On 44

It has been... a year. The dominant person of my life is no longer with me, but he is still with me all day every day as I feel my own Poppy clock catch up with him. I hope to make it to his 79 and well past it, but today was as bad physically as it was gratifying emotionally.

Apparently the two years we age quickest at are 44 and 60. Well, I'm in this bizarre event horizon between fat youth and sick middle age where the older I feel, the younger I look. The sicker I am, the less I can eat, and the more I look like I'm in great shape (I'm also 6'3 now...). Fortunately, I found a beta blocker that worked recently, and I consequently gained 20-30 lbs back, but now I'm sick again, and if I have a few months of feeling like this, I expect to be down at least another thirty lbs.

We all fight against death: deaths of life, deaths of love, deaths of people we once were, knowing that eventually every fight will be lost. But not yet, and hopefully not for a long long, very long and long while long yet.

The meaning of life isn't work, the meaning of life isn't love, the meaning of life isn't even survival or connection. The meaning of life is life, and taking everything as it comes, one day at a time and trusting everything to its season, every loss and every gain, every triumph and setback, every blessing of surprise and every dream deferred. Every day is not a gift, but some days are the very much gifts. Some days are a bag of glass ground and mixed into the hard boiled eggs that are sometimes the only thing I can eat.

I'm going to be in touch with a lot of you soon, even the people who aren't reading this. Life is here to be lived, and you should see the people whose company makes you feel better (and even some who don't). If it ruins my health on the way? Well, life is meant to be practiced, and if it ruins my health completely, well, life is better lived on the lam from an ambulance than it is in a room waiting for one.

See you soon,

Management

Or maybe the meaning of life is Shen Yun.

Letter to Dad #3

Oh Dad,

It's happening. Everything you called, everything you prepared us for, everything that bounds to that world from which we hail. The cycle of history begins anew, and everything my peers are not prepared for occurs just out of your reach to see your vindication. 

I was the last person ever born to another world. Not a world of Europe, but a world of European immigrants, immigrants of Eastern Europe who carried their burdens tattoo'd on their arms. Yiddish speakers everywhere, in the grandparents house, in the nursing home, in the stalking streets of a Baltimore suburb to which they never belonged. 

We belonged to the twentieth century when everyone we knew belonged to that bizarre event horizon between the centuries when history didn't matter, turbulence didn't matter, suffering didn't matter, life didn't matter. Now life matters again, life is threatened, and they don't know how to save lives. It sometimes seems you died at the very moment when your wisdom was necessary, but the truth is that your wisdom was always necessary. The wisdom of unreconstructed practicality is what kept us all alive for all your eighty years, from the moment of your conception to the moment of your passing, taking things as they come and solving problems as they happen. You often did it unwillingly, you were so obsessed with solving problems that you tried to solve them before they happen, but I have doubts there is such a thing that there is a problem before a problem happens, problems are unpredictable: an infinite series of black swans. But when it came to solving problems once they happened: personal and abstract, there was no one better in the world. 

You were a cold warrior to your dying day, personally, not politically. Emotions did not matter to you, just the problem itself, and you solved them at the very root even as feelings were constantly bruised. You were the glory and problem of America writ small: people who solve problems as problems happen have to steamroll over everybody who isn't convinced the problem is a problem, and in the process, your practical protection became a kind of prison. It wasn't just me who rebelled against you, you were the embodiment of everything America rebelled against since 1968. You wanted us all to be safe, we all wanted to be free. To you, freedom was a myth, a tiny piecemeal thing whose share we had to settle for regardless of how it was apportioned. Even if that was what America practiced, it was the opposite of what we all preach. You were every stern, holier-than-thou father this country ever had who governed in the opposite of the American ethos and viewed us all as a collection of statistics: you were Bob McNamara, you were Henry Kissinger, you were Jimmy Carter, you were Michael Bloomberg, you were Hilary Clinton. 

But it's all happening now. Events are careening out of control in entirely the way you said the world works. Every dialectical probability happened. The right went haywire my whole life, it pushed the left haywire, which made the right still more haywire. Practicality saved this country a thousand times as it's saved every country, and ideology is what tears it apart. Secular atheists lost their connection to their ancestral religions, and it pushed those who stayed with religion into every type of orthodox nuttery, which turned the secularists into their own religion of identity and solidarity. Overachievers who left their small towns turned the differently abled who stayed into feeling like rejects, which lead them into a series of arms more demagogic than the last in every decade, who gut cities of funding and made them ever more unlivable. Republicans think government is ineffective, so they work to make government ineffective, which make leftists want to revolutionize the government, which makes Republicans embrace the politics of revolution. Vulture capitalists want unregulated capitalism, which provokes Democrats to flirt with socialism, which provokes the vulture capitalists to turn the economy to a potential dictatorship of automated, artificial capitalism that fills the accounts of three people and makes all our meals dependent on whether they're feeling charitable. 

We all did this to ourselves, and you always seemed so certain about it; but none of it had to happen this way, even if it usually does. Probability always stated that this was America's direction, and everything eventually dies, but haven't declining powers saved themselves before cataclysm by adapting with the times? I can't think of when, but I'm sure if I pause on writing for enough time I'll think of examples. Just because we likely won't adapt with the times doesn't mean we shouldn't fight with every inch to make them adapt. 

For years I've said the faultline of civilization is Israel, but I used to think it was the border between Greece and Turkey. It would seem currently that I was half right both times, the bad half... Israel provokes Iran, Iran fires missiles on Turkey, Turkey involves NATO, NATO fights Iran, Iran enlists Russia and China, and we're all in serious, serious trouble. A potential war now has two battlefields: somewhere between Russia and Ukraine, and somewhere between Israel and Iran. All it takes now is for China to invade Taiwan and cut off US economic interests and we have an almost unavoidable world war where all the world's major powers line up side-by-side and there won't be any world powers any longer. 

Whatever's concealed in those Epstein files must be so absolutely spectacular because Trump will do literally anything to conceal what's in them, including provoke World War III. Would Trump and Netanyahu start WWIII rather than relinquish power? How is that even a question at this point? Every time Netanyahu and Trump are down in the polls, there's another war. There's another conflict that can't wait. Again Iran is three weeks from the bomb when they were three weeks away from it fifteen years ago. Governments are decapitated until the moment the polls go up, at which point the governments are left in place. First Venezuela and now Iran, we decapitate their governments not because they're strong threats, but because they're weak. They can't fight back, and it's utterly trivial to world events that we go after them any more than we already have. 

Except it's not trivial. If Putin and Medvedev are serious about the incursion into Iran, then perhaps I was utterly wrong about the Trump being a Putin agent. Or maybe Trump is finally rebelling against his overlord. Put two psychopaths in a conspiracy together and one will eventually turn on the other as surely as Hitler turned on Stalin.

