Grumpy Robert Hughes (part of an ongoing series)

Quote of the Day:

Le Malon: i've always said that music has been worse off since 1342

Friday Playlist #9: Mad Men Edition

Bob Dylan/The Band: Don't Think Twice It's Alright



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Arthur Collins (1899): Hello My Baby



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One more...

Still one more

Bobby Helms: You Are My Special Angel



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Gillian Hills: Zou bisou bisou



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Luis Mariano: C'est Magnifique - Click Here

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Voices of Washington: By The Rivers of Babylon


(utterly shameless...i know....)

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Advanced Playlist:

Bach: St. Matthew Passion


To go or not to go to the performance this weekend...

800 Words: Epistolary Blogging: Jacques Barzun

Dearest Jacques,
In case there’s anybody who cares (though I have no idea why you would) there is not a single matter of life on which I take a position that is anything resembling conservative, and and only a reactionary could mistaken me for one. This much has been true for me ever since I was an adolescent animal rights protestor who found himself defending all sorts of people he never wanted to defend, merely because God forbid the world should be viewed as something more complex than we, the forces of light and virtue, doing battle with they, the army of darkness who will triumph over us all if I occasionally eat a piece of pizza with unsynthetic cheese on it. Over and over again, I find myself feeling sorry for people I never wanted to feel any sympathy for, merely because the people on my side who trash them seem so stupid, so tonedeaf to the nature of problems, so unwilling to consider a point of view from any side but their own, that there’s no mystery as to why the world’s in bad shape: most of the people who believe the right things are just as dumb as the people who believe the wrong ones. What matters is that you come to conclusion through actual thought, and you entertain the thought that the people who believe differently from you might be right. So if not always approving of every radical solution to a probem is a conservative position, then fine, I’ll be a conservative. If not always trying to preserve every old institution makes me a socialist, then fine, I’m a socialist. But let’s not pretend that there is anything worth living for in a world where there is only one right answer to every question.
Over the course of thirty years, one meets many of these morons, and some of them are quite brilliant. Idiocy can take many possible forms, and just as people can be right and wrong at the same time, people can be utterly moronic simultaneously to being incredibly intelligent. No one has a greater capacity for self-deception than smart people, and no one finds it harder to resist simplistic explanations for a world too complex to understand. Dumb people might be taken in by religion, but smart people are the ones who lead the religions.
Your book, From Dawn to Decadence, gets most things utterly wrong; yet it is, beyond doubt, one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. An 800 page history of culture in the last 500 years and its decline, impeccably researched, spectacularly written, air-tightly organized, and thoroughly wise. You trace cultural developments from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century in a matter which shows that culture – that dirty word of our time – has been thoroughly exhausted, and can be traced from the romantic spring of the Rennaissance to the authoritarian black comedy (still a happy ending because it ultimately spread the reach of culture) of the Baroque to the bright comedy of neo-classicism, to the tragic crisis of faith in culture which befell Romanticism, to the decadent ironies of modernism. It is so erudite, so utterly well-supported in its arguments that I find it difficult to disagree with any of your conclusions. And yet your conclusions are thoroughly wrong, and I know it even as I read them. You go out of your way to praise writers like Montaigne, Bagehot, and William James whom you feel represent a ‘double vision’ that can get inside the heads of those whom they disagree with so that they might understand different conclusions. Yet you seem completely oblivious to the fact that you thoroughly lack this double vision yourself.
