Tales From the Old New Land - Tale 4 1/2 - An Interview with Ivan Ticoczki - More than a beginning.

AC Charlap: We have just heard the fourth and worst of the Psalm settings by the Composer of the Old New Land, Ivan Ticoczki, whose settings of the Psalms we broadcast all throughout our podcasts. Ticoczki is a recipient of the Polar Music Prize, known also as the Musical Nobel, and is known particularly for a joint statement of protest against his receiving the award co-signed by famous critics and musicologists Norman Lebrecht, Edward Said, Robert Craft, Richard Taruskin, Jay Nordlinger, Martin Bernheimer, Alan Rich, and John Simon as being the worst possible recipient of the Polar Music Prize. You responded in your acceptance speech that you agreed with them and said, and I quote: "when you survive the Camps they want to give you a lot of awards."

Ivan Ticoczki: That's true.

Charlap: Evidence was then presented that you were not in fact in the Camps and had escaped during World War II and at various points lived in New York, London, and Los Angeles.

Ticoczki: Also true.

Charlap: Whatever the truth, you've clearly lived an extremely fascinating life. You've at least claimed to have been witness to most of the major cultural developments of the last hundred-three years.

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: How did this come to be, can you tell us where you're born?

Ticoczki: I was born in a town called Bransk.

Charlap: It's known for its Science Yeshiva yes?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: Now Bransk is in a part of Europe that has belonged at various points in your life to Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, Poland, the Free City of Danzig, The Soviet Union, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, then Slovakia, and now I believe it's part of Belarus. Is that correct?

Ticoczki: Who cares.

Charlap: Fair enough.

Ticoczki: I did not live there long enough to go to the Bransk High School of Science, we left by the time I was three.

Charlap: And I believe you were born on June 28, 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand is that also correct?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: It is said that there is a picture of you being held by your father in the October Revolution when he stood next to Lenin.

Ticoczki: Yes, my father was a Chassidicher Rabbi turned Orthodox Marxist who personally shot the family of Czar Nicholas.

Charlap: But the dates for that don't quite line up. Your father fell out of favor with Lenin because of his failure to starve more than half-a-million peasants by the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk's signing so that the provisions Germans provided for Russia's withdrawal from the war would last the Red Army through the coming Civil War against the Whites. This was in March 1918, so your family escaped from the Soviet Union a full four months before Czar Nicholas the Second was assassinated.

Ticoczki: Is that my fault?

Charlap: I suppose not. But even if your father was not the assassin of Czar Nicholas, you played an pivotal role in the death of Walter Rathenau.

Ticoczki: Yes indeed, we had to make a living in Germany, and for a bit less than a year I was Rathenau's personal shoeshiner. I was not quite eight years old yet, and in the climate of Weimar, he did not even trust his personal chauffeur. He chose me because I told him I was fifteen, not eight. The circumstances of the death of Rathenau were very similar to that of the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand. I thought I knew a shortcut to the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse. Unfortunately, we were intercepted on the way by right-wing extremists in a car with a machine gun. The machine gun missed me and may have missed Rathenau, but when they lobbed a grenade into my seat, I threw it in the direction of Rathenau, and it exploded half his body. This means that I may not only have been Rathenau's cause of death, but therefore the cause of eighteen-million more deaths due to Hitler - a fact of which I am both ashamed and deeply proud.

Charlap: It's also interesting because one of the first deaths at the hands of Nazis was your father's a year later.

Ticoczki: My father believed greatly in believing in things. He died in Munich during Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch the day after a Nazi threw a brick at him. He was so thrilled by the experience that he made me promise on his deathbed to try to join the Nazi Party.

Charlap: Records show that you became a Nazi party member in 1933 for exactly one day.

Ticoczki: Yes, I joined the Nazi Party in the hope of getting musical commissions from Albert Speer. We had an appointment to go swimming in a Berlin gymnasium followed by a Turkish Bath. My membership was revoked when it was discovered I was circumcised.

Charlap: How did you not see that coming?

Ticoczki: There were lots of Jews in 1933 who wanted to join the party.

Charlap: How can that be?

Ticoczki: We didn't think Hitler was serious!

Charlap: You didn't??

Ticoczki: He could a man that swish be a Nazi???

Charlap: But this was a very interesting period for you. In the Early 30's you lived in Berlin, and apparently had an affair with Hannah Arendt.

Ticoczki: Indeed.

Charlap: Apparently you went into hiding when your rival for Arendt, Martin Heidegger, put you on an arrest list, and escaped to Paris with Raymond Aron.

Ticoczki: Ja.

Charlap: And Aron would later claim that his book, The Opium of the Intellectuals in which he criticized the fashionable flirtation of intellectuals with totalitarian systems...

Ticoczki: ...was based on the contempt he felt after talking on the train with me. Arendt also later said that 'the banality of evil' was based on her experience of our relationship.

Charlap: That claim was proven to be a lie.

Ticoczki: If you say so.

Charlap: But let's stay on Berlin for a moment. You were also involved briefly with Lotte Lenya, weren't you?

Ticoczki: Everybody was. Brecht, Einstein, Heinrich Mann, Georg Grosz, Fritz Lang, one night she went home with the entire Frankfurt School.

Charlap: How did Kurt Weill feel about this?

Ticoczki: He didn't know.

Charlap: It's interesting that you mention Fritz Lang. When you were 17 you wrote a score to accompany M.

Ticoczki: Yes, Lang hated it so much that he burned it.

Charlap: Really?

Ticoczki:  He told me that he could just have Peter Lorre whistle Hall of the Mountain King and it would be better than what I wrote.

Charlap: That's pretty harsh.

Ticoczki: Nein, it was scheissemusik.

Charlap: Did you have any involvement with the great opera companies of 20's Berlin?

Ticoczki: Indeed I did. I sang third boy in The Magic Flute with Bruno Walter and he was so impressed with my performance that he immediately agreed to premiere my fourth symphony in his concert series at the Berlin Philharmonic.

Charlap: That was known as a disastrous premiere.

Ticoczki: Indeed, Bruno Walter had a stomach bug, but it was said that he was so disgusted with the music that after the symphony was over he threw up in the tuba.

Charlap: Nevertheless, shortly thereafter you got a commission from Otto Klemperer to write for the Kroll Opera.

Ticoczki: Ja, it was only a chamber opera for which I wrote the book in which the Emperor of a distant kingdom goes off in search of a woman with the perfect nosejob. It was six hours long, had a cast of a hundred fifty plus chorus and an orchestra of three hundred. It has not been staged in full since 1928.

Charlap: You absconded to Paris but you didn't spend much time there until after the war.

Ticoczki: Quite true.

Charlap: By 1934 you were living in Vienna.

Ticoczki: Yes, I went to Vienna to abandon music.

Charlap: Vienna is the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler... That seems rather counterintuitive.

Ticoczki: Perhaps, but I wanted to be a writer.

Charlap: Did you write anything?

Ticoczki: No.

Charlap: Then how were you a writer?

Ticoczki: There were lots of writers in Vienna who did not write.

Charlap: Then what did they do?

Ticoczki: They sat in the coffeehouses, where they would loudly proclaim witticisms to professionals who would make a great show of laughing, even though the din was so loud that they could not hear properly most of what we said.

Charlap: So, in a sense, you were a professional former of witticisms?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: Can you tell us any of them?

Ticoczki: No.

Charlap: You can't remember any of them?

Ticoczki: They lose meaning in translation.

Charlap: But surely...

Ticoczki: The Vienna of those years is impossible to convey to those who were not there. It was a great and unrepeatable gathering of intellect, and being intelligent was so important that nobody did anything.

Charlap: Fascinating.

Ticoczki: There were writers like Musil and Broch and Canetti who wrote very long books that we all claimed to have read and none of us made it past the second page.

Charlap: But you all read Stefan Zweig.

Ticoczki: Yes, but he paid us to read him.

Charlap: I'm told that when the Nazis came to Vienna you attempted suicide half-a-dozen times.

Ticoczki: This is true.

Charlap: You must have been quite despondent.

Ticoczki: No I actually felt I that in suicide finally had a metier to become a great artist. Suicide in Vienna was a great art into which many artists and philosophers put great effort into staging. I had a magnificent idea for a suicide in which I would be strung along by pulleys into a pile of marzipan, between getting my head caught in the pulleys and the molasses, I was sure I would die. Unfortunately, the pulley's broke, and I contracted diabetes for which I lost a foot in the Jewish hospital.

Charlap: You then arrived in London and claim you were the lover that drove Virginia Woolf to suicide.

Ticoczki: She was a very confused women. She was a lesbian who was also an anti-semite, but she was also attracted to particularly ugly and dwarf-like Jews, whom she thought possessed a cheap and low cunning which she found incredibly erotic. She could live very easily with her attraction to women and with infidelities to Leonard, but she hated herself for being attracted to Jews, and planned on blaming her suicide on me as an assassination. The famous suicide note she left for Leonard Woolf was in fact planted by me, when I realized that she would use her letter to frame me, and I made a copy of a new letter in her handwriting.

Charlap: This resulted in your being accused by George Orwell of having murdered Virginia Woolf.

Ticoczki: I will not answer any more questions about this matter.

Charlap: You also became a frequent houseguest of John Maynard Keynes in London.

Ticoczki: Yes, and he was a swine.

Charlap: What do you mean?

Ticoczki: I have known many many geniuses in my life, but Maynard Keynes was, without a doubt, the most unpleasant in addition to being one of the most brilliant. He was an anti-semite and a snob who was always trying to throw me out of his house for having sexual relations with people who were not him.

Charlap: Why didn't you leave?

Ticoczki: I had to have somewhere I could bring Virginia, and being at the receiving end of Maynard's abuse was much less boring than staying with Forester or Elliot...

Charlap: You also claim you were in Terezinstadt during this same period.

Ticoczki: I had a rich Capo who was a very great fan of music, and he allowed me week-long visits to Virginia and John in England on chartered planes for which he would pay the full expense.

Charlap: But there were so many great musical figures in this period living in Terezin in circumstances that were truly sub-human: Pavel Haas, Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Karel Ancerl, Gideon Klein, Alma Rose, Ilse Weber....

Ticoczki: Oh... Ja, they were let out too.

Charlap: What??

Ticoczki: They went to see their various lovers in Prague and Vienna for weeks at a time on furlough so long as they promised to return.

Charlap: This will be news to the entire music world. Why did they return?

Ticoczki: They believed the camps were their best chance for survival.

Charlap: How is that possible?

Ticoczki: We all believed that Terezin would eventually change and be the humanitarian city for the Jews which the Fuhrer claimed it was.

Charlap: How could you have possibly believed that?

Ticoczki: In Vienna we were vermin. In Terezin we had a chance to be the most honored Jewish composers in history.

Charlap: That's the most incredible thing I've ever heard!

Ticoczki: Remember, none of us thought that the Deutschen Volk would be as stupid as they were. Eventually, the German people would rise up and atone for their sins and we would be the honored artists of the Deutschen Reich who were rewarded extra performances for our persecution.

