Remains of the Day

Clarence Thomas and Saving Private Ryan

This week's New Yorker includes a humor column riffing off of this remarkable fact:

Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question from the Supreme Court bench since Feb. 22, 2006. . . .

“I have on many occasions or a number of occasions when things were becoming particularly routine gone down to my basement to watch ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ [Thomas] said. “I can’t tell you why that particular movie, except we have it and it’s about something important in our lives—World War II.”

—“Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students,” in the Times, April 13, 2009.

It's tough to argue against Clarence Thomas as the worst Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime.

Anna Netrebko

The Asian leg of my vacation is complete, and I miss Hong Kong and Tokyo already. It's never a fair comparison, pitting the hometown where you've spent years living and working versus the places you visit for just a few days with an itinerary set to plunder the destination's peak offerings. The allure of the new and mysterious almost always overwhelms the mundane and the familiar, especially given how many vacations come after long stretches of work which have whittled your creative energy down to a nub.

I had many more days of exciting discoveries left in Tokyo. It's such a massive city that my four days there were just enough for me to feel comfortable there at the exact moment I grasped, in a very physical sense, its sheer density and magnitude. I left with a feeling that there were more things I hadn't visited that I would love than I had crossed off the list. That's rare for me, being somewhat of a travel completist.

But more on Asia later. Today I come to speak of the Russian Anna Netrebko, widely considered the world's greatest soprano and its preeminent diva, that term being a great compliment in the world of opera.* I heard Netrebko this afternoon in the final performance of her short run with the San Francisco Opera performing the role of Violetta Valery in Verdi's La Traviata.

I will preface my thoughts by saying I am no expert on opera, so those looking for a review of the finer points of Italian diction and an assessment of where she took her breaths will be disappointed.

I first heard of Netrebko from a friend who'd seen her perform early in her career, and then I lost track of her until a cover story profile in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. She was most well-known for two things, not often paired in an opera singer: her voice and her beauty, both sensual and captivating. If you were a baseball scout grading her voice on the traditional 20-80 scale you'd give it a 75. As for her looks, I showed some friends her CD covers today after the show and one compared her to Monica Bellucci, an apt comp in that she does recall in many ways the full-bodied Italian starlets of old.

I don't often go out of my way to see certain performers live, but I make an exception for generational talents: Michael Jordan, for example, or Roger Federer, and in this case, Netrebko. When I saw her calendar for 2009 included two stops in the US, one in NY at the Met and one in SF performing La Traviata, I snapped up tickets almost a year in advance for a weekend date of the later and knew I'd plan some way to attend. As I noted before, I'm at best an opera dilettante, but I far prefer a good opera to a musical, and that makes me a rarity among my generation. I'm just as susceptible to being bored to slumber by a pondering German opera, but the best of the ones I do love have an otherworldly musical beauty that lifts me up in a way no musical can.

One of the problems with opera, and one reason I think it struggles to connect with a younger generation, is the deadly pairing of plot implausibility with wooden acting. The cartoon parody of opera, not entirely inaccurate, is of an overweight woman in a Viking helmet, her diminutive male counterpart barely the size of her thigh, screeching so loudly that windows shatter, said immense woman playing an ageless young beauty despite sporting the looks of a fifty-something housewife.

It's a gross objectification and simplification, but I have left many an opera wondering what would have been lost by closing my eyes throughout and just listening considering that the stage choreography consisted mostly of a singer walking to and fro on stage, all facial and bodily expression an afterthought in the pursuit of accurate diction and musical phrasing.

Netrebko arrived on stage in style, in the backseat of a classic Buick. She is a bit heavier now than in photographs I've seen of her, but that's understandable considering she had a baby not too long ago. The voice is still the voice. What's amazing to someone like myself, who can't sing along to more than a few songs at a concert without losing my voice, is how effortlessly she can generate a massive, rich sound. At times she barely appeared to be opening her mouth and yet filled the house with her voice. The ease of her vocal power was such that if I didn't know who se was I'd think it was some odd form of lip synching. This incredible vocal power is a huge advantage when acting out more tender emotions. A lesser singer who'd have to contort her body and strain her face to generate the same output is much less likely to convey emotion than sheer physical exertion.

