You will have to excuse me, this morning; I’ll be spending time with this young gentleman. It’s his mother’s birthday, which means that, although she rarely gets a working holiday, the people she depends on often take the day off. So, while Megan participates in a conference call from home, I’ll take Will to the park. It’s not enough to play with him in his own room; ever since whenever, he has demonstrated that he knows when his mother is on the telephone on business — and that he doesn’t like it.

Although perhaps those days are over. He can play for hours now with his trains. When he gets tired of rolling them around on their tracks, he pushes them through the archway in the bridge, say, and sees how far his arm can follow. Or he might explore the many ways in which the trains fit and don’t fit in his other toys. If I were a mathematician, I might propose that Will is deeply involved in set theory these days. It’s quiet work.

I won’t chance it, though; I’ll take the stroller along with me. The air is a bit snappy this morning, perfect for running around the playground.

Later, I will tell you what I thought about J Edgar, or why I found it to be an unpuzzling movie full of puzzlements. If I don’t get run over by a train.

***

But before I get to that, I’d like to tell you how I spent the afternoon, once I returned from the Lower East Side and lunch, for the first time ever (amazing, really, that it has taken so long) at Veselka — where Will’s contentment at the table furthered a sense, adumbated last night over pizza, that he is once again content to sit through a meal at table. Before it was time to head downtown this morning, I read Charles Rosen’s generally favorable review of Roger Nichols’s new biography of Maurice Ravel, in the process of which Rosen characteristically ventured an appreciation of Ravel’s keyboard oeuvre. Fully a quarter of the piece is devoted to Gaspard de la Nuit, about which I have never read anything so cogent.

Gaspard de la Nuit is a suite of three piano pieces that, considering how sinister and difficult-sounding they are, ought to be more demanding, harder to listen to, than they are. You don’t really have to pay attention to the first two, “Ondine” and “Le Gibier”; the first is appropriately bathed in watery ripples, while the ostinato bell tolling at the back of the music works pretty much like moonlight, steady but fascinating just for being there. The final piece, which, as Rosen notes, has “the reputation of being technically one of the most difficult pieces ever written,” is less modest about grabbing attention, but it is never tedious — always the threat posed by “morbid romanticism.” (Rosen applies this phrase to “Le Gibier” only, but I think that it describes Gaspard as a whole.) The suite lasts a little longer than a quarter-hour. Rosen’s program notes made me keen to hear it, and I had no trouble locating the CD of Angela Hewitt’s performance.

When I got home, I went to see what else there was in the cupboard, and quickly found Marta Argerich’s recording. Quickly found it in iTunes, that is; finding the CD was trickier, thanks to my incorrect assumption that it was issued on the Philips label, but I found it (on DG) eventually. Then I discovered that there was no more. No more in iTunes, anyway. So I ran to Arkivmusic to refresh my memory; just the other day, looking for a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 13, I was reminded that I own Daniel Barenboim’s set of all the concertos. But nothing familiar turned up, so I dug deeper in my collection and found two more Gaspards, among copies that I’d made of CDs that I’d given away, back in the days before iTunes playlists — back when I played only my favorite recordings of anything. Well, at least I kept copies. On the visit to Arkivmusic, I picked up recordings by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Hewitt and Argerich play the hell out of Gaspard, but Philippe Entremont’s performance has its moments, and Monique Haas, while not great, is good enough to set a benchmark. Here’s what puzzles me still, though: why have I devoted an afternoon to listening closely to music that, upon increased familiarity, I’m prepared to agree with Charles Rosen in judging “the greatest tone poem of the school of Liszt.” (“Scarbo”) But don’t wait for me to figure this out. Read Rosen and get yourself a recording ( Hewitt’s complete Ravel would be my choice; it’s only two discs). I’ll tell you what Roger Nichols’s book is like when I read it, which, with luck, will be during the Thanksgiving break; I ordered a copy today.

***

Clint Eastwood’s new movie, J Edgar, is a very glum affair. Perhaps it ought to be. It’s not so glum as to be disagreeable to watch, but I’m in no hurry to see it again. Even Leonardo DiCaprio can’t make the FBI director an engaging character; we watch his story because the man had such a baleful effect on our nation’s life. Obsessed, like most conservatives throughout the Western world, by a dread of alien Bolshevist infiltration, Hoover sounded like a time capsule by the time I was growing up, in the Sixties. (For an idea of what I’m talking about, revisit Spike Lee’s deployment of Enver Hoxha’s orations in Inside Man.) Hoover clearly outlived his usefulness by at least 25 years.

Eastwood’s point, of course, isn’t to reconcile us to Hoover’s abuse of office; on the contrary, I think that his film ought to make it more difficult than it is for righteous tones to develop uncritical momentum. In my book, Hoover is an Augustine figure, someone whose sexual peculiarities, combined with a position of authority, inspired a rule book that we’ve found it difficult to live with in the long term. it’s hard to sympathise with the pains, such as they might have been, of those peculiarities. Eastwood shows us the suffering, and Mr DiCaprio certainly projects it, but I found myself feeling the same sort of pity that the site of a cow in an abattoir would rouse. Thwarted love, dented self-awareness — these are the most terrible things that can happen to a free and healthy human being. The fact that the first director of the FBI had to endure them does not make him more attractive. The terrible thing about J Edgar Hoover is how ordinary he was in everything except persistence.

For the moment, the only thing that I want to say about the film is that its sepia coloration is ultimately rebarbative, or at least tiresome. The special effects makeup is hard to overlook. By excising Hoover’s middle age, Eastwood avoids the problem of grading his leading man into prosthesis; we have the young Hoover and the old Hoover, and never the in-between Hoover. The old-man getup is very convincing. Ditto Naomi Watts’s. Alas, I cannot say the same of whatever was done to Armie Hammer, who does such a fine job of playing Hoover’s companion, Clyde Tolson. His old-man look is utterly unpersuasive. At the best, it reminded me of Keir Dullea in 2001. Most of the time, though, I thought of C3PO in a plasma attack. There were moments when Mr Hammer looked like a strange, beautiful-eyed tropical fish in a suit. But he never looked a day over 30. It was most disconcerting. 

Of course you have to see it. I’m hoping that J Edgar will prove to be Clint Eastwood’s warm-up for more interesting mid-century biopics. George Kennan would make a great subject.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2011 at 8:26 am.