As long as you're not a registered lobbyist, you can buy swell inauguration crap

"This pencil set includes two No. 2 pencils, decorated with the 57th Presidential Inauguration logo." ($3)

"My children will be devastated to learn that I will be unable to bring home the much-sought-after $5 presidential dog button. Will the humiliation ever cease?"

-- Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National
Transportation Safety Board, now a registered lobbyist

by Ken

In keeping with the general theme of this presidential inauguration, that it sure as heck isn't like the last one, our pal Al Kamen calls attention, in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column, to certain limitations of purchase of the crap swell stuff you can buy at the online Presidential Inaugural Store, where it turns out that your purchases are treated like, and monitored like, contributions.

You'll find items ranging from caps for $10 to fancy designer clothes for around $125, to a "medallion set" for $7,500.

It’s simple: You just click on the item you want and then "add to cart." When you’re done shopping, you click on "Go to checkout." Don’'t forget to "apply discount code," which is "2013" and gets you a 15 percent discount.

Then you fill out the standard billing form: name, address, credit card info. You also have to say who your employer is and give your occupation. Then there's this: "If this donation is from an entity rather than an individual, please provide the name of that entity here."

Donation? Well, whatever. But then, before you can get to the final purchase, there's this:

"By clicking this button I certify" six things: that you are over 16, that you're a citizen or lawful resident, that if you are a company it's an American one, that the money is not from a political action committee, that no one's giving you money to make the "donation," and that you are not a registered lobbyist.

That's right. While the committee has dropped the ban on corporate contributions that it had during the last inaugural preparations, it will not accept money from certain employees of those corporations.

As reflected in the quote atop this post from former National Transportation Safety Board managing director (and current registered lobbyist) Peter Goelz, the registered-lobbyist community is feeling the pain. "But wait!" says Al. "If you're in town -- as many lobbyists naturally are -- you can go to the inauguration store at 1155 F St. NW and buy stuff there, no questions asked."

But if you buy more than $200 worth of stuff, you have to sign a form (for the Federal Election Commission) and -- uh-oh -- you must "certify" that you are not a "currently registered lobbyist."

So you can “"donate" some cash for swag, just no more than $200. Unclear whether you can shop there every day.

At $7500, this medallion set is apparently beyond the reach of even the most ardent lobbyist.

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Sleep tight, Justice T, and don't let the bedbugs bite!

Can't you just feel the excitement in the air? Oh, wait . . .

by Ken

Thanks to our eagle-eyed colleague John Aravosis at AMERICAblog for catching this magic moment from President Obama's inauguration. We all recall how, despite the arctic chill, the excitement in the crowd kept everyone at fever pitch. The sense of history was palpable for . . . er, for this . . . um, for this historic . . . oh, for goodness' sake, would somebody wake Justice Thomas up?

In fairness to Justice T, those familiar with his, er, customary demeanor during oral arguments before the Supreme Court say that while yes, it does often appear that he dozes off during the proceedings, there are occasional indications that at least some of those times he isn't so much sleeping as expressing his general contempt for the proceedings. Actually, what's interesting is how often you hear some version of this from lawyers who have argued cases before him -- or tried to.

Note: Although the Secret Service probably wouldn't like it to be widely known, the above seating plan is actually used for all Supreme Court outings to events that involve reserved-seat ticketing, like Washington Nationals' baseball and Wizards' basketball games. Chief Justice Roberts, in particular, likes to be well removed from the aisle so that somebody else usually winds up paying while he fumbles for his wallet when the hot-dog and beer vendors come around.

