NEWS FROM BOSTON: I do not, as a rule, spend much time thinking about what goes on in Boston. I suppose I should, just as a matter of personal curiosity, but I don’t. I have better things to do with my time than ponder the Byzantine mental contortions necessary to keep voting for Mr. Kennedy every six years or to contemplate the widespread public breakdown in law and order that permits the satanic cult headquartered in Fenway Park to perform their diabolical rituals in full view of an uncomprehending populace. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I heard some news from Boston that I actually found interesting. It seems that last week, after many a long year of suffering in silence, long simmering resentments finally turned violent in the Boston Symphony’s string section when the viola players finally went after the violinists with hammer and tongs, or, in this particular case, with a tuba and a glockenspiel, during a performance of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto No. 6 in A Minor. Apparently, the violists had had enough of the violinists’ snotty and altogether snooty attitude towards them and their instrument, and were out for some musical payback. Neither the Boston Police Department, who had to call out its SWAT team and use generous amounts of teargas to break up the onstage riot, nor the Boston Symphony will say what finally set the violists off; no one, as far as I can tell, is saying anything about anything up there, but the buzz on the Internet says that the occasion for the melee was the symphony’s second violinist making a crude joke about the first violist’s sister, who plays flute for the symphony and does card tricks on the side. I should say, though, that at this point this is just a rumor, although the first violist’s screaming threats to take out the second violinist’s punk ass if he ever showed his face in the orchestra pit again got major play in the Boston newspapers and on CNN as well.

The violence quickly spread from one end of the orchestra to the other, as tuba players went after trumpeters, bassoonists and oboists had at each other, and the French and English horns decided to have another go at the Battle of Waterloo. The symphony, caught off-guard by this turn of events, as most authorities usually are, it seems, sent its musical director down to the rehearsal hall to calm the situation down, only to see this gentleman wind up face down in a kettledrum. Institutional dithering being what it is, the symphony tried to keep the police out of the matter, which only led to a rapid increase in the violence. Finally, faced with the attempted lynching of one of the symphony’s more prominent guest conductors, whose advocacy of such modern composers as Ives, Varese, and Bartok angered the more traditional supporters of the classical repertory no end, the symphony’s leadership called in the police. The Boston police deployed several hundred officers in full riot gear, a SWAT team, and a hostage negotiator in case things turned truly ugly. Despite the massive show of force, however, it still took the police several hours and the liberal use of tear gas to quell the rioting and get the situation under control. The police arrested over a dozen rioters and several more members of the symphony had to be hospitalized, including the second violin, who had multiple contusions, a fairly massive concussion, and a piccolo wedged halfway up his backside.

No sooner had the riot ended than critics began attacking the police department’s tactics in suppressing it. Almost all the critics pointed out that police clumsiness led to the destruction of at least one Stradivarius cello and an Amati violin, which were both almost literally priceless, and more than one critic said that the police presence was altogether too Wagnerian and out of place in the middle of a Vivaldi concerto. Friends of the violinists told reporters afterwards that the police deliberately targeted them for abuse and arrest, even though the violinists were the victims of the initial attack, proving, they said, that the police shared the same long-term prejudice against violinists that caused the riot in the first place. Many of these same friends demanded an immediate investigation of the police department’s handling of the situation, calling the department heavy-handed and inept.

Defenders of public order swiftly came to the defense of the police, pointing out that the police clearly gave the rioting musicians more than enough time to stop fighting and leave the hall; videotapes from the symphony’s own surveillance system also show the police warning the rioters to stop fighting or face the consequences, albeit on bullhorns that were obviously out of tune and therefore had no business in a concert hall. The liberal use of tear gas also had a detrimental effect on the overall quality of the cellos, making their sound weak and tremulous when it should have been strong and passionate. And, as everyone pointed out, the sirens, bullhorns, and other police instruments were all out of tune. Perhaps there is a future for them in playing the moderns, but on the whole, this sort of thing can be forgiven once, I think, given the exigencies of the situation, but the Boston Police Department will have to spend more time, a lot more time, working on their sound in the rehearsal hall if they ever wish to return to the concert stage again.

