Squid Game

Netflix is moving ahead big time. It's right up there now with other agencies that blur the line between popular culture and corporate power, like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Youtube, all natural-born children of the internet. This latest contribution to the phenomenon of bingeing shows that it has made a brilliant move in terms of commercial success by expanding beyond the borders of the U.S. and of the English-speaking world. Squid Game is a local Korean production that has exploded into the largest-selling Netflix streaming offering of all time.

The question is why, and I don't have the answer. It won't surprise me to see reviews and commentary popping up that go on about the fall of civilization. Squid Game is about people in Korea who have fallen on hard times and are recruited into playing a series of games which, if they win, will provide them with a fortune. And if they lose, they will be shot and killed. Or dropped from a great height and killed. Or killed in bloody face-to-face encounters by their friends and loved ones.

It is listed as a horror film. I think that's the wrong category to place it in.  A more appropriate label for the genre, I think, would be sadism.

Intellectually, you can come to its defense and claim it's too artfully made, too original, to be reduced to sadism pure and simple. It can be seen as a satire of capitalism, where some people are reduced to abject poverty and others get so rich that wealth comes to bore them and the only way they can entertain themselves when their cars and yachts and bigger houses no longer satisfy, and their need for novelty is so inflated, is to watch people they see as losers claw and club each other to death over money. 

If you have never given serious thought to the mentality of ancient Rome, where rulers kept their people under control by "bread and circus," circus being watching the losers of society being eaten alive by lions, now's your chance to direct your thoughts in that direction.  If you've never marveled at the willingness of one gladiator to hack off the limbs of other gladiators, ask yourself why. How have we managed to avoid the cynicism out there that makes us see all human life as little more than a casual encounter between those lucky enough to get ahead and those who, through physical or mental weakness, or simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are randomly selected for destruction?

All morally justified by the possibility that a good performance can be rewarded with a "thumbs up" that will release the victim from the fate of death.

The question I'd like answered is this one. Is Squid Game being watched because people appreciate its original approach to satire? - it's nothing if not original. Or because we have arrived at the same place the Romans did when they set up the Colosseum to entertain themselves by watching other people suffer and die? There might well be a third or fourth possibility, but at the moment, I can't for the life of me think what that might be.

One can't help marveling at the fact that Squid Game starts off with a warning that the film shows people smoking. And at the fact that it is being watched all over the world by large audiences and that people are buying costumes worn by the guards who shoot the game losers to wear at Hallowe'en, that nobody seems too concerned that in a satire on capitalism, the promoters are boasting of the profits the series is bringing to the investors at Netflix. You can't make this stuff up.

I contributed to this exercise in absurdity. I went back and watched the whole nine episodes after getting into a discussion with friends who were wondering what it was all about and why it was getting so much traction. I decided I needed to know what the hullabaloo was all about. I had earlier turned it off after one episode, not just because of the violence, but because I really hate the histrionic Korean style of acting which involves shouting at the top of your lungs, pushing your face into all sorts of contortions, groveling on the ground when asking for favors and other examples of a lack of irony and subtlety. Not my cup of tea. Nothing against Koreans. Maybe there is plenty of subtlety in Korean theatre and I've just been looking at the wrong stuff. But Squid Game did nothing to alter my biased view, if that's what it is. In fact, it has set it back years.

There are other things wrong with the story. Clumsy plot line, things that don't make sense. But spending time critiquing them is on the same level as warning viewers they might encounter smoking in any given episode where they will witness characters they've come to care for get a bullet to the forehead.

By all means watch it so you'll be able to join in when it comes up as a topic. If you've seen slasher films and are, like most people today, inured to blood and violence, have at it. And do tell me, please, if you think I've got this take all wrong.

But don't say I didn't warn you.

photo credit: this image is all over the place, and I can't find the original source. Sorry. It depicts the contestants in green uniforms trying to solve a puzzle. The figures in red are the guards ready to shoot them if (and, in most cases, when) they fail.

Pflicht

Growing up semi-bilingual - my German never actually reached the level of my English - I learned early on that certain words are difficult to translate. You can get the general idea, the denotation, across. But the connotations often don't survive the transfer. The expression "lost in translation" is not an idle notion.

