The Posts I'd Have Written Part 5

19. Left Conservatives - In the last ten years, we've seen the deaths of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Oriana Fallaci, Norman Mailer, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Vonnegut, Tony Judt, Howard Zinn, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, and now Gore Vidal. It's beginning to look as though a particular type of figure is dying out - the man of leftist letters with the education of an aristocrat, and the inclinations of a revolutionary (can Noam Chomsky be far behind?), utilizing the methods of Marx to achieve the ends of Edmund Burke. Each of these writers was part-brilliant, part crackpot - espousing revolutionary causes with such fervor that they picked up some conservative causes along the way as a means to expedite their visions of justice more swiftly. For large parts of almost all their lives, they were either Europeans living in America or Americans living in Europe. The result was that each arrived at their own vision of a progressive pseudo-liberalism that had a special kind of obsessive love-hate of the United States as its core. Their record of bringing about revolutionary change is frankly the opposite of impressive - for the last 45 years, the most influential governments have largely been run by neo-liberals and conservatives who want to cut government programs and roll back all the progressive gains made post World War II. Theirs is a generation that has, however, done a fantastic job of showing people how a wide-ranging education has failed to create the better world to which we should all aspire - making them perhaps the last generation of writers for whom a wide-ranging classical education is a given. We now live in a world of their making, where conservatives rule because progressives are not willing to make the compromises necessary to govern, and an 'intellectual' is a person of such narrow specialty that none of their successors have read widely enough over a diversity of subjects to see connections across disciplines. They did not bring us closer to the better world they wanted us to envision, they drew us further away.
These figures had at least as much in common with conservatism as liberalism because ultimately they came to views of the dispossessed which only a rich person could have - glorifying the oppressed's travails in the abstract without serious thought as to how those pains could be remedied. In each of them, there was a marked streak of entitlement group-think which so many over-privileged feel and then assuage any insecurity over it by claiming that all people deserve the privileges they have. Well, yes, other people deserve their privileges, but do they give serious thought as to how it can come about? Responsibility is a terribly difficult thing, and it's all too convenient to blame people in power if they're clearly trying their best against people who wish them ill and all the people which good politicans try to help. Nearly all of them came to despair of the next progressive generation, which instead taking up their struggle to banish tyranny from the world, finds the smallest outrages at which to take offense as a means to implement a forced, ersatz form of multi-culturalism where every special interest can claim special privileges and attention which would inevitably come at the expense of every other interest group.  But they were kidding themselves, these were the creators the next progressive generation. And the real liberalism espoused by the followers of Rossevelt, Truman, Atlee, and Helmut Schmidt might actually involve sacrifice, and therefore was nowhere near as attractive because it had a chance of working, and therefore might compromise their privileged status. How very conservative they were. Which brings us to...

20. The Expatriot -  There is a specific type of first-worlder particularly given to extensive travel, to living abroad, and using such an act as an excuse to reject everything about whence they came. It's one thing to leave a place where one has deep roots because it's become truly impossible to live there happily, or because of a good opportunity in work or love elsewhere, but it's quite another to leave home because living in the place where one has roots is merely irritating. Driving this sentiment is often both a childish wish for instant gratification which insists on rejecting everything because some things don't work, and a kind of dangerous superficiality that allows people to give up on their roots and chase whatever new system comes their way for the simple reason that any system has to be better than the allegedly dysfunctional one in which they grew up. The truth remains that in their minds, they are still living in their homelands, perhaps more than they ever would be if they still lived in their home town/country. Roots are not something nearly so easily shorn, and the more one runs them down the more mental space they occupy. Staying as close to home as possible to be under the monolithic control of roots is not a legitimate option for happiness, but neither is the shedding of all allegiances.  

21. Why I Get Mad at the Left - One of the things which has long troubled me on this blog is how much of my political ire seems reserved for left-wing causes rather than right-wing. It’s a habit that’s long since grown ingrained in me, and try as I might, I can’t seem to shake it. There was a time, about five-minutes long as a high school senior after Bush v Gore, when I was utterly leftier than thou - trying to be a vegan, helping bring in leftist guest speakers for politically active students (one particularly memorable one told us to inspect our tap water for fluoridation), and perhaps most embarrassing of all to me now, claiming that all holocaust remembrances were a fetishizing excuse to neglect all the genocides that are still happening. I don’t doubt part of this ire is an unconscious form of penance.  
It’s a habit which goes back at least to college when I saw so many other students spouting slogans with no thought deeper than 5 words at a time. From conservatives I expected this - it’s a political movement like any other and needs nothing more than to surrender your mind to groupthink to be accepted in the group (which I suppose explains why so many seemingly intelligent Republicans seem to turn into slogan machines when politics come up). But liberalism is supposed to be a philosophy that requires education, skepticism, and self-reliant thought - and yet all around me I saw people falling for Howard Dean’s demagoguery, conflating Israel with the most evil regimes the world had ever seen, and boiling the complex (and still nefarious) motives of the Iraq war down to nothing more than war profiteering. What I saw from so many people was not liberalism by any definition I understood, it was the exact same groupthink of the overprivileged which one finds in conservative circles. If you read no books, you can still be a member of the hard right. If you read one book, you can be a member of the hard left.
As many emotionally bruised right-wing relatives and friends can attest, I haven’t a conservative bone in my body. But I can’t deny that I don’t feel much inspiration in writing about what’s wrong with right-wingers. I know what’s wrong with the Right, nearly everybody who regularly reads this blog knows what’s wrong with the Right. Would there be a single person who’d be more enlightened at the end of a post about why Republican beliefs are mendacious than they were at the beginning? Even if I agree that at least 90% of conservative beliefs run contrary to any sense of a positive society, what could I possibly add to understanding those beliefs that can’t be found on a thousand different blogs by people much better credentialed (and occasionally better informed:) than I?  
I’d like to think that in a well-functioning society, I am a liberal squarely in the center of discourse, neither socialist nor conservative. I want a government run by reliable people who can give the facts on any issue then find the best possible (and never the ideal) solution. But contemporary America is not that society, it is clearly a society run by disproportionately conservative values - and therefore by the American standards of 2012, I am quite to the left-of-center.
The political spectrum isn’t a straight line from right to left, it’s a sphere in which some forms of conservatism resemble socialism and vice versa, a moderate liberal and a moderate conservative may well have many more beliefs in common than two left-wingers, and the amount of commonality may pale in comparison to the amount which two extremists from opposite wings have. When Hitler was looking for brownshirt recruits, the first place he looked was the Communist party, for whom he instituted a complete forgiveness policy because he knew that Communists would make far more devoted converts than any ex-democrat.
If there is one thing which left-wing and right-wing share, it is expectations of life that are far too high. Has anyone taught these people yet that nothing in life will come as we hope it does?

