Friday, June 30, 2023
My Favorite Piano Recordings
Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Beach Writing
Summer 2011.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
New TCP - Rough Beginning
Herod:
...Alexandra is just another mother-in-law scheming to get her daughter back, and like everybody's mother-in-law I so underestimate her; continual communication to Egypt to entreat Cleopatra to kill me and avenge the death of Aristobulus while I pursue my delusional collusions with Anthony in Rome, thinking only I could be clever enough to bend the world's ear.
Both we parties ended our machinations in requirements to explain ourselves amid the splendor of Cairo, where Rome's whore gets to play the diplomat by being the only party who doesn't want to kill the whole room.
I'll give it to that faux-Egyptian whore: Cleopatra is venomous in pursuit of her friends; rewarding loyalty with cheer in that way Anthony does only as burden, and because of it I knew I may not return to Judea except in the bodybag they might deny me so they may throw my ashes into a desert I hold in as much contempt as a Jewish Jerusalem.
As I wished to live, I had to present Cleopatra something none else could grant, and all I had was the grand prix; not jewels, and not just essential oils: the deed to Jericho's balsam, in perpetuity, with all that fair city's pwrpetual palm trees that after every destruction grows back faster than balsam can be extracted.
But knowing it still might not be enough, I put Mariamne under the charge of Uncle Josef. Should word reach him of my death, duty'd leave Josef would no choice but murder Mariamne immediately. I didn't even need give the order so implied it was. Truly it's s a shame. I've grown to love the sweet girl. Would it come to that perhaps I may console myself with the thought she could be mine again in the great sheol to come.
But even after my offer of good will to Cleopatra, Alexandra refused to rescind her claim to Egypt's legal right for woman's vengeance. Cleopatra called for recess during so she might consult her oracle, a very weird looking eunuch of a Jewish minister named Yanai of Yavneh.
I did what I could to use that free moment to let Alexandra know of her daughter's vacation at the house of Josef. A series of implication laid perfectly down with no order given. Humiliated in horror, she announced at reassembly her claim on my life was withdrawn.
My god is great.
Mariamne:
I didn't know what I was doing at Josef's house, though I knew it could be nothing benevolent, and I had to be every inch the queen it repulses me to be. Josef always liked me, perhaps he loved me, but if he loved me, his strength could have easily taken me and after years of Herod, what would I have done to fight him off?
There was nothing I had to do to fight him off but Salome is a far greater beast of burden. She is everything of which Jewish women are accused: spoiled, manipulative, shrewish, the one in thirty-seven women who gives Jews a bad name.
Friday, June 9, 2023
A Brief Digression on Musical Brilliance
We fundamentally misunderstand brilliance in the arts in four ways:
- There is brilliant talent everywhere. Talent is as common as artificial intelligence can reproduce it, but without deep life experience, talent can only produce insipid things that only make sense during the moments when life itself feels insipid.
- Genius is both less and more common than we think. No generation has more than a very few geniuses in every field, and you can't expect that every talent of the hundreds hailed as a genius is a genius. Nevertheless, there are geniuses in every field worthy of note. Duke Ellington was no less a genius than Dmitri Shostakovich, and both of them were quite a bit more a musical genius than Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez.
- Genius makes its own rules, so it does not need to be properly trained. If you can't understand the genius inherent in the work of rock groups like The Beatles or The Beach Boys - the burden of proof is now on you, not the people who hear it. But what makes us know that genius is genius is the mutability of the product - does the universality transcend cultures? Not just cultures of place, or even cultures of time. but cultures of mentality. Can the work speak to the same people in bad moments as well as good ones? Can the work of this talent not only make one feel joy but also put suffering in context?
- It would be wonderful if every talent is equally worthy of merit, but if that is true, then why are the rewards of some talents put on such a pedestal that it's at the expense of the thousands over whose work they climb to get those rewards? The answer is that there is an inborn capacity in the human built for worship that will not go ignored. So if we're going to irrationally worship certain objects and people, we might as well rationalize which objects are worth our worship. It is better to worship artists who put us in touch with the deeper phenomena of the world than it is to worship whatever is the latest pop sensation, whose entire cultural purpose is to turn us off to things in the world that actually happen.