Showing posts with label Potpourri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Potpourri. Show all posts
Feb 11, 2023
Aug 13, 2022
Oct 23, 2021
Aug 26, 2018
Mar 12, 2017
Why Musicians Need Philosophy
by Sir Roger Scruton
Not as much, I grant, as philosophers need music, but nevertheless the need is real. In the past our musical culture had secure foundations in the church, in the concert hall and in the home. The common practice of tonal harmony united composers, performers and listeners in a shared language, and people played instruments at home with an intimate sense of belonging to the music that they made, just as the music belonged to them. The repertoire was neither controversial nor especially challenging, and music took its place in the ceremonies and celebrations of ordinary life alongside the rituals of everyday religion and the forms of good manners.
We no longer live in that world. Few people play instruments, and music at home emerges from digital machines, controlled by buttons that require no musical culture to be pressed. For many people, the young especially, music is a form of solitary enjoyment, to be absorbed without judgment and stored without effort in the brain. The circumstances of music-making have therefore changed radically, and this is reflected not only in the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music, but also in the radical avoidance of melody and harmony in the ‘modern classical’ repertoire. Released from its old institutional and social foundations our music has either floated into the modernist stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth by the repetitious mechanisms of pop.
At the serious end of the repertoire, therefore, ideas have taken over. It is not music that we hear in the world of Stockhausen but philosophy –second-rate philosophy to be sure, but philosophy all the same. And the same is true of other art forms that are cut loose from their cultural and religious foundations. The architecture of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe is an architecture of ideas, and when the futility of the ideas became apparent they were replaced by other ideas, equally alien to architecture as an aesthetic discipline, but nevertheless impeccably philosophical. The gadget architecture of Zaha Hadid and Morphosis does not issue from a trained visual imagination, or a real love of composition: it issues from doodles on a computer in response to ideas. There is a philosophy behind this stuff, and if ordinary people protest that it doesn’t look right, that it doesn’t fit in, or that it is offensive to all natural standards of visual harmony, they will be answered with fragments of that philosophy, in which abstract concepts extinguish the demands of visual taste. These buildings, they will be told, provide a pioneering use of space, are breaking new ground in built form, are an exciting challenge to orthodoxies, resonate with modern life. But just why those properties are virtues, and just how they make themselves known in the result, are questions that receive no answer.
Just the same kind of botched philosophy has dominated the modern classical repertoire. Very few composers have philosophical gifts, and fewer still attempt to justify their music in philosophical terms – the great exception being Wagner, who, despite his vast literary output, always allowed his instinctive musicianship to prevail when it conflicted with his philosophical theories. But it is precisely the absence of philosophical reflection that has led to the invasion of the musical arena by half-baked ideas. Without the firm foundations provided by a live culture of music-making, philosophy is the only guide that we have; and when good philosophy is absent, bad philosophy steps in to the gap.
The worst example of this, and it is an example whose influence is almost as strong today as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, is Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, first published in 1947. In that book Adorno develops the philosophy of a major composer, who almost succeeded in doing what Wagner happily failed to do, which was to replace the reality of music by an abstract idea of it. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism was based on a set of ideas that are clearly disputable, but which, because of the pretence of system, could overwhelm the hesitant objections of mere music-lovers. Here are some of those ideas:
Philosophy can be driven out only by more philosophy. And the rival philosophy has not been forthcoming. All that we have received from Darmstadt and its successors is a reiteration of the clichés introduced by Adorno, in particular the cliché that musical organisation in our tradition is fundamentally arbitrary, and can be remade according to other rules – permutational, aleatoric, serial, and so on – while engaging the perceptions and interests that have emerged over centuries in the concert hall. That cliché commits the paradigm error of philosophy, which is to oppose an empirical truth with an a priori falsehood.
There is in fact nothing arbitrary about the diatonic scale or the place of the tonic within it. While there can be other scales, some sounding strange to Western ears, they are all attempts to divide up the octave, to provide significant points of rest and closure, and to preserve natural harmonies delivered by the overtone series. The diatonic scale is one of a number of modes derived from mediaeval church music, and its history is not a history of arbitrary invention, but one of gradual discovery. The circle of fifths, the chromatic scale, modulation, voice-leading and triadic harmony – all these are discoveries, representing at each stage an advance into a shared tonal space. The result is not the product of decision or design: it is as natural and embedded in our experience as the post and beam in architecture or frying and baking in cookery. If composers are to ‘make it new’, then they must recognize this natural quality and not defy it. Yet defiance of nature has become an orthodoxy, and when asked to explain and justify this defiance composers will invariably lean on some variant of Adorno’s philosophy. Music for the concert hall has increasingly followed the pattern of Stockhausen’s Gruppen – elaborate sound effects, organised by arcane systems of rhythm and pitch, which no normal ear can hold together as music, but which comes with intimidating programme notes explaining why this doesn’t matter, and why the normal ear is an impediment to creative music in any case.
What I have said of Stockhausen’s massively pretentious piece will be dismissed as reactionary and philistine. Adorno and his followers accuse their opponents of ‘not getting it’, of being behind the times, and resisting the march of history. A kind of anti-bourgeois snobbery infects Adorno’s pages, as it infected the pages of his hero Karl Marx. The Young Hegelian doctrine of the forward march of history survives in their philosophy of music, notwithstanding its crushing refutation by history itself. One of Wagner’s greatest achievements was to have taken that Young Hegelian doctrine seriously, to have built it into a music drama of titanic proportions, and to have allowed his music to refute it. In the end that is one of the most important lessons of the Ring cycle. The artist hero, who is to usher in the new world of emancipation by smashing the spear of our previous agreements, destroys thereby the moral order on which he depends. Such is Siegfried’s tragedy.
No wonder Adorno was so negative about Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung, the most modern composition of its time, which shows in detail why it is against nature to be a modernist. We need to go back over the ground so intricately covered by that great work of art, and to raise again the question that motivates it: how to reconcile future creativity with the legacy of our past agreements? This question has been raised by other composers too – notably by Hans Pfitzner in Palestrina. And that opera contains the seeds of quite another philosophy than the one foisted on the musical public by Adorno, the philosophy touched on also by T.S. Eliot in his great essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. According to this rival philosophy true artists are not the antagonists of tradition but their latest advocates. They belong to the future because they are guardians of the past.—Future Symphony
Not as much, I grant, as philosophers need music, but nevertheless the need is real. In the past our musical culture had secure foundations in the church, in the concert hall and in the home. The common practice of tonal harmony united composers, performers and listeners in a shared language, and people played instruments at home with an intimate sense of belonging to the music that they made, just as the music belonged to them. The repertoire was neither controversial nor especially challenging, and music took its place in the ceremonies and celebrations of ordinary life alongside the rituals of everyday religion and the forms of good manners.
We no longer live in that world. Few people play instruments, and music at home emerges from digital machines, controlled by buttons that require no musical culture to be pressed. For many people, the young especially, music is a form of solitary enjoyment, to be absorbed without judgment and stored without effort in the brain. The circumstances of music-making have therefore changed radically, and this is reflected not only in the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music, but also in the radical avoidance of melody and harmony in the ‘modern classical’ repertoire. Released from its old institutional and social foundations our music has either floated into the modernist stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth by the repetitious mechanisms of pop.
At the serious end of the repertoire, therefore, ideas have taken over. It is not music that we hear in the world of Stockhausen but philosophy –second-rate philosophy to be sure, but philosophy all the same. And the same is true of other art forms that are cut loose from their cultural and religious foundations. The architecture of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe is an architecture of ideas, and when the futility of the ideas became apparent they were replaced by other ideas, equally alien to architecture as an aesthetic discipline, but nevertheless impeccably philosophical. The gadget architecture of Zaha Hadid and Morphosis does not issue from a trained visual imagination, or a real love of composition: it issues from doodles on a computer in response to ideas. There is a philosophy behind this stuff, and if ordinary people protest that it doesn’t look right, that it doesn’t fit in, or that it is offensive to all natural standards of visual harmony, they will be answered with fragments of that philosophy, in which abstract concepts extinguish the demands of visual taste. These buildings, they will be told, provide a pioneering use of space, are breaking new ground in built form, are an exciting challenge to orthodoxies, resonate with modern life. But just why those properties are virtues, and just how they make themselves known in the result, are questions that receive no answer.