Charlap: But you never returned to that area after the war.

Ticoczki: Not to live no....

Charlap: In fact, during that period of the early 40's, both Stravinsky and Schoenberg claimed you took lessons with them in Los Angeles.

Ticoczki: Ja. I was on furlough from Terezin.

Charlap: They flew you there and back from California???

Ticoczki: Why is this so unbelievable.

Charlap: You'll just have to permit me a minute of disbelief.

Ticoczki: I learned very little from either Schoenberg or Stravinsky.

Charlap: They both seem to have agreed with that statement.

Ticoczki: Ja...

Charlap: Schoenberg apparently wrote of you to Kandinsky and said that 'He is by such great a margin the most incompetent pupil I ever had that even John Cage is Mozart in comparison.'

Ticoczki: I can't help it if Schoenberg did not accept the theories of music I tried to teach him.

Charlap: You had theories you tried to teach Schoenberg???

Ticoczki: Ja! He was so rigid and dogmatic. His music required such great order that it sounded like disorder. I told him that the crucial key to writing great music which he missed was incompetence and amateurism. I deliberately wrote terrible part exercises to show him that bad musicianship is more beautiful than good.

Charlap: He claimed that you wouldn't know how to write better counterpoint even if you tried.

Ticoczki: What does that matter?!?

Charlap: In any event, one thing at which you were clearly not an incompetent at was bartending. In fact, when not even a teenager, you were remembered as the youngest bartender in Paris.

Ticoczki: Oui, I was still only eleven and a bit over four feet tall. So I would stand on the bar of the Moulin Rouge and take the orders of many Americans like Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, at twelve I lost my virginity to Josephine Baker and again to Sergei Diaghilev. I threw Hemingway out of the Moulin Rouge many times and nearly beat him to death with the soprano saxophone of Sidney Bechet. And I was drawn by Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Matisse, Mogdiliani.

Charlap: All of these drawings, by the way, are evidently lost.

Ticoczki: They were confiscated from my Ile Saint-Louis flat by Vichy.

Charlap: I see.

Ticoczki: I also invented the Boulevardier for Zelda Fitzgerald and the Jack Rose for Maurice Chevalier.

Charlap: Did you have much to do with music during this time?

Ticoczki: I wrote a lot of Charleston Dances for Josephine and ghostwrote about a hundred thirty pieces for Darius Milhuad, but no. Not really.

Charlap: Your biography says that immediately after the war you went to New York.

Ticoczki: Yes, this period was the favorite period of my life.


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Charlap: About four years before you got the Polar Music Prize, you published a rather infamous memoir.

Ticoczki: I don't understand what was so infamous about it.

Charlap: Well, first of all because it was a three volume, twenty-eight hundred page memoir in which you claimed yourself the greatest cultural figure since King David. 

Ticoczki: Is it such a crime to be great? 

Charlap: Don't you find the claim rather extravagant?

Ticoczki: Is it my fault that I hear wrong things in everyone else's music?

Charlap: I think a lot of people thought you should have been more charitable.

Ticoczki: What does charity give people? It 

Charlap: Your opinion is your opinion, but it does not seem to be shared by anyone.

Ticoczki: History will vindicate me. 

Charlap: Well, let's take just a few examples of your... we'll just call them uncommon opinions. For example this one: "The music of Bach is the Christian lie set in musical form. It presents an all-knowing, infinitely compassionate God whom in his ever loving mercy sends all but a hundred-forty-four thousand of us to hell. Bach's music is supposedly the music emanating from Heaven's organ-loft, but it is in fact the Devil's Trill."

Ticoczki: What's wrong with that opinion?

Charlap: Well nothing's wrong with it, but you must admit that your opinion is uncommon.

Ticoczki: Common opinions are for common people. I still believe that Bach was a minorly great composer after a fashion and it is not Bach's fault that he was the instrument through which posterity subsumed an entire millennium's worth of Christian music, but the music of Christianity is a music of a transcendence that does not exist nor would it be desirable if the world allowed for it. 

Charlap: Well then there's the infamous passage when you said that there were a half dozen better composers in the generation preceding you than Stravinsky, Bartok, or Schoenberg. Milan Kundera pointed out in 'Testaments Betrayed' that you excoriate Stravinsky for having abandoned feeling and Bartok for having abandoned didacticism in the same paragraph.

Ticoczki: You should not forget that I also attacked Hindemith in this passage for abandoning both. But it is not my doing. I cannot help it if Bartok's two transcendent masterpieces are musical instruction manuals.

Charlap: You mean the 44 Violin Duets...

Ticoczki: ...and the Mikrokosmos. In the growth of this music's sophistication we hear the evolution of intellect and human soul to its full capacities. 

Charlap: But these are instructional pieces to help children play their instruments.

Ticoczki: I knew Bartok, you didn't. He was a human robot, only his children moved him. 

Charlap: But what about your praise of pieces like the Third Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra?

Ticoczki: Yes, they still have problems but they are better.

Charlap: And you really believe that Kodaly is a better composer than Bartok?

Ticoczki: Insofar as his artistic priorities are more correct, yes.

Charlap: There are people who dislike Bach, but this is an opinion shared by literally no one.

Ticoczki: History will prove me right.

Charlap: And then you talk about Stravinsky, from whom you received an enormous amount of financial help in Los Angeles during the War, and you say that after Les Noces he should have never written another note because all he ever produced was notes. 

Ticoczki: Stravinsky wouldn't have given me a penny if he wasn't interested in my ex-wife. 

Charlap: But nothing Stravinsky did was worth anything? Oedipus? The Rake's Progress? Agon? The Symphony of Psalms? The Fairy's Kiss? The Violin Concerto?

Ticoczki: Well, the last three you mentioned are better. Stravinsky wasn't a composer, he was a brilliant musical thief. 

Charlap: That's a direct quote from your autobiography.

Ticoczki: Yes. When he stole from the Russian sources that meant something to him, his thievery was very moving, but when he tried to steal from other cultures the act of stealing meant nothing to him. 

Charlap: Speaking about what you said about your wife, you also seem to allude to the idea that Stravinsky....

Ticoczki: Yes, he stole my wife too, but she was German, and therefore his act of theft was not sincere at all.

Charlap: You also say that there have only ever been exactly nine great composers, and every other composer is at best a composer who wrote great music by accident.

Ticoczki: Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mussorgsky, Janacek, Mahler, Ives, Shostakovich.

Charlap: You then talk of nine levels of lesser greatness - you call it 'lesser receptivity.'

Ticoczki: Yes, the first and highest level of receptivity are those composers whose ears act as the crown from which you can survey the entire kingdom of music, and can absorb and adapt all modes of influence into their music and render them in such a way that any expressive or emotional reaction is possible. They are pure expression through sound. I then refer to the nine lesser levels of receptivity under different names, there are nine different composers in each category, because there are exactly nine great composers, exactly eighteen composers who are good, and exactly twenty-seven who are decent, and exactly thirty-six composers who are competent. It is my belief that there will be another ten composers who are greater than incompetent before music ceases to be altogether.

Charlap: I suppose our audience will want to know which composers are which.

Ticoczki: The good composers are divided between the wise composers: like Berlioz and Brahms and Vaughan Williams who are masculine, and the intuitive composers like Schubert and Dvorak and Gershwin who are feminine.

Charlap: That's truly insightful.

Ticoczki: We then move to realms of the decent composers. The kind composers like Haydn and Copland and Liszt, severe composers like Schoenberg and Bartok and Sibelius, beautiful composers like Chopin and Debussy and Dvorak. Beneath them lies the competent composers: the eternal composers like Bruckner and Messiaen and Josquin, the splendid composers like Richard Strauss and Berlioz and Tallis, and the foundational composers like Bach and Gluck and Machaut. Underneath them, you have the king-composers. A king is an unjust man who takes what should be rightfully the property of others, therefore they are the composers who emulate other composers but are in fact only imitative of greater voices. Neo-classical composers are particularly in this sphere: Stravinsky is one, Hindemith is another, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Martinu, but also pre-classicists: Handel, Vivaldi, Lassus and Palestrina who plagiarized themselves hundreds of times.

Charlap: But isn't this a little too mathematically neat?

Ticoczki: That is not possible. Music requires formal cohesion.

Charlap: But isn't it possible you have to make exceptions for composers you haven't heard yet?

Ticoczki: Do not question me.

Charlap: Alright. I'm sure you know what the obvious question is about your nine great composers...

Ticoczki: No.

Charlap: What made them great?

Ticoczki: I already defined them. These are the nine which had the correct artistic priorities.

Charlap: Which are?

Ticoczki: I explained it as simply as I could, and if it could be properly explained in words I would do so.

Charlap: But you spend 450 pages doing exactly that.

Ticoczki: And I fail.

Charlap: Nevertheless, I'm going to quote you. "The correct artistic priorities are a willingness to be open to all the diverse possibilities of the universe's expression. All expression of human experience, animal and plant experience, biological, chemical, physical, must manifest themselves in the greatest music, and one must have an omnipresent sense of the unpredictability of experience's totality."

Ticoczki: I would not be nearly so dogmatic today. I was a young man when I wrote that.

Charlap: You were eighty-five.

Ticoczki: I was young.

Charlap: You also write of tragic examples of composers who came close enough to the correct artistic priorities that we can only mourn that their music is not better than it is.

Ticoczki: Rather more numerous.

Charlap: You pretty much rip apart every composer who ever lived for their badness. Henri Dutilleux commented that he wasn't sure his music was any good because he was not at the receiving end of your abuse.

Ticoczki: He was alive when I wrote that book, I prefer not to talk about the living.

Charlap: You talk for ten pages about how horrible you find Arvo Part!

Ticoczki: He's not alive.

Charlap: Sure he is!

Ticoczki: Listen to his music.

Charlap: Well what about other living composers?

Ticoczki: Their priorities are generally not mine.

Charlap: Meaning that their priorities are incorrect?

Ticoczki: I didn't say that.

Charlap: Surely there are living composers whose music you love.

Ticoczki: Of course there are, but I do not find their priorities appropriate.

Charlap: What does that even mean?

Ticoczki: You seem to know my book better than I do. You tell me.

Charlap: Well in the book you even say that there are at least a few dozen reasonably famous composers of whose work you're reasonably fond. Can you tell us who they are?

Ticoczki: I cannot.

Charlap: Why not?

Ticoczki: Because that will be three-hundred-fifty pages in the fourth volume of the autobiography.

Charlap: Well, I see then... When will that be released?

Ticoczki: Sometime between 2019 and 2021. It will be fourteen-hundred-eighty pages long.

Charlap: Why so long?

Ticoczki: It's not that long, the editor insisted I cut another twelve-hundred pages from this one. In this volume I outline the importance and purpose of the Psalm project.

Charlap:

Charlap: I understand you're quite fond of some popular musicians too.

Ticoczki: Certainly. I think their artistic priorities are better.

Charlap: Can we try to get a better definition of what you mean by artistic priorities?

Ticoczki: I'd rather let my work speak for itself.

Charlap: But how many people want to read twenty-eight hundred pages.

