar symptoms are something she has to work through, a wild card in her interactions with people around her that she has to accept and control to the best of her ability, knowing it will always push her to the margins of her community.

The laser-like focus of the first season was trained on the bureaucracy of military intelligence in all its (paradoxical) clumsiness and subtlety... and on the quiet turbulence of a soldier whose convictions have been entirely upended... and on the jarring cycles of bipolar disorder and the way it affects goal-seeking and social behavior. This focus has waned in the second season, and the veneer of plausibility has chipped away a bit. That's why some of the show's most ardent defenders are now talking about how it should be read as a "character show," instead of a wet dream of realism in plotting and suspense. The writers have allowed the drama to bloat into more fantastical territories, with moments of contrived irrationality and unlikely contingency, but they are still doing two things right. First of all, they are still trying to evolve their characters and the situations they're faced with to reveal new dimensions of the show's primary personalities (frankly, I think Quinn is about to supplant Carrie as the most interesting and dynamic character). Second, they are still resisting the tiresome plotting and pacing and emotional cliches that plague the rest of screen entertainment. In particular, the development of Brody's situation in episodes 16 through 20 are some of the most convoluted and unpredictable of the show so far. Season 1 won the show a permanent place in my entertainment annals, and I'm content to sit back and see how long it can go before it implodes or loses my interest.

As I read my list of prospective media for this accounting, I can see that I had a really solid 2012. I hope some of you know these media artifacts, and I've given you a chance to smile and nod and understand why I thought they were so great; and for those of you who haven't experienced them, I hope I've given you something to enrich your 2013, or 2020, or 2050... or whenever you get a few minutes away from your amazing job and beautiful family to engage in some blissful media consumption. Now, onward! my friends, for more sights and sounds and moving pictures await us.

Read More

800 Words: Best of the Year (Part 2)

Worst (cultural) Experience of the Year: Rewatching 90’s Action Movies

The 90’s was the Golden Age of the Hollywood Action Movie. When the 90’s began, Spielberg had just wrapped up the third Indiana Jones movie. When it ended, Peter Jackson had yet to finish Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and George Lucas was only beginning to screw up his legacy with the Star Wars Prequels. The implications of the Spielberg/Lucas revolution were felt as never before or since in Hollywood, and it looked for a time as though special effects could be worked into the fabric of great movies as an enhancer for greatness rather than a substitute. To see the promise which Special Effects and CGI held for movies, all one has to do is look at the imagination on display in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

And yet it never worked like that. Special effects meant that filmmakers had no limits on what they could imagine, so rather than Hollywood using CGI for greater imaginative flights, most Hollywood movies settled for far less imagination. And since special effects could help to stage the most spectacular effects known to the human eye, it would necessarily follow that most of the most spectacular effects humans can think of are violent effects.

This point was brought home to me just this Sunday as I tried to relax at home by watching The Fugitive - an R-rated action movie so beloved that it almost qualifies for most people as family entertainment, indeed I first saw it when I was 11 or 12 during a sleepover with both my friend and his parents. And yet within the first five minutes, we see a grizzly murder of a beautiful woman so graphically rendered that any hope of relaxation is impossible - followed by a 911 tape recording of her dying wheeze. There was simply no reason for this level of violence except to show that they can get away with it. The violence is not there because of any humane horror at the awfulness of murder, the violence is there because audiences find murder exciting. Well, sure, it’s exciting, but it’s also tragic and disgusting, and there’s no reason to make a spectacular movie with its most grisly scene at the beginning of it unless you want to use the graphic murder of a beautiful woman as a means to excite your audience.     

I had a similar sinking feeling recently when I watched The Rock. Your teenage self will thank you endlessly if you don’t watch it again. It is so much worse than you remember. From the corny one liners which Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery say when driving their cars alone in a chase scene to no one in particular, to the speeches about honor which various marines make to one another right before they kill each other real good; to the stereotype of the gay barber clearly meant to be offense, to the catchphrases thrown in with no context (“winners go home and fuck the prom queen”); to the psychotically violent threats of ex-marine turned terrorist solders, to the “satisfaction” of watching two of their faces get melted off by a chemical weapon. That last one was particularly terrible to think of as the prospect of chemical warfare’s resurgence in Syria is raised.

I have no problem with violence in movies. In fact, it would be just about impossible to create drama, and perhaps even comedy, without it. But violence has to be viewed with critical distance or else it has no purpose except to excite the people who watch it - perhaps even to imagine, or begin to consider, themselves able to perpetrate all the terrible things which 90’s movies let them see. Even if I opposed their methods, I understand the reasons behind the movement to censor violence in movies, music, and video games. I honestly would have little problem with its censorship it if I thought for a moment that it would be successful or wouldn’t be abused by people who want to ban violence wholesale. But violence cannot be contained. There are certain irrational parts of human behavior that are impossible to stop - sometimes, like in sex, those irrational behaviors are pleasant, sometimes, as in violence, they are loathesome.

