"The Rest is Noise," Alex Ross (2007): Starting from scratch

"Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch." (Kurt Weill, 1928)



Battle-lines are still being drawn over the meaning of much twentieth-century music. Often, the music is (still) overlooked in performance as too challenging, too difficult for audiences, trying the patience as well as the comprehension of most listeners who prefer the sounds of Strauss over Stravinsky. Alex Ross, of The New Yorker magazine, tries in his brief if too broad overview The Rest is Noise to put the musical daring of Stravinsky and Sibelius, Cage and Glass, Ellington and even Coltrane (as well as many others, mostly from Europe) in context with the times.

Understandably, two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and economic upheaval produced many fractured forms, and no single view of the century's music can explain it all. But Ross writes entertaining history, even if the reader may be familiar only with the names of many composers. And just when the book begins to take on the brisk, breezy approach of a survey course in modern music, he devotes 35 pages to the rise of Nazism in Germany and its effects on composition, as well as another 45 pages to the smothering effects of Communism.

Even Richard Strauss, whose music had once been a favorite of Hitler's (and whose premiere of Salome, in 1906, marks the opening chapter of the book) eventually becomes an object of ridicule from the German high command. Strauss suffered what Ross writes as "a public breakdown" as a result of a series of psychological games by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich's propaganda minister. "He is unpolitical, like a child," Goebbels wrote in his diary about Strauss, who sought assurances for his family's safety. A witness recounted Strauss' public humiliation in front of a large assembly:

"'Lehar has the masses, you do not!' the minister screamed. 'Stop once and for all your chatter about the significance of "serious music"! You are not helping your case! The art of tomorrow is different from the art of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are yesterday!'"

Ironically, the effects of this creative chill in Germany and Russia helped to spread the ideas of exiled musicians, who moved anywhere there was freedom to write and perform. (Hollywood became the surprising home to a number of emigre composers, who wrote film scores.) Ross does a good job illustrating how the many threads of modern music that subsequently developed -- serialism, minimalism, atonality -- have become part of a common musical vocabulary familiar to most listeners of popular music, even as "serious music" appears to draw futher from the mainstream.

His book also dispels the notion of a singular, dramatic arc to twentieth-century music -- the conservative notion of modern art as acts only of mere shock, and a dislocation of values. Some of the chapters deserve books of their own (the Russian chapter, although lengthy, still seems just an introduction). Certainly as the perspective on the century lengthens Ross could revisit some of the later themes, which seem slightly rushed. The book's critics claim Ross's leftward leaning politics are clearly in view, but it's hard to argue with his main thesis: that composers spent most of the twentieth century demolishing the romantic forms of the century before it.


But not completely. He begins the book with Strauss's opera Salome -- based not just on the Biblical story of a jealous wife and wanton daughter, but also drawn from a scandalous play written in 1891 by Oscar Wilde. In the audience sat Gustav Mahler, the young Arnold Schoenberg, and Puccini,"the composer of Tosca and La Boheme, who arrived to see what 'terribly cacophanous thing' his German rival had concocted."


The outrage ought to have been complete; Ross writes that Strauss's opera retells the story "in which the princess eroticizes the body of John the Baptist and indulges in a bit of necrophilia at the end." Instead, the Vienna audience erupted in applause and Strauss emerged in triumph, although Mahler later admitted he was "bewildered" by the opera's popularity. Also in the theater that night, with money borrowed from his mother to make the trip, was seventeen-year-old Adolph Hitler; Salome became one of his favorite Strauss works. By the 1940s, Salome was on the list of "degenerate" Jewish music, although Hitler continued to insist versions of it be performed -- the echoes of the nineteenth century, it seemed, would give birth to more things inexplicable than mere music in the twentieth.


The Rest is Noise is a brief, sometimes confounding introduction to the complexities of modern music. John Adams' Nixon in China (1987) and the beautiful, haunting music and movement of his recent opera, Doctor Atomic (2005) about the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, move contemporary music even further into new fields of politics and history. In a final chapter Ross careens from Boulez to Terry Riley, from Ligeti to the cool mathematics of Iannis Xenakis; his survey ends in a bit of a spin trying to name-check a multitude of composers for whom music can be a beautiful noise, and vice versa. 

Is it music, or just noise? In his preface Ross tries to prepare the reader for the journey ahead by quoting John Cage, whose 1952 piece 4'33" is divided into three movements yet involves only the sounds of the audience: "Wherever we are ... what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

"Dubai is for flamingos" (Harper's, June 2009)

It's officially the first day of summer, that day you never dream is coming in February. And it's hot: 95 degrees? Or is it 97?