Ticoczki: You cannot contain the complexity of the world. It must contain all the nuances and details of the world at hand.

Charlap: That makes no sense.

Ticoczki: Because you do not examine the full complexity of the statement.

Charlap: Can you convey it?

Ticoczki: Not in the time allotted for this interview. 

Tales From the Old New Land - Tale 4 1/2 - An Interview with Ivan Ticoczki - Beginning

AC Charlap: We have just heard the fourth and worst of the Psalm settings by the Composer of the Old New Land, Ivan Ticoczki, whose settings of the Psalms we broadcast all throughout our podcasts. Ticoczki is a recipient of the Polar Music Prize, known also as the Musical Nobel, and is known particularly for a joint statement of protest against his receiving the award co-signed by famous critics and musicologists Norman Lebrecht, Edward Said, Robert Craft, Richard Taruskin, Jay Nordlinger, Martin Bernheimer, Alan Rich, and John Simon as being the worst possible recipient of the Polar Music Prize. You responded in your acceptance speech that you agreed with them and said, and I quote: "when you survive the Camps they want to give you a lot of awards."

Ivan Ticoczki: That's true.

Charlap: Evidence was then presented that you were not in fact in the Camps and had escaped during World War II and at various points lived in New York, London, and Los Angeles.

Ticoczki: Also true.

Charlap: Whatever the truth, you've clearly lived an extremely fascinating life. You've at least claimed to have been witness to most of the major cultural developments of the last hundred-three years.

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: How did this come to be, can you tell us where you're born?

Ticoczki: I was born in a town called Bransk.

Charlap: It's known for its Science Yeshiva yes?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: Now Bransk is in a part of Europe that has belonged at various points in your life to Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, Poland, the Free City of Danzig, The Soviet Union, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, then Slovakia, and now I believe it's part of Belarus. Is that correct?

Ticoczki: Who cares.

Charlap: Fair enough.

Ticoczki: I did not live there long enough to go to the Bransk High School of Science, we left by the time I was three.

Charlap: And I believe you were born on June 28, 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand is that also correct?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: It is said that there is a picture of you being held by your father in the October Revolution when he stood next to Lenin.

Ticoczki: Yes, my father was a Chassidicher Rabbi turned Orthodox Marxist who personally shot the family of Czar Nicholas.

Charlap: But the dates for that don't quite line up. Your father fell out of favor with Lenin because of his failure to starve more than half-a-million peasants by the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk's signing so that the provisions Germans provided for Russia's withdrawal from the war would last the Red Army through the coming Civil War against the Whites. This was in March 1918, so your family escaped from the Soviet Union a full four months before Czar Nicholas the Second was assassinated.

Ticoczki: Is that my fault?

Charlap: I suppose not.

Ticoczki: My father believed greatly in believing in things. He died in Munich during Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch the day after a Nazi threw a brick at him. He was so thrilled by the experience that he made me promise on his deathbed to try to join the Nazi Party.

Charlap: Records show that you were a Nazi party member for exactly one day.

Ticoczki: Yes, in 1933, I joined the Nazi Party in the hope of getting musical commissions from Albert Speer. We had an appointment to go swimming in a Berlin gymnasium and then a Turkish Bath, my membership was revoked when it was discovered I was circumcised.

Charlap: How did you not see that coming?

Ticoczki: There were lots of Jews in 1933 who wanted to join the party.

Charlap: How can that be?

Ticoczki: We didn't think Hitler was serious!

Charlap: You didn't??

Ticoczki: He could a man that swish be a Nazi???

Charlap: But this was a very interesting period for you. In the Early 30's you lived in Berlin, and apparently had an affair with Hannah Arendt.

Ticoczki: Yes, she was quite a Korva in those days.

Charlap: Apparently you went into hiding when your rival for Arendt, Martin Heidegger, put you on an arrest list, and escaped to Paris with Raymond Aron.

Ticoczki: Ja.

Charlap: And Aron would later claim that his book, The Opium of the Intellectuals in which he criticized the fashionable flirtation of intellectuals with totalitarian systems...

Ticoczki: ...was based on the contempt he felt after talking on the train with me. Arendt also later said that 'the banality of evil' was based on her experience of our relationship.

Charlap: That claim was proven to be a lie.

Ticoczki: If you say so.

Charlap: But let's stay on Berlin for a moment. You were also involved briefly with Lotte Lenya, weren't you?

Ticoczki: Everybody was. Brecht, Einstein, Heinrich Mann, Georg Grosz, Fritz Lang, one night she went home with the entire Frankfurt School.

Charlap: How did Kurt Weill feel about this?

Ticoczki: He didn't know.

Charlap: It's interesting that you mention Fritz Lang. When you were 17 you wrote a score to accompany M.

Ticoczki: Yes, Lang hated it so much that he burned it.

Charlap: Really?

Ticoczki:  He told me that he could just have Peter Lorre whistle Hall of the Mountain King and it would be better than what I wrote.

Charlap: That's pretty harsh.

Ticoczki: No, it was scheisse.

Charlap: You absconded to Paris but you didn't spend much time there until after the war.

Ticoczki: Quite true.

Charlap: By 1934 you were living in Vienna.

Ticoczki: I went to Vienna to abandon music.

Charlap: That seems rather counterintuitive.

Ticoczki: Perhaps, but I wanted to be a writer.

Charlap: Did you write anything?

Ticoczki: No.

Charlap: Then how were you a writer?

Ticoczki: There were lots of writers in Vienna who did not write.

Charlap: Then what did they do?

Ticoczki: They sat in the coffeehouses, where they would loudly proclaim witticisms to professionals who would make a great show of laughing, even though the din was so loud that they could not hear properly most of what we said.

Charlap: So, in a sense, you were a professional former of witticisms?

Ticoczki: Yes.

Charlap: Can you tell us any of them?

Ticoczki: No.

Charlap: You can't remember any of them?

Ticoczki: They lose meaning in translation.

Charlap: But surely...

Ticoczki: The Vienna of those years is impossible to convey to those who were not there. It was a great and unrepeatable gathering of intellect, and being smart was so important that nobody did anything.

Charlap: Fascinating.

Ticoczki: There were writers like Musil and Broch and Canetti who wrote very long books that we all claimed to have read and none of us made it past the second page.

Charlap: But you all read Stefan Zweig.

Ticoczki: Yes, but he paid us to read him.

Charlap: I'm told that when the Nazis came to Vienna you attempted suicide half-a-dozen times.

Ticoczki: That is true.

Charlap: You must have been quite despondent.

Ticoczki: No, actually I felt I that in suicide finally had a metier to become a great artist. Suicide in Vienna was a great art into which many artists and philosophers put great effort into staging. I had a magnificent idea for a suicide in which I would be strung along pulleys into a pile of marzipan, between getting my head caught in the pulleys and the molasses, I was sure I would die. Unfortunately, the pulley's broke, and I was sent to the Jewish hospital for an overdose of sugar.

Charlap: You then arrived in London and claim you were the lover that drove Virginia Woolf to suicide.

Ticoczki: She was a very confused women. She was a lesbian who was also an anti-semite, but she was perversely attracted to particularly ugly, dwarf-like Jews, whom she thought possessed a cheap and low cunning which she found incredibly erotic. She could live very easily with her attraction to women and with infidelities to Leonard, but she hated herself for being attracted to Jews, and planned on blaming her suicide on me as a murder. The famous suicide note she left for Leonard was in fact planted by me, when I realized that she would use her letter to frame me, and I made a copy of a new letter in her handwriting.

Charlap: This resulted in your being accused by George Orwell of having murdered Virginia Woolf.

Ticoczki: I will not answer any more questions about this matter.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Charlap: About four years before you got the Polar Music Prize, you published a rather infamous memoir.

Ticoczki: I don't understand what was so infamous about it.

Charlap: Well, first of all because it was a three volume, twenty-eight hundred page memoir in which you claimed yourself the greatest cultural figure since King David. 

Ticoczki: Is it such a crime to be great? 

Charlap: Don't you find the claim rather extravagant?

Ticoczki: Is it my fault that I hear wrong things in everyone else's music?

Charlap: I think a lot of people thought you should have been more charitable.

Ticoczki: What does charity give people? It has given us the current mediocrity. 

Charlap: Your opinion is your opinion, but it does not seem to be shared by anyone.

Ticoczki: History will vindicate me. 

Charlap: Well, let's take just a few examples of your... we'll just call them uncommon opinions. For example this one: "The music of Bach is the Christian lie set in musical form. It presents an all-knowing, infinitely compassionate God whom in his ever loving mercy sends all but a hundred-forty-four thousand of us to hell. Bach's music is supposedly the music emanating from Heaven's organ-loft, but it is in fact the Devil's Trill."

Ticoczki: What's wrong with that opinion?

Charlap: Well nothing's wrong with it, but you must admit that your opinion is uncommon.

Ticoczki: Common opinions are for common people. 

Charlap: Well then there's the infamous passage Milan Kundera pointed out in 'Testaments Betrayed' in which you excoriate Stravinsky for having abandoned feeling and Bartok for having abandoned didacticism in the same paragraph.

Ticoczki: Can I help it if Bartok's only transcendent masterpieces are instruction manuals? 

Charlap: You mean the 44 Violin Duets...

Ticoczki: ...and the Mikrokosmos. In the growth of this music's sophistication we hear the evolution of intellect and human soul to its full capacities. 

Charlap: But these are instructional pieces to help children play their instruments.

Ticoczki: I knew Bartok, you didn't. He was a human robot, only his children moved him. 

Charlap: And then you talk about Stravinsky, from whom you received an enormous amount of financial help in Los Angeles during the War, and you say that after Les Noces he should have never written another note because all he ever produced was notes. 

Ticoczki: Stravinsky wouldn't have given me a penny if he wasn't interested in my ex-wife. 

Charlap: But nothing Stravinsky did was worth anything? Oedipus? The Rake's Progress? Agon? The Symphony of Psalms? The Fairy's Kiss? The Violin Concerto?

Ticoczki: Well, the last three you mentioned are better. Stravinsky wasn't a composer, he was a brilliant musical thief. 

Charlap: That's a direct quote from your autobiography.

Ticoczki: Yes. When he stole from the Russian sources that meant something to him, his thievery was very moving, but when he tried to steal from other cultures the act of stealing meant nothing to him. 

Charlap: Speaking about what you said about your wife, you also seem to allude to the idea that Stravinsky....

Ticoczki: Yes, he stole my wife too, but she was German, and therefore his act of theft was not sincere at all.

Charlap: You also say that there have only ever been a nine great composers, every other composer is at best a composer who wrote great music by accident.

Ticoczki: Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mussorgsky, Janacek, Mahler, Ives, Shostakovich.

Charlap: I'm sure you understand what the next obvious question is.

Ticoczki: These are the nine composers who had the correct artistic priorities.

Charlap: Which are?

Ticoczki: If I could explain it in words I would do so.

Charlap: But you spend 450 pages doing exactly that.

Ticoczki: And I fail.

