Unshakable
This spaniel, clearly too old (or disabled) to make any unnecessary moves, gazed at me with trademark mournfulness for quite a while before I responded by taking its picture. It had eyes for me only. Millennia of breeding made it impossible for me not to be warmed by such extravagant interest.
In November or December, I forget which, I watched Emmanuel Carrère’s La moustache. I had read the novel years and years ago. (Unsurprisingly, it took a while for the writer to make his own picture; the surprise was that he made it at all.) I wasn’t crazy about the book, and the movie, while quite a bit more engaging, was still too haunted by a paranoia that seemed forty or fifty years out of date. Accompanying the vivid camera work, however, was a striking score by Philip Glass: his Violin Concerto. The concerto, premiered in 1987, suited Mr Carrère’s story of a man who seems to have run through a bizarre temporal discontinuity (his father, much to his surprise, has been dead for two years, and his wife has no recollection of the moustache that he shaved off the night before). I wrote down the performance details as the final credits rolled by, and, sure enough, the soundtrack made use of the only recording, on Naxos. I ordered it from Amazon right away, but for some reason or other wasn’t in the mood to listen to it until last night.
The CD is a measure of how the classical music record scene has changed from what it was when I was a kid. When I was young, a performance by unknown artists on a budget label was extremely unlikely to be better than tolerable, and many were not even that good. Yet there is nothing less than first-rate about the Naxos offering, which features violinist Adele Anthony and the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Takuo Yuasa. Ulster has an orchestra? Ulster has an orchestra that sounds this good? When I was young, the sound quality on an inexpensive recording would have been mediocre to awful — awful. The Naxos issue is clear as a bell and every bit as rich as it ought to be.
La moustache explores the fragility of the construct that we call the “self.” In my experience, this construct isn’t remotely fragile, but rather constituted of the grimmest granite. So inalterably stuck am I with the character that I wake up to every morning that the idea of a sudden singularity is more intriguing than frightening, as perhaps the reality would be, too. If I couldn’t dislocate my persona with a daily diet of LSD (senior year in college), then I’d like to know what kind of dynamite might have worked. One of the boons of growing older is that I no longer wish to escape an all-too familiar self; on the contrary, I’m prone to count my blessings, such as they are. But the notion that identity is tenuous doesn’t really sell in my vicinity.Â