Life Imitating Art: The Storm and Two Cathedrals

What separates Sandy from the power of the mere Hurricane Irene is its historic convergence of meterological phenomena. From Newsday:

"It's been 69 years since the metropolitan area was hit by a late-season hurricane. Sandy's expected turbulent merger WITH a cold front moving in from the west, AND a southern dip in the jet stream from Canada, will make it a hybrid storm, an even rarer occurrence, experts say."

No West Wing fan can hear that description without thinking of the season two finale "Two Cathedrals," and the tropical storm that had not hit DC in May, out of season, in 100 years, but descended after Mrs. Landingham's funeral and pushed Bartlet to make a decision.

The episode is on many people's list of top 5 episodes in TV history, and Bartlet's confrontation with God in the National Cathedral, partly in Latin, is most often cited. But it is so much more than that, and for me, it's the last 6 minutes that have to do with the storm that put it in the realm of art.

•Like all great works of film, the episode defies time boundaries, meaning  it conveys what seems to be a magical amount of exposition in its 44 minutes. Every stroke is so efficiently and exquisitely planned that the sheer impact of story and emotion and ideas is remarkable.

•The flashbacks to young Jed are beautiful haikus to Jed’s whole relationship with his unloving father and Mrs. Landingham’s “big sister” love and encouragement. They start beautifully integrated into the situation room scene.

•Before he starts speaking in Latin, Barlett lashes out against God killing Mrs. Landingham in the vernacular:

“You're a son of a bitch, You know that? She bought her first new car and You hit her with a drunk driver. What? Was that supposed to be funny? 'You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God', says Graham Greene. I don't know whose ass he was kissing there, 'cus I think You're just vindictive.”

It’s a startling, liberating speech on tv. It’s perfect for the character, it’s perfect for the storyline.

•The funeral itself. Visually moving. Bartlet’s earlier line when Charlie asks him does he need anything, “I need pall bearers” is heart wrenching, in the midst of the MS news breaking

•Then the storm, blowing in Mrs. Landingham's ghost or soul, or just raising the anger in Jed. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” It’s beautifully filmed, beautifully written:

Bartlet: I've got a secret for you, Mrs. Landingham. I've never been the most popular guy in the Democratic Party.

Mrs. Landingham: I've got a secret for you, Mr. President. Your father was a prick who could never get over the fact that he wasn't as smart as his brothers. Are you in a tough spot? Yes. Do I feel sorry for you? I do not. Why? Because there are people way worse off then you.


•And then comes the finest 6 minutes of one of the finest hours in television: Jed’s walk through the West Wing to the car to go over to the press conference at the State. Dept. to the haunting strains of Dire Straits’s "Brothers in Arms." This music essay within an episode is a tv convention that has been so imitated that it seems trite now, but in 2001 in was still fresh. (Although I must note that Michael Mann scooped Sorkin with BIA by 16 years, in a music essay in Miami Vice's “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run.” Another exquisite hour of television).

Sorkin’s essay has a twinge of Bartlet as Lear, walking in the rain with no coat or umbrella, yet not in madness but in a baptismal rain cleansing his sin of concealing MS; Jed’s own band of brothers falling in behind him as he walks to the car; a beautifully framed motorcade in the rain; the purposeful walking feet shot; the president’s car passing the Cathedral just as the janitor finds the cigarette butt; and at the press podium, Bartlet being Bartlet.

There's no soundtrack to the real power and potential terror of nature unleashed upon people. I dearly hope everyone remains safe. If the essentials are covered, then Aaron Sorkin and Dire Straits do offer some inspiring, serious rain.

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 Mapeel     10/28/2012     current events, television, West Wing   

Reading Comprehensions

Since you are visiting this blog, you are a Reader, someone who actively enjoys reading, and thereby reading comprehension. One of the great joys as a Reader is understanding subtleties of language, straight out, or the complicated systems of signs and signifiers to the signified as described by Ferdinand de Saussure, the venerable father of linguistics.

And so some potpourri thoughts on things I’ve read, or read about, recently.

Dan Brown. Yeah, We Need to Argue With Success

The long-awaited actual sequel to The Da Vinci Code went on sale last week. It sold 2 MILLION copies in that first week, combined hardcover, audio, and electronic in the U.S., U.K., and Canadian markets alone. That’s an astounding number of readers.

I have not read his prose, and only barely watched TDC on tv, but I’ve been reading a bit about the books and the phenomenon. Seems he likes to play with facts, beyond the legitimate fictional tale he is spinning. This site tracks some of his lapses in fact-checking, particularly resetting the Illuminati, which was an Enlightenment-era secret society, into the early 1500s. In my mind, if you want a secret society of scientists to vow revenge against the Church for “crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus,” then you make one up. You don’t borrow an actual secret society from more than two centuries later that had no such agenda.

And then there is Dan’s prose. I ran across an article in the Telegraph where a young poet named Tom Chivers details 20 of the Brown’s worst sentences, with comments. It’s worth reading the whole list, but this is my favorite:

#10. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4:
“Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow.”

Did they hit him with the kaleidoscope?


Tim Chivers, he's a Reader. His deadpan comment just made my day.


John Wells Just Didn’t Get The West Wing Fans


Reading extends to the semiotics of film and television. I’ve been watching the Bravo reruns of the exalted series The West Wing in the morning. Seeing the whole series compressed like this underscores the decline that set in when Aaron Sorkin left and John Wells took over as executive producer. In the episode “Gaza,” Wells tampered with a small detail that spoke volumes about how he thought the WW fans couldn’t “read” their own show.