BROADWAY: Among my less onerous duties here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor daily for the biblical mite is sign making. Now, your average American public library is chock full of signs these days, just as the average American public library is chock full of functionally illiterate people who cannot read these signs and whose only interest in the average American public library centers on where the DVD section is and where they can download Internet porn. But even so, the signs pullulate, spreading over walls, ceiling, stacks, and just about every other flat surface in the library like so much hyperactive and overly intelligent kudzu, until there are as many words on the walls informing people where they can go and where they can’t go, what they can do and what they can’t do as there are in many of the books on the shelves. Not as many words as a Tolkien or Tolstoy, obviously, and certainly not Proust, but maybe a couple of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books and maybe Faulkner’s Spotted Horses for good measure. If you prefer 19th century Americans to Faulkner, you may substitute Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener or Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown instead. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych or Maupassant’s Boule de suif are equally acceptable, although Gogol is not. It is difficult enough to maintain the high standards of decorum necessary for the proper functioning of your average American public library without noses popping off and doing whatever they damn well please.

I don’t mind doing the signs, nor do I mind proofreading other people’s signs or doing the occasional tweak that will make a sign that much more effective in not reaching the broad swath of people who daily pass through our doors to submit their lungs for mycological experimentation. It was in this latter capacity that I found myself with a new sign on my desk and a note from the nice Chinese lady who runs the monthly movie program asking me if I would check her grammar and, while I was at it, could I make the reds in the sign a little redder? Sensing a challenge ahead of me, I immediately set to work on her current creation.

After about an hour, I gave up. The sign’s text was fine; there were no grammatical errors and the meaning was clear: the library will present, on the last Friday of the month, the 1954 version of A Star is Born, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. The problem came when I tried to brighten the reds in the sign. Every attempt at brightening or saturating those reds led ineluctably to the same result: the picture of Judy Garland saturated way too much. In fact, the picture saturated to the point where Ms. Garland’s face and hands looked as though they had blood smeared all over them. In frustration, I sat back and tried to think of some other way of doing this, and as I did, it occurred to me that there aren’t any really good Broadway musicals about mass murderers anymore.

There was Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, of course, and while there just aren’t enough good things you can say about a homicidal barber and his slightly odd lady friend’s attempt at making cannibalism an important part of the ever competitive fast food industry, the play first went on the boards some twenty-five years ago, if my memory serves me correctly, and there hasn’t been a successful one since then. The Texas Chainsaw Musical closed out of town when the Peoria Police Department’s SWAT team cut down the cast in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and many other projects simply never got off the ground, either for lack of funding or lack of interest. Even the one everyone thought was going to be a massive success, The Silence of the Lambs, failed miserably, despite its classic story of boy meets girl, boy flays girl, boy gets shot by girl FBI agent. Some critics say that the producer’s attempt to generate some buzz by having a naked actress randomly fire a shotgun into the audience turned off many theatergoers, while the consensus of opinion amongst many Broadway professionals was that the songs didn’t really support the book, and as a result what the public saw was a somewhat disjointed effort that neither edified nor entertained, despite the near constant gratuitous sex and violence that audiences have come to expect in the theater these days.

It’s a shame, I think, that a proud old genre like the American mass murderer musical should have fallen on such hard times. Those musicals, the product of a much more innocent time, spoke to our hopes and dreams of a better world, but facts remain facts, no matter how unpleasant. By the 1960’s, the audience simply outgrew the genre and moved on to other things. Today with the Internet and 500 cable channels, it would be difficult, at best, to bring back a genre that required little more than a willingness to suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours and wait for the slutty blond to die a horrific and spattery death while wearing the minimum of clothing required to avoid a police raid.