7/4

Thanks Brownie.

What is it?

I've been reading this all day and I just realized that I haven't said anything. Congratulations!

the Signal to Noise thread.

Les Paul. This disc won a Grammy when it came out.

http://www.biink.com/a/discography.htm

Picking on an obit?

Please don't do it Jim. I'd contribute, but I'm between jobs as they say right now...

Big fan when I was a little kid, but I grew out of it. Obviously I must have related to it. Go visit Lucys booth.

-_-

bunch of junkies, dammit. get off of my lawn.

October 8, 2007 Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family By PATRICIA COHEN David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him. But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women. “It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.” His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. “The whole thing is completely wrong,” she said from her home in Utah. “I think he wanted to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family.” “We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say things about our Dad,” she said, complaining that the children play a very small role in the book. Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.” “Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.” Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own “melancholy” and anxieties. “I have this awful feeling of impending doom,” he said on “60 Minutes” in 1999. “I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere.” Many portraits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s 1989 biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,” similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks, despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success. Nor does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective. He wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000 after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word. Mr. Michaelis’s biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” which HarperCollins is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the fall publishing season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s emotions. “He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’” “A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said. Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be unaware of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet Malcolm, in a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis, describing the relationship between a journalist and a subject as innately deceptive and the journalist as “kind of a confidence man.” Elements of all these explanations have been invoked. Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband, whom friends called Sparky, was “melancholy,” but she said that was only part of the story: “It’s not a full portrait. Sparky was so much more. Most of the time he loved to laugh. “Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about the actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the ‘sense of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly well. “David couldn’t put everything in,” she said, but added, “I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.” What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s judgments. “Every artist has to take a point of view,” she said, “but if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then you need to back it up.” “The attribution is very vague,” she said, mentioning anonymous quotations. Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a particular source. Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that “it just makes me wonder about other things in the book.” Mr. Michaelis “obviously took notes,” she said, but some things were clearly “mistranscribed or misinterpreted.” Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a mention of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked for the family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him lecture at a writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a ridiculously low estimate for building an ice-skating rink, which made it seem as if there were a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun. He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed as an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said, “I am not talking to anybody about anything.” Meredith Hodges, who grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book as “cold,” “distant” and “afraid to love,” and she wrote in an e-mail message, “No comment.” Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely generous, devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as energetic, capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as much space. Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most amazing Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up the negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said. Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”

