This year's New Yorker Festival videos spotlight global troublemakers from Edward Snowden to Kim Dotcom to Larry David

"Edward Snowden: The game plan for the NSA leak"


New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer talks to the NSA leaker, somewhere in Moscow.

by Ken

As New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski explains in his introduction to the interview with Kim Dotcom below, when he learned that this year's New Yorker Festival would attempt remotely connected virtual interviews with subjects unable to be onsite, he immediately thought of two people: former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, from somewhere in Russia; and Internet ultra-entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, from his compound in Auckland, New Zealand, where he has remained since the spectacular January 2012 raid U.S. authorities in cahoots with New Zealand law-enforcement troops launched the sort of raid normally associated with most-wanted terrorists to shut down Kim's file-sharing company, Megaupload.

I'm not going to say that you learn everything there is to know about a person by seeing the person tell his/her own story, but there's a good chance you're going to learn things, and see sides of the person, you won't get just from reading about him/her. Goodness knows, I've read and heard a great deal about Edward Snowden, for example, but looking at the clips of his festival interview with ace New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, well, this isn't really the person I had imagined. You'll hear him answer Jane's question as to why, when the leaking of all the classified material was so meticulously planned, the plan didn't include an exit strategy for him personally, and hearing him explain it, I'm prepared to believe that he really didn't think that what would happen to him, which was unknowable to him in any case, figured much in his thinking, especially since he thought of himself as such a small part of the total operation.

I was also fascinated to learn, given all the punditocratic assertions, often imprecations, of what each pundit unhesitatingly believes was in Snowden's head in undertaking the release of his massive document cache, they all have their heads up their butts. With all that bloviating about Snowden's qualifications to determine what documents should be made public, I was fascinated to hear that he never intended to be the judge of that -- this was the whole point of doing the document releases through established journalists. I don't know how many other clips there are besides this one from the Snowden interview, but just from this one I have a very different sense of the guy.


Live from New Zealand, meet Kim Dotcom, Hollywood's Public Enemy No. 1


New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski gets an amazing story out of irresistibly charming Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.

By contrast with Edward Snowden, Kim Dotcom was almost totally unknown to me. After watching the interview, where the German-born New Zealander chats so freely and easily and, seemingly, so unreservedly, I have the feeling that I know everything there could possibly be to know about him and his path to the founding of Megaupload, which plugged the need, then as now, for sharing really large files. Not surprisingly, not all the files that were transferred via Megaupload were legal, and to the Hollywood moguls in particular Kim became something like Public Enemy No. 1. (It turns out, by the way, that contrary to Daniel Zalewski's original understanding, Kim isn't under house arrest in New Zealand, though he was for a while. He just can't leave the country.)

However, Kim is quick to point out that quite a lot of the material on Megaupload is copyright-protected (and the avenging authorities, he notes, are often quite muddled about what is and what isn't protected); that in YouTube fashion the company was always quick to remove material upon complaint from a copyright holder; that the draconian raid was organized without any attempt to engage the company in any kind of dialogue about legal problems; and that the way the raid was conducted, large quantities of perfectly legal content was effectively destroyed. Kim's understanding of what brought the raid on was the prospect of President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, for which large quantities of Hollywood cash would be sought. It's also his understanding that the operation was spearheaded by Vice President Biden, standing in for a squeamish president. Kim also has interesting things to say about the way in which Hollywood has made itself so vulnerable to unauthorized international distribution of its content, suggesting that there are other ways of organizing the financing of its products which would go along way toward eliminating this vulnerability.

Nevertheless, with minimal regard to legalities, the avenging U.S. feds have taken pretty much everything from Kim, and done everything they can to close off sources of funds -- including funds totally unrelated to Megaupload -- to prevent him from mounting any kind of defense against their efforts to silence him. He also believes that the breakup of his marriage is a direct result of the traumatic way his business was terminated.

Am I the only one who is utterly charmed by Kim? I feel like he's my new best friend, or at least I wish he were. His English, despite the unmistakable German accent, is effortlessly idiomatic, and he sure sounds like he has nothing to hide.

This is a long clip, but you should be able to pause it by clicking on it, then reclicking to restart.


"Larry David on writing Curb Your Enthusiasm and why he doesn't understand 'squirmish' people"


Meanwhile Larry David, in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick, is, well, Larry David.

