Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible.

--Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic bomb, from director and librettist Sellars and composer John Adams.

The article isn’t available online, but Ross writes more about the opera here, here and here, and posts some pictures here (and if you tire of Ross’s take on the subject there are plenty of links to other articles therein).

On a sort of related note, I’ve been listening to The Jam’s “‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street” and its companion, “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”. Although the right-wing thugs have been replaced by tracksuited chavs, it’s remarkable how similar a picture these songs paint to the Kaiser Chiefs’ “I Predict A Riot”, nearly 20 years on.