When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Something worth noting that I think a lot of readers don't realize. In fifteen years of covering Europe between the wars, George Orwell rarely wrote about Hitler, fascism, Mussolini. He obviously wrote about Franco, but Franco was different than the rest of them. He took it as a given that what was evil about fascism was so obvious that it needed no comment - fascists were every person you ever met who is lazy, mean, incompetent, they deserve no comment. Karl Kraus only said of Hitler that about him no thoughts occurred at all. The same holds true of Trump and Putin and Bolsonaro - what's there to say about them? They're evil, they lust for power and they like it when lots of people in their countries die because it makes them feel more powerful.

Orwell wrote so much about Communism and Socialism as it was practiced by everyone but him because what was wrong with it was not obvious to millions of people who claimed to know better, who claimed to be enlightened, who claimed that a better world was just around the bend so long as we curtail this or that, and had all the pathologies of everybody they claimed to hate.

The elderly that were adults during the 1930s are not even cold in the ground yet, but like clockwork, dogmatic leftism has made its presence known and clearly announced it's intention to stick around for the rest of our lifetimes. Let's make no mistake here: you may be my friends, but on an intellectual level, you've announced over and over again that we're opponents, and I'm not sure I trust your friendship anymore, and I'm certainly not sure you ever trusted mine.

The response to that letter proves everything the letter alleged is right on the money. People like you will only get more powerful as the decades wear on. We are now potentially at the beginning of a depression as extreme as The Great Depression and potentially as long lasting as The Long Depression of 1873-1896. Unemployment may go back to normal levels soon, it may also be at 30% for a generation. The temptation to believe people like Jeremy Corbyn and others well to the left of Bernie Sanders will probably only grow as we get closer and closer to the Global Warming rubicon. The deliberate incompetence of the Right will only make the undoable more and more and more likely. In a quarter-century, I expect that the children of those who say that we need safe spaces from ideas will convince themselves that we need safe spaces from certain people just as the people do whom they so strenuously oppose. The exact opposite ideas, the exact same pathologies.

It was not a system which brought us to this point, and every time some movement comes along promising systemic changes, the only change is that the system changes for the worse, and the true believers inevitably say 'it didn't have to be this way' 'the leaders betrayed the movement.'

And that's exactly the point. Leaders ALWAYS betray the movement. The very ideals of every movement makes it all the easier for demagogues to rise to the top. 'The System' never changes. The problem is never the system, the problem is if the people running the system are greedy and evil. We got to this point in history because of greedy, lazy, evil Republicans and moderates who cared more about their profit margins than about the future. Somebody, some group, will always be in power, and we're dependent on the checks and balances of regulation to keep their power from expanding exponentially. Republicans and moderate democrats took the regulations off American life, and now the system is spinning out of control. We will probably not see the system operating efficiently again in our lifetimes.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Multiple friends and family have been telling me for a while that thinking like this is apocalyptic, and that I indulge in it all too frequently. I don't think anything I've said is particularly apocalyptic. It's just repeating the facts of the trials every civilization in history has undergone until now, and it would be foolish to think us exempt. I wouldn't even say that the coming trials are going to be as bad as in this article. But I do believe civil institutions will be tested on an unprecedented scale in our generation, and unprecedented in American history, very much including in the Civil War. You only have a good future if you provide for one, and we obviously haven't. All the concerns of today: medicare for all, social security reform, police reform, robust national defense, more equitable representation, even democracy itself, what does all that mean when the planet regularly washes away millions of people in a day?

Importantitis Part 23235634679586720394857....

I have within me a gigantic idea of historical megafiction that takes in the entirety of Jewish History. I'd hoped that by now I'd have used the last four months to take a serious crack at getting it done. But every time I start I have trouble getting out of first gear. Every attempt so far had good nuggets amid a bunch of shit.

I've made stabs at beginning it chronologically: in which Abraham, whom the Bible clearly paints as something like a schizophrenic, kills Isaac rather than stopping from killing him at the last moment. In this version, the 103 year old Sarah would die immediately upon hearing the news and Abraham would have a stroke rendering him very confused. Eliezer, fearing that the Hebrew tribe would break into civil war, abducts Abraham in the middle of the night and takes him to Ur, where Ishmael and Hagar have set up house with Beulah and Laban. When he gets there, Eliezer convinces Abraham that Hagar is Sarah Ishmael is Isaac, and brings them all back to Chevron, where Ishmael adopts the name of Isaac and Eliezer convinces Abraham that Ishmael is in fact Isaac, whom he never killed. And while the tribe knows that something foul is afoot, the succession is provided for, the Hebrew tribe stays afloat, and agrees to operate as though the lie was truth.

I also tried starting it from the end and working backwards, where a slightly crazy guy named AC Charlap who seems like someone you all know starts experiencing visions of all sorts of events through Jewish history as though he's personally present at them.

I even tried cutting it up and starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, where a family of twelve sons lives in a shtetl and the money dries up, so they have to disperse all around the globe and experience all the Jewish vicissitudes of the 20th century.

The problem is that it's much much too big. It has 'Great Jewish American Novel' written all over it, and nothing is more guaranteed to be terrible than something which consciously tries to be great. Every time I have a great idea for it, I have ten more ideas that are clearly shit, and I have no idea how to filter the ideas' flow into anything that I would want to read, let alone anybody else.

I am so fucking sick of writing about politics, caring about politics, hearing other people care loudly about politics, hearing myself respond to it, convincing myself that I have any idea what is right and what is wrong, convincing myself or convincing others that any concern of today matters any more than the concern of yesterday which was completely unrelated to the concern of the day before. I am so sick of moral absolutes, my own as well as others, keeping up the pretense that anything that was true about this era is not what was true about other eras. It's the same types of people I knew who when they were teenagers thought politics was complete bullshit are now the people who think politics are the absolute be all and end all of living, and the issues of the present are so important that nothing can wait for the future.

There is no such thing as the present. The present in which I start this sentence is a different time than the present in which I complete this sentence. There is only the past and the future, everything that's already happened, and everything which is going to happen. Even the act of doing things themselves can be cut up into a million parts of things we've already done and things we have yet to do.

