5/27/08

Parting Shots: Not so "so long," after all

Dear Detritusites, I need to ask you a big favor, well, two favors: One, please be patient, this is a long ‘un. But most importantly, two, would you please hold your anger-filled comments and death-threats until the end? This might sting a bit, but, if you can accept for a moment that I may not be entirely crazy, then this will be easier on all of us. Besides, if, by the end, you still feel the need to tear me a new one and shove a fistful of wadded-up Lachenmann scores in the open wound, by all means, go ahead. It’s your right, and I’ll take it with a grin on my face. Now, you could be asking yourselves, what could be so bad that Empiricus felt he needed to issue a disclaimer? Well, people, I’m going to throw-down with Alan Rich.

As you may or may not know, Alan’s post as classical music critic at the L.A.Weekly has been terminated. And this is his last entry at that post (though he’ll remain there, albeit in a limited role).

Parting Shots

I must say, at the onset, that we have not gone after his work, until now, because it is utterly stupendous. Aside from his keen knowledge and ear, his prose is gorgeous. Here, he puts his brilliant knack for imagery and insinuation into motion right away.

Helmut Lachenmann cuts a solitary figure in today’s musical world. At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity, that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent whose music ground its way through Zipper Concert Hall last Monday.

That’s ridiculously clever, maybe even poetic. However, what lies beneath this elegant prose—which, by the way, sets up the rest of the review perfectly—is almost pure anti-modernist venom, couched in populist (?) idealism. To get a better sense of what I mean, let’s take a closer look.

At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity...

He’s just setting up and defining the contrary, yet popular, point of view by naming Lachenmann’s aesthetic adversaries and their accomplishments. In fact, he’s hailing their accomplishments, while making clear that their work represents the present: “at a time when,” “composer-heroes.” This places Lachenmann, where?

...that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent...

Lachenmann is placed on Lonely Mountain, as it were. Or, as we’ve seen so many times before, in his own selfish, ivory tower. But he’s placed there as a relic (“old notion,” “gaunt”), happy to swim upstream. He’s seen as the last of a dying breed (“old notion...rests almost solely”).

Put all of it together we come up with something like this, which sounds a lot like someone else we’ve dealt with before: Lachenmann is an old-school, aloof, who-gives-a-shit-about-comprehensibility kind of composer-God, who doesn’t care about pleasing his audience, unlike “Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters,” who, by the way, are heroes. Salonen, really?

And also, apparently, good riddance, Lachenmann! (I read ahead)

Okay so far?

Well, no. I’m not okay. BEGIN STUPID RANT STOP Accessibility in music means popularity. If that was, indeed, the penultimate goal, then every composer would be imitating this guy. And the only things you get by imitating that guy, besides money and paparazzi, is awards. I mean, where are these composers now? Where is their music being performed? Are these popular Pultizer Prize winners in the canon?: Douglas Stuart Moore, Gail Kubic, John la Montaine, Robert Ward, Leslie Bassett, Richard Wernick, Stephen Albert (Seriously, Google them. YouTube them. Did you find anything? Any music?) What did popularity ever do for them? END STUPID RANT HERE STOP

Okay so far?

Yes, I suppose I’m a little better. Thanks. I needed to get that off my chest. Anyway... you know what? No. Come to think of it, no, I’m not better, because this tripe continues.

“He is the world’s greatest composer,” proclaim a few holdouts in the new-music community who dote on inscrutability.

Unpopular Lachenmann fan = doter on inscrutability. Great. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for nothing. Way to avert the unfamiliar! Way to close your mind! Way to conform. Baaaaah!

At them in response, I fling my favorite James Thurber line: “ ‘He’s God!’ screamed a Plymouth Rock hen.”

For those of you not familiar with “The Owl Who Was God,” here you go. Note the “moral” of the story, near the bottom. (I love unintentionally ironic references)

Now, in defense of poor Helmut, I’ll lob over a favorite Morton Feldman quote: “The only fanatics I have ever met were conservative musicians.” Take that, conformists!

Yet the concert drew a large crowd, and there were many who stood and cheered at the end.

That’s an ordinary, reasonable response; people go to concerts they might enjoy. This, however, isn’t a reasonable response:

I would love to know what they heard.