In later years, after I had spent years in Japan and acquired a better than entry-level familiarity with the Japanese language, I added other untranslatables to the pile. "Ikenai" - literally "that doesn't go" - for example. Mothers say that all the time to their kids. A translation that gets a little closer to the Japanese might be "People don't do that!" In Japan - at least in the Japan I first got to know half a century ago - the importance of not looking bad in the eyes of your neighbors carried a hell of a lot more weight than it did in other places I had spent any length of time. I might even make an argument that when a mother says "ikenai" to her kids, what she's actually saying is "don't you dare embarrass me in the eyes of everybody we know."

"Komaru" is another of those words. In my head, I hear "I am having a hard time with this." It's a verb with a very broad semantic range. It covers everything from distressed to troubled to inconvenienced to embarrassed and at a loss. When it's time to harness the dogs for a walk, and they fail to line up fast enough to satisfy my Japanese husband's sense of proper dog behavior, he scolds them with "Komaru yo!" (I am "komaru!")

From my German grandmother, I learned such concepts as "Ordnung" - "order" - as in "Ordnung muss sein!" - "there must be order."  I once heard her describe the bedrooms of my sister and me as "Sodom and Gomorrah." She liked things to be in their proper place. Another German concept was "Disziplin" - discipline. As in, "if you haven't got it, you're of no use to anybody, including yourself!"

And my grandmother came immediately to mind when I saw this sign the other day,

English: STOP! From here on, the wearing of a mouth-and-nose covering is a DUTY (sic - all caps)!

Modern Germans, like modern Americans, are more likely to respond to carrots than to sticks, so it's now not unlikely you'll see this sign instead:

Same icon with face mask, only this time the imperative is a polite one. Note the use of "thank you." (And, of course, the presence of an English translation suggests the people posting the sign are addressing an international audience. And that begs the question of whether the first one, in German only, comes from a mindset that assumes when one shouts "Achtung!" everyone within hearing will jump immediately to attention.

In any case, the first one reminds me of my grandmother. There's no "please," no "thank you." 

There's simply that wonderful German word "Pflicht" - "duty".

One can almost hear the second part of that command:

"Violators will be shot!"

She was a loving lady, not militarily inclined in the least. But she was a native speaker of the German language, and imprinted on me not just a lot of everyday German vocabulary items, but a whole bunch of unspoken connotations, as well.

Kerson Leong

Kerson Leong

Don't know if this is a trend, or just a nice coincidence, but I love the idea of Canada - what's not to love about Canada? - being a place where Asian families can immigrate to and produce brilliant young musicians. I know, I know.  One sweetly twittering birdie does not a springtime make. Or two, for that matter. But after going off the deep end over Montreal Canadian Bruce Xiaoyu Liu at the Chopin Competition this month, I am now grooving over another Chinese Canadian - this one from Ottawa, I believe, also really easy on the eyes, whose mode of seduction is the violin.

His name is Kerson Leong. For a little background, click here.

Here he is playing Zigeunerweisen, that honey-on-sugar-cubes overschmalzed Hungarian tune erroneously attributed to Gypsies by the Spanish composer, Pablo de Sarasate, back in the 1870s. Everybody knows the tune. It's an oh-so-Hungarian (think Liszt's Rhapsodies) romanticizing of the Gypsy Life (Zigeunerleben), the German analogue to Stephen Foster's Old Kentucky Home where "tis summer and the darkies are gay."  Today Zigeuner is a word effectively banned as insensitive in modern-day German. The traditional "Gypsy Sauce" is going the way of Aunt Jemima and Eskimo Pies and being replaced by "Paprika Sauce."  

But I digress. Here's Kerson playing "Gypsy Airs," using the "traditional" word (Zigeuner) for gypsy.

And it's a toss-up which part of the whole I love most. The beautiful young face, the music, the patent leather shoes, the virtuosity at the violin...

I guess I'd have to say the shirt.

I've got to get that shirt to wear at weddings and parties.

Once again, Zigeunerweisen. Click and swoon.

photo credit

XVIII Konkurs Chopinowski*

 Bruce Liu, on hearing 
he's the first prize
winner

I feel I've just come back from music camp and I'm so filled with music that I'm seriously disoriented. I don't know how to get back to life as normal. Taku tells me it's time I focused on some of the things around the house begging for attention - the kitchen drain keeps backing up and we probably need a new garbage disposal - it will be our fourth! And the busted recessed light over the kitchen sink is crying equally loudly for an electrician. But I've been listening to Chopin's études, mazurkas, polonaises, sonatas, nocturnes, preludes and impromptus for two weeks now - almost morning till night, and the expression "from the sublime to the ridiculous" has taken on new relevance as a summation of the absurdity of life.