The only thing that's truly interesting about it is understanding why people believe what they believe. The world is complex enough that most things we believe, even the things we're experts about, are completely wrong, so even or perhaps especially if you disagree with their points of view, understanding why people believe what they believe is the most interesting thing about politics, about religion, about philosophy and life, about people, about fiction and art, maybe even about science.

And those are the stories I want to tell, but how?.......

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

That letter about cancel culture was a good idea, not a bad one. The point of it is not that it's a pity that celebrities who misbehave have it difficult for five or ten years. They're generally getting what they deserve so who cares? But what is served when people no longer have permission to share their thoughts out loud? The only other option is that the really insidious thoughts go back underground, and we no longer know who's secretly harboring thoughts we don't like. It's one thing when people reveal themselves to be white supremacists or any other true form of bigot, they absolutely should be shunned, and the more inviolable freedom of speech can be maintained, the easier it will be to find out who they are. But thought is a process of trial, and trial usually means many errors along the way. Shout and shame as much as you like for people whom you disagree with, make their lives miserable, but if you get rid of their power and increase your own, someone else will eventually do the same to you.

It's easy for someone like me to think out loud, I'm obviously a verbal diarrheist who has very little to lose, but when people who have real influence become too circumspect about expressing unpopular thoughts for fear of losing their jobs, then the only people who will be promoted in all those institutions are people who hew the orthodox line, and when that happens, those institutions decay because they can never develop new ideas and they can't evolve with the times - and that's true whether it's the Democratic party or the Democratic Socialists of America, and the institutions which replace them in the discourse may very well be right wing institutions rather than left-wing ones. You may not think political correctness exists, but Donald Trump would never have been so much as a candidate let alone a President without it. The more we clamp down on heterodox thought, the more the right wing can exploit it for much much more demagogical presidential candidates. We now see the momentum for Tucker Carlson to be the next generation of anti-PC candidate. He's everything Trump is, but smart. Everything Trump wanted to do, Tucker Carlson can do.

So you may think this is what you want, but believe me, its not. Every attempt to create impossible standards of order that humans can't live up to can only create more chaos. The proof is Trump, just as the proof was once a hundred other governments that got more and more right wing as their countries' left wings became more and more impossible in the standards of their demands.

What To Do About The Founding Fathers?

I was gonna keep my big mouth shut this year on July 4th, especially because things are so important right now. But the left is absolutely correct in one way: symbols do matter. Where they're wrong is that symbols shouldn't matter: symbols are bullshit, a way to convince lazy people who don't do their own homework that a certain pre-programmed set of opinions is true. And by giving up Jefferson and Washington without even so much as a fight to reclaim them for the good they did, the Left is surrendering two of the very most powerful symbols in American history that will be the exclusive property for the American Right to use and win the lazy minds of moderates.

Getting involved in world affairs is a big enough undertaking that there has never been such a thing as an historical figure who kept his nose clean, even by the standards of ordinary people. It's not just that you do things on the job: war, murder, theft, bribery, blackmail, humiliation of underlings, that ordinary people never have a chance to do, it's that you have to have the temperament that a life full of that kind of dirt appeals to you.

We need to teach and explain exactly what Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Madison did and why they are vastly more complicated than we were ever taught: just as Jews need you all to explain the antisemitism of Mohammed and Luther and the Vatican and even FDR - who never opened a single border to Hitler's refugees and could have stopped Auschwitz with a single bomb to a train track. The only option left is to explain what the Founders did, everything - bad and good, constructive and evil.

But no matter what good we do in our own lives, future generations will judge us and our leaders just as harshly: for being Nazis to animals - imprisoning and killing billions every year for our own gastronomic enjoyment, for stinting on recycling and letting the planet decline into ruin, for willingly killing off a million species, for potentially drowning hundreds of millions near the coasts when sea level rises, for potentially starving hundreds of millions near the equator when temperatures rise and wetland turns into desert, for enabling totalitarian control of whole continents because we wouldn't boycott social media before it's too late, for writing our woke slogans on phones that were made by wage slaves in East Asia.

Do we deserve it? Probably somewhat, we're all complicated, the bad exists along with the good, and what we think of as virtuous deeds or things we do without a second thought may damn every one of our legacies. It's all part of the whole person, all part of the good and the bad impact, part of the stories told about us to the future.

But if we simplify Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Madison to the equal extent to which they've been simplifed so far, the vast majority of people will believe the explanation that is most flattering to themselves, and in the land of the USA, the vast majority will always choose to believe these people are heroes before they accept that they're uncomplicated villains.

Evan's Snobby Pop Culture Guide:

Evan's Snobby Pop Culture Guide:

**1/2 (high concept production with value but less than meets the eyes and ears): Linn Manuel Miranda, Aaron Sorkin, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Led Zepplin, Tim Burton, Gone With the Wind, Joss Whedon, Pink Floyd, Oliver Stone, Lost, CB DeMille, Downton Abbey, Glee, DW Griffith, Les Mis, The Doors, Wicked, Animaniacs, Prog Rock (sorry Gary...), Brian de Palma, Lord of the Rings, Grateful Dead, Rick and Morty, Stanley Kramer, Gipsy Kings, John Huston, 12 Angry Men,

*** (a perfect product that does what it does): Marvel and DC, Madonna, MJ, Three Stooges, Brill Building, Saturday Night Live, John Ford/Westerns, Black Sabbath, Lieber&Stoller, Buddy Holly, Milton Berle, Kanye, Cowboy Bebop, Journey, James Bond, K-Pop, Michael Mann, Elvis Presley, Grease, Michael Crichton, Queen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Phil Spector, Homestar Runner, Dave Barry, Fawlty Towers, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Eurovision

