An American Classical Tradition Part 1

 Joe Horowitz with an interesting question: what would an American performance style be?

American Classical Music at 250 — Take Three: The Orchestra Gap: Europe vs. the US | Unanswered Question

We don't have one. We never did. Our American performance style is a musical style the way a corporate board room is art. It is a signifier of status: anonymous luxury, plush cliche, pointless muscle flexed to show power that overwhelms but never inspires. The ideal American musicians? James Levine. Murray Perahia. Hilary Hahn, Robert Merrill, the Emerson Quartet, The Chicago Symphony: Robots. Automatons. Long before this uninspiring period, American classical music was synonymous with anonymous perfection and polish designed for the specific purpose of eliminating personality.

Classical music in America is so boring that no wonder the interesting souls gravitate to virtually every other form of music there is. God knows there are plenty of boring jazz and rock musicians out there, but interesting was never discouraged in rock, and it's only recent that it was in jazz.

Joe mentions a few who got past the individuality threshold: Bernstein, Vickers, Stokowski, Gould... each of them had a different way of playing, but each was interested in something deeper than 'excellence.' Each of these stars was a unique spirit--we've had a few more: MTT, Jessye Norman, Eileen Farrell, Rosa Ponselle, Rosalyn Tureck, Lawrence Tibbett, Paul Robeson, Norman Treigle (more on him later), Anthony Newman, Teresa Stratas, Virgil Fox. There's a few more if you make allowances for some restraint: Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Samuel Ramey, William Warfield, Gerald Finley, Maureen Forrester, Igor Kipnis, George Shirley, Richard Purvis. but this is still a pathetic list. How many musicians is this? Twenty? Compare that to the hundreds of any European tradition. How many did I miss? Are there even another dozen?

Horowitz's basic point is that since there is no American 'canon' of classical music in the manner possessed by Germany, Italy and Russia, we can't be surprised that there is no American performance style either.

Who can doubt that that's true? But classical music has a very basic problem: we're competing here with its own homegrown genres of music which guard their traditions jealously. What is a young adult musician who's lived an original, perhaps struggling life, going to gravitate to? Will they gravitate to the music that's synonymous in America with class privilege and anodyne technical excess, or will they gravitate to music that is known for articulating the inner lives of Americans for generations? Which will make them feel expressed? Which will make them feel heard?

There's nothing we can do to compete with that. Some of us may find popular music more trite, but it is 'our' music, and there probably was never going to be an American classical canon. By the fifties, Gershwin might have grown so frustrated by concert hall strictures that he'd have fully decamped to Broadway or Hollywood for the generally agreed upon golden age of the musical. Leonard Bernstein fell into conducting because classical music found him too free in his expression for a proper composer. Composers were supposed to make due with the idioms of Europe, preferably in a modernist dross. If I'm right about Gershwin, maybe we'd have lost Bernstein to Broadway too.

Classical music today attracts the timid: the good students, the children of immigrants, doctors and scientists who grew up playing instruments. Since the 1950s, classical music has almost always denoted a certain amount of relaxation inherent in class privilege. In 1880, if you wanted to hear the music of masters, you had to make it yourself, and the very act of recreating it for yourself put this music into your body and soul Today, if you want to hear the music of the masters, you flip a switch, click a remote, or click on a mousepad. Even the people who play classical music have their own music which they click the mousepad for, and it's the music everybody else listens to: pop, rock, hip-hop, country, R&B. Classical music is almost completely divorced from the music of their souls. The only reason so many grew attracted to it was the challenge of technical mastery, and thus the classical profession's generally pursued these days by the diffident souls who express themselves by coloring in the nine dots.

Our Top 12 Unknown Canonical Works?

The Tides of Manaunaun/Harp of Life/Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance/The Banshee/Fairy Answer/Voice of Lir/Dynamic Motion 

Lukas Foss, The Song of Songs (1/2) 

Adolphus Hailstork (Symphony No. 2) 

WS_William_V2_16x9.mp4 (William Grant Still Symphony no. 2 "Song of a New Race", assuming the crowd who reads this knows the Symphony #1: 'Afro-American Symphony')

Morton Gould Spirituals for Orchestra (Antal Dorati, 1953) 

Wuthering Heights, Bernard Herrmann, 1965, Part 1/8 

George Crumb "Ancient Voice of Children" 

Lou Harrison: La Koro Sutro (1973) 

Blackwood, 16-note Microtonal Etude (opus 28) Andantino © (Easley Blackwood Microtonal Etudes) 

HOVHANESS: Symphony No. 2 op. 132 "Mysterious Mountain" / Reiner · Chicago Symphony Orchestra (could easily be a dozen other pieces) 

Conlon Nancarrow - 45 studies for player piano [w/score] 

HARRY PARTCH - King Oedipus 1952 (Audio) 

The truth is, even in our small classical world, we have our heroes, our original spirits, the real artists who warp the fabric of reality when you hear them. We have the makings of a canon, we just don't play the right music. Gershwin and Ives are great, Copland's populist music is great, so is Barber's, Reich's minimal music is great, even Adams is great, but what about Henry Cowell? I will stay on my hill calling Cowell one of the greatest composers of the 20th or any century until the entire world comes around to my view. But what about the mystical music of Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison? What about the polystylism of Morton Gould and Lukas Foss? What about the music brined in African-American musical traditions by William Grant Still, Adolphus Hailstork and Florence Price (we still don't hear much of her chamber music)? What about the player piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow and invented instruments of Harry Partch? What about east coast academics like David Diamond, Walter Piston and Vincent Persichetti? What about Ruth Crawford Seeger? What about Arthur Farwell? Not to mention all the legendary immigrant composers, not to mention all the movie composers like Korngold and Rosza and Goldsmith and all the others; even John f***ing Williams. There are living ones still active too who should be in the canon: Moravec, Kernis, Daugherty, Danielpour, Bolcom, Schwantner, Heggie, Puts Higdon and relatively young ones like Caroline Shaw, Andrew Norman and Carlos Simon.

All this is a real canon, it is not a canon as large as the canons of rock, country, R&B, probably even hip-hop by now, but it is enough to say that we can be proud of what we've done in America if only we paid attention to it and tried to get someone to fund playing it...

And perhaps this new generation is the generation we've been waiting for (not likely but...), because my generation is truly the first generation for whom there is no compunction about any source: I wish we'd be more understanding about what's commonly termed cultural appropriation, but otherwise, consider the freedom of the modern compsoer: high source, low source, it doesn't matter.

And there are great, original spirits among American performers if only we'd pay attention to the right ones.

Just think of American violinists:

Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto 1st movement - Rachel Barton Pine

Stravinsky - Violin Concerto in D major (Leila Josefowicz)

I don't know why Hilary Hahn is known as the world's greatest violinsist when Rachel Barton Pine tours every city to empty houses with a repertoire three times the size, youtube tutorials on every major violin concerto and a series of pop song encores she arranged herself. To anybody paying attention, she isn't just a better artist, she's got more charisma too. Everybody seems to forget about Leila Josefowicz who plays with the passion you'll never find in Hahn, or Jennifer Koh who champions all the obscure and raw repertoire you'll never hear from the exquisitely pretty playing of Joshua Bell--and exquisitely pretty is something you will never hear Stefan Jackiw's playing described as.

Sibelius, Camilla Wicks, Sixten Ehrling ‎– Concerto In D Minor For Violin (1952) Capitol P 8175

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6TBHR8-Ac&list=RDtM6TBHR8-Ac&start_radio=1 (Oscar Shumsky in recital) 

In the recently deceased generation we had the Ivry Gitlis-like devil may careness of Camilla Wicks, the Grumiaux like musicality of Oscar Shumsky where every bar has a subtle detail to make it come to life, the Szigeti-like intellect of Berl Sonofsky where you hear how every phrase fits in the context of a longer term plan, the relaxed perfection of Aaron Rosand, and Fredell Lack.... whom I still know nothing about. Perhaps they should have all been superstars. What happened to all of them? Well... it would seem that Isaac Stern blackballed them: that's pretty well documented. He was clearly determined to be the #1 violinist of his generation, and did what he had to to knock any rival out of the way. During Stern's heyday they were all relegated to regional orchestras and university positions. Was Stern actually better than they were? Well, he certainly had an explosive personality that came through in his playing, but find a recording by Wicks or Sonofsky and tell me with a straight face that Stern was obviously the best of them.

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61: I. Allegro ma non troppo (Live) (Beethoven VC done by Sonofsky with Munch/Boston. He may have been a schmuck but man he could play.)

Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36, TH 27: I. Andante sostenuto - Moderato con anima - Moderato... (Serebrier doing Tchaikovsky) 

Our big five could have been lead by Kenneth Schemerhorn, George Cleve, Jose Serebrier, Jorge Mester, Maurice Peress: each of them as good in their way as Maazel or Levine if only some promoter or manager gave them a chance. This isn't even getting into somewhat better known names like Conlon or de Priest, or champions of unknown American music like Gerard Schwarz and Dennis Russell Davies, or the fact that Zinman and especially John Nelson should be remembered as two of the greatest conductors of the age. But of the 'big five' names I just suggested, the three Americans among them were known for being difficult, but were they any more difficult than Lorin Maazel? And did any of them have Levine's baggage? Serebrier at least has some recordings where we can commemorate what an interpretive giant he is, but we have barely any of Kenneth Schemerhorn in his core repertoire. The little I've heard, like a broadcast of a Milwaukee Symphonie Fantastique, was explosive like Bernstein or Mitropoulos. Mester was a bit fleeter and balletic, more self-consciously 'virtuoso' like Kleiber, though looking at concerts in old age with undistinguished Latin American orchestras he's becoming rather Giulini-like. Both Schermerhorn and Mester made plenty of records, but it was all in the unselfish pursuit of getting music recorded that nobody else would do.

Mahler: Symphony No 2, "Resurrection" - Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor 

Kenneth Schermerhorn conducts Beethoven's Symphony No.7 (LIVE at Hong Kong)

The problem of all five was that they were too 'interesting.' Maazel and Schippers chose to have celebrity careers where you make top dollar and spend your lives aboard first-class flights, these guys chose to make music. Mester was a veritable tornado of new music, Schermerhorn scarcely less, while Maurice Peress is best known now for his jazz crossover arrangements: something Gunther Schuller is better known at than he, but Peress may have been even better at it. 

Black, Brown And Beige Suite: Work Song/Come Sunday/Light (orchestrated by Maurice Peress)

Brahms, Symphony no. 3 - George Cleve, RPO 

But then there was George Cleve. When I heard Schermerhorn in Milwaukee or Mester in Sydney, my reaction is 'wow!' When I heard George Cleve, over and over again, my reaction is 'oh my god!' We had a conductor that musical and that intense in America for the better part of fifty years and never recognized him strikes me as perfectly extraordinary. The reason why is obvious: he was a tyrant of the old school. A musician who regularly played under him seemed to groan through the keyboard when he talked me about him. One longstanding acquaintance of mine who knew him in SoCal referred to him as 'a scary dude.' And yet, scarier than Dutoit? Scarier than Maazel? Scarier than Muti? I doubt it. America keeps dismissing the chance for great music directors like Klemperer and Erich Kleiber as too difficult, then hired tyrants like Szell and Rodzinski whose only difference was how much colder their musicmaking was and the possibility of slightly less new music.

 Schumann, Symphony no. 4 - George Cleve, cond.   

More tomorrow...

Someone keeps trying to look up these Jewish Times columns

I might as well share them...

The Unwinding: The History of the Distant Present 

The world is seven billion stories waiting to be told. America is perhaps the only nation conceived on the principle that individual stories are worth telling, but in this era of foreclosure, it's the nation most likely to walk back its promise to tell them. 

No matter what America ever aspired to be, we've never come close to living its mythos. The greatness of America was not in providing greater opportunities for its citizens, but in that it aspired to provide them. The world is a cruel enough place that no state before the United States ever believed that individuals had dignity enough to treat as something more than a dot to move to its proper place among a massive collection of dots. But America was, at least in part, founded on the audacious belief that each dot has a unique composition worth appreciation. Even if America was founded on the idea that female dots and African dots were more dispensable, the path of individual rights was set with unalterable momentum, slowed down many times, but never thus far never stopped.

Yet most of the time, the ride feels slow indeed. Despair sets in all too quickly in this nation whose national religion is optimism. If America is so awash in opportunity and freedom, why are its people so consistently desperate? From King George to Vladimir Putin, when a despot sees a country like America who proclaims the rights of the individual so loudly, and violates those rights so often and flagrantly, how can they not think this faux-democracy's unceasing demand for greater human rights is anything but hypocrisy? The greatest insult of all is that this jingoistic American establishment, with so much vested interest in proclaiming freedoms for their citizens they so seldom grant, is the closest thing to a friend these suffering American underclasses ever have. No one has a greater interest in prolonging the hypocritical suffering of the American poor than despots like Vladimir Putin, who want to show the world that it's folly to ever hope for better lives. And no enemy of America has ever been more successful in showing American hypocrisy than this neo-Tsar whose conception of freedom was formed in the Middle Ages.

In eras like ours, mass movements of the Left and Right always emerge to tell us that until now, all American progress has been a mirage. On the one side, people who claim that slavery just took different forms, on the other, people who say that life would be better if we reverted to institutions more like slavery. What instantly strikes you about the nihilism of both movements is their self-defeatism. If all progress until now has been for nothing or regress, why keep struggling? Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, so why should anyone expect there that these struggles will ever result in anything better than before? 

Ambiguities like these are the genius of George Packer's non-fiction masterpiece, The Unwinding - An Inner History of The New America. Apparently taking his cue from John Dos Passos's much celebrated and seldom read USA Trilogy (sitting on my shelf for a year), Packer constructs a gorgeously detailed fresco of recent American life - hopes, fears, anguishes, and all too few triumphs. He follows the life stories of Americans who could stand as archetypes for our era - the Southern entrepreneur thwarted into the poorhouse at every turn by corporations, the African-American lady frantically searching for ever-dwindling factory jobs to support a family perpetually on the verge of falling apart, the once idealistic public servant who sold his soul to make millions as a lobbyist, even the story of an entire city - Tampa - built on credit and loans which banks knew their citizens could never pay back, then convinced by right-wing media that the root of their problems is government interference, interference which should have prevented the financial sector from exploiting them. Against their biographies are pitted the biographies of the 'great men' (and women) of consequence whom in their various ways created the circumstances that lead to this moment in American History: Newt Gingrich, Sam Walton, Robert Rubin, Oprah Winfrey, Andrew Breitbart, Jay-Z.

But a year after The Unwinding's publishing in 2013, the air of American life began to feel very different. The relatively subtle authoritarianism of Newt Gingrich became outright in Donald Trump. The unwittingly predatory finance of Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs became the deliberate predation of Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase. Andrew Breitbart's misleading journalism as entertainment became the monolithic propaganda machine of Steve Bannon. The Unwinding is not the inner history of the new America, it's the inner history of an already old America that we were in denial existed while it did, and created the America in which we're now deposited. 

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The Godfather at 45 

When you watch Officer McCluskey slug Michael Corleone, it should be impossible for a Jew not to wonder how often small Jews got beaten up in the eras of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin by huge Irishman. McCluskey is the old American alpha male - Scotch-Irish, brawny, mercurial, a little dumb. The old American alpha male is an uneducated guy, a hired gun or goon who gets paid for his strength. Had the movie been made fifteen years earlier, it wouldn't have been far-fetched to cast him with a cameo from John Wayne. But the new American alpha male is a Machiavellian like Michael Corleone - university educated, always strategizing, always deceitful, always consistent, always ruthless, and always careful. The new alpha male is the businessman who realizes that there's more money to be made if you're the one who hires the goons. 

Seeing The Godfather with your own father is always a bizarre experience. I've seen it with him at least half-a-dozen times before seeing it in the theater this week on its 45th anniversary re-release; but it's still more bizarre when he's your boss, and still yet more so when your brothers are colleagues in the same business. When you watch The Godfather as an adult, it's impossible not to notice how much of the movie feels like what goes on in any business. Everybody is always going over the laundry list of things which need to get done, again, and again, and again, as though your lives depended on it. It's incredibly striking that the last thing Sonny ever says to Michael is not 'We'll get you back to America' or even 'I love you', but a reminder about how to dispose of the gun. 

As the clear Fredo of the family, I should probably pass on any opportunity watch Godfather II with them again. Godfather II warned us of the price of maintaining these traditions, and we all now live with the price of America's Corleone mentality. Even as The Godfather's greatness remains clear as day that takes on new meanings with every viewing, it's impossible not to see ways in which it's started to show its age. In 2017, it's impossible The Godfather seems like an incredibly right-wing movie that has no room for a different moral outlook. There's never a sense that Don Vito is anything but a benevolent shepherd looking after his flock. There's never a sense Michael Corleone exhibits judgement that's anything but infallible, even in killing Carlo. It's no knock on a movie to say that its morals are conservative so long as the conservative points are legitimate, but Godfather II is clearly beginning to seem like a superior movie. The Godfather excuses and glamorizes these figures. Sure, it seems to say, they're ruthless and violent, but they're right. Godfather II has no such excuses for this violence, and demonstrates exactly how such violent authoritarianism begets itself from generation to generation. 