You told me I was a conspiracy theorist with how far I took all this. It's entirely possible you're right. But the last ten years of your life showed us that just because 49 in 50 conspiracies are insane doesn't mean the 50th didn't happen. Kissinger did promise to give Ho Chi Minh a better deal if he walked away from Lyndon Johnson's peace talks, then kept the war going another six years, anywhere from nearly 1 to nearly 5 million Vietnamese died in the extra six years and 30,000 American troops. Candidate Reagan made the same promise to Khomeini to wait on releasing the American hostages, then backed Saddam in a war to overthrow Khomeini: 500,000 to 1 million dead. Rumors of CIA involvement in elections turned out to be absolutely true in nearly every country. Rumors of r*pe in Hollywood and the Church turned out absolutely true. Rumors that FDR could have stopped Auschwitz but decided not to. We told ourselves that it was sane not to believe all this: and then a quarter of the world's conspiracies turned out true. So many things about Trump walk and talk like a duck: the Russian agent theory, the underage r*pist theory, the Deutsche Bank theory, the pay for play foreign governments theory, the lost migrant kids theory. At this point, nobody can tell us that Trump is not as nefarious as he looks: so far beyond Clinton, W, Nixon, Harding, even Burr, that he is the tectonic event from which America may fall, the event to which you spent your entire lifetime witnessing the lead up. 

Just as your parents did, at least some of us will make it to the other side. Unless we change our ways, left as well as right, we are headed for exactly that cliff our old world fell off from 1914 to 1945. Whether it's 1914 now or still only 1890, we can still stop every disaster before it happens, but every day we don't turn back it gets harder and harder. You might have said that this is why you have to anticipate problems before they happen. Why does that matter? The problem is here. 

Books that will help: On History by Benedetto Croce - first... 20%?

 Over and over again, we hear from old school moderates, conservatives, even some liberals, that we can't judge the past by the standards of the present. Well, here's an unreformed liberal thinker, one of the very greatest of the twentieth century, who says we very much can judge the past, in fact we must, and that if we don't judge, history is utterly meaningless. He might have some quibbles with how we judge it, but while he'd insist on his right to critique, he would look on things like the 1619 Project and recognize that such projects to reclaim past identity in the present is the only way that history means anything at all. . 

Beacuse according to the magical Italian thinker, Benedetto Croce, it's the human spirit, or human perception, which organizes information into stories and creates meaning. It's a thought which ultimately comes from Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher operating in the 1720’s who could be considered the real originator of modern thought. Vico’s primary idea is the ‘Verum Factum:' which states that the truth is not something observed, as Descartes or Plato believed, but formed. Nothing of this world, not even mathematics or science, is grounded in eternal truths but only in human perceptions of the eternal truths. Knowledge is therefore something to be understood, analyzed, and abstracted, but never something you can never know in its totality. So therefore, all knowledge is constantly reevaluated in light of new discoveries. There is always some new bit of data or context to learn about any subject at all.

To me, and I'd imagine three other people, this is a more seminal insight in human development than anything in German philosophy or the Enlightenment. It makes the entire Enlightenment possible, it makes modern liberalism and education possible, it makes possible modern humanism itself. What matters is not the truth, what matters is our perception of it. Some today would call it 'our' truth. Does that mean that 'my truth' is true? No. It does, however, mean that 'my truth' is always valid, it is always part of the truth, perhaps even an enormous part. We and all our associates owe 'my truth' proper hearing, dignity, inquiry and study so that our perception of the truth constantly accumulates new perspectives and new meanings. The meaning of life is not the truth within it, but the struggle over a lifetime to understand the truth and every bit of context that went into making it. And therefore, the meaning of 'my truth' is not what happened to me, but what I made happen because of the things which happened to me.

Let's go to Croce now:

'Document and criticism, life and thought, are the true sources of history--that is to say, the two elements of historical synthesis,' --perhaps that means, in our parlance, the confluence between lived experience and ideas.' 

Here is a major liberal thinker 100 years ago saying that lived experience is something distinct from rationalism and empiricism, and that no amount of thought or observable truth is a replacement for experience every nerve twitch of our limbic system and hippocampus, experiences that we all have to organize into a meaningful life story if our experiences matter at all. 

The point of this project is to create what I hope will be a bunch of useful thumbnails of mostly 20th century books that can help guide people through how to understand this 21st century crisis.The 20th century is the nearest century to our own, with world crises that most resemble our own, and would therefore probably require the least amount of mental leap to see how one century's problems would relate to another. Perhaps if I do enough of these I'll leap over more centuries, but let's get through one thumbnail first...

From the standpoint of a grad school dropout like me, most thinkers are more worth reading because of how they're wrong then how they're right. Benedetto Croce is in that rarefied class worth reading because he's right. Is he completely right? Well... is anybody? What is unique about certain thinkers, the very rarefied class in my never humble opinion, is that they come to the ultimate realization for what lets us all live on: that we all disagree with billions of people we have to live around to a point well past irreconcilable, but that we can find ways to live with each other even so, maybe even respect each other for our strenuous differences. To come to that realization involves the hardest thing the human brain is ever asked to do:hold two contradictory thoughts in their head and realize they're both true. No one wants to do that, particularly today, but if you think it's hard for us, imagine what it must have been to write a book like this in 1938, in the darkest crucible of fascist Europe, knowing that so many people you know are doomed. The temptation to write off fascists as irredeemably evil must have been overwhelming. 

Most people think that acknowledging there might be a certain validity to views which inspire some disgust in you means relinquishing your point of view, when in fact it's the ultimate declaration of your view's security. It demonstrates that the truth of your view is so solid that you can acknowledge the validity of the exact opposite view without conceding that the opposite view is true, and in the ability to do that, we can gain enormously in hope and self-security. 

Croce wrote eighty books. I'm not going to read more than one and fractions of a few others. He wrote a lot about subjects that don't particularly interest me: like the tensions between rationalism and empiricism. This is stuff mostly beyond my intelligence level, but what's important is that he uses 2026's prize concept: lived experience, as a middle ground between the two. He doesn't call it lived experience, he calls it 'immanentism.' To Croce, lived experience, or 'immanentism', is the true perception because it is the only form of experience that happens within a definite time and place, and is therefore provably valid to an extent past even empirical study.

But Croce's lived experience has much more definite use than simply acknowledging the feelings and dignity of the person who experienced something traumatic. To Croce, lived experience is when we take our experience, not just our feelings but our perceptions, encounters, events, confrontations, suffering, activities, commitments, skills, thoughts, pleasures and pains, interactions, reflections, and yes, feelings too, and turn it all from mere perceptions to a worldview, a narrative, to something that shows we are claiming our lives as something with dignity, meaning and purpose. 

It's not a perfect formulation. Surely demagogues can exploit this by constructing destructive narratives of people's lives that robs them of dignity even as people think they're claiming dignity. But there are a few things which make Croce's point of view particularly useful. 

