TUAA: Talk Back with Bob Saget

Tonight I attended my first Temple University alumni event in over a year. The last event I made it to was the Dodgers-Phillies game on my birthday last year (8/11/08). The last event I blogged about was the first alumni event I ever attended, when they put on this great shindig at the Getty Center, one of my favorite cultural venues in L.A., in December 2007. The L.A. chapter of TUAA (Temple University Alumni Association) typically puts on one event per quarter, sometimes two. I think last winter they hosted two events, both of them college basketball viewing parties at some sports bar or other. One of them was in Long Beach on a Sunday, which I couldn't make both because it conflicted with football Sunday and because I don't otherwise feel like driving that far on a Sunday. The other one was in Hollywood, which is close, but I think it was on a weekday night and I didn't have the energy. I'm not a big college b-ball fan anyways.

I'm very impressed with TUAA LA. They definitely have their ducks in a row, what with their Facebook page, their e-mail communications, and the variety of events they put on. A year ago May they had a cheesesteak and wine tasting party at the house of a Temple dental school alum in Encino. That still ranks as the best cheesesteak I've had since moving to L.A. eleven years ago. As much as I enjoyed tonight, I have to put it second to the Getty Center event. My father, a professor at Temple, is blown away by the kind of outreach this Philadelphia university has. His jaw dropped when I told him Temple has over three thousand alums in Southern California. I have to say I was a bit surprised too when I first read that. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Temple prides itself on its School of Communications and Theater, which was my school. At every alumni event I see a good share of SCT folks. You can tell by the label on their shirt that includes their school as well as the year they graduated. SCT alums are everywhere. Their film department, formerly Radio-Television-Film and now called Film and Media Arts, tends to rank well in the area of documentaries. That's too bad because I'm more into feature films, storytelling, spinning my own yarns. Still, I did at least develop an interest and proficiency in the fundamentals. And I have to credit Temple for getting me interested in films made before I was born. Seriously, before Temple, if I was flipping channels and came across a black and white movie, I'd move on right away. Black and white films were anathema. Movies that weren't playing at my local multiplex must not've been worth seeing. Temple's film professors changed all that. In four short years my cultural spectrum expanded exponentially.

Tonight's event was called Talk Back with Bob Saget. You've heard of Bob Saget, right? Whenever I hear his name, I think Full House. He's done plenty since then, but Full House put him on the map. It was a sitcom that ran for eight seasons (1987-95) and almost two hundred episodes. Since 2005 he's been the narrator on How I Met Your Mother. Once in a blue moon he directs something. It's too bad he doesn't direct more, since that's why he went to Temple. He was an RTF major, class of '78. Wait a second. What am I talking about? I also majored in film at Temple and haven't directed shit. I do hope to change that with 48 Broad (http://fortyeightblog.blogspot.com/). But still, until then, how have I used that degree besides that part-time production assistant job from 2001-03? I wonder if I ever will get 48 Broad made as a feature film. I'm determined, but so many things can go wrong in making a feature. Let's put it this way: Either I will or I'll die trying.

Another cool thing about tonight's event was that it took place at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in the center of Hollywood, on Highland Ave. just north of Hollywood Blvd. This joint's still pretty new, only built in the last six or seven years or so as part of Hollywood's grand revival. If you only know Hollywood as synonymous with the movie biz, you should also know that it is a neighborhood in Los Angeles. No, it's not its own city. It used to be, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then in 1910 it was annexed by L.A. because of water supply issues. What else is new, right? The only movie studio that's actually in Hollywood, by the way, is Paramount Pictures, located on Melrose Ave. Anyway, for a long time Hollywood was a ghetto, a blight on the landscape you did everything you could to avoid. Case in point: My mom grew up in L.A. in the forties, fifties, and early sixties. Hollywood as a rubbish heap is how she remembers it. On Melrose and La Brea is a very famous hotdog joint called Pinks. It's been there since the 1930s. So you might think my mom may know of it, right? Especially since dogs and burgers are her two favorite food groups. But when I asked her during one of her visits a few summers ago, she had no idea what I was talking about. When I told her the address, she was like no wonder. Her folks avoided that part of town. Most people did, especially people from the tony Westwood neighborhood where she grew up.

Then about ten years ago or so, around the time I moved out here, the city of L.A. coughed up close to half a billion to bring Hollywood back from the dead. By 2002 or thereabouts, most of the work was done. Mind you, Hollywood definitely still has its shady side and its fair share of characters, but that central area around Hollywood and Highland has been vastly improved. And they've expanded from there, centering improvement projects around popular landmarks. The Sunset and Vine area, which includes the Cinerama Dome and the Palladium, has been rejuvenated. Old abandoned buildings have been restored as residential living spaces. The Cinerama Dome was closed in 2000 and reopened in the spring of 2002 as one part of the new ArcLight Hollywood movie theater complex. And the Palladium only just reopened this year after the Los Angeles Conservancy spearheaded its renovation (see my Last Remaining Seats posts about the Conservancy). Across from the ArcLight is a brand new complex of mixed-use residential and commercial buildings and restaurants.

A couple blocks up from Sunset and Vine is Hollywood and Vine, where you have the grand old Pantages Theatre, one of my favorite theaters, which has been beautifully preserved. It used to be a movie palace back in the day. Citizen Kane premiered there in 1941. Now it's a stage theater. I've seen stuff there like Wicked, The Lion King, Peter Pan, and The Producers. Hollywood and Vine also has the Avalon nightclub and concert venue, which reopened in September 2003 after a million-dollar renovation. So you see? Hollywood's coming back, the real Hollywood, slowly but surely.

I didn't mean to digress like that on Hollywood's decline and fall and resurgence, but the hotel I was at tonight is the biggest symbol of the renaissance of Hollywood, which is why it's too perfect that the hotel itself is called the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. So I couldn't help myself. I'm proud of L.A. and the commitment it's made to this area. After all, the very word "Hollywood" is probably this city's biggest tourist draw.

The invitation said the reception started at 6:30 p.m. and that the event would kick off at 7:30 with a speech by Temple President Ann Weaver Hart. That was how it worked at the Getty Center two years ago. I got to the Getty just as the reception started. They were holding it in the restaurant. While it was cool to be in the Getty restaurant, where normally I never go because it's pretty expensive, it was awkward as hell standing around by myself while everyone seemed to be part of a group or with their significant other. All I could think to do was alternate between strolling around and standing to the side. In that interminable hour I had something like three beers. I don't know about you, but three in an hour is more than my body's used to. By the time we adjourned to the auditorium for President Hart's talk and the lecture by that art historian, I was feeling great, but my attention span had been compromised a bit. Although not so much that I couldn't whip up a pretty thorough blog post about it. Check it out if you haven't already.

Tonight I just didn't have it in me to stand around for an hour and look stupid. Hey, it's Monday, cut me some slack. So what I did was, I got to the Renaissance at 6:30, but instead of heading up to the mezzanine level, where the TUAA folks were set up in the restaurant Twist, I stayed down on the first level and hopped over to the lobby bar. I got one Corona and nursed it while watching Monday Night Football and chatting with the middle-aged Hispanic barkeep. Miami was hosting Indianapolis. The barkeep seemed to be pulling for Miami, although I admire his efforts at neutrality on the off chance that he might offend any Colts fans in the vicinity. I'm a Skins fan so it made no difference to me, but he had a point. L.A.'s chockfull of transplants. You'll find fans of every team right here.


