The Music of My Life: Georges Bizet Edition

 

I have been listening to music since the mid-1960s. Memory is fuzzy here but I think I have been listening to art music or classical music since the 1960s as well. I probably heard it first in films and cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes cartoons, and fell in love with it. I have never looked back.

I have been buying classical records since the early 1970s. The first one I bought, if memory serves, is the 1970s Bohm performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

At the time I started buying classical records the big boys included the late lamented Philips Classics, which was my favourite since they had the glorious Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon (DG), and EMI. At the time all these giants of the industry seemed to have been run by people who actually liked classical music and who, while they saw it as a commodity, did not, as the people who run these labels seem today, to see it as little more than something similar to a Serta bed or a Cadbury’s candy bar. 

Between the 1960s and the early 2000s these labels released tonnes of great, good, and adequate performances of classical music, mostly the hits: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all that jazz. Today, Philips is gone. It was gobbled up by Decca, who, like Philips and DG,  was gobbled up by the megacorporation Universal. EMI went belly up and is now part of that other bureaucratic giant of the classical music industry, Warner Classics. Today DG and Decca don’t release much in the way of art music. Presumably, it isn’t a big enough seller for them to warrant the release of new performances unless of course, a performance is given to them by some conductor or symphony orchestra and they don’t have to pay for the recordings. They are releasing old music, much of it in the form of monster conductor boxes like those of Herbert von Karajan, the pride of DG and perhaps the best known conductor, along with Bernstein, of the 1970s and 1980s. 

The action in classical music these days is with the independents though even those are getting gobbled up by the big boys. The wonderful English independent Hyperion was recently purchased by Universal making its future an open book. The wonderful Swedish independent label BIS recently got gobbled up by Apple making their future open and raising the question what does Apple want with a label that has recorded tonnes of Scandinavian music? We still have Naxos and other independents like Brilliant Classics, thank god. Naxos and Brilliant are perhaps the most interesting labels today given how much interesting music, including art music outside the mainstream, they record and release.  

Of the big boys my favourite label at the moment is Warner Classics. I love to buy composer box sets and recently Warner Classics has been releasing a number of interesting one. I have their wonderful Mendelssohn and Prokofiev box sets, for instance. But the box sets I love the most from Warner are those of French composers. Erato and EMI France, which are now part of Warner, have recorded some wonderful French art music over the years, and Warner is slowly but surely collecting it, collating it, and putting it in box sets for release. I have their Berlioz, Dukas, Faure, Franck, Pierne, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens box sets, all of which are wonderful. I recently purchased their Bizet box set.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the Bizet box set. It contains some wonderful stuff in good and very good performances. However, it does not contain several EMI and Erato recordings of Bizet that should be in the box. The box contains two performances of Carmen: the Pretre/Callas and the Rattle, both of which are good (I actually preferred the “original” edition conducted by Rattle to the Pretre). It doesn’t, though it should have, contain the Beecham, Mazel, Plasson, and Burgos performances of the opera, an opera that is one of the most popular in the repertory. It has the Pretre Pearl Fishers but not the Cluytens. It has some of the Plasson Bizet but should have it all. The Plasson performance of the L’Arlesienne incidental music is complete unlike the Gardiner in the box set making one wonder why the curators of the set chose the Gardiner instead of the wonderful Plasson. It has no Martinon Bizet but should. As for the concern that this might be too much repetition in the set, I say the more the merrier.

I hope Warner keeps releasing box sets and particularly French classical music box sets. I am praying for uch needed Chabrier and a Chausson box sets from then. Here’s hoping.

Life as Crisis Management: The Food Stamp Renewal Kiada

 

There really is no escaping Murphy’s Law, Kafka’s Law, or Voinovich’s Law, call it whatever you will. This is a lesson I learn every month if not every week.

Because of the increasing cost of my medical bills last year—I am now the proud owner of irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, asthma, arthritis, and sinus issues—I decided to apply for food stamps. I was trying to find anything within reason to keep me financially afloat. 

