Beautiful Schoenberg

There is plenty by Schoenberg that is beautiful - both tonal and atonal. But for those who can't abide the thought of listening to Schoenberg , listen to this. Then listen a dozen times more. The Gurrelieder is a dreary piece that has absolutely gorgeous moments. But how could the person who writes moments like this be anything but a great composer?

....Get to bed Evan.

800 Words: The Useful Idiots of Occupy Wall Street

These scenes of Occupy Wall Street should be reminiscent of Birmingham, of Prague, of Tahrir Square. This should be a movement that takes back America from the jaws of people who’ve hurt it most. Instead, we’re seeing a protest movement commandeered by all the Trustafundians who are least affected by the current depression. As it has for generations, radical chic will stop at nothing to set back liberal causes. At the backbone of Occupy Wall Street is precisely the same worldview that let Richard Nixon be elected by refusing to vote for Hubert Humphrey, let Nixon get re-elected by supporting George McGovern over Edmund Muskie, let Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter by supporting John Anderson, and let George W. Bush get elected by supporting Ralph Nader over Al Gore (of whom, I’m still ashamed to admit, I was one). Over and over again, people who allowed America to become what it is today had the chance to change America's destiny by simple compromise. Over and over again, they chose to do further sabotage to the country rather than choose a feasible solution. They have every right to believe that the country is in a state of disaster; they’re probably right. But anyone not willing to make the compromises it takes to keep America from disaster has no one to blame but him or herself.

There are all sorts of reasons for a mindset that would sooner allow a disaster than a compromise. But at its heart lies a paralyzing fear of responsibility. With decisions come consequences, with consequences come accountability. With this mindset comes the poisonous idea that there is nothing more attractive than a lost cause or the unceasing devotion to an ideal that can never be attained. When political actors renounce responsibility, all that is left is a list of frustrations with a world they both don’t like and don’t want to change. Stalin had a term for these people: Useful Idiots.

This is a movement powered by all the same people who holler betrayal at Barack Obama for making the compromises necessary to enact any reform at all. It is only now that Barack Obama’s second term is in doubt and his power to enact any agenda limited that they’ve chosen to mobilize as a force. These are the descendants of people who deserted the greatest liberal leaders in American history at the times when they were most needed. They deserted FDR for Henry Wallace, they deserted Abraham Lincoln for Horace Greeley and they deserted George Washington for Thomas Jefferson. And all three of the greatest American presidents were sent to premature graves....

About a week ago, my friend HaZmora sent me a copy of the original program from the March on Washington in 1963. The difference between the two in agendas, procedure and organization is mind-boggling. Just to take one example, here is what the March on Washington Program says about “Why We March?”:

We march to redress old grievances and to help resolve an American Crisis.

That crisis is born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation. They rob all people, Negro and white, of dignity, self respect and freedom. They impose a special burden on the Negro, who is denied the right to vote, economically exploited, refused access to public accomadations, subjected to inferior education, and relegated to substandard ghetto housing.

Discrimination in education and apprenticeship training renders Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and other minorities helpless in our mechanized, industrial society. Lacking specialized training, they are the first victims of automation. Thus the rate of Negro unemployment is nearly three times that of whites.

Their livelihoods destroyed, the Negro unemployed are thrown into the streets, driven to despair, to hatred, to crime, to violence. All America is robbed of their potential contribution.

It is a clear statement of purpose, beautifully articulated as so many SLC documents were. It served to rally people together who desperately needed hope, to draw outside attention to their plight, and to welcome all people into it.

On the Occupy Wall Street website, there is not a single mention of the ‘Why’ behind this march. The closest to it is in the section ‘Who We Are.’ And when you click on it, you discover that thus far, this entire section adds up to two youtube videos and a bunch of comments. The title of one youtube video is: The Demand is a Process. (!!!!)



This is nothing about this video except that this is tenth-hand dormroom bull session philosophizing, and everyone who watches it will know that. Currently, Occupy Wall Street is the mouthpiece which speaks louder for liberalism than any other group in America. This is at a time when Herman Cain leads the Republican polls. Even if Herman Cain goes down in the polls (as he no doubt will), he has laid the groundwork for a Tea Party candidacy which unites anti-tax nuts with anti-Mormon Evangelical bigots. Whether Cain or someone else, a third-party candidate could arise that could take the conservative vote while Mitt Romney gets the moderate and Barack Obama the liberal. And as Yeats would say, "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passion and intensity." In an election in which moderates will be especially key to prevent Republicans from controlling all three branhes of government, no group could alienate moderates from voting Democrat more quickly if they tried.

Occupy Wall Street should be the great cause of our time - a crusade against bankers whose lack of accountability has bled our country dry. It should be an abundant coalition of poor and rich, black and white, Christian and Muslim, liberal and conservative. If some of those people were not innately predisposed to join, then they should be convinced. The movement should not be occupying Wall Street, the movement should be Occupy Main Street. The movement should occupy the places hardest hit by banker’s greed for the people who most desperately need attention paid. This movement should not be exposing Wall Street’s lavishness, everybody knows about it. They should be exposing the ruin which Wall Street’s greed has wrought. The protests should not be happening on Wall St or Freedom Plaza, they should be happening in Elkton, Indiana or Spanish Harlem.

….But that would involve real commitment.

800 Words: Who Cares About Columbus Day?!?

Christopher Columbus did not discover America. And even if he did, America might have been ‘discovered’ a dozen times before Columbus. Furthermore, in no language was his name ‘Christopher Columbus.’ It was Christophorus Columbus in Latin, Christoforo Colombo in Italian and Christobal Colon in Spanish. When Columbus landed on a Caribbean island on October 12, 1492, he had absolutely no idea that it was America. Nobody knew it was America until Magellan’s crew finished circling the world in 1521, fifteen years after Columbus’s death. Until then, nobody had any idea of the world’s size or the location of its unexplored landmasses.