Charlap: Nevertheless, I'm going to quote you. "The correct artistic priorities are a willingness to be open to all the diverse possibilities of the universe's expression. All expression of human experience, animal and plant experience, biological, chemical, physical, must manifest themselves in the greatest music, and one must have an omnipresent sense of the unpredictability of experience's totality."

Ticoczki: I would not be nearly so dogmatic today. I was a young man when I wrote that.

Charlap: You were eighty-five.

Ticoczki: I was young.

Charlap: You also write of tragic examples of composers who came close enough to the correct artistic priorities that we can only mourn that their music is not better than it is.

Ticoczki: Rather more numerous. Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Rossini, Chopin, Verdi, Dvorak, Puccini, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Poulenc, Copland, Messiaen, Britten, Lutoslawski, and Schnittke.

Charlap: This is a bit like an honor roll of the world's greatest composers, and yet there are no living composers among them!

Ticoczki: I prefer not to talk about the living.

Charlap: You talk for ten pages about how horrible you find Arvo Part!

Ticoczki: He's not alive.

Charlap: Sure he is!

Ticoczki: Listen to his music.

Charlap: Well what about other living composers?

Ticoczki: Their priorities are generally not mine.

Charlap: Meaning that their priorities are incorrect?

Ticoczki: I didn't say that.

Charlap: Surely there are living composers whose music you love.

Ticoczki: Of course there are, but I do not find their priorities appropriate.

Charlap: What does that even mean?

Ticoczki: You tell me.

Charlap: You even say in the book that there are at least a few dozen reasonably famous composers of whose work you're reasonably fond. Can you tell us who they are?

Ticoczki: I cannot.

Charlap: Why not?

Ticoczki: Because that will be three-hundred-fifty pages in the fourth volume of the autobiography.

Charlap: Well, I see then... When will that be released?

Ticoczki: Sometime between 2019 and 2021.

Charlap: I understand you're quite fond of some popular musicians too.

Ticoczki: Certainly. I think their artistic priorities are better.

Charlap: Can we try to get a better definition of what you mean by artistic priorities?

Ticoczki: I'd rather let my work speak for itself.

Charlap: But how many people want to read twenty-eight hundred pages.

Ticoczki: You cannot contain the complexity of the world. It must contain all the nuances and details of the world at hand.

Charlap: That makes no sense.

Ticoczki: Because you do not examine the full complexity of the statement.

Charlap: Can you convey it?

Ticoczki: Not in the time allotted for this interview. 

What Kafka Tells Us About 2017

Whenever I teach, I've learned over time to write out what I want to say and then divert from it in class, so here's the prepared text.

We're going to start, as every talk about Kafka ever does, by reading his quick parable from The Trial, 'Before The Law'. 

(Call on someone to read it)

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.' These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.' During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.' "

Has there ever been a more Jewish paragraph than this? Kafka spent two pages making fun of characters who tried to interpret the parable and how pointless it is to try to interpret something so open-ended, so since it's so stupid to try to interpret it, let's try to do exactly that. 

What do you think it means?

(when ready to transition)

So I maintain, this is just about the most Jewish secular text that's ever been set down on paper. First you have a parable that is so open-ended that it can mean anything at all, which means that thinking people will never be able to resist the temptation to ascribe meaning to its ambiguities. In two-thousand years, they're still going to try to interpret this paragraph and come up with ever new meanings for it. 

So why is this Jewish? I would answer that what makes it Jewish is the idea that the authorities, out of spite, went to the trouble to design a door tailor made to bewitch you to the point that all you can do is look at the door for your entire life? Christianity would never say that, Christianity would say that God loves you and he wants you to go through the door made for you. Atheism or hedonism would say, 'just walk away, there are other doors, and you don't even have to walk through a friggin' door', but Judaism, or for that matter, Existentialism, believes that there are doors that you will always have to struggle to walk through, and you might as well pick a door that appeals to you. Judaism is in large part based on the idea that you're going to wrestle or at least grapple intellectually and emotionally with God, it not only puts a door in front of you whose appeal to you is impossible to resist, but puts a guard who warns you that even if you get through the guard and though the door, you'll have to face a new and even more alluring door with a guard who is even stronger. "He who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" 

What door does America stand in front of in 2017? Some say the door is Trump, some last year said the door was Bernie, some say it's the status-quo, some say it's capitalism, some say it's liberalism, some say it's immigration, some say it's nativism, but the one thing we all seem to agree on is that Modern America is stuck in front of a door, can't get through it, and refuses to walk away.

Assuming that we can walk away, what would be so terrible if we did? Again, Kafka has a kind of answer.

I

ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back and said to the watchman: "I ran through here while you were looking the other way." The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. "I suppose I really oughtn't to have done it," I said. The watchman still said nothing. "Does your silence indicate permission to pass?". . . 

I'm not going to ask a rather pointed question here. In order to ask what this answer means, I'm going to first ask, is this an answer?

(allow for discussion, when it winds down) 

I'll say about this that to my way of thinking, this is an answer by being a non-answer. When this guy goes through a door with a watchman, his first thought is if he had permission. I suppose it then follows that the next question is, what will the watchman do in response to his going through the door without permission? Will there be retaliation, will there be consequences, what's being risked? Is this guy even a watchman? Like the object in every parable, the door itself is just a McGuffin - it's the device to move the story forward, and it means everything and nothing - in other words, whatever you want it to mean. I take that to mean that whatever the situation in our lives, among our families and friends and communities, among our cities and countries, there is no way of knowing what comes next. All we have is the anxiety of knowing that even if we have the most infinitesimal choices in our lives, we still have an infinity of choices within that infinitessence, and we will always worry that we didn't pick the best choice, because of course we never do. That's life, that's existence which either precedes essence, as existentialism would have it, or is of an essence that we can never truly know, as the Tanakh and the Kabbalah would tell us. 

Now Kafka was a fantastic middle point between Judaism and Existentialism - influenced enormously on the one hand by the stories of the Tanakh and of, believe it or not, both the Yiddish Theater and Reb Nachman of Bretslav, and on the other by existentialists like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. His great talent was as a teller of Bible-like parables. His novels are not quite as good because they're really just a loose collection of parables with filler. But unlike Reb Nachman, who used his parables to show the existence of God, Kafka used these parables, and he'd often use Reb Nachman's framework, to show that God is immaterial to how we ought to live. God may very well be there, but we have to proceed as though he isn't. 

So let's skip to the second-to-last parable (call on someone to read):

The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible--when there is no one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction; hence the graves will open themselves. This, perhaps, is Christian doctrine too, applying as much to the actual presentation of the example to be emulated, which is an individualistic example, as to the symbolic presentation of the resurrection of the Mediator in the single individual.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.

Now, if this strikes you as controversial to Judaism, I would refer you to another Reb Nachman, Nachmanides, who said, or at least according said to that 70's movie The Disputation with Christopher Lee, that Moshiach will only come when we deserve him. And it's entirely possible that we will only deserve him by being so good that we no longer have need of him. 

So now we have to talk about how do we get to the point where we can either be worthy of Moshiach's coming or no longer have need of him? And in order to do that, we have to talk at least a little bit about the milleu in which Kafka was himself. 

He grew up in Prague, which was, perhaps, the Boston of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It wasn't Capital City and far from the Largest City, it was a small, beautiful, culturally relevant, relatively prosperous third city of an Empire that only took up the East Coast of the German speaking lands. And unlike Germany, which was basically monoglot and as Hitler proved, rather uniform in its ethnicity and culture, though that never stopped the various provinces from hating each other, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was probably the most multi-cultural place in the world. There were something like two-dozen separate nationalities, all of which spoke different languages, hated each other, an hated being part of the Empire. As my father pointed out to me, the only people who loved the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including the Austrians whom, as Hitler proved, wanted to be German, was the Jews - who had no territory on which they could aspire to nationhood. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, like all Empires really, an autocracy, but was, relatively speaking a liberal one. In terms of advancement and the suffrage of the various issues on which citizens could vote, it was more liberal and tolerant than any truer democracy of its age. And Jews prospered accordingly in it.

The Prague of its time was emblematic of the Jewish situation everywhere at every time. There were 30,000 German speakers in this town of 300,000 who ruled Prague as a ruling class. Half were gentile, half were Jewish. If Jewish history tells us anything, it's that the rich prosper and constantly elevate the Jews as a kind of civil servant class. We're the world's 'middlemen.' We'll leave cultural explanations of why for another day, but what it inevitably means is that Jews inevitably become the symbol of the occupying class. Everywhere, we are seen as a foreign import that prospers on the backs of a native underclass that is more deserving than we, and we become the symbols of their oppression. We are the evil Christkillers who prevent Jesus from returning, we are the evil monotheists who turned the classical world away from reason, we are the evil bloodsucker race who pollutes the purity of the great race's blood, and now we are the evil occupiers and imperialists who prevent self-determination. The antisemitic blood libel always changes but it's always there, and some Jews believe it themselves as well as gentiles, and it's always easy to believe, because in a perverted way, it has a film of truth. If human nature were different and less ambiguous, perhaps all those things which fanatical ideologies wanted would be possible. But Judaism, wherever it's gone, has been the great exception, and drives people who have a two-dimensional view of the world insane. And because we're not protected the way the real rulers are, we're the only people upon whom really meaningful retribution on ruling class is taken. It hasn't happened here yet, but if it never does, it'll be the first place for which that is true.

So let's switch gears again and talk about some Kafka stories.

Kafka began his mature writing the night after Yom Kippur in 1912, almost exactly two years before World War I, with the short story, The Judgement - you can infer the Jewish connotation for yourself. It was part of, as he saw it, a tryptich of three stories in which fathers triumph over sons. We can spend the whole rest of the time talking about Kafka's relationship to his father and his characterization of fathers. But instead of talking about fathers in of themselves, it's better to talk about fathers as metaphors. A metaphor for a dying society in which an older generation simply won't give way, they have a more old-fashioned, more authoritarian, more patriarchal way of looking at the world, and by sheer will to power, they are triumphing over a new way of life that is more sensitive and more accepting. Now in today's America, both the right and the left have their patriarchal resentments. The right talks about paternalism, the father state telling us what's best for us. The left talks about patriarchy, the system by which men pose as father figures who know best and keep women subservient. 

All throughout history, 'father' has been a poetic metaphor for a larger superstructure that keeps people in place. The more present the structure feels, the more like a prison it feels, no matter how objectively good this structure provides for in people's lives, it does not feel that way. When we're in the middle of the chaos of war and poverty, we have a longing to return to order. But when we are, as Kafka was, from an assimilated upper-middle class background where it is clear that life, however disappointing, is not going to get any better than it is right now, the chaos of the outside world calls out to us, and there's a homing device in all of us that's receptive to returning to it. It often seems as though the more privileged we become, the more all of us have a longing to smash that privilege into a million pieces, because the privilege reminds us of what we still don't have, and teases us with how tantalizingly close we are to a better life. Whether you're liberal or conservative, alt right or intersectional warrior for social justice, it all seems to be part of the zeitgeist we feel today. Our prosperity doesn't make us more satisfied, it makes us less. America is, by any objective standard, a better country to live in now for more people than ever before, and yet, ever since the beginning of the 21st century, we've been miserable as a country. One thing after another - Lewinsky, Bush v Gore, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the Great Recession, Obamacare, the 2016 election, wherever we fall on the political spectum, the polarizing debates about these things have made us feel less trusting, less happy, and more powerless.