21. What Was Lost


(Tchaikovsky's Manfred - an extremely imperfect work that will haunt your dreams for decades after you hear it. From the last time it was performed at the Proms, just as great, though different...more on that in a later mini-post.)

On Saturday I went to the first of four nights of Proms in a row. I saw the amazing Vladimir Jurowski conduct the London Philharmonic and the main work on the program was Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony. For the first time in too long, I had a few truly transcendent, out of body moments while listening to music. The performance of the first movement particularly was so perfectly controlled yet so passionate that parts of it seemed like frozen moments of animal agony, yet those moments made you feel completely alive - obliterating any wall that distances you from the music. It's generally good not to have those moments too often, which would turn you into the musical equivalent of an adrenalin junkie (go to any punk show to see what that's like). But to be without them is to live in a prison of your own thoughts (which is in some ways why I imagine the 19th century bourgoise needed music like Tchaikovsky's and Wagner's which let them escape that prison so easily).
I subscribe very much to that antiquated 19th century belief that music exists to express emotions. Music is a language like any other langugage, but it is the langugage of suggestion and hypnosis - with different sounds resounding in our ears as redolent of various emotions. There is plenty of music in the twentieth century that is just as expressive of emotions as anything in Tchaikovsky - but what I miss terribly in so much of 20th century music is the sheer articulate specificity of what romantic-era music expresses. So many popular musical genres depend so much on spontenaiety, and while it's a wonderful experience in its particular way, it's a completely different experience from music written in the 19th century (which we mistakenly call 'Classical').. When we listen to jazz, or rap, or heavy metal, we are partaking in the enjoyment of indistinct, spontaneous emotion from each fleeting moment, caught utterly on the fly. And perhaps that's exactly what we need to feel most in our hyper-regimented, exactly organized societies. But in such an environment, it becomes that much harder feel a diversity of emotions, and to associate different sounds and chords with happiness and sadness, laughter and tears, compassion and anger.
It's the same with our transfer of allegiance from literature to cinema and TV. Novels, short stories, non-fiction, and even certain types of poetry (back when poetry was narrative) and theater (at least in the age of the solilioquy) allow us to articulate the thoughts of characters as they happen; because in a sense, everything which happens to these characters also happens to us. We are literally thinking along with the other person, and like classical music, it is a technique that brings us as close to telepathy as the world has given us. But in the age of screen entertainment, the best we can do is read the implications of what the director is telling us. The characters no longer describe their feelings, they transmit them by facial expressions and what remains unsaid, and it's up to us to read between the lines.
Emerson has that great line I keep quoting on this blog, why stop now? 'In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.' It's a quote I've come to love more and more as I get older. The most important thing which 'great art' does, regardless of genre, is to bring us out of our shelves and make us realize that other people have experienced those things we have experienced. Vladimir Nabokov called this sort of identification of the self with works of art an 'adolescent pleasure.' In Nabokov's world, art is no different than an ingenious game or puzzle in which all that truly matters is the mechanics - if all of us were like Nabokov and had no need for an unsterile version of art that lets us identify with what we see, perhaps we'd have no need for drama and poetry because we'd all be too busy playing chess and jigsaw puzzles, or collecting butterflies. But apparently we need music and stories and pictures nearly as much as we need to breathe, and we need them because they make us less lonely. If a person had no struggles in his life, he would have no need for anything that consoles him. As it happens, we have struggles. And the result is that we still listen to Tchaikovsky.

The Posts I'd Have Written Part 4

14. Urbanities - When modern New York was first built, it cearly had Paris in mind - the gigantism of its high-rise apartments, the huge avenues, the teeming mass of humanity packed like sardines into a small central location, it was all clearly a tribute to the grandiosity of Baron Haussmann's neoclassical vision of Paris; just as Paris pays tribute to Paleo-Classical Rome and Rome pays tribute to Athens. London pays exactly the same tribute, but in a different way. The sprawling austerity of modern London is in some ways more understated, perhaps after the manner of Frederick the Great's Berlin and copied by Chicago. But then the modern (post-modern?) Paris of the late 20th century made a stunning reversal and seemed to base its ideas on mid-century New York.
Contemporary New York is a very different place from the New York of the world's imagination. It is more metropolitan area than city, and as with so much of America, most people who work in it live in planned communities beyond its outskirts. The people who move to New York with dreams of living in a land of boundless opportunity and innovation are more than fifty years behind the times - by common consensus America's west coast has long since overtaken the East as the land of forward thinking, and neither holds much of a candle to many cities in Asia. But whereas New York is now a land of cars and commuters, Paris is still a land defined gargantuanly efficient public transit and continual pedestrian crossings, centrally located art museums and mid-century jazz - like a Golden Age New York preserved in Europe.

15. Le Jazz - As with so many aspects of modern French culture, the French jazz scene is like a refrigerator in which the best periods of American jazz seem to be preserved exactly as they were. Over and over again, I seem to be stumbling on jazz cubs in which the sixty-year-old set listens in worshipful reverence to the jazz combos that wouldn't be out of place in a Coltrane and Ornette Coleman set with nary a sense that the more progressive jazz of the 70's and beyond - late Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report - ever happened. You could do worse, there's a lot of later Jazz that sucks, but this is a conservative culture, freeze-blasted in the past, in no way a dynamic, evolving one. This is jazz as classical music, preserved around the early sixties, the one moment in American history when jazz and perhaps only jazz was considered the true American music. But speaking as someone completely sick of the classical world, it does not speak well for the future of jazz if it exists only as a classical canon where the gate must always be guarded. The fact that you're listening to quality music is guaranteed in such a situation, but it's also the worst possible safeguard against the kind of revelations which make great art worth seeking out.
 The early 60's was the golden era for jazz appreciation, but was it truly the greatest moment in jazz history? Moved as I'll always be by A Love Supreme, Sketches of Spain, and Ah-Um, I can't escape the feeling that jazz was already something much too "serious" by by the age of Miles Davis and all his various progeny. It was the 'romantic period' in Jazz History when artists had the freedom to create exactly what they wanted, and while the results are often fascinating, they aren't necessarily better than in periods when artists were more restricted. Just as few people would argue that Weber, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were better composers than Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, I find it hard to believe that Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane were better musicians than Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie. In an era when artists get to do precisely what they want, they can take themselves as seriously as they want - and the inevitable byproduct is that humor is usually either thrown overboard, or totally segregated from seriousness. For me, great as Coltrane and Miles are, the real revelations in jazz come from that earlier era of Pops and Duke and Art Tatum and Earl Hines, when jazz was new and liberating, and not bogged down by all the weight of tradition. If you want revelations in the 60's, you have to find it in rock and R&B, where The Beatles and Ray Charles were able to capture life in all its facets. It is only in the sense that what's there has not yet been said that one can find the real revelations, the real new discoveries which every generation finds for themselves in their own (sweet) way.

