Breakfast with Pandora

Seussical the family

I just finished doing something that I didn't realize was on my bucket list until I did it: sing and dance in musical theater.

My uncle was a professional actor, and theater and acting has been a part of my life ever since I played the part of the Kid in "The Kid versus the Bruiser," a vaudeville-style boxing skit I did when I was 5. But until now I have never done a musical.

(Image: the show I did features a cat and a hat, among other things; all props to Theodor S. Geisel)

And I think I might do another, someday.

Musicals take a different kind of gumption from regular theater. In an ordinary play, you have to become someone else for a while. That's not that difficult for me.

In musicals, you not only have to be someone else, you have to sing as someone else and dance as someone else. Which is an awesome and at the same time horrendous prospect for most of us.

And a school musical-- that's what this was, by the way-- presents a whole other kettle of fish. Great reams of paper and reels of film have been expended telling stories about this cosmos, the world of the drama clan. Apparently there is an entire movie that is called "High School Musical," though I've never seen it.

I probably should, now.

I didn't cotton to the drama people in high school. They were too enthusiastic for me, and too mysterious: quirky types who wore scarves, and rubbed each other's backs at the drop of a hat. The school newspaper was more my speed, and still is.

But 30 years removed from high school and my acne and awkwardness, drama (and even a musical) is a big, fat blast.

I didn't audition for my role as Yertle the Turtle in Seussical the Musical. It was an emergency. Another faculty member had been recruited and had had to withdraw. I got called something like three weeks before opening night.

Now Yertle is not a big role. I had one short solo and was in five numbers out of thirty-five, so it was a cameo. But I made hamburger of it until our closing show, in which I think I finally got most of it right, except for the dancing. 

You need a lot of practice for the dancing, more than I got.

And what about the students? Awesome, every one of them. Our school is K-12, which meant that pretty much every grade had a member in the cast. So at the same time that you had the self-assured seniors showing everyone how it's done, you had the lower school kids leaping around with simple joy and the middle school kids working hard to master the tough stuff and show they belonged.

It was a family.

Which made me the crazy uncle in the green face paint.

And what about the show? Well, whatever genius decided that Dr. Seuss' stories and rhymes would make for a hilarious and poignant Broadway show, hats off to them. Musically it is a tour of the melting pot of American musical styles, from the African-American spiritual to Latin salsa to R&B, 50's Rock and Roll, The Beach Boys, ragtime, the jitterbug, the circus calliope, and of course the classic American musical ballad:

I can fly
Yes, I have wings
Around the moon
And far beyond the skies
You called my name
And you set me free
One small voice in the universe
One true friend in the universe
Who believes in me 

Loads of fun.

My favorite part wasn't a part of the play itself. One of the things that's imperative in musical theater is, apparently, to encourage everyone. This is because many people who act are highly talented, extroverted perfectionists who have challenges believing consistently in themselves (sometimes referred to as ENFPs; fun link below on that topic). In a musical, where there is a triple threat of failing, you almost never have all three phases of your game simultaneously free of error (see above under "hamburger" for typical actor's self-assessment).

So you praise. You encourage. Are you ready? Are you excited? Thumbs up. Break a leg. You're awesome. You were so good. I love your costume. No, that looks good. Do it. Keep it. I love it. You rock the house.

That's music to this teacher's ears.

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ENFP intro: welcome to my world!

Holy Week sans choir (not mythology)

For the past twenty years I've spent Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, firmly ensconced in the tenor section of a choir.

This year, not.

I have learned a few things from the experience.

I like feeling needed, and most of the time a church choir needs tenors. So for the last twenty years I have filled the need. Besides, in choir, you have something to do in church, and you don't have to talk to people you don't know.

Also, I found out, singing is way cool.

Sometimes I didn't feel like going to choir, but choir guilt is powerful. You miss a week and you get The Look when you come up for communion. Miss two weeks, and you get The Talk. Miss three, and your choir robe is up for grabs.

