by Nils Peterson

My First Opera

My first opera was at the old Met, Cav. and Pag,  Cavalliera Rusticana  and Pagliacci, cheapest seat in the house, last row, last seat, highest balcony in a corner, view of the opposite wing almost as large as my view of the stage which, in truth, was interesting  – watching the preening before performing. At the intermission, I offered my seat to an older woman who was standing behind. As she thanked me, I could almost hear her thinking what a nice young man, but in truth, the tiny raked seat did not work with my six foot six frame and its basketball wrecked knees. I had been in agony, and her taking my seat and my standing was a blessing.

My Last Opera

As you get older you find there are things you just cannot do anymore. I have peripheral neuropathy. I was diagnosed with it when I was 65. It’s now almost a quarter of a century later.  My diminishment was slow. First I had to give up tennis, then golf. Finally, a few years ago, of all things, the opera. So here are some thoughts on that.

On Sunday I went to my last performance at the SF Opera. I’ve had a half season ticket there for more than 40 years and I’ve had the best cheap seat in the house ever since the restoration of the opera house after the earthquake. Right side of the right aisle in the wheelchair row. Room for my legs and a clear sight of the stage. My last opera was Carmen, a very different Carmen from the one I first saw, or the one I saw in LA with a somewhat over-aged Placido as the Jose (this wretched machine doesn’t want to accept Domingo’s first name. it keeps wanting to turn him into Placid). This production had Don Jose and Micaela taking selfies, and simulated oral sex. Both leads were really fine, though Carmen’s voice may have been just a little small, but just right in timbre. The staging was very physical, and she was very good. She had a slim athlete’s body and exuded sexuality. Pastias was a Mercedes driven on stage out of which a drunken outdoor picnic evolved. (I think I even smelled exhaust, though I can’t believe it was really driven on stage. They must have pushed it in some way.)

However, I left at the intermission to drive home towards San Jose. I just had sat enough, the drive up, the lunch, the first two acts, and the coming drive home, and my right leg was beginning to ache and swell a bit. And as I went over it in my mind, I didn’t want to see Micaela come to a ruined, jealous Don Jose, nor did I want to see him kill Carmen in the last act, though I would have liked to have seen the street scenes which I’ve sung when my chorale did opera choruses. Read more »

by Jonathan Kalb

Richard Gilman (1923-2006)—a revered and feared American critic of theater, film and fiction in the mid-century patrician grain of Eric Bentley, Stanley Kauffmann and Robert Brustein—was a self-absorbed titan of insecurity and the best writing teacher I ever had. Negotiating the minefield of this man’s mercurial moodiness, beginning at age 22, was one of the main galvanizing experiences of my pre-professional life.

Gilman’s signal teaching talent was showing others how to read their own writing well, which he called an “indispensable skill.” His and Kauffmann’s “Crit Workshops” at the Yale School of Drama—required every semester for three years—were tiny, intensive seminars devoted to upping our games. We crit students venerated these men because we wanted what they had: perches at the increasingly rare prestigious intellectual weeklies (such as The Nation and The New Republic) that were surviving the withering assaults of the media age in the 1980s. Each three-hour Crit session focused on a single student paper. Dick (as he introduced himself) never bothered with written comments. In his classes, he’d read the paper aloud in its entirety, leaning back in his plastic chair, chain-smoking cigarillos, and channel the writer’s voice with his own inflections, like a Brechtian actor supplementing a role with his savvy persona. Thus he performed the model intellectual, articulating, in a stream of unsparing interruptions and digressions, the manner and temper of the “generally intelligent mind” we were told we should write for.

