The bassoonist’s monologues in Shostakovich’s 9th got plenty of room in his recording. He coulda been wearing a stripey sweater and a resigned expression, as one in Bernstein’s orbit — though he’s surely older than he looks. Able performances all around, and I see the sacrifices of control where precision or flexibility might suffer to make the phrase readable. Readability will likely be a theme here for a while — it might be a central hook (control hook) for my anime experience, which four years after watching the first gateway media franchises? will take some doing. Cameron’s work in “Alita” described a good starting point: digital ultra-realism as an expressive language. I got to explain away the pro-forma exaggerations of a manga-inspired visual adaptation and just enjoy the film seriously. (It was long before I would enjoy the gleeful excess of Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen — I only appreciated/enjoyed such magical realism as Death Note and the Ghibli/Miyazaki complex.) It didn’t help that I had parasocial relationships with any and all of my favorite characters; their design was so much more resonant than the writing of the show that I’d struggle to reconcile the two. — In the meantime, I wonder about facilitating the access that makes good taste possible: what good is it to play across leisure cultures like classical music, animation, and storytelling, if the people whom I want to reach with these cultures aren’t yet inclined to try them out? Like AB or JW in their explorations as scholar-performers, I don’t want slack jaws or applause so much as partners to find the “new poetics = expressive language + expressive language + perceptual environment.” Needs refinement.

I certainly wouldn’t reach Nathalie Simper’s studio by talking like that in my class tomorrow. — Though now I have a goal for these paragraphs: to establish a “constellation” of influences for myself. AV would have some ripe comments on humanistic goals, and with Maglaque’s & Yelle’s narratives of Protestant disenchantment I’d stand pinned, limned, guilty as charged.