This year, I have never been so swamped at work, and I have not mastered the skill of teaching Latin and Greek without talking. So at the end of a 10-12 hour workday, I have no legitimate singing voice left. It makes rehearsals close to useless. In fall, after several weeks of croaking through practices and slumped over with fatigue, I begged off.

I appreciated having my Wednesday nights free so that I could collapse at 8 PM, and throughout the year there were times when I had the greatest appreciation for those in the choir who were soldiering on, Sunday after Sunday, and sometimes for special services as well.

But Holy Week trumps all of that.

Choirs in traditional churches such as mine are on duty in Holy Week from Wednesday through Sunday, singing at least one and sometimes two services a day. The music is special, there is a lot of it, and it is often difficult. The maddening part: you can't rehearse enough for any one thing, and yet you're rehearsing hours for everything.

In my previous church, I felt compelled to do something extra that upped the ante considerably on my fatigue factor: the Vigil. This is a prayer time lasting from the end of the Maundy Thursday service through the night until Good Friday mid-morning. It is designed to let people have the experience of being in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus as he prays to his Father the night before he is to die.

I did the manly thing every year and took a shift somewhere between 2 and 5 in the morning. For many years a friend and I would take a 5 AM shift, then drive to the Farmer's Market and buy vegetables for our Easter dinner. Then we'd nap for a couple of hours and go sing in the noon Good Friday service.

By Saturday night, where the most emotional service is held and you go from deep depression to giddy elation, I would be so sick with exhaustion the only thing keeping me going would be Easter candy.

Easter Sunday could be comical. The twice-a-year crowd would be out, thinking it was such a terrible imposition to wrestle their children into dresses and suits and combing their hair. In my worst moments I would be, not humble and thankful, but scornful, sitting cocooned in the choir while the ushers set out chairs for the latecoming thousands.

But in better years all the rough edges got smoothed out by a grilled lamb dinner, wine, and a strong sense of accomplishment-- a sense that I had done something worthwhile. It was wicked fun most of the time, too.

This year I have bypassed all that, bypassed the fatigue and sweat and feeling of not measuring up musically, as well as the feelings of grand adventure. I got truly terrorized by the Tenebrae "great noise." I slept through the night Maundy Thursday. I went to a noon Good Friday service where we walked around the block with a big cross, in sunshine, with a lovely, cool breeze, and bearded irises nodding in the garden.

I had the energy to write a blog post.

I relaxed.

I meditated on the meaning of Holy Week.

I guess a sabbatical was long overdue.

I don't feel guilty. Much.

Next year I am hoping work will be less taxing, although there is no guarantee of that. I will be back in choir and see how it goes. I don't know that I have learned a great truth from all this.

Maybe I have learned that you don't need to grit your teeth and find a great truth in everything.

Image, what Christians celebrate at Easter, from here.

Jericho, Troy and ancient story culture

"Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down."

I sang this song as a child-- don't know where I first heard it-- but have very seldom read or heard the actual story, which is in the Book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament.

Today I heard the story, and I was struck with the contrast between the ethos of the ancient Hebrews, and that of the ancient Greeks.

Both cultures have their stories about walls and conquering cities, and they couldn't be more different.

Image from here.

The Hebrew story is about a group of refugees from Egypt who are looking for a place to settle, and who believe that their God has given them the slim corridor of land between the east coast of the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

There are already people who live here, and they must be conquered. So God sets out to let the Hebrews conquer these people, many of whom live in the city of Jericho.

God, being kind of weird, doesn't let the Hebrews take the city of Jericho by a conventional siege. Instead, he tells the priests of the religion to blow trumpets and walk around the city. After a certain number of ear-shattering blasts, the walls of Jericho fall down, and the warriors of the Hebrews can fight the city dwellers on equal footing.