It was ten past seven when the first half ended. Time to suck it up. I went up to Twist, signed in at the table by the entrance, grabbed some free pens and pins, and headed in. As with the Getty event, the TUAA folks had arranged for a buffet. I wasn't hungry, but I did get another Corona from the barkeep, another friendly middle-aged Hispanic guy. Again like the Getty, I wandered around, made awkward eye contact, and met absolutely no one. Although I did recognize this one alumna with whom I'm linked on Facebook. She was sitting at the bar and eating dinner while chatting with everyone in her general vicinity. Eventually I got comfortable against the bar and snapped photos with my cell, including one of Bob Saget chatting with another alum about his age, whom I found out during Bob's talk is a high-up at Warner Brothers. I did manage to talk to one or two alums before the event started, but not long enough to remember their names. Too bad. One of them was this adorable gal about my age.

First to talk was Deborah Fowlkes, Executive Director of TUAA. I can't remember if she was at the Getty. Could've been. She joined Temple two years before that, in the summer of 2005, after she'd led Duke University's alumni association for a good while. I wonder what happened there. Certainly Duke is more prestigious. At any rate, Deborah was decked out in a business outfit with blouse and tight knee-length skirt that was cherry red, one of Temple's colors. Her hair's mostly silver with some black here and there. And she was well spoken, very distinguished overall. Since replacing John MacDonald, who'd been with Temple forty years, she seems to have settled in well. Deb didn't talk all that long, just wanted to thank us for being there and impress upon us what a difference the alumni make in helping get the word out about Temple University. And, of course, the difference we make in keeping Temple in business. This year marks Temple's 125th birthday, she said. I knew that. I've known 2009 was Temple's lucky 125th since last year at least. Temple has a quarterly alumni magazine called, not very originally, Temple Review. I read each issue cover to cover, which is by far the best way to keep up with what's going on over in Philly. Main Campus has grown and changed quite a bit since my days there in the mid nineties. It's also nice to read about their more successful alumni ("Class Notes"). Anyway, I believe it was last year or the year before when they announced their big fundraiser to coincide with the 125th anniversary of Temple's founding by Russell Conwell, a lawyer and Baptist minister from Philly.

After Deb, Bruce Waxman gave a little spiel. Now him I remember because he speaks at all the alumni events. Bruce is in charge of the Los Angeles chapter of TUAA. Since finishing Temple in 1983 with a Bachelor's of Business Administration, Bruce has done quite well for himself. He started out at the public accounting firm of Laventhol & Horwath in Philly, and then moved to their L.A. office. He worked a good ten years or so at Ryan Miller and Associates. In 2003 he founded his own company called the Waxman Group. Located on Wilshire Blvd. in Westwood, the Waxman Group is basically a headhunter for the media industry. Bruce has relationships with folks like ABC, Technicolor, Lucasfilm (awesome!), Sony Pictures, and a bunch more I can't remember from Deb's introduction. I also can't remember if he got this kind of introduction at past alumni events. I don't think I did an exposition of him in my Getty post. Usually Bruce comes up and speaks first thing and doesn't waste time boasting of his accomplishments. But maybe he should. Shit, he's got an office in Westwood. That can't be cheap. And he resides in the Pacific Palisades. He's also on the President's Advisory Board for Temple. Need I say more? And graduating in '83, you've got to figure he's pushing fifty, right? Dude doesn't look a day over forty, what with his jet black hair and youthful countenance.

Bruce didn't talk for very long. Usually he talks about upcoming events, but apparently they don't have any scheduled because he didn't mention anything, not even a football or basketball viewing party. He did say more events were coming, though, so that's good. I don't doubt him. The man's obviously type A. He also said something all us Temple folk can relate to. We scared the shit out of him with our last-minute registration for this event. Temple folks always show up for class a bit late. I almost never did, but many others certainly do, that's true, especially those 8:40 a.m. classes. Brutal! True to my character, though, I did not wait until the last minute to register for tonight's event. I signed up when I got the invitation back in July. But I know what he means. See, the way Temple has folks register for events is through their networking site, myowlspace.com. You can also see the list of everyone who's registered for a particular event. Now and again I would check the Bob Saget event just out of curiosity. No joke, as recently as Friday (three days ago), less than ten people had registered. It may have been five. Seriously. That was the last time I checked it, so obviously most of the fifty or so people there tonight all signed up over the weekend. Hilarious.

After his spiel, it was time for the Grand Poobah, University President Ann Weaver Hart. It's a big deal, her being here, the president of a university with over thirty thousand students. It's the second time I've seen her at an alumni event, the first being at the Getty two years ago. Like I said, I always read the alumni magazine so I can't help but follow what this gal is up to. Her hiring was the alumni magazine's cover story in the summer of 2006. I remember reading it that August (Ann became President July 1) while Mom and I were hanging out at Santa Monica Beach.

I read the whole article. Originally from Utah (the article never mentioned if she was Mormon, not that it matters), Ann's been married to the same guy for a long time and now has four grown kids who are themselves thriving, and six grandkids. She just turned sixty last year. Before Temple, she was President of the University of New Hampshire, and before that Provost and VP of Academic Affairs at Claremont in California. She got her doctorate in Educational Administration from the University of Utah. She's the first woman President in Temple's history. I always read her little columns in the front of the alumni magazine.

She spoke for about fifteen or twenty minutes, mainly about all the great stuff they're doing on campus, the new buildings and what have you. Student enrollment's higher than it's ever been. They have to reject many more applications than they used to. The average SAT score of incoming freshmen has gone way up. I'm glad I went when I did because I sucked at the SATs. I took them two or three times. Aptitude tests just never suited me, even though I got good grades and graduated from Temple summa cum laude. Anyway, so Temple's doing awesome. Nice and recession-proof, right? Actually, I did hear that its budget does rely in part on the state of Pennsylvania and that looming state budget cuts might trickle down to the state schools and result in layoffs. Ah well. I guess no one's immune. My employer's had three layoffs in the last two years, so it's not like I don't know what that dread is like.

To be perfectly blunt, a good part of why she trumped up the school was to appeal to our wallets. Part of Temple's 125th anniversary includes raising as much money as possible. They set a goal a couple years ago, well ahead of time. I forget what it is, but it's pretty high. They want to reach it by the end of this year. I've given Temple money only once, and it was before this drive started. Man, it must be almost ten years now. What's wrong with me? I should give them a few ducats before the year's out so I can at least say I participated in the anniversary. Gotta give them credit for persistence, though. They call me all the time. I never answer, but I know it's them thanks to that ever handy caller ID. Temple's got the number that starts with 215-204. Seriously, though, I need to give.

Okay and now for Bob Saget. During all the preliminary spiels, he'd been standing in the back. Ann gave him a nice intro, and he hurried up to the little stage while Ann took a seat in the front row next to Bruce Waxman and Deborah Fowlkes. He immediately made us laugh by looking at the two or three bottles of water on the table next to him and asking if any of us were thirsty. Then he observed the mug of coffee he was nursing and remarked how weird it was to have coffee right after he'd had a beer. Bob warned us that with such a push and pull, he could understand if he sucked tonight.

Actually he didn't suck at all. He was hilarious, and I'm afraid my talking about it here won't do it justice by a long shot. On the other hand, he wasn't splitting our sides for the entire hour he spoke. A lot of it, in fact, was sincere, especially the stuff about his nephew Adam, and his sister dying of scleroderma, and the TV movie her death inspired him to make. I learned a lot about Bob Saget tonight, including the fact that just because Full House is long gone doesn't mean he's been starved for work. Quite the contrary, he's got a lot going on. His story's also yet another example of how luck must be on your side at some point if you're to make it in this business, no matter how much skill and intellect you have. Clint Eastwood said this during one of his Oscar acceptance speeches. Not the one for Unforgiven, one of the more recent ones. And the older I get, the more I see how fundamentally true that is.

