Dear Dad #9

You would kill me for this trip. I mean, you would absolutely lay into me for a thousand reasons. Not because of my profligacy, though you'd find an unbelievable amount to criticize there, but my idiocy, my incompetence, my laziness: Missing flights and full price for the new one, going to the ER at the first sign of a little trouble, skipping the concert I organized the whole trip for, being around so many friends who've gone back to chain smoking cigarettes, going back to drinking wine when it's so detrimental to my health (and not just a little, one night was a bottle worth, another day was half a large bottle of prosecco). I resisted the cigarettes completely, but the simple act of being around them pushed my voice down an octave. You might be a little more understanding about leaving my glasses in a lyft, that one I'm down on myself enough for, but you'd definitely be down on me for purchasing a bunch of pairs of reading glasses that aren't perfect when each pair is thirty bucks. 

But this is the sort of trip you'd love: the events, the people watching, the history, the views. It's everything you could want. I'm sorry you were careful with your life. Care to what end? You were the type that would get more out of vacations and tourism than anyone: most people have no idea of the history they tour. They ooh and ah by the gravesides of writers and statesmen they'd never heard of; but by the time you realized what you'd missed, your health slowed down. No one is sorrier than me that you didn't take more vacations but... well... you were cheap. I'm not. You were all too responsible, I'm not. My father is dead and your death taught me that life is all too short. Maybe I'm having my mid-life crisis, but I'm going to have all the adventures you refused yourself. 

I'm heading home right now on a train from New York and it's been twenty days. Twenty days! The longest I've been away from home in four years by a factor of well over two weeks! My own health took a turn for the much worse in your final years, and a few months after your passing I finally found a drug that keeps it mostly OK. I feel like life is just starting over now, and I'll have to be careful to not have a second half that will be as reckless and profligate as the first half was careful, lest the second half turn into a fourth quarter. 

Oh my god: San Francisco. You took J and I to San Francisco in 2009: it was wonderful. Whatever skirmishes we might have had on the trip (I can't remember), you took us to show us what stuff may be lying out there. Maybe it was really for you, maybe you wanted to share memories with your children, but maybe it was to show J all the possibilities that lie out there post-college, and maybe it was to show me that there was as much beauty and glory in the history of America as there is in the Europe I longed to go to for more than three weeks every ten years, but it was a great trip. We saw a David Mamet play, we ate some of America's best (mildly priced) food, and we got thrown out of the Robert Mondavi winery. The scenery everywhere took your breath away be it the windy hills of the city or the glowing sunlight of Napa. A homeless man sang to me a serenade in the street and another one asked J to critique the quality of his mugshot. The moment I was to go into the City Lights Bookstore: spiritual home to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Korso, and at that moment out stepped David Gergen: press secretary to both Clinton and Reagan. It was as though DC invaded San Fran and I was an unwitting accomplice. 

This time was shorter than the last two: just three days in American paradise. Even the sun in California is different: at all times you can literally see the sunlight. It doesn't just glow, it shines, not in the heavens above, but on the earth right next to you. The only other place I've seen anything like that is Italy. Even at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit it's strong enough to bore red marks into your exposed skin, yet somehow if you don't have a jacket you freeze to death even on a summer night. Every moment in that city seems like an outdoor party. I was there for the 'Breakers Festival', a costume festival not unlike Mardi Gras, only with more nudity. I probably saw about fifty dongs that Sunday morning, most of them old gays, probably Boomers, trying to recapture their glory days. San Francisco, like everywhere, has gotten a little more puritan, and I doubt there were more than two or three nudists there under fifty. So much has the spirit of San Francisco changed that I even saw a straight couple make out in the Castro! 

Even if San Francisco has changed, I don't understand how a place like that can exist. I've still never seen New Orleans or Charleston, but I have never seen a city in America that beautiful: maybe by a country mile. Even if the homeless are defecating right outside, even if a quart of milk costs a million dollars, every property is so well maintained, every townhouse seems painted a hundred colors, every restaurant has outdoor seating, every park seems to have a perfectly half and half mixture of pine trees and palm trees. It is that precise place in America where temperate meets tropics, and the climate creates a perfect city of a type that may not be seen anywhere else on earth. 

But there's no such thing as 'real perfection', and such perfection can breed a kind of unreality. The spirit of San Francisco may have changed, but it is just as vivid today as in the sixties, and perhaps quite a bit more influential. The world can seem all too explicable when living in circumstances so ideal. On the one hand you have the tech sector, which seems to have crossed overnight from libertarian into authoritarian (as I'm pretty sure I predicted to you), on the other you have the very famous San Franciscan brand of leftist. There's a whole new generation of them now: simultaneously more puritan and decadent than ever: tattoos on three sleeves yet so scared of saying something inappropriate that their very smiles seem to indicate a kind of desperation; more self-righteous than ever, yet simultaneously more terrified. You'd bristle with contempt for all sides: their utopian beliefs, their line item ideologies, the very lack of concern for money which lets them stay in America's most expensive city. There was never a less Californian person than you. The only people in San Francisco you'd have sympathy for are the Asians: who still dress as though America is in the 1950s, the young among whom carry themselves with that very middle class confidence which tells the world that they are the ones who truly run it. White people in San Francisco all have weird ass hair and bad tattoos, and at times they all look a little insecure. The Asians right next to them look happy as clams: hanging out with each other in a country that even in its depleted state is at least more distant from the threat of the Chinese government. 

 I certainly had moments of impatience I did my best to hide from San Francisco and all its mental baggage: be it a friend gone right-wing, one I'd rarely ever seen get heated in twenty five years, who heatedly asserted to me that liberals have controlled the Supreme Court for sixty years (why not seventy=five years then?), or his left friend who asserted to me that Israel is an ethnonationalist state in its very creation and only seemed to get madder with every calm contradiction I tried to make to points even he acknowledged were not particularly informed. Alcohol doesn't help in those situations, but one has the sense that whatever circles one moves in, the Bay Area is so ideologically lock stepped that they forget what it's like to talk with those who disagree with them. Those of us who live among disagreement every day and conscious of our surroundings realize that you have to approach political discourse as though you're walking through a landmine territory, where any footstep can cause a destructive explosion. But in such idyllic surroundings, it's very easy to think you don't have to be careful. 

