The Bald Soprano

I was a junior in high school when I discovered absurdity. I understood absurdity immediately because it reflected my life so perfectly.  Absurdity kicked me down the road of being a creative artsy type and it continues to have a strong pull on me to this day.  Thanks, absurdity, old buddy.

My first encounter with absurdity took the form of The Bald Soprano, the play by Eugene Ionesco, presented as a particularly arresting picture book.  Today, I guess we'd call it a graphic novel.  Here's the cover:

That's Ionesco himself substituting both tragically and comically for the O's in his name.  The full cast can be seen as well, left to right: Mrs. Martin, Mr. Smith, Mary the maid, the Fire Chief, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Martin.  The whole book is rendered in black and white.  Each couple's lines are rendered in a different type face, the women in italic.  Pictures, stark high contrast black and white, show who is speaking and give a sense of the action.  Here's the back cover:

I'm pretty sure I liked this play before I even opened the book the first time.  Here's the text of the cover:

ionesco THE BALD SOPRANO followed by an unpublished scene.  Translated by Donald M. Allen.  Typographical interpretations by Massin and photographic interpretations by Henry Cohen.  Based on the Niccolas Bataille Paris production. Grove Press, Inc.  New York

I found The Bald Soprano in the library - I don't remember now whether that would have been my high school library or the public library.  A couple of years later, in college, when I had an extra ten bucks, I ordered my own copy which I still have today.  When it arrived I signed and dated it: October 3, 1970.  This play, in this particular format, became one of my artistic touchstones.  Eventually I saw a live performance - which disappointed me greatly.

The scene is a middle-class English interior.  The plot is pretty simple, I guess.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith tell some stories.  Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrive and reintroduce themselves to each other.  The Smiths and Martins tell more stories, occasionally interrupted by the Maid and the Fireman who, unsurprisingly, tell stories.  Everything devolves into a screaming frenzy.  And then it ends by beginning again at the beginning - except that the Martins and Smiths have switched places.

Nothing makes any real sense, of course.  The lines make sense in only the smallest bits.  Responses have tenuous relationship to what has preceded.  I guess that's what makes it Theater of the Absurd.  It's definitely that aspect which seemed to me to correspond exactly with what passed for conversation in my family - although for completely different reasons.  My family came to its absurd interactions through a combo of age disparity, English as second language and hardness of hearing.  None of that has anything to do with Ionesco.  The resulting effects, however, were strikingly similar in my mind.

Here's a sample from the awkward conversation as the two couples are settling down for their social evening together:

Mr. Smith: Hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: Hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Hm, hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, but definitely. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: We all have colds. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Nevertheless, it's not chilly. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: There's no draft. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Oh no, fortunately. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Don't you feel well? [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: No, he's wet his pants [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The heart is ageless [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: So they say. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: They also say the opposite. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The truth lies somewhere between the two. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]

In the book each of those lines gets two facing pages.  All the space represents the long silences.  The particular line "The truth lies somewhere between the two." has given me comfort many times in many different situations over the 45 years since I first read it.

Here's a pair of pages showing the (much more lively) responses to Mrs. Martin's story about seeing a man on the street who had bent over to tie his shoe:

Notice that "fantastic" is divided up among three actors.  (Click on any picture for enlargements.)   Later in the play:

Mrs. Martin: Thanks to you, we have passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.
Fire Chief: [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that - the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment]
Mrs. Smith: She always wears her hair in the same style.

One more page for good measure.  Here the Fire Chief is encouraged to tell a story The Dog and the Cow - which I actually set to music sometime during my college years.  (That, along with the only other song I ever wrote, has since been lost.)

So why am I dragging this subject up now - beyond the need for basic blog padding, of course.  There's a story about that:

Leslie and I were having dinner in a local restaurant last month, one of those new-style buffets with the old-style trick of showing you the desserts while you're standing in line still hungry.  We didn't have much to talk about.  At the next table was a family - mother, father, grandmother and three tweens, two with smart phones.  They had a lot to talk about, most of which didn't seem too important.  There was an amusing lack of communication and several crises concerning the food.  Leslie and I found ourselves watching them as carefully as we could without being obvious.  They might have been somewhat embarrassed had they been able to watch themselves.  Maybe not.  On our way home, Leslie and I discussed various unresolved questions (like which parent was the child of the grandmother and the color of the mother's panties).  I was reminded of my encounter with The Bald Soprano and I explained to Leslie why this literature was important to me.  When I got home I re-read it for the first time in a very long time.  It felt good to experience The Bald Soprano again.  It brought back a lot of memories, although you can be very certain that none of them involved my mother letting anyone in a restaurant see the color of her panties.

