The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the painful, highly problematic birth of American music

-->

 The Fisk Jubilee Singers, then and now.

1. THE HISTORICAL RECORD

On a sweltering June night in 1871, a handful of concertizing African American university students and their music director, George L. White, stood outside a small-town hotel in rural Tennessee, menaced by an angry, drunken crowd who called White a “Yankee nigger school teacher.”

“White and his troupe retreated to the train station to pray and sing. White interposed himself between the crowd and his frightened troupe and directed them in some hymns. Gradually, recalled (student) Ella Sheppard, the riotous crowd left of their jeering and swearing and slunk back, until only the leader stood near White, and he finally took off his hat. ‘Our hearts were fearful and tender and darkness was falling. We were softly finishing the last verse of “Beyond the smiling and the weeping I shall be soon—”

                        Beyond the farewell and the greeting

                        Beyond the pulse’s fever beating

                        I shall be soon.

                        Love, rest and home,

                        Lord, tarry not but come

‘—when we saw the bull’s eye of the coming engine and knew that we were saved. The leader begged us with tears falling to sing the hymn again, which we did.’”

This remarkable passage from Andrew Ward’s masterful account “Dark Midnight When I Rise” crystallizes the transformative impact of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who formed the secret songs of slavery into the spirituals that formed the bedrock of American music to come, and anchored the spiritual vocabulary of the culture as well.

Nearly every child growing up in America has either sung or heard songs such as “Steal Away,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Wade in the Water,” “Hold On,” “Rocking Jerusalem,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Go Down Moses” and “Balm in Gilead.” Even those who don’t share the brand of faith implicit in the words of these songs can feel their power. How did they wink into existence?

This remarkable body of music didn’t spring from any one identifiable mind, but from the consciousness of an enslaved race. Ward explains how the African slaves imported into America, cut off from their native cultures and forced into the acceptance of Christianity, shaped an amalgam of African song and Western hymn in services hidden away from the eyes and ears of their white overseers -- and put intense measures of agony and faith into it.

Ward quotes gospel scholar and singer Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer on spirituals:

“’ . . . after a while, it’s almost like therapy. It begins to take the frown out of the face. The shoulders begin to come back to their natural position. What’s happening is, you’re going through a cleansing process. You’re coming back to where you wanted to be. Things are not quite as bad as you think they are. And the more you sing it, the more you find relief, the more you believe that there is a way out of this.’”

These songs, passed down orally, were not shared with a larger public until George L. White, treasurer and music director for the newly founded Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee heard them in 1871.

The university, run by the American Missionary Association, was begun with the idea of educating African Americans. White, a missionary himself, had been searching for a way to stave off the institution’s bankruptcy.

Choral music had only recently come into vogue as a viable form of entertainment in America. Successful tours by Alpine folk-singing groups such as the Tyrolese Minstrels in the late 1830s spawned homegrown concertizing by such traveling bands as the Hutchinson Family Singers and the Gibson family in the 1840s.

White hit on the idea of taking down these spiritual songs he heard from his black students, and formalizing and presenting them in concert. Surprisingly, his initial point of resistance was the students themselves, who felt that these folk compositions were relics of a slave past best left behind.

White found something profoundly musical and moving in them. He developed a cappella arrangements and drilled his students mercilessly; emphasizing not volume but intensity, until the Singers’ trademark sound was that of a pianissimo attack that filled any given venue with sound.

An 18-month tour across the Northeast began discouragingly. Writes Ward, “Nothing had prepared Northerners for White’s young choir. What little they knew of black culture was derived from the derisive ‘Darktown’ cartoons of Currier & Ives and the bug-eyed, burnt-cork minstrel troupes with their ‘Congo banjos,’ interlocutors, ersatz ‘plantation melodies,’ and ‘nigger’ jokes that cavorted across the stages of the day. For many Northerners, minstrel troupes were there only African American frame of reference, and even the pious Yankees who attended White’s first concerts took their seats expecting to laugh at the antics of a primitive people.”

Nothing could withstand the power and sincerity of their performances. What began as a predicted folly ended a triumph. The Singers raised tens of thousands of dollars for their university, and the troupe soon found themselves suffering from overwork rather than neglect. Subsequent tours that covered England and parts of Europe as well over the course of six and a half years were to prove lucrative, but also the group’s undoing.