1. Unlike more pessimistic points of view, the very optimism and hope of Croce's ideas are their own gauntlet thrown to us to refine the view so that we can find a narrative that means something more constructive for us. Will we? Well, maybe not, but the search for meaning always goes on. 

2. For Croce, lived experience is not what happens to us but what we make happen. It's an active process  It encourages us to think of ourselves not as participants in our lives, or as victims of them, but as the determiners of our own life course. Even if that's not always true, is it not important to have a conception of ourselves that readies for those moments when we can determine our own life path? 

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

"For dead history revives, and past history again becomes present, as the development of life demands them. The Romans and the Greeks lay in their sepulchres, until awakened at the Renaissance by the new maturity of the European spirit. The primitive forms of civilization, so gross and so barbaric, lay forgotten, or but little regarded, or misunderstood, until that new phase of the European spirit, which was known as Romanticism or Restoration, 'sympathized' with them--that is to say, recognized them as its own proper present interest. Thus great tracts of history which are now chronicle for us, many documents now mute, will in their turn be traversed with new flashes of life and will speak again."

Perhaps the problem we're experiencing, and why our age is so very dangerous, is that we do not have a previous era we approve of. The very nature of today's intersectionality is that there is no previous era sufficient to the needs of human rights, and its just a stonethrow of reason away from the idea that we must overthrow all the notions of the past and start anew. What can starting anew constitute but a massive expenditure of life? Obama tried to wrap us in the symbolic shrouds of Lincoln and the Civil Rights struggle, Biden in Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society, but none of these went far enough to inspire today's movements. There is no historical precedent far enough for them, and therefore, they don't see the value in history to begin with. But without the careful study of history, we are awash in a sea of present, and if we're only in the present, we are susceptible to all the same propaganda people fell for in the past. 

When we do incorporate models from the past, these models are testimonies of victimhood: the 1619 Project, The Native Landmap and Dawnland Voices, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Bracero Archive, the Transgender Archives, The Making Gay History Podcast. These are all noble projects, necessary projects, but they're not enough. If all we can learn from history is how to honor victims, the only thing we're learning is how to be victims ourselves. 

 

Furthermore, it causes those who defend traditional notions of history to remain intractable and not permit any thoughts their natural evolution. If so many traditional notions are under attack at once from Columbus to 1776 to the pioneer spirit to the 1950s to the American dream, people will think everything they've done and believed in their entire life is being attacked and called meaningless. OF COURSE they're going to fight back from that. How could anyone think they wouldn't?

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The natural world is perhaps the best historical symbol we could emulate, not just primitive man living in a kind of 'offensive harmony' with his surroundings, but the birds and the bees and the trees and all the natural species of earth who have lived together for billions of years in a state of perpetual war where basically nobody has eliminated one another. The more technology we have, the more danger we are of elminating nature, and the important it is to find a way to incorporate science and technology into the world as it already is. Perhaps we all need to be more like the hippies: live outdoors, grow our own crops, hunt our own animals, dress as animals on holidays. Like the Catholics, we could make some animal the patron saint of every day of the year and pray to that animal depending on our birthdays and confirmation days. 

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"Thus philosophy, when it inquires and interprets, knowing well that the man who enslaves another wakes in him awareness of himself and enlivens him to seek for liberty, observes with serenity how periods of increased or reduced liberty follow upon each other and how a liberal order, the more it is established and undisputed, the more surely it decays into habit, and thereby its vigilant self-awareness and readiness for defense is weakened, which opens the way for a "recourse" as Vico termed it, to all of those things which seem to have vanished from the world, and which themselves, in their turn, open a new "course." Philosophy considered, for example, the democracies and the republics like those of Greece in the fourth century, or of Rome in the first, in which liberty was still preserved in the institutional forms but no longer in the soul and customs of the people, and then lost even those forms, much as a man who has not known how to help himself but has in vain received for a time received ministrations of good advice is finally abandoned to the hard school of life. (copy all of page 61)

...He sees this and he sees so many other things and he draws the conclusion that if history is not an idyll, neither is it a "tragedy of horrors" but a drama in which all the actions, all the actors, and all of the members of the chorus are, in the Aristotelean sense, "middling," guilty-non-guilty, a mixture of good and bad, yet ruled always by a governing thought which is good and to which evil ends by acting as a stimulus and that this achievement is the work of liberty which always strives to re-establish and does re-establish the social and political conditions of a more intense liberty."

It is truly extraordinary how quickly the meaning of words changes, or at least the aura surrounding the words. Liberty was a word so abused by the Bush administration and the Supreme Court that no American can hear it without their eyes glazing over with the assumption it's about to be exploited. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to economic libertarianism and campaign finance laws, thanks to the religious right's insistence that legalizing abortion and gay marriage infringes on their religious liberty, 'liberty' and 'freedom' are words that seem contorted to mean their opposite. The American 'right', the non-racist right (which exists, believe it or not, even if they sometimes make it hard to tell...) has always heard the left talk of 'equality' and 'justice.' Believe it or not, the vast majority of the Right believes in equality and justice, they just define it a bit differently and have overwhelming differences of opinion about how to go about procuring it. But even if they believed in equality and justice with all their hearts, they assume that these words on the left are code for 'retribution.' Similarly the non-classist left hears conservatives invoke 'freedom' and 'liberty', and the overwhelming majority of them believes in those notions, but they hear 'freedom' and 'liberty' and hear code for 'exploitation.' Both sides of current American discourse believe in the causes closest to the other side's hearts, what they don't believe is that is stating their true beliefs out loud. If either conspiracy of silence were true in 2026 or twenty years previously, it would be impossible to hide on the internet. Short of the Trump Administration and the more violent wings of Antifa, even the most powerful or extreme among them don't truly believe that what they do is exploitation or retribution, not because it isn't, but because it is so much more convenient to believe the propaganda you yourselves disseminate. 

Croce gives the answer to this too near the very beginning of the book: 

By liberty we do not mean a fixed condition once achieved and then preserved unchanged. Liberty is not a possession. It is a continual activity of the spirit. It is the effort through which human beings free themselves from what constrains them—whether these constraints arise from nature, from social structures, from inherited beliefs, or from the passions and illusions of the mind... Seen in this way, the history of liberty is not merely the story of political freedoms or constitutional institutions, though these are among its expressions. It is the story of the human spirit gradually becoming conscious of itself and asserting its power to shape the world in accordance with reason and moral purpose.

Letter to Dad #2

 

.