And then there's Larry David. I love Larry David, and New Yorker editor David Remnick is a splendid audience. Could anybody but Larry be so upset to discover that a surprising number of Curb Your Enthusiasm viewers were made squeamish by portions of episodes? Larry says it never occurred to him that anything he writes could make people uncomfortable. Offended, sure. In Larry's mind that's pretty much a given. (In the clip we can see how pleased with himself he is even now by making the connection between "survivor" as in CBS's fake-survivalist series and "survivors" as in concentration-camp survivors, and I"m guessing there are still a lot of people who are just as offended as they were when the episode in question aired. So viwers who are offended, of course. But viewers who are made uncomfortable? This seems to make Larry feel really bad.

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Larry David's definitive statement about apologies: All that matters if if you're ACTING sincere

Says Nathan Flomm: "Apologies don't have to be sincere. It's just the act of the apology itself. It's only -- all that matters is if you're acting sincere."

by Ken

In Saturday's "TV Watch preview" I was caught up by a segment of the trailer HBO put out for its film Clear History, premiering that night, starring Larry David as a marketing genius who walks away from what turns out to be "literally a billion-dollar idea" and becomes an object of national scorn.


The trailer for HBO's Clear History

WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: I'm really sorry.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
WIDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER [exasperated]: Apologies don't have to be sincere.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: You see? You apologized, but you didn't mean it!

I just loved this. As I wrote Saturday:

We're living, after all, in the Age of Apologies, where putatively sentient humans devote an ever larger portion of their waking hours to demanding an apology from so-and-so, without any clear indication that so-and-so is the least bit sorry, even if his/her handlers decided that he/she really should issue the demanded apology, which in any case is likely to take some form of the weaselly "I'm sorry if anyone is offended," which of course makes it pretty clear that the alleged apologizer isn't sorry about what he/she did, but only about the possibility that some beclouded soul might have been somehow offended by the words or deed.

In this clip the Wildly Enhairified Larry David Character merely takes the reality one step further, to the entirely reasonable destination where sincerity doesn't even come into the matter of an apology. If this sounds like pure Larry David, bear in mind that all three writers and the director were ranking collaborators of his on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It still sounds like Larry to me. Do you suppose the NSA has surveillance video of the Clear History writers' room?)

After watching some of the movie, I added this update:

The movie turns out to be harmless enough, and as I feared, the "apology" exchange is the best thing in it. In fact, the trailer version is seriously truncated. Since I wasn't recording the 9pm airing, I can't transcribe the full version, but I'm recording the 12:45am rebroadcast, and by tomorrow I should have the complete version to post.

FIRST, LET ME CORRECT MYSELF ABOUT THE WRITING CREDITS

I identified the writers of Clear History as David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer, thinking I was dutifully transcribing the information given on the HBO website. Or perhaps I should say "the always-dreadful HBO website," which loads like a tortoise and, as it demonstrated once again, yields up information with the greatest reluctance. And since the credits don't appear until the end of the film, even when I watched most of it I didn't see that Larry David is indeed listed first among the four writers, with his longtime collaborators Mandel, Berg, and Schaffer.

NOW BACK TO THE APOLOGY, IN THE FULL VERSION

Nathan Flomm (Larry David), known for the marketing genius he displayed at Edible Arrangements, was hired by Will Haney (Jon Hamm) as marketing director for the revolutionary new electric car he has invented. But Nathan, who is also a 10-percent investor, "drew the line" when Will announced that the car was to be named the Howard -- after his precious son, who's named after The Fountainhead's Howard Roark. "Nobody's gonna buy a car named Howard," Nathan insisted. "It's like naming a restaurant Hepatitis." When Nathan suggested to the mortally aggrieved Will (remember, he named is son Howard) that he buy out his share, Will happily did.

Only to leave Nathan derided by his wife and friends, who insisted he had to go back to Will and get his job back. With this result.