The difference between the violence of 80’s action and horror and 90’s action and horror (don’t get me started on horror movies) is simple. The more CGI took over the film industry, the more excited people could be by the gorefests, which could reach a level of realism and disgust impossible in the days of cartoonish special effects. Indeed, there’s a whole subset of violent art movies - from directors like Gaspar Noe, Uwe Boll, Mel Gibson, Michael Haenke, Dario Argento (perhaps the all-time champion), and a whole industry of them in Asia - who try to dress up a taste for mindless violence as though they’re making great art. Sometimes even more prominent filmmakers indulge in the same violence fetish, you can see it in the work of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, David Fincher, The Wachowski Brothers, The Coen Brothers, and Jonathan Demme. Even Steven Spielberg is not immune to it. At least filmmakers like Eli Roth and Paul Verhoeven are upfront about the fact that they make trash. But to pretend that art exists to excite our animal instincts is not just high class barbarism, it’s an insult to our humanity and an incitement to evil. The inevitability of people being seduced by violence is one of the great tragedies of human nature - in fact you can make a great movie about that. In fact...many have.

An Approximately Ranked List of the Greatest Films of the Nineties I Can Think Of Right Now:

Before Sunrise
The Truman Show
The Apostle
All About My Mother
Forrest Gump (yeah, that’s right...Forrest Gump)
Schindler’s List
Rushmore
Pleasantville
Primary Colors
Husbands and Wives
Babe the Pig/Babe: Pig in the City
Shakespeare in Love
Boogie Nights
Deconstructing Harry
Trainspotting
Malcolm X
Quiz Show
The Madness of King George
Vanya on 42nd Street
He Got Game
Three Colors Trilogy
Crumb
Saving Private Ryan
The Remains of the Day
The Lion King
Bringing Out the Dead
Sunshine
A Simple Plan
Boys Don’t Cry
Bullets Over Broadway
Out of Sight
Eve’s Bayou
Groundhog Day
Jackie Brown
Les Miserables
Goodfellas
Dazed and Confused
The Insider
South Park
Election
What About Bob?
In the Name of the Father
Beauty and the Beast
Unforgiven
Casino
Pulp Fiction
Three Kings
Fargo
Aladdin
Out of Sight
The Big Lebowski
Fight Club
Heat

(I reserve the right to change this list as time goes on)

Read More

Best of the Year 2012 - Der Koosh

Prelude 

My recent "thing / criteria" when it comes to evaluating a show, movie, book, etc involves what isn't on the screen/text, but is a quintessential part of the universe.  By that I mean what you can speculate about that isn't part of the main plot, but may or may not contribute to it.  I don't mean trying to guess a character's motivation for a specific action, or what the director meant by a particular shot angle, or even what might've happened to a character if their arc peters out prematurely.  No, I mean more about thehistory, future, and off-'screen' present of the book/show/movie.  What happened to bring the world to this point, what's going on in the world that's hinted at but not part of the plot (distinguishing it from a loose end which is distinctly brought up, but left unresolved), and where is this universe going after we close the last page / the credits roll.

(Oh dear, I hope this doesn't mark me as a post-modernist.)

A great example of this principle is Babylon 5.  Yes, it was crippled by numerous problems: a borderline schizophrenic approach from the show's backers, bad sweaters (it was the 1990s, even if it was the 2250s-60s), and a ridiculously slow start that didn't really get moving until a quarter of the way through Season 2.  But the universe that existed was so expansive, that you can (and I have) speculate about so much of both a character's past and that of their species without having to actually touch what happened on screen at all.  The characters and their dialogue betrayed so much behind the curtain that wasn't seen, but was brought with the characters, that it creates a universe which you, the viewer, can fully participate.  This is one of the reasons why Doctor Whohas taken a step back for me as of late; everything's explained in such a nice little package that I might as well be consuming the show instead of participating.

Best Book You Read This Year

Hasn't really been an impressive slate this year, I'm afraid.  Too much election reading, not enough fiction reading.  I don't know if this really counts, but Great Paintings, by DK Art and Collectibles would probably be my choice.  They have a fine range of paintings included therein, and very in-depth analysis of each that is extensive without getting too abstract.

Best TV Show You Watched

Disclaimer: This is going to be a long one.  Settle in.

