Thoughts on Current Viewing, Listening, Etc

1. We watched the new Lena Dunham show on Netflix, Too Much, and found it interesting and enjoyable. I guess I'm a Dunham partisan. Despite some slacking in the quality of the series along the way, I watched Girls all the way to the end. Where many people find her schtick insufferable, I find her take on life among her peer group to be convincing, possessing of verisimilitude. In the new show, she does a great job presenting a certain Bohemian milieu in London, in this case the world of indie rock. You don't see this done well that often. I always think about how Alan Ball presented the art school world convincingly in Six Feet Under. It rang true. In Dunham's case, both her parents were successful artists, she must have been exposed to all sorts of the geniuses, charlatons, wackos, drifters, grifters, addicts, and saints that inhabit that world. The other thing that distinguishes Dunham's work is her facility with dialogue, to me, the most crucial aspect of any show. Hers is filled with unexpected ironies and off-the-wall jokes that cause me to perk up just about every time. She didn't stick the landing of Too Much, leaning too far into implausible politics, but I remain a Dunham believer.

2. Earlier this week the lyricist Alan Bergman died. With his wife, Marilyn, they were one of the premier composers of lyrics for film songs of the last half of the 20th century. Their main partnership was with Barbra Streisand, who recorded many dozens of their songs. Indeed most obits led with the title song they and Marvin Hamlisch composed for The Way We Were. But to me, more interesting was the song they composed with Michel LeGrande in the 60s called "The Windmills of Your Mind." What a remarkable set of lyrics! It reads like pure stream-of-consciousness symbolist poetry of the sort that could sit easily alongside Dylan on the radio back in the day. The thing is, they weren't hippies or counter-culture types at all. In fact, they earlier had had success composing for Sinatra. So it wasn't weed or acid that inspired the trippy lyrics, but rather Marilyn's memory of getting nitrous oxide at the dentist and experiencing a spiraling sensation in her consciousness, an effect they mimicked with the song's dense, swirling phraseology and imagery. I don't think they composed any more in this mode, but what a gem this is. Linking the great Dusty Springfield above.

3. What a shame that Edvard Munch is known only for "The Scream." That was my takeaway after viewing the terrific Munch show last week at the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition was billed as a collaboration between the conservators and the curators, but frankly I didn't quite get what they were saying. I did note that there was a huge overlap between Munch's conception of his oil printings and prints, with the latter executed with many unconventional techniques. The Scream was a far less important motif for Munch the image of two figures on a shoreline, a man and woman, facing way from the viewer and gazing out into the void of the sea. Certainly he was concerned with existential and spiritual matters, though not explicitly or overtly, or in a sensationalistic way as in The Scream. This spirit definitely informed his portraits, which are fantastic. I especially like his woodcuts, which have nice texture and suggest strong feeling.

4. Interesting profile in The New Yorker by David Denby of David Hurwitz, the classical music YouTube enthusiast, critic, and as some would have it, gadfly and troll. Which I get. I was struck by how flippantly he writes off the works of major conductors as pure dreck. I don't know as much about classical as I do about jazz, but I found it hard to believe that musicians at the very top of this field could produce garbage. These musicians are all virtuosos, and though you may dislike an interpretation or performance, it would still have to have some musical value. In jazz, where players also have to be virtuosos, I have never heard a recording or performance that didn't have at least a modicum of merit. More likely what you will hear sometimes is a relative lack of inspiration and inventiveness compared to the greats, but that in no way means that the musician should be written off.

5. Just finished Robbie Robertson's memoir, Testimony. Quite good and sort of similar to Peter Wolf's in terms of the wide range of very interesting characters he encountered, first through playing the honky tonks with Ronnie Hawkins and then through his work with Bob Dylan and his group, the Band. Two quick takeaways. Robbie observed of Dylan that he knew more songs than anyone he had ever met, and that means all of the words to those songs as well as all of his own, which can get pretty darn verbose. I'm reminded of a funny line Chris Smither had. He said he was invited to record as part of a Dylan tribute project. He thought to himself, that'll be easy, I know a lot of Dylan songs. He soon found out that what he actually knew was exactly 2/3 each of 40 different Bob tunes. The other takeaway: Dylan was the original punk. When he went out on the road with his electric band, including Robbie and members of the Band, they received vitriol in every city, every night, and Dylan just didn't care, and soon the other band members felt that way, too. Oh, and Dylan didn't even want to rehearse the group for this tour. They just went out and played. That's either punk or jazz. One of them.