Hawking’s Non-Heaven

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

With those words, British physicist Stephen Hawking set off yet another round of controversy already preceded by similar pronouncements in his 2010 book, The Grand Design. There, he wrote that “the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” a thought reflected in his comments from a few days ago in The Guardian, reiterating his belief in spontaneous creation and human life as being a matter of “chance.”

The reference to heaven as a “fairy story” is what’s gotten the most attention, but Hawking’s computer analogy is what most struck me. Far be it to call anything Hawking believes “simplistic,” but to reduce the sum total of a human being to hardware destined for the dumpster feels a bit shallow. Much as I view cemeteries as metaphorically nothing more than used-car lots where the drivers have long since moved on, that failed PC in Hawking’s example would likewise have been worthless as well had something bigger not pushed the button and turned it on in the first place. (The “soul” being a subject for another time.)

Pop Culture Musing for a Wednesday 5/25/11

The Oprah Goodbye: I wasn’t a follower of the Winfrey show on a daily basis, not even close, but it seems everyone was caught up in today’s finale, an impossible-to-escape buildup that was one of the more massive in recent television history. Enough words have been written regarding the Oprah phenomenon, and I’m sure that as everyone bids farewell, the Big O will be saying hello again soon enough.

Suffice to say that our culture of personality was tailor-made for her, and few are better suited to the times (or did she create the times?) I think the unprecedented faith her supporters have invested in her throughout the years points to an inherent honesty (real or perceived) sensed deep down, and which lies at the root of her influence. Trust invariably follows truthfulness, and it’s something the viewers always felt from Winfrey (and they put their money where their hearts were).

The Tudors Revisited

Both serious students of 16th-Century England and those with a passing interest in the period will find The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty by G.J. Meyer a comprehensive look at that momentous span of history, along with essays that provide supplementary context to the saga of this most examined of British royal families.

Now released in paperback, the book is also a refreshing reality-check grounded in fact after the entertaining fictions of the recent past that have figured in the public imagination, most notably The Tudors, the TV series on Showtime, which took the term “historical license” to a new – and outrageous – level.

The background entries lend flavor and perspective to the times, such as “Bestsellers,” which explores the advent of printing and its impact on the scholars of the day. “They Were What They Ate” is a taste of typical Tudorian fare and recipes (“Take a necke of mutton and a brest to make the broth stronge and then scum it cleane”), along with speculation as to why many of the Tudor lineage deteriorated at young ages (with the exception of Elizabeth I, who apparently ate sparingly).

The book is the first in a while to tackle the Tudors in such an ambitious fashion, and the critical analysis is for the most part (with one notable exception) on the mark. The focus on Henry VIII, for example, is as “Monster,” an apt description, and not just due to his reputation as Bluebeard-ish barbarian and decapitator of two wives. Henry’s reign of terror actually began prior to his marriage to doomed second wife Anne Boleyn, and in the chapter “First Blood,” Meyer describes his initial victim, a 27-year-old nun named Elizabeth Barton (the “Nun of Kent”), put to death due to her opposition to the King’s intentions of divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Ode to Hejira

Joni Mitchell is nothing less than a musical goddess to me, and I’d venture that she sits high at the altar for legions of other fans, who, once immersed in her words and music, became lifelong devotees of this quintessential singer/songwriter. Difficult to believe, but Hejira, her landmark and unequaled album, is 35 years old this year. And like most timeless works of art, this is no relic. It remains as fresh and innovative as when it was first released in 1976.

The searingly personal Blue (1971) is usually cited by critics as her most influential, but it’s really Hejira that’s the summit of Mitchell’s singular synthesis of talents. Musically imaginative, lyrics exploratory and poetic, conceptually seamless, Hejira (from the Arabic word for “flight”) is about exactly that  –  and the inner journeys of the road. (It’s appropriate that the ethereal “Amelia” is named for the aviation pioneer, Amelia Earhart, and is a paean to the artist’s identification with her spirit: “Like me she had a dream to fly…”)

From the opening guitar strains of “Coyote” (not the canine, but an unruly lover), to the closing “Refuge of the Roads,” Hejira shows a mind with few equals in creative musical intelligence, as well as consistent curiosity in extending the boundaries of the pop genre. What strikes me on every listen is that even though Mitchell was relatively young when she wrote it, the album expresses an emotional depth that could take many lifetimes to acquire, as in these lyrics from the sublime title track:

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality – to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken-scratching for my immortality

“Furry Sings the Blues” is musical prose that could almost be a short story. A prismatic portrait of Memphis’ famous Beale Street and aging blues guitarist Furry Lewis, it’s Mitchell in full flower, words and voice creating visual images with vivid eloquence:

Pawn shops glitter like gold tooth caps
In the grey decay
They chew the last few dollars off
Old Beale Street’s carcass

The cheeky “Blue Motel Room” is all jazz and light; “Black Crow,” restless and zig-zaggy, is the darker side of the wayfaring experience. And “Song for Sharon” reiterates Mitchell’s intrinsic independence, as she tells a (married) childhood buddy: “You sing for your friends and your family, I’ll walk green pastures by and by.”

Legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius’s moody style is the undercurrent that drives the sonic wave of Hejira from start to finish, the perfect accompaniment to the songwriter’s vision, and in many ways defining its aural idiosyncrasy.

One can hope that new generations will join in discovering the wonders of this seminal album…and Mitchell, an artist for the ages.

 [First published as Joni Mitchell's Hejira: An Appreciation on its
  35th Anniversary on Blogcritics.org.]

Summer Nears

Ericeira Beach, north of Lisbon, Portugal 5/11/11
(Photo: Jose Manuel Ribeiro/Reuters)

Dreams of a Masterpiece

American Counterpoint, released by EMI as part of its “American Classics” series, features the works of three modern composers, John Adams, Conlon Nancarrow, and John Cage, with conductors Simon Rattle and Michael Tilson-Thomas (pianist in the Cage piece) as interpreters. The focus here will be on Adams’ stunning Harmonielehre, as rendered by Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Perhaps most known for his 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls (commemorating the 9/11 attacks), and the recently revived opera Nixon in China, the 64-year-old Adams is associated with the minimalist genre, alongside other exponents as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Harmonielehre’s title (literally, “theory of harmony”) is also the name of a treatise by composer Arnold Schoenberg, who could be called the “granddaddy” of the minimalists.

Lush, dissonant, and melodic all at once, the amazing Harmonielehre came to Adams after a dream he had following a drive across San Francisco Bay and a tanker explosion he witnessed en route. The 1985 piece begins with staccato blasts that signal the remarkable musical journey to come: all surging chord progressions before segueing into a rich string segment that eventually moves back into looming expectation. “The Antefortas Wound,” Harmonielehre’s second movement, loosely based on the legend of The Fisher King, is a respite from the preceding tension, beginning somberly and ominously, ending in ambivalent notes of mystery.

The final movement (enigmatically titled “Meister Eckhart and Quackie”) was also inspired by a dream, this one of Adams’ daughter (whose nickname was “Quackie”), traveling through space accompanied by the 14th-Century mystic, Eckhart von Hochheim. (Whew!) It returns to the musical themes of the first movement, urgency unbound, minimalist motifs in full force, and culminating in an exultant and majestic crescendo that soars in its grandeur.

American Counterpoint is rounded out with Three Canons for Ursula by Nancarrow and Three Dances by Cage. But it’s the Harmonielehre that makes it a must listen.

[First published as Music Review: John Adams, et al -
American Counterpoint on Blogcritics.org.]

The Writer’s Heart

Lesley McDowell’s Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers, an insightful exploration of several entwined literary and personal relationships, some well known (Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), and not as well known (Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker), is viewed from a neo-feminist perspective. The author posits that a cursory overview could make it seem like these poets/writers compromised creative accomplishments as a result of life with their male counterparts, but in actuality emerged empowered despite their often ambivalent, mercurial, critical… and unfaithful partners. (Ernest Hemingway among them.)

Early Sartre and de Beauvoir

The book is set up in three sections and by decades ranging from the 1910s to 1950s, and McDowell assigns monikers (“Companion,” “Ingénue,” “Survivor”) to each of the women, as snapshot summaries of their primary identities within the context of the alliances. The descriptions are well chosen; for H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) a lifelong dependence on Ezra Pound as mentor left her a psychological “Novice” despite her own vast body of work as a poet. The union of the intellectual powerhouses of Sartre and de Beauvoir (the “Long-Termer”), that lasted in one form or another for 51 years until Sartre’s death in 1980, was, not unsurprisingly, complex. (Sexual issues included, with de Beauvoir sharing her female companions with Sartre, as a means, many said, to maintain her control over him. They had what they called a “morganatic” marriage.)

There’s little fresh to impart regarding the well-chronicled coupling of Plath and Hughes, but I found an unexpected discovery in reading about the pairing of English poet George Barker and the “Chaser” — Elizabeth Smart. (A name, quite honestly, I had until now only associated with the Utah kidnap victim of a few years ago.) A sort-of fatal attraction (on Smart’s part) of the poetic persuasion, the Barker-Smart connection lasted over four decades, produced four children, and never a marriage.

But it did result in a quite magnificent prose-poem by Smart titled (and what a beautiful title!), “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.” First published in 1945, acclaim came after its reissue long afterwards, in 1966. An operatic and extraordinary rendering of her roller-coaster emotional ride with Barker, the work ends with a sad, solitary, and ultimately futile expectation of a reunion at the landmark train depot. Newfound knowledge of Smart and this classic made Between the Sheets, absorbing in and of itself, even more of a treat.

[First published as Book Review: Between the Sheets:
The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century
Women Writers by Lesley McDowell, on Blogcritics.org.]