The show that I started watching this year, and the one to which I'm indelibly hooked, is decidedly not what most would expect from a straight, married man in his late-20s.  That being said, when I say that I'm hooked, I mean that I visibly worried for a few weeks when I first heard that the third season was slated for only 13 episodes, when the first two seasons had 26.  As an economist, I first did a rudimentary trend analysis and sent the following distressed email to my wife: "I DON'T LIKE THIS TREND.  WHAT IF THEY'RE GOING TO CANCEL IT?!!!!!"

Thankfully, one of the show's co-creators came out recently and said that there will be many more seasons, and that the season length will vary based on the demands of the plot. That, obviously, was an enormous salve for me, and it's allowed me to assuage my fears that a show that I've only recently discovered would be snuffed out so quickly.  So that bodes well.

When I mentioned in my prelude that what I enjoy about books, shows, movies lately is the ability to perceive the universe outside the main plot, character arcs, etc. without it being crammed into the book/show/movie, it's this element that this show has in spades.  Just the other day, I had a 20-30 minute discussion with a friend of mine (also a friend of the show) about whether one of the characters of the show was a benevolent autocrat in the Judeo-Christian God mold or a savvy Machiavellian operator.  Seriously, we worked out how you can interpret her actions over the course of the episodes, what her real intentions are vis-a-vis the main character (what's her long game?  Is this Janus trying to eliminate a potential rival for power, or manipulate the protagonist into being completely under her thumb so when said character realizes her full potential, she'll be a loyal vassal of this brilliant schemer?

Obviously, the show I'm talking about is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

This show may be the greatest children's show of all time, which is ironic because it's not really a children's show at all.  It's arguably the best thing on television right now.

No, I don't like Mad Men and I haven't seen Game of Thrones.  Deal with it.  

Why do I think it's the best thing on television right now beyond the fact that I watch very little non-British television nowadays andSherlock is off the air until late 2013?  The philosophy, the characters, the message, the comedy, and the complexity.

1) The philosophy.  As someone who's a huge Plato fan, I've never seen a show with stronger parallels to The Republic (despite the fact that the linked article is from one of my favorite blogs, I noticed the parallels independently).  The three types of ponies in the show obviously reflect Plato's three components of the soul - the telekenetic, studious (with magic obviously subbing in for reason/knowledge, exemplified by the main character Twilight Sparkle) unicorns as "gold" reason, the proud, militant (Fluttershy exempted) Pegasi as "silver" warrior spirit, and the commerce-focused, far more numerous earth ponies as "bronze" desire.

Not only is the philosophy spectacular, but its approach to religion is amazingly humanistic.  In one episode, the main characters play-act the "origin story" of the realm of Equestria, and what it took to get off the ground.  As you can imagine from the title of the show, teamwork was involved, but that's not what I want to point out.  The flag that the ponies raise at the end after they, on their own, come together is the same flag that they raise at the start of the show.  That may not seem like a big deal, but keep this in mind: on the flag are the two quasi-deities of Equestria: Princess Celestia (of the Sun) and Princess Luna (of the moon) - both recurring characters in the show.  The thing is that as far as the origin story is concerned, neither Celestia nor Luna has shown up yet, as the two of them are regularly cited as the reason by which Equestria is held in egalitarian harmony/balance.  What this is saying, in effect, is that the ponies, upon that first instance of working together and founding modern Equestria, created Celestia and Luna as deities to lend a quasi-religious sheen to ensure the success of their society.  This is an incredibly human (some might say cynical, as was brought up about Civilization V's introduction of religion as a cultural force) way to portray religion: that it was developed not out of divine inspiration, but that it evolved out of either conscious or unconscious understandings of society's needs and environmental considerations at large.

How often do you see that in what's nominally a children's show?

2) The characters.  In retrospect, I didn't have many female role models in media growing up.  In this show, there's several, all of whom have a very human realism about them.  Yes, they each have their distinctive, exaggerated character traits, but often entire episodes exist to help them break out of those archetypes, instead of crystallizing them: the bookish Twilight is forced to find a role without magic, the jock Rainbow Dash discovers the joys of reading after repeatedly making fun of "eggheads," etc.  Instead of over-emphasizing what makes the characters different, the show illustrates the complexity that exists within each of them, and challenges the very exaggerations which make the characters memorable in the first place.  In so doing, the show demonstrates just how complex we all are as human beings (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

As you can imagine, the overwhelming majority of characters in this show are female; in fact, there isn't a male non-comic relief character who shows up until the end of Season 2.  That being said, the characters themselves cover the gambit of the emotional spectrum quite well; the militant, competitive, quick-to-anger Rainbow Dash and the tough, hardworking farmhand Applejack exemplify many male characteristics on their own, and the rampant sarcasm that so many of the characters use is as common as any "bro" show would include.

