Sounds & Fury

One Helluva Composer That Wolfgang

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 2:04 AM Eastern on 13 Apr to add a footnote.]

Viewed the Met's 2012 La Clemenza Di Tito for the first time this afternoon courtesy the Met HD film, PBS, and my HD DVR. Music-making, singing, acting, staging all splendid cum gorgeous. Bravo tutti!

Clemenza may not be on the same exalted level as Mozart's Big 4 mature works, or even his early Idomeneo with which Clemenza might more rightly be compared, opera seria to opera seria, but it ain't chopped liver either and is a more than respectable product of a frantic, health-impaired, deadline-determined, mere 45 days or so worth of work.*

One helluva composer that Wolfgang. One helluva composer indeed.

* The report by Mozart's first biographer Franz Niemetschek that Mozart finished the opera in 18 days having begun it on the coach journey from Vienna to Prague where the work was to have its premiere is almost certainly in error. Mozart had received the Caterino Mazzolà reworking of Metastasio's original libretto for Clemenza in mid-July of 1791 and set to work on the music immediately thereafter putting aside his work on both Die Zauberflöte and the Requiem for the purpose. Clemenza received its premiere in Prague on 6 September 1791 with Mozart conducting.

Bravo!, Alan (And Sesame Street)

Mad Men: Season 6

Mad Men is back for its sixth season with a two-hour opener tonight. We haven't seen it yet (we're DVRing it so we can watch without having to sit through the plethora of seemingly interminable commercial breaks; a nice irony, that) but we'd be willing to bet, sight unseen, it's just more of the same of the past five seasons. The show just never seems to grow — or grow up.

And what is more of the same? Here's the very best in-a-nutshell critique of the show we've ever read. It's by culture writer Daniel Mendelsohn from a lengthy article he wrote for the 24 February 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books titled "The Mad Men Account":

The writing [in Mad Men] is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish. Worst of all — in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues” — the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

Should the Mad Men sixth season opener astonish us by disappointing our expectations we'll come back here with an update — and an apology.

Meanwhile, don't hold your breath.

Grin And Bear It

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up (Götterdämmerung)

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

And so it goes.

Netflix's New Drama Series, House Of Cards: Some Brief Remarks

We take a momentary break from our hiatus from blogging to note briefly Netflix's small revolution in the delivery of original TV-type series drama to audiences worldwide.

We've just finished viewing Friday's premiere of all 13 hour-long episodes of Season 1 of the new Netflix original drama series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, and Kate Mara, an American remake of the brilliant 1990 BBC series of the same name starring Ian Richardson, Diane Fletcher, and Susannah Harker, and it's a splendid effort both substantively and in its revolutionary method of delivery (all 13 episodes of Season 1 available at the same time on the Internet for instant streaming directly to your properly equipped viewing device of choice). The drama's production is visually gorgeous and the performances largely first-rate throughout. The writing, however, is only occasionally so, we're sorry to have to report, and is fairly uneven both within and across episodes (all told, there were some six writers involved) and around Episode 8 the drama begins going badly off the rails and thereafter quickly degenerates into a series drama of the typical American TV network sort for the most part. But even at the series's best, Kevin Spacey's bluntly brutal Francis (Frank) Underwood is no match in Machiavellian machination for Ian Richardson's deliciously wicked Francis Urquhart, and Robin Wright's barbed, athletically coarse Claire Underwood is no match in seductive Lady Macbeth-ness for Diane Fletcher's coolly smooth patrician Elizabeth Urquhart, nor is Kate Mara's Zoe Barnes a match for Susannah Harker's Mattie Storin in quietly inviting beauty. You may think we're being biased in our assessment by our often evident Anglophilia. You might very well think that. We couldn't possibly comment.

That is all. We now resume our interrupted hiatus.

