I wrote the article below almost eight years ago. It was published on a long-since-defunct WrittenByMe.com, and got an honorable mention of the week, or whatever their equivalent of an elementary school smiley face sticker was. When I found and re-read it a few day ago, a few things jumped out at me immediately. The "new, even better digital formats" (SACD and DVD-A) never took hold, and are now all but dead. I had a reference to MiniDisc in the original version too, but that was already dead even then. The availability of used vinyl has shrunk significantly, and the prices have skyrocketed. I feel that I rode the last great wave of cheap, plentiful old records. The Tower Annex, along with the rest of Tower Records everywhere, is, very sadly, history. Thankfully, new vinyl is still being released, though it is usually no longer cheaper than the same title on CD. What I saw in 2000-2001 was the last vestige of vinyl as a normal format. Today, it is a 100% specialty market. Finally, needless to say I am no longer "not even thirty."
A turntable?!?! You just bought a turntable? And a brand-new one, no less? This is the year 2000, for goodness' sake! We have CD! Perfect sound forever! We also have MP3, and new, even better digital formats are just around the bend. Have you been cryogenically frozen for the last fifteen years, or have you simply lost your mind? Well, no. Before you burn me at the laser stake for digital heresy, allow me to explain. I have not been frozen, and I would like to think that if indeed I am insane, it is for completely different reasons. Yes, there are CDs - I have hundreds of them. I love them and I think they sound great. Although to some extent I grew up with LPs (more on that in a moment), I am really a member of the CD generation. There still are, however, very compelling reasons to own a quality turntable.
First, there is the audiophile, specifically the analog-obsessed variety. There are people out there who never subscribed to the whole "digital is better" philosophy. They are convinced that analog recordings, when properly reproduced, sound warmer, more musical and more lifelike than digital ever can. As the respected audio reviewer Steve Guttenberg puts it, there is more "there" there. This approach may seem esoteric, and I think it is. Unless you are totally bluffing your way through the whole process, it involves being able to hear extremely subtle differences in inherently unquantifiable aspects of sound reproduction, which in turn requires learning how to hear these differences and having the opportunity, time, inclination and not insignificant amounts of money to compare various gear. Besides, an argument has been made - a very good one, in my opinion - that music listening is a fundamentally holistic experience: either it grabs your soul in its entirety or it does not, and when it does, everything else, including sound quality, becomes irrelevant. To talk about individual aspects of sound is thus to miss the point.
There is a further subset of audiophiles who enjoy gear for gear's sake. There is almost nothing else they would rather do than balance tonearms, twist counterweights and optimize stylus tracking angles, and they can debate relative merits of moving-coil versus moving-magnet cartridges long into the night. At best, this is appreciation of engineering, not art. In any case, these people most likely already own multi-thousand-dollar masterpieces of industrial design fashioned out of hand-polished rosewood and aircraft-grade aluminum to caress their cherished vinyl, so they are not who I am talking about here, or who I am trying to appeal to.
Second, there is the pragmatist. There is a ton of quality used vinyl out there available at bargain basement prices. It is true that it is becoming more scarce every year, but it is also true that so much is still left that even if I did nothing but listen to LPs for the rest of my life, I would not be able to get through it all, and I am not even thirty. Some of us are fortunate to live in or frequently visit places where quality used vinyl is plentiful. Between Bleecker Bob's, Second Coming Records and the Tower Annex in New York City's Greenwich Village, one can be in collector's heaven for years. Even elsewhere, there is hope. The day after the turntable arrived, at a used book store right here in Washington, DC - a notoriously vinyl-deprived place - I picked up Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto for $1 and Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert for $6, both in pristine condition, and this was before I visited a single thrift shop or garage sale. Fifty cents apiece, anyone? Seventeen records for $10? An entire milk crate for $25, crate included? Who cares that you will never listen to three quarters of the stuff. Buy now, sort it out later. You'll still make out three to four times better than the same titles on CD, and that's before you even consider that a good part of that music is probably out of print forever. Finally, new LPs are still being released in quantities larger than most people realize, and they usually retail for less than the same title on CD. At least a third of the Fantasy Records (umbrella label for Riverside, Milestone, Prestige and Stax, among others) 2000-2001 catalog is available on LP. So, if you subscribe to the non-comparative notion that LPs can sound at least good, which they most certainly can, you just saved yourself some serious money.
Beyond the audiophile and the pragmatist, there is the nostalgic sap. To paraphrase a certain tasteless t-shirt, I am 51% pragmatist, 49% nostalgic sap. I have always felt that holding a record in my hands, especially a used one, with its sleeve edges beginning to fray and the cardboard starting to turn yellow with age, puts me in touch with the time it was made more than a CD ever can. It takes me back to the earliest childhood I can remember, when my father would always have records around the house. His own, mostly Mozart and the Beatles, which he would spin on his god-awful one-piece record player, and his friends', which he would diligently copy onto tape using his gargantuan reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was a place where all non-military technology was at least twenty years behind the rest of the world). I recall tagging along with him to the apartments of his friends - men with longish hair who smelled of cigarettes and bad aftershave - who would promptly show us their stereo systems, almost entirely self-made (nothing like the Iron Curtain to create remarkable artisans out of average joes), dominated by a jury-rigged turntable, always large and ugly, but always functional. They would pull out a record and put it on, handing my father the sleeve and turning up the volume. "Wow, an original Oscar Peterson," my father would say with admiration, and they would talk for a while about what records so-and-so smuggled in on his latest trip to West Germany and how much money might convince him to part with some of them. Then they would retreat into the kitchen to smoke and drink tea, leaving me in the living room to examine the mysterious switches and wires in awe.
Even more recent times are brought into focus by certain records for me. I recently picked up a copy of Liz Story's Part of Fortune (1986). I didn't hear a note when I listened to it for the first time - I was too busy admiring the sleeve. It features a full-size portrait of young Story, her hair teased and sprayed beyond recognition, wearing a blazer with a paint-splotch pattern and exaggerated shoulder pads. The photo is touched up with just the right amounts of powder blue and pastel pink. Today, we might see a picture like this in an ad for a retro-Eighties dance party at the local multi-level dance emporium, but this is the real thing. People looked like this as a matter of course, and touching up a photo in pastel tones was considered chic rather than tacky. Putting the envelope down and noticing that the needle has long since reached the end of a side, I reflected on just how little we notice the changes in everyday things until something so simple as a record hits us over the head with contrast. Humans are nostalgic creatures. We love things that remind us of bygone days. While living in the past is dangerous, taking an occasional trip back never hurt anyone, and there are few better ways to do so than by spinning up a record.
February 2001
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
New York
Quick trip to New York over the weekend to take care of some personal and family stuff. I was done with everything by the end of the day Friday, leaving Saturday for a little socializing.