16. France - Editors of America: A few days ago I saw a quote written in graffiti on a subway: "The mind is like a parachute, it doesn't work if it's not open." - Franck (spelled like Cesar Franck) Zappa. I thought that was amazing, showing in one small gesture the way the French seem to idolize everything great about America, even if they don't understand it. From the earliest age, America was critiqued by its earliest aly, France, a friend and sometimes frenemy of long standing which has the longest and most reliable tradition (in both senses) of critiquing America, showing America what is right about it, and also what's wrong. Occasionally France gets it wrong in both directions, but even so, France is our most devoted friend: championing the best in us and condemning the worst more than any country in our relatively short history than any other country.
But like all friends, countries often don't understand one another, often talking past each other in the ways we want to hear even if it's not at all what the other meant. France, like most countries, celebrate the greatness of America all the while reviling all those things they hate about it. Yet none of these countries seem to realize that one simply can't have one without the other. France, like most of Western Europe, is far too well-removed from history's pressure cooker to remember what it was like to live in it. The age when France was at the center of world history is two-hundred years in the past - and since the fall of Napoleon, there are other countries that have mattered far more to cultural history. For a hundred years, America has been the world's chief battleground on which those ideas are fought, and I'm sorry to say that the country may now be losing that battle (as all great civilizations eventually do) but if America does not manage to renew itself from its latest crisis, the battle will rage on somewhere else, perhaps somewhere in Asia, and America will be free to play France to their new friends - living a life of comparitive lesiure and with all the privileges of criticizing freely because the decisions won't have the same existential importance to us as they will to those who live in the thick of them.

 17. The Museum Will Close in Twenty Minutes - A Dialogue with the now deceased but still grumpy Robert Hughes:



RH: Well, what did you think of the Musee D'Orsay?

ET: A brillianty depressing place.

RH: What could possibly be depressing about such enlivening creativity?

ET: The sheer emptiness of it. The spiritul rottenness of these artists. The lack of consideration about anything smacking of a human emotion.

RH: Well surely you can't feel that way about all of it...

ET: Hardly. I love Courbet and Daumier, and the liveliness of their paintings stand out even more in relation to everything that came after.  And I especially love Van Gogh because he saw the emptiness of all those Cezanne and Monet paintings he tried to emulate and it drove him to suicide.

RH: Surely you can't be one of those phillistines who thinks still lifes and landscapes are boring.

ET: By and large I absolutely am. I can watch fruit any time I want.

RH: Well there is no hope for you then, but no matter. And your Van Gogh comment is not quite as out of left field as it seems, but I'm still beginning to think that you're just a vapid generalist who doesn't really want to understand anything.

ET: This coming from the art critic who tried to anchor 20/20?

RH: I thought American television could be more intelligent than it was.

ET: It is now, but there's no BBC, and you're no Clive James.

RH: And thank God for that, Clive's a gifted writer, but he's an imperialist toady.

ET: That doesn't make sense.

RH: A lot of my insults don't make sense.

ET: Neither did a lot of your enthusiasms.

RH: I contain multitudes.

ET: Well in the hair department, nobody's arguing.

RH: A great critic needs great hair as much as a great artist.

ET: I'm working on that.

RH: (stares at Evan's hair, makes Evan uncomfortable) Work quickly...

ET: So let's change the subject, I hate Auguste Renoir, he's like the French Norman Rockwell. 

RH: I prefer to think of him as the French Walt Disney. And besides, isn't his son your favorite movie director?

ET: He's certainly near the top. But his son has real insight into human beings rather than just weird fetishes for fat women and little girls.

RH: Well if that's how you feel abot Renoir, do you like Manet's women better?

ET: Oh god, Manet's worse - at least Renoir's fetishes were interesting.

RH: Do you like any impressionists?

ET: Do Degas or Toulouse-Latrec count?

RH: I suppose if you want to be charitable.

ET: My favorite is Rousseau.

RH: Oh god, that self-taught amateur?

ET: What's wrong with Rousseau?

RH: He can't fucking paint.

ET: And I can't fucking see.

RH: Then what the hell are you doing in an art museum?

ET: I'm a tourist in Paris with bad French, what else is there to do?

RH: I never thought I'd meet anyone grumpier than me...



18. The Veelas of Shakespeare and Co. - I'm not much of a fan of archetypes in literature, even in Harry Potter, but one of the best archetypes for me is the Veelas, the magical French beings so beautiful that the mere act of looking at them can enchant you. The veelas in the Harry Potter 4 movie could never do justice to what we could imagine in the books. But then again, right around the time I saw Harry Potter 4, I knew a beautiful French girl I nicknamed Fleur Delaceur - so beautiful it was almost irritating, smart, always the center of attention, so beautiful that the worst parts of life was pretty much guaranteed never to happen to her because the rest of us 'normies' would always go out of our way to help her just for the pleasure of being in her company, and she knew it.
It's almost needless to say, but there are so millions of women in France who could pass for Veelas - perfect women who appear to resemble nothing so much as a perfect mix of physique, intelligence, elegance, eccentricity, and sexuality. To imagine yourself with any one of them, particularly for a guy like me with the unfortunate habit of staring at the floor when in the company of beautiful women (or at her breasts), seems like a happiness too far - almost something you can't even dare yourself to do. And of all the beautifl women in France, the most beautiful women in all Paris seem to congregate at the English langugage bookstore, Shakespeare and Co. Weirder still, they all seem to be American.
 There is a very specific type of American woman who goes Francophile. They seem to do so with a specific aim - to compete with French girls at their own game, and beat them. In this age of the newly liberated women, perhaps the first generation to not remember when the glass ceiling was uncrackable, and these American girls: usually upper-middle class, well-educated, intelligent, fancy themselves among the creme-de-la-creme of their generation; and they're usually right. I must know at least fifty girls who fit this description to a T, and at one point or another I've probably been in love with all of them (don't flatter yourselves). 
 