In Greek mythology, there's another city that needs to be conquered, that has very high, unconquerable walls: Troy. In fact, the warriors of Greece take 10 long years before they realize these walls are not going to come tumbling down.

So instead, the Greeks devise a plan that involves faking their own departure from the beaches next to Troy, and leaving behind a trick, the Trojan Horse. This tall, wooden, hollow sculpture contains armed Greek warriors, and, when the Trojans ill-advisedly take the horse inside their walls, the Greeks inside wait till nightfall and then leap out, open the gates for their fellows, and Troy is lost.

Two great cities, two great ways to conquer them.

My sense is that these two methods of conquering cities show two strikingly different ways of looking at the world and at divinity.

The Hebrews knew in their bones that God was with them. Not all of them, of course, because theirs is a history of running after false gods and being called back by their prophets. But in their scriptures there is an unwavering sense that even and especially when the going is the roughest, God is with them.

In fact, it is when they rely on God that good things happen. The whole point of life is to be in communion and community with this (weird) God who creepily wants to be part of human life. Even in war, this God says, you've got to interface with me and highlight that you need me.

The Greeks had no such confidence. They looked at the world the way it appears: random. They were much more realistic than the Hebrews. Their gods had conflicting desires and their own agendas that sometimes included humans and sometimes not. They certainly prayed to their gods to help them, but then they went on and did what they had in mind to do.

The Greek gods-- by the admission of their own poets-- did not even have power always to help humans. Even Zeus, Mr. Sky and Lightning God, was not omnipotent, but bowed to the power of the Fates.

The Greeks relied on their ingenuity and hoped that Fate was on their side this time, because they knew that it often wasn't.

So the Hebrews had this sense of God as close by and caring, while the Greeks thought the gods were distant and (pretty much) uncaring.

It strikes me that most people today fall somewhere on the Greek-Hebrew confidence-in-God spectrum.

Many people live life as if it's random. A lot more really hope and pray God is on their side. And a few very confident people know God's in control. 

I think it's extraordinary that any group of people such as the Hebrews could have cooked up such an idea that God is more interested in being with us than even we are in being with him. I love that idea and that's the type of God I believe in and think is real.

The Greeks get a gold star from me for perceiving the world as it empirically is. I love them for that. Their system of divinity really and truly gets it right for what seems to be occurring on the surface of life. The Hebrews get my vote for seeing something that seems to be under the surface and requires faith to believe.

This is a beautiful, spine-tingling performance of "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" arranged by the incomparable Moses Hogan.

The Muppets: nostalgia on steroids

I never watched a lot of the original Muppets television show, although I knew it was a very big phenomenon. All the characters, all the inside jokes, all the celebs who made appearances-- it was a big deal.

Image from here.

But that was back-- I don't know-- 25 years ago?

(No, more.)

And there's no way the Muppets are going to make a comeback.

But everyone in Hollywood does make a comeback, and the Muppets have, too. And even if the voices don't sound quite exactly like they used to, the trademark Muppet comedy is back and better than ever.

The original Muppets show started in 1976, which is actually 35 years ago, but one thing they did is still very "now:" self-consciously play with the idea of show.

The Muppets never just did a show where you saw the performance and that was it. They interspersed scenes behind the scenes, showing the sausage-making quality of putting on a stage show. Kermit the Frog's ultra-nerd nervousness and neuroticism added humor as he tried to make sure all was well amidst the floating chaos of bahk-bahk chickens, prop mishaps, and Miss Piggy divadom.

All that comes back in spades in the new movie, along with plenty of self-referential break-the-fourth-wall intertextual inside joke stuff. Which means that the adorable and star-powered Amy Adams, looking very wholesome with long, curled hair, actually has very little to do in the picture. 

Yes, there is plenty of show in this Muppets show. To spare, in fact. Almost as if they took the original show and pumped it up on Muppet-Growth-Hormone. At the end, despite all the self-consciousness, it would not be surprising if you wipe away a bit of a tear.