But I have a certain sympathy with all of them. You try being from my generation and see how you'd take to it. I have the same deep terror of Silicon Valley we all do, but at least they're trying to solve problems, even if it's increasingly the problems they create, in a country where we've given up on solving problems almost entirely. As for the leftists, well, there is something about the intractability of modern America that pushes everybody to extremes: left and right. They think the country lied to them, and they're right. My generation was told there would be jobs, there would be prosperity, that our educations were worth something, that all those years spent prepping for college with extra-curriculars and volunteer work would pay off: then we took out massive student loans we couldn't pay because we all thought we were going to get high paying jobs. Where is all that money? It's all concentrated in 930 billionaires. Anybody who blames millennials for turning left without looking into themselves is doomed to worsen the problem. 

Boomer center-liberals like you chose your prosperity over making society work, so when pragmatists who know how to fix things choose their prosperity over solving society's problems, people inevitably flock to radical solutions. This is the world we now live in. It's sad to see hubristic friends who should know better be so heedless of history, but what can we do? The J Tuckers of the world told us to work hard, because hard work was what worked for you. We're not lazy, we just know that hard work won't be rewarded anymore. 

Nothing is more fragile than beauty, and there is something truly fragile about San Francisco. The very glory of it feels like it's running on borrowed time. Just like how cities as beautiful as old Dresden, old Warsaw, old Tokyo and Rotterdam were bombed to ember (Paris and Prague almost were too), the most beautiful cities in America seem the most threatened: either from war with China like San Francisco and Portland, or from civil conflict like Austin and Nashville, or even rural California. These are places much more dangerous than they look. Not yet, but if life gets still more unstable than it currently seems, it won't be places like Baltimore or Detroit which opponents will look to destroy. Why bomb something that already looks bombed out?

Perhaps Denver tomorrow...

Celibidache Rant

You can always tell a Celibidache pupil, they parrot his arrogance, they parrot his pseudo-philosophical bullshit, they populate conducting programs and reproduce his cult: a cult that has produced almost no conductors of note at all.

I had to defriend one of them: who just strikes me as one of the most arrogant little shits in the music world, and who controlled the conducting program at my local conservatory for years. Thank god I never went there, I would have challenged every assertion of his and lasted about five lessons. Everybody who disagrees with him is 'wrong'.

On his webpage he has a thing about 'maestro malpractice' about how so few conductors obey the tempo markings in Shostakovich 5. If he knew anything about the history of Shostakovich performance he'd realize that Sanderling was picked apart by some Shostakovich pupil for not obeying the markings, and Shostakovich shouted him down! He said 'if Kurt feels it that way, let him do it!'

Then there was a thing the other day about how to hold a fermata. Reading it enraged me. He said that in some debate 'everyone is wrong' and 'there is only one explanation.' It's one thing if I've seen it from him once, but I've read him do it over and over and over again. This is the kind of closed system that has cut off classical music from music for over 100 years, and has closed classical music at the root from the evolution of the world. It academicizes all sorts of phenomena that are about practical accommodation and living evolution, and prevents classical music culture from participating in the wider evolution of music. We have many great composers right now, but they are, by and large, composers for a small audience of conoisseurs: and there should always be composers for a small, specific audience, but where are the populists? Where are the ones who can appeal to the broad base? Where are our Shostakoviches, our Verdis, our Beethovens, our Mahlers?! What distinguished them was not tonality or tunes, it was the broader support of the music world that allowed them to realize their ambitions, even when nobody liked the results. Sure, there were still commercial and censorious considerations, but the vision remained, the ability to pursue the large scale remained. Where are our composers who can represent humanity at its broadest crossections? The ones who even try to do it are generally confined to ghettos we don't accept: film music, video game music, crossover, where they are almost entirely dependent on commercial appeal which dilutes the vision.

Nearly every composer can't do it today: and it's not that they can't, it's that they're prevented. The circumstances are certainly better than they were even 20 years ago when I was applying to grad school, perhaps even much better, but we still haven't felt the results yet. The combination of academic pressure, lack of funding, lack of experience in learning musical techniques of other genres, and commercial pressures mean that the vision it takes to create the longest, most diverse, most visionary and challenging projects is discouraged. There are so many talented composers out there, of all ages, that the fabric of talent has lumps! But we're all stuck doing the small shit, we're all teeming with ideas that are too big to ever get the funding and audience we need, and many of the older academics were incentivized to root against our success because it would ruin the justification for the ones who got the jobs we all coveted by repeating the atonal/serial bullshit dogmas of their own professors. Academia rewards orthodoxy. The problem is not that tonality lost, the problem is that curiosity lost! Those who love atonal/serial music (as I occasionally do) should always be free to listen, support, create it with no block to their funding and productivity, but when so many of them said 'this is the only way', they created an iron curtain around our music that wrecked our ability to be influenced by the wider world. Thank god, they're retiring now, but their effect on us will continue for a lifetime.

Similarly, where are the performing musicians who are truly free? Between the moderation of Kubelik and the extremity of Bernstein, I'll always take moderate romantics like Kubelik, but there has to be a place for extremity too! We have a few, some of whom unfortunately embrace extreme politics in addition to music, but at least the extremists realize what we're missing, and want to turn back the clock to an era when the public really cared. We need more musicians who can shock us, the shocks are where the real challenges lie: musicians like Patricia Kopatschinskaya, Fazil Say, Ivo Pogorelich, Gidon Kremer, Adam Fischer, even conductors of dubious ethics like Francois-Xavier Roth and Teodor Currentzis. Just like past musicians like Stokowski, Gould, Gitlis, and dare I say, Celibidache in his performer form (not the cult leader), the negative reactions they engender is part of the artistic process that grows us all. We grow through being challenged. You (and I) may not always like the results, but the results are necessary. No challenge: no art.

I have deep, philosophical suspicions of anyone who says there is only one explanation. Music is not a science! It's not even a soft science, it's an art, and art is done by practical solutions, not theory and certainly not ideology. I'm sure there are cases when there is only one solution, but it's maybe 1 in 100 at most. People who say that there is only one reason or solution are generally dogmatists trying to squelch your individuality: either subscribers to a cult or the leader themselves. Celibidache would throw Buddhism and totalitarian philosophers like Heidegger as justification for his 'phenomenology' and 'epiphenomena' bullshit, against him I raise philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Montesquieu and Giambattista Vico, who say that the truth is not discovered but made, built, dependent on the circumstances of its creation, and the vast majority of the time, there is more than one way of doing things, and that the world becomes a better place when people realize that there can be irreconcilable viewpoints that nevertheless can live together in peace and celebrate each other's differences.

