Cell Phone Culture
15 Jan 2012 2 Comments
in Culture, Music Tags: Alan Gilbert, Cell Phones, Gustave Mahler, New York Philharmonic
I own a cell phone. It is not a smart phone. I don’t search the internet, look at GPS, or have a lot of apps. I talk and I text. Because my mother is 93. I almost always have it with me in case she or one of her aides is trying to reach family. I am obsessive about having it on vibrate at concerts, at work. Until I read about the incident at the New York Philharmonic, I mostly thought about those people who are constantly on the phone. They stop in the middle of the sidewalk unexpectedly or they weave back and forth so you can’t pass them. They drive erratically and often don’t notice that the light has turned red. They have loud and sometimes very private conversations on the train. And I have one work colleague who has loud personal and political conversations for large parts of the day. This is the way the world is now. We try to ban talking and texting on the phone while driving with little success. We announce that patrons should turn off electronic devices before concerts. (I notice that the Boston Symphony used to have a projected announcement but this year have added a broadcast message.)
Then last week we had the incident at the New York Philharmonic. According to the story in the New York Times
The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.
After words from Mr. Gilbert, and what seemed like weeks, the cellphone owner finally silenced his device. After the audience cheered, the concert resumed. Internet vitriol ensued.
Gustave Mahler
So the cell phone owner, Patron X, claims he didn’t know it was his phone ringing. He thought he had turned it off, but the alarm was still on.
But no one, it seems, felt worse than the culprit, who agreed to an interview on Thursday on condition that he not be identified — for obvious reasons.
“You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,” said the man, who described himself as a business executive between 60 and 70 who runs two companies. “It’s horrible, horrible.” The man said he had not slept in two days.
The man, called Patron X by the Philharmonic, said he was a lifelong classical music lover and 20-year subscriber to the orchestra who was friendly with several of its members. He said he himself was often irked by coughs, badly timed applause — and cellphone rings. “Then God, there was I. Holy smokes,” he said.
“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.
“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”
What have we learned from this incident? First, music, live music, is still important. Two, many people have no clue about how to use their technology. I’m not talking about knowing the programming or electronics, but how to turn it on and off and what bells and whistles it has. Anyone read the instructions?
I think the incident at the Philharmonic shows again that we are being ruled by our technology. The Economist had this comment
The problem is that although most people are minded to silence their mobile phones during performances, alarms are often designed to make a racket regardless of whether the phone is in silent mode (some even sound when the device is powered down). In 2007 Apple’s late boss, Steve Jobs, touted the original iPhone’s mute switch in 2007, which could be without messing with menus (though the device can also be unintentionally unmuted in a pocket). But alarms override the mute function.
Donald Norman, a guru of usable design and a former Apple and HP executive, says that there have been proposals to design phones to detect a signal disseminated in a performance space that instructed the phone to mute itself. (Suggestions involving signal blockers are no use against alarms, and are in any case banned by telecoms regulators.) He notes that the vibration mode is of little help. After all, the vibrations need to be significant enough to rouse a mobile’s owner, and creating them produces sound. Perhaps, Mr Norman suggests facetiously, concertgoers ought be frisked before entering a theatre.
Maybe it won’t come to that. Modern smartphones can use satellite-navigation and Wi-Fi network information to determine location indoors. They also have an array of sensors for noise, light and movement. It shouldn’t be too difficult to teach an operating system to suppress all alerts when, say, it discerns live music at the same time as locating itself in Avery Fisher Hall (the New York Philharmonic’s home).
For now, though, vigilance remains the only safeguard—albeit not a foolproof one. Mr Norman, doubtless a sophisticated user, admits that even he can’t disable all sounds on his phone; every once in a while, the blasted device beeps. One can only hope it doesn’t choose to do so at an inopportune time. Like the adagio of Mahler’s Ninth.
As I said, technology rules us. I wonder what Mahler would think. Happy 100th Birthay, Gustav!
Bob Smith, White House Piano Man
12 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Music, Politics Tags: Bill Clinton, Bob Smith, George W. Bush, Nixon, The White House, Tipper Gore
Politico.com had this great human interest piece today about Bob Smith who first played at the White House for Richard Nixon, but retired before George W.
According to Politico
Former White House pianist Bob Smith provided entertainment to presidents, their spouses and guests for more than 30 years. As such, he has plenty of stories to tell — like the one from his White House debut, with the Army Band Chorus, at Tricia Nixon’s 1971 St. Patrick’s Day engagement party. “My Three Sons” star Fred MacMurray arrived at the event seemingly inebriated and took up the saxophone.
“He was just horrible. … The most awful thing you heard in your life,” Smith recalled. President Richard Nixon asked Smith to “get rid of him,” and Smith, with help from the Secret Service, complied.
Made official White House pianist,
…First lady Pat Nixon, Smith said, used to bypass protocol and call him directly on his home phone to ask him personally to play various events—from background music at cocktail parties and receptions, to sitting in as accompanist to a hired musical act.
He later played for and with the Clintons and Gores
Later, he got along great with the Clintons. He and the president bonded over their shared love of playing music. Smith recalled several duets he played with Clinton on sax, an instrument “that was always in reaching distance” of the president.
He was in with the Gores, too.
“So while I’m doing saxophone things with [Clinton] at the White House, I’d go over to the vice president’s house, [where] Tipper Gore had her drum set set-up outside in the living room next to the grand piano. She’d come over and say, ‘Can I sit in?,’” Smith recalled. Tipper Gore was a “very good player,” he said.