2. PROBLEMS

In addition to the grueling schedule, the usual interpersonal frictions arose. More significantly, the singers began to demand better treatment – a less taxing schedule, higher pay, individual recognition. White and the others who led them in turn accused them of ingratitude, and invoked their sense of dedication to a higher cause (in this case, Fisk, Christianity, and racial equality, in ascending order of irony).

Another unfortunate long-term side effect of the Singers’ popularity was the unintended reinforcement of the Uncle Tom-ish stereotype of virtuous victimhood of African Americans. The myth of the passive, benighted, saintly Negro would persist even down to the well-intentioned metaphors connecting Tom Robinson and the title creature in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Was White’s well-meaning transmission of these songs simply another in an almost endless stream of white assimilation, exploitation and pollution of another culture’s handiwork? And then there is that nasty question: does art born of torment and torture redeem that experience, or simply use it as a means to an end?

Christianity’s central metaphor is suffering and redemption, and the Jubilee songs embody this theme. Art is redemptive only in the sense that it is cathartic – that in and of itself, whether lauded or even noticed by the outside world, it aids the soul in surviving and making sense of reality. Does that mean that art is therapeutic? Sure; but therapy is not art, something the self-indulgent will never understand. In other words – everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone knows how to tell a story.

The power of spirituals extends past the boundaries of the faith within which they were conceived. Any participant in vocal music can tell you how it feels to be swept up passionately in the act itself. To serve the tune is to relinquish self for a time, to become a vessel of a higher power.

Again, Ward:

“When White asked several Genevans through an interpreter how they could so enjoy the songs when they could not understand the words, ‘the answer was, “We cannot understand them, but we can feel them.”’”

European sacred and art music has its limitations. The majesty and beauty of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, Mahler, Verdi and all, despite their presumed dominance by educators and experts, still don’t touch much of the musical universe as practiced worldwide.

White codified the music, but did not tamper with its power. That power injected itself into the pale culture that dominated it. As Ward notes:

“An editorial in the A.M.A.’s (American Missionary Association) journal went so far as to suggest that a little exposure to black religion might do whites good. ‘One of the beautiful and blessed effects of a real Christian culture for the negro would be the reflex influence of his emotive religion upon the unimaginative and unemotional white people who are now benefiting him.’”

Painfully condescending, but spot on in terms of white religion. Anyone who has suffered through years in the sedate pews of non-evangelical Christianity knows that subdued obedience and unduly demonstrative participation is the order of the day. No wonder the Jubilee Singers’ listeners felt they were hearing, in many senses, revelation.

Ward quotes one of the group’s most enthusiastic and eloquent fans, Mark Twain:

“’Arduous and painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary – to my surprise – has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. Away back in the beginning – to my mind – their music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now. It is utterly beautiful, to me; and it moves me infinitely more than any other music can.’”

3. RESOLUTION

After seven years and three tours, the Jubilee Singers raised enough money to build Fisk University’s first permanent structure, Jubilee Hall. Succeeding classes kept the tradition alive, and alumni, such as the brilliant Roland Hayes, spread the tradition.

Spirituals led to gospel music – the deliberate expressions of individual composers such as Thomas A. Dorsey and James Cleveland. The harmonies and feeling filtered down through the culture, influencing jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, bluegrass, pop songs, rock and others.

The Jubilee Singers continued, expanding their repertory and winning acclaim. Until recently, their efforts have gone largely unrecorded; however, the 2003 disc “In Bright Mansions” is a remarkable and moving recapitulation of the songs that cemented the group’s reputation nearly 150 years ago.

Meanwhile, the contradictions still chafe. It’s still evident that African Americans are still disenfranchised and culturally segregated in any number of ways – while their songs of suffering have been fully integrated into the American consciousness.

SOURCES

“In Bright Mansions”

The Fisk Jubilee Singers

Curb Records

2003

Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

Andrew Ward

HarperCollins, New York, 2000

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

http://www.fiskjubileesingers.org/

http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/

Winning the war: old, fat men vs. the Taliban

-->

I

I know all about combat -- I have seen "Stripes" at least 15 times.

I volunteer!

Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! I’ll go!

Look, this war on terror thing is not working, at least in central Asia. We beat up on the Taliban, leave -- and they come back. We bribe the inhabitants to be on our side, and they use the money to buy more weapons with which to kill us.