Well Dad,

I've had so many ideas for what to write this week that I really don't know what to write about: everything from Iran to Ukraine to Mel Brooks to family reunions to multiple bullying music critics to the loneliness of friendship distance to the absolute epidemic of people around my age with colon cancer (two people I know died of it in the last week, another is stage 4). Given my stomach trouble and our family history I'm a little amazed it hasn't been me. It's such a testament to your toughness that you survived so many health scares and so much despair at your health to make it a few months to 80. I think you were motivated by your absolute sense of responsibility: it inflamed you, it inspired you and you steamrolled all challenges. It's a sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige that I can only wish I share as my age advances too, but I wouldn't know how.

I'm not motivated by responsibility as you understood responsibility, I'm motivated by watching and bearing witness, I'm motivated to leave some kind of record behind, to tell not just my story but ours. And in many ways, I'm motivated by you. Not in the way you wanted me to be, but I owe your sense of responsibility so much. I'm motivated to leave a record behind that shows that your responsibilities paid off and were to some use. It may not be the use you thought, but you saw the world was changing so quickly right before you went. Today's world is active, active, active, and I feel alone in living a life of contemplation. As I get older and see the frustrations of so many successful lives around me, I feel more and more alright about it, almost even happy. Short of starting a loving, stable family, there is no more blessed life.

I think your favorite book of the Bible was Samuel 1: you always loved Saul, whom you rightly called Shakespearean. I've always loved Genesis. You and I both remind me of our namesakes. You gave me the Hebrew name Avraham, and I always related to his mental troubles, his iconoclasm, his fanatical temperament, his desire to forge his own path among the unfamiliar, not to mention the voices in his head...

But you, Jack Tucker formerly Yakov Tikocki, always reminded me of Yakov: a great businessman without an athletic gene who took his paternal responsibilities so seriously that he fucked them up. But as you aged, I think we both related more to my other favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, the most beautiful and profound poetry I have ever read. 'Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity/What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?/One generation passeth away, another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever./

The world is always in crisis. The only time it wasn't was in my childhood. But our family, our story, from the Russian Revolution to the Nazi occupation to the Polish civil war to the American success to our many, many fights, is the proof that some form of us survive, some form of us muddles through, some form of us will be here to tell our story from generation to generation, all the trials and triumphs and frustrations and defeats. To everything there is meaning, there is dignity, there is as goodness in the world as evil, and what matters is to tell the story: tell it to the next generation just as you did to us.

I love you Dad, I will always love you, and I will honor you in every way I know how to do,

Talk soon,

Evan

Letter to Dad #1

OK Dad,

I haven't been able to write much lately, and I can't help thinking it's to do with you. I see your face every minute of the day. It has still just barely hit me that you're gone and my life feels no different than when you were here. If you're going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life, I'd better talk to you. I don't know whether I'm more scared of your answering back or not answering at all.

Whatever the source of the craziness, you made me this dinosaur: you filled my head with music and history and books and movies, I was your pet project to make into the one person you could regularly talk to about all the things that went through your head. The worst thing about my life is that you succeeded. You didn't understand how I couldn't figure out how to navigate my own direction, but how could I when my whole mind was owned by you? I'm now this strange 19th century man of letters adrift in the sea of a world who moved on long before I was born.

Whatever the disagreements, the worst thing you gave me was understanding of the world. By late 2006 I saw how the subprime housing bubble would lead to Great Recession before you did. Shortly after the recession I looked at the combination of Republicans' systemic gaming of the political system and a buttressed class divide and realized America would lurch into authoritarianism ten years before anyone would agree with me. I saw the worst of Trump coming and we fought like cats and dogs for five years until on January 6th, you finally acknowledged I was right. I didn't think it was that big a deal. I dont know how people kept up with the news and didn't see it.

As you never tired of pointing out, I also got many things wrong along the way and forecast doom at plenty of wrong moments. But a combination of your bildung and my own life story led me to the conclusion that something was rotten with this country at the fundamental root long before anybody else noticed. When they did notice, they misdiagnosed it, and now it looks like turtles all the way down. Your skeptical liberalism was the right way, I'm just an updated version of yours, but it's the worst possible attitude toward life in America to have in 2026: what profits a man to be pessimistic in an era that deserves pessimism when our only option is to fight it even as we know we'll lose? We have to believe in a better era, we have to believe in better lives, but you never showed me how to do that. You cynicism infects everything, and as a result, the world evolves with seizmic tremors, and we only know how to pretend it's somewhere between 1907 and 1954. Even Mom and Nochem are more of our time than we are. Right or left, nothing is more au currant than to hate liberals. We're not good exemplars of liberalism. Good liberals know how to fight for everything right even as they know that they'll lose so much of what they value in the process. You never showed me how to do that, but you did show me the world. I'm inestimably grateful, I love you more because of it, but it's the worst possible way to live a life.

Whether people realize it, what every Westerner hates is people exactly like us. Left, right, maybe even center. They hate everything we are, everything we support, every choice we make. The right may call it paternalism, the left may call it patriarchy, but we embody everything they resent: you and I both. We are the tragic, skeptical education that assimilated the world's knowledge and came to the conclusion that there are no moral absolutes: only millions of compromises along the way to solutions that are only livable moment-to-moment. We know there is no such thing as justice and equality just as we know there's no such thing as security and liberty, you can have tiny, unreliable bits of each, but nothing is guaranteed and if you take too much of it, you will eventually provoke those you steal them from into stealing from you. We are the people who tell conservatives they have to sacrifice money to protect their own country, we are the people who tell leftists they have to sacrifice non-violence to protect the world. We are the people who tell the right that they have to stay out of the bedroom and tell the left they can't cut people off just because their views aren't enlightened--or even that their actions aren't enlightened, we are the people who tell moderates that they procure their self-advancement and complacency at everyone else's expense, and eventually, everyone else will take revenge. I don't know if we are the education they were denied or if we are the self-education they didn't know how to give themselves, but we are the people who know that when you spend your life pursuing ideals to an impossible standard, millions die in the acquisition.

There is so much to talk to you about and I don't know where to begin. I blame everybody, but I find myself cowardly for not joining the fights without hesitancy. Even as I know the fighters will screw it up and screw it up even as I write, the pen is not enough, charitable contribution is not enough. I know that if I tell the truth about how people are enablers in what's coming, they will hate me, they will disavow me, they will find my provocative prognostications still more annoying than they already do. We need bodies that will put themselves in harm's way against the worst of society, which teems all around us now. I fear getting beaten up, but I think I can overcome that fear. What I can't overcome is that I don't want to get beaten up or worse for a tactical error. I don't want to be Alex Paretti or Renee Nicole Good, I don't want my friends to be them either, but still worse, I don't want the examples of people I know to be the one who leads America's protestors into a situation like Iran's. It won't happen any time yet, but it's probably coming. Still worse than that may come. Still so much worse. People talk about Trump like he's Hitler. He probably isn't, but if he is, he is SO MUCH WORSE. Hitler killed a mere 18 million, but with every danger in the world today, we could stand to lose 1.8 billion. Horror, horror, horror everywhere. Everyone affected. Everyone complicit.

