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March 31, 2005
Dragostea din tei
I bought the album that has the Romanian pop song Dragostea din tei, better known to some as the Numa Numa song. One unfortunate feature is the "bonus" track with an English version. In addition to being musically mangled, the substituted words are Backstreet-Boys awful. Worse, they rhyme with the original lyrics ("all my colors fade away...") so when I hear the original now, sometimes the crap English lyrics invade my mindspace. Not cool. So I wrote some lyrics of my own (original lyrics here). They, too, rhyme with the original chorus. Whew.
Comments, suggestions, revisions welcome.
[Chorus A]
Miya-hee etc.
[Verse 1]
Alo, Salut, we're here, channel five
On the air, here's the weathermen: Peter, Paul and Mary
Alo, alo, we're here, fourth studio
Hear that beep? It means more rain
Even though we know it's a pain.
[Chorus B]
Oh, I'm tired of these rainy, rainy days
Rain, rain go away, please come back another day
Yes, I need one warm and sunny day
So I can see the deep blue skyway.
[Verse 2]
The sun, it is gone, it's veiled, it hides
Alo, we're the weathermen: Peter, Paul and Mary
Alo, alo, we're here in fourth studio
Hear that beep? It means more rain
Even though we know it's a pain.
Posted by David Richmond at 11:38 AM EST | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
Mmm...beer
This stuff is really, really good.
In my dreams, I wind up back in Portland when I'm big and grown up.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:45 PM EST | TrackBack
Jumping the Shark
The phrase has been around for a long time now, and it's great slang, but at last I can say that I've seen the original. Fonz, what a legend.
Posted by David Richmond at 9:05 PM EST | TrackBack
March 28, 2005
Security Blankets, Not Checkpoints
This article in Reason on the TSA is old, but is today's required reading anyway. The point is that the TSA is all sound and fury, accomplishing nothing; while we all feel more secure as a result of the post-9/11 air-travel security measures, we aren't really. While I'm inclined to agree with the civil libertarian critique here, it should be noted that the experience of "feeling" secure applies equally to the protected and the protected-against. If the bad guy thinks you're secure, and is thereby deterred from acting, that's good enough. But I think all of this obscures the more subtle civil libertarian point that hijackings, like dictatorships, depend on the consent of the hijacked (the point is more than metaphorical). So insofar as draconian TSA measures prevent passengers from defending themselves, that's a real problem. (The recounted stories of crazed air marshals don't help, either.) Passengers collectively won't let another hijacking like 9/11 happen; the danger is in what we haven't thought of yet, not in what's already been tried by the bad guys.
Posted by David Richmond at 6:59 PM EST | TrackBack
March 27, 2005
Aspen!
I haven't yet mentioned here that I got accepted to the Aspen Music Festival and School, so I'll be returning there this coming summer. Not unexpected (I would, after all, have been severely disappointed had I been turned down), but very exciting and pleasing nevertheless. And this time, thanks to more advance notice and frequent flier miles, I'm flying all the way into Aspen, instead of taking the five hour slow bus from Denver. Live and learn.
I'm definitely looking forward to another amazing summer.
Posted by David Richmond at 4:12 PM EST | TrackBack
Such A Philistine
This NYT article on Edward Hopper reminded me that when it comes to the visual arts, I'm completely ignorant. I've never heard of this guy, but I really what his work -- or at least, what I can see of it through my web browser. And now, I'm sure, the visual aesthetic police are going to descend on this humble blog and tell me that I'm an even worse philistine for 1) thinking that I could get even remotely close to the work of art through a web browser and 2) for liking Edward Hopper. Whatever.
I suppose that's how one's cultural education starts, though, right? You start with what you like and move tentatively outside the tight circle you've drawn for yourself. The first classical CD I ever bought was this recording of Barber's Adagio for Strings and the Violin Concerto, and I bought it, quite shamelessly, because an older girl I had a huge crush on at the time was raving about how the Adagio was her favorite piece, etc. while I had never heard it, and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I still like the recording, especially Isaac Stern's Barber. But Gil Shaham has supplanted Stern as my favorite violinist. In this I have good company; Isaac Stern's son Michael led one of my orchestras last summer at Aspen in the Elgar concerto with Gil, and said of him, "I've heard a lot of great fiddle players....but he's the best." Can't wait for his Elgar recording. Somebody argued a few weeks ago to me that the Elgar is about 25% too long. That somebody clearly hasn't heard Gil Shaham play it.