***1/2 (aspires to more, sometimes gets there): Stones, Star Trek, Stewart&Colbert, Jay Z, Judd Apatow, Norman Lear, Mad Magazine, Breaking Bad, Quentin Tarantino, David Bowie, Punk, Game of Thrones, Stephen King, Prairie Home Companion, Monty Python, Coen Brothers, American Horror Story, Miyazaki, Frank Capra, Clint Eastwood/Spaghetti Westerns, Ridley Scott, Tom Wolfe, Frank Miller, Kendrick Lamar, Patsy Cline, Pete Seeger, James Michener, Battlestar Galactica, Velvet Underground, Stieg Larsson, Esquivel, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Neil Simon, Community, Christopher Nolan, PT Anderson, Van Morrison, Elmore Leonard, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, Popol Vuh, Kurt Vonnegut, X-Men, Chronicles of Narnia, Jerry Lewis, late David Lean, Key and Peele,

**** (perfect pop culture): Beach Boys, South Park, Marx Brothers, David Letterman, Mel Brooks, Prince, I Love Lucy, The Far Side, Looney Tunes, Mitch Hedburg, Stevie Wonder, Sid Caesar, Powerpuff Girls, Laurel & Hardy, Motown, Prince, Charlie Chaplin, Batman the Animated Series, Big Mouth, Johnny Carson, Benny Goodman, Carol Burnett Show, Django Reinhardt, The Who, Moms Mabley, Ella Fitzgerald, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Broad City, Buster Keaton, Beavis & Butthead, Screwball Comedy, Tina Fey, Robert Zemeckis, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Count Basie, Agatha Christie, Edward Gorey, AC/DC, Conan O'Brien, Cheers (post-Diane era), Spongebob Squarepants, Parry Gripp, Funk, Rogers & Hammerstein, The Nutty Professor, Joan Rivers, Run Lola Run, Richard James, Goran Bregovic, The Big Lebowski, Superman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Preston Sturges, Abba,

****1/2 (art): Bob Dylan, Twilight Zone, Dave Chapelle, Aretha Franklin, Hank Williams, Maus, Leonard Cohen, The Searchers, Public Enemy, Alan Moore, Dick Cavett, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, The Wire, Janis Joplin, American Crime Story, Joanie Mitchell, George Jones, Black Mirror, Billy Wilder, Freaks, Film Noir, The Manchurian Candidate, Apocalypse Now, Miles Davis, Parasite, Cab Calloway, George Carlin, Blazing Saddles, Monty Python movies, Stanley Kubrick (begrudgingly), Batman, Philip K. Dick, Robert Johnson, Will Eisner, Nick Cave, Jimmy Hendrix, Jordan Peele, Thelonious Monk, Carousel, David Fincher, Jimmy Rogers, Neil Young, Charles Mingus, John Lee Hooker, Dave Brubeck, Moonlight, Robert Smigel, Brian Eno, Paul Schrader, Chinatown, Springsteen, Roseanne (first run...), Bjork, David Byrne, Irving Berlin, Stephen Soderbergh, Classic Disney, Sonic Youth, Edith Piaf, Sunrise, Don Bluth, Don Hertzfeldt, Norm MacDonald, Buster Keaton, Ray Bradbury, Wes Anderson, Sandra Bernhardt, Frank Zappa, Ali Farka Toure, Radiohead, Pere Ubu, Twelve Years a Slave, Sufjan Stevens, Charlie Parker, Coal Miner's Daughter, The British Office, Nine Inch Nails, Sam Peckinpah, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python: Upper Class Twit of the Year & Argument & Silly Walks & Lumberjack Song & Spam & Spanish Inquisition & Fish Slapping Dance & Gangs of Old Women & Revolutionary War Re-enactment & Dead Parrot,

****3/4 (great art): Louis Armstrong Hot Five, Otis Redding, Duck Soup, Seinfeld, Richard Pryor, The Wiz, Gershwin, Amadeus, Scorsese, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, The Sopranos, Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Woo... (name redacted), Pet Sounds, Stranger Things, American Graffiti, Greg Daniels, Lena Dunham (fuck you), Modern Disney, Alfonso Cuaron, Fela Kuti, M*A*S*H, Glow, Christopher Guest movies, Jelly Roll Morton, Raymond Scott, Monty Python: Life of Brian and Meaning of Life ,Dr. Seuss, Bob's Burgers, Woodie Gurthrie, King of the Hill, Astor Piazzola, Smokey Robinson, Bonnie and Clyde, The Critic, Bill Monroe, Jerome Kern, Bill Evans, James Br... (name redacted), Jelly Roll Morton, Fargo, Margaret Cho, Marvin Gaye, David Lynch, Kander & Ebb, Earle Scruggs, Roald Dahl, I Claudius, Celia Cruz, Bubbles' Redemption Arc in The Wire, Dolly Parton, Fiddler on the Roof, Sing Sing Sing and King Porter Stomp, Casablanca, Chuck Berry, Tito Puente, Howard Hawks, Robert Johnson, Cole Porter, Derek and the Dominos, The Music Man, Black Panther, Hello Dolly, Cheers (the Diane era), Amadou & Mariam, Flanders & Swann, Orson Welles, A Fish Called Wanda, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Daria, Noel Coward, Jason Reitman, Bill Bryson, Veep, Patton Oswalt, Babylon Berlin, Buena Vista Social Club, Um Khulthum, Art Tatum, Abdullah Ibrahim, The Right Stuff, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Robert Crumb, Ang Lee, Al Green, A Night in Tunisia, Rogers & Hart, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Dance of the Hours in Fantasia, Judy Garland, early David Lean, The Princess Bride, Levinson's Baltimore Series, 