Will it happen? Well, history tells us that some day in history it will. Not necessarily in my lifetime, not necessarily in Eli's and Joel's, but one day, it will happen. The point is, it always happens when people fight tyranny with their hearts without their brains. To do so is to enable people who fight with their brains without their hearts. The world must think with its heart so good can worm its way into evil, and feel with its brain to guard against how easily evil can worm its way into good. Nobody does that today, and if people don't start soon, the results of heartless thinking will begin to display their rot.

Is it a blessing you taught me to see that while no one else does?

For Jose van Dam (1940-2026)

 

One of the great singers of the 20th century. He was a favorite of mine. The only time I heard him live, I was fortunate enough to hear him sing Hans Sachs. He was not a huge personality, he was, rather, a singer of google intelligence, enormous dignity, and emotional restraint. Every vocal nuanced felt earned and apiece with itself. No grandstanding, and while probably as intelligent as someone like Fischer-Dieskau, none of DFD's pedantic bending over backwards to make musical points.

He exhibited a complete lack of vanity. Part of it is generational: the postwar generation put an enormous value in being understated and technically immaculate, but some of those artists always sounded to me as though they wanted credit for it (Abbado, Anda), but van Dam was born into nobility. Literally, he was a Baron. The understatedness seemed bred into his ethos. I think of him as the vocal equivalent to someone like Dohnanyi or de Larrocha. The understatement and intelligence never precluded warmth or communication, and there was never a lack of musical detail. Every bar had a nuance should you care to notice it. Self-effacement wasn't what he wanted to be, it was simply who he was.

A José van Dam Recital (1994) - YouTube

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Half of it

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

On vacation. 

It was supposed to be an overnight trip to see my favorite conductor and favorite orchestra play my favorite piece of music. A train up, one night in Boston, then a train home. Two glasses of wine in some bar while talking to some guy and our bartendress about... what did we talk about? Then back to my hotel room. 

Then on the way home, the train stopped in New Haven. Apparently power had gone out in Manhattan's Penn Station. No trains were coming in or going out. Nearly everybody else of the thousand passengers left the train, able to travel locally through Grand Central Station which would honor their tickets on another train. But being the passenger with the farthest distance to travel, I had to stay onboard and for two-and-a-half hours I did. Finally, with no end in sight, almost out of food, I went out into the train station. 

I immediately realized there were two options: catch another train, or take my first genuine vacation of a distance past Philadelphia in... I don't want to say... No matter how much my stomach blew up to Veruca Salt-like proportions, I would take the risk.  

And so I did what I'd been loathe to do and start regularly taking those beta blockers I've been supposed to take every day since late November. Not for belly bloat, but for heart issues. 

And yet the 10 I took it before this week, the biggest impact it had was not on my heart but my stomach, or at least once it had that impact on New Year's Eve. But I never really thought it did again. 

Until New Haven! I could eat! I could drink wine! I could go on vacations like a halfway normal person. For three days I went around Yale University, the closest thing America has to a gothic village like Bruges or Avignon where you can picture having a royal wedding then murder your in-laws. 

New Haven, full of Yale professors with nothing to do, is one of the best culinary towns in America. Not only is the food amazing, but the nutritional content is listed everywhere. There was barely a place where I was left unnotified of all the ingredients, even before ordering. All the problems and fears of ordering in Baltimore restaurants were nowhere to be found in this leisure resort for smart people. Simple things my body could not keep down were suddenly digested with no trouble: hard cheeses, chocolate, butter, even things I wasn't able to have for years as simple as cucumber and greek yogurt were able to be kept down. Even the carbonation of kombucha did not affect me, and it began to have the stomach settling effect everyone promised. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

On the other hand, if I die next week, it probably won't be from heart issues: at least not directly. It would be from an abscess I'm pretty sure I developed while on vacation after scratching a skin tag too hard in a train bathroom. Today when finally home and finished with a prescribed antibiotic, I had it cleaned. I was told to go to the hospital if it grows back, and now I find myself debating whether or not to go. They didn't tell me what it might be, but I made the mistake of looking up the symptoms, and the abscess is in an area where sepsis becomes a genuine possibility. 

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Beginning

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

More later...

Six months today Dad

You didn't live a short life and survived many health scares, but it was still much too soon. You may not believe me, but I miss you all the time, which is unbelievable even to me because I sense your presence every minute of the day. It still utterly feels like you're here and will send an email or call or enter a room at any moment. Such is the force of your personality that I do not even feel a void where you once were. You make yourself felt even in your absence.

Authenticity

So here's the problem: 

The guy who writes this page is a good writer, a really good writer, maybe even a great one. If he ever finished a book, people might be really impressed with what he does. He happens to also be a really smart guy who is extremely modest..., and so he hears from most, great company, always ready to make himself vulnerable, loyal to a fault, solicitous to the welfare of those for whom he cares, in spite of his physical ailments a 6'5 adonis, and does his admittedly mediocre best to be reliable in action. 

He's also a little crazy. 

He's no fool, he knows what's going on, but he's also not a model of balance. He's not nearly as crazy as he seems from description, but also crazier. He could try to conceal the extent of it for more than a short term, but if he did, it wouldn't be true to himself, and he'd lose a lot of the authenticity people find most appealing about him, not to mention; 50% of his best writing. 

He writes in the hope that the daemon (demon?) on the page is exorcized, so that he is free to live his personal life with the appearance of a (not particularly) normal person. Some people just have to be creative, and unfortunately it takes precedence over just about everything else in life, because if they do not sacrifice themselves to creating things, the creative urge devours them, and the mind creates situations that sail over its own resistance, even of people with great capacity for rationality. Over the years he's learned a few things about keeping this pack of hounds at bay: the usual psychiatric things of course, but also an extremely steady appetite for learning. The more actively the brain is learning other things, the less actively the brain works against itself.  

In terms of craziness, he's probably an 8 out of 10, maybe a 7.7 at this point. Going from 9 to 8 was extremely hard-won, and he'll exert continual effort to lower that number for the rest of his life. In terms of difficulty, at this point in his life, he's probably a 5.25: no pushover but also a person who goes along to get along and lives by a near-religious belief in the importance of compromise, and over the years the trajectory of his number has gone steadily downward. Recent relationships have been a bit stunned by how easy he is to get along with. 

No matter what people aspire to be, they have to be themselves, but they can't simply present themselves exactly as they are on the first interaction. That would be still greater madness than any he already knows, and no matter what is discovered afterward, it would be a terrible imposition to admit to a complex situation as a first interaction. One can allude to it, but one can't simply tell it. 

Some people manage to conceal truths over a lifetime, but the concealment comes at horrific personal cost of suffering and fear, what could possibly make that worthwhile?

He has learned to hope over the years, not because he's put any great store in hope, but because life has no improvement without the practice of hope, and over the years his hopes have borne out some improvements. 