And why is that? Take it away, Alan!

Prior to this concert, I knew Lachenmann mostly from the ECM recording of his setting — “opera” in the broadest sense — of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Lachenmann’s own scrapbook, Mahler, Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream.

A game: Find the Epistrophe!

(Jeopardy theme music)

Find it? The answer is: "horrendous." By repeating horrendous twice with regards to one subject, he’s strongly emphasizing how Lachenmann’s opera is (list of possible synonyms) dreadful, awful, terrible, shocking, appalling, horrifying, horrific, horrid, hideous, grisly, ghastly, gruesome, gory, harrowing, heinous, vile, unspeakable, (takes breath), nightmarish, macabre, spine-chilling, blood-curdling, loathsome, monstrous, abhorrent, hateful, hellish, execrable, abominable, atrocious, sickening, foul, nasty, disagreeable—you get the idea.

But, why wasn’t that a reasonable response? Well, “just for starters,” if a newspaper is going to assign a critic to review a concert, it might be nice if they sent someone who has a general interest in the music to be played. It might also be nice to have a critic open to new possibilities, instead of one who can’t fathom alternate definitions of “opera,” in quotation marks (in quotation marks: in "quotation marks"). Also, also it might be nice if the reviewer was familiar with the music, you know, say the reviewer knew more than one piece by the composer. Just an idea. But who am I to question these things?

Does that lovely, sad Andersen story deserve that?

I didn’t know stories deserve things.

Do we?

To be fair, I don’t know that we deserve “horrendous wet dreams,” either.

Did we on Monday?

Hell no! Everyone is aware that we only deserve “horrendous wet dreams” on Tuesdays, and sometimes Fridays depending on the tide. Mondays are simply out of the question, what with the morning rush-hour commute and all!

But I digress, too. Go on, Alan. Spew more Lachenmann derision.

I had never before endured pain at a Monday Evening Concert; this time I did: pain and anger.

You can’t blame Lachenmann for the burritos you ate at lunch! Lachenmann + burritos = the runs.

The music by [...] Helmut Lachenmann reflected the nastiness dear to so many German and Austrian creative hearts these days.

Whoa! Where’d you come from? Who are you? Get out of here! Go. Get!

[...] Mr. Lachenmann's ''Movement (Before Paralysis)'' seemed almost to jeer at the easygoing spirit and borderline sentimentality of the [preceding] American pieces [...].

Shoo, I said! I mean it!

“Movement (Before Paralysis)” seems proud of its complications. Hard, angular, percussion-ridden, highly uneven in movement, this is the art of unease. Mr. Lachenmann produces wheezes, whines, shudders and whooshes that are sophistication itself.

Go on! Get out of here! And stay out! That's better.

“Played,” by the way, often consisted of blowing through only the mouthpiece of a wind instrument, banging on the case of a piano, delivering frenzied blasts through a brass instrument and otherwise violating the customary sound possibilities of various instruments.

But that’s not new. However, saying that Lachenmann rapes the instruments is new; that’s a new one on me, anyway.

Such procedures are not new,

See.

and they have a certain joke value the first time around.

Odd, but not necessarily new, procedures = a joke, the first time around. Just like sul ponticello, right?

The Lachenmann works were long enough to allow these things to happen several times, and you all know what happens to a joke when you tell it more than once.

It gets old. I got it. You were clear about tha...

Hold it. (sniffs the air for a cheesy taint)

Mr. Rich, sir. Are you saying that...(thinks... “grmphblhpt”)...I don’t know what you’re saying. See, if you’re saying that novel sounds are a joke, but lose their comic luster (?) when repeated, then... I mean, if you’re saying that odd instrumentations, which may not be new, are funny, except when they’re reiterated, which makes them bad things, then...

I’m confused. Let’s go backwards.

These things I can grasp and accept: Lachenmann is not popular. You don’t like his music. Presumably, you do like Adams, Reich, etc. (Salonen, hmmm). They are (more) popular/accessible.

But, therefore...? Lachenmann is a joke? Because he’s not accessible? Because he utilizes odd sounds? Because he’s a modernist? Because his music causes the runs?