But take a moment to think of the flamingos forlornly sweltering at the Dubai International Airport. The June issue of Harper's features a brief report by Negar Azimi, editor of Bidoun magazine, on the state of the economic boom-gone-bust in the United Arab Emirate. Rumors were multiplying; the birds -- dyed purple -- were stuck at the airport in an extravagant development plan gone bad. There are still plans to market camels-milk chocolate (because "the little pleasures are forever," one company representative comments as they sip camels-milk cappuccino), and Dubai is home to the world's tallest building. Yet just as here in the U.S., it seems that the global "downturn" has had some unexpected consequences in Dubai. Here are some excerpts:


"The flamingos at Dubai International Airport had been in quarantine for five days and nobody knew what to do with them. Their handlers had gone missing, I heard, and there was great bewilderment about how to tend to their needs: what exactly they ate, the temperature to which they were accustomed. People said the birds were unhappy, fluffing their feathers and gravitating toward the edges of the enclosure like sulking children, or erupting into great fits of squawking that sent the airport personnel scurrying away. Natives of the Great Rift Valley, they were destined for The Lagoons, a 70-million-square-foot development of residences, shopping centers, and offices set on seven interconnected islands of finely cultivated marsh ecology in the middle of the city.

But the construction of The Lagoons, along with many other extravagant projects in Dubai, had been put “on hold,” maybe for good. The story I heard—and Dubai is full of stories these days—was that the primary developer on the project was in jail, held on multiple charges of corruption and bribery. The long-legged waterfowl, dyed a deep mauve color for dramatic effect, waited in awkward limbo.

Since the coming of the plunge, the Persian Gulf city of Dubai has been subjected to a windfall of press coverage chronicling its dramatic decline. Cocktail-party chatter once celebrated the spectacular rise of this 'global hub,' its multicultural can-do spirit and liberal-leaning ways. Now conversations over artfully carved morsels of cheese dwell on hubris and the inevitability of imploding bubbles. 'It just had to end,' one hears. 'It was too big, too much, too fast.' Heads nod in unison.

The Burj Dubai: 160 habitable floors, 2680 feet tall, opening October 2009

... Earlier this year, the Australian feminist and sometime Marxist Germaine Greer deplaned at Dubai International Airport for all of a four-hour layover. Boarding one of Dubai’s hokey green double-decker tourist buses, she traveled a typical route that took her from the tallest building in the world (the Burj Dubai) to a hotel shaped like a sailing ship (the Burj Al Arab) to a handful of malls, and proceeded swiftly to eviscerate the place. 'For all its extravagant novelties and its masses of petunias, Dubai is a city with neither charm nor character,' she wrote in a February issue of the Guardian.

... In part, Dubai invites such hysterical interpretations because it is nearly impossible to verify anything there. When the New York Times published accounts of 3,000 cars abandoned at the airport by panicked debt-ridden foreigners, officials insisted that the number was more modest: eleven. Three thousand or eleven? Who knows? The cars are but one example. No one seems to be collecting statistics in any systematic way. What is offered instead is a stream of perennially sunny press releases ('UAE Protects Workers’ Rights,' announced a piece in the Gulf News last year in response to a report by Human Rights Watch on the dire situation of laborers). And although rumors have always had a magical currency here, these days they have become Dubai’s chief commodity.

A cursory sampling: Thousands of businessmen have been locked up in prison for bad debts; come the end of the school year, half the expatriate population will abandon their strenuously air-conditioned palaces; the United Arab Emirates, famously tax-free, will soon impose an income tax on all its residents; neighboring Abu Dhabi will shift its border into Dubai in exchange for a $20 billion 'bailout'; the posh Atlantis Hotel, perched on the tip of a man-made island shaped like a palm tree, has shut an entire wing due to low occupancy; the ruler of Dubai is dead; judging from the city’s ubiquitous security cameras, there have never been so many people weeping in elevators; there are thirty-two purple flamingos languishing in Terminal 3 of the Dubai International Airport.

'It’s all lies,' an acquaintance from the Executive Office, the ruler’s consulting circle, told me defensively as we sat at a Starbucks in the Emirates Towers. 'It is all coming from Abu Dhabi,' said another EO employee, referring to the emirate’s oil-rich cousin next door.

The flamingos at the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary, Dubai

... I call up Sama Dubai, the state-owned development firm that was in charge of The Lagoons project before it all came to a screeching halt. I am eventually referred to Kevin Hyland, a British-born flamingo specialist at Dubai’s Wildlife Protection Office, who confirms that the real estate venture was supposed to have included flamingos, though they’ve never set foot in an airport. They’re local birds—about 1,000 of them—and Hyland has been tending them since the 1990s, at their home in the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary, which was to be one of The Lagoons’ premier attractions.