October 14, 2007 Ideas & Trends You’re a Good Prop, Cruel Muse By RANDY KENNEDY THE cult of the suffering artist, that gaunt, rheumy-eyed creation of Romanticism, was all about introspection and isolation, so it didn’t exactly bequeath a handbook. If it had, a few artists probably would have been cited as examples to emulate. Van Gogh, of course, as the depressive in chief. “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher,” he wrote shortly before the earlobe incident, “so much more am I an artist.” Rimbaud, with his description of the artist as he who “exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences,” would have been included. And even such late entries as the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who wore his artistic hair shirt extra scratchy, piling up miseries and misdeeds: bankruptcy, depression, incarceration, agoraphobia and infidelity (with his wife’s sister, no less). He described his youth as a period of “moral torture.” To make room on this list for Charles M. Schulz, hugely wealthy and long famous creator of a beloved bunch of cartoon kids and their zany beagle, might seem like a stretch, or a gag from “Peanuts” itself. But since Mr. Schulz’s death seven years ago — in fact even while he was alive — the image of him as an unhappy, lonely and bitter man who drew deeply on his discontent to create his comic strips has gained ground. And with the publication this week of a highly anticipated biography by David Michaelis, “Schulz and Peanuts,” that examines seemingly every disappointment and slight (real or perceived) in Mr. Schulz’s 77 years, his reputation as tormented creative soul seems poised only to grow. The book was written with the cooperation of Mr. Schulz’s family, but in the weeks leading up to its release, some family members have criticized it, saying that it overemphasizes his melancholy and chilly side at the expense of other aspects of his personality — his generosity, his sense of humor, his love of family and, in many ways, his resolute normalness. “It’s not a full portrait,” Jean Schulz, his second wife, told The New York Times last week. Monte Schulz, his son, called it “preposterous.” Mr. Michaelis has defended himself, saying that after years of research and hundreds of interviews with those who knew the cartoonist best, “this was the man I found.” Such arguments are nothing particularly new in the world of biography. Writers and loved ones often end up staring each other down across a big chasm separating substantially different versions of a subject both claim to know intimately. But in the case of Mr. Schulz, the dispute seems to bring up a more fundamental question, whether almost two centuries after outlaws like Byron and Chateaubriand linked suffering and creativity, a connection that probably would have baffled Shakespeare or Swift, we still have a deep-seated need to believe in the idea of the tortured artist, to think that the only enduring ones are the really unhappy ones, even if we’re talking about syndicated cartoon-strip artists. While Mr. Schulz took pains to say that he did not see his cartoons as serious art, critics and writers have tended to disagree, some comparing his career to that of Balzac in scope. The short-story writer George Saunders has said that “Peanuts” prepared him for Beckett. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the man behind that work was a Balzac or a Beckett, or more than a very talented and insightful popular entertainer. And this is the ground in which Mr. Michaelis has gone to work, depicting Mr. Schulz as a much more self-aware and autobiographical artist than has been understood previously, a conduit for his times and the timeless subjects of art: longing, love, heartbreak, disappointment, distrust. (One strip, drawn when Mr. Schulz’s first marriage was breaking up and his wife, suspicious of an affair, was questioning his phone bills, shows Charlie Brown yelling at a lovesick Snoopy: “And stop making those long-distance phone calls!”) Looked at simply as a narrative problem, it is not hard to see why any biographer would want a strong framing device in trying to tell the story of Mr. Schulz. He was a homebody workaholic whose passions, other than his strips, were golf and hockey. He was a Sunday school teacher who was not only a teetotaler but disdainful of drinking and those who did it. His favorite ice cream was vanilla. A woman who knew him at the height of his early fame described him as a “genius at becoming invisible.” In trying to mine the sources of a lifelong gloom it’s not easy to figure out where his demons might have come from — except a naturally oversensitive and crabby personality. He had, by conventional measures, what George Plimpton (speaking of himself) called a “non-unhappy childhood.” His father, an industrious barber in St. Paul, had work throughout the Depression. His mother could be aloof and withholding and died when he was 20. But it was she who took him to his first comics show; she knew he was smitten. Stacked up against the sundry misfortunes that were courted by or fell on the heads of history’s best-known tortured artists — prostitute mothers (Jean Genet); drug addictions (Coleridge); physical deformities (Toulouse-Lautrec) — those that Mr. Michaelis describes in Mr. Schulz’s youth sound tame and sometimes a little silly. His father used to give him funny haircuts; he had to sleep in a room with his grandmother, who snored; he was afraid of girls and had a crushing Norwegian sense of humility; he was terrorized by schoolyard bullies, though those who knew him at the time can’t remember an instance of him actually being walloped by any. Patricia Hampl, a memoirist and poet who grew up in St. Paul and teaches at the University of Minnesota, suggested that our desire to think of good artists as fundamentally troubled stems from a need even now — perhaps particularly now, in the age of entertainment’s dominance — for art to be something separate from our quotidian lives, something almost spiritual. “People don’t want to believe that someone like them could just sit down at a typewriter or a desk and create something great or timeless,” she said. “It’s got to be the product of a lot of misery and angst.” She compared the impulse to that of conspiracy theorists and their reluctance to believe in the banality of evil: “It’s hard to accept that a guy could just go up into a building and shoot the president.” Morris Dickstein, a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said he believed that despite the cliché of the suffering artist, pain still deserved a whole lot of credit as a catalyst for creativity. “People who have always had a happy life and lived on an even keel and haven’t had a lot of misfortune really don’t tend to be creative people,” he said. (Though of course there are many contemporary examples of successful writers and artists who seem to have gotten by with fairly contented lives: John Updike? Jeff Koons?) Perhaps in today’s era of acute awareness of our depressions and neuroses, Mr. Schulz’s, as mild as they might have been, were simply enough to qualify him for membership in the modern miserable artists’ club. Or, as Mr. Dickstein suggested, maybe there wasn’t a need for a monumental amount of misery but for just enough to fit the funny pages. “It got filtered into a medium that we don’t think of as deep,” Mr. Dickstein said, “and certainly not as being dark.” And yet in its own way “Peanuts” could make a bit of newsprint as forlorn as a set for “Waiting for Godot” (with a kite, of course, caught in the naked tree and a doghouse somewhere in the distance). As Mr. Schulz himself summed it up: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.”

