So... I got blocked by a good 'internet friend' out of nowhere for the second time yesterday. Twenty years ago we met in a record store in Israel where he worked, went to bars to drink, smoke cigarettes, and talk classical records. Twice when I visited Israel I went back to the record store to see if he worked there, but he'd disappeared. Nobody who worked there even seemed to know who he was. I figured that was the last I'd seen of him until facebook tracked him down. And then for years we talked music for five hours at a time, multiple times a week, well into the middle of the American night.
We differed on everything. His top 5 were Bach, Verdi, Monteverdi, Wagner and Strauss. Mine were Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Janacek and Mahler. He loved opera above all. My great love was orchestral music. He loved performers that kept things crisp and rhythms strict. I loved performers who kept things a little loose. He valued form and transparency, I valued detail and character. He thought the performer's job was to stay out of the way. I thought the performer's job was to find the meaning. He wanted every chord evem, I wanted inner voices brought out. He loved sororities that gleaned, I loved sororities that glowed. He thought making big dynamic contrasts got in the way. I thought dynamic contrast was the lifeblood of music. He loved the gleam of Lipatti and liquid of Haskil, I loved the glow of Lupu and the flow of Firkusny. He loved Erich Kleiber and Igor Markevitch, I loved Bruno Walter and Rafael Kubelik. He loved the Staatskapelle Dresden, I loved the old Concertgebouw. His favorite Verdi was Don Carlo, mine was Otello. His favorite Wagner was the Ring, mine was Meistersinger. He loved Furtwangler's Rome Ring. He loved Baroque music, I loved early modern. I loved Furtwangler's Ring from Milan. He loved period instruments, I was ambivalent. He loved old recordings for thir sonorities. I loved them for their freedom. He loved La Scala Verdi from the 20s. I loved Met Verdi from the 30s. His favorite singers were Callas and Lili Lehmann, Christian Gerhaher and Hans Hotter. My favorites were Vickers and Chaliapin, Christa Ludwig and Elisabeth Soderstom and... for eight years I managed to conceal a love for his enemy singer #1: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
But we differed so much that there were always things to talk about and excitement whenever we agreed.
Where we agreed above all was Mozart. He was practically above both our Top 5s. We spent multiple hundreds of hours analyzing every measure, every harmony, every phrase length, every instrumental doubling and vocal color. But even there, his favorites were Idomeneo and Magic Flute, my favorites were Seraglio and Figaro. He preferred the piano concertos, i preferred the Sinfonia Concertantes and the piano sonatas. He loved Bruggen and Gardiner, I loved Harnoncourt and Davis. He loved Haskill and Anda, I loved Lili Kraus and Casadesus. He loved Brautigam and Badura-Skoda, I loved Moravec and Curzon. He loved the beauty, I loved the irony. He loved how Mozart looked back. I loved how Mozart looked forward.
There was always mutual respect between us, until there wasn't... When we met he'd have no idea I struggled with mental health, and I had no idea he struggled still worse with it. Last time this happened I said some absolutely unforgivable things which then got published in the private music group I run and was mass shamed, I owned up to it by saying still more unforgivable things and humiliated myself in front of a hundred people. A year later I sent an apology to him, was forgiven instantly and the friendship resumed as though nothing happened. Then it happened again yesterday...
This time I won't be nearly so egregious, I'll just put it in an essay...
The issue, as last time, was just taste, aesthetic taste, which this guy views in moral terms. You'd be surprised how many crazy people on the internet do, and he's hardly the worst of them. Internet message boards creep and crawl with malodorous malcontents of malice causing mayhem. Dig an inch deep and he's the opposite of malicious, he's just hurting badly and refuses to believe there's any help for it.
The internet attracts lonely people and deepens loneliness. To pass the time, lonely people develop obscure interests that make them still lonelier and find each other on the internet seeking like-minded individuals. But by definition, like-minded individuals are as mal-adjusted as they, and therefore deposit their full neuroses onto each other. Never visit any message board or comment section if you're a well-adjusted person. It will only make you despair of humans and worsely adjust you to the world's condition.
But let's face it, there are a lot of reasons for the world to make you crazy, and even the stupid among us will notice them all the time. The world has a lot of consolations, but they're consolations on top of a world we did not ask to be thrown into, which gives us all lifetimes' worth of frustration.