There’s a “parting shot,” indeed. (super-slow fade to black)

-

If this had been an actual meta-critique, this is how it might have gone. But, fortunately for Alan and a number of you, this is where your patience will be rewarded, because it was not a critique, per se—even though a lot of points stand—because, Alan, like I said at the beginning, is a fine, fine critic, a critic we’ve never before tried to tear apart. Then why go through all this rigmarole, Empiricus? Why parody yourself? So I could make obvious that there is almost no difference between Alan’s opinions and those of other critics, opinions that generally warrant a long, scathing Detritus-like whipping.

What’s the difference, then? Simple. First-person.

Listen, I don’t agree with anything, anything in this review (except maybe the part about Lachenmann being one of the last modernists). Let me just make that clear. Alan and I have polar opposite opinions. I don’t think that if we ran into one another at a concert, that we’d become BFFs.

But, because he uses the pronoun I to express himself, I can’t fault him. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And he’s calling it as he sees it. No disembodied, third-person generalizations vomited as objective truth. Just him, and his opinions.

I can’t fault Alan, but I can fault the newspaper higher-ups and whoever gave Alan that particular assignment. I think its pretty clear that Alan can’t stand Lachenmann’s music nor “ivory towerites.” Then why send him to review a Lachenmann/modernist concert? That makes no sense. “Let’s send ol’ Mel Gibson over to cover the bat mitzvah.” That doesn’t make any sense either. So why do it?
-

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I was going to defend Mr. Rich until his Germanophobic episode. Frankly, I've always favored the South Park line, "Dude, what the fuck is wrong with German people?" Clearly Mr. Rich went off his meds for a few paragraphs.

If we can disregard that unpleasantness, I think this discussion of sending modernist friendly reviewers to modernist concerts is getting off course. First of all, I whole-heartedly agree that there are many (a vast conspiratorial majority, if you will) who are outright hostile to modern/new music. However, I don't think the solution to this problem is sending those reviewers to just the Mostly Mozart festivals to dote over the true classics--really, to me, such reviews are just as useless as the uninformed anti-modernist rant. I say fire them! They clearly are too ignorant on their subject matter to make cogent arguments. Their reviews suck and they should be fired. [How’s that for subtle?]

Okay, with that said, I think that there is a place for negative reviews, as well as disliking composers. That's what makes music (and most art) so fascinating--that two highly educated and intelligent people can have such wildly different opinions on a given work/composer. I think it must be pointed out that Mr. Rich's comments are probably representative of his readership (and most classical music lovers -- oh how I loathe that term, but I digress). What Alan Rich, so indelicately, gets at is that new music is often a challenge for its audience. Reviews can not be written with the sole purpose of affirming some truism—be it “modernism sucks”, or “all Lachenmann is swell”. The worst crime of any journalism (especially of the op/ed variety) is ignorance. I don’t think we can accuse Rich of this. You may disagree, but his opinion does have a place. There are those who choose to blindly applaud every new work and every new idea, and those who choose to buy the propaganda of the traditionalist, the good ol' days. Neither will serve new music well.

Like you point out, Empiricus, we know that Alan Rich is a smart and capable critic, but why take umbrage with his negative review (again, putting aside his anti-Bavarianisms)? Because Lachenmann has been accepted as an unassailable composer? By whom? Yes, Rich doesn't really give any good reasons for disliking Lachenmann's music, but I don't think his point of view is unfounded. Frankly, I think the bigger crime is the number of glowing reviews that go to marginal and downright awful composers.

I want dissent.

Let me repeat that: I want dissent. Well, actually, I want intelligent dissent. Great composers and great works are the ones that are able to triumph in spite of their detractors. Given friendly, and frankly, dishonest criticism doesn't serve the cause of new music. Alan Rich saying the Lachenmann sucks and you (the Empiricus you) blogging that it's Rich's opinion that sucks, that serves the cause of new music. A discussion has been started. All thinking people then ask themselves, does Alan Rich suck? Maybe Lachenmann music does really suck? Maybe sul ponticello sucks?

These are all good questions -- hopefully good answers will be sought. New music needs the discussion. And like government, it needs dissent.

Okay, so this seems like a fairly unintelligibly rant. Sorry. I hope that I don’t sound too crazy, since I merely want to provide a counterpoint to this recurring thread on Detritus. And I would love to edit and make my point clearer, but I need to tend to my frittatas.