The hardest part of the experience is recognizing that my friends, bless their hearts, by and large, don't seem to want to put their lives on hold and listen to four to six hours of Chopin all day every day, and I've had to go this alone. Not that my friends don't like Chopin; it's that most of them have lives. Some actually go to work.

No matter. I have been following the competition practically from when it started, nineteen days ago on the 2nd of this month, gradually gathering steam, learning more than I ever thought I would about Chopin and his music and watching the pool of some 150 wannabes in the preliminaries get whittled down to 87 pianists from 18 countries for the first round, then 45 for the second, 23 for the third, and 12 for the final round. By the time they reached the final round I felt I had a personal connection with all the contestants and - from the privacy of my room where I can choke and tear up at will - I began seeing them all as my kids. I picked a favorite - Bruce Liu - early on - and tried to persuade myself it was his beautiful hands making beautiful music that was the sole criterion, but I knew down there somewhere inside I was also being drawn to him as a sympathetic dude from Montreal, charming as he is handsome, and I'd make an absolutely terrible judge.

But picking a favorite among such talents seems crass, somehow. It's like being asked to choose your favorite child, your favorite dog, your favorite finger on your right hand. You don't have a favorite, in the end. You thank the stars you are not on the jury of world-class Chopinists choosing the latest to join their ranks. The Warsaw Competition is right up there with the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow that Americans - well, this American, at least - became aware of back in 1958, when the prize went to Van Cliburn. I was 18 years old and at the point of recognizing that my brief glory days as a pianist and organist were in fact never going to take me into the major league. I was always going to be an enthusiastic listener, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Today I have absolutely no sense of having missed out. I am delighted that I got a good music education as a child in the public schools of Winsted, Connecticut. These days at the top of the list of the many ways my country is messed up is the way in which it distributes its wealth so badly that it keeps its military and its corporate executives going strong all the while insisting that civics, art and music classes are luxuries we cannot afford. I don't know how many others around the world and in the United States were glued to YouTube these past three weeks, but I wish the whole world might have put things on hold to share in this breathtaking adventure. I take great consolation in the fact that since these performances are available on YouTube, they should eventually reach a much greater number than they have so far.

I've always loved Chopin, but until this experience, when asked to name my favorite composer I would say Brahms or Rachmaninoff. Chopin was always a bit too much on the flowery side to take the number one position. I'm not sure I want to revise my list - the metaphor of having to choose a favorite finger holds in this case, as well. But I am humbled by having been exposed to so many more of Chopin's compositions into realizing I simply didn't know enough to be even close to making an educated assessment. In any case, I will always appreciate the fact that it was Chopin who made piano music what it is today. Nobody composed more - or better - for the piano.

What struck me most about the contestants was how young they are. 

The twelve finalists, listed from youngest to oldest with their birthdays are:

Eva Gevorgyan - April 15, 2004
JJ Jun Li Bui - June 10, 2004
Hao Rao - February 4, 2004

Hyuk Lee - January 4, 2000
Kamil Pacholec - November 11, 1998
Bruce Liu - May 8, 1997
Jakub Kaszlik - December 23, 1996
Martín García García - December 3, 1996
Aimi Kobayashi - September 23, 1995
Alexander Gadjiev - December 24, 1994
Kyohei Sorita - September 1, 1994
Leonora Armellini - June 25, 1992

(for a complete list of competitors, click here)

The average of all the birth years is 1997.8, which means the oldest, Leonora, just turned 29 this summer,  the youngest three are only 17 and the median and average age is around 23. This is a competition among young folk, many of whom have been playing since they were prodigies. I think I can be forgiven for thinking of them as my "kids." On the basis of age, they could all be my grandkids!

When I began tuning in to actual performances, I listened to some of the 87 of the first round quite at random, and immediately found myself thinking, "This has got to be the winner." Then I'd hear the next one and think, "Well, maybe this one - he/she's just as good." And this went on and on, each new player wowing my socks off. I've never had this experience before, never listened to talent this conspicuous in such intensity, one after the next. I was hooked. Couldn't stop. Had to hear the next and the next and the next.