The Posts I'd Have Written Part 3

10. Singer and Chagall

Isaac Bashevis Singer came from a Polish town called Radzymin, just a few towns over from Bransk, my father's family's town of origin. Marc Chagall grew up in Vitebsk, the Lithuanian city from where my mother's family hailed. The two great explainers of Yiddish culture to the Western Public - both obsessed with relgion, sin and sex - reading or looking at their work can be quite a shock for those of us whose memories of Yiddish culture are entirely through the eyes of our geriatric grandparents. Singer spent his career trying to return to the shtetl, Chagall spent his career trying to leave it. Singer ended up in New York, amidst a Yiddish culture of Greenhorns who tried (and failed) to live as though the past could be recreated. Chagall landed mostly in France, amidst a thriving culture of aesthetes, but for all his efforts to embrace French hedonism, he could never put his place of origin behind him. It is this tension which still makes their xorks explode off the page, and illustrate as greatly as any pair of creators have the problems of living in two worlds.

11. Modernism: Conservatism in Disguise 

Any self-respecting modernist will tell you precisely the same thing: the emptiness of modernism is a reflection of the emptiness all around us - the vacuity of consumerism, the vacuity of politics, the vacuity of war, the vacuity of our collective consciousneszzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... And yet for all its condemnations of modern life, it has a tremendous fear of being seen as anything but modern. Going through the Pompidou Centre in 2012, what is still modern about all this art, this videography, this music? The world has evolved well past needing modernism, and modernism is now a word that seems stuck in the "return to the 19th century" mentality which is far beyond anyone's ability to do, even if we ever wanted to do it. Artistic modernism does not seek to embrace the future, it seeks to eliminate it.

12. The Francofication of Mad Men

I apparently can't stop thinking about this show, even in France. The appearance of the French-Canadian Megan Calvet, once seeming so utterly out of left field, suddenly makes perfect sense. The America of the early 60s embraced French culture - the films of Truffaut and Godard, the songs of Piaff and Brel, the philosophy of Sartre and Camus, not to mention attitudes to food, fashion and sex .... - that the entire late 60s can be said to be inspired by what Americans saw coming from France. When Americans of the sixties wanted greater cultural freedom; the freedom to follow one's desires in work, in love, in sex, in politics, what they were really longing for is the freedoms which so many of the people who constitute French culture took for granted. Megan's family is a fully realized alternative culture to the family of the American Dream - one that far more resembles today's American families than any other family shown on Mad Men. Just as Layne Pryce represents the old world of England - the world America left behind in their founding, Megan Calvet represents the world of America's future. As Mad Men draws into its final two seasons, Megan may get still more interesting.

13. Getting Robbed: A Semi-Fiction

No further explanation necessary for the time being...

800 Words: The Posts I'd Have Written Part 2

6. The World's Most Christian Country - The center of Catholic History is France, not Italy. Italian history must contend with classical history as well as Christian history - just as Turkey must contend with Ottoman history as well as Byzantine (in reverse order). The most Christian countries are Russia and France, and no country was more exclusively formed by Catholicism than France - its entire nationhood, its entire history, is bound to the Church - either in practice or in reaction. The Catholic Church began as a heresy in Italy, but it arrived in France with all the power of a conquerer, and the greatest, most well-known monuments are to be found on French, not Italian soil.

7. France: Land of the Past - France is perhaps the only country in Europe in which an American would feel more strongly out of place than he did at the end of World War II.  French culture swam far unimaginably far against the globalizing current to preserve itself exactly as it was. The French are the only Europeans who speak English with an accent as strong as they did fifty years ago, and all their cultural traditions seem to run parallel to the American current. The reasons for this are, strangely, as conservative a sentiment as they are liberal, and the end result is that by isolating themselves, France allows a glorious past to subsume the present. There are very few cultural/scientific breakthroughs in the last forty years of which the world has taken notice - in my lifetime, France has always remained unalterably France - with no sense that it changes from decade to decade, meanwhile, the evolution time insists upon boils just beneath the surface.

8. What does France do Best? - England has drama, America has movies, Russia has novels, Italians have art, Germany has music, Spain has dancing, perhaps Japan has animation...what artform does France do incontrovertibly best? The answer is that the greatest artform of France is...France itself. To an extent far past any other country, France has mastered the plastic arts that create the food on our plate, the clothes we wear, the scape of our cities. Other countries have particular genres of art which theyve mastered to make life more bearable, France, to a greater extent than any other country, has mastered life itself.

9. L'obsession anti-americaine - There are many, many things worth criticizing about America. But it's very different to hear it from people who are not Americans themselves. There is always a gaggle of ironies about when Europeans accuse Americans of running down the achievements of other cultures while boosting the virtues of their own. The very concept of the European Union and the social welfare state would not exist with neither the United States's example, nor its repeated generosity. People with a view from the cheap seats are always bitter, and those without power can afford to criticize those who do without fear of reprisal, because their opinions dont matter.

800 Words: The Posts I'd Have Written Part 1

I don't doubt a severe chance of a lost/stolen/broken computer would be risked had I brought a computer to France. Even so, I feel almost mute without it - totally without that imaginary internet reader/friend who understands me utterly and thinks I'm perfect in every way... so, for that friend, who probably would be on facebook, here are just five (there are a number of others) of the posts I've been gathering notes for and would probably have written most of had I regular access to a good computer.

1. The American Gentleman - 150 years ago, there were a group of Russian intelligensia - overprivileged men of means who straddled that fine line between intellectual voraciousness and pseudo-intellectual - with names like Turgenev, Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky, and some names that are much more famous today... Like all people privileged enough to travel, they eventually made their way to Western Europe, where they were astonished at the quality of life they saw in comparison to their home country. The crushing realization dawned on them that life as it was in Russia did not have to be as difficult as their governments made it, and they and their countrymen were missing out on easy privileges which Western Europeans take for granted. Like the Western Europe of that period, today's Western Europe is hardly a model which other countries should emulate in every detail. But the alternative to learning their lessons is to unlearn them, and just as the 19th Century Russians had pan-Slavism and Christian fundamentalism saying to reject the lessons of Western Europe, today's America has Tax Leninists (Grover Norquist's own words) and Christian fundamentalism telling us to reject Western Europe's easy mores. Where that leads is anybody's guess...