Meanwhile, this whole drone thing isn’t working. Remember how we killed Pakistan Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud last year? Oops, it turns out we didn’t, probably because he wasn’t disguised as a wedding or a funeral. (In July of 2009, the Brookings Institution reported that the ratio of civilian to militant deaths via Predator drone-launched Hellfire missiles is 10 to one. Not a great public relations move.)

This is by no means a slam against our enlisted people. Hey, I’ve worked for big companies – whether or not your bosses know what they’re doing, you have to follow orders, right? However, poor executive planning in civilian life usually leads merely to bad phone service or the cable guy never showing up – not the killing or maiming of the staff.

The only answer is sending out soldiers with nothing to lose. I’m talking about middle-aged men. Get us off the couch and into the fray!

Why? Let’s look at the facts:

1. Biologically speaking, we are expendable. By the time we hit 45, we’ve probably procreated all we’re going to – unless we get incredibly, stupendously (un)lucky one night. Let’s face it -- if we were bees, our sexual organs would already have been ripped out of our bodies during intercourse. Ouch. In terms of advertising demographics, we don’t even exist.
2. We love action movies. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, Sly, Arnold . . . Snake Plissken . . . these are our role models! We are the most likely age/sex group to do some ridiculous things with ammunition and explosives, with little regard for consequences. We could blow ourselves and everyone around us up at any time. It would be like having a bunch of suicide bombers on your team – only we’re just dumb. It all worked out in “Stripes,” didn’t it?
3. Now that I can get access to espn.go.com just about anywhere, I am flexible about my location, and I feel I can say the same for my sports-loving brethren. And sistren.
4. We are always alert! Always! At least, I am. I think it’s because I always have to pee. Or I can’t pee. Or I pee a little bit, all the time. That makes me grumpy! And alert! All the time!
5. My middle-aged fuddy-duddiness leads me to just OOZE counterintuitive attack concepts. For instance – young soldiers play gangsta rap and heavy metal when they go into combat to get pumped and intimidate opponents. I prefer to dash into action with the lilting voice of Mel Torme crooning “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in my ears. In fact, I would prefer to blow the enemy away -- with the sweet stylings of award-winning tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano. (Actually, if I could find some terrorists who are into pre-electric Miles, we may have a peace process on our hands.)
6. We don’t need basic training. Not because we are battle-ready; because we are incapable of being trained. Ask our wives. We do follow orders well, however, as we are leery of being bitched at.
7. We are clean and sober, as our doctors have already told us to quit smoking and drinking. OK, maybe we need a little weed. OK, a lot of weed. And some acid. But none of the hard stuff.
8. War is not for the young. The young should be home, having sex. Raising kids. At the very least, getting in over their heads with bad mortgages, as God intended. Ask, tell, gay, straight, I don’t care. (I draw the line at animals -- you cannot spoon with a cow. You cannot train a goat to get you a snack in the middle of the night. God knows I’ve tried.)

Ladies and gentlemen, follow my plan and the war will be over in weeks. Of course, we may all wind up speaking Pashto. Inshallah!

From Senses of Cinema -- Kurosawa's "Scandal"

F

For my friends at Australia's Senses of Cinema, my essay on Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film "Scandal":

Shubun/Scandal was the final film legendary director Akira Kurosawa made before catapulting to international fame with Rashomon (1950). As such, it is a waypost that points both to the past and to the future in the director’s work. This uneven yet vital offering chafes uncomfortably against its genre conventions while it offers moments that presage Kurosawa’s glorious output to come.

Scandal, his tenth film, neatly demarcates the first third of Kurosawa’s directorial career, an apprenticeship that began in 1936 (1). It had taken a few years after World War II’s end for Kurosawa to move out from under the shadow of the censorship imposed by both the Japanese authorities and those of the American Occupation. Scandal, ironically, would focus on the dark side of newfound freedoms, specifically the freedom of the press.

Kurosawa created a trio of gritty, hard-hitting, socially conscious dramas – Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel, 1948), Shizukanaru ketto (The Quiet Duel, 1949) and Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949) – just prior to Scandal. All three films featured the signature acting presences of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura (and Scandal would be the eighth Shimura/Kurosawa collaboration). These two remarkable performers would maintain positions at the centre of Kurosawa’s repertory company for years to come.

