The Amarna Period: Akhnaten, by Philip Glass (1984)

ltpatridge's avatar March 7, 2014

Due to my old-fashioned habit of putting CDs in wallets and then saving those wallets with my college mementos, I found my copy of Glass’s Akhnaten, and I was able to give it a listen while working today.

I remembered why I didn’t take to it years ago — I got tired of the four notes.  Thank you!  A little Philip Glass humor for you, there.  Now that that’s out of the way, I have to admit that I appreciate the work, but as a Glass piece, not an interpretation of the Amarna Period.

Was there ever a composer better named than Glass?  His pieces are so clear, cool, prismatic.  Akhnaten functions as a splendid example of his work, and an excellent listen when you are otherwise occupied.  As a retelling of the Amarna Period, however, it is ultimately unsuccessful.  Due to the use of ancient languages for the singers, which sounded so cool to me when I ordered the CDs, the cast are cut off, remote from the listening audience.  They are as much as singing bas-reliefs or statuary themselves.  Yet the music is distinctly modern, lacking influence from middle Eastern styles that might themselves echo ancient music, so they lack even this verisimilitude.  Moreover, the stylized retelling of the story lacks any touch of madness.  The tangled, suffocating family tree of the Pharaohs must serve as a major element of any retelling of the whole story of Akhenaten’s reign.  Without this human folly, Akhnaten is almost divorced from the heart of its subject.

Modern opera and the ignorance thereof

ltpatridge's avatar March 5, 2014

I was just now reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and in googling it, I found that there is in fact an opera.  I love finding out that someone has written an opera – not a dead old Italian or German thing, but a real breathing modern piece – on something that fascinates me.

The last time I found this out, it was concerning the life story of Donald Crowhurst.  I have a terrible little obsession with Donald Crowhurst, with what makes someone become him.  The opera is Ravenshead.  I’ve done a lot of work to this soundtrack.

There is of course an Amarna Period modern opera, Akhnaten by Philip Glass.  I have to admit it bored many a pant off of me when I heard it, and I subsequently lost my CDs, but I was much younger then.  I must give it another chance, and review it properly.

My review for KBR of The Wrath Inside by RR Gall (2014)

ltpatridge's avatar March 2, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This novel of Roman-occupied Palestine, circa 15 A.D., is a sharp and engaging read.  It does not, despite its setting, foreshadow the events of the life of Jesus.  Instead, it focuses on Ezera, a teenager with an ordinary, troubled family and dead-end life, who wanted nothing to do with politics and treachery.  The threats of a mysterious stranger and the ensuing wrath of the occupying Roman forces push him into increasingly desperate schemes to keep his village safe.
Despite a few linguistic anachronisms, easily overlooked, the historical setting is firm and well established.  The action is constant, grim and gripping.  The outcomes of the teenagers’ plots to help each other and the town only increases the pathos of life under Roman rule, with its constant and shocking brutality.  For anyone with an appetite for realistic historical fiction of the period, I recommend this book.

Isn’t it time for Mardi Gras already, please

ltpatridge's avatar February 25, 2014

I miss New Orleans. It’s been ten years since I saw it. Missing New Orleans is not a particularly admirable emotion in me. I’m the kind of pure tourist who misses what is vanished: the magic, the ancient, the fear.

The Princess and the Frog was a terrific movie for saps like me. Listen to the villain song in French, which sounds for all the world like the original language, and tell me you don’t want to go the hell down there right now. There are better constructed and better loved Disney princess movies, but I will always have a special place in my heart for the only one that contains the line, “Go ‘long! Y’all from Shreveport?”

A far better choice for anyone who loves New Orleans as it was is now free on the internet. Gumbo Ya-Ya, a compilation of folk tales, life stories, and gris-gris, was assembled by the Louisiana Writers’ Program and published in 1945, by which time much of the folk memory on which the book was based had already died out. I got ahold a copy of it in sixth grade, at a time when I was suffering from bullies. Vividly I remember the time I spent pausing and trembling over one of the curses in the Appendix:

To harm a person in any way you may wish, write his name three times on a piece of paper and burn a black candle on it on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Whatever you wish will happen to him.