Netrebko actually matches her vocal expression with acting. No one will confuse the work that can be accomplished while vocally navigating passages of coloratura with the type of method acting Meryl Streep accomplishes in a close-up shot, but Netrebko makes it easier for those who don't understand Italian to understand what she's feeling. There were several moments where I missed the text on the prompter because I was peering through binoculars, but as long as I kept my eyes on her I never lost track of the emotional or plot throughline of the scene.

Having just arrived back in U.S. timezones less than 24 hours earlier, I was worried I'd succumb to jetlag during the show, this being a Sunday 2pm performance that was 6am Tokyo time. But a quick powernap and a rare espresso before the show, combined with the excitement of seeing Netrebko live in a fast-moving La Traviata kept me sharp throughout.

I've never seen La Traviata live, and my lack of knowledge of the finer points of opera preclude any other thoughts on this particular rendition. Two other memorable moments from the performance: at the first intermission, I saw a sign that said Netrebko would be in the lobby after the show signing her CDs and DVDs. At that precise moment I knew that about half the cash in my wallet had just been lit on fire, and I felt a pang of regret that I'd left my SLR at my friend's apartment and would have to rely on my iPhone camera in the underlit lobby. Second, at the end of the performance, when Netrebko came out to a standing ovation, she put a hand over her heart in appreciation and blew kisses to her adoring SF fans, here at the site where she'd made her US debut many years past. As the curtains fell for the last time, just as they were halfway down, she suddenly threw inhibition to the winds and hopped up and down like a young girl, waving her arms frantically overhead, as if sending off departing friends from summer camp. It was a youthful, exuberant expression of joy that I just couldn't picture coming from someone like an Angela Gheorgiu or a Jessye Norman, for example.

I waded through a crowd in the giftshop and picked up some $70 worth of Netrebko CDs for the signing, then jumped into a long line that wrapped around the corner of the lobby inside to wait for her to appear. After twenty minutes in which I saw opera house staff running back and forth with some distress, I felt a hand pull me sharply back to clear a gap in the line to a side door to the orchestra seating of the hall. I looked up to see an older man with a staff badge, and who should walk up from behind him than Anna herself, a young female assistant in tow. The old man rushed to open the side door to give her a shortcut through the hall to get to the autograph table in the lobby, but Netrebko took one look at the door, discerned his intentions, and turned away without breaking stride to walk down the hall past her waiting fans instead.

The old man finally popped back out, puzzled as to why she hadn't come on through. By then Anna was halfway down the hall, waving and clasping hands with fans as they greeted her with shouts of "Anna!" and other phrases in Russian and a variety of other languages.

The line did not move quickly, and while we waited a woman from the opera house came walked down the line with a post-it note pad writing down patron names in block capital letters so we wouldn't have to teach Anna how to spell our names. Good idea, but when she came up to us she also said that we could only give Anna one item to sign. Having purchased four CDs at significant price premiums to what I could have paid on Amazon, I was not pleased. If it were an opera I would have burst out into a fiery aria.

But Anna had already defied the opera staff once, and so I held out hope that she wouldn't adhere to such arbitrary house rules. As I turned the corner and saw her, I understood why the line wasn't moving more quickly. While the staff tried to hustle her fans through, Anna would look each fan in the eye, listen to what they had to say to her, respond, often in their native language (I heard her speak in English, Spanish, Russian, and French to various fans), pose for photos, and sign each CD or DVD with the same deliberate pace.

When I reached her, I chose a double disc set of her performance of La Traviata from Salzburg as the item most worthy of her signature, and she signed it right on the cover of the case. I mumbled something about having been honored to hear her sing, and she thanked me with a warm smile. I turned to leave, but then she saw the other CDs in my hand and reached out her hand.