By the late 1400’s, Africa and Asia were reasonably well-explored. Prince Henry of Portugal (called Henry the Navigator though he never left dry land) set up a research center in 1415 at the country’s south-west point, Sagres. From Sagres, Portugal accumulated the knowledge of Africa which made possible Vasco de Gama’s circling of Africa to reach India in 1497. The Silk Road - established by the Chinese thousands of years before their first contact with Europe - gave Europeans the safe passage they needed through Asia to make detailed exploration. European maps of both continents exist from that era that are surprisingly accurate. But no ‘civilized’ European had ever attempted to sail much West of the Azores. There is documentary evidence which displays that even a thinker as early as Hesiod in the sixth century BC knew that the world was round. But until 1521, nobody had any idea of the world’s size. If Columbus had any idea of the distance between Spain and India to the West, he would never have attempted the venture.

But the world’s ignorance of this one simple fact propelled Columbus to super-human persistence in his effort to obtain funding for a voyage which every prudent statesman in the world viewed as crazy. Over a period of twelve years, he endured multiple refusals not only from the Spanish court but the Portoguese and French as well. When Queen Isabella finally relented, it was because she was a little crazy herself. In an age that saw the height of the Spanish Inquisition’s power, it counted for much that Columbus, like Isabella, was clearly a fanatical Catholic. The entire cost of his voyage would be less than the cost of entertaining a single royal visitor. Columbus’s goal was not all that lofty - he was not looking for a lost continent, merely to find a quicker way to Asia, convert and trade with natives, and perhaps find a way of encircling the Islamic infidels.

Columbus himself was a very competent seaman. He came from an upper-middle-class Genovese family of weavers and routinely set sail on voyages since he was ten years old. He was a well-built man who once fell overboard and swam six miles to shore. He was married to an extremely well-connected Portoguese family, worked on mapmaking with experts at Sagres, and even convinced a Spanish shipbuilder to subsidize his voyage. But the voyage was delayed for six years because crazy Queen Isabella insisted that if the voyage be made at all it could only be a royal enterprise.

The technology of his boats was state of the art for 1492, the crew numbered nearly 100 and included professionals, aristocrats, felons and expelled Jews. Columbus required his crew to sing hymns every hour on the hour. The ships had a surgeon and an Arabic translator who could barter with the natives of China and Japan.

Columbus himself was a very articulate man, perhaps even charismatic. Viewed in one light, he was a visionary man and perhaps a great one. Viewed in another, Columbus was clearly insane. And like many of the Renaissance’s great visionaries, he was penalized disproportionately for things that are not his fault. But his case is unique in that the punishment shows no signs of abating. Centuries ago, posterity rehabilitated Galileo, Dante, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and even Martin Luther. However flawed they seem today, they are fundamentally forgiven their blemishes. But every one of these figures from history were enormously controversial in their own day, and perhaps for good reason. But alone among them, Columbus remains a person still more reviled in our time than he was in his own.

Historical evidence exists to show that Columbus meant both harm and help. Certainly he meant far less harm than many effective conquistadors of whom most who denigrate him have never heard. Queen Isabella herself condemned the reports she heard of Spaniards abusing natives. One of her principal advisors was a man named Bartolome de las Casas, who is better known to many Latin-American Catholics as the great ancestor of Liberation Theology. Even the Jesuits and Dominicans who controlled the Inquisition opposed the atrocities of the New World. Many friars who came to the new world did so with a mission to ensure that Native Americans would be dealt with justly. Isabella’s successor, Charles V, enacted comprehensive legislation called ‘The New Laws of 1542’ to ensure that native Americans would not be mistreated. These laws included the prohibition of slavery, the guarantee that Native Americans would be considered free persons under the law, that natives would be guaranteed compensation for their labor, a requirement that natives not be sent into mines unless proven absolutely necessary, and a limit on the amount natives were taxed. It’s hardly a perfect setup, but this was more progressive legislation than one would find in parts of the American south until the 1960’s. The only problem was how to enforce it.

It’s absolutely true that in 2005, unearthed testimony lost for centuries displayed that Columbus did indeed have a hand in the atrocities committed in the New World - after which Columbus and his brothers were brought back to Spain in shackles and chains. But let’s also remember, Columbus was never tried for his crimes. He was a man 1490’s Spain, an era which profligately burned heretics due to confessions the state obtained under torture. We will never fully understand the vast network of motives at play in this very complicated era of history.

In the 1490’s there was no such thing as a background check, and those who left with Columbus to settle the New World had mixed motives. Many of the new settlers were led to expect a world of ‘bountiful riches,’ only to encounter the same dull poverty they experienced in Spain. In a vast, unknown portion of the world, there is no conceivable way to police the actions of those who go ‘off the reservation.’ The proper analogy for Columbus is not to later imperialist atrocities like the Belgian Congo, it is to the Wild West. No governor could possibly hope to contain the violence therein. Perhaps Columbus was every bit the tyrant which is alleged, but we will never know. And even if we did know that he was a tyrant, why is Columbus Day considered so much more egregious than President’s Weekend? The orders of Abraham Lincoln killed far more people than Columbus’s, but to our contemporary eyes the cause for which Lincoln killed so many was quite just. But was the preservation of the union worth the deaths of 700,000? In another century, perhaps we won't think it was, and Lincoln will not be considered the great man we now think he is.

So if you have an opinion about Columbus Day, good for you. Celebrate it, don’t celebrate it, nobody cares. It’s a stupid holiday about a complicated historical figure that’s made all the more stupid by all kinds of people who have no idea who Columbus was.

800 Words: A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks (Part 1 of 2...I mean it)

(Cartman tells it like it is.)