Congrats to the people behind all this. And congrats to everyone who kept the flame burning all these years.

It was worth it.

The utility of studying Latin and Greek

Over here a mini-controversy on the utility of studying Greek and Latin, sometimes called Classical Studies, or (as I prefer) Classics.

(Image: Cicero orating against Catiline)

My position on that is summed up in the following: 

My ideal primary school would have the following four core subjects: Art, Music, Physical Education, Latin and Greek.

Yes, students would take Latin and Greek in kindergarten and they would learn to read English like demons. In fact, they would devour books. Guaranteed.

Middle school would retain the four core subjects. English and history would be combined into one cross-disciplinary class, and math and science would be combined into another single class, and they would be electives.

In the upper school, students could opt for a more conventional subject smorgasbord, including modern foreign language with immersion in target language nations for up to a year.

Post-secondary education would focus on training students in specific skills, except for the next generation of teachers, who would be further educated in a liberal arts and sciences track.

My sense is that education means equipping the brain to think broadly, liberally, humanely, critically, and deeply. Training, by contrast, is equipping a human being to do a specific needed skill.

Therefore, we should have students study at a young age those subjects that form the brain in the most comprehensive way possible. And it has been shown scientifically that the four core subjects of my ideal school are those that do that. Music is probably best in this area, but I think Latin and Greek are a close second.

Once students get older and have an established foundation for critical thinking, they can easily acquire all the skills they need, or study further the subjects that interest them.

So I think Classics is very important to education.

But I am not so thrilled with Classics as a university research subject. Classics is a very old subject and has been studied thoroughly. In the mid- to late-twentieth century there was a flowering of interpretive studies that were the happy result of hundreds of years of painstaking philology-- that is, scholars making sure the surviving manuscripts of ancient texts were as readable as possible.

Nowadays we do not need another book about the Iliad, and we most certainly do not need more books on the less important authors such as Silius Italicus. My sense is that we could do without any more research on Classics for the next 50 years and we would not be the poorer for it.

I would encourage the next generation of Classics Ph.D.'s (of which, I am told, there are too many) not to pursue a tenure-track job (of which, I am told, there are too few) at a college of university. Teach high school, middle school, elementary school Latin and Greek. You will be happy, your students will be happy, and the nation will thank you.

Lenka's turn at being Pandora

I am not really a musician, but sometimes popular music does seem to stray into the realm of the mythological, and that's fascinating to me.

Last week daughter had a dance performance and one of the numbers in the program was to the pop song by Australian singer Lenka, "Trouble is a Friend." Apparently this is a very popular song that has been featured on American TV shows, shows that I do not watch. When I heard this song during the performance, I was immediately struck by its stalking 6-note piano riff, ethereal cloud of xylophone notes, and breathy, cute girl vocals. I found it on YouTube, bought it on ITunes, and played it for the rest of the weekend.

The beloved, who is a great music afficionado, thinks this song is nothing special, but I am of the opposite opinion. I think that Lenka has captured something deep and important about the experience of young women in this song, experience mirrored by the story of Pandora.

I have argued in a number of places (here, but mostly in my head) that the story of Pandora is the original teenage girl story-- the tale of a young woman ready for marriage placed into an unfamiliar setting with the terrible potential for unleashing all the ills of the world, plus hope. The fact that I am now the father of a teenage girl has intensified this feeling by about one hundred fold.

Lenka sings as a woman for whom "trouble" is both a friend and a foe. Trouble is envisioned as masculine, of course. He's always there, you can't get rid of him, he makes you feel bad, and yet there's something attractive about him ("I'm a sucker for his charms"). The idea of trouble as omnipresent, negative, and yet attractive, seems to me to encapsulate perfectly the teen girl's simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from "drama," the current buzzword for whatever's happening that is clearly going to be the end of the world, whether it involves boys or not.