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Sunday Classics: 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free -- "Simple Gifts" as rendered by Aaron Copland

Marilyn Horne sings Aaron Copland's arrangements of "Simple Gifts," "Long Time Ago" (at 2:20), and "At the River" (at 6:02) from his Old American Songs, with James Levine conducting the New York Philharmonic, at the May 1991 Carnegie Hall Centennial Gala.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

by Ken

So we were hornswoggled during the inaugural ceremonies! The day after, I wrote:

It was a nice gesture, having the presidential swearing-in preceded by a brief "serious" musical offering played by the rainbow quartet of violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero, and it's impossible not to admire their hardiness in performing -- not at all bundled up -- under those weather conditions [emphasis added]. The actual offering, John Williams' Air and Simple Gifts, was concocted for the occasion. So-called "occasional" music doesn't have the happiest history, and this didn't impress me as a happy specimen.

Not so, however. It turns out that, for understandable reasons, the musicians weren't performing in those dreadful conditions. They were Milli Vanilli-ing. Of course these players, unlike the Milli Vanilli boys, could actually have played their parts, as they did for the recording that was played. As I say, it's understandable that, given the circumstances, they weren't asked to do so, but it seems to me that in that situation you can't fake it -- what you have to do is introduce the musicians and invite the audience to join them in listening to their pre-recording.

But I digress. In our clip above we have mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne giving a fine performance of Aaron Copland's arrangement of the Shaker song "Simple Gifts," along with two more of the Copland-arranged Old American Songs, in the composer's orchestral version. (An earlier Horne performance of just "Simple Gifts" in the piano-accompanied version -- played by Martin Katz -- can be heard here.)

The best performances I've heard of the Old American Songs were given in recital by the late bass-baritone Donald Gramm, but unfortunately he never recorded them, though I imagine there must be live-performance tapes somewhere. For a charming bit of culture clash, you can hear baritone Thomas Quasthoff singing "Long Time Ago," "Simple Gifts" (at 3:12), and "I Bought Me a Cat" (at 4:58) from the Berlin Philharmonic's "Silvesterkonzert" this past New Year's Eve, with music director Sir Simon Rattle conducting.

The Old American Songs were first performed by bass-baritone William Warfield, starting with the first set of five (including "Simple Gifts," "Long Time Ago," and "I Bought Me a Cat") in 1951. Warfield's wonderful mono recordings of both sets, made shortly after their premieres in 1951 and 1953 with the composer at the piano, are included in Vol. 2, "Chamber Music and Rarities," of Sony Classical's 2000 series A Copland Celebration, three two-CD sets that can now be had dirt-cheap on Amazon.com. Warfield was past his vocal best when he and Copland got around to the orchestral version in 1962, but that beautiful stereo recording still hasn't been equaled. (It's in Vol. 3, "Vocal Works and Opera," of A Copland Celebration.)

Before Copland made his arrangement of "Simple Gifts" in the Old American Songs, he had brought the song, well known among the Shakers but not elsewhere, to general consciousness when he used it for the final section of his 1944 "Ballet for Martha" (Graham, that is -- for use by her trailblazing dance company), Appalachian Spring. Last week I wondered if the second movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C is the most beautiful music ever written. It would certainly be on my shortest short list, and so would Appalachian Spring.

The original version of the ballet was scored, out of necessity, given the Graham company's limited resources, for a modest ensemble of 13 instruments (two first violins, two second violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and piano). Here is a culture-straddling, though decidedly quickish, performance of the last six minutes, beginning with the clarinet's first sounding of the "Simple Gifts" theme, by 12 members of the Tsinghua University Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Shao Zhang playing the piano part, given in Beijing last May 26:



The score of Copland's 1945 full-orchestra Appalachian Spring Suite contains this note:

The action of the ballet concerns "a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbour suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house."

As anyone familiar with both the original chamber scoring and the later orchestral Appalachian Spring knows, wonderful as the full-orchestra version is, in the 13-instrument version the composer made a virtue of necessity -- it has its own gritty rustic pioneer charm. That version wasn't much played before Columbia Masterworks (now Sony Classical) had the composer make a recording in New York in 1973 with the "Columbia Chamber Ensemble," an assemblage of top-notch free-lance musicians.