Let Obama Be Obama

Has no one noted the eerie similarity of what must have gone on in the White House in the weeks before and following President Obama's victory in the November election that culminated in his uncompromisingly Liberal Second Inaugural Address which unmistakably put the obstructionist Republicans on notice (and it's about bloody time, too) with the 19th episode of Season 1 of The West Wing titled, "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet"? Here is Wikipedia's description of the plot of that episode:

Sam knows no progress is possible on getting a policy in place so that gays and lesbians can openly serve in the military; Josh confronts a group of Republican Congressional staffers who threaten him with poison-pill legislation if he even thinks about pushing for campaign finance reformers on two newly opened Federal Election Commission seats; and Toby screams to Leo that they've had only one victory in office and that was putting Judge Mendoza on the Supreme Court. The staffers and the President feel listless and ineffectual in their jobs, and worry that they will be unable to achieve anything meaningful due to the constraints of the political system.

The memo and news coverage of how Bartlet too often compromised his positions to placate his opponents and avoid controversy resulted in Bartlet's popularity going down in the polls. On seeing his job approval rating dropping five points in a week to 42 percent, the staff comes to realize that the Bartlet administration has been ineffective because it has been too timid to make bold decisions, focusing instead on the exigencies of politics. Finally, Leo confronts President Bartlet with his own timidity, challenging him to be himself and to take the staff "off the leash." – in other words, he seeks to "Let Bartlet be Bartlet". The President and his staff resolve to act boldly and "raise the level of public debate" in America by moving forward with a more liberal agenda.

As we said, an eerie similarity.

Paragon

We've just finished watching — uncut, unedited, and uninterrupted by commercials, all courtesy of that invaluable cable channel TCM — the 1973 Oscar-winning movie The Sting written by David S. Ward and directed by George Roy Hill starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and even after six or seven previous viewings over the years it remains fresh and a source of unalloyed pleasure. From its intricate, suspenseful, twisty plot, to its brilliantly realized characterizations, to its casting, to its soundtrack (Scott Joplin rags adapted and arranged by the late Marvin Hamlisch), to its costumes, to its cinematography, to its minute attention to detail throughout, it is positively lapidary; a very paragon of the well-made Hollywood movie; an exemplar of the breed.

Since the mid-70s we've visited a movie theater only rarely (only three times, to be more precise) and so ask the question: Does Hollywood make such movies anymore, or have 21st-century movie audiences become too sophisticated and/or lost their taste for such intelligent if unserious fare? We honestly don't know, but judging from what eventually makes it to the TV screen from current-day Hollywood we would guess such movies are today considerably out of fashion and would fail to be appreciated.

If so, too bad. In a world and era fraught with difficulty and danger, such supremely well-made intelligent if unserious fare is just the ticket if only to provide but a few hours of soul-satisfying escape and relief from the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up

Thanks to the Met and PBS we've now seen all four parts of Robert Lepage's staging of Wagner's Ring and so it seems at least a brief summing-up is in order concerning it. Yes, we're well aware we didn't do even a bullet-point review of Götterdämmerung. There was simply nothing there to impel or compel us to undertake the tiresome and unrewarding task. Suffice it to say that it was pretty much more of the same-old-same-old with Mr. Lepage's employment of Le Machine ranging from his trademark stupefying Busby Berkeley symmetricality thing to the occasionally evocative to the at least visually attractive to the unobtrusive and un-tricky, to the totally flat and boring as at the close of Götterdämmerung. And more of the same-old-same-old as well with Mr. Lepage's seeming habit of leaving his singer-actors to their own devices dramatically for the most part sans any "directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision" as we put it previously. The singer-actors all gave their professional best which is considerable as did the Met Male Chorus but we would single out only Jay Hunter Morris for his convincing Siegfried, and Iain Paterson and Wendy Bryn Harmer for making come fully alive Gunther and Gutrune, respectively; two too often innocuous characters as they're typically sung and played. As for conductor Fabio Luisi, his reading of the score gave full due to Wagner rhetorically and stylistically notwithstanding that Maestro Luisi tends to run rather too fleet through some of the dramatic high points and climaxes not the least of which is the climax of the three intertwining leitmotifs that form Götterdämmerung's — and the tetralogy's — close.

There. Don't ever say we didn't review Götterdämmerung.