3) The message.  This is absolutely one of the biggest selling points for me.  I knew I was hooked halfway through the second episode, when the characters are on a journey to discover a weapon capable of saving the kingdom.  I won't give too many spoilers, but they encourage an incredibly frightening scenario, and only emerge from it because one character encourages them to laugh in the face of fear.  This lesson really stuck with me, because it's something for so many children to learn.  What makes MLP so unique to me is that, unlike so many children's shows that simply ignore the presence of darkness or evil in the world, MLP fully embraces.  It's as if the show is saying, "Yeah, there are scary things out there, but here's how you can deal with them."  That sort of gritty realism coupled with a fundamentally optimistic look really meshes well.  The whole show is a reflection of that idea; often, the situations that the characters face have very real-world applications, and they don't shy away from showing both sides of a dispute (one episode in particular comes to mind, when the characters have to work through a land-use dispute between what are, essentially, Native Americans and cowboy settlers).  Further, the lessons at the end are not your simple, run-of-the-mill, borderline-useless "be nice to everybody" platitudes.  Through example, the show shows kids how to deal with real-life problems.

As a future father, I fully plan on importing those messages to my kids.

4) The comedy.  Again, growing up, the closest thing I saw to a woman being a victim of physical comedy (in a non-cruel way) was Bugs Bunny in one of his many cross-dressing affairs, or maybe Lucy.  Regardless, they were few and far between.  But with MLP, the fact that there's almost exclusively an all-female cast makes that a virtual necessity.  The fact that it's a necessity doesn't take away from the fact that the show isn't afraid of having its characters, say, get hit by a rapidly-opened door or fall head-first into a giant puddle of mud.  I don't point this out for some sort of schadenfreude, but rather because it shows female characters in a "real," non-dainty way.  The show's characters are confident enough that they won't erupt into tears when having, say, a bowling ball hit them on the head (that episode dealt with the paradoxical nature of time travel, but I digress).  It's a very real, human way to portray women, and one I don't see that often.

5) The complexity.  As if the above hasn't convinced you that this isn't some superficial sparkly girly-girl show, let me make one last point.  While there are far too-few "arc" episodes in a given season in my mind, the ones that exist definitely build on the idea that the characters are really evolving.  In a cartoon, this is tough to show because the characters aren't getting "older" or developing physically.  However, each season premiere and finale brings the characters up against tougher challenges, pushing them further and further away from their comfort zones, dealing with both existential crises and political / military ones, really asking what are, essentially, characters in their late teens / early twenties (Twilight Sparkle, the show's main protagonist, definitely strikes me as a graduate student) to grapple with problems far above what you'd expect their scope to be.  The fact that these characters are called on again and again, not only by the religious/political authority (Celestia) but by the earthly authority (the town's mayor) for important, leadership-dependent responsibilities demonstrates a real trust in "the younger generation" that is far removed from today's sickening Baby Boomer-centric slurping in the nation's politics, op-ed pages, business elite, etc.

In short, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a phenomenal show.  It contains all the symbolism, comedy, drama, undertones, and fundamental optimism that we expect from great art.  That's right, I'm a huge fan.  And I'm not alone. 

Best Movie You Saw

Midnight in Paris. In fact, it's the best movie I've seen in quite a few years, let alone just this one.  Let's go through the awesomesauce:

1) The casting.  Boy, does Woody Allen know how to put together a dynamite cast.  Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Dali (Adrien Brody) positively steal the show.  And throwing in Carla Bruni as a Museum Guide?  That's just unfair.  If Best Casting was a category at the Academy Awards - and it should be - this movie would've won it by such an overwhelming margin that the Academy wouldn't have even bothered nominating anyone else.  I actually didn't mind Owen Wilson being cast as Owen Wilson Gil Pender because, frankly, his character doesn't have the stature that just oozes out of the Fitzgeralds, Hemmingway, Stein, Dali, Gaugin, Degas, Toulouse-Leutrec, et al.  Therefore, he shouldn't be the one driving the plot, even if he is the protagonist.

2) The setting.  I mean, c'mon.  I'm well aware what our dear blog host thinks about Paris, but the shots they take in that movie - both in the present and the 1920s - are just architecture porn.  As Arnost Lustig might say, "Ohhhhh, Paris, she soooooo beautiful.  Right now, little boys touch themselves thinking about how beautiful she is."

3) The characters.  Not just the ones based on real people (because, again, Hemingway and Dali, WHOA) but even the fictional characters.  I've already gone briefly into Gil's merits, and I like that he grows enough over the course of the film to arrive at the film's main realization organically.  Good writing, for me, demands as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that the writer leaves a trail of bread crumbs that's small enough not to actively notice, but once the big reveal happens, they shine so brightly that you wonder how you missed them in the first place.  And Woody does a masterful job here with Adrianna as muse / plot device.

