httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt7pPKXDhPc
The anniversary of the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony passed earlier this week, so here is the entire thing, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.
Saturday Night Beethoven
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Video
Saturday Night Video: Wonky Hipsters From California
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raT433AMiV8
Inspired by Stacey Clemence: a selection of songs from Cake, Pavement, and Beck that capture the eccentric spirit of the West coast music scene of the 1990s, and feature an agreeably quirky amalgam of guitar hero and bohemian sensibility. What they also have in common are irresistible sing-along choruses.
First up, the cuddly, the adorable, Cake, with “Shadow Stabbing”, a nifty little song about the claustrophobia of writing. Above is a fan-produced video, and Cake seems to inspire a lot of those.
TGIF: Peter Cook as Satan in “Bedazzled”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8AddFYCnA
When Peter Cook died in 1995, John Cleese said of him that while he needed three hours to write a three minute sketch, Cook could do it in three minutes. And that, Cleese concluded, is the definition of genius: the ability to do it in real time.
Above is a clip from the lovely little English comedy from swinging 1967, Bedazzled, in which Cook, as Satan, tries to make a Faustian bargain with the hapless Stanley Moon, played by Dudley Moore. And, in making the argument, he illustrates the principle that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXjY6w1KQMo
On this date in 1749 Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was first performed in London.
The performance here is on period instruments. Part 2 after the jump.
Thomas Middleton
Today is playwright Thomas Middleton‘s birthday (1580 – 1627). I once joked to a prof that if there’d been no Shakespeare, we’d be reading Middleton by default. Not meaning to diss the birthday boy but, the impressive output notwithstanding, we got the better end of the deal.
Frye in Notebook 9:
One, or two, reasons why this is not an age of great tragedy are improved methods of contraception and of police investigation. In The Changeling two people are arrested for murder on the ground that they left town the day after the murder took place: one needs ghosts of victims & confessions by the guilty to improve the quality of detection. (CW 20, 256-7)
Trailer for a current English production of The Changeling after the jump.
Saturday Night Video: “Mona Lisa”
For Bob Denham. First, of course, a live performance of the song by the great Nat King Cole.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxEmnxiUz8w
After the jump, the lush studio recording arranged by Nelson Riddle, as well as a couple of surprising performances by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
John Ford
On this date playwright John Ford (1586 – 1640) was baptized.
In Notebook 9 Frye makes some telling comparisons between Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, particularly Ford, Webster, Tourneur, and Dekker.
As compared with his contemporaries, Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy is much more firmly rooted in history, and he lacks the moralizing tendency that makes Tourneur call his characters by such names as Lussurioso & Ambitioso. Hence he does illustrate my point about tragedy being closer to a reality-principle than comedy. Outside him, I’m not sure that that’s true: there’s just as much fantasy & manipulation in Tourneur or Ford as there is in Shakespearean romance. Shakespeare’s tragic vision also has something to do with his adherence to popular theatre: he has a public sense of dramatic action, not a ruminative psychologizing one…
In Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore] an amiable & harmless old woman who has connived at the heroine’s incest first of all has her eyes put out, & then, as an applauded act of justice, is led out to be burned at the stake. That really is brutality. And Hamlet’s excuse about Claudius’ murder until he’s sure to go to hell is nothing compared to what the viallains in Tourneur & Webster do. We expect a very high standard of sensitivity from Shakespeare, even the senstivity of readers who on the whole don’t live in tragic worlds. We understand, but don’t realize, Dekker’s remark: “There is a hell named in our creed, and a heaven, and the hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.” Several tragic dramatists, especially Webster, pick up M’s [Marlowe’s] remark in Faustus…
A manipulated tragic situation is often one where providence or Heaven or some power overreaching Nature takes a hand in the action, & functions as the eiron. Many dramatists put up “Danger: God at Work” signs: there’s a good example in Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore]. (CW 20, 256-7)
A trailer for a recent San Fransisco production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore after the jump.
CODCO: “Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqtkwr-YJI
The skit banned by the CBC in 1991 in the wake of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal.
The latest child sex abuse scandals in the Church seem to have broken through the last outpost of public forbearance which for so long put the whole issue into a bizarre moral and legal limbo.
Not many people outside of Eastern Canada seem to remember that the scandal actually began in Canada just over 20 years ago — in Newfoundland, in fact, at the Mount Cashel Orphanage.
Anyone who loves Newfoundland culture knows that nothing distills the black humor and native irreverence of the Newfoundland character better than the legendary comedy troupe CODCO. Some might even recall that head writer and performer Andy Jones quit CODCO’s weekly CBC TV series back in 1991 over the network’s refusal to air the skit featured above involving a deadpan satire on the sexuality of the supposedly celibate. (As regularly happens with CODCO, you don’t necessarily laugh out loud, but you do wince and cringe, and that’s the way they sometimes preferred it.)
In this case, we can clearly see that satirists at their best are like EMTs — the first on the scene with potentially life-saving aid. And yet, in this case, sadly enough, the service being offered was refused by antsy Canadian censors, and the public remained in its peculiar state of denial about what all of this really entailed for another 20 years.
Handel’s Messiah
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_nJ11BgTE
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, Halelujah Chorus
On this date in 1742 Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin.
Frye on Handel in his remarkable student essay on Romanticism:
The rhythm force of music is incarnated and symbolized in the dance. Hence, men like Bach, Handel, Mozart were all dance composers. The suite or selection of dances in one key was a standard artform, and later, when the sonata sublimated the dance rhythm of the suite into a stricter form, the minuet, in many ways the typical dance, was often retrained. (CW 3, 54)
Jacques Lacan
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URsYj-TVFjc
Lacan on the unconscious (French with English subtitles)
On this date Jacques Lacan was born (1901 – 1981).
A telling citation of Lacan in Notebook 52:
The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, which is Venus’ day: white goddess modulating into black bride. I’m sure the Tempest masque and the exclusion of Venus from it are connected, what with the insistence on preserving Miranda’s virginity. Lacan is wrong: it isn’t just the phallus that’s lost, but since the Fall every sexual union has had, or been, a screw loose. Yeats’s poem on Solomon and Sheba is the one to consult. (CW 6, 454)