If not following the score is an excuse for laziness, obviously it's unacceptable. But if it's a way of creating a different sort of performance, that is how music LIVES. That is how music EVOLVES. The musical scenes and genres that realize this are the healthy ones, the others are diseases that can only live by killiing healthy bodies.

TCP Vol 2: Tale X: Counterauthority--rough draft

 To High Priest Yoazar,

I'm afraid I can't reveal my identity to you, but rest assured, you know me. 

What you need to do is firstly assure the people of Israel that this is not a prelude to slavery, no matter what taxes signified in previous civilizations, Rome is Rome. These other civilizations practically took over neighborhoods and blocks compared to Rome's empire spanning the world. Rome is a step up in the progress of the world, and when Rome taxes, the taxes are put to public use, not private enrichment. 

Secondly, the idea that high taxes would be a prelude to the nationalization (internationalization) of all Jewish industries and property is absurd. That will never happen, and once again, just because it happened this way in other occupations does not mean that Rome is the same. 

Rome is the exception to history. Other empires fold by their lack of competence, their lack of organization, their lack of dynamism and adaptability. Rome's rise continues because it has solved the question of how to maintain civilization, and can maintain it ad infinitum should it so choose.

It's true, it is rather concerning that Hillel's school has acceded to the bellicosity of Shammai's, but when the real violence begins (imminently I'm sure), Hillel will regain their tactful composure. However, the continued mistreatment of all the mokhes and gabbais in Rome's employ is a shandous outrage. They are now beaten in the street, or at least spat on, and whenever they report their ill-treatment, Rabbis and Elders dismiss their claims prima facie because the Sanhedrin ruled that the credibility of known Jewish employees in Rome's public sector is so damaged that they cannot testify in court. 

This is a development so beyond unacceptable to Rome that Rome demands action for it and orders you to threaten any such vigilante with excommunication. We and Rome are well aware that the issue of excommunication falls under purview of the Sanhedrin and tribal councils, but Rome is adamant that you claim counterauthority from them and attempt to seize power from the Sanhedrin by claiming their irredeemable corruption. Such a claim is always helped by the fact that the Sanhedrin is just as corrupt as the priesthood, and the more you repeat your accusations, the less their accusations against your administration hold moral credibility to the average Judean. 

This is what Rome bids you do at the moment, and if you have any further questions, they will be conveyed though the couriers of the Roman governate and any written questions or requests will be sent to me, who bears far more detailed instructions from the Emperor's family. 

For the Senate and People of Rome,

Rome's Man in Jerusalem

The American Sublime 2: Bug-centric Cockatoo

.

So I just got back from West Side Story today--a work I've written about endlessly. It was a pretty great performance, 9/10? A little too busy and unsubtle, but all the leads were great bordering on wonderful. Better than I thought I'd ever see it done. At the beginning scenes and the ending I wiped away a lot of tears as my lip quivered, then I looked over and saw my mom doing the same, then I looked in front of me and there was a woman outright sobbing while her husband consoled her, then I looked next to me and there was a couple younger than me and both the man and the woman were wiping tears. The only person near me who didn't like it was the twelve year old texting on his phone the whole time until I asked him to stop nicely at intermission. He apologized very politely, then kept checking the time during the second half.

What is it about this play that speaks to everybody here so deeply? You can't just explain it rationally. Part of why West Side Story is timeless is because we're still living West Side Story's crisis. and it's basically the same show: still gangs, still poverty, still projects, still racist cops, still misspent youth. It could be set in Baltimore today and all you'd need is David Simon to revamp the script, make the Jets African-American and up the racism of the cops, and it's the same show.

But no, you can't explain it like that, that would just make West Side Story a sociology lesson. It has to provoke deep emotional associations, and it can't just be nostalgia.

No, what we're experiencing is something much deeper. Something almost ecstatic. I come out of West Side Story not just moved, but electrified. Simon Schama talks about that effect in the famous documentary: The Power of Art: "

"In the end, there's only one test that matters. You come into the room, you fix it in your sights. Does it, or does it not attack you in the guts, it does. Does your heart jump? Do your eyes widen? Does your pulse race? Do your feet get a bad attack of lead boots you're so struck down by it?"

There's so much about West Side Story that shouldn't work: the antique slang that probably wasn't even real slang in 1957, the ridiculous love story, the ballet sequence that comes out of nowhere and feels like an ego trip from the choreographer... and yet we buy every bit of it. It's one of those works that moves through our heads in a state of grace. Some works just have that irrational impact on us. It's not many, it's never many, but they exist, and if you're open to it, you usually know it when you see it.

You particularly know it because you keep coming back to them. They marinate in your head like an unfinished dinner in the fridge that gets better overnight, and every time you revisit it, it's a completely different experience. A character may resemble your parent, then 20 years later resemble you, then 20 years after that resemble your child; a place may represent the place you live in, then it becomes the place you grew up in, then it becomes the place it used to be but no longer is. Aristotle called it 'mimesis', but what it means is that we just look at the screen or page or stage and say 'that's me.'

It may not exactly be you, but it's something you know, something you remember, something you love or hate or fear, something you're experiencing right now or expect to experience later, and it goes through a journey into your psyche, and by the time it's done you're not the same person anymore.

What's a little unique about West Side Story is that for a country with so many choices for entertainment, how few of them seem to have that ecstatic effect on millions of people. Sure, all kinds of musical groups can get a whole stadium to bob their heads and raise their arms in a kind of trance, but that's not the experience I'm talking about. I'm talking about the solitary experience, the experience that when you leave, you know that your life can never be the same after it happened, and you know that if you come back in 50 years, it will have the same effect. Not just because of its effect on your emotions or nerves, but it's affect on your mind. The kind of piece where your thoughts complicate your emotions, and your emotions complicate your thoughts. And between the two, something deeper emerges even than the heart: a soul. The essential part of who we become, and by the end of that process, we don't just feel delighted or deflated, we understand.