Regarding the staging of the entire tetralogy, if one were inclined to be kind about it one might say Mr. Lepage is, by slow degrees, learning how to best employ the Frankenstein contraption that's at the very heart of his staging of the Ring. The problem with that, however, is the very way in which Mr. Lepage seems to approach everything concerning the employment of the contraption. His focus seems to be on what he can get the contraption to do that will result in some visually arresting effect at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption can best be exploited to express, frame, or support the dramatic content to hand. It's a tail wagging the dog approach that's all but guaranteed to come up with the wrong way to go pretty much every time.

Of course, saying that Mr. Lepage is by slow degrees learning how to best employ Le Machine is not saying very much and is of little comfort given Le Machine's appalling initial and ongoing cost. The Met (and its audiences) deserve far more and far better considering the huge investment involved. On the other hand, occasionally evocative or visually attractive or unobtrusive and un-tricky employment of Le Machine is preferable to their opposites and since it's an almost sure bet that Le Machine and Mr. Lepage or his Lepage-trained surrogate will be with the Met for the next decade or so of Ring performances, we suppose the Met (and its audiences) ought to be thankful for small favors as there's but one other way out for the Met from under Mr. Gelb's colossal economic and artistic blunder: cease throwing good money after bad, have done with it entirely, and live to try again another day the wiser for the experience.

But we all know that's not going to happen, don't we.

Of course we do.

And so it goes.

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Siegfried

We're going to make brief, bullet-point work of this as writing our music-drama-by-music-drama commentary on the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen has become a most tiresome and unrewarding exercise. So, in brief and bullet-pointed:

⚫ In Acts I and II of Siegfried, Le Machine showed that it could be something more and better than it's been so far and actually create some genuinely evocative settings while at the same time accommodating the singer-actors by functioning as a stage for all their actions (not just a few tricks) instead of as a mere 21st-century high-tech version of a 19th-century scenery flat in front of which the singer-actors can do their thing. Most impressive. On the other hand, the very same genuinely evocative settings are achievable without having to construct a special piece of machinery costing $16M to achieve them.

⚫ In Act I, and for the first time in this tetralogy so far, it appeared the singer-actors were not left to their own devices but had their every movement shaped by a director who, for the most part, seemed to know his business. Also for the first time in this tetralogy so far, the singer-actors actually faced the person with whom they were exchanging sung dialogue instead of singing their lines facing the audience bel canto opera style (and it's about bloody time, too!). Perhaps the director was responsible for that as well.

⚫ The Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris) actually looked (and acted) every inch a Siegfried, and although his fine voice is not terribly big it was big enough and used with intelligence.

⚫ The dragon looked a bit silly but we've seen worse.

⚫ Conductor Fabio Luisi, treating this music-drama as the Ring's scherzo as it is, made a fine if just a tad too-fleet job of it, and Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Gerhard Siegel (Mime), Bryn Terfel (The Wanderer), Eric Owens (Alberich), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Hans-Peter König (Dragon/Fafner), and Patricia Bardon (Erda) all did themselves proud.

⚫ Memo To The Powers That Be: Fire the idiot who suggested Mime should wear spectacles (complete with a jeweler's loupe, no less). Fire as well the idiot who suggested that Erda be blond and blue-eyed and leave her subterranean abode to stroll about with The Wanderer.)

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Die Walküre

We just finished watching our recording of this telecast which was our second viewing of an HD film of Die Walküre the first of which we viewed this past January. We wrote then that this staging was...

...perhaps the most wooden, most vapid, least evocative, and most utterly empty staging of a Wagner music-drama it's ever been our displeasure to witness, Le Machine accomplishing nothing but constrain the action of the singer-actors who, for the most part, moved to and fro seemingly willy-nilly along the thin strip of real estate provided them downstage doing vaguely appropriate things most, but by no means all, of the time, and make itself impotently conspicuous merely by its looming, hulking, contribute-nothing presence.

We saw nothing in this viewing to alter our opinion of this staging except to note that we missed a couple adjectives in our above assessment; namely, silly and idiotic.