Like all attempts to interpret history, you reduce the unknowable course of human events to a series of biases that can’t help but be spectacularly wrong. Yet you realize that it does not alleviate you, or us, of the burden of the attempt. We either study our origins, and accept that we can only have a bad understanding of the past, or we forget the past and we doom ourselves to a future of ignorance. In the perfect society that can never exist, people like you are the loyal opposition – always present to remind us of what worked in the past even if you are incapable of looking toward the future. Woe betide the country lead by a person (there are many) like you; still living, and turning 105 this year, yet the world seems to have stopped around the time of your birth. The great achievements of twentieth century culture: modernism, cinema, popular music, graphic novels, Keynesian economics, international law, linguistic developments, have completely passed you by, and you dismiss it all with a simple wave of you hand. You only concede that a single 20th century intellectual, Jose Ortega y Gasset (never read’em) has an understanding of the world equal to the greats of the past. You are the very epitome of the brilliant idiot.
It does not occur to you that the chaos that is modern civilization existed in every possible antiquity – with corrosive social degeneration that is forever in conflict with progress and humanism. In every age, there are great humanist artists like Chekhov, Mozart, and Jean Renoir, and there are great (by some people’s definition) anti-humanists like Dante, Wagner, and Stanley Kubrick. Sometimes degeneration wins, sometimes progress does – and we have no way of being certain which side of any issue is progress and which is regression. All we have is unverifiable speculation and opinions – and we do the best we can to make our lives as good as we can. Great historians like are particularly susceptible to the idea that your field have a unified theory; whether it’s the conservative theories Spengler and Niall Ferguson, or the socialist theories of Eric Hobsbawm and Tony Judt.
Like you, when I see how people in our time, in my own generation, have so little regard for the great achievements of the past; who’ve never listened to the entirety of Beethoven’s Fifth, or seen a Breughel drawing, or are bored by Shakespeare, and it fills me with more than sadness; it fills me with disgust. Every time I see people watch Jersey Shore, or dance to Lady Gaga, it makes me wretch. I have no problem with their existence (I even once danced to a long stream of Lady Gaga songs at a wedding. My friends were a little too impressed....), only with their omnipresence. You can't escape either, and it's the sort of groupthink that makes a person somehow 'weird' if they don't want to listen/watch either or hundreds of other pop culture memes that are forgotten nearly as quickly as they become a craze. I don’t want to live in a world without entertainment, but there have to be periods in history when people were more interested in the sublime, the transcendent, the aesthetic bliss only borne of long study, than this one. I think of all the idiots who got a much better higher education than me without learning to appreciate a single thing that’s truly beautiful about the world, and it makes me want to throw something through a window, it really does (Y’all idiots use reality TV and the Top 40 like a crackpipe). But a world like the one for which you wish, in which everyone can resist the urge to indulge in the lower pursuits sounds every bit as hollow, as puritanical, and as unenjoyable as I find our current one. We are the victims of our own success. We live in a world where people experience so much comfort that many of them do not do experience enough life to require Mahler or Chaucer or Werner Herzog or Tom Waits. When every desire in life is so instantly available, what need is there for art that requires thought? Perhaps this is a triumph, not a defeat. But I find people who don’t need ‘the good stuff’ to be incredibly dull.
One day, perhaps I’ll get into all the uncertainties which this book provoked in me. But provoking uncertainty is not the aim of a book like this, the aim is persuasion. We are meant to see the world in a different light – your light. I can’t imagine I’d ever concede that you’re right, yet there is that 5% of me that gnaws at the back of my head, telling me that possibly, just maybe, you understand the world better than I do. And that is what it means to really study our origins. Thank you for that.