Just the same kind of botched philosophy has dominated the modern classical repertoire. Very few composers have philosophical gifts, and fewer still attempt to justify their music in philosophical terms – the great exception being Wagner, who, despite his vast literary output, always allowed his instinctive musicianship to prevail when it conflicted with his philosophical theories. But it is precisely the absence of philosophical reflection that has led to the invasion of the musical arena by half-baked ideas. Without the firm foundations provided by a live culture of music-making, philosophy is the only guide that we have; and when good philosophy is absent, bad philosophy steps in to the gap.
The worst example of this, and it is an example whose influence is almost as strong today as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, is Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, first published in 1947. In that book Adorno develops the philosophy of a major composer, who almost succeeded in doing what Wagner happily failed to do, which was to replace the reality of music by an abstract idea of it. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism was based on a set of ideas that are clearly disputable, but which, because of the pretence of system, could overwhelm the hesitant objections of mere music-lovers. Here are some of those ideas:
- the diatonic scale arranges pitches which could be arranged in other ways and still be used to make intelligible and enjoyable music;
- melodies could be constructed without the use of scales, and without a mode or a key;
- the twelve notes of the chromatic scale could be used in such a way that no one of them emerges as tonic, or as in any other way privileged;
- to achieve this it is sufficient to devise a permutational, rather than a successive, arrangement of the pitches;
- harmonies, construed as simultaneities, will abolish the distinction between consonance and dissonance, opening the way to new forms of harmonic sequence.
Philosophy can be driven out only by more philosophy. And the rival philosophy has not been forthcoming. All that we have received from Darmstadt and its successors is a reiteration of the clichés introduced by Adorno, in particular the cliché that musical organisation in our tradition is fundamentally arbitrary, and can be remade according to other rules – permutational, aleatoric, serial, and so on – while engaging the perceptions and interests that have emerged over centuries in the concert hall. That cliché commits the paradigm error of philosophy, which is to oppose an empirical truth with an a priori falsehood.
There is in fact nothing arbitrary about the diatonic scale or the place of the tonic within it. While there can be other scales, some sounding strange to Western ears, they are all attempts to divide up the octave, to provide significant points of rest and closure, and to preserve natural harmonies delivered by the overtone series. The diatonic scale is one of a number of modes derived from mediaeval church music, and its history is not a history of arbitrary invention, but one of gradual discovery. The circle of fifths, the chromatic scale, modulation, voice-leading and triadic harmony – all these are discoveries, representing at each stage an advance into a shared tonal space. The result is not the product of decision or design: it is as natural and embedded in our experience as the post and beam in architecture or frying and baking in cookery. If composers are to ‘make it new’, then they must recognize this natural quality and not defy it. Yet defiance of nature has become an orthodoxy, and when asked to explain and justify this defiance composers will invariably lean on some variant of Adorno’s philosophy. Music for the concert hall has increasingly followed the pattern of Stockhausen’s Gruppen – elaborate sound effects, organised by arcane systems of rhythm and pitch, which no normal ear can hold together as music, but which comes with intimidating programme notes explaining why this doesn’t matter, and why the normal ear is an impediment to creative music in any case.
What I have said of Stockhausen’s massively pretentious piece will be dismissed as reactionary and philistine. Adorno and his followers accuse their opponents of ‘not getting it’, of being behind the times, and resisting the march of history. A kind of anti-bourgeois snobbery infects Adorno’s pages, as it infected the pages of his hero Karl Marx. The Young Hegelian doctrine of the forward march of history survives in their philosophy of music, notwithstanding its crushing refutation by history itself. One of Wagner’s greatest achievements was to have taken that Young Hegelian doctrine seriously, to have built it into a music drama of titanic proportions, and to have allowed his music to refute it. In the end that is one of the most important lessons of the Ring cycle. The artist hero, who is to usher in the new world of emancipation by smashing the spear of our previous agreements, destroys thereby the moral order on which he depends. Such is Siegfried’s tragedy.
No wonder Adorno was so negative about Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung, the most modern composition of its time, which shows in detail why it is against nature to be a modernist. We need to go back over the ground so intricately covered by that great work of art, and to raise again the question that motivates it: how to reconcile future creativity with the legacy of our past agreements? This question has been raised by other composers too – notably by Hans Pfitzner in Palestrina. And that opera contains the seeds of quite another philosophy than the one foisted on the musical public by Adorno, the philosophy touched on also by T.S. Eliot in his great essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. According to this rival philosophy true artists are not the antagonists of tradition but their latest advocates. They belong to the future because they are guardians of the past.—Future Symphony
Nov 16, 2014
The True Stories Behind Classic Fairy Tales
Fairy tales, gripping, magical and inspiring, are master narratives. Children subconsciously recall their messages as they grow older, and are forced to cope with real injustices and contradictions in their lives. Some fairy tales are based on legends that incorporated a spiritual belief of the culture in which they originated, and were meant to emulate truth.
Numerous fairy tales, and the legends behind them, are actually watered-down versions of uncomfortable historical events. These darker stories might be too terrifying for today's little lambkins, as well as some adults! Their horrific origins, which often involve rape, incest, torture, cannibalism and other hideous occurrences, are brimming with sophisticated and brutal morality. Their images cannot be dispelled easily and their lessons are more powerful than the present-day, innocuous fables they resemble.
In the early 1800's Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected stories that depicted the unpredictable and often unforgiving life experienced by central Europeans. These brothers, determined to preserve the Germanic oral story telling that was vanishing, poured over the folklore of the region. Their first collection of stories was based on actual, gruesome events. However, they had to provide lighter interpretations of these factual incidents in order to sell books. Consequently they paid attention to previously printed fairytales, particularly those of Charles Perrault. As early as the 17th century, this Frenchman who is thought to be the father of fairy tales, created some of the most imaginative and delightful stories ever told. His confabulations of a pumpkin carriage and Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, for example, are magnificently enchanting. His original Cinderella, based on a true story, contains violent elements as well, since the wicked stepsisters butcher their own feet while trying to get into the slipper that the Prince had found.
Perrault's tales, albeit charming, were unsentimental; for they were intended for adults, because no children's literature existed at the time. His suspense story, BLUEBEARD, reads like a crime thriller, with the bloody knives and curious dead wives, his moral, that women should be less nosy, apparent. Perrault based his fairy tale on two accounts of dark depravity in Brittany, France. The earlier of the two accounts dealt with a savage, 6th century ruler. The second detailed the acts of a nobleman, named Gilles de Rais, who tortured, mutilated, raped and murdered hundreds of innocent children. My book explores the life and crimes of this tragic, historic figure.
The almost barbaric episodes that follow are just a smattering of fairy tales, as we know them today, derived from spoken legends which were based on facts. The morals these stories convey are far more important than the events themselves, the circumstances of which are often forgotten. These cautionary tales, where good conquers evil, the wicked get punished, the righteous live happily ever after, offer hope that one can do something positive about changing oneself and the world.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The fairy tale is based on the tragic life of Margarete von Waldeck, a 16th century Bavarian noblewoman. Margarete grew up in Bad Wildungen, where her brother used small children to work his copper mine. Severely deformed because of the physical labor mining required, they were despairingly referred to as dwarfs. The poison apple is also rooted in fact; an old man would offer tainted fruits to the workers, and other children he believed stole from him.
Margarete's stepmother, despising her, sent the beauty, to the Brussels court to get rid of her. There Prince Philip II of Spain became her steamy lover. His father, the king of Spain, opposing the romance, dispatched Spanish agents to murder Margarete. They surreptitiously poisoned her.