Met my old friend D. for coffee mid-morning on Saturday. D. is on the art history faculty at NYU and is currently working on a radical reinterpretation of a Michelangelo drawing. We walked over to Ninth Street Espresso, at the corner of – duh – 9th Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City. I had not explored that neighborhood much before, and was pleasantly surprised. Evidently, gentrification has not quite reached it, and it had the feel that the rest of lower East Side had fifteen or twenty years ago. The coffee shop was decidedly New York – a tiny one-room space with barely a decoration on the walls, ten or so tables scattered densely around, it screamed “we do coffee and nothing else.” They did stoop to making iced drinks – even purists can’t avoid that if they want to stay in business – but I had a plain old cappuccino, the measure of any coffee shop for my money. It was spectacular, quite possibly the best one I have ever had. It was of a classic, Italian size, not an ounce bigger than the very first cappuccino I had in Venice over twenty years ago, with a perfect proportion of espresso, steamed milk and foam, and – a trend in certain circles from what I understand – a bit of a symmetrical pattern poured into the top of the foamy head. The flavor was delicious – deep, roasty coffeeness, just bitter enough, foiled nicely by the rich warm milk. I was surprised to discover that the place used beans roasted by Stumptown, based in Oregon – I would have thought they could have found something acceptable in New York. D. and I caught up inasmuch as it is possible to catch up on something that doesn’t really require any catching up. When we exhausted our uneventful personal lives (his is a bit more eventful than mine at the moment), we talked about architecture. Afterwards, I had some time to kill, and we walked around Alphabet City at random, always ending up on the sunny side of the street for some reason. The heat was stifling.
It is worth pointing out that on the way from the train station at 6th Ave. and 9th Street to D.’s apartment a few blocks away, I passed by Washington Square park and discovered that the center of it had been fenced off and turned into a constructions site. I asked D. about it. He rolled his eyes and told me that NYU, which owns the land, was moving the fountain. “Really? Where is it going to be?” I asked naively. “Oh, they are not moving it to a different location,” D. replied, “just a few feet over.” I looked at him incredulously. “They want to line it up with the arch,” he said. “Looks better in convocation pictures.”
After D. and I parted, I met C.S. for lunch at Momofuku Noodle Bar. C.S. had arrived in New York earlier that morning to run in the New York Half-Marathon the following day. The lunch proved to be delicious. We started with a beef tongue appetizer – paper-thin slivers from the tip and a generous slice from the thicker part grilled to a rich, smoky flavor, served over some frisee and slices of pickled cucumber. It had the spongy taste that many people find off-putting about tongue, but I loved it, and so did C.S. even though he claimed not to like tongue just before ours arrived. For the main course, noodles was the way to go. C.S. opted for ramen, which was absolutely delicious, with a rich, porky and fishy broth, generous slices of pork belly and fresh locally-made noodles. Having just walked around for a better part of an hour and a half in late-July heat, I went with somen, which was served cold. It came dressed with a kimchi-like sauce, cucmbers, seaweed and a topped with a fried egg. It was hearty, but the cool temperature and the refreshing spiciness of the sauce made it summer-appropriate.
After lunch, we stopped in at the Strand, where I bought a non-falling-apart copy of George Kennan, walked around some more, then parted ways, he to his hotel to rest up for the race, and I to Ft. Lee, NJ, where I was staying at my parents’ house.
Met my old friend D. for coffee mid-morning on Saturday. D. is on the art history faculty at NYU and is currently working on a radical reinterpretation of a Michelangelo drawing. We walked over to Ninth Street Espresso, at the corner of – duh – 9th Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City. I had not explored that neighborhood much before, and was pleasantly surprised. Evidently, gentrification has not quite reached it, and it had the feel that the rest of lower East Side had fifteen or twenty years ago. The coffee shop was decidedly New York – a tiny one-room space with barely a decoration on the walls, ten or so tables scattered densely around, it screamed “we do coffee and nothing else.” They did stoop to making iced drinks – even purists can’t avoid that if they want to stay in business – but I had a plain old cappuccino, the measure of any coffee shop for my money. It was spectacular, quite possibly the best one I have ever had. It was of a classic, Italian size, not an ounce bigger than the very first cappuccino I had in Venice over twenty years ago, with a perfect proportion of espresso, steamed milk and foam, and – a trend in certain circles from what I understand – a bit of a symmetrical pattern poured into the top of the foamy head. The flavor was delicious – deep, roasty coffeeness, just bitter enough, foiled nicely by the rich warm milk. I was surprised to discover that the place used beans roasted by Stumptown, based in Oregon – I would have thought they could have found something acceptable in New York. D. and I caught up inasmuch as it is possible to catch up on something that doesn’t really require any catching up. When we exhausted our uneventful personal lives (his is a bit more eventful than mine at the moment), we talked about architecture. Afterwards, I had some time to kill, and we walked around Alphabet City at random, always ending up on the sunny side of the street for some reason. The heat was stifling.
It is worth pointing out that on the way from the train station at 6th Ave. and 9th Street to D.’s apartment a few blocks away, I passed by Washington Square park and discovered that the center of it had been fenced off and turned into a constructions site. I asked D. about it. He rolled his eyes and told me that NYU, which owns the land, was moving the fountain. “Really? Where is it going to be?” I asked naively. “Oh, they are not moving it to a different location,” D. replied, “just a few feet over.” I looked at him incredulously. “They want to line it up with the arch,” he said. “Looks better in convocation pictures.”
After D. and I parted, I met C.S. for lunch at Momofuku Noodle Bar. C.S. had arrived in New York earlier that morning to run in the New York Half-Marathon the following day. The lunch proved to be delicious. We started with a beef tongue appetizer – paper-thin slivers from the tip and a generous slice from the thicker part grilled to a rich, smoky flavor, served over some frisee and slices of pickled cucumber. It had the spongy taste that many people find off-putting about tongue, but I loved it, and so did C.S. even though he claimed not to like tongue just before ours arrived. For the main course, noodles was the way to go. C.S. opted for ramen, which was absolutely delicious, with a rich, porky and fishy broth, generous slices of pork belly and fresh locally-made noodles. Having just walked around for a better part of an hour and a half in late-July heat, I went with somen, which was served cold. It came dressed with a kimchi-like sauce, cucmbers, seaweed and a topped with a fried egg. It was hearty, but the cool temperature and the refreshing spiciness of the sauce made it summer-appropriate.
After lunch, we stopped in at the Strand, where I bought a non-falling-apart copy of George Kennan, walked around some more, then parted ways, he to his hotel to rest up for the race, and I to Ft. Lee, NJ, where I was staying at my parents’ house.
Opinions
How is it possible that someone who is an opinionated, contrarian crank outside of work can be a such a non-confrontational, complacent pushover at the office? The person I am talking about is your humble servant. At work, Person A and I maintain a certain system used by a department headed by Person B (not the same Persons A and B). Person B calls me to discuss certain changes that need to be made to the system. When I show up, Person B closes the door and complains to me about how Person A frequently does not do what Person B asks for. I mumble something non-committal in response. Eventually, the discussion gets around to its advertised purpose. When I get back to my office, I brief Person A, for whom I have a lot of respect, I should point out, on the discussion (not the personal stuff of course, only the technical). Person A rolls their eyes. Why such blustering? I’ll tell you why – strong opinions. Much has been made of the necessity to have a passion for your work as a prerequisite for career success. But I would surmise – not to inflate my ego or anything -- that the wheels of American business are frequently oiled by nameless, faceless functionaries like myself, who often just don’t care enough whether, or how, something gets done, to disagree.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Misha Alperin
From the binge: Misha Alperin, Her First Dance. Pianist Alperin was another accidental discovery. Many years ago, I came across a used copy of his North Story CD in a used record shop in Buffalo, NY. Used copies of ECM recordings in good condition are a rare find, so I scooped it up despite some serious reservations about Alperin's awfully Russian-sounding name. He did prove to be Russian-ish - originally from Chişinău in Moldova - but his recorded output was created entirely in the West. North Story was impressive, and though it never became a staple in my CD player, I became interested enough to start keeping up with his releases. Alperin is not prolific - a CD every five years or so - but most of them have at least something, usually a lot, that is worth hearing.