***** (hits something transcendent): Sondheim, Simpsons, Beatles, Spielberg (yes), Mad Men, Johnny Cash, The Godfather, The Muppets and Sesame Street, Peanuts, Jerome Kern, Tom Waits, Richard Linklater, Calvin & Hobbes, Frank Sinatra (really), Randy Newman (shut the fuck up I don't want to hear it), Spike Lee, Six Feet Under, Ed Sullivan, Ernst Lubitsch, Pixar (begrudgingly), W. C. Handy, Robert Altman, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, Alison Bechdel, Shel Silverstein, James L. Brooks, Freaks and Geeks, Charlotte's Web, Alexander Payne, Maurice Sendak, Lo... (name redacted), Jerome Robbins, Jacques Brel, Strange Fruit, Kurt Weill, Robin Williams standup, Bojack Horseman, The Producers, The Social Network, Charlotte's Web, Charlie Chaplin, Chicago (the musical), Heaven from Top Hat - Pick Yourself Up (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers), Thunder Road, Nightmare by Artie Shaw, Singin' in the Rain, What's Goin' On, White Christmas, Fan Dance in The King and I, Radio Days, Bonnie and Clyde's assassination, Astaire and Gene Kelly's duet in Ziegfeld Follies, Be Our Guest, Under the Sea, Planetarium in Rebel Without a Cause,

*****1/2 (unnameable): Citizen Kane, Pan's Labyrinth, Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz, Into the Woods, West Side Story, Company, Rose's Turn, Sweeney Todd's epiphany, the painting sings in Sunday in the Park With George, Bobby sings Being Alive in Company, Homer jumps Springfield Gorge, Homer and the Toaster Oven, Sideshow Bob and the Rakes, Ned Flander's breakdown in Hurricaine Neddy, the end of Lisa on Ice, Mr. Burns and Germs, Homer the Heretic, El Viage Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer, The Suitcase, The Other Woman, My Old Kentucky Home (three Mad Men episodes), Day in the Life, Tomorrow Never Knows, Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, The Emerald City and the flying monkey attack in The Wizard of Oz, last reel of Close Encounters & ET, bell ringing in Lincoln, introduction of survivors in Schindler's List, Opening of Saving Private Ryan, Jungleland (Springsteen), The Giving Tree, Muppets sing Inchworm with Charles Aznavour - Turn the World Around with Harry Belafonte - Just One Person with Bernadette Peters, Sesame Street - Goodbye Mr. Hooper, I Don't Want to Live on The Moon, What's The Name of That Song, Sing a Song, It's Not Easy Being Green, If Moon was Cookie Old Man River (Showboat), One For My Baby and My Funny Valentine (Sinatra), Baby What'd I Say and Busted (Ray Charles), the hospital scene in Godfather I and the assassination of Don Fanucchi in Godfather II, Nick playing Spirit of the Radio in Freaks and Geeks, Jacques Brel singing Les Desesperes, last twenty minutes of Come on Feel the Illinoise (Sufjan Stevens), The Dance at the Gym and The Balcony Scene in West Side Story, Steam Heat from Pajama Game and To Life from Fiddler on the Roof, Fred Astaire - drum scene in Damsel in Distress - Hat Rack Dance - Dem Bones (last w/Cyd Charisse), Gene Kelly roller skate dance in It's Always Fair Weather, Where The Wild Things Are, Satchmo's 1947 Symphony Hall Concert, I've Been Loving You Too Long, Seinfeld - George's Marine Biologist monologue - the trip to Susan's cabin - the Kavorka - the Junior Mint, Radio Raheem sequence in Do The Right Thing, The Assassination and the Dance Sequence in Malcolm X, Louis CK's daughter asks 'why', Sam and Diane fight, King Heroin (James Brown), Kyle McLachlan hides from Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, Gene Kelly doing Make'em Laugh, Reminiscing in Tempo & Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue & Come Sunday (all Ellington), the Psalm in Love Supreme, Roma - the father leaving - the scene in the water - the riot/pregnancy sequence, the drinking scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien, the tracking shots in Children of Men, Christopher's intervention and Carmela leaving Tony in The Sopranos, the ending of Six Feet Under, the band plays in The Music Man, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell's opening scene in His Girl Friday, the recovery and reconciliation in Sunrise, the opening of UP, the dance in space of WALL-E, the shower scene and climax of Psycho, Judy bathed in green light in Vertigo, Grace Kelly in Raymond Burr's apartment in Rear Window, the jail scene in Dumbo, Bambi's mother's death and the fire scene, the tracking shot and Tommy getting made in Goodfellas, the 'did you fuck my wife' sequence in Raging Bull, the TV drop and Travis Bickle's training sequence in Taxi Driver, the animation in Hugo, the long farewell in Before Sunrise, the hazing in Dazed and Confused, Bill Evans playing Peace Piece, Springtime for Hitler, opening and the Planetarium scene in Manhattan, Martin Landau discovering Angelica Houston in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the assassination attempts in Babylon Berlin and Nashville, the traffic jam in Nashville, Hellhound on My Trail (Robert Johnson), I'm So Lonesome (Hank Williams), Opening of The Lion King, Robin Williams in Aladdin,

********** (Cats): Cats

'The Speech'

So I suppose my name is Evan Tucker: I'm 38 and looked exactly like this at 18, I'm a Baltimorean, extremely Jewish, a semi-professional musician, semi-violinist, semi-singer, semi-composer, and semi-sane. This is my third NMG. I completely stumbled upon the New Music Gathering in Baltimore on the very week I'd resolved to begin my musical life anew as an adult composer. It was, perhaps, as we say in Judaism, Bashert, a predestined meeting. And as an icebreaker to prepare you all for the level of honesty in this talk please let me confide in you that while it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I snuck into that whole gathering with a Johns Hopkins ID I hadn't thrown out ten years after I was a student there and still owe the NMG money for my participation that weekend, which I am happy to contribute whatever I owe as absolutely soon as this speech is over if related parties provide the venmo or paypal account.

For better or worse, if one can consider that humor then that's the extent I have to bestow. Because I come before you with open arms as both a complete outsider to your world and a complete insider to the world of classical music, and must beg your indulgence for a plea I entreat you born of decades of profound desperation. Please don't think of this plea as registered on my own behalf, but on behalf of the thousands of musicians over the generations, represented in every demographic, who should have been at gatherings like this yet were prevented by neurological conditions. I am most tremendously grateful for the existence of New Music Gathering, because had I not known of it, I doubt any but two or three other composers would ever have known that I exist. And in order to tell you why, I'm afraid I must relate to you some of the circumstances of my life, circumstances which I always seem to be telling as a way to explain what people are dealing with when they deal with me, because whenever I conceal them, that way disaster inevitably lies, but please try to believe me that however often, I have never, ever spoken these tales with anything but the greatest reluctance, and have been utterly exhausted of re-relating some version of this story for thirty years now. 