NATHAN: I actually love the name Howard. Yeah, I was thinking about that name last night. It's a solid name. Howard's a good guy. There's a lot of good Howards. They're average. They're an average guy, doing average things, and this is the campaign: solid, dependable, trustworthy -- that's our Howard.
WILL: The name that yesterday you had nothing but disparaging comments about.
NATHAN: I'm really sorry. I am. I'm sorry.
WILL: It sounds to me like you're sorry you fucked up, but not, you know, not for what's underneath it.
NATHAN: I apologized. That's what's important.
WILL: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
NATHAN: Apologies don't have to be sincere. It's just the act of the apology itself. It's only -- all that matters is if you're acting sincere.
WILL: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be, is sincere.
NATHAN: Oh God, Will, I completely disag- . . .
WILL: Otherwise it's just words.
NATHAN: I'm acting sincere. Of course I don't believe it.
WILL: Here, at this company, we believe in sincerity. You had the opportunity to meet my son yesterday, the one thing in the world that I happen to care about more than this company. What did you do? Do you remember? You talked about his nanny's hair, and how much it might stink.
NATHAN: Nope, nope, never said the nanny's hair stunk. I never said that. I never said it stunk.
WILL: You know what you didn't say?
NATHAN: What?
WILL: "Cute kid."
NATHAN: I was gonna get to that.
WILL: "What a nice son." "What a great job you did raising your son as a single parent. What a nice job. Seems like a good kid." You know what? You don't "get to that," you lead with it.
NATHAN: How could you lead with it if somebody's shampooing once a week?
WILL: Janine has your severance package at the front desk. Your things have been packed up. You can tell the delivery company to take them wherever you need them to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
NATHAN: Are you sorry? Are you really sorry?
WILL [after a pause]: No.
NATHAN: You see? You did the exact same thing I did. You apologized but you didn't mean it.
WILL: Janine has your things. The delivery guys need an address.
NATHAN [gets up, walks toward the office door, then turns around]: You know, I was an early investor in this company. I believe in this car. I thought we were good friends. Will, this isn't fair. It's not fair.

In the next sequence a CNN talking head is declaring, "The Howard is the Model T of its time. It's literally a billion-dollar idea. . . ." And Nathan is a national laughingstock for walking away from billions.

Okay, you could watch the movie -- it wouldn't kill you. But the genius part is still the part about apologies. Really, is there anything more preposterous than the demanded apology? It would be one thing if the offending individual actually showed, not just remorse, but genuine understanding of what in his/her statement or action is objectionable.


CONSIDER THE CASE OF IOWA LOON STEVE KING

Let's imagine -- and I realize it's quite a leap -- that Congressman Steve had an impulse to damage control that included a lick of sense or decency. (I warned you that this would be a really big leap.) He could, of course, apologize if anyone was offended by his remarks. He could even attempt an apology in which he does his best to act sincere. But if he wanted to make it right, what he would need to offer is not an apology but an education to anyone who might have taken those remarks the least bit seriously -- an education as to why what he said was wrong and why it's dangerous for people to spout such evil gibberish.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

TV Watch preview: Larry David on apologies, plus (finally!) the final episodes of "Breaking Bad" begin

A trailer for HBO's Clear History

WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: I'm really sorry.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
WIDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER [exasperated]: Apologies don't have to be sincere.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: You see? You apologized, but you didn't mean it!

by Ken

I don't know much about this HBO film Clear History (written by David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer and directed by Greg Mottola, with a cast including -- in addition to Larry David and Jon Hamm -- Bill Hader, Philip Baker Hall, Kate Hudson, Michael Keaton, Danny McBride, Eva Mendes, Amy Ryan, and J. B. Smoove), which has its premiere tonight, but on the basis of the exchange I've transcribed above, I will absolutely give it a shot.

UPDATE: The movie turns out to be harmless enough, and as I feared, the "apology" exchange is the best thing in it. In fact, the trailer version is seriously truncated. Since I wasn't recording the 9pm airing, I can't transcribe the full version, but I'm recording the 12:45am rebroadcast, and by tomorrow I should have the complete version to post.

We're living, after all, in the Age of Apologies, where putatively sentient humans devote an ever larger portion of their waking hours to demanding an apology from so-and-so, without any clear indication that so-and-so is the least bit sorry, even if his/her handlers decided that he/she really should issue the demanded apology, which in any case is likely to take some form of the weaselly "I'm sorry if anyone is offended," which of course makes it pretty clear that the alleged apologizer isn't sorry about what he/she did, but only about the possibility that some beclouded soul might have been somehow offended by the words or deed.

In this clip the Wildly Enhairified Larry David Character merely takes the reality one step further, to the entirely reasonable destination where sincerity doesn't even come into the matter of an apology. If this sounds like pure Larry David, bear in mind that all three writers and the director were ranking collaborators of his on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It still sounds like Larry to me. Do you suppose the NSA has surveillance video of the Clear History writers' room?)

Anyway, the premiere showing of Clear History is at 9pm tonight at 9pm, at least here in the Eastern time zone. (Please don't ask me about other time zones. If you got to this post, you presumably have computer skills. HBO has a website, hbo.com.) Which means that if you're in this time zone, and you're reading this post close to its posting time, which is 9pm ET, the thing may still be playing on your cable box, so if your cable system has the "START OVER" feature and if it works better than mine, you can still catch the premiere. Otherwise you'll be reduced to catching one of the million repeat airings.


