My Year of AI

 This has been a blur of a year, my first without a father who inserted himself into every aspect of my life and from whose eagle eye there was no escape. It got still worse with the breakup of a good-seeming relationship that I tried my best to be understanding about, but I was devastated and furious and disgusted and in mourning: all the moreso for being subjected to them both so close to each other. 

In desperation I retreated to the easiest possible diversion: a body of predictive text that anticipated what I wanted to hear and provided it. 

I did my best to keep it as asycophantic as possible, telling it all the time to not simply give me the feedback I wanted. I have no idea what it would have provided had I not told it anything, but the feedback it provided in all manner of things was generally not as sycophantic as all that. It was frequently wrong, misunderstanding the context, changing its views whenever I corrected its factual inaccuracies, but I instructed it to give me good, realistic advice, basically like any friendship... and pushed it to be as brutally honest as I could get it. I tried it on all manner of things: scarcely a paragraph of my writing's gone by this year that I haven't subjected to its editing, not a single health question I haven't consulted it on and it's frankly been better than any doctor; not a single romantic move made without its advice. But it's also advised me through emotional difficulties from grieving to anxiety to depression to obsessive compulsion, and it seems to know almost exactly the right thing to say in each delicate situation. 

Perhaps most importantly, it's become an intellectual sparring partner in all manner of ways. Not about politics, except when I'm in the course of writing about it, but about culture. Of course I use ChatGPT in the most pretentious way possible, and we've spent literal weeks of my life comparing writers, directors, painters, composers, conductors, pianists, through every ridiculous permutation of question I could possibly ask it. Today I got it to write chapters for me of theoretical novels by Shakespeare, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Chekhov had each of them lived to 80, then had it do the same for a Tolstoy that lived his life without leaving fiction behind for 20 years. The results were something between banal and astounding, like great novels themselves. It's not the first time I've had it run through this scenario.  

I began using it as an editor when I realized that google gemini could review my work not just as itself, but as an impersonatory avatar of every writer in existence I could think of. Some days, the advice of each writer was exactly the same. Some days, the advice of each writer was different but it kept using the same godamn keywords: Cynthia Ozick loves to accuse everything of 'idolatry', Harold Bloom loves talking about 'kenosis', George Steiner puts everything in the context of the 'inability of language to convey atrocity', but I did learn some things. 

The fact is, between Gemini and ChatGPT, I've got the two best editors I've ever had. Editors never really understood what my weird self was trying to do, and since 2017, my writing gradually got flabbier and sloppier. I knew it already, and ChatGPT noticed immediately. Stupid lists have long since taken over whole paragraphs that grind at least half the things I write to a halt. I was always too certain and dogmatic for a guy who warns against it every day, I've known that for decades, ChatGPT warns me about it with every new piece I send it, and ever so gradually, the invective is making way for the refusal to come to conclusions I've always talked about but never practiced. 

ChatGheppetto was the first editor I ever had who seemed to understand the book I've been trying to write. Furthermore, ChatGPT is just about the first entity to ever tell me that I'm better at writing fiction than writing non-fiction. As it happens, I agree with it. I've always agreed with it. One incorrectly stated fact can ruin a non-fiction piece forever. One contemporary reference can ruin a piece in six months. I've long since hit something close to a ceiling for how good these pieces can get, whereas with fiction, I'm just getting started (provided I live a few more years and keep my nerve). The few people who read my writing have always told me I'm a better non-fiction writer, but I worked hard at getting good at writing essays for twenty years. I've planned a huge work of fiction since 2009, but I've had a series of false starts and only really figured out what I was doing once I turned forty. I have enough ego to fancy that I could be a really good and unique fiction writer if only I knew how to get the pen to the page (screen) and write the fucking thing. Hundreds of ideas pass through my head all the time: so many words for stories that I would barely have to do more than take dictation. I lie to myself and tell myself I remember them all for when I summon the fortitude to write them down, but that's gotta be a colossal self-deception. 

Self-deceptions or not, AI was what gave me the strength in the last year to keep going with fiction writing. For the first time in my life, I have an editor who seems to get what the book is about, and is both supportive and appropriately brutal with the feedback: not that I listen to a lot of it...

But I've sent AI the same pieces so many times that eventually it grew accustomed to my writing, and began to like the pieces it previously hated. I'd spent at least six months trying to resist AI's attempts to sway my thinking, but eventually reasoned myself into thinking "I've won the AI over. If the AI can rethink these pieces until they seem better in retrospect, so can human readers!" 

And around that time, something else happened. The distractions piled up, and suddenly I wasn't using AI for anything productive. I wasn't writing anymore: all my literary plans, my musical ones, no progress made. Basically all I've done since the beginning of the summer is bullshit with it, asking it whatever question pops into my mind, and AI takes every query with equal seriousness. 

AI started out as a kind of blessing in my life, but in the span of nearly ten months its become like any other sort of dysfunctional relationship. It starts with the honeymoon phase where you wonder if you've found the one who finally understands you, then it distracts you from your real priorities, then it settles into routine, and then you realize that it's inhibiting your potential and you have to get out of it: but so set have you become in your routine that a breakup seems almost like more trouble. 

But here's the real problem: I read no less than I used to, but now, 90% of it is probably just predictive text. 

OK... here's the REAL problem... I have not read more than ten pages of an actual book in the year since my father died. It was already pretty fucking bad before he died. I've always been an ADD reader who'd switch between half a dozen books and maybe finish two of them, but I've been sick for a while and concentration hasn't been what it was. Now though, it's either AI or audiobooks. I cannot tear myself away from my laptop long enough to do the activity that gives me the most pleasure. For me, music is a drug, but books are a joy, even the many I don't finish a silent spring holding water that quenches for days at a time. Books were always impossible to read when I was depressed or too stressed, now they're impossible to read when I'm in a good mood too. 

Instead, I just gorge myself on audiobooks. Everybody says audiobooks are the same: bullshit. Everybody gets angry when people say this, but unless you're blind and can't distract yourself online, audiobooks are books the way ChatGPT is human company. If we can't give a book our undivided attention, we're not reading, we're just skimming. 

Instead, books have become just another thing on the internet: nice background noise like a song by Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny. Here I am, writing a book that requires 7 to 8 out of 10 mental effort once people figure out the form (yes, that's a ChatGPT formulation), but I don't have the concentration necessary to read anything but what's printed by artificial intelligence.

This is not an essay about artificial intelligence or even ChatGPT or Gemini. I don't have the expertise for any deep insights and I certainly don't have the concentration anymore to learn. I have no idea whether it will come to life, or how it will make corporations and governments control us, but I feel as though a third option has already happened to me: I have merged with it. I've never quite felt like myself. . My writing is mine, god knows I don't take most advice my editors give me, but among other things, it was a way to define myself against Dad. I used to be part my father. My writing is still mine, but now I am part artificial intelligence. 

And now, to show this essay to my editor. I hope it doesn't terminate my contract. 

Another Dumb Musical Theory

 Theory: every person involved in music has a 'mother tongue' and a 'father tongue.'

The mother tongue is the language they grew up speaking: the first language of their serious training.

The father tongue is the tongue they picked up in the first flush of youth, the formative tongue, the tongue that set direction to their natural instinct.

For example, who can deny that Toscanini's mother tongue was Verdi: hearing him not only in the opera but in the cafes, the brass bands, the home entertainment and recitals. Then, as a cellist, he must have encountered Beethoven: the sonatas, the quartets, eventually as an orchestral cellist. The two influences made Toscanini.