Recently, I got the form that would allow me to renew my food stamps (or SNAP, as it is now known). So, I filled out the form, both in electronic and paper form, and sent the latter back to Albany County Social Services.

Within this packet of material was a date and time I was given for an interview. Unfortunately, the date and time conflicted with an appointment I had at Albany Ear, Nose, and Throat, an appointment I made six months previously, today at 9:30 am. So when I sent in my paper application for SNAP I noted on the sheet they sent me on which I could notify them about any problems with the date and time that the date and time I was given for an interview conflicted with my doctor’s appointment. I never, of course, received confirmation either that my application was received electronically or in paper form and never received any confirmation that the office received my I have a problem with the date and time form.

Assuming the worst, I went early too Albany ENT today and waited for the 9:30 am call. 9:30 am passed. 9:43 am passed so I headed into the doctor’s office assuming they got my message. When I got home at around noon guess what? You guessed it, I had a message from Albany County Social Services that I had just been called by them for my interview. The message told me to call them as soon as I could.

And that is what I did as soon as I could. As soon as I could, however, was when the office was out to lunch. So I called after 1 pm, typed in the 2 in to speak to a SNAP operative and waited and waited. Eventually a message came on telling me the volume of calls was massive and to leave a message which is what I did. I am still waiting. I have, by the way, called and left a message asking for a call back with Albany County Social Services before and got no return call. So the question is: will I get anywhere this time or will I have to call and call and call?

The answer to that question is no, I did not get a call. I did, however, get a very pleasant representative at Albany County Social Services who did my interview and renewed my food stamps, which don’t amount to very much but every little bit helps in these retirement days. I managed to get through at around 1:45 pm on Thursday (a good time to call?). Before I go I want to note something that should be obvious: those involved in the SNAP programme everywhere, particularly in the era of Mr. Potter style capitalism, are no doubt overworked and underpaid both of which help me understand why it is so hard to get through to them by phone and makes me appreciate even more than I already do everything they do.

The Books of My Life: John Sayles (Molyneaux)

Modern and postmodern life is inherently absurd. Since human life is absurd it is also, as the reflecive person grasps, sometimes annoying. One of the most annoying aspects of human life, in my humble opinion, are critics, particularly literary, film, and television critics.

Critics, of course, come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours just like toothpaste and Jello. There are, for example, at least since the rise of the new digital media that can be used to make money, the casual amateur reactor who reads books and watches films and television programmes and reacts to them for money”. As a general rule the reactors to books are the best of this digital age species.

There are the fanboy and fangirl critics many of whom actually know something about the production aspects of what they read and watch because as fans they scour the  world for primary source material about the writer, director, and creator of the novels, films, and shows they adore. They generally turn the writer of the book, the director of a film, or the writer-creator of the show into a saint (and a sinner once he or she sins like all humans invariably do). Much of their knowledge, their cultural capital, about the making of a novel, a film, or a television show, comes from interviews with those involved with whatever they are reading or watching along with second hand sources such as biographies.

Then there are the academic critics. Academic critics come in several stripes. There are those, a minority, who actually do primary research on an author, a film director, or a television show creator. Generally speaking these critics try to put films or television shows into economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts. As I said these literary, film, and television historians, these social scientists, of art and commerce, are few. 

There are the crystal ball textualists of which there are, these days, many. Crystal ball textualism, the dominant or hegemonic strain of literary, film, and television theory academics have been socialised into and trained in these days, is not grounded on extensive contextual descriptive analysis. Crystal ball textualism assumes that everything you want and need to know about a novel, a short story, a film, or a television programme, can be found in the finished text itself. The finished text is what these wizards with special knowledge peer into in order to immediately decipher any text by teasing out the psychoanalytic dream worlds, the ethnic aspects, the racial aspects, and the gender aspects of the text they are peering at. They are aided and abetted in this task by the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches they have been socialised into. This means that they, unlike more intense fan boy and fan girl critics, generally pay only limited attention to primary source materials beyond the text.

