Tale 7: Rough Draft - 80%

 (CW: this contains all manner of extreme slurs and violence. I have determined not to spell out the offending words themselves in full, because while I consider the current necessity of doing so an abomination - artistic integrity might as well shoot itself in the head, such is the nature of today that I could become person non grata from thousands by spelling slurs out, which is misery inducing because, of course, the people would have no sense of the context and, of course, a mob wouldn't care. I'd be cancelled without having even been subscribed to. On the other hand, it would be the first attention I've ever gotten from a wide public in my entire life - maybe I should just do it and if I'm hated by thousands at least I'd finally get some readers...)

...The company commander's a gentleman named Hastings, queer upper class chap, clearly of the original Norman lineage whose very name showed his family's been ruling Old Blighty since 1066. Every sentence of his starts with 'dear boy' and every word has a hundred vowels; and though we're in Madagascar his office has a library with a thousand books. When he saw my papers said I was born in Poland he asked me if I know a writer friend of his named Conrad. Of course I don't know English books from Egyptian bokhers but he told me to take some book called Lord Jim; second shelf, third row down, fifth from the right. I've been trying to read it every day since I got here, but I still can't get past page 3 or 4. Then he starts reciting some poem called 'Jerusalem' and gives me some speech about how the Empire accepts all people and I'm an Englishman now and we're the light unto nations who has to save the world from itself. Then he goes on about Disraeli and how he was the Empire's great champion who stabbed us in the back about the Belgian Congo. I know what he's saying but of course I stay respectful, and then he starts on the 'bloody Boers' and how every savage is a Shakespeare compared to them so the Empire has to take every part of Africa 'from Cape Town to Cairo' to stop the slaughter.

Then I meet the soldiers, from every part of the Empire - limeys, scotches, micks, orientals, w**s, even a few n*****s. It doesn't take two minutes for some cockney arsehole to identify me as a k**e from my name. They know I'm a Yid, I know I'm a Yid, but I have to pretend I'm not and they have to pretend they believe me while every other sentence I hear is "thief this" and "cheat that."

It's not five minutes before more Boers arrive and we have to register them, and it's not five more minutes before one of them does something that makes the on-duty sergeant beat some poor Boer lad in front of his family. The first few times you're gobsmacked, half the times the lads end up dead and I could only think of the pogroms. After the third or so time I said to one of the n****r soldiers "won't these Boers respond better if we earn their trust?", the n****r just laughed at me "You don't know the Boers yet, but you will." Of course you get used to it eventually; it's just the way things are done in these camps. There are thousands of them against a hundred of us. Who knows how they'd rise up if we didn't make examples?

After about a month of this, the night sergeant is feeling particularly stroppy. The lad looks dead, and he orders me and two n*****s to tie the Boer to a fence as an example. The lad looks dead but the moment we tie him up, he starts convulsing. He might die, he might live. One of the n*****s says we should shoot him and not draw it out, the other says we should bring him to the infirmary, fuck the sergeant's orders, he's always piss drunk and'll forget he said anything the next day. They look at me as though I'm the whitey with authority - for all I know they've both been here a hundred times longer than me, but the lad is looking a little better so we might as well tie him to the fence and leave him there.

So the n*****s and I get to talking, they say they see there's 'something different about me' and soon they get to arguing with each other like I'm not there. They're disputing like Rabbis about what's the Brits' fault and what's the Boers', turns out they might be the only guys who know what's what in this war and give me any rundown of the events that led this war to shambles. One of the n*****s thinks Brits are the one thing saving Africa, the other thinks Brits are a curse, but then a bomb goes off and I wake up the next morning in the infirmary. One of the n*****s is dead and the other's lost an arm and a leg.

I've got a concussion but the doctor tells me I'm ultimately none the worse for wear and tells me the worst thing I can do is stay off my feet and work. I'm feeling dizzy but I'm obviously not the doctor so i'm put back on my feet and Hastings calls me into his office; tells me that the officers are handling the interrogations but I'm the lead on it. I ask him why, he says he needs someone with brains and some sense. I don't know why he thinks I have any brains except that he thinks I'm a Yid, and I have to pretend he doesn't think that I'm a Yid even though he's right, and now I'm stuck figuring out how to get the soldiers to scare the information out of the prisoners without hurting them too badly. I need this like a hole in the head.

And of course by the time I get there, the guards have already walloped the shite out of every prisoner they want to talk. It's one thing to bruise the prisoners or even break an arm, but they all come out missing a couple fingernails and a couple of them no longer have two eyes. The fact that the Commander is making them do all this for the sake of a dead n****r makes them that much more harried, which makes them thrash the Boers even more. Finally, I come up with a solution that makes everybody happy: beat them up less, threaten them more. There isn't a single Boer in the camp who doesn't know what we'll do to them if they don't cooperate, so I busy the men coming up with all sorts of new ways to threaten torture without actually torturing any more prisoners, while I go to the barracks, ask some questions and try to settle on a few suspects.

Before they can even threaten anybody, all the answers that night point to this guy named Botha. Everybody in Boerland is named Botha, but Botha is not your usual Boer. Everybody in the camp seems to know that Maarten Botha was a smuggler who ran guns in the First War to Praetoria from here in Madagascar.

So we drag Botha in. I suppose I expected one of those strapping Dutch farmers who look too large to ride a horse but Botha's kind of a short bloke: thin, balding, glasses (which the guards of course broke), and then he opens his mouth and you instantly realize this is the type who reads a new book every time he plows a field. He doesn't look like the he'd know how to build a bomb any more than I do.Scotland Yard though teaches that the smart ones are the ones who kill the most people with no conscience.

And of course his English is perfect, which he learned at some old Dutch university then moved to the Transvaal to be a doctor. Put him in Knightsbridge and he'll seem like a proper English gent long before I do, but this is not your usual farmer. I don't know what guys like this go out into the wilderness for, but it's not to grow wheat or even to find diamonds....

Good Books #1: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

 This country wrote and wrote and wrote about 'The Great American Novel' as though it's a designation that ever had any meaning, but if it does, it was always the wrong books mentioned. Is literary greatness really about hunting white whales or getting thrown out of boarding schools? The whiteness of these lists is a problem, but it's a symptom of the bigger problem, which is that the very idea of 'literary greatness' is more about the greatness than the literature. Literature or 'litteras' is the Latin word for letters, and just as in English, letters both mean the alphabet and correspondence. Letters are about intimacy, richness of experience, forming connections between writer and reader... so literature is literally about inclusion at its root meaning. Literature is meant to be about the dignity of little people in situations too great to not oppress, and we read about them not because the characters are diverse, but because the characters are oppressed.

So any list of candidates for the Great American Novel that does not have Bless Me, Ultima near the top is just a false list where the critic is either too ignorant to be read, hasn't read it out of bad faith, or is keeping the book from us for their own political ends. It's very rare that you get to say 'this book is so good that if you don't like it, the problem is you,' but if you don't believe me.... read the fucking book...

Bless Me, Ultima is the simplest story ever told, and yet its complexities are infinite. On the one hand it's simply about life in the Chicano parts of postwar New Mexico, where babies are born, kids grow up, adults chase opportunities they never find, and the elderly pass on their knowledge. On the other hand, it's about the forces of creation itself, and about a three way battle between reason, religion, and superstition. It's about the nature of memory to exaggerate the past, and how the bonds of family simultaneously hold us together and wear us down. It uses modern literary techniques so deftly that you feel as though you're reading variations on folk tales told by the bards of Native America before any Spaniard could influence their telling, and in many ways, that's exactly what we're doing when we read this book. And yes, it's about poverty and racism too, very much so. It's a work that's equal parts Cather, G G Marquez, IB Singer, Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare. In 1972 it sold 300,000 copies purely by word of mouth, and then it disappeared. But unlike so many American one-hit wonders, Rudolfo Anaya plugged on to the very end - 35 books. Anaya died last year, and as far as commemorations go, it was as though he never existed.