Pandora, too, is seen by her creator, Hesiod, the curmudgeonly complainer who was probably a father of teenage girls, as a troublemaker who intentionally opens the jar of ills that Zeus gives her. Far from being a victim, either of circumstances, or of curiosity, Pandora seeks out drama, and this, so Hesiod says, is the downfall of men.

I once wrote a poem about teenage girls in the voice of Hesiod that I like:

Hesiod's Poem To His Teenage Daughter

You are powerful
My dear
You have the gifts of the gods
Your outside is impossible and
Your inside is impossible and
You can't help but open
A refrigerator
full of spirits
inside and outside me
I can't help myself
as the spirits circle
All I can do is write

Hesiod's helplessness about the teenager is channeled into a myth that becomes one of the most popular stories in the Western world.

The Greeks hoped to rein in the teenage girl by marrying her off young. Part of this is found in the Greek word damar, wife, which literally means "tamed." Nowadays we let young women extend this difficult, drama-filled period of their lives into their twenties and sometimes beyond. Mostly, I am told, you get your daughter back around the age of 22. Hope so.

This is a creepy but highly creative music video of the song, using paper cutouts. It has been viewed by over 5 million people on YouTube, attesting to its status as, if not myth, something very close to it. Tell me what you think.

 

Pomplamoose, ingenious, talented, other superlatives

In my continuing, irregular series of posts about music:

I don't watch much TV, and even fewer commercials on TV, but a recent one for Hyundai caught my eye. There was a beautiful young lady in what looked like gray long underwear, a navy pea coat, boots, and a colorful scarf singing the old holiday standby for kindergarten choirs: "Up on the Housetop."

This song is nothing special to me, but the way the young lady sang it was somehow mesmerizing. Just not like anything I've heard before. And there was this Dionysus-like goat-bearded sidekick in a santa cap who was doing instrumentals. He was goofy, and fun.

So I went on an Internet search for the woman, thinking I might find out who it was from some afficionado of commercials, like when I went searching for a particular actress from a Dr. Pepper commercial.

I didn't have to search long. The woman is Nataly Dawn of the indie pop/jazz group Pomplamoose, and her "sidekick" is Jack Conte. Together they make up Pomplamoose and they are already famous and have been interviewed on NPR. What's more, they are from good old Corte Madera, California, in good old Marin County. Hello, Tamalpais Drive.

What makes Pomplamoose unique-- besides their unique name that is perfect for search engines? They put all their music on YouTube as videos, and the videos include shots of all the music being made. In other words, when Jack Conte plays the drums or the piano, you see him in the video playing drums or piano. When Nataly is singing, you see her at the microphone. When they mix three different tracks of Nataly in order to harmonize and deepen her sound, you see three Natalys.

It's fascinating to watch these videos for that alone, but Nataly herself has a voice you can't tear yourself away from and, as already mentioned, is beautiful and has a great smile, too.

Recently I spent a week with Pomplamoose's cover of Lady Gaga's "Telephone" rattling through my brain.

This is good because I did like the song when I heard it on the radio, but I find Lady Gaga herself a bit much to take. Blame it on being really old and uncool.

 

Pomplamoose does its own music, too, and worthy, but the covers are the most accessible and the most fascinating, because the arrangements are ingenious and defy superlative description. I include here a brilliant rendition of "Favorite Things." This one showcases Nataly Dawn's voice. Many superlatives.

They also do various video clips and outtakes of themselves being adorable. Really, they are Captain and Tenille for the 21st century. They should have their own variety show.

Even cooler: recently, Pomplamoose did a fundraiser using WorldVision (a great charity, very old school) to do a Heifer Project-like buy-a-thon of animals for folk in developing nations. Check it out here. Props to the kids from CM. Let's have a BBQ at Corte Madera Town Park sometime.