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Used copies of The Bald Soprano are available on Amazon.

Stories of Almost Everyone

My friend John Steinmetz sent me an excerpt from the book Mirrors, Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano.  The excerpt is about a famous piece of classical music (the one I have resolved never, ever to listen to again.)

THE NINTH

Deafness kept Beethoven from ever hearing a note of his Ninth Symphony, and death kept him from learning of his masterpiece's adventures and misadventures.

Bismarck proclaimed the Ninth an inspiration for the German race, Bakunin heard it as the music of anarchy, Engels declared it would become the hymn of humanity, and Lenin thought it more revolutionary than "The Internationale."

Von Karajan conducted it for the Nazis, and years later he used it to consecrate the unity of free Europe.

The Ninth accompanied Japanese kamikazes who died for their emperor, as well as the soldiers who gave their lives fighting against all empires.

It was sung by those resisting the German blitzkrieg, and hummed by Hitler himself, who in a rare attack of modesty said that Beethoven was the true führer.

Paul Robeson sang it against racism, and the racists of South Africa used it as the soundtrack for apartheid propaganda.

To the strains of the Ninth, the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

To the strains of the ninth, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

John knew I would be fascinated by this because it deals with the common Mixed Meters trope that musical meaning is mutable according to who is listening.   And of course it mentions Adolf Hitler, which I have been doing a lot lately.

After reading about Galeano I ordered a "like new" copy of this book from an Amazon associate seller.  The price was 39 cents.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Thirty-nine U.S. pennies for a $26.95 list price hardcover book originally published in 2009.  Shipping charges were more than ten times the price of the book: $3.99.

In capitalistic America such a low price for nearly 400 pages of printed matter can only mean a huge lack of demand.   Could this be because Galeano says things Americans don't care to hear?  Or maybe someone is giving copies away because they think Americans ought to hear those things.  After all, the vilified Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez presented another of Galeano's books to Barack Obama, the increasingly vilified American president.

Mirrors consists of nearly six hundred short historical tales similar to the sample above.  I thought to myself "It's a novel in the form of a page-a-day calendar."

In reality it's a history book.  It's the story of human culture told in sequential "sound bites".   Each bite is short enough for even the tiniest attention span.  It would be perfect for multi-tasking, channel-switching, constantly on-the-go media consumers.  Except for one problem - it's a book.

Galeano makes his attitudes perfectly clear.  He is against sexism, racism, facism, colonialism, corporatism, imperialism and exploitation.  He counters pro-western, pro-northern, pro-European bias.  He lampoons the silly and he bemoans the greedy, the evil and the immoral.  He talks about the crazies, the revolutionaries, the successes, the failures and the famous.  Almost everyone.

Galeano obviously has strong opinions. His little tales will make you think.  Like the Beethoven symphony, what he tells is often open to interpretation.  If you think about the stories too hard they could be profoundly depressing.  You could even end up regretting being human.

But in spite of that, the book is a really easy read.  It would make a good blog.

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Listen to an interview with Eduardo Galeano on the NPR radio show Latino USA.  He says "I am just a person fascinated by reality and the magic hidden inside reality."

Other Mixed Meters posts mentioning Beethoven's Ninth: Everybody Loves Beethoven Probably and In Which Music Moves Slowwwly.

Everyone Tags: Eduardo Galeano. . . Beethoven. . . Hugo Chavez

In which I read the book that John Adams wrote

I started working as a music copyist for composer John Adams about 1985 on a little piece he called Hamonielehre. I've worked on a lot more of his music since then.

We live in different California urban areas positioned on different cultural tectonic plates. Our communications have always been principally by remote technologies: first by phone, then by fax and now by email. It's rare for us to see each other, rarer still to talk in person. Our last conversation happened during a hair-raising night-time rush hour drive through Palo Alto, California.

Lately John has occasionally mentioned "my book" but never really explained what he meant. It turned out to be his autobiography entitled Hallelujah Junction which is also the name of his piano duet which is also the name of an actual junction. (See it in Google Maps by clicking here.)

More surprisingly, last week he honored me by sending actual Word files of an actual complete draft. So far I've gotten as far as chapter five (out of fifteen.)