Bless Me, Ultima, is the perfect book for our time. A book as great as Great Gatsby and Huck Finn, once ignored by the critical establishment because its writer was Chicano, and a book still ignored by the intersectional literary world because.... why exactly? I have no answer to that, but of course, I have a guess, and my guess is that Anaya was inconvenient proof that quality literature from minority communities had a chance for mainstream acceptance even in the whiteness of mid-century America. I have no way of proving that, but the critical ignorance of this book's quality is as scandalous today as it was forty years ago.

If you want to read and promote a book that convinces the world that the lived experience of minority demographics can summon aesthetic glories which no other can summon, there it lies - the ultimate evidence that more equal representation benefits art and communities in equal measure, and yet when I go on goodreads, literally one person among the incredibly woke people I know has read it, and only one person has marked it 'to read.'

But that's the thing.... The fact that Bless Me, Ultima still goes unnoticed in spite of its author's death, in spite of its extreme usefulness in proving right every claim about the benefit of listening to unheard voices of color.... that makes this book exhibit A that most people who talk about more equal representation in art don't care very much about art, they care much more about making art into an arm of ideological propaganda, and might let art and artists burn to the ground rather than let art exist as something more complex than the messages they want it to carry. They're perfectly happy to be tourists in the artistic world, advocating for artists that represent different demographics, so long as they don't have to be among the audiences consuming the art themselves.

Artists, as opposed to businessmen or scientists, have few real bases of power, and it's not like most artists have ever studied politics, so rather than revolutionize areas of human endeavor like technology or industry that demonstrably change people's lives, the world of woke worms itself into the arts where most practitioners never had much power or security to begin with, and go through their days feeling so humiliated that convincing them of the necessity of a revolution is very easy.

So to anybody reading this out there on the woke ramparts: here's yet another message from the kind of white (and Jewish...) liberal you're currently trying so hard to render extinct: the woke vanguard is ignoring the singular book that could be its very best argument. This is the kind of book that whatever you're reading, you have to put everything down to read, it's proof that the Great American Novel may have been written by a person of color, and has been staring at us from our grandparents' shelves for fifty years; yet nobody knows about it, nobody shows evidence of wanting to find out about it, and nobody's shown any desire to search it out. You owe reading this book to yourselves, your students, your friends and family, your world. I don't know how many exclamation points to put at the end of this message to make people realize the importance of this book, but it's there, just waiting; a timebomb of truth and beauty that could do more to empower entire BIPOC communities than anything in the Bible and simultaneously convince white people that they've underthought about the humanity of millions who live right next to them. If you haven't read it, if nobody you know has read it, powerful cliques are out there, trying to make sure you don't know about this book because it's better for their agenda to keep a book this good under wraps, and iot's probably two separate cliques. If Bless Me, Ultima were widely read today, I guarantee that one in four thinkpieces would consider the question of the 'Great American Novel' closed forever, and it would do as much to make people think of their fellow citizens more democratically as anything in Leaves of Grass.

So if I can write anything about good books that is of any use to anybody, my message is obviously very subtle:

READ BLESS ME ULTIMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Haitink

 For people a generation or two older than me, Haitink's death feels literally like the end of an era. Herbert Blomstedt is older, but Bernard Haitink became a recording star at roughly the same time Leonard Bernstein did. I'm not that old, I can only view it from the perspective of some ancient seeming history I didn't live through, and even if I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Bernard Haitink was (my parents had LP's...), it still doesn't feel anywhere near as momentous as the death of Ligeti or Harnoncourt or any musical giant who literally changed the axis of history.

The truth is that Zubin Mehta became a star right around the same time as Haitink, but if someone had told the average music lover in 1963 that Bernard Haitink would be considered the legend and Zubin Mehta the disappointing relic, they would be incredulous. Haitink was considered by many a young mediocrity given a large profile twenty years too early, who'd probably fade to the margins of concert life by the time of my birth twenty years later. But it was the very unassumingness and 'dullness' of Haitink that led generations to underestimate him. It makes the more generous souls work that much harder to be worthy of what they're given. Nobody thought Haitink the most talented musician out there, least of all himself, and he clearly worked multiples as hard as more talented musicians who coasted on their natural abilities.

It took me a long time to properly appreciate Haitink. I still find that a lot of his music carries moderation to a point well past excess. You can almost hear the uptightness of his personality in the way he stays absolutely, imperturbably steady through every musical event.

But to have heard him live in the 70s and 80s must have been the experience of a lifetime - during his Concertgebouw heyday when he'd proven all the critics wrong, the recorded evidence shows a musician who literally made the air catch fire. Since those years also dovetail with his extended period with the London Philharmonic and Glyndebourne, this probably explains how beloved he became in England far more than his supposed 'British reserve.'

After he left the Concertgebouw, he was never quite the same. Some people love a lot of his operatic work, but except for the Mozart I was never particularly impressed. And for someone who's remembered as such a fine director at Covent Garden, it's pretty amazing that people have developed such fond memories after griping about him so much at the time.

What made him a grand old man was that he was a beloved guest around the world who reminded all manner of struggling organizations past their prime of the golden years they used to have. The great orchestras, by and large, are extremely volatile organizations, but a guy like Haitink or Blomstedt has been doing it for so long that they don't need to say anything at all. The moment you talk is the moment people can misinterpret what you say, so a guy like Haitink just made his hands go, said very little, and create a calm environment to let the musicians express themselves in manners they'd forgotten they could.

Was Haitink truly as legendary as his legend? Well... no. When you make hundreds of records, at least 100 of them better be indisputable classics, and Haitink falls well short of that. And every concertgoer has stories about the week Haitink was boring... that's not what made Haitink special.

What made Haitink special was precisely his longevity. It's no small feat to do a concert with a giant work every week for sixty years. He was the opposite of Bernstein or Tennstedt who left all the tears and adrenaline on the floor. He constructed everything like an architect, always terracing every dynamic, color, and instrumental balance in such a way that minimum of effort was expended until the exact moment it was needed, at which point the sound poured forth in climaxes so overwhelming that you wonder where that passion came from.

I remember hearing him conduct the LSO in Brahms 3, live at the Barbican. The first movement was not great, but then came the middle movements, which were very beautiful, with some of the most miraculous soft playing I've ever heard. When it was time for the finale, you forgot the diffidence of the opening, and suddenly those F-Minor/Major explosions poured forth with force so massive that I gasped. This must have been Haitink's plan the whole time. I remember thinking 'this is not quite Brahms, but it's great all the same.' Brahms, to me, has more flow, more relaxation, more espressivo. The grandeur was very authentic, but perhaps more naturally suited to Bruckner.

To me, Bruckner is the center of Haitink's achievement, moreso even than Mahler or Shostakovich. Haitink simply 'got' Bruckner, and got him better than a lot of conductors better known for Bruckner. Other conductors expended every effort to make Bruckner sound profound and grand, but Haitink made Bruckner sound organic - he grew the music out of exactly what it needed. Every melody sang, every rhythm sprang, every color was applied with an ear to creating a Rembrandtine glow.