Posted by David Richmond at 3:47 PM EST | TrackBack
On The Importance of Estimation
As orchestra manager for Lowell House Opera, it fell to me to make copies of the parts to prevent damage, etc. to the originals. This I did, spending several hours at Kinko's gaining intimate familiarity with the technical differences between Canon and Xerox photocopiers. I paid for said copies on my multipurpose debit/check/Visa card, so I got no receipt from Kinko's. All told, the copies ran to about $50. A quick head calculation will tell you that that's a crapload of copies (well over 500 pages).
I went several months without bothering to ask to be reimbursed, until finally I preordered DVDs of the last two nights of the show from our producer, Sarah. Not wanting to give her $20 cash (which is expensive for me to get in Cambridge, since my bank is home in Oregon) only to have her give me a check later, I printed out a copy of my online debit ledger with the "Kinko's" lines from my photocopying binge highlighted, and gave this quasi-receipt to her before curtain on closing night in order to be reimbursed by check, less the $20 cost of the DVDs.
After giving this to her, I went off and did other orchestra manage-y things, like starting to ferry my bassoon stuff into the pit. A few minutes later she comes backstage, finds me, and the following conversation ensues:
Sarah: Okay, here's the deal. You needed to tell us how much you were spending before you spent it. We can't reimburse you tonight, but maybe after we find out how much we make from ticket sales...
DR, thinking the show must really be over-budget: Oh, don't worry about it.
Sarah (flabbergasted): What? What do you mean?
DR: Just give me the DVDs and we'll call it even. If the show's deep in the red I'm not going to ask you to hand me a check for $30.
Sarah: David Richmond, it's not $30, it's more like $3,000!!
DR: wtf....
It turns out she added up the "balance" lines of the checking ledger instead of the "withdrawal" lines. An understandable mistake, since she probably thought I was giving her a credit card statement (which would only have one balance at the end instead of a running balance) and didn't realize it was a checking account. But that's where the sanity check happens, one would hope.
On one hand, I'm offended that anyone would think I would try to embezzle $3,000 from LHO by claiming I spent it on "photocopies". But I also wonder what kind of conceivable embezzlement scheme involves funneling $3,000 through Kinko's on a Visa card (FedEx Kinko's....now owned by the mob). And barring that, I wonder if I could spend $3,000 at Kinko's even if I tried really, really hard. On the other hand, I suppose I should be flattered that she thought I would float the Lowell House Music Society a $3,000 no-interest loan for two months....on a Visa card.
Posted by David Richmond at 3:15 PM EST | TrackBack
Oven-Fresh Blogging
Now, I'm a college student. That means that some days, I'll have time to go completely nuts on this blog, but then maybe I won't blog for another week. "Ahh!" my friends say, "you haven't blogged in forever! How am I supposed to procrastinate?" Even worse, Homestar Runner hasn't exactly been on a timely weekly schedule, either. So what can you do?
If you're using Firefox, you can syndicate this site (and any other blog you read) using the Live Bookmarks feature, or another RSS reader of your choice. Then instead of taking the time to type in "symphonicman.com", you can quickly scan through the live bookmark folders of all the blogs you read to see if I've written anything new. Faster than checking your email, and way more fun.
This is also the secret to ultra-fast comment response times.
Livejournal automatically has RSS feeds active. Xanga does, too, but as Moses points out, it has to be fixed by manually subscribing to http://www.mikexstudios.com/labs/XangaRssFixer.php?user=[xanga_username] instead (because Xanga's RSS is invalid).
Posted by David Richmond at 3:03 PM EST | TrackBack
March 26, 2005
Email Encryption Primer
I've posted my public key, and, as promised, here's a short primer on encryption: by which I mean, a bunch of links to information about email encryption. This stuff is relatively esoteric, even as esoteric technical things go, but I write for the curious. So here we are.