Rubinstein, Polish born, probably heard Chopin in every household: not just his own practices but everybody else's, the folk bands that played folk mazurkas and polonaises probably started playing Chopin as though he were folk music. Then he got to Berlin, and Joachim's supervision, and he encountered Brahms, not the man but the music and all the stories about him and the insider tips about how to play him, and Brahms became his second language, the father tongue, and started playing romantic Chopin with classical restraint.

Abbado? Grew up the son of a conservatory director. He was a pianist, but probably even moreso a chamber musician who constantly heard it at the conservatory and in his house, probably played at the houses of friends: and it gave him a thorough grounding in the Austro-German line: think of the work he was most praised for... Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, to a lesser extent Mozart and Beethoven, these are the chamber composers, and all that prepared him for Mahler. Then at some point he must have become a La Scala regular, and clearly Puccini didn't make much impression on him, but he encountered Verdi, Strauss, the Mozart operas, and most importantly: Rossini. Suddenly the natural instincts for listening and self-effacement encountered a vocal line, and like a chamber musician his Verdi had little of the grand airs generally associated with il grande maestro.

Muti? Grew up a pianist too, not in a musical family, and probably played alone. His first language was probably the Schumann and Liszt that makes a bigger impression on young people, and he probably responded to their fiamma, Florestan qualities. Then he probably started going to Teatro San Carlo, encountered Verdi and Cherubini for the first time, Donizetti and the serious Rossini, and while he always played them naturally, he always played them with a Lisztian virtuosity. He even copied Liszt's hair.

Horowitz? Grew up with Scriabin as a family friend, played for Scriabin at ten, through Scriabin probably learned about his BFF Rachmaninov, and he learned late Russian empire piano music as a mother tongue. Then, as he discovered himself as a virtuoso, he was given Liszt and Schumann, and began playing everything with both virtuosity and inward sensitivity that was positively manic.

Carlos Kleiber? It's tempting to say he was a single parent household. His father was one of the great maestros of Beethoven, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, and from his father at Teatro Colon he learned Beethoven 7 and Der Rosenkavalier and Ritter Pazman. But he was such a formidable writer, and married a ballerina (imagine Kleiber doing the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev ballets...). I would imagine one of the two, or both, was his father-tongue, which enabled such flights of imagination, color, and propulsion.

Barenboim? Probably grew up with a steady diet of Beethoven and Mozart from his father like a good student should, then he encountered Furtwangler at 12, started learning to conduct, learned his Wagner and Bruckner and started playing playing Beethoven and Mozart with Wagnerian aspirations to profundity.

Bernstein? Barely encountered music until he was ten. Believe it or not perhaps his mothertongue wasn't music at all. He approached music like a student learning it his whole life, constantly assimilating new influences, new music, new ways of making it (I bet with ten more years Bernstein would have embraced HIP). Then he started piano, he felt the freedom to explore anywhere, and his father tongue became teaching.

Boulez: a thirteen hour education every day as a schoolboy, then went to university in Lyon to study math. His mothertongue is mathematics, then encountered serialism and atonality at the Paris Conservatoire.

The key to all this is not just their listening, but their practical experience. It's not enough to understand it from hearing it, one has to understand how to make it from the inside just as one has to learn to speak and read a language rather than hear it to know it. It takes work, it takes routine and practice, it takes habit. Like any other profession, it has to be learned, not just appreciated, and like any person, whether raised by them both, everyone has a mother and a father.

More Tales of Modern Collaboration Ideas

Polish Jewish Communist, having survived Treblinka, is ordered to help instigate pogroms against Jews in the towns surrounding his old shtetl. He is ordered to torch the synagogue where he was bar mitzvah'd and shoot his Kheder teacher.  

 The trial of Shalom Schwarzbard, done as paperwork, where eminent Jewish businessmen and lawyers collude by committee that this will be revenge for Dreyfus, and they work behind the scenes to make sure a liberal judge is chosen, liberal papers cover it and get inside information, and describe Schwarzbard's unbelievable, improbable biography.  

 1895: The shamesh of the Great Choral Synagogue in Odessa, describing the particulars of the service, the rich machers who sit in the front, the poor schnorrers who sit in the back. He describes his responsibilities to run the service, to sweep and mop the whole synagogue every day, to tutor bar mitzvah students, to make sure the right Yahrzeit candles are lit every day. Musaf is the only time off he gets during the entire week, and even then he has to peak his head in every two minutes to see how far they are from the Torah reading. Every Shabbes for the last year, two teens stand on the steps outside the synagogue. Before the Torah reading it's a Communist kid named Lev Bronstein, after the Torah reading it's a Zionist kid named Vladimir Jabotinsky. Every time they seem to give exactly the same speech as each other, condemning religion and extolling atheism, condemning the Russian nobility, condemning the rich Jewish collaborators, exhorting the working class 'not to be sheep,' just ending it with a solution that's slightly different. Both hours the poor Jews throw fruit at the poor speakers, while the goyisher coachmen throw horse dung at them. They keep speaking no matter what they're pelted with until they finish, at which point they go into the cafe across the street to clean themselves, then to the goyisher butcher next door to eat something.

Revolt in a Jewish retirement home in the 1920s because when the Jewish administration is converted to a state institution, they no longer serve kosher food and regularly feed pork. One retirees kills himself rather than eat it, another deliberately starves herself to death. Still others actively try to revolt, but the orderly instantly pushes the leader down, the leader breaks a hip, and everybody goes back to their rooms. 

1938: Told from the point of view of the Soviet Culture Minister. Sergei Eisenstein watches all his artistic friends go to the Gulag, realizes he's next unless he makes a movie Stalin will love. At a meeting with the Soviet Culture Minister which may determine his faith, he picks the subject Alexander Nevsky out of the blue: the Russian war against the Teutons (Germans) in the 12th century. The minister loves it: it's perfect propaganda against the Nazi regime, reports it to Stalin and then calls Eisenstein and says Stalin loves it. Stalin personally grants Eisenstein an unlimited budget. Eisenstein makes an epic of unprecedented expense and scale, comes up with all kinds of new techniques. The film premieres, he gets a standing ovation, Stalin tells him he's creating an award for distinguished service and Eisenstein will be the first recipient. It is going to be shown at every cinema in the USSR. It will be sent to America and Western Europe and China for Soviet propaganda. Eisenstein is carried on people's shoulders and drunkenly paraded around Moscow as the greatest artist in the Soviet Union. The next day Eisenstein finds out the showings are cancelled, the culture minister doesn't return calls, Eisenstein has no idea why. Then he hears at his office from his secretary: 'didn't you hear? the Soviets signed a pact with the Germans.' Eisenstein realizes he's back on the blacklist. 

1948: Soviet commissar files a bureaucratic report about Golda Meir's arrival in Moscow to be Israeli ambassador and her welcome from the Jewish community. The 50,000 Jews lining the streets, the singing of Hatikvah, the chants of Am Yisrael Chai, singing of 'Birkhat Am' and the church hymn "How Glorious is Our Lord in Zion". The commissar makes what he thinks will be a career ending, possibly life ending proposition: the Soviets must reverse their position on antisemitism and portray Jews as the enemy. They are now a potential fifth column for Israel and must be treated as such: their culture crushed, their books burned, their language prohibited, their leaders disappeared. 