So I’ll end by saying:
Empiricus, your critique was dead on. Great work once again.
and
I want smart, informed critics – not ones that agree with me.

And the answers to the rhetorical questions:
does Alan Rich suck? NO
Maybe Lachenmann music does really suck? NO
Maybe sul ponticello sucks? Already in the halls of most overused effect bowing

--Whatever, I'll what I want.

Anonymous said...

Ah! Screwed up my own tag line!

AH! MY FRITTATAS ARE BURING!!!

--Whatever, I do what I want.

Empiricus said...

Good points, Gustav. Sure. Maybe it wasn't totally clear in this post, but I embrace dissent, which is something I laud Mr. Rich for doing. I don't take issue with negativity, in general. I remember one of Alan's reviews of Brahms (the music) that was, well...whew...scathing, but apt. Very good stuff. He's intelligent, witty and humbly opinionated--that's all I ask for, you know. It has nothing to do with sending modernist-friendly reviewers to concerts.

Oh, by the way, Gustav, that wasn't Alan saying those things about Germany and Austria, it was someone else; I linked the other guy's article in the post (I had hoped that the color differentiation was obvious. Maybe pink as secondary-reference color has to go).

Lastly, there were a handful of other topics I wanted to bring up, but the length of the post was already too long, so I scrapped them. One topic I wanted to bring up, and one on my mind lately, concerns the differences between triadic and non-triadic traditions vying for space in the same venues. I wonder if "classical music" has fractured enough to where there are two vastly different threads that require separation, the same kind that, say, blues and heavy metal enjoy. Maybe music in the modernist tradition needs its own reviewers, venues, audiences. Maybe it needs to stop competing with the Louvre, which is certainly still going strong. Some ensembles seem to be going in that direction quite successfully (eighth blackbird, for example). Audiences seem to be finding their place, too. Why not "PostClassic Music Critic for the Times-Guardian," or something?

Murderface said...

I think we actually can accuse Rich of ignorance, from his own admission. He says that his knowledge of Lachenmann consists of a single recording! By any definition, this level of knowledge fails to qualify him to offer the intelligent dissent you advocate.

Plus, you say yourself that he doesn't give any good reasons for disliking Lachenmann. So why defend this claptrap?

Yes, there are too many sheepishly glowing reviews of popular older pieces. Fine. There are also far too many sheepishly shrill reviews of newer music that offer nothing in the way of actual criticism. Sadly (given the DR's position on Alan Rich's overall body of work), this is yet another example.

Just saying something sucks is not criticism.

Rich--in his final review, no less--just said Lachenmann sucks and offered nothing more.

Empiricus offered criticism.

Ynloqzu: Arawak for "Whatever, I do what I want!"

Aaron said...

In Kenny Chesney's defense, that is one sexy tractor. Hubba hubba! And I would pay good money for Mel Gibson's review of a bat mitzvah.

As to the substance of the critique, I think Empiricus' suggestion that the gulf between modernist composers and their old-school brethren - at least from the audience's perspective - might indeed be big enough to justify different beat reporters. I don't know that it's quite the blues/heavy metal degree of difference, but it's clearly significant enough to present an obstacle to getting fair* reviews of modernist music.

*"Fair" as Gustav notes is not the same thing as "positive." The problem is that guys like Rich or Bernard Holland can't actually tell whether a modernist piece is any good. To them, it's just noise. They don't have an appreciation for the art form, so they can't say whether it's any good. I don't have an appreciation for Scandinavian death metal or abstract expressionism; if you're going to ask me about whether art in those genres is any good, you'd be better off asking a moderately intelligent ape. Negative criticism is necessary, but it needs to be informed by an appreciation of what the artist is trying to do, or what traditions he's working with. Otherwise it's just badly-informed slagging, and that's what blogs are for.

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm glad to hear Alan isn't the raging Germanophobe that I feared. [sorry that I missed that--not the fault of the pink text, just me not paying close enough attention.]