Rapunzel
Rapunzel draws upon an early Christian story. In the third century A.D. a prosperous pagan merchant, living in Asia Minor, so adored his beautiful daughter he forbade her to have suitors. Accordingly he locked her in a tower when he traveled. There is no mention how hair became important, but she converted to Christianity, praying so loudly when the merchant left, her devotions reverberated throughout town. The merchant, informed of her actions, dragged her before the Roman pro-consul who insisted the father behead her or forfeit his fortune if she should refuse to give up her newfound religion. The father decapitated her but was killed by a lightning strike soon after. She became the martyr, Saint Barbara, revered by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Bluebeard
Perrault wove his story around Conomor the Cursed, the Breton chief who had been forewarned he would be slain by his own son. As soon as one of his wives became pregnant, he murdered her. But Perrault was more fascinated by Gilles de Rais, a wealthy 15th century nobleman, a hero of the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc's protector on the battlefield. After he left the military he became a notorious serial killer of children. He was given the nickname, Bluebeard, because his horse's sleek fur looked blue in the daylight. At his shocking trial, he described in detail how he had preyed upon and tortured innocent children. Perrault drew upon these facts to conjure up his own nightmarish character.
Hansel and Gretel
The tale of Hansel and Gretel could have been told to keep children from wandering off. But during the great famine of 1315-1317 A. D. that crushed most of continental Europe and England, disease, mass death, infanticide and cannibalism increased exponentially. Seeking relief, some desperate parents deserted their children and slaughtered their draft animals.
Or Hansel and Gretel might have stumbled upon the home of the successful baker, Katharina Schraderin. In the 1600s, she concocted such a scrumptious ginger bread cookie that a jealous male baker accused her of being a witch. After being driven from town, a posse of angry neighbors hunted her down, brought her back to her home, and burned her to death in her own oven.
Little Jack Horner
This story matches events in the life of Bishop Richard Whiting of Glastonbury and his steward, who was perhaps named Jack Horner. When King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church and dissolved its Monasteries in England, Glastonbury remained the sole religious home in Somerset. Whiting, trying to keep the abbey, bribed the King by offering him twelve Catholic manorial estates. To thwart potential thieves, he hid the deeds to the estates in a pie crust. But the seventy-nine-year-old Bishop, convicted of treason for serving Rome, was drawn, quartered and hung at Glastonbury Tor overlooking the town. His "good" steward absconded with the plum deed to the Manor of Mells, and Horner's descendants lived there until the 20th century.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
In 1264, a pied piper had offered to get rid of the numerous rats in the Germanic village of Hamelin, as long as the town elders gave him a considerable amount of money upon the completion of this task. After he disposed of the rats, the elders reneged on their promise. Furious, the piper enticed the children of the village to follow him. They never returned.
Some believe the Piper led the innocents to the Mediterranean to join the Children's Crusade leaving for the Holy Land. Presumably children would peacefully convert Moslems to Christianity after the Mediterranean rolled back, allowing their safe passage to Jerusalem. The Sea did not oblige, and many children starved to death waiting for the miracle to occur.
Cinderella
That blond, fair-complexioned, but mistreated beauty in Perrault's tale loosely relates to the history of Rhodopis, a Greek woman, whose name means "rosy-cheeked." When she was a young girl, she was captured in Thrace, sold into slavery around 500 BC, and taken to Egypt.
Her unusual looks made her a treasured commodity, and her master showered her with gifts, including a pair of golden shoes. These shoes and Rhodopis were noticed by the Pharaoh, Ahmose II. He insisted she become one of his wives. While not his principal, revered partner, born of royal blood, she would still perform ceremonial functions and...mainly be readily available to gratify Ahmose sexually. Did her new found status offer her perpetual happiness? Probably not. –Huffington Post
Numerous fairy tales, and the legends behind them, are actually watered-down versions of uncomfortable historical events. These darker stories might be too terrifying for today's little lambkins, as well as some adults! Their horrific origins, which often involve rape, incest, torture, cannibalism and other hideous occurrences, are brimming with sophisticated and brutal morality. Their images cannot be dispelled easily and their lessons are more powerful than the present-day, innocuous fables they resemble.
In the early 1800's Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected stories that depicted the unpredictable and often unforgiving life experienced by central Europeans. These brothers, determined to preserve the Germanic oral story telling that was vanishing, poured over the folklore of the region. Their first collection of stories was based on actual, gruesome events. However, they had to provide lighter interpretations of these factual incidents in order to sell books. Consequently they paid attention to previously printed fairytales, particularly those of Charles Perrault. As early as the 17th century, this Frenchman who is thought to be the father of fairy tales, created some of the most imaginative and delightful stories ever told. His confabulations of a pumpkin carriage and Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, for example, are magnificently enchanting. His original Cinderella, based on a true story, contains violent elements as well, since the wicked stepsisters butcher their own feet while trying to get into the slipper that the Prince had found.
Perrault's tales, albeit charming, were unsentimental; for they were intended for adults, because no children's literature existed at the time. His suspense story, BLUEBEARD, reads like a crime thriller, with the bloody knives and curious dead wives, his moral, that women should be less nosy, apparent. Perrault based his fairy tale on two accounts of dark depravity in Brittany, France. The earlier of the two accounts dealt with a savage, 6th century ruler. The second detailed the acts of a nobleman, named Gilles de Rais, who tortured, mutilated, raped and murdered hundreds of innocent children. My book explores the life and crimes of this tragic, historic figure.
The almost barbaric episodes that follow are just a smattering of fairy tales, as we know them today, derived from spoken legends which were based on facts. The morals these stories convey are far more important than the events themselves, the circumstances of which are often forgotten. These cautionary tales, where good conquers evil, the wicked get punished, the righteous live happily ever after, offer hope that one can do something positive about changing oneself and the world.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The fairy tale is based on the tragic life of Margarete von Waldeck, a 16th century Bavarian noblewoman. Margarete grew up in Bad Wildungen, where her brother used small children to work his copper mine. Severely deformed because of the physical labor mining required, they were despairingly referred to as dwarfs. The poison apple is also rooted in fact; an old man would offer tainted fruits to the workers, and other children he believed stole from him.
Margarete's stepmother, despising her, sent the beauty, to the Brussels court to get rid of her. There Prince Philip II of Spain became her steamy lover. His father, the king of Spain, opposing the romance, dispatched Spanish agents to murder Margarete. They surreptitiously poisoned her.
Rapunzel
Rapunzel draws upon an early Christian story. In the third century A.D. a prosperous pagan merchant, living in Asia Minor, so adored his beautiful daughter he forbade her to have suitors. Accordingly he locked her in a tower when he traveled. There is no mention how hair became important, but she converted to Christianity, praying so loudly when the merchant left, her devotions reverberated throughout town. The merchant, informed of her actions, dragged her before the Roman pro-consul who insisted the father behead her or forfeit his fortune if she should refuse to give up her newfound religion. The father decapitated her but was killed by a lightning strike soon after. She became the martyr, Saint Barbara, revered by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Bluebeard
Perrault wove his story around Conomor the Cursed, the Breton chief who had been forewarned he would be slain by his own son. As soon as one of his wives became pregnant, he murdered her. But Perrault was more fascinated by Gilles de Rais, a wealthy 15th century nobleman, a hero of the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc's protector on the battlefield. After he left the military he became a notorious serial killer of children. He was given the nickname, Bluebeard, because his horse's sleek fur looked blue in the daylight. At his shocking trial, he described in detail how he had preyed upon and tortured innocent children. Perrault drew upon these facts to conjure up his own nightmarish character.
Hansel and Gretel
The tale of Hansel and Gretel could have been told to keep children from wandering off. But during the great famine of 1315-1317 A. D. that crushed most of continental Europe and England, disease, mass death, infanticide and cannibalism increased exponentially. Seeking relief, some desperate parents deserted their children and slaughtered their draft animals.
Or Hansel and Gretel might have stumbled upon the home of the successful baker, Katharina Schraderin. In the 1600s, she concocted such a scrumptious ginger bread cookie that a jealous male baker accused her of being a witch. After being driven from town, a posse of angry neighbors hunted her down, brought her back to her home, and burned her to death in her own oven.