Russia devoted 200 years of literature to that effect, Italy had multiple hundreds of years of that art, but we in America? We don't think much of solitary creation. Of course, even the solitary creators have help, but in so much of even our best art, the vision itself comes from collaboration. Collaboration can do all sorts of wonderful things, but collaboration can also mean committee. And when a committee creates a work of art, the result is not a person's original vision. Committees generally don't look at a work and say 'let's get more daring'. It happens, but not that often, and I think it's a little harder to communicate from one heart to another.

So, individual or collaboration, how do these works have that effect on us? Well, I wonder if there are three ways (and I had a little help from ChatGPT on this...): in the works we see the 'concrete America,' the 'mythic America,' and the 'metaphysical America.' In the concrete America, your mind sees sights and concepts just like the ones we know: open landscapes, tall cities, saturated media, money problems. In the mythic America, it speaks to the dreams we have, both when we sleep and when we wake: the freedom to reinvent ourselves, to meet our destiny, to venture into the frontier. The dream that we'll all be free and equal, and the nightmare that we may get only less as time goes on. Metaphysical America is the America of the spirit, where being American stops being a fact and becomes a way of life. Maybe it's a particular American loneliness where we start questioning what all this freedom and prosperity was for. What happens if, when we reinvent ourselves, we lose ourselves or our souls. We're in a country where we're free to believe anything at all, but what happens if we stop believing in anything?

And when you see these three levels of America reflected back at you, it hits you harder than any rational truth would. It doesn't wrestle with things that are true right now, it wrestles with universal values, fundamental moral laws, universal emotions and experiences and conditions.

I think what makes West Side Story so extraordinary is that there aren't all that many pieces in America that unquestionably do that: We have our share, but we are, supposedly, the freest country there's ever been (that's another story...), and yet we haven't used that freedom to make all that much art that probes questions just that deep, and what we do have, even the best of it, feels just a little bit commercial, just a little bit safe. Not everything's supposed to be a 'really good show,' and even in a show like West Side Story, you can feel the audience concessions. The first half-hour of West Side Story is so beautiful, and then you go into America: America is one of the best songs ever written in this country, but it's placed right after Maria and Tonight, two songs so ecstatic that you want to stay in their spell forever, and it yanks you out of that ecstasy so jarringly that you (I) almost resent it. Then, a half hour later, comes One Hand One Heart, another of the most beautiful songs ever written, and West Side Story's built an entirely new head of steam, and you feel yanked back into love and beauty. Then Act 1 ends with deaths on the stage, and Act 2 opens with I Feel Pretty. We were in the world of the The Wire, and then we're yanked into the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's part of West Side Story's greatness that it can be so many things at once, but it's a little bit exhausting, and in the back of your mind, you wonder if they did it because they worried about the ADD of the audience.

But it's true, sometimes commercial considerations make a work better, sometimes populism makes a work better, sometimes 'simpler' is simply better...

In the vast majority of the best American work, that's what we get. For better or worse, artists here usually have to be entertainers first. The unregulated profundities of Dostoevsky and Wagner don't as often happen here. Does that make the work here worse? Maybe a little bit... but it also means that most of our best art is just that entertaining, and you wouldn't just miss out on something that will change you and give you wisdom and a self-transformation, that seems different every time you experience it, but also, you'd miss having a really good time.

I was going to write about which works are on this list and why, but I don't have that kind of time. Here's another f***ing list....

Absolute: means what it says.

The Simpsons (f*** off it's my list...)

Citizen Kane (a lot more entertaining than you remember)

West Side Story

Moby Dick

Death of a Salesman

Leaves of Grass

Our Town

Alan Lomax Collections

Louis Armstrong Hot Five & Seven

Pinocchio

New York

This World is Not Conclusion

A Love Supreme

Mad Men

Gershwin Songs (basically all of them)

Do The Right Thing

Gypsy

Wizard of Oz

Appalachia

The Muppets

Bessie Smith (basically everything)

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

Unnamable, competes with the best of any time and place:

Life on the Mississippi

The Souls of Black Folk

Assassins

Barbecue Cuisine

Invisible Man

Twin Peaks

Beloved

The Grand Canyon

Riverside Church

New Orleans

Black, Brown and Beige

Come Sunday

Charlotte's Web

Nashville (movie)

The Mississippi Delta

Chicago

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Great Plains

Take the A-Train

Grand Central Terminal

The Pacific Ocean

Diego Rivera Detroit Murals

Mood Indigo

Harlem Air Shift

The Twilight Zone

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

The Red Badge of Courage

Levi's Blue Jeans

Absalom, Absalom!

The Haunting of Hill House

I Heard a Fly Buzz --when I died

National Geographic

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The Times They Are a'Changin'

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding

Chimes of Freedom

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Flatbush and Flushing

A Hard Rain's-a Gonna Fall

Democracy in America

The Civil War (documentary)

The Vietnam War (documentary)

Varieties of Religious Experience

Deep Space Nine

Ah-Um

Kind of Blue

The Last Picture Show

The True Believer

It

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

Cosmic. Essential for anyone who cares to experience America:

Mahalia Jackson (Move On Up A Little Higher, How I Got Over, Precious Lord Take My Hand, Come Sunday)

Migrant Mother

Long Day's Journey into Night

As I Lay Dying

Pryor: Live in Concert

The Great Gatsby

San Francisco

The Awakening

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (Newport '56)

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Redwood Parks

Company

late George Carlin specials

Follies

Woodstock

Boston

The Stand

The Education of Henry Adams

Seinfeld

The Public and its Problems

The Liberal Imagination

An American Tragedy

African American Spirituals

Central Park

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Warmth of Other Suns

Star Trek TNG

Waffle House

Creole Cuisine

Neuromancer

Baseball (documentary)

The Scarlet Letter

Such Sweet Thunder

Los Angeles

Robert Frost (Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall, The Road Less Traveled, After Apple Picking, Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial)

New Orleans Jazz (generally)

Mardi Gras costumes

Rear Window

These Truths

Baltimore (!)