Each of these critic cultures are fundamentally cultural and ideological. They are strongly normative and value laden though many would not admit this. Some critics, many of whom seen to be wanna be writers of books and wanna be makers of films and television programmes tend to whinge and whine about movies they find too talky and with too little camera movement and editing. For them such talky and static movies are theatrical, a term of derision for them, and not cinematic because they are too talky and have too few cuts and camera movements (both of which seem to become moral forces for them). The fact is, however, and to the contrary, anything put on film is a moving picture, is a piece of cinema. Moreover, there is nothing inherently evil about a film with intelligent talk and limited editing, limited cuts, and limited camera movements. See Rear Window.

Another thing academics, particularly academic crystal ball textualists whinge and whine about as they study novels, short stories, films and television, shows is that aren’t politically and ideologically correct their politically and ideologically correct. For them any novel, short story, film, or TV show that isn’t anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist is inherently bad if not evil at least to some extent. For them progress is tied to a decline in racism, sexism, and classism. And while I agree with Richard Roud (“Introduction" to Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980) that all criticism has normative aspects to it and while I have no problem with critiquing and criticising various forms of ethnocentrism in media texts, all cultural analysis, in my opinion, should be tempered by and grounded on sound descriptive analysis and primary documentary evidence before one moves on to interpretation and homiletics. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that all forms of criticism are equally normative and equally ideologically correct. The critics with the least cultural and ideological baggage are those historians and social scientists who do have the capital or at least some of the cultural capital to explore the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of “texts” and who do engage in primary research, film historians and social scientists like Gerry Molyneaux whose book on the independent film director, writer, and actor John Sayles I recently read. Molyneaux’s John Sayles: The Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000) was, for me, a welcome antidote to the crystal ball textualism that dominates academic criticism these days and the ignorance is bliss reactions of YouTube reactors. Molyneaux explores Sayles’s life from birth to his latest film, which was, at the time the book was published, Limbo (1999). He takes readers on a journey that starts with Sayles’s birth in upstate New York through his work on Roger Corman films through his life as a writer, script doctor and through his life as a film director. He rightly notes that Sayles and others of an independent bent were stimulated by the fiercely independent cinema of writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes who, like Sayles, often wrote and acted in order to make money to fund his own cheaply, by Hollywood standards, made films, that were accused by some of being too talky and too primitive cinematically by some at the time.

What sets Molyneaux’s book apart from many other film studies monographs past and present is its focus on the broader social contexts of Sayles’s life and work. Monlyneaux nicely explores the economic contexts of Sayles’s films all of which were made for six million dollars or less, sometimes a lot less. He nicely explores the role Sayles’s partner, Maggie Renzi, played in obtaining funding for these independent films in an economic context that was often dynamic making raising funds difficult. He notes that Sayles often financed all or a good part of his films himself. He points out that whether Sayles’s films made a return on investment—often they did not—this translated into further difficulties  for him and Renzi to get money to make the films he wanted to make. He nicely explores what might be called the leftist political orientation of Sayles’s films such as the pro-unionism of Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), the ethnic focus and ideological complexity of Lone Star (1996), and the humanism of Men With Guns (1998). He explores Sayles’s commitment to making films his way. He explores Sayles’s sometimes problems with the suits that ran the Hollywood studios and Sayles as scriptwriter and script doctor for hire, sometimes for the studios. Sayles, for instance, as Molyneaux notes, made Baby It’s You (Paramount, 1983) and he was the creator and show runner of short lived television show Shannon’s Deal (NBC, 1989-1990) for NBC,  the former, in particular, left a bad taste in Sayles’s artistic mouth. He explores Sayles’s career as writer of short stories and novels. He explores Sayles as actor. All of these—Sayles as a script writer, Sayles as a script doctor, Sayles as a writer of novels and short stories, and Sayles as an actor—helped Sayles make monies to fund his own films. He explores the theme of community in Sayles’s work and the complexities and ambiguities of Sayles’s work. He notes Sayles’s interest in race, in ethnicity, in class, and in unions, something that should earn Sayles a legion of politically and ideologically correct academic fans but doesn’t seem to have. In Sayles’s films so much if not all is on the surface and crystal ball textualists generally prefer directors who make them dig beneath the surface given that they perceive themselves as kind of cine-psychoanalysts with a social conscience.