Bob's originally from the Philly area. Abington to be exact, which is about twenty minutes north in Montgomery County. He went to Temple in the late seventies. Damn, I was still a baby when he graduated. Like I said above, he majored in Radio-TV-Film in the School of Communications and Theater. Bob talked about the cooperative nature of the program as he experienced it. He'd do grunt crew work on the films of some of his classmates, and they'd return the favor. Apparently this high-up from Warner Brothers, who sat behind me, was a student at the same time. So they all worked crew on each other's films. That's great. Sounds like their classes were more conducive to that kind of supportive environment. Me? No way. I made most of my film projects by myself. And yeah, I sort of had a crew for my senior thesis film, but I had to force my two senior thesis professors, who didn't get along with each other, to make a sort of sign-up sheet for crew. They were hoping crew work would be organic within the class. Hell no. Most of us didn't know each other. The guy I got stuck with was this douche bag named Pasquale. I went to his house once for a shoot during our junior year. I said hi to his father, who sneered at me and yelled at his son. Nice family. Pasquale was one of maybe two I could get to help me senior year. Neither he nor the other one, a circus freak of a diminutive woman, could do anything. Instead, we wasted an entire night shooting film that the bitch hadn't fed through the camera properly. So it was all a complete waste of time. And then the asshole Pasquale, who for some reason thought Pat was a good nickname, said he'd told me so. He told me so? Really? What a prick.

I had a good time at Temple overall, but as far as their film department went, I caught them precisely when they were going through a big transition, and my education suffered for it. It probably says a lot that I chose to get a masters in creative writing and have since devoted my artistic energies wholeheartedly to writing ever since. Only now, at thirty-three, has the film bug bitten me. 48 Broad, here I come!

Glad to hear Bob had such a supportive environment, but it wasn't only that which helped him succeed. He recognized a great story in his own home. Bob's nephew Adam was born with a defective facial bone structure. It required a lot of surgery to keep him going, and with that you had all the associated drama about whether he'd make it. And what about Adam himself? What was life like for him? That was the premise of Bob's senior thesis film, a documentary called Through Adam's Eyes. While Bob had been discovering his comedic chops during his Temple years as part of a student troupe, Through Adam's Eyes was anything but a comedy. It was tender, heartfelt, and very sobering. Get this: Through Adam's Eyes was nominated for a Student Academy Award....and won! Even cooler is that Adam himself was there tonight, sitting right behind me. Seemed like a quiet, unassuming guy. I guess he'd be about my age. He had a beard, blonde scruffy hair. And glasses like his uncle. And his woman is beautiful. He didn't speak or anything, just stood up for a second and waved and smiled and avoided eye contact.

The Academy Award for Through Adam's Eyes was Bob's ticket to any graduate film program of his choice. He opted for USC's MFA program. The way he told it tonight, he quit the program on the third day and decided to tough it out on the local comedy circuit. Now to me, that'd be a pretty ballsy thing to do, to throw away an education that would almost guarantee you a successful career as a filmmaker. Now he didn't say anything about what really informed that decision beyond his interest in comedy, but there must have been more to it than that. He must have really either stopped liking filmmaking and/or really loved doing standup considering there isn't much money in that racket. And/or he had an ego the size of Texas to think his comedy was good enough to warrant dropping his already proven skill with directing. At any rate, a full scholarship to SC, one of the top film programs in the country, and he quits the first week. That really is amazing. I wish he'd talked just a bit more about that and what his emotions were leading up to that decision. Was he conflicted at first? Did he feel the program was going to be too hard?

What I mentioned above about luck applies to what happened next. The venue he hit the most was The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. I've never been inside, but I walk by it whenever I go down there to see a concert at the House of Blues, which is right down the street. Bob's starving days at The Comedy Store coincided with the starving days of many other future big names. We're talking Dave Letterman, who was the MC, as well as Jay Leno, Robin Williams, Bobcat Goldthwait, all those kats. Richard Pryor performed there, but by the time Bob showed up in the late seventies, Richard's acting and writing career had already taken off. Bob toiled in that place for eight years before landing the Full House gig. While he skirted his SC dropout decision, he went on and on about how long people usually have to tough it out there, and that by the time they make it, the media sometimes makes it seem like they're an overnight success. Those were eight long goddam years for him. One comedian he talked about who's still not well known (although that might change now) is Zach Galifianakis, who stole the show as Alan in The Hangover this year. If you haven't seen that, please do, if for no other reason than to see this guy. I'd never seen him in my life. Bob's known him for the twenty years Zach's been a regular at The Comedy Store. Twenty years. And he didn't land a single acting gig until the late nineties. The Hangover's probably the most visible thing he's done, but he has been working somewhat steadily since that first small role on the short-lived show Boston Common. Dane Cook is another example he cited of someone who toiled in The Comedy Store trenches for a long time.

Richard Pryor was a great influence on Bob. Indeed, his two idols were Richard Pryor and Don Rickles. You talk about two schools of comedy as far apart as you can get. Rodney Dangerfield was another one he looked up to. Now there's a guy who paid his dues. A few years before he died, Rodney did this interview in TIME where he talked about all the odd jobs he endured. The only one I remember was aluminum siding installer. But there were a ton. He gave up on comedy at one point, figured he had no future in it, before finally giving it another go years later. Thank God he did or where would people like Bob Saget be? Back in the eighties Rodney hosted this young comedian special on HBO. I kind of remember it, but I can't remember which comedians he had on since, of course, they were nobodies then. Apparently Bob Saget was one of them. So was Jerry Seinfeld.

It was inevitable Bob would get Full House questions from the audience tonight. This one older guy who sat near the front said he lives right down the street from Dave Coulier (Joey). Bob said he still sees Dave now and again and that he's one of the nicest guys he knows. In fact, they tour the comedy circuit together. One thing I admired about Bob was his complete lack of pretense or tact. The cold truth is, Full House drove him nuts. If you've ever seen him doing standup or anything, if you know how he really is, then you know he's one twisted, vulgar mofo. Did you see that documentary The Aristocrats a few years ago? It's about this inside joke comedians tell each other. It has this very open-ended premise, and it's up to the comedian to make it their own. I'll spare you the details, but the premise of the joke is already kind of raunchy. They had almost every comedian you've ever heard of in this flick. Look it up on IMDb. It was weird seeing someone like Drew Carey telling a joke like this. Like Bob Saget, he's someone you associate with family TV. He used to have a sitcom, and now he's hosting The Price I$ Right for Pete's sake. Anyway, one thing all of those comedians could agree on is that as gross as they could be, they didn't hold a candle to Bob Saget.

One or two young women in the audience tonight were egging him on to be his usual nasty, raunchy self, but he resisted. For the most part. Anyway, that's why Full House drove him nuts. On the one hand it was a godsend because it meant he'd never have to worry about money again. It was eight solid years on one of the highest-rated sitcoms on the air, but it didn't exactly conform with his desired career path. His costar John Stamos felt the same way apparently. That's the compromise you make when you're a starving actor. Talk about out of character, two years before Full House, Bob landed a guest role on one episode of the third and final season of The Greatest American Hero. I just watched that season last year. The episode's called "Wizards and Warlocks," and it centers around this nerdy group of college kids who devote themselves to a Dungeons & Dragons type game. David Paymer's in it. He's pretty much in everything now. Bob and Dave played two of the nerdy kids. Hilarious, huh?

