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? 9.5/10? 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, 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....

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

American Sublime

Essentials:

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

Citizen Kane (a lot more entertaining than you remember)

West Side Story

The Great Gatsby

Death of a Salesman

Leaves of Grass

Our Town

Alan Lomax Collections

Louis Armstrong Hot Five & Seven

Pinocchio

Mad Men

Gershwin Songs

The Last Picture Show

Nashville

An American Tragedy

Central Park

Do The Right Thing

Strange Fruit

How The Other Half Lives

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

Vietnam War Memorial

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

Gold:

Gypsy

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

Mullholland Dr.

Goodfellas

Pet Sounds

The Truman Show

Bonnie & Clyde

Bless Me, Ultima (**** off it goes here)

The Night of the Hunter

Photo of Allie May Burroughs

Chinatown

Porgy and Bess

Ives 4

His Girl Friday

Appalachian Spring

Angels in America

Show Boat

Pacific Overtures

Duke Ellington (Blanton-Webster Years)

Woody Guthrie

Duck Soup

Jimmie Rodgers

Johnny Cash America Albums

America Today Mural

The Muppets

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

Silver:

Company

My Antonia

The Searchers

Apocalypse Now

Blood Meridian

All The King's Men

Absalom, Absalom!

Ah-Um

The Social Network

Gas

Invisible Man

The Steerage

Blue Velvet

Randy Newman

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Psycho

Taxi Driver

A Raisin in the Sun

There's A Riot Goin' On

Dreamgirls

Follies

The Right Stuff

Other Johnnie Cash

Vertigo

Washington Square

The Deer Hunter

The Sopranos

A Love Supreme

Sugar Shack

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Born to Run

Network

The Wizard of Oz

Into the Woods

American Graffiti

Dazed and Confused

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Sunset Boulevard

Boogie Nights

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Paris, Texas

Deadwood

Tom Waits

Freaks and Geeks

American Gothic

Rothko Chapel

Piano Music of Henry Cowell

Rodeo & Billy the Kid

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

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

Bronze:

Go Tell It On the Mountain

Nighthawks

The Wire

Moby Dick (I maintain, half is a technical manual for whaling, and the part that isn't belongs to the world, not America)

Breaking Bad

The Americans (photobook)

Highway 61 Revisited

Black Saint & Sinner Lady

Beloved

A Face in the Crowd

Friday Night Lights

Dog Day Afternoon

A Streetcar Named Desire

Badlands

Wise Blood

American Pastoral

Koyaansqatsi

Moonlight

Twin Peaks

South Park

Singin' In the Rain

Seinfeld

First Reformed

Easy Rider

Gone with the Wind

Nebraska

Long Day's Journey into Night

As I Lay Dying

Get Out

The Big Lebowski (pinnacle of Western Civilization)

Casablanca

Days of Heaven

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

Not my thing but game is game

There Will Be Blood

To Pimp a Butterfly

Autumn Rhythm #30

Walden

The Grapes of Wrath

Howl

The Waste Land

2001

Hamilton

No Country for Old Men

The Tree of Life

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)