Sorry, blog

Well, it hasn't been a good time for blogging. The good news is that my TV screen is still intact, even after three evenings of imagining myself throwing various objects in that direction as the Red Sox seem to be fizzing out. Maybe it will all end tomorrow night and I'll return to a saner, more contemplative state of mind, suitable for blogging. I have lots of interesting "baseball and meaning" observations to make, but they'll have to wait as I'm more tied up with practicing than sometimes is the case. Britten's John Donne Sonnets are hard and on the performing agenda for the weekend. Off I go.

Armageddon Averted

So, maybe I was silly to think that my viewing habits would affect the outcome of the Yankees-Indians series. I had feared that by abandoning the Indians on Sunday night (after helping them build a 2-0 lead), I had set in motion a chain of events that would result in another Red Sox-Yankees postseason nightmare. Well, the Yankees went down for good last night, and the world is a more orderly place. Now I've returned to the more rational understanding that my powers are only strong enough to change games in which Boston is actually participating. Just to be clear, it's not that I don't think Boston could have beaten New York, or even found them less beatable than Cleveland. It's just that a series against the Indians feels like exactly what it is: a series of games in which one team will win and the other lose. That's fine. Sox-Yankees never feels like that, even during relatively unimportant regular season games. Every game is excruciating. So, hooray for regular baseball.

The Sox-Yankees thing is a good example of something so good it becomes too good. Sports are much more fun when you care what happens - but it turns out too much caring can be not so much fun. I'm sure it says something bad about me that I almost care more about the Yankees not winning than I care about the Red Sox winning, but that's just one of many bad things that can be said about me. I can live with that.

Manufactured Meanings

A point of clarification with respect to that last post.

When I talked about manufactured meanings, what I meant was that there's no reason it should matter that "Michael Monroe," "Mind/Meaning," "MultiMedia" (and "Manufactured Meaning"!) all can be acronyMMed as MM, and yet I can't help feel that these coincidental initials help to reinforce and even unify my musing mission. If I were named James Monroe, maybe everything would be different; because we find meaning in such coincidences, they become meaningful. The allure of anagrams is an even better example of this. It shouldn't really mean anything that the letters of Clint Eastwood can be scrambled into "Old West Action," but it sure is interesting. Of course, the entire idea of poetry (and, really, just about any kind of literature) is dependent on such instances of verbal resonance that help to shape messages. I think I'm wading into that whole medium is the message murkiness, so I'll muse no more for now. This was supposed to be a point of clarification post!

a little stitious...

It's all going too well right now - the Patriots just rolled through their fifth straight victim and the Red Sox just swept the Angels to advance in the playoffs. Now the Yankees are trailing early in their game and could be eliminated before the night is over, meaning I wouldn't have to endure another instance of the Apocalypse this Fall. (Dealing with the stress of postseason baseball is bad enough, but the Sox-Yankees rundowns are just too intense for anyone's good at this point.)

Of course, it's dangerous to bring any of this up because I risk jinxing everything. As Michael Scott memorably said in the slightly disappointing season premiere of The Office, "I'm not superstitious; just a little stitious." As it happens, the last couple of times I mentioned here that the Red Sox were killing me, things turned around, so maybe it's OK for me to blog about them. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that basking in victory (as opposed to wallowing in misery) will have the opposite effect and David Ortiz will be bitten by a squirrel and develop rabies tomorrow - all because of my hubris.

On the other other hand, I just helped the Indians score their first two runs against the Yankees. I'm not really even watching the game closely, but I flipped by it to see some anonymous Indians player hit a dribbler to Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. "Throw it away, Derek," I yelled - and he did! That runner came around to score the first run of the game. Next inning, I flipped by again and saw former Sox star Trot Nixon step to the plate for Cleveland. "Go yard, Trot!" I implored, and he hit a rope over the right field wall on that very pitch. My wife witnessed both of these events - the only commands I uttered with respect to this game. I was responsible for those two runs scoring. Part of me now feels obligated to watch the rest of the game and continue directing traffic, but I'm going to have to hope the Indians can hang on to the two-run lead I've provided. After all, I'm only a little stitious.