Critically, Scandal has frequently been dismissed as a “courtroom potboiler” (2), a “curiously unbalanced film” (3), and a “sentimental melodrama” (4). Yet a look with fresh eyes reveals a divided but still powerful cinematic document, a hybrid of pessimistic social critique and redemptive fable.

The impetus behind Kurosawa’s choice of subject was his anger over what he termed the “verbal gangsterism” of gossip magazines, which sprang up like weeds in post-war Japan. Suddenly free to print stories about celebrities, with little regard for the truth, these publications ran roughshod over reputations – a significant shock to a formerly closed and highly structured society. As Kurosawa states: “This was not freedom of expression, I felt, it was violence against a person on the part of those who possess the weapon of publicity. I felt that this new tendency had to be stamped out before it could spread.” (5)

The film begins in the countryside in winter. “You an artist, mister?” is the first line of dialogue, spoken by one of a comic trio of country bumpkins as they watch the protagonist, Ichiro Aoye (Mifune), paint the mountain landscape in front of them in a decidedly non-representational manner (he later refers to comparisons of his work to that of Maurice Vlaminck, the early-20th-century Fauvist painter). Aoye is the stereotype of the bold, noble, two-fisted avant-garde artist (reflecting, perhaps, Kurosawa’s own background in art), right down to his pipe and motorcycle.

Aoye is on his way to a mountain spa. A beautiful voice draws the men’s attention, and mounting the hill and emerging into the frame is Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi), a prominent singer on her way to the same destination as Aoye, who offers her a lift on his bike. This innocent favour is spotted by two journalists for the gossip rag Amour, who then trail the duo to the resort and snap photographs of them that make them appear to be involved sexually with each other.

Yamaguchi seems a perverse pick for a role as a demure, publicity-averse artist. The actress and singer, referred to by some as the “Judy Garland of Japan”, was embroiled in controversy for much of her career. Manchurian-born, she was one of the era’s “seven great singing stars” and was featured in a number of pro-Japan Chinese propaganda films made during World War II. After the war, she was nearly executed for treason – until her Japanese birth certificate was made public (6). (After a few more years in film, Yamaguchi became a successful journalist and politician, and her life story became a hit Japanese stage musical.)

Once the unscrupulous paparazzi have gotten their “scoop”, the scene shifts permanently from open-air pleasures and simple artistry to the gritty city streets and entanglement with the law. The plot cranks along predictably. Amour goes to press with its faux-expose, “Love on a Motorcycle”. Aoye sees a wall plastered with his and Saijo’s image, putters over to the magazine’s shabby offices (the chicken-wire interior walls reinforce the viewer’s sense of entrapment), and punches out the publisher. Soon we are exposed to a wry Capraesque back-and-forth, as publisher and artist issue salvoes at each other to an ever-growing crowd of reporters and cameras.

Still, bits of Kurosawa magic leap out at us. Aoye decides to sue, but can’t convince Saijo to join him. In two beautiful shots, Aoye’s hand snatches up his goggles and gloves, and then he powers away from our point-of-view, sailing in a serene downhill curve parallel to a set of streetcar tracks.

25 minutes into Scandal we meet the character that, according to many critics, derails the film (7). Takashi Shimura plays Hiruta, a weak and self-loathing shyster who looks up Aoye in his drafty, Bohemian studio in the hope of taking up his case against the magazine. “Even scoundrels know the law”, he says, foreshadowing his betrayal to come.

Hiruta leaps out at the viewer for two reasons – one, the magnificent and nuanced performance by Shimura, and two, the relatively flat characterisations that surround him. Kurosawa has dropped a real human being into a forest of cutouts, and Hiruta begins to run away with the picture. Kurosawa cites his inspiration for Hiruta in a man he met in a bar years before – a figure with a bedridden, tubercular daughter who went on and on about his unworthiness compared to her (8). Hiruta, too, has a sickly, saintly child, who Aoye meets inadvertently. Her state convinces him to hire Hiruta.

Meanwhile, a revealing scene with Saijo takes place. Her manager encourages her to embrace the ramifications of the scandal, citing increased ticket sales for her upcoming concerts. Saijo snaps out of her demure state long enough to baldly exclaim the film’s credo: “I don’t want popularity without respect. I won’t be a freak on display!”