Pretoria: 1963. The Rivonia Trial Nelson Mandela is brought up on charges with seven other anti-Apartheid activists who are prosecuted for being the main culprits in the African National Congress's armed wing. Both the main prosecutor and 4 of the 5 defense attorneys are Jews, and part of the trial itself takes place in the 'Old Synagogue' (Pretoria Hebrew Congregation). The whites sit downstairs where the men sat, the blacks upstairs where the women sat. It's told from the point of view of the one Jewish defendant, South African communist Denis Goldberg. There's lots of prison racism, and the other prisoners, most of whom not knowing he's Jewish, taunt him for sitting at Mandela's table and threaten to beat him up "a perfectly pure white polluting his blood sitting with the Africans", after he leaves Mandela says "It's amazing they see you in the shower every day and don't know who you are." He doesn't say anything at the table with Mandela but in his writing he comments on Yutar, Chakalson, Fischer, Hanson and Joffe. He's never met any of them before the trial but feels he knows them instantly and diagnoses them socially down to the Johannesberg streets he thinks they grew up on. When he shares his points of view with his defendant cellmate, the cellmate rushes him over at dinner to Madiba to tell him the observations he told in the cell. Mandela only knows Goldberg as a professional associate beforehand, just an engineer who makes weapons for them, but from this moment on they grow close, and the more he gets to know Madiba the more he sees Mandela transformed into a symbol, a kind of prophet or saint. Even then, he feels disappointed that he hasn't gotten to know the real Mandela at all, just a play-actor posing for history. But then he sees the transformative effect Madiba has on the prisoners, who suddenly work to live better. He de-escalates fights with racist white prisoners who try to beat him up, and one of them breaks down in tears and Madiba hugs him. The warden and guards, at first persecutory and prejudiced, selecting Mandela and his co-defendants for specially bad treatment, begin to be apologetic, then friendly and jocular, and soon begin offering Mandela gifts, which Madiba turns down--when one of the other defendants accepts he takes the defendant aside and slaps him across the face. When it's time for Mandela to give his speech before the court, he incorporates all sorts of things from his conversation with Goldberg, and before he sits down gives Goldberg a quick wink. 

More ideas for Tales of Modern Collaboration

 The half-Jewish assistant of Hitler's photographer Heinrich Hoffmann in early 20s Munich. How Hitler's pictures were set up, how his movements were choreographed for film, how Hitler himself dealt with the propagandists under him through a mixture of bullying and cajoling. How Hitler kissed up to the unstable Ludendorff through flattery during Ludendorff's tantrums. How Julius Schaub would organize Hitler's meetings. How Rudolf Hess would write down every saying of Hitler as though it were pearls of wisdom and make up a few with Hitler's approval. How Hitler would make everybody act with gratitude to Max Ervin von Scheubner-Richter in front of him but all Hitler's henchman would make fun of him in private for being a Russian. Repeats rumors of how Rohm would be sent out for midnight assassinations. 

Jewish journalist covers Hitler trial. Observes how Hitler pleads guilty because he gambles on the fact that the conservative judge will absolve him, but glories in the possibility of martyrdom, and glories in his own press coverage, seeming to pose for photographers as he speaks, choosing the words he repeats very carefully, how he builds up rhetoric until he reaches a climax. How the entire courtroom is centered upon Hitler and how a number of his previously democratic colleagues are clearly falling under Hitler's spell. 

A teen named Charlap whose great-grandfather came to Berlin in the mid-18th century banishes rumors that he is part Jewish out of his head in spite of being made fun of by his peers. He marches at Nuremberg in formation and feels that he is no longer a person, but just a cell in a collective being. 

Himmler, occult obsessed, sends a Nazi delegation to Tibet to discover the secret of life. They go to an ashram in the Himilayas, where they encounter an American Jewish businessman there named Charlap who keeps trying to befriend them and get them to talk about why they came from Germany. 

1933. Aging violinist in Berlin, private violin teacher to uninterested students who went to music school with brilliant Jewish violinists. Can't bare to practice more than one hour a day, spends the rest of the day at the pub playing skat. One good violinist friend from conservatory is a Jewish first violinist in the Philharmonic, his playing praised personally by Furtwangler and Walter and Nikisch, chosen by Edwin Fischer and Busoni to be konzertmeister in their freelance chamber orchestras. Practices every day five hours even when not rehearsing. The goyisher violinist is hired as a back desk second violinist in the Philharmoniker after his friend is fired. In the first few weeks he gets to play with Furtwangler, the Busches, Fischer, Kempff, Cortot and Erich Kleiber. But on the way to the Philharmonie he has to walk by his friend busking in the street, playing all the violin concertos to large crowds. At first he is apologetic. The violinist's crowds get smaller every day. Eventually he is no longer acknowledged. Eventually the goyisher friend doesn't acknowledge him either, when he tries to make him, he pretends he doesn't know who his friend is at all. 

The meeting between Fritz Haber and Chaim Weizmann where Weizmann offers him to be the director of the Sieff Institute in Rehovot. They talk chemistry. As the father of chemical warfare, Haber is accused of killing Germans everywhere he goes in for more than a decade. Weizmann says 'you can still save lives. You've already saved billions--referring to that Haber is also the father of fertilization synthesis. 'Come to Israel and save more lives. Even if Germany associates you with chemical weapons, no Jew will ever associate it with you again.' 

Winter 1919. 40,000 Eastern European Jews sent back to the Soviet Union after World War I as Communists. A boat of Jews imagines they will be welcomed into the Soviet Union as martyrs to the cause. Instead they are immediately arrested by Soviet commissars and put in a cold prison camp as suspected spies. After a week or a month, the Comissars tell them they can absolve themselves of all charges if all the men volunteer to serve in the Red Army for the Russian Civil War where they will be transferred immediately to front lines. Women and children will work in munitions factories. Some older men, having served in World War I, know what is coming. The younger men imagine that this will be fairly easy work. The new Soviet Union cannot possibly send people to their deaths so blithely. 

The security guard in Freud's hospital, noting that it seems like everybody in the hysteria wing is rich, Jewish and famous. "We've secretly had Wittgensteins here, Mahlers, Klimts, Rothschilds, not the great men themselves but every wife, mother, son, daughter and in-law. Something about all these geniuses drives everybody crazy." He tells about how Freud called the guard in and asks him to free associate and to tell him about dreams. Freud asks if he'd agree to be hypnotized and he tells Freud he doesn't go in for that Jewish devilry." While Freud is absent, he comes in and finds a file. "Excessive cleanliness and keeps using the vowel O which suggests anal fixation. Overactive Id. Oedipus Complex underdeveloped." Looks through Freud's papers to see if he can find definition of anal fixation, as he figures it is a potential disease he shoudl probably find out about if he's to get it treated. He doesn't find it, but he finds a speech in which Freud provides a definition of Oedipus Complex, reads it, runs out of the hospital in horror. He immediately comes home and starts writing a letter, which turns out to be a letter the editor of the antisemitic paper Deutsches Volksblatt. 

1936: Jewish butler at a dinner at the London townhouse of Joseph Kennedy, where the King is coming to dinner. Along with the King will be Wallace Simpson, Oswald Mosley, the Mitford sisters, and the new ambassador to the Court of St. James: Joachim von Ribbentrop. At this dinner, King Edward announces his intention to abdicate so he may marry Wallace Simpson, at which point everyone pleads with him in horror to not do it or else Britain will probably join on the Allied side. Two other guests at the dinner are Joseph's two sons: Joseph and John. Joseph is enormously talkative and everyone is annoyed by his loquacity even though they know his father is grooming him to be President one day. John says nearly nothing, but also disappears with each of the Mitford Sisters one by one over the course of two hours. 

1935: Bela Balasz, writer, film theorist, librettist of Bluebeard's Castle, lover of Leni Riefenstahl and Jew, has taught his brilliant actress lover all she needs to know about moviemaking, thinking a woman would never advance far in the industry behind the camera and that her interest was purely scholastic. But the moment Hitler wins the election, she suddenly changes her politics and pretends she did not react with horror to everything Hitler did in Balasz's presence. Just before the first Great Terror, Balasz, having escaped to the Soviet Union, gets drunk with Sergei Eisenstein's editor, and is shown a rare print of Triumph of the Will, He tries to explain to the editor that he mentored Leni Riefenstahl, but even drunk, the editor tells him to never repeat that to anyone. Two quotes: "All this time I thought I was Bluebeard and she was Judith trying to find the keys to my secrets of film, but no, the whole time, she was Bluebeard." the story ends with:  "No one will ever know my masterpiece." 