October 14, 2007 Good Grief! Reviewed by CHARLES McGRATH SCHULZ AND PEANUTS A Biography. By David Michaelis. Illustrated. 655 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95. Toward the end of his life Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” wished he were Andrew Wyeth. What Wyeth did was fine art, he grumbled, while he was just a newspaper cartoonist, a draftsman, whose work would surely not last. In fact, “Peanuts” is still read, in anthologies and compilations, by many more people than ever looked at a Wyeth, and Schulz’s was arguably the greater talent. He transformed the newspaper cartoon strip, busy and cluttered by the time he turned up in the late ’40s, by flooding it with white space, and by reducing his childish characters to near abstraction — huge circular heads balanced on tiny bodies — he rendered them far more expressive than their cartoon peers. The strip was able to register grown-up emotions, like anxiety, depression, yearning, disillusionment, that had never been in cartoons before. Instead of the “Slam!” “Bam!” “Pow!” sound effects that were the lingua franca of the comics, it employed a quieter, more eloquent vocabulary: “Aaugh!” and “Sigh.” “Peanuts” was beloved by everyone: by hipsters and college kids (in the ’60s especially); by presidents (Ronald Reagan once wrote Schulz a fan note, saying he identified with Charlie Brown); by the Apollo 10 astronauts, who named their orbiter and landing vehicle after Charlie and Snoopy; by ministers and pastors, who read moral and theological lessons into the strip; by the suits in Detroit, who paid Charlie and the gang a small fortune to shill for the Ford Falcon. At its peak the strip reached 300 million readers in 75 countries; 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. The various animated TV specials continue to top the Nielsen charts whenever they’re broadcast, and the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” after selling out for four years off Broadway, is now a staple of high school and amateur theater productions — the most-produced musical ever. The success of the strip, together with its spinoffs and an almost unending flood of cheesy “Peanuts” ware — calendars, bedsheets, wastebaskets, lunchboxes, “Warm Puppy” coffee mugs and the like — made Schulz an immensely wealthy man, rich enough to build his own ice rink. In the ’80s he was one of the 10 highest-paid entertainers in America, right up there with Oprah and Michael Jackson. In fact, if by artist we mean someone who paints or draws, it’s no stretch at all to say that Charles Schulz was the most popular and most successful American artist who ever lived. He was also, to judge from David Michaelis’s new biography, one of the loneliest and most unhappy. We should have guessed, for as Michaelis points out, “Peanuts” was almost transparently autobiographical. There really was an unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, and she jilted Schulz in July 1950; he nursed the rejection, along with all the other slights he suffered from wished-for girlfriends, for the rest of his life. Charlie Brown, wishy-washy, disillusioned, but also secretly ambitious, was the artist himself, of course; and so were Linus, the oddball; Schroeder, meticulous and gifted; and, above all, Snoopy, with his daydreams, his fantasies, his sense of being undervalued and misunderstood. Violet, with her mean streak; and Lucy, bossy, impatient and sarcastic, were all the controlling, withholding women in Schulz’s life, especially his mother and his first wife, Joyce. Michaelis also goes in for a certain amount of psychologizing, but once you have the key it hardly seems necessary. Michaelis’s last book was an exceptionally good biography of N. C. Wyeth (Andrew’s father), and his task here is both easier and harder. Wyeth was the practitioner of a dying, minor art form — he was the last of the great painterly illustrators — and if that earlier book had a weakness, it was that Michaelis barely bothered to explain why he deserved a full-length treatment. In the case of his Schulz biography, the importance of the subject almost goes without saying (though the author is at frequent pains to remind us, even so). Schulz was what so many lesser figures are carelessly said to be: a genuine American icon, who in his unassuming way deeply imprinted our culture. On the other hand, N. C. Wyeth lived a large, big-themed life, with a tragic, Dreiser-ish subplot for good measure. (In his 60s, he became obsessed with one of his daughters-in-law and died in a