Listen to this Bruckner 5. It's not an essential Bruckner 5, which requires a fearless podium artist with the will to make drama; but tempi are wonderfully chosen, and that's just the skeleton of this performance. The flesh is in the balance between all the inner lines and how Haitink gives clarity and weight to them all, as though every note is like a human being who deserves a space to be heard. Every voice is balanced to the point that you hear them all, but also balanced to the point of blend. It's one of those performances that you can hear from so many different vantage points and find reward: listen linearly to every voice and you hear literally everything. Listen for color and you hear more color here than anything in Rimsky-Korsakov. Listen for architecture and you find a performance plotted with all the care musicians usually give to the B-Minor Mass. Haitink didn't always reach the peak of this mountain, but a performance like this shows just how high Haitink aimed. He wanted musicmaking of the highest seriousness, that paradoxically takes in every element of what the music has to offer by staying outside of the music. It's very much an approach of his own era and generation. Like I said of Colin Davis, to whom he was sometimes (and not entirely accurately) compared, he was an emissary from a more stable era, who arrived at musical truth by a mysterious self-effacement and serenity that perhaps is not possible today in our more unstable, narcissistic world. His generation saw terrible things we didn't, and many of that period were chastened into not expressing things that were in any sense inessential, because neurosis over trivialities can destroy more than it creates. Perhaps we would do better to emulate their example a little more often.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhxH_mtU2Cs&fbclid=IwAR1Gi4IlZsbrdLuFdeIK4ztTKsVsqZJESb_AyAliiYEPSs9_sxwe4SUwuS0

Tale 7 Rough Draft: 60%

 (CW: this contains all manner of extreme slurs and violence. I have determined not to spell out the offending words themselves in full, because while I consider that an unforgivable violation of artistic integrity, such is the nausea inducing nature of the internet that I could become person non grata from the people being dumb enough to have no sense of the antiracist context and, of course, a mob doesn't care. I'd have been cancelled without anyone ever having subscribed. On the other hand, it would be the first attention I've ever gotten from a wide public in my entire life - maybe I should just do it and if I'm hated by thousands at least I'd finally get some readers...)

..The company commander's a gentleman named Hastings, queer upper class chap, clearly of the original Norman lineage whose very name showed his family's been ruling Old Blighty since 1066. Every sentence of his starts with 'dear boy' and every word has a hundred vowels; and though we're in Madagascar his office has a library with a thousand books. When he saw my papers said I was born in Poland he asked me if I know a writer friend of his named Conrad. Of course I don't know English books from Egyptian bokhers but he told me to take some book called Lord Jim; second shelf, third row down, fifth from the right. I still haven't read it. Then he starts reciting some poem called 'Jerusalem' and gives me some speech about how the Empire accepts all people and I'm an Englishman now and we're the light unto nations who has to save the world from itself. Then he goes on about Disraeli and how he was the Empire's great champion who stabbed us in the back about the Belgian Congo. I know what he's saying but of course I stay respectful, and then he starts on the 'bloody Boers' and how every savage is a Shakespeare compared to them so the Empire has to take every part of Africa 'from Cape Town to Cairo' to stop the slaughter.

Then I meet the soldiers, from every part of the Empire - limeys, scotches, micks, orientals, w**s, even a few n*****s. It doesn't take two minutes for some cockney arsehole to identify me as a k**e from my name. They know I'm a Yid, I know I'm a Yid, but I have to pretend I'm not and they have to pretend they believe me while every other sentence I hear is "thief this" and "cheat that."

It's not five minutes before more Boers arrive and we have to register them, and it's not five more minutes before one of them does something that makes the on-duty sergeant beat some poor Boer lad in front of his family. The first few times you're gobsmacked, half the times the lads end up dead and I could only think of the pogroms. After the third or so time I said to one of the n****r soldiers "won't these Boers respond better if we earn their trust?", the n****r just laughed at me "You don't know the Boers yet, but you will." Of course you get used to it eventually; it's just the way things are done in these camps. There are thousands of them against a hundred of us. Who knows how they'd rise up if we didn't make examples?

After about a month of this, the night sergeant is feeling particularly stroppy. The lad looks dead, and he orders me and two n*****s to tie the Boer to a fence. The lad looks dead but the moment we tie him up, he starts convulsing. He might die, he might live. One of the n*****s says we should shoot him and not draw it out, the other says we should bring him to the infirmary, fuck the sergeant's orders, he's always piss drunk and'll forget he said anything the next day. They look at me as though I'm the whitey with authority - for all I know they've both been here a hundred times longer than me, but the lad is looking a little better so we might as well tie him to the fence and leave him there.

So the n*****s and I get to talking, they say they see there's 'something different about me' and soon they get to arguing with each other like I'm not there. They're disputing like Rabbis about what's the Brits' fault and what's the Boers', turns out they might be the only guys who know what's what in this war and give me any rundown of the events that led this war to shambles. One of the n*****s thinks Brits are the one thing saving Africa, the other thinks Brits are a curse, but then a bomb goes off and I wake up the next morning in the infirmary. One of the n*****s is dead and the other's lost an arm and a leg.

Once I'm better, Hastings calls me into his office and tells me that the officers are handling the interrogations but I'm the lead on it. I ask him why, he says he needs someone with brains and some sense. I don't know why he thinks I have any brains except that he thinks I'm a Yid, and I have to pretend he doesn't think that I'm a Yid even though he's right, and now I'm stuck figuring out how to get the soldiers to scare the information out of the prisoners without hurting them too badly. I need this like a hole in the head.

Tale 6: The King of Mushrooms - Rough Draft

And Abram did fall into a very bad crowd who were called 'Habirus' for they had covered their heads with dust. 

And the Habirus did deny the false gods and were outcast from the people of Haran. 

And lo, the King of Haran did say unto the Habirus: "thou art a race of thieves and deceivers who worship no idols and sacrifice to no gods. We do exile thee to the barren land of Canaan, where all is dust for from dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return." 

And lo, did Terah said to Abram "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child. Thou hast fallen in with dirty mercenaries and broken out against all sound judgement." 

And Abram did say to his father: "I am not a child, I am seventy-five." 

And Terah did answer: "thou art an errant weed who worships no graven images, sacrifices no humans, and eats nothing unclean. Surely thou art an abomination in the eyes of the Lords." 

And Abram did answer: "Surely I am unrighteous and have sinned against idolatry, I have trespassed and betrayed."

And Abram did repent of unheathen ways, and made burnt offerings of his slaves. 

And Abram did work in his fathers fields and sell his father's idols. 

But the Habirus did give Abram a mushroom which caused Abram to see all gods of the earth as an heavenly army, and a Lord of hosts proclaiming above them as a celestial King.

And the king did say unto Abram: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house, unto a land that I will shew thee." 

And Abram did flash back to his lordly vision manifold times. And Abram did say: "The Lord and I will make of the Habirus a great nation and bless me, and make my name great, and I shalt be a blessing.

And He will bless them that bless me, and curse them that curseth me, and in me shall all the families of the earth be blessed." 

And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.

Tales from the Old New Land - Table of Contents - Book 1 - 2/3rdsish

 (none of these can go past 1000 words except with special exceptions, the Moses and Joseph stories may not exceed 3000)

1. Dream of Jewish History (complete)

2. Abraham acquiring Me'arat HaMachpela (in final form)

(New 3, 4, 5, 6?. Earlier mythology of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson that may not have made it into the Bible?)

3.  German bible scholarship and archeology (written but possibly needs revision)

Cain Fragment no. 1: Cain at Masada

(New 4? New story about Egyptians or Mesopotamians coming into contact with monotheism for the first time?

4. Noah's Flood (almost in final form)

(New 5? Journeys of Shem, who comes into contact with Ziusudra and Gilgamesh?)