As with Dave Coulier, Bob keeps in touch with John Stamos. He raved about John's performance as Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret on Broadway a few years ago. And John's on Broadway again. Just this month he scored the role of Albert in the Broadway revival of Bye Bye Birdie. Bob does some theater, most notably The Drowsy Chaperone a few years ago. I got the impression he wants to do more. One thing he did say about Full House was that, despite his feelings at the time, he does look back at it fondly. Nonetheless, when someone up front asked about the possibility of a reunion, Bob was pretty doubtful. Partly it's because he and his costars have compartmentalized friendships with each other. So in other words, he'd never hang out with Dave Coulier and John Stamos at the same time, or the Olsen sisters with John Stamos. He didn't elaborate on that bit of diplomacy, but it can only mean some of those people must not like each other. But they all like hanging out with Bob. He joked that if a reunion does happen, it'll be on Twitter.

Another person up front, I think one of those women who wanted Bob to get dirty, asked about Julia Louis-Dreyfuss's comment at this year's Emmys: "Broadcast TV is dead." Bob was like, "She said this on broadcast TV?" He did concede that broadcast TV is certainly cutthroat. Earlier this year he was on this midseason replacement sitcom called Surviving Suburbia. I can't say I remember it at all, but then again, I'm not much of a sitcom watcher. Anyway, it did its half season of thirteen episodes and got the axe. Bob said the best night they had was 3.5 million viewers. While that's not a lot compared to the more successful stuff like Grey's Anatomy, all the CSI spinoffs, House, American Idol, etc., Bob couldn't help marveling that having over three million people tune in just wasn't good enough. Most comedians would kill for that kind of audience.

I might have to put For Hope on my Netflix queue. That's the TV movie Bob directed in 1996 in honor of his sister. The Hope character was based on her. I'm intrigued after hearing about it tonight. Bob did get serious for a few minutes when he talked about his involvement in raising awareness for scleroderma, the disease that killed his sister, whose real name was Gay, at the age of forty-seven. I mean I'm sure the movie's depressing as all get-out, although Dana Delany, who plays Hope, is never hard on the eyes. And besides, I've become a Bob Saget fan after tonight. He's hilarious and seems like a decent guy, for all his raunch. I see on IMDb that Henry Czerny's also in For Hope. He's no big name, of course, but he always plays these interesting roles, ambiguous types about whom you're not sure how to feel. Examples include Clear and Present Danger, Mission:Impossible, and The Tudors. Harold Gould's in it, which makes me impressed with Bob's clout.

You have to cut Bob some slack when it comes to his gross humor. Dude's personal life has been beyond rocky, if not downright depressing. He didn't go into it much, but I certainly can't blame him for that. Even before Gay died, his other sister Andrea had already died of an aneurysm at thirty-four. His wife divorced him in the late nineties. His mom had two babies that died at childbirth before Bob was even born. And then in 2007 both his mom and his dad died. They were ninety, so their deaths weren't a shock. But still. They were Mom and Dad. They say comedians are often crying on the inside. Of course most comedians deny that emphatically. But come on now. Just look at what the guy's been through.

Speaking of toughing things out, he also talked about his part-time deli job during his Temple years. He worked at this one deli in Cedarbrook Plaza in Wyncote. I forget the name, but I guess it's still around because when he said the name, people in the audience seemed to recognize it. Bob said it was a great place to meet all kinds of people and practice his comedy. One guy came in, dipped his hand into the pickle vat, pulled one out, and ate it right there. Another time he was cutting open a can of meat and hacked up his hand pretty good. Seriously, he showed us the scar. Another nice thing about the job is that it gave him the cash to buy film stock. That's pretty much where all the money went, 16mm black and white film stock for those Swiss-made silent film cameras which, I should say, is what Temple was still using when I showed up there almost twenty years later. They're okay and everything. Durable. But they're silent, so you have to cough up more money for mag film to record the sound. It's the old fashioned way, I reckon, but at least you learn by getting your hands dirty. Bob and this Warners hot shot behind me shared fond memories of using those old cameras, going on night shoots, helping each other out on film projects.

Speaking of that Warners guy, he turned out to be just the contact Bob needed to get Farce of the Penguins made. You saw March of the Penguins, right? That French-produced documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman about the annual pilgrimage of the Emperor penguins? Well if not, you should. It's pretty decent. Bob? He and his friends like it too, but they're comedians so they can't help themselves. What they'd do is, they'd mute it and then put in their own voiceovers, impersonating the stereotype of old Jewish guys with Yiddish accents. Then this Warners guy got Bob a meeting at the studio to talk about the idea of a satirical sendup. Bob didn't take it seriously at all. He figured his old Temple pal was just humoring him. The meeting wasn't with this hot shot, but one of his colleagues in the development department. So Bob shows up and pitches the idea. This was in the fall of 2005 (the film came out that summer). He figures it'll be a short meeting, right? Thanks and see ya? Well, as it turns out, the suit in question wanted Bob to come back for a second meeting to elaborate on the idea further. The way Bob told it tonight, he was speechless. All he could think of saying at the time was, "Wh-.... Wh-.... Really?!" And so he goes back. You know the rest. In early 2007 Warners releases the mockumentary Farce of the Penguins, written and directed by Bob Saget. Hilarious, huh? Hollywood, I tell ya. But look at that. It pays to have contacts, does it not? Networking. It was only thanks to Bob's pal setting up the introduction. Check out all the actors he got. Samuel L. Jackson did the narrating. The penguins' voices were supplied by the likes of Jason Alexander, Christina Applegate, Jim Belushi, Lewis Black, Dane Cook, Dave Coulier, Drea de Matteo, Harvey Fierstein, Whoopi Goldberg, Gilbert Gottfried, Alyson Hannigan, Jon Lovitz, Norm MacDonald, Mo'Nique, Tracy Morgan, Jonathan Silverman, John Stamos, Damon Wayans. Amazing, huh? All for a comedy released the time of year usually considered the dead zone, after all the Oscar bait and before the summer tent poles. It couldn't've cost much to make, and I'm sure it made a fortune on DVD.

Speaking of networking, that's how he got some of those people to lend their voices. More than once tonight he brought up Norm MacDonald. They're pals. He also talked about Lewis Black when someone asked him about comedians he admires today. Someone in the audience got excited when he said that name. I'm afraid I don't know too much about him. He also loves Chris Rock. The great thing about Chris, Bob said, is that he has this whole philosophy of life, and the comedy springs from that organically. Interesting, huh? I suppose when you're a comedian, you make a point of studying and analyzing other comedians' techniques. Just like when you're a filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker and you watch other films, you discern things not noticeable to the lay viewer. I've seen Chris Rock perform on TV enough to know what Bob's talking about, but it would never have occurred to me to phrase it the way he did.

Bob talked about staying close to his comedy club roots. No matter how far along you get, you should always take those trips back to the mic. Robin Williams does it all the time. He likes to pop into clubs unannounced, especially when filming on location. In addition to The Comedy Store, Bob mentioned this venue in New York. It only seats about a hundred fifty people so it's relatively small. And it's there that he gets to see Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. Damn, I wish I could remember the name of that place because apparently those two perform there regularly.

So that was it for the night. What a treat. Bob seems like a pretty kool kat. And I'm very impressed Temple University could set this up and that Ann Weaver Hart flew out, what with all the responsibilities she has to shoulder. I can't wait to see what their next big event will be.

Opera League Seminar: Siegfried

It was a beautiful day today in the City of Angels, boys and girls. It wasn't too hot in the Valley, and it was even more pleasant downtown. I should know. I hopped on the subway this afternoon and headed downtown to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for an Opera League seminar on Siegfried, part three of Wagner's Ring Cycle, which LA Opera will be staging later this month as well as next month. As for the station fire, which I'm sure you've been reading about in the news no matter where you live, it's still going, but it's not as--how shall I say?--influential as it was a week ago, when my mom was still here on vacation. Last weekend we went to Encino on her last day here, and you could easily see the station fire umpteen miles away in the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. It looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. It didn't look all that different today, only the smoke from the fire wasn't permeating the atmosphere. Indeed, the sky was a vivid blue. And you could easily make out the details of the hills and mountains.

It was a packed house on the fifth floor of the Chandler, the salon level, as they say, where they have this huge plush banquet hall where I've now been several times for seminars since becoming an Opera League member a couple years ago. They've also got a kitchen up there, which I suppose is logical considering it's a banquet hall, but I never noticed it before. You had servers decked out in their best black and whites rushing back and forth through the swinging metal door with the little window in it. Further down the hall look to be a bunch of offices. I've yet to venture down that far. Next time I'll have to make a point of doing just that.

As always, Dr. Allan Edmiston stepped up onto the makeshift stage in front of the windows overlooking the Music Center plaza and told everyone, in his soft-spoken way, to sit down and be quiet. Of course he's much more gentle than that. The vast majority of Opera League members are of retirement age so it's not like he's got a rowdy bunch to corral or anything. Still, a good bunch of them are usually women who come with their women friends. And do they love to chat or what? So the flipside of his soft-spoken coin is that he typically has to repeat himself a few times to get everyone to take their seats.

Allan's a pretty unassuming guy for someone so accomplished. Check it out. He's a USC-trained cardiologist who's served as the head honcho in cardiology at both Huntington Memorial in Pasadena and Methodist Hospital in Arcadia. Originally from Illinois, he came out to L.A. for his training at SC and apparently never looked back. Pasadena's been his home for a long time now. For you non-LAers out there, it's pretty easy to reach downtown LA from Pasadena, just a quick shot down the 110 Pasadena Freeway. According to the Opera League site, Doc is a seminar consultant and "opera docs coordinator." Not sure what the latter means. But as you can tell, working around the clock to keep people's hearts pumping can't deter this guy from getting his operatic ya-yas out.

The first thing he talked about was Siegfried. An event like this has got to be right up Doc's alley as he is a die hard Wagner fan. They've got this society here in Southern California called......wait for it......The Wagner Society of Southern California. Doc's a member of that, and I think last year or the year before he was the president. He talked about how Siegfried used to be THE opera that any company worth its salt would stage. The Met circa 1900 was still a mostly German company. It wasn't even twenty years old at that point. And they would put on Siegfried, sometimes as part of the Ring, other times just on its own, and it always sold out. He also couldn't help plugging the Ring Festival Los Angeles, a city-wide event taking place next May and June, at the end of the 2009-10 season, when LA Opera will stage the Ring in its entirety three times over the course of three or so weeks. Dozens of companies and vendors throughout L.A. will be taking part in this festival. It's still a little vague to me what exactly that all means, but I sure am excited to find out.

As this was the first Opera League seminar of the 2009-10 season, which officially kicks off next Saturday with a production of Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore (The Elixir of Love), Doc's main order of business was to introduce us to the brand new League president, a kat called Lieb, Judy Lieb. A petit lil' thing, around sixty or so with a dark bob, Judy is Orange County born and bred. For a long time she was the school administrator in Buena Park. She still consults with the Orange County Board of Education. She came up and plugged the various props on display on the back tables. These props were used in LA Opera's production of The Birds back in April. Indeed, one of my April posts on this very blog is about the League seminar on The Birds, a week before I saw the production. It wasn't bad. And the props sure looked interesting, including that giant bird claw on a pole, but alas, I just don't have the budget to buy opera props at this juncture. Anyway, Judy seems like a smart and sweet gal. I'm sure the League will do just fine with her at the helm.

While she had the mic, Judy introduced us to a woman in the audience named Julie Benson, a volunteer from Chicago's resident opera company, Chicago Lyric Opera. Julie's just become president of Opera Volunteers International. We all clapped when she stood up, but she didn't give a talk or anything. This Opera Volunteers International, by the way, is a pretty big deal. LA Opera takes part in their events. They had an article about it in the most recent issue of Bravo, the LA Opera newsletter.

The seminar was split into two lectures, each examining various aspects of Siegfried. The first lecture was given by Simon Williams, a middle-aged Englishman who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. I've seen him here before. Simon's a very articulate and animated guy. Dude is obviously passionate about his subject matter. His lecture was called "Siegfried and the Problem of Fear." As you'll see, more than just fear, the bigger theme at work here is Siegfried as a drama, how it works, how it doesn't work, and pluses and minuses of the title character as a dramatic figure. So in other words, Simon's whole thing was about the storytelling aspects of the opera. The second lecture, called "The Music of Siegfried" by Mitchell Morris, was about exactly that. But more on Mitchell's lecture in a bit. First, let's deal with Simon.

Siegfried and the Problem of Fear - Simon Williams

Simon didn't pull any punches. He said right up front that he wanted to tell us why Siegfried, while it is a terrific piece of work, is actually the most flawed of the four Ring operas. He cited four main flaws. First, it's male dominated. You don't have a single female character enter the stage until the end of act two. Secondly, there isn't much of a cast to speak of. It's all about this one character. Siegfried. Although he did temper that by saying the one-character thing gives you an epic quality, that we get to watch Siegfried grow and mature as a man. His character arc is very complete. The third flaw is the opera's "rough and raucous" tone, as Simon put it. In other words, whereas the other three Ring operas are mostly dramatic and somber and sometimes brutal, Siegfried feels like a vaudeville. One example he cited is the duel between Siegfried and Fafner in the middle of act two. Fafner and Fasolt were the two giants from the first opera, Das Rheingold. Fasolt dies at the end of that one, but Fafner lives. By the time we see him again in Siegfried, he's become a dragon (don't ask). Siegfried has a duel with him and finishes him off. Simon was saying the duel isn't as dramatic as you'd think. The dialogue, in fact, is kind of hilarious, sometimes unintentionally so, it seems. And finally, the last flaw he talked about was sort of implied in the second and third, that Siegfried is more of a comedy and less of a drama. Again, he talked about Siegfried's character arc. Simon said it's unintentionally hilarious that you'd have a story line that only encompasses two days, and yet Siegfried grows and matures so much in that time. It feels like years have passed when the curtain falls. Of course, that might at least partly be because the damned opera is five friggin' hours long, but whatever.

So yes, Siegfried is far from a perfect opera. Simon claims that Tristan und Isolde is, in fact, the one and only perfect opera Wagner ever wrote. LA Opera actually staged that halfway into the 2007-08 season. I saw it. Maybe I need to see it again. It didn't exactly keep my attention rapt. Man, I tell you. Wagner, more than any other composer in my experience, is an acquired taste. The attention span required to appreciate his work is beyond the purview of most of society these days, in the age of Twitter and all that.

By far the biggest reason for Siegfried's flaws is that Wagner stopped working on the score after act two. That was 1857. He didn't come back to it until 1869. I'm not talking about the librettos, mind you. For you non-opera folks, a libretto is to an opera what a screenplay is to a movie. Wagner wrote the four Ring librettos consecutively, and backward to boot. He originally intended it to be one opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), which ultimately became the fourth and final Ring opera. Then he realized a lot of backstory was missing, so he wrote Siegfried. And so on, doing the libretto for Das Rheingold last. Then he set to composing the scores. Yes, in proper sequence this time. He polished off Das Rheingold and Die Walküre soon enough, but after composing the first two acts of Siegfried, dude was burned out. He'd been working nonstop on the Ring for years at that point. So he spent the next dozen years working on two masterpieces, Tristan as well as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Not bad for a hiatus, eh? Simon said the break was worth it. By the time he resumed Siegfried's score in 1869, Wagner's creative juices were fully recharged for the Ring. He came back with a vengeance, Simon said, and it's readily apparent right away when the curtain goes up for act three.

Simon played four excerpts to illustrate his point about tone contrast: The beginning and end of act one, and the beginning and end of act two. The start of act one is dark, brooding, slow. The end of act one did indeed sound raucous, like something from a vaudeville. Act two kicks off in Fafner's cave. Remember, he's somehow become a dragon since the end of Das Rheingold. The tone is once again somber. Simon described it as "total inertia." You've got a lot of deep brass and these quivering strings underlying it the whole way. And then the end of act two is where Siegfried kills Fafner and runs up the hill to rescue everyone's favorite Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. The music once again bursts with excitement. This was Wagner's last hurrah before calling it quits on the Ring for a while. I forget if it was Simon who told us or Dr. Edmiston, but Wagner was convinced the Ring Cycle was destined to be a failure. Dude had no confidence in it at all, which contributed to his throwing up his hands and moving on to other stuff for a while. When he came back to it, Simon said he was at the pinnacle of his talent. The beginning of act three represents Wagner at his best. Simon couldn't emphasize that enough.

Simon said it wasn't all bad that Siegfried was a comedy. Some of it was certainly intentional. Wagner inserted a lot of comic brio that worked well, if only sometimes. Not only is it the most cheerful of the four operas, Siegfried is also more in tune with nature than the others. It has the best portrayal of Wotan, the god of gods. In Siegfried Wotan has made himself human, known only as the Wanderer. The title character is Wotan's grandson, and the big man has come down to earth to see how he grows up. More than that, he wants to study how humans in general behave. He just doesn't get us. I know how he feels. Anyway, Simon said that the fullness of Wotan's character ties into one of the best musical things about the opera, that of the contrast between the comedy of Siegfried's adventures and the tragedy of Wotan's wandering. Wagner struck a perfect balance.

At this point Simon talked about the biggest problem with Siegfried: The title character. First, he gave us some context. In creating this character, Wagner drew from a whole bunch of myths. We're talking Hercules, Heracles, Achilles, Osiris, and Baldr. When the Ring first came out in the 1870s, people loved the character Siegfried. George Bernard Shaw compared him to Nietzsche's Übermensch (literally the overman, although we'd just say superman). Friedrich Engels positively loved Siegfried, said he was a good guy and that he fought for the good of the people. Funny how times change, isn't it? Seriously, in this day and age, being endorsed by Engels or compared to Nietzsche isn't something most artists would shoot for. But whatever. It's all about the context of the age, right?

Anyway, once he set up that context, Simon said that over time audiences have tempered their views of Siegfried. A more recent critic called him an "exuberant boy scout." Others have said Siegfried not only doesn't fight for good, he's a totalitarian bully who stomps all over people's rights. And because Wagner was an anti-Semite, people have said that Siegfried by default must be anti-Semitic as well. When Hitler came along, some fifty years after Wagner's death, he became Wagner's biggest fan. That could not possibly have helped people's rosy views of Siegfried. Other than that, Simon didn't go into the political baggage Siegfried has racked up over the years.

Even without unfavorable associations, Simon said the Siegfried character still had issues. The main issue is a technical one. In the story, Siegfried stands for good, but you can't be all good and still be a dramatic character at the same time. A dramatic character should do two things. First, he needs to be a character in action. He needs to show us someone we recognize, someone we can relate to, someone who could live down the block from us. Could anyone say that about Siegfried? Uh, no. At least I sure as heck hope not. Secondly, a dramatic character should symbolize something greater than the story, something the writer or composer wants to convey organically via the dramatic action. Dramatic characters should ideally have some friction within them that stems from these two aspects, the action and the symbolism. As Simon said, these two sides should not "quite dovetail." Hamlet is a good example of a character who pulls off this balance nicely. Simon cited some Ring characters who pull this off as well: Wotan, Alberich, and Brünnhilde. If you have a character who is purely symbolic, that could only mean there's nothing, ya know, human about them. No chance for sympathy. Characters who are pure action aren't very human either, and therefore once again make it hard for you to sympathize with them. One example of the latter is Othello. That guy didn't seem to stand for anything. He just did what he did.

After talking about these technical issues of character, Simon arrived at the title of his piece, the problem of fear. First he read us a letter Wagner wrote to a friend of his named August Merkel. Not sure if I spelled the last name right. Anyway, it was a letter he wrote after wrapping up Das Rheingold. In it he said that besides corruption and materialism, he wanted the Ring to be just as much about death. The problem of dying. Not just death as in people biting the dust. But death as in the end of something. In the letter Wagner went on about how it's the fear of the end that gets in the way of our love. And this fear of the end includes fear of change, fear of the unfamiliar. Wotan embodies this in Das Rheingold. I can sort of confirm this myself, having just seen Das Rheingold for the first time earlier this year. It's clear his marriage to Fricka is on the downslope. Those overly proud gods fight all the time about everything. Why don't they just get the divorce over with? Well, Wotan's too scared to. The divorce would be a sort of death, per Wagner's letter to August. It would be a change too great for Wotan to deal with. This whole fear thing goes even further in a way I didn't discern when I saw Das Rheingold, but can sort of see now that Simon mentioned it. The ring itself, the chief cause of all the mess that unfolds, wouldn't mean anything if Wotan and the other gods weren't so greedy to attain power, and accordingly weren't so afraid of losing the ring. In other words, the curse Alberich places on the ring isn't really a curse in the magical sense. At no other time does he display magical abilities. No, the curse is more a state of mind. If you buy into the ring being able to give you power, then you'll be afraid of losing it. The curse is more a "blight of fear," Simon said. Here he played an excerpt from scene four of Das Rheingold, when Alberich "curses" the ring and all those who desire it:

Doomed to die

may the coward be fettered by fear

as long as he lives

let him pine away, languishing

lord of the ring

as the slave of the ring:

till the stolen circlet

I hold in my hand once again.

Heavy stuff, huh? Well there you go. I'm not sure Alberich could've illustrated Simon's point any more about, as his lecture is called, the problem of fear. What's more, Wotan sees himself in the so-called curse. Check out this other excerpt from the same scene. This is Wotan talking now:

Night draws on;

from its envious sway

may it offer shelter now.

(very resolutely, as though seized by a grandiose idea)

Thus I salute the stronghold

safe from dread and dismay.

Poor god, huh? That's Valhalla he's referring to, by the way, the stronghold. One of the subplots of Das Rheingold is Wotan trying to get Fafner and Fasolt to help him build Valhalla. One thing that got everyone chuckling was when Simon asked us if we, too, weren't a bit "touched" by Alberich's curse. Two operas before we see him as a human in Siegfried, we can already see some humanity in Wotan. Who wouldn't want just a little bit of the power and wealth represented by the ring?

And therein lies a big reason why Wotan's a better character than his grandkid Siegfried. We can relate to Wotan, right? His marriage is rocky, he feels things like fear and frustration. Siegfried feels no fear at all. Simon called it his "unification." Drama implies conflict and division, both within people and between them. Right? If there's no conflict in the story, why tell the story? The Devil's a juicy character. God? When was the last time you saw him in a movie, those George Burns comedies notwithstanding?

Simon now played us an excerpt from act two of Siegfried, the birdsong from the "Forest Murmurs" scene. The music carried a light air to it. Siegfried is happy at this point. In stark contrast to his grandfather, he has no worries at all. Unlike most adults, he's not bothered by anything in his past. Therefore the past doesn't determine who he is and what he does and will do. Simon said we're told repeatedly throughout the opera that Siegfried feels no fear.

Simon agreed with some of the more contemporary critics with the idea that Siegfried is kind of a bully. Here he played the Forging Song from act one, where Siegfried forges his sword Notung. It is during the forging that you could argue Siegfried seems downright totalitarian, each blow of the metal like a blow on our shoulders. Here Simon said how interesting it was that Siegfried is the only character in the Ring Cycle who doesn't tell any stories, with the exception of the last opera. That's a pretty stark illustration of Siegfried having no concern with the past.

Simon talked about the character Mime, Alberich's brother. Like Alberich, Mime's a pretty rotten guy. Unlike Alberich, though, he's not a very well-drawn character. Alberich you can at least somewhat relate to and understand. Mime? Not so much. Going by Simon's definition above of a dramatic character, he's all action, no symbol. Alberich is someone you love to hate. Since Mime doesn't have a third dimension, liking or not liking him feels pretty pointless. And this is why Simon called Siegfried's killing of Mime the worst moment in the entire Ring Cycle. Siegfried kills him without any sense of consequence. Just kills 'im and moves on. It's true that Mime had to die for the story to move forward, but Wagner could've made it feel more significant. What's more, it's not even represented musically. Seriously, Simon went on and on about how Mime's death scene bugged the heck out of him. He called it--get this--"apocalyptically insensitive."

This is in contrast to Siegfried's killing of Fafner in act two. You've got something that offers plenty of action as well as some symbolism. Fafner is the last of his kind. No more dragons after Fafner, right? He even says something to this effect while he's in extremis. Therefore this duel represents a passing of generations. Fafner represents the earlier age, the beforetimes. Again, like Mime, he had to die, but unlike Mime, you feel a certain sadness, or at least a sense of loss, for an age that has passed forever.

Simon went back to Wotan, continuing the contrast between Siegfried as flat and Wotan as well defined. He discussed the idea of resignation as it was espoused by Arthur Schopenhauer. You heard of him? He was a German philosopher and writer from the 1800s who became renowned for being a four-alarm bummer. Seriously, Schopenhauer basically said that humans were doomed never to get what they want, no matter how hard they bent their will toward it. Oh, and that was another thing he was noted for, dissecting this whole issue of willpower. Anyway, Simon mentioned him in the context of Wotan's resignation. Erde tells Wotan, just as Schopenhauer told the world, that letting go and resigning himself to fate will make him happier.

And this takes us to act three. Remember, by the time Wagner started composing this part, he'd been away from the Ring for twelve years. First, Simon played us the beginning. The music is dark like the beginning of the first two acts, but this is even more so if you can imagine. "Titanically dark" was how Simon put it. Nice, I agree. And as Simon also pointed out, it's beyond amazing that Wagner had this music in the back of his head for all that time, while he worked on material like Tristan and Meistersinger.

Enter Wotan. The Wanderer. Cutting a very impressive figure (partly because he's the god of gods, yet someone we can relate to), Wotan is walking around earth to see how humans, and especially Siegfried, grow up. He wants to see if his grandson can create the utopia he tried and failed to create with Valhalla. He's also looking for Erde:

O unwise woman!

I call on you now

to sleep forever, free from care!

Fear of the end of the gods

no longer consumes me

now that my will wishes it so/What I once

resolved in despair

in the searing smart of inner turmoil

I now perform freely

in gladness and joy;

though once, in furious loathing/I bequeathed

the world to the Nibelung's spite,

to the lordliest Wälsung

I leave my heritage now...

And so on. Wotan says some more, but you get the point. It's all about letting go of your fear so you can love again, exactly what Simon said at the start of his lecture. After playing this excerpt, he said this "fearlessness of love" is Wotan's leitmotif. He eventually does find Erde. Only this time, instead of saying resignation is good, like she did the last time they spoke, she says that all she sees in the world is chaos. Resigning won't bring happiness because happiness just isn't possible in the human realm. She's downright nihilistic, in other words.

The final excerpt he played was from later on in act three. Wotan's on the mountain trail to block Siegfried from reaching Brünnhilde. Like the Fafner scene, this is very poignant. It's the end of Wotan, his final appearance in the Ring Cycle.

Simon then talked a bit about the next scene, the last one of the opera. Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing a thirty-minute duet on the mountaintop. Simon called this duet the single most "energetic" song in all of Wagner's oeuvre. That's a pretty huge claim, but he'd know much better than me. He said the next time we see the opera, while they're singing that duet at the end, we should ask ourselves: Are the two sides of Siegfried's character balanced, or does one outweigh the other? It's an open-ended and interpretive question. While he stressed there is no one right answer, he did say our answer would inevitably influence our attitude toward the character of Siegfried as well as the drama as a whole.

Simon finally couldn't help himself. He had the audio assistant, the guy who sits in the back and plays all the excerpts, put on the very end of the duet. It's quite rousing and hammers home his point about the similarities to vaudeville. And yes, it's also energetic. When it was over, we couldn't help applauding. You'd understand if you heard it. Simon said he's normally the type of person who doesn't like to clap too much at the end of operas. He prefers exiting the auditorium discreetly. One exception he makes is with this piece. It makes him "positively jump up and clap."

This lecture marks the first time I've ever heard someone use the word "splendiferous" in a sentence. Simon said when Siegfried's over, you won't leave with any sense of the satisfaction that comes with closure, but you'll still leave smiling because of the "splendiferous" music. As I'm sure you can tell by now, Simon's got a flair for dramatics that few other lecturers, in my experience anyway, can rival.

Certainly the second lecture today, as fun and informative as it was, couldn't rival it. Don't get me wrong. I've become sort of a fan of Mitchell Morris. I've seen him talk at one or two other Opera League seminars. Plus, he was one of the lecturers at the Getty Center's day-long seminar on German art and opera this past March. Read that post if you haven't already. Fascinating.

The Music of Siegfried - Mitchell Morris

Mitchell's a music professor at UCLA. A musicologist, as they say. By the time he came on, there was barely an hour left. Not even. Nowhere near enough time to do justice to the music of a Wagner opera. Nonetheless, he was a good sport and did what he could. It must've been tough. During Simon's lecture, Mitchell was sitting directly behind me. I could hear him preparing and revising his notes.

He kicked things off in a tone quite the opposite from Simon. Whereas Simon started out by saying Siegfried was fundamentally flawed, Mitchell said Siegfried occupied the most fascinating position of the tetralogy. It's the pivotal piece. And yes, Mitchell, like Simon and I'm sure every other scholar and expert on the subject of Siegfried, couldn't resist talking about the (in)famous twelve-year hiatus Wagner took between the second and third acts, which only makes this opera all the more fascinating. It's not every day you come across a piece of art that has a gap of that size in its creation. One thing he said that Simon didn't mention was that Wagner originally called this piece Der junge Siegfried (The Young Siegfried), and then called it Jung-Siegfried (Young Siegfried). He also mentioned that the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, was originally called Siegfrieds Tod (The Death of Siegfried). Despite the hiatus, he said that although you can see Wagner coming back with a creative vengeance, the opera still doesn't feel disjointed.

Mitchell talked about Wagner's deal with Romantic heroism. As someone born and raised in the Deep South, Mitchell has no patience with what he called the "impulse of heroism." He cited the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a philosopher and writer from the 1700s. His whole deal was about humans getting in touch with the state of nature. The way Mitchell said it, people from the Deep South like himself would think, well, if Jean-Jacques and his ilk want to go to the zoo and watch monkeys hurl shit at each other, they were welcome to it.

He compared Siegfried to the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. For starters, you've got the violence. Don't forget that Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma were eaten by the wolf before they were cut out of his gut. And in the original Snow White, the evil queen was forced to wear glowing hot iron shoes. Also, Grimm's fairy tales don't have any character development. Siegfried himself doesn't have an arc, as Simon made abundantly clear above.

Mitchell pointed out that Siegfried has more singing than the other three Ring operas, although Götterdämmerung has more formal song. People lying to each other, in other words, as Mitchell only half-joked. This is when he walked over to the piano and talked about various musical concepts, starting with harmony. Bear with me here. A lot of what he talked about was technical stuff. Some of it went over my head. Yes, I was taking notes, but Mitchell was flying right along. Pressed for time, he wasn't allowing for the fact that some of us may have been among the lay masses. Anyway, with harmony he talked about the idea of triads, three chords that are variations of the same thing. One variation would be an inverted triad, when the bass is not the same as the root. What, confused already?

Then he talked about how you can create a sense of expectation in music, where the last note is dragged out. With the piano you achieve that with your foot on the pedal, right? Hey, I used to take lessons once upon a time. I remember how that works. Anyway, that sense of expectation can reach unbearable proportions. In other words, you can really drag out that last note. He related a story about a house party Felix Mendelssohn threw one time. He went to bed early, which put off some of his guests. One of them sat down at the piano and hit one key and kept their foot on the pedal to drag it out. Apparently the note was dragged for fifteen minutes before Felix came down and pressed another key to finish it off.

This led to deceptive cadence, which is pretty much what you'd think it is. It's where you have a chord that leads you to believe you'll be progressing to the next logical chord, only you end up somewhere completely different. Bach did it. Beethoven and Shubert did it. Wagner did it in the first two Ring operas as well as the first two acts of Siegfried. From an opera's standpoint, deceptive cadence is helpful if you're trying to create an atmosphere that's rich and mysterious. One example he used was if you used a flat six-chord system (e.g. B flat, C flat, etc.) instead of regular six.

With Tristan, Wagner used deceptive cadence to create a theme both overdetermined and underdetermined. It's not stable, yet it is, as Mitchell said. It was Wagner's work on Tristan where the idea of expanding a temporal span in opera using deceptive cadence came of age. And it was a real struggle for Wagner apparently, writing Tristan. Coming to grips with moving forward the evolution of deceptive cadence was at least partly why. When he went back to Siegfried to write act three after wrapping up Tristan, you can hear the evolution. The harmony in act three is more subtle and indeterminate. Mitchell cited parlor music as a more mainstream example of where you can find deceptive cadence.

Next up was the idea of key and scale, how you can have a minor scale, a minor side in a major scale, and a major side of minor. One example he cited here was the Plato cadence, the scale that sounds like how they sing "amen" at the end of church songs. And again he talked about Tristan. In that opera, after a while, major and minor no longer matter. Each key has more than seven pitches. Act one has two keys: A and C, both major and minor. Tristan is less about leitmotifs and more chromatic. It was during Wagner's twelve-year gap between acts two and three of Siegfried, when he toiled over Tristan and Meistersinger, that he sought ways to be more flexible with his music while trying not to create hash. It would still be organized, only more creatively.

Then Mitchell talked about meter and how Wagner helped change that convention as well. Human brains think in terms of twos and threes, Mitchell said, and to demonstrate this, he had everyone snap their fingers. No matter how complex the chain of sounds, you naturally break it down into pairs and trebles. As far back as the fourteenth century, music would have two layers that would demonstrate meter. The end of Beethoven's Fifth (the Die Hard song) is an example of hyper-meter. It's resolutely quadratic, four plus four. But Beethoven as well as Haydn played around with hyper-meter, sometimes making it five plus three.

Then Wagner showed up to break all that down and create real musical ambivalence. The first excerpt Mitchell played here was act one, scene three of Siegfried, when the title character forges his sword Notung. It starts strophic, but then it turns into a different musical genre altogether. It's as if Wagner composed a second forging song. But wait. He's fooled you. By the end, you are musically taken back to the beginning.

Mitchell talked about how the songs in Siegfried tend to start in a very generic, conventional way, as if Wagner were purposely alluding to folk music just to set up an expectation in the audience. Again, in the forging song this is reflected in Siegfried singing the refrain:

Hoho! Hoho!

Hohei! Hohei!

Hoho! Hoho!

Hohi! Hohei!

This song also has what Mitchell called an augmented triad. This basically means you'd have chords whose relationships to each other were lengthened or widened. Wagner already employed this technique in his famous Die Walküre song. Mitchell's not entirely convinced Wagner meant to do that with the forging song. At any rate, this song owes a lot to Beethoven with its symphonic qualities: Giant octave leaps, rugged tone, peculiar choice of rhythm. It also requires a lot of work from the tenors who play Siegfried and Mime, the two characters in the forging scene. Mitchell said they're most likely going to be Heldentenors, who have especially dark and powerful voices. "Classy baritones," Mitchell called them. The forging song doesn't really end so much as evolve into something else. It shows Wagner as anti-numbers, musically speaking, going back to the four-plus-four/five-plus-three meter concept above. Mitchell even piggybacked, cleverly I thought, onto Simon's whole thing about Mime being a shallow character. Not only is that the case dramatically, but musically as well. His sections of the forging song are a simple comic kind of music.

Next Mitchell played an excerpt from act three, scene three, the duet between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Like Simon, Mitchell's a big fan of Brünnhilde. She's a more interesting character. In fact, Mitchell cited more recent criticism that says Siegfried is more about Brünnhilde than it is about Siegfried himself. Siegfried's heedlessness isn't valued as much as it used to be. Mitchell did say, though, that Brünnhilde's apostrophe in Götterdämmerung is embarrassing. He wasn't specific about that. Was he referring to when she orders invisible forces to build a bonfire for her, upon which time she rides into it on her horse? Is it embarrassing to Wagner or to her as a character?

The last scene of Siegfried is a series of three apostrophes. You've got Brünnhilde singing to the sun, gods, the world, the "resplendent earth." And so on. Mitchell said this is a good example of the aesthetic of the sublime, although he said that in Wagner's time, sublime and beauty were not synonymous like they are today. He cracked me up. Nowadays, he said, sublime made him think of a North San Diego County land developer. "Improve it now. Make it more beautiful." But no, here I think he meant sublime as in giving you a sense of grandeur.

The song starts with tiny trilling strings which ostensibly seem unrelated to the arpeggios. Brünnhilde comes in. We hear the same melody from the end of Die Walküre. But then it changes and continues developing per the new style of music at the time, which Wagner helped pioneer. The very end of the song has a lot of "lachende." Laughing. Especially by Brünnhilde. Which is fitting, as the name of the duet is "Laughing love, laughing death." This reinforces the comedy aspect of the piece. It's a frenzy that ends, as Mitchell said, in an "amphetamine high." Siegfried is the only Ring opera to do this. It was funny. While the song was playing, Mitchell stood there at the podium looking down at the same handout with the lyrics that we all had. He was smiling at it and shaking his head, as if the handout had done something naughty. I can back up his claim about the song reaching a high. Brünnhilde in particular reaches great heights with her voice. The song has an amazing ability to expand in an arc. Mitchell called it Tristan by accident. And then he added that this song really is informed by Tristan. It's more than a coincidence. And it also musically predicts Parsifal.

That was about it for Mitchell's lecture. I know it ends kind of abruptly, but he didn't have much time. Plus, dumping all that terminology on us up front only cut into the time he had to talk about the opera itself. After those two excerpts, it was time to go. I hope you were able to keep up and learn something. Me? I learned a ton.