They have Handel’s Messiah, we have “I Have a Little Dreydel.” So it goes. Great music by Jews is very different than ‘Jewish Music.’ We were shuckling in the Ghetto while Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin, Isaac, Gombert, Willaert, Lassus, Victoria, Palestrina, Striggio, Taverner, Tallis, Byrd and Monteverdi (among so many others) wrote the great Christian masterpieces of the Renaissance. Even Bach and Handel predated the Jewish emancipation. The presence of Jews as musicians with any more prestige and education than Klezmerschpielern depended upon a world no longer ruled by religion. Every time Jews were let into the mainstream of cultural life, they were too late to the party to write Jewish music of equal value to the great music of Christianity. When Christian art and music dominated cultural life, it was the apex of civilization for its time. Both the authoritarian Christianity of the Middle Ages and the more humanist Christianity of the Renaissance represented the triumph of monotheism and order over the chaos of a Pagan world. A world with one god was a world in which every person the world over shared something in common and had at least one more reason to live in peace with his neighbor.


(The Christian Rock of 800 years ago. The first ever full setting of the Catholic Mass by Guillaume de Machaut. This is truly great Christian music, but how would we know it’s Christian if we didn’t know the text? Does it sound Medieval? Gregorian? French? Andalusian? Spanish? Arabic? Sephardic Jewish?)

When the historical emancipations of European Jewry began, Jewish artists were at an impasse which even now very few have solved. How can a progressive, educated, liberal minded artist create truly great art that openly declares an allegiance to parochialism, medievalism, and segregation? It’s hard enough for great talent to flourish in any religious community. What if a person’s talent leads him in a direction that contradicts the dogma of the religion? But how much more difficult would that be in a dogmatic community that has also been an embattled minority for two millenia? Even the relatively liberal Jews of 17th-century Amsterdam gave Baruch Spinoza a Cherem.


(Even a work as moving as Bach’s St. John Passion has strong anti-semitic overtones.)

For any artist for whom Judaism is anything more than an accident of birth, there is an uncomfortable truth that should trouble them far more than it seems to. All too few modern artists who create ‘Jewish Music,’ ‘Jewish Art,’ or ‘Jewish poetry’ seem to create anything worth remembering. Little of it sounds or looks particularly Jewish. It’s just like bad goyisher art, only it’s made for Jews. Go to any Reform Temple (once) and take in the unabashed awfulness of music by Debbie Friedman, Schlomo Carlebach or Safam. The only thing that separates it in quality from Christian Rock is that most people can’t understand the banality of the lyrics. Just as Christian Rock (or ‘Worship Music’) has done for Christianity, this music should strike us as bad news indeed. Whatever remains of Judaism’s greatest artistic traditions are being replaced by a bland, accessible music of which nobody with a brain would ever want to go within a hundred feet. What’s frightening about bringing the guitar into the mainstream of religious life is how successful it’s been at bringing people back to religion. Instead of people viewing religion as a fascinating and illuminating artifact of previous civilizations, people are convinced to believe in religion with all the devotion and literalness with which their ancestors believed 500 years ago. So it goes.


(Debbie Friedman. It’s sad that she’s dead. But her music makes me nauseous.)

When Martin Luther wrote the first Protestant hymns, his aim was more than simply musical. He needed a simple style of music that spoke directly to the layman to express a simpler vision of religion. There should be little doubt that Luther’s hymns still speak to us today. But there should be little more doubt that Luther’s hymns struck most Catholics of his day (if they heard Lutheran hymns at all) as absurdly trivial. These hymns call centuries of unconscious associations into our minds. From Luther we can hear the kernels of Bach, of the Anglican Hymnal, of Black spirituals, of Gospel music. We don’t simply hear Luther, we hear everything that came from him. As unlikely (and awful) as it might seem to us, people may one day hear Hillsong and hear the kernel of much much greater music that comes later.


(....Though I doubt it. Forever Reign by Hillsong.)

But the problem for Jews is compounded. Simplifying Jewish culture will never work for one reason: There is nothing simple about being Jewish. If you want a simpler religion, you have hundreds of Christian sects to choose from. Judaism is a religion built around 613 laws so complex and obfuscating that there are two-thousand years of commentary around the interpretation of every one of them - with heated debates between between many rabbis of each generation. No Jew could ever hope to master all the laws and commentary in a single lifetime. If anybody wants the secret of Judaism’s long-term survival, it’s all too simple: Jewish laws are so strange, and discovering a proper interpretation of the laws so time-consuming that a strictly Orthodox Jew would never have a chance in the hell he doesn’t believe in of fitting in with the rest of society.


(Whose directions would you trust? Directions from somebody whose religion allows for a setting of ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ like this one by Bach?......)

Furthermore, the complexity that is Judaism’s natural state will only be accepted by a society that is comfortable with complexity. A society that is appreciative of complexity, education and individuality is a society that will find much common ground with the Jewish people. A society that views those concepts suspiciously is almost guaranteed to view Jews with suspicion. Unfortunately, Ultra-Orthodox Jews can seem strange to even the most liberal-minded people. But some people are quite comfortable with the strangeness of the ‘other.’ Some people are not. For nearly three millenia, Jews have lived at the mercy of other communities. Liberal communities warmed quite well to the differences of the Jewish people, illiberal ones did not (and let that be a lesson about getting into bed with the Religious Right). If all feelings of liberalism and tolerance were to desert the world tomorrow, there is not a single Jew in the world who would survive by this time next year.


(.....or directions from somebody whose religion allows for a setting of ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ like this one from Chris Rice?)

Thank God (no pun intended) we live in an extremely tolerant era, relatively speaking. In descending order, the countries with the 10 highest Jewish populations are Israel, the US, France, Canada, the UK, Russia, Argentina, Germany, Australia and Brazil. Each of these countries is a democracy, relatively speaking. There has never been a time where being a Jew among goyim has been so easy. And there has never been a time when there is less incentive to uphold Jewish traditions. No Jew need uphold a mitzvah in today's world if he or she doesn’t want to.