But Hiruta is soon seduced by Amour’s publisher into taking money to throw the case. In a shot that neatly parallels that of Aoye’s earlier departure on his motorcycle, a drunken Hiruta, loaded with ill-gotten gifts, is returned to his ramshackle house in an Amour distribution truck. In a lengthy scene, Hiruta attempts to hide this latest moral slide from his daughter, but her tuberculosis seems to have given her psychic powers. Soon Hiruta is babbling his confession to her – “In order to stay undeceived, I had to start deceiving others” – until he passes out at her bedside.

Through to the end of the film, the battle between the by-the-numbers suspense plot and the story of Hiruta’s suffering continues. Clichés such as Hiruta guiltily turning his daughter’s picture to the wall in his office, or a tearjerking scene in which Aoye and Saijo give Hiruta’s daughter a splendid Christmas concert, are interspersed with inspired moments. The sprightly sequence of Aoye’s delivery of a fully decorated Christmas tree to Hiruta’s home on his motorcycle, and the despairing face of Hiruta peering through his own window, his dying daughter’s smiling face reflected in the pane, are marvellous.

Later, Hiruta and Aoye make a drunken expedition to a local dive. (A jab at the influx of American influence is made when the scene opens, with patrons singing “Buttons and Bows”, a top American pop song of the day.) There, stalwart Kurosawa regular Bokuzen Hidari (best known as sad-sack villager Yohei in Shichinin no samurai [The Seven Samurai, 1954]) plays a drunk who speaks of the New Year with a slurred resolve to change his ways. Soon, he and Hiruta and the rest of the bar’s inhabitants break into “Auld Lang Syne” as the camera gracefully swoops round them. Critics such as Donald Richie see this and other aspects of the film as dry runs for Kurosawa’s subsequent masterpiece, Ikiru (Living, 1952) (9).

The soused duo then stumble back past a pond near Hiruta’s home (a call back to the polluted urban fen that plays a central symbolic role in Drunken Angel). The water reflects the starry sky – a quietly miraculous shot that foreshadows Hiruta’s redemption, at least until he yells “Merry Christmas!” for the eighth time and passes out at its verge. The movie then returns to a tone of business as usual. The trial progresses. It turns out that Aoye, at least, knows that Hiruta is cheating him, but hangs on to give him a chance to prove himself. The sudden off-camera death of Hiruta’s daughter pushes him to reveal his complicity with the defendant, saving the day for his slandered clients at the cost of his career and reputation. One scandal drives out another.
Indeed, the upbeat Hollywood-style conclusion – Aoye states to yet another gaggle of pressmen after the trial that Hiruta’s redemption means that “a star came into existence” – is undercut by the final sequence. Hiruta plods forlornly past the pasted-up handbill images of Aoye and Saijo, now torn and tattered. He is as forgotten as all the fuss that blew over him.

Kurosawa’s crusading effort ultimately came largely to naught (he states that “Scandal proved to be as ineffectual a weapon against slander as a praying mantis against a hatchet”) (10). However, Shimura’s agonised, over-the-top portrayal of Hiruta sets the stage for his more restrained and more affecting performance as the similarly meek bureaucrat Watanabe in Ikiru two years later.

Scandal combines several key aspects of Kurosawa’s cinema: his social conscience, his magnificent eye, and his feel for character. All the elements, unblended, are there. That it does not hang together seamlessly makes the quantum leap he made with Rashomon all the more astonishing.

Endnotes

1. Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Faber and Faber, New York and London, 2001, p. 29.
2. Michael Koresky, “Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa”, The Criterion Collection: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/627.
3. Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 3rd ed., University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996, p. 69.
4. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2000, p. 180.
5. Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock, Vintage Books, New York, 1982, p. 177.
6. Galbraith, pp. 123-125.
7. Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1991, p. 75.
8. Kurosawa, pp. 178-180.
9. Richie, p. 66.
10. Kurosawa, p. 178.

Shubun/Sukyandaru/Scandal (1950 Japan 105 mins)
Prod Co: Shochiku Prod: Takashi Koide Dir: Akira Kurosawa Scr: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima Phot: Toshio Ubukata Ed: Yoshi Sugihara Art Dir: Tatsuo Hamada Mus: Fumio Hayasaka
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi, Takashi Shimura, Sinichi Himori, Yoko Katsuragi, Noriko Sengoku

‘Schoolhouse Rock Live’: Sing-along for the sentient

The ensemble of "Schoolhouse Rock Live" at the Arvada Center. [Photo credit: P. Switzer]

There are two kinds of parents in the world – those who have never heard the songs of “Schoolhouse Rock,” and those who can’t get them out of their heads.