Little Jack Horner
This story matches events in the life of Bishop Richard Whiting of Glastonbury and his steward, who was perhaps named Jack Horner. When King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church and dissolved its Monasteries in England, Glastonbury remained the sole religious home in Somerset. Whiting, trying to keep the abbey, bribed the King by offering him twelve Catholic manorial estates. To thwart potential thieves, he hid the deeds to the estates in a pie crust. But the seventy-nine-year-old Bishop, convicted of treason for serving Rome, was drawn, quartered and hung at Glastonbury Tor overlooking the town. His "good" steward absconded with the plum deed to the Manor of Mells, and Horner's descendants lived there until the 20th century.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
In 1264, a pied piper had offered to get rid of the numerous rats in the Germanic village of Hamelin, as long as the town elders gave him a considerable amount of money upon the completion of this task. After he disposed of the rats, the elders reneged on their promise. Furious, the piper enticed the children of the village to follow him. They never returned.
Some believe the Piper led the innocents to the Mediterranean to join the Children's Crusade leaving for the Holy Land. Presumably children would peacefully convert Moslems to Christianity after the Mediterranean rolled back, allowing their safe passage to Jerusalem. The Sea did not oblige, and many children starved to death waiting for the miracle to occur.
Cinderella
That blond, fair-complexioned, but mistreated beauty in Perrault's tale loosely relates to the history of Rhodopis, a Greek woman, whose name means "rosy-cheeked." When she was a young girl, she was captured in Thrace, sold into slavery around 500 BC, and taken to Egypt.
Her unusual looks made her a treasured commodity, and her master showered her with gifts, including a pair of golden shoes. These shoes and Rhodopis were noticed by the Pharaoh, Ahmose II. He insisted she become one of his wives. While not his principal, revered partner, born of royal blood, she would still perform ceremonial functions and...mainly be readily available to gratify Ahmose sexually. Did her new found status offer her perpetual happiness? Probably not. –Huffington Post
Nov 2, 2014
8 Facts You Didn't Know About 'Sesame Street'
Sing of good things you didn't know, not bad.
Sing of happy, not sad.
In its almost 45-year history, "Sesame Street" has won 159 Emmys, multiple Grammys and, as of 2009, as many as 77 million adult Americans had watched the show as children. Over three dozen countries have a version and many more air the dubbed American show. In short, millions of people the world over have discovered how to get to Sesame Street.
In celebration of its many milestones, here are a few (The Count would say there are eight) little known facts from "Sesame Street":
1. Many of the main characters have completely changed.
It's understandable that characters have gone through updates since the show's inception. That written, a few of these updates have been considerably radical. A few examples:
Mr. Snuffleupagus used to be unintentionally super scary looking. Snuffy had yellow slits for eyes that made him look like a monster and had a much more ghastly body with less padding.
Cookie Monster used to have big pointy teeth, although this was when the puppet was used in commercials before the beginning of "Sesame Street."
Oscar the Grouch was orange.
Telly Monster initially had antennae coming out of his head and his eyes would spin whenever he watched television.
Caroll Spinney, the actor who played Big Bird since the beginning, described the character as not looking "too keen." Spinney said the bird was "one of the ugliest things" he had ever seen.
The Count's love of numbers isn't exactly just a play on his name. Vampires are supposed to have arithmomania -- a strong need to count surrounding objects.
Mr. Snuffleupagus used to be unintentionally super scary looking. Snuffy had yellow slits for eyes that made him look like a monster and had a much more ghastly body with less padding.
Cookie Monster used to have big pointy teeth, although this was when the puppet was used in commercials before the beginning of "Sesame Street."
Oscar the Grouch was orange.
Telly Monster initially had antennae coming out of his head and his eyes would spin whenever he watched television.
Caroll Spinney, the actor who played Big Bird since the beginning, described the character as not looking "too keen." Spinney said the bird was "one of the ugliest things" he had ever seen.
The Count's love of numbers isn't exactly just a play on his name. Vampires are supposed to have arithmomania -- a strong need to count surrounding objects.
In some versions of vampire folklore, a way to ward off the attacker is to throw "rice, millet, wheat or red lentils," as the bloodsucker will need to count the grains before moving on. In Europe, people would place "poppy seeds, millet or sand" at the graves of suspected vampires as a pre-emptive defense.
But is the Count even a vampire?
The puppet was originally modeled off Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula, and he certainly appears to be a vampire (the fangs, the cape, the creepy castle and the bats all certainly point to vampirism). But "Sesame Street" canon is actually divided on the subject. According to the "Muppet" fan wiki, in some accounts the character has been described as a "number-friendly vampire" and a "Numerical Vampire," but in at least one instance it was insisted: "The Count is not a vampire."
The Huffington Post contacted "Sesame Street" PR who pointed out that Count is "not named specifically as a vampire" in his bio. Perhaps it isn't possible to shed more light on this mystery as vampires hate that.
3. The show was almost all about Bert and Ernie.
But is the Count even a vampire?
The puppet was originally modeled off Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula, and he certainly appears to be a vampire (the fangs, the cape, the creepy castle and the bats all certainly point to vampirism). But "Sesame Street" canon is actually divided on the subject. According to the "Muppet" fan wiki, in some accounts the character has been described as a "number-friendly vampire" and a "Numerical Vampire," but in at least one instance it was insisted: "The Count is not a vampire."
The Huffington Post contacted "Sesame Street" PR who pointed out that Count is "not named specifically as a vampire" in his bio. Perhaps it isn't possible to shed more light on this mystery as vampires hate that.
3. The show was almost all about Bert and Ernie.
In the original pilot, the scenes between human and muppet characters were separated, as child psychologists worried that mixing fantasy and reality would mislead children. The muppets that dominated the show were Bert and Ernie, the only characters that tested well during screenings. As soon as the program would cut away to just humans, children's attention levels plummeted.
It is rumored that a decision was almost made to cut everything but Bert and Ernie and have the show focus around them. These testings led to the creation of Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus, according to Edward Palmer, one of the founders of "Sesame Street."
4. Oscar the Grouch actually fell in love ... with the Wicked Witch of the West.
It is rumored that a decision was almost made to cut everything but Bert and Ernie and have the show focus around them. These testings led to the creation of Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus, according to Edward Palmer, one of the founders of "Sesame Street."
4. Oscar the Grouch actually fell in love ... with the Wicked Witch of the West.
The trashcan dweller may be known for usually just loving "crummy weather," but he has actually fallen in love. In a now banned episode that was deemed too scary for children, the Wicked Witch of the West made an appearance on "Sesame Street" and was crushed on by Oscar. Unfortunately, the relationship didn't take off.
For what it's worth, Oscar did also fall in love with a new, trashy neighbor named Germaine the Grouch in a short children's book. The green grouch struggles to woo the pink grouch when he tries to flirt, and therefore isn't grouchy. When he loses his temper in frustration, his true grouchiness comes out though and the two have a disgusting picnic together. True love!
5. Snuffleupagus was initially Big Bird's imaginary friend, but then became real so kids wouldn't fear bringing up sexual abuse.
For what it's worth, Oscar did also fall in love with a new, trashy neighbor named Germaine the Grouch in a short children's book. The green grouch struggles to woo the pink grouch when he tries to flirt, and therefore isn't grouchy. When he loses his temper in frustration, his true grouchiness comes out though and the two have a disgusting picnic together. True love!
5. Snuffleupagus was initially Big Bird's imaginary friend, but then became real so kids wouldn't fear bringing up sexual abuse.
Until 1985, the adults on "Sesame Street" believed Snuffy wasn't real. Whenever Big Bird would try to introduce the character, the adults would just miss meeting him (Snuffleupagus would walk out of the scene before their arrival, the adults wouldn't turn their heads in time or other similar gags). Besides Big Bird, only a few other muppets, kids and guest celebrities (such as Judy Collins) could see Mr. Snuffleupagus.
The character was finally introduced to adults in Episode 2,096. According to the "Muppet" fan wiki, Martin P. Robinson, the person who played Snuffleupagus, said in the documentary "Sesame Street Unpaved" that the introduction was due to high-profile cases of pedophilia, which convinced writers that children shouldn't be afraid adults won't believe them. Dulcy Singer, the show's executive producer, said at the time, "We didn't want to do anything to discourage children from going to their parents."
Also, on a much less serious note, did you know that Mr. Snuffleupagus' first name is Aloysius?