If Michael and Vito's judgement in Godfather I seemed less accurate, they would never have the same hold on the Jewish imagination. In 1972, they were new alpha males for our time - dominating other men not because of their strength, but because of their cunning. If they were ruthless, it was all in the service of giving their families better lives. And for a generation whom in childhood watched Israel fight again and again for its survival, it's probably impossible not to see the story of Israel in the Corleones either - particularly because 1972, the year before the Yom Kippur War, was the last year when Israel's judgement still seemed infallible. Indeed, what Jew who's been to Israel can watch Michael Corleone wander around his family hometown in Sicily and not think of Jerusalem or Tzfat?

Many Italian-Americans hate The Godfather, but for Jewish men of the Baby Boom generation, there is no overestimating the earth shattering impact of The Godfather to their lives. In an era when so many Fredos left their cultures behind for protests and Ashrams, this was a movie that stood up to defend family and religion and heritage. It took a stand against the idealism of the sixties generation, arguing that the world would always remain a dangerous place whose benevolent customs developed in tandem with its violent ones as a means to dignify people in a world that consistently conspired to take dignity away from them. Every nice Jewish boy who thought about leaving Judaism but decided to stay put saw himself in Michael Corleone. Pikesville was built by thousands of his foot soldiers. 

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Der Rosenkavalier: Modern America in 3/4 Time 

Excepting sex, comic opera's the best thing in the world. The reason is simple, comic opera isn't funny, it's just opera without grand airs. All it does is imitate life's flowing moods. Mozart's its great master, every phrase of his operas simultaneously capturing all life's moods. He's the ph7 of expression. Composers tried to bring us back to ph7 ever since, and no one got closer, or further away, than Richard Strauss. 

Strauss is exhibit A that mediocrities can be geniuses. No composer displayed more creativity in music's superficialities. Strauss does with 5000 notes what Mozart does with five.  

I've always had a pet theory: Strauss was a born entertainer doomed to become an artist. He was musical royalty - son of Wagner's favorite hornist. Possessing infinities of musical talent and no profound thoughts, young Strauss translated the profound thoughts of Cervantes and Nietzsche to their musical equivalents in what we call 'Tone Poems.' His adoring musical public thought him a great intellectual, but Strauss's music parodied intellectuals contemptuously. 

In dotage, Strauss became a Nazi collaborator, but his personality was like a Jewish caricature: materialistic, practical, cynical, greedy. To make art worthy of the name, he needed a temperamental opposite. 

English readers never read Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but German readers think his early poetry as perfect as Keats or Rimbaud. The latter two were dead by their mid-30's, but when Hofmannsthal began work with Strauss, he was 35 and washed up. Strauss viewed creativity with the banality of a sausage factory, but Hofmannsthal came from one of those wealthy German-Jewish families that viewed art and culture as a substitute for the religion they renounced.

The great secret of creators like Mozart is that there's no distinction between art and entertainment. When you're a transcendent genius, it doesn't matter whether you create art or entertainment because everything you do is both entertaining and meaningful. 

When Strauss paired with Hofmannsthal, he found a collaborator who viewed art as something more than banality, and his music glowed with Mozartian light. Rosenkavalier's so true to life that twenty minutes pass while you forget you're listening to music rather than conversation. But even with Hofmannsthal, there are soulstates Strauss never expresses.  

To Mozart, happiness is something we deserve, but never achieve. To Strauss, happiness is achievable for some, who deserve happiness at others' expense. Mozart makes low-class characters the scene-stealers, showering them with affection and dignity. In Strauss, lower classes are anonymous masses, footstools onto which aristocrats lay smelly extremities. 

To aristocrats of 2017, Der Rosenkavalier could be a manifesto. The 1911 world bequeathed Rosenkavalier was smeared with bullshit that seems as familiar as distant. The rules of social order were unbreakable. No one can say what they mean or mean what they say, and their world cries out for a demagogue who destroys their world by making his rage appear sincere.

Der Rosenkavalier makes you care about the world of aristocrats. It reduces generations of white males like me to puddles of feelings as we watch a woman approaching middle age realize that a whole new generation of privileged women will feel trapped like breeding mares by their patriarchal husbands, and treats it as the world's most consequential issue. Meanwhile a death machine prepares a hundred million early graves.

I'm an opera-loving white male stick in the mud. I've never gotten my nose around the feculence of faux-revolutionary concepts that smell like rage of the marginally less entitled than those whom they fight against. But as I watched the Metropolitan Opera's movie relay of Der Rosenkavalier last week, it was impossible not to see the oafishly villainous Baron Ochs as Donald Trump incarnate - a hurricane of toxic masculinity whose constant sexual harassments mask complete cowardice. It was impossible to view Renee Fleming's Marschallin, her luminous 58 playing 32, her character knowing she's of age for the pasture in a society that only values women for looks, without rage for her plight. It was impossible to view Elina Garanca, a beautiful 40 playing Marschallin's 17-year-old boy lover Octavian, without thinking that maybe, just maybe, the cycle of men raised to do evil can be broken by the purity of adolescent love. For five hours, the world's most aristocratic art form convinced me that patriarchy really is the defining concept of world history, and gender's nothing but a social construct. 

When you watch Marschallin selflessly surrender Octavian to the love of the 16-year-old Sophie, you really do believe the future can be better. If adults act better, maybe the next generation can extend the purity of first love all the way through adult love's infinite complications. Maybe young men can be better men, and we can the cycle of toxic masculinity. Such is the stuff which fairy tales are made, and only aristocrats believe them. 

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Jewish Fiction: What Happened? 

Here's the dirty secret of Jewish Fiction. There's no such thing.

Make a list of the famous modern Jewish fiction writers and movie directors. The vast majority is roman a clef about people they know, narrated from a character who might as well have the author's name. Even Kafka wrote from the point of view of a guy named K. The main character's almost always the book's dullest person, a filter through which the author can process the various foibles and quirks of acquaintances who doubtless were anything but thrilled to know the literary world would read the writer's thoughts about them.

Whether through Star Wars or Game of Thrones, our postmodern generation seems infatuated with myths as only a generation determined to destroy myths can be. Any gentile author could write a book like Catch-22, but usually chooses not to. Meanwhile, will any Jewish author of science fiction or fantasy ever equal the franchise success of Narnia?  

Lots of readers avoid realism, thinking it dull next to experiences of violence and distant worlds, which authors make seem exhilerating rather than the dreadful experiences they usually are. But what's more savage? Works that mirror the exciting life you wish you lived, or works that demonstrate the violence in our souls with pains so real they can neither be forgotten nor unread? Realism is hated by many because it tells us the truth: this is the only world we have, and it's not much fun. 

Save the Bible, there's no fiction in Judaism. We're not a religion of myths, and insofar as we have myths, we have a 2000 year Rabbinic tradition of deconstructing them - millennia of Rabbis who put all their might and soul into explaining those plot holes which give us no rest; our critical sense becoming ever sharpened by them and finding ever new flaws to explain. Every religion has this theological tradition; what's unique to Judaism is our belief that laymen should school themselves in it.

There are only two famous Jewish science fiction writers: Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand - one of whom doesn't count. Unless you count Singer and Kafka, there isn't a single famous Jewish writer of fantasy. Perhaps it's too stereotypical to say that there's something in the Jewish temperament that doesn't lend itself to fantasy, but there reality is. Even latter day Jewish novelists and filmmakers who dabble in genre fiction give a more critical bent to their genre work that puts cherished tropes into a balance sheet. 

The only innate creators of Jewish fiction are comic book artists: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Siegel and Shuster. Comic books like theirs are creations of pure, irrational fiction, made by the first Jews since Biblical times who could dare imagine themselves superseding life's rules. But even in comic books, you have to contend with great graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Harvey Pekar whose work was even more autobiographical than their novelistic counterparts.

From Proust to Lena Dunham, Modern Jewish Fiction is essays masquerading as fiction. Plausible characters, clearly based on composites of people the author knows, exposed and critiqued, all their too human virtues and flaws and yearnings and fears. Fiction's inherent mythological code, seemingly present in the literature of all lands, is found almost nowhere in the fiction of a people without a land. 

Jews lived in the pre-industrial world like everybody else, but except for rabbinical tales told to illustrate morals, there's nary an example that resembles fiction in post-Biblical Jewish writing. In my reading, the only Jewish fiction writer who seems unironically grounded in the same archetypes as gentile fiction writers from Shakespeare to Stephen King is Isaac Bashevis Singer - an exception deposited in New York after a childhood as a pre-modern Rabbinical student. One might say that Stephen Spielberg is a modern teller of stories whose movies are shot through with that awe primeval, but Spielberg's his own category who can just as easily make Schindler's List as Jurassic Park.

Yet there are many, many examples of goyisher authors who embrace the world of messy, complicated, life. The realistic fiction of Tolstoy and Dickens and Flaubert, are fictions of a relatively healthy society, recognizing itself as it is, gradually improving and putting off dismantlement for another day. Somehow, these periods when realism is 'in' correspond to the moments when Jews' situation gets better. Perhaps that notion's a myth in itself, but a large part of the world's notion that we can improve it by examining reality comes from us. Whenever the world starts knocking its myths down to build up new ones, it's bad news for Jews. The world often can't take an attempt at an honest appraisal, but whenever they can't, it's not just bad news for us, it's bad news for us all. 