So let's talk about The Judgement for a second. It is about nothing more or less than a father who sentences his son to death by drowning, and the son obliges. Don't look at this as a familial tale, look at this as an American one, look at it from the point of view of Social Security, a program founded when there were 27 workers for every retiree, and when the last Baby Boomer retires, there will be less than 3 workers for every Baby Boomer retiree, and that's before the effects of mass automation on employment. While my parents are in many ways the precise opposite of this Baby Boom phenomenon to leave their children worse than they found them, the entire millenial generation has been handed something not unlike a financial death sentence by our parents and grandparents that will indenture us at best to US student loans and at worst to East Asia who bails us out at still worse rates of exchange.

Let's now think about Metamorphosis. You all know the story: Prague Salesman turns into giant bug. The original translation into English translation is a gigantic insect. But here, there is a very specific problem. To say that someone is turned into an insect is value neutral, it emphasizes the absurdity of what happens and gives definition to Kafka's idea that isn't really there in the German. The problem though is that Kafka insect, he said 'monstrous vermin', or in German 'ungeheuren ungezeifer', a spiritual insect. When you hear 'ungeheuren ungezeifer', you realize that what's important is not that he's an insect, but that he's vermin. Now think of that Freud phrase: The narcissism of small differences. Gregor might not even be an insect, he is just seen as an insect. Maybe he's a schizophrenic who's convinced himself that he's an insect and is therefore treated like vermin by his family, or maybe vermin is just a metaphor for how he's viewed by the people in his life, and he's simply internalized it. We just don't know, but what we do know is that if there were two words Hitler loved to use in his speeches, it's 'ungeheur' and 'ungezeifer'.

As he acclimates to his new condition, his vision and memory dims, so does his ability to think verbally, but that's no different than how a malnourished prisoner would decline. He eats rotting food, he has an offensive odor that permeates everything, and even the sister, supposedly the most sympathetic member of the family to him, can't bear to look at Gregor. This is the moment when we realize that prison reform is at the back end of the liberal policy dreams, and we have more prisoners in this country than any substantial in the world either in raw tallies or per capita, and that includes authoritarian regimes like China and Russia

But imagine prisoners who seem insect-like and are not secluded in far-away prisons, but right next to you, on Park Heights Avenue and North Avenue and around the looted CVS at Penn Quarter. When you're in Station North, when was the last time was that you looked into the eye of a North Avenue beggar? You know that there is a less than 1% of a 1% chance that anything will happen except that he'll try a little harder to make you give him money, but the panic it triggers in you is unmistakable. As a bug, Gregor can't make himself understood in German anymore, but even were Gregor not a bug, even if this bug spoke something like German, would he be able to make their plight understood considering that everybody is already pre-conditioned to find the point of view of someone who looks different unsympathetic? When he dies, he's emptied out with the garbage. I don't need to tell you more about what Jewish experience The Metamorphosis can give us an uncanny look into except to point out that Gregor was the only person in the family who works, and the rest of the family has nothing to do but further resent the vermin in their lives. What ultimately was the problem which brought Hitler to power? It was jobs, Hitler was supposed to be the 'jobs Chancellor.' How did Hitler bring jobs? By making war on people he said were vermin. How was he able to do this? Because the biggest problem of unemployment is not necessarily the chance of starvatio,n because in a first-world country there a relatively small chance of that, it is the injured sense of humiliation unemployment gives, and when people are humiliated, they will do anything to retaliate.

So let's now think of what I'd call the greatest of Kafka's short stories, The Penal Colony. This is the one about 'The Machine' which The Princess Bride so memorably riffed on. In this colony, if the prisoner is handed a death sentence, it's by one officer who serves as judge, jury, lawyer, and executioner. No trial, the officer simply hooks the prisoner up to a machine designed to kill the prisoner over a period of twelve hours by writing the crime into the prisoner's back with needles - literally a tattoo of flesh. The similarity to the death camps doesn't need any elaboration, but what does need elaboration is the officer's description of the machine at its height, and I'll do a slight dramatic reading here about the decline of the machine that will hopefully prove that Kafka can be shockingly funny.

"How different an execution was in the old days! A whole day before the ceremony the valley was packed with people; they all came only to look on; early in the morning the Commandant appared with his ladies; fanfares roused the whole camp; I reported that everything was in readiness; the assembled company--no high official dared to absent himself--arranged itself around the machine; this pile of cane chairs is a miserable survival from that epoch. The machine was freshly cleaned and glittering, I got new spare parts for almost every execution. Before hundreds of spectators--all of them standing on tiptoe as far as the heights there--the condemned man was laid under the Harrow by the Commandant himself. What is left today for a common soldier to do was then my task, the task of the presiding judge, and was an honor for me. And then the execution began! No discordant noise spoiled the working of the machine. Many did not care to watch it but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done. In the silence one heard nothing but the condemned man's sighs, half muffled by the felt gag. Nowadays the machine can no longer wring from anyone a sigh louder than the felt gag can stifle, but in those days the writing needles let drop an acid fluid, which we're no longer permitted to use. Well, and then came the sixth hour! It was impossible to grant all the requests to be allowed to watch it from nearby. The Commandant in his wisdom ordained that the children should have the preference; I, of course, because of my office had the privilege of being at hand; often enough I would be squatting there with a small child in either arm. How we all absorbed the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance of that justice, achieved at last and fading so quickly! What times these were, my comrade."

So this of course begs a question, when any form of justice is improperly applied, do you then blame the improper application, or do you blame the form of justice?

So here, for what it's worth, is my answer. Justice, when improperly applied, is not justice. The results, statistically and conceptually, will always speak for itself. If you have to justify any system by saying that it's simply been improperly applied, be it Communism and Socialism, or libertarian views of capitalism, or imperial conquest, or a cult of personality around a Presidential candidate, if the vast majority of the results you can point to is failure, then the problem is not that it's been improperly applied, the problem is that you have a conception of human nature that requires the neatness of a machine, and is therefore inhuman. There was never any chance that your belief was ever going to be anything but a disaster when implemented.

So what happens at the end of The Penal Colony? The Officer, realizing that the machine will never be used again, sacrifices himself to be the machine's last victim. He believes in his mode of justice so greatly that he's willing to kill any number of people, including himself. We used to see this kind of ideological fanaticism in Europe, but who can look at 2016 and not think to ourselves that it's come to America? There are 300 million privately held guns in this country, any number of which could be in the hands of vigilantes, and don't just think to yourself that these vigilantes can only come from the Right, it's entirely possible when apprehended, the vigilante will say that he did what he did in the name of social justice.

We could do similar interpretations with The Burrow and The Hunger Artist and various parts of Kafka's novels, there's even a very short story called 'The Bucket Rider' about a dystopian world in which survival depends on coal. In the 19th century, that was absolutely true, and it would appear that in the 21st century, we could be heading back there... But I'm worried we're running out of steam, so let's talk about the story that most obviously parallels 2017: The Great Wall of China.

There's so much that can be said about its contemporary relevance, but the story i not at all what you'd expect, It has the tone of a scholarly article, and it has a weird spiral logic with parables within the parables, it's more like Borges than Kafka and it's kind of dry as Kafka admittedly can be. But there are three brief quotes worth saying aloud here on the second paper I provided.

The first is, in a rather grotesque parallel, Kafka writes

"the command deliberately chose the system of piecemeal construction. But the piecemeal construction was only a makeshift and therefore inexpedient. Remains the conclusion that the command willed something inexpedient...",

Here's the second quote. Try to reverse the polarities in your mind:

"Against whom was the Great Wall to serve as a protection? Against the people of the north. Now, I come from the southeast of China. No northern people can menace us there. We read of them in the books of the ancients; the cruelties they commit in accordance with their nature make us sigh in our peaceful arbors. The faithful representations of the artist show us these faces of the damned, their gaping mouths, their jaws furnished with great pointed teeth, their half-shut eyes that already seem to be seeking out the victim which their jaws will rend and devour. When our children are unruly we show them these pictures, and at once they fly weeping into our arms. But nothing more than that do we know about these northerners. We have not seen them, and if we remain in our villages we shall never see them, even if on their wild horses they should ride as hard as they can straight toward us--the land is too vast and would not let them reach us, they would end their coarse in the empty air." 

The meaning of the parallels here are so clear that I think we should just let them speak for themselves. So let's end with Kafka's second attempt at a story about building a wall. But before we read it, let me ask that you try to think of what this means in a world where there are so many sources, so disputed, that we don't know what's true anymore. Kafka lived at the end of the European era, and in some ways marked the beginning of the Jewish one. Jews always flourish when the world is in transition, we've been so adaptable that we often seem to be the yeast through which history works, and many people mistaken that for parasitism. Just consider that since Biblical times, there was no universally accepted great Jewish writer of fiction until Franz Kafka. The whole Renaissance and Enlightenment passed us by, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Moliere, Goethe, Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Melville, Flaubert,  all hugely influenced by Jewish writing, and all of whom have things to say about individual will and character and destiny, and posterity hardly remembers a single Jew is present to say anything about it. No doubt, a large part of that's due to antisemitism, but it's also partly because individuality is only a primary concern in Judaism when we talk about the individual's relationship to a community. But the modern era comes along, with all its anxieties about how communities and the systems which hold communities in place can rub out individuality, and how an individual can struggle to survive and maintain his dignity in a place where everything conspires to rob him of it, and suddenly Jewish fiction writers proliferate like rabbits. That starts with Kafka, but how much longer can it last? In the online era, algorithms can predict our future choices better than we can ourselves, and it's possible that the people who control that information can form us into anything they want. Human nature may have been solved. So if that's the case, then the modern era is very much like the medieval one, and as accelerated as the progress of our world seems today, we may be, as unlikely as it still seems, headed for a very different, superstitious world again, in which religion will have to be our great consolation. And with that in mind, let's read this last fragment. Don't read it as a piece of nostalgia from the distant past, read it as a potential warning for our future.

