Month: December 2013

Alan Zilberman considers that trend in movies:

A generation ago film composers took a different approach when they wanted a score to sound significant. Compared to [composer John] Murphy’s “Adagio [in D Minor],” David Newman’s score from “Hoffa” sounds cloying: at the two-and-a-half minute mark, the orchestra overstates its case with high notes and a cacophony of percussion. Randy Edelman’s corny, relentless “Fire in a Movie Theater” sounds dated—anyone who went to the movies in the 1990s will wince when they hear the opening bars. There are some film scores that still sound fresh—James Horner’s score for “Aliens” is pulverizing, and John Williams’ work will always stand the test of time—yet there has been a sea change in film scores from complexity toward simplicity. This is because composers trust canny audiences to feel an emotional response when abstracted melodies contain an aural space for significance (or what feels like significance).

I talked about the power of simplicity with composer Nicholas Britell, who composed all the musical arrangements performed by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in “12 Years a Slave.” … After studying neuromusicology at Harvard, Britell became deeply aware of, “patterns that trigger cascades of feeling.” … I asked Britell to give an illustrative example of powerful music.

He thought for a moment and suggested François Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mysterieuses [embedded above],” a baroque piece for the solo piano Terrence Malick used in “The Tree of Life.” According to Britell, the key to the piece’s power is the dissonance.

“Throughout the piece, there are certain times where the lines continue a little longer (i.e. “suspensions”). The harmony changes yet they’re still holding an old harmony and then they quickly resolve. This process is something I always find very beautiful. It’s the main technique of a lot of music, where something overstays its welcome by a millisecond then resolves.” Listen again and it’s easy to hear what Britell is talking about: as one melody continues, the notes from another evaporate as if the music is breathing.

Andrew Cohen contends that “no one who digs deeply into these grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice.” He discusses three Supreme Court justices who changed from pro- to anti-death penalty:

The systemic problems with capital punishment that Lewis Powell mentioned in 1991, and that Justice Blackmun identified in 1994, had not been cured by the time Justice Stevens identified them in 2008 (and again in 2010, in The New York Review of Books, in a review in which he lamented the Court’s broadened application of capital punishment). Nor has the Supreme Court addressed, let alone resolved, these problems in the years since Justice Stevens retired. Just last month, the justices refused even to hear an Alabama case in which an elected judge overrode a jury’s sentencing verdict and imposed a death sentence.

Three Republican-nominated justices, three men of moderation, among the least ideological the Court has produced in the past 50 years, all came late in life to regret their early doctrinal support for capital punishment. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Court, a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, also questioned the use of capital punishment near the end of her tenure on it. She had concerns about the execution of the innocence, she said, and she acknowledged the equal protection implications of the fact that rich capital defendants get better legal representation than poor ones.

Now let’s list the Supreme Court justices of our time, or of our parents’ time, who started out as advocates for the abolition of capital punishment but whose experience with capital cases on the High Court over decades caused them to support the death penalty. Alas, we can’t do it. Not a single justice has ever been so converted. Is that not telling? Exposure to capital cases doesn’t cause these smart and honorable men and women to gain confidence in the neutral and accurate application of the death penalty, because no such confidence is warranted—because no such application exists.

http://youtu.be/ywnHFLpMVIo

Commenting on Susan Boyle’s revelation that she has Asperger’s Syndrome, Alyssa notes the proliferation of TV characters with autism spectrum disorders and the misconceptions they reinforce:

Many of these depictions of fictional people with variants of autism paint them as savants. I understand this tendency, because it’s a way to give people on the spectrum both dignity and work that they can do as part of a show’s plot mechanics, whether separately or part of a team. But it’s not as if getting diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum is a one-way ticket to genius with side effects.

I’ve been relieved to see Alphas, for example, which had two characters on the spectrum of the show, with very different levels of social and communications skills, as a counterbalance to The Big Bang Theory, which falls somewhat closer to the tendency I’ve just described. And of course Parenthood is a terrific, ongoing exploration of both what it’s like to be a pre-teen and now a teenager with Asperger syndrome, and to parent someone with Asperger’s, without making an argument that Max (Max Burkholder) [seen above] needs to be a genius to somehow pay back his parents for their love, affection, and patience.

