An Aria from the Next Dimension

Some deaths remain in the news for weeks (Anna Nicole comes to mind) for no discernible reason; others are barely noticed, even though the life that has been transfigured could be richly celebrated over a month's worth of daily columns.

Beverly Sills, the extraordinary soprano who died Monday, is a case in point. Her life touched millions of people who became interested in opera through her direct influence. Sills, mainly in her work with the New York City Opera, poured a fresh charge of energy into opera, and gave it new life. She made that art appealing and affordable to countless visitors to Lincoln Center. I should know: I am one of them.

Back in the 1980's, I was making enough money to afford a subscription to a box at the Met. I would take my girlfriend along; we would dress up for every show, knowing that when we stepped through the curtain and into the box, folks would look to see if we were someone famous. It was fun, but a little disconcerting.

I always felt more at home in the balcony of NYCO than in that box at the Met. For that, I credit Beverly Sills, who made it her mission to give opera the same life and simple human energy that you could get from a Broadway show or a play or a television sitcom. To be sure, it was still opera: the singers were first-rate, the musicianship professional, but there was a familiar passion to the performances that gave them life.

I can recall a performance of Carmen some 20 years ago, featuring a hand-picked Sills protege who sang the famous Habanera with a unique sizzle. As she sang the refrain, she lay back on a bench on the set, parted her legs and let her hand stray suggestively between them. It was an electric moment that was kind of revelatory for me: Sills had brought open sensuality right onto the stage, made the story live in a way that perhaps no one else had ever tried.

That's how she lived, too: pushing boundaries, exploring alternatives, making mistakes, and always seeking more from the art, to make it a truer experience for those of us who came to watch and listen.

Sills was able to make opera popular because she transcended all the received truths and formalities of opera, mastered and then challenged its traditions, and transformed it into something poignantly direct and human. Those of us who love opera will miss her; but in some dimension to which our ears are not tuned, I'm betting they're hearing a hair-tingling, crystalline Cleopatra this week.

Good night, Bubbles, and thanks.

A Downpour of Silence

You would think that with everything that's going on in the world—you know, bombs ripping apart the flesh of innocents in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan (to name only a few)—that the popular ardor for fireworks might cool a bit. And you would be wrong. The fireworks mania has continued apace, with the usual results.

Here in Brooklyn, it's never a good sleeping night, yet sometimes Nature helps out. I was settling in for a long night of listening to the pops, screeches, and booms of the amateurs in the neighborhood, when just after midnight, a blessing: a heavy downpour of rain.

Now in our culture, rain is typically demonized as "bad weather." Turn on the local newscast and witness the labels being applied to Nature: precipitation is bad, sunshine is good. Our mass media imagine that we're not smart enough to discern any finer shades of meaning than that. Or maybe it's just that they're not.

Same as how they portray political contests: Mitt is a real candidate, because he looks like one. Kucinich? Too short, too dumpy, not an ounce of stud in him. Unelectable.

And so we get bombs. Literal bombs, in places near and remote. Figurative bombs, in the seats of high power. It's all about the choices we make as citizens, and the decisions we make to accept or reject the lies and half-truths broadcast to us over the boxes in our living rooms.

Bombs are not fun, nor are they pretty, except via a projection of our minds. Bombs are dangerous: they can make sleep difficult, or they can make it permanent. Perhaps what we need in the Middle East are cloud seeders rather than troop surges, so that the bombs are more frequently enveloped in the watery silence of rain. I can only tell you that it sure worked here, last night: the rain came down and the fireworks were silenced.

Geek Bless America

The new Harry Potter game: Non-violent, engaging, fun, visually and sonically beautiful. Available for both Mac and Windows. Can't go wrong with this one, Moms and Dads.




Geek Wednesday: Confessions of a Mac Fanboy

The Communication Declension:

iPhone
uCrackBerries
heSidekicks
sheTreos
weXpress
theyRAZR

Since when do people have so much to talk about, so endlessly? Are we turning into a giant and ceaseless session of Congress, sliding into a vortex of Sunday spout-show on a collapse into C-Span hell?

Maybe that's why I love geeks and musicians: they work in languages that can't easily be spoken, but only understood.

Anyway, the big news from last week is this: another corporate devil has climbed into bed with Uncle Steve. AT&T (your world, delivered...to the NSA) now joins Nike. But if you'd like to try out the iPhone as a WiFi device and iPod, you can, thanks to some code from reverse-engineering uber-geek Jon Lech Johansen, who writes one of the more entertaining and informative geek blogs I've read.

Yet the Apple momentum is now in juggernaut force: later this month, expect to see new iMacs—arguably the best desktop hardware out there. And we're 3 months away from Leopard, with its new previewing, file management, backup, and workspace features. All dizzyingly cool, but let me add a few admittedly petty recommendations:

click graphic to enlarge

Can we fix the traffic light? You know, the window control buttons that correspond to Windows' dash-square-X protocol? I don't care that Apple has them on the left side of the window (anyone who knows me knows I lean left, anyway), but should I need a Geiger counter to find them on a laptop display? Make them big and easy to get to...not like in Windows, but more like Linux/KDE.