Watchmen

Bowling Alone

Black Boy

Las Vegas

Call It Sleep

The Searchers

Blade Runner (under protest)

Peanuts

Calvin and Hobbes

All The King's Men

James Brown: Live at the Apollo

Fun Home

Go Down, Moses (novel)

Thanksgiving Dinner

Sophisticated Lady

Civil Rights Movement Songs

Niagra Falls

Strange Fruit

Ko-Ko

John Lee Hooker (generally)

Desolation Row

Follies

I Am Legend

The Godfather Saga (TV version putting both movies in chronological sequence with an hour of restored scenes is best)

Yellowstone National Park

Master's of War

Second Line Funerals

Far East Suite

How The Other Half Lives

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Origins of Totalitarianism

The Great Lakes

Battle Hymn of the Republic

How The Grinch Stole Christmas

Hoop Dreams

The Unanswered Question

Pentacostal Services (generally)

Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart

Apocalypse Now

Fallingwater

Freedom Highway

I've Been Loving You Too Long

The Assistant

Spirit In The Dark

King Heroin

The Atlantic Magazine

Brooklyn Bridge

A Raisin in the Sun

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Collected Stories of IB Singer

Chinatown

Midwest County Seat Towns

Tangled Up in Blue

The Fire Next Time

Chrysler Building

The Truman Show

The Iceman Cometh

Brokeback Mountain

Porgy and Bess

The Manchurian Candidate

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Blood Meridian

Raging Bull

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Civil War Union Songs

Experience and Nature

The Rust Belt

The Promise of American Life

Moonlight

Nebraska

Green Eggs and Ham

Nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

My Antonia

Lady Soul

Where The Sidewalk Ends

MAD Magazine

Rain Dogs

King of the Hill

Bless Me, Ultima

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

County Fairs

the Zoot Suit

The Fish Fry

Dispatches

The Crawfish Boil

Jewish Deli

The Human Condition

"Chinese Food"

Armies of the Night

The Southern Breakfast

Pragmatism (William James)

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Work Boots

The Giving Tree

Sesame Street

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Gold: a Transcendent Achievement:

Mean Streets (still Scorsese's best...)

Philadelphia

The Truman Show

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Italian American Dinner

Mullholland Dr.

Goodfellas

The Public and its Problems

The Rockies

Frasier

Memphis

Walden

Life Against Death

The Clambake

New York Pizza

Denim

Jazz (documentary)

Detroit

Alien

Work Boots

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Plains

The Adventures of Augie March

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Pet Sounds

The Mojave Desert

Washington DC

The Martian Chronicles

The Cat in the Hat

Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars

The New Yorker

Closing Time

Bonnie & Clyde

The Apartment

The Matrix

The Closing of the American Mind (under protest)

Emily Dickinson (various)

American Pastoral

Native Son

Taxi

Graceland

Appalachian Mountains

Gravity's Rainbow

Las Vegas Strip

Platoon

Born on the Fourth of July

Long Day's Journey into Night

Portrait of a Lady

The Night of the Hunter

Blue Velvet

The Power Broker

The Right Stuff

Soul Food

Bojack Horseman

Robert Johnson (generally)

Photo of Allie May Burroughs

Ives 4

New York Bagel

Harlan County, USA

Gumbo

Blue Velvet

Blue Plate Special

The Battle Cry of Freedom

Ubik

County Fairs

His Girl Friday

Appalachian Spring

Angels in America

Blood on the Tracks

The Brothers Ashkenazi

Soul Food

Ace in the Hole (movie)

Creative Orchestra Music 1976

Roseanne

Leather Jacket

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Love and Will

Highway 61 Revisited

Show Boat

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution

The Moviegoer

The Conversation

Modern Times

Pacific Overtures

The Glass Menagerie

The Problem We All Live With

The Searchers

The Civil War: A Narrative

The Twilight Zone

The Fog of War

Cole Porter (various)

Deadwood

It's a Man's World

The Sopranos

Woody Guthrie (various)

Zodiac

Walden

The Immortal Otis Redding

Duck Soup

ET

The Producers

Watchmen

Catch-22

The Executioner's Song

Staples Singers (various)

Coat of Many Colors

Hank Williams (various)

Woolworth Building

Long Day's Journey into Night

Fargo

Alexander's Ragtime Band

Waffle House Breakfast

The Sweet Smell of Success

Touch of Evil

The Philadelphia Story

Army Field Jacket

Black Church Hats

Drag

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Jimmie Rodgers (various)

Johnny Cash America Albums

America Today Mural

Carousel

Six Feet Under

The Larry Sanders Show

Chappelle's Show

Bluegrass Jam Sessions

American Gothic

The Americans

Contract With God Trilogy

Roots

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Cheers

Her

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

Silver: A Great Achievement

The Fixer

The Social Network

Robo-cop

Herzog

The Turn of the Screw

All The Pretty Horses

Blazing Saddles

Gas

Corn on the Cobb

The Steerage

Randy Newman (album)

Portnoy's Complaint

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Mary Tyler Moore

Christina's World

Kind of Blue

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Hippie Fringe and Denim

Disneyland

Pittsburgh

All in the Family

Battlestar Galactica

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

There's A Riot Goin' On

Succession

Cleveland

Suttree

St. Louis

Church Potluck

Guggenheim Museum

Twin Peaks

Gravity's Rainbow

Dreamgirls

Follies

Jurassic Park

Other Johnnie Cash

Denial of Death

King Kong

Nixon (movie)

City Lights

Vertigo

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Ebony

Jet

Washington Square

The Deer Hunter

The Sopranos

Sugar Shack

Rolling Stone Magazine

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Diner Pie

Carol Burnett Show

Born to Run

Network

The Wizard of Oz

Into the Woods

American Graffiti

Red-Headed Stranger

Dazed and Confused

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Sunset Boulevard

Boogie Nights

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Paris, Texas

M*A*S*H (TV)

Tom Waits (various)

Animal House

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

The Apartment

Rothko Chapel

Piano Music of Henry Cowell

Rodeo & Billy the Kid

Exciteable Boy

The Iceman Cometh

The Crucible

Fences & The Piano Lesson

Glengarry Glen Ross

Stag at Sharkey's

Carousel

Groundhog Day

Close Encounters & ET

Fargo

Toy Story

What's Goin' On

Double Indemnity

All About Eve

Pudd'nhead Wilson

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

Bronze: A Mostly Great Achievement:

Nighthawks

The Wire Breaking Bad

The Best Years of Our Lives

Black Saint & Sinner Lady

Sula

Kind of Blue

The Color Purple

Ah Um

Erasure

The Hunger Games

The Apartment

Playboy

A Face in the Crowd

Friday Night Lights

Flannel Shirt

The Americans (TV show)

Dog Day Afternoon

Macaroni and Cheese

White T-Shirt

Badlands

Magnolia

Tapestry (album)