2. Englishman or Frenchman - At heart, everybody is either an Englishman or a Frenchman - a classicist or a romantic' a realist or an idealist, a rational being or an emotional one, superego driven or driven by the id. The French and the English constitute the oldest continual civilizations on Earth. Through decline and rebirth, at no point in over half-a-millenium has either country been utterly decimated in the way so many other neighboring countries could not avoid (though WWI came close). The result is an organic, unimpeded kind of growth you can't find in any other European country in which each era makes sense as a reaction to the previous era and makes sense in relation to what was going on in either country. No two countries are more different: the French seem to value sense; they see the world as something to experience and hardly a single French person can be described as anything but beautiful: the English seem to value sensibility; they see the world as something ascetic to understand and look like mole people.

3. The Decline of Breast Implants - I can't help myself...really I can't....Nice has amazing topless beaches, but more amazing anthropologically than aesthetically. The barrage of bare breasts is somewhat beguiling at first glance, then you look up to see that 18 out of 20 most impressive bare mammaries in any given field of vision seem to be the property of women in their late sixties whose plastic surgery collapsed everywhere else. These are women from the sexual revolution's first generation - whose idea of glamor still came from old school Hollywood and European art-films. They're young enough to believe in sex as something to be approached casually, but too old to be of an impressionable age when feminism taught women to believe that they did not have to devote their lives to impressing men. The result is that there may not have been a generation of women in living memory whose lives were so difficult.

4. Who Are Our Impressionists? - Impressionist painters were barely known in their own time. The greatest painters of late 19th century France were at the time considered to be painters of whom we've never heard - whose sole recommending quality was that their painting was as pretty as they were vapid. In so many ways, this resembles many artistic genres in our own day, particularly in music. We like the beat of a three-chord song, or the lyrics are easily understood, and we don't give much more thought to the music than that. It's entirely possible that in 100 years, all the music we listen to; even Bjork or Steve Reich or Pierre Boulez or Kanye West, will interest precisely no one. Who are the Monets, the Van Goghs, the Cezannes, the Gauguins, of our day. As the hipsters would say, you've probably never heard of them - neither have I.

5. The New Gothic Era? - Looking at the iconography of a Medieval Age tells us we're beginning to have far more in common with the Middle Ages than with the Renaissance. Like the Middle Ages, we seem to prefer stories told in pictures which need no education to be understood, we increasingly prefer our art to deal with the depiction of fantastic realms than we like those works which deal with reality (perhaps because we now view reality as something trivial), we increasingly divide spiritual matters from sensual ones, and the disparities in people's education grow far wider. There was a brief period in modern life (isn't it always brief?) when it seemed alright to believe in both religion and secularism. These periods happen for brief times in different places - usually when civilzations reach their apex - the America of FDR, the Greece of Alexander, the England of Elizabeth I, the Austria of Metternich, in which a civilization - for whatever reason - feels fundamentally as though their is no division between temporal matters and eternal ones, and for these brief periods, humanity makes progress and comes to understand itself a little better - the harvest from which human beings benefit from afterward until the present day.  In our own time, religion did not produce the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, and in so many cases it was on the side of civil rights and protection against political repression. But this period seems to be drawing to a close. Religion has come increasingly close to self-denial. Rather than the creation and liberation which eroticism brings, it is returning yet again to renunciation, penitence, violence. Meanwhile, secularists, inceasingly having lost any connection with "spiritual" matters, have embraced a kind of nihlistic revision of liberalism that does not allow for any respite but a temporary one. The result is a far greater preoccupation with the more permissive elements of liberalism - particularly in matters of sex, rather than the stuff which matters far more - freedom of speech and due process, education, health care, employment (it's highly possible that a more educated public taught to care about rights would see things like freedom of choice for abortion and allowing gay marriage as a given). By focusing so much on bedroom matters at the expense of other things, secularism has in fact given itself the same obsessions as religion - and is just as much a slave to them. In the happiest periods of human history, perhaps people found a means to feel pleasure through fulfillment and fulfillment through pleasure.  And we humans would feel a little more at peace with both our own persons and the eternal, infinite time and space around us. 

800 Words: The Very Reverend Evan Tucker

(To the tune of “God Bless America”)

I am an Anglican,
I am CE,*
Not a High Church,
Not a Low Chuch,
But Apostolic, Catholic and Free.
Not a Lutheran,
Not a Presby,
Not a Baptist,
White with Foam.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.


If I could have one honor in my lifetime, it would be to be called ‘The Very Reverend Evan Tucker’ as a title - I would even take that over wearing a terrible toupee that everybody’s too polite to ever point out.  Of all the absurdities in the English language, there can’t be many as absurd as allowing bishops and deans to hold the title ‘The Very Reverend.’ Calling someone “Reverend” is bad enough, it’s a subtle way of claiming a priest as ‘revered’, but uses a form of English grammar so antiquated that it probably went out of use by Shakespeare’s time. Obviously they know this, but to refer to your priest as ‘Revered’ is generally a lie. But by compounding it by calling a clergyman ‘The Very Reverend’ they compound its absurdity and its pomposity by an exponential figure  - nobody even remembers that ‘reverend’ is supposed to be an adjective, not a noun. Imagine a congregation where the clergy is called ‘The Very Rabbi’ or ‘The Very Imam.’


This was, of course, the thought which occurred to me yesterday afternoon as the Very Reverend such-and-such intoned a greeting to me over the Westminster Abbey Audio Guide. I say ‘of course’ because this thought occurs to me at least once every few months - usually more often. And once the sing-song voice of the clergy stopped (is ‘sing-song intonation’ a course requirement at divinity school?), it was replaced by the unmistakable rasp of Jeremy Irons as my tourguide. As far as tourguides go, it was not as good as the creepily bug-eyed rector with black hair and an albino face I had eight years ago, but having Jeremy Irons as a tourguide ensures that the Church of England still knows how to keep it creepy. 