(For the record, that recording employs 15 rather than 13 players, using a trick that other performers of the chamber version would do well to follow: adding a third player on each violin part, because two violinists playing the same music will always sound somewhat anemic and slightly out of tune against each other, no matter how precise their intonation may seem, whereas if you add a third player, you can get a blended -- and in-tune -- ensemble sound.)

For that 1973 recording Copland was persuaded to do the complete ballet, which includes a chunk of about seven minutes that he had omitted from the suite, fearing that it wouldn't hold up to the scrutiny of non-dance performance. He made it clear that this is a separate issue from the choice of orchestral vs. chamber version, that both the complete ballet and the suite can be performed in either scoring.

The 1973 Appalachian Spring was issued in Vol. 1 of Sony's Copland Celebration ("Famous Orchestral and Chamber Works"), along with the fascinating 17-minute chunk of rehearsal that Columbia had released as a bonus with the original LP issue. The composer's CBS recording of the orchestral suite with the London Symphony was not included in the Copland Celebration but has been issued in goodness-knows-how-many CD editions, as has his earlier RCA recording with the Boston Symphony.

To hear a sample of the orchestral version, there's an online performance of the complete suite by David Matthies and the DePauw University Symphony Orchestra, of which Part 3 picks up a little before the above chamber version. (You'll hear the clarinet entrance with the "Simple Gifts" tune at 1:15.)


RECORDING NOTES

By now there have been countless recordings of the Appalachian Spring Suite in the full-orchestra version. I have a special fondness for William Steinberg's lovely Command recording with the Pittsburgh Symphony, which has surely found its way onto CD. (The earlier Steinberg-Pittsburgh version, on Everest, is fine too, but that's not the one I mean.) In addition to the composer's own recordings, noted above, not surprisingly Leonard Bernstein's recordings -- the earlier CBS/Sony one with the New York Philharmonic and the predictably more spacious, reflective DG one with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (both issued in countless CD couplings) -- remain especially satisfying.

For the Old American Songs, the Warfield-Copland recordings -- the mono one with piano, the stereo with orchestra -- are both indispensable, all the more so in that I don't have much to suggest in the way of alternatives.


RECENT CLASSICAL MUSIC POSTS

The updated list can be found here.

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On the theory that you can't make a new gummint without cracking wise, here we go!

by Ken


"OAF OF OFFICE" REVISITED

[click to enlarge]

WHAT'S THE REAL DEAL WITH BIG DICK'S BUM BACK?

Yes, yes, we all saw the now-former vice president (God, I love saying that!) being wheeled around in his Dr. Strangelove-model wheelchair at the inauguration, and we've all heard the famous story about how he hurt his back moving cartons at his new Virginia homestead.

A friend suggests that he insisted on moving one box himself -- the one with all the lists of who he met with to discuss energy policies, torture, Iraq, etc. But what do you suppose really happened?


INAUGURAL SNAFU? ALL THOSE DAMNED WINTER COATS!

I took note yesterday of the general chaos in getting people to where they needed to be and then getting them into their ticketed sections for Tuesday's inaugural. By then I had been tipped that the responsibility most likely lay with the Joint Congressional Committee for Inaugural Ceremonies, and that the JCCIC's point man for such matters would be Senate sergeant-at-arms Terrance Gainer, whose illustrious law-enforcement career goes back to riot-cop duty during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and includes stints as "executive assistant chief" of the D.C. Metro Police and chief of the Capitol Police. A colleague who wishes to go unnamed reports that Gainer "has been a major pain in the ass his entire career in D.C." and "has made screwing up large crowd events into an art form."

Yesterday's Washington Post reported: "Part of the problem, Gainer said, was that people wearing bulky winter clothing took up more space than officials had expected."

If only someone could have anticipated that people might be wearing bulky winter clothing! Then perhaps they could have set up coat-check tents at each of the entry points, and had everybody check those bulky coats -- just for the few hours the folks would be standing out in the Mall.