Call on someone

The news of the building of the wall now penetrated into this world. This, too, arrived late, some thirty years after its announcement. It was on a summer's evening. Ten years old, I stood on the bank of the river with my father. As befits the significance of this much discussed moment, I remember the smallest circumstances. He held me by the hand--he liked to do that even when he was very old--and with his other hand he stroked his long and very thin pipe as if it were a flute. His large, sparse, stiff beard moved in the wind; enjoying his pipe, he looked upwards across the river. This made his pigtail, which was an object of reverence to children, sink lower, softly rustling against the gold-embroidered silk of his holiday gown. At that moment a bark came to a stop in front of us; the boatman beckoned to my father to descend the slope, while he himself climbed up to meet him. They met each other in the middle; the boatman whispered something in my father's ear. To get even closer to him, he embraced him. I did not understand what was said and saw only that my father did not seem to believe the news. The boatman tried to convince him that it was the truth, but Father still could not believe it; the boatman, with all the passion of a sailor, almost tore his clothes open on his breast in order to convince him that it was so. Father became quieter, and the boatman leaped back into the bark with a clatter and sailed away. Meditatively, my father turned his back toward me, knocked out his pipe and stuck it in his belt, stroked my cheek, and pulled my head toward him. This was what I liked most, it made me very happy, and so we returned home. There the rice soup was already steaming on the table, several guests were already gathered, and the wine was just being poured into the cups. Without paying any attention to all this, my father began to report from the threshold what he had heard. Naturally, I have no exact recollection of his words, but because of the extraordinary nature of the circumstances involved, which was enough to impress even a child, their meaning sank into me so deeply that I stil feel able to give a kind of verbatim version of them. And I do so now because these words were very characteristic of the popular interpretation. Thus, my father said more or less the following: A strange boatman--I know all who usually sail past here, but this one was a stranger--has just told me that a great wall is going to be built to protect the Emperor. As you may know, the infidel nations, wth demons among them too, often gather in front of the imperial

Kafka never finished many of his stories, but like in Michelangelo, he always gets to the essence in what's already there. As Orwell said, the object of power is power, and if the wall is built, it's not built to keep East Asians or Russians or Near-Eastern infidels or Mexicans out, but to keep us in. Here endeth the lesson. 

Tale 5: Five in One - First Little Bit

In order to tell the tale of Clarissa Johansen, we must tell the tale of her great mentor, Bethany Katz, for Bethany's story is the story of love - spiritual love, humane love, physical love, public love, personal love, self love, the strength which love gives, and the bridges which love cannot cross.

"It's like you get five religions in one" is what Barack Obama's grandfather said about Unitarianism. Unitarian Universalism, that great leveler of Christ, the great hope that religion and modernity can mix, that you can tame religion and all its demands for Holy War into a domesticated pet that lets you experience the holiness of divinity while not recognizing its primacy, lets you feel connected to the oneness of all things while still feeling yourself important enough to love and be loved, that guiltlessly binds the best of all religions together without considering how the people to whom these practices are life itself might feel it desecration.

And yet, Unitarianism is the best of us: The Adamses, the Alcotts, Susan B. Anthony, Bela Bartok, Ray Bradbury, e. e. cummings, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Buckminster Fuller, Horace Greeley, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Jefferson, Tomas Masaryk, Hermann Melville, Isaac Newton, Paul Newman,  Barack Obama's family, Keith Olbermann, Linus Pauling, Joseph Priestley, Christopher Reeve, Paul Revere, Benjamin Rush, Arthur Schlesinger, Albert Schweitzer, Pete Seeger, Rod Serling, Robert Gould Shaw, Adlai Stevenson, William Howard Taft, Kurt Vonnegut, Daniel Webster, William Carlos Williams, Joanne Woodward, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Wright.

There are less than 200,000 members of Unitarian Churches in the entire world, and less than 900,000 people who identify as Unitarian. No religion, not even Judaism, ever did so much in so short a time by such a large percentage of adherents to advance the causes of freedom and justice and beauty in the world. It is the religion of true miracles, in which the divine works are made manifest not in the skies, but here on earth - the place where in the end we find our happiness, or not at all.

At fifteen years old, few were happier than Bethany Felicity Katz. The younger daughter of Reverend Mary Katz, Senior Minister for the last three years of the First Unitarian Universalist Church and Center in San Francisco at the intersection of Geary Blvd and Franklin Street, herself the daughter of Matthew Williams, for thirty-seven years the Senior Minister at First Parish in Concord, himself the second son of Reverend Frank Williams, who was Senior Minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, the flagship Unitarian Church on Farnsworth St. in Boston. After fifty-two years, Reverend Frank was succeeded by Reverend Frank Jr., who was Senior Minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in DC on Harvard St. and ran the Unitarian Lobby, DC Unitarians for Social Justice. The second son, Burke Williams, fried his mind with hallucinogenics in 1950's San Francisco and lived in a group home for thirty-five years for the mentally disturbed before Frank Jr. asked Mary to leave Boston for San Francisco to help look after Burke.

Bethany was also the younger daughter of Adam Katz, the most expensive, and therefore the best, invasive cardiologist practicing at Mass Gen, who left both his hospital and his still more lucrative private practice in Concord to live in a Victorian townhouse on Steiner St. across from Alamo Square Park that he joyfully repainted with bright primary colors when their new neighbors suggested that the Katzes turn the last remaining house on their block into one of the Painted Ladies. In his new practice, he worked thirty hours a week rather than seventy, he was paid handsomely, but he didn't need any more money than he had. His fiftieth was around the corner, and he had more than enough money to keep his family living handsomely in San Francisco's best neighborhood while his mother was safely in the Boston Area's best Assisted Living facility. If there was trouble,  his sister could drive down from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

When Adam started dating Mary Williams, his parents were livid. Not because they particularly cared whether or not he married a Jewish girl, but because they both knew their widowed mothers would be furious. Fortunately, Bob's bubbies: Flora Katz (born Blumeh Levinson) and Mildred Spivak (born Menukhke Braverman) - were elderly and sometimes confused. His parents thought they could keep both their mothers in the dark about the relationship which their goldene eynikle who attends Harvard Medical School embroiled himself. Eight months into the relationship, Blumeh passed away. On the first anniversary of their first date, the lovebirds announced their engagement. Menukhkeh passed away a week after getting the news.

They moved to San Francisco when Bethany was twelve and her older sister was sixteen. Bethany's older sister, Marian, was bitter about the move let her parents know in no uncertain terms. She had a boyfriend in Boston she had to leave, seemingly hundreds of school friends, and was determined to hate every minute of her years in San Francisco. When it came time for college, she applied only to schools in Boston, and chose Northeastern. Six months after graduation she married her high school sweetheart, had four children, stayed at home to take care of them, and is now that the younger two are teenagers is wondering what to do when everybody leaves the house. Maybe she'll get involved with politics - she fancies that she always wanted to care about things, or maybe she'll just take an art class.

Bethany, however, was the type who knew how to be happy wherever she went. Like Marian, she was the most popular girl in her class at Cambridge Friends School, but unlike Marian, her popularity was not based on fear, and when she enrolled in San Francisco Friends School, she quickly became the most well-liked girl in her class - the teachers commenting on what a lovely effect she had on the other kids. A relatively unruly class of kids was suddenly nicer to each other, better behaved in class, and even the picked on kids who were falling behind were accepted by others because Bethany accepted them. In the case of the most particularly picked on and learning disabled kid, she would cheerfully volunteer to partner with him on group projects class and gently ministered with patient help and explanations to get him caught up with the class.

If Bethany's parents always figured that Marian would become a doctor, it seemed absolutely obvious that Bethany was destined for a life of service.

There was no third sibling, but as seemed tradition from time immemorial in every branch of the Williams family, the Bob and Mary would board a new student every year. In generations past, it would be divinity students, but in Jet Age of the late 20th century, it seemed especially exciting to host foreign exchange students. So every year, the Adam and Mary Katz would host a new foreign exchange student to Cambridge Friends School, and when they came to San Francisco, promptly founded a foreign exchange program at San Francisco Friends School.

Marian was, perhaps understandably, a little bitter about the experience of having to learn to communicate with strange people. One particular male exchange student from Argentina would make a pass at her every day while living under their roof, and twice was waiting in her bedroom for her when she came out of the shower. Her parents never seemed to take her particularly seriously, but after that experience they generally made it a practice of taking female exchange students when possible.

Bethany though, would take it upon herself to learn as much as she could about her new siblings' language, their cultures, their hometowns, their families and friends back home, and would stick to them like glue in public to make sure that their transition to America ran as smoothly as the day is long. After they went back to their home countries, she would write them long letters full of hearts to make sure they knew how much they were missed and how much love they added to the Katz family, inevitably ending with ample promises to visit them back home.

When Bethany was fifteen, the exchange student was Kristina from Dresden. A new adventure. Blond, five-feet eleven, friendly and outgoing, characterful English, and charmingly unable to get jokes. Every attempt to turn her smile into a laugh would be met with a brow that frowned while the smile stayed pasted on, and two seconds later an explanation as to why the statement Bethany just made was not true. It caused Bethany no end of delight. Kristina's father was once a member of the Communist party, his father before him a member of the Nazi party. Other various indirect ancestors were members of the Deutsche Reichspartei, the SPD, the Stazi, and the Waffen-SS.

But you would never know from such a troubled past by looking at Kristina, who resembled life itself. Nothing was too adventurous for Kristina, who insisted on taking Bethany, indeed the whole Katz family, all along the trails and rivers of Northern California.  . . . . (the Katz's thought they were an outdoors family until Kristina took them to a new outdoor habitation every weekend)

It was during one of these outdoor habitations that a series of a dozen-and-a-half vans pulled up to the next door house. Driving through the entire block is prohibited, and traffic is blocked for a half-mile in each direction. Ten children emerged with two parents, and forty other men and women helped them move into the house parallel to the Katzes. The men wear dark suits and black hats which they only take off for the severest of labors, the women never take off their long sleeves or their long dark dresses or the hats atop their heads. The few women who show any hair look as though their hair is completely synthetic.

Within seven hours, all the furniture was properly deposited, along with an extra sink properly drilled and plumbed, two refrigerators installed, an extra oven installed with the previously installed thoroughly cleansed, two microwaves, two toasters. All able to be done because the wall between the two townhouses was thoroughly knocked down so that two townhouses become one large townhouse in the middle of the San Francisco Victorians. The multicolored hue of the Victorian paintjob was next thing taken care of, repainted not as a many-colored cloak but as a simple Blue and White, with a painting on the third floor of an old man with a very long, almost completely square beard with four Hebrew letters underneath that read "Mem, Shin, Yud, Khet." Moshiach.

The protests began immediately. The block was immediately wrecked, the

It's Not Even Past: Episode 2 - Beginning

As I said at the beginning of the last podcast, if I was being harder on the Left than I'm being on the Right, it's because I assume that it's mostly people of the Left who will listen to this podcast, as they do to podcasts generally. Educated people in our day and age generally tilt to varying degrees of Left, and the problems of the Right in American life are so unbelievably obvious and present and fecund that they need no enumeration from me. Dominance by the American Right is a simple fact of modern American life, now more than ever, and the nearly the only questions about it are under the rubric of how to defeat it. And to defeat it we have to talk a little bit about imperialism. 

Unless you feel that a person's quality of life is of truly equal importance to a person's right to life, it is very difficult to say that imperialism is a crime quite on the same level as Nazism and Communism. Imperialism is the oldest of all political crimes, the most difficult and dangerous to eradicate by far, and one crime in which every person in the modern world has to one extent or another been complicit.

