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.

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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....

More Ideas for Tales of Modern Collaboration

Holocaust Survivor on a Kibbutz in 1960, having to deal with Sabras making fun of him for what a sheep he was for not fighting against his capture. One day he finally has enough at a central committee meeting, explodes and beats them all, even with their soldier training.  Later he is sent out to deal with a person who sells farm equipment. The salesman explodes in Yiddish while the survivor gets defensive, which is only seen by a group of teenagers, but they don't speak Yiddish so they have no idea what was said. So while he's out in the fields they break into his home, where they find pictures of him as an Olympic boxer in Poland. One of the group refuses to break in and refuses to talk to them for a few days. Turns out the kid speaks Yiddish, and he says the salesman recognized him as a Judischer Ordungsdiest (Jewish Ghetto Police) in Warsaw who beat his brother to paralysis. He's summoned before the central committee and given a hearing: he defends himself by saying 'you have no idea what it was like. We who survived did everything we had to to make it.' He is cleared of charges, goes back to his job. "Nobody spoke to him anymore but he was never made fun of again." 

Wittgenstein and Hitler in the same gymnasium class. Wittgenstein continually humiliates Hitler. 

Early Nazi party meetings. It starts as politics and devolves into discussions of art and literature in great nuance during which they discuss the artists they later ban at length and in great detail. At the next meeting they resolve to bring their instruments so they can play chamber music together.  

The Adventures of the Einsatzgruppen: educated intelligent man with a PhD, constant access to methamphetamines, seeing his fellow members killing, burning, raping, fucking each other, cannibalizing and mutilating their way through Eastern Europe. At first perhaps he views it with horror, but as the drugs take over he decides it can be noble if he turns it into a science experiment. He decides to enact the most depraved things of which he can conceive as a series of experiments and record the results. 

Eichmann goes to Israel in 1937 with Herbert Hagen. He meets with Ben-Gurion and the Grand Mufti about the possibility of resettling Jews in Israel. The Mufti insists that he will simply repatriate the Jews to Nazi territory or form a final solution. Then meets with Ben-Gurion, who insists on speaking German to Eichmann, Eichmann insists on speaking Yiddish to Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion says that of course the Mufti said that he would either deport Jews back to the Nazis or he will kill them. Hagen says that the Jewish state clearly has ears everywhere if they know what the Mufti said. Ben-Gurion says that's nonsense, everyone knows what the Mufti would do. Eichmann says that perhaps if Ben-Gurion did confidence building measures to appease the Mufti and forswore a state perhaps the Mufti would let Jews in, to which Ben-Gurion blows up and accuses Eichmann of being the Mufti's propaganda stooge. 'And where would you put them?' 'Perhaps in camps until they can be resettled.' 'Resettled!? The Jews would never be resettled! They would be the majority of the population and would sit in those camps for a hundred years until the Palestinians finally annihilate them!' 'But I've spoken with the Mufti, he is not..' 'THE MUFTI IS JUST TRYING TO GET YOU ALL TO DO WHAT HE WANTS SOMEONE ELSE TO DO! YOU DON'T WANT THE JEWS, HE DOESN'T WANT THE JEWS, THE ONLY OPTION IS DEATH! I DARE YOU TO TRY! GO AHEAD! DO IT! KILL YOUR JEWS! I DARE YOU! I DARE YOU! YOU WOULD NOT SURVIVE THE CENSURE OF THE WORLD! YOU WOULD NOT SURVIVE CENSURE BEFORE GOD! THE THIRD REICH WOULD FALL BEFORE IT EVEN BEGAN AND BERLIN WOULD BE A CITY MORE BURNED THAN JERUSALEM!' Hagen and Eichmann leave Ben-Gurion's office in silence. 