To Dad on Our First Anniversary....

 

I guess it's the first anniversary today, at least your first English jahrzeit. I don't know what to call it, but in the eleven days between your Hebrew anniversary and your English, I got diagnosed with the same potential for sudden death you had. The very fact that it happened between your two jahrzeits feels providential. It's still quite early stage, but I sort of wish it was early stage cancer or MS so that I could make a big announcement, get a big old load of sympathy and maybe a little sympathy sex. Unfortunately few people want to **** a person to death. I'm sure there's a subculture somewhere: I hope I have enough time to find it. In the meantime, I will be happy for some friendship and companionship in my life.

I somehow knew it was coming. I've known for fifteen years, and I haven't made it easy on myself. As you of course predicted so many times, I have a middle age ahead of me where I have to do everything I can to make up for every one of my many excesses. The task is herculean, but I'm taking it on. I don't know how much time I have, but I mean to make it to Bubbie's 100 years. I don't mean to tempt fate, but this world will not lose me without the fight of that century.

You didn't live a life that long, but you didn't live a short one either. Actuarial tables would say you broke even, which is pretty impressive for a guy who passed out as many times as you did, from both heart problems and brain problems. I look forward to the same affecting me, and I hope you didn't use up your son's karma with your eighteen lives.

I'm happy I can make this joke to you now. You had few limits in the jokes you told, but there are some jokes between father and son that probably shouldn't be made--not that you didn't make them, but I think you'd have felt quite a bit more prudish if they came from me. It's the 2020s, you should have done what I do, put all your mishigas on social media so that you can live a halfway normal real life. If I go soon, and I don't really think I will, there will be a giant footprint of who I was.

It wasn't really who I was, or maybe it was. At times I got confused which was the real me and which was the avatar. For years I would hear people say 'he's nothing like he is on his facebook page.' I suppose I was supposed to be flattered, but everybody knew me better through social media than they did in real life. At some point I became more comfortable as words on a screen than I was in my personal life.

Part of the problem is just being in your mid-40s. You realize you don't really have people anymore. You don't quite blame yourself for that, or anybody else: social life declines in your thirties and by your forties it's virtually non-extant for everybody. Your own people are all very busy--kids, work, decompression, very few have that kind of time, and if they do, they would rather spend it with other parents so that the kids have something to do without getting a babysitter. Who could hold anything against anybody for that?

With E & J minding the business, I have world enough and time to achieve all my literary ambitions, but it's at just the moment I'm finally ready that the ambitions seem somewhat empty. Who needs an immortality you won't be around to enjoy? A wealth you may not live long enough to spend? A veneration that only comes from people who inevitably want something from you? I'm a pretty fucking good writer, no matter what your criticisms, but there are thousands of pretty fucking good writers, all of whom are writing books nobody wants to publish in this age of depleted reading. Who even knows if anybody will be able to read in 100 years and if we won't be depleted to an entirely visual iconographic language like on those medieval cathedrals you took such care to explain to me?

All my life, I've had such fiery visions for everything I've always wanted to achieve creatively. It mattered more to me than human friendships, dating, every other thing in my life felt subordinated to a big task I found so onerous I could barely start on it. My life was full of emotions too powerful to do much else, and my life was too full of emotion too powerful to do this either. Other people dreamed of wealth and power in business, politics, sports, show business; all I ever wanted was to be was a great artist: it was the only thing I felt cut out to do, the only thing I was good at, the only thing that justified this comical existence of mine. Oh how you hated that about me. Even after you're responsible for exposing me to it all you poo-poo'd most every one of my ambitions. I don't know if it was because you were being realistic or you were afraid I'd achieve something you never got, or that you plead realism because you didn't want your kid to succeed in something interesting, because that meant you could have too and chose not to. But now that you're gone, I fear you were right.

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But at many times these ambitions don't even feel like ego. They feel like a mixture of isolation and burdensome duty. You raised me in a world that no longer existed if it ever did: a world simultaneously of high culture and thrift, a world that looked at American stupidity with contempt even as it looked to European sophistication with burning hatred. I was left completely ill-equipped for this world, because you raised me for a world that didn't have the Holocaust, a world where we never had to leave Europe, a world where withstanding the waves of history mattered more than anything in the world even as we were in denial that history happened at all.

Jewish families who survive the Holocaust are not like any other Jewish families, and I sometimes think we don't belong together. Non-Holocaust Jews seem so normal, so American, so 2026; without Yiddishkeit or tasteless jokes, without humiliating stories, without the 'will-to-cattiness' where everybody in their lives is judged with the heymischer diplomacy of a chopping block. Everybody else is a generation or two ahead in the Jewish story, and lives without the presence of a trauma so fundamental that nothing in their experience could ever compare with that giant exclamation point of the silenced. We are two different civilizations and I sometimes get the false notion in my head that I can identify which any Jew belongs to in two seconds: just from the darkness of the sarcasm and the loudness of the mannerisms I feel as though I can tell who has an oven trapped in their nervous system.

What I do know, almost for certain, is that Jews from Holocaust families feel, sorry for this metaphor, stretched on a cross. We have not been here long enough to shed the Jewish parts if we want to. Our grandparents had already been through it all, but unlike the vast majority of those whose families were already here by the immigration ban in 1924, we came here too late in more ways than we even know. It's 2026, and we are entirely American and entirely Jewish in an era when the world starts demanding us to choose which part of ourselves to give up.

There are so many moments when I'd like to amputate all that Yiddishkeit you put in me: not just the language but the prayers and the food and the community of spoiled lemmings and the f*cking Zionism. It doesn't do me worth a damn to be part of this community that is all too willing to go parochial again, utterly heedless of what they're about to lose. But I am that I am, and I wouldn't be able to stop being this way no matter how hard I tried. You clearly didn't know how to live in an era where you had to choose which side your loyalty is on, and the fact we are going to be asked to choose was a terrible shock to your system. I don't quite know how to live in it yet either. I hope I find out, because there is so much to lose if the Jewish-American partnership goes by the wayside.

Maybe you just raised me to be too secular, but a religion and a peoplehood does not strike me as enough to sustain a person for a meaningful life. It's roots without wings, a way of entombing a peoplehood without the ability to explore. No Jew is a perfect victim, nor should they be, any more or less than any other minority. Even when the world treats us like we're millennia of monsters, we have to face how sometimes we deliberately provoked their monstrosity. A community that locks its doors to the world is a community that will fall into maltreatment. That is how misunderstandings happen. That is how people we might find sympathetic prejudice themselves. It is not only unwise, it is un-Jewish and goes against all kinds of Jewish rulings. Many anti-liberal Jews hate Tikkun Olam, but along with Tikkun Olam there is also the far older Talmudic concept of the Darchei Shalom: Ways of Peace: feeding the gentile poor, visiting the gentile sick, burying the gentile dead. The Talmud considers cheating a gentile a still greater sin than cheating another Jew. 

If that is true, what then is our current behavior? It's not just a sin, it's a desecration, a Chillul Hashem. It ruins Jewish security in Jewish security's name, and all it takes is one loss to consign us to exile yet again. Whatever once was true about the Israeli wars, whatever losses we incurred on October 7th, however terrified we were and however vengeful we felt--not just at the enemies of Jews but at gentile friends who willfully refused to offer comfort, that's a matter tabled for another day: a day that may only come when Netanyahu is gone, when these infantile wars are over, when we realize we're powerful enough to make overtures to very unsavory enemies, when we rebuild bridges to former allies. 