This was a thrilling and terrifying experience. Dick would stop to remark on any formulation, image, or thought that bothered him, not only flagging our dangling participles, flaccid metaphors, and baggy digressions but also speculating on the reasons for them. He’d ask tetchily about our intentions and then, with biting humor, pronounce Olympian verdicts on our evasions, confusions, pretentions, and oceanic ignorance. This painful, merciless crucible was everything I’d hoped for from that storied school. Read more »

From David Winner’s first column about his poignant relationship with buildings and their ornamentation, to Angela Starita’s discussion of the Bengali/Italian/Uzbek gardens of Kensington, Brooklyn as well her own growing up with her Italian-born father who became a farmer in middle-age, our column centers around place and what it signifies: architecturally, historically, emotionally. We will try to interrogate buildings: factories, apartments, houses, cities. Sometimes we will enter inside their doors to focus on what goes on inside.

by David Winner

When Angela and I visited Paris for the first time in the early nineties, we stayed in a large house near the Parc Monceau owned by a friend of my great-aunt’s, Henri Louis de la Grange, Mahler scholar and bona fide baron. When Alain, a former lover of Henri Louis, had us to dinner one night, he complained about a recent visit to Cincinnati. Echoing Gertrude Stein’s famous “no there there,” comment, he dismissed the city as “provincial.” When I repeated the comment to Henri Louis later over dinner with my great-aunt, he disdained Alain, from Normandy, as provincial himself.

That memory begs two questions. What constitutes provincial, and where and what is “there?”

Many students at the community college where I teach come from former colonies of the Spanish empire. Provincial backwaters to some: think poor Zama in Antonio de Benedetto’s eponymous novel, stuck in murky Asuncion, desperate to get transferred to Buenos Aires. My students often refer to the capital city of their country not by its name – Santo Domingo, Quito, San Salvador – but simply as “the capital.” After moving to Jersey City within spitting distance of Manhattan, those cities remain capitals for them, the antitheses of provincial.

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I visited Riga, the capital of Latvia, which spent much of its recent history as a backwater of the Russian then Soviet empires, in the summer of 1997 when Angela was doing a program for journalists in Finland. I took the ferry across the Baltic Sea to Estonia, then a bus to Riga. The Soviet Union had only recently fallen, and it felt like a distant, exotic destination. Except it wasn’t. The well-preserved Old Town with its late seventeenth century German architecture bustled with tourist life. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

In the decade before World War I, the newspaper dominated life like it never would again. The radio was not yet fit for mass use, and neither was film or recording. It was then common for major cities to have a dozen or so morning papers competing for attention. Deceit, exaggeration, and gimmicks were typical, even expected, to boost readership. Rarely were reporters held to account.

This characterization is not mine but taken from Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Kraus believed this environment had to be held responsible for plunging Europe into war. He parodied its excesses in his 1918 play The Last Days of Mankind where he developed his signature montage style. In a time of upheaval, Kraus cut through the noise by repeating its own voice back at it, splicing quotes together into a new interpretation. As he recounted in the play’s preface, “the most improbable deeds reported here actually took place. The most implausible conversations… were spoken verbatim.” Kraus pursued a unique kind of literary realism with the perceptive eye of a documentarian, and in his crosshairs was the newspaper.

Like many writers and artists of the early 20th century—whose perspectives ring so familiar to us today—Kraus sought to dramatize how mass media, particularly the newspaper, was distorting the urban individual’s sense of place. Is it so surprising that writers and artists then, argues critic Lucy Sante, “took such pleasure in shredding it”? After all, the stakes were dire.

I have been reading Sante’s translation of one such “shredder”: Félix Fénéon. He is an individual who remained largely unknown during his life, but played an outsized role in modernism and early 20th-century literature. Fénéon found himself close to the heart of this media whirlwind I am describing, writing anonymously for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. But rather than get caught up in its bluster, he instead opted for an approach that was unique in its candor, simplicity, and intended speed of consumption. Read more »

Sughra Raza. At Totem Farm, April 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Gus Mitchell

This September marks 50 years since the deaths of three men. One died at the very beginning of the month, in Oxford, one in the middle, in Santiago, and one at the end, in Vienna.

Anyone likely to be reading this will have heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died on 2 September in Oxford, city of his life and work, aged 81. Unfortunately the contemporary world has absorbed Tolkien to an unhealthy extent that sweetens and ultimately sickens his achievement. His achievement was to create myth anew. I use that word order deliberately, as opposed to “created a new mythology”.