railroad-crossing collision — probably by accident, but possibly by intention — with her son, his grandson, at his side.) Schulz’s much longer life (1922-2000) was, by comparison, bland and eventless — or at least the part that wasn’t lived inside his head, and except for the strip, he left few clues as to what was going on in there. Though he was one of the first to introduce psychological themes into cartooning, with Lucy and her sidewalk psychiatric-help booth, he was himself stubbornly unanalytical. His nature was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1987. People who knew Schulz always called him Sparky, the nickname given him at birth by an uncle, who shortened it from Spark Plug, the name of a woebegone race horse just recently introduced into the popular Barney Google comic strip. It was an almost comically inappropriate handle — there was nothing in the least scintillating about the young Sparky, who was small, shy, geeky — and also a fateful one, linking him to what from a very early age he determined to be his life work: to produce a syndicated daily comic strip. Not that there were many signs he had a gift for it, or for anything else. Schulz was born and — except for a weird and awful two-year stint the family endured in the California desert — grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. His father, who was born in Germany and grew up with German-speaking parents, ran a barber shop (just like Charlie Brown’s dad). His mother, who never got beyond third grade, came from a clannish, depressive, hard-drinking Norwegian farm family and was one of those people who feel inadequate and superior at the same time. According to Michaelis, she could be distant, cool, even mocking and scornful, and he blames her for most of Sparky’s woes, especially his lifelong feeling of being insufficiently loved. Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. “I wasn’t actually hated,” he said later. “Nobody cared that much.” His one chance for distinction was lost when some cartoons he had drawn for the school yearbook were unaccountably turned down — a rejection he never forgave, just as he never forgave all the girls who failed to notice that he had worshiped them from afar. After graduation, Schulz’s shyness and insecurity rendered art school out of the question, so instead he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., the kind of place that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks. (He found the instruction so helpful that he eventually joined the faculty himself and years later went on the board.) In 1942 Schulz was drafted and, heartsick and terrified, left for boot camp only days after his mother had died. But he actually thrived in the Army and came back newly confident. He even began to go out with girls — though his idea of an appropriate dating present was a Bible. (All his life Schulz was the straightest of arrows: he didn’t smoke, swear or drink, on the grounds that neither did Jesus. The wine at Cana, the young Sparky used to claim, was nonalcoholic.) In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a 22-year-old divorcée with a young daughter from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage to a cowboy. He arranged to adopt the daughter, Meredith, and afterward always insisted she was his, even when the teenage Meredith began to poke around and ask nosy questions. To some degree it was probably a marriage of convenience on both sides, but for a while it was happy enough, and the Schulzes went on to have four children of their own. Sparky was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband, though, because, self-absorbed and secretly harboring immense ambition, he was really married to his work. After a lot of rejections and false starts, he finally landed a weekly strip, called “Li’l Folks,” with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was syndicated in 1950 by United Feature, which insisted that the title be changed to “Peanuts.” Schulz hated the name but went along, adding this to his ever-growing list of grudges. Schulz had initially dreamed of an action strip but began drawing children because that’s what seemed to sell. The earliest strips hit what now seems the authentic Schulzian emotional tone — “Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown. ... How I hate him!” — but it took a while for the drawing to evolve, for the heads to enlarge, the limbs to shrink. “Peanuts” grew slowly at first; caught on hugely in the ’60s, when almost by accident it seemed to speak to everyone who was