As a general mind and meaning side note, I might mention that the tendency for sports fans to see their game-viewing actions as meaningful is just so human. We're conditioned to look for meaning where we can find it - especially when something seems out of our control like a baseball game being played far away. Any apparent cause-and-effect bit of evidence is so tempting for our mental meaning-making machines. Sometimes when I'm watching the progress of a Red Sox game online while doing other work, if something good happens, I'll feel like I can't turn on the radio or TV to continue following the game because good things were happening when I was just getting the pitch-by-pitch online info. It's an awesome responsibility to have this kind of power, so it's a good thing I'm not superstitious.

Speaking of connections and mind and meaning issues, I don't think I've ever blogged about the felicitous connections embedded in my blog title. Yes, not only does MMmusing alliteratively stand for "Michael Monroe musing"; it also can stand for "mind/meaning musing," and, as I've now created something like 75 multimedia examples for this blog, it can also stand for "multimedia musing," not to mention that it can sound like someone elongating the m in "musing". Perhaps it can even suggest the word "amusing." As someone with a congenital weakness for wordplay, I find all of this very satisfying, even though I know the significance of these connections is manufactured. There's no logical reason why we should find it significant that words with semantic connections to each other also share initials or rhymes or whatever, but just as the sports-viewing mind looks for connections in coincidence, so do verbal minds find joy in these lyrical links. It reminds me of composers who write tunes that "spell" words; the pitches that "spell" Bach don't really say Bach in any acoustic way - but we love finding meaning in hearing a tune as Bach's tune.

So much of the perception of art has to do with finding satisfaction in some kind of connection. It's also delightful to discover how many various meanings can be extruded from something - like a blog title or a Diabelli theme - that was first created with a specific and limited meaning in mind. This speaks again to the joy of constraints; anything accomplished against the odds is interesting.

And speaking of constraints, I'll end near where I began by voicing my fear that The Office may be off to a slightly disappointing start due to lack of constraints. This fantastically subtle show has become such a hit that they're now beginning a season with four hour-long episodes and an obviously bigger budget that has enabled not one, but two car crashes in the first two episodes. Hey, it's still a very funny show, and it's always relied on a certain amount of broad humor, but I wouldn't be surprised if the needs to fill more time and be more "eventful" have thrown off an important creative balance. Time will tell, but now that the Yankees have closed to within 3-2, I feel as if I must submit this post in hopes that a Cleveland win is preserved. (On some level, I really think that.)

UPDATE: Seconds after hitting "submit," I clicked over to see that the hated Yankees now lead 5-3. It's all my fault!

UPDATE 2: Now it's 8-3, Yankees. I feel as if I owe the entire city of Cleveland an apology - wasn't it enough that my Patriots destroyed their Browns today? Couldn't I have left well enough alone? This could all end very badly. Maybe this is a good time to recall that I began my blogging career partly to occupy me while I'd given up sports for Lent. I'm also now remembering how I felt a quiet sense of relief when the Red Sox didn't make the playoffs last year. I slept normal hours, I cared about normal things. Sigh...

UPDATE 3: Yankees live to fight another day. I hope you appreciate the curious logic of my experience here: I wrote that I caused the Indians to score two runs. Then, because that's such a ridiculous thing to have claimed, I was punished by having the Yankees come back and win. You see, I'm still in control, even when I'm punished for believing that I am in control. The important thing is not whether I've helped or harmed the Red Sox cause; it's that I feel like I'm the one in control. If it's not about me, why would I care?

Constraints & the Amateur

When I e-penned on Saturday morning about the joys of fragmented musical experiences, I hadn't noticed Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal article about the problem of reviewing amateur productions. The question there concerns how a critic must adjust his/her standards in dealing with such productions; this is just another side of the point that interests me - namely, that we can receive tremendous satisfaction from a performance even when professional standards are nowhere to be found. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but most important, I think, is that we intuitively take into account the human element and adjust according to what we know about the humans involved. This is more or less the same thing I've said all along about the Joyce Hatto story; people listened to "her recordings' with different ears than they might to other recordings because of the perfectly natural tendency to hear her in the context of her dramatic biography. A lot of people seem to think there's something inherently wrong with that. I think it's just normal.