He still doesn't have much audience, though he does have at least a couple dozen devoted readers. He's a little terrified of the concentration and distraction it requires to do serious publicity, but he writes in the hope that he can hold out hope to others in the still darker situations which he, like all of us, fears are imminent for us all. He's accumulated a lot of experience over the years, joy as well as suffering, fun as well as humiliation, courage as well as fear, hope as well as depression. What matters to him, what matters to us all, is the affirming flame, the importance of using the voice one is given as a call to our better angels. 

He tells his own story not for his own masturbatory arrogance (or so he hopes), he hopes that by telling his own, he is in fact telling a story of his time, his place, of people like him, even of people who aren't. He's writing about themes common to us all: loneliness and community, suffering and joy, history and the future. Every writer needs an address, a camera through which they perceive the wider world. This camera just happened to be the one at hand. You work with the material you have. This is, for the moment, his best camera, though he hopes to improve some of the others before too long. 

He would like to get away from provocative political prognostications, which have gotten him far too easy an audience (such as it is), and get to those things people really care about. The soul-feeding place from where people can derive the inspiration to keep going. 

It's a journey. Slowly but surely, he's getting there. As an artist, whatever that means, and far more importantly, as a human. He is not obligated to complete the work, but nor is he free to abandon it, and whenever the darkness deepens and helpers fail (whomever they may be), he will abide. 

For Tamas Vasary (1933-2026)

 Tamas Vasary was one of the greatest performing musicians of all time. Full stop. His playing is instant catharsis, his conducting scarcely less so, and he was conducting and teaching to nearly the end. In his youth, Deutsche Grammophon recorded and marketed him as a virtuoso. What a shame. In those years, DG's pianist of probity was his fellow Hungarian Geza Anda, whom I think never got to the level of Vasary. In Anda you heard technical perfection: utterly even passage work and balanced chords, god knows what practice it took to get him there, but I've never heard music.

There are a number of ways to make the highest level of music. But one of my favorites is art so subtle that it sounds as though they're playing the music as straight through as Anda, but they're not. It's just phrasing so subtle it can't possibly be noticed. You only notice it by the cathartic effect it has on you. One could call it flow or glow, but it's past even there. It's fully in the 'next world.' Who gets there? Well, it's so few, you'd probably have to look past just pianists. Along with Vasary, Sandor Vegh, Menachem Presler, Adolf Busch, Gustav Leonhardt, Helmut Walcha, Marcel Moyse, Josef Suk, Brendel and Schiff and Kempff at their best but only at their best, if I'm feeling charitable then Grumiaux and Lupu. There are a few who get close: De Larrocha, Pires, Rubinstein, Moravec, Lipatti, Curzon, Milstein, Enescu, Oistrakh... I honestly wonder if that's it. You'll notice how many of them were not just instrumentalists: they were all-around musicians--chamber musicians, teachers, and conducting being their very last priority. This is the very top of the mountain of musical performance, where full-time conductors don't belong. Neither crowd nor craft matters as much to them as music, and music is all they are.

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 - London Philharmonic Orchestra - Tamás Vásáry (piano) (RFH, 1981) 

Folie a deux

.

I made the mistake tonight of ingesting a slight bit of a spice my stomach couldn't take, so I'm up for the night to ponder tonight's interaction.

I was where I was because a good old friend came down from Philadelphia. Not a friend I've seen much for twenty years, but he's one of the more consequential relationships of my life. When I knew him best he was the coolest kid in school: every girl we knew was in love with him and it wasn't hard to see why. He was charismatic, he radiated positivity, he was the guitarist and lead singer to my sideman violin with all the connotations. To my disappointment, the bastard was thoughtful too, and always had answers at the ready to my practiced cynical poses--which were really a cover for terrible despair and doubts from which I had no idea how to recover.

We both were in Ha'Aretz (Israel) in our mid-twenties, blessed in a sense with time to figure things out, and in another sense, stuck. We were musicians trying to practice in the desert, but there was little else to do but drink. I think we did our mighty best to ply our trade, and had unforgettable experiences playing both in cities and in the desert forty miles away from any town at all. Clearly, the long and strange experience of Mizrach HaTikhon seeped into his pours and made the same searing impact on him it made on me. Twenty years later, he's clearly as affected by the experience as I, and we both have devoted large parts of our lives to figuring out the lessons we learned there. We were adrift in the larger half of Israel, the barren half, the desert Israel was supposed to make bloom, but most of we saw there was abandonment: abandonment of citizens, abandonment of moral obbligations, abandonment of dreams. Those of us there were left to contemplate: what went wrong?

The Israel of twenty years ago was a veritable united nations of Jews. The town we lived in was not just full of ignorant Americans like us but thousands of Russians who felt humiliated by their station and looked as ever to authoritarian leadership to deliver them from what they couldn't deliver themselves. It was thousands of Mizrachim, Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by the Ashkenazim: the European higher social class, educated and mostly liberal, whom, to their thinking, sold their homeland and peace of mind out to the very Arabs who so oppressed them in their parents' countries of origin. I met Brits, Scots, Swiss, northern Africans, and people of absolutely indeterminate origin. It was home to Amos Oz, Israel's writer of writers, but we never saw him, and rarely did anyone we spoke to. Israel is a place that collects Jewish eccentrics and misfits, nowhere moreso than in the forgotten towns of the south. I met people there from every conceivable European background: all of whom seemed to carry some kind of disappointment by what life promised them, and no less by what Israel promised them. If we wanted to see where the powder keg was for everything that came next, it was right in front of us.

Other than him and maybe two others, all my closest friends on the program were the Europeans: British, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch, Scottish, French, and yeah... Israeli too. Most of the Americans and I never really figured each other out. They were the cool kids and as ever, I was a strange nerd: too cerebral and acerbic for American Jews, whom in our generation were still taught to be optimistic and full of action.

But somehow this guy saw fit to take me under his wing, his protection, and playing with him, talking to him, traveling with him, made a lot of the time there worthwhile. He's clearly of a far more optimistic bent than I, and it's served him well. He turned outward to activism, I turned inward to books (not that I'm reading anything like enough lately...). He turned to people, I turned to ideas. He's one of those guys whose answer to every question is 'yes.' No matter what the challenge, he takes the plunge, whereas I have always listened to the instinct for caution, perhaps even fear. My answer to every question has always been 'no'. I think I'm right, the world is what it is, the folly of humans persists from age to age, person to person, but what has being right ever gotten anybody in the world? He is writing the music he was ever meant to write, engaging with the people he was meant to engage. I write a steady stream of personal essays when all I want is to write the fiction and music that boils in my head but I have not the courage to make daily practice of setting down. What point is there setting things down when the majority of what you know how to write is doubts? I have some small degree of faith in God, but my God is not particularly benevolent. He, I would guess, has not made up his mind about us. Whether or not there's a god, we were sent here to make the world what we make of it. If we want to make it better, we have to see past the void and imagine better. Maybe it's not my nature or temperament, maybe life experience has taught me so to be, but imagining better has never been a great gift of mine.