Her First Dance, Alperin's latest, is nominally a trio record with Arkady Shilkloper, another Russian, on French horn and flugelhorn, and German cellist Anja Lechner. All three have recorded together before, on Lechner's Night, which I also have and will comment on some other time, plus Alperin and Shilkloper go back many years and have recorded together as long ago as the 1980s. You barely hear all three playing at the same time, however - Her First Dance is essentially an album of solos and duets in various combinations of instruments. It also ends up being, unintentionally I am sure, avant-garde for the iPod generation. Although Alperin does have a recognizable style on the piano, there is little unity to the album as a whole; the record is not a coherent work in and of itself. Individual tracks, however, almost always stand up to intense scrutiny and each ends up being a complete statement.
Although Her First Dance was issued under mainline ECM imprint, instead of their New Series sub-label which focuses on "classical" music (most of it contemporary), Alperin is first and foremost a composer, not an improviser. Only on "Lonely in White," a solo piece, Alperin extemporizes in a semi-conventional fashion over a repeated figure in the left hand. Even here, however, he never plays with reckless abandon the way most self-respecting jazz musicians would strive to do - everything is perfectly controlled and fitted precisely into the four and a half minutes he allots himself. "Jump," another solo, sounds spontaneous on the surface, but again the spontaneity is shallow - Alperin takes a couple of clumps of notes and tosses them back and forth for a while. On the rest of the tracks, all but one composed by Alperin himself, two characteristics are readily apparent. One is his obvious concern with structure and contrasting themes. The other is the fact that he writes amazing melodies. The latter characteristic is always in evidence. The former - only sometimes, which gives the record its somewhat disjoint character.
Alperin's melodies are not catchy in a conventional sense. You will not walk away humming any of them. They are beautiful, however. Sparse, in that inimitably Nordic way that ECM fosters so well and then captures expertly on tape, with space between the notes accorded just as much importance as the notes themselves. Harmonically, the melodies are often ambiguous, but they are not dissonant. While they may not carry an inexorable logic of a more conventional tune, they do not puzzle or agitate. They are dark and often sad, but always meaningful and conclusive.
Alperin's fellow musicians' (with Lechner on cello, I can't call them sidemen, can I...) playing is top-notch throughout. Shilkloper is a known virtuoso, supposedly; a long-time principal of a major Russian orchestra (it escapes me for the moment which one it is). French horn is an infamously difficult instrument (believe me, I know - J. has been playing it for close to twenty years) and does not lend itself to complex soloing, and aside from a few embellishments on the title track, where he plays flugelhorn, Shilkloper doesn't try. But his tone is gorgeous, his intonation absolutely perfect, and he imbues each note with a ton of feeling. Both French horn and flugelhorn are amazingly expressive instruments, and Shilkloper takes full advantage of them.
The same goes for Lechner. Her tone is beautiful, and the controlled but intense emotion of her playing fits Alperin's music perfectly. One of the more interesting tracks is "The Russian Song," a Lechner-Shilkloper duet. Both are playing single-line instruments, but you never miss the lack of a real chord. Helped by ECM's moist, echoey mix, they fill an amazing amount of space with just two notes at a time (maybe three with Lechner's occasional double stop). Elsewhere, like on "A New Day" and especially on "Frozen Tears," Lechner's playing, accompanied by Alperin's piano, bears more than a passing resemblance to stuff David Darling did with Ketil Bjornstad on Epigraphs, my long-time reference for cello-piano duets.
Complaints are few, and they happen to book-end the CD. The opening "Vayan" is a prefect example of Alperin's preoccupation with contrasting themes, but the secondary theme, busy and chaotic, while contrasting alright, is not particularly enjoyable. The closing "Via Dolorosa," also for solo piano, is sufficiently heavy to justify its title, but at over seven minutes gets a little monotonous. These are minor quibbles, however. On balance, Her First Dance is excellent - beautiful and distinctive, with all three musicians playing at the top of their game.
Her First Dance, Alperin's latest, is nominally a trio record with Arkady Shilkloper, another Russian, on French horn and flugelhorn, and German cellist Anja Lechner. All three have recorded together before, on Lechner's Night, which I also have and will comment on some other time, plus Alperin and Shilkloper go back many years and have recorded together as long ago as the 1980s. You barely hear all three playing at the same time, however - Her First Dance is essentially an album of solos and duets in various combinations of instruments. It also ends up being, unintentionally I am sure, avant-garde for the iPod generation. Although Alperin does have a recognizable style on the piano, there is little unity to the album as a whole; the record is not a coherent work in and of itself. Individual tracks, however, almost always stand up to intense scrutiny and each ends up being a complete statement.
Although Her First Dance was issued under mainline ECM imprint, instead of their New Series sub-label which focuses on "classical" music (most of it contemporary), Alperin is first and foremost a composer, not an improviser. Only on "Lonely in White," a solo piece, Alperin extemporizes in a semi-conventional fashion over a repeated figure in the left hand. Even here, however, he never plays with reckless abandon the way most self-respecting jazz musicians would strive to do - everything is perfectly controlled and fitted precisely into the four and a half minutes he allots himself. "Jump," another solo, sounds spontaneous on the surface, but again the spontaneity is shallow - Alperin takes a couple of clumps of notes and tosses them back and forth for a while. On the rest of the tracks, all but one composed by Alperin himself, two characteristics are readily apparent. One is his obvious concern with structure and contrasting themes. The other is the fact that he writes amazing melodies. The latter characteristic is always in evidence. The former - only sometimes, which gives the record its somewhat disjoint character.
Alperin's melodies are not catchy in a conventional sense. You will not walk away humming any of them. They are beautiful, however. Sparse, in that inimitably Nordic way that ECM fosters so well and then captures expertly on tape, with space between the notes accorded just as much importance as the notes themselves. Harmonically, the melodies are often ambiguous, but they are not dissonant. While they may not carry an inexorable logic of a more conventional tune, they do not puzzle or agitate. They are dark and often sad, but always meaningful and conclusive.
Alperin's fellow musicians' (with Lechner on cello, I can't call them sidemen, can I...) playing is top-notch throughout. Shilkloper is a known virtuoso, supposedly; a long-time principal of a major Russian orchestra (it escapes me for the moment which one it is). French horn is an infamously difficult instrument (believe me, I know - J. has been playing it for close to twenty years) and does not lend itself to complex soloing, and aside from a few embellishments on the title track, where he plays flugelhorn, Shilkloper doesn't try. But his tone is gorgeous, his intonation absolutely perfect, and he imbues each note with a ton of feeling. Both French horn and flugelhorn are amazingly expressive instruments, and Shilkloper takes full advantage of them.
The same goes for Lechner. Her tone is beautiful, and the controlled but intense emotion of her playing fits Alperin's music perfectly. One of the more interesting tracks is "The Russian Song," a Lechner-Shilkloper duet. Both are playing single-line instruments, but you never miss the lack of a real chord. Helped by ECM's moist, echoey mix, they fill an amazing amount of space with just two notes at a time (maybe three with Lechner's occasional double stop). Elsewhere, like on "A New Day" and especially on "Frozen Tears," Lechner's playing, accompanied by Alperin's piano, bears more than a passing resemblance to stuff David Darling did with Ketil Bjornstad on Epigraphs, my long-time reference for cello-piano duets.