experiencing the generation gap; and then almost drowned in a licensing binge and flood of tchotchkes. Schulz said yes to everything, no matter how kitschy — toys, cards, books, sweatshirts — until even his fans began to complain he was selling out. What saved “Peanuts,” Michaelis suggests, was the elevation of Snoopy into a main character in the late ’60s, and the way his boundless, almost surreal fantasy life frequently took over the strip, which at the same time was being pared down to a visual minimum: a scarf, a helmet, a doghouse indicated by just a few horizontal lines. Another thing that didn’t hurt was the gradual souring of the Schulz marriage. The family was living in Southern California by now, on a sort of private Disneyland with its own stables and miniature golf course and the ice rink (where Schulz like to hold court in the Warm Puppy snack bar) nearby. Despite his success, Schulz was prickly, lonely, depressed and increasingly subject to panic attacks; Joyce felt overburdened and underappreciated. Their feuds, their long bouts of coldness, inspired some of the most Thurber-like stretches of “Peanuts” — the strips where Charlie and Lucy seem to be locked in the eternal struggle of male and female, with the latter always wielding the upper hand. As Schulz grew into middle age, he filled out, stopped wearing his hair in a buzz cut and discovered that he was actually attractive to women. He had one full-fledged affair, and in 1973, a year or so after divorcing Joyce, he married Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, 16 years his junior, whom he had met — where else? — at the ice rink. This second marriage was happier, in large part because Jeannie, as she was known, saw it her job to make it so. Schulz was often moody and withdrawn nevertheless, and was also compulsively flirty. The evidence suggests that his was essentially an arrested sensibility, locked in adolescent longing and self-absorption. But for a certain kind of artist this is not such a bad thing. Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse suffered, or benefited, from much the same condition: like Schulz, they were truly happy only when transported by their work. Schulz said once that if it weren’t for cartooning he’d be dead, and indeed he died within days of resigning from the strip because of ill health. In another way, though, Schulz’s is a classic American story: the lonely, misunderstood genius who clings to his dream, finds riches and fame, and discovers that they don’t make him happy after all. He was like Gatsby or Citizen Kane. That he chose the comic strip as his medium links him, on the one hand, to such gifted, pioneering and equally misunderstood figures as Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman; and on the other, to current practitioners like R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the graphic novelist who goes by the name Seth, who is currently editing “The Complete Peanuts” for Fantagraphics (and who illustrated this review). These younger artists have a far warier relationship to popular success than Schulz did, but they share his themes of loneliness, of loss, of being unable to connect. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is in many ways Charlie Brown grown, while still an adolescent, to a premature old age. And Crumb offers a window onto what Schulz might have been like if only he had let the anger out. Michaelis, who had the cooperation of the Schulz family, tells this story brightly and engagingly, if not always succinctly and without repetition. There is rather less than one might expect about the rich tradition of newspaper comics that spawned Schulz, and more than some readers might prefer about, for example, the patterns of metastasis in cervical cancer (the disease that killed Schulz’s mother). Throughout the book Michaelis maintains affection for his subject without losing sight of how exasperating and narcissistic he could be. And the smartest thing he has done is to pepper his pages with actual strips from “Peanuts,” dozens of them, usually without comment or footnote or even date: an appropriate strip just turns up in the middle of a paragraph that happens to be talking about something similar. Sometimes it’s an illustration, sometimes a wry comment. The effect is to continually remind us of why Schulz matters in the first place, and of the potential not just for humor but for feeling and eloquence in the odd and oddly persistent art form where he made his home. Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.