I am one of you, I am a composer and musician, and all I have ever wanted from my life is the ability to be a practicing musician, because as Clergy is called to serve god, so too was I called to serve music. Those who have achieved little can afford to be immodest far more than those who have many achievements to parade, so please forgive anything here which sounds pathetically boastful. Another famous Jewish saying is "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and to this day I have little answer to that question.

I don't know if I would have qualified as a prodigy, but there was no question that music chose me at the earliest possible age rather than my choosing it. At two or three, I was discovered to have perfect pitch, and to this day can identify every note of a hexachord and exactly which note is missing in any eleven note chord. At four or six I was harmonizing songs on the piano without a single lesson, by eight or nine were I asked I could probably write out dozens of orchestral scores in piano reduction, and to this day I could probably write out a reasonably decent facsimile of a vast plurality of the standard classical repertoire in full score, and quite a bit of early music and contemporary music too. From the earliest age I was reading generally at a comprehension past all but the highest achieving high school students and hold in my memory vast swathes of text, and an historical database of dates, places, and names that come to me with instant neurological availability, I've lost a trivia game twice in my adult life - it's not even fun. And through all this learning, I was barely ever directed. I discovered it all on the engine my own curiosity.

And yet I am utterly not one of you, and never could be. Most people at this gathering probably have a veritable infantry of music degrees and grants and awards, while I have a musical degree from a university whose course offerings, at least at the time, were paltry enough that when it came time to apply for a masters or doctorate in composition, I was told by university after university that my educational background rendered continued education impossible unless I began my musical education anew from the very first term of a bachelor's degree, a musical degree which itself I obtained because I was mostly left to my own devices. While my teachers always seemed sorely tempted to tell my battery of issues to shove it, I think they did on some level realize they were dealing with a savant who was either learning everything on his own or unable to learn anything at all. At the end of four years I held a composition recital in which twenty-six musicians took part, along with a forty-five minute pre-concert lecture and demos on both my compositions and on music history, and for the extra effort to which yet another organizational maelstrom almost killed me, I gratefully received five honors credits. 

Because, you see, any musico-harmonic terminology which I successfully learned, I learned as a very small child, and any technical terms thereafter of harmony, form, and counterpoint were somehow beyond my capacity for comprehension, and I therefore would have been, and very much was, laughed out of audition for any serious music program. It took me two years to learn any music software, and to this day I can still barely use it for anything but the most basic notation. And as for the organization required to mount performances of my own music - how possible is that for a guy who could not learn to tie his shoes until he was ten years old, who has not learned any math past the algebra he also apparently mastered when he was three, who would certainly have failed out of both high school and middle school but for full-time parental help, and who now has the capacity at thirty-eight for organization, time management, and spatial reasoning, which is roughly at the developmental stage of a small child. So too was learning and comprehending music as other musicians understand it impossible, the comprehension of which my own personal musical encyclopedia should have rendered irrelevant to any music program who ever took five minutes to realize that they were dealing with an incompetent of a completely unique variety. 

I have come to believe over the years that surely there must a God, because only a supernatural force could render tortures so exquisite. I, the person who once apparently was Evan Tucker, told from first consciousness that he was some kind of freakish changeling whose intelligence could change the curvature of walls, am in fact a person with the most profound mental impairments and disabilities. Thirty-one years ago, I was told I was the smartest person anyone had ever met. Thirty years ago, I was told I was in fact the dumbest, and would be so for the rest of my life. A sentence to life imprisonment within a brain of wide and deep comprehension and no ability to demonstrate that comprehension within any classroom or work setting as it has yet ever been structured. I spent a year studying politics at Johns Hopkins, and got myself accepting by sneaking in through a tiny back door that I was only made aware of due to luck, and the stress of organizing course work put fifty pounds on me and caused a chain reaction that landed me a stay in a psychiatric hospital.

A few years ago I taught music history at an adult education program. On the last day of class a student was was literally so moved that she cried, a second told me what he learned in my class had routinely become his family discussions, a third told me that one day I would be world famous. But due to administrators wanting not to deal with my organizational requirements, I was only offered six weeks of teaching for the next year and the administration excused themselves by telling me my classroom performance was sub-par.

It is not my obligation, nor have I time or desire to tell decades worth of tales of daily humiliation, bullying, and guidance quackery. But they surely happened on virtually every day of my late childhood, the entirety of my adolescence, and all too many days of my adulthood. 

But of course, from those learning disabilities grew emotional disorders that only grew more profound as the years wore into decades. In my early teen years, the most severe emotional discombobulations, the details of which I will spare you, and in my late teen years the most severe psychotic delusions, the details of which I will spare myself. But for the past three decades, I have looked ten years past my actual age, three decades of daily battles with severe depression anxiety and psychosis can do that to anyone, so too does medication that at times causes one to be a hundred pounds overweight, as does a late Picasso's worth of unpreventable facial tics, a Heifetz worth of hand tremors, a Sandy's worth of hyperventilation, all provoked by anxiety which comes without warning, along with recurrent neurological psychosis, and the daily chest pain and accelarated pulse of a man my weight but a quarter century my senior. 

The possibilities of jobs as other people hold them, long-term romantic attachments as other people experience them, fulfillment as other people derive fulfillment, is something which human as I am, I cannot help but continue to pursue as I can, but I have come to pay dearly for any appearance of paltry success I have yet achieved in my life, with a tornado of unresolved organizational storms, and yes, emotional storms too, which others are perhaps understandably reluctant to take upon themselves once they understand the the risks' enormity. 

I am, as you can see, a white male, and thank god for that because were I of any identity more distasteful to the forces of history, I firmly believe the difficulties would quite possibly render a person like me deceased. There are literally millions of my disadvantages without my advantages in every generation left to the worst fates with no safety net beneath them. 