TCP: Volume 2--Beginning:

 Last Will and Testament of Herod the Great--Very Rough Draft

I, Herod-ben-Antipater, being of unsound mind and unsounder body, do hereby bequeathe the following. 

But before I do, please, if you will, indulge a word for posterity from Herod the Great: Rome's Protector in the East, Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans, Ensnarer of Cleopatra, Rebuilder of Jerusalem, this, that and the other. My mind may be unsound but it's still sounder than any man in Judea and most of the prostitutes. You once held me in your hearts with terror, please find just a bit of room in your hearts for he who used to be so close to you.  

This place I have left, built according to my design, is the most important place on earth. Not Rome, not Alexandria, not Athens, this small blight of desert and scrubland is the seat of world power, and all who sit in faraway places forever orient themselves to capture this land that cannot be captured. What matters in the world is power, and though Israel may seem subjugated, it is the most powerful land in all the world, and will remain so for all time. All foreigners continue to long for it, all rulers long to conquer it, all who have seen it long to go back. Cross Israel and you encounter not Israel but the world: Africa, Asia, Europa. Study the literature of any nation yet known and there is a definite origin point or a definite end: Israel's literature begins at creation's dawn and continues to this very day. To dominate the world entire, the first step is to dominate Israel. Israel is, has, and will be the most dynamic place on earth, and therefore always the most dangerous. 

Posterity will remember me as Israel's great villain for all time. It is my pleasure that they do. I was formed by Israel, my life was raised by Israel even after my life was destroyed by her, I then avenged myself upon Israel even as Israel avenged itself upon me. I use the term "Israel" rather than "Judea" because it is Israel with whom I wrestled. Judea is this mere nub of the Jordan's west bank which no non-Jew could possibly want or contest. Israel is the prize: the center meeting point of land toward which all men aspire and all men fall short, and I, Herod, son of a penniless Palestinian, held it in my hands for thirty-four years! Only illness could part me from her as half a dozen giants of the earth never could. Control Israel, you control the world, and I, Herod the Great, ruled the world, not Rome. 

Augustus is worshipped as a hero and god, but one day he will be a mere nub of history: a name who means nothing except a man who was once incredibly powerful for fifty years. Cleopatra is hated and loved, and thanks to many efforts on behalf of her vanity, this ugly witch will be synonymous with erotic love. Antony, that drunken wastrel, will be misremembered as Caesar's capable assistant. Only I, this Palestinian from nothing, will be remembered among this false drama for exactly as I am: villain among villainy, evil among evildoers.

 I am that I am, I have presented myself as I have chosen to present myself, and whatever happens in my wake, I will forever be Herod, my life written upon all of yours. 

(text cuts off here) 

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

Tale #2: Objectives--Rough Draft

   By order of Empress and Domina Livia in the name of Autokrator Dominum Nostrum Princeps Imperator Caesar Augustus in the year 759, I hereby invest Annaus Iacobus-ben-Flavius as Lord High Priest of the Judeans, under the auspices of Syrian Governor Varus. 

The objectives of Annaus are as follows: 

1. Build relations with assimilated Sadducees as countervailing force to Pharisee fanatics, with tax credits and housing inducements to greater observance of Jewish faith in Roman supervised ritual practice, involving more involved synagogue participation, more frequent temple tributes and sacrifices, and the cultivation of a rabbinate more amenable to secular influence that will moderate the more fanatical rulings of Pharisee rabbis like President Shammai, against whom the Holy Father Hillel's opposition is insufficient to be meaningful.

2. As Hillel and Shammai proved themselves incapable of being assassinated by Herod--Shammai having emerged unburnt from a stake, Hillel having walked off a crucifix--further attempts to assassinate them may encourage the perception of weakness in Rome's standing, therefore rather than assassination, they must be watched without cease and their ordinances countermanded vigilantly. 

Further Notes: 

1. A rumor has gripped the land that Herod died because Hillel stabbed him while Shammai held him down. Irregardless of this rumor's veracity, intelligence must propagate an alternate rumor into city speculation which elucidates the probable truth: that Herod died from overwhelming natural causes which long threatened his life. Rumor goes about Judea that Herod had frequent bouts of septicemia first acquired when Imperator Augustus demanded a blood oath, but surely Rome cannot be held responsible for the misfortunes of its colonized, and therefore mention of this rumor must be punishable by crucifixion. 

2. We must note an opportunity. At Herod's death he was found preserved in a vat of honey, as odd as that seems, even for Herod, we must therefore note a dissenting note from an analyst who believes that Herod died of murder. There is even one rumor that he died at his own hand. As unlikely as that is for a man of great self-possession, this rumor could in fact be encouraged, because it would cause a perception of weakness in a royal family that the entire Syrian governate agrees has grown far too unheedful of Rome's directives. 

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

Tale #3: Foccaccia--Rough Draft

Minutes of Roman Imperator Family Council--

Julia Augusta (Livia): We have to discuss the matter of Herod's surviving children. 

Caesar Augustus: I can't be bothered with the dealings of yet another dysfunctional family. 

Livia: You will be bothered by this one! Herod has divided his kingdom into three parts for each of his living sons.

Tiberius Claudius Nero: I suppose this is their reward for surviving him. 

Livia: TACE STULTUS! They're coming to Rome together in a show of mutual support to have you rule on who is the successor. 

Caesar: Those idiots! While all of them are here their kingdoms will fall apart. 

Nero Claudius Drusus (Germanicus): Some local Herodian colonel could easily conquer half the country in their absence before the Governor in Syria even knows. 

Gaius Julius Caesar the younger: I guarantee that one of these children has already shored up local support and means to kill the others regardless of your ruling. 

Caesar: Ah. Smart as boiled asparagus that one. Not yet eighteen and he already understands the machinations of princes. 

Livia: And yet you don't if you don't establish a single heir! 

Caesar: (pounds table) I will designate my heirs as I see fit! 

Germanicus: It would seem that Herod has deliberately divided the country among his sons so that they'll kill each other. 

Caesar: That Herod truly was one of my best decisions... 

Tiberius: Well, at least his sons are intelligent enough to ally themselves. 

Livia: Stop talking about what you don't understand. 

Tiberius: All I said was!...

Livia: You don't understand politics filius, you're here for military reasons.

Tiberius: Oh and what does the most hated person in Rome know about politics?

Livia: Much more than her child it seems because he can't keep his mouth quiet when he should be listening. 

Lucius: Germanicus, didn't you say something about an asset we were already cultivating?

Caesar: Oh, listen to him, already having his ear about the goings on at court. 

Livia: STOP SPOILING YOUR GRANDCHILDREN!

Caesar: (pounds desk again) THEY'RE MY GRANDCHILDREN AND THEY NEED THE CONFIDENCE TO RUN AN EMPIRE! I'M CEASAR AND IF I WANT TO PRAISE MY ISSUE FOR BEING INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS YOU DON'T DARE STOP ME! 

(slight pause)

Livia: Might I inquire if Caesar has had lunch? 

Caesar: That's the first productive thing you've said in this meeting. 

Livia: Tiberius, go see about some food. 

Tiberius: Mother, I....

Livia: SEE ABOUT THE FOOD! I'll let you know everything you missed. Germanicus, please answer Lucius's question.  

Germanicus: Unfortunately the asset was considered important and compromising should the identity be revealed that he reported only to Nicolas of Damascus, who has gone into hiding and has not emerged. Not even Agrippa knew the identity, so the asset very well may have been killed by Herod. But the will of Herod specifies that his son Archileus gets all the territory around Jerusalem, his son Antipas gets the land around the Galilee, and his son Philip gets the Golan. 

Tiberius: Well mother, speaking from my military expertise Philip is in the best position, even if he controls a shit region. 

Livia: WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN ABOUT THE FOOD YET?

Tiberius: With all due haste Domina (bows and leaves). 

Caesar: Where is Salome in all this?

Germanicus: She's been bequeathed all the crops and products coming out of Yavneh. 

Caesar: That's not inconsiderate. His opinion of her must have been larger toward the end. 

Germanicus: She's considerately formidable. She personally marched down to Sheol to countermand an order by Herod for the guards to kill all the imprisoned nobles on his death. 

Caesar: Wasn't there a rumor that Herod wanted to execute the entire Sanhedrin on the day he died so that people wouldn't celebrate his death?

Germanicus: We can't prove that Herod ordered it, but if he did, Salome may have been responsible for stopping that as well. 

Caesar: It's a shame we can't support a woman.

(room goes quiet) 

Gaius: So who should we support?

Germanicus: Archileaus is clearly the most gifted. He's been giving stump speeches all over Judea and Summaria about how he will countermand all Herod's unjust laws. 

