Sunday Night Journal — November 27, 2011
About that ballet
A month or so ago I wrote about my intention to watch a George Balanchine ballet that was being broadcast on PBS. I recorded it then, and finally found time to watch it this week. I'm sorry to have to report that I didn't really get it. I can certainly appreciate that there is a great deal of beauty in the movements of the dancers, not to mention the enormous level of skill in the dancing and the choreography, but I can't say that I was captivated or very much moved. My reaction really didn't go much beyond interesting.
There were actually three pieces (is that the right word?) on the program: "Square Dance" and "Western Symphony" by Balanchine, and "The Golden Section" by Twlya Tharp. Here is a brief preview which gives you a glimpse of all three.
http://www-tc.pbs.org/s3/pbs.videoportal-prod.cdn/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf
Watch Miami City Ballet Dances Balanchine and Tharp on PBS. See more from GREAT PERFORMANCES.
I liked "Square Dance" best. That probably had something to do with the music (Vivaldi and Corelli). "The Golden Section" was possibly the most purely interesting of the three, and even to my entirely untrained eye obviously far less classical than the Balanchine works. I suspect the fact that I found it more interesting does not speak well of it. As you might expect from a contemporary work, it was rather heatedly erotic at times, and I won't pretend indifference to that aspect of it. And in general the technique was, well, stranger than in traditional ballet, and…there is no way to say this without making myself look like a clod, but I may as well admit it: much of the vocabulary of classical ballet is not appealing to me. Part of the reason is that it involves prancing and fluttering that is often lovely, if occasionally prissy, on the women, but downright effeminate on the men. Combine that with the extremely skin-tight costumes of the men, and–I'm sorry, but I want to be honest–there is an off-putting gay vibe about the whole thing. (And let me note here that Edward Villella, the founder and director of the Miami City Ballet and a former dancer of apparently considerable fame, was a good baseball player and boxer, twice-married and father of three.)
My wife, who has more interest in dance and a better eye for it than I do, watched the program with me, and thought "Square Dance" was "fabulous" (and she was not using the word archly or ironically; she really liked it.) Neither of us cared much for "Western Symphony": we were not able to take seriously male ballet dancers in 1940s-style cowboy suits; it's the last piece on the program and we didn't finish watching it.
Not knowing anything about the art, it's not surprising that I would miss whatever it is that makes Balanchine different. If you didn't know anything about classical music and decided to start with "Rhapsody in Blue," you wouldn't recognize the mixture of the traditional and the innovative in it, because you'd have nothing to compare it to. By the way, I'm throwing Balanchine's name around as if I know what I'm talking about, but I really don't. I only know that he was a choreographer who seems to have been something of a modernist in a Stravinksy-ish sort of way (as opposed to a Schoenberg-ish sort of way). He worked with Stravinksy, in fact: here is the Wikipedia biography.
So. That's that, I guess. And yet: it still sounds appealing when people talk about it.
OWS and Utopia
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street (or, as it spread, just "Occupy") movement. I think most people recognize that many of the specifically named complaints of the movement are justified: the middle class is shrinking, the economy was driven into a ditch by reckless-at-best financiers who, as the saying goes, privatized their gains and socialized their losses, etc. Yet I keep having the feeling that these things are not what the movement is fundamentally about. I don't claim to have followed it very closely, but I keep seeing and hearing things that remind me of the 1960s counter-culture, things that seem alternately amusing, pitiable, and disturbing, things that are rooted in a quasi-religion to which young people in modern times have been particularly susceptible: the belief that we can, as Joni Mitchell put it in her sweetly air-headed tribute to Woodstock, "get ourselves back to the garden." This piece in The Weekly Standard describe some of its intellectual-spiritual roots. I don't agree with everything in it, but on the whole I think it makes an important point. Read the Weekly Standard piece, then look at the Occupy Wall Street web site, and you can't miss the connections.
I say "disturbing," but it's not because I think anarchist ideas and their proponents really pose a signficant danger in any direct way. They disturb me because for a couple of years at the end of the 1960s I bought into that movement, in the hippie manifestation which is frequently echoed by OWS, and I hate to see its continuing power over young people who long for a noble cause and who turn their fundamentally religious zeal toward a hopeless quest for the earthly paradise. Too many people who shared my experiences in the 1960s (and early '70s) seem to be hoping still that one day they'll wake up and it will be 1969 again.
The slogan "We are the 99%" annoys me a little. Artur Davis, a moderate-to-conservative Democrat who might be Alabama's governor now if he hadn't offended the party machine, articulated the problem:
it literally links the interest of a hungry child in the Mississippi Delta to those of a six figure accountant whose mortgage is underwater.
Like, by definition, almost everybody, I am part of the 99%. But OWS doesn't speak for me. Not only does it not speak for me, it doesn't even like me, culturally and politically speaking. But I suppose if you're going to do mass politics you have to have a simplisitic slogan, and not be too scrupulous about its relation to the truth. After all, if you want people to buy your product, you have to advertise.
Newt 2012?
The phone rang this morning and I saw the phrase above, minus the question mark, on the caller ID. I was tempted to answer, just out of curiousity, but decided not to, afraid that if there was a person (as opposed to a recording) on the other end I would find myself in a conversation I didn't want to be in, answering "poll" questions such as "Are you in favor of the Obama administration's attempt to destroy the United States?"
A Newt Ginrich presidency, viewed from many angles, seems such a terrible idea that I was surprised to find myself the other day thinking Well, maybe… There is one reason I might consider voting for him: if I thought that he might be able to engineer a reform of our health care system that would be a real reform. I'm more and more convinced that the mess we have is a signficant factor in our economic problems. It has a paralyzing effect: people fear to take risks, on either the employee or the employer side, because of its burden and uncertainty. But I think Obamacare will make things worse. Why Gingrich? Well, for all his faults and weirdness, he is a very bright guy and willing to think outside the usual categories. But I suppose that by virtue of those same qualities whatever he might want to do with health care would probably be as over-complicated and unrealistic as the Democrats' plan.
Light On Dark Water 
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