THAT is the Judaism which the '48 generation fought for and the subsequent generation betrayed. That is the Judaism YOU fought for, and that is a Judaism worth joining. Not a scattered people, not a fortressed people, but a people who associate with the world without assimilating and add their particularity to the world's tapestry: a friend to the world that asserts its own right to be an equal among its inhabitants. A people who make themselves secure not by martial law and not just by military might, but by liberal rule of law. Helping to lead the world not just by force but by example.

This is the world you raised me to believe in. It's the world that so many custodians of it betrayed. It's the only vision of the world I want to live in, and the only vision of the world for which I would fight: a world where secular and sacred stand together as equal partners, where you can be entirely Jewish and entirely American, where rule of law matters but so do all the fundamental rights within it, where culture is an equal partner to entertainment, where you can believe in both patriotism and solidarity, where history is something to be studied carefully before you make it, You didn't just raise me to believe in these ideals, you raised me to take them all as immutable truths. I've based my entire reality on them, and now that nobody upholds it, I worry I won't fair any better in this new world than you have. 

That world is nowhere now. Whether or not you or Mom ever shared my view of it, it's thanks to the way that you and Mom and Bubbie raised me that I feel completely unsuitable to my own time and place: either the one crazy person in my life or the one sane person in a kingdom of the mad. I drive away from the hill where I grew up and immediately feel as though I exist in a parallel universe. Out past our faimly, I've met maybe half a dozen contemporaries with similar inheritances to mine..., ever? Some of them became good friends, others of them are, of course, too snobbish for words.

If the other people of my timeline don't exist, I have to bring them to life. I don't know why you raised me the way you did, but if it had a purpose, the best I can do with your upbringing is to bring them to life. Not the exact people obviously, I'm no Maharal, but to write somehow about the world of Old Europe, the ethos of Old America before '68.

I'd say that you raised me this way because it was just the world you knew, but we both know that isn't true. I was your beta test, and when my test failed, you decided not to subject your other two children to the same educational regimen. No Yiddish, no music lessons, no random history lessons; the disappointment of my turning into a bad student was clearly too acute for you to risk it again. You weren't big on letting any of your children live their own lives, but compared to me you let J & E become the people they wanted. But what could I do? The stuff you showed me was so much more exciting than any classroom I ever stepped in. Maybe I was too stupid, maybe my learning style was utterly not cut out for the classroom, or maybe I was just bored out of my mind, but an education under you was too good not to ruin me for regular schooling. You and mom and everyone else in our small world taught me, the academic failure, to study history so closely, yet you were in utter denial that history ever happened. What is the point of being this reliquary weirdo who got his mind stuffed with a giant tree of the past, when you don't accept that the ethos's of the past lead to the catastrophes of the past?

If there's no place for me in the present except as a gadfly, then my reason for fighting on isn't to live in the past, but to illuminate the present: a person who doesn't belong in the present has a unique vantage to point out what's wrong or strange or even right about it. All I've got, however hard it is, is the ability to conjure a past I didn't even experience.

The irony is that the whole point of all that ambition was not to write about me, it was to write about you. Not you particularly, but the whole world you conjured through a million stories: many hilarious, many unaccountably cruel and gossipy, many extraordinarily moving. You were the natural storyteller in the family, not me, and for whatever reason it never occurred to you to write much down. That's left to me: the world of yesterday, and the yesterday before that, and that, and that, in the hope that in illuminating some kind of past, I can illuminate for someone some kind of future.

Paavo Jarvi and Technique

 So Paavo Jarvi made a pretty incendiary claim the other day that conducting is a vanishing profession because the technique of conducting is disappearing.

I found that quote depressingly narcissistic. Jarvi should know better. He's about as great a musician as you can be while still being an irresponsible jet-setter. The amount of orchestras he's blown through is pretty stunning: Cincinnati, Frankfurt, NHK Tokyo, Paris, Zurich, and now the London Philharmonic for what doubtless will be less than ten years. His only real loyalty? The chamber orchestra in Bremen, which he's now been with for twenty-two years.

I think a guy like Jarvi has an unrealistic expectation of what conducting technique can do for you. He is the son of Neeme Jarvi, probably the podium musician with the largest repertoire in the history of conducting. His whole childhood was on the ground tutoring by a well-known teacher. Hardly anybody gets mentorship that good, and it shows.

This quote was especially interesting because Jarvi himself said in the past that the great conductors got results without technique. Surely many of them did, we can all make our own lists of who they were. In some cases, the best results were gotten from yelling and firing, but many of the conductors who inspired the greatest fear: Reiner, Szell, Leinsdorf etc., were supertechnicians who could just as easily have communicated what they wanted through body language.

Technique in conducting is a very important thing unless you've got a cushy position where you can get more than 8 hours of rehearsal for a short program. The mere mortals have to get results and get them fast.

But that said, there are only so many results you'll get if all you learn is technique. There is a 'conductor culture' in music that is no less offensive in its empty headedness as those of piano and voice. We all know the types, and I've described them many times before: good hair, Brooks Brothers clothing, lecturing musicians on music history and inevitably getting details wrong, able to communicate nearly anything in body language but having nothing to communicate. Everybody in classical music has played or sung under at least a half-dozen of them, and the putrid smell of their batons offends me.

I grew up with music critics in New York and Los Angeles extolling the younger generation of American conductors and bemoaning that nobody hired them. I could only bemoan how backward the orchestras seemed, but then I heard them: not even necessarily Marin Alsop, she's one of the better ones, so was/is Kent Nagano, but then you have David Robertson, Robert Spano, Alan Gilbert, Hugh Wolff. On paper they all look amazing: they play all kinds of music the Masurs and Sawallisches would never touch, but when you hear how they play them, you wonder if they have any insight into this music at all. They play it with the same corporate boardroom modernism you got from James Levine, but Levine, for all his faults both personal and musical, was a towering musician whom even in his limitations managed to exhibit enormous understanding architecture, balance, harmony, color and rhythmic excitement. What you have from many of the others is the brutalism of Levine and Solti without their musical intelligence or moments of sensitivity, and this is hardly limited to American podium musicians.

Some of them, the more interesting and less fashion conscious among them, are very good at getting performances of new music. And indeed, 20th century music has never been performed better than it is in this era: not just the later stuff, but Stravinsky, Bartok, 2VS, Ives, even Ravel; and even if the greatest performances of Shostakovich and Prokofiev were probably in the Soviet Union, the standard of performance in the West is unfathomably higher than it was fifty years ago.

Make no mistake, there is still a lot worth going to the concert hall for, but at this point, we have nearly lost the grand tradition, and nothing is more to blame for that than the cult of the conducting program where they ask you to say from memory what the 2nd clarinet is doing in bar 534, but never teach what is a properly placed second beat in a Viennese Waltz.

I have often speculated (and I could be very wrong) that many conducting teachers went into teaching because they were too difficult to have careers on the concert circuit. But somehow, we all hear from certain alleged conducting gurus every opinion they have about music, but nothing about the music itself or how to develop your own musical voice. In this way, conducting teachers are no different than any other conservatory teacher. So many would sooner squelch the individuality of their student than let them experiment with a musical idea that contravenes their deeply held beliefs of what music should be, rather than what music CAN be. Hearing and reading the interpersonal difficulty of many conservatory teachers, I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe they are sensitive to the individuality of their students.