TOMORROW NIGHT AT 9pm ET, OF COURSE< IT'S THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AMC'S BREAKING BAD

"I could not be more excited about these final eight episodes. An awful lot happens, probably enough to fill 20 episodes."

-- Breaking Bad creator and exec producer Vince Gilligan

"These episodes take on a trajectory that we haven't experienced before."

-- Bryan Cranston (Walter White)

"It's a violent, brutal sprint to the finish line. We only have eight hours left to tell the story, and so there's no episode that allows the audience to kind of take a breather."

-- Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman)

That's right, the final sequence of eight episodes, the "second half of Season 5" (even though it's actually launching a bit more than a year after the start of the "first half os Season 5") begins tomorrow night.

Sorry, I once again had to put this clip at the end in order to avoid losing all my line breaks. So now -- once you get past the commercial -- you can see and hear these worthies say the above, along with assorted other contributors, all of whom are pretty good (I'm happy to say) at not giving away actual plot information.

Sunday Classics preview: What was Richard Wagner doing conducting Wagner outside his house?

In last night's preview I promised a fuller version of the scene in which Larry David is accused of being a self-hating Jew for whistling Wagner. Here it is. Now here's Wikipedia's somewhat fuller version of the creation of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 25 December 1870, by a small ensemble on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen (today part of Lucerne) in the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Cosima awoke to its opening melody. . . . The original title was Triebschen Idyll with Fidi's birdsong and the orange sunrise. "Fidi" was the pet version of the name Siegfried. It is thought that the birdsong and the sunrise refer to incidents of personal significance to the couple.

We're going to approach the Siegfried Idyll in two quite different ways: one in tomorrow's post, and another in a future week, maybe even next week. (It all depends.) For tonight, though, we're just going to listen to the piece, and in the click-through we've got performances of both the original chamber version and the expanded full-orchestra version.



Here's a chunk of the Siegfried Idyll, played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Peter Eötvös.


TO HEAR THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL PROPERLY, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics preview: What is Larry David doing conducting Wagner outside some guy's house?

In the "Trick or Treat" episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David winds up conducting Wagner outside the home of his neighbor Walter who has, shall we say, wound him up.

by Ken

It's a sort of famous Hollywood legend, of which (for reasons I hope will become clear) I was trying to refresh my ancient recollection: a piqued Groucho Marx hiring the Los Angeles Philharmonic to play Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude outside the home of . . . well, somebody or other (that's one of the things I couldn't recall), a somebody who had done something-or-other (another thing I couldn't recall) to get on his bad side. So I started rummaging around online, and stumbled across a page posted online from Otto Friedrich's City of nets: a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, containing a version of the story which we'll read in the click-through.

Bur first a quick reminder of what the "Trick or Treat" episode was about:




NOW, FOR OTTO FRIEDRICH'S VERSION OF THE
GROUCHO STORY, AND SOME MUSIC, CLICK HERE

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The New Health Care Bill Might Not Cover Women's Health But Orrin Hatch Insists On Paying For Voodoo Sessions

The big health care reform talk since Saturday night's passage of the House Bill has been about the attempt of the Republicans with the connivance of 64 anti-choice Democrats to severely restrict-- in fact, to take away-- women's health options. By Monday morning 41 progressives had signed a letter to Pelosi vowing to vote against a final bill if it includes the reprehensible Stupak-Pitts anti-choice amendment.

As Members of Congress we believe that women should have access to a full range of reproductive health care. Health care reform must not be misused as an opportunity to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment to H.R. 3962, The Affordable Healthcare for America Act, represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health services to which they are lawfully entitled. We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law.

Senior pro-choice Democrats have assured them the anti-choice wording will not be in the final bill. So with corporately-owned reactionaries like Orrin Hatch, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham vowing to block the bill as being too progressive; with progressives enraged that the bill isn't nearly progressive enough; and with the Senate's ultimate weathervane of cluelessness and stupidity, chirping away that she's pro-choice but not that pro-choice, no one has picked up on the Republicans' one big initiative to fashion the bill into something that would be acceptable to people still living in the 14th Century... or in Afghanistan in case Obama decides to annex it.

A few days ago the L.A. Times reported on a provision slipped into the Senate bill that "would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses." Orrin Hatch is behind the provision, but he was aided by Kennedy and Kerry, the senators from Massachusetts, which is where Christian Science has its world headquarters.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."... Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional healthcare.