He performed tonight, songs of his own composition in Hebrew and Arabic as Mizrachi as the roots Americana I remember us performing, and what I saw from him is something I'd never seen before. A righteous anger: not a personal anger, but the anger of the prophets, an earned anger that is the anger of our generation. I didn't agree quite with everything, I didn't need to. I wasn't even supposed to. The point of his message was that we all needed to hear points of view that jar our own, and hopefully he jars a lot of them, because few things need jarring more right now than Jewish complacency, which is writ small the complacency of both Israel and America.

But as he's gotten more angry, I've gotten more serene, and I don't quite like it. At the beginning of the night, someone said that they did not know a single Jew whose perception was not shifted by October 7th. At that moment, I realized, I was that Jew. Nothing for me changed on October 7th. I felt as though I was the only Jew prepared for the event and most of what would happen next was clear to my mind as a diamond. Nothing about what happened next surprised me. I felt terrible despair for the loss of life, I felt even more despair at saying goodbye to the world as I hoped it would be, but I felt no shock. Only 40 I may have been, but I'm acquainted with history, i'm acquainted with folly, and I'm acquainted with its grief. I felt a bit like I could be a guide through the new era for those who needed it, but it's not as though I much liked the situation I've been guiding through.

But then he did something that made my jaw drop. He had the courage to say aloud the question that is in every Jewish mind right now, even if they repress it--the question I write repeatedly but dare say to barely anyone in person: did Netanyahu put the defenses down on purpose? Has he done it before? Will he do it again? Will it be still worse next time? The sheer boldness, fortitude, self-security it takes to say it aloud right now is something so far beyond most of us, and here he was prepared to say it in front of a group of strangers, not knowing who might call him a traitor, a self-hating Jew, an antisemite, or worse, in a public square. The sheer bravery of it is something I can only aspire one day to emulate. I'm just a writer who puts ideas into people's heads, this guy is a true leader. We may disagree on a few particulars, but this person has a level of bravery and moral backbone so far beyond most of us that we can only aspire to be more like him even as we fail. When true moments for bravery come, most of us will have doubts about how well we'd handle ourselves. This guy will never flinch in pursuit of what's right.

We probably never thought it would happen, but we're now the middle generation, promised things in our youths by America and Israel both that never materialized, and now the first generation to take the reins of a society we know will get worse. Yet we have to drag it through, solving very little, but salvaging everything we can so that the next generation muddles through until such time comes when things can be solved, in the hope that it will be their generation's destiny to solve problems of whose making they are entirely yet innocent. We did not ask for this burden, but so long as there are enough people who can live up to his example, we will solve them.

Abi Gezunt and thank you for being a balm for my doubts, now as well as two decades ago.

Evan

A Digression on Soul in Music

Last night I went to a very bland performance of a piece that couldn't be less bland. My 'hotshot local conductor' led my local in Shostakovich 4: the most difficult, most terrifying, most unique, funniest and potentially best classical masterpiece of the 1930s: it's either this, Lulu, Shosta 5, RVW 4, or Bartok MSPC. It's one of the most ironic, bleakly comic pieces ever written. Last year I heard it in Philadelphia conducted by Tugan Sokhiev: a Ossetian Russian who comes from a war torn region and surely understands what this music is about in his marrow. But when our local did it, it was done with the wistful sincerity of Brahms 1.

Our local guy is not at all a bad conductor, he's just... well... he's a very earnest young man, and he makes music like one. A nice guy though a little full of himself as successful young people tend to be. But I get the sense he's so sincere that if one were to meet him and make a joke, there's a 50% chance he wouldn't get it.

Jonathon Heyward is going to be the biggest thing in American orchestral life since Michael Tilson Thomas, perhaps since Leonard Bernstein. No doubt he will grow into the roll, but I doubt he'll get there until he sheds the brash overconfidence of those two predecessors. It's just not him.

Our generation is full of all this talk about separating the art from the artist. Bullshit. The artist's temperament, character, background and beliefs are intimately bound up with it. If you respond well to an artist whose character is, as we say, problematic, one would do better to consider the problematic aspects of one's own character than simply eliminate their works from your consumption. The whole reason we have art is so we can contemplate it. A great artist's flaws of character are a large part of the process of understanding the works. Evil-natured artists give you a window into the mental processes of evil. If you want to understand evil, you would do well to keep paying attention to them.

I've grew up listening to a long list of live podium musicians. When you hear them, after a while you begin to feel as though you know them. You feel as though you know their personalities and life stories through their music, and they take on the qualities of friends.

David Zinman was a New Yorker of the 1950s who grew up in the era of Sid Caesar and Golden Age Broadway. He is of the same generation as the 'sick comics', educated comics who pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond the Borscht Belt: Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Nichols and May. Zinman, who paid his way through college with stand up gigs, is perhaps the funniest man who ever stood in front of an orchestra, and you hear that wit in his musicmaking. He spent his career trying to be Leonard Bernstein, who was half Harvard professor and half movie star, but he should have been the American Charles Mackerras. He wanted to be known for his Mahler and Brahms, but he should have been far better known for many others who don't demand quite so much existential depth: Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Ravel and Stravinsky, Berlioz and Richard Strauss. He could make extraordinary noises in fortissimo and pianissimo, but they were used with extreme intention. His musicmaking was always fastidious, urbane and full of wit: there was always lightness and retraint. The extravagant angst of German romanticism seemed almost completely alien to his nature. Zinman was music's truest high comic, and rather than Zurich, he, not Slatkin, should have followed Andrew Davis at the BBC, where he could have been the most beloved Last Night conductor of all time. Now, I could mention the incredible virtuosic precision of a Zinman performance and their dancably pulsating rhythms, the magnificent ear for balances, or his ability to project harmonies and linear transparency, but it's frankly not the most important thing about him.

Yuri Temirkanov was obviously very different. He was funny in a very different way, but his musicmaking was suffused with heart. Temirkanov was, apparently, an enormously passionate reader, and I remember a profile in Baltimore when he said he would rather never listen to music again than give up reading. His way was not the animal passion of Svetlanov, it was emotionally specific, suffused with many different emotions at once. In many hands, perhaps most, Tchaikovsky sounds like melodrama. In Temirkanov's, T's music sounds like masterpieces as emotionally complicated as anything in Tolstoy or Pushkin. His musicmaking went almost simultaneously between passion, terror, joy, rage, humor, romance, melancholy, and all of it suffused with exactly the kind of winking irony you get from the great 19th century novelists. He was a giant of a musical poet whose poetry unlocked the works of the Russian masters as I'd never heard anyone unlock them live but Mariss Jansons and, occasionally, Valery Gergiev. But before a Shostakovich 13, one of the greatest performances of anything I'd ever heard, he did a Haydn 104 that probably sent flies dropping to the floor for how much air was sucked out. I could mention Temirkanov's ability to stretch a vocal line for minutes at a time, his ability to create an overtone glow in the string section, the way he tied rubato to harmonic tensions and resolutions, and of course, the bodily power of his fortissimi--niceties of linear clarity be damned, and, of course, the constant imprecisions. But that's not what made him memorable.