6. "Sesame Street" develops special features for military families and for children with an incarcerated parent. Also, Elmo's dad was deployed overseas.
The character was finally introduced to adults in Episode 2,096. According to the "Muppet" fan wiki, Martin P. Robinson, the person who played Snuffleupagus, said in the documentary "Sesame Street Unpaved" that the introduction was due to high-profile cases of pedophilia, which convinced writers that children shouldn't be afraid adults won't believe them. Dulcy Singer, the show's executive producer, said at the time, "We didn't want to do anything to discourage children from going to their parents."
Also, on a much less serious note, did you know that Mr. Snuffleupagus' first name is Aloysius?
6. "Sesame Street" develops special features for military families and for children with an incarcerated parent. Also, Elmo's dad was deployed overseas.
"Talk, Listen, Connect" is a special installment of videos for military children that helps explain both long absences and the possibility of parents returning with injuries or even not returning at all. According to a U.S. Army sergeant quoted on the Sesame Workshop site:
We had a triple amputee come in recently who had not seen his 3-year-old daughter since his injury and was afraid of how she would react ... I gave him the 'Talk, Listen, Connect' outreach kit and explained the materials to him. He was so happy he started to cry with joy.
The materials are free and available online.
Similar kits also exist to help children with an incarcerated parent, as well as many other potentially devastating scenarios such as hurricanes or familial financial struggles.
7. The Elmo puppet was initially just a background extra and was given up on as a workable character.
We had a triple amputee come in recently who had not seen his 3-year-old daughter since his injury and was afraid of how she would react ... I gave him the 'Talk, Listen, Connect' outreach kit and explained the materials to him. He was so happy he started to cry with joy.
The materials are free and available online.
Similar kits also exist to help children with an incarcerated parent, as well as many other potentially devastating scenarios such as hurricanes or familial financial struggles.
7. The Elmo puppet was initially just a background extra and was given up on as a workable character.
Elmo didn't officially debut until Season 12, although the muppet had already been used as a random extra in scenes for quite some time. Initially this "new" character only communicated with "sounds rather than words."
Apparently, one of the early voices of the character, Richard Hunt, tried to perform Elmo with a gruff, caveman voice, but eventually abandoned the concept. According to legend, he tossed Elmo around, only to have Kevin Clash pick up the muppet and create the beloved character.
The red 3-year-old ended up becoming the only puppet or non-human to testify before Congress in 2002, advocating for increased funding for music programs.
8. "Sesame Street" is named after the "Arabian Nights" phrase "Open, Sesame!"
Apparently, one of the early voices of the character, Richard Hunt, tried to perform Elmo with a gruff, caveman voice, but eventually abandoned the concept. According to legend, he tossed Elmo around, only to have Kevin Clash pick up the muppet and create the beloved character.
The red 3-year-old ended up becoming the only puppet or non-human to testify before Congress in 2002, advocating for increased funding for music programs.
8. "Sesame Street" is named after the "Arabian Nights" phrase "Open, Sesame!"
According to Sesame Workshop, a show writer named Virginia Schone proposed the word "Sesame." Its use in an "Arabian Nights" tale, she said, made it feel like it was loaded with a sense of adventure. The show was already set on an urban street, so "Sesame Street" just clicked.
Producer Jon Stone claimed “the name was set at the 11th hour and 59th minute.” Apparently, names such as "1-2-3 Avenue B" and "Fun Street" were also considered. The former was ultimately rejected as it would appeal less to children outside of New York City.
Everyone on the staff initially disliked the name, fearing children would have a hard time pronouncing it, but obviously those worries ended up being put to rest.
BONUS: Cookie Monster did not become the Veggie Monster.
That was a hoax! In 2005, Cookie Monster did start to focus slightly on eating right -- he can be seen eating fruits and vegetables occasionally -- but the character still devours cookies like nobody else. Cookie Monster went on "Today" in 2006 and explained his new diet to Matt Lauer:
Cookie Monster: Me like fruit.
Matt Lauer: And there you have it. Cookie Monster likes fruit, and not cookies.
Monster: No! You members of the media blow story way out of proportion! Me still like cookies!
Lauer: Then why fruit?
Monster: Why not fruit? It delicious! And healthy. Me still eat cookies, like me world-famous for doing, but now me eat other things, too.
The misconception is partly credited to a new song entitled "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food," although Hoots the Owl actually sings the song to Cookie Monster, and at the end Cookie Monster declares: "NOW is sometimes!"That was a hoax! In 2005, Cookie Monster did start to focus slightly on eating right -- he can be seen eating fruits and vegetables occasionally -- but the character still devours cookies like nobody else. Cookie Monster went on "Today" in 2006 and explained his new diet to Matt Lauer:
Cookie Monster: Me like fruit.
Matt Lauer: And there you have it. Cookie Monster likes fruit, and not cookies.
Monster: No! You members of the media blow story way out of proportion! Me still like cookies!
Lauer: Then why fruit?
Monster: Why not fruit? It delicious! And healthy. Me still eat cookies, like me world-famous for doing, but now me eat other things, too.
The misconception is partly credited to a new song entitled "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food," although Hoots the Owl actually sings the song to Cookie Monster, and at the end Cookie Monster declares: "NOW is sometimes!" -Huffington Post
Cookie Monster: Me like fruit.
Matt Lauer: And there you have it. Cookie Monster likes fruit, and not cookies.
Monster: No! You members of the media blow story way out of proportion! Me still like cookies!
Lauer: Then why fruit?
Monster: Why not fruit? It delicious! And healthy. Me still eat cookies, like me world-famous for doing, but now me eat other things, too.
The misconception is partly credited to a new song entitled "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food," although Hoots the Owl actually sings the song to Cookie Monster, and at the end Cookie Monster declares: "NOW is sometimes!"That was a hoax! In 2005, Cookie Monster did start to focus slightly on eating right -- he can be seen eating fruits and vegetables occasionally -- but the character still devours cookies like nobody else. Cookie Monster went on "Today" in 2006 and explained his new diet to Matt Lauer:
Cookie Monster: Me like fruit.
Matt Lauer: And there you have it. Cookie Monster likes fruit, and not cookies.
Monster: No! You members of the media blow story way out of proportion! Me still like cookies!
Lauer: Then why fruit?
Monster: Why not fruit? It delicious! And healthy. Me still eat cookies, like me world-famous for doing, but now me eat other things, too.
The misconception is partly credited to a new song entitled "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food," although Hoots the Owl actually sings the song to Cookie Monster, and at the end Cookie Monster declares: "NOW is sometimes!" -Huffington Post
Mar 2, 2014
Why Toronto Is A Great Music City
I love Toronto. I was born and raised in Toronto where I was fortunate to have a world-class musical education from a young age. I started violin lessons at four with Clara Schranz, took saxophone lessons in middle and high school with Andy Ballantyne and Alex Dean and studied violin with the legendary Lorand Fenyves.Leaving Toronto to go study classical violin at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music turned out to be a mixed blessing. While there, I improved my violin playing, learned a lot about music theory, learned how to play well in a chamber group, and a whole lot more. Most importantly I learned that I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra, and that I really didn’t want to live in Cleveland. Coming from a world-class city such as Toronto made Cleveland look pretty bad.
I spent a lot of my time working out techniques for jazz improvisation on the violin, jamming with friends in various genres, and generally avoiding the Cleveland Institute as much as possible.
The very best thing that came out of my time there was meeting my talented and wonderful wife, violinist Rebekah Wolkstein.
I could have ended up anywhere, as I had no specific plans to return to Toronto. Luckily, I met the late great guitarist and trumpet player Jeff Healey on a trip home during my final year and he told me that I had a job waiting for me in his Jazz Wizards when I finished school. I learned far too much from my time with Jeff to enumerate here, but by far the most important thing he did for me was to bring me home.
Living in Toronto, in the centre of the Canadian music scene, I have had opportunities to play numerous genres of music. I love jazz, but I love variety even more. This city is culturally and musically rich, which has allowed my career to develop in new ways every year. I’ve had opportunities to write arrangements, to compose for soundtracks, to write songs, and to produce records. Since moving back here ten years ago, I’ve played in concert halls, bars, weddings, funerals, sessions, orchestras, musicals, house concerts - you name it - in countless genres with countless fantastic musicians.