Months ago, when I was booking this trip, I thought to myself that I did not want to have one of those inevitable American trips to Europe in which we cattleprod ourselves into reverend awe over the fact that such beauties can exist as one finds in the great European historical sites. Big vacations are too precious to waste on nothing but ‘great art.’ Beauty is amazing, but is fun on a vacation too much to ask? Would it be too much to ask that we Americans actually enjoy ourselves in Europe rather than merely claiming to? 


So like an alzheimer’s patient I’ve visited Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral in my first two days. Better to get religion out of the way first I suppose. And as I re-toured the many stunning chapels and tombs at Westminster, I could not help the fact that the most striking thing about it was the IKEA lamp box I saw peeking out from underneath the tomb of an 18th century soldier (of course, the name already escapes me...). We don’t live in a reverential (reverendial?) age, and after a certain point, one reaches a diabetes like numbness in the face of so much beauty. 


I understand why Westminster Abbey is a truly stunning building, but like all the churches I will soon see in France, it is a relic from a completely different age of humanity. The French churches hail from the anonymous age of the Gothic Cathedrals when anonymous architects and stone carvers made churches so large and ornate that they gave their worshippers a foretaste of eternal life (more on that in France...). But Westminster Abbey was begun in 1245, the Gothic Age was already half-finished. Unlike Notre Dame de Paris, the purpose of Westminster Abbey has always changed throughout the centuries. It is not a pristine Gothic monument to God, it is a monument to the English State. After 1550, it was no longer even a cathedral. God has so many cathedrals, surely the English Kings can have a church of their own... Rather than glorify God, Westminster Abbey exists to glorify England. And so it has the tombs of monarch after monarch, poet after poet, military leader upon leader, musician, artist, tax-collector, patent lawyer...


England has Westminster Abbey, God has St. Paul’s Cathedral. Kings and Queens marry and are crowned at Westminster, but their funerals are at St. Paul’s. Westminster is Gothic with a captial G, St. Paul’s is neoclassical. Christopher Wren designed the Cathedral with a challenge to Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s in Rome with its Parthenon-like columns and proportions clearly in view. Having been to both, I couldn’t see much contest at first. When I went to St. Pauls eight years ago, it was under heavy scaffolding, dirty, and much of it sectioned off from view. ‘What a dump’ was my first thought. It has since finished its cleaning - itself a ten year project! - and it has a kind of pristine glory that today’s Westminster (clearly in a bit of disrepair itself) lacks. Westminster Abbey reflects the infinite Gothic aspirations of Medieval times, whereas St. Paul’s is presided over by a Renaissance god who wants even religion to be at harmony with its surroundings. The building itself is every bit as friggin’ huge as any self-respecting cathedral should be, but somehow I wasn’t surprised that the original St. Paul’s was still larger by a third. And yet even in this miniature version of St. Pauls, and even after the cleaning, the cathedral is still too big. Parts of it already look dirty again, and one wonders if even after ten years they couldn’t get to cleaning all of it. Nobody should wear white. 




But the biggest shock came when I went to Choral Evensong at St. Paul’s. The Choir of St. Paul’s was unfortunately on holiday, so instead we got a local parish choir. Anyone who’s been to a local (white) church service in America would utterly roll their eyes at this prospect - an out of tune mishmash of unmusical kids whose parents make them sing and too-loud-singing adults who still think a singing career is still an option. But even the parish churches of England apparently have incredible choirs with perfect blend and diction, and the perfect ‘straight tone’ (no vibrato) English sound. It would be nice though if English choirs sang better music than the cheap 20th century Anglican knockoffs which pale as much in comparison to the great composers of the English Choral Tradition as America’s Episcopal choirs compare to their Anglican equivalents. 


I did not find any part of this spiritually inspiring, not even remotely. In our day, we needn’t take things nearly so seriously. Why is Westminster Abbey such a miracle when wikipedia can give us a virtual tour of it? We neither understand nor need the high seriousness of a Choral Evensong. But I can understand why someone else would.


It was before but a blink of an eye in the world’s history that reverential awe was the step forward. In an era that knew barely anything of instant gratification, great workmanship was a state to which all humankind had to aspire. Three hundred years ago, all citizens of Christendom could look from the floors to the walls to the windows to the ceilings of the great cathedrals and see a glimpse of infinity: infinite space and time, infinite soul, infinite beauty, infinite justice, infinite compassion, infinite workmanship, infinite patience, and infinite effort. In an age when all work was done with hands, the cathedral was the sum total of man’s achievement. When a family of stonemasons or woodcarvers went to Westminster Abbey, they could see for themselves what could be done with their hands, and we should never doubt for a second that the reverential awe they felt at such sites was as ecstatically real as ours is forced.

800 Words: The Proms Wakes Me Up

Had I returned to London any year before this one, reacclimation would have been easier, perhaps instant. For seven years after I lived here for a mere summer, I had looked back on London as ‘my city’ with all the fervor of a spiritual home: in which the people are far better educated, more polite, friendlier, funnier, than any other place I’d ever been. Hell, maybe it’s even true. 


But I could far easier make a claim for ‘my city’ to be Baltimore, Washington DC, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, perhaps even New York or Bethany Beach, Delaware and not have to be one of those stupid Americans who thinks of Europe as a kind of magic dreamland which exists completely apart from reality. On the other hand, London really is my kind of town to a degree no other city has ever been; not even New York or Boston. All the cultural amenities of America - the TV, the movies, the music, are thriving here with a public that boils with enthusiasm and make themselves present to a degree that would cause any American to feel at home. But on the other hand, there’s the old-world veneration of those things about which so many Americans have completely forgotten: old music, straight theater, the written word, Art with a capital A. Certainly some American cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, have those qualities as well, but none of them feel built to house both in tandem to nearly the same degree which London does. Perhaps Paris will, but whatever Paris holds, it will reveal some very different things from London. For me, London stands as the cultural watchdog between Old World and New, meanwhile becoming a playground for the best of both. Now if only I had unlimited amounts of money....


But this London, ‘my’ London, seemed almost absent for me on my first day. By the time I arrived early yesterday morning, my bleary-eyed self had barely slept in 24 hours. I spent the plane ride reading about France, failing to finish movies, and being woken up by crying babies and restless neighbors.


Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, but the alarming truth was that I spent an entire day in London without it entirely hitting me that I was back (poor me..). It was shocking how absent the frission was of seeing the city’s omnipresent green spaces, being back in the tube, walking around South Kensington, standing next to Royal Albert Hall... it was as though I’d completely forgotten what once thrilled me about this place. It just seemed so....white!