By "email encryption," what I mean is "public key cryptography," the primary email implementation of which was invented in the early 1990s as "PGP" (stands for Pretty Good Privacy). The idea is that you exploit the difficulty of reversing certain mathematical functions -- in particular the difficulty of factoring the product of two very large prime numbers -- to make a private key (the two primes) and a public key (their product). Because of the computational difficulty of solving the private key from the public key, the public key can be distributed anywhere without compromising the security of the encrypted exchange. This is a clever solution to an age-old cryptographic problem: it's easy enough to send a coded message, but if you send the instructions to decode it along with the message, or if those instructions, sent by another route, get intercepted, the coded message isn't quite so coded anymore. With public key cryptography, I give the world my public key; to send an encrypted message to me, you use my public key, and then I decrypt it with my private key which is stored in secret (and encrypted itself with a secret passphrase that's only in my head) on my computer.
So far, so fun. How to actually do this depends on your computer system. If you're using Windows or have a Mac, the PGP corporation will happily take $59 from you for their official product, which, I am assured, works very well. For my part, I not only run Linux (strike one) but I also hate spending that much for something I rarely use (strike two), so I don't use PGP's version. It probably integrates very tightly with your usual desktop email client, though, which is nice.
More useful for those of us who don't keep extra money lying around as a compulsive habit is the open-source GNU Privacy Guard (GPG...cute, right?). The definitive documentation for GPG is the GNU Privacy Handbook, which also has an excellent discussion of public key cryptography concepts in general. See also this more introductory page.
I use GPG set up on the Linux-running laptop to which I download my email (integrated with KMail), and I also have an implementation running on Harvard's email server for those cases where I send email on the go sans laptop. FAS Webmail does not integrate with GPG, and Pine doesn't either (I think), so in order to use it, you'd have to use a better email client like Mutt. You definitely have to know what you're doing with a UNIX shell prompt to get this working, or know someone else who knows what he or she is doing. If you want, and if you ask nicely, I can help you with this. As an added bonus, Mutt really is better than Pine.
If you're running Windows, here's this page on running GPG on Windows. Once you've got the command line part set up, here's a page about GPG with Outlook and here's one about Eudora. If you're on a Mac, here's some information about Eudora on OS X. Beyond this, googling "GPG" along with the name of your email client will usually turn something up.
Finally, a word about the other use of one's keypair: digital signatures. This is the answer to the frequently-asked, "DR, why do all your emails come with an attachment?" This attachment is my PGP signature. To make this signature, GPG takes my private key and uses it in combination with the message body as input into a hash function. The output of this function is attached to my email as the "signature". My public key can be used to verify the output of the function (the signature), confirming 1) that the message came from me (since I'm assumed to be the only person with access to my private key) and 2) that it arrived unaltered.
Posted by David Richmond at 2:06 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
Language Immersion
Ian had the following as his away message:
giovanni withdrawal:
nel veder i miei bocconi
gli par proprio di svenir
Which I read and asked, "is that from the finale?" And indeed, Google reveals that it is. I don't know a word of Italian in real life, but yet I read that and knew where in the opera it was from. And it's not like it's a repeated chorus line or something, it's said by Don Giovanni once as a stage aside (incidentally, I also knew that before I googled it).
Strange how automatically we pick up language. I also got pretty good at reading the projected supertitles backwards (since that's how they appeared from the orchestra). For a while it was really puzzling and then all of a sudden there were bits I could just read like you read, you know, normal text. Bizarre. I also started understanding bits of Italian.
The show closed Saturday, but I definitely still have it in my head 24/7. Withdrawal, indeed.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:41 PM EST | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
Condi '08 watch
Condi consolidates her power, argues Time, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. But don't overlook Bush's role in this. I absolutely see this as a recognition by Bush that the neoconservative foreign policy types overstepped their bounds -- or, as he likely sees it, outlived their usefulness. This kind of subtle political manuevering is Bush's primary strength. I've always said that if Bush isn't smart enough to make his own decisions, at least he is smart enough to surround himself with people who are. This, I think, shows that he's just as capable of recognizing when his deputies have strayed too far -- even if he would never publically admit it. He's a shrewd one, Mr. Bush.
And Condi is the beneficiary.