André Benichou - Jazz Guitar Bach

video

I bought it yesterday, works for me. I'm missing the extra tracks.

Welcome to Organissimo Pete. Stick around...

just trying to educate the kids, I guess.

October 14, 2007 Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT MENTION the term 12-tone music to many veteran classical concertgoers and watch them recoil. Twelve-tone music? All those dreadful, aggressively dissonant pieces that a cadre of cerebral composers tried to impose on audiences for so long? Mention 12-tone music to younger people and fledgling concertgoers, and for the most part they draw a blank. They don’t know 12-tone from “Ocean’s 12.” They just know what contemporary music they like and don’t like. Among all segments of the audience major misconceptions persist about the 12-tone technique of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. Schoenberg’s use of systematized sets of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale — all the keys on the piano from, say, A to G sharp — was a radical departure from tonality, the familiar musical language of major and minor keys. Seized with excitement over his breakthrough, Schoenberg predicted that the 12-tone technique would assure the supremacy of Germanic music for another hundred years. He could not have been more wrong. His system spread well beyond Germany, but with far less impact than he had hoped. Still, the invention of the 12-tone system was arguably the most audacious and influential development in 20th-century music. Its impact can be heard today in works far removed from the knotty scores of composers like Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Charles Wuorinen and its other formidable practitioners during its heyday in the third quarter of the last century. Elements of 12-tone style turn up even in Broadway shows and film scores. Yet an overwhelming majority of music lovers have no idea what the technique is, what exactly the music sounds like or what the fuss was all about. Adaptations of the technique and aesthetic have become so integrated into concert music today that few listeners even notice anymore. Patrons at the season-opening gala of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at the Rose Theater last month might have been upset had they thought they were going to be confronted with some gnarly 12-tone piece. Yet the program included the premiere of Bruce Adolphe’s spiky “Crossing Broadway” for chamber ensemble, music that impishly blurs the distinctions between skittish 12-tone riffs and jazzy scat. The audience listened with pleasure and gave Mr. Adolphe a warm ovation. The 12-tone movement was supposed to have engendered a revolution. In 1979 Mr. Wuorinen declared victory, at least in the realm of “serious” music. “While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backwards-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream,” he wrote. “It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system.” Obviously this declaration was premature and ultimately wrong. Beginning in the mid-1960s a backlash emerged against 12-tone dogma. Minimalism, post-Minimalism and neo-Romanticism took root, along with various hard-to-label approaches to composition that found invigorating ways to combine tonal and atonal elements. Before long audiences developed such animosity toward 12-tone music that its adherents, if not abandoning the technique, were disavowing the label. “If anyone writes program notes and says that I am a serial or a 12-tone composer, I am infuriated,” Donald Martino said in a 1997 interview. “I don’t want to prejudice people with that.” By now the popular perception is that 12-tone music is passé if not dead. Yet the revolution may have surreptitiously succeeded, at least in part. Almost every composer of significance has had to come to grips with the method. You could say that once the 12-tone commando squad was defeated, the victors picked through the spoils, taking what they liked and ignoring the rest. Now that decades of hostility are past, maybe it is time to reacknowledge the pervasive impact of this path-breaking development. It’s hard to ignore that at its worst the battle was debilitating. On one side were 12-tone composers who claimed the intellectual high ground, usually from secure posts in universities; on the other, composers who clung in various ways to tonal languages, cared about connecting with audiences and withstood the patronizing disdain of the tough-guy modernists in their midst. The critic Alex Ross tells the whole sorry story in his insightful, compulsively readable book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” coming out Oct. 23 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Happily, the best young composers today feel entitled to borrow from anything and anyone, and more power to them. Talk to those young creators about the standoff between the Babbitts and the Coplands of 20th-century music, and they react as if you were trying to explain some archaic history, like the schism between the Brahms and Wagner wings of late 19th-century German music. Who cares? From what I can tell the 12-tone technique is seldom adhered to strictly anymore. Even in Schoenberg’s day his followers, notably his devoted student Alban Berg, found deft ways to inject elements of haunting tonal harmony into astringent 12-tone scores, most amazingly in Berg’s unfinished opera “Lulu.” Still, if the application of the technique is loose, the aesthetic of 12-tone music — its deliberately disorienting sound world, its burst-open harmonic palette, its leaping lines and every-which-way counterpoint, its gleeful avoidance of tonal centers — is very much alive among exciting composers of otherwise strikingly different styles. Think of Judith Weir, Stephen Hartke, Kaija Saariaho, Steven Stucky and Thomas Adès. For those unversed in music theory it may be worth explaining with a little more specificity what 12-tone music is and how it came about. Tonality is a means of organizing pitch in accordance with the physics of sound. A fundamental tone — say, C in a C major scale — is central; the other pitches relate to it in a hierarchy of importance based on natural overtone relationships. Whatever happens, the music keeps returning to that fundamental tonal mooring. Variety, expression