Sayles has gone on to write further novels and films and direct further films since Molyneaux’s book was published foregrounding the fact that Sayles is still an artistic work in progress and that analysis of Sayles’s work is also a work in progress and so any conclusions about his work must remain tentative. He limitedly explores the criticisms of Sayles as a dialogue director rather than a cinematic director though he notes rightly that financial realities place limits on the equipment one can obtain and the film stock one can use, something that many of the critics who seem to think that films are made in an economic vacuum forget. Many if not all of these critics still think of art and the artist in romantic terms, as unsullied by the real world. Whether Sayles and Renzi will be able to put together what is necessary for Sayles to make another film remains an open question as I type given the realities of contemporary big money Hollywood film making and the difficulties in making independent films and getting them distributed these days. Perhaps streaming will come to the rescue. Only time will tell.

Molyneaux’s book on Sayles may not be as academically and intellectually sexy as books that come from the crystal ball textualists (some clearly find crystal ball textualists work sexy). It nicely lays out the actual economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of Sayles’s film. It provides a sound base line for further studies of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the work of writer, director, and actor John Sayles even if, like fanboy and fangirl criticism, it tends to be too often more laudatory than critical. And while we like what we like—and I admit I like Sayles’s films a lot—what we like needs to be grounded in an analysis of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of life. Finally, Molyneaux’s book raises that eternal question about books on film directors: couldn’t it have done what it did in article and hence less repetitive form?
 

The American Health Care System Sucks Kiada, Part One

 

There is a lot, for rational and reasonable reasons, to dislike about the US Health Care System. There is the fact that so much of the health care system is for profit, skanks making monies off of other people’s health problems. There is the fact that its pharmaceutical sector is controlled by a cartel. There is the fact that health insurance is largely available only through employers and too expensive for the common man and women to get through some of their employers or if they are independent. There is the attendant fact that millions of Americans have no health insurance and pharmaceutical insurance at all. There is the fact that waiting times to get into see specialists is sometimes way too long—months— forcing the unhealthy to go to emergency rooms, hardly a cost effective “strategy". The US health care system, in other words, is irrational, idiotic, looney, moronic, and, of course, profitable.

One of its irrationalities is something I had to deal with recently, prescriptions that last only one year. I recently called CVS to refill my Linzess. I had five refills left which is why I told my Gastro-Intestinal doctor when I saw her earlier this month that I did not need a new prescription. Unfortunately, I did not notice that the prescription just expired today. Long story short, I could not get a refill. So now the doctor has to be contacted—she is not in today—and a new prescription has to be sent. Unfortunately, I only have three more pills and Linzess is a medicine I need because I have a chronic condition, irritable bowel syndrome. 

Wouldn’t it be more rational for those with chronic conditions to have prescriptions that don’t expire since they have chronic and often dangerous chronic conditions? Well not in the US.

Life as Crisis Management: The CVS Telephone Automated Prescription Refill Kiada

I think of myself as a pretty libertarian kind of guy. As long as you don’t tread on me with any theocratic bullshite I am, to quote Faith, five by five, and won’t tread on you. 

Unfortunately, I presently live in the United States of America where there are a shitload of theocratic interest groups, some with power, who want to tread on me with their theocratic bullshit. Needless to say, I am disturbed and disgusted by these theocrats, secular and religious, and have to admit that I have grown, as a result, to hate them.