To Muderface's point, I wasn't necessarily defending Rich's review. Empiricus was right on with his attacks, and I don't have any problem with anything he was commenting on. Rich was dismissive and offered very little to support his animosity. And there's not much that bothers me more than someone with an unsupported opinion. I think an argument could be made about the ridiculous nature of reviewing an event after it has occurred and how that grants a certain amount of artistic freedom to the author, but still (like I always say to my students) you need to support your opinion with actual argument.

In any case, my frittatas were delicious and I just finished my third margarita! Despite Mr. Rich and his Lachenmann-bashing tripe, the evening was good.

CRYMMNAI = It's pronounced CRY-mmn-ai, not cry-MMN-ai!

Anonymous said...

"'Let’s send ol’ Mel Gibson over to cover the bat mitzvah.' That doesn’t make any sense either. So why do it?"

Perhaps the same could be said of putting modernist music in common practice venues.

"The minuet, whether it be made especially for playing, singing, or dancing, has no other affect than moderate gaiety. Next let us look at the gavotte, whose affect is truly jubilant joy. The hopping quality of the gavotte is its true property. A melody having a more fluid, smooth, gliding, and connected character than the gavotte is the bourrée. Such melodies seem contented, obliging, unconcerned, relaxed, careless, comfortable, and yet pleasing.”

from Passions of the Soul (1645-46) - Descartes

Mr. Rich’s article is a fun read, well written (could do without the wet dream analogy- thank you!) and consistent with classical criticism. Having not heard Lachenmann’s music I can not comment on the accuracy of Rich’s review. He could be totally off as Empiricus asserts or he could be right on. Doesn’t “bad” music exist? Mattheson, Fux, Rameau all thought so- certainly these guys knew something about music. Modernism avoids criticism which is its own right. But if you want to hang with the historical big guys you’ll have to toughen up a little. Empiricus’ review sounds strikingly similar to a 5th grade boy crying to his mommy that a 2nd grade armless boy in a wheelchair kicked his ass. Or maybe, in the words of Rich, that was just my horrendous wet dream.

Anonymous said...

Furthermore, what if Rich wrote:

“Prior to this concert, I knew Kenny Chesney mostly from the BNA recording of his setting — “song” in the broadest sense — of the Kenny Roger’s story “She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Chesney’s own scrapbook, Cash, Parton, Jackson, Brooks, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream.”

LOL. By the way, the overwhelming majority of people in the world do not listen Chesney. If Chesney made this video in Iran he’d probably be hanged in a day for the dress on that girl- HOT. But nevertheless, I enjoyed watching that video, thanks for the consistently thorough linkage on this site.

Empiricus said...

Anonymous:

1) You're totally right--we are (I am) pretty childish. I'll be the first to admit that. But, I hope that our childish whining does a little justice towards a better musical dialog. That's why we value comments, such as yours. So thank you.

2) Bad music does exist and it needs to be sorted out, by audiences or critics or performers or whoever (though, our definitions, through collective dialog, of "bad" is how this is accomplished). Again, towards my last point, we're here to facilitate a more well-reasoned way of sorting out bad music and championing the good, via better dialog.

3) We like Rich's writing very much. Unfortunately, I disagreed with just about everything he said in this particular review. However (and this is the point I'd like to stress), we could've taken him to task on many occasions, like we did today, but have always found it terribly difficult. It's not because of what he said, it's how he said it. And we admire him for that, very much. If more critics used the first-person narrative, which is essentially an admission of humility--your opinions are yours alone--then we'd have a hard time meta-critiquing anyone.

4) I'm sure I'll be thinking about this for some time, but my initial reaction to your statement, "modernism avoids criticism," is this: I don't think that modernism avoids criticism as much as the criticism avoids modernism. I think that criticism steers our conversation about the topic, to what degree is anyone's guess. But, without appropriate vocabulary or firm historical reference points (as were lacking in today's Lachenmann review--newness, newness, unfamiliar newness!), its hard to say anything about modernism, let alone sort out the bad and the good, or the ugly for that matter. I really don't fault Alan for his opinions, but how long have we had to gestate experimental practices?

5) I, too, question whether modernism should vie for common practice venues.

Again anonymous, thanks for the comments. And nice Descartes reference!

AnthonyS said...