I needed a point of focus, and that became the contestants from Japan. I'm married to a Japanese, but even more significantly, I taught Japanese students, mostly undergraduates, for most of my career, and developed a sense of familiarity and affection over the years. The occasional rotten egg would show up now and again, but overwhelmingly I had the fortune of getting to know dozens and dozens - more like hundreds - of really great Japanese kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, for the most part. It was natural for me to see the twelve Japanese contenders among the initial 87 in the same light as I saw my students. Only here they were nervously putting themselves all out, showing their best sides, and absolutely shining. I found myself beaming. My kids were blowing them away!

One of the contestants, Hayato Sumino, I was already quite familiar with. I have been listening to his YouTube videos for several years now. He's a bit of a showboat, but his brilliance never fails to get your attention. He's very versatile, does jazz piano as well as classical, plays around, even playing duets with himself on the Steinway and a toy piano simultaneously, and although I began tuning out when he got overly chummy (and I think intellectually lazy) with his fans, I never stopped tuning in when he played seriously. I had a contestant to root for.

In time, however, I began to realize there were other Japanese that could more than match him. Kyohei Sorita first caught my attention, then Aimi Kobayashi. When these two made the finalist list and Hayato (who goes by the nickname "Cateen") didn't, I realized I was using YouTube as a filter without a lot of justification. Young talent commonly fail to get the attention it deserves. Kyohei and Aimi are well known in Japan, it turns out. Just not by me. And there in a nutshell is sufficient reason for holding competitions like this one in Warsaw. These kids need to be put on stage and heard perform. If I could go back in time, I would attend the Hamamatsu and Sendai competitions in Japan as well as any others within reach over the years.

By the time the twelve finalists got to perform, I had had time to expand beyond the Japanese contestants. I was now familiar with Leonora, from Italy, with Alexander from the border town and his dual Slovenian-Italian identity, the Spaniard, Martín García García, who delighted me no end with the way he bounced in his seat, tossed his head back and forth and hummed along. I remember reading about how Glenn Gould used to hum unconsciously along with his playing and engineers making recordings of his performances frequently had to stop him and start over. It was a bit annoying when I first saw Martín do the same thing, but this quickly turned into something too charming for words. How could you fail to appreciate an artist so into his own playing that he can't stop singing along?

Other trivia caught my attention. Like how many East Asians were present. In my own lifetime, I remember (in about 1970) NHK putting programs on television instructing audiences how to applaud. I found this hilarious, and maybe a bit embarrassing. But more recently a friend invited me over to hear Chinese audiences learning to appreciate Western classical music, and I realize how recently Asians have started breaking into the field, and how they are taking (have taken) it over with a vengeance. I mean that positively. It's hardly a hostile takeover; they're adding so much to what Europeans and Americans have called their own cultural possession for centuries and have made it truly universal. And I have to mention, along that line, that half of the twelve finalists are East Asian, ethnically, and that the two Canadians among the finalists are both ethnically Chinese - and one of them, Bruce Liu, is the gold prize winner. Bruce was born in Paris and raised in Montreal, and one has to add "cosmopolitan" to the list of adjectives he might use in boasting about himself, if he were so inclined. They tell me he is not so inclined.

While I'm chuffed as hell that Bruce won first prize (those hands! how could you not love those hands!) I'm also aware that were he not in the contest Kyohei Sorita would surely have won it. Luck of the draw. It's always that way. When you leave the judging of world-class performances in the hands of judges, no matter how sharp their powers of observation, it's always a subjective decision. I trust Kyohei - and Aimi as well - are just getting started, and I've got people to watch closely in the years to come.

Don't know how many years I have left.

I'm glad I lived long enough to have had this, my very own Chopin music camp, in the privacy of my bedroom, where I could choke up and tear up, and stifle sobs - long ago having learned that I don't cry that much with grief, and not at all with sadness. But beauty opens the ducts like nobody's business.

What a couple of weeks!

*I posted my last blog entry under the mixed English-Polish title of Chopinowski Competition. I thought this time I'd go all the way.

photo credit

Chopinowski Competition

For anybody tired of standing in line to get a flu shot, tired of people reminding you that Trump could become president again in 2024, tired of hearing how the Republican Party is now working full time to remove the right of black people to vote and how the Supreme Court could very well remove the possibility of poor women getting access to an abortion (rich women can afford to travel to Mexico), let me suggest you turn your attention to the 18th Annual International Chopin Piano Competition (XVIII Międzynarodowy Konkurs Pianistyczny im. Fryderyka Chopina, if your Polish is up to snuff) going on as we speak now in Warsaw. I promise you you won't be sorry. You may, if you're inclined to tear up at the exquisite, find yourself balling your eyes out. So much beauty has never come out of a Steinway or a Yamaha. Well, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but only just a bit.