4) What Isn't Seen.  See my disclaimer.  There are so many avenues to go here, not the least of which is that the movie is unique as a romantic comedy because the romance is Gil falling in love with Paris, and that the two women with whom we expect him to connect with, he doesn't.  It's only at the end of the movie we see the beginning of a romance.

5) Carla Bruni.  Yes, again.

Best Music You Listened To

Regina Spektor's new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats.  I love Regina's voice, quirky non-sequitrs, mood, beat, you name it.  Just a solid, solid album.  I don't really know how to talk about music, and I barely can discern lyrics as-is, so I won't try to push any further than that.

Best Misc.

I'd go with "best political blog," but really couldn't tell you if Ezra Klein's Wonkblog or Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight makes more sense, as they're both pretty equal in my mind, be it the former's excruciating detail in explaining policy or the latter's excruciating detail in explaining polling.  My inclination is to go with Silver, since Wonkblog pretty much wins every year and Nate Silver had to deal with far more dumb and non-sequitur attacks from the "unskewed" crowd than Klein did, so I'll give it to Five Thirty Eight on Level of Difficulty points.

Worst Social Media Trend

When someone you know on Twitter or Facebook posts some stupidly radical / uninformed / unsourced quote, anecdote, or statistic, captions it "Interesting..." and leaves it at that.  No defense, no criticism or endorsement, no explanation, nothing.  I point this out now because this trend was rife during the primaries and the election season in general.  I can't describe how many times I saw a story pop up on my feed along the lines of "Obama's trying to institute martial law - here's how" or somesuch nonsense.  I'm aware that truth is the first casualty in politics, so I shouldn't be surprised.  I suppose it just feels worse this year because Twitter/Facebook "chain emails / stories" are so much more prevalent nowadays, and it's doubly irritating to see them from people you didn't think were initially political.

I'm not saying that people should go out intentionally picking fights on Facebook.  That being said, what you post is, unless you explicitly criticize it, an endorsement of what you believe.  After all, it's going out under your name.  If you're confused or unsure about what you're posting, either 1) don't post it until you've figured it out, or 2) explain why you're confused or intrigued.  Give some context for people so, if someone comments, they have something to play off of instead of trying to tease out your cowardly non-position.  And if you get upset at people for calling you out on it, then maybe you should think about what you're sharing before you share it.  Maybe those few seconds of thought will make you realize that it's really not your belief...or maybe it is, and you can at least articulate it.  What social media needs aren't thoughtless linking to a million stories - things are already cluttered enough - but thoughtful, reasoned, civil opinions to provide context for the reams of information thrown at us every day.  People follow / subscribe to you because they want your thoughts, not just what you randomly link to without any sort of context

Read More

800 Words: Best of the Year Part 1

I don’t like Best of the Year lists. Not only do they promote false claims of authority in bloggers, but the lists also forces bloggers to go through thousands of mediocre things that are not worth the time to examine for the sake of completion. Such a list does not allow for any of the flexibility which good writing requires. When creating lists, no longer do you write because you’re moved to write about something - whether in love or hate. When making a ‘best or worst of the year list’, you’re moved to write out of a sense of obligation. What should be done with inspirational fire is done by rote.

So as with last year, only in two posts rather than 40, I’m going to change this pseudo-objective ‘best of the year’ list to a more honest ‘Best Things I Read/Saw/Heard/Watched this year. This won’t be about things which happened this year, this will be about things which happened to me.

But there’s a further problem. One of the worst parts of constant writing is that you lose a bit of your ability to be surprised. As you write your reactions, you contemplate yourself all the more frequently, and you begin to ever but heavily know yourself. If you’re thinking constantly, the wall of resistance to new ways of thinking becomes insurmountable - not because you’ve closed off new paths, only because you’ve already tried every path of which you’ve already thought, and a person becomes understandably circumspect at the thought of walking down a path he knows will lead to a dead end.

When I think of my formative cultural experiences, I realize they’re nearly all in the past now. It’s a terrible thing to know what you like, because you know precisely what will not impress you only to have your knowledge confirmed yet again. Those early, formative, semi-religious experiences of music, and movies, and books, which raise your pulse and hormones to exalted levels happen ever-more seldomly as that critical voice nags at you that there’s no way Hamlet could ever catch the conscience of the King with a play - especially one which sucks as much as The Murder of Gonzago.

Every new experience becomes an act of faith that somehow, some way, you’ll find a means to rekindle the old fire. And the worry becomes inevitable that as you grow older, kindling will become harder and harder.