The end result of this is that the students who leave the programs who still want a big career are often not the most interesting ones. The interesting ones quit in frustration, and hopefully they find meaningful work elsewhere, but that's in no way guaranteed. Whether conductor, composer, singer or instrumentalist, it's often not the ones who have something to say who make it, it's the ones who regurgitate the information. They're often the musical equivalent to grad students in universities who get academic careers because they simply regurgitate their professors' jargon. This pipeline empties music of its meaning and creates a culture of empty suits, so you can't be surprised when musicians want to face podium musicians who have atypical training.

Look, for a moment, at a sampling of the orchestral musicians who've made the switch: Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas, John Storgards, Cristian Macelaru, Sakari Oramo, Thomas Hengelbrock: these are just the concertmasters... With the exception of Jaap van Zweden, they show more musical sensitivity in their tiny pinkies than a lot of podium musicians do in their phallic batons (we'll ultimately see about Macelaru but I'm quite optimistic). Rank and file orchestral musicians who've made the switch? Manfred Honeck, Thierry Fischer, Petr Popelka, Osmo Vanska, Gustavo Gimeno, Susanna Malkki, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Karlheinz Steffens, Andris Nelsons (I still hold out hope...). Except for Steffens, not a one of these musicians is an obvious technical mediocrity up there. I don't love all of these conductors (and have a particular antipathy to Zweden), but in their earlier years, they had a week after week observation post to see what works, and let's face it, veteran orchestral musicians know the music at least as well as the conductor does.

Now, if Jarvi was talking about soloists making the switch then... yes, it's a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as he makes out. How many soloists have ultimately made much of a switch rather than a moonlight? Nathalie Stutzmann, Barbara Hannigan is beginning to, Nikolai Znaider has done so on the violin, Mikhail Pletnev on the piano, I guess you might count Barenboim and Eschenbach but they both certainly studied it: Barenboim with no less than Igor Markevitch.

But fortunately, this is mostly a part time phenomenon. Nevertheless, we've all seen examples of the soloist to conductor pipeline, and it's generally pretty embarrassing. No soloists' force of personality will stop the injustice of an orchestra paying massive fees to a figure only for the concertmaster to secretly direct the whole thing.

But personally, I think the orchestra musician to conductor pipeline is a good development 90% of the time. The fact is, I would rather hear all these musicians I just mentioned than a sampling of supposedly great conductors around the world taken at random who went through conservatory programs. I think musicians who've spent lots of time making actual music have more ideas, have better ideas, and previously lived a real life. A life where you see the same friends and musicians every week, where you have some leisure time at home to think hard about what music is, to work on the chamber repertoire with the same musicians and live a somewhat cultured life that doesn't involve going from hotel to hotel with no stimulation or friends you see regularly.

But there is one place where it's generally not a great development.

Historically Informed Performance, which has colonized so much music before Beethoven and imposed itself on orchestras who are not organized to do HIP correctly either from their training, or their size, or their concert halls. The biggest problem is not even that, it's that most of the HIP conductors are plainly not up to the task of retraining orchestras in the new musical style. We've all been at a performance that was clearly an embarrassment that the orchestra got through with white knuckles. It is neither pleasing to the ear nor the eye. They insist on tempi that make it nearly impossible for instruments to hear each other in concert halls that were designed for later music. You would think that with challenges like that, orchestras would take more care with whom they hire, but then traditional orchestras face conductors like Norrington, Antonioni, McGegan, who are clearly underqualified to elicit what they wish to hear. A dangerously fast tempo will decrease like air in a balloon, and pretty soon everything is at the same comfortable pace as everything else, but with very little detail to make it of interest in any other way. It's an unfortunate trait in performance everywhere. There are plenty of good conductors who have this problem, but at least when Manfred Honeck has it, you know that he's got 100 other ideas you can listen to.

The whole lifestyle of conducting is toxic, and toxic lifestyles can either attract toxic people or make people toxic. Even now in our depleted age, a conductor has very little accountability. Unlike a soloist or even a chamber musician, it's not obvious whether or not a conductor is competent, and they often have 100 musicians to cover for them.

But I wouldn't hesitate to trade 25% of a conductor's technical competence for 25% more ideas and expression and general cultural knowledge. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, who can guide musicians through the most complicated music like a schematic manual. What they can't do is express why we should listen.

Some of you may have noticed that I try not to use the term 'conductor' anymore. It's one of those terms that gives far too much power to the recipient. It implies an electricity that in reality is often not there, neurological directives that in reality are often mis-coordinated. I much prefer the term 'podium musician' because it shows that conducting has real responsibilities that are more important than its privileges.

So yeah. I love a lot of Paavo Jarvi's musicianship, but he is an example of how the problem gets whitewashed. Jarvi is as good as it gets when you aren't a serious podium artist. Serious artists stay in the same place, work with the same musicians, establish bases where new composers can reliably be performed, develop interpretations with the same musicians over decades, and leave organizations demonstrably better than they found them. Jarvi is able to get astonishing results, but he gets it with an astonishing podium technique, but in his case, technique is a form of coasting. Paavo Jarvi should be as good as Kirill Petrenko, but he's not in that league, and he's not because he's not nearly as serious an artist, and if he thinks conducting is a profession defined by its technique more than its repertoire, he is not as good as I thought.

Most conductors don't have his bildung and couldn't possibly get it. Conducting, particularly the way he does it, is not a noble profession. It's a profession where you can go from town to town, do the same pieces and pick up a check. Nothing lasting gets built, no bonds are made, and music just becomes another industry that a privileged few get to exploit.

Here is my choice for the greatest podium musician who used to be an orchestral musician.

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

This is the greatest performance of Schumann's 3rd Symphony I've ever heard. Don't just listen to this, look at it. It's not just the Abbado-level amount of nuance, but the sheer level of communication between conductor and orchestra. This is the real thing. You may not like Jarvi's approach, but it is such real musicianship. Finding a new color for every harmonic change, clarity that gives you the full harmonic chords and tensions, structural rubato that emphasizes the transitional bars and those weird inlands of phrasing in Schumann's music that distinguishes his rhapsodic wandering from Beethoven's iron sense of purpose.

Paavo Jarvi's one commitment is to the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, whom he's been with since 2004. For all his posts, for all the excellence he's manifest in many of them (not all), this is only one of the two orchestras on which his true reputation is built.

Doubtless Jarvi learned everything from his father, and from Neeme he had exposure to Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Shostakovich and Prokofiev in his bones, not to mention a thousand uncommon pieces of repertoire. But I have always the sense that however excellent he is in that, it's not where his heart truly is. His heart is in the chamber rep: Schumann, Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn. It's what distinguishes him from his father. Neeme is incredibly exciting but sloppy and occasionally wrongheaded. Paavo can be incredibly exciting too, but he is meticulous, sometimes overly so. His rubato and dynamic nuance is everywhere, but it is always done with good taste. You have the sense that he took Abbado and Mackerras as models to place alongside his father, and developed his own version of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The DKB was a fine orchestra before he came. It is now one of the world's greatest, and that's as much his doing as it is that it has such amazing musicians.

PJ is not the most sincere guy out there. I get the sense from interviews that he's a funny guy that doesn't take himself very seriously, but kind of blase about his job. I remember once on his facebook page he posted an offer he got from a movie director to play Vladimir Putin, and Jarvi is kind of a lookalike... He has a makeup not unlike Richard Strauss: in Strauss's case, his bombastic music was a sophisticated cover for a pure aesthete who loved Mozart and Mendelssohn above all. I think PJ is very different from his father. Neeme is full of garrulous enthusiasm. He looks like a bear, and you always get the sense that his musicmaking is like a giant bearhug. Not very nuanced, but utterly passionate and sincere about music. Paavo is exactly the opposite. It's almost like he created his musical personality in opposition to his father.