Complaints are few, and they happen to book-end the CD. The opening "Vayan" is a prefect example of Alperin's preoccupation with contrasting themes, but the secondary theme, busy and chaotic, while contrasting alright, is not particularly enjoyable. The closing "Via Dolorosa," also for solo piano, is sufficiently heavy to justify its title, but at over seven minutes gets a little monotonous. These are minor quibbles, however. On balance, Her First Dance is excellent - beautiful and distinctive, with all three musicians playing at the top of their game.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Marilyn Crispell
One of the CDs I picked up on my recent (well, not so recent anymore) binge was Marilyn Crispell's Vignettes. Crispell, apparently, was a protegée of Cecil Taylor, and played for many years with Anthony Braxton, but since those people represent the one corner of jazz that I feel like I will never have the mental cojones to explore, I first stumbled upon Crispell's music through her Amaryllis, which she recorded for ECM in 2001 with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. I picked it up on a whim, but it proved to be one of those transforming experiences where every note was close to magic. It has remained a favorite ever since. I missed the intervening Storyteller, another trio date, but when I heard about Vignettes, her first unaccompanied record ever, I believe, I had to check it out.
Like Amaryllis, Vignettes is a mixture of completely free improvisations and compositions, or at least something resembling compositions. The free improvs are short pieces named “Vignette I” through “Vignette VII,” sprinkled throughout the disc in twos and threes. They have no melodic or rhythmic structure at all. Clusters of notes, some dense, some sparse, they speak in an intensely private language that I suspect would lose even the most ardent fan of musical chaos. I have not heard Crispell's playing with Braxton, but based on what I know of the Free Jazz movement in general, the “Vignette” pieces are Crispell's most direct link to her past with the likes of Braxton and Taylor.
The compositions are titled more conventionally, are longer in duration, and, to my ears, absolutely sublime. Most are Crispell's own, though two -- “Cuida Tu Espiritu” and “Stilleweg” are credited to other composers, neither of whom I know. I use the term “composition” somewhat loosely here – there is still plenty of improvisation – but there is distinctive melodic material on all of these tracks, not so much in a head-solo-head format, but recurring throughout each piece, usually altered, inverted or displaced, but almost always recognizable.
Emotionally, the unifying factor for the “conventional” works on the album is probably a sense of inner peace in Crispell's playing. The tempos here, as on Amaryllis, are predominantly slow, sometimes exceedingly so, but the former record was full of tension and urgency despite this, while Vignettes is far more relaxed, with Crispell sounding like she is in far more harmony with whatever is going on in her head than she was seven years ago.
This is the kind of record for which the random access of a CD player (or, these days, an iPod I suppose) is essential – once you program out the Vignettes, Vignettes becomes a masterpiece.
Like Amaryllis, Vignettes is a mixture of completely free improvisations and compositions, or at least something resembling compositions. The free improvs are short pieces named “Vignette I” through “Vignette VII,” sprinkled throughout the disc in twos and threes. They have no melodic or rhythmic structure at all. Clusters of notes, some dense, some sparse, they speak in an intensely private language that I suspect would lose even the most ardent fan of musical chaos. I have not heard Crispell's playing with Braxton, but based on what I know of the Free Jazz movement in general, the “Vignette” pieces are Crispell's most direct link to her past with the likes of Braxton and Taylor.
The compositions are titled more conventionally, are longer in duration, and, to my ears, absolutely sublime. Most are Crispell's own, though two -- “Cuida Tu Espiritu” and “Stilleweg” are credited to other composers, neither of whom I know. I use the term “composition” somewhat loosely here – there is still plenty of improvisation – but there is distinctive melodic material on all of these tracks, not so much in a head-solo-head format, but recurring throughout each piece, usually altered, inverted or displaced, but almost always recognizable.
Emotionally, the unifying factor for the “conventional” works on the album is probably a sense of inner peace in Crispell's playing. The tempos here, as on Amaryllis, are predominantly slow, sometimes exceedingly so, but the former record was full of tension and urgency despite this, while Vignettes is far more relaxed, with Crispell sounding like she is in far more harmony with whatever is going on in her head than she was seven years ago.
This is the kind of record for which the random access of a CD player (or, these days, an iPod I suppose) is essential – once you program out the Vignettes, Vignettes becomes a masterpiece.
Dogfish Head
Went to the beach at Cape Henlopen, DE on Saturday. Our friend K.L. came along. The beach itself is not really worth writing about – we got there early, the weather was excellent, and we had a great time. Saw two pods of dolphins, one quite close to shore. I went for a run along the beach, which was a nice change from my usual asphalt-bound running routine, though I only covered a mile and a half at most. Our only misadventure was a rogue wave that soaked most of our stuff and killed my portable CD player in late afternoon as the tide was coming up.
Afterwards, we drove into the town of Rehoboth Beach proper, as we usually do, and stopped in at the original Dogfish Head, where I had a Palo Santo Marron, their latest extreme concoction. I had tried it once before at an event, but here I was able to focus and taste it properly. It was absolutely delicious. Dark, with a pronounced head, it looks like a stout, but was really its own animal. At 12% ABV, its strength is in the barley wine territory, but it is far less sweet. The flavor is smoky, resiny, and perfectly balanced between all basic flavors. On the nose – and this is going to sound bizarre, I know – it made me think of beef jerky. All in all, a delicious brew.
Unfortunately, we also made a mistake of eating dinner at Dogfish Head, and the food was as disappointing as it had been in the past, contrary to the rumors that things have improved in the kitchen. We are finally swearing it off for good. The service was so slow, that by the time we were done, there wasn't time left to walk around the town, and we got in the car and drove home.
Afterwards, we drove into the town of Rehoboth Beach proper, as we usually do, and stopped in at the original Dogfish Head, where I had a Palo Santo Marron, their latest extreme concoction. I had tried it once before at an event, but here I was able to focus and taste it properly. It was absolutely delicious. Dark, with a pronounced head, it looks like a stout, but was really its own animal. At 12% ABV, its strength is in the barley wine territory, but it is far less sweet. The flavor is smoky, resiny, and perfectly balanced between all basic flavors. On the nose – and this is going to sound bizarre, I know – it made me think of beef jerky. All in all, a delicious brew.
Unfortunately, we also made a mistake of eating dinner at Dogfish Head, and the food was as disappointing as it had been in the past, contrary to the rumors that things have improved in the kitchen. We are finally swearing it off for good. The service was so slow, that by the time we were done, there wasn't time left to walk around the town, and we got in the car and drove home.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Eero Saarinen
Went to see the Eero Saarinen exhibit at the Building Museum on Saturday. Thoroughly enjoyable. I realized, once I got there, that I have never been to a museum exhibit dedicated to an architect and his architecture before. True, Saarinen was also known as a designer of furniture, specifically of chairs. He is credited with the first truly original chair design since Le Corbusier, and according to those who experienced both, Saarinen's are much more comfortable. Several of his chairs were duly displayed, and it was neat to see them, especially out of context. They are actually familiar designs, especially his pedestal chair, but they are normally seen in striking modernist interiors which can make it difficult to focus on individual objects. At the show, you could really look at the chairs without bookshelves, tables, or even the space itself competing for your attention.
First and foremost, however, Saarinen is known as an architect, and how do you exhibit architecture without exhibiting the actual buildings? Through photos, drawings, and blueprints, with an occasional scale model mixed in. This proved to be more effective than I had expected. The photography was excellent, and architectural drawings are a weakness of mine – I often find them beautiful irrespectively of how I feel about the depicted building once it's built. The models were a little less interesting – very stylized with most of the details omitted – but useful nevertheless for getting an idea of the overall shape and proportion of Saarinen's often gargantuan buildings.