"Here, let me sign those for you," she said, grabbing the stack. She signed each of them on the cover, but when she reached the last CD, she paused, furrowed her brow, then opened the case and signed the back of the paper insert instead. Then she grabbed the CD of La Traviata back from me.

"I am not sure if this will stay,", she said, rubbing her finger across the ink of her previous signature on the plastic CD cover. But the ink had already dried and did not smear.

"Oh, it is okay!" she beamed.

I usually dread meeting famous people, especially those I admire. The imbalance in relationship of worshipper to hero is so severe as to lead to disappointment more often than not. What can be conveyed in a single autograph line encounter of any substance or genuine emotion between a fan and a celebrity who doesn't know that fan as much more than one of an adoring throng of millions? The usual exchange of pleasantries:

1. Fan expresses admiration for celebrity.
2. Celebrity thanks fan, then asks what the person's name is and what they'd like to have signed.
3. Celebrity signs item while fan perhaps gushes a bit more, perhaps elaborating on the earlier admiration to name a specific moment or instance of the celebrity's work that particularly struck them.
4. Celebrity thanks fan for that more specific example in which his/her work has touched the fan, hands back the autographed item, and then turns to the next fan.
5. Rinse, repeat.

I've just recently met two celebrities to have items signed, one being another classical music performer I've followed for decades now, and the other being one of my favorite movie and music video directors. In both cases, the celebrities were brusque, borderline cold, and the encounters left me feeling like a silly fanboy who'd wasted their time by forcing them to indulge in such banal and forced interactions with the ungifted masses.

What Netrebko conveyed in our short encounter was subtle but, given my previous two hero encounters, momentous. She showed genuine appreciation for my appreciation of her work, and she displayed a thoughtfulness that, amplified by the previously noted disproportionate one-way admiration that is typical of fan-to-hero relationships, bordered on genuine intimacy. This ability to convey a genuine warmth and caring in short interactions with complete strangers is something I'd only read about from skilled politicians like Bill Clinton. Netrebko has it in spades, and one has the sense that if she could spend even more time meeting her fans she'd have a relationship with them that not opera critics or vicious opera bloggers could mediate. She can be the people's diva, and more than that, she seems like a genuine person, and so she brings a realism to the flawed operatic heroes she plays on stage.

My friend who was with me said afterwards that Netrebko's charms seemed particularly tuned towards men, but I didn't hear her at first, I was so engrossed in flipping through my stack of autographed CDs with a big smile on my face. If opera is to survive and thrive in the next generation (I could not help but notice, once again, that the median age of this crowd was likely in the late 50's), there is something to be learned from the Netrebko's of the classical music world, and it is not about selling out with sex appeal or crossover albums.

* The term prima donna comes from Italian. Prima is the feminine form of primo--"first"--and donna means lady. The prima donna is literally the first lady of an opera troupe. It's not a coincidence that the term is more often used in English to describe a vain, temperamental person. But the operatic sense of the term looks at the glass half full and connotes someone able to fill the seats of a massive opera hall and satisfy patrons paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of witnessing a performance from someone with a personality and stature to match the ticket prices in scale. At least that is my layman's interpretation.

Antichrist...Rated E for Egad

Hot rumor of the day is that Lars Von Trier's controversial movie Antichrist, which caused the biggest ripples at Cannes this year, will be made into a PC-only videogame. Yes, the same Antichrist which features onscreen genital mutilation, said genitals belonging to one Willem Dafoe, and aforementioned mutilation occurring courtesy of Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Wii jokes are so obvious that they were stale even before they wrote themselves.

I thought Von Trier didn't like animation. Do videogames not count?

I may need to reinstall VMWare Fusion just to give this a whirl.

***

Court jester of the art world Banksy gets a legal exhibit at a museum in Bristol. You can see peruse a few of the pics. Always amusing.

***

NYTimes Magazine profile of Rafael Nadal.

“Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer,” Philippe Bouin told me. “But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different.”