It’s just like the sense of entitlement a college student feels to see a place which resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale and decide that such a place is his birthright. But my first reaction was a sort of deadened hilarity at how homogeneous English people are. Certainly there is a large Middle Eastern and Indian population, but at first glance, the white population seems so secluded, so segregated from that population that it seems to affect them not at all - at least in America whites interact with blacks and hispanics by forcing them to serve as the underclass...


For a country so well known for its class system, today’s England is strikingly casteless. Interacting with today’s Englishmen feels not unlike interacting with the Americans of two generations ago. To a contemporary American, it can seem like a relic of the perfect (or perfectly dead) society which we will never know in which everybody gets a stunningly high base level of education, to a point which no cliques seem to have formed with each holding their own values and ‘languages,’ and everybody seems to interact one another with such security that nearly the entire country seems like an extended family. The different parts of English society have so successfully, seemlessly blended that there is hardly a melting pot of which one can speak. Compared to America, today’s England seems so secure, and so shielded from conflict, that it can almost deceive you into thinking it dull. Is this a sign that the country is on the precipice of an explosion, or a sign that it’s about to have half-a-millenium of uninterrupted peace?


It was only around 7:15 yesterday evening, upon us ‘prommers’ being led into the gallery of Royal Albert Hall after roughly hours of standing in a queue, shepherded into the most crowded imaginable space like Muslims on the Haj into the Grand Mosque to see Daniel Barenboim conduct two Beethoven Symphonies and a ‘modern’ work by Pierre Boulez, that I began waking up to an overwhelming sense of culture shock.




I was standing exactly four rows behind the conductor’s podium. And around me in that gallery was a panoply of ages, and at least half a dozen simultaneous conversations about classical music, all knowledgeable and completely audible. Two rows behind me was a young man talking up a beautiful woman and seemingly trying to impress her with his knowledge about Charles Mackerras’s career. One row behind me to my left was a man and a woman clearly on a date, both in their late fifties, and telling each other about the most memorable orchestral concerts they’ve seen in the last few years. In front of me was an older gentleman, telling an older lady about how Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven stacked up to all the other Beethoven cycles he’d seen. My friend, The Harris, and I struck up a conversation with another guy there; in his fifties, my height and vaguely Jewish looking (we were the only two people there under five-and-a-half feet tall) and spoke about Barenboim for some minutes. Near me was a German couple in their thirties, and from whatever little German I have I picked up that they were very excited for the Boulez. Next to me was a still more beautiful woman than the other who seemed to have come to a Proms concert completely alone. Near me another guy, early twenties and looking like an American popped-collar frat boy, standing completely on his own. Another guy in his twenties stood alone, and was reading some sort of music book. Clearly the older generation seemed more knowledgeable on the whole, but here was a city where classical music still clearly has a future.


It was only at intermission that I worked up the nerve to do what I barely had the nerve to do eight years ago - I spoke to nearly all of them. The kid reading the music book was a doctoral fellow at Kings College in Medieval Literature who hated Wolfram von Eschenbach. The ‘jock’ was an enthusiastic amateur violinist who loved playing Beethoven in semi-pro orchestras. The beautiful girl standing alone was a French girl with barely any English, but she played Beethoven on the piano and wanted to hear the symphonies. The German couple were jazz music lovers who wanted to determine if Boulez sounded like free-jazz, or if free-jazz sounded like Boulez (they also gave me some delicious olives). Of the couple on the date, I learned that the guy had been going to the Proms every year for thirty years and had been going to concerts of the Liverpool Philharmonic since he was a child, and of the woman I learned that she has a personal, not musical, hatred of Roger Norrington.  

The Proms is the greatest music festival in the world. Period. There is nothing in any other genre in any city which compares to the coordination it takes to assemble a different orchestra from a different part of the world every night for two months in a venue that can house six-thousand people with standing room 5 pound tickets in the front of the hall. It is now in its 117th year, and the seasons show only signs of growing in size and scope - there’s even an additional chamber music festival now at Wigmore Hall.


In America, a festival like this is utterly unthinkable. In order for The Proms to happen, there needs to be a massive government subsidy from a national broadcasting organization (in this case the massively funded BBC) which thinks classical music is in itself a public good - and they therefore produce, distribute, and advertise the concerts throughout the entire world. The whole idea that classical music, or even music itself, is a public good would cause many Americans to laugh themselves senseless - and perhaps rightly so. There is very little evidence that much good is done for the public by putting a hundred or so classical concerts. But ultimately, that is why The Proms are so awesome. Artists thrive on risk, and the best art is neither made when artists have too little money nor a too stable source of income - neither situation inspires people in the arts to their best. What inspires them is that tenuous middle ground where the funding to survive can be taken away at any moment - and they therefore must beg, borrow, or steal the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

Many music lovers in the UK protest the fact that the Proms, and the organization who produces them, are being irredeemably dumbed down (how spoiled can you be?). But unlikely as it sounds, should the economy of Britain crumble to the ground tomorrow, what program will be hacked up first? The Proms or the National Health Service? Its the very fragileness of a festival like the Proms that makes it such a miracle. I’m not sure if I believe in God, but I believe in The Proms.

800 Words: I Need a Vacation

In recent vintage, the posts on this blog have gotten darker and still darker, more and still more self-revealing, less and still less well-advised. I’ve tried to make it a rule for this blog to keep some kind of balance. Something dark must be followed by something light, something serious by something frivolous. If it can be helped, no writer, and no person, should ever edge too far in any mental direction without returning the other way. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you; if you avoid the abyss, the abyss no longer gives a shit.

Even as I’ve felt no less happy in the last month (if anything, rather happier than usual), I’ve found my thoughts on these pages gravitating toward bleaker and still bleaker sentiments. The longer an anxious person goes without feeling anxiety, the more he feels anxious about the anxiety to come. And the more premonitions he has, the more likely he is to allow them to come true.