And if you feel strongly that a person's quality of life matters as much as his or her right to life, then I'd ask you to seriously prioritize in a world where a person's mere right to stay alive is still so often questioned. Quality of life is surprisingly difficult to define without context, but whether or not a person dies of natural causes is generally a question whose answers are binary. But even if you disagree with that any of what I've said so far, this is, after all, my show, so for the moment let's take it as a given that the a person's right to life is more important than a person's quality thereof for the simple reason that a right to life is the obvious first step in achieving quality of life.

If a person's right to life is the most important of all factors, then the single greatest justification for lancing the boil that is imperialism until full drainage is that even with all its attendant evils, is not the inequalities of imperialism within themselves, but the near-apocalyptic events which such wealth inequalities almost inevitably seem to foretell. And in that sense, yes, imperialism is absolutely an infected limb that requires amputation. But the problem is that theft and exploitation and plunder of one civilization to the detriment of another - which as Modern China's current plunder of Africa proves, and just seventy years ago, Imperial Japan's plunder of Manchuria - is not merely a Western problem, and perhaps less an exclusively Western problem than in more than a hundred years.

Imperialism, both in its causes and its results, is so complex that the vast majority of marginal attempts that history has yet made to eradicate it have resulted in their own attendant disasters. Not only were Communists who attracted so may followers over two centuries with their championship of anti-Imperial struggles, more prolific artists of death than Hitler - albeit both over two decades more and much greater square mileage, but so by and large were second rank left-wing dictators of the quote-unquote Third World who so often perpetrated their bloody deeds in the name of fighting against imperialism - left wing dictators who were still quite a bit more bloody in their statistics than their right-wing nationalist counterparts.

And I realize how controversial that statement still is, and perhaps especially is today, but to take a few obviously selective examples: no amount of Mussolini blood in Italy's occupation of Ethiopia could spill a tenth of the blood spilled by the anti-Imperial Mengistu, no amount of French and American greed or incompetence or delusion could unleash on Cambodia what the anti-Imperial Pol Pot did. No amount of Chinese nationalism could spill blood with the joyful alacrity of Mao - no one ever has and hopefully no one again ever will. Right wing dictatorship is often not quite as bloody, and perhaps for the simple reason that the innate predisposition of right-wing pathology with its veneration for institutions and tradition is a predisposition to authoritarianism and violent law enforcement.  Dictatorship does not do as much to upset the natural right-wing order of things because conservatives already respond with veneration to authority. On the other hand, the Left, with its pathological predisposition toward upending tradition and institutions, has a natural predisposition to chaos and terror. Generally speaking, a right-wing dictatorship tries to uphold the law by the most extreme of measures, while a left-wing dictatorship, as happened most obviously under Mao and Stalin, and perhaps even to a small extent under Hitler's National Socialism - remember that Hitler was still as much a socialist as a nationalist and conservatism is different than illiberalism - will always break the law, change the law, subvert the law, to make even and perhaps especially their most loyal citizens live under the profoundest terror. The best way to do it is to kill their neighbors, kill their friends, kill their families, and finally kill them. And furthermore, when one hears about Steve Bannon's veneration for the American working class, your tentacles for detecting a national socialist philosophy should immediately go off.

Again, as we said at the beginning of the last podcast. One of Art's great secrets is its societal tremors, Art is a societal seizmograph. The relevance of this will, hopefully, make sense in a few minutes. With obvious exceptions of course, a secure era always seems to be dominated by secure Art in which the rules are clearly defined. The vast majority of the 18th century, with its intricate and unbreakable monarchical hierarchies, was the archetype of a society in which art was created with extremely distinct rules so as to not upset the precarious balance of an incredibly intricate societal structure. All official European and American buildings seemed to be designed with the kind of columns one finds in Ancient Greece or Rome, with heights determined by mathematical ratios found in nature so as to provide the most harmonious possible surroundings. Nearly all pictorial art was designed by schematic before the schematic was painted over. All music ends in the same key in which it begins, and the phrase-lengths are inevitably kept in multiples of four. The poetry was almost inevitably kept in strictest possible couplet form. The expectations of what art was supposed to be were ironclad. But as anyone who grew up in the suburbs can tell you, predictability can at times feel like a kind of prison, and when the prison walls come down, the chaos is that much more explosive because nobody remembers what chaos feels like.

By 1789, France, the kingdom well-known for having the most intricate of all Europe's monarchical hierarchies, was beset by a revolution. First came a financial crisis, then collapse, then the rise of the Jacobins and the guillotine, then the execution of a few hundred noblemen, then the rise of Robespierre who executed most of the other Jacobins and eventually was himself executed for having been responsible for the execution of 20,000 Frenchmen, then came the ten year French Revolutionary War which killed somewhere between 300,000 and 1.1 million French, and then came Napoleon to unite France under his dictatorship and who decided he needed to put the rest of Europe under an Empire united under his rule, and somewhere between 3.5 and 6 million died for the cause of his ambition to conquer the world. When there is too much order, the ensuing chaos become all the worse. It was an avalanche of death that claimed ever more lives for twenty-six years before it finally stopped.

War did not rage throughout the supposedly civilized part of the world for another hundred years, when it broke out again in 1914, it took thirty-one years to stop, and in the meantime, if we go by the estimates of R. J. Rummel, probably the best known scholar of state murder who has an easily accessible website if you can stomach such a thing, we lost somewhere between 17 and 18 million to World War One, somewhere between 20 to 50 million in the Spanish Influenza which broke out because of the unsanitariness of the battlefields, an estimated seven million who starved to death in various countries during the Great Depression, another estimated 5 to 9 million deaths due to the Russian Civil War of the early 1920s which broke out after the collapse of the Czar, and the four million deaths for which Lenin was directly responsible after he consolidated power, and the 5 million killed by Imperial Japan, the 20 million dead in the Chinese Civil War of the 30s and 40s, for which the Communist party led by Mao in the few years before he assumed power was responsible for 4 million deaths alone, the four million Chinese Deaths for which Chiang-Kai Shek's right-wing nationalist government was responsible, the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Turkish generals which killed roughly 1.8 million if one counts a few hundred thousand non-Armenians also murdered, and the nearly million people killed by the allegedly great Ataturk who is still revered by American neoconservatives as the model of an incorruptible secularizing dictator, the well over a million killed in quote-unquote minor European dictatorships, another roughly 20 million killed in various ways by Hitler's Nazis for which we needn't elaborate, and the probable upward of 50 million people killed by Stalin's various orders and policies alone. It is macabre at best to list these totals and then add all of them up, but let's just say that the wars of the early twentieth century killed so far over a hundred million people that it's probably closer to two-hundred million. One then adds up the stupefying death tolls of the Cold War and the quote unquote Third World upon whom it was mostly perpetrated, the roughly twelve million Soviets for which dictators after Stalin were responsible, the 2 million dead in the killing fields of Pol-Pot's Cambodia, the roughly 1.7 million killed by North Korea, another 1.7 million killed in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the 1.5 million dead in the Polish Civil War which killed my great-aunt after surviving the Holocaust, the 1.5 million killed by the various Pakistani military dictatorships, the 1.1 million killed in Yugoslavia, yes, the 6 million dead from United States actions in the Cold War. And worst of all, the roughly seventy-seven million killed in Mao's China, for which no truly reliable total is possible, and some estimates go up to a hundred twenty million people. While estimates are obviously unreliable, evidence would seem to point to that five hundred years of traditional Western mercantile Imperialism with all its attendant mass murders cannot equal the total number of deaths engendered by thirty-one years of advanced warfare, let alone the seventy five years of it from the outbreak of World War One until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In fact, for five hundred years of Western Imperialism to reach anything even resembling the equivalent death tolls of the twentieth century one would have to not only accept the very highest estimates - such as putting the total Native Americans killed rather than felled by disease at 120 million people higher than than the 15 million that is generally supposed, but also include the casualties of Islamic Imperialism.

Even the single greatest death toll of vaguely recorded modern Imperialism which admittedly boosts arguments of moral equivalence significantly, the mass famines of Indians in the British Empire, and killed what's generally regarded to be somewhere between 12 million and 29 million people, have to be considered in the context that these were acts of starvation. Acts of starvation which the great tyrants of the 20th century were in no way beneath, but still, when compared to the mass murders of Auschwitz, The Great Terror, and the Red Guards, pale in comparison. Furthermore, as the British developed technologies to mitigate the worst of famines, the famines decreased. These were clearly grisly matters of unspeakable contempt and incompetence and horror, but it was not premeditated murder and even the most contemptible of British officers issued orders to give the subjects just enough wages to keep them alive. Some would consider this all the worse, and there's certainly merit to that argument: because it shows that people of color did not even factor into the decision making of imperial rulers who plundered a century of wheat crop from a land they ruled for the joy of ruling, and shows that they were willing to tolerate the long, drawn out suffering of those who were clearly destined to die when a bullet to the head might have been more merciful. And yet, I would also ask you to particularly consider one Emperor of the Mughal dynasty, which controlled the vast majority of the Indian subcontinent for the three hundred years before British dominance. Auranguzeb, ruling for forty nine years between 1658 to 1707, was considered to rule somewhere in the area of a hundred to a hundred fifty million people. He brought the Mughal Empire to its largest dominance, 3.2 million square miles, which held for fifty years after his death. He required from his subjects a yearly tribute of nearly 3 billion rupees, which was roughly 38 million pounds in 1700, which means roughly 10 billion pounds in today's money, which means he commanded a yearly tribute of 12.5 billion dollars, much of which was collected from penniless peasants.

In Auranguzeb's lifetime, 4.6 million were said to have been killed from war. One has to imagine that with the unreliable records kept in the 1600s all over the world, the total may be much, much higher. When one considers that in 1900, the population total of India was 280 million, it would seem that the British Empire's crime is roughly on par with the most expansionist of the subcontinent's own leaders when there was no meddling from the West, and with far less premeditation. Whether from the East or West, Man is a tyrannical animal, given to imaginative flights of crushing fellow humans as though the rulers are children learning they have power of life and death over insects.

Review Dump 5

January 20th: Johannes Debus and the Baltimore Symphony:

Barber of Seville Overture

Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 2 - Jean-Efflam Bavouzet

Brahms Symphony no. 1

It was Inauguration Day, and I desperately needed a musical balm which perhaps my favorite symphony would give me. In so many words, it sucked. Johannes Debus is a superficial conductor who played Brahms with all the depth of a generic symphony by an unknown composer. This was 'revisionist Brahms' that copies all the superficial qualities of Weingartner with none of Weingartner's ability to get across the essence that belies the elegance. I was so disappointed that I nearly drove up to Pittsburgh a few weeks later to hear Manfred Honeck doubtless show how the piece should be done. The concerto soloist was the extremely French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who has seemingly recorded every piano work ever written. Except for a very few gorgeous pianissimo sounds in the cadenza, his contribution was barely more inspiring. 

January 21st: The Threepenny Opera - Spotlighter's Theater

The less said, the better. 