Whether I am anything but the least sympathetic demographical representative for them, the most severely learning disabled are too an underserved minority, and, one must add, extremely distinct and far less numerous than those of minor disabilities whose functionality is sufficiently unimpaired to live relatively uninterrupted careers and family lives. And furthermore, by definition, our community is utterly hamstrung in our capacities for self-advocacy. We cannot even explain to you the ways in which we are organizationally challenged, because if we explained them, that probably means we could understand them sufficiently to master them. The arts and classical music already have so much to answer for how they've left so many of their most devoted servants to rot, but we too of this demographic are of those who demand answers and reform, but by definition we are the ones least likely to know how to implement effective reform. 

So where have we been in a thousand years of musical history? The mentally ill of course have an honored place in artistic history, some of course would say too honored. And it's a little too easy to armchair diagnose the eccentricities of an historical figure by saying 'well, maybe Mozart had ADD...' Maybe hyperactive geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven were sufficiently abused into developing the necessary skills for composition in spite of their deficiencies, but how many great musicians were beaten that didn't develop the necessary skills to translate great improvisation into composition? We'll never know, and obviously an unfortunate genius like Beethoven was lacking in the one skill more crucial in music than learning. But the true blue learning disabled? Well... maybe there's Mussorgsky, for whom even the most historicism minded reader would tempted to render a modern LD diagnosis, and maybe there's John Cage, but otherwise?... It's difficult to imagine that anyone with the most severe learning issues could withstand the battery of complex tasks traditionally presented before the life of a composer.  

And yet the learning disabled are otherwise no less talented, many neurologists even speculate that their brains have compensatory skills, and yet their specific contributions to music history are probably lost to the sands of musical pre-history, because the only way many of them could contribute was through the oral continuum, so I suppose it likely that they became folk musicians of one sort or another, or they became performers who cleverly hid their deficits, just as Pavarotti concealed his inability to read music, but there was no chance of viewing the full gamut of musical talent which lay dormant until the microphones of the 20th century showed the palace of music to have more rooms than Mozart and Beethoven dared to dream. And one hundred forty-three years after the first acoustic recordings, classical music has yet to catch up with the discoveries or recover from the shock. In the span of the hundred-twenty years during which recorded music's been widely available commercially, music has evolved more than it ever did in the thousand beforehand. It was a cultural quantum leap from which we, who'd devoted a millennium to obsessively honing our musical skills with ever greater specificity of conceptual intent, and have still not made our peace with the idea that a person can simply play an instrument with absolutely no beforehand planning, and the results may in fact turn out more profound than had you worked on the piece for thirty years. 

When I was sixteen, I would be trapped in a school for three years that was basically a cult from which maximal mental pressure was applied to make sure no one left - a school for troubled teens who believed all learning issues are a function of a person's moral character and therefore all failures to comply with demands, no matter how strenuous nor unreasonable, ought to be met with various forms of corporal punishment. Instrumental lessons of any meaningful type were impossible during that period, preparing auditions for music schools was not even questionable. I would imagine that nearly everyone else in this gathering began their lives listening more popular forms of music and worked their way out to classical, but I knew barely anything of any music but classical music until I was sixteen, and then was thrown into a sink-or-swim situation where the only way music could be of any use was if I took my violin and turned it into a fiddle, noodling my way around a bunch of high school guitarists, one or two of whom were quite skilled and became pros themselves, but most of them only knowing three chords - playing their five-hundredth rendition of wagonwheel or wonderwall or we will rock you, and having to find yet another way to take a violin solo over the guitar chords that would impress poorly behaved teens who often came to the school as bullies who beat on kids like me. I had to find a way for myself in music that was completely disconnected from the music I'd discovered at the earliest imaginable age and no peer of mine had anywhere yet seemed to discover. 

Fast forward fifteen years. Classical or popular, I was never a huge musical success, but I discovered I had some gift as a violin improviser, and found some tiny way forward in music with my violin putting an improvisational spin on a number of genres, and around the age of thirty I found myself the violinist in what a briefly popular local band of Balkan folk music - I suppose I was an f-list local celebrity impressing his friends by how often he was recognized on the street as a musician not only in Baltimore but also in DC, and branching off to do my own klezmer side project. But like all bands, the amount of work it takes for a band to become successful is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes before the band members stop getting along. And since these two bands had mostly the same musicians, when I lost one band, I lost both, and that was almost the least of my worries during yet another annus horribilis. 

What saved me was a project that I had despaired for more than five years I'd ever be able to bring to fruition, the idea of which came to me on one of my many manic highs - to set all hundred-fifty Biblical Psalms of David to music, and to do so because of an engineer I'd met in my sojourns into popular music. And for those who do not know the miracle worker of Baltimore: Mat Lefler-Schulman, he should be used as an engineer for any and all musical projects around the globe so long as they don't impede on mine. For the last five years, I've used whatever extra cash I have on-hand to arrive at the studio once a week with barely even an outline of the music, and do my damndest to record, improvise, and electronically shape music completely unwritten out into text. Work is agonizingly slow, and in five years, we have just barely completed seventeen psalms. But if we're both around another forty-five years, we should be able to complete the project. 

This is concrete music, unable to be reproduced in any capacity but private consumption, but in the era of pandemic when live music is still a theoretical speculation, there's a truly unfortunate possibility that musique concrete may be every musician's future. 

Such are my own incapacities that I will always be unable to understand the technical means by which I make my own music. But musicians whose capacity to absorb tech proficiency are much wider than my own will be able to create music by our processes much more cheaply, more quickly, and more fluently.

But in the meantime, my plea is simple: the world of music composition can be so vast. For thousands of years, talented musicians with disabilities have most likely been unable to contribute what could have been a vast storehouse of great notational music to the world, if only people were there to assist wherever they fell down. It is perhaps precisely their disabilities which may have given them completely different conceptions for what music can be, and just as the unwritten music of the potential great women composers and composers of color is a loss to the world, so too is the lost music of disabled musicians. By definition, cannot ascertain the nature of our problems, but if you ever gave us the time of day, you can, and you would, and the reward would be yours as well as ours. 