I’ve had two separate friends tell me that this blog is coming to resemble a Dostoevsky novella, one of whom said it weeks before I even mentioned Dostoevsky here. Lest you think I’m being overly egotistical by bringing this up, please understand that I often seriously question whether Dostoevsky is not an absurdly overrated author – and I don’t doubt that they meant it in precisely that same spirit. I can love Dostoevsky for fifteen minutes at a time, and then invariably get absolutely tired of him. But the sentiments in Dostoevsky, the long-windedness, the narcissism, the constant hysterical confessions by total strangers, the glorification of suffering, the proto-fascist longing to be told what to think by a higher power….those sentiments are all beginning to sound a little too familiar... I never wanted to write bad Dostoevsky, I wanted to write bad Chekhov and bad Pushkin. Ideally, this blog was meant to house well-proportioned writing which mingles every possible emotional state at a length that never outstays its welcome. Blogging, like life, seems to aspire to a state of Chekhov but ends in a state of Dostoevsky.

But all good blogs are good in the same way, all bad blogs are bad in different ways (I know, I know, that’s Tolstoy). When this blog is good, I like to think that in its small way it gets the whole flavor of experience. From day to day, I have new ideas for all sorts of subjects whose thoughts seem to write themselves, and they run the gamut from serious to silly, sad to happy, heavy to light, smart to stupid. When this blog is bad, the mental acuity slows, and I very much feel like I’m agonizing to think of every word. When that happens, the emotions gravitate more toward one end of those scales and forgets the other. Needless to say, lately it’s been gravitating more toward seriousness, heaviness, sadness, perhaps even stupidity…

Fortunately, the past year of writing’s experiences far number more in the former category than the latter – I’m damn proud of the writing I’ve done here, and would never take back a word of it (except the grammar mistakes). Like any writer who finds the process easy, in my best moments I don’t feel like it’s me who’s writing. It’s only in my worst moments when every individual word feels as though it must be sucked out of my brain and I have to tap into things which I probably shouldn’t’ be sharing on this blog in order to keep the writing at a pace.

I do not regret becoming what many bloggers call an ‘oversharer’. If you want to write, then to a certain extent you have to draw on personal experience – where else can you draw? If people want to understand each other, then they unfortunately have to expose information to one another that might not be well-advised to expose. My red flags used to go up instantly when I saw someone share the private details of their lives online, as though somehow that was indicative of a person being particularly volatile or insane. But then I realized, who the hell am I to pretend that my bodily emanations don’t stink? And what the hell do I have to lose? I’m not particularly special, I’m just a nerdy kid from Baltimore who in his own way has led a fairly interesting life.

And then I remembered, this is what most if not all decent writers do – no matter how well a writer conceals the details of his life, all writing, even all fiction, is a variation on autobiography. Even if your unconscious dictates your material, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired to write something by what you read, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired by the details of someone else’s life – a friend, a famous person, a person you meet at a bar – that’s autobiography. In each case, it's you who has to process the information, and at least in that sense it's happening to you as much as it's happening to anyone else. Some writers are clearly more upfront about this process than others, and it makes little difference to the quality of their work whether they conceal the details of their lives in their work or share them – different processes work for different writers. But so long as human beings do the writing, we can only write based on what we perceive.

I’d like to think my perceptions are about to change rather drastically. Tomorrow, I’m headed to France and England for a month. This will be the biggest vacation I’ve been on in thirteen years and the first time I’ve been back to Europe in eight. Eight years ago, I lived in London for a summer – and in so many ways that was the summer which defined all the choices I’d made since then. It was in London that I began writing a blog, and blogging has been the most consistent activity I’ve had since then. I had the most horrendous internship with a British musical organization imaginable (not telling which), and it’s soured me towards office work ever since (not that I’ve successfully avoided it in recent years). I was in what is still my favorite city in the world, yet all I could think of was how much I missed my friends back home – friends who are still among my closest. Every night I heard new pieces of music and theater that made me want to stay in this city forever, and it made me broke three separate times during that summer – a financial state I became intimately acquainted with as the years went by. 

Like all Americans of some cerebral bent, I still put a cache on Europe that probably isn’t entirely deserved. To Americans, Europe is the place where fairy tales are reenacted. It’s less true than it once was, but Americans don’t understand history. The idea that we are who we are because other people got us here is completely antithetical to an American self-image. We believe we are masters of our destinies, hatched from our mothers’ wombs sui generis, and view the entire world as an orange to be squeezed. America has always been a vast, uncharted space of opportunity – a blank canvas on which we can all paint our own mural. Europe is a collage on which millennia’s worth of people already made their own forms. European cities seem as chaotically organic as any natural forest, on which thousands of years of growths collide, clash, and overtake one another – each generation splattering a new seed and pollen into the ecosystem. American cities are like planned forests, in which the buildings seem like trees planted in a straight line – no American city is more than 300 years old, and it’s impossible to obtain the diversity of style and spirit which each age added to the most mythical European cities.

Americans view Europe with a confused mixture of intimidated awe and the irritation with which young people have for nagging parents who try to shame their children in an unconscious effort to stop the kids from achieving more than they ever did. But Europe is even more confused by America, and their stereotypes are hilariously inconsistent. Americans are fat, yet obsessed with health. Americans are lazy, yet obsessed with work. Americans are warm and friendly, yet could not be more obnoxious. Like an older generation viewing a younger one, they dotingly observe everything about their ‘kids’ yet can’t understand a single thing they see, and just like when old people try to imitate the habits of the young, their oft-made attempts to be more like Americans are rather hilarious. To take some famous examples, no American would place the value the French do on Jerry Lewis, or the Germans on David Hasslehoff, or the Russians on McDonalds. Every person interprets other people through their own filter, and Europe and America continue to talk at each other in a series of blackly comic misunderstandings that grow more unstable every decade. Once upon a time, German physicists were imported to Chicago and New Mexico to work on a nuclear bomb; today American physicists tele-commute to Switzerland work on the Higgs Boson particle research. From the new American liberalism of Roosevelt partnered the imperial conservatism of Churchill, the Atlanticist political relationship evolved into the imperial conservatism of George W. Bush partnered with the old American liberalism of Tony Blair. Fifty years ago Americans flocked to movie theaters watch the Hollywood-influenced artfilms of Truffaut and Fellini, today Europeans buy DVD’s by the gross to watch European art-film influenced TV shows made for American cable in their own homes. Europeans once envied Americans for their social programs and efficient government…you know the rest…

Europe is different than America. I plan on enjoying every one of those differences for maximum contrast and updating this blog as often as I can to chart precisely how weird it is to be an apple pie American again on the strudel continent. If posts have gotten quite dark lately, I have a feeling (though can in no way guarantee) that balance will be restored, because the tone is about to get lighter in kind.