I don’t know how many people will have heard of Victor Jara. If they haven’t, they ought immediately to stop reading until they have given their full attention to “Manifiesto”, one of the really incomparable things ever committed to record. “Manifiesto” was recorded in August 1973. It was released posthumously; in its closing lines, Jara had written: “For a song has meaning / When it beats in the veins / Of a man who will die singing / Truthfully singing his songs.” And Jara was murdered the following month, on September 16^th, doing what he himself had predicted.

Many people will have heard of W.H. Auden. Another acronymous luminary of 20^th century British letters, he is also its greatest poet. Auden died on 29 September in Vienna, aged 66: rather lonely, estranged from his partner Chester Kallman, intending himself to make his way back to Oxford, and having likely swallowed his habitual nightly dose of barbiturate and vodka (his practice for three decades.) Auden was the kind of poet that doesn’t really exist anymore: a grand reflection of his age.

September also marks fifty years since the Pinochet coup in Chile, a coup supported by both the United States and the United Kingdom, and that would lead first to the deaths of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, then at least two thousand more Chileans, and the torture and imprisonment of more than thirty thousand more. On the 12 September 1973, the morning after the coup and Allende’s suicide, Victor Jara, along with five thousand others were arrested by the fascists and taken as prisoners to the Estadio Chile in Santiago. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Marie Snyder

It’s such a go-to now to call the enemy some version of a communist in a weird throwback to 1950s America and McCarthyism. And now the leader of the opposition accused Canada’s Prime Minister of being a Marxist, and he said it like it’s a bad thing!

Lisa B0923 5 minute Tiktok explains why Trudeau is decidedly not Marxist:

“This is what Marxists believe: ‘Marxism analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in the society. It stimulates the workers to protest the injustice.‘ Now I guess compared to the current CPC the liberals may look Marxist because the current CPC is so far right, like, you can’t even see them in the distance.”

But let’s dive a little deeper into what Marx said to see that philosophically, communists and capitalists aren’t that far apart, but both are nowhere near the neolibertarian capitalists. Kinda like Lisa said above, neoliberals are just so far to the right that everyone looks like a commie from their vantage point.

Commies, Capitalists and Neoliberal Capitalists

What I think is interesting is that one of the fathers of capitalism, John Locke, and one of the fathers of communism, Karl Marx, were reacting to their different situations in very similar ways. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

All will unite—no sooner had our world
Combusted (see “The Big Bang”) than it sought
Accretion of the bits that had been hurled
To every corner (where there once was naught,
One nanosecond previous, un-warmed
By ours or any other burning stars,
Un-lit by lunar satellite), and formed,
In steady labour, suns and planets, Mars,
And Jupiter, and Venus, and the rest:
Great gatherings of what was late alone,
But now into a merry round compress’d
Was through our skies in conjunct chorus thrown.

And so it is with us, made of those bits
As well, and yearning for return to what
We once were, unities before the blitz:
One rounded whole, harmonic and uncut
As yet by gods invidious, those same
Whom we’ve appeased in solemn ritual,
With sacrifice, and planetary name,
And ceremonies individual. Read more »

Found this dead and dried out dragonfly lying on a sidewalk in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by William Benzon

I have been thinking about the culture of AI existential risk (AI Doom) for some time now. I have already written about it as a cult phenomenon, nor am I the only one. But I that’s rather thin. While I still believe it to be true, it explains nothing. It’s just a matter of slapping on a label and letting it go at that.

While I am still unable to explain the phenomenon – culture and society are enormously complex: Just what would it take to explain AI Doom culture? – I now believe that “counter culture” is a much more accurate label than “cult.” In using that label I am deliberately evoking the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s: LSD, Timothy Leary, rock and roll (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and on and on), happenings and be-ins, bell bottoms and love beads, the Maharishi, patchouli, communes…all of it, the whole glorious, confused gaggle of humanity. I was an eager observer and fellow traveler. While I did tune in and turn on, I never dropped out. I became a ronin scholar with broad interests in the human mind and culture.