A day in the life of Auschwitz told from the point of view of Hurbinek: the silent three year old whom Primo Levi documents in Survival at Auschwitz. He speaks the 'divine tongue of infants' which no adult human understands. Prisoners take turns taking care of Hurbinek until each dies in turn. He has survived by staying silent. He does not cry, but he has not learned to speak. He talks of the transfer to Auschwitz in the cattle car, and how he saw a mother smother her child so the child would not have to endure what came next. Others on the cattle car make suicide pacts and stab each other. Others pray while others mock, one young couple has sex in front of the whole car, others laugh and tell jokes. Don't know yet about how to describe the work detail and the death marches and the barracks. It ends with Hurbinek taken to the gas chamber where a woman holds him like a mother and sings to him. She says to him 'don't let go. I'm here. I love you.' It turns out the woman is an angel, she drives Hurbinek in a chariot to heaven. It ends with him arriving: 'and there was mameh.'

The Nazi neighborhood in Buenos Aires. 

Eichmann trial witnesses and their attempts to put their lives back together (need to watch trials...). 

Certainty: Parts 1 and 2

Part 1:

I'm a good lover, I'm an even better hater. Some of us carry a lot of resentments, and it's very easy to deposit them when you have an entire virtual space at your disposal: you can count yourself a king of infinite slop.

But hatred is easy, blaming others is easy. If you want an answer to a question, it was always easy to find one regardless of its truth, but in the era of the internet you can be convinced of something wrong within a literal three seconds.

The struggle is for the truth, the struggle is for the patience to find it, the struggle is to not quiet all the doubts on the path to your search, a struggle made doubly hard by the unfortunate certainties upon your path to the wrong answers.

The point is to doubt, the point is to question, and the point is to not cease the questioning once you think you've found the answers. You'll inevitably get things wrong along the way, but the biggest certainty is that certainty is the most lethal force in the world. Doubts kill us slowly, certainties can kill us all at once.

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I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, basically for as long as I can remember, and finally I think I know the reason. I just got a diagnosis I've long suspected: for a decade I thought I had a heart condition. Nobody really believed it. Last year I found out I had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I was told it was a benign form. It's not. This week I was told the condition is serious: even a little more serious than I thought it was. Not necessarily lethal, but roughly the same as finding out you have MS or stage 1 or 2 cancer. I may be here in 50 years, I may be gone tomorrow. For the moment, I mean to do as much with whatever time I have as the healthiest man alive.

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I saw Bob Dylan two weeks ago at Wolf Trap. I'm not really a Dylan person. I respect the game, I respect how he still tours at 85 all the time and is still writing really good songs, but he's not for me.

But after the concert two of my best friends informed me why he's been touring non-stop since the year before I was born: he views stopping as death. He may be onto something: Dylan has a mission, he has a reason, and he keeps going year after year, lasting through all the seasons of life, all the seasons of his reputation, all the seasons of personal difficulty, all the seasons quality in his writing and performing. Motivation helps when you get 1 billion dollars in intellectual property, record sales and merch, but that wasn't enough to motivate nearly every other rock star the same way.

The moment I heard that, I resolved to write every day of my life. For years I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, and finally I think I know the reason.

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Here's the worst thing about dying now. I'd get the smallest funeral I'd probably have in the history of my life. At my father's funeral he got nearly 500 on the week before school when everybody was away. Had he died a few weeks later he'd get 700.

I'd get a couple hundred: they'd mostly be my parents' friends and contacts. Some from my brothers. But from me? Well, there was a time when I'd get a hundred or two of my own, but that was the DC days, the early Baltimore days. I'd be lucky to get 50 or 60 now. I'd be consoled that more than 100 would genuinely mourn me, but I doubt they'd be able to haul ass to the funeral in two days (can you? Pleeeeease?).

But at this point in my life, most of my friends are in other towns and we talk online. The vast majority of my Baltimore friendships have gone the way of all flesh. Maybe they're busy, maybe they don't like me, maybe I don't like them. I never quite figured it out and I never quite fit with a bunch of cycling hipsters and rock geeks who drink as much in their 40s as I did in my 20s. How do they keep it up? Well, apparently they don't have heart conditions.