Cain Fragment no. 2: Cain at Tower of Babel

5. Biography of Abraham. (Do the biography as many tales or just one?) How Terah and Abraham got to Ur.

6. Letters between Rebecca and Laban (complete in final form)

7. Abraham among marauding nomads known as the Habirus. 

8. Abraham and Sarah in Egypt. 

9. Abraham and Lot business fights.

10. Abraham being a mercenary soldier for Sodom, fighting in a war that causes the collapse of the Sumerian Empire and the destruction of Sodom. 

11. Abraham dispute with Abimelech. 

12. Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael's bad behavior. 

13. The healers whom Abraham thinks are angels who cure Abraham and Sarah of their infertility. 

14. Ruth and Naomi - the domestication of homosexuality and their joining as handmaidens to Sarah.

15. Abraham, growing senile, misinterprets God and joins the moon cult. 

16. Abraham has vision to redeem himself for his misinterpretation by sacrificing Isaac. Actually does it and Eliezer has to replace Isaac with Ishmael. 

17. Philo argues for Caligula to take down the statue of himself in Jerusalem's Beit-HaMikdash.

18. Maimonides ministering to Saladin.

19. Nachmanides and Paolo Christiani: the disputation in front of James I of Aragorn. 

20. Kierkegaard dealings with Jews. Evolution of his antisemitism. 

21. The Wisdom of Sirach - Grandson of Jesus

22. Early Reform Judaism - Post-Civil War Cincinnati, and the evolution of modern political correctness.

23. Elderly Jacob writes to Benjamin a revised, deliberately altered history of his family as they journey to Egypt. 

24. Deborah - in this version the daughter of Naomi, who comes to the House of Abraham and fights alongside Abraham in the war . 

25. Something about how Abraham and Jacob finessed their belief in one god with the need to pay tribute to local gods. 

26. Dinah tells the story of Shechem's destruction and the invasion by Simon and Levi. 

27: Vespacian's  meeting with Rabbi Yochanan. 

28. Josephus's unpublished chapter about the destruction of Jerusalem. 

29. Eusebius and the birth of antisemitism in the Byzantine Empire.

30. Levi the 'Lion Man' makes himself king of Shechem after his curse from Jacob. The Egyptians go to war with him, kill him, and force Jacob to take Shechem for himself. Jacob punishes the descendents of Levi with servitude. 

31. The alliance between Joshua and Shechem.

32. Joseph all in one long chapter, focusing on the Potiphar story with subtext of a homosexual relationship between Joseph and Potiphar. 

33. The birth of the monotheistic cult in Egypt - Akhenaten who came to see the sun god Ra as the only god and himself as the Messiah, because he had Joseph as his prime advisor. 

34. The realization by Akhenaten's court that the Hebrews and their monotheism are such a threat that they will upend the entire structure of Egyptian society, and therefore Akhenaten must be killed and the Hebrews must be enslaved.  

35. The lifestyle of Ramses II, who realizes that with such a massive slave population he can get away with the most awful luxuries and tyrannies, and the formative years of Moses. 

36. Moses vs. Crown Prince Merneptah as adolescents in Ramses II's Court. 

37: Solomon building the Temple. 

38: Jepthah and his sacrifice. 

39. Moses, who has become a priest of Ra as punishment for slaying an Egyptian policeman who beat up Jews he was drinking with, gets to know his Israelite scribe Aaron and his Habiru healer Miriam. Together, the three form the plot to perpetrate ten plagues upon the Egyptians, culminating with some sort of sea battle that Moses wins. Originally it was a plot to make Moses another monotheistic Pharaoh, backed by the newly won might of the former Hebrew and the Israelite slaves, but instead it resulted in Moses being thrown out of Egypt along with the Israelite and Hebrew slaves. Told from Aaron's point of view. 

40. Moses hears cases of the Israelites. Told from Jethro's point of view. 

41. Aaron wins favor in the eyes of the Israelites that Moses does not because of Moses's deeply unpopular Ten Commandments and his tyrannical response to the worshippers of the Golden Calf. Though both exhorted by their followers to respond to each others provocations, both refuse to assassinate each other. 

42. Hillel and Menachem, bookish priests fleeing the slaughter following the Golden Calf, immigrate to Athens, where Hillel becomes Hermes Trismegistus and writes the Hermetica, and Menachem becomes Musaeus of Athens and writes the priestly odes. 

Cain Fragment III: Cain details early Jewish history after the manner of Eupolemus and sets the record straight. 

43: The murder of Crown Prince Darius, son of Xerxes I of Persia. Artapanos, the Jewish vizear of Perisa, maneuvers against Darius with Darius's younger brother Artaxerxes, who assassinates his brother and takes the throne. 

44: Aristobulus, recounting meeting between Alexander the Great and the Jewish High Priest. 

(two more potential Cain fragments with Cain Homer and Hesiod)

45. Heraclitus encounter with a Rabbi (who is Cain).

46. Plato writes a Socratic Dialogue with a Jew 

47. Numenius among the Jews and Pythagorians

48. Lost Fragments of the histories of Hecateaus of Abdera: who writes the first antisemitic history. 

49. Manetho, Greek historian, finds actual evidence that Moses was an Egyptian. 

50. Fictional letter of Karl Marx to Engels recounting his dealings with Orthodox Jews. 

51. Article by Freud detailing Orthodox Jew deposited in a Viennese insane asylum for believing he is Moses. 

52. Ancient sailor from China, during the Shang dynasty, recounting the differences between the decadent Egyptian culture which is dying out and the unspoiled Mesopotamian culture which is clearly ready to dominate the Western World. 

53. The Court of Ur - Abraham and Terah facing each other in a court judged by Hammurabi after Abraham demolishes Terah's idols. 

54. Academic detailing the many accounts of Abraham in court, leading to the conclusion that either they are all Cain fragments, or Abraham was the most profligate litigator in the ancient world. 

55. Ezekiel detailing his heretical communion with Moses.

56. Later Judge (one of the 'Judges') must deal with implications of Mosaic code and leads to other which proscribes death for so many problems that don't deserve death, compares to codes of other nations. Leading to formation of the "Law of the Goring Ox."

57. Moses and Aaron form the final form of the Ten Commandments. 

58. Rabbi Simlai (3rd century) tabulates that there are 613 actual commandments in the Torah. 

59. Moses goes to international law conference in Syriac territory, meets Ugarite Ras Shamra who is shocked that Moses does not permit fornication, adultery, bestiality and incest. Gets Moses drunk and convinces him one night to fuck Shamra's wife and sheep. 

60. Moses becomes extremely controversial among Jews when he bans shellfish and pork after Miriam deals with epidemics of parasites due to eating raw animals. 

61. Miriam deals with a second epidemic, this time of leprosy. 

62. Moses hears a lawsuit questioning the necessity of circumcision and must call God to the stand, for which he must create the impression that God is present in the courtroom. This is the reason for the story of God killing Moses's son before he was circumcised. 

63. The first sabbath. Aaron comes up with the idea, and unexpected to no one but Moses, buys them both enormous popularity. 

64. Elijah's magic instruction manual - written as a series of instructions to Elisha. 

65. (possibly earlier tale) Details of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam's discussions that lead to the conclusion that there must be only one god, and also that a monotheistic society can motivate and dominate all the world. 

66. Early Christian monks try to locate Mount Sinai and come to arbitrary conclusion. 

67. Moses brings Hebrews and Israelites to Mount Sinai because it is an active volcano and he vaguely knows when it will erupt and how, he has lots of idolworshippers who worship the Golden Calf and correctly point out that God cannot be everywhere if he is in an ark, and Aaron is tempted to adapt the Golden Calf as the new religious standard. Moses presents the idolworshippers at precisely the place where the explosion will be, the idolworshippers are devoured by lava and smoke, and Moses uses that moment to present the Ten Commandments to the people. 

