800 Words: An Ambition for Culture - Part 4

IVa.

Hyde School. Winter term. I’m about to turn nineteen. Through some miracle of mercy, I’m granted an independent study to write the most abstract and absurd possible theater piece to be performed at the term’s end. As usual throughout my life, I had a grandiose idea for creating a world-changing piece of art that had no hope of materializing. My head was filled with concepts from Beckett, Boulez, Brecht and Artaud - and I’m sure I didn’t understand the first thing about any of them. True to the grandiose ambitions that have followed me at every stage in my life, I wanted to ‘create’ a ‘new’ kind of ‘theater’ that was so spare and ‘primal’ that all our basic assumptions of what constituted theater, art and life itself would be challenged. In truth, the idea was nothing deeper than Andy Kauffman, only much, much more pretentious.

So I came up with a title for the piece called ‘The Purgatory Machine,’ and finding a way to perform it had obsessed me for a whole year previously. So obsessed was I by it that I used my free hours to take naps while the rest of the school played sports. In my defense, I’d long since given up on making The Purgatory Machine a reality and simply prayed that nobody would remember that I’d basically ditched sports for a term. Nobody seemed particularly interested in what The Purgatory Machine was, which is just as well considering that I couldn’t explain it to them, particularly to my advisor, Mr. Edwards. I had spent the entire year trying to get students, teachers, even janitorial staff interested in this so that somebody might volunteer to be a part of its performance. Finally, we get to two weeks before performance time and my advisor needs to see an outline. I knew exactly what it was in my head, but I could not explain it to anyone. So I just write up an outline of the whole piece in two hours - the whole thing is a page and a half long. To my utter shock, my advisor sends me back an email saying in all-caps “THIS IS SUPERB!”. I can only surmise that he was just happy that the piece was a real thing and that I wouldn’t have to be held accountable for doing nothing, because superb it certainly was not.

And so I corral my advisor and three underclassmen to be the other actors in the piece. For two weeks, we rehearse in our spare time. The action includes lots of time in which the audience looks at a bare stage, sequences conducted in pitch dark with non-verbal grunting noises and fights choreographed between us so as to confuse the audience into thinking the performance was completely breaking down. Three days before the performance, one of the performers drops out, “it’s just too weird” he tells me. They had no idea what we were doing and I got all sorts of protests from the actors. They were right to protest, I also had barely an idea what I was doing. I wanted to tell a myth that explained the capabilities of human endeavor, language, science and philosophy. When it came time for curtain, I simply told the performers ‘if we do not get half the audience clapping and half booing, we have failed completely.’ Mr. Edwards introduced it to the audience by saying ‘We can promise you this, it will be something!’

The audience was clearly confused. A third of the audience was laughing (with or at us....did it matter?), a third was shushing the laughers, and another third sat in utter silence. To my disappointment, I did not get half the audience to boo. And to my terrible dismay, the audience gives it an ovation. More intellectual students came up to me afterwards to offer their own interpretation of it, that it was about ‘evolution’ or ‘creation’ or ‘concsiousness’ or whatever else. Some less intellectual ones came up and said ‘I didn’t understand it, but that was really funny. I didn’t think I would like it, but I really did.’

IVb.

I am named for my great-grandfather, Avraham Katz. Since Jewish genealogy is a very difficult pursuit, there isn’t all that much about him that’s verifiable. I do know that he was born around 1892 in a town near the Belarus-Lithuania border called Maladzyechna. Around the time of the Russian Revolution he married a local girl named Tirtza Gordon. By 1920 they were married and Tirtza became pregnant with my Bubbie, Malkeh Katz. Would Malkeh grow up in a war-torn country or would she grow up in a place that gave her a chance to know peace and prosperity? And so for the entire year of 1920, my great-grandparents waited in the Free City of Danzig to find a ship that would take them to America.

Like almost all my immigrant relatives, Avraham (now Abe) Katz was a Baltimore shopkeeper. Like all my immigrant relatives, he worked his way up from nothing. He made sure that my Bubbie had a full education put her through both college and graduate school.

Though he had no formal education outside of the Cheder, Abe himself was a well-rounded man. Bubbie once described to me how her father would send her around Baltimore to comb the libraries for every Yiddish and Russian book she could find - and apparently he had a particular fondness for Tolstoy. When I first read The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, I could not escape the thought that my great-grandfather must have been very much like Grandma Lausch. Abe Katz was barely a lower-middle-class resident of the tenements, but he believed in culture and believed in the importance of imparting its power to his daughter. In the late 30’s when the Metropolitan Opera used to come through Baltimore, he used every spare penny he had to make sure that my Bubbie could go to every one of its performances. He was also a huge fan of wrestling. He would go to as many matches as he could find in Baltimore. My mother tells stories of watching him shout at the TV whenever a wrestling match was on.