This is a big change for me. As a scholar of culture, ideology, and religion, a meaning system and, in some instances something that took an organisational form, I have long tried to be dispassionate and fair in my study of religious groups like the Quakers and the Mormons and I think I was fair in studying religious groups like the Quakers and the Mormons. Recently with the upteenth resurrection of White evangelical Christian theocratic nationalism and their coming to power, however, my dispassion and fairness have worn thin given that they want to tell me what I can think, what I can read, and how i must live. I have, in other words, grown to hate these arrogant self-righteous, and remarkably Un-Christian groups and their most recent messiah.

White nationalist evangelical theocrats are not the only things I hate. I have CVS, yet another American mega-corporation out to take over America and the world, and its seemingly endless derivatives including CVS Health, CVS Silver Script, and CVS pharmacies. I hated the latter so much I took my business to a local independent pharmacy until it became impossible for me to continue to purchase prescriptions at that pharmacy in part because skanks like CVS are squeezing these independent pharmacies trying to put them out of business. 

I have had problems with CVS Health and CVS Silver Script, the latest their decision not to refund me for a prescription I over paid for thanks to a bureaucratic error. To make matters worse, the local pharmacy did refund me for my second filling of the medicine. I am still appealing this sensationally moronic decision but I don’t imagine that will solve the issue given who I am dealing with.

I have had problems with three local CVS pharmacies for years. The latest involves their automated call prescription refill service. The last three times I have called to refill prescriptions, which apparently can’t be automatically refilled, I have gotten a message that my Famotidine is up for refill. The problem with that is that it this is bullshite; the Famotodine cannot be refilled since I picked up a ninety day supply on 22 June 2025. Interestingly and annyoingly, the prescription that I can refill, Pregabalin, doesn’t automatically come up in the automated system when I put in my account information so I have to do that refill by hand.I have to type in the prescription number. Let’s hear it for high tech.

By the way, after three denials of a refund that should have been seen as obvious, I am told that a cheque is on its way reimbursing me for the overcharge as I type. Now I none to serenely await the next muck up by the CVS corporation.

 

Musings on The Twilight Zone Episode "He’s Alive”...

 

I really didn’t watch that much television when I was growing up until we moved to Dallas. For some of you out there this might seem a bit paradoxical since my father worked for Philips, a maker of televisions and other electronic equipment (not to mention a great and, now that it is gone, a much lamented classical music label).

The television we had in those days was one of those typical big and heavy black and white TV’s of the era. Me and my sister would sit as close to it as we could get. We did eventually get a colour television, though I don’t remember exactly when. It was probably sometime in the seventies.

The main reason I watched TV in those halcyon days was for the movies. As I have mentioned before in these blogs there were movies galore on Dallas’s five TV stations: CBS, NBC, ABC, and, in particular, on the two independents that broadcast in the city.

I did not like most of the shows on the network prime time schedules of CBS, NBC, and ABC during the 1960s and 1970s. I would watch Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, which my sister kind of liked,  but they weren’t my cup of tea. I watched The Ed Sullivan Show and other shows of that ilk for the music. I was there, for example, when the Beatles appeared on Sullivan. I watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for the same reason, for the music. I simply put up with what came before and after on these in order to see the week’s musical guests because I was a hard core pop and rock musicoaphile at the time. 

What I really liked on Dallas TV, beyond the movies, were the older shows on the independents and the local schedules of Dallas’s network stations. I loved and still love The Dick van Dyke Show. And I loved and still love The Twilight Zone. To me The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone were and are amongst the few shows on American over the air commercial television that can be spoken of in the same breath as the great British and English television shows. 