and development result when a composer plays with expectations and introduces ambiguity, letting the music drift to remote pitches and chords that are not part of the basic major or minor scale. As music developed in the late 19th century, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and other path breakers pushed at the boundaries of that mooring and weakened the pull of the tonal center. Ten years into the 20th century the whole business was in crisis, Schoenberg argued. . So he started composing in a harmonic language unhinged from tonality: atonality, it has been called. His works in this style, Expressionistic pieces like “Erwartung,” sound as if they were conceived almost through harmonic free association. Yet Schoenberg revered order, form and tradition. So he took a conceptual leap. If all 12 pitches in the octave are to be used more or less equally, why not devise a system that ensured a kind of equality? Instead of the old tonal hierarchy, or his short-lived experiment in harmonic free-for-all, Schoenberg specified that the 12 pitches be put in an order, or row. Once a pitch was sounded, it was not to be repeated until the entire row had unfolded. There were countless ways around this dictum, however, because Schoenberg adapted his technique so that the row could be transposed, gone through backward or upside down, broken into smaller units that were mixed and matched, and so on. Wiggle room was built in from the start. This description may make the technique sound like a rigid methodology, but Schoenberg found it liberating. “I find myself positively enabled to compose as freely and fantastically as one otherwise does only in one’s youth, and am nevertheless subject to a precisely definable aesthetic discipline,” he wrote to a colleague. Besides, tonal music relies on patterns too. Whole spans of pieces by Mozart and Beethoven are generated through default patterns of pitches: arpeggios, scale passages, chords and the like. If the human ear is conditioned to find music with tonal moorings satisfying, if we are “embedded in a tonal universe,” as Leonard Bernstein once put it, then 12-tone music discombobulates those aural expectations and shakes up the universe. A Berlin critic of Schoenberg’s atonal works wrote indignantly that the music “kills tonal perception.” Exactly! And that’s what’s so exhilarating. You are invited to take a vacation from tonality, to experience music without a tonal safety net. Other composers also found Schoenberg’s invention liberating. One branch took the systematizing principle radically further by placing rhythms and dynamics as well as pitches into predetermined series; hence the term serialism. In the 1960s and ’70s 12-tone music and serialism were treated like scientific disciplines by composers working within universities, where their research, to call it that, was of interest mainly to other composers. Alas, there are many stories of gifted young composers who initially felt no choice but to adopt 12-tone technique. David Del Tredici, for one, eventually made the break and was in the vanguard of composers who rejected the dogma and reclaimed tonal languages. He emerged from that experience bitter. William Bolcom went through this experience too, though with fewer psychic scars, from what he has said. He was drawn to the music of Mr. Boulez and Luciano Berio as a young man, but also to the music of Darius Milhaud, with whom he studied, as well as a wide range of American vernacular music. In time Mr. Bolcom too shed what he considered an academic approach to composing and developed a vibrantly eclectic language, rich with allusion to American song, jazz, ragtime and rock. Still, he and Mr. Del Tredici are stronger and more precise composers today for having been through the rigors of 12-tone composition. Several giants explored 12-tone technique as well: not only Stravinsky, whose move into the enemy camp shook up the world of modern music, but also Messiaen and Copland. Whether their explorations were driven by a competitive desire to be in the front lines of modernism or by honest curiosity, each grew immensely from devising his own adaptations to the 12-tone system. I don’t mean to romanticize 12-tone music, which has given us lots of terribly cerebral pieces. But prosaic, dull tonal works of every description continue to be written as well. I would much rather hear Mr. Babbitt’s scintillating 12-tone piano pieces than, say, the lushly tonal “Tempest Fantasy” by the Poulenc-infatuated Paul Moravec, a piece that beat out distinguished works by Peter Lieberson and Steve Reich for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music. The refreshing lack of dogmatism among the new generation of composers seems to have spread to audiences as well. The brilliant pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard segues from Beethoven to Boulez, from Liszt to Ligeti on the same program, and today’s audiences just follow along, open to everything. As Elliott Carter, the dean of modernist composers, approaches his 99th birthday, he keeps challenging us with complex and ingenious new scores and is cheered by young and old at every premiere. I doubt that Mr. Wuorinen spends much time regretting dogmatic pronouncements he made in the heat of the battle, since he is far too busy enjoying the recent burst of enthusiasm for his music, thanks in part to champions like the conductor James Levine and the pianist Peter Serkin. Certainly Mr. Wuorinen’s Fourth Piano Concerto is evidence of a stunningly complex approach to writing music. But in a brilliant performance by Mr. Serkin with Mr. Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 2005, that concerto came across as audacious. You stopped thinking about tone rows and responded to the playfulness and ferocity of this formidable music. In retrospect the major flaw in Schoenberg’s astute analysis of the crisis of tonality was the notion that pursuing an alternative had become a historical necessity. The development of 12-tone technique was no necessity. During the same period Bartok, Stravinsky and other giants were finding enthralling ways to adapt, transform and shake up tonality. Instead Schoenberg’s great adventure was, as Mr. Ross puts it in his new book, “one man’s leap into the unknown.” But what a leap!