For a full report, click here.  Or read on.

The first round of 180 contestants performed back in April. Half of those went on to the second round, known as the "Main Event" which began four days ago, October 2. It consists of three stages first with around 80, then 40, then 20 contestants each and a final stage with ten pianists.

I found a list of 87 contestants and zeroed in just on the Japanese ones, since they include some of the pianists I have followed for some time and gotten to be very fond of. There are twelve of them and they include one of my top two favorites: Hayato Sumino (aka Cateen). Fantastic as he is, if I read the results right, he didn't make it to the second round. Shows you how high the bar is!

STOP THE PRESSES.  MY BAD!!! Cateen DID make it to the second round, along with seven other of the Japanese contestants. Sorry for my error.

Just saw an interview with Garrick Ohlsson where he said, in response to a question about whether he was going to listen to the competition this year, "No." Too much of a good thing. I got to that point myself. Like dining on a banquet table with nothing laid out in front of you but an unlimited supply of chocolate ice cream. Had to jump to something mundane - like Chris Hayes' speculation that Tucker Carlson's head might be on the chopping block at Fox because of the sheer amount of misinformation on Covid he puts out there. Hayes believes Tucker is so over the top that even Fox is going to have to shut him down.

Garrick Ohlsson also related a wonderful tidbit about what a snob Chopin was. Referring to Liszt, he apparently once said, "Get that pig out of my garden."

What a world, where Chopin can call Liszt a pig.

Meanwhile, back down here on Planet Earth I can groove on the fact that in Russian, the genitive masculine adjective ending ends in -ego, but it's pronounced -evo for some crazy reason. The Poles apparently have the same -ego ending but it's pronounced -ego.

Must find out why the Russians have that peculiar feature. And why in Slavic languages surnames are adjectives. And that's why Mr. Tchaikovskii is Tchaikovskii and his missus is Madame Tchaikovskaya.

And when you look at her you're looking at Madame Tchaikovskuyu.

In any case, this is the 18th Konkurs (Competition) Chopinowski.

Just love that.

 I won't post links to any of the concerts. They're all online. All of them. You can find them easily on YouTube. Just type in some Polish - like Chopinowski. Or Chopinowskego, if you prefer addressing him in the genitive.

Or you could just start here to get yesterday's morning session. You’ll easily find your way from there to the other dozens of hours of c̶h̶o̶c̶o̶l̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶a̶m̶ Chopin etudes, ballads, waltzes, etc. 

And brilliant young people to make you feel a whole lot better about the world.



.







.

Bye bye, Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson is now leaving the stage. He's retiring from the 700 Club, the popular TV program he hosted on the Christian Broadcasting Network he built with the profits from his diamond mine in Africa. Which he bought with the widows' mites he fleeced from the innocents in his audience who believed their responses to his televangelist appeals for cash were a way of bringing about God's kingdom on this earth.

The world can only wish him a speedy journey into oblivion.

I learned a lot about power from this man and how it works. When he exercised the power he had from the millions of dollars he earned preaching to the religiously gullible, he was a dangerous evil man, somebody to fear and work to oppose. Gay people suffered greatly from his pronouncements in the days when he was taken seriously by mainstream America. He regularly preached that gays were responsible for hurricanes and maybe even a meteor. And even claimed that they wore special rings designed to cut into people's flesh and give them AIDS. And, more recently, that they also brought on Covid.

Despite the fact that he wrapped himself in the banner of Christianity, his views of God were purely that of an Old Testament god of wrath who inflicted punishment, not a god of love, forgiveness and compassion. But those views are also shared by a large segment of the American evangelical population, or his message would have fallen on deaf ears. He's not alone in his folly; it takes two to tango.

As the gay liberation movement in the U.S. and other modern nations came of age, it became clear that he was little more than a clown, and not a particularly clever one. Gays were not the only people to laugh at him. Blacks too (and the general population, for that matter) saw the fool in him when he pronounced the Black Lives Matter movement a movement to bring about a "lesbian Marxist revolution."

People focused too much on the fact that he was a Trump supporter, and not enough on the fact that the reason for his support was his belief that Trump would bring on Armageddon. 

In any case, he's gone. And like with the urine stains my dogs left on our carpet when they were still puppies, it will take some scrubbing to erase his memory.

But the stains are gone.

And I trust the memory of this clown, too, will fade in short order.