This profile was written before Nadal officially withdrew from Wimbledon, but that fits with its thesis which wonders if Nadal's style of play will cause him to break down physically. Very sad for the sport that he won't be there. Tennis needs Federer to face his foil.

The future

MLB.com to stream full games to the iPhone. The first one is the Cubs-Sox game this afternoon.

I always thought this day would come, when I could watch Cubs games live on my phone, but it's still a thrill to have that day upon us.

Wine tip

Many of us should be drinking our white wines warmer and our red wines colder to maximize appreciation for their character. This is one reason people are often surprised when they go to a wine tasting at a winery and find the reds served cooler than they're used to.

Twilight

xkcd today was brilliant. Score one point for Stephanie Meyer.

On the other hand, the fact that Twilight won every award at the MTV Movie Awards made me feel out of touch, old. I suppose the awards at that ceremony are really just filler until the next prank or joke.

Funny quote

White House economic spokesperson Austan Goolsbee, on a panel, responding to Jack Welch's opinion that Barack Obama's budget is "from the moon":

The budget is from the moon, Jack is from Mars and Joe [Stiglitz] is from Venus.

Look, we enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire. We’re throwing people from the windows into the pool to save their lives and this is the evaluation of the Olympic diving committee: Well, the splash was too big.

I am no economist, but neither are most people who want to debate the economy with me. I don't know if what's being done is right, but I'm not sure anyone else does either, so when people complain, on either side, I just tune out. It's like discussing the weather.

Clinton

In the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, a profile of Bill Clinton post-presidency. What was most interesting to me was a passage covering his ability to convert enemies to friends.

Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant.

...

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”

It reminded me of one of the 48 Laws of Power:

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Sports Guy, we love you

Eric (our CTO) and I are both card carrying members of Sports Guy Nation. So it's extra special whenever he posts any reference or link to Hulu.

He tweeted about an episode of Miami Vice on Hulu:

Go to the 42-minute mark of this Miami Vice clip: http://tinyurl.com/lkfome ... Has there ever been a better use of a song in TV history?

With over 100K followers on Twitter, he has some influence, and so that ep of Miami Vice is creeping up our Most Popular Videos list, up to page 4 at last check, which is pretty strong for a random library episode of a show that isn't new to the service.

Here's a direct link to just the music reference he mentions:

This song was used later to end another TV episode to great effect, the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing. That was actually the season finale of the second season of the show. It's one of my favorite West Wing episodes.

Here is a reciprocal link for Bill Simmons: his new book on the NBA comes out this fall.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

***

So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

***

Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

***

Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

***

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.

Miscellany

Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.

***

Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.

***

Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com

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Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.

***

Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.

***

How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.

Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.

***

Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.

Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.

I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

***

If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?

Two challenges

This Munsell hue test is a fun challenge of one's color vision. I was nervous taking it and perhaps overly excited when I submitted my arrangements and received a perfect score.

That might be my proudest accomplishment since breaking 100 for the first time on Flight Control on the iPhone (at $0.99 for a limited time only, Flight Control is a steal).

Here is a YouTube video of someone breaking 10,000(!?!) on Flight Control which makes breaking 100 seem like not such a great feat after all.

Misc.

An interview with Philip Glass.

The kind of music I was doing in the Seventies was very radical. The structure became the music itself. It became identical. In that way it was closer in a way to maybe Jasper Johns was painting and I was very influenced by his painting — when Jasper Johns did a painting of a flag, he painted a flag. So the question is: is it the flag or is it the painting of the flag? In the same way when I did a piece, I had reduced everything to scales and to a few simple notes. The process of the music became the structure of the music. So what was interesting for me was that the content and the form were identical — that was a very radical idea in music and in many ways it may still be a radical idea.

***

Atul Gawande turns his investigative eye towards the high cost of healthcare in the United States in this week's New Yorker.