Over the years, Smith also had numerous interactions with celebrity White House visitors, including Audrey Hepburn and Lena Horne, who sang along while he played. Cary Grant once skipped out of a White House dinner to sit outside the dining room at the piano with Smith. At the actor’s request, Smith said, the two played Cole Porter songs for over an hour.
But the reason he retired is one of the most interesting parts of the story
Smith decided to retire when the Clintons moved out of the White House because, after playing for Bush 41 and spending time with the Bush family, he preferred leave before Bush 43 moved in.
President George H.W. Bush “was very cool,” Smith said. “But there were too many times where I saw [his son, President George W. Bush,] over that time where he was less than statesmanlike,” he laughed.
Maybe the Obamas should get him out of retirement.
Michael Jackson and Race
05 Jul 2009 2 Comments
in Culture, Music Tags: Michael Jackson, Patricia Williams, Racism
It has been more than a week since Michael Jackson was found near death in his rented home in Los Angeles and was pronounced dead at the emergency roon. I haven’t written about Jackson because I couldn’t quite figure out an approach. I have to admit that I liked the Jackson 5, admired “Thriller” and “We are the World”, but never really got into his post-Thriller music. And like everyone else, I spent years watching the horror show that was his life. Now we are all picking though the comments and observations of everyone who can get air time.
I don’t know for sure if he was physically abused or not. His father says not, but some of his brothers say otherwise and I’m sure they are right. He was clearly psychologically abused. Jackson used to say he had no childhood because he had to work all the time but I heard Barry Gordy describe pick-up basketball and baseball games with the Jackson kids, his kids and other children of the Motown family. I’m not sure we will ever know the truth. But we did watch him have extensive facial surgery so that his nose almost disappeared and we watched his skin turn paler and paler. (I don’t believe anyone who says he had a skin condition – no one else in his family seems to have a similar problem.) He tried to make himself Caucasian. I couldn’t look at him anymore.
I heard someone say he sheltered his kids so they would not have a public upbringing. They point to Diana Ross as his role model – she raised kids and few people knew she had them. But he didn’t “shelter” them. He exploited them. The famous balcony scene with the baby, “Blanket”, being held over the edge; the kids – all white, by the way – being dressed up and paraded around. No one can tell me he was trying to shelter them. And now we learn that none of the three have any of Jackson’s DNA.
Patricia Williams has put this all together for me. In her column in the Nation, Williams writes
To me, the most arresting image of Michael Jackson was President George H.W. Bush citing him as a role model for young black men. It was 1990 and Jackson was at the height of his fame. “Man in the Mirror” had been released two years earlier. Jackson had not yet gone into full white-face disguise, but the handsome little brown boy of his first album had long since entered the bizarro phase of rhinestone gloves. I wondered then what on earth about Jackson could ever be a role model for anyone. Musical savant though he was, Jackson was, almost from the beginning, a tragic figure–so obviously trapped in that mirror, forever reflecting what others wanted him to be.
In the wake of his death, many have hailed his “crossover appeal.” There is no doubt that his musical acumen led to the integration of MTV; but that “appeal” had a more sinister undertone. If Elvis was “the White Negro,” so Michael fashioned himself into “the Negro Caucasian.” He literally erased himself before our eyes, his nose slowly disappearing, his skin fading to ghostly pallor, his voice growing higher and whispier, his body evaporating to a dry husk of barely a hundred pounds at the time of his death. It was hard not to be fascinated by him as he molted through all possible confusions of gender, race and sexuality. But his transgressivity was more than just theater; he mimed a narrative of constant paradox and infinite suffering.
I can understand the need to appear “lighter”, “whiter”. I had one grandmother who despaired every summer when my sister and I turned browner and browner. She believed, as many Japaneses did, that pale skin was a sign of upper classeness and dark skin of being a peasant.
Williams again
But in the longer term, the question of Michael Jackson’s children is challenging in other ways. Like his demands for plastic surgery or painkillers, their conception was accomplished as a made-to-order, cash-on-the-barrelhead commercial transaction. According to TMZ.com and other entertainment news sites, Jackson is not biologically related to any of his three children. Reportedly, the women who gestated them carried anonymously donated eggs fertilized by sperm from secret donors. Apparently the children were all crafted to be “white” enough to match Jackson’s artfully devised if pathetically alienated image of himself. Deborah Rowe, Jackson’s ex-wife and the surrogate who carried his oldest two children to term, describes being inseminated “like a horse”; she then received around $9 million to give up any claim to them. On the birth certificate of Jackson’s youngest child, the space for “mother” is left blank.
It’s hard to imagine that Jackson would have been found fit if he had attempted to adopt children. It is interesting to contemplate the eugenic ends to which in vitro fertilization and surrogate birth are being put these days, often as a kind of end run around the formal inspection of the adoption process. How much more common will the purchase of “the perfect child” become when bioengineering for specific physical traits becomes easier and less costly? It’s not a new problem: “colorism” (preference for lighter skin) is an old problem within the African-American community. Choosing trophy spouses is a cruder version of the same game. Nevertheless, it is troubling that the law of sales is about the only context for debating this rapidly developing area. Shouldn’t we think harder about the degree to which a free market for eugenics is enabled by easy-payment contract clauses conferring parenthood through the immaculate conception of biotechnology?
We can only hope that Michael Jackson leaves a legacy that is more than his music and that through his children we can begin a serious dialogue about genetic engineering. This would be a very positive thing to leave behind.