Silly were the costumes (this entire Ring is in urgent need of a new costume designer) and the entirely redundant shadow play pantomimes projected behind Siegmund's Act I telling of his and his family's early history, and of how he managed to lose his weapons and end up wounded and weaponless at Hunding's hut. And idiotic (and we use the term advisedly) was the giant "eye" (at least it looked like an eye, presumably symbolic of Wotan's lost eye) that slowly appeared downstage center out of nowhere and for no reason at the beginning of Wotan's great Act II monologue and within which are seen images referring to those things of which Wotan is singing at the moment (e.g., Alberich's theft of the Rhinegold, the ring, Erda's warning, etc.) as if Wotan's words and their leitmotif-rich music were insufficient on their own. (One can almost hear Mr. Lepage saying to himself: "The man will be sitting there singing almost all by himself for some twenty minutes and NOTHING ELSE IS HAPPENING! Can't have that. The audience will be bored out of their skulls. Have to put something in there to liven things up.") Needless to say, that "eye" served only to trivialize Wotan's deeply searching and deeply mined confession which confession, along with the immediately preceding scene that provoked it, is the very linchpin not only of Die Walküre but of the entire tetralogy.

And speaking of that immediately preceding provoking scene wherein Fricka, sung by the big-voiced Stephanie Blythe, forces Wotan to see and understand what a conniving self-deceiver he's been, was itself trivialized by none other than Stephanie Blythe herself by virtue of her transformation of Fricka into a wounded-wife character out of some Italian soap opera. Whether she did that on her own hook or at Mr. Lepage's ignorant direction the responsibility for the trivialization lies squarely at Mr. Lepage's feet and it's unforgivable.

So much for the dramatic aspects of this production. As to the musical, James Levine made a rather better job of it than he did with Das Rheingold but, still, nothing to write home (or a blog entry) about; and principal protagonists Bryn Terfel (Wotan), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), and Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde) all performed respectably, Mr. Terfel bettering his Rheingold Wotan by an order of magnitude. The only outstanding voice and characterization in this production belonged to Hans-Peter König who made one helluva Hunding.

And so it goes — or, rather, has gone so far.

Onward to Siegfried.

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Das Rheingold

We've just finished watching our recording of the PBS telecast of the Met's Robert Lepage staging of Das Rheingold and what a two-and-a-half-hours waste of our time it was. On the Lepage staging of Die Walküre we'd written previously that it was...

...perhaps the most wooden, most vapid, least evocative, and most utterly empty staging of a Wagner music-drama it's ever been our displeasure to witness, Le Machine accomplishing nothing but constrain the action of the singer-actors ... and make itself impotently conspicuous merely by its looming, hulking, contribute-nothing presence.

The same could be said of this staging of Das Rheingold. Dramatically, it was leadenly static and absent any hint of "directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision" which, it seems, was "left to the dictates and requirements of Le Machine and the whims and inclinations of the individual performers, each according to his or her wont," (to quote ourself), and musically no more than merely competent on all counts from all performers, from the conductor (James Levine) on up. It also badly miscast vocally the two principal protagonists — Bryn Terfel (Wotan) and Eric Owens (Alberich) — each of whom should have been singing the other's role. To detail all the myriad badness of this staging would take far too much of our time and in the absence of payment in serious money for the effort we refuse to undertake the task except to point out that this is a Rheingold absent a Walhall (we kid you not). The only thing positive one could say about this staging is that it isn't a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept Regietheater) staging — although on second thought, perhaps that would have been preferable.

REMINDER: Wagner Week On PBS

Beginning Tuesday, 11 September, and continuing for the next three days, PBS's Great Performances At The Met will be telecasting the HD films of the Met's Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen preceding which, on Monday, 10 September, will be telecast the promo documentary film, "Wagner's Dream".

Check your local listings for telecast times.

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

RTWT here.

The Met's New La Traviata As Seen On PBS

It was one of those need-to-watch-TV-cause-we're-bored-silly nights. Problem was, there was nothing on TV worth watching. And so, faute de mieux, we turned to New Jersey's PBS HD channel which was airing the Met's HD film of La Traviata in the staging by Willy Decker and vowed to watch the whole thing through no matter what, except in the case the voices were not more than merely competent in which case we would be done with it and watch the news on CNN instead.