Those of us in the Washington, DC area think of the Dulles Airport when Saarinen's name is mentioned. The exhibit covered Dulles, of course, and I was dismayed to find out that in addition to the striking front terminal building, Saarinen was also responsible for the idiotic “mobile lounges” that take passengers to the “island” where most of the jetways are. In his defense, however, the original design for the lounges was infinitely better than the current fishtanks on dump-truck wheels (those who have flown in and out of Dulles know what I'm talking about) – aerodynamic and streamlined in the best 1950s General Motors style, they would have at least been attractive, if no less functionally idiotic.
For most people, however, Saarinen is known for the giant arch in Saint Louis and the original TWA Terminal at the Kennedy Airport in New York City. The show featured both prominently, of course. I didn't really care about the arch – I don't go for the functionless and site-ignorant architecture of memorials, though technologically it is, of course, very impressive – but the TWA Terminal is a gem, and the extensive display dedicated to it at the exhibit did it full justice. I was about to write that I have only seen it from the outside, but realized that this is not true – when I arrived in New York for the very first time in September of 1987, it was on a TWA flight from Rome, and a quick look at the terminal's timeline shows that I must have arrived there. This did not occur to me at the museum for some reason, but only now, as I am typing this. I remember nothing of the terminal's flowing, swooping interior, of course, from that time, so the show's photography was still useful in connecting the familiar exterior with what's inside.
The real value of the exhibit for me, however, was all the other stuff Saarinen had designed. He started in partnership with his father Eliel, and designed several impressive buildings under those auspices, including Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, NY, where J. and I had heard several concerts some years ago without being aware that the Saarinens were involved. Eero's independent career, however, was shockingly brief – only eleven years. Established independently upon his father's death in 1950, he died unexpectedly of a brain tumor in 1961. In that time, he produced an astounding number of designs, some of them on an absolutely vast scale.
Most of the criticism Saarinen received in his lifetime centered on the suggestion that he had no identifiable style and pandered to his clients a little more than a great architect should. To me, however, his fatal flaw was the very scale on which he occasionally worked. Saarinen invented, or at least codified, the idea of the corporate campus – several office and/or factory buildings built in the middle of nowhere on a central plan. The best known example is probably the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, MI – a gigantic complex of over twenty buildings in austere International style interconnected by miles of roads, walkways and tunnels. I am sure it, and others like it, seemed wonderful in safely Utopian, car-centric fifties. Today, we abhor them as sterile dinosaurs from an era when technology and uniformity was thought capable of curing all our ills.
Thankfully, Saarinen redeemed himself with plenty of smaller-scale works that the show spotlit equally well. One was his college and university architecture – he has designed many remarkable buildings on a number of campuses in the US, many of them not otherwise well-known, and they show that he could work very effectively in the context of his surroundings and on a scale appropriate for the site and the building's intended use. The other was his church designs. I find it remarkable that houses of religion, which is by definition irrational, lend themselves so spectacularly well to creativity in the most rational art form and the only one that is equal parts art and science. When the two intersected, Saarinen could be truly sublime.
The exhibit runs through August 23rd, and I highly recommend catching it.
First and foremost, however, Saarinen is known as an architect, and how do you exhibit architecture without exhibiting the actual buildings? Through photos, drawings, and blueprints, with an occasional scale model mixed in. This proved to be more effective than I had expected. The photography was excellent, and architectural drawings are a weakness of mine – I often find them beautiful irrespectively of how I feel about the depicted building once it's built. The models were a little less interesting – very stylized with most of the details omitted – but useful nevertheless for getting an idea of the overall shape and proportion of Saarinen's often gargantuan buildings.
Those of us in the Washington, DC area think of the Dulles Airport when Saarinen's name is mentioned. The exhibit covered Dulles, of course, and I was dismayed to find out that in addition to the striking front terminal building, Saarinen was also responsible for the idiotic “mobile lounges” that take passengers to the “island” where most of the jetways are. In his defense, however, the original design for the lounges was infinitely better than the current fishtanks on dump-truck wheels (those who have flown in and out of Dulles know what I'm talking about) – aerodynamic and streamlined in the best 1950s General Motors style, they would have at least been attractive, if no less functionally idiotic.
For most people, however, Saarinen is known for the giant arch in Saint Louis and the original TWA Terminal at the Kennedy Airport in New York City. The show featured both prominently, of course. I didn't really care about the arch – I don't go for the functionless and site-ignorant architecture of memorials, though technologically it is, of course, very impressive – but the TWA Terminal is a gem, and the extensive display dedicated to it at the exhibit did it full justice. I was about to write that I have only seen it from the outside, but realized that this is not true – when I arrived in New York for the very first time in September of 1987, it was on a TWA flight from Rome, and a quick look at the terminal's timeline shows that I must have arrived there. This did not occur to me at the museum for some reason, but only now, as I am typing this. I remember nothing of the terminal's flowing, swooping interior, of course, from that time, so the show's photography was still useful in connecting the familiar exterior with what's inside.
The real value of the exhibit for me, however, was all the other stuff Saarinen had designed. He started in partnership with his father Eliel, and designed several impressive buildings under those auspices, including Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, NY, where J. and I had heard several concerts some years ago without being aware that the Saarinens were involved. Eero's independent career, however, was shockingly brief – only eleven years. Established independently upon his father's death in 1950, he died unexpectedly of a brain tumor in 1961. In that time, he produced an astounding number of designs, some of them on an absolutely vast scale.
Most of the criticism Saarinen received in his lifetime centered on the suggestion that he had no identifiable style and pandered to his clients a little more than a great architect should. To me, however, his fatal flaw was the very scale on which he occasionally worked. Saarinen invented, or at least codified, the idea of the corporate campus – several office and/or factory buildings built in the middle of nowhere on a central plan. The best known example is probably the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, MI – a gigantic complex of over twenty buildings in austere International style interconnected by miles of roads, walkways and tunnels. I am sure it, and others like it, seemed wonderful in safely Utopian, car-centric fifties. Today, we abhor them as sterile dinosaurs from an era when technology and uniformity was thought capable of curing all our ills.
Thankfully, Saarinen redeemed himself with plenty of smaller-scale works that the show spotlit equally well. One was his college and university architecture – he has designed many remarkable buildings on a number of campuses in the US, many of them not otherwise well-known, and they show that he could work very effectively in the context of his surroundings and on a scale appropriate for the site and the building's intended use. The other was his church designs. I find it remarkable that houses of religion, which is by definition irrational, lend themselves so spectacularly well to creativity in the most rational art form and the only one that is equal parts art and science. When the two intersected, Saarinen could be truly sublime.
The exhibit runs through August 23rd, and I highly recommend catching it.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Fourth of July
Occasionally I feel regret over not having served in the military. My family was able to come to the US and build a new life here, one far better in every imaginable sense than we ever could in the country we left, and it has frequently seemed to me that I ought to have done something more than just being a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen, to express gratitude. When I stop to think about it, however, I realize that not only would I have been miserable in the military, I would have made a terrible soldier. I have a deep-seated, pervasive mistrust of authority. Not in a knee-jerk, teenage rebellion sort of way, but – I would like to think – in a way that a thinking, seeking, questioning, scientifically skeptical person questions any purported wisdom dispensed from above. In fact, the ability – no, imperative – to question authority is the greatest expression of the American ideal of freedom of speech, thought and expression. We, as a society, are unique in our respect for that kind of skepticism, or at least in the extent to which is has permeated our way of thinking about government. Say what you will about the Patriot Act or the encroachment of fundamentalist religious thinking on education in certain parts of the country. I still maintain that the US is unique in its respect for individuality in thought. Happy Fourth of July, everyone.