Posted by David Richmond at 3:27 PM EST | TrackBack
March 17, 2005
Sounds of the Day
Taking a 10am meeting time with a professor (I had section at 9, eww) means that you get the whole hour to yourself. Borne from this hour with John Stewart (man, what a terrible picture), the sounds of the day are:
- an A major triad over a fifth in the bass of F and C (from Schoenberg, related to the Act-ending chords in Berg's Lulu, which don't have the C/C# cross relation I like so much)
- a D major triad in first inversion with #4 (G#) added (also from Berg)
The #4 appogiatura is also a favorite of Mahler and Hugo Wolf. Berg sees no need to give us the F#, of course, but whatever. As JS put it, "#4 must have been in the water back then." Could I get some of that water, please?
Posted by David Richmond at 11:19 AM EST | TrackBack
March 16, 2005
Musicology Heaven
Once again I have more stuff to blog about than time in which to do it, so once again I'm left promising you interesting material at some indeterminate time in the future. I meant to mention the symposium on Wagner's Flying Dutchman that the Harvard music department put together on Monday. It was a budding musicologist's dream, especially for someone (like me) interested in the emergence of "classical" music as historically-conscious monument worship, or, as Lydia Goehr (among others, probably) puts it, "Art-religion." And by the way, she was there. And I met her. And talked to her. And then I decided I could die. (encouragingly, she was very receptive to me and my questions. And Christoph Wolff was friendly, too, who I interrupted in order to talk to her. For my non-musicological readers, Professor Wolff is probably the world's leading Bach scholar.)
She spoke on the ways that Wagner forces the listener to consider his work as monumental, and the musical and dramatic methods that music drama uses to sustain the illusion of reality without interruption, as opposed to opera which carries no such presumption about itself. Opera doesn't pretend to be reality, while music drama does. And that particular aesthetic tenet of the music drama carries over into the instrumental realm to crystallize the classical instrumental canon. She indicated to me later that this view is opposed by more historically-inclined scholars, who see this primarily as a historical or social phenomenon instead of a "purely" musical one, while she views it as "not either/or".
Alex Rehding spoke with his usual sharp wit about the character of Erik in Dutchman, remarking that Erik-the-hunter from the pure German forest loses out in his pursuit of Senta to the mythological (and more exotic) Dutchman, symbolizing the need (in Wagner's eyes) for Germany to supersede its past with something even more self-consciously German. "If Senta is the woman of the future," Professor Rehding suggested, "Erik is a man from the past, and that is his fatal flaw."
And then we (we being the half-dozen undergrads in attendance, surrounded by hundreds of geriatrics from who-knows-where) got a taste of incoming Harvard professor Carolyn Abbate's (now of Princeton) whimsy when she spoke on the very real connections between Dutchman and 1930s and 40s American film. Which is apparently, she told a group of us after her talk, part of a larger topic (music in early American film) on which she'll be teaching an undergraduate seminar next school year. Sweet.
And lest all of this (combing through a sea of hundreds of geriatrics) make the academy seem stifled and irrelevant, I should add that more than one symposium panelist made fun of the average audience age in comments to me and fellow undergraduates. Which just goes to show that even middle-aged university professors are still young at heart. And that their ideas are targeted not towards the past of music, but towards its future -- whatever it may hold. All in all an inspirational afternoon for me, absorbed as I am in the cultural and social problems of my art and its production.
Posted by David Richmond at 2:26 PM EST | TrackBack
March 15, 2005
The Cavalry Arrives for Crimson Arts
Jenn Chang reviews Lowell House Opera's Don Giovanni in The Crimson. In other news, the savvy of the Arts Monday section jumped 83.4% this week.
I think Ed (our music director) will be especially pleased to read:
In fact, the orchestra's volume hums well beneath that of the soloists throughout the opera. The orchestra's willingness to provide the often under-appreciated accompaniment demonstrates a mature musical sensitivity that audiences will appreciate.
(orchestra/vocal balance is one of the hardest things to manage with a student ensemble)
UPDATE: (11:30 pm) I should probably note that the many synatical and punctuation errors are obviously the result of over-aggressive and braindead editing, lest someone read this and think, "Oh, DR is such a Jenn Chang homer that he ignored all of these errors." I noticed them, but they're so egregious that they could only be made by an editor on hard deadline.