The voices were indeed more than merely competent for the most part, the standouts being that white-haired Russian guy whose singing was spectacular and that French person who, after a somewhat rocky start, did honor to her role as principal protagonist. And it didn't hurt matters that this opera is the sort of opera that's mother's milk to conductor Fabio Luisi who did a splendid job in the pit.

And then there was the staging.

To put this in perspective, one must first ask oneself what Traviata is at bottom. And the most honest answer to that question is that Traviata is, at bottom, nothing more than a soap opera in the typical Italian-opera mold. Its music, Italian-opera-lovely as some of it is, and its text declare it so and no staging can transform it into something greater which, we suspect, is what Herr Decker attempted (unsuccessfully) to do with his staging which staging, we hasten to add, while decidedly Regietheater is NOT Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash). The staging maintains throughout the concept of the opera's creator and does not attempt to substitute its own Konzept in place of it. It merely reimagines the realization of the opera creator's concept which is, of course, what makes it a Regietheater staging.

We found that elegant but starkly bare staging to be hockey-puck devoid of anything that could be called evocative or resonant, and found the sledgehammer-symbolism of that ever-present clock thing and the equally ever-present silent figure that's supposed to represent Death (yeah, yeah, we get it, Willy; her time is running out) embarrassingly hokey as was that sparse IKEA (or was it Walmart) furniture not to speak of all that singing while lying down or crawling about the floor.

Mr. Gelb, we suggest, should do lots more along the lines of vetting these stagings before committing the Met to live with them beyond their initial presentation. We wonder just how many seasons this vapid entry will have to run in order to amortize its cost.

Early Warning

We've always been contra Republicans generally (that party has more loony tunes and idiots per congressional district than does Byberry state mental hospital and a positively delusional fairytale economic ideology that's resulted ultimately in catastrophe of one sort or another wherever and whenever it's been freely implemented), but here's a more current specific reason to be contra Republicans this presidential election year.

From a leaked transcript of an upcoming cover story in Fortune magazine by Andy Serwer in New York and David Whitford in Boston, Politico reports the following gem from the lips of presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate [on becoming president]. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf. [emphasis ours]

So, not only delusional loony tunes and idiots, but woodenheaded philistines as well (does Mr. Romney actually imagine a meaningful savings of money would result from such cuts?).

Make certain y'all vote this coming November to ensure that not only are Republicans kept out of the White House, but that the Congress is cleansed of as many Republicans as possible.

Masterpiece Mystery's Sherlock: "The Reichenbach Fall"

We've just finished watching the third episode of the three-episode PBS Masterpiece Mystery series Sherlock, Series II, titled "The Reichenbach Fall" the episode written by Steve Thompson who also wrote "The Blind Banker" episode of Sherlock, Series I. (We call our readers' attention to the last graf of our above linked review of that episode even though what's suggested there doesn't quite play out fully in the present episode but will play out, we're all but certain, in the series's final dénouement, perhaps in Sherlock, Series III, scheduled to begin shooting in early 2013 according to RadioTimes.) We won't say anything more about this third and final episode of Series II (and no, we've no solid idea (as opposed to a guess or two) as to how Sherlock managed you-know-what) except to say that in our considered estimation "The Reichenbach Fall" is to the world of the reimagined 21st-century Sherlockian pastiche as is the Chaconne of Bach's Partita No. 2 to the world of the solo violin, or Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro to the world of opera, or Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 to the world of the symphony, all of which is to say "The Reichenbach Fall" is a singularly sterling achievement and, from top to bottom and beginning to end, as nearly perfect as perfect can be.

"The Reichenbach Fall" can be seen in full here. If you missed this brilliant and moving episode we suggest you click on over and avail yourself of the online video before it becomes unavailable (19 June 2012).