Gore Vidal
Finished Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, just in time for the Fourth. This is Vidal's irreverent and - he thinks - witty take on the founding of the United States. I have mixed feelings about the book.
This is a genuine history. Someone who knows absolutely nothing of the establishment and the early years of the US and its founding fathers can gain this knowledge in a relatively succinct fashion by reading Vidal. I admit that my own expertise in our early history is not nearly as thorough as it should be, so while I was familiar with the general outline of the events and the major personalities that shaped them, I learned more than a few new things. The first was Daniel Shays' rebellion of 1787. Somehow, all my history classes missed it, or else my memory is much worse than I realize. Was Shays America's first socialist? Why not - Vidal traces Franklin Roosevelt's later usurpation of the government prerogative to Shays.
More significantly, according to Vidal, Jefferson believed in a "living constitution," which to him meant rewriting the laws of the land roughly every twenty years or so. Apparently he was the only one of the major players of the day who thought this was a good idea, or else we'd be living in a very different place today. There are a few others.
What jumped out at me the most, however, was Vidal's insistence on focusing on the negative qualities of the founding fathers. None come out as particularly likable or often even respectable from under Vidal's pen, though he does end up pretty well redeeming Washington by the end, and Jefferson's villainy is minuscule compared to that of, say, Hamilton. I understand the motivation - Vidal is trying to cut them back down to size, to remind us that they were humans, too, that the Olympian status we ascribe to them today came much later, through the fog of our early history. And not only that, but they were politicians, as scheming and conniving as the best ones today, and the arguably greater social civility of the era went only so far. This is reasonable, and even admirable, in its intent - anyone made into a god ought to be unmade in short order - but Vidal ends up sounding distastefully cynical doing it. Every contemporary account he chooses and every letter he quotes relentlessly points to the wickedness of the person being described.
In addition, Vidal makes his own political biases obvious. Far too obvious for anything attempting to be an impartial history. His condemnation of the Electoral College is right on the money. Finding Franklin's prediction of a "despotic government" embodied in the current Bush administration - ok, maybe. But Vidal can be positively Naderesque in his politics: [Jefferson] makes no reference to these... lobbyists, to use a current word for those who profit from unpatriotic activities undertaken for domestic and foreign masters [p. 95].
Vidal can't resist indulging his narcissism and ends with an account of a conversation he claims to have had with John F. Kennedy about the founding fathers in Hyannis in 1961 (after beating him at backgammon, he doesn't fail to point out). The account is supposed to illustrate the superior intelligence and statecraft of Washington et. al. as compared to leaders of Kennedy's and, by extension, our, age. But all it ends up doing is showing Vidal for what he is - intelligent, frequently insightful, and a crack writer, but also a relentlessly pompous ass. Just like his heroes.
This is a genuine history. Someone who knows absolutely nothing of the establishment and the early years of the US and its founding fathers can gain this knowledge in a relatively succinct fashion by reading Vidal. I admit that my own expertise in our early history is not nearly as thorough as it should be, so while I was familiar with the general outline of the events and the major personalities that shaped them, I learned more than a few new things. The first was Daniel Shays' rebellion of 1787. Somehow, all my history classes missed it, or else my memory is much worse than I realize. Was Shays America's first socialist? Why not - Vidal traces Franklin Roosevelt's later usurpation of the government prerogative to Shays.
More significantly, according to Vidal, Jefferson believed in a "living constitution," which to him meant rewriting the laws of the land roughly every twenty years or so. Apparently he was the only one of the major players of the day who thought this was a good idea, or else we'd be living in a very different place today. There are a few others.
What jumped out at me the most, however, was Vidal's insistence on focusing on the negative qualities of the founding fathers. None come out as particularly likable or often even respectable from under Vidal's pen, though he does end up pretty well redeeming Washington by the end, and Jefferson's villainy is minuscule compared to that of, say, Hamilton. I understand the motivation - Vidal is trying to cut them back down to size, to remind us that they were humans, too, that the Olympian status we ascribe to them today came much later, through the fog of our early history. And not only that, but they were politicians, as scheming and conniving as the best ones today, and the arguably greater social civility of the era went only so far. This is reasonable, and even admirable, in its intent - anyone made into a god ought to be unmade in short order - but Vidal ends up sounding distastefully cynical doing it. Every contemporary account he chooses and every letter he quotes relentlessly points to the wickedness of the person being described.
In addition, Vidal makes his own political biases obvious. Far too obvious for anything attempting to be an impartial history. His condemnation of the Electoral College is right on the money. Finding Franklin's prediction of a "despotic government" embodied in the current Bush administration - ok, maybe. But Vidal can be positively Naderesque in his politics: [Jefferson] makes no reference to these... lobbyists, to use a current word for those who profit from unpatriotic activities undertaken for domestic and foreign masters [p. 95].
Vidal can't resist indulging his narcissism and ends with an account of a conversation he claims to have had with John F. Kennedy about the founding fathers in Hyannis in 1961 (after beating him at backgammon, he doesn't fail to point out). The account is supposed to illustrate the superior intelligence and statecraft of Washington et. al. as compared to leaders of Kennedy's and, by extension, our, age. But all it ends up doing is showing Vidal for what he is - intelligent, frequently insightful, and a crack writer, but also a relentlessly pompous ass. Just like his heroes.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Walter Krivitsky
Finished Walter Krivitsky's In Stalin's Secret Service over the weekend. Krivitsky, the chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Europe in the 1930s, was the first high-ranking Soviet spy to defect to the West, in 1939.
I must admit I initially questioned the book's authenticity. I had never heard of Krivitsky, and I thought that if he really was who he claimed to be, and really did experience everything he described, he would have been much better known. Then there is the tone of the book. Its language is contrived and melodramatic, and there is no information about translation or editorship in the places one would normally find them. There are a couple of obvious inconsistencies, one example being the reference to the Deuxieme Bureau of Soviet Intelligence on p. 140, the only such reference. Why French all of a sudden, and without a proper accent mark to boot? Might this have been cobbled together, haphazardly, from a variety of sources written by different people in different languages?
The most unbelievable, however, is the actual fact that Krivitsky escaped. He was the head of Soviet Military Intelligence at the time when the OGPU, later the KGB, was systematically taking over all domestic and foreign spying functions, and eliminating internal competitors. He was in Moscow at the height of Stalin's purges, specifically when Stalin decapitated the Red Army by executing all of its top brass, most notably Marshal Tukhachevsky and General Voroshilov. He witnessed a few interrogations himself, and talked personally with several political prisoners. He was scheduled to return to Holland, where he was stationed at the time, but a few hours before departure time, he still had not received his passport. He had resigned, he claims, to the idea that he would not be permitted to leave, and was keenly aware that at the very least, he would lose his job, and that a bullet to the head in the basement of the Lubianka was not out of the question. Yet, at the last possible moment, he was summoned to the office of an OGPU big shot, who shoved Krivitsky's passport into his hand and barked, "Your train leaves at ten o'clock!" If that's not a set-up worthy of Hollywood, I don't know what is. Yet a bit of research on the 'net proved, or at least indicated with a reasonable degree of confidence, that Krivitsky's bona-fides check out, and that his story really is true. That makes the book a priceless historical document.
