I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JAN VOGLER AND ALESSIO BAX-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #128 (December 16, 2020).

This is the third of three Tiny Desk Home Concerts to honor Beethoven’s 250th birth anniversary. This was my favorite. The first was just piano the second was a quartet of strings.  But this one, a combination of the two, was the most exciting.  I love the way the cello (Vogler) played off of the piano (Bax).

For this Tiny Desk (home) concert, we pay a visit to the doctor’s office. Actually, the venue is called Rare Violins of New York and it’s something of a second home to cellist Jan Vogler, who pops in frequently to have the experts give his 1708 Stradivarius cello a thorough checkup. If your multi-million-dollar fiddle has a cough or the sniffles, or even needs a full-blown restoration, Rare Violins, which sits just a block away from Carnegie Hall, can help. The firm also has a lovely music room, kitted out with a fine piano – something Vogler lacks at his place.  With help from the fine pianist Alessio Bax, Vogler makes a convincing case for Beethoven as one of the great heroes of the cello. Beethoven, whose 250th birthday falls this week, wrote five cello sonatas, plus other works for the instrument, which, before his time, was primarily relegated to beefing up the bass line in various chamber music situations.

Beethoven, in essence, liberated the cello. Listen to how it dances and struts in the opening scherzo from the Sonata in A, Op. 69.

“Cello Sonata in A, Op. 69: II. Scherzo” starts with a piano and the cello quickly jumps back in.  The song builds and swells and then quiets down to a pretty piano and cello melody.

Like Jonathan Biss, these two are very chatty. They are mostly chatty with each other, but they do direct their answers to the camera sometimes too.

Up next is a short piece from the beginning of his career “12 Variations on a Theme from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus: Variation XI: Adagio.”   In this piece the cello “sings sweetly.”  Vogler says that Beethoven was friendly with a fantastic cellist and he may have inspired the composer to write more pieces for the cello.

Although the piece starts with a lovely piano intro and has several moments of just piano, the cello adds so much to it.

Before the final song the two talk about how the pandemic has changed them and what they are looking forward to doing when it is over.

And finally there’s the opening to Beethoven’s last cello sonata, which Bax — whose role is far more than just an accompanist here — says is compact with emotion, yet “stretches the boundaries” for the instrument.

“Cello Sonata in D, Op. 102: I. Allegro con brio” feels like a call and response–two instruments in conversation.  And they had a lot to say.

[READ: December 20, 2020] The Disaster Tourist

In continuing with my around-the-world reading, I picked up this novel that was originally written in Korean (translated by Lizzie Buehler).

This story sounded really weird and interesting.

Yona works for a company called Jungle which specializes in offering vacations in areas that have suffered a disaster.

On a disaster trip, travellers reactions usually went through these stages

shock; sympathy and compassion, maybe discomfortable gratefulness at their own lives; a sense of responsibility that they’d learned a lesson and maybe a feeling of superiority for having survived where others didn’t.

For instance, a tsunami had hit Jinhae–in an instant everything was underwater.  Yona travelled there because Jungle currently didn’t offer any tours there.  But they would soon.  Yona would give donations and offer condolences to the community.  Then she would create a vacation package that involved viewing the aftermath along with volunteer work.

Yona had worked at Jungle for over ten years.  She was something of a star.  But apparently, her star was starting to fade because she had all of sudden been asked to handle some customer service phone calls–never a good sign.

Things got even worse when a supervisor named Kim got on the elevator with her.  He said:

Johnson is asking me to send my greetings to you.
Who?
Johnson.  My Johnson. Kim pointed to his crotch.

At this point I had to wonder.  Is this level of harassment something that happens in Korea?  Is this  shocking incident for any reader?  Is this a hyper real fiction in which everything is just a bit beyond reality?  I don’t know.

Then Kim grabs her bottom and put his hand in her blouse.  The gesture suggested that Kim didn’t care if he was caught.

Yona was upset, but not because of the sexual assault. Because Kim was known to only target has-beens.

She complained to HR.  But she learned that victims who complained to HR somehow learned about each others problems–the secrets were not so secret.

Another weird moment happens when the other victims invites Yona to lunch with them. They try to get her to stand up against Kim with them.  She refuses to get involved and when she leaves another customer has walked off wearing Yona’s shoes.  The owner blames her for not putting her shoes in the rack properly.

This is weird, but even weirder was

The shoes she had lost were actually part of a pair and a half.  The store she’d bought them from offered a second right shoe for free with the purchase of each pair.

Again … what?

The whole story has a surreal air to it.

The next day Kim gives her a kind of ultimatum. He wants her to test one of their failing packages.  As a customer, not an employee.  Jungle will pay for everything.  They want a report on her experience.

This means that her Jinhae project was going to go to someone else–her replacement had been given an already complete project that she worked very hard on.

She decided to go on the Desert Sinkhole package.  It wa trip to a place called Mui–an island near the southern part of Vetnam.  It was not a popular package–the scenery wasn’t very exciting and it took a long time to get there.

There had been a sinkhole on Mui once and it had been frightening and deadly, but that was a long time ago.

The trip to Mui is as bizarre as the book might lead you to expect. She gets a luxury resort but there are hardly any people there.  One of the resort’s unique feature was two enormous lights shaped like eyes that hung from the front:  Close both means do not disturb; open both means please clean.  But outside it gave everything a very surreal look.

Yona mixes with the other travellers.  There’s a writer and a teacher.  The teacher brought her young daughter with her.  The daughter was full of questions all the time–she drove everyone mental with her constant nagging of Why Why Why.

Yona understood why this package was so dreadful.  The only event wa a recreation of the 1963 head hunting tragedy.

Then things go south for Yona.  She gets lost from the group and she loses her passport and her phone.  She no way to contact Jungle and no way to prove who she is. She is in dire straits until someone tells her she need to talk to Paul.

Paul is connected to everything here.  In fact she soon learns that Paul is a large corporation which owns just about everything on Mui.  Once she learns this, she becomes an insider to some upcoming plans.

And the plans are shocking–a way for Mui to capitalize on a past disaster by creating a new disaster.

The writer is actually not a vacationer.  He is creating the script that the citizens will follow.  The script will have everything a disaster needs to get people to come see it.  That includes All of th epeople on the island, including Yoni herself.

Yona’s insider information will allow her to pitch the tour to Jungle even before the disaster happens.  How often does one get to know exactly when the disaster will strike and to be ready for it?

But sometimes even a script can go wrong. Even if you think you are the star character.

So, yes this story was very bizarre.  Interestingly not a lot happened.  It was more of a cerebral look at disasters.

There were a lot of things that seemed to come up and then fade away somewhat unresolved or dismissed quickly.  I felt like I was going from one weird situation to another, which wasn’t unpleasant but which never really felt satisfying.

I do wonder when I read something like this if it’s a cultural difference that prevents me from fully getting the book.  Or maybe this writer is just writing a bizarre story.  I’m curious what other readers think.