Joe Ades

Watch the late Joe Ades in action and try to imagine resisting his sales pitch.

RIP, Joe Ades (kottke.org)

[The peeler is now available from Amazon.]

Review: Leave Me Alone!

[Harvey Pekar and Harvey Pekar.]

Leave Me Alone! A Jazz Opera in Two Acts
Streamed live from Oberlin College, January 31, 2009

Leave Me Alone! seems to me to add up to less than the sum of its parts, the parts being Harvey Pekar's libretto and Dan Plonsey's music (with additional words by the principals' spouses, Mantra Ben-ya'akova Plonsey and Joyce Brabner, and additional music by Josh Smith). Pekar's stated intention, to create an opera about the fate of the avant-garde and "the problems faced by turn of the 21st century artists in general," feels unrealized in performance: what I saw and heard on my laptop (in what appears to have been the opera's sole planned performance) is less an inquiry into artistic production and reception and more an examination of problems in the lives of Harvey Pekar and Dan Plonsey: day jobs, domestic quarrels over chores, opossums in the basement. The opera's final moments enact a squabble between the Plonseys over ibuprofen dosage. Earlier, a recorded telephone conversation between Pekar and Robert Crumb lets us hear Crumb's skepticism about whether the opera-in-progress is going to work. "A buck is a buck, man," says Pekar, who spends most of his time on stage sitting on a couch reading.

The four-singer cast works gamely, with movement and masks adding interest here and there. But the libretto — e.g., "Music is against system, even when employing systematic elements" — often leaves little room for expressive singing.

Bright moments: Dan Plonsey's music, with deep influences from Charles Mingus and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; Joyce Brabner's monologue, offering another perspective on the Pekar-Brabner household; and the work of the instrumentalists, particularly the tenor saxophonist, who contributed a volcanic, voluminous opening solo. (Was it Josh Smith? The credits are vague.)

[Corrections: Co-Musical Director Daniel Michalak notes that Dan Plonsey played the opening solo. (I wish I'd been able to see that!) And there were five singers in all.]

Leave Me Alone! (Real Time Opera)
Dan Plonsey (composer's site)

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts

Erica, Erika

The New York Times Corrections column makes for unpredictably enjoyable reading:

An article on Jan. 11 about the television show United States of Tara, whose protagonist has dissociative identity disorder (once known as multiple personality disorder), misidentified a soap opera character who has the illness and the actress who portrays her. Viki Lord Davidson, a character on ABC's One Life to Live played by Erika Slezak, has the disorder — not Erica Kane, a character on ABC's All My Children portrayed by Susan Lucci.

The Four (at Least) Faces of Tara (New York Times)

My friend Stefan Hagemann caught this mistake last month. Stefan, feel vindicated!

[The Times correction links to the wrong article; I've linked to the right one above.]

George Schneeman (1934-2009)

[Window. Color photocopy, 2006.]

The painter George Schneeman died a few days ago:

If George Schneeman was an “unfairly obscure” painter, as The New Yorker once called him, he did not mind it very much.

For Mr. Schneeman, making art was a deeply personal act, though also a highly social one. He was known in an intimate New York circle for his long, fruitful collaborations with a flock of well-known poets, among them Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin and Ted Berrigan.

George Schneeman obituary (New York Times)
George Schneeman slide show (New York Times)

Plagiarism policy plagiarized?

There's a Little Rascals short, Hook and Ladder (1932), in which the kids spot a fire in the firehouse. "Fire in the firehouse!" they shout.

If Southern Illinois University had a firehouse, it would be burning today. The committee developing a university-wide plagiarism policy appears to have plagiarized Indiana University's plagiarism policy.

Here's the relevant passage from Indiana:

Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else's work, including the work of other students, as one's own. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged, unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from course to course.

a. A student must not adopt or reproduce ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, or pictures of another person without acknowledgment.

b. A student must give credit to the originality of others and acknowledge indebtedness whenever:

(1) directly quoting another person's actual words, whether oral or written;

(2) using another person's ideas, opinions, or theories;

(3) paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written;

(4) borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; or

(5) offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

And now behold the following passage from Southern's draft policy, offered without attribution:

Plagiarism is presenting another existing work, original ideas, or creative expressions as one's own without proper attribution. Any ideas or materials taken from another source, including one's own work, must be fully acknowledged unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from subject to subject. To avoid plagiarizing, one must not adopt or reproduce material from existing work without acknowledging the original source. Existing work includes but is not limited to ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, and pictures. Examples of plagiarism, subject to interpretation, include but are not limited to directly quoting another's actual words, whether oral or written; using another's ideas, opinions, or theories; paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written; borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; and offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

Says Arthur M. "Lain" Adkins, chair of the SIU committee that created the draft policy, "It could be a coincidence."

Says SIU administrator David West, "We think this is a non-story. It hasn't become official yet. If there's a problem with the draft, we will correct it."

As a college prof, I'm familiar with student use of coincidence and draft defenses. They don't work. Words and phrases and sentences don't organize themselves into parallel series as a matter of coincidence. And when work is submitted for critical evaluation, it becomes something more than a draft. Saying that one hasn't yet added the necessary citation defies any measure of what's plausible. SIU's draft policy has been publicly available for download, as its creators sought comment from the university community. USA Today reports that SIU's trustees will be voting later this spring.

Read more:

SIU accused of copying plagiarism policy, with links to relevant documents as PDFs (The Daily Egyptian)
Southern Illinois' plagiarism policy appears plagiarized (USA Today)

A related post
"Local Norms" and "'organic' attribution"

A few words from Harvey Pekar

One of my favorite moments in the film American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) comes from Harvey Pekar's story "Alice Quinn" (words by Pekar, art by Sue Cavey). Pekar has been thinking about a college classmate and "all the decades of people" he has known:

The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand-new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

Leave Me Alone!, a jazz opera by Pekar and Dan Plonsey, streams from Oberlin College tomorrow night, 8:00 EST.

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts

Naming names

People mentioned by name in Rod Blagojevich's closing argument to the Illinois Senate:

Phil Bredesen : George W. Bush : John Cullerton : Jimmy DeLeo : Willie Delgado : Dick Durbin : David Ellis : Rahm Emanuel : John Glenn : William Holland : Ted Kennedy : John McCain : Bob Menendez : Barack Obama : Harry Reid : Bill Richardson : Elizabeth Taylor : John Warner

Yes, Elizabeth Taylor.

Homonym accident

From a Rural King circular.


Related post
No job too small

Snowbound

(A house, in the village.)

MAN
    My little house must think it queer
    To watch my woods fill up with snow.

(He looks out his window, at his woods, distant, wistful. Curtain.)

Life imitating life

"Let me make this perfectly clear. Let me make this perfectly clear: I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing."

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, on The View this morning, after declining an invitation to do his (reportedly great) Nixon impersonation