I got everything together that I needed, and yet at the last I could not bear to call down the Devil on Jimmy Thomas in room 6C, for I had also heard that whatever you invoked would return to you times nine.

Strangely, now, I miss the Devil – or rather, I miss how it was when I believed in the Manichean dualism of a world with the forces of God and of the Devil. It would be a warmer world with his great coils writhing beneath the surface.

I am getting better

ltpatridge's avatar February 24, 2014

I am still not exactly ready to talk about my health problems.

I will say this, though: what is the shape of madness? It is a single room, two rooms perhaps with a low ceiling, a warren of unused possessions both unnecessary and indispensable. Snow outside, incessant and beating. Snow and salt and wet without. Nowhere and no one else to be. A readiness to end, to escape.

 I am terrified and eager for spring.

Wonderment and puzzle

ltpatridge's avatar February 22, 2014

I was only recently made aware that the Legend of Zelda theme, apparently, owes a good deal to the song “April” by Deep Purple. It’s especially apparent around the the 2:00 mark. The composer for Zelda, Koji Kondo, was at one time in a band that covered Deep Purple.

It doesn’t seem to me like cheating, or like anything deplorable. Rather, it serves as a chance to hear some good old prog rock and realize that Japan is not what we expect it to be. Those of us who play video games, watch anime, or otherwise consume Japanese pop culture often begin to think of Japan as a planetary generator of weirdness, as a closed cultural ecosystem of kawaii. This should remind us otherwise.

 Shigeru Miyamoto has said that part of his motivation for the original Legend of Zelda was to create somewhere that players could explore with the same wonder and sense of discovery as he had felt when he explored the woods and caves outside Kyoto as a child. As a child, I treated this game as a substitute backyard. I wandered there when it was too wet or dark to play outside, not bothering with game goals, just being, and being at peace among the strangeness and joy. This is something else LoZ shared with prog rock.

I have managed to note few things of interest to the wider world lately

ltpatridge's avatar February 19, 2014

But I want to advise you, in case you did not know it, that a thing called Worzel Gummidge existed.

We no longer make children’s entertainment like this, live-action shows that suggest it is permissible for preteens to wander around unattended, befriend strange men who purport to be animate scarecrows, and keep their magical secrets. Especially not strange men who are suddenly abusive to women. No, these days, everything they make for children has to “model appropriate behaviors.” I dare say we have lost something.

Faraon [Pharaoh] (1964)

ltpatridge's avatar February 10, 2014

This is not a movie about the Amarna Period, but nonetheless I thought it was worth mentioning.  This Polish movie, with subtitles in English, has been posted in full on Youtube here by its studio.  I watched the whole thing last night.  

It is a fair chunk of movie.  I have never really seen a film set in Pharaonic Egypt that had any intellectual heft, or pretended to.  This movie is an exception.  It’s based on a Polish novel, by Boleslaw Prus, about a fictional Pharaoh Ramses XIII at the close of the Twentieth Dynasty.  Egypt was a weak and imperiled state then, in comparison to the Nineteenth Dynasty, and Prus used Egypt as a setting to examine state power itself.  Although popular, it appears to be a dense and cerebrally focused novel, if the film is any basis for comparison.  

Assuming that the film’s story was streamlined and dumbed down, it’s hard to imagine how much rougher the going was with the novel.  The film is turgid to the point of dullness, and yet I was somehow drawn to keep watching through to the end.  Part of that was that one of the characters was named Pentuer, and I expected this was meant to be this Pentawer and thus that he was going to get horribly buried alive, so I thought that was worth sticking around for.  That never happened.  

It is hard to know whether to recommend this movie.  It’s certainly beautiful, packed with carefully researched props, costumes and location shots.  It’s also very much a period piece from Eastern Europe in the ’60s.  But it is nice to watch a movie set in ancient Egypt that actually takes its setting and subject seriously.