The fact that Judaism is a conscious choice for today’s Jews makes our generation of Judaism different than virtually every Jewish generation in History. Until the Holocaust, Judaism was a Scarlett Aleph. Whether or not Jews chose to assimilate, the Gentile world looked upon even the most assimilated Jews with suspicion. After the Inquisition forced Jews to convert or leave Spain, the Jews who remained were still stuck with epithets like ‘Marrano’ and ‘Tornadizo’, terms perhaps as offensive (if not more) to their society as ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ are in ours. In the Spain of the 1500’s, a Marrano was a Catholic convert of Jewish origin, a ‘Tornadizo’ a heretic who practices another religion in secret. Many Spanish Jews did practice their religion in secret. But many of those whom the Inquisition burned alive for practicing Judaism were neither secretly Jewish nor even Jewish by origin. In Spain, as everywhere else so far, we were stuck with the accident of our birth. Whether we viewed ourselves as Jews, the rest of the world refused to view us as anything else. We therefore were discriminated against, attacked and slaughtered for the simple crime of being something different.


(What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe)

Well into the 20th century, Judaism had this unfortunate reason for continuing, and so did its culture. But it’s a reason which it no longer seems to have. In ages when the survival of your community is in doubt, every good work - whether in science or politics or culture - becomes an affirmation of why the community lives on. But in a world where your survival is nearly guaranteed, what urgency is there to uphold the magnificence of a culture? The tides of history are such that thousands of years of great Jewish music-making have been lost simply to posterity, but apathy might lead us to forget all the vestiges of older Jewish culture which we still have.


(The Selikos Epitaph. The oldest surviving musical composition. Would the Greeks have recognized this?)

Even among the Greeks and the Romans, we have only a handful of musical remains. It would be far too much to ask of history that we find remains of music from the people they conquered. Sure, we have the instruments of biblical times, but we have no idea what they played with them. The oldest example of Jewish composition is ‘Cantillation.’ Every Jew knows what cantillation is, even if they don’t know what it means. Cantillation is what every Bar-Mitzvah instructor calls ‘Torah Trope.’ But even in this, we have no idea if, or which, notated cantillation is accurate to what Cantillation was in the days of the temple. The system which most American bar-mitzvah students learn is the cantillation of the Litvaker Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe. But Litvaker cantillation is only one of at least thirteen distinct varieties of cantillation that are still practiced throughout the world today. How many other styles of cantillation were born and died over the millenia?


(Profanation. The second movement of Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony. In this piece, Bernstein took the most boring thing in the world: the Eastern European Haftarah trope which every American Jew has to learn for his/her Bar/Bat Mitzvah and turned it into some of the most exciting music ever composed)

We have more specific examples of the Sephardic/Mizrachi music of Spain, Northern Africa and the Middle East. But even from these later periods in history, we still have very little idea how their music sounded. Mizrahi music has now become perhaps the most vital force in Israeli contemporary music, as though Sephardic musicians finally have an opportunity to create a permanent literature that speaks for their civilization.


(Layers on layers of music. An original Sephardi melody with Ladino text. With a Mizrahi band reinterpreting it to sound like a contemporary vision of what the music of the Andalusian Period might have sounded like)

Even the final pre-modern wave of great Jewish musicmaking, what we once called ‘Chazzanus’ is a dying art. The Chazzan (or ‘Cantor’) is a singer - often a trained opera singer - who prays to God on behalf of the congregation. He (and sadly in the old days it was always a ‘he’) might lead the congregation in some communal prayers, but he is ultimately no less an intercessor to God than a Catholic Priest. Chazzanut has its roots in very old ideas that are not popular in our time: in the very Catholic idea that people need a spiritual figure to speak to God for them, and in the very ‘Old Europe’ idea that people the ultimate enjoyment is to be found while sitting in respectful silence so an expert singer can sing something far more beautifully than any amateur could.


(Leib Glantz. Would that today’s lyric tenors could sing like this...)


The Chazzan is no longer a wanted figure on both sides of Judaism. Most orthodox Jews view cantors as an unnecessary barrier to God. Most conservative and reformed Jews view cantors as an unnecessary barrier to direct participation in the service. Increasingly, we are seeing the replacement of the chazzan. Orthodox congregants know all the prayers by heart already and simply chant them themselves. Conservative and Reform synagogues would rather have simple melodies that everyone can sing and responsive readings in the language of the congregants. So if that’s what works better for some people, bully for them.


(Shir HaMaalos. Sung by Yossele Rosenblatt, traditionally thought the greatest of all Jewish cantors - even if it’s bereft of vocal fireworks, this is one of the very few recordings that does true justice to the beauty and power of Chazzanus to move audiences. A simply stunning document.)

But I can’t help thinking that it’s one of the most unfortunate developments in modern Jewish history. A great Chazzan is one of the few Jewish ways to obtain an authentic spiritual experience without all the baggage of religious dogma. No one who has heard a great Cantor can ever forget the experience. A nonagenarian relative of mine, musically quite knowledgeable, has sworn to me that most of his greatest musical experiences were in the synagogues of Brooklyn. I believe him.


(The famed cantor Gershon Sirota died in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a recording from 1903. The Unetanah Tokef, a Jewish High Holy Day Prayer. Recorded with Choir as Cantors always should be. If people could hear the recorded performances of Chazanim like this in better sound, it would likely take the entire world by storm.)

Chazzanut is music-making at its very rawest - with all the spontaneity and passion of great opera singing. Unfortunately, it is a greatness that cannot be well captured by recording. Orthodox Judaism strictly forbids recording a synagogue service. And so nearly all the great cantors had to record in a studio. And to make matters worse, the synagogue choir was usually replaced by a church organ (doubtlessly for financial reasons). Most of what we hear on recordings is a pale shadow of the greatness that must have transpired in every week in Shul.