Wife says hard work, not wild living, made Hunter Thompson a success DENVER - It wasn't a reckless obsession with liquor, drugs and gunplay that made the late Hunter S. Thompson the undisputed king of Gonzo journalism, his wife says. Instead, it was old-fashioned principles such as working hard and telling the truth, enlivened by the glee Thompson took from learning and from being right. "I don't deny his lifestyle, because his lifestyle was pretty extreme," Anita Thompson told The Associated Press, but that lifestyle was made possible by his success as a reporter and writer, not the other way around. In her new book, "The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," Thompson says her husband built his career with a tireless dedication to the craft of reporting, a keen awareness of his own shortcomings and his personal blend of patriotism - loving his country while mistrusting authority. And, in a wide-ranging interview, she spoke about a rift between her and Hunter Thompson's son and the agonizing doubts that dogged her in the days after her husband's suicide. Thompson shot himself in the kitchen of his home outside Aspen in February 2005 at age 67. He had established himself as an original and riveting voice with "Hells Angels," published in 1966, and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in 1972. It was Gonzo journalism - irreverent, outlandish and unapologetically personal. The image it projected, coupled with his undisguised love of guns and explosions, gave Thompson a reputation as an unbridled outlaw surfing on a wave of drugs and excess. After his death, Anita Thompson said, she got stacks of e-mails and letters from young people who thought they could duplicate his success by mimicking his infamous consumption. "They wrote me these letters about drinking bottles of Wild Turkey and doing grams of cocaine," said Thompson, a tall, outgoing, slender woman with shoulder-length dirty blond hair and a ready smile, who munched on a salad during an interview at a Denver hotel. "And I realized, OK, I need to correct that." Her book, published by Fulcrum Publishing, depicts the man who used the pseudonym Raoul Duke in his famous "Fear and Loathing," as a relentless researcher and a voracious reader. He viewed politics as both worthy and necessary to get things done, the book says, and he believed nothing could be accomplished without friends and allies. "The Hunter I want people to understand is hardworking, righteous and a patriot - a bedrock patriot and loyal to his country and loyal to his friends," Anita Thompson said. Even his most savage political commentary was written in hopes of inspiring change: "He believed we were better than what we were electing." Thompson also knew his faults and either compensated for them or harnessed them, his widow said. He thought he was lazy, so he worked hard. He could be angry and violent, so he poured that energy onto the page. But not all of it ended up there. "Sometimes, it felt like the walls of the cabin would come down when we would get into our big fights," she said. "Things would fly, grapefruits and a lamp would fly - a lot of shouting." Their marriage worked, she said, because she fought back, and he was never physically violent toward her. "To me he was a great husband. He could be scary at times . . . but so could I," she said, laughing. The 35-year age difference between them - she was 32 when he died - enriched their relationship. Thompson described Hunter as her teacher, boss and best friend, while she sometimes played the role of designated grown-up. "He was such a child at heart that I was often the adult between the two of us," she said. Anita Thompson was born in Fort Collins, about 210 kilometres northeast of Aspen. She attended the University of California at Los Angeles but got so heavily involved with environmental groups on the campus that she burned out. She moved to Aspen in 1994 for what she thought would be a one-semester break but it stretched into years. She went snowboarding every day during ski season and was working as a nanny and a ski shop bookkeeper when a friend introduced her to Hunter. They became friends and he asked her to go to work as his editorial assistant on a book of his letters. They fell in love. She moved in with him in late 1999 and they married in April 2003. Writing "The Gonzo Way" has helped her heal from his suicide, she said, but the path has been uneven. The first few weeks were especially dark, complicated by a split with Juan Thompson, Hunter's son from a previous marriage. Twice before the suicide, Juan and his wife had asked Anita to leave Hunter, said Thompson, who does not know why and refused to consider it. "I had no intention of leaving him," she said. "He was the love of my life and he was sick at the time." Hunter Thompson had undergone a hip replacement and back surgery, and had suffered a broken leg. After the suicide, Juan told her his father had wanted to end the marriage and that a paper found near his body was a divorce document, she said. She didn't believe it, but then recalled a note her husband wrote two weeks earlier saying, "I love you enough to set you free." She had asked what he meant but he didn't want to talk about it. "So when Juan said that 'My dad wanted a divorce,' I thought maybe Hunter did want me to go," she said. "I had to requestion everything - my place there, if my being there maybe caused Hunter to do it." Relief came three weeks later, she said, when she got a photograph taken by investigators that showed the paper found near Thompson's body was not a divorce document but an amendment to his will. "I know Hunter didn't want a divorce. I know that," she said. Anita Thompson said Juan won't discuss the document with her. Juan Thompson declined to discuss the assertions, saying they involved "very personal issues." "If we're going to talk about Hunter, I think we should talk about Hunter's accomplishments and writing rather than his personal life," he said. Like many others who knew the writer, Anita Thompson said she was not surprised that he committed suicide, because he had spoken more than once about ending his life on his own terms, when he thought it was time to go. "I have accepted his decision with an open heart. But I do feel it was a mistake. I believe he did it too soon," she said. Now 35, Thompson said she is doing her best to move on. She is finishing her undergraduate degree in American studies at Columbia University in New York and is considering graduate school. She may pursue a career in public education, but, she said, "I will always work for Hunter, or at least for the things he thought were important, because they're important to me, too." One of those causes is working with a marijuana-law reform group. Her family sometimes worries that she is "still orbiting around Hunter." But that's all right with Thompson. "It's like Venus - doesn't want to lose the sun. One day you wake up and the sun is gone. What do you do?" she said with a laugh.

Nah...these guys put it on their ear.

'tiz OK, no big deal.

Someone on staff must have lied to him and slipped it past him for the fun of it.