TWW often played with time conventions, starting an episode at the end of a day, and then the next frame says 7:10 a.m., and you know they mean that morning and that you will see what led up to the first scene.

And then Aaron Sorkin left, and John Wells and company decided they needed to over-explain conventions that had worked well for 4 seasons. And so the "Gaza" episode. It starts in the settlement, with Fitz, Andy, and Donna on a fact-finding mission. In the intro before the credits, the SUV with Donna and Fitz blows up. It’s very dramatic.

The next frame is in the west wing, and the chyron says 7:00 a.m. BEFORE THE EXPLOSION. I remember people going crazy about this on TWOP when it was first on, and seeing it anew, I understand wherewith the outrage and the need to mock Wells.

Then, after the credits, and a scene back in Gaza, the action returns to the west wing, with a chyron 8:00 a.m., DAY OF THE EXPLOSION. OMG. Did Wells really think that no one could follow such simplistic playing with time? (Imagine what Wells would do if he took over Lost.) And even if we did get confused, he just told us it was the morning of the explosion. Clearly John Wells is not much of a Reader himself.

And Then There’s Grammar

Here’s a very problematic sentence in the current New Yorker, from no less than David Remnick, in his Talk of the Town about Rod Blagojevich.

“The American political memoir comes in many forms-—the magisterial catalogue of heroic achievement, the backward glance at a modest beginnings-—but none of these sub-genres have thrived with more repetition and variation than the cri de Coeur of the indicted-but-not-yet-convicted office-holding grandee.”

With only 2 examples set off by dashes, “none” should be “neither.” I wonder if Remnick had 3 examples when he wrote it, then one got cut for space and no one realized that the predicate subject of the next clause had to change.

More importantly, “have thrived” should be “has thrived,” no matter how you parse it. None is singular, “none has thrived” is the underlying sentence.

Whoever is copy editing this TOTT pieces isn’t a Reader, not as we here understand it.

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 Mapeel     9/24/2009     literature, West Wing   

Carly Simon and Thomas Tallis: O Jerusalem

I went to a shindig the other evening at the Waldorf in honor of a captain of industry, who thankfully had a great sense of humor about what is sometimes a deadly formal affair. Adam Sandler, one of the presenters, had a very funny bit about some letters to a certain male magazine that had just surfaced . . . .

But the highlight of the evening for me was when Carly Simon performed at the behest of the captain of industry. She sang “Oh Susannah” from her new album, McCartney’s “Blackbird” and then “a hymn for Howard and for New York”

Let the river run
Let all the dreamers
Wake the nations.
Come, the New Jerusalem . . . .

That line sent shivers down my spine. She’s in the deep, smoky part of her range, which as an alto, I love to hear. But beyond that, there’s something stirring about hearing the words “the New Jerusalem” sung. Jerusalem is not just any word.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.

The week before I had heard the majesty of the word pronounced in Latin (with that lovely soft “yeah” for the “J”) at a concert of the superb Vox Vocal Ensemble, an early music a capella group under the direction of George Steel of the Miller Theatre at Columbia University. I went with John Steed’s little-known brother, Osbert, who is a musicologist. Going with Osbert is like having a living audio guide at your side—-his knowledge of composers, modes, theories, trivia, is staggering.

The Vox concert offered the Lamentations of Jeremiah from the English composers Parsley, White, Byrd, and Mr. Tallis. The text they all set comes from the Latin translation of the book of Lamentations (which follows the book of Jeremiah) for liturgical use during the Holy Week service of Tenebrae. It was written by the prophet, or one of his followers, after the destruction of the Temple as a people mourned their defeat at the hands of their enemies. In Judaism it is read on Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the catastrophic event.

Different Renassiance composers set various parts of the whole text, which has a fascinating structure: each of the 5 chapters has 22 verses, corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, except chapter 3 which has the multiple of 66 verses. This wiki page details all the verses-—it’s the clearest delineation I’ve ever seen.

A greatly beloved setting is by Thomas Tallis. He set the first five verses of chapter one.

Aleph
Beth
Ghimel
Daleth
Heth

It’s all exquisitely mournful, but for me, Beth is the most beautiful.

PLORANS PLORAVIT IN NOCTE—-“by night she weeps in sorrow.” I could live in that Latin. I love the sound of plorans—-it’s so much more expressive than crying.

ET LACRIMAE EIUS IN MAXILLIS EIUS—“and tears run down her cheeks.” Lacrimae are so much deeper than tears.

And after that personal/national sadness is sung, comes the haunting supplication:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.
Your nation is in ruins, you need to return to the Lord your God.

No one other place is as important to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as Jerusalem. Does the word simply hold the weight of all that import, and is that what sends the chills when the Vox Ensemble sings the sublime line of Tallis, or Carly Simon sings it in exuberance? Whichever, for me it is a very special aural moment in an overly visual world.

I entreat you to discover the sublime beauty of Renaissance polyphony, if you are not already a devotee, and the glories of the Tallis Scholars. For you tristate people, go hear this art in person at the Vox’s next concert.

As for Carly, her New Jerusalem is the soundtrack to this fan video for The West Wing. What a perfect salute to the Latin-speaking President Bartlet. Boy, I miss that show.

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 Mapeel     2/10/2007     music, Steed, television, West Wing