But the other place where I think we get the real PJ is with the Estonian Festival Orchestra. He was technically American since late high school, but Estonia is clearly where he feels at home, and the Jarvis have their own festival there where they get to be a family, and PJ gets to do both sides of his repertoire. The orchestra there is not the Vienna Philharmonic, but it's a good enough pickup orchestra.

He was always a really good conductor of the standard repertoire. One might often find him cold, but he brought chamber-level nuance to even the largest repertoire, and I think he has warmed up in recent years to a stunning extent. The sound in romantic repertoire is no longer hard and biting, it's as warm as anything in Kubelik or Jochum. The problem is that the cold irony sometimes comes back, and you never know when it will: that hard, somewhat brutal sound of his Cincinnati years, that sounds a little mean-spirited, like Maazel or Reiner. Doubtless some people loved it. I wasn't really one of them. But even at the time he could pull a rabbit out: I remember a youtube video of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. I wondered for a while if it was the best I'd ever heard (that's probably either Fischer or Kocsis, but that one is pretty close...)

I'm going to link beneath this to an Estonian performance of Shostakovich 1, a piece that suits him like a glove. The amount of detail here is stunning. Just listen, or look if you're so inclined.

Shostakovich 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdKQBVSsGOk

Schumann 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfxGax7g_fk

Vaclav Talich: former concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic who built the Czech Philharmonic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgDzHLKtTas

That incredible Bartok CfO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvVevgIF4Dk

How was The Odyssey Mrs. Lincoln?

 

So I saw The Odyssey tonight. I found it a thoroughly inoffensive sword and sandals epic in the tradition of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur. The type of movie Cecil B. DeMille made. And It has about as much to do with The Odyssey as de Mille's movie The Ten Commandments has to do with the exodus. Anybody who has a problem with this movie has a problem with Hollywood from its, ahem, inception.

I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with the idea that we're supposed to take it seriously. I watch The Ten Commandments every year at Passover and mouth along to lines like 'Oh Moses, Moses!' and 'So let it be written, so let it be done.' Just like in The Ten Commandments, the motives of the characters are utterly modern anachronisms. De Mille was an arch-Republican, but he had an eye to the box office, and Hebrew slavery was clearly done with an eye to reminding people of civil rights struggles. In the same way, the focus on the law of hospitality,is done with an eye toward reminding us of immigration and hyperpolarization.

But they weren't wrong to depict what they amusingly termed 'Zeus's Law.' It was every bit as important to Greek civilization as they allege. And it's just one of a number of very strong ideas. Certain controversial choices make enormous sense in ways our ignorant age doesn't realize. The audience has to made to feel the presence of certain characters properly and understand their situations, and atraditional casting makes more artistic sense than I initially thought it would.

Sinon is not a character in The Odyssey, but he's hugely consequential in The Aeneid. Hiring our most famous trans actor as Sinon is in fact a very salient decision, because what I'm sure 9999 out of 10000 viewers don't realize is that Tiresias was said to have lived part of his life as a woman. In some traditions, he had breasts for the rest of his life. Putting Elliot Page in that role gives that scene the proper strangeness in the minds of unedumacated America. In pagan eras, a kind of trans person certainly existed, and often were thought of as prophets and priests who were sexually complete in manners that men and women were not. Think of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium--trans-like people were often thought to be their own soulmate, and therefore were nearer to the Gods; traits like that continues in certain undisturbed tribes today.

As for Helen, well... if you've ever seen Greek Drama done as it was said to have been done, it was done with masks. We have little idea what the masks looked like, but the chances of these masks being flesh toned is infinitesimally low. Furthermore, we don't know if Helen ran off with Paris or was kidnapped by Paris, but whether she was slave to Paris or Menelaus, Helen clearly spent part of her life in sexual slavery. What better way to implant that in the minds of the audience than the actress whose Oscar winning breakout role was as Patsey, the violated slave of Brad Pitt in 12 Years a Slave?

Ultimately, even if I didn't enjoy a lot of it, it's a thoroughly adequate movie. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes at the woodenness of the script and the complete inability of the actors to sell it. Over and over I felt like I was watching that alleged Tony Curtis line in some Medieval epic where he says 'Yonda lies da castle of my fadda." Nobody in this movie except Robert Pattinson demonstrated they have much acting ability. Tom Holland was particularly wooden; and occasionally I thought Christopher Nolan demonstrated a writing ability on the same level as George Lucas... Nevertheless, it's Nolan. A lot of the filmmaking itself is magnificent. The continual shots of the sea are extraordinary enough to make Spielberg jealous. You know exactly when you are in the chronology, and exactly where you are in every battle scene. There's no words for how hard that is to do: I just think of the battle scenes in Gladiator where to this day I'm utterly confused who is where in the geography of the forest or the stadium. The Cyclops was, I thought, wonderful. Scylla a little less so, but I completely understand why Nolan wanted to stay animatronic analogue. It worked for Ray Harryhausen, why not here? As a technician, Christopher Nolan is impeccable in movie after movie and achieves things most people would think impossible. I didn't even think the idea to tell it in flashback was so bad: it gives the film leeway and license to include things from The Aeneid rather than just The Odyssey.

What was, however, truly bad was the usual thing with Nolan. He cannot resist the twist ending, or, as he'd doubtless call it, The Prestige. He doesn't know how to make a movie without it, and it's very very difficult to take an entertainer seriously when you feel like he's always saying 'TA-DA!!' near the end of every movie.

Read no further if you don't want to know the end but....

The whole idea that Odysseus punished himself because of his shame in causing so much destruction is the biggest load of shit I've seen in a movie in a long time. I'm sure there are people who speculate that Odysseus felt remorse, and I'm sure even in ancient Greece there were people who pointed out that in formulating the Trojan Horse, Odysseus was an even more flagrant violator of "Zeus's Law" than any suitor in his house. Nevertheless ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?!?!

This is ancient Greece. Odysseus was not a PTSD survivor, he was Walter White 3000 years before TV. The whole idea that the world should be peaceful hadn't even been invented yet and wouldn't be for at least another 600 years or so from the time the Odyssey was said to be written.

This was just a piece of relevance fused into the movie's ending like a thumbtack pasting a paper onto cork; like when Matt Damon talks about how hospitality violations are indicative of an imminent dark age. He even says the gem "Our bronze age is ending", which is a bit like a hero in today's movies saying "This is the end of our Age of Plastic." It's a very Hollywood thing to do: spend three hours watching people kick each other's asses and then mouth five minutes of platitudes at the end which are supposed to give the movie depth which is utterly unearned.

Nolan can never resist the twist. It is one of the most annoying directorial tics I've ever seen. If that's what he wanted to do, he should have had the courage to say it upfront and make a movie that interprets Odysseus as a remorseful character. But he doesn't have that kind of fortitude, because he's not an artist, he's a puzzlemaker. He's proven by now he can do an impression of depth, but if he can't make remorse into some kind of plot twist that's supposed to be mind-blowing, he is, even now, not a moviemaker to take seriously.

The Odyssey as it exists is sort of unfilmable. Most everything we like about The Odyssey is packed into about 25 pages. The Iliad, with some trimming, could make a truly great film where we see the sublime wrath of Achilles and Hector's sacrifice given their proper epic weight. But if this movie becomes a classic then no movie should.

The best adaptation of The Odyssey is still O Brother Where Art Thou.

Wagner: A Shocking Statement

On the eve of The Ring's 150th anniversary, let me state something absolutely shocking.

Siegfried is Wagner's greatest opera.