Aside from my Hebrew name, his great legacy is Mollie Witow, my Bubbie. Now 90 years young, last month was the first Baltimore election in sixty-two years in which she was not a judge. She has spent her life in pursuit of the culture to which her father gifted her. No concert in Baltimore is left unheard, no movie unseen, no book unread, no gallery unviewed, no country untravelled, no academic lecture unlistened, no community college course untaken. But no girl from Patterson Park could be as highbrow a snob as a description like that could make you think. Over the years, she and I have gone together to baseball games, to see Lewis Black at the Baltimore Improv, to eat tuna sandwiches at every diner in Baltimore. She once even asked me to go to a Matisyahu concert with her (there are some things you won’t even do for your grandmother...). The most enthusiastic I have ever seen her after a movie was when she came to our house after seeing Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. When her parents came to America, it was so my Bubbie could live a life exactly like the one she has.

IVc.

Fourth or fifth grade. I’m sitting in the Krieger Auditorium at Solomon Schechter Day School with a room full of kids no older than eleven or twelve. An actor comes onto the stage. He tells us that he is a nearly blind old man named Claude Monet who cannot see any of our faces. He proceeds to tell us his life story - his joys, his sorrows (mostly sorrows) and his passions. With every new story comes a new painting which he places upon the easel. Every new painting provokes a massive gasp through the audience - as though every student in that auditorium seems overwhelmed that something like a Monet painting can exist. Monet will never overwhelm many of us again.

IVd.

Hyde School. I’ve just turned seventeen. It’s taken me six months at my new school to meet my best friend of those years, Chris Wyton. At that point, I still have no idea whom Alec Wyton is. I only know is that I’m hanging out with a kid I’ve barely said a word to for six months, in spite of the fact that we’re known as our grade’s ‘music guys.’ As music guys, the conversation is mostly about music and I pretend, as I often do, to have any idea what rock people are talking about. He tells me to get my violin, he leaves to get his guitar. Five minutes later, we’re outside of Hyde’s Cultural Center with the 1,100 seat theater which the school barely uses. He starts playing. I have no idea what the song is. But after thirty seconds I get the harmonies and I improvise around it. No sheet music, no preparation. 1 Corinthians 15:52

IVe.

January 2001: I and a few other Hyde students risk expulsion (I come closest) to compel the school to let a group of 16 students go down to Washington DC and protest George W. Bush’s inauguration.

Nine months later: I'm at AU. And as we used to say, “9/11 changed everything.”

June 2002: I go back up to Hyde to see the graduation of my friends in the next class. I’m talking to a radical friend from Hyde and an even more radical teacher. The teacher storms out of our conversation when I say that I could see why the Afghan Invasion might be a good idea.

February 2003: I’m an active supporter of the Iraq War on the most political campus in America (by a few million miles). Shouting matches are a thrice daily occurrence for all of us. Friendships between all sorts of people both pro and anti grow strained. One or two break apart.

September 2004: My friend KW and I are being interviewed on AU radio for being the only liberals on campus who support the Iraq War.

November 2005: I arrive in Israel a full-fledged liberal hawk who constantly rails at my political friends for opposing our wars, therefore betraying the liberalism of FDR, Truman and Kennedy. I can quote Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff and Kenneth Pollack to them in my sleep (and probably did). I’m about as close to neo-conservatism as you could get while still claiming to hate neocons. But when you’re in a seven-month sojourn into the desert with weeks spent camping, fiddling with guitarists every day,drinking at the bars until 5 every morning, even your most tactfully worded support for war can sound like support for General Franco.

July 2006: I return from two-thirds of a year in Israel on the very day the Lebanon War begins. For eight months, I dithered over whether to become an Israeli resident in a manner that would impress Hamlet. Finally, I make up my mind to come home and rebuild my life from the place where it started. Even with a war raging, it’s a decision I instantly regret. Some of my best friends in the world are still in Israel. I have no job, no prospect for a job, and no desire to look for a job. Instead, I obsessively update a blog on the Israel/Lebanon War which I’m fairly certain was never read by anybody. I have twenty or more posts a day, often just cutting and pasting the texts of articles into posts (properly attributed of course). Most days I have a post of my own which goes upwards of 3-5000 words. I didn’t even know that I had 3-5000 words to say about Israel, but I certainly thought I did at the time.