There are so many amazing musicians in Toronto that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Every time I think I must have met every great musician in town, I suddenly discover more. There are two great jazz schools pumping out new players all the time, so the talent pool shows no sign of drying up. I’ve been teaching at one of them (Humber College) for several years, which has allowed me to meet and work with many great young players who I expect to see on the scene in coming years.
And to support those musicians, we’ve got music lovers as well! My weekly gig at the Rex Hotel has been well attended for 5 years. JAZZ.FM91 is an amazing supportive radio station, which goes out of its way to promote jazz and local talent.
The quality of life for musicians in Toronto is great. National healthcare alone gives it a leg up over American cities. My friends who live in New York and other music cities can’t believe how well musicians are able to live here. This city has kept both my wife and I busy as players for years, often in completely different musical spheres - if you are curious, you should look up her amazing new Tango project, Payadora. It’s also been a wonderful place for us to raise our amazing 15-month-old daughter Sylvie.
If you’re reading this you’re probably already on the same page as me. If you love this city as much as I do, take every opportunity to support the arts. Give money, give time, go to shows, donate to JAZZ.FM91, tell people about the musicians you love, go see new artists, go see old artists, buy music from artists you like, host a house concert, foster a love for good music in a young relative, whatever! The music fans in this city make it a great place for musicians, who in turn make it an amazing place for music fans. We all win! -Jazz FM 91
Feb 2, 2014
12 Most Offensive Adverts That Would Be Banned Today
In the present age of marketing, advertisements often tend to cross limits in a race to elevate the sales or to get the limelight of media. Advertisements often use lies and exaggerations as their main tool for grasping the attention of the masses. But what line did advertisements cross in the past? The answer lies in these offensive, racist vintage adverts:
Oct 6, 2013
Sep 15, 2013
Aug 4, 2013
Jul 14, 2013
Apr 21, 2013
A Star Is Reborn
Hit the Wall, Re-creating The First Night Of The Stonewall Riots, Opens In New York.
Some LGBT people of a certain age may think younger ones don’t know or care about the movement’s history, but this youthful playwright and theater director certainly do — and they’re re-creating a major part of that history on a stage not far from where the event happened. Writer Ike Holter, 27, and director Eric Hoff, 30, tell the tale of the first night of the Stonewall riots in Hit the Wall, now having its New York premiere at the Barrow Street Theatre, just a couple blocks from the Stonewall Inn, after having been staged twice in Chicago last year.
“I’ve always been fascinated by Stonewall and its late-’60s revolutionary zeal,” says Holter. “I just always really responded to that kind of grassroots civil rights movement.”
“I know there are a lot of younger people who have no idea what Stonewall is,” adds Hoff, but he expects Hit the Wall to change that, telling the world about the night in June 1969 when gay and trans patrons of the Greenwich Village bar fought a police raid, sparking the modern gay rights movement.
Hit the Wall opened at Barrow Street in March for an open-ended run. It was first produced early last year in Chicago by the Inconvenience, a storefront theater company, through Steppenwolf Theatre’s Garage Rep program, which spotlights small, innovative troupes. Another run followed at the Windy City’s Theater on the Lake. After good reviews in Chicago and discussions with New York theater types, the Barrow Street production fell into place.
The show has a 10-person cast, two of whom appeared in the Chicago premiere, and while it’s not a musical, it has original incidental music by Daniel Lipton. Producers include longtime Woody Allen associate Jean Doumanian, a “legend,” says Holter.
In addition to introducing the story of Stonewall to some audiences, the production is generating memories for some attendees who lived in New York during the riots, notes Hoff. With the New York production, “there’s this amazing contextualization,” Hoff says. Some theatergoers, he says, go over to the Stonewall Inn for a post-show drink.
President Obama’s mention of Stonewall with other civil rights milestones in his second inaugural address adds yet more context to the play, the collaborators say, noting that it’s not simply an LGBT story; it’s an American story. “It’s a very important thing,” Holter says, “not just for GLBTQ people, but for people who believe in human rights.” -By Trudy Ring/Advocate/April 16, 2013
Some LGBT people of a certain age may think younger ones don’t know or care about the movement’s history, but this youthful playwright and theater director certainly do — and they’re re-creating a major part of that history on a stage not far from where the event happened. Writer Ike Holter, 27, and director Eric Hoff, 30, tell the tale of the first night of the Stonewall riots in Hit the Wall, now having its New York premiere at the Barrow Street Theatre, just a couple blocks from the Stonewall Inn, after having been staged twice in Chicago last year.
“I’ve always been fascinated by Stonewall and its late-’60s revolutionary zeal,” says Holter. “I just always really responded to that kind of grassroots civil rights movement.”
“I know there are a lot of younger people who have no idea what Stonewall is,” adds Hoff, but he expects Hit the Wall to change that, telling the world about the night in June 1969 when gay and trans patrons of the Greenwich Village bar fought a police raid, sparking the modern gay rights movement.
Hit the Wall opened at Barrow Street in March for an open-ended run. It was first produced early last year in Chicago by the Inconvenience, a storefront theater company, through Steppenwolf Theatre’s Garage Rep program, which spotlights small, innovative troupes. Another run followed at the Windy City’s Theater on the Lake. After good reviews in Chicago and discussions with New York theater types, the Barrow Street production fell into place.
The show has a 10-person cast, two of whom appeared in the Chicago premiere, and while it’s not a musical, it has original incidental music by Daniel Lipton. Producers include longtime Woody Allen associate Jean Doumanian, a “legend,” says Holter.
In addition to introducing the story of Stonewall to some audiences, the production is generating memories for some attendees who lived in New York during the riots, notes Hoff. With the New York production, “there’s this amazing contextualization,” Hoff says. Some theatergoers, he says, go over to the Stonewall Inn for a post-show drink.
President Obama’s mention of Stonewall with other civil rights milestones in his second inaugural address adds yet more context to the play, the collaborators say, noting that it’s not simply an LGBT story; it’s an American story. “It’s a very important thing,” Holter says, “not just for GLBTQ people, but for people who believe in human rights.” -By Trudy Ring/Advocate/April 16, 2013
Jan 20, 2013
Blacks Would Not Be Democrats
If They Only Knew This…
^^^*^^^
Runaway Slave is one of the most important films of the year, it follows the Reverend C. L. Bryant as he travels a new underground railroad upon which black conservatives are speaking out against big government policies. –Patriot Update
Alan Cumming Has Never Been Better
The story of Any Day Now may take place in the past, but the discrimination against same-sex families it depicts is unfortunately still all too real.
George Arthur Bloom lived in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, back when it was a rough-and-tumble area. He was inspired by a larger-than-life character everyone seemed to know, Rudy, who developed a fatherly relationship with, as filmmaker Travis Fine puts it, a “kid who was terribly handicapped, both mentally and physically” and whose mother was a drug addict. Bloom turned Rudy’s real-life experience into a screenplay, which almost got filmed several times during the ensuing years (at one point Tommy Lee Jones and Sylvester Stallone were attached to it). Then it went nowhere, Bloom gave up, and it sat in a drawer until his son, an old high school friend of Fine’s, showed the director the script.
The movie that came of it, Any Day Now, which hit theaters this winter and garnered awards on the festival circuit, follows The Good Wife’s Alan Cumming as Rudy, Raising Hope’s Garret Dillahunt as Paul, the closeted attorney who becomes his partner, and Isaac Leyva as Marco, a teen with Down syndrome who’s abandoned by his mother and taken in by the men. They all must fight a biased legal system so the couple can adopt Isaac, a heart-wrenching storyline that will resonate with many of the 2 to 6 million LGBT people who say they’d like to adopt.
“The story of Any Day Now may take place in the past, but the discrimination against same-sex families it depicts is unfortunately still all too real in some parts of our country,” says GLAAD president Herndon Graddick.
It’s real too for kids like Marco. As of 2011 there were 104,236 children in foster care awaiting adoption, many of them considered special-needs children because they are black or Latino, are older than infants, or have some form of mental or physical disability. “What the film’s remarkable performances and eloquent script reveal, though, is how unjust and hurtful to same-sex couples and children that discrimination really is,” Graddick adds.