Boyle further complicates the idea that people on the spectrum are all math nerds or computer geniuses. Instead, she’s an artist (like Community‘s Abed). And perceptions of people on the spectrum aren’t all that her success challenges. At 52, Boyle is much older than the average pop star (though not than any number of popular classical singers, or Elaine Paige, who Boyle said she hoped to be like at Britain’s Got Talent). She’s single, and speaks about her father’s decision to break off the main serious relationship of her life when she was in her twenties in a way that’s almost inexpressible in the tabloid language used today to analyze celebrities’ relationships.

Christopher Benfey explores the English writer’s “four-year sojourn in Vermont, from 1892 to 1896, [which] was a remarkably productive period for this versatile poet and short-story writer, and established patterns, aesthetic and political, for much that came later”:

During his American interlude, Kipling initiated his lifelong practice of adding verse epigraphs to stories, and sometimes verse epilogues and interludes as well, knitting whole books together with an alternating current of verse and prose. The main inspiration, as Charles Carrington, Kipling’s official biographer, pointed out long ago, was probably Emerson, an overwhelming influence on Kipling’s poetry and prose. It was in The Jungle Books, written in 1893 and 1894, that Kipling first systematically adopted a complicated mix of poetry and prose. Much of the main narrative of the book is built on a contrast between upholders of “The Law,” inculcated by Mowgli’s tutors, the kindly bear Baloo and the severe panther Bagheera, and those who undermine the Law—above all, the monkeys, or “Bandar-Log,” whose herd mentality prevents them from accomplishing anything of significance. Much has been written about The Jungle Books (with Kipling’s encouragement) as in part a political allegory, in which the monkeys figure as American populists, always promising great things and achieving nothing.

Other inspirations for The Jungle Books:

One source that Kipling is thought to have drawn on for his Mowgli narrative is titled “Wolves Nurturing Children in the Dens,” first published in 1852, and written by a British official named William Henry Sleeman. The stories are relentlessly downbeat. When the children adopted by wolves are returned to their families, they have callouses on their elbows and knees from crawling on all fours; they prefer raw to cooked meat; they feed among the dogs; they are incapable of learning human language; they die young, and so on. The responsible parties in Sleeman’s suspiciously similar stories are never the villagers, with their negligent parenting that allows wolves to “carry off” their children, but rather the British officials and those employed by them. The need for European “paternalism” is demonstrated at every turn. The local Hindus must be taught to value their children. To teach them such values, one might say, is another of the White Man’s Burdens.

How Kipling’s narrative differs:

It is a mark of Kipling’s originality that he departed from his Indian sources in several key ways. This supposed guardian of empire and the White Man’s Burden chose a native child for his hero and portrayed Mowgli’s native birth mother sympathetically. … He grows up not with callouses on his knees and elbows, cowering in the shadows, but rather as a virile and sensitive leader, powerful in mind and body, who can kill a tiger, make complicated moral choices, and right the wrongs in both human and animal communities.

A 2006 study found that, out of all Americans, white heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Lisa Wade blames the conditioning boys undergo in their teens:

[M]en are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends.

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Katy Waldman thinks it’s also about gay panic:

Wade doesn’t mention the rainbow elephant in the room, but I wonder whether men are less afraid of girliness here than homosexuality. In many ways, it’s a distinction without a difference, since homophobes tend to imagine gay men as effete. But if a man ever is allowed to relax his stone face, it’s around his romantic partner. Being open, communicative, vulnerable—all of these behaviors evoke love relationships. It makes a sad kind of sense that boys trying to assert their masculinity would steer clear of playing the “boyfriend” around other guys.

Daisy Buchanan believes one solution is to battle the stigma against boys making friends with girls:

I don’t believe men are naturally wired to be any less intimate and caring than women are. But if young boys grow up in a world where they’re mocked for pursuing friendships with girls, and don’t see enough examples of friendships between older men, it’s going to cause huge problems for men and women later in life. Without a network of friends, boys are going to grow up to feel confused, lonely and alienated. According to research from the charity Calm, suicide is now the biggest killer among young men in Britain, with a spokesperson for the charity citing “social isolation” as a major factor. If boys were explicitly encouraged to develop and invest in friendships, it could save lives. And if we tell them that it’s important to make friends with girls as well as other boys, it could change feminism for ever.