Everything written on that blog is long since lost to that graveyard where deleted blogs go when you’re in too embarrassed by your writing to save it to a flash drive. But at the time, it all seemed terribly important. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool Israel ambassador gleefully seizing any opportunity to debate a tangentially Israel related topic. Back in Washington, I get plenty of chances - particularly when the alcohol is flowing. It usually starts with an innocent comment, my retort ‘whatd’ya mean....’, the entire room except the offending person leaving and one of them poking their head into the room once every half-hour to check if I’m done yet.

On July 29th, 2006, I receive this letter.

Dear Mr. Tucker,

My name is Mal’ak (a pseudonym), I'm a 18- year old university student (well actually I still did not start studying but hopefully I will at La Sorbonne).
First of all, I would like you to know that I found your writing great. It displays great knowledge about the Middle East. But I think you were bit biased. I'm not saying this because of anything, (I actually hate what Hezbollah did), I just think that writing should never be biased if it is meant to intensify the truth. Well, I know I'm still young and un-experienced but I think you missed a very important issue which is childrren.

Mr. Tucker, don't you think that innocent civilians and especially children, on both sides(whether in Lebanon or Isreal) are the ones who are paying the price? I actually think Hezbollah are making a very big mistake by creating mini-hidden bases between houses in Lebanon.

I trully believe that this war has been planned for, like most wars now. Besides, where is Iran from all this? Isn't it the main catalyst in this crisis?

I'm sorry if I disturbed you, I just wish we could exchnage opinions because I'm really very intrested in discussing this event with you.

Thank you for reading my email.

With high hopes you will reply to me,

Thus begins one of the most fascinating friendships of my life. Mal’ak is a Palestinian business student living in Amman. She never did get to La Sorbonne, but that made her all the more remarkable. She parades her commitments publicly in a country where public commitment means much, much more than it does in the United States. She’s an extraordinarily talented artist whose work could astonish the world if somebody were smart enough to notice her talent. For five years we’ve been sending letters to each other, the only day we’ve even so much as g-chatted is the day Mubarak falls.

January 2007: I’m back in the States, taking poli-sci grad classes at Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore campus. How the fuck could I have supported the Iraq War?

800 Words: An Ambition for Culture - Parts 1-3

I.


(Mahler Symphony no 7. For me the masterpiece of Mahler’s Viennese years)

If I ever get to Part 2 of A Boring Fantasy, it shall take place in the true city of my dreams: not Paris, or London, or New York. iIt’s Vienna, pre-World War I fin-de-siecle Vienna. At least in my mind, pre-World War I Wien is the world’s grand summit of culture; a place where tradition was never forgotten, but never suffocated new development. It is a place where radicalism was tolerated, liberal thought was the establishment and the conservatism the anti-establishment. It was a place where the most important ideological fights were on the battlegrounds of music, art and literature, and each of them debated as the matters of life and death which they are.

Yes, culture is a matter of life and death. So are health, poverty, war, education, the economy, the environment et al. But all of these potential problems are mere stale words in comparison to the multi-hued vibrancy which culture implies, because culture is one of only two words which can unify all of these issues. The state of the world can be explained with only two words: culture - which is what the world is, and politics - which is what the world can be.


(on Rilke’s The Swan)

Whereas politics still seems as important to our lives as ever, culture is a trivial term; a much abused word of jargon used to mean thousands of completely unrelated definitions. We have popular culture, counterculture, sub-culture, corporate culture,ethnic culture, regional culture, feminist culture, queer culture, Christian culture, youth culture, high culture, low culture, mass culture, bus culture, plane culture, bar culture, restaraunt culture, culture of poverty, culture clash, clash of cultures, creative culture, cross-cultural communication, inter-cultural competence, cultural bias, cultural imperialism, cultrual dissonance, cultural theory, cultural studies, comparative cultural studies, cultural institutions studies, culture wars, interculturality, socio-cultural evolution, urban culture, transculturation, acculturation, cultural models, cultural invention, cultural artifacts, culture industry, multiculturalism, monoculturalism, structuralist culture, Marxist culture, archeological culture, cultural anthropology, cultural materialism, cultural ecology, cultural evolution, cultural science, cultural boundaries, cultural system, cultural organization, cross-cultural samples, cultural patterns, living culture, cultural relativism, cultural diversity, cultural context, cultural kinship, and no doubt untold thousands of other definitions I can’t find on wikipedia. Culture has come to mean so many distinct things that one has to wonder if it currently means anything at all. My own favorite among the definitions is ‘cultural rape’, which is a favorite term of demagogues the world over to scare people. I suppose its inevitable that this term would be turned on its head, and now we hear feminists speaking of ‘rape culture.’ There could not be a more unfortunate use of the term, there is no more blatant a misuse of ‘culture’ than in the context of describing people who clearly have none.