There are a finite ways of dealing with that frustration. One is love, one is hate, one is sadness, one is anger, one is envy, one is fear, one is confusion, one is surprise, one is work, and one is 'interest.'
Over the course of a lifetime, we all fall into each category; but still more than love, being 'interested' is the easiest rabbithole to fall down, because being interested in something means understanding why we're frustrated by everything that doesn't interest us, and there is a paper thin line between interest and addiction. There are wholly bad addictions, like substance abuse, and then there are 'good' addictions, or at least 'potentially good', like the subjects whose investigation gives us satisfaction: those subjects can be anything from sports, to art, to politics, to science, to technology. They can be just as destructive as the 'bad' addictions, but just as moderate use of mind-altering substances can cause temporary happiness, so too can our interests give us satisfaction at times that borders on bottomless, and causes a joyful enthusiasm that infects from us to others.
But how is it that our satisfaction with a subject becomes something we care about so deeply that we cause the opposite of satisfaction, both in ourselves and others? Just as unmindful relationships can cause awful ugliness, so too can unmindful interests. Just as love is more powerful than us, so are our interests. None of us dictate our mind's thoughts without herculean effort, not even the best of us; and just as thoughts of other people can control us if we're not careful, so can the subjects which interest us. There is such a thing as caring too much, and it causes us to pin too many expectations on something we always have to let be itself. We have to let the subject be the subject, and not be us. To view ourselves as indivisible from other things or people is to misunderstand them, and warps our perceptions of them into something they aren't.
With any subject, we always have to be mindful: 'what if you're wrong?' What if our beliefs are wrong? What if our sense of selves are warped by them? What if we pin all our hopes on things which disappoint us? What if our beliefs distort our sense of right and wrong into something unrecognizable from the basic precepts?
That never means to stop being hopeful, it never means to stop celebrating when our convictions are validated, it never means to give up on the anything we're attached to so long as we can reasonably guess it will hurt people less than the alternatives, but it does mean that growing too attached to our convictions can result in frustrations exponentially compounded. Love the attachment, never grow too attached. Always trust, but verify.
So forget about people for a moment, forget about politics or science, let's just talk about subjects that are matters of taste. It's just the arts, it's just sports, it's just tech. It's not human beings themselves. We pass the time with these things that give us pleasure, but put too much stock in the subject and the pleasure turn to anguish. Leave the anguish to the professionals of the things which interest us. The people who disagree with us are not evil, they're not stupid or blind and deaf, and they're only malicious to the extent that they believe the rest of us are.
But at the same time, our convictions are our convictions, and it's very hard to convince us otherwise. Convictions evolve, but if they remain the same from year to year, they're addictions, and if they change wholesale overnight, they're still addictions. Nobody changes overnight. We are 99.9% the same people from day to day, and we're all prisoners of what we believe, whether right or wrong.
So there's this guy a lot of you know: very short, red-headed, slightly balding, big nose and an underbite, has trouble with posture, recently lost a lot of weight because he's sick and burps all the time, speaks his mind too much but pretty funny, has a lot of esoteric interests that make him seem snobbier than he is, inclined to be too pessimistic for a satisfied life but he's working on it.
His four core beliefs are:
1) an antiquated form liberalism that comes from 1948: reform over revolution, regulated capitalism over socialism, establishment of greater rights without retribution against those who denied them, the necessity of foreign interventionism and nation building but always under multilateral auspices. Human progress that can only begin from the bottom up, but always must be directed and channeled by the top.
2) Judaism without God. As his father said 'There is no god, and He gave us the Torah at Mt. Sinai.' A Judaism of ritual and custom, which is tempered by realistic beliefs about the world. About matters of God, trust God. About matters of the world, trust the world.
3) While old notions of culture can never save the world, a decent appreciation of it helps. You can't reject a culture you know little about.
Those three beliefs may eventually change, but he came by them hard earned and they aren't changing any time soon.
Reject the transcendent system, the cause that affects everything for the better: be they spiritual solutions like monotheism (including Orthodox Judaism) or material solutions like socialism or libertarianism, the transcendent possibility is statistically impossible. Such a system may exist, but the chance that YOUR system is THE system is one in a trillion.
So what then does it mean about culture and taste that you reject the transcendent system?
Who knows? All art is bullshit anyway.
But what he does know is that those works of art which promote a transcendent system are generally not his cup of tea. Neither are those works of art which advocate overthrowing a transcendent system. His timid temperament looks at them both and thinks 'trouble.' He can't help noticing that secure eras that provide for a more prosperous future are more inclined toward celebrating works of art that depict human beings realistically, and are more interested in their foibles and folly.
He's not nostalgic for the repression and anxiety of the 1950s, but he is nostalgic for how the ascetic 50s laid a foundation for a brighter, more fulfilling future, a foundation which our demands for instant results can destroy.
It doesn't always work like that, the 1950s was as much the age of Bradbury and Asimov as it was Salinger and Nabokov, as much the era of Kerouac and Burroughs as it was Cheever and Capote, as much Ellison and Baldwin as T.H. White and E.B. White, Herman Wouk and Leon Uris as much as Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shirley Jackson and Ayn Rand as much as Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee. All these fiction writers existed in tandem, and it wasn't a complete given that the populist books would outsell the more traditionally literary ones.
It was an era when Leonard Bernstein, Miles Davis, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash could all exist as part of the cultural conversation in rough parity, and even if you didn't like all four, you weren't considered a completely up-to-date person if you didn't know what all four's music sounded like. So the difference is that for all the lambasting of mid-century 'monoculture', it arguably remains the most diverse, dynamic culture the United States ever had. No one form of culture completely subsumed the other. We think of the 1950s culture as controlled by the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America, and yet if it was a cultural dictatorship, the dictatorship did a better job promoting diverse voices than today's democracy. Today, there is nothing like that censorship, yet Pop and Hip-Hop dominate the music industry completely. All our best known rock bands are nostalgia acts from the 20th century, while even country music fanatics agree that the best country music is well in the past. As for Jazz and Classical, forget it... If there are new musical geniuses working in those two fields, who would know except a couple thousand colleagues?
Why was this era so much easier for every cultural demographic to have some kind of voice? He thinks it's because, in some ways, the ambitions were much smaller. Nobody sought to dominate the market, and those who did always made a just a bit of room for the 'little guy' who wouldn't sell a hundred thousand records, on the belief that eventually the sales would recoup the costs, even if it took a few decades. Nobody tried to sell 50 million copies of anything. Nobody even thought those sales possible.
And that ethos is reflected in the fiction, it's reflected in the music, it's reflected in the movies. It may not have been the most challenging stuff ever made, but it was enough. Even the guys who wrote about certain forms of transcendence: the Bradburys and the Tolkeins, wrote works which seemed to defend a modest ethos. Earthlings colonized Mars and then regretted their colonization. Hobbits were adventurers who just wanted to go home. Around the corner were romantics who overthrew this classical ethos and advocated complete revolution: Dylan, Kubrick, Vonnegut, Carlin, Cassavetes, Didion, Mailer, Peckinpah, Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey, Morrison and Hendrix, Le Guin and Frank Herbert, Philip Roth and Erica Jong, Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider.
And American culture grew ever more insular, ever more cut off from Europe. 50's intelligentsia were besotted with Bergman and Kurosawa, Fellini and Antonioni, Camus and Zhivago, Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz, Picasso and Stravinsky and Nabokov. With every decade, America paid less and less attention to Europe, and a corresponding influence from East Asia was still fifty years away.
We all think of the fifties as being one of America's most exclusionary decades, but in many ways it was our most inclusive, and it was inclusive because everybody seemed to believe in free choice. Even if the freedom of choice wasn't particularly free, even if everybody seemed to freely choose the same ways of life, even if there was enormous pressure to conform, the belief in freedom of choice was at least as important as the reality. Compared to the tyrannies of Europe, 50s America was freedom itself, and therefore it was a culture that celebrated freedom.
We are freer today than the 1950s by every metric, yet everywhere we are in chains.
We are in chains because we no longer believe in freedom of choice. We think we do, but ask anybody in America what they think of people who disagree with their fundamental principles and you're at least as likely to get a symphony of vituperation as you are a novel of nuance. Hell, ask anybody around the world.
The internet gives us more choices than the 1950s would ever know what to do with. It's put the most advanced learning and erudition online for anybody who wants to pursue it. 125 years of recorded music and movies are there for anyone with for fifteen dollars a month, the entire contents of libraries and museums are there for our purusal.
Do we take advantage of it? Hell no! We're arrested by the tyranny of choice. We are all alone, mastering knowledge of our small slivers of the world's knowledge so that we master one particular sub-sub-subject, knowledge which is a mile deep and an inch wide, and therefore we have no idea how to talk to anyone whose knowledge is different than our own. The world has no idea how to process all that information, and somewhere in our minds, the thought occurs, if that much information is available so easily, is it really worth that much?
And therein lies the seeds of destroying it all. Therein lies where fake knowledge proliferates: pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, doctored photos and bots. Therein lies the fake culture of AI that can pose as human creation. There is so much knowledge and culture that it can be imitated by falsity, and created with an eye to pander to our brains by being easily understood.
Most works of art are pretty neatly divided between the real and the unreal. The rational stays rational, irrational stays irrational. People generally consume one or the other, while ever more people of our day choose to consume tales of the irrational almost exclusively.
What this guy we know minds about the irrational is not that he thinks its intelligence inferior in any way, but he fears such works contain a kind of serious danger. It seems to him that so many irrational works call to us with messages of violence and destruction: Game of Thrones and The Terminator, The Ring of the Niebelung and the Divine Comedy, even a lot of the Bible. They all have many things to say about morality, but they don't tell us much about what it's like to be us. They're stern, judgmental, and exhort us to rash, ruthless action. They preach destruction and let us take a voyeuristic delight in watching it happen. So much modern science fiction seems in love with dystopias, so much modern music seems in love with violence. These works can be inestimably great, but the era that produces them is usually announcing bad news about the next era.
So that being said, there will always exist these works of much greater ambition, and this guy is not such a stick in the mud that he's immune to its charms. Part of human folly is that we all crave magic. We all need experiences of the irrational, there are works of fantasy, legend, science fiction, even sacred texts, replete with magical transfigurations that he swallows with magical delight and enthusiasm. He finds it harder in those genres to find things he thinks are truly great, but when he finds them he wonders if they're even greater than the realistic ones he so supposedly prizes.
To make just a small list of movies of this type, let's include, say: Pan's Labyrinth, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Close Encounters & ET, Children of Men, Arrival, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, WALL-E, Metropolis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, La Jetee, A.I., Brazil, even a few pretentious movies he doesn't like could fall into this category like A Clockwork Orange and Stalker.
These are a very specific type of fantasy or sci-fi movie. What he loves in these movies is that they use non-human means to illuminate properties of humans that are extremely elusive, and perhaps could never be illuminated without them.
What do they illuminate? The human relationship to the irrational, which is an enormous, and underrepresented, part of the human experience. And not just of the irrational, but the human relationship to the ultimate irrational of our time: technology.
We are bonding closer and closer to technology we in no way understand. The technology is invented through rational means, but for 99.99% of us, the means may as well be ancient spirits. If we want to understand it, we need so much more of this particular kind of irrationally rational art that illuminates how the irrational affects we fools who fancy ourselves rational.
I believe in art, I believe in quality, I believe in good taste.
I think works of art which advance values of destruction and exclusion can be of inestimably towering quality, but they will always be in bad taste.
I believe that art can make us better people, but never will if only consumed for its own sake. Like any pursuit, art has to be tied to values, and those values have to be creation, not destruction, inclusion, not exclusion, drawing in, not keeping out.
But the paradox is that what makes art art is omission, distortion, refraction. We have to be mindful that in its natural state, art is as value neutral as any tool. The omissions of art can omit entire facets of the human experience and flatter small islands of people to fancy themselves righteous at the expense of everyone else. It all depends on the intentions of the person who picks the tool up and the receptivity of their audience.
But at the same time, art is not a tool; it's a basic human compulsion, necessity and right. It is as much part of the human experience as family, work, emotions, sex and death. In so many ways, art is how we process them all.
There is a lot more to this subject... I'd like to get to it tomorrow or Thursday. Who'd have thought this question would be so complex?