Nor have they been dyed purple but are instead a standard shade of pink. And if the new, grand lodgings envisioned for them fail to materialize, at least they are not in jail, where several executives of Sama Dubai have, in fact, been obliged to take up residence. Like flamingos everywhere, they cluck, squawk, and flutter, but these are not necessarily noises of complaint. I’ve come to think of them as stoic, strutting under the sun as they weather the interminable downturn."

"Have You Seen ...?" (David Thomson, 2008)

David Thomson's Have You Seen ... ? is one of those doorstop-sized list books that some moviegoers will read and argue over, and not necessarily for what Thomson leaves in or out of his survey of a thousand of his chosen must-see films.

The British film writer for Film Comment, The New Yorker, and Salon lays his intentions on the line in the book's subtitle, A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films: it's a number meant to impress, in this age of lists, and the reviews are one-a-page, so even the most casual moviegoer familiar with, say, Jaws, will at least glance at it's opposite-page mate, La Jetee, Chris Marker's 29-minute film about life after a Third World War.

Or maybe not. These essays are written in that certain telegraphic newspaper style of film criticism -- with an assumption that the reader shares a common knowledge of, and admiration for, what goes on the screen, as well as behind it. A lot is written about the struggles and disappointments of directors and scriptwriters -- the films that could have been. Those who know directors Ford from Huston, Carpenter from Boorman, will enjoy the backstories of classic films, if they don't know them already; others less interested may find such details distracting in essays -- sketches, really -- that run only 750 words in length. And as might be expected, most of Thomson's list draws heavily from films before 1970. As he writes in his introduction,

"Films are not what they were. Far fewer of us go to see them. Young people coming to this book are being asked to bear with 'restrictions' that they resist in the marketplace -- silence, black-and-white, a lot of smart talk, a sense of morality, etcetera ... Of course, the latest films do not fare as well in this book as pictures from the thirties and the forties. Too many new films are gestures trying to capture the interest of kids set on war games and PlayStations. We are so ready for shallow amusement that it may be harder to enjoy profound entertainment ... This book may come off as helplessly nostalgic -- a tribute to an age that is not coming back."

In other words, Thomson reviews these films secure in the knowledge that he thinks they're great (and they undoubtedly are, most of them) but his enthusiasm for old Hollywood mostly misses the mark: as an introduction to movies, he tells us names and dates and stars (what makes the movies tick) but never really communicates what would make these films exciting to a first-time viewer. Young movie fans are missing in Thomson's book, unless they have an interest in exploring older films on their own. And without a younger audience of readers interested in movies, Have You Seen ...? loses is point, even as it tries to be entertaining.

That observation may sound uncharitable, but consider: Thomson begins his alphabetical list of reviews not with his original first choice, Abe Lincoln in Illinois ("trapped by alphabetical order," as he writes) but with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so as not to open the book with a film that "would depress the ordinary heart." That's odd: the book is Thomson's personal introduction ... but he's talked into this choice by a Sony Pictures representative, who at least had the grace not to suggest one of his own company's films.


A reader supposes there's room for Abbott and Costello in such a long list. Paying nearly $4o to read that "the movie becomes about Lou's jitters and romantic self-absorption" doesn't make the cut'n'paste of Universal Pictures' horror and comedy franchise stars a more classic film. Or even much worth the time of its 83-minute running length, considering there are 999 more films to watch. For a film buff such a marketing ploy throws the rest of Thomson's reasoning into a questionable realm.


There are great choices in the book of course, but the sheer number of titles dilutes the power of truly great films deserving to be seen (Murnau's Sunrise) and elevating some that are less than mediocre (The Incredible Shrinking Man). What is surprising is that Thomson takes aim (repeatedly) at some directors whose reputations are secure at this late date: Kubrick ("strange," "straining," "pretentious") and David Lean (in Lawrence of Arabia "the sun shines over the shell of an empty film") are just two examples, and John Ford (How Green Was My Valley) receives several backhanded slaps apparently for not attempting to be a better director than Carol Reed (The Stars Look Down).

Thomson gets down to explaining his view of Kubrick in a March, 2009 interview from Stop Smiling magazine while promoting the book. It's a shame he wasn't this forthcoming in his reviews of Kubrick's films; it would have added some context to his criticism.

"I think there’s something tremendously dotty and appealing about Kubrick the American giving up America. About the space traveler giving up travel. About the man open to the wide world becoming a hermit, nearly. About the man with a rather limited private life making studies about rich emotional lives. He’s fascinating. The ambition alone is awesome. In my book he’s made two masterpieces, and for me, if you make one masterpiece you’re of major importance. Some of Kubrick’s work fails, badly. But I’m not put off by bad failure. I think it’s all fascinating. It’s quite true that I’m extremely critical about many of these films, but I watch them over and over again. There is a sheer pleasure and fascination in watching Kubrick fill the screen. When he’s on, he’s amazing, and one of the great life stories in film."