Apollo Theater

Habits of the Heart

The Quest for Community

Wise Blood

JFK (movie)

Koyaansqatsi

Deep Dish Pizza

Twin Peaks

South Park

Some Like It Hot

Singin' In the Rain

No Place of Grace

Girls

First Reformed

South Bronx Housing Projects

Stagecoach

Easy Rider

Gone with the Wind

Nebraska

Get Out

Air Jordan Sneakers

The Big Lebowski (pinnacle of Western Civilization)

Casablanca

Days of Heaven

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

Doesn't Belong:

Andy Warhol

Jeff Koons Jackson Pollock

Cindy Sherman

Robert Rauschenberg

Ye

The Eagles

Steely Dan

Nine Inch Nails

Velvet Underground

Lou Reed

Talking Heads

Patti Smith

Metalica

Tool

Eminem

Grateful Dead

John Cage

Damien Chazelle

Scarface

La La Land

2001

Infinite Jest

The Tree of Life

Easy Rider

Superhero Mythology (sorry)

Austin

Silicon Valley

Mount Rushmore

Tom Cruise movies

American Beauty

Joker

Fight Club

La La Land

Friends

Avatar

Nomadland

White Noise

Ready Player One

Tarantino

Dan Harmon

Noah Baumbach

Ayn Rand

Bret Easton Ellis

Michael Bay

Joss Whedon (was not a fan before everybody else wasn't)

Ryan Murphy

David Foster Wallace (as a novelist)

Don DeLillo

Chuck Palahniuk

Seth MacFarlane

Wes Anderson

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Jordan Peterson (Canadian I Know)

Taylor Swift

Lena Dunham (this one honestly also hurts)

How I Met Your Mother (god that aged badly... should have seen that coming)

Chuck Lorre

The End of History

Steven Pinker

Wall Street (movie)

Natural Born Killers

On The Road

The Goldfinch

Visit from the Goon Squad

House of Leaves

Vonnegut

Hunter S. Thompson

The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway novels

Dom DeLillo

Naked Lunch

Pynchon

William Gaddis

Blood Meridian

Regretfully off the list:

Anthony Jeselnik

Bo Burnham

Frank Zappa

Hunter S. Thompson

Blood Meridian

Sam Harris

David Foster Wallace

Jonathan Franzen

Damien Chazelle

Woody Allen

Belongs under protest:

Stanley Kubrick

Billy Joel (really)

Norman Rockwell

Frank Capra

George Lucas

Cornell West

Oliver Stone

Howard Zinn

Take Them Seriously As Artists:

Charles Schultz

Mister Rogers

George Romero

Bob Ross

Harold Ramis

Brian de Palma

Take Them Seriously as Great Artists:

Steven Spielberg

Jim Henson

Johnny Cash

Tom Waits

Garrison Keillor

John Prine

Dolly Parton

Norm MacDonald (I know he's Canadian)

Dear Dad #8

 

I just heard every composer in Baltimore will be at my premiere tomorrow to hear the Schnittke, so, of course, this is the time I choose to write the kind of goyisher soft-ass choir shit I always made fun of with other composers.

It doesn't really sound goyish, it sounds like a modern synagogue tune, with a slight dollop of mizrachi intervals. I wanted to do so much more with this piece, but I knew I had to make it user-friendly.

The choir, they... I guess they like it well enough. Like most new composers, they barely mention it, it's just something we all feel the need to do for each other. It overwhelms me with pride that an organization this eminent is doing my piece tomorrow. Hearing them do my music is like soul satisfaction injected into my veins, but I do wish I'd written a different piece: both for them and a different piece in memory of you.

I'm planning on making a recording of all the various choral pieces I've had in my head and am finally jotting down on music software. They're better than the piece we're doing tomorrow, but next to Schnittke and Bernstein they needed an easy piece, so I wasn't about to try to compete with two of my heroes.

Schnittke is, I'm sure, not your thing. He's very much my thing. Long before I met this conductor who did his dissertation on Schnittke, I thought Alfred Schnittke was the greatest composer of the 20th century's second half. He's laughed at now (and oh my god Mom is going to bust a gasket at some of the percussion effects tomorrow. I don't want to spoil it for her because I want the entire chorus watch her cackling), but Schnittke is one of the great artistic moral witnesses, prophets of 20th century horror like Shostakovich, Mahler and Amanda Bynes.

In his own way, he's no different from Leonard Bernstein. Both of them want to combine the high and the low. It's not Schnittke's fault that he was born in a society that had no market forces that would force him to be popular with a mass audience.

We 'artists', if that's even what I fucking am, don't have it easy. You warned me about that so many times, even as your refusal to believe in my path through it made the path still more difficult, but even the ones who 'make it', they don't have it easy. There are all kinds of entertainers who make it, and we call them artists, but real artists don't spend their days touring stadiums or grossing millions every week at the box office. If you get that level of popular acclaim, you haven't challenged your public, you've pandered to them.

So the real thing, the 'artistes', they don't exist to the public. A lucky few do: Dylan, Scorsese, Ellington, they get to evolve and experiment to a large, invested public. The public doesn't always appreciate them, but no matter how weird they get, their audience is interested in what they do, and stays interested over a period of 50 years--and in Dylan's case now, sixty five years. There are others of that level of course, but something does so many of them in before their ends should have been met. Sometimes it's death, sometimes it's drugs, sometimes it's burnout, sometimes it's lack of money or support, sometimes it's even too much money or support. But even among the American artistic gods, there are the pandering fingerprints: is Dylan really a Homer? Is Scorsese really a Dostoevsky? Is Ellington really a Beethoven?

As for the rest of us, we may have publics (I don't...), but even the ones who do, it's basically a monastery. We all have our little scenes, but America doesn't like the vast majority of artists, they don't think they need us. We all have our preferred few we pick and choose, but the problem is that once we pick an artist out of the million choices we have, we stick with them, and as such, they have to provide us with the tried and true stuff that we require from them: even their risks become predictable, because in every scene, there's a set way to be risky, and if you truly break the taboos open of your public, you will alienate them. So even the best of it has the stain of pandering on it. Where is the risk in talking about racism and misogyny to an audience composed entirely of antiracists and feminists? Where is the risk in addressing the plight of the poor to an audience of progressives and socialists? Where is the risk in the artistic avant garde in a generation raised on critical theory?