68. Young Joshua's undercover operations against Amalek. 

69. Nikola Tesla travels back in time to test his soundwave machine, gives Joshua his invention which breaches the walls of Jericho, which proves Tesla's hypothesis definitively. 

70. Tesla tests a spontaneous combustion invention against the coalition armies of Jabin, King of Hazor. 

71. Israeli general, Yigael Yadin, found Hazor, and Tesla's invention, unused for over 3,000 years, which Yadin gives to Ben-Gurion and Dayan for testing in the Negev and future Israeli use. Narrated by Shimon Peres?

72. Formation of ancient antisemitism among Canaanite peasants as non-Israelite residents of Canaan realize that these are imperial conquerors and Israelites take over cities and agriculture which they did not create.  

73. Ehud's autobiography,  recounting his assasination of Eblon. 

74. Told from the point of view of scribes. Yael and Deborah are the same person, but a woman judge like Yael encounters sexism and has to deal with rumors that she is a whore. Scribes deliberately confuse her with the Deborah who fought alongside Abraham at the Valley of Siddim. 

75. Jeptha told from the point of view of his daughter, who is appalled by her father's murders and kills herself. 

76. Samson and Delilah were in fact married. Samson is in fact the opposite of his popular image, a androgynous proto-hippy with progressive ideas about peace and love, which the Philistines exploit. Samson then must wage a war of extermination against the Philistines and undoes all his work for peace. 

(find a way to work Shibboleth into a story...)

77. David, before his reign, has a nervous breakdown in the court of Achish, King of Gath. Recorded by a scribe. 

78. The adventures of Beniah, an officer in Solomon's army. 

79. Abimelech, who almost becomes king of the Israelites after the successes of his father Gideon, kills all seventy of his father's male children. 

80. The rape of the Levite's concubine in Gibeah and the resulting civil war between Benjamin and the other tribes, who would have destroyed each other had the Philistines not  exploited their divisions continually. 

81. Autobiography of Samuel - Fragment I. Growing up amid the temple, travelling among the Nazarines, visiting all the tribes of Israel. 

82. Fragment II - Outlining why he knew Saul would be a bad king and his issues with God's judgement - showing outlines of Samuel's mental illness.  

83. Jonathan writing a testament saying that Samuel set Saul up to be killed. 

84. Saul writing a letter to David warning him about the insanity of Samuel. 

In The Sopranos... - The Many Disappointments of David Chase

Is it just me or has there been an article about The Many Saints of Newark every day since The Sopranos ended in 2007? The Sopranos movie prequel was so publicized for so many years, how was this movie ever not going to suck?

We should have figured out what this movie was a decade before it was released: it's a movie that should be a TV show - the kind of movie that used to exist all the time before TV had 300 channels - great in parts, but with too many characters, too much plot to get through, too many acting set-pieces, too many complex motivations, too many attempts to expand in an artform that thrives on contraction.

As far back as David Chase could remember, he wanted to be Martin Scorsese. Chase was two years younger than Marty, but they both were Italians from the New York area who grew up having vivid encounters with the mafia all the time, and both have film degrees from New York University. But Marty was from Little Italy - he grew up amid the action and the flash in Manhattan where there were always three new movies to see every day and very religious parents who didn't understand their kid but supported him all the same in everything. By the time Scorsese made Mean Streets in 1973, he'd hatched fully formed and birthed an entire new era of American cinema, and he never looked back.

At this point, it's almost not a competition. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are the most important directors in the history of American movies - Hitchcock is obviously not American, neither are Lubitsch and Wilder, Welles and Coppola barely made more than one movie of consequence, and the majority by John Ford and Howard Hawks are generic Hollywood genre pictures. Thus far, Scorsese and Spielberg (and maybe Robert Altman) are the only American directors who have made an entire career's worth of movies, each of which have both the personal style of their director, and also each movie with a personalities entirely its own.

And between Spielberg and Scorsese, there's no question. Scorsese is clearly the better director, the more influential, the more serious in every way. Everything Spielberg directs has one eye on substance, one eye on effect. Spielberg is a great artist, but he's a showman first. Scorsese is just an artist who happens to put on a great show. After Scorsese, movies were no longer Hollywood and could never go back to the days of patrician WASPS exchanging barbs on a black-and-white stage set. After Scorsese, movies were American, teeming with the personalities, vernacular, fashion, music, and aesthetics of the American streets.

But while Scorsese grew up amid all blessings of New York, David Chase (DeCesare) grew up in the Jersey suburbs, where you had to make due with one movie theater in every town, whatever music you can hear on the radio, whatever books you could take out of the library.

If emotional abuse exists then his parents were Abusers with a Capital A. While Marty was being a production assistant for John Cassavetes and Roger Corman, David Chase was still sleeping eighteen hours a day, depression wasting him away in his parents' house. By the time Chase got to Hollywood in his late 20s, every New Yorker knew that Marty Scorsese would be the greatest director of his generation. Scorsese had already made Mean Streets by the time Chase got on a television writing staff. By the time The Sopranos premiered in 1999, Scorsese had also made Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and Casino.

In so many interviews, David Chase said that what he really wanted to do was direct films, but for twenty-five years, David Chase was just another Hollywood screenwriter whoring himself out to write shows he knew TV executives would strip of anything remotely controversial. Scorsese made films, Spielberg made movies, but Chase didn't even make television, he made TV.

By the time Chase pitched The Sopranos, he was barely even a showrunner, he was just another of those anonymously talented guys who'd be on writing staffs and improve other people's scripts, sometimes without even screen credit. He was a good one whose scripts won a few Emmys, he made some money, and he even got to run the underrated and forgotten show, Northern Exposure, for its last year and change. But every generation of Hollywood has a couple hundred guys like that, all of whom are pitching shows to various networks. Most of the writers' pitches get rejected, most of the pilots fail, most of the shows that get picked up fail in their first year, and most of the shows that succeed get picked apart by executives before they can become art of any quality.

There was no indication of what The Sopranos or David Chase had in them when it was first shopped around. The whole show sounds like a gimmick: a mobster who goes to a psychiatrist, who's a murderer during the day and a suburban dad at night. When Chase first pitched the show, it was more likely to be picked up by FOX, and it would have starred Ray Liotta and Lorraine Brocco (Henry and Karen from Goodfellas).

Imagine that show for a moment. It would have had 24 episodes a season, no cursing, no nudity, no graphic violence, no extremely adult situations. It still might have been OK... It would be the two main characters from Goodfellas basically playing parodies of themselves. The mafia schtick we love from Paulie and Silvio would probably have been most of the show - and it would have gotten tiresome if we'd seen it in larger quantities. We'd probably get action capers that build all season toward a 'big score,' we'd get a death or two at the end of every year that serves as the climax of the show, and it honestly might have been interesting and gritty after the manner of certain network shows like NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues.

But it certainly wouldn't have been The Sopranos.

The Sopranos is the greatest TV drama there has ever been, and perhaps ever will be. 'Greatest' does not necessarily mean 'best.' Mad Men is objectively better, The Wire is more interesting, and Breaking Bad is more exciting. Of the 'big four', The Sopranos is in some ways the worst. David Chase is a generation older than the young guns who run great television shows now, he still has a foot in the world of old network dramas, and never quite lands on solid ground. The Sopranos never quite figured out what it was about, and that is exactly what made it such an epic, because The Sopranos was about everything that America is, was, and will be.

