A couple of years ago, at the height of the #MeToo movement, when I found myself accusing myself of complicity in the case of the Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, an abuser I sort of knew was an abuser but whose victims I never gave any thought to, I mentioned some video I'd seen of him rehearsing the soprano Kathleen Battle, as an example of how an artist who is a bad man can also be a good man, and a great artist can also be a person of extraordinary tenderness and generosity, on the job, but I didn't post the video, or even look for it, and I just happened to run across some of the same tape, a longer thing featuring not only Battle but also the wondrous Jessye Norman, in the 1988 Met production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and I wanted to post it now, for the record, by way of trying to explain the thing I couldn't articulate. I guess that means open thread.
Showing posts with label sexual assault. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexual assault. Show all posts
Saturday, August 10, 2019
For the Record: Rehearsal
A couple of years ago, at the height of the #MeToo movement, when I found myself accusing myself of complicity in the case of the Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, an abuser I sort of knew was an abuser but whose victims I never gave any thought to, I mentioned some video I'd seen of him rehearsing the soprano Kathleen Battle, as an example of how an artist who is a bad man can also be a good man, and a great artist can also be a person of extraordinary tenderness and generosity, on the job, but I didn't post the video, or even look for it, and I just happened to run across some of the same tape, a longer thing featuring not only Battle but also the wondrous Jessye Norman, in the 1988 Met production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and I wanted to post it now, for the record, by way of trying to explain the thing I couldn't articulate. I guess that means open thread.
Monday, December 4, 2017
Complicity: Totebaggers edition
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| Riverside Park South, December 3, where apparently spontaneous sculptures rhyming with the remains of old piers have popped out of the rocks. |
Remember Congressman Gerry Studds (D-MA), who was censured by the House in 1983 for having an "inappropriate relationship" with a (male) House page and then regularly reelected by the good folk of his South Shore and Cape Cod district six times, till he retired in 1997? NPR brought him up as a kind of bothsiderist counterpoint, I think, to Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, exemplifying how
Justice has been swift for some of the men accused of sexual harassment in media and entertainment. But in politics the consequences haven't been as swift or decisive. The biggest reason: democracy.Voters are slow to react, unlike the brave people in public broadcasting—it's been some season for them, with revelations of the abuses of PBS's Charlie Rose, NPR's Garrison Keillor and Michael Oreskes, and WNYC's John Hockenberry, previously thought to have gotten the sack last summer because he was getting so terrible at his job, which was also true (and a miscreant against women on the air, constantly interrupting, dismissing and mansplaining, as listeners could have told and possibly did tell them years ago)—and today's Alabamians are no different from yesteryear's Cape Codders.
Naturally I think there's something else going on there, which is about the march of cultural change in the first place.
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