Best TV You Watched This Year: Louie



It’s easiest when the rules of what works are just being written. We still in the process of understanding what works on television, and being present at the Idiot Box’s creation is one of the most thrilling things about being alive in our time. Think about it, we were a generation that learned how to be kids by watching Bart Simpson, learned how to behave like an adolescent by watching Jerry Seinfeld, and learned about what happens if we don’t graduate college by watching Tony Soprano. It’s a pretty awesome time to grow up.

Mad Men was the perfect show to watch when you were 25 - you’re finally finished with school, you’re free to create yourself in any way you wish, only to realize that even when you’re completely free to be yourself - life is still as disappointing as ever. And if Mad Men is the perfect show for 25, then Louie is the perfect show for hitting 30. The responsibilities pile up, the sense of grievance at how your life’s turned out settles in, the realization hits that you’re either using others or being used, and you begin to pursue the thankless work which success entails simply as a means to spite a world that tells you you’re destined to fail.

(Spoiler alert for this paragraph) In Season 3 of Louie, we’re forced to watch as Louie gets dateraped by a woman, chickens out of a reunion with his estranged father, chickens out (mutually) of a fling with a guy, has to decide whether to make an unspoken suicide pact with another woman he dates, is put through an endless series of personal humiliations so he can have the mere chance of landing his dream job, watch himself powerlessly as his daughter gets bullied by other girls in her class, and watch just as powerlessly as the woman with which he’s in love with dies within minutes of their reunion.  

If Louie is the best comedy since The Simpsons, and I’m prepared to argue with anybody who says it’s not, then it’s the best because it’s the most painful. We laugh so that we may not cry. Louie is the cruelest show on television, but unlike the cruelty of so many other shows, Louie is cruel so that it can impart the most amazing, inspiring dignity to its subject. The subject is not Louie, the subject is us. Louis CK uses the experiences of his own life as a standin for all of our lives and how fate conspires to spit on our fondest hopes. And yet, like Louie, we go on hoping against hope that in the future, life will do better by us.

Best Book I Read This Year: Piles of Eric Hoffer



Just like there are TV shows for every segment of life, there are books and writers too. When I was of college age, I loved writers who were cynical solipsists. Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Philip Roth, and Kafka for fiction, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman for politics, Pauline Kael for film, Robert Hughes for art, Richard Taruskin and Alan Rich for music. These writers were perfect for me. People are stupid, I suppose I reasoned, and deserve to be known as such. In their distinct ways, each of the above writers were poets of contempt, and contempt was my favorite emotion during that period of my life. When I was in the midst of my twenties, I graduated to writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Michael Kinsley, Jonathan Chait, Tim Page, and David Thomson who, in their own ways, would humiliate their subjects just as often, but viewed their subjects as deserving of compassion in spite of their stupidities. Now that I’m on the other side of thirty, I’m tending towards more and more non-fiction. The writers which I now try to read exhaustively now are Stefan Zweig, Amos Oz, Isaiah Berlin, Bohumil Hrabal, Roger Ebert, Alan Rich, Robert Christgau, and Eric Hoffer. This is the first time in my reading life that writers speak to me who do not seem to view life as a curse. They almost, not quite, seem to view it as a blessing, or at least as a mixed one.

Among non-fiction writers, Eric Hoffer is now my greatest hero and an ambition to which I can only hope to aspire. Hoffer was no Intellectual with a Capital I - he worked his entire life as a San Francisco longshoreman who wrote down his thoughts when he got home from work. Hoffer never went to college, spent the Great Depression on Skid Row, and wrote down all his favorite passages of the books he read on index cards. He maintained his commitment to learning through the toughest imaginable circumstances.  Rather than tailor his style as an academic might to an audience of academics, or even as a journalist might to an audience of like-minded readers, Hoffer had no such luxury. He was forced to write his books in such a way that any curious amateur could not only understand it, but be elevated to the level of his material. The result is a style of aphoristic essay for which Montaigne himself (Hoffer’s greatest hero) would be proud to call his own.

One of the great ironies is that the alleged Marxist ideal of the cultured worker who lives by his hands during the day and by his pen at night should find its greatest flowering in America in the hands of a philosopher so contemptuous of communism that he regarded it as interchangeable with fascism and fanatical Christianity. Hoffer was no Conservative: in the above interview he refers to then-Governor Reagan as a ‘B-Movie actor who wants to run California on a B-Movie budget.’ But he was unapologetic about his belief in the greatness of American individualism, and merciless in his critiques of those philosophies which negated the individual.