Masterpiece Mystery's Sherlock: "The Hounds of Baskerville"

The Hounds of Baskerville", the second episode of Sherlock, Series II, is just a bit, shall we say, too clever by half and lacks the frisson of the Doyle original upon which it's based. Writer and series co-creator Mark Gatiss certainly knows his Canon, but unlike his co-creator Steven Moffat (the author of the opening Series II episode, "A Scandal in Belgravia") his sense of the material is largely intellectual. He lacks Moffat's spot-on intuitive feel for things Canonic and as a result his Sherlock scripts don't "sing" whereas Moffat's always do. In addition, this episode contains a glaring lapse; a lapse of the very worst sort; namely, a necessary lapse; in this case, a lapse without which it would have been game over for the episode after a mere 45 minutes or so.

Holmes, sweating profusely and in clear physical and mental distress, goes flat-out loopy and starts behaving like a maniac, and Dr. Watson — Dr. Watson of all people! — shows no sign or hint of even so much as suspecting an external agent of being responsible.

Impossible.

Gatiss is, of course, depending on Holmes's manic behavior at episode's opening to act as explanation for Holmes's present loopy behavior for both Watson and the audience and so not rouse any suspicions about external agents at that point. But Holmes's present loopy behavior is clearly not of the same sort, a fact that should have been instantly manifest to any audience member paying proper attention, which is a good thing. That it wasn't instantly manifest to Watson, however, is, as we've already noted, simply impossible; ergo, the lapse.

This episode fell rather flat for us, and it was only the pleasure of watching Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (Holmes and Watson, respectively) do their thing that saved it for us.

"The Hounds of Baskerville" can be seen in full here.

Masterpiece Mystery's Sherlock: "A Scandal in Belgravia"

As the time for airing neared, we earnestly attempted to dial-down our expectations for the first episode of the second series (of three new episodes) of PBS's Sherlock, "A Scandal in Belgravia", but by airtime we found all our earnest efforts to no avail: we were totally and helplessly pumped.

We needn't have been concerned. This brilliant, inventive, intricate, and twist-laden episode easily exceeded all our expectations. It is, in short, the very best of all the already-aired (in the U.S.) episodes (four now, including the present one), all of them first-rate; a veritable tour de force by writer and series co-creator Steven Moffat laced with myriad (we counted over a dozen) Canon-insider puns, allusions, and references by way of Canon tale titles, incidents, and verbatim snatches of dialogue. Both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were as Doyle-perfect a Holmes and Watson as one could wish for — as per usual. Almost as much could be said for all the portrayals of the characters in this episode, most particularly the Mycroft Holmes of Mark Gatiss (the series's other co-creator), and the Irene Adler of Lara Pulver.

There were, however, two glaring lapses in this episode:

1: Based on, um, certain criteria (you'll have to see the episode to discover what they were), Holmes misidentifies a corpse as being none other than Irene Adler; a misidentification it would have been absolutely impossible for Holmes to make in the context of this episode.
2: The final plot twist which marked the end of the episode was, shall we say, a bit over the top — of Mt. Everest!

But judge for yourselves. A Scandal in Belgravia can be seen in full here.

This episode of Sherlock is, in every way, not-to-be-missed television.

Lovely

Since we began some five months ago to again watch television with some frequency thanks to Verizon's FiOS TV, we've been repeatedly surprised to find that the most creative and arresting things to be seen thereon are regularly to be found among none other than that lowly and most often justly despised breed, the TV commercial. For example, this for Air France airlines. The music is from the Adagio of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488) (yes, we know; it sounds more like Gluck than Mozart, piano part notwithstanding).

TWOG: Smash (Our First Twog*)

As we've noted here several times over the years, Broadway musicals are not our thing. We in fact pretty much hate musicals (Sweeney Todd doesn't count; it's not a musical no matter what anyone says). So why is it we're hung up on and totally crazy for NBC's Smash, especially its production numbers which are superb, and especially its two girls, Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty, neither of whom we'd ever heard of before and both of whom are hugely gifted performers, the former having a dancer's body, gesture, and movement and the latter a voice which are to die for?

Interesting question; one which we find ourself incompetent to answer.

* twog: the blog equivalent of a tweet; a blog entry of 140 words or less.