(Somehow, somebody recorded Moshe Koussevitzky live during a service. Not very well...)

It’s yet another of Judaism’s cruel ironies that Jewish culture is moving away from building on a great cultural tradition at the very moment when the world would value it most. But like most things about Judaism, Chazzanut is a culture built to be appreciated by a precious few.

No, the chance for Jewish music to make its mark in an age of religion has passed. Once upon a time, religion was the world’s great force for progress. But progress has long since passed religion. No doubt, what we hear of Josquin and Ockeghem are pale shadows of what music lovers heard 500 years ago. How much more difficult would it be to recapture the musical greatness of a roving sect who only wrote down a small portion of the great music it made?

The vestiges of the old traditions are far too beautiful to not be preserved. New Chazzanim have to learn the secrets that made cantors like Rosenblatt and Leib Glantz so compelling and practice like mad so that other people can also experience what makes Chazzanus great. We have to have more Jewish musicians who learn Arabic instruments and research Sephardic music so that we can make a convincing recreation of what Andalusian Jewish music that sounds like something more than a skeletal outline.


(Pentecostal Music. Better than ever and a total contradiction to what I say in the paragraph below)

Personally, I’ve become more and more convinced that great religious art isn’t possible in an era when religion is a force that moves the world backward rather than forward. It isn’t unique to Jewish music, anybody who’s gone into a Church in the last ten years will know that the quality of Christian music is growing ever duller. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. And anybody who’s heard Pentecostal music knows that great religious music is not dead. Today’s Pentecostals play their old tunes with more musical skill and passion than you’ve long since ceased to find in your average jazz club.

The only chance for Judaism to make a mark on an inclusive world culture is to put the echoes of the old Jewish music into works of art that have a function that isn’t related to religion. It’s stil possible - maybe more possible than ever before - to create as much great Jewish art as it is to create as much great Christian art. But most artists don’t do it. Instead, they’ve liberated their work from the confines of religion. Perhaps they’re right to do so. But religion has produced too much good along with the bad to be banished from the present day.


(Perry Como’s Kol Nidre. Because I can’t help myself.)

Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror

h/t Il Giovine

800 Words: An Ambition for Culture - Part 4

IVa.

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

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

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

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

IVb.

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

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

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

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

IVc.

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

IVd.

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

IVe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Tucker,

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

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

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

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

Thank you for reading my email.

With high hopes you will reply to me,

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

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

Schubertiana: by Tomas Transtromer

Today's Nobel Prize winner talking in English and reading his poem Schubertiana. Bad sound but absolutely beautiful.

“Schubertiana”
by Tomas Transtromer. (Trans. Kalle Raisanen)
I.
In the evening-dark of a place outside New York, a look-out point
where one glance can encompass eight million people’s homes.
The giant city over there is a long, flickering snow-drift, a spiral
galaxy on its side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are slid over the counter, store-fronts
beg with passers-by, a crowd of shoes that leave no traces.
The climbing fire-escapes, the elevator doors gliding shut, behind
locked doors a constant swell of voices.
Sunken bodies half-sleep in the subway cars, the rushing cata-
combs.
I know, also — statistics aside — that right now Schubert is
being played in some room over there and that to someone
those sounds are more important than all those other things.
I I.
The human brain’s endless expanse crumpled into the size of a
fist.
In April, the swallow returns to its last-year’s-nest under the roof
of that very barn in that very parish.
She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks
over two continents, steers toward this dissappearing point in
the land-mass.
And the man who captures the signals of a whole life in some
fairly ordinary chords by five strings
the man who makes a river run through the eye of a needle
is a fat young man from Vienna, called “Little Mushroom” by his
friends, who slept with his glasses on
and got punctually behind his writing desk each morning.
At which the wonderful centipedes of music were set in motion.
1
“Schubertiana” Tomas Transtr¨omer. (Trans. Kalle R¨ais¨anen)
I I I.
The five strings play. I walk home through tepid forests with the
ground springing under me
crawl up like an unborn, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future,
suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts.
IV.
So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day
without sinking through the earth!
Trust the snow clinging to the mountain slope over the village.
Trust the promises of silence and smiles of understanding,
trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden
axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the wheel-axles that carry us on the highway in the middle
of the three-hundred-times magnified bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else.
Trust what? Something else, and they follow us part of the way
there.
As when the lights turn off in the stair-well and the hand follows
— with confidence — the blind handrail that finds its way in
the dark.
V.
We crowd in front of the piano and play four-handed in F-minor,
two coachmen on the same carriage, it looks slightly ridicu-
lous.
Our hands seem to move clanging weights back and forth, as if
we were touching the counter-weights
in attempt at disturbing the terrible balance of the great scales:
joy and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie said, “This music is so heroic,” and it’s true.
But those who glance enviously at the men of action, those who
secretely despise themselves for not being murderers
they don’t recognise themselves here.
And those many who buy and sell people and think that everyone
can be bought, they don’t recognise themselves here.
2

Not their music. The long melody that remains itself through all
changes, sometimes glittering and weak, sometimes rough and
strong, snail-trails and steel wire.
The insistant humming that follows us right now
up the
depths.

800 Words: The American Hero Who Died Yesterday

Steve Jobs was a douche. There, I said it. Anybody who spent two minutes last night on Facebook, Twitter, blogs or anything else internet related can realize exactly how misplaced are the priorities of our generation. To say that is not to deny that he's probably the most influential businessman of the last thirty years. That's not to deny that to lose him so young is an incalculable loss for America, the business world and potentially humanity. That's not even to say that he may be the very last of the great American entrepreneurs. It's just to say that he's a douche. And all the blubbering sentimentality of Apple Cult cannot change two simple truths about Steve Jobs:

1. He really was one of the most fascinating people of our time.
2. That’s mostly because he was not a very good one.

As Dan Aykroyd used to say when he impersonated Bob Dole: you know it, I know it, and the American people know it. Steve Jobs was not simply a nasty person, he wasn’t a good one. It's not because he was an authoritarian boss, it’s not because he viewed every rival company as an enemy to be crushed. All is fair in business and war, and sometimes it takes unpleasant people to create the best results. It’s not even because his highly touted $1 salary was probably a ploy to cheat the US government out of millions of tax dollars.