Then came Marin Alsop. Alsop, like Zinman, is a New Yorker, but she is a Boomer, a woman, and once upon a time, a musical hustler going gig to gig. I didn't know Alsop particularly well. She knows who I am, but I met her less than half-a-dozen times. Everybody I knew who knew her testified to two things: 1. She is formidably demanding. 2. She is a very nice person. Alsop is, at heart, an ambitious New Yorker. You always heard the brashness of those pieces, the cynicism, but you also heard the sincerity and lyricism. She was a better Mahler conductor than Zinman and probably even than Temirkanov. She was fantastic in Richard Strauss and Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Hindemith and Britten, and, of course, all that mid-century American music. She's grown over the years, and after her Vienna years she's learned how to do German romanticism in a way she never used to. But it can only get you so far. Hearing her in the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica was like a balloon leaking helium as the tempo got slower and slower, and I found her Tchaikovsky 5 so dull that I outright walked out to catch a rock band down the street. I don't think she has the earnestness of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in her character: that simplicity, that unbridled optimism or pessimism. I think a person like Alsop is a realist who takes things as they come. I get the sense she realizes that life is never one thing or the other. I could mention that the orchestra was dominated by a big, LSO like, brass sound, and the rhythms always seemed to swing in a groove like a piece of American pop music. I could mention that over the years she developed a bloom in the string sound that at first she obviously found extremely hard to do, even with her background as a violinist. But that's inside baseball. It's not why anybody comes to the concert but nerds like all of us.

On the other hand, it strikes me that that earnestness is exactly who Jonathon Heyward is: a sincere young African-American from that very earnest region, the South, who sees the world in primary emotions. His sincerity therefore makes him magnificent in Tchaikovsky, Brahms, even Verdi. He is clearly a devoted champion of new music, but he also wants to be known for the early 20th century classics: Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Bartok and Shostakovich which require a 20th century pessimism he does not understand. I get the sense he wants to be an updated version of Simon Rattle, but he clearly lacks Rattle's weirdness, Rattle's probing for the minutest details, Rattle's willingness to be polarizingly bizarre. Rattle is, at heart, a Carnaby Street hippie, and responds to the psychedelic in music. I could be very wrong, but at heart, I get the sense he's much closer to an earnest romantic like Giulini than a hippie postmodernist. He can get a deeply impressive noise, visceral and bass heavy, but when it comes to conveying complicated emotional states: pessimism, wit, sarcasm, he has no idea what he's doing. When he does Beethoven, he does it at fast tempos he does not yet have the technique to sustain, and it sounds as though he doesn't truly feel a thing about it.

One day, this guy may be a great conductor, but not yet. In a few decades, after a lifetime's stresses and frustrations and sadnesses, he may understand these things much better, but the essential temperament of a person rarely changes.

The problem with being a musician is that the conscious self can only get you so far. Being an artist of quality is not a matter of brain or even heart, it's a matter of stomach. You can do all the work in the world, bring out all the countermelodies and cross rhythms and balance all the harmonic dissonances, but you have to find a way of making art that coincides with the person you are. Perhaps you can fake it for a little while, but if you try to be someone else than the person you really are, it will burn you out. Look at Carlos Kleiber: he seemed to be so joyous up there, but everyone testified that he was in absolute agony, so he could only do it once a year.

Had my life worked out very differently and I ended up the conductor I wanted to be when I was three years old, I would have loved to be a musician with the bittersweet glowing naturalness of Pierre Monteux, Rafael Kubelik, Fritz Busch, Zino Francescatti, Fritz Kreisler, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Wilhelm Kempff, ... obviously I'd be much worse than these guys.... But good or bad, I'm not that guy. I'm a Jew who grew up solely among Jews, speaking Yiddish and Hebrew whose grandparents survived the very worst of the 20th century under both Hitler and Stalin. If I wanted to express what was in my soul, it would probably sound like highly mediocre versions of Klemperer, Horenstein, Kletzki and Sanderling, at certain moments maybe Tennstedt, Scherchen, Harnocourt, Kubelik, Fricsay or Mitropoulos. Extreme dynamics, slower-than-average tempos, massive rough sounds interrupted by lyricism. That's what my violin playing was always like (the slow tempi were because I didn't practice enough...). But at heart, whether or not I'm a musician, I'm probably first a Jew who missed his calling as a historian. I'd probably be best in those composers who articulated the crises of the 20th century from various sides: Mahler, Janacek, Bartok, Nielsen, Shostakovich, the 2nd Viennese school, Hindemith, Britten, Messiaen, Ligeti, Ives, Schnittke, even Vaughan Williams and Mussorgsky. I doubt my natural temperament could find a way into the unbridled romanticism of Wagner or Verdi, and my temperament has very specific notions of what the greatest masters like Mozart or Bach should sound like that are extremely different from any traditional view.

Interpretation is not a question of what the musician thinks it should sound like, it's a question of what their subconscious needs to express. If they're able to translate their conscious thoughts to sound, they firstly need to have the temperament and grace under pressure to do something so purposeful to the intellect. If they don't, they have to find their way in, and the way in is to relate to the music on a human level, not an abstract one.

The technical aspects of music have their own sort of fascination, but so do boardgames. Obviously, the technical aspects matter very, very much. But they're only the beginning. Many artists are not even aware of how they've interpreted unless they hear a playback. The 'why' of art is so much more important and interesting than the 'how.' You can't just listen to the notes of music, you have to listen behind them. The 'how' of art obviously matters, but it's usually a question best left for the practice room. 'How' is a question for the left brain: far more important to math, science and technology. The humanities are those murky waters that only exist in metaphor and context. If the emphasis of a climax is placed on the physical impact and not on the harmonic resolution (or dissonance), what's important is the why: what it makes you feel like and what it might make the musician feel like. I think it was Oswald Spengler who said 'metaphor is the algebra of the right brain.' What matters is not whether a countermelody is brought out, but why it was, how it made the audience member feel and what the artist wanted to communicate. In the arts, there is no 'this is that', there is only 'this is like that.' As I've said before, the key to understanding art is not emotion or intellect or message or didactic purpose or beauty or empathy, the key to art is meaning, and meaning takes in all those aforementioned notions and a thousand others besides. Meanings are simultaneously universal and deeply personal.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "Who you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you're saying."