In the case of appreciating amateur performances, this also intersects with another favorite topic of mine - the important role played by constraints in the creative process. Not only does an understanding of the constraints faced by a non-professional performance make us more forgiving, it actually changes the way we think about what we're seeing/hearing. And it should, because we're human, they're human, etc. One of my favorite movies is one that I made (!) a few years ago. It's a 45-minute version of The Wizard of Oz starring my daughter and about 10 of her cousins. We shot it over three days, and although some creative prep work went into fashioning costumes and scouting out locations, there was almost no rehearsing. We basically shot it line by line; we'd feed the kids (mostly ages 4-12) lines and then roll film.

Although I was screenwriter, director, and cameraman, there's little question that my most important role was editor. I've never counted, but I'd guess the final product is the result of something like 300-400 takes stitched together in a process that was both laborious and wonderfully challenging creatively. Talk about constraints. Now, I can't say for sure how unbiased eyes would view this film (not sure if I'll ever post it online, mainly because the innocent deserve protection), but biased eyes love it and have watched it over and over. I find the final product quite satisfying, and it's significantly because I'm astonished at what we were able to achieve within such tight constraints. No, it's not a Hollywood quality movie, but no one would ever watch it with those sorts of expectations.

In fact, I think viewers understand that those constraints (only three days, no boom mics, chainsaws roaring in the distance, tired kids, etc.) are part of the language of the movie. This is one of the crucial things about how constraints work in art. I recently encountered two fun examples of this, first in stumbling upon a PBS mini-feature on the photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. He's made a career out of a sort of trick photography that creates amazing images using nothing more than a Polaroid and skillfully set-up shots (warning, use of clothes is not one of his tricks). The images are often extraordinary, but it's quite important to Minkkinen that no digital or even darkroom manipulation enter into the equation. And we as viewers look at the results differently knowing the constraints he set for himself.

On a lighter side, Fred Himebaugh recently wrote about the constraints written into the rules of writing barbershop harmony. I really like what he says here:

"We roll our eyes at the rules because personal expression is a Myth that dominates our modern understanding of art. Then we reconsider, reminding ourselves that constraints often stimulate creativity: think Rachmaninoff's Vespers. The truth is that art struggles in environments that are too permissive, but also, in environments that are too restrictive. There's a region of magical twilight where just enough resistance leads to just the right kind of struggle that results in a satisfying work of art. That finding that region is difficult is only one more way that Art Is Hard."

That stimulating of creativity is what I find most interesting about constraints, but I think awareness of constraints also has much more to do with our perception of artworks/performances than is often assumed. The rigorous academic study of an art can make us think that unless all the ideal factors we've come to care about are taken care of, an artistic experience will not satisfy. [UPDATE (the next day): I think I accidentally deleted a transition sentence here, something along the lines of "However, we naturally forgive imperfections in a performance when we know there are constraints that explain them." The transition to the ideas of these last two paragraphs still needs work. Hopefully, I'll flesh that out soon.]
Here's one way of thinking about that; is it possible for Beethoven's genius to shine through in a hackneyed, uninformed playing of the first movement of the Moonlight sonata? (To the student who recently performed that, I don't mean you! That was sensitive, beautifully shaded playing.) This has to do with what I think of as the 90/10 problem. Most of us understand that achieving that final 10% of rightness takes something like 90% of the effort. (i.e. getting the Moonlight notes right is just the start; the artistry lies beyond that.) As a result, we also start to assume that the success of a performance is determined by that last 10%.
I'm not sure that it is; I've enjoyed far too many non-professional performances, and at a really deep and meaningful level. Of course, that has to do with adjusted expectations. I just put on a professional recording of a Mozart piano concerto and was completely distracted by some surprisingly out-of-tune wind playing that would probably have bothered me much less hearing a local orchestra live. I have nothing but the fondest of memories of a high school production of Carousel that I helped out with as a grad student, even though the performance standards would have been inconceivable on Broadway. But my point is not just that I can enjoy both; it's that the message/meaning of the artwork can be just as powerful in these different contexts. At least, I think I think that, but I'm going to end here for now. Soon I'll post about this, which has had me thinking about some of the same issues.