The reason Steve Jobs was a douche’s douche is because in 1997 he eliminated all corporate philanthropy at Apple. For all the hugeness of Apple’s influence, this is a corporation that has not contributed a cent in nearly fifteen years to advance the cause of bettering humanity. And it is a company worshipped by the very people who would condemn it most loudly if it were any other company in the world.

Whatever bad things one can say about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the charitable work of the Gates Foundation will be an enormous part of both their legacies. The wealth of Gates and Buffett is used to improve the lives of people who truly need it. The wealth of Steve Jobs was used to improve the lives of an upper-middle class that needed nothing more than it already had.

No, Steve Jobs was far from a hero. But a real hero died yesterday. A great man, a true leader and an example to the world of America at its best.

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth once vowed to “Kill Segregation or be killed by it.” It’s probably fair to say that no civil rights leader was put into harm’s way more often. And no Civil Rights leader’s survival seems more miraculous. Even Martin Luther King called him 'The most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.'

In 1956, Fred Shuttlesworth was 34 years old. He was Pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham’s Membership Chairman for the NAACP. When the State of Alabama outlawed membership in the NAACP, Shuttlesworth co-founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). With nothing more than a collection box at meetings to raise money, they used the courts to draw attention to the injustices perpetrated by segregation. When the Birmingham police refused to accede to the ACMHR’s demand to hire black police officers, the ACMHR took to the courts.

In December 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation in nearby Montgomery, Alabama was unconstitutional. The ACMHR announced soon thereafter that it was time to end segregation in Birmingham. On Christmas Day, 1956, unidentified assailants hid sixteen sticks of dynamite under the Shuttlesworth bedroom window. The house was nearly destroyed, but Shuttlesworth was unharmed. When Shuttlesworth came downstairs for the first time, a police officer who was also a Klansman told him “If I were you I’d get out of town as quick as I could.” Shuttlesworth told the policeman to tell the Klan that he wasn’t leaving and “I wasn’t saved to run.” Years later he was quoted in a newspaper as saying: “I believe I was almost at death’s door at least 20 times. But when the first bomb went off, it took all fear from my mind. I knew God was with me like he was with Daniel in the lions’ den. The black people of Birmingham knew that God had saved me to lead the fight.”

The next day, Shuttlesworth announced that the time had come to challenge segregation laws. On that day, December 26th 1956, Shuttlesworth led a group of protestors with the express intent of desegregating Birmingham buses. The police arrested 21 people. When he arrived home, he returned to find that his congregants were taking turns standing guard around his house.

It was the next year that Shuttlesworth joined forces with Martin Luther King and more than half a dozen other eminent pastors to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The motto for how they protest was all-too-simple: “Not one hair of one head of one person shall be harmed.”

In 1957, after Shuttlesworth enrolled his children in an all-white public school, he and his wife were attacked by a mob of Klansmen. The assailants beat him in the streets with chains and brass knuckles while his wife was stabbed. In 1958, a church member spotted a bomb and threw it into the street before it went off.

In 1961, Shuttlesworth became involved in planning the Freedom Rides. The idea behind the Freedom Rides was to board inter-state busses starting in Washington DC and heading south. On every ride, at least one black person would sit in the front, a man and woman looking like an interracial couple would sit in adjoining seats in the middle, and at least one white person would sit in the back. The riders would continue riding uninterrupted until they were able to reach New Orleans, be arrested indefinitely, or be beaten.

Shuttlesworth begged the other planners to consider an alternative less guaranteed to put protestors in harm’s way, but James Farmer and the other planners were set on the plan. Riders were arrested in North Carolina and Mississippi, and a rider named John Lewis (now a congressman) was beaten in South Carolina. But the violence endured in South Carolina was nothing compared to the violence which Lewis and all the other riders encountered in Alabama.

On Mother’s Day, 1961, a group of Klansman met the first of the initial two Freedom Ride buses in Anniston, Alabama. The bus attempted to leave Anniston, but a car blocked its way at every maneuver. Meanwhile, the Klan proceeded to slash the bus’s tires. Undeterred, the bus managed to get out of the bus terminal drove onward; only to be forced off the road by the pursuing Klansmen after a few miles. The Klan, followed by a supportive mob, launched a firebomb into the bus. The mob held the doors firmly shut in an attempt to burn the Riders to death. The Riders managed to break free, but not before incurring vicious beatings from the surrounding mob. It was only warning shots from a highway patrolman that prevented a full lynching.

At a hospital, most of the Riders were refused care. Fearing the angry mob growing outside the hospital, the hospital ordered the Riders to leave immediately at 2 AM. It was Fred Shuttlesworth who organized a convoy of cars to brave the mob and rescue the injured Freedom Riders from a mob that was otherwise certain to finish what it started earlier.

When the second bus reached Anniston (an hour after the firebombing), eight Klansmen boarded the bus, beat the Freedom Riders to semi-consciousness and deposited their bodies in the back of the bus. Undeterred, the bus continued on. When the bus reached Birmingham, the riders were met again by a mob of Klan members - this time armed with pipes, bats and chains. The Birmingham Police Commissioner, Bull Connor, privately assured the Klan that they would have fifteen minutes to carry out the beatings without intervention from the Police, and was true to his word. After the second beating, this group too was refused treatment by hospitals. In response, Shuttlesworth made a decision to use his church as a recovery ward, where Freedom Riders could recuperate from their injuries. The violence continued in Montgomery, but thanks to Shuttlesworth’s efforts the Freedom Riders reached their final destination.