Hmm.. interesting question, this bit about modernist music in common practice venues. I guess my question is thus: are we talking in the small scale (as in modernist concerts vs. mixing modernist music with common practice music) or large scale (as in finding alternative venues for modernist performances?). The former strikes me as defeatist, though I understand the impetus. The latter seems impossible-- the concert hall is one of the few silent spaces left in the world. Much (I dare not say all, though I'm inclined to believe thus) modernist music requires a kind of silent attention and contemplative, real-time engagement (free of distractions) that common practice music requires. A new venue would have to be similar in its silence. That's a big problem I have with a lot of alternative venue performances-- be they in bars, clubs, outdoors, etc.-- there is too much else to really give the music and the performance the attention it deserves.

Happy to be back from operatizing. That's opera, not "opera".

Anonymous said...

Anthonys,

Good points. But many concert halls already rent out their "quiet space" for entirely modern practice programs which are successful. Period practice music hasn't been hurt by not sharing the same stage (at the same concert) as the orchestra in residence at any particular hall- with its own instruments, performers and conductors, period practice music is doing quite well. And people are continuing to go out and hear dead composers they’ve never heard of.

If the common practice orchestra has the hall on Thursday and the modern practice ensemble has the hall on Friday. There should be no conflict. On top of it all, the people from both sides that dislike each others music wouldn't bicker so much. And they each could have their own critics. It's a win-win situation and quite frankly.

I'm personally sick and tired of common practice fans dismissing modern music as "not music." And I'm equally disappointed with the many graduate level composers and professors that express their open distaste for common practice music.

Furthermore, there is an animosity growing from modernists riding the legitimacy “coattails” of the common practice- which hurts both musics. If the modern practice is viable, which obviously it is, then a common practice/modern practice divorce should not be a “defeatist” idea at all- in fact it should be a welcome one.

Anonymous said...

Sentence fragments and missed apostrophe. Oops- forgive me.

AnthonyS said...

Where does non-modernist contemporary music fit into this? Would that remain on the common practice concerts?

This divorce idea (which I'll admit candidly I'm not enamored with) seems easier for chamber music, less so for orchestra.

Regarding professors/students hating common practice period music, that is pretty awful. I've never experienced that personally, but if that is out there, that really... well, sucks. Of course, the "modern music isn't music" folks are out there, but I'm guessing they will always be there. They should just go see "Cats" or something.

Anonymous said...

"non-modernist contemporary music" You mean pseudo-tonal/modal music? I really don't know. I suppose you let the people running the halls and the concerts in conjunction with the audience decide. After all, that's the way it's been run for the last 1000 years more or less. Certainly, a composer doesn't "demand" that his music gets played at any place.

There are a few successful large orchestras that only play modern music- if general interest in modern large orchestra pieces increases for audiences and composers I'm sure we would have more orchestras dedicated to playing modern music.

And a final clarification: some of these people that don't think modernist music is "music" are quite sophisticated musically and play instruments with varying degrees of skill. But because someone likes Tosca, Carmen, or Don Giovanni doesn't mean that's they'll like Moses and Aaron or Nixon in China- or vice versa.

Music is complicated- people that like "the Marriage of Figaro" don't necessarily like "Don Giovanni"! Check out this link for Tabbycat's rant on "modern" music versus the "classics" and you might start to share my opinion that mixing lemon juice and milk probably won't get us very far in the long run.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006041202347

Anonymous said...

New drink:

"The Yuker"

2 parts whiskey
2 parts sweet red wine
3 parts milk
1 part lemon juice

garnish with an olive and a cherry- goes great with pizza!

Empiricus said...

RE: Anonymous and his/her tabbycat

You got a nice lookin' cherry-picker. Mind comin' over some time and showing me some more of your Yahoo?

By the by, does "the Yuker" refer to Kevin Youkilis? If it does, it's funny. If not, that's just gross.

Anonymous said...

Empiricus, very good! That's what yahoo pulls up on a search of modern vs. classics. Isn't that scary? Uphill battle if the "classics" are AC/DC and the Beatles and the modernists are "Ben folds" and "Christina Agui-maleria."

And the Yuker is what you get when you mix elements that don't go well supposed to be put together. Apparently my attempted analogy/joke of mixing modern/common practice music together didn't work. Who's this Kevin Youkilis- a composer? My cherry-picker only found stuff on a baseball player of that name.