January 24th: Philadelphia Orchestra & Yannick Nezet-Seguin - Kennedy Center

Lili Boulanger: D'un matin des printemps

Chopin: Piano Concerto no. 1 - Louis Lortie

Stravinsky: Petrushka

It doesn't get much better than this. Note for note, there hasn't been a better concert I've gone to in this concert-filled month. The Philadelphia Orchestra is not the Philadelphia Orchestra of old, it still sounds like Riccardo Muti's orchestra - Stokowski or Ormandy would never have allowed for those whip-crack fortissimos pummeling you between the eyes. Except for its virtuoso excellence, you wouldn't be able to pick the Philadelphia Orchestra out of a lineup. The orchestras of Cleveland and Boston still retain something of their old sound, but it seems that the velvet of Philadelphia's golden era is lost to history. 

Yet everything, even so, was a thing of wonder. Perhaps the Philadelphia Orchestra, probably the first American orchestra to achieve a worldwide reputation, is undergoing a second golden era, entirely different from its first. When you hear the very best performers, you remember precisely what it is that the live experience gives that recordings never can. There are certain musical colors that you can never hear on a recording. Neither the Baltimore Symphony or the National Symphony, good as they both can be, give you those numinous moments with any frequency. You can only hear this kind of music making in the flesh. For the second time this season, the Philadelphia Orchestra provided them for these ears in spades. From the very first notes of Lili Boulanger's all too rarely heard music, you knew that you were in the presence of a musical greatness. It continued even continued with Louis Lortie's Chopin. I am no fan of the Chopin piano concertos, but Lortie made a 40 minute concerto seem like 25 minutes. The accompaniment of the Philadelphia Orchestra was such velvet that you think to yourself that maybe, just maybe, they still have that velvet in their veins that made Rachmaninov himself swoon. 

But even music lovers less ambivalent about Chopin don't drive an hour and a half to hear the First Piano Concerto. I went to hear Petrushka, and it was damned magnificent. The numinous moments where everywhere - the huge eruptions of bass, the all-too-spooky entrance of Petrushka's ghost, the organgrind whose piccolo decorations sounded exactly like squeaky gears, the whiz-bang orchestral kaleidescope in which every note and dynamic nuance registers precisely at Yannick Nezet-Seguin's top speeds. At times, you wished that YNS would, as Dudmel did in his very different performance, shape and bend the phrases more. Petrushka can be a human statement, much more affecting than a showpiece, and yet what a showpiece! No recording can thrill like this!

January 26th: National Symphony - Christoph Eschenbach
Weinberg Violin Concerto Gidon Kremer Soloist
Shostakovich Symphony no. 8

There was simply no way that this concert, good as it was, will register in my memory in the same manner which do the concerts which bookended it. The National Symphony is a decent orchestra, and Christoph Eschenbach, when on his game, is as good as any conductor in the history of music. But with revelations on either side of this, a very good Shostakovich 8 (a work I adore) just doesn't measure up.

Even the presence of Gidon Kremer doesn't do much to liven things up. I highly doubt that Moises (I'm not going to look up the spelling of his Russian name...) Weinberg as great a composer as people begin to allege, and yet, even if it sounds almost indistinguishable from Shostakovich, it's not truly bad Shostakovich. Few composers do their best work in their violin concertos - even a lot of immortals phoned it in. So I look forward to making the acquaintance of a composer whom, were I a Soviet citizen in the 1960's, would have probably seemed to me a perfectly legitimate candidate of the pantheon.

Eschenbach was, apparently, his usual slow self. 75 minutes by the clock. You could have fooled me. I was expecting things to feel much slower than they were. The slow movements went by in no time. The soft dynamics he got in the first half of the opening were truly breathtaking. It was only the middle scherzi which were a bit ragged. You can always tell in an Eschenbach performance which sections get all the rehearsal time - and it's almost always the slowest movements. Eschenbach is, for all his many weaknesses, a recreative musician of the pantheon who brings insights to everything he touches. In Eschenbach's presence, I finally felt as though I got a handle on the troublesomely incoherent last movement, in which the snare drums seem to signal an air bombing interruption of what sounds like people resuming normal life with its enjoyments. The final passage, which Ken Woods called the bleakest C-Major in the world, seemed to me like gratefulness, perhaps the gratefulness of a man thankful to have lived through another day. In a week without the Philadelphia Orchestra or the Staatskapelle Berlin, I'd have been thrilled to take these priceless (for me) insights home and leave it there. But this was no normal week.

January 27th: Staatskapelle Berlin - Daniel Barenboim
Mozart Sinfonia Concertante
Bruckner Symphony no. 7

Forget about that lackluster Sinfonia Concertante except to say that the very attractive principals from the Berlin orchestra who played the solo parts made me wonder how many couples have had sex in the auditorium of Carnegie Hall.

I doubt I will ever hear a Bruckner 7 to match that in my life. Barenboim's newest recording of Bruckner 7 is, along with #5, the highlight of the cycle (at least in the symphonies I care about). The Carnegie performance was even better. Of course, a few quibbles here and there - particularly the fact that the cymbal player was slightly off on his crash (You had one job!!!), and of course, even in the Staatskapelle Berlin, the brass are too loud, occasionally I wish Barenboim would have allowed for still more tempo flexibility in the Adagio (as is his wont). And yet, everything else... The flexibility of tempos, the way sections of the ensemble phrased as one, the gemutlicher warmth of the sound. Barenboim, in his greatest performances, is an artist of improvisation. He paints with dabs of orchestral color, a little more violin here and less there, signaling to a wind player to play as though they are interrupting the thought of a string section. He hears the harmonic tensions in a score on such a fundamental level that he knows how to guide Measure 40 of the opening to obtain a better result in Measure 220 of the finale.

There were so many numinous moments throughout the performance, but there was one particular type of numinosity that was so revelatory that I question if I ever understood Bruckner until I heard (rather, felt) these moments.

Why is the brass in Bruckner so loud? What purpose does it serve to drown out the orchestra as he does? It's not enough to say that Bruckner created an organ-like orchestra, though that gets us a part of the way there. When you hear the brass in the lower octaves on recordings, you all too rarely hear the high winds peaking out in the octaves over them. The high winds are there to shape the overtones. You don't so much hear them as you feel them. In truth, you have no idea if you're actually hearing what you think you're hearing, or if it's psychosomatic. All you know that the winds are there, and it creates a kind of psychedelic hallucination, as the high notes of the winds peak out from the mass of sound like beams of light.

January 28th: Staatskapelle Berlin - Daniel Barenboim
Bruckner: Symphony no. 8

As boring as the night before was lifechanging. I don't want to talk about it...

February 6th: Budapest Festival Orchestra: Ivan Fischer
Beethoven Symphonies 8 and 9

Ivan Fischer is not a natural Beethoven conductor - he wants Beethoven to be Mozart or Schubert. He does not have the killer instinct, the wild animal willing to forego subtlety - if you don't subscribe to Beethoven's metronome markings, and Fischer's clearly happy to follow the old Austro-German ways, then the blunt force which the Austro-German greats brought to Beethoven becomes even more important. When the great unreformed Beethovenians: Szell, Karajan, Klemperer, Wand, Schuricht, the Kleibers, Bernstein, Masur, Tennstedt, Blomstedt, Schmidt-Isserstedt,  even Furtwangler (some would say especially) conducted Beethoven, they knew that the force of Beethoven depended not on originality of conception, but the unwillingness to pull even a single punch. If you were not going to generate momentum through the quickness of tempo and articulation, you have to have not just an enormous, deep, bass heavy sound - which the Budapest Festival Orchestra possesses to a level that equals nearly any orchestra of the German-speaking world, but the willingness to use all of it. Fischer, known for his unorthodox seating arrangements, put the timpani at the front of the orchestra between the violin sections for both symphonies. The timpani has an extremely prominent part in both pieces, but Fischer put the timpanist in front only for the timpanist to play his instrument with the delicacy of a triangle. The spirit with which the timpani gives the rhythmic momentum to Beethoven's music was completely lost. It might have been more to the point to place the timpanist offstage and have him wail on his instrument at a consistent fortississimo.

This is not to say that Fischer's Beethoven was ever any less than exquisite, and sometimes truly brilliant in its insights. The sheer proliferation of nuances was mindboggling, the way he accelarated into the beginning of the eighth's scherzo, the thunderous way he made the strings roll their thirty-second notes in the 'metronome' movement - if only he did the same at the piece's climaxes... It particularly became a problem in the last movement of the 8th symphony, which Fischer took at a tempo that by the standards of 2017 was shocking in its leisure.

But there were two insights into Beethoven's Ninth that I would have travelled much farther afield than New York if I knew I'd gather them. The first was Fischer's brilliantly unorthodox treatment of the first movement's gigantic recapitulation into the tonic. Conductors of a spontaneous disposition tend to slow down to capture the full weight of the orchestral sound, but Fischer sped up. It was brilliant, shocking, utterly unexpected, and felt completely inorganic - which I suppose was the point. The episode did not feel like a logical extension of what came before, but an utter interruption - completely apiece with the Storm movement of the Pastoral Symphony. As far as I was concerned, it was an absolutely revolutionary way to view this passage and an absolutely valid one. I will never look at Beethoven's Ninth the same way.

Fischer is a musician given to lots of spontaneous sounding moments, but he is precisely the opposite of a spontaneous musician. Every interpretive nuance is clearly long thought over, rethought, tested in rehearsal, performed, then retested in a different manner. He's like a musical chemist, trying to find the precise formula to get a magical chemical change.

And the chemical compound he came up with for the finale was so extraordinary as to seem like alchemy. Even before the Ninth began, I heard audience members say 'Where the hell is the chorus?' Having read old reviews of Fischer's Ninths I had a vague idea of what was coming. I imagined that the chorus would be sitting in the first few rows. But I did not expect for the entire chorus to be completely dispersed around the concert hall (if you can call Geffen Hall that...), because there are no words for the risk it takes for a chorus to do this with a touring orchestra when they must have had one rehearsal at most to get it right.

It was a gambit of foolhardy courage, and the payoff was transcendent in a manner that the rest of the concert was not. No doubt, the symbolism of this was apparent to all, this this music of humanity was not meant as a ritual to enact on stage but an inspirational challenge to live more valuably for ourselves and those we love. But in practice, it felt different than that, and still more valuable. This immersion felt less like a traditional performance of Beethoven's as it did Tallis's Spem in Allium, as though angels and ghosts of humanity were bathing us in benevolence and forgiveness. It felt not just like an embrace by humanity, but an embrace by the beyond (Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen...) At first, I was so amused that I was half-temped to stand up and sing the bass part myself - nobody knows me in New York concert halls so it's not like I'd have embarrassed myself in front of anyone, but the sound was far too beautiful to spoil - both utterly intimate because of the dominance of the singers' voices nearest to us, and completely choral because of the blend of the chorus's voices in the background.

Fischer is a detail conductor. He rarely, in my experience, gives a front to back reading in which every single detail feels wholly convincing in the manner that a conductor like Mariss Jansons does (or used to...). He does not go for 'ultimate performances', he trusts that eventually his conception will win you over emotionally, and in the meantime, searches for intellectual nuances to point up. He is an incredibly odd mixture of good taste with eccentricity, and he is avant-garde as only a thoroughgoing traditionalist can be. There has never been nor ever could be another conductor quite like him.