They're good people: better perhaps than I, but they are so fucking certain of the ways of the world. I am not, and their security makes me insanely jealous. It will give them long lives of relative calm. Paradoxically, I was kept around by many of them for the negativity of my tongue: they seemed both scared of me and to find it very funny. I never made any secret of how little we had in common and how stupid their 'ways' were, and somehow, they seemed to enjoy it.

But they were never really my people, and eventually many of us tired of each other. It is a terrible thing to contemplate the end in your mid-40s, not knowing whom your people are, knowing that there aren't many people you leave behind that miss your constant presence.

Perhaps this is the legacy by which I can keep them company after my absence. Maybe they'll find me a better friend when they don't have to deal with me directly.

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

My Zaydie, like my father, was a witty but difficult man: unlike me, who is as easy as a summer breeze. He wore a suit and watch to everything because to him, that's what a businessman does. He would obsess about his clothing, obsess about social slights, and obsess about his funeral.

I'm sure the main thing is that he didn't want a small crowd. But I think he also didn't want a Rabbi talking all the time about Hashem.

Unfortunately he had a subdural hematoma at 59 after falsely being told he had a heart attack and falling out of his hospital bed. They sent him home and he literally screamed in head pain until my med student uncle yelled over the phone for him to be readmitted to the hospital. He was never the same: aphasic, slurred, and just as difficult. He lived another thirty years, twenty compos mentis, and said it would have been better if he'd died.

I am not only in danger of heart events but also brain events. I certainly fear sudden death or the pain of a heart attack, but I suppose I fear a stroke more. I can deal with physical debilitation, I may even be able to deal with slurred speech, but the idea of a compromised brain is more than I can fathom. Some of us write so we may not die. I can deal with anything so long as I have the ability to write, words or music, but take away them both and I will be very short for this earth.

Zaydie was not frequent in his use of humor by the time I knew him, but he had his moments. When his and my father's business partner died, the Rabbi talked only about Hashem and not Mr. Goldman at all. Zaydie's comment to my father? "If Goldman had been there to see his funeral he would have died."

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Part 2:

It is so easy to be jealous.

Easier still because I sometimes think I'm a kind of Forrest Gump whom through no great achievements of his own got connected to some of the most consequential organizations in America. As I never tire of saying: I went to homecoming with Haley Stevens (I did not, however, 'stick it to her.' ... ... I stand by this joke). While in college I worked as a journalist under people who are involved deeply in the Washington Post and ABC News along with a relative who is a macher at the Associated Press. I've had multiple friends with positions in the White Houses of Bush and Obama, and multiple acquaintances who were deeply involved in Trump investigations. Acquaintances are Ivy League professors, literal hundreds of acquaintances and friends who studied at Ivy League schools. Many friends are now at the very top of their professions in law, science, medicine, business and engineering. In a college acting class I once ran a scene with someone who's now a B-list Broadway star and was in a theater program with someone who seemed to enjoy my company who's now a B-list Hollywood director.

None of this is extraordinarily connected for any person. It is, however, extraordinary for a person of lifelong underachievement. I was as smart as any of them, but learning and emotional debilitations prevented me from reaching for the stars they took for granted would always be there.

For years, decades even, the bitterness was overwhelming, and it's still there. Perhaps it will have contributed in some small part to shortening my lifespan. I was smart, I was capable, I had every gift except the gifts of organization (and height...), and feel like I've done nothing with them. I'm sure I could have tried harder, but the despair and terror of the difficulty was so very intense.

I heard I was smart too often when I was young. It was the worst thing I could have heard, and now I watch the world pass by and I cannot help but howl to myself about the rotten hand I was dealt and the still rottener way I played it.

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

One of the certainties of life: when the mind suffers, the body suffers with it, and the older I get, the more the body takes over from the mind.

I wish one could describe the extent of major anxiety and depression to one who hasn't experienced it, but I fear no one could. People say that the experience of illness cannot truly be recalled in moments of wellness, and just like I doubt a person with migraines could explain migraines sufficiently to someone who has not experienced them nor can the experience be completely recalled in moments without their presence. In the same way I doubt a person who has experienced major depression or major anxiety can recall exactly what it's like in the moments when they are not that way because the mind which would recall it is experiencing flight from precisely that state.