(Kokoschka: A Face for Our Time)

Submerged beneath this tangled web of meaningless meanings is the humanist definition of culture which gave rise to the civilization upon which we have the privilege of wagging our fingers. There was a time (just barely) in living memory when culture meant only two things:

1. The growth the useful bacteria which creates wine, cheese and yogurt.
2. A well-developed mind.

The twentieth century killed hundreds of millions as as a testimony to the importance of culture. I am grandson to two of its most tested survivors, and even I believe in that quaint nineteenth-century notion that a well-developed mind can make us better people. To many people, that sentiment is not merely quaint. It’s downright offensive.

The old paradox about how German soldiers could massacre thousands during the day and weep at the beauty of Schubert at night should give anybody pause. The three worst massacres of the 20th century were perpetrated by Germany, Russia and China, three of the most well-developed, learned civilizations the world has yet seen. For only a great civilization could construct the means to murder people so efficiently.


(Gustav Klimt)

When viewed through that light, it’s all too tempting to throw up your hands and declare with all certainty that culture cannot improve anything. How can we claim that it does when the land of Beethoven and Einstein produced the Death Camps, when the land of Tolstoy and Mendeleev produced the Gulags, when the land of Confucius and Li Po produced the Red Guards? How could any great civilization go off the rails so utterly? Could we go off again? Have we already?

And that’s the problem with civilization. It’s utterly value neutral. Civilization gives us the tools for a great society, but no instructions for how to use them. We produce the technology for infinite reserves of energy, and its used for a bomb that can kill a hundred thousand people in an instant. We produce the technology to transport ourselves from city to city in a fourth the time it used to take, and its used to transport a hundred thousand soldiers to a battlefield to be slaughtered in a single day. We produce the technology to accumulate infinite knowledge, and it’s used to accumulate....well, we’ll see.

II.


(Stefan Zweig’s final years in Brazil)

There are only two fiction writers whose work has ever hit me harder in the solar plexus than Stefan Zweig (Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chekhov, in case anybody cares). But the fiction is just the beginning of Zweig’s greatness. He was a produced playwright and a lauded memoirist, he might have even had another career as an opera librettist if the Nazis had not stopped his collaboration with Richard Strauss. But the great backbone of his achievement is his biographical essays: he wrote full-length essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Rilke, Herzl, Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, Bruno Walter, Joseph Roth, Dante, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Renan, Rodin, Busoni, Toscanini, Rimbaud, James Joyce, Freud, Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Cassanova, Stendahl, and Tolstoy. He wrote full-length biographies of Marie-Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Magellan, Erasmus, Castellio, Calvin, Amerigo Vespucci, Balzac, Emile Verhaeran, and Romain Rolland.

As a writer, Zweig was clearly a jack of all trades. More specialist writers of his era like Thomas Mann and Robert Musil dismissed him a writer of second rate pot boilers and pseudo-scholarship. But whether or not they considered him a mediocrity, the Nazi’s certainly didn’t. One of the first things to be destroyed in post-Anschluss Vienna was Zweig’s encyclopedic library, which held the largest non-museum collection of manuscripts and first-editions in Europe. In desperation, Zweig fled to England just before the invasion, forced to leave behind his home, his library, even detailed outlines of future books. The Nazis burned them all.


(Egon Schiele)

But the most important thing he left behind was the memory of his Viennese paradise. The Vienna that stretched from his birth in 1882 until the year he left. The Wien of Mahler and Rilke, Hugo Wolf and Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Klimt and Kokoschka, Kraus and Altenberg, Alfred Polgar and Alfred Roller, Egon Schiele and Egon Friedell, Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Anton von Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky, Musil and Broch, Brahms and Bruckner, Wittgenstein and Godel, Bruno Walter and Fritz Kreisler, Richard Tauber and Franz Lehar, Emanuel List and Friedrich Schorr, Theodore Herzl and Sigmund Freud, not to mention women like Anna von Mildenburg and Alma Schindler/Mahler/Gropius/Werfel, or . The Wien of Stefan Zweig: a city in which an ordinary person could sit in a coffeehouse and bump into any one of these extraordinary minds, most of them more than obliging to talk to any passer by their table about whatever struck their fancy.