Thanks to the excellent current production of “Schoolhouse Rock Live” at the Arvada Center for the Performing Arts, we can all get on the same page.

Under the inventive direction of Kitty Skillman Hilsabeck, the sextet of performers give literal life and bounce to the material developed by TV producer Tom Yohe beginning in 1973.

Thanks to great writing and performances by people such as Bob Dorough, Blossom Dearie, Jack Sheldon and Lynn Ahrens, the bite-sized series of animated songs that covered topics such as math, science, grammar, American history, economics and more are indelible. My wife can sing the Preamble to the Constitution thanks to the show, and I believe that if you turn a figure 8 on its side it’s a symbol meaning infinity. And one of my offspring thinks that there is some Kabbalistic profundity about the song “Three is a Magic Number.”

The stage adaptation finds a clever framework within which to place the action. A young, nervous teacher, Tom (Seth Caikowski) finds himself surrounded by an ensemble of alter egos that lead him through the material he plans to address to his class – Schoolhouse Rock style, of course.

The five avatars of Tom (Amanda Earls as Sparky, Ashlie-Amber Harris as Whynona, Matt LaFontaine as Coolroy, Daniel Langhoff as Mathu and Julia Perrotta as Hap) exhibit great singing voices, bold physicalization, and cheery stamina. This is a fast-moving, high-energy show, and no one drops a beat throughout.

The result is fun for the kids, who will love the loopy set, costume and makeup designs as well – and nostalgic for we who drove them there and know each one by heart. I almost held up my lighter at the end. I was trying to get them out for an encore of “Interplanet Janet.”

“Schoolhouse Rock Live” is presented by the Arvada Center for the Arts, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, through May 15. Tickets are available by calling 720-506-4130 or by visiting http://arvadacenter.reachlocal.net.

Your mom goes to the opera: the ever-threatened fine-arts audience

Ever notice how the arts are always dying? They’ve been in a perpetual swoon since I can remember. Periodically, a U.S. study is released stating that arts attendance and participation are lower than ever, and that “something must be done.”

There have been forays into topics of the moment, such as “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and a newly proposed piece about the life of Anna Nicole Smith. 

Orchestras, museums, theater companies, and other entities are constantly trying to reach the coveted 18-35 demographic by feigning hipness, good cheer and snarky humor in their promotional materials – and showing some skin doesn’t hurt either.

Fine-art appreciation is stereotyped as a rich man’s pastime. In fact, many times high-art tendencies are supported and perpetuated by people with disposable income and a desire for prestige. And, many times, they drag themselves to high-falutin’ cultural events for reasons of social distinction, not on the basis of enthusiasm or deep appreciation. Yep, those dudes in the tuxes are just as bored as you.

There’s a lot to be said for maintaining and expanding arts education and participation for school-age kids. A recent proposal by Colorado’s Boulder Valley School Board to reduce or eliminate 5^th-grade music programs has raised parental uproar, but is a typical move for a financially distressed school district.

But is there much you can do to lure audiences of young adults to the concert hall? I doubt it. Should you try? I say get Grandma and Grandpa gussied up and send them down to the cultural events only they are capable of appreciating!

Japanese philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi split art, for the sake of analysis, into three categories: pure, popular and marginal. Pure art requires a certain level of expertise and knowledge from both its creators and its consumers. In popular art, the creator is still a professional but the audience is undiscriminating. Marginal art is everything else – from decoration to gesture – the raw material of aesthetic creation and response in everyday life.

So pure art is smart art. It needs the audience’s critical tools to complete the communication circuit. It requires contextualization, intelligence, education, and indoctrination; it has connoisseurs, cognoscenti, specialists and interpreters. Smart art aims high, features demonstrations of technical expertise, and to be sure errs on the side of seriousness and significance and pretentiousness. Accordingly, it has a much higher failure rate. It’s despised, made fun of and marginalized by a populist reverse snobbery that discourages explorations that can’t be easily packaged or sold.

The very things that are unique about these niche arts are what marketers and publicists are trying to overcome. Instead of trying to make them palatable, perhaps their best move would be to emphasize these points of difficulty.