IF YOU WANTED TO WORK FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA --

Al Kamen reports in today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

So many Clintonites are finding top jobs in the administration that this joke is making the rounds 'mongst the Obama campaign foreign policy folks: "If you wanted Obama to become president, you had to work on his campaign. If you wanted to work for President Obama, you had to work on Hillary Clinton's campaign."


AS LAURA PARADES HER ALL-"I'M WITH STUPID" WARDROBE --

[click to enlarge]

Afterthoughts from the inauguration

That's the back of 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens as he swore in Vice President Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill, their daughter Ashley, and his sons Hunter and Beau.

by Ken

It was, apparently, a good event to watch on TV, though I'm sure the people who were there will carry special memories of their own. Here are some fairly random things that linger in memory from the day.

SENATOR KENNEDY

It was great to see Sen. Ted Kennedy there, in apparently good spirits, fedora and all -- and this notwithstanding his having to be removed from the luncheon by stretcher following a seizure, which is apparently characteristic of his condition. (His condition was later reported to be stable.)

Who would have thought that the most lightly regarded of the Kennedy men would turn out to make the most enduring public contribution?

JUSTICE STEVENS

I mentioned the Rev. Joseph Lowery's rousing benediction yesterday. The other procedural highlight for me: the swearing in of Vice President Biden by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who turns 89 in April.

Justice Stevens's tenacious endurance as the Court was being transformed into a rubber stamp for the rich and powerful has made him one of my personal heroes. He gave every indication of being as alert physically and mentally as everyone has been saying he is, so he seems ready for at least one more Court term. Thanks to his tenacity in outlasting Chimpy the Decider, he can now make his decision about continued service based entirely on personal considerations, and also worry less about what happens if circumstances take the decision out of his hands.

It's worth remembering that Justice Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford (at the recommendation of Attorney General Edward Levi). If this makes him the most enduring legacy of the Ford administration, it's not a bad one.

OAF OF OFFICE
(not original, but I can't resist using it)

Justice Stevens certainly seemed more alert than Chief Justice John Roberts. The chief justice's conspicuous screw-up with the presidential oath seemed to me revealing of both participants' character. The president-elect came prepared. He had clearly taken the trouble to memorize the oath, whereas the chief justice couldn't be bothered, but then the president-elect froze when the chief justice got it wrong. To his credit, he didn't simply utter the oath correctly from memory; he was, after all, supposed to be repeating after Chief Justice Roberts. And he did eventually decide that that's what he should do. Of course by the time he made his adjustment, the chief justice had corrected himself, so they still weren't quite in sync.

Nevertheless, all the words got said -- including the controversial "so help me God" that's not included in the constitutionally prescribed oath but that regrettably seems to have become standard. (One assumes the chief justice didn't spring this on the president-elect without prior consultation.)

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
I: HE'S NOT REALLY PRESIDENT!

Pursuant to the burbled oath: The wingnut hordes promptly went berserk with the joyous news that President Obama is not therefore legally president! Oh, that crafty Chief Justice Roberts!

Oh, for Pete's sake! At this level of imbecility and insanity, these people should really exercise their imagined Second Amendment rights and buy lots and lots of guns and point them at their itty-bitty brains and just keep shooting -- for a better America.

UPDATE: Fox Noise's Chris Wallace won himself Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World citation tonight for taking up this very argument. Of course, strictly speaking, Fox Noise isn't "outside" Wingnuttia -- it's more like the professional arm of the howling loons. Still, if it lies in that Twilight Zone between formal Wingnuttia and and the mainstream infotainment-news media (see below), it does represent a wider scope than I was originally reporting.

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
II: INAUGURAL $$$$$ BULLSHIT

Not just the wingnuts but shamefully large segments of the infotainment-news media have been abuzz with factually bogus stories about the cost of the Obama inauguration -- most preposterously claiming it cost "nearly four times as much" as the second George W. Bush inauguration.