I was reminded of just how good and just how prophetic The Twilight Zone was and is recently during the Heroes and Icon (H&I) network's Rod, White, and Blue Twilight Zone marathon. There are, of course, many episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone that I have found memorable over the years. there was the episode centring on a operation on a woman’s face because she thought she was ugly (“Eye of the Beholder, 1960). There was the episode in which Billy Mumy thinks people into the corn field ("It’s a Good Life", 1961). There was the episode in which aliens use that good old time human fear of the other amongst those living on the all-American Maple Street ("The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", 1960). There was the episode about a concentration camp commander (Death’s Head Revisited”, 1961). And there was the episode about an American Adolf Hitler (He’s Alive”, 1963).

Like so any episodes in The Twilight Zone “He’s Alive” is deeply allegorical. In "He’s Alive” Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, who, as a boy, had a difficult childhood abused as he was by his father and neglected by his mother. He finds comfort in a Jewish neighbour who had survived the Dachau concentration camp and meaning in Naziism. With the aid of an unseen figure Vollmer becomes the head of the local Nazi movement thanks to the rhetorical and strategic skills (creating martyrs) he learns from his unseen mentor. Under his leadership Vollmer’s fascist movement goes from being a joke to being a serious movement. The twist—one always finds a wonderful twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episodes—is that the unseen figure is the real Adolf Hitler (listed as Adolph in the credits).

The allegory that is at the heart of this episode, of course, changes with the changing times. Today, thanks to changing history, the allegory in “He’s Alive” has taken on a different interpretive life. What does not change with the changing times, however, one Rod Serling, who wrote the episode notes, is that Hitler, the allegorical Hitler, the metaphorical Hitler, is always with us. 

And he, of course, is always with us in some way, shape, and form. Today in the United States we have yet another, to quote Serling’s introduction to “He’s Alive”, “little man who feeds off his self-delusions and who finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.” Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man was abused as a child. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man imagines himself as a man of steel. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man feeds off the adoration of the masses. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man uses fear of devilish others including immigrants, to spread his gospel of hate, sometimes unsubtly subtly). Unlike Vollmer but like Hitler this little man is a bully boy of the seventh grade order. Unlike Vollmer and like Hitler this bully boy little man has achieved power and is increasing his power as the countervailing power of courts, the legislative branch, the universities, the corporations and the media either aid and abet him or step aside allowing him, by doing this or remaining silent, to do his will. As Sterling predicted in 1963, in other words, what Hitler represented is always with us in the real world not just in the twilight zone.

On the isn’t it ironic side of the ledger, the actor who played a Nazi in “He’s Alive” and who was Jewish would go on to play a gestapo officer in Hogan’s Heroes. Additionally, Paramount, which owns CBS now, recently settled a legal suit with the litigious and blackailing Trump over the editing of an interview with Democrat presidential candiate Kamela Harris on its 60 Minutes series despite the fact that the suit has little in the way of merit. Paramount, you see, has a mega-dollar merger deal they want the President-King's assent to. This means that Paramount, like  Columbia University, Indiana University, and several legal firms, has become a Vichy like collaborator. History ever repeats?

I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

 

Like virtually everyone I have dreams when I sleep at night, multiple dreams that always, over the last two or three years, wake me up. I usually don’t remember, as I have said before, most of them. I wouldn’t have remembered this one except for the fact that I wrote it down immediately after the last dream I had last night woke me up this morning.

In my dream I was milling around Flinders Station in Melbourne. I was doing ethnography. I was trying very very had to notice and pay attention to the people around me. 

And there were lots of people around me. There were a lot of people milling around Flinder going into it and coming out of it. I noticed that one in three people I saw were wearing red t-shirts with Zero Culture stamped in white on a black circle in the middle of the shirt. I interpreted this as a celebration of Melbourne’s trams, trains, and buses. 

There were celebrities who I did not recognise. Some of these celebrities seemed to be trying to hide themselves perhaps bashful of what they had become. Or perhaps they were trying to hide from the celebrity chasers who were out in force and who were chasing the celebrities.

Finally, there were people I recognised as spies. These spies were chasing other spies who were chasing other spies. Everything was becoming a swirl.

And then I woke up.