Krivitsky lasted roughly two years in the West, making his way through France to the US, then to Great Britain, then back to the US. He was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room in February 1941 with a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Washington Metropolitan Police after a botched and half-hearted investigation, and the case quickly closed. Yet Krivitsky, and a small handful of close friends he had in the West, knew that he was a hunted man, and had in fact had several close calls both in Europe and the US. All this was described, rather well I thought, in a long article by Flora Lewis, published in the Washington Post in 1966 and titled Who Killed Walter Krivitsky. The article is included at the end of my edition of the book, and I wish it had been included at the beginning instead, by way of an introduction. The article goes a long way towards explaining why the book reads the way it does, in particular its tone and language.
Krivitsky was not happy in the US. In France, where he was at the moment of his defection, he found it relatively easy to obtain official protection from the government of Leon Blum, a well-advertised Socialist with strong sympathies for Trotsky. Krivitsky - and this bears emphasizing - never abandoned the cause of Socialist Revolution. It was Stalin he reviled, and believed that Stalin betrayed the Bolshevik's original idea. Any Russian Socialist who was anti-Stalin was assumed to be pro-Trotsky in the West, and even though Krivitsky was forthcoming about the fact that he had no plans to join Trotsky, Blum was easily placated and provided around the clock bodyguards, bodyguards that saved Krivitsky at least once from assassination. Even with official protection, however, France was too close to Russia and Nazi Germany for comfort, and Krivitsky made his was to the US.
Here, he found himself in a different situation. Few people cared about who he was, what he had to say, or, most importantly, what would happen to him. Roosevelt's government had bigger fish to fry than to protect an unknown Russian defector. The fact that Krivitsky claimed to know so much but told so little didn't win him many friends in the State Department, then consumed with its own political infighting. Once, when Krivitsky realized he was being followed on the street by an OGPU agent he recognized, he sought help from the police but was told that they were powerless since no crime had actually been committed. To a Russian, even one who was convinced that the criminality of Stalin's violence was beyond the pale, such an attitude simply did not compute.
Mostly, however, Krivitsky needed money. Through friends, he met Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-speaking writer, journalist, an authority on Socialism and Communism and, most importantly, an expert salesman of sensation. He got Krivitsky to agree to write, and arranged to have his memoirs serialized in the Saturday Evening Post at $1,000 per installment. Krivitsky probably knew some English, but not enough to write, and wrote most likely in Russian, or, possibly, German, in which he was fluent, with Levine and/or his people translating. It is to Levine that we owe the inflated tone of the book's prose. Did he embellish it? Possibly, but probably not a lot - Lewis tells of endless arguments between Levine and Krivitsky, the former pushing for grandiosity, the latter preferring a dry, Foreign Policy-style recitation. Had Levine not come along at the right moment, or had Krivitsky been luckier in securing gainful employment in the US, a priceless historical document might never have been produced.
That's the back story, or bits of it, anyhow. To the memoir itself. Krivitsky's purpose is singular - to expose Stalin's evils to a Western reader and to demonstrate, once and for all, how deeply that evil ran, both morally and operationally.
Chapter One is dedicated to Stalin's appeasement of Hitler. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 is well-known, of course, but a casual reader, or even a not-so-casual one like yours truly, would be shocked to discover how long, thoroughly, and consistently Stalin courted Hitler. According to Krivitsky, it was Stalin's goal to establish friendly relations, and preferably some kind of formal agreement, with Nazi Germany practically from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. Every bit of Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1930s was single-mindedly dedicated to achieving this goal. Stalin admired and feared Hitler. Here was someone who thought much like Stalin did, but possessed a far stronger military and a much firmer economic base - a formidable man indeed, and Stalin wanted nothing more than to become the Tabacqui to Hitler's Shere Khan. Sounds odd to our ears that a monster like Stalin could so willingly humiliate himself, but Krivitsky is convincing, and provides ample evidence.
Chapter Three is a thorough examination of Russia's intervention in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It is an accepted fact that Russia helped a fellow Socialist government against a Fascist onslaught. That it was done clandestinely is frequently not mentioned. What few of us realize, however, that Stalin's true aim was never to help the Spanish Republican government. His aim was to overthrow it, and to gain control of Spain, finally establishing a Bolshevik regime in another European country. The Republicans paid for every Russian rifle with complete, unquestioning subservience to the OGPU advisers who occupied every single important post in the Republican forces. Caballero was sacked by the OGPU because he would not toe the line sufficiently. There was absolutely no question what Stalin was attempting to do, and again Krivistky is quick with revealing detail. He is surprisingly silent on the question of why the Russians left Spain unexpectedly, throwing the Republicans to Franco's wolves, but George Kennan has suggested that Stalin suddenly saw an agreement with Hitler to be within his grasp, and did not want to be discovered opposing one of his allies. Given what Krivitsky so painstakingly reveals elsewhere in the memoir, this makes complete sense.
The most outrageous story Krivitsky tells is of Stalin's counterfeiting American dollars. During the first Five Year Plan (1928 - 1932), Russia was broke and desperately needed hard currency. True to his common criminal origins, Stalin decided to print some, about $10 million in all. This sounds unfathomable, I know, but once again Krivistky has the details, and the Western press of the time, which he quotes on several occasions, is certainly full of stories of counterfeit $100 bills showing up all over Europe, and a few arrests of people trying to pass them. Krivitsky's account really begs to be read - it is too fantastic to be paraphrased.
The true value of the book, however, is Krivitsky's account and analysis of Stalin's purges. We have all heard of them of course, but most of us have not studied them. As moral human beings, we should. No, must. And while far more formal historical studies exist, what Krivitsky gives us are names, places, ambiance in the interrogation rooms, the trail of smoke rising from the examiner's cigarette. What's more, he makes plain, to the extent something like this can be made plain to minds like ours that work in a different mental dimension, the thought process that went on during the purges, both those of the perpetrators and their victims. To pick an example at random:
For all its surface defects, most of them not Krivistky's fault, In Stalin's Secret Service is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand one of the top three tragedies of the twentieth century. Please excuse that pompous, term-paper-like conclusion - I can think of no better. Read it - it will leave an impression.
I must admit I initially questioned the book's authenticity. I had never heard of Krivitsky, and I thought that if he really was who he claimed to be, and really did experience everything he described, he would have been much better known. Then there is the tone of the book. Its language is contrived and melodramatic, and there is no information about translation or editorship in the places one would normally find them. There are a couple of obvious inconsistencies, one example being the reference to the Deuxieme Bureau of Soviet Intelligence on p. 140, the only such reference. Why French all of a sudden, and without a proper accent mark to boot? Might this have been cobbled together, haphazardly, from a variety of sources written by different people in different languages?
The most unbelievable, however, is the actual fact that Krivitsky escaped. He was the head of Soviet Military Intelligence at the time when the OGPU, later the KGB, was systematically taking over all domestic and foreign spying functions, and eliminating internal competitors. He was in Moscow at the height of Stalin's purges, specifically when Stalin decapitated the Red Army by executing all of its top brass, most notably Marshal Tukhachevsky and General Voroshilov. He witnessed a few interrogations himself, and talked personally with several political prisoners. He was scheduled to return to Holland, where he was stationed at the time, but a few hours before departure time, he still had not received his passport. He had resigned, he claims, to the idea that he would not be permitted to leave, and was keenly aware that at the very least, he would lose his job, and that a bullet to the head in the basement of the Lubianka was not out of the question. Yet, at the last possible moment, he was summoned to the office of an OGPU big shot, who shoved Krivitsky's passport into his hand and barked, "Your train leaves at ten o'clock!" If that's not a set-up worthy of Hollywood, I don't know what is. Yet a bit of research on the 'net proved, or at least indicated with a reasonable degree of confidence, that Krivitsky's bona-fides check out, and that his story really is true. That makes the book a priceless historical document.