Here's a lesson straight from Windows: for god's sake, can't we have the ability to resize a window in all corners/sides? Apple gives you one (lower right).

Re-naming files: This is a big one, because we do it all the time, especially those of us who take a lot of pictures. You unload your camera's contents into iPhoto and want to give the files unique names. Here's how it works now:

You drag the picture to the desktop.
You select the file "P7004305839045.jpg" or whatever, and hit Enter. You're ready to edit.
But the whole file name is overwritten as soon as you start typing, so you have to remember to put the correct extension in at the end.

Why not set the default so you're overwriting only the file name prefix, but not the extension? The current one (in this case .jpg) can remain, and if the user wants to change the format, he can but doesn't have to. Make sense?

Make friends with the Penguin: OS X has a UNIX / BSD core and runs X11. Google has a Linux version of Picasa (and now, of Desktop); Firefox, Opera, Real, and other major software providers make Linux versions of their major products. So how about a Linux-friendly version of the Boot Camp drivers? And can't Apple make Linux versions of Safari, Quicktime, and iTunes? They're all free for Windows users: what's the problem, Steve? Can't afford the geeks to do it with? The day I see a Linux version of iTunes, I'll know you're serious and sincere in what you say about DRM.

Death by a thousand charges: Two dollars to get an 802.11n driver; $30 for Quicktime Pro every time there's an upgrade (I've paid that twice so far, for v6 and v7, in the space of less than two years); $100 for dot-mac when Google gives me equal or better features NC; $100 a year to get to the front of the line at the Genius Bar. Do your shareholders have you handcuffed to continue this money-bleed, in exchange for them looking the other way when someone on exec row fiddles with dates on stock prices? Be careful, Steve: it could alienate people who might otherwise be attracted to your good stuff.

I can say for a certainty that it's beginning to alienate this one-time Mac fanboy. Much as I love Apple hardware and OS X, and as much as I'll take a long, close look at those new iMacs later this month, the likelihood is that my next desktop machine will be a PC running Linux.

There But for the Grace of God Scoot I...

Here's where we stand in our great nation today: if you question or criticize the government and its actions, you will be duly branded a traitor in virtually every public forum available to said government and its slave media. But if you actually do something treasonous—i.e., compromise national security by exposing the identity of one of your government's secret agents—you will be elevated and rewarded; and if some activist judge or an attorney we forgot to fire happens to catch you and prosecute you, no problem: you will escape the velvet chains of minimum security prison, thanks to the beatific hand of the Compassionate Conservative. Of course, it helps if Congress happens to be occupied with another vacation or else running for President.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg, I'm ready now—give me a call.
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On Keeping a Dead Body Upright

Before he ever told the first of his innumerable lies to the people of America and the world, George Bush had to lie to himself.

A lie--let alone a compulsive habit of lying--needs constant support, which comes from lavish expenditures of physical and mental energy. In short, a lie takes a lot out of you, because it demands unceasing attention. A friend of mine once told me, "lies have short little legs--they can't go very far on their own power."

So a lie must be dressed up, ornamented, disguised, and above all, carried. And an entire network of lies, such as the Rove machine has manufactured these past six years—that requires an unending and vigilant maintenance program of ever-increasing complexity. You need an entire department, a full arm of your bureaucratic machine, to uphold and coordinate your lies.

It is much like the effort involved in keeping a dead body upright. All the while, as you pour more and more energy into keeping the program of falsehood standing--as you sacrifice your life-force to the cultivation of the superficial--the core slowly and silently rots.

This is the course of inner death, the story of sacrifice, the discordant song of suicide.

The Perils of Plutocracy

Want a quick read on how sick and benighted our political culture is these days, and why Al Gore's new book is so timely and critical?

Just have a look at what the MSM is gushing over this morning: Obama is taking the lead. In the polls? At the caucus before the caucus? Heaven forbid, on the issues facing our political nation?

No: in the money, silly. After all, isn't that the only thing that matters?

It's all here and here and even here (shame on you, BBC—I expected better of you). Clearly, there's a place for this sort of thing—but on the front page, in your headline?

As I've said before here, money is marvelous stuff, and even capitalism has its virtues*. But if it becomes your primary signpost in the search for leadership, you are planting the seeds of self-destruction. Has the grim experience of corporate tyranny these past six years years taught us nothing? When you wed your future to a plutocrat, you get plutocracy. Sometimes, if you're lucky, a benign plutocracy, such as Rome had with Augustus, or as we had with our nation's founders or more recently, during the Clinton years. But after Augustus came Nero and Caligula; after Washington came Adams (and his odious Alien and Sedition Act, a gun that still smokes before our immigration-challenged society); after Clinton came...well, you know that story.

Yet our mass media, supported, it seems, by the Supreme Court, think that the corporate dollar is the only leader worth following. Is it any wonder that the politicians, ideological sheep that they are, follow along? Yet imagine the good that could be done with all the hundreds of millions raised by the candidates pursuing the magic moment of broadcast message—if only we could turn off the TV set and ignore the propaganda of plutocrats.
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*As I've also mentioned before, capital is the virtue concealed within capitalism--in this case again, it's the tail that makes the dragon: the -ism.