Posted by David Richmond at 2:19 PM EST | TrackBack
March 12, 2005
Privacy
Andrew Sullivan blames technology for our simultaneous social atomization and destruction of the private sphere. Okay, but please don't blame the technology. Technology can be used both to improve and destroy privacy. Case in point: encrypted email, which is much more private than a physical letter (because a physical letter could be intercepted and read enroute). But this lack of security doesn't bother most people, who are likely to ask, "fine, I admit that it's conceptually possible, but no one would go to such lengths to read my private physical correspondance." And that's where the boundary of privacy ends for most people, a subjective judgment that beyond this point, the barrier to violation of their privacy is high enough that jumping over that barrier won't be worth it to the "bad guy".
That's the main judgment we make in all our security decisions. It's fairly trivial to pick a lock, technologically speaking, and windows can always be broken. But we set our barrier of privacy to our homes with the expectation that a lock will deter most thieves.
The tools are available today to secure electronic communication like email and instant messenging. I have a PGP public key, with which I sign all my email. But hardly anyone bothers to encrypt email to me with this key (which reminds me, I haven't posted the key on this blog yet. I'll do so later, along with some links to email encryption primers for the curious). People are obviously making the subjective judgment that no one cares enough to read their email.
This judgment seems false to me, not only because reading email in transmission is absolutely trivial, technically speaking -- to say nothing of IM -- but also because of the ease of reproducibility. That, I think, is the real transformative shock to our society's "privacy threshold" judgment. It's that when your private information can be obtained by anyone, anywhere, once it's been obtained by someone, somewhere, the "bad guy's" evaluation of your private information's value skyrockets. We as a society haven't figured that out yet, and it will probably take more widespread disasters (i.e., lives ruined by exposure of information meant to stay private) before people do figure it out.
And all that said, I myself am guilty as charged. I say things on IM all the time I don't want the world to read, and I send emails all the time with things I don't want the world to read. The number of lives I'm living is probably somewhere around 1.25 (which is to say, I try to keep the way I present myself to different people within a variance of 25%*), so it's not like I have a wife and kids plus four mistresses on the side. Nevertheless, my electronic privacy is probably far less rigorous than it ought to be. And I'm technically competent enough to actually do something about it.
Although my passwords are random strings, so maybe I'm running faster than you, after all.
* I did pull that number out of my butt, but you get the idea. We all present ourselves in different ways in different situations as social beings. Even the most "straight shooting" probably have a life number of 1.05-1.2. And yes, I also just completely made up a theoretical concept and presented it to you as rhetorically authoritative. Deal.
Posted by David Richmond at 12:03 PM EST | TrackBack
Sean Gallagher
Sean Gallagher, Sandy Cohen, separated at birth?
I don't really see it, but you can decide for yourself.
Posted by David Richmond at 11:34 AM EST | TrackBack
March 10, 2005
Candide in New York
Candide's playing in New York, which is cool -- but I mention it here not only as a public service announcement for New York-based readers, but also as a plea to copy editors everywhere to stop making punn-y titles like this one ("In Best of Possible Worlds, House Could Be Smaller") whenever Candide is mentioned. Or worse, whenever Leonard Bernstein is mentioned. I did a RILM search on Bernstein last night and had to groan out loud at the many too-clever-for-their-own-good musicologists who succumbed to similiar temptations.
Posted by David Richmond at 11:38 AM EST | TrackBack
Tales From Lecture
Quoth the good (Moral Reasoning) professor:
I have a gay friend who has had trouble keeping long-term relationships together, but he really wanted a child. He became friends with a lesbian couple who also wanted children, so they put their heads together....not just their heads, as it turned out (laughter), and they had a child together, legally the child of the lesbian couple. And he takes an intimate interest in this child's development. So this child really has three parents...
Hey, whatever works, right?
(The question under discussion is, what makes a good family? How can we resolve the incongruity between the authority inside the family and our democratic political beliefs? "This family is not a democracy; eat your brussels sprouts!" etc.)