Love,

Evan

Ray Lewis Is A Better Motivational Speaker Than You

This man is Baltimore.

Quote of the Night:

The Hicks (about his first experience of listening to Das Rheingold): You ever call someone and the the boring, useless, pedantic significant other traps you in an endless conversation about bullshit?

Quote of the Evening:

Le Malon (on naming his soon to be baby girl):
rachel is out,
mao is a maybe

Quote of the Day:

Aunt Debbie: We Jews are not a good looking people. It must be all that inbreeding. We did an enormous favor to our people by adopting Leeor.

800 Words: ET: Almanac

I will have a comment upon this passage tomorrow. In the meantime, I cede the floor to Jacques Barzun.

Let Us End with a Prologue

"The careful historian, before he ventures to predict the course of history, murmurs to himself 'Schedel.' It is not a magic word, but the name of a learned German who, in 1493--note the date--compiled and published the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages of mankind was drawing to a close, and it included several blank pages for recording anything of interest that might still occur during the final days. As we know, what occurred was the opening of the New World and all innovations that followed from it--hardly a close. With this risk in mind, I mean to set down what appears to me possible, plausible, likely, as our own era reaches an end.

Our Age

Some of the descriptive labels: Age of Uncertainty, Age of Science, Age of Nihlism, Age of Massacres, Age of the Masses Age of Globalism, Age of Dictatorships, Age of Design, Age of Defeat, Age of Communication, Age of the Common Man, Age of Cinema and Democracy, Age of the Child, Age of Anxiety, Age of Anger, Age of Absurd Expectations

"Some writers have called our time the end of the European age. True in one sense, the phrase is misleading in another: it overlooks the Europeanization of the globe. Techno-science and democracy are far from ruling everywhere, and in certain places they are fiercely opposed, but together they grip people's imagination and inflame their desires. The whole world wants, not freedom, but EMANCIPATION and enjoyment. And the West is the corner of the globe whose peoles, borrowing freely from all others, have shown the way of achieving the one and given the means of possessing the other. [A book to browse in is Pandemonium by Humphrey Jennings.] The shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone's power to define, if it were guessable it would not be new. But on the character of the interval between us and the real tomorrow, speculation is possible. Within the historian lives a confederate who is an incurable pattern-maker and willing to risk the penalties against fortune-telling.
"Let the transitional state be described int he past tense, like a chronicler looking back from the year 2300. As the wise ancient Disraeli remarked, 'We cannot be wrong, because we have studied the past and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place.'
"The population was divided roughly into two groups; they did not like the word classes. The first, less numerous, was made up of the men and women who possessed the virtually inborn ability to handle the products of techne and master the methods of physical science, especially mathematics--it was to them what Latin had been to the medieval clergy. This modern elite had the geometrical mind that singled them out for the life of research and engineering. The Lord Bacon had predicted that once the ways and biases of science were enthroned, this type of mind would be found relatively common. Dials, toggles, buzzers, gauges, icons on screens, light-emitting diodes, symbols and formulas to save time and thought--these were for this group of people the source of emotional satisfaction, the means of rule over others, the substance of shoptalk, the very joy and justification of life.
"The mind was shaped and the fancy filled by these intricacies as had been done in an earlier era by theology, poetry, and the fine arts. The New Man saw the world as a storehouse of items retrievable through a keyboard, and whoever added to the sum ws in high repute. He, and more and more often She, might be an inventor or a theorist, for the interest in hypotheses about the creation of the cosmos and the origin of life persisted, intensified, from the previous era. The sense of being close to a final formulation lasted for over 200 years.
"It is from this class--no, group--that the governors and heads of institutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain--clerics in one case, cybernists in the other. The latter took pride in the fact that in ancient Greek cybernetes means helmsman, governor. It validated their position as rulers over the masses, which by then could neither read nor count. But these less capable citizens were by no means barbarians, yet any schooling would have been wasted on them; that had been proved in the late 20C(entury). Some now argue that the schooling was at fault, not the pupils; but when the teachers themselves declared children unteachable, the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everybody to its view.
"What saved the masses from brutishness was the survival (though in odd shapes) of a good deal of literature and history from the 500 years of western culture, mingled with a sizable infusion of the eastern. Some among the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people with a culture over and above the televised fare. It was already well mixed and stirred by the 21C(entury). Public readings, recitals of new poems based on ancient ones, simple plays, and public debates about the eternal questions (which bored the upper class), furnished the minds and souls of the ordinary citizen. This composer of longings, images, and information resembles that which the medieval monks, poets, and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman heritage. Religious belief in the two ages alike varied from piety, deep or conventional, to mysticism.
"As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, superseded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency. Their The pretext was rarely borne out but the game prospered and the character of the players followed another medieval prototype: constant nervousness punctuated by violent and arbitrary acts against persons and firms. Dismissals, resignations, wholesale firings of workers and staffs were daily events. There being no visible bloodshed, wounds and distress were veiled. The comprehensive welfare system, improved since its inception, repaired the damage. Its decisions being all made by computer on the basis of each citizen's set of identity numbers, there could be few terrible grievances. Those due to typing errors would be corrected--in time. There was thus no place for the citizen voter and the perpetual clash of opinions that had paralyzed representative governments.
"The goal of equality was not only preserved but the feeling of it enhanced. Faith in science excluded dissent on important matters; the method brings everyone to a single state of mind. On the workaday plain, the dictates of numerical studies guided the consumer and the parent, the old and the sick. The great era had ended--by coincidence, no doubt--as it had begun, with a new world disease, transmitted (also like the old) through sexual contact. But intense medical research in due course achieved cure and prevention, and the chief killer ailment was once more heart disease, most often linked to obesity. The control of nature apparently stops short of self-control. But Stat Life, ensured by the many specialized government agencies, inspired successful programs and propaganda in many domains of the secure society. The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather suddenly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, seuxal promiscuity, and tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, having to be concealed, attracted only the bold and reckless. And even they agreed that the veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity.
"As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the West from the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident and America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming, in offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into their plans.
"After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence--in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of our nascent--or perhaps one should say, renascent--culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive."

Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence

And Yet We Are Here!

by Karl Wolfskehl

Always driven, always in the bite of
the blast --
Was the burden of life ever bitterer
on earth?
Has harsher yoke pressed on calloused
shoulders,
The plough of dark Destiny cut deeper
furrows?
Were death and dread ever quite so
near?
And yet we are here!

And yet we lifted our foreheads over
and over,
And yet our songs of thanks, our
prayers and paeans mounted,
When air and light stole through a rift
of the mouldy dungeon,
They found us bowed on the book, at
God's work, the workers!
Our hearts did not break though our
lot was austere,
And yet we are here!

Terrible Fate, you bring weeping and
the lust to kill,
All day you crouch in corners, threaten
and leer,
All night you gnash your teeth and
lurk by our pallet.
When we sobbed, swore, implored, it
was you who spoke.
Only Hatred replied with savage jeer
And yet we are here!

Yes, yet we are here, and must remain,
Sucking at pain as at honeycombs.
The others go -- are allowed to! Our
hour
Once shall bloom from a fertile wound.
Then we shall know why He suffered
our tears.
Then, when the trumpet's holy Yes
rings clear,
We shall be here!

Friday Playlist #8: 30th Birthday Party Edition

Duke Ellington: Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue -



Leonard Bernstein: Mambo -



Louis Armstrong: Hello Dolly



Abreu: Tico Tico -



Frank Sinatra: I Get A Kick Out of You



Ginastera: Estancia - Danza Final (Malambo)




Advanced Playlist: Bruckner Symphony No. 9 with completed and reconstructed Finale

800 Words: The ABC's of the Marriage of Figaro - B5 Part 2

B5: Cervantes and Schubert Part 2

I finally read the end of Don Quixote on Saturday. Before we go any further, I should probably clarify that ‘reading the end’ is not the same as finishing. There’s probably an entire half of the book that I’ve not read even once, there are also chapters I’ve probably read half a dozen times. Such is the life of an ADHD reader, constantly dabbling in books before another comes along to steal your attention. Perhaps the reason movies and opera appeal to me more than other genres is that there’s a guaranteed beginning and ending that simply involves you sitting in your seat and paying attention to whatever you like at whatever pace other people set.

I’m an autodidact who only earned a college degree by enrolling in a tenth-rate music program, and I’m hardly a natural bookworm. The act of getting through long books involves a methodical efficiency which I’ve always lacked. I’ve started thousands of ‘important’ books, and probably finished a few hundred at most. If I live another fifty years, I’m sure I’ll finish most of them. But for someone who keeps a blog which bloviates endlessly about intellectual topics, this is a terrifying thing to admit – no matter how many times I admit it on here. There’s an old joke which says that C-students become artists, the A-students become their critics – a different version of it is A-students in Law School become academics, B-students become judges, C-students become rich. But what happens when a D-student still demands entrance into the field?...