Lucius: Has he yet?

Caesar: Wonderful Lucius how you got to the point right away. (turns to wife) Don't you dare Livia....

Livia: (shrugs) I didn't say anything... (to Germanicus) Well has he?

Germanicus: No. But the people...

Caesar: No no no no... this is what I wanted Gaius to report on. Let him give it. 

Gaius: The people chose a publius to represent them and make demands on Archilaeus. 

Caesar: And they are?

Gaius: 1. The yearly income tax should be reduced. 2. Duties on public sales and purchases should be ended. 

Lucius: Isn't that called a sales tax? 

Caesar: Splendid Lucius, yes, but this is Gaius's presentation, do go on.

Gaius: 3. Liberation of all the prisoners, including non-politicals who may have been convicted for political reasons. 4. Imprisonment of all the Sanhedrin who voted the death sentence when Judeans destroyed our Eagles. 5. The Roman-chosen high priest Annaus be removed and the Sanhedrin appoint a new one.  

Caesar: (applauds) Excellent Gaius! Excellent! (looks around to compel everyone else to applaud, they comply) Well we don't like #4 do we but you presented it so well! 

(Tiberius returns with three boxes of focaccia topped with tomato sauce and melted romano)

Caesar: Here we are. Do any of these at least have sausage on it?

Tiberius: One's salami, one's prosciutto. 

Caesar: I know everyone likes these fancy meats but just once I wish we would order a foccaccia with plain Roman sausage. 

Tiberius: I surely will Mr. Princeps, the other one's just as Mater likes it: mushrooms, onions and artichoke. 

Livia: Thank you filius. 

Tiberius: Anything for you Domina. 

Caesar: You see? He does care about you!

Tiberius: I certainly do (bends down to kiss his mother on the cheek), and I heard applause, I take it Gaius has given another wonderful presentation?

Caesar: (smiling) Your irony is noted but Gaius is learning very quickly. A fine Caesar he would make, and so would you Lucius! 

Tiberius: This is going to end so we...

Livia: TIBERIUS! 

(pause) 

Caesar: Well obviously Archilaeus won't agree to these terms. 

Germanicus: He did.

Caesar: He did? How?

Germanicus: He's also said that he can't do it unless he gets an imperial sanction from you. 

Caesar: Oh, this one is gifted! We'll have to keep a watch on him. 

Gaius: Is he well-favored towards us?

(Caesar lights up and smiles, then looks desperate, he looks at Livia and throws his hands up)

Livia: ...Now it's me who's proud Caesar (touches his arm).

Germanicus: That remains to be seen. What has been seen though is his methods. When he delayed acceeding the demands, the people of Jerusalem revolted. 

Tiberius: As they always do. 

Livia: (shakes head) I give up...

Germanicus: They rebelled during a very hot day so they stopped demonstrating and rioting around noon. 

Caesar: I'm amazed that doesn't happen more often in the south, all that heat.... 

Germanicus: And he used that moment to order his soldiers to massacre the demonstrators. 3000 marchers dead. 

Caesar: Well, there we have it, we have our new Herod. 

Gaius: So we have to back one of his brothers?

Caesar: No my dear, we back him!

Gaius: I don't understand. 

Caesar: If there's one thing my dealings with Herod taught me, it's that stability matters more than long term principles. This boy would win their war anyway. We'd either have to kill him, which makes him a martyr to one faction of Judea who'd then declare war on us, or we'd back him, and he'd murder the opposition that would declare war on us if he didn't murder them. Men like Herod disappointed me terribly, but he made our decisions fairly easy. Let's open the foccaccia now, did they provide any plates?

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

Tale #4 - Thriving

Caesar: ...Archilaus two years ago I stood with you IN THIS ROOM and I backed you as the successor to your father because I thought you were clearly were the most gifted of your brothers. I heard you put down a revolt and massacred two thousand demonstrators who had broken for lunch, and thought here was a boy as ruthless as his father and it would be senseless to stand in his way. Now I find out you're as incompetent as every other vassal king in this sorry empire. 

Archilaus: If I recall correctly Mr. Princeps, you called all three of us idiots. 

Caesar: Yes well you ARE idiots. While you went on this good will sojourn to Rome your slaves mounted a revolt and set fire to half the royal palaces in Judea!

Archilaus: With all due respect, Caesar, there was no way of knowing that a slave revolt was imminent. The last time there was a major slave revolt in the Empire was in the time of First Triumvera... 

Caesar: (interrupting) Yes we all know about Spartacus! But then a group of two thousand Idumean soldiers revolted because they hadn't been paid. 

Archilaus: That wouldn't have happened if you hadn't sent Sabinius to repossess the temple treasures. 

Caesar: Well can you imagine what any of those groups might have done if they had access to your treasures? They'd have conquered the whole Levant as quick as boiled asparagus. And then you had a revolt in the South from shepherds! SHEPHERDS! 

Archilaus: Well they were facing Roman soldiers, not Judean. 

Caesar: Are you publicly questioning the skill of Roman soldiers IN MY OFFICE?

Archilaus: My apologies Caesar, I would never... 

Caesar: Spare me. I knew what it was to learn that Jewish kings are cleverer than me, but I never thought I'd learn what it is to manage an incompetent Jewish king. 

Archilaus: Caesar, if you...

Caesar: If you hadn't come to Rome in some false display of solidarity and simply killed your brothers like a proper barbarian this would have never happened. Now everyone else in Judea's going to die and their King has left for Rome AGAIN! 

Archilaus: If Caesar would just allow me to explain. 

Caesar: As though there's any explanation for this. 

Archilaus: The revolts that happened in our absence were really not as big as the reports. 

Caesar: How could they possibly be as big as the reports....

Archilaus: There was no existential threat to Judea's Roman presence, just minor skirmishes that were easily put down when we returned. But a new threat has arisen that really is existential. 

Caesar: My analysts never sounded so afraid as they did about those Judean revolts, and now you tell me those were minor compared to what's happening now? 

Archilaus: There is a man, his name is Judah of Galilee, who lead a force and defeated a legion to take the fort in Tzippori. 

Caesar: Vassal you will refer to that city as Diocaesaria in Rome. 

Archilaus: He burned the fort in Diocaesaria but he took all the Roman weapons, he's taken all the Roman money, and he's turned nearly half the soldiers in our army to his cause with bigger pay than we can possibly afford. 

Caesar: (pauses for a second) Were any of our eagles in that fort?

Archilaus: I... don't know. 

Caesar: WERE ANY OF OUR EAGLES IN THAT FORT?

Archilaus: I don't know. 

Caesar: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT ROMAN EAGLES ARE IN YOUR COUNTRY?

Archilaus: It didn't seem relevant. 

Caesar: Your country is in flames and the symbol of the Roman army doesn't seem relevant to you?

Archilaus: With all due respect, Caesar, the legion is fundamentally uncompromised. There were a few hundred deaths but the vast majority of the legion is still functional and fighting. 

Caesar: You Jews have no sense of honor. Eagles are not just trinkets, they're as holy as a torah, and imagine there are only thirty torahs in the world. To lose one is a desecration against Jove and all gods on Olympus. 

Archilaus: Sire I did not understa... 

Caesar: IT'S YOUR BUSINESS TO UNDERSTAND! 

Archilaus: Yes Caesar. 

Caesar: I have never done this in all my years as Princeps of Rome. You leave me no choice but to fire a king. You will not be tried, you will not be executed. You will become a full citizen of Rome, given all the honors of a King in exile, not that you deserve them. But you will make a speech to the Roman Senate extolling the glory and generosity of Rome and her selfless service to your ungovernable country and justify a request to make Judea a Roman governate. You will personally request military aid amounting to three legions to defeat this Judah of Galilee and avenge Rome losing her eagle. The Senate will be so inspired by your loyalty that they will insist upon sending four legions to Galilee and I will make the Nabatean king send his army just in case the Roman army is too lenient. Every soldier fighting for Judah of Galilee will be crucified where the Judean public can see them. Then you will retire to a villa in the beautiful South of Gaul, full of wineries, plentiful crops, beautiful slaves, friendly neighbors and YOU WILL NEVER MAKE YOURSELF HEARD FROM AGAIN!  

Archilaus: Yes, Caesar. 

Caesar: I thought Jews were the cleverest people we have: the best administrators, the best scribes and artisans in the Empire AND THE BEST POLITICIANS! I celebrated your duplicity and defended it as your people's greatest trait! Now I find that without Herod you're as incompetent as everyone else and twice as obnoxious. 

Archilaus: I'm sorry Caesar, I've failed you. 

Caesar: Say what you will about those German idiots in the North, they tell the truth and have a sense of honor, but you Jews have no symbol that means enough to you to make you understand the importance of an eagle except a book that most of you can't even read. You can't even see your own god, how do we know you even believe in him?

Archilaus: Caesar, I assure you my people believe in this god very much.