Posted by David Richmond at 11:20 AM EST | TrackBack
Yeah, But Nobody Memorizes IP Addresses, Either
This New York Times piece reminds me of the fact that over winter break, I, too, had cause to reflect on the strange realities of no longer needing to memorize phone numbers. Having replaced my old Nokia with a Motorola, I had to enter all 150+ of my contacts by hand, and in so doing, found ample amusement at the numbers I still remember from when I actually dialed them on something called a landline phone. Except we didn't called them "landlines" back then, they were just phones, because they were all we'd got, and also I walked six miles to school every day through drenching rain, uphill both ways....
I still have my first bassoon teacher's number memorized, and Mark Eubanks' (sidenote: go ahead and laugh at my comment on Mark. sure, it's true, but could I possibly have found a way to say it any more inarticulately and any more pretentiously? the real trick is that I maximized both variables at once! I do believe I've actually gotten less pretentious by half since coming to Harvard. Which still leaves me pretty damn pretentious, on the scale of things.). I also apparently still have my high school girlfriend's home phone number in long-term memory, despite not having called it in nearly three years.
But the funny thing is, phone numbers were a technological limitation to begin with. In real life, we use words to name things (unless, of course, one goes to MIT). Nobody ever saw fit to make Arpanet users memorize IP addresses; they named their hosts from the get-go. So we probably shouldn't be too sad about the addition of another layer of abstraction to our interaction with the technology.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:46 AM EST | TrackBack
Inspiration
Anna Himmelrich has finished her thesis. Meanwhile, I'm just beginning mine, with a proposal due to the music department in just about a month. Anna, you are an inspiration to eager juniors everywhere.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:41 AM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 9, 2005
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
I knew the mainstream media was biased and stupid, but I didn't realize they were this lame about it.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:17 AM EST | TrackBack
March 8, 2005
Why I Love Playing the Bassoon
It's things like Don Giovanni that remind me why I want to play the bassoon professionally. When you find what you really want to do with you life, you put in 100% and get 150% back, emotionally speaking. And that's why I love this. If forced to choose between a reality where I can play Don Giovanni in particular and the bassoon in general, but where there is no sex, and a reality where there is sex, but no Mozart and no bassoon, I'd will sex out of existence. You, dear reader, probably find this deeply disturbing. I'd suggest you take your morbid curiousity and bring it to the Lowell House Dining Hall on a Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday night sometime in the next two weeks.
Posted by David Richmond at 3:09 PM EST | TrackBack
Don Giovanni!
I've been exceptionally busy lately with Lowell House Opera. The production is Mozart's Don Giovanni, which quite possibly is the greatest opera of all time. One of the singers of the title role disputed that judgement, suggesting Verdi's Rigoletto in its stead. A fitting choice, since I haven't been this excited about something musical since I played Rigoletto at Aspen. At the Sunday sitzprobe (rehearsal with cast), the orchestra really "clicked," I felt, for the first time. Professor Hasty claimed yesterday in Tonal Analysis that the difference between Haydn/Mozart and their contemporaries was that Haydn and Mozart understood the use of rhythm. This somewhat controversial claim matches my experience on Sunday, when one of the finales caught fire and I suddenly envisioned myself surrounded by tens of thousands of adoring fans at the Fleet Center. i.e., it rocked. Literally. Not only that, but the arias are gorgeous, and Mozart, in his infinite wisdom and benevolence, has given the best bits to the first bassoon. No wonder I'm so excited about the show.
But really, you should come see it. The cast and orchestra have an usually good rapport musically and professionally, and so as an overall musical package this could be one of the best run of performances at Harvard in a long time. The performance dates are Wednesday 9 March, Friday 11 March, Saturday 12 March, Wednesday 16 March, Friday 18 March, and Saturday 19 March, all at 8:30pm in the Lowell House Dining Hall. Tickets are $8 for students and are available at the Harvard Box Office, or at the door if you want to chance it.
It's been a very exciting year for opera at Harvard between the ambitious success of Dunster House Opera's Candide and now Don Giovanni.
Posted by David Richmond at 2:53 PM EST | TrackBack
Mo-Do
The self-consciously clever Maureen Dowd of the New York Times takes on society's relationship with powerful women:
From pornography to "Desperate Housewives," women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were "broken," like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability....
Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing that alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and that they had better soften those sharp edges.
I learned covering Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential bid that the reaction of women to extraordinarily successful women is also ambivalent, with as much hostility as sisterly pride. An Icarus crash can mitigate the jealousy, while intensifying the feminist attachment.