At least among the boomers: the rock gods, the New Hollywood film brats, there was a mass audience, and the paradox was that because there was a mass audience, the audience knew that they wouldn't like everything the artist gave them because they shared this artist with people very different from them. So the audience always expected to be challenged. This is the paradox of mass culture: mass culture was a community, and within the community, it allowed everybody a certain degree of individuality.

But over time, the market mastered us, watered down our products to a point past even vanilla until it's all just water. Supposedly, we have the freedom to choose whatever sort of music, movie, book we want, but we seem more imprisoned by our choices than we ever were by what we were forced to consume together.

There's plenty of great stuff now, but who sees it? Who even knows about it? In a fairer artistic world, the biggest names wouldn't be Taylor Swift or Ryan Coogler. It would be names like Anthony Braxton, Esperanza Spaulding, James McMurtry, John Darnielle, Kelly Reichardt, Charles Burnett, Kara Walker, Marilynne Robinson (at least Obama's a fan of her...), Colson Whitehead. Artists like this deserve to be as famous as Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, JD Salinger, but we don't care anymore. It's gone so far beyond that we don't care about so-called classical music or so-called literature. Now, there isn't even a new generation whose recognition would replace the great popular artists. When Alfred Hitchcock retired, Spielberg was there to take his place in the public imagination: who will take Spielberg's place? When Dylan and Springsteen go, will any singer-songwriter take their place in the public eye? Norm MacDonald and Robin Williams are dead, Louis CK and Dave Chapelle might as well be, let's hope Taylor Tomlinson can get to the summit because otherwise, it's just more 'microcomedians' that we occasionally see a reel of on facebook.

Nobody needs to be a celebrity, but the modern arts are sadly dependent on that kind of attention seeking because that level of exposure raises all boats in their fields. The more excitement the mass market generates, the more revenue streams there are for everyone in the same field. Columbia and RCA knew that with their hits, they could pay to record the entire music scene, and whatever lost money, the mass sales would recoup the costs. Corporations are never great, but back then they knew that the ultimate purpose was the legacy, not the profit margins. But now that the profit margins are everything, and somehow, there's less profit! Relatively speaking, artists are making less money than ever in living memory, and it's because of the moneymen. A few products like Taylor Swift and Marvel make more money than anyone's ever seen, and instead of paying the investment forward to create the new generation of Taylor Swifts and Stan Lees, it lines the pockets just a few artists and executives, and everybody else has to fend for themselves in a business which now roots for them to fail.

Each of the artists I mentioned has an appreciative public, but compared to the public for something that challenging when you were twenty years younger than I am now, it's a miniscule thing. What is the point of all those gains in self-expression and identity if we have have no idea what to express? We wonder how our country is in such crisis: but there are, literally, millions of works of art which are there for us to use as moral instruction, waiting for us to pick them up either in hard copy or online, and instead, we just doomscroll and share more memes that either make us mad or emotionally deaden us. Literally, the cultural riches of the world are there to make us better understand everything we see and the crises we live, and 99.9% of it we completely ignore.

So it's a shame nobody gets the music of guys like Schnittke. Schnittke is one of the great cultural role models, not because he wants to be important, but because he doesn't. He doesn't want to be a prophet, he wants to just combine seriousness and fun, just like you taught me to try to do, and which you did with such effortlessness for as long as the 43 years I knew you.

Schnittke didn't need the love of the world the way Lenny Bernstein did. He was content to be himself and challenge his listeners, knowing that through music he could bear witness and still make it fun. It's not necessarily pleasant to listen to, but it's enjoyable even when it disturbs you.

There are so many coincidences about tomorrow's performance I don't know where to begin. It's not just saying a Requiem for you nine months after you died (I've said Kaddish to myself for you every day for at least the last month, not that I need credit, but I just need you to know that in my own way I'm trying), it's that after my piece, we're doing the Chichester Psalms. We're singing the 23rd Psalm, which every Jew chants upon the death of a loved one. We're singing Psalm 2, which I set in my hardest core ever piece ten years ago. And then the Chichester Psalms ends with, of all things, Hineh Ma Tov, which Eli's gone around Bubbie's house singing every day for at least the last month. I told him I'm singing it in public, he wants to go, but I told him it won't be the melody he knows. I don't think Eli is ready for Schnittke, even though if any 5-year-old would be...

I'll try to get through Chichester without crying--once I had to excuse myself from rehearsal right before they rehearsed my piece because all I could think of was you, and the memories were so thick I couldn't bear it. It's gonna be rough, but I've got a lot of friends coming whom I would prefer not see me in that compromised state.

You will be with me tomorrow Dad. In some ways it's just a concert like any other concert. I tried to write something people would like, but ultimately it's just another piece of new music that everybody's going to shrug at, but at the same time, it's so different from any other concert. Not just because I'm getting premiered by a major musical organization, but because there are so many connections between us and that program. Schnittke and Bernstein both lived the kind of century you lived. Bernstein is us in America, Schnittke is us in Europe. We got over here, a lot of our family wasn't so lucky. But whether or not you ever wanted me in the arts, the art is there, bearing witness to everything Bubbie and Zaydie endured, everything they hoped for by coming here, and hopefully, fulfilling just a small piece of that hope in getting my music played.

I love you.

Amen

TCP: Vol 2 Tale IX: Grace of Mars

   Caesar Augustus: Now see here Coponius, here is the ultimate evidence we take this matter of the gravest seriousness. You know your counterpart in Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, and he's sailed all the way to Rome. You'll sail back together and Quirinius will tell you everything you conceivably need to know. 

Coponius: Thank you Caesar. 

Caesar: You know my wife, Livia, from whom I hide no matter of state. 

Coponius: Of course, Domina. 

Livia: I wish you all the very best of luck in that impossible province. May you succeed where everyone else fails. 

Caesar: Now now Matronia, we don't want to prejudice our worthy appointee toward failure. Coponius my confidence in you is infinitum. 

Coponius: Thank you Caesar.

Caesar: And this man, of course, needs no introduction. My new adopted son, Tiberius. 

Coponius: I was so sorry to hear of the loss of your grandchildren Caesar. 

Caesar: And you may not know him by sight but all Rome knows the reputation of Gaius Cilnius Maecenus. 

Coponius: Of course. It is an honor 

Caesar: Yes, well, all of us sacrifice for Rome don't we? They were good boys and would have been fine Emperors. 