"We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality," said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

"We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare," he said.

I was diagnosed with cancer around 7 years ago and chose to eschew deadly chemotherapy and surgery and follow a holistic approach. So far it's worked really well. Western medicine doesn't recognize it-- at least not in the U.S.; it's pretty widely accepted din Europe -- and my insurance company won't cover it at all. It'll be amusing to watch voodoo treatments and other practices outside the realm of science being covered though.

In the early 20th century, the church sought recognition from state regulators so the practitioners would not be prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. Criminal courts have convicted Christian Scientists in cases where children have died after visiting prayer healers instead of receiving conventional medical care. The church says no such incidents have occurred for two decades.

About 90 years ago, private insurance companies began paying for Christian Science prayer treatments, but more recently, managed-care insurers declined reimbursements, insisting on paying for care that produced proven medical results.

The Internal Revenue Service allows the cost of the prayer sessions to be counted among itemized medical expenses for income tax purposes -- one of the only religious treatments explicitly identified as deductible by the IRS. Some federal medical insurance programs, including those for military families, also reimburse for prayer treatment.

The spiritual healing provision was introduced in the House by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), whose district includes a Christian Science school, Principia College.

Two committees in the House voted to include the measure in their versions of the overhaul, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) stripped it from the consolidated House bill last week after a few members argued it was unconstitutional.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, said the provision raised serious questions about government support of religion.

"I think when Congress mandates that health companies provide coverage for prayer, it has the effect of the government advancing religion," he said.

Harry Reid, like Hatch, a Mormon, is still trying to decide whether or not to include this in the Senate bill. The "church" has a big time K Street lobbying firm, Mayer Brown (the 9th largest law firm in the U.S.), working on the Senate for them. Mayer Brown lobbying clients include shady operators like Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan Chase, AT&T, Chevron, Verizon, TPG Capital, Motorola, and, biggest of all their clients, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This year Mayer Brown has given large donations to Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Peter Roskam (R-IL), and Ethan Hastert (R-IL).

Speaking of the Crap Christian Right: Is it possible to be too stupid even to be guilty of hypocrisy?

(As you can see, the YouTube head is a lie)

Are the nutters really so stupid that they don't

know what's truly meant to offend them?

by Ken

We all find ourselves on e-mail lists from the Other Side -- the Dark Side, the Utterly Loony Side -- and it's usually more trouble than it's worth trying to get off. (Not to mention, does one really want to make contact with those people?) Earlier this week I was privileged to receive such a communication from a crypto-journalist who chronicles the outrages of us lefties. This week he was in a high state of outrage over a moment from last week's Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. That's right, ladies and gints, the nutters have seen the enemy, and it's, uh, Larry David???

I could be wrong, but I think that our earnest nuttier was claiming that in a scene in the episode Larry urinated on a bible. If so, he was totally detached from reality. ("Quelle surprise," as certain Old Europeans might say.) Today I finally watched the episode, which is hilarious, and the simple fact is that absolutely nothing is "urinated on." What happens is that, because Larry's drug-conditioned urinary flow is now achieving rocketlike potency, a drop splashes rocketlike out of the john and up onto a cheesy image of Jesus posted on the bathroom wall right beside the john, such that the residents think it's a miracle: Jesus weeps!

The reason I'm assuming my nuttier says that Larry urinates on a bible is the form his withering outrage takes: Can you imagine the outrage if there were a depiction of urinating on a Koran? And surely he couldn't be suggesting any sort of equivalence between a tacky fake-Jesus picture and a Koran, could he? Could he???

So you get the train of the outrage, right? Christian religious artifacts, says our nuttier, can be violated without consequence, whereas the slightest disrespect shown to a Muslim holy book would bring down, well, I don't know, the wrath of Allah?

Every time I think my mind can't be more boggled than the Doodyhead Right has already managed, I'm set up for further boggling. This loon has got the whole thing backwards. After all, here he is screaming bloody murder over absolutely nothing, while the fact is that he and his evil Crap Christian hypocrite zealots not only wouldn't care if a Koran was defiled, they would cheer.

For God's sake (and I hope He's listening in on the bullshit being slung in His name), does this moron truly not recognize his own reference to urinating on a Koran. For once in his fervid pursuit of snares and delusions, he's not making something up. He's remembering one of the categories of behavior we were (too reliably) informed was perpetrated in our names by our representatives in the torture halls of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

Well, maybe the chump really doesn't recognize it. Consider just how hard lying sacks of ignorant doody like him have to work to block out all vestiges of reality from intruding on their lack-of-consciousness. They still will refuse to deal with the illegal as well as immoral behavior committed in their name under the watch of those agents of Satan Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and not even God can make them.