Even so, I regret to tell that my life is most likely an advanced scouting report, either for your lives or your students' and children's. My trials by fire are the trials writ small which classical music must now undergo in the viral age. Classical music has still never truly adjusted to the presence of the microphone while hundreds of other musical forms are only made possible by the microphone's presence. Mechanical reproduction changes everything about the human relationship to music, both creative and consumptive. The next generation will undergo the biggest retrenchment of values at very least since the transition to homophonic common practice tonality, and quite possibly since the invention of polyphony itself or even the invention of modern musical notation, and made all the more difficult for the fact that the retrenchment is well over a hundred years overdue as previous generations of classical musicians have leveraged credit for which their societal futures must foot the bill just as entire modern societies have. This payment is blood itself, and its pain is almost unendurable, but just as I have survived, so too will you, battered and bruised, devalued and demoralized for years at a time, on a completely different and far more arduous journey than we thought we'd have to take, but also possibly, far more meaningful, and far better equipped to light beacons through darkness so that future generations may continue to walk paths that we are the generation who set.  

I thank you for your time, your ears, and your generous presence. Please listen to the results of my music when you get a chance at evantucker.bandcamp.com and I particularly recommend the Psalms beginning with Psalm 11, and just so you know, the Billy Joel quote on my page is a joke because I fucking hate Billy Joel. 

Tales From the Old New Land #2

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.

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

Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1899:

We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Ticoczki, and formerly before that Moishe Kharlap.

The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, the very same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against forced baptisms and blood libels. But 1264 was also when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, which apparently did exist, and genuinely adorned with a kind of sparkling Renaissance architecture and art one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would find true international fame under the personage of its Archbishop Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II.

One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.

All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit."

So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid on the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in the same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags."

The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be.

-------

In the beginning, or 'at the beginning,' or 'in principle cause,' or 'in primal cause,' or 'in the head of the cause;' in the beginning was the word: 'B'reishit', the primal document of civilization beginning with a primal word so enigmatic, with meanings so infinite, that it is no beginning at all, and rather implies an infinity of presence before the beginning.

There is an infinity of presence before every beginning: no definite first cause or initial yesh, but either an infinite yesh or an infinity of beings who were present before we were able to record any definite shekhina. And yet most of our definite presences begin not at the rosh, not even in the biblical tekufah, but in the modern era. Before the Kharlap family whom we shall follow through the 20th century, there must have been 80 generations who preceded them merely of Jews, and an infinity of beings: prehistoric men, primates, mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, annelids, porifera, protazoa, bacteria,... going back to inorganic matter of the earth, formed from rock, which itself comes from the stars, perhaps separated from one another as far back at the Big Bang, which may be the instant of separation into distinct parts of a single whole, the whole of which may have either been the divine totality of which we are each a part, or was matter that only came together for the smallest instance - previously divided in a completely different permutation, or perhaps before the beginning existed an infinity of other possibilities to us either unconceived or inconceivable.

And yet only in the 19th century did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did.

And while Reb Yaakov Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environs of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in good faith into some of the most reliable composites we've had yet of whom and what humans are.

What was Reb Yaakov Kharlap? Well.... he was a Jew, and a Rabbi at that, and like so many unlucky Rabbis down the millennia, a Rabbi of no particular prestige so far as we know. Had he any great Talmudic insights, he never wrote them down, and if he wrote them down, nobody preserved them - neither his sons nor his students. He may have been a rabbi, but he was just another Jew, undesignated by Hashem for a life of any distinction, and rather condemned to make his living teaching the same dafs of Talmud, triennial year after triennial year, to the boys of a Kheder in the same town, for seventy or more years, and subject, like any Jew, to the laboratory Hashem seems to have chosen Jews as his test subjects in a laboratory of endless permutory experiments, in which Jews are compelled and commanded to wrestle with endless turahs and tzurahs of Yesh, for which he uses (and some might say: abuses) his Jews as test subjects for all states of being; for Jews a people for whom human issues can still exist in a state of tohu va'vohu, before he releases these tzuris upon the general public with much more definite tophes and tupos.

The name Kharlap is itself shrouded in mystery. It is clearly an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish grifter who realized he could mark up the prices of whatever he sold if he lied about the eminence of his Yichus. And yet of that 'Pay' at the end of the name there also is mystery, because it may not be the head of the exiles in Poland, but rather in Portugal. So rather than an Ashkenazic family who moved to Poland from the Holy Roman Germany of Charlemagne, it may be in fact an eminent Portuguese family moving to Poland after the Portuguese expulsion of 1496. But Portuguese or Polish, it may just be some low-class Jewish fraud adapting an important sounding name to get some better deals.

The Russian Imperial Census of 1897 lists Yaakov Kharlap as born sometime around the 27th of January 1845: one hundred years to the day on the secular calendar before the liberation of Auschwitz, but Reb Yaakov always insisted he was born on Rosh Hashana 1844, which would put his birth exactly a hundred years before the Warsaw Uprising.

-------

And so Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. And just as all circumstances of the world are incarnated in primal mystery, so will the Kharlap family's incarnation come to us, and to Reb Yaakov, in mysterious, mythical circumstances. Perhaps akin to a hassidic tale by Reb Nachman of Bretslav or a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he incorporated editors' suggestions - which like Gabo this self-deluded author will only accede to with great reluctance).

According to hebcal.com, Hanukkah came early in 1899. Beginning on the sunset of November 26th and the eighth night on December 4th. It's a whole month before 1900 and the 20th century--a century whose vistas of progress most Europeans could not look forward to with more eager anticipation.

Tales From the Old New Land #1

A Beginning, obviously to be revised as each new post comes in... peruse at your leisure:

----------

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.

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

Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1899:

We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.

The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, and genuinely adorned with sparkling Renaissance architecture and art which one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would truly find its true fame in the personage of Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II.