But it was in 1963 that Shuttlesworth became a leader in the Civil Rights Movement perhaps second only to Martin Luther King. It was Shuttlesworth who convinced King to use Birmingham as the place to make the big push for desegregation. Shuttlesworth’s plan was called ‘Project C’ - the ‘C’ standing for ‘Confrontation.’ The mission of ‘Project C’ was all too simple: make Birmingham realize that the financial cost of segregation was so great that the city could no longer sustain it. The way to do that was through publicity.

From long experience, Shuttlesworth realized that Bull Connor and the KKK would respond to any ‘provocation’ with extreme measures. When Birmingham encountered non-violent protests in their streets, Connor would respond with water canons, police dogs and beatings administered to unarmed men, women, and children alike. These images would then be broadcast to the world (along with images of the 16th St. Church Bombing), causing irreparable damage to the city’s reputation and forcing citizens with privileged connections to publicly distance themselves from the brutality of these measures. Since Connor was determined to maintain segregation by any means necessary, it would be impossible to maintain segregation in the face of so much violence.

Nearly as much as Martin Luther King or Lyndon Johnson, it was Fred Shuttlesworth who desegregated America. Steve Jobs was a towering businessman and a very creative thinker. But there was an American hero of vision and drive who made the world a better place died yesterday. And the plaudits he deserves are being stolen.

Addendum: Mrs. Der Miksic points out yet another example of Steve Jobs's utter douchery which I hadn't even heard or thought about in nearly two years. Like every other bad thing about Steve Jobs, it was simply swept under the rug.

Garth and Kenny G.

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

I.


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

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

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


(on Rilke’s The Swan)

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


(Kokoschka: A Face for Our Time)

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

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

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

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


(Gustav Klimt)

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

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

II.


(Stefan Zweig’s final years in Brazil)

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

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


(Egon Schiele)

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

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


(Alban Berg: The Altenberg Lieder)

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

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


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

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

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

III.


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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day:

Der Fersko: I haven't seen Ken Burns'
Old timey booze hour
But I can probably act it out the next time we meet

ET Almanac

"[O]ne lived an easy and carefree life in this old city of Vienna, and our neighbours to the north, the Germans, looked down with something of spite and envy, and something of disdain, on us Danubians who, instead of showing ourselves to be hardworking and serious, and obedient to a rigid order, peacefully enjoyed our lives, eating well, taking pleasure in festivals and the theatre, and moreover making excellent music. Instead of those German “values” that eventually spoiled and envenomed the life of all other peoples, instead of that avidity to dominate others, instead of always being in the lead, in Vienna we liked to chat amicably, took pleasure in family reunions, and let everyone take part, without envy, in a spirit of friendly complaisance, that was perhaps even a little too loose. “Live and let live,” said the old Viennese proverb, a maxim that even today seems more human to me than any categorical imperative. . . ."

Stefan Zweig

Jason Robards & Mick Jagger vs. Klaus Kinski

Fitzcarraldo is quite far from a great movie, but it has some absolutely incredible, primal, mesmerizing scenes in it. This brief scene, with Klaus Kinski, has got to be one of the most charismatic, animalistic pieces of acting on screen. I'm absolutely sure that I'd have felt the same way if the subject were pickup sticks instead of opera. And to think that Werner Herzog tried to make this material into a typical Hollywood ethnic schlock. Now THAT would have been terrible, might I present as evidence just the first 25 seconds of this video. Achen Vey.

Note:

As I am currently broadcasting from State College, PA. Blogging has ceased for the time being. We shall resume our regularly scheduled blogging efforts either tomorrow late in the PM or early Monday in the AM.

800 Words: Seriously Unserious Judaism

It’s Rosh Hashana. The last two days have been spent, as they have for the last twenty-eight years, in shul. It is shul for us, not synagogue or temple. It’s a fifteen minute walk from our parking place on Old Forest Drive to the main sanctuary of our shul in Pikesville, Maryland (which shall remain nameless). Upon our arrival, my father, brothers, and I descend to take our seats with my uncle Harold and his sons in the second row of the men’s side. Meanwhile, my mother and my grandmother must walk the length of our cathedral-size sanctuary to meet my aunt Robin and female cousins in the third row of the women’s side. To reach our seats, we each must pass through a cast of thousands. Some of this cast we know very well, some of them we know not at all, some of them we only know from having seen them every year at the High Holidays. I exchange friendly greetings with people whom I’ve never met outside of this building. I see faces so familiar that I can spot new wrinkles on their faces: faces that I’ve seen every year of my life, though never anywhere else but shul. Sometimes these faces, usually the older ones, disappear. Sometimes new, younger faces appear next to them.

If we were Christian, this service would seem like something right out of the Russian Orthodox Church or Pre-Vatican II. Our (nameless) cantor, brother-in-law to a famous Israeli singer and who could easily be a Verdi Baritone himself, stands at the front of the stage (or bimah) with his back to the congregants so that he may wail four hours worth of obscure Hebrew prayers in minor keys while accompanied by a scarcely less operatic sounding male choir. Occasionally, the awe and dread are interrupted by more upbeat Chasidic melodies. But this cantor - and his predecessor even moreso - sets a mood for religion that always involves awe and dread. If you ask me, if you can’t picture Dracula appearing in the middle of the service, it’s not religion.

Our shul is, so I hear, the largest Orthodox Synagogue in America. Perhaps it has been for half a century. During the High Holidays, it hosts two main services, an even more orthodox service, a service for teenagers, and services for every age-group of children. Among its congregants are real estate tycoons, construction magnates, some of Baltimore’s most prominent doctors and lawyers, the majority of the state delegates from our district in the last forty years, and a United States Senator. There are also some blue collar types - contrary to popular belief, blue-collar Jews do exist and occasionally they’re the most devout people in the Shul. It is often repeated, there are two power centers without which nothing gets done at our shul: the millionaires and the minyanaires (if you don’t know what a minyan is, ask a Jew).