I asked his permission to quote from Hallelujah Junction here. He agreed but added that the quotes I picked were "funny". I intend them as "teasers", little bits to make you wonder just what he's talking about. Maybe they'll give an impression of his prose style.

The real point is that I am reading John Adams' autobiography. And you are not.

I'm finding an awful lot of interesting stuff I never knew. (Anything in purple is a quote.)


Another patient walked around with a harmonica stuffed into his mouth. When he smiled his face became the front grille of an automobile. He serenaded us by moving the harmonica with his lips while conducting with his two free hands.


The trip was symphonic in form, with an exposition, development and recap. Or maybe it was a rondo…I forget.


If I’d learned anything from John Cage, there was certainly no evidence in my Quintet for Piano and Strings, music that sounded like it could have been composed in 1910 Vienna by a young man bent on committing a triple murder-suicide.


Tacky, laughably hokey strip clubs lined both sides of neighboring streets, and each had its own sleazy barker, dressed in regulation loud, horrific Seventies-style bellbottoms and Hawaiian shirt. His job was to coax the reluctant tourist into the dark interior. “Come on in, sir, take a peek. It’s on the house. Ladies invited, too.”


... and then staying up nights until the building closed, huddled in my office with a soldering iron, my desktop covered with surplus resistors, capacitors and circuit board chips that I had scrounged at a flea-market near the Oakland airport.


I vividly recall standing patiently in the park with my microphone poised over a pile of dog poop, recording the buzz of several blissed-out flies as they hovered over their find.


Between the toxin of the bee stings and the shock of hearing my piece for the first time, my nervous system began yet again to go into red alert. An hour later I found myself on a bed in the emergency room of the Santa Cruz hospital connected to an IV dripping adrenaline into my arm while a man who’d nearly lost his finger to a chainsaw moaned in the neighboring bed.



The top picture is John at Stanford University after the premier of his Son of Chamber Symphony. The second picture, which appeared in Mixed Meters previously, was taken in Disney Hall. Click pictures for enlarged views. The music bit is John's handwriting.

Read previous MM posts concerning John Adams by clicking here.

John's own website is www.earbox.com where I could find no mention of his book


Hallelujah Tags: John Adms. . . Hallelujah Junction. . . autobiography. . . composers

Buckets for Babies in Pasadena

I think there's a conspiracy afoot here in Pasadena. It could be similar to W.A.S.T.E. in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

I'm regularly noticing seemingly abandoned children's car seats on sidewalks and parkings. I've heard them called "Baby Buckets".

What messages are these items sending and to whom? What secrets are the buckles and straps and handles concealing?

After a short time they simply disappear. Who takes them? Where do they go? All this simply must have some meaning or other.

They don't call me Mr. Paranoid for nothing you know.






And here's a reminder from purveyors of large quantities of scoopable cat sand (or kitty litter) not to let your baby drown while he or she is washing cute little handsies in the empty bucket afterwards.Tag Buckets: baby bucket. . . car seat. . . conspiracy. . . Thomas Pynchon. . . Robert Anton Wilson. . .cat sand. . . kitty litter. . . Pasadena. . . abandoned items

Oh, here's a fun orchestra piece to listen to wherein art imitates P.D.Q. Bach. I found this via Steve Layton's post on Sequenza 21.

Molly Ivins

Several years ago I was driving alone to San Francisco - taking twelve hours to do what some people can accomplish in six. I was almost there and barely awake. I tuned the radio to one of those small, left-wing stations that mysteriously flourish in the Bay area, hoping for something to help keep me alive.

They were playing a tape of a woman with a towering Texas twang speaking about Texas politics. It was side-splittingly funny, car-crash hysterical. I considered the possibility that she was making these idiot characters up. No, I realized, you can't make up stuff that good. Thankfully, her speech ended before I died in fiery laughter.

It was Molly Ivins. This is an obituary of sorts. Here's a real obit at CNN. Here's a remembrance by her editor (plus access to her most recent columns.) Her last one was about stopping "the surge". What a good idea.

Some people have a unique ability to talk back to political stupidity wisely and with humor and good nature. We need more of that in the United States these days.

I hope some political columnist will step up to the plate and become the next anti-Anne Coulter. The neo-cons are probably breathing a sigh of relief this morning that they don't have to be kicked around by Molly Ivins any more.

Meanwhile, here's a Mixed Meters post where Molly has a part - What You Can't Call an Artificial Penis in Texas Watch her in the video.

MollyIvins Tags: Molly Ivins. . . Texas politics. . . political columnist