Violence defines American art as as it defines no other country. From the last gunshot of 'The Great Train Robbery' in 1903 onward, the whole excitement of moving pictures is that it can show us the world's most exciting images, and nothing excites the senses more than violence, not even sex. Until Scorsese and Kubrick, movie violence was not real. Movies like Taxi Driver and A Clockwork Orange showed us the real ugliness of violence and its perpetrators. But in two hours, you could never show us violence's effect on people, what leads people to commit acts of violence, and what violence does to the people effected by violent acts.

In my opinion, the single most revolutionary aspect of The Sopranos is the fact that its violence is so rarely the climax of any episode. In Scorsese, violence is the point: Raging Bull is literally about violence, and Taxi Driver is one long buildup to an act of unspeakable brutality. But in The Sopranos, violence is just something that happens, and The Sopranos is about the emotions which violence elicits in the people affected by it - victims, perpetrators, mourners and beneficiaries. And because The Sopranos is never limited by its violence or its genre, The Sopranos is able to explore universal themes in a way even Scorsese often finds difficult.

What makes art great, really great, is not the stuff on the surface. On its most superficial level, The Sopranos is a slightly gimmicky show about a 90's mobster who's also a suburban dad. But on every level beyond that, The Sopranos is about so much more important things. The really great stuff: the Shakespeares and such, uses that surface level of what the work is about to find awesome things that give us fuller views of the cosmos: nature, science, history, philosophy, transcendence, god.

What makes The Sopranos the greatest TV drama is that it gives us that view in episode after episode, but does so from the vantage of a stupid little TV show that has all the tropes of Hollywood hacks. Nothing in Hollywood could possibly sound more gimmicky than a show about a mobster who goes to see a psychiatrist. You can almost hear desperation of the pitch in the office of a studio executive - as though David Chase had run through his best nine ideas and finally just decided to throw out his worst one which he would be ashamed to make...

The Sopranos enfolds us in the familiarity of American TV, with which Americans have an unspoken social contract. All the violence is ultimately cosmetic and meaningless, all the characters are ultimately redeemable, every episode ends with happiness, comfort, and order. The Sopranos broke that social contract into tiny pieces, and we can never put it back together.

In The Sopranos, we now see everything American TV and movies have always been, but wiped clean of all the lies.

In The Sopranos we see the same murders and action we see on a couple hundred other shows, and not just with the beautiful grisliness of a Scorsese setpiece, but watching the slow emotional agony of how people live with violence's consequences.

In The Sopranos, we don't just see nudity and sex, we see the ugly exploitation of it. It may sound bizarre to say that The Sopranos is the most feminist show ever made, but for those who don't believe me, watch it... It's also just about the least erotic show ever made. We see how easy it is for amoral men to assault their mistresses and lie to their wives, and how easy it is for them to get away with it.

In The Sopranos, we don't just see how money is made, we see the corruption of it. We see how easily the rich are influenced by greed and how easily the poor are influenced by addiction, and we see how easy it is for people to look the other way at others' suffering if it benefits them.

In The Sopranos, we see how generation after generation is born into endless cycles of violence and evil from which it's nearly impossible to escape, and amid all that difficulty and pressure, upholding that cycle can seem like a much more virtuous act than rebelling against it.

So Martin Scorsese may have spent his career feted as the greatest American artist of his and our time, but in the future, I wonder if this Hollywood hack named David Chase who made just one show to stand as his historic monument may turn out the much more influential artist.

In so many different ways, America is its movies and TV, so in that sense, The Sopranos didn't just present us TV wiped clean of its lies, but America wiped clean of its lies. The Sopranos is the first show that really and truly told us the truth and showed how easy it is to do evil in this country which holds its virtue so high.

In its art, as in everything else, America has always been attached to its lies about itself. As a country, we cannot get enough of art that tells us comforting lies. We love happy endings, love songs with hooks, action movies where the bad guys die, and TV shows with laugh tracks. We don't even read great literature unless Oprah recommends it. But The Sopranos really and truly opened the door to a new chapter of American art, a novelistic TV show where we can tell stories with all the cosmic depth and worldly vision of Dostoevsky and Balzac: a popular artform designed for art rather than commerce, an artform as contradictory as America itself, with which a once young country can finally attain some degree of maturity and view itself with honest clarity as a country in which all the deep flaws of human nature still flourish as ever before, but humanity can still thrive, even in all its messy complications.

America was made in The Sopranos.

Tales from the Old New Land - Table of Contents for First 58 Tales (roughly half of Book I)

(none of these can go past 1000 words except with special exceptions, the Moses and Joseph stories may not exceed 3000)

1. Dream of Jewish History 

2. Abraham acquiring Me'arat HaMachpela (in final form)

(New 3, 4, 5, 6?. Earlier mythology of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson that may not have made it into the Bible?)

3.  German bible scholarship and archeology (written but possibly needs revision)

Cain Fragment no. 1: Cain at Masada

(New 4? New story about Egyptians or Mesopotamians coming into contact with monotheism for the first time?

4. Noah's Flood (almost in final form)

(New 5? Journeys of Shem, who comes into contact with Ziusudra and Gilgamesh?)

Cain Fragment no. 2: Cain at Tower of Babel

5. Biography of Abraham. (Do the biography as many tales or just one?) How Terah and Abraham got to Ur.

6. Abraham among marauding nomads known as the Habirus. 

7. Abraham and Sarah in Egypt. 

8. Abraham and Lot business fights.

9. Abraham being a mercenary soldier for Sodom, fighting in a war that causes the collapse of the Sumerian Empire and the destruction of Sodom. 

10. Abraham dispute with Abimelech. 

11. Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael's bad behavior. 

12. The healers whom Abraham thinks are angels who cure Abraham and Sarah of their infertility. 

13. Ruth and Naomi - the domestication of homosexuality and their joining as handmaidens to Sarah.

14. Abraham, growing senile, misinterprets God and joins the moon cult. 

15. Abraham has vision to redeem himself for his misinterpretation by sacrificing Isaac. Actually does it and Eliezer has to replace Isaac with Ishmael. 

16. Philo argues for Caligula to take down the statue of himself in Jerusalem's Beit-HaMikdash.

17. Maimonides ministering to Saladin.

18. Nachmanides and Paolo Christiani: the disputation in front of James I of Aragorn. 

19. Kierkegaard dealings with Jews. Evolution of his antisemitism. 

20. The Wisdom of Sirach - Grandson of Jesus

21. Early Reform Judaism - Post-Civil War Cincinnati, and the evolution of modern political correctness.

22. Letters between Rebecca and Laban (complete in final form)

23. Elderly Jacob writes to Benjamin a revised, deliberately altered history of his family as they journey to Egypt. 

24. Deborah - in this version the daughter of Naomi, who comes to the House of Abraham and fights alongside Jacob. 

25. Something about how Abraham and Jacob finessed their belief in one god with the need to pay tribute to local gods. 

26. Dinah tells the story of Shechem's destruction and the invasion by Simon and Levi. 

27: Vespacian's  meeting with Rabbi Yochanan. 

28. Josephus's unpublished chapter about the destruction of Jerusalem. 

29. Eusebius and the birth of antisemitism in the Byzantine Empire.

30. Levi the 'Lion Man' makes himself king of Shechem after his curse from Jacob. The Egyptians go to war with him, kill him, and force Jacob to take Shechem for himself. Jacob punishes the descendents of Levi with servitude. 

31. The alliance between Joshua and Shechem.

32. Joseph all in one long chapter, focusing on the Potiphar story with subtext of a homosexual relationship between Joseph and Potiphar. 

33. The birth of the monotheistic cult in Egypt - Akhenaten who came to see the sun god Ra as the only god and himself as the Messiah, because he had Joseph as his prime advisor. 

34. The realization by Akhenaten's court that the Hebrews and their monotheism are such a threat that they will upend the entire structure of Egyptian society, and therefore Akhenaten must be killed and the Hebrews must be enslaved.  