I suppose that “Rationalist” is the closest thing this community has as a name for itself. Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI and seeks to prevent it by figuring out how to align AIs with human values.

I’ll leave Bayesian reasoning to others. I’m interested in AI Doom. But to begin understanding that we must investigate what a post-structuralist culture critic would call the discourse or perhaps the ideology of intelligence. To that end I begin with a look at Adrian Monk, a fictional detective who exemplifies a certain trope through which our culture struggles with extreme brilliance. Then I take up the emergence of intelligence testing in the late 19th century and the reification of intelligence in a number, one’s IQ. In the middle of the 20th century the discourse of intelligence moved to the quest for artificial intelligence. With that we are at last ready to think about artificial x-risk (as it is called, “x” for “existential”).

This is going to take a while. Pull up a comfortable chair, turn on a reading light, perhaps get a plate of nachos and some tea, or scotch – heck, maybe roll a joint, it’s legal these days, at least in some places – and read.

Read more »

by R. Passov

In 2010, the company for which I was then Treasurer was invited to send me to China. The purpose of the trip was to meet with senior members of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Shanghai stock exchange as a prelude to becoming the first US company to issue bonds to be traded on the Shanghai exchange.

Before discovering that there were numerous companies in line to be ‘first’ I met with a senior official of the NDRC. Along with my travel companion, a Chinese national who had relocated to New Jersey and worked on my team, I arrived at a palatial office exactly at the right time, only to wait perhaps as along as 45 minutes, maybe longer.

Eventually my companion and I were escorted into a cavernous conference room, in the center of which was an impossibly long table surrounded by as many as 40 high-backed, elaborately upholstered chairs. We were instructed to take seats away from the table against a far wall. After more waiting, a senior official entered the room followed by two assistants and proceeded to a chair at the very center of the table.

After the official was comfortably seated we were instructed by his assistants to move to the table and occupy the two seats directly across. One of the assistants left and our host began the meeting.

Introductions were short. The NDRC official knew who we were, and perhaps a lot more. I only knew that he was a Vice Chairman and according to my colleague ‘very, very senior.’ The Vice Chairman was politely condescending and direct: When, he wanted to know, would my company be able to commit to a securities offering. Read more »

by Bill Murray

This month’s travel column includes suspiciously little travel – just two short walks, to a courthouse and a jailhouse. I live in Atlanta, where quite a bit of national politics has happened in those two buildings these last few weeks.

I walked downtown a couple of weeks ago when things were going on down there that you wouldn’t call festive, August is too hot for festive, but they were purposeful, and expectations ran high. Peoples’ opinions diverge, don’t they, but until the Trump indictments were actually handed up August 14, everybody at least agreed something important was coming and that it would shape events.

To walk from my part of town, Atlanta’s big busy Midtown, to the sprawling government complex downtown, is to walk “right down Peachtree,” as much loved Atlanta Braves baseball announcer Ernie Johnson used to say when describing a pitch right down the middle.

From Midtown you walk Atlanta’s main street a couple of miles south. There’s a dodgy block or two and then a positively anti-human overpass where noise, grit and gridlock coalesce over a squeezed together forced marriage between interstates 75 and 85. We call that the Downtown Connector.

Once that’s over you forge alongside Woodruff Park (for sixty years Robert W. Woodruff personified Coca-Cola); you are now in the heart of downtown, and continue beyond an iconic neon Coca-Cola sign and through the disused entrance to what has been, on and off again, Underground Atlanta.

After that barriers were up, roads were shut and cadres of traffic cops moved about. TV trucks staked out the Lewis R. Slayton Courthouse for a couple of weeks down there and everybody with a supporting role in presenting the Donald Trump drama, TV techs, cops, drivers, caterers, couriers and a few protesters deserved hazardous duty pay for managing in the 100 degree-plus daily heat.

Out here in the provinces these felt like important events; it seemed like purposeful people were busy with weighty affairs, even if it was only all in the service of getting one man and his associates in trouble with the law. Read more »