(pause) 

Coponius: Yes, Caesar. 

Caesar: Fortunately, this one is here to pick up the affairs of state while we wait for young Postumus over there to mature into the head of state we know he can be. 

(Gestures at Marcus Agrippa Postumus playing with two dogs in the corner of the office. Empress Livia scowls.) 

Coponius: Yes, Caesar. 

Caesar: And you may not know him by face, but all Rome knows Gaius Cilnius Maecenus by reputation. 

Coponius: Of course. Magister, it is an honor. 

Maecenus: Yes I'm sure it is. 

Caesar: And Tiberius, no mere focaccia today, correct? 

Tiberius: No, Caesar. (Livia looks at him sharply, Tiberius clicks heels and bows) a six-course meal including roast peacock, flamingo tongue, sow's womb and stuffed doormice. 

Caesar: Ah yes, I do love stuffed doormice but can you go to the kitchen and make sure they're serving Patina de Pisciculis? If I'm not mistaken that's known as your favorite dish, is it not Coponius?

Coponius: I'm sure whatever Caesar serves us cannot help but be delicious. 

Caesar: Nonsense, you're our hero setting off to the privations of the East, you must leave us with the taste of Rome in you!

Coponius: Thank you Caesar. 

Caesar: Jacobus!

Flavius Jacobus: Yes, Caesar. 

Caesar: Can you please tell the valet on the other side of the hall that we're ready to be served?

Jacobus: With pleasure Caesar. 

Caesar: Yes. Hurry please, you still have to give your briefing. 

Jacobus: Of course, Caesar (bows). 

Caesar: (waits a moment) Now that he's off, let me tell you to mind what he says. He's very clever that Jacobus but he's bound to tell us things that are half-truths. 

Coponius: So he's a liar?

Caesar: Not exactly. He tells things that are true without being entirely true. That's what I find so clever about these Jews. They're always called liars, but I've never caught one directly in a lie. They merely omit from the truth what they don't wish you to know. 

Coponius: (misses the moment when Caesar thinks he should answer, then he snaps to) Astonishing, Caesar! 

Caesar: Your job is to study them. 

Coponius: To know what they're omitting?

Caesar: Yes, but also to emulate them! There is more utility in their way of telling the truth than a million Roman lies. 

Coponius: Truly fascinating, Caesar. 

Caesar: Here he comes. Pay close mind to what he says, if you read between his words, you will be overwhelmed with his cleverness. 

(The text cuts off here. Presumably the disappeared segment is Flavius Jacobus's presentation upon the state of Judea, in both senses, and what is required for its maintenance. - Dr. Richard Westenbach, Free University of Berlin, 1954) 

Jacobus: Therefore my recommendation is for a census that will account for every citizen of Judea who then can be watched vigilantly, and as, again, the middle class is mostly pharisee, a tax rate of one third on all middle class households: merchants, guildmen, scribes, landowners, large commercial farmers. These are the people most likely to donate to revolutionary causes, and therefore we have to deplete their income base. 

Caesar: (claps) Splendid! Absolutely magnificent! Coponius, Postumus, I hope you were taking great care to hear everything he said. 

Coponius: Yes, Caesar. 

Caesar: I particularly liked what he had to say abo(ut)....

(The text cuts off here yet again) 

Caesar: So we simply can't impose a census on the Jews without imposing it on the whole Empire. We don't want to seem antisemitic after all Maecenus. 

Maecenus: Indeed Caesar, who could doubt that?

Caesar: I understand your concern that the census might set off rebellions all throughout the empire but it would be a wonderful chance to flex the full might of those legions you seem so eager to demonstrate at the first sign of any rebellion at all. 

Maecenus: I apologize again for that Caesar. 

Caesar: No, perhaps you're right. Perhaps this empire needs some rebellions to show what happens when you cross the justice of Rome. 

Livia: Pardon me, Caesar mea amor? 

Caesar: Yes, amor of my life? 

Livia: Isn't the whole point of having this magnificent army that we never have to use it?

Maecenus: Forgive me Domina, but what is the point of that?

Livia: Isn't the power of our army implied? Don't our subjects look on its mighty brutality and think there but for the grace of Mars go I?

Caesar: Yes, but not enough. 

Livia: What is enough, then? 

Caesar: Dearest Domina, we occasionally have to show that we're willing to use this army. 

Livia: Use it? Once we use it we will never stop using it! 

Tiberius: What in Hera's name do you mean, Mother?

Livia: Just this: fear is a motivator that can be conquered. Rage is never conquered, and the more subjects we murder the more rage we inspire, the more we'll have to kill again and the more rage we'll again provoke. 

Caesar: I'm sorry I brought this up. Let's go back to taxes. We'll at least have to impose a tax on all Judea, we can't simply tax the middle class without taxing the wealthy. 

Livia: Why not?

Caesar: What sort of idiot robs the coiffeurs of the people who work and preserves the indolent rich? We have enough of those in Rome.

Livia: So you would tax the wealthy class who's loyal to you and turn a class of layabouts with nothing to do into revolutionaries? 

Caesar: Oh by Jove, Livia they're Judeans, even the wastrels are more sensible than that. 

Livia: When has a subject been sensible in this entire Empire? All this time and wasted effort in Judea and you're still determined to make Judea your light unto the empire!

Caesar: That's not true Domina. 

Livia: Why do you love the Jews so?

Caesar: Divine Julius loved the Jews and they bankrolled his ascendance.

Livia: We already have their money! They wouldn't dare not cross us now. Jacobus you wouldn't dare cross us, would you?

Jacobus: Never, Domina. 

Coponius: HE'S LYING!

(everybody freezes and stays quiet) 

Caesar: Go on?...

(awkward pause)

Coponius: Forgive me Domina, I didn't mean to interrupt you. 

Caesar: Very well. No Jacobus, you're not lying, and yet if a new coming man arose, not from the Julio-Claudians, would you be so resolute? 

Jacobus: Surely there's no coming man other than in this room (gestures to Tiberius and Postumus). 

Caesar: You see? He knows exactly what to say in all situations! 

Livia: And you're telling us all Jews are that skilled?  

Caesar: We won't know unless we have records of them. 

Livia: Then why aren't getting a census only of the Jews and WHY OF THE ENTIRE EMPIRE? 

(text cuts off here)