Cumming, whose performance is riveting and one of his most inspired, talks about making the film.
I found Any Day Now just completely absorbing and really moving. And I notice people just seem to really have a gut reaction to the film. Why do you think it reaches people that way?
I think that we see the story of people who are damaged and devastated by bigotry and prejudice and ignorance. And we understand how wrong that is because we’ve invested in these characters and we want them to be together. And then I think in a larger way, we know that the reason that happened is because that bigotry and that prejudice still exist in our society. And I think we are so moved by it because we know that we are complicit in that because we are all members of that society.
This is a story about many things — about family, the foster care system, and coming out, but at the heart of it, it’s a love story between your free-spirited Rudy and Garret’s buttoned-down, closeted Paul. How did you develop the sort of chemistry that viewers see between you and Garret on-screen?
We just had to fake it, because we didn’t know each other. It was very well-written. and obviously Garret is a really brilliant actor and we luckily felt very comfortable with each other and got on. And I think that’s half of it. Once you feel comfortable with someone you can just dive in. But you’d imagine we’d have lots of time to talk and get comfortable with each other. No, we were practically in bed on the first day.
One of the other parts of the film that we don’t see a lot of — but is so true — is that there’s so much difficulty over same-sex couples trying to adopt. But the reality is there are a ton of children and teenagers, especially with physical or mental disabilities, that will just languish in the system.
Absolutely right. And that to me is the biggest idea—because everyone falls in love with Isaac. Garret says at one point, “I’m just hoping that this child doesn’t slip through the cracks in the system,” and sadly he does.
Tell me about working with Isaac.
Oh, it was great. I loved it. I mean people think…you’re going to make a movie with someone who has a learning disability, what’s that going to mean? I had no idea. But I just went into it…with an open heart. And he was just an absolute darling and so lovely.… He’s got kind of openness to him and…he’s not at all jaded. Everything there’s pure, and it kind of reminded me of what acting should be like. Everything’s really on the surface and completely authentic.
That's great. You have some scenes of just real heartbreak and anguish. Was there anything in your own life that you could call on to sort of nail those scenes? To inspire?
Well, yes. I have had heartbreak and anguish in my life. That's not difficult for me to access.
So, ten years ago, we used to ask straight actors if they had any hesitation about playing a gay role. Now it's more common to ask gay actors if they worry about being pigeonholed. This is certainly not your first gay role, but do you ever worry about that?
No, I actually don't. I mean, [I'm] playing a straight man on TV every Monday. I just don't deal with that. I mean, I've played gay people, but I don't know the percentage. I just I don't think much in that way, you know. I don't correlate it in that way.
But I'm drawn to the stories and the character's heart, you know. And perhaps because… I'm comfortable with it, I'm likely to be offered things, I could see people know that I would be more ready to be comfortable with doing it. But I don't worry at all. I'm not really a worrier. I refuse.
That's great. So assuming they met somehow, what would Rudy think about Eli, your character on Good Wife?
I think… in terms of the story, I think he'd probably try to see what he could do to help his situation. I think probably they might lock horns a little bit initially because they're both quite sensitive types. But I imagine that, you know, they might get on eventually because they look so alike. That was a joke.
What’s the most critical thing for you to get across with this film? What do you want people to take away from it?
George Arthur Bloom lived in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, back when it was a rough-and-tumble area. He was inspired by a larger-than-life character everyone seemed to know, Rudy, who developed a fatherly relationship with, as filmmaker Travis Fine puts it, a “kid who was terribly handicapped, both mentally and physically” and whose mother was a drug addict. Bloom turned Rudy’s real-life experience into a screenplay, which almost got filmed several times during the ensuing years (at one point Tommy Lee Jones and Sylvester Stallone were attached to it). Then it went nowhere, Bloom gave up, and it sat in a drawer until his son, an old high school friend of Fine’s, showed the director the script.
The movie that came of it, Any Day Now, which hit theaters this winter and garnered awards on the festival circuit, follows The Good Wife’s Alan Cumming as Rudy, Raising Hope’s Garret Dillahunt as Paul, the closeted attorney who becomes his partner, and Isaac Leyva as Marco, a teen with Down syndrome who’s abandoned by his mother and taken in by the men. They all must fight a biased legal system so the couple can adopt Isaac, a heart-wrenching storyline that will resonate with many of the 2 to 6 million LGBT people who say they’d like to adopt.
“The story of Any Day Now may take place in the past, but the discrimination against same-sex families it depicts is unfortunately still all too real in some parts of our country,” says GLAAD president Herndon Graddick.
It’s real too for kids like Marco. As of 2011 there were 104,236 children in foster care awaiting adoption, many of them considered special-needs children because they are black or Latino, are older than infants, or have some form of mental or physical disability. “What the film’s remarkable performances and eloquent script reveal, though, is how unjust and hurtful to same-sex couples and children that discrimination really is,” Graddick adds.
Cumming, whose performance is riveting and one of his most inspired, talks about making the film.
I found Any Day Now just completely absorbing and really moving. And I notice people just seem to really have a gut reaction to the film. Why do you think it reaches people that way?
I think that we see the story of people who are damaged and devastated by bigotry and prejudice and ignorance. And we understand how wrong that is because we’ve invested in these characters and we want them to be together. And then I think in a larger way, we know that the reason that happened is because that bigotry and that prejudice still exist in our society. And I think we are so moved by it because we know that we are complicit in that because we are all members of that society.
This is a story about many things — about family, the foster care system, and coming out, but at the heart of it, it’s a love story between your free-spirited Rudy and Garret’s buttoned-down, closeted Paul. How did you develop the sort of chemistry that viewers see between you and Garret on-screen?
We just had to fake it, because we didn’t know each other. It was very well-written. and obviously Garret is a really brilliant actor and we luckily felt very comfortable with each other and got on. And I think that’s half of it. Once you feel comfortable with someone you can just dive in. But you’d imagine we’d have lots of time to talk and get comfortable with each other. No, we were practically in bed on the first day.
One of the other parts of the film that we don’t see a lot of — but is so true — is that there’s so much difficulty over same-sex couples trying to adopt. But the reality is there are a ton of children and teenagers, especially with physical or mental disabilities, that will just languish in the system.
Absolutely right. And that to me is the biggest idea—because everyone falls in love with Isaac. Garret says at one point, “I’m just hoping that this child doesn’t slip through the cracks in the system,” and sadly he does.
Tell me about working with Isaac.
Oh, it was great. I loved it. I mean people think…you’re going to make a movie with someone who has a learning disability, what’s that going to mean? I had no idea. But I just went into it…with an open heart. And he was just an absolute darling and so lovely.… He’s got kind of openness to him and…he’s not at all jaded. Everything there’s pure, and it kind of reminded me of what acting should be like. Everything’s really on the surface and completely authentic.
That's great. You have some scenes of just real heartbreak and anguish. Was there anything in your own life that you could call on to sort of nail those scenes? To inspire?
Well, yes. I have had heartbreak and anguish in my life. That's not difficult for me to access.
So, ten years ago, we used to ask straight actors if they had any hesitation about playing a gay role. Now it's more common to ask gay actors if they worry about being pigeonholed. This is certainly not your first gay role, but do you ever worry about that?
No, I actually don't. I mean, [I'm] playing a straight man on TV every Monday. I just don't deal with that. I mean, I've played gay people, but I don't know the percentage. I just I don't think much in that way, you know. I don't correlate it in that way.
But I'm drawn to the stories and the character's heart, you know. And perhaps because… I'm comfortable with it, I'm likely to be offered things, I could see people know that I would be more ready to be comfortable with doing it. But I don't worry at all. I'm not really a worrier. I refuse.
That's great. So assuming they met somehow, what would Rudy think about Eli, your character on Good Wife?
I think… in terms of the story, I think he'd probably try to see what he could do to help his situation. I think probably they might lock horns a little bit initially because they're both quite sensitive types. But I imagine that, you know, they might get on eventually because they look so alike. That was a joke.