In the same way, I can only recall a general state of what depression and anxiety is, but I cannot recall the specific experiences of it. It would be impossible, and it would be furtherly impossible to describe it to those who've never been to those countries. They are pains that are deeply physical, alter one's sense of time and space, alter your sense of movement, alter one's perception of literally every life event and maintenance. It is a literal alternate body within the body. A second person, a shadow self, whom you become under moments of pressure.

What one does know is that you do not truly recover from it. Like diabetes, like MS; like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, once you're in, you're in: permanently altered, your life is defined by managing it, and you know with absolute certainty that sometimes, these black dogs will win.

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What's there to do but bear witness: witness to joys, witness to suffering, and witness to mistakes?

Not just to the mistakes you've made yourself, but to the mistakes others have made. Your shit stinks just as much as ours does, and every time someone claims that they have answers, my eyes glaze with the same anger you feel as all our raised hearts take over our atrophied brains. But the reasons are inevitably reciprocal, maybe your lives, dear readers, were simple enough that answers felt easy to ascertain: mine has not been. Simple explanations are luxuries reserved for the entitled.  

I am not certain of much, but I am certain of the presence of a snake oil that grips people's minds like predatory worms. Each person peddling them becomes both victim and perpetrator, addict and pusher, mentors who turn their pupils' brains to pulp. This mush is called ideology. 

Ideological certainties are insults, moral insults to the universe's most sublime forces, and intellectual insults that devolve ostensibly smart human beings into sniveling rodents. 

Lots of ideologues say that every belief is an ideology, they tell us that to even be anti-ideology is to be ideological. Quite so. The human body also has 50 benign tumors for every one that kills you. Ideology is designed to be the cancer that kills the body, and once the body is dead, the ideology promises resurrection. 

The irony is that often the ideologies do provide a type of resurrection, but it's a resurrection for a far off people we've never met. Europe fought for democracy for 200 years, They got it, but somewhere around 150 million people had to be killed. Meanwhile, the place that enjoyed the easiest fruits of European efforts was here in the good ol' US of A. 

America fights now for equality: racial, gender, sexuality, perhaps even class. Somewhere else will doubtless get the equality America wants for itself long before we do, but we're just at this fight's beginning, and the price tag could eventually well exceed 150 million.

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I could describe the ideological silos through which we all live, but we all know them. And we all pretend to bemoan it even as we're kind of in love with them. Liberals often want to shun conservatives to protect their way of life, conservatives often want to crush liberals to protect theirs. Socialists? Well, they don't even have residual attachments to any part of America. They just want to just bring the whole thing down so they can build some grandiose dream in its place. And libertarians? Well, they just want to bring the whole thing down...

And it doesn't stop at politics. Tech bros have this strange dream of an innovation paradise where businessmen are free to innovate free of regulation and heedless of consequence, many of which will inevitably be disastrous. Academics and artists have dreams of an equality paradise where people can cast off their oppressions and be equals because they can resolve conflicts by already agreeing on everything. Businessmen and investors constantly think the stock market will go up and up and up without ever wiping out a country into another great depression. National security workers think we can simply change the world into a battle fortress to insure ourselves against terror, (take a deep breath everybody) doctors and scientists think we can run the country along ideal medical regulations without taking the realities of people's jobs into account. We shall not even, dear reader, approach issues of diversity, sex and gender with disinfectant gloves.

This whole country, the pragmatic USA that emerged after World War II with more than 50% of the world's GDP because it did not embrace the narrow strictures of every other country involved, is besotten with precisely the sorts of ideologies they once fought. 

And yet we wonder why we're just another declining superpower...

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Actually, nobody wonders. Everybody thinks they have the explanation, and the explanation is inevitably provided by their ideologies. 

And from where, ultimately, do we get these ideological certainties?

The place you are reading this essay, dear reader. 

The interlinking screen is a force so innovative, so powerful, that we will not fathom what we've unleashed until we see its full might.