Caesar: They must if they care this much about overthrowing us, but who knows if their god is even their real motive? There is nothing they cannot part with, nothing they cannot justify. Everything is survival to them and they will lie, bribe, steal and argue their way back to life: I could kill every Jew in the world and still it would seem like you're all thriving. 

Archilaus: This is everything my father said. 

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

Tale #5 - Only One Way - First Draft

(Hillel and Shammai are packing their office) 

Shammai: Just one last time, are you sure this means we can't die?

Hillel: I thought we were in agreement here!

Shammai: I just want to be certain. 

Hillel: I've never been certain of anything in my life and I am of this! You couldn't be burned at the stake, I walked off a crucifix. I got shot with a bow and arrow, I lost three logs of blood.

Shammai: Again, I'm sorry about that. 

Hillel: We can't be responsible for all our meshuggeh followers. 

Shammai: ...Thank you for that.

Hillel: Then you got stabbed with a knife... how many times? 

Shammai: Eighteen. 

Hillel: Well, there you go, Chai's your sign. 

Shammai: I'd rather we have the basis for this on law. 

Hillel: I ruled that Vayikra 18:5 means that wherever possible you live to serve the law, not die to serve it. I ruled that and you agreed with me!

Shammai: It was under... compromised circumstances. We were worried every Jew was going to die. 

Hillel: And this isn't? We've both been killed twice now, once by the Romans, once by the Jews, and neither of us died. 

Shammai: Right, so?

Hillel: You're reasonably sure my followers killed you, I'm reasonably sure your followers killed me.

Shammai: Right...

Hillel: So if they can't kill us, they're going to kill our replacements. 

Shammai: OK...

Hillel: So we have to get our followers out of Jerusalem before they kill each other and the Romans kill everybody else. You read the same report about the legions as me. 

Shammai: I'm still not certain that's going to happen. 

(Hillel laughs) 

Hillel: You realize what's happening now...

Shammai: I'm a little confused. 

Hillel: I'm the one who's certain and you're the one who's seeing ambiguity everywhere. 

Shammai: I'm not uncertain I'm ju... alright I'm uncertain. 

Hillel: Geb a kook, think again for a minute, it's the perfect system. We both set up Yeshivas, I go to Yavneh, you go to Tsfat. Once every eighteen months, you come to my school with a bodyguard, I come to yours, you interview my students, I interview your students, and from them we pick each others' students to be new Sanhedrin.

Shammai: This still just strikes me as compromise over truth. 

Hillel: It IS compromise over truth. Compromise over truth is why we're still alive. 

Shammai: The compromises might be what motivate us all to kill each other. 

Hillel: That's why we have to keep them far apart! 

Shammai: So that's a compromise within a compromise?

Hillel: OK, yeah, it's a compromise squared... but if they don't kill each other before they learn to behave, eventually we can fill the Sanhedrin with real khakhams who know their drek. 

Shammai: If both of us are choosing the most moderate students we're not appointing the khakhams. 

Hillel: Alright then, real rabbis. If they're mediocre they're mediocre, but it's better than Sanhedrin executing their own fathers. 

Shammai: Well now we're gonna be under the auspices of Rome. 

Hillel: So?

Shammai: They might put us under the same threats as Herod did. 

Hillel: Of course they might. 

Shammai: So es helft vi a teytn bankes. 

Hillel: Alright, so it helps like leeches on a corpse, but at least it's one less threat to the Sanhedrin. 

Shammai: We've got bigger threats. 

Hillel: I know, I know, the Roman appointed priests. 

Shammai: So don't you see what's coming next?

Hillel: Maybe?

Shammai: They don't try to rule through the Sanhedrin or Pharisees like us, they'll go through the Sadducees and the Priests. 

Hillel: Oh those fucking Kohanim... 

Shammai: LANGUAGE! 

Hillel: I told you years ago to get me a swear jar. Of course it's going to be through them, that's why we need a united opposition that won't break and ally with those rich bogeds. 

Shammai: ...emes. 

Hillel: (pauses to consider this concession) I always appreciated what a mensch you are Shammai. 

Shammai: Ir aykh Hillel. You might have been compromising, but you were never duplicitous. 

Hillel: So you admit compromise doesn't lead to duplicity?

Shammai: Just in your case... which is why I trusted you. 

Hillel: You always worked with me, I was genuinely dershteynt. 

Shammai: Maybe it really does come down to the character of the man. 

Hillel: What do you mean?

Shammai: We can put all the holds in place, make things as lawful as possible so nobody with a greyser yetzer ha'ra can exploit the rest of us, but if there's a person with enough yetzer ha'ra, they'll find a way. 

Hillel: I'm not sure whether that's always been your point or mine. 

Shammai: I can't believe I'm asking you this Hillel, but I have to ask.

Hillel: OK, I won't tell anybody.

Shammai: Did we solve more problems than we caused?

Hillel: (frankly) I don't know. 

Shammai: It seems like everything we did, every ruling we made, Herod used it to his advantage. Yours, mine, it was all the same to him. 

Hillel: He was a very gifted man, but we didn't do bad enough for him to kill us all. 

Shammai: Apparently Hashem wants both of us not to be killed. 

Hillel: (pats him on the shoulder) That's the ruakh.

Shammai: Maybe he does want us to start these schools. 

Hillel: There's only one way to find out. Geb a kook, the sun's coming up, Shacharit's about to start. (grabs tefilin out of his desk) 

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

Tale 6: An Interview with Judas of Galilee

Welcome to the Sepph Hippodrome Y, we begin this evening with an interview with the leader of the new rebellion: Judas of Galilee is here. He is one of our most distinguished rebels and public intellectuals. His pamphlet, Zealotry: The Fourth Way, has inspired killings all around the North, and he himself has ordered the deaths of all those in the Galilee who registered for the Roman census and sacked Roman Empire depositories of gold, orichalcum and silver in Scythopolis, Ceasaria Maritima, Gamia, Sepphoris and Caesaria Philippi. I am pleased to have him at this table. 

Judas of Galilee: Thank you Charlus. 

(A Roman centurion walks on the stage and stabs Judas of Galilee)

Fin. 

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

Tale 7: Amici Caesaris

Iuly 4th, Ab Urbe Conditia 759

Amici Caesaris,

We have a grave problem, a cataclysmic problem, a semantic problem to be exact, a semitic problem to be approximate. To tell about the nature of this problem is difficult because the problem itself is better at articulating problems than we are. 

We are accustomed to thinking our imperial subjects barbarians. One after another kills each other, and their motive for murder is utterly clear: wealth, they wish to accumulate, threats, they wish to eliminate, fear, they wish to inspire. We in Rome can help the most ruthless among them fully realize their barbaric potential and are only too happy to let them freely indulge in it so we may continue our organization of the civilisation that rules over them. 

But the Jews, they are not barbarians. Or, if they are, they are something still more difficult: barbarians who think like the civilized. The threat from Roman Jews is more easily understood: they are our friends and donors, they are if anything too good at playing civilisation, and too easily throw about their influence. Even were such influence not a demerit to true Roman virtue, it would nevertheless signify a threat to the patrician class that so many amiable and intelligent barbarians can simply buy their way into our company by virtue of inborn talent. 

It is very easy to think these Jews of the Levant less intelligent or corrupting, due to their odd appearances and abrasive lack of etiquette. That would be a calamitous underestimation. As with our problem's progenitor Herod, their shrewdness is every bit as developed, their critical faculties every bit as honed. 

What they lack is schooling as we and the Greeks understand it, and thus, they are not beholden by precision to hit at the root cause of problems, which, as you all know, The Philosopher demands in his Nicomachean Ethics. And therefore, in their approximations, they are allowed to permit themselves infinite nuance to tell truths subjectively, and thus evade the precision and might of Roman law. In our courts, we have complaints that they argue as sophists do. On the witness stand, they tell the truth only in approximations and give their opinions on what happens rather than the truth itself.  

As you know, we have seen this trait in our Eastern Jews for generations, but now that Caesar has deigned to make Judea a governate, this problem invades our advisory chambers. 

After the first joint meeting of Herod's sons as claimants to the Judean throne, each sent their advocate.  rather than represent themselves, and rather than argue the objective truth, they can argue as Sophists do in opinion and perception. They uniformly do not state 'this is the truth,' they state 'I believe.' Belief is endemic to the Judeans, and while I have no objectivity to give this claim, I submit that their belief in the unknowability of ultimate truths is the greatest threat to Rome in our history, and we must convince Caesar of such before their beliefs infect our discoveries of truth. 