Whether in The True Believer or The Ordeal of Change or The Temper of Our Time, Hoffer believed in the aim of a dippy concept like ‘self-esteem.’ But in Hoffer’s hands, an abused concept like ‘self-esteem’ has real meaning. Like the term ‘ego’, self-esteem has taken on a meaning that signifies almost the opposite of the meaning for which the word was created. We do not aspire to high self-esteem, we aspire to self-esteem, period. And if we do not achieve self-esteem, nobody fills that void by inflating their sense of esteem, we fill that void by convincing ourselves that the self does not matter. And therefore, those of us who do not believe we matter attach ourselves to groups which we believe do matter. God only knows how Hoffer would have lain into the Tea Party...

According to Hoffer, we gain our self-esteem by succeeding at that with which we are put on earth to do. Those of us who can partake in those activities which give us contentment and joy, whatever those may be, are people who’ve realized their sense of self. Those who cannot partake in those activities shall find no substitute. It is difficult to believe that many people were more tested in that regard than Hoffer himself - an uneducated blue-collar worker who never married and didn’t write his first book until just before his fiftieth birthday. And therefore, his life, his writing, his entire legacy, should be an inspiration to everyone. Writing was what he was put on earth to do, and he wrote on in spite of all life's attempts to deposit him in the least sympathetic surroundings for his joy.

Best Music I Listened To This Year: Evan Goes Back To The Proms


I went back to London this year, and everything was new again. If you’re like me and need a sense of self-esteem, go to The Proms. It’s the only place in the world where every complaint I have about the classical music ghetto of my youth has even a prayer of being redressed. The Proms is the one place in the entire world where classical music seems to matter so much that it’s given to the public as a fundamental right. 5-quid seats, standing room in the front, a 6,000 person capacity audience a night, and at very least one concert once-a-night every night for two months. If an angel assured me that The Proms tickets would be available in heaven, it’s probably the one incentive that could make me behave in this world like a righteous man.


(Daniel Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at The Proms. If you look five rows back you can see me... Well, I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.)

On the day I arrived in London, I got to see Daniel Barenboim conduct his orchestra of Israeli and Arab youth in the piece he performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in a free concert on the day the Berlin Wall fell. If you believe that music means more than a bunch of notes and symbols, an experience like that is unmissable. If you don’t believe that music is more than mere music, it’s difficult to believe you still could after an experience like that. I’m not a knee-jerk Daniel Barenboim fan, but that concert was one of the most inspiring experiences I’ve ever had in the concert hall, and can make you believe that maybe, maybe, just maybe... music can build the bridge that is more than a self-congratulatory symbolic one.  


(Vaughan Williams 6. Amazing.)

After three weeks in France and a rather uninspiring Boulez concert (Boulez couldn’t even show up, “Bosh Flimshaw!” as Mr. Burns would say), I returned to the Proms to hear a program I’ve long dreamed about (conducting or listening to): the three middle symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams on the same program. Vaughan Williams wrote his three middle symphonies when already in his sixties and seventies - old RVW was forced to watch as darkness descended upon both his personal life and the life of his country. The fourth symphony is a harrowing, boiling piece of music - the rare moment of rage from this most sober composer is exhilarating. RVW wrote the fourth as Hitler began conquering Europe and as his wife began her descent into the long illness which would kill her a full fifteen years later. The fifth was written during wartime and after Vaughan Williams began to take up with the mistress who would become his second wife. The fifth is as consoling and humane as the fourth is brutal. But imagine my astonishment that after eighty minutes of tremendously difficult music, Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony reserved the finest for last. Vaughan Williams’s 6th symphony is a postwar symphony, full of Cold War anxiety and written as RVW cared for his first wife on her deathbed. It’s been suggested by some that the supremely mysterious final movement is a depiction of earth after the nuclear apocalypse, and by others that it is a depiction of his dying wife. Whatever the truth, it was an absolutely extraordinary end to yet another of the greatest concerts of my life.


(Petrenko does Manfred...amazing...but...)

And yet the wonders did not cease. A mere two days later I was back in the Royal Albert pit to hear Vladimir Jurowski conduct the London Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. For two years, I’ve listened to a Proms performance from Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic practically on loop - first from a radio relay, then on youtube. I could not have imagined better advocacy for this great yet flawed semi-symphony by Tchaikovsky. But that was before I heard Vladimir Jurowski do it live. Vasily Petrenko is a young Russian conductor who reminds one of those supervirtuoso Russian pianists who possess the ability to pull off effects of color and dexterity that make your hair stand on your head, even as you wonder if they're capable of doing anything less superficial. But Vladimir Jurowski is a great conductor who happens to be Russian, with a Carlos Kleiber-like ability to hone in on the composer’s precise intent. No conductor since Kleiber has a more uncanny musical sense, but like Kleiber, his talent is so huge that the lack of spontaneity is almost crippling. To a conductor like Jurowski, the idea that an interpretation can happen spontaneously is a horror - and that’s what made his Manfred an amazing experience. No matter how rambling the passage, Jurowski controlled it with an iron hand, and therefore nobody in the hall was able to tear their ears away from the black hole of emotional darkness contained within every bar of this black pearl of a work for even a moment. Wait until that performance gets to youtube...