One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.

All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit."

So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in that same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags."

The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be.

-------

In the beginning, or 'at the beginning,' or 'in principle cause,' or 'in primal cause,' or 'in the head of the cause;' in the beginning was the word: 'B'reishit', the primal document of civilization beginning with a primal word so enigmatic, with meanings so infinite, that it is no beginning at all, but implies an infinity of presence before the beginning.

There is an infinity of presence before every beginning: no definite first cause or initial yesh, but either an infinite yesh or an infinity of beings who were present before we were able to record any definite shekhina. And yet most of our definite presences begin not at the rosh, not even in the biblical tekufah, but in the modern era. Before the Kharlap family whom we shall follow through the 20th century, there must have been 80 generations who preceded them merely of Jews, and an infinity of beings: prehistoric men, primates, mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, annelids, porifera, protazoa, bacteria,... going back to inorganic matter of earth, formed from the rocks, who themselves came from the stars, separated from one another at the big bang, who may in fact have separated in an instant as distinct parts of a single whole, which itself may have be either the divine totality of which we are each a part, or have been previously divided in a completely different permutation, or could an infinity of other possibilities either unconceived or inconceivable.

And yet only in the 19th century did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did.

And while Reb Moshe Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environes of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of skilled statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in some of the most reliable composite we had yet of whom and what humans are.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Y'know... I've been warning boomer moderates and conservatives for fifteen years about how easily the further left can and eventually will take over the country because everybody else refuses to evolve with the times and still see the world as it existed from 1985 to 1992 as the immutable way the world works. So they never ever believed me, and all of the sudden, they finally see it now, and they've gone from saying the left will never have any power in this country, to panicking like a chicken who's already been beheaded and comparing this movement to Lenin and thinking everybody who isn't a leftist is about to be treated as a kulak sent into the fucking gulags.

There's no concession to reality with these people.... They're determined that no matter what they believe, even if it's the opposite of what they believed yesterday, they're right and you're wrong. And they wonder why the country might be on the brink of a revolution....

Underrated Classical Musicians - Terje Tønnesen

It's going to be a long time until people feel safe with an orchestra of 100 on stage in a full sized concert hall with 2000 people in the audience. 2/3rds of American artists are currently unemployed and that number is only going up. I can't speak with much detailed authority on too many arts, but this is going to be one of the most painful moments in the history of classical music, perhaps the single most painful. The World Wars decimated populations, but so endemic was classical music once to the fabric of daily life that there was never a question about institutional continuity. But now, orchestras who've been around for well over a hundred years may disappear in a puff of smoke. All that may be able to survive is much lighter-complemented ensembles, flexible in composition, that learn to play together in highly concentrated and focused rehearsals. Such may be their scarcity that they will fortunately endow much less chance for a conductor to become a star at the musicians' expense, but the concentration of rehearsal time makes a singular authority figure in the ensemble that much more likely to coalesce around.

And that's why violinists like Terje Tønnesen or Richard Tognetti become a prototype for something so much more crucial in this new ensemble makeup - like Rudoph Barshai or Szymon Goldberg before them, and before them musicians from Handel to Corelli leading from their position in the orchestra. Keyboardists like Trevor Pinnock or Richard Egarr sometimes have nothing to do, and therefore take their place in front of the chamber orchestras like any other conductor, so they are not truly a new model. But a principal string player leading an orchestra, rather, is very much a new and workable model of musicmaking, because, unlike woodwinds or keyboard, there is a part for them in virtually every score. 

They are neither quite concertmasters, conductors, nor soloists, and yet their authority over their ensembles is unquestioned.  If there's no money to afford extensive rehearsal time, a truly collaborative effort among musicians becomes more difficult, not less. And yet, because of the space allowed in performance by not having a conductor shape the music moment-to-moment, spontaneity among the more rank and file musicians becomes much more possible, and interpretations can grow in liveliness and meaning as musicians respond from one another's interpretations phrase by phrase into interpretations entirely new, possibilities unreplicable when there is a figure who is literally on top of them, dictating the spirit of every musical moment. 

When you listen to one of the seemingly many ensembles Terje Tønnesen's leads, you hear a level of detail that is truly astonishing, results which very few conductors are able to elicit from their ensembles. Much of the music he leads is done, as it was in the 19th century, not in the original instrumental composition but arranged for whatever ensemble happens to be on hand - in his case usually a string orchestra. It seems as though it wouldn't work. And yet when you hear him lead a string ensemble in Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, it is one of the greatest performances you will ever hear - twenty-odd musicians creating a far more intimate and sacred atmosphere than most string quartets would ever allow themselves to create. When you hear his string ensembles play the Tristan prelude, at a slightly faster tempo than a full orchestra generally does, shorn of its metaphysical baggage (some might even say bullshit...) it sounds both completely apiece with Verklärte Nacht, and also like true love music. And when you hear a Norwegian string ensemble play the piece it was of course born to play: Grieg's Holberg Suite, you realize just how special this ensemble must be because they do what they have to to shield what must be an incredibly overfamiliar piece to them from routine: taking their interpretive skill to an entirely next level - sometimes adding folk dance choreography that is completely apiece with the music's meaning. I have to imagine that never in the history of this overplayed string piece has it ever been played with so much magical meaning. 

Now that orchestras and choirs are outright safety hazards, classical music may now be entering the true age of the Chamber Orchestra, and leaders like Terje Tønnesen may prove themselves more crucial to the history of music than most famous traditional conductors of his generation. In such a formate, we may learn the traditional repertoire completely anew as we discover the chamber aspects of orchestral repertoire and the orchestral aspects of chamber repertoire, but if this is our future, then hopefully we will find an entirely new repertoire, meant for such ensembles. Not just the instrumental Bach and Handel (and what a shame if we no longer would be able to cover the glories of their choral repertoire), but for actual chamber orchestra, is there a Mahler, a Bruckner, a Shostakovich out there whose work will provide those kinds revelations? Will a modern composer rise to the challenge? I look forward to finding out, because classical music's future may depend on our finding them.