Britney's Woman-izer

When Britney Spears was riding high late in the previous millennium, I mostly ignored her. She seemed to be a good dancer, and popular. But my kids were young and listening to Radio Disney CDs: things like Hampton the Hamster's Hamster Dance. "Oops I Did It Again" was the novelty song in our family.

Nowadays, daughter is on the cusp of teenagehood and has thrown herself into it with enthusiasm. She likes her top-40 music and switches the car radio to it when she knows Dad won't switch back to NPR.

I heard "Womanizer" first on the car radio and got hooked on the vocals. I still haven't been able to sing cleanly with the radio the line that goes like this:

Boy don't try to front I (I) know just (just) what you are (are are)

As a scholar trained to analyze ancient poetry, this line obsesses me. First, because it is so consciously trochaic.

The English language is naturally iambic. It proceeds in 2-syllable units (feet) that go ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, which means lines of five ba-BUM rhythmed feet. For example:

But soft what light from yonder window breaks 

Notice that the natural stress goes on soft, light, yon, win, and breaks. Iambic rhythm.

But Britney's line consciously adds extra syllables to create an opposite, BUM-ba, BUM-ba rhythm. In her line, boy, try, front, the second I, the first just, what, and the first and third are's are stressed.

This line in ancient Latin poetry is called a trochaic septenarius catalectic, one with seven BUM-ba feet and a stray syllable at the end.

The word "womanizer" is a natural trochaic dimeter, or two-foot unit, and this line is a trochaic octonarius, or eight-foot line.

Womanizer woman womanizer you're a womanizer

Getting even more basic, the word "woman" itself is a natural trochee. Maybe the songwriter, through the words and the rhythm, was interested in having "woman" be a kind of mantra, woman woman woman woman, always in the background.

Boy don't try to front I (I) know just (just) what you are (are are)
woman woman woman woman woman woman woman wom

Which brings us to the video. It's mostly about Britney alternately enticing and punishing the title man, who doesn't seem as much a womanizer as a guy who's startled to find stiletto heels in his face.

Britney also grabs the lioness's share of the camera and skin time, and in the lyrics decisively lets the man know he has no power over her. Despite the title of the song, the message seems to be more the woman than the izer.

Which, to me, goes along with my recently ruminated idea of the natural power of the American woman, power that antedates feminism. I like what Oscar Wilde has to say about them, including things like "She behaves as if she were beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm."

That is intended as an insult, but it is telling.

I do believe that American women have great self-esteem. Britney has been through a lot that has beaten her down. But it is American of her to perform a song that proclaims a woman's power, despite all the things to the contrary that have happened to her.

Tagged by Dances with Minivans

Dances with Minivans has laid a chain-post curse on me. I am to list five songs I am currently listening to, and then tag 5 other bloggers to do the same thing. I'll list the songs, but I can't think of who I'd tag.

1. Good Hearted Man by Tift Merritt. She's a local alt.country singer who couldn't help but get noticed. I love it when beautiful women sing about yours truly. And her other stuff is really good, well-written, and original.

2. Jerusalem by the Soweto Gospel Choir. A South African group that sings in English, Xhosa, and other South African aboriginal languages. Unique sound and heartfelt.

3. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel by the Dixie Hummingbirds. From a greatest hits album of the legendary gospel quintet. Resonant bass anchors the ultra-tight harmonies. Takes me back to my old Alabama days.

4. Best of Michalis Hadjiyannis. A Greek Andrea Bocelli with folk-disco leanings. You have to have gone to a Cypriot supper club and danced to it to have the full appreciation. I left my heart in Limassol under the brandy sour moon.

5. He Can Fix What Is Broke by the Mississippi Mass Choir. As my mother would say, "They're the real thing." Rollicking, with that sound that's half shout and half close harmony. They always help me put back together what's broken.

Tagged:

Confessing Reader - an accomplished musician, I'd like to hear what he has to say about this.

Eric Scott Matthews - (not G rated, BTW) Read his review of the HBO show Rome. He's not impressed. I haven't seen it yet.