(HMS Pinafore with Sir Charles Mackerras in 2005)

It would have been fantastic had Sir Charles Mackerras lived long enough to conduct a semi-staged Yeoman of the Guard at the Proms, as he inevitably would have if given five more years. Jane Glover is a competent replacement, but she clearly does not have Mackerras’s inspirational spark. For years, I’ve liked G&S well enough, but never have I loved their operettas enough to seek them out. The continued appeal of G&S is easily enough explicable - sublime silliness behind a flimsy pretext of high seriousness. But The Yeoman of the Guard is the only opera by G&S which aims at a humanity beyond the Muppets-type shenanigans. It’s fun for a night at the theater, still more fun to act in (I’ve been the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance, and played in the pit for Mikado) but those who don’t know G&S shouldn’t have to put everything down to find it. Except, that is, for The Yeoman of the Guard, which I did not know before this production. It is the only G&S operetta that is anything but a comedy. A comedy it certainly is, but a tragic comedy in which the main character’s ending is extraordinarily sad. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I didn’t see it coming, and it was so affecting that I literally sobbed as I applauded. It is the only G&S show with more weight than a piece of paper, with an almost Mozartian sadness that pervades the whole show, and a stunning score with which Sullivan's great musical ancestor couldn't possibly be delighted. Indeed, had Mozart lived eighty years later, perhaps Yeoman of the Guard is precisely the sort of tragicomic opera he'd have written.


(Vanska doing Nielsen 4 in a 2005 performance that’s still a benchmark for me)


And finally, we come to two heroic symphonies. Carl Nielsen’s music does not have Beethoven’s diversity. But Nielsen is the only composer since Beethoven to share the same towering moral vision. Every note of Nielsen’s symphonies is an heroic affirmation that with enough perseverence and fortitude, a better world shall be built. Even if he might be wrong, we need to believe that Carl Nielsen is right. It is nearly impossible to view the fifth symphony as anything but a depiction of World War One, with all its terrors and graphic suffering intact, you can hear the march of soldiers, the whizzz of the bullets, the terror of the battlefield, and the hymns which beg an uncaring God to save us and those whom we love. The second half-movement of the symphony is one of the most moving works of art ever created, during which Nielsen instructs a snare drum player to improvise around an orchestral hymn ‘as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra.’ It is an affirmation of order and meaning in the midst of indifferent chaos and violence, and it is one of the great glories of all music. Osmo Vanska is not equally great in everything he conducts, but he is, among other things, the greatest living Nielsen conductor. No other living conductor who champions Nielsen (not even Blomstedt) is as reliably in possession of the fire it takes to breath life into these Beethovenian masterpieces. I expect it will be decades before I’m as moved or thrilled or shaken by Nielsen as I was by this performance by Osmo Vanska and the BBC Symphony.



(The closest I’ll ever get to watching ‘me’ conduct at the Proms. Andris Nelsons)

And finally, the night before I left, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony and Andris Nelsons. There is enough to say about Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony to fill an entire 4,000 word post - don’t think I haven’t thought about it. I occasionally wonder if this alleged piece of bombastic trash isn’t the greatest symphony written since Beethoven. Classical music lovers condescend to Shostakovich at their peril, and history will vindicate Shostakovich at their expense, even if contemporary fashion doesn’t vindicate him. But the greatest part of this concert was finally seeing Andris Nelsons live. …

There was something about watching the enthusiasm this uninhibited 34-year-old Latvian exhibits (is he the first conductor since Leonard Bernstein who star-jumps?), the half-a-dozen misplaced cues, the pool of sweat separating him from the first-desk stringplayers, the receding hairline and the already swelling beer-gut that makes me wonder - is this the best vicarious thrill I’ll get to watch myself conduct a major symphony orchestra? Nelsons is precisely the kind of conductor I love to listen to. Fearless in repertoire, fearless in interpretation, sloppy but always exciting. Vladimir Jurowski may be even more talented, but Jurowski is all control, and the result is the kind of perfect performance that provokes awe but no love of music. Nelsons is all enthusiasm, and there are all sorts of questionable choices Nelsons makes both as a conductor and as an interpreter, and yet when he succeeds, which is quite often, he works absolute magic. In a few years, he may take his place with Kubelik, Bernstein, Mitropoulos, Jarvi, Munch, De Sabata, and Rattle at the top of my personal pantheon.

Read More