You all know that Caesar is determined not to repeat his rash judgement which deemed Archilaus the proper King of Judea. You also know that the new claimants to the Judean throne are being adjudicated with all due deliberation over a period of months. What you do not know is that yesterday, a designated team of advocates for our threat, Judah of Galilee, insisted upon being seen with the guarantee that the rebellion would cease were their demands met. They had but one demand, that Judea become the republic which Rome once had, and which Caesar still pays heed to returning the country to even over the objections of Domina Livia. Obviously, we could not grant this request. The principal advocate, one Yokhanan of the Judean Hill Country, then immediately switched his demand to that Judah of Galilee be made King of Judea, and then when we said that no king suitable for Judea would ever entertain a republic, he immediately denied he ever said Judea should be a republic. Of course, we told him, we have it recorded scrupulously in our minutes that he said it, as is good government policy dictates since Divine Julius. The minutes were duly read back. However, said record is now missing from our archives, along with all copies. When questioned about this, all the advocates were plainly in our company from the moment they arrived to the moment the minutes went missing, and thus have impenetrable alibis. 

Within seven minutes of the advocates' arrival, a messenger duly came with the happy missive that Judah of Galilee is now dead. The advocate now presented one of his fellow advocates, a Pharisee called Zadok whose town of origin they refused to name so they might not perjure themselves. The lead advocate presented Zadok the Pharisee as the new and rightful King of Judea, who is ready to make Judea precisely the trial liberal kingdom Caesar so rashly proposed to Judea's tyrant Herod. All these contortions, mind you, happened within a ten minute window. 

Until such time as the records appear again, we are officially forced to entertain the claim, even as Caesar has no intention of granting it. We cannot allow for Judea or any other kingdom to learn that we will entertain this trial project, or demands of it will multiply geometrically throughout the empire. Our men in Judea must be on the lookout for any and all ships and any and all letters, to the point of killing all passengers on all ships going into Israeli ports or even any private shore unaccounted for. Every Roman soldier in Judea and Syria must be dispatched posthaste all along the Mediterranean coastline for search and seizure. Whatever rebellion lack of policing causes, it will be insignificant next to the rebellion fomented by the knowledge that we are officially hearing this claim. 

In the name of Caesar I hereby invoke Operation Cincinnatus to dispatch all messengers to Judea and Syria to convey this order to the governors. By order of Caesar, I also dispatch legions III Cyrenaica, II Triana, XII Fulminata, and XXII Deotariana to Syrian base camp with the standby order to prepare march upon Judea.  

Senatus Publius Qui Romanus, 

Gaius Cilnius Maecenas

Deputy Magister Equitum, Consul ex-officio, Consolium Principis to Princeps Caesar Augustus 

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

 Amici Caesaris,

Kindly disregard the order of the great and honorable Maecenas. He is the most Roman of us all, but if we are to run an empire, we must occasionally do as the empire does. We will duly consider the motion, we will roundly reject it, and we will tie every other petition up in the lower courts in perpetuum. 

Your Dear Friend Who Misses You All,

Augustus

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

Tale 8: Buta ben Baba

Mr. Princeps Caesar Augustus and Domina Livia,

I know we have not communicated before, but immediately upon my release from jail my contact ordered me to send all future reports to directly to you, Revered One and Mater Patriae. To say the least, I am flabergasted to be reporting directly to the masters of the Roman world after my life hung in the balance for eighteen months on end. 

I am told that Caesar is not a man for fawning, so that is the last reference shall make to the reverence in which I have always held you both. 

The Sanhedrin has determined to make its President an hereditary post, and but for Shammai's brief sojourn as its head, the position now falls to Shimon ben Hillel: yes, of that line, and he was approved by unanimous consent, clearly by order of Shammai. 

The first order of business was that the Shammaian party, lead by one Buta ben Baba, proposed a ruling on going to war on the Sabbath. One would expect that the School of Shammai, due to their strict interpretation of Jewish law, would stand by the injunction, but the School of Shammai has long since dropped all pretense to neutrality--at least for the moment, and is willing to entertain any and all measures to fight what they refer to as 'the Occupation.' They point to the example of your General Pompey who used that prohibition to attack Jerusalem on Sabbath (sometimes called Shabbos) and since then they've never gotten rid of Rome (please note: your new man in Judea says that with approval).

 However, the School of Hillel, holding an equal number of seats, did not let the motion pass, the vote was tied 35-35. It is quite probable that the Hillelians held strict instructions from their master that any resolution about war would rightly be seen by Rome as a provocation. 

The entire Shammaian party left the Sanhedrin chamber and walked out en masse to the Temple Courtyard, perhaps it was all planned and the entire meeting of the Sanhedrin was a kind of procedural theater. The Shammaians are lead by one Buta ben Baba, who mounted the Temple's western wall and made a frankly magnificent speech to all those assembled in the public courtyard about not appeasing Rome (I refer to its quality merely so Caesar can understand the jubilant effect it had on the public), however, the peroration of his speech was interrupted by the entrance from the Chain Gate by one Zadok, whom my contact assures me Caesar is familiar with some hundred twenty followers. He refers to his followers as Zealots or Kanna'im in the Hebrew tongue. Zadok explained that they are there to rebel against what they believe is Hillel's appeasement and collaboration and they demand the lives of every Sanhedrin Rabbi from the School of Hillel be forfeit. To the perhaps shock of these Zealots, it was the Shammaians who blocked the door to the Sanhedrin chamber and the unsuspecting party of liberality. Buta ben Baba made a second brief speech entreating the citizens of Jerusalem to defend the Sanhedrin. What followed was a terribly bloody melee in which were killed no less than seventeen Shammaian rabbis and yet another one wounded. The Shammaians covered themselves in valor defending these more progressive Rabbis whose deaths they would entirely welcome in the right circumstances. 

This had the further result that the Hillelians have actually expanded the Sanhedrin to 71; fully allowing the Shammaians an extra seat so that the 17 empty seats may be replenished by the School of Shammai, and the surviving Rabbi too may reclaim his seat upon return from convalescence. 

The Shammaians have eminently earned this seat, but there is no future plan for parity, so while Hillel rules in figure, Shammai rules indeed. 

Reverentur Summito, 

Your Man in Jerusalem

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

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) 

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

Tale X: Counterauthority--rough draft

 To High Priest Yoazar,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Senate and People of Rome,

Rome's Man in Jerusalem

So I had a bit of ulterior motive in that latest list.

The point of making it is to show that some sublime moments are earned, some sublime moments 'cheat' and get their uncanniness through exploitation.

How do you tell the difference?

Well, if you hear the swelling music, the golden light, the panoramic shots, the cinematic sucker punches to pump our adrenaline or our tears, that's not the real thing.

That's not sublimity, that's manipulation.

The sublime can be noisy, but it's often very quiet, but you know it's sublime because every time you see it, not only does it not lose any quality by noticing the gimmickry, the genuineness makes you that much more in awe. One is spectacle, one is revelation. One wows you, can make the hairs on your neck stand, can make you weep, the other completely reorders the walls of reality when you think of it again, it keeps reordering. One tells you exactly what to feel, one makes you feel something different every time.

Unfortunately, one's a drug, and one's a vegetable.

Maybe you're better off not experiencing it, because once you notice the real thing, you have trouble going back and it takes real effort not be cynical about the whole process. I've worked very hard to fall back in love with Hollywood magic and the Spielberg and Star Wars that gave me so much joy as a kid. To love what's good about Hollywood and Disney and genre fiction, you have to suspend your cynicism, but in order to truly understand it, you have to have skepticism. You have to realize that a large part of what it's doing is there to sell tickets and toys and t-shirts, which enables the lifestyles of executives and stars who use their power to exploit thousands: sometimes through low pay, sometimes emotional exploitation, sometimes sexual.

Once you really ponder the cost of that, it becomes much harder to appreciate it. I know a lot of people, as often as not political radicals, who leave their politics at the door when it comes to Disney and Marvel and Game of Thrones and Star Wars: knowing perfectly well that these things exist to exploit them and consuming them anyway like perfect late capitalists. I'm sorry to say it's a bit more difficult to take their politics seriously when you know they do that.

God knows, exploitation exists in art as well as entertainment, but it's not the exploitation of literal millions in every country. It doesn't exist to make perfectly docile consumers out of us so that a group of narcissists and psychopaths can live like lords of the universe.

Art doesn't exist to make money. Art COSTS money.

Of course, there's plenty of art that makes money, and many of the greatest artists are as much entertainers as artists, but the POINT of what they do is not entertainment, the point of what they do is to fit art within entertainment: be they Scorsese, Shakespeare, Dickens or Dylan, the point was to squeeze art into commercial demands.

But superstar artists are lucky enough that they don't have to choose, they can make art that's entertainment and konw they won't lose their clientele. The rest of us probably have to pick a lane, because there are lots of people with power over us who will penalize us if we don't make exactly what they want be they producers who demand a perfectly marketable product or academic supervisors who demand a piece of art that looks or sounds exactly like theirs. Most artists have hundreds of experiences like that, and we'll never know who might have been another Scorsese or Dylan had they better sponsorship. Genius is very rare, but it's not as rare as people think. For every genius who flowers, there are half a dozen who could have been with the right breaks. If you don't have understanding mentors, sponsorship, patrons, commissions, producers or publishers, you will not make a living from art, and you'll have to spend your days doing whatever you can to get those eight hours a week where you can work on what cwuld make you esteemed everywhere if you had forty.