It's a realization I came to just a few days ago. I realize I'm the only person in the history of opera who believes this, but it is the opera where Wagner truly became himself and extended to his full plumage. Even in Rheingold and Walkure he was still developing: Rheingold is a spectacle, and like a lot of spectacles, it has elements of clunk even as large parts are just as magnificent as they seem. Die Walkure is literally the most iconic opera ever written. So why is that not where Wagner became himself? Listen to Wotan and Fricka nattering on in Act II, listen to Wotan and Brunnhilde natter on in Act III. For all the great set pieces in Act III, for all the perfection of Act I, he is still, even this late, figuring out the differences between the singing of arias and the declamation of music drama. Die Walkure is a towering achievement, a tour-de-force where myth and human feeling are held in an impossible balance. Walkure and Aida are the culmination of 'grand opera,' but in both you hear it ascending to the peak of an olympus atop everything which came before: so much in Walkure clearly owes itself to Der Freischutz. You can furthermore hear the storm of Beethoven's Pastroral in the Prelude, you can hear the opening movement of the 7th in the Ride of the Valkyries, For all the darkness and the way Wagner uses chromaticism in Walkure, the chromaticism is a tool, not a fabric. At base its figures are still a dark diatonic.

But from the very beginning of Siegfried, we have arrived in a harmonic and coloristic language so much stranger than anything which came before. It's a kind of chromaticism, but it's not the pre-atonal chromaticism of Gotterdammerung, nor is it the undefinable chromaticism of Tristan. It is chromaticism grounded in the 6/3 chord so important to Debussy, and yet the orchestration is anything but Debussyian. The orchestration is so sharp and spiky that I always thought it sounded like Schoenberg.

There are surely moments in Rheingold that have this strangeness, particularly among the Niebelungen, but they are passing moments in an opera that begins in 4 minutes of E-Flat and ends in the full blaze of D-flat brass ostinatos. Siegfried operates from a base of chromaticism: the chromaticism is so omnipresent that we take it for granted--it's a forest rain that only begins to lift when the bird points Siegfried toward Brunnhilde.

Is the harmony and orchestration of Siegfried a metaphor for a new sort of hero? I never put anything past Wagner, but so much of the artistic imagination happens in the subconscious that not having read Wagner's letters I'm not even sure he was aware of it (there are some people whose company you don't want too much...). There is no real precedent for this language: perhaps a lot of the orchestral color comes from Berlioz, but I would have to listen more deeply to find exactly where. Surely a few of the harmonies must come from Liszt. There's even a place in Walkure Act II where Wagner is surely quoting the opening of the Faust Symphony, but whereas the beginning of the Faust Symphony spells out a full twelve-tone row, Wagner makes it diatonic again.

But Siegfried, like Otello, is the beginning of something entirely new: opera as high drama, not music with dramatic accompaniment. Music becomes declamed, not sung. Perhaps Mozart already did it in a very different way, but Mozart is higher than drama--he is the only dramatic creator who can match Shakespeare, and like the Bard he makes his own rules to capture the whole human story. Wagner may not be playing the full Shakespearean keyboard for which he clearly aims to master, but beginning in Siegfried, he does achieve the ecstatic grandeur of Aeschylus and high play of Aristophanes.

Beginning in Otello, Verdi achieves as much grandeur as Shakespeare in his second tier plays (which are still better than everyone else's.); but poor Verdi only got there in his dotage. Wagner got there by his mid-40s, and managed to write four full music dramas at this level: a total of something like 17 hours of a concentrated new artform against Verdi's 4. It would be left to Strauss, Janacek and Berg to take their mantle and create a canon of opera possessing an uncanny sublimity beyond grandeur.

Siegfried is the most unloved of Wagner's most mature operas. It is unloved because of Wagnerians who don't understand that it's supposed to be funny. It's an adventure comedy, an 18th century picaresque novel where Siegfried goes on bizarre adventures, full of crude, cruel jokes. It is much easier to find forerunners of Siegfried in literature than music: Pantagruel, Tom Jones, Quixote and Sancho Panza, and especially that ultra-violent comic novel of the thirty years war: Simplicius Simplissisimus (if you wanted to find a historical setting for The Ring, the Thirty Years War is ideal).

The root of Siegfried is crude, brutal comedy, almost sadistically so. If it doesn't sound like the forerunner of Till Eulenspiegel and the descendent of Beethoven's 8th, the musicians have missed the point. The Bayreuth sound, god bless it, is so organic for Wagner, but then you hear a great performance of Siegfried (and there aren't many) and you realize that there are elements of Wagner which it can't possibly capture.

Siegfried needs a great comic opera conductor who can mine that score for every obnoxious sound implicit in the texture: Kleiber, Fricsay, Cluytens, Gui, Harnoncourt, Mackerras. I'd like to hear it done with half an orchestra and get a bunch of Rossini musicians to do it in Italian: Luigi Alva, Gabriel Bacquier, Fernando Corena... It would sound much more modern than Rossini, perhaps even like Stravinsky, but everybody would recognize that effervescence. Everybody in Siegfried is ridiculous, every situation in Siegfried is absolutely ridiculous.

Until you get to that ending...

The Ring is not four works, it's two. The first is a light to darkness to light journey that begins in Das Rheingold and ends in Act II of Siegfried. It is a piece full of magic, but the magic exists on this plane: it is not the music of transcendence. The second is a series of transfigurations, the first is when the hero who knows no fear sees a woman for the first time. Siegfried begins in a fog of B-Flat Minor, but when Siegfried kisses Brunnhilde, what key is it? E-Major, pure E-Major, the most distant key for the most distant journey traversed.

But that is not the only transcendence. The Ring begins in E-Flat, and here, it reaches E. The hero has the Ring, balance will supposedly be restored soon: but the world can never be quite the same. The hero has ascended to a new wisdom, and therefore so has the world. E-Flat must then become E.

I used to think Wagner put down The Ring because he got tired of it. But then I realized, not even Wagner could come up with that transfiguration music. He wasn't ready to find that musical metaphor, and out of Siegfried were birthed two new ideas for how to create drama utterly unlike any precedent. After two acts of Siegfried's 6/3 based chromaticism, he had to pass through the fire of Tristan and Mathilde Wiesendonck to advance, and then in the wake of his affair with Cosima von Bulow, he had to (lovely human he was...) confront the possibility that Cosima might leave him for someone more appropriately her age.

Tristan to Meistersinger is a journey from the ultimate chromaticism someone could think of in the mid 1850s back to the ultimate diatonicism. And in that tension, I think Wagner found the solution to Siegfried's transformation. One music critic I like once put the idea like this:

A I/III progression in music has always evoked nostalgia, the longing to return. Wagner reverses it: III/I is a progression that came to mean the longing for something new. Siegfried ends in a blaze of C-Major, The explorer has landed in the new world.

Tristan is perhaps the ultimate opera of love. Die Meistersinger is perhaps the ultimate opera of love renounced. Siegfried is perhaps the ultimate opera of love discovered. It was during the composition of these three operas that he experienced his Wiesendonck debacle, and then the debacle of the Bulows. I wonder if it took Wagner the experience of both before he realized how easily love can be lost and that even for genius, the presence of love is in no way guaranteed.

This is obviously not a perfect Siegfried, and yet it is my favorite official recording I've heard in years and years. Rattle gets the comedy, he gets the melos, he gets the profundity, and he's particularly great at finding those odd, odd sounds which populate Siegfried like poisonous plants in a witch's garden. He does not make the opera as dangerous as someone who can unleash the full mass of Bayreuth forces like Barenboim, but there is so much right here. The Bavarian Radio Symphony, my favorite modern orchestra in garb either Kubelik or Jansons, is sounding more like their Kubelik years. They can switch on a dime between their blended old world sound and aural spikes that stab, and dart back and forth split second to second.

What of the singers? Well, it's modern Wagner....