Art Garfunkel
Some Enchanted Evening

THE REVIEW

There is something beautiful and painful at the same time about having to deal with one's own muddling. I have always loved the famous duo Simon&Garfunkel with quiet and admiring moderation. Some things I have always found excellent and certainly worthy of setting a standard, as they indeed have. Others have always seemed excessively sentimental and baroque. Still others, frankly quite useless, even though I have long since shelved the criterion of usefulness as a usable evaluation parameter: too extremist and subjective. I have always bought Paul Simon's records and silently despised Art Garfunkel's.

The first has always earned on-the-field credentials as a great songwriter, while the second is universally recognized as “nice little voice”, author of not-so-successful songs and co-author of stadium reunions. Good: I read that a new record has been released, which features only the presence of great classic songs from the American repertoire. But not from the songwriting repertoire...: we go from jazz standards to well-known background and dance hall tunes (both luxurious).

I download it (don't have the courage to buy it), I listen to it. I criticize it harshly. Baroque, banal, rhetorical, devoid of real content, very academic in both instrumental and vocal interpretations, naturally objectively impeccable. I listen to it again and criticize it again. I make a nice CD of albums in mp3 as a background for office work. I look at the list of records in memory in Nero's little window and say to myself: “obviously not Garfunkel, right...?” Obviously Garfunkel yes. I listen to it again. Again. Again and again. Still rhetorical, banal, baroque, and... yes... let's say it: useless. Very useless. Useless beyond measure.

Enough with self-imposed principles: an outrageously useless record. But. But there's a but... But I love it like crazy. It relaxes me, I hum along to it, I leave it on, very low, even when there's some customer... In short: a senile and absolute, foolish, and pseudo-adolescent infatuation. It is what it is. I can't do anything about it. And I live in the secret hope that my original and very severe judgment was wrong. And that I am instead the same as ever.

But deep down I know the horrible (and beautiful) secret: I have become muddled.