You won't find this kind of explanation presented anywhere in the book, unfortunately. Since the Kubrick, Lean and Ford movies are included in the book at any rate, Thomson's judgements seem awkward and arbitrary, and the reviews don't achieve any critical depth. As with any book of lists, the reader is free to agree or disagree with Thomson's broad generalities employing one's own standard of disbelief.

Favorite films are a personal choice, and the brief reviews of Have You Seen ...? would be a great, drowsy beach read in a hot sun. It's doubtful Thomson's book will spark any serious debate; it's not scholarly, and it's meant to be an introduction to movies that, by far, are not even making the rounds of art houses any more. More than likely it will be a handy, hefty guide next time you're rearranging your Netflix queue on lazy Saturday afternoons.

Disappearing ink: "The Nation" (June 8, 2009)

The current issue of The Nation has Elizabeth Sifton's lengthy piece about the decline of book publishing, and while the usual suspects are named (market decline, the internet, e-books, a lack of "serious" readership) the tone of the article suggests an "us" vs. "them" approach to the brave new whirl in what lies ahead for the publishing industry. In tandem with an article on "The Last Book Party" by Gideon Lewis Kraus in the March issue of Harper's, the future of ink-on-paper is bleak indeed, if you imagine that technology can only wreak destruction and ruin on the printed word.

But industry uncertainty and conjecture can see only so far. "The future always looks like a void on the other side of the farthest thing we can safely predict," writes David Rotherberg in his article "Information Ecology," appearing way back in the Spring 2000 issue of Parabola: it was the edge of a new millenium, and he was speaking of the increasing appeal of nostalgia at the time. It is always easier (and more comforting) to look back at the known past, forgiving or forgetting all of the turmoil and confusion of the times, than to look at the blank slate of the future.

And so, too, with the fears and insecurities of the publishing industry in Sifton's article. Publishing has suffered serious setbacks in the market, and not just with the economic downturn, when compared to the boom times of the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., before the intrusion of the internet and its turning of the once-mighty word into mere "content"). She does correctly outline the enfolding of independent publishing houses into larger corporate entities, who have turned profit-margins, rather than good books, into quarterly business goals.

"Along with old-time skills, the trade publishers risked losing their nerve and cultural daring. This is a well-known sad story. The money men trusted editors less and marketing people more; literary experiment was frowned on, though gambling on popular authors was acceptable--and they all bid to publish the same ones. They became more and more alike, competing to overpay for the same celebrities. ... The corporations that consolidated the publishing houses, like the Silicon Valley children of today, saw book copyrights as valuable 'content' with plenty of cultural cachet that could be 'synergistically' exploited--optimally by the other arms of their media empires."

Sifton has few kind words for the devaluation of the mass-market books that do take up much shelf space in remaining bookstores -- celebrity tell-alls, media tie-ins, self-serving political items she refers to as 'booklike objects" -- that take away from the vital literature that, preumably, would take its place. Public libraries seem to have reached a balancing act with new technology and the remaining ink-and-paper trade, by installing banks of computers that draw in a public for internet access who might then check out a book or two, usually by a best-selling author in a well-known series.

The dire predictions for publishing's disappearing ink, of course, are marked with unknowns. Sifton seems to take special aim at the purveyors of internet content, and she seems bemused by the fact that many of the caretakers of the "open-access Eden" she claims they wanted now choke their sites with advertising -- which Americans have come to expect, but which devalues the content found there:

"It's a colossal irony to have the guys and gals of Amazon, Google and their ilk lusting for free book 'content' as premium material on which to stake their enlarged claims to commercial riches. For these clever mathematicians and engineers who are shaping the electronic business of our time and the archives of the future, these baby-faced young entrepreneurs, have risen to their mercantile eminence without encountering books, and don't think they need to. 

I enjoyed the fatuous surprise of Google's Sergey Brin discovering that 'There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.' Translating this backhanded recognition of value into his own debased lingo, he understands that books make for 'viable information-retrieval systems,' information being the only cultural signifier he recognizes, evidently. His company's amazing presumption that book people should simply hand over the keys to their priceless kingdom shows how completely he and his colleagues misunderstand what is at stake."

Will we miss what we had? Will we mourn the loss of reading-for-pleasure in twenty years? Not likely. Sifton's dire predictions seem to point the way to a darker age when easy-access, advertiser-driven information replaces knowledge, but most likely it will only be new market forms of books and reading that the publishing industry itself will come up with. It doesn't look as much like the end of the industry as it does finding new ways of dancing with the devil.