Of course, what this fulminating asshole doesn't seem to notice (again, I only glanced at his screed) is that the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode is far from harmless in its view of the Crap Christian corporate enterprise. It's being suggested that the poor sad people who are the victims of the Crap Christian wizards in fancy dress are so abject, so beyond hope or help, that they actually tack fake-Jesus images on the wall beside their johns, and then believe their lives have been touched -- finally! -- by grace when all it is is an errant splash of urine.

In other words, with a certain amount of pity as well as derision, Larry seems to think those people are even more abject than he regularly portrays himself.


POSTSCRIPT: TO REVISIT REALITY FOR A MOMENT . . .

As a matter of fact, I loved that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. As Larry and Jerry Seinfeld work on their supposed Seinfeld reunion show, while neither of them seems (at least yet) to have slipped fully into spontaneous conversation, we are getting our first direct glimpses of the mind-meld that produced Seinfeld. Fabulous! On to tonight's episode!

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[5/7/2011] Sunday Classics preview: What was Richard Wagner doing conducting Wagner outside his house? (continued)

LIKE I SAID, ALL WE'RE DOING TONIGHT
IS HEARING THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL TWICE


WAGNER: Siegfried Idyll (chamber version)

We're starting strong: The recording of the chamber version by Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) may be the most beautiful performance of the Siegfried Idyll I've heard.

Members of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded October 1961


WAGNER: Siegfried Idyll (full-orchestra version)

By normal standards, this studio recording by Hans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965) would be regarded as a "slow" performance. But as we'll see, by the standards of the real Siegfried Idyll tortoises, it qualifies as "moderate."

Munich Philharmonic, Hans Knappertsbusch, cond. Westminster/MCA, recorded November 1962


IN TOMORROW'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

More of (and about) the Siegfried Idyll.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[5/6/2011] Sunday Classics preview: What is Larry David doing conducting Wagner outside some guy's house? (continued)

Larry puts this fellow -- who turns out to be a neighbor he doesn't recognize -- in his place. Accused of being "a self-hating Jew," he declares, "I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish." We'll have a fuller version of this scene in tomorrow night's preview..


AMONG THE FEATURED PLAYERS IN THE STORY TOLD BY OTTO OTTO FRIEDRICH ARE BEN HECHT AND CHARLES MacARTHUR

Not that I searched that exhaustively, but this is the only photo I could find of Hecht and MacArthur together. Here's blogger Florice Whyte Kovan's caption (on the benhechtbooks.net website, "devoted Ben Hecht Biography & Works"): "Ben Hecht on violin, right, and Charles MacArthur on sax, left. They worked for rival newspapers in Chicago before writing The Front Page together."


AND NOW OUR BOOK EXCERPT . . .

Here's the Groucho story as told by Otto Friedrich:

Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of the Ben Hecht Symphonietta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of the first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him.

The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarrassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted.

When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannh&aumlo;user.

"Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphonietta. We took him in."

THIS SOUNDS FAIRLY AUTHORITATIVE,
AND IT'S IN A BOOK, AFTER ALL, BUT . . .

For one thing, in whatever version of the story I heard, I don't recall the orchestra being inside the house. (You mean it was possible to sneak an entire symphony orchestra inside Ben Hecht's house without anybody noticing?) For another, Tannhäuser seems surely wrong. While it's true that later portions of the Tannhäuser Overture get louder, the piece begins thusly:



Whereas the Meistersinger Prelude goes like this:
 
Oslo Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. EMI, recorded c1991

 Hey, who doesn't get them mixed up? (Larry David, for one. He seems to know the same version of the story I do.)

YOU DIDN'T THINK I'D SEND YOU AWAY WITH JUST THOSE TEASES OF TANNHÄUSER and MEISTERSINGER, DID YOU?

 Here, in the performances we sampled above, are the complete things, or at least as complete as they get with concert endings tacked on. (In their native forms, both lead right into their operas, the Meistersinger Prelude most emphatically so.)

WAGNER: Tannhäuser: Overture



WAGNER: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude


Oslo Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. EMI, recorded c1991


IN TOMORROW NIGHT'S PREVIEW

Isn't it interesting that the "Wagner-hating Jew" was able to identify the "Jew-hating Wagner" from that bit of whistling of Larry's? Tomorrow we'll have the history -- and the music, which will be the subject of Sunday's post.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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