How does it manage to keep up this level of success for so long? The answer is all too simple:

Nobody cares.

There are few things in life as unattractive as people who insist that others act as though they believe in what they do. Everything about our shul is a hypocrisy, but it’s a benevolent one that grows more necessary with every year. The High Holiday services at our shul are easily the longest in Baltimore. Most shuls get out on Rosh Hashana by noon, ours is lucky to get out by 1:15. The reason they can afford to keep us that long? Because everybody talks right through the service.

There are Reform Jewish services in Baltimore that are far closer to the spirit of true religious orthodoxy than at our shul. Except for a mechitza (which in our case means a six-foot transparent glass wall which technically separates the men from the women), there is barely a pretense to real orthodoxy. The men wear $500 suits to shul, you’re as likely to hear talk about the Orioles or the particulars of a business deal discussed as to hear the cantor clearly. The women are decked out with their finest pearls, the younger ones in incredibly revealing dresses. The Rabbi’s sermons are loaded with constant appeals for money and the Rabbi makes sure to pepper the service with entertaining asides. And I suppose that’s the real reason for our shul’s hold over people: the utter charisma of the Rabbi, whom it would not surprise me to learn was voted the most charismatic in America.

Our Rabbi (who shall also remain nameless) is a spiritual leader to the manner born. While he speaks with a Brooklyn accent on steroids, he is totally bereft of the sing-song Rabbiisms that turn most of us off from religion. From my earliest age, this Rabbi’s sermons have spoiled me for every other Rabbi I’ve ever heard. His secret? He never talks about religion.

Don’t get me wrong, he does. But unlike so many clergy, he realizes that religion alone cannot answer people’s spiritual needs, and theology is always of secondary importance to real human concerns. The sermons are about the World, about community, about family, about ethical values, about doubt, about what it means to be human. I can’t think of how many times I have caught a lump in my throat from his sermons, only to look down the row and find that tears are streaming from everyone else too. Short perhaps of Barack Obama, you will search in vain for a contemporary politician who speaks with such eloquence. I have learned more from his sermons about both ethics and the craft of writing than I ever did in any classroom. Yes, he’s too supportive of any Israeli policy for my taste. He’s too unforgiving of intermarriage. He’s too critical of ethical lapses in politicians. He’s clearly a tad vain. But I don’t care. He is my Rabbi, and until he retires he always will be.

In recent years, it’s become increasingly apparent that this shul is the center of Jewish life in Baltimore. It is the one place in Baltimore which observes all the traditional forms of orthodoxy and still tolerates all deviations from orthodox belief among its members. For all the orthodox traditions, the shul tells its congregants that you don’t have to observe Judaism in a traditional way to observe the values which Judaism espouses: family, community, intellectual engagement, the preservation of history, the importance of law, the necessity of ethics. And if you don’t particularly believe in those values, well...that’s ok too.

A place like our shul is more necessary now than at any point in American Jewish History. Like everything else in America, the center of Jewish life is falling apart. Today’s world grows ever more polarized, and Jews are increasingly forced to choose between orthodoxy, reformation or assimilation. In a generation or two, Secular Judaism could sound like a complete oxymoron. It’s all too apparent that the days of Secular Judaism in America are numbered.

For what it’s worth, I very much support the right of people to marry outside the Jewish faith without becoming ostracized by their communities, as still happens all too often in America. But the rate of intermarriage among Jews now stands at 1 in every 2 marriages involving Jews. And of those couples in which the spouse does not convert, only 4% choose to raise their children as Jewish. A Jewish culture without orthodoxy simply cannot sustain itself in such an environment. Even if one counts all the spouses of all intermarried Jews as part of the total American-Jewish population, the number of Jews in America can be no larger than 6.7 million.

The fertility rates speak for themselves. The birth rate in secular Jewish households is 1.29 children. In Reform Jewish households it is 1.36 children. In Conservative Jewish households it is 1.4 children. In Modern Orthodox Jewish households it is 3.39 children. In Orthodox Jewish households it is 6.72 children. As has happened in every Jewish diaspora since the Babylonian era, acceptance can only last for so long. Eventually, the Jewish presence of every liberal civilization becomes such an accepted part of the culture’s fabric that Jews can marry into non-Jewish families without stigma. When they do, the liberal faction of the Jewish community dwindles inevitably to nothing. All that is left is a community of orthodox Jews whose customs put them utterly at odds with the Gentile majority. All that prevents such a community from being ostracized, ghettoized, imprisoned or slaughtered is the presence of a government liberal enough to refuse to demonize Jews for their differences - a presence that can never be guaranteed. At the moment, the ultra-Orthodox are darlings of the Republican Party, feted as the true guarantors of Israel’s continued existence; which Evangelicals view as absolutely necessary to presage the Second Coming of Christ. But the day may come when the Tea Party or the Evangelical Right asks Orthodox Jews to turn on Reformed Jews for being so unsupportive of their agenda. It wouldn't happen for a while, but the day might come. I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that Orthodox Jews would never do anything dishonorable to other Jews. If Judaism in America ever turns to such dire straits, the final bell will toll when Orthodox Jews opt for principle over convenience, as they always have throughout history's darkest chapters.

I do not believe in Judaism, but I believe in being Jewish. For me, the only importance of religion is that the option is always there. Even if you don’t believe in religion, there is enormous comfort in knowing that your family is always there for you. Not just your nuclear family, but the religious family from whence you come - ready to receive you with open arms if you ever decide to devote yourself to it. I don’t ever want to be forced to decide between the Jewish world and the secular world, because I can’t imagine my life without either option. But I worry that one day I, or my children, will not have that choice. And that frightens me.