The cost of art is something nobody wants to know in our generation, because art is not just pleasure, it's serious work. The people who make it slave away at it and most of them don't get much remuneration. They just keep buggering on about something that, if you look at it, may make your life more meaningful.

It's not just serious work to create it, it's serious work to understand it. Sometimes, you gotta plow through the boring parts to understand the whole, and the older I get, the more I realize that's just the way it is. Like everybody, I skip boring passages of novels and boring songs in albums, but I mean to come back to them. Art is a process, and at the end of it you understand something you didn't understand when you first encountered it. Furthermore, the way you know that the process will be worth it is because some people, some 'authorities' with lots of experience of this stuff, tell you this is what's worth your time.

Because what happens when we don't?

If we're that easily manipulated by entertainment, what else can we be manipulated by? Everybody seems to agree that the world is ripe for chaos and mass violence, but everybody wonders how.

Whether or not you choose to admit it, there are giant industries with vested interests in making you think a certain way with absolute certainty. That much is easy to admit for many, but it's not just the ones you think they are. It's not just the right wing propaganda rags:

- It's the universities that pump us full of critical theory about how everything in the world is a normative capitalist lie even as they steal our futures through student loans so they can put in enough amenities to let us live like capitalist kings for four years we'll pay for for the rest of our lives.

- It's entertainment industries that paradoxically anaesthetize us through noise, and realize that if a movie or music is loud enough, we won't be able to hear our own critical thoughts and make better consumers for overpriced music that's cheaper to make and simpler to hear. We become addicted to noise, simplicity, repetition, until we can't consume anything that might make us a little less hard to fool. It may be a paradox, but we become anesthetized through adrenaline.

- It's social media companies that make money by keeping us enraged, so they promote more and more ideologically polarizing content.

- Its political parties and their believers (yes, both), who deliberately manufacture memes designed to simplify issues so that we'll accept any action they take.

- It's games built to addict us through microrewards.

- It's streaming entertainment built to addict us with cliffhangers, no matter what slop they put in the middle of episodes.

- It's a fashion industry that dictates what clothes we need every year and send so many of the well-dressed among us into credit card debt.

- It's even the respectable news organizations who sell advertising eyes by making us permanently scared.

And that's the thing, manipulation can be very, very good quality. The quality of a lot of popular culture is exemplary, but it's not the full story, and the overwhelming majority of it is not fully art. Just like the speeches of politicians can be inspiring even as we know politicians have ulterior motives, so too can movies and TV that pumps up the cliches. Just like there are politicians who inspire us because they mean well, there are lots of entertainers who are so good that they take on properties of art. Cliches become cliches because they work, and there are all sorts of moments in movies that work on us even as we know that a little bit of the effect is bullshit.

What is art? Well, that is not going to be anything we agree on. But I do know this: art is only fully art if it is real. Art is a real individual response to the phenomena of the world: what it isn't is a response to love or loss that tells you something about them that you already know.

Real art is something that takes, as Master Yoda would say..., the deepest seriousness of purpose. In that way it is no different than science or medicine. Art is as much a leg on the table of how we keep society going as economics, humanities, science, medicine, politics and sports. I know that is just a personal truth. I also KNOW that truth is universal.

A couple paragraphs ago I said so much of entertainment was like a politician's bullshit, so what does 'bullshit' mean in this situation?

Perhaps there's a better word for it. Perhaps we should call it slop, perhaps we should call it 'ersatz' or 'kitsch', but ultimately, it's just 'fake.'

Fake can mean a lot of things, but in this case, the ultimate definition of fake is fake at the basest level: a false perception of reality, a utopian perception of reality, a perception of reality that lets us believe that we can achieve what we want without compromise, without lesser evils, without our hopes mercilessly dashed over and over again. The fakery that tells us we can get through life without a broken heart, without grief, shame, connivance, defeat, maybe even deprivation. The fakery of the happy ending, the fakery of the utopian pursuit, the fakery of the person who sees what they want, goes out and does it, and doesn't tell us enough about the cost of getting there.

The 'cost of getting there' is what art is about. It's not about the victory, it's about the struggle: not just the struggle, the loss, the compromise, the complicity, the division and tension between who we are and what we want.

If art exists to do anything at all: it tells us, again and again, that that is true: that life is full of all those terrible things.

And yet, at the same time, art exists to tell us life is beautiful, life is never worth giving up on: that there are consolations and dignities in failure, and that even if success never looks like what you thought it would: success may yet come.

The greatest art tells us this brutally bittersweet truth, and it tells us ecstatically. Great art is the pursuit of what Werner Herzog calls the 'elusive, ecstatic poetic truth.' Art is elusive because understanding situations on a deeper level than appearances requires an enormous amount of thought, and its ecstatic because there is a triumph inherent in encountering something that changes the way we perceive reality: both for the creator and the appreciator.

But in entertainment, we don't hear about the human cost. We don't hear in all those Marvel movies about the family of the guy who gets crushed for being in the wrong parking garage. We don't hear in Disney about all the bitchy things the princesses do to their servants and friends to keep themselves the center of everybody's attention. It took twenty-five years before Star Trek admitted in Deep Space Nine that its utopian vision may be a false bill of goods. It took nearly fifty years for Star Wars to tell any story in their universe about someone who doesn't have force powers.

Art is about what you give up, not what you gain. And if you believe so many radicalizing forces on so many sides telling you that we stand to gain so much as a society without giving up things we hold dearer than life, you're likely not to appreciate much art either.

Because if we're manipulated so easily into credulity that we cry at a Steven Spielberg ending but can't appreciate the ecstatic tragedy at the end of Citizen Kane, what else can we fall for?

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

Ecstatically sublime moments in movies: the real thing...

The hunt, the music box, and the outdoor resolution of The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)

The final shot of Erich von Stroheim in The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)

The casting of the bell in Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)

The burning castle and the flute player at the cliff in Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

The final shot of Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)

The wife's tale in Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)

Monkeys facing the monolith and the bone in 2001 (Stanley Kubrick)

The bomb ride in Doctor Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick)

Ethan in the doorway at the beginning and the end of The Searchers (John Ford)

The baptismal massacre in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)

The assassination of Don Fanucci in Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola)

Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)

The raft down the river in The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)

Isak Jacobi's magic house in Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)

The flagellants and the procession of the dead in The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)

The merging of faces in Persona (Ingmar Bergman)

The emergence of Omar Sharif from the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)

Cleo and the soldier walking the pavement at the end of Cleo 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda)

The grandparents watching the sea in Tokyo Story, the grandmother watching her grandson, the grandfather returning to the empty house (Yasijiro Ozu)

Lady Wakasa's revelation in Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi)

Anju singing at the river in Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)

The walk through Rome after liberation at the end of The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)

The bows to the boy in The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci)

The burning of the Icon in Decalogue I (Krysztof Kieslowski)

The oil fire in There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Aguirre among the monkeys in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)

Angela Lansbury's monologue in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)

Old Auntie rocking Apu's cradle as she sings to him in Pather Panchali, Apu discovers the train, Durga dances in the rain and becomes sick. (Satayajit Ray)

The mother standing in the doorway waiting for Apu in Aparijito. (Satayajit Ray)

Apu carrying his son on his shoulders in The World of Apu. (Satayajit Ray)

The Xanadu scenes in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

Madeleine bathed in green light and the appearance of the nun in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

The fire and locust scenes in Days of Heaven (Terrance Malick)

Joan's Face in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

The boxing ring scenes in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)

Don Fabrizio's palace in The Leopard (Lucchino Visconti)

Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

John Glenn circling the earth and returning to Earth in The Right Stuff (Philip Kauffmann)

The party scene in City of God (Fernando Mierelles)

Burt Lancaster looking out from his balcony in The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrik)

Adrian Brody walking among the ruins of Warsaw in The Pianist (Roman Polanski)

The angel ministering to a dying man in Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)

The reunion in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)

Sam the Lion's monologue in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich)

The coin toss in No Country for Old Men (The Coen Brothers)

The appearance of the baby in Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)

The diary entries in First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Burt Lancaster overlooking New York from a balcony in The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrik)

First contact in Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)

The Pale Man and final revelation of Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)

The end of La Strada (Federico Fellini)

The procession at the end of 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)

The trial audience in A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressberger)

'Love is very simple.' in Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne)

The freezeframe at the end of The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)

The trip to Angkor Wat at the end of In the Mood for Love (Wong-Kar Wai)

The reburial of the son in Ida (Pawel Pawelikowski)

The riot, labor and water scenes in Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)

Radio Raheem and the riot in Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee)