By Peter Gimpel.
(Page numbers refer to the “First Anchor Books Mass Market Edition.”)
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a historical first. Traditionally, lies, disinformation and other deceptive devices were foisted on a naive public under the unambiguous guise of factual and historical truth. Conversely, writers of historical fiction expended much time and effort in order to ensure that their fictional plot lines dovetailed seamlessly with established historical fact or plausible hypothesis. In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown wantonly “revises” history in order to meet the demands of his fictional plot. Since the plot is premised on the inflammatory claim that the Church has deliberately suppressed and vitiated the genuine message of Jesus, the result is a kind of new-age Protocols of the Elders of Zion that is virtually impervious to exposure as a work of base propaganda. “Come on, now: it’s just fiction!” says Dan Brown. “Yes,” suggests the novel’s ante-prologue. “but it’s based on ‘fact,’ just like the works of the great writers of historical fiction, like Irving Stone and Lion Feuchtwanger.”
The ambiguity permits Dan Brown to use his fiction in much the same way as Harriet Beecher Stowe used her Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Except that Stowe’s novel was historically plausible and designed to further the noble cause of Black emancipation; while Brown’s is based on lies and designed to smear the Catholic Church while promoting a kind of New Age pornospiritual feelgoodism at the expense of traditional morals. Indeed, The Da Vinci Code attacks the Judeo-Christian religious teachings as violently, obsessively hostile to the “sacred feminine,” while promoting the idea of heterosexual indulgence as a mystical pathway to G-d and to the true, “suppressed” teachings of Jesus.
The juxtaposition of these last two progandistic objectives is intriguing, for, as should be obvious, they are completely contradictory. Indeed, while the author pretends to call for the return of woman to her original status of revered and holy minister of love, caring and nurturing, it seems that this is only to reduce her once again to an object to be used for the procurement of “holy” male orgasms. (337)
True, Brown does not seem to object to the woman’s sharing in this sacrosexual revelation, but he does seem to rue the disappearance of the ancient institution of ritual prostitution (a pre-Israelitic practice expressly outlawed by the Torah!), while describing with approbation the public sex ritual of “hieros gamos” purportedly practiced by various heretical sects throughout the ages.
At this point, one begins to suspect that the author has discovered the secret of Teflon:
1. The Da Vinci Code is based on fact and history (page 1, under the heading, “Fact”). The Da Vinci Code is a work of pure fiction. (Copyright page)
2. The author is a male chauvinist, envisioning women as priestesses of sex or holy prostitutes. The author is an ardent feminist, a pro-feminine advocate for restoring the sacred feminine to its rightful throne.
3. The author maliciously libels the Jewish Faith by falsely and baselessly claiming that “men seeking spiritual wholeness came to [Solomon’s Temple] to visit priestesses—or hierodules—with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union.” (336) The author admires sacred prostitution (336) and credits the Jews with protecting the alleged wife and daughter of Jesus (276); hence he can’t be an anti-semite. (Note that the purported sexual licentiousness of the Jews has long been a favorite theme of Nazi and other anti-Jewish propaganda.)
4. The Church is desperate to to suppress “a secret so powerful that, if revealed, it threatened to devastate the very foundation of Christianity!” (259, 288) Everybody knows this “secret” anyway, including “scores of historians” (273), the authors of an international best-seller that “caused quite a stir back in the nineteen eighties,” (274), and Walt Disney himself, who made it his life’s work to pass on the secret “metaphorically” via his cartoons! (282)
5. The author says and does these things, but no, he doesn’t: it is only his fictional creation who says them and does them.
These artful, self-contradictory, spineless shiftings are not just legalistic posturing. They are epitomized by the very plot line of Brown’s novel. For the heroine, who at the novel’s end is revealed as the most direct descendent of the royal bloodline of the purported Jesus-Magdalene union, hence as the heiress-apparent to the exalted priesthood of the Magdalene herself, (477) wraps things up by propositioning the hero (after their first kiss), for a secluded week of sex in a Florence hotel! (484) So their story ends—at least until the sequel, when no doubt we will all be invited to attend the “hieros gamos” of the happy couple.
This should be a dead give-away. The Da Vinci Code is not an inspiring journey of rediscovery of the Holy Grail, the Sacred Feminine, the True Teachings of the Christian Messiah. It is a pretentious, shallow, deceitful, intellectually sordid, cynical, back-alley, legally armor-plated puerile voyage of pseudo-cultural obfuscation, historical revisionism and spiritual degradation. Thanks to Dan Brown and Random House / Doubleday, in the future all best-selling novels will be written this way.
May 12th, 2006
For information on this great artist born one hundred years ago today, April 16, visit www.gimpelmusicarchives.com!
April 16th, 2006
After reading National Book Award-winning novel, The Corrections, I can’t imagine what, besides $$, would motivate a brilliantly gifted writer like Jonathan Franzen to take an interesting idea and then cynically sacrifice it on the altar of mass appeal. The Corrections is a satire on the global culture of quick fixes and its effect on traditional American values. It contains an emblematic scene in which one of the characters urinates into his own beer stein. This is what Franzen has done to his book via the constant use of low humor, jock language, deliberate clichés, and a flippant - even contemptuous - treatment of some very serious issues and plausible characters. Was Franzen attempting to portray the dehumanizing of humanity by dehumanizing his novel? Or did someone (his agent? his editor?) put him up to this? Either way, it was a sad mistake. I have a tea bag that quotes Albert Einstein as follows: “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” So even a tea bag understands that when a writer gives up the high ground to write “corrections,” he becomes part of the problem. That should not have been rewarded by a committee of critics who presume to represent the literary taste of a nation.
April 16th, 2006
By Peter Gimpel
According to postings on the internet, Paul Gordon’s “Concert Magic” — reportedly the first full-length movie ever made that was entirely devoted to a musical performance — premiered in San Francisco on Friday, Oct. 8, 1948, and in Europe in 1950. The original film featured several important artists besides violinist Yehudi Menuhin (the film’s star performer) playing both solo and with pianist Adolf Baller. The other artists were contralto Eula Beal (with pianist Marguerite Campbell), Antal Dorati conducting the “Hollywood Symphony,” and my father, pianist Jakob Gimpel. According to my father, the great harmonicist Larry Adler also participated, but his segments were evidently cut from the final version—quite possibly as a result of his brush with the HUAC. The movie appears to have been well received by critics both here and abroad, but my father never had occasion to see it: for reasons never ascertained, it disappeared from circulation shortly after its debut, and has not been seen or heard of since.
Until now, that is. In September of 2005, a DVD of “Concert Magic” (EuroArts / Naxos) surfaced in a carelessly edited version that seems to derive from an inferior German copy. The release is disturbing for several reasons. In the first place, little, if anything, appears to have been done to restore the sound quality, which is fairly poor throughout. There are also several noticeable dropouts, and the music is slightly out of synch. Second, the video is incomplete—at least one segment (Gimpel playing a Chopin Mazurka in C# minor) apparently missing without explanation. Moreover, not only have the producers failed to offer any account of how and when they acquired their master copy, neither did they bother to provide any meaningful info on the supporting artists—as though no reasonable person could be interested in anyone besides Menuhin! (The slant is confirmed by the above-mentioned synch problem: it is less noticeable in the violin segments, so why bother to correct it?) What little history there is comes from the elderly Menuhin himself, fatuously interviewed as he watches the video and critiques his own youthful playing.
Of course, Paul Gordon, the original filmmaker, knew as well as anybody which “star” to hitch his wagon to. Menuhin was already a big name in 1946, whereas Gimpel, a wartime refugee from Nazi Vienna, was just beginning to attract notice in the US as a rising star with a recent Columbia album and several movie appearances. On the other hand, while Menuhin’s playing preponderates in minutes, the structure and staging of the movie show that the other artists were originally treated with a decorum that is painfully lacking from this DVD presentation. In his interview with Humphrey Burton, Menuhin comes across completely self-absorbed, saying scarcely anything about Beal, and not one word about Gimpel. That Menuhin would comport himself thus is incomprehensible unless he was railroaded by the usual marketing yahoos. Tully Potter’s passing remarks on Jakob Gimpel and Adolph Baller are preposterous. A serious critic does not write this way about internationally recognized artists.
As for the playing itself, though it is fascinating to watch Menuhin’s Buddha-like composure while his fingers and bow are burning up the strings, his sound does not benefit from the close miking, which reveals a slight impurity of intonation as well as a monochromatic timbre. Menuhin was a first-class technician, but his tone tended to be as cool as his outward demeanour. Perhaps the most musically satisfying is Wilhelmj’s violin arrangement of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” — the final number on the DVD. Menuhin is disarmingly correct when he characterizes his own playing of the Prelude from Bach’s E-Major Partita as “the performance of a good — no, an excellent student.”
I wish I knew more about Eula Beal, a contralto with a beautiful, disciplined voice that must have had a velvety quality in a hall, but here comes through with an edge hardened by poor engineering, and a lack of color and dynamic variation.
Naturally, to me, the most interesting performance here is my father’s, but I can’t say that I am altogether thrilled. The Chopin e-minor waltz, E-major Etude, and Bb major Mazurka, though played with characteristic panache, seem a bit rushed by standards he espoused only a few years later. However, the F-major etudes (Chopin and Mendelssohn) are ravishing in delicacy and brilliance. Curiously, the high point here is not Chopin, but Liszt’s “Un Sospiro.” It is pure magic: there is no other way to describe it.
“Concert Magic” ought to be reissued in a fully restored, properly re-integrated and researched edition. Had the producers of this DVD treated this historical and cultural treasure with the care it deserves instead of exploiting it for their own private agenda, they might have done a great service to a later, more enlightened age.
March 30th, 2006
For Di Amud: Learn Nusach haTefilla with Rabbi Moishe Shur:
Weekday and Shabbos (Nusach Chabad/Russian).
Tired of davening in a monotonous drone? Ashamed to daven for di Amud? Learn the traditional melodic chant for Weekday and Shabbos Prayers! Learn the traditional Nusach of Chabad-Lubavitch and other Russian Chasidim. Taught by renowned Chazan Rabbi Moishe Shur. With 16-page booklet of detailed notes and explanations. Trackmap keyed to standard Chabad Siddur. Includes Kabbalas Shabbos, Kiddush and Havdolah.
2-CD set. Jewel Box included.
Price: US $18.00
Usually ships within 24 hours.
Read More and purchase.
January 8th, 2006
Michael Blackstock, Salmon Run: a Florilegium of Aboriginal Ecological Poetry. Kamloops, B.C., Wyget Books, 2005. US$14.95.
With his first published book of poems, Salmon Run, British-Columbian / GitXsan artist Michael Blackstock (Ama Goodim Gyet) displays a remarkable poetic inventiveness and literary talent. Though Blackstock’s poems do not yet, as a whole, display a complete mastery of matter and form, they do reveal a Protean imagination, grace, thoughtfulness, humor, and a spontaneity of vision not found in many of his more polished, university-published contemporaries.
A trained forester and a highly accomplished painter in the First Nation style, Blackstock sometimes expresses his ethnic pride and social conscience through a kind of dialog of his own invention, involving mythical or pseudo-mythical characters. Evanescent, sardonic and whimsically, undefinably portentous, they are unlike anything that I have read elsewhere.
Blackstock has included some poems that might better have been left out–some because of their undue reliance on erotic imagery, others because of a certain flippancy that leaves me hungry for real substance.
However, there are also poems here (such as “That Duck,” “Wabi Sabi,” “Two Times,” “Ant Logic,” “Dig a Hole to Hell,” “Wyget’s Wing Print,” “Parisienne Dogs,” and others) that give one reason to hope that Michael Blackstock will become an authentic voice of his GitXsan Nation–indeed, of the whole biosphere.
All in all, a delightful and interesting collection, beautifully designed and typeset by the author.
–Peter Gimpel
http://www.redheiferpress.com
August 2nd, 2005