Smart art doesn’t require money – it requires passion. Occasionally, art bridges the categories of pure and popular for a time – opera in the 19^th century, jazz up to the bebop era. Its popularity phases out, or never develops, but the art form stubbornly persists and continues to speak to its audience, however small.

Smart art also requires maturity – that dreaded word! Hopefully, the longer life goes on the greater the stock of life experiences and learned lessons grow within each person. Those who age successfully develop a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, develop longer attention spans and more nuanced receptivity. And I think that those closer to the end of life have a more keen appreciation of artistic work that asks hard questions.

Smart art has a research and development arm – it’s called life. Life grows the gray-headed, always-dying-off audiences that mysteriously maintain the arts in America, replacing the fans that pass away with others who have aged out of the commercially bombarded demographics into the more deserted areas where, at last, they can sit down and look and hear and feel and think.

Now, get cracking!

ESSENTIAL TEXTS:

 A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide to the Plots, the Singers, the Composers, the Recordings; Sir Denis Forman, Random House, 1994.

The New Penguin Opera Guide; ed. Amanda Holden, Penguin, 2001.

The Grove Book of Operas; Stanley Sadie and Laura Macy, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas; ed. John Freeman, W.W. Norton, 1997.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker, 1994.

JUST FOR FUN

"P.D.Q. Bach: The Abduction of Figaro," dir. Kaye S. Levine -- 1984.

"Anna Russell Sings! Again?," Anna Russell, CBS Masterworks, 1953.

"Das Ring Gott Farblonjet," by Charles Ludlam, 1977.

Ice fishing: as painful as it looks?

PART 1: GO WITH THE FLOE

Howdy, thrill-seekers! How would you like to combine the slam-bang titillations of fishing with the palpable danger of freezing to death?

Well, look no further! Ice fishing is here. This year, I’ve heard dozens of folks in the Colorado area talk about it – this distinctly Northern pastime has really caught on out West recently.

For those of us without the syrupy blood of native-born Michiganers, Minnesotans or Wisconsonians, this perilous enterprise has got some explaining to do.

Evidently this sport began as a desperate survival tactic. The breathtaking nonchalance of the ice fisherman, or person, suspended above the abyss by an unknown thickness of cracking, groaning temporary solidified from of water, while making a play for dinner is inspiring.

No wonder they drink.

My friend Joe started me out by cluing me in that the last people you want to ask “How well are they biting?” are the people who run the bait shops next to the lake. “Of course, they’re biting! Here, let me ring up that beef jerky for you.”

Joe spoke movingly of the quiet simplicity of the experience. He lovingly described augering a special second hole in the ice for the beers, watching them float – “sort of like watching a campfire burn on the beach during a summer night.” Damn!

Then he compared ice fishing to women – “you never know what you’re going to get.” Well, we were deep into Hemingway territory now. My manhood was at stake -- I had to try it.

I recruited two very close friends to accompany me, who I thought frankly would hold up a lot better under the strain. Now that we’re out of urgent care, I have time to sit back, relax and reflect.

 PART 2: THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

Needless to say, always check on ice conditions. ALWAYS CHECK ON ICE CONDITIONS. Don’t make me say it again. A great resource in Colorado is the state Division of Wildlife – their ice fishing Web page is at http://wildlife.state.co.us/Fishing/Reports/IceFishing. Trust them. Budgets are tight, and no one has the money to send a diving crew to collect your remains.

Good rules of thumb are: 4-6 inches of ice thickness to walk on, 7 inches to drive a car or snowmobile out on and 10 inches to drive a truck out on. “Inches?” I enquired. “How about feet?” Nope – too tough to cut through, and no room for the fish below.

You are fishing for, depending on your location and time of year, panfish such as bluegill, crappie, yellow perch, sunfish, and pumpkinseeds; also, northern pike, walleye, lake trout, burbot and bass. Please note: feeding times in the winter largely adhere to the dawn/dusk patterns of fish during the summer, so you still have to get up when it’s dark and cold and stay out until same if you want results.

To make it, you need to dress in layers. Polypropylene first, then wool, then Gore-Tex. Get the order straight. I did this backwards, contracted hypothermia . . . and parts of me shriveled up as well.

You should have a shelter to crouch within while fishing, hopefully with a gas heater by your side. These “ice houses” come from the most simple to the fanciest, complete with bunks and satellite TV. What they all have in common, though, is the capacity to asphyxiate you via carbon monoxide poisoning – the same way Emile Zola died, although he was not ice fishing at the time. Zut alors!