35. The lifestyle of Ramses II, who realizes that with such a massive slave population he can get away with the most awful luxuries and tyrannies, and the formative years of Moses. 

36. Moses vs. Crown Prince Merneptah as adolescents in Ramses II's Court. 

37: Solomon building the Temple. 

38: Jepthah and his sacrifice. 

39. Moses, who has become a priest of Ra as punishment for slaying an Egyptian policeman who beat up Jews he was drinking with, gets to know his Israelite scribe Aaron and his Habiru healer Miriam. Together, the three form the plot to perpetrate ten plagues upon the Egyptians, culminating with some sort of sea battle that Moses wins. Originally it was a plot to make Moses another monotheistic Pharaoh, backed by the newly won might of the former Hebrew and the Israelite slaves, but instead it resulted in Moses being thrown out of Egypt along with the Israelite and Hebrew slaves. Told from Aaron's point of view. 

40. Moses hears cases of the Israelites. Told from Jethro's point of view. 

41. Aaron wins favor in the eyes of the Israelites that Moses does not because of Moses's deeply unpopular Ten Commandments and his tyrannical response to the worshippers of the Golden Calf. Though both exhorted by their followers to respond to each others provocations, both refuse to assassinate each other. 

42. Hillel and Menachem, bookish priests fleeing the slaughter following the Golden Calf, immigrate to Athens, where Hillel becomes Hermes Trismegistus and writes the Hermetica, and Menachem becomes Musaeus of Athens and writes the priestly odes. 

Cain Fragment III: Cain details early Jewish history after the manner of Eupolemus and sets the record straight. 

43: The murder of Crown Prince Darius, son of Xerxes I of Persia. Artapanos, the Jewish vizear of Perisa, maneuvers against Darius with Darius's younger brother Artaxerxes, who assassinates his brother and takes the throne. 

44: Aristobulus, recounting meeting between Alexander the Great and the Jewish High Priest. 

(two more potential Cain fragments with Cain Homer and Hesiod)

45. Heraclitus encounter with a Rabbi (who is Cain).

46. Plato writes a Socratic Dialogue with a Jew 

47. Numenius among the Jews and Pythagorians

48. Lost Fragments of the histories of Hecateaus of Abdera: who writes the first antisemitic history. 

49. Manetho, Greek historian, finds actual evidence that Moses was an Egyptian. 

50. Fictional letter of Karl Marx to Engels recounting his dealings with Orthodox Jews. 

51. Article by Freud detailing Orthodox Jew deposited in a Viennese insane asylum for believing he is Moses. 

52. Ancient sailor from China, during the Shang dynasty, recounting the differences between the decadent Egyptian culture which is dying out and the unspoiled Mesopotamian culture which is clearly ready to dominate the Western World. 

53. The Court of Ur - Abraham and Terah facing each other in a court judged by Hammurabi after Abraham demolishes Terah's idols. 

54. Academic detailing the many accounts of Abraham in court, leading to the conclusion that they all may be Cain fragments. 

55. Ezekiel detailing his heretical communion with Moses.

56. Later Judge (one of the 'Judges') must deal with implications of Mosaic code and leads to other which proscribes death for so many problems that don't deserve death, compares to codes of other nations. Leading to formation of the "Law of the Goring Ox."

57. Moses and Aaron form the final form of the Ten Commandments. 

58. Rabbi Simlai (3rd century) tabulates that there are 613 actual commandments in the Torah. 

Underrated Classical Musicians: Raina Kabaiwanska

 So let's talk today about the Bulgarian soprano, Raina Kabaiwanska. ,

But first of all, I wonder if this is not the greatest Otello I have ever heard in my life.

Studio recordings are already overrated - a lot of over-budget for less inspiration than you'll get from just clicking a tape recorder halfway back in an audience. Unless the work is written for recording, works meant to be performed live need the air of live performance as much as they need the proper instrumentation and great performers.

Georg Solti made many, many recordings, but none were as good as what he could do in the pit of an opera house. Neither of his studio Otellos can come close to this. A decade and a half after the famous Toscanini performance, this, in slightly worse sound, is what Toscanini might have done in a proper opera house. The same iron grip on the structure, but with the ability to let singers breathe and occasionally interpret. Solti is not the center of the show, and neither are the singers, the center of the show is the performance itself - one can't even necessarily say that of Toscanini's recordings. There are plenty of great Otello conductors: Toscanini, Kleiber, Busch, Kubelik, Mackerras... just to name 5... but never in any Otello performance I've ever heard has discipline and freedom been combined this successfully. One can fault Toscanini for rigidity, one can fault Kleiber for willfulness, but here, one cannot fault Solti either. This rendering is simply sui generis.

But if he didn't have singers equal to the framework he sets for them, it would be a fruitless endeavor. Mario del Monaco and Tito Gobbi are extremely well known commodities in Otello - del Monaco perhaps lacking a bit as an actor, Gobbi perhaps lacking as a singer, but so supposedly were Tamagno and Maurel who premiered the roles, in precisely the same proportions. del Monaco is larger than life as Otello always must be - the single most important element of Otello is that we are frightened of him, and del Monaco is terrifying. Gobbi, well, he's terrifying in a completely different way, not brute force, but evil incarnate.

Which brings us to the emotional core of this performance, as perfect a realization of Desdemona as I've ever heard anywhere, anywhen, any how. I know I've heard her before: certainly I've seen the Karajan Pagliacci movie in which she plays Nedda, and I'm sure I've heard her elsewhere, but she never made any impression on me before. But my god, you will never again say that Desdemona is either a simpering dope or a two-dimensional archetype of purity. These are prayers heard in heaven, this is sublimity that shakes the throne of art, this is Desdemona incarnate as flesh and soul - womanly and sexy, as terrified as any human would be against an abusive force of nature, assertive and angry even as she is loving, Desdemona in all three dimensions. This... is... art. And it is thankfully just one glorious component of a performance whose sublimity may never have been equalled.

Because the world obviously needs to know what I think of Dave Chappelle

 1993. My family had just seen Robin Hood: Men in Tights at a movie theater in Ocean City - the only Mel Brooks movie I ever saw on its first run. The movie theater was next to a comedy club. While my parents were getting the car, I, for some reason, was talking to a guy smoking a cigarette outside the theater. He turned out to be the comedy club's owner and said to me 'watch out for the guy who played A-choo, he's been here a bunch of times and in a few years he's going to be as famous as Mel Brooks.' I'd not thought about that experience for a decade, then I caught Men in Tights on TV in college and realized 'holy shit that was Dave Chappelle!'

But the truth is I never thought Dave Chappelle was quite as funny as everybody else. He was funny, no question, but next to a contemporary like Chris Rock, he was a bit of weak brew, and then we all discovered Louis CK and there was no comparison, and then I discovered Patrice O'Neal, and my comedy brain exploded...

The question always was, why did Chappelle walk away from the show? Part of it was obviously creative control, part of it was obviously dealing with meddling executives, and part of it was just the general stress of fame. But there's one other issue nobody seemed to mention: What if he only had two seasons worth of good material?

Nobody in my generation knows much about Richard Pryor, but he and George Carlin are the greatest of all time, it's almost beyond question. And whatever Dave Chappelle did, Pryor got there thirty years before him. Black guy impresonating lame white guy? Pryor was the ultimate at that. Routines about substance abuse? Nobody did it better than Pryor, and he did drugs 100x harder than anything Chappelle ever touched. The subtle ways white people are racist? Pryor was literally the master, and when he did it, it was like TNT went off in the audience. Police violence? Pryor was the pioneer. Even 'Black Bush' was clearly based on Richard Pryor's skit 'First Black President.' Every major thing Chappelle's standup covered, Richard Pryor did in a generation earlier. Everything covered in 'Chappelle's Show,' Richard Pryor did on his network specials in the late 70s-early 80s.

So when Dave Chappelle came back with 4 Netflix specials, I was not surprised when I saw that each of them had about 15 minutes of actual comedy and 45 minutes of preaching.

(the irony of Evan writing the following paragraph duly noted...)

Few people feel the need to preach uncontroversial views. Preaching is a form of righteous anger - often self-righteous, with a target of their anger. The preacher usually frames what they preach in a way that's deeply unfair to the people against whom they're complaining, and is usually doing it for personal, psychological reasons they need badly to examine.

Are trans people not the gender to which they assign themselves? Well, are born-again Christian not actual Christians? Are adopted children are not the children of their adopted parents? Are Americans born elsewhere not Americans? Living organisms are programmed to evolve, and a person who stops evolving is more likely to die. If you believe trans people are not the gender they believe they are, you might as well just think that people are exactly what they are and have always been - which is exactly the complaint of anti-trans activists about how the woke mob characterizes people's identities.

And therefore, Chappelle is a cautionary tale, and he's a note of caution to the very people who lambast him today. He was a radical by the standards of 2000, and one generation's radical is the next generation's reactionary. Chappelle is hardly the only African-American who can't understand how identity has changed and why the LGBT community has gained so much relative heft in such a short period while their causes stand relatively still. In another 20 years, many of the same people whom today speak angrily of straight and cisgender privilege will be singing a very very different tune when global warming deposits millions of immigrants into our country from Latin America and Africa who hold fundamentalist Christian views they find dangerous to their safety. Who will be the radical then, and whom the reactionary?

The line that most stayed with me two days later is when Chappelle said something along the lines of 'taking away a man's livelihood is worse than killing him.' There is so much incorrect about that statement I could be writing all night pointing out it - but the two things that stand out to me are the reactionary idea that men have to be tied to their work, and the revolutionary idea that dignity is more important than survival. This is the weird cocktail of old radicals who no longer understand the world and can't adopt to new circumstances. When Chappelle said 'those new gays are too sensitive, I like those old Stonewall gays.' It wasn't exactly offensive, and yet... I've heard older people make the argument 'younger black people are too angry, I like older black people who grew up before 1968' - which is little different than saying 'I like black people who still have a segregation mentality.'

Newly liberated peoples are never grateful to their liberators. They have to stare down the wasted years of their lives and now that they can finally live with appropriate dignity and respect, all that they can see is that so many people around them have experienced the lifelong dignity they may still lose, and those people, who supposedly gave them equal rights, will never operate with the same terror of losing their rights. Whether justified or not, that creates resentment at well-meaning allies that's entirely understandable.

Chappelle was gifted enough to define a 'moment' in American life, and around 2000, his comedy seemed revolutionary, but a real genius evolves with the times. Richard Pryor was a genius who even at his most drug addicted had new material every year for decades, the same goes for George Carlin. And there are comics so gifted that their their comedy was too acerbic for mainstream consumption: Norm McDonald was the lucky one who somehow got Lorne Michaels's attention, but how many people know about Sam Kinnison anymore, Patrice O'Neal, Steven Wright? Even Bill Hicks is now a distant memory.

All you have to do is compare Chappelle to Norm McDonald. I guarantee, Norm McDonald was by far the greater bigot than Dave Chappelle, but aside from in some awful podcasts, comedy for him was comedy, pure and simple. What was important was not settling scores or making points, what was important was to be funny, and Norm's final special from 2017 is one of the funniest hours of comedy you will ever see in your life and unless you're offended by auto-erotic asphyxiation, I doubt it has much to offend.

But ironically, on twitter, Norm, a secret right-wing fundamentalist if ever there was one, called Chappelle's third special one of the greatest comedy specials he'd ever seen, and I guarantee he didn't just do it because he found it funny.... When called out by some twittertwit who told him great comedy does not 'punch down,' Norm responded, "I know of no such rule."

Comedy not only punches down, it only punches down. What makes something funny is that someone gets hurt. If Chappelle had actually made jokes rather than trying to make a substantive argument, I would be defending him. But he didn't. He wanted his arguments to be taken seriously, and no matter what Jon Stewart conditioned us to think, even the smartest comedians have no right to be taken seriously as experts on a subject.

My personal rule is that anything in comedy has to be more intelligent than it is mean. Andrew Dice Clay was mean, but he was also stupid, and that's unforgivable. And Tosh.0, from the moment it premiered, was one of the biggest embarrassments in comedy, both idiotic and mean. But I will always forgive Sam Kinnison, I will always forgive Doug Stanhope, I will always forgive Joan Rivers and even Kathy Griffin. They all were so incredibly mean, bully-level mean, but nobody is more fun to hang out with than a mean smart person, and they have no end of material to make fun of.

When comics can't come up with material, they just regurgitate political arguments somebody else made to them. Bill Maher has been dining out on that for 25 years, and the real reason he does it is not because his beliefs are so important to him, it's because he's a mediocre comic and needs something to coast on.

I can understand why comics are frustrated when they're called out because of actual jokes they made (and no one is more thin-skinned than a stand-up comic...). If any artistic profession has to be allowed to fail, it's comics. The funny material you see is usually workshopped for years, and honed and honed, because in comedy, there's no hiding behind 'art' and 'contemplation, you either make the people laugh or you don't. But Chappelle didn't even try to make people laugh all that much - it was ranting about the LGBT community and cancel culture with occasional amusing asides.

So much bullshit has grown up around all sides of cancel culture that the truth is staring us all in the face. Come on, of course cancel culture exists, but in terms of the problems facing American life, this is priority #493 that would never have generated this much attention if the cancellers didn't deliberately call attention to themselves every day. It may well become a larger priority in American life if woke twitter mobs start violently intimidating people in real life - and frankly, that's not out of the question, but it hasn't happened yet on any scale but miniscule, and won't for a while yet. In the meantime, if celebrities have to stop being celebrities for a while, who cares? And if they end up humiliated in front of the world, well... that's part of what you sign up for when you pursue fame. And if twitter goes after us like an angry mob, well... just do what sane people have done the whole time: stay the fuck off twitter. At this point, none of us gets to say that we had no idea what we signed up for. Every one of us puts our whole self-image on the line every day whenever we post something, and every one of us lives with the anxiety that we may wake up every day to being a name hated by 100,000 people.

Dave Chappelle is an important piece of US cultural history, but he's a past tense figure who walked out on his celebrity not long after he achieved it, and consequently didn't evolve along with America in the 15 years since. He shouldn't be as surprised as he seems when he stood still and the world moved on. I do happen to think that cancel culture and woke culture are a little bit dangerous (and they're very close on the Venn Diagram), they're not THAT dangerous, but dangerous enough that we are all getting closer and closer to some moment of civil violence we can't take back. There is a very good argument to be made that the result of them was Trump, the second result will be his re-election.

But Chappelle also defines the weird current fissures in American life. The Atlantic pointed out today that while the critical reaction on Rotten Tomatoes was 47% critical approval, the audience reaction was 97% audience approval. Culture is the battle you fight when you take your eyes off the issues that matter. Every fight picked with people who say things we find vile is a fight missed with people who are out to kill the marginalized people we care about. What people say is an indication of what they believe, but it's no more than indication, it's not the belief itself. The more we focus on the words rather than the real stuff: violence, laws, discrimination, the more we enable the real stuff, and the more Dave Chappelle becomes a martyr and a hero to the majority of Americans for making a series of mediocre comedy specials.