Author Archives: joemiller

Classical Now 5-12-14 – hours 1 & 2

May 12 is a big one on the classical calendar. Spring birthdays for two great French composers, Jules Messenet and Gabriel Faure. It is also the death anniversaries of Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Music from all of them coming up in the program We’ll get our daily dose of vitamin B from Friedrich Gulda, hear from the Muungano National Choir of Kenya, and thank Scottish guitarist Paul Galbraith for his superb recital last week at the Lobero.

And your name was . . . ?

There is this peculiar conversational idiom popular now for some years.  Most often I find it occurs during business transactions, but it might just as often happen with a new personal acquaintance.  It is simply this: somebody asks for your name in the past tense.  Think about it. We have all experienced it, perhaps we are compelled to use the idiom ourselves.  But my question is why?  Why do we ask What WAS your name, rather than What IS your name?  Continue reading →

On Second Thought

We value very young children for their spontaneity, their unguarded self-expression. Whatever the activity, they’re all-in, free of self-consciousness—that outside standpoint that makes of self an object, wondering how one looks, how one is being judged. Yet growing-up means developing an ego, a self-image, and entering the social hall of mirrors where images are distorted, inverted and shot back, sometimes with horrifying effect. And this leads, naturally, to a curbing of impulse.

Second thought is the giving of thought to thought. It adds an extra layer, and therefore can clearly disguise and encumber. But is that all? Is self-consciousness necessarily nothing more than constriction?

Continue reading →

Gem of the Ocean – Rubicon Theatre

GEM OF THE OCEAN

RUBICON THEATRE

PREVIEW BY JOSEPH MILLER

The late August Wilson once said that all his plays boil down to one short story called The Best Blues Singer in the World, which is told in one sentence: “The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.” But how does a drowning man sing, I wonder?

“Gem of the Ocean is all about the water,” Director James O’Neil told me by phone this week. The prospect of directing an August Wilson play is undoubtedly, well, august. The late playwright’s credentials include two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony Award; a theater in New York City and a cultural center in Pittsburgh each bear his name. The American literary canon embraces his “Pittsburgh Cycle” of ten plays, which illustrate the African-American experience through each decade of the 20th Century. What’s more, the well-read Wilson packs his plays with mythic references not only from the Bible, but from Africa, and even Russian fairy tales. Continue reading →

Charles Lloyd and Sangam

Finding an Inner East

Sangam, featuring Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain and Eric Harland. At the Lobero Theatre. Saturday, Mar. 8, 8pm.

Previewed by Joseph Miller

There is a poem by Walt Whitman where the poet’s elastic identity migrates around the globe with the tides of humanity, from ancient Asia to modern America, only to end up facing west from California’s shore. With Manifest Destiny exhausted, the restless seeker can turn nowhere except within himself: “Where is what I started for so long ago / And why is it yet unfound?” The poem anticipated many seekers in the 20th Century who turned west to find an inner East. But few people illustrate the point better Continue reading →