Krivitsky lasted roughly two years in the West, making his way through France to the US, then to Great Britain, then back to the US. He was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room in February 1941 with a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Washington Metropolitan Police after a botched and half-hearted investigation, and the case quickly closed. Yet Krivitsky, and a small handful of close friends he had in the West, knew that he was a hunted man, and had in fact had several close calls both in Europe and the US. All this was described, rather well I thought, in a long article by Flora Lewis, published in the Washington Post in 1966 and titled Who Killed Walter Krivitsky. The article is included at the end of my edition of the book, and I wish it had been included at the beginning instead, by way of an introduction. The article goes a long way towards explaining why the book reads the way it does, in particular its tone and language.
Krivitsky was not happy in the US. In France, where he was at the moment of his defection, he found it relatively easy to obtain official protection from the government of Leon Blum, a well-advertised Socialist with strong sympathies for Trotsky. Krivitsky - and this bears emphasizing - never abandoned the cause of Socialist Revolution. It was Stalin he reviled, and believed that Stalin betrayed the Bolshevik's original idea. Any Russian Socialist who was anti-Stalin was assumed to be pro-Trotsky in the West, and even though Krivitsky was forthcoming about the fact that he had no plans to join Trotsky, Blum was easily placated and provided around the clock bodyguards, bodyguards that saved Krivitsky at least once from assassination. Even with official protection, however, France was too close to Russia and Nazi Germany for comfort, and Krivitsky made his was to the US.
Here, he found himself in a different situation. Few people cared about who he was, what he had to say, or, most importantly, what would happen to him. Roosevelt's government had bigger fish to fry than to protect an unknown Russian defector. The fact that Krivitsky claimed to know so much but told so little didn't win him many friends in the State Department, then consumed with its own political infighting. Once, when Krivitsky realized he was being followed on the street by an OGPU agent he recognized, he sought help from the police but was told that they were powerless since no crime had actually been committed. To a Russian, even one who was convinced that the criminality of Stalin's violence was beyond the pale, such an attitude simply did not compute.
Mostly, however, Krivitsky needed money. Through friends, he met Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-speaking writer, journalist, an authority on Socialism and Communism and, most importantly, an expert salesman of sensation. He got Krivitsky to agree to write, and arranged to have his memoirs serialized in the Saturday Evening Post at $1,000 per installment. Krivitsky probably knew some English, but not enough to write, and wrote most likely in Russian, or, possibly, German, in which he was fluent, with Levine and/or his people translating. It is to Levine that we owe the inflated tone of the book's prose. Did he embellish it? Possibly, but probably not a lot - Lewis tells of endless arguments between Levine and Krivitsky, the former pushing for grandiosity, the latter preferring a dry, Foreign Policy-style recitation. Had Levine not come along at the right moment, or had Krivitsky been luckier in securing gainful employment in the US, a priceless historical document might never have been produced.
That's the back story, or bits of it, anyhow. To the memoir itself. Krivitsky's purpose is singular - to expose Stalin's evils to a Western reader and to demonstrate, once and for all, how deeply that evil ran, both morally and operationally.
Chapter One is dedicated to Stalin's appeasement of Hitler. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 is well-known, of course, but a casual reader, or even a not-so-casual one like yours truly, would be shocked to discover how long, thoroughly, and consistently Stalin courted Hitler. According to Krivitsky, it was Stalin's goal to establish friendly relations, and preferably some kind of formal agreement, with Nazi Germany practically from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. Every bit of Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1930s was single-mindedly dedicated to achieving this goal. Stalin admired and feared Hitler. Here was someone who thought much like Stalin did, but possessed a far stronger military and a much firmer economic base - a formidable man indeed, and Stalin wanted nothing more than to become the Tabacqui to Hitler's Shere Khan. Sounds odd to our ears that a monster like Stalin could so willingly humiliate himself, but Krivitsky is convincing, and provides ample evidence.
Chapter Three is a thorough examination of Russia's intervention in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It is an accepted fact that Russia helped a fellow Socialist government against a Fascist onslaught. That it was done clandestinely is frequently not mentioned. What few of us realize, however, that Stalin's true aim was never to help the Spanish Republican government. His aim was to overthrow it, and to gain control of Spain, finally establishing a Bolshevik regime in another European country. The Republicans paid for every Russian rifle with complete, unquestioning subservience to the OGPU advisers who occupied every single important post in the Republican forces. Caballero was sacked by the OGPU because he would not toe the line sufficiently. There was absolutely no question what Stalin was attempting to do, and again Krivistky is quick with revealing detail. He is surprisingly silent on the question of why the Russians left Spain unexpectedly, throwing the Republicans to Franco's wolves, but George Kennan has suggested that Stalin suddenly saw an agreement with Hitler to be within his grasp, and did not want to be discovered opposing one of his allies. Given what Krivitsky so painstakingly reveals elsewhere in the memoir, this makes complete sense.
The most outrageous story Krivitsky tells is of Stalin's counterfeiting American dollars. During the first Five Year Plan (1928 - 1932), Russia was broke and desperately needed hard currency. True to his common criminal origins, Stalin decided to print some, about $10 million in all. This sounds unfathomable, I know, but once again Krivistky has the details, and the Western press of the time, which he quotes on several occasions, is certainly full of stories of counterfeit $100 bills showing up all over Europe, and a few arrests of people trying to pass them. Krivitsky's account really begs to be read - it is too fantastic to be paraphrased.
The true value of the book, however, is Krivitsky's account and analysis of Stalin's purges. We have all heard of them of course, but most of us have not studied them. As moral human beings, we should. No, must. And while far more formal historical studies exist, what Krivitsky gives us are names, places, ambiance in the interrogation rooms, the trail of smoke rising from the examiner's cigarette. What's more, he makes plain, to the extent something like this can be made plain to minds like ours that work in a different mental dimension, the thought process that went on during the purges, both those of the perpetrators and their victims. To pick an example at random:
It may seem surprising... that there should be barters in human lives between a lord high executioner and his trapped victims. We of the inner Bolshevik circle always took such negotiations as a matter of course (p. 167).Krivitsky is particularly thorough in his description of the purges of the officer corps of the Red Army (the act that contributed to Hitler's impunity in disregarding the non-aggresion pact and attacking Russia in 1941). I didn't learn that Tukhachevsky was purged until a few years ago, and was shocked at the time, but in Krivistky I found more details I could ever want, and his analysis of Stalin's motivation is faultless. I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing here, of course, but as a summary, this will do:
Once more Stalin demonstrated that he never forgets or forgives. The old differences of opinion... remained in his memory as "opposition." The "opposition," when dragged into the meshes of his OGPU machine, became a "conspiracy." Such "conspiracies" are the rungs in the ladder on which Stalin climbed to absolute power. In the process, critics became "enemies," sincere opponents "traitors," all honest... oppositional opinion - with the exprt aid of the OGPU - "organized plots." (p. 209)Krivitsky has some numbers, too, though that is less of a focus for him: "Within the first five months of 1937, 350,000 political arrests were made by the OGPU..." (p. 215, emphasis mine). This was a secret, and therefore probably accurate, figure given to him by an OGPU section chief.
For all its surface defects, most of them not Krivistky's fault, In Stalin's Secret Service is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand one of the top three tragedies of the twentieth century. Please excuse that pompous, term-paper-like conclusion - I can think of no better. Read it - it will leave an impression.
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