A hole between 6 and 8 inches in diameter will be cut in the ice – hopefully, not by you. Tools for this task include an ice saw, ice chisel and auger. Whew! Let the drinking begin. Most ice fisherfolk use the ubiquitous “tip-up” pole, which is positioned on a frame over the ice and signals a nibble by the raising of a small flag, after which the prey can be hooked, gaffed and stacked over in a corner until the haul is complete or the game warden is gone.

Alternatively, you can use a short jigging rod, with which the wielder is compelled to shimmy and bounce around incessantly in an effort to attract the attention of some sluggish, recalcitrant future filets. This second approach is more for nervous types who are out for results, not simply hiding out from their spouses, work or the law.

Bait: some swear by live minnows, chubs, shiners, wax worms, fly larvae. Others count on chunks of raw meat, cake and uncooked oatmeal. Still more rely on lures with cool names such as spoons, jigs, teardrops, glows and fry. What they all have in common is that NONE OF THEM WORK. This is fishing, remember!

Oh, here are a few more recommended items: an ice skimmer, chairs, compass, map, flashlight, GPS, depth gauge . . . and the stuff with weird monikers! I love those the most, as they constitute the terms you will sling about widely and inaccurately after your adventure. Flasher – gaff hook – spud bar --- creepers – awesome.

Here’s my favorite pair of must-have items – the ones that pushed the big, hooting alarm in my head. Ice pick, 50 feet of rope and personal flotation device! 

 

I should have known the other pescadores del hielo would laugh at me as I shuffled out onto the frozen surface of Dead Bastard Lake clad in a life jacket. Too bad, suckers! While you will be swept away under the ice, I will bob to the surface, unscathed and praising my creator.

The ice pick clutched in my hand? What’s that used for? Well, when the ice breaks, you stab frantically at the edges of the frozen mass with it in an attempt to keep yourself from full immersion.

And the 50 feet of rope wound about my middle? That’s in case the ice pick doesn’t work. Evidently you can calmly pass one end to your companions as you rapidly subside into that sleepy-bye Jack London “To Build a Fire” hypothermic coma, so they can drag your carcass out at leisure.

  

And beer. And whiskey. And schnapps. And some food, if there’s room.

 PART 3: ICE FISHING – THE MOVIE

(Three men wander in a forlorn skirmish line across the surface of a high-altitude frozen Colorado lake. Blizzard conditions make their exact coordinates doubtful. Each carries an absurdly heavy and large bundle of equipment. MUSIC: Symphonia Antarctica, Movement 3 by Vaughan Williams.)

CASEY: Hey, guys, this looks like a great place!

OAKLAND: Whe-whe-whe-

ME: This is the worst idea you ever had.

CASEY: This was your idea!

ME: Shut up.

OAKLAND: I’m cold.

ME: Shut up.

CASEY: I brought a spear!

OAKLAND: Why?

CASEY: You can spear them through the hole.

OAKLAND: How?

CASEY: I guess they come up to check it out.

OAKLAND: My parts are cold.

(CASEY grinds hole in ice, stands watchfully crouched over hole, spear in hand. The others try and fail to construct a shelter around him, using broken-off car aerials and Saran wrap.)

CASEY: This is fun! I’m having fun.

OAKLAND: (Lays down ceremoniously, preparing for death) This is the last of earth; I am content.

ME: Move over, I want to try this flip-up contraption.

CASEY: I can’t. I can’t move, really. I’m frozen.

(I pour whiskey on Casey’s lips until he can form his mouth into a spout. He thaws.)

OAKLAND: (Mumbling) Thomas Jefferson still lives.

ME: (Addressing sky in grand fit of hysteria) Nothing works. My hands can’t flex to put the lure on. I can’t see the car. We’re all going to die.

CASEY: We’re not licked yet!

(CASEY fires flare gun into sky. It strikes a hovering rescue helicopter, the sudden presence of which requires a serious continuity revision. The helicopter explodes, crashing in flames upon our three protagonists, and burning through to the icy waters below. Finis.)

ME: Ow.

CASEY: COOL!

OAKLAND: Pretty . . . fishie . . .

Obit Patrol

I can't help it -- I read the obits. Do you? Now I've started keeping track. The Obit Patrol's a way to note the passing of interesting and significant people from the world. Check it out.