What I’m describing is why Don Quixote (at least what I’ve read of it) is still funny, sometimes hilariously so. Most of us (arguably all) are hopelessly stuck longing for things which we are absolutely ill-suited – be it in work, love, or the general state of our lives. There will always jobs we long for that we could never do, loves for which we pine that could only end in disaster, lives we ache to live that are completely ill-suited to who we are. We’re all hopelessly trapped, trying to make things happen for ourselves that rarely happen for anyone, and would be cataclysmic if they ever did. Life is the longing to achieve a state of Schubert, and ending up in a state of John Tesh.

As a young man, Miguel de Cervantes may or may not have fled Castille to the Spanish navy after wounding another student in a duel. He was wounded in battle himself at the age of twenty four – he demanded to fight while experiencing a fever and was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the left hand, permanently losing use of it. At thirty-eight, he was captured by pirates and was a slave in Algiers for the next five years. During his time in Algiers, he organized atttempts to escape four times, and we can only imagine how he was punished for that. He only left Algiers when his family successfully ransomed him. After a stint in Portugal as a Spanish spy, he returned to Madrid with dreams of being a dramatist. He wrote twenty plays, every one of which is reported to have bombed. He then became a tax collector, only to be jailed twice for discrepancies in his accounting. Legend has it that it was during his second stint in jail that he began work on Don Quixote.

We have no idea how much of Cervantes’s personal experience inspired the book, though many people have alleged that the criminal ‘mastermind’: Gines de Pasamonte who keeps fooling the Don and Sancho to be a stand in for Cervantes himself. What we do know is that a quick glance at the details of the author’s personal life would indicate that he was well prepared to write a story about a person who aspires to greatness, only to fail so miserably that he could only be a figure of fun to others. Whether or not we choose to admit it, we’re all either that person or are terrified of becoming him.

Whether or not Don Quixote was crazy by force or choice, he followed the inner voice which told him how life must be lived so that it can be truly lived – and he paid dearly for it. If this book has a message, it is not that we should cower in fear against our deepest aspirations; it’s only that we’re powerless against them. Whatever our reality, we’re doomed to pursue happiness in whatever way we see fit for however long we’re capable. Even with all evidence pointing to the fact that we will never accomplish our dreams, we’re still doomed to follow them. We shall persist in our lunacies until our dying days, and everybody will think us an idiot for our troubles.

Don Quixote has been called both a wise book and a cruel book – as though the former state could exist without the latter. The reason it is wise is that Don Quixote acknowledges that truth which too many hallowed works pieces of art would never admit; cruelty can be really, really funny. Every time we laugh at Don Quixote’s good nature getting swindled, and the following mayhem in which Sancho Panza gets still more teeth knocked out, we are complicit in the violence done to them. Does this mean that we’d all be capable of laughing if we saw similarly awful things happen to strangers (or even friends) in real life? Quite possibly. Does this mean that any of us would visit the same violence on people if given the chance? Again, it’s quite possible. Laughter is not a benevolent sentiment; if it don’t hurt, it ain’t funny. Every time we laugh at an offensive joke, every time we play a prank, every time we make fun of a friend, we’re contributing to the potential damage of another person. Yet we all do it – the alternative is no fun at all, and therefore we’re probably having our fun at a more ethical person’s expense. We can either be an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, or we can take our share in life from others so that they’re unable to take it from us. Anyone who has ever experienced depression or addiction, even if only for a few days, would know that there is nothing a person in the throes of it would not do in order to stop it – yet it cannot be stopped. The self becomes divided by forces larger than our control, and we experience revulsion for our compulsions, even as we cannot help indulging them.
Like so many of us, Alonso Quixano became addicted to his pleasure – which was reading chivalric Romances. Was there true love in what these books made him feel, or was it simply infatuation? The romances told him of a world that exists with greater rewards, virtues, and excitements than anything that could exist for a shy retired gentleman of leisure like himself. Now fifty years old, his wits seem to atrophy, and he goes out into the world with the sole intent of being a knight-errant – playing at knightly adventure much as boys a tenth his age might pretend to be an action superhero. When kids do it, it’s supposed to indicate a healthy imagination, but when adults do it, it’s supposed to indicate insanity. Is Alonso Quixano insane?

If one can boil the power of a book so famous down to a single sentence, it would probably lie within the tension between what Don Quixote (as a