But the reality is that we're still working out the post-feminist relationship between the genders. Dowd seems to scorn us for our fear of powerful women, and admire those same women for their resiliency. But it's not that we fear powerful women; it's that we fear gender as power, period. If women are degraded by pornography and Desperate Housewives, men are degraded by every advertisment that shows them as bumbling, animal-driven fools who need women to keep them from slobbering all over themselves. Of which there are many. And this sort of male degradation penetrates far into the cultural discourse: witness the exploding popularity of He's Just Not That Into You, which, while mostly truthful and perceptive, seems to be taken by many of my female friends as the commandment, "Thou shalt not show interest in a guy." Guys, you see, are bumbling fools and need to be manipulated into liking the girl by appealing to animal instinct and competitive drive. What horsecrap. Guys are perceptive, too, and if we don't sense interest, we won't chase.
The trouble, it seems to me, is that no one's figured how to make these sort of gender-based power relationships anything besides zero-sum, whether in terms of individual sexual or emotional relationships, or in terms of women in leadership or society-scale power roles. The feminist battle cry was, "subvert the patriarchal status quo," but what happens apres le deluge? Surely the answer isn't to replace masculinity as king with feminity as queen. But that, it would seem, is exactly what the crowing Maureen Dowd would like to see.
Posted by David Richmond at 2:34 PM EST | TrackBack
Reflections
One of the reasons I haven't blogged in a week and a half is, I think, that I've had relatively little time to myself (that, and I've been super busy with Lowell House Opera). On Sunday, I walked back alone from my bassoon lesson in Arlington, taking some much-needed "me" time. I'm quite self-reflective and contemplative by nature, obviously, and for some reason I've always found myself most able to internally focus when surrounded by urban chaos. On the other hand, strangely enough, when I'm alone with nature, I have an overpowering desire to share it with people I love, which prevents it from ever being a truly solitary experience.
Finch alleged a week ago that I spend far too much time "absorbed in self-pity" or some such thing (pot...meet kettle), but I don't pity myself for anything. I don't care for your pity, either. I share my internal insights and questions with my friends because I think they're interesting insights and questions, not because I seek sympathy, which never helped solve anything in any case. When my posts here tend towards the dark, it's really a pretty dispassionate sort of darkness. Speaking generally, I don't cloak myself in melancholy or sadness. But I do think about things. A lot. And they're sometimes serious things. And some of them I'll choose to share with you.
As someone who cared about me once said, as we walked together through a dark and empty (or so it seemed) downtown, "I think that's one of the reasons that I like you so much: you think about things." In retrospect, that night would be the high-water mark in our understanding of each other; it would be the last time we would ever really listen to each other. The ear hears, but the heart listens. The lesson there is to enjoy those brief moments of resonance while you can.
But more to the point: there is anxiety, I find, about this sort of deep contemplation, as if it is weak to examine oneself. And certainly to do so in any sort of social setting. But it is not weak. False confidence is a weakness, because the line you think is impenetrable hides weaknesses you could not have expected. Hence true strength lies in flexibility and mobility. So, always question. The algorithm is more useful than the solution. And I found validation about that from my companion that night.
But this discussion of doctrine obscures a sadder truth. It's not that the model of human excellence to which our society apparently subscribes is a model of inflexible strength and confidence. It's that it must appear to be so because the virtues of inner strength are so undervalued. Which is why I like Scent of a Woman so much. It's hackneyed and overdone at times, but it deals with themes -- loyalty, integrity, honor -- so rarely addressed honestly in contemporary culture. We understand larger-than-life historicized examples of these themes; hence we watch our war movies and celebrate our heroes. But true loyalty, integrity, and courage comes not on the scale of a nation but on the scale of brothers. Family. Friends. One's character is measured not by the largest thing one does but by the accumulated worth of the little things.
Posted by David Richmond at 1:51 PM EST | TrackBack
March 5, 2005
Long Time No Blog
Yes, I know I haven't blogged all week. No, I'm not dead, it's just been a really busy week. Lowell House Opera sitzprobe this afternoon, but blogging will resume thereafter.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:50 AM EST | TrackBack