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

In an earlier Q&A online, Gawande noted:

The most important transformation going on in health care worldwide, I think, is that the complexity of medical know-how has exceeded the abilities of individuals. Medicine now requires teams of people to work together to prevent and treat disease for patients successfully. Medical schools don’t teach students how to work in teams or how to bring teams to be successful at this work. It requires communication skills and an ability to monitor and improve team performance. Some of this I touched on in a previous article called “The Checklist.” But insurance reform or not, this is the way we have to go.

***

I have a longer post in mind based on my informal study of the Amazon review distribution of items I really like. For example, for books, most of my favorite recent popular books seem to have an average 4-star review on Amazon.com, whereas recent books scoring 5-star reviews have, for the most part, disappointed me. That distribution is different for older books, classics.

But that's for another day. The part of that post I want to steal from today is that while it may not be foolproof for current books, for kitchen items, universal Amazon acclaim has proven a useful indicator of quality for me. Take, as an example, the Spyderco Sharpmaker Knife Sharpener 204MF (placed, for some reason, in Amazon's musical instruments search index).

I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to kitchen knives, spoiled by my knife skills class at the Institute of Culinary Education back when I lived in Manhattan. I like my knives sharp, not just for ease of cutting but because a sharp knife is a safe knife (most knife accidents occur when struggling hard with an unsharp blade, when the knife slips) and a sharp knife encourages the proper knife-wielding motion.

The Spyderco 204MF has nearly a 5-star average rating at Amazon, and I used it this weekend to sharpen two of my Wusthof knives. Worked like a charm. Both knives are now so sharp I was worried they were going to slice through a plastic cutting board.

Skype billing issues

I've been hit with the Skype billing issue discussed in this Slashdot thread. A few days ago, I received three e-mails in succession:

• The first said came with the subject "Skype: problem with your payment" and began with the greeting "Hi there Joel Adams, Unfortunately your payment failed, but don't worry, we didn't deduct any money from your card." I thought it was a phishing attempt, but it listed my correct Skype Name. Uh oh. I haven't ever paid into my Skype account, and my name, as most of you know, is not Joel Adams. Alarm bells went off.
• The second e-mail came 3 minutes laterwith the subject "Skype: we've delivered your purchase." It began with the greeting "Hi there Roseangela Rubio, Thanks for buying Skype Credit. We're happy to confirm your payment." AGain, it included my correct Skype Name. I was even more worried, and a bit confused. Who is Roseangela Rubio?
• The third e-mail, with the same time stamp as the second, had the subject line: "Welcome to Auto-Recharge". This note was addressed to Roseangela Rubio.

I immediately logged into my Skype account, changed my password, canceled Auto Recharge, and removed the credit card in my account. Then I waded through the customer support links to find one to submit an inquiry as to how this could have happened.

I received a reply 2 days later saying that it seemed a third party might have gained access to my account, and asking me to change my password. Of course I'd done all of that already. What was aggravating was this paragraph:

Skype can not refund the money you might have lost due to this incident. Every user has to take care of his/her security systems on private computers.

Please check if your PC?s security systems are running properly and if they are up to date. In order to prohibit those incidents Skype strongly advises to regularly update your PC's security software (e.g. firewall, antivirus etc.). It is possible that a trojan or some kind of hidden information collector is installed on your computer and sends this to a third party who uses this information abusively. Also be aware of different 'phishing' sites or Skype chat messages from strangers that contain links or require you to reveal personal information (passwords, credit card numbers etc.)

Any reasonably tech saavy user is going to resent the implications in this e-mail, the tone of voice that lumps them in with people who write their password on post-it notes and stick them on their computer monitor. I keep all my passwords in Yojimbo, I don't use dictionary words, etc. I always forward phishing messages, most of them for eBay, Paypal and Bank of America, to those companies.

I've written Skype back and demanded a refund, and we'll see how that goes. I've enjoyed using Skype a bit here and there in the past. It's a solid product. But any security issue like this, followed up by a customer service response that includes a sermon on PC security, is bound to leave a really bitter taste in one's mouth. Let's see how they respond.

In the meantime, if you're a victim of this problem, and you're reading this message, you are the resistance! (I just returned from a screening of Terminator: Salvation)