What’s the most critical thing for you to get across with this film? What do you want people to take away from it?
I want people to…have a real emotional experience and an emotional connection. But really…I want people to go away and think, Wow, look at the effect of prejudice and ignorance and bigotry, and look at how much our society is still engendering and encouraging that.
Speaking of, you and your husband, Grant, got married earlier this year in New York. What are your thoughts on the recent marriage equality successes?
I think it’s great that we have a president who is very vocal in his support of equality and gay rights. I think the last election is really exciting in that it showed that the country was rejecting all that sort of prejudice and fear-based prejudice. We’re still the second-class citizens. And people still can be fired for being gay and people are gay-bashed.… So, you know, I don’t mean to be ungrateful but I don’t see why I should be so grateful for my rights. I think that’s what we should all remember.
I have one last question. You have a book coming out in 2013: May the Foreskin Be With You. I read a little excerpt from it and it made me want to ask, what made you want to talk so intimately about your penis and other people's penises?
Because I was shocked when I first came to America, [and] I realized that the people who were seeing my penis were so utterly ignorant of what a real penis — a normal, intact penis —looks like. I thought, God, I'm here, I'm in New York City, this progressive, cultural, melting-pot of the world, and these people don't realize that they are genitally mutilated as children. And that was really what got me going, I was like, this is how it's supposed to be.
And then I've [found] out more about it, and saw all the things about lack of sensation that people have, and I became aware of that because you just are aware that people with their circumcised penises are less sensitive. And so it just became a cause for me, really.
And then of course you find out all these things about how the circumcisions can go so horribly wrong, and how these poor kids have terrible, terrible things happen. I've been in situations where I've been in a car, and me and an interviewer are talking about the book or other things, and the driver will go, "I heard you speaking and you know, my circumcision went wrong and I… pee out of two holes."
And I think it's this unspoken thing, of men, that don't want to talk about it and they certainly don't want to be told something that irretrievable, irreversible. It's so wrong and they're losing so much. Also, it's fighting the medical system that [doesn't want to] admit they're wrong, and they don't want to lose the money that every circumcision brings them.
To me, it seems to me this huge conspiracy. And actually … if it was girl circumcision, I mean female genital mutilation, we would be horrified about it. And we are, when it happens.
Yes, [female circumcision] is illegal here, yeah.
Yes, so why is it? If anything happens to thousands of little boys and we think that's okay.
Yeah. And there always seems to be the excuse that a boy's penis should look like his father's. I hear that again and again.
To which I think, do you go home get your cocker in front of your dad? I didn't. Is that an American custom? Because I don't think that's right, if it is. –By Diane Anderson-Minshall/Advocate/January 04, 2013
Speaking of, you and your husband, Grant, got married earlier this year in New York. What are your thoughts on the recent marriage equality successes?
I think it’s great that we have a president who is very vocal in his support of equality and gay rights. I think the last election is really exciting in that it showed that the country was rejecting all that sort of prejudice and fear-based prejudice. We’re still the second-class citizens. And people still can be fired for being gay and people are gay-bashed.… So, you know, I don’t mean to be ungrateful but I don’t see why I should be so grateful for my rights. I think that’s what we should all remember.
I have one last question. You have a book coming out in 2013: May the Foreskin Be With You. I read a little excerpt from it and it made me want to ask, what made you want to talk so intimately about your penis and other people's penises?
Because I was shocked when I first came to America, [and] I realized that the people who were seeing my penis were so utterly ignorant of what a real penis — a normal, intact penis —looks like. I thought, God, I'm here, I'm in New York City, this progressive, cultural, melting-pot of the world, and these people don't realize that they are genitally mutilated as children. And that was really what got me going, I was like, this is how it's supposed to be.
And then I've [found] out more about it, and saw all the things about lack of sensation that people have, and I became aware of that because you just are aware that people with their circumcised penises are less sensitive. And so it just became a cause for me, really.
And then of course you find out all these things about how the circumcisions can go so horribly wrong, and how these poor kids have terrible, terrible things happen. I've been in situations where I've been in a car, and me and an interviewer are talking about the book or other things, and the driver will go, "I heard you speaking and you know, my circumcision went wrong and I… pee out of two holes."
And I think it's this unspoken thing, of men, that don't want to talk about it and they certainly don't want to be told something that irretrievable, irreversible. It's so wrong and they're losing so much. Also, it's fighting the medical system that [doesn't want to] admit they're wrong, and they don't want to lose the money that every circumcision brings them.
To me, it seems to me this huge conspiracy. And actually … if it was girl circumcision, I mean female genital mutilation, we would be horrified about it. And we are, when it happens.
Yes, [female circumcision] is illegal here, yeah.
Yes, so why is it? If anything happens to thousands of little boys and we think that's okay.
Yeah. And there always seems to be the excuse that a boy's penis should look like his father's. I hear that again and again.
To which I think, do you go home get your cocker in front of your dad? I didn't. Is that an American custom? Because I don't think that's right, if it is. –By Diane Anderson-Minshall/Advocate/January 04, 2013
Jan 13, 2013
Red Hot NYC Jazz Singer Talks About His Gay Dad
How did straight jazz singer Marcus Goldhaber handle his Dad coming out late in life?
How does a straight jazz singer handle his Dad coming out late in life? "Communication is key-stay connected, stay open," says Marcus Goldhaber, the acclaimed New York City-based jazz-pop singer-songwriter. Goldhaber's third album, Almost Love (Fallen Apple Records), hit stores (and iTunes) last week. His first recording of all original standards, Almost Love is sure to get the praise that was heaped up on the jazzman's first two albums. We talked with Goldhaber about his gay dad, his music, and his childhood.
Warner: I understand you have a special tie to the LGBT community.
Goldhaber: I do, yes, my dad. My father is gay. He came out later in life, around 2000. To hear people talk about their experiences now, as more and more parents do come out after being married for 20 or 30 years, it’s a seemingly safer environment, I guess, and it’s pretty inspiring.
Warner: It's a big change.
Goldhaber: It’s a huge experience, and it impacts everyone. I still haven’t figured out if there is an actual “best time” for having the coming out talk, for a parent, you know? Earlier, when the kids are young, or waiting until they’re older. But the one constant thing I’ve found throughout it all is that communication is key. Stay connected, stay open to each other.
Warner: Are you close to your dad?
Goldhaber: We’ve got a great relationship. And I love that he’s in New York and comes to my shows. We’re very close. That hasn’t changed at all.
Warner: You grew up in Buffalo, New York. My hometown, too — well, Niagara Falls, but it’s really close.What was your childhood like?
Goldhaber: Really? You’re from there, too? Small world. I went to Williamsville South High School, and traveled all over, like to North Tonawanda, and all the surrounding cities because I played volleyball. You mentioned Niagara Falls, and of course, that’s where I went for senior prom.
Warner: Yes! I went to Niagara Wheatfield High School. I remember our teams playing Williamsville and North Tonawanda. Back 15 years ago in Buffalo they were pushing out bands like the Goo Goo Dolls and 10,000 Maniacs. What drew you to jazz?
Goldhaber: Well, it wasn’t like today, that’s for sure. After school there was outdoor time. When I got home from school, my parents pushed us to go outside and play, so I’d be out there playing games and stuff and then I’d come in to do my homework and have dinner. Afterwards my mother would always play piano. She was pianist.
Warner: How did that influence you?
Goldhaber: She would play all these songs from the '20s, '30s and '40s — the songs she had grown up with. I kind of learned them through a form of osmosis. Pretty regularly, she would innocently ask “Do you know this song?” and I would be like, “I’m 12, why would I know ‘Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree’ or the Andrew Sisters?” [Laughs] But these were the songs of her childhood, ones that my grandparents played for her. It was her culture and she was passing that on to me. They were the songs of her generation. So, I fell in love with them over time. When I graduated from high school, I already had hundreds of standards in my head. Some that I didn’t know the titles, or who wrote them, but the melodies were solid and locked into my brain. -BY Denise Warner/Advocate/November 27 2012
^^^*^^^
Marcus Goldhaber - "Walkin' My Baby Back Home"
Nov 25, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)