Fin-de-siecle Wien was a place built to live life to its fullest extent, and if it could not be lived that way then it was not worth living at all. The millenium-old Holy Roman Empire was a mere nub of its former self. The Empire, now merely the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had long since been stripped of its political and financial glory. It was a part of the world intimately acquainted with defeat. All that remained for Austrians to boast of was the splendor of a capital city that once towered over the world. In lieu of anything better, the city of Vienna became a playground for great music, great theater, great books, great food and great art.


(Alban Berg: The Altenberg Lieder)

A place like the Vienna of that age instructed people how to live, but it provided no instruction for how to survive. It was one of those intellectual bubbles of human history too extravagant to ever last: a culture so absorbed by its surfeit of instant delights that it was powerless against the horrors of the future. Vienna was as close as the world has come to an intellectual democracy: a place where a provincial Jew like Mahler could run an opera house and a clinically insane man like Kokoschka could be celebrated as a great artist. Yes, Mahler converted to Catholicism, and yes, Kokoschka lived a very difficult life, but in what other European city would their stories even be possible?

The Vienna of Stefan Zweig was the freest exchange of ideas the world had ever seen. So free that a mediocre painter named Adolf Hitler looked at its developments with horror, a horror shared by all-too-many in the conservative anti-establishment.. Most German cities of that period were stale and monoglot, unable to receive ideas of other places. But Vienna was alive with the influences of other worlds. It was a city in which you were nearly as likely to hear Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Ukranian, Romanian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovak, Serbian, Slovene, Russian, Italian, and Yiddish as you were to hear German spoken in the streets. Each language did its part to contribute to the uniqueness of the city. And there should be no doubt that each did its part to provide material that made its way into the work of artistic masters.


(The Mermaid by Alexander von Zemlinsky: a man who was quarter Austrian, quarter Hungarian, quarter Sarajevo Sephardic Jew, quarter Bosnian Muslim)

What killed Vienna was that it was simply too much. There was so much focus on culture at the expense of politics that few bothered to organize when the Christian Social Party managed to elect Karl Lueger, a Christian socialist who blamed the exploitation of workers by bourgeois Jews for Austria’s economic depressions. The upper-middle class, of which a good many were Jews, were painted by Lueger as over-educated, weak-willed, corrupt, decadent, spoiled by luxury and spoilers of a once great culture. This all should sound familiar. Not only because Lueger provided half the schematic for Nazism’s platform, but also for reasons that have to do with us.

As always seems to happen when culture grows too dominant, politics became Vienna’s weak spot. And what a weak spot.

III.


(How to annoy a Viennese musician: remind them that their only native-born great composer is Arnold Schoenberg)

But surely you’ve noticed this before I did. There is something more than a bit precious about the Viennese concept of culture. Where are the sports? Where are the lower forms of entertainment? Why is there so little comedy in all this? Is it too much to ask that our entertainment be fun?

There is nothing more offensive to most Americans than the idea that being boorish or vulgar is a bad thing. We take pride in being the most superficial civilization in history. We spent the twentieth century in battle against the world’s most self-consciously profound civilizations, and look where it got them! So if we want to spend our lifetimes watching football or Dane Cook, or listening to Insane Clown Posse, who are you to stop us? This is Ammurika damnit!

Who indeed. Profundity without frivolity clearly didn’t work. Perhaps frivolity without profundity will. Why worry about what happened to old Vienna when we’re having so much fun ourselves. The old notions of ‘art’ and ‘culture’ are on the one hand seen as boring, stuffy pursuits by self-important people concerned with status and appearances; on the other seen as indicative of moral laxity and decadence. Who knows? Maybe both are true.

But who’s to say that the old Viennese didn’t have as much (more?) fun than we do? They clearly ate as well, had as much sex, went to as many shows as we do. Just like ours their entertainment could be as based in the home as well as the theaters. We have the DVD and DVR, they had the salon.

No, the problem with the Viennese was not that they were too stuffy or pompous. Their problem is that they were too refined. There’s an enormous difference. You’re as likely to find arrogant, narrow-minded people in a NASCAR arena as you are in a concert hall. The problem was that the idea of going to see a NASCAR race or a Busta Rhymes concert would have been as much a horror to to the old-school Viennese as going to a Secessionist exhibit or a Society for Private Musical Performances concert would be to the former.