Aside from the conveniently forgotten fact that both W. inaugurations were heavy-breathing pay-to-play operations, where the massive fund-raising, with every attempt made to keep donors' identities secret, was just part of the ritual of business-as-usual under the Bush regime, whereby any dollar that didn't stink with corruption was considered a dollar wasted, or that the Obama inauguration accommodated vastly larger numbers of people, the Bush spending figures are conveniently purged of by far the largest component of the inaugural budget, security, which can easily count for three-quarters of the total tab. Media Matters' Eric Boehlert waded into the muck to try to bring some sense to this hodgepodge of real and imaginary numbers (left unexamined by lazy "reporters"), not to mention numbers that can't be compared directly.

It's reassuring to know that to the knee-jerk propagandists of the infotainment-news media, it's still the case that no lie is too outrageous or excessive if it serves the interests of the Extreme Right.

INAUGURAL MESS

While it's obviously true that yesterday's ceremonies accommodated numbers of people heretofore unimagined for an inauguration, this is not to say that, however much it cost, those people were accommodated adequately.

I'm hearing countless stories of official cluelessness and even chaos, stories of people with tickets being unable to figure out or find out where they were supposed to go, and if they found where they were supposed to go, then being left in limbo for hours, in many cases not to be admitted at all. Arrangements for organizing and moving the hordes seem to have been largely ineffective or simply absent. In at least one section, it appears that large numbers of people whose tickets weren't even checked were admitted ahead of patiently queued ticket-holders.

The size of the crowd would have made the situation hard to manage under the best circumstances, but the breakdown in planning, staffing, and execution seems to have been widespread. There are a lot of directions in which to point fingers (I'm hearing that the heaviest burden may lie with Senator Feinstein's joint congressional committee in charge of the inauguration), but surely most -- if not all -- of them eventually come back to Team Obama.

Is anyone else concerned by this series of staff breakdowns we seem to be seeing, despite the vaunted efficiency of the Obama operation? I still spend odd moments trying to figure out how the Pastor Rick Warren brouhaha was brought about. Even if you admit the sinister theory that people on the team thought it might be helpful in courting right-wing and specifically evangelical support to be seen treating its leftish and specifically LGBT supporters so badly, I just can't believe they're happy with the kind of uproar his invitation to deliver the inaugural invocation aroused. At the same time, how could they have not expected the kind of uproar they got?

Again with the debacle of the surgical exclusion of Bishop Gene Robinson from the "business" portion of Sunday's pre-inaugural concert -- i.e., the portion that was (a) attended by the Obama and Biden families and (b) televised: Even if we accept the Presidential Inauguration Committee's insistence that this was not its plan, how could there have been people at any level of the PIC too dense to understand the significance of the "error in executing the plan" which was built into the final event schedule? And possibly worse, why did nobody anywhere in the organization take the most cursory look at the final schedule and see the problem?

SPEAKING OF PASTOR RICK

I thought Pastor Rick's invocation was fine, starting from the premise that we allow the heavy religious overlay in these proceedings. At the same time, if Pastor Rick were a different sort of person, he might have made a point of saying something to rebut the ugly image of him which has been spread so wide -- based on his own words and actions.

MUSICAL MISHMOSH

It was a nice gesture, having the presidential swearing-in preceded by a brief "serious" musical offering played by the rainbow quartet of violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero, and it's impossible not to admire their hardiness in performing -- not at all bundled up -- under those weather conditions. The actual offering, John Williams' Air and Simple Gifts, was concocted for the occasion. So-called "occasional" music doesn't have the happiest history, and this didn't impress me as a happy specimen.

Maybe some people found the "air" appealing. I was relieved when it gave way to the celebrated Shaker song "Simple Gifts." Probably the song is best known in the arrangements by Aaron Copland: the piano and orchestral versions of the song itself included among his Old American Songs, and its incorporation in the final section of his ballet Appalachian Spring. "'Tis the gift to be simple," the song starts, and Copland's renderings displayed that gift. The clutter Williams piled on showed that it's a far from universal gift, and I fear served to confirm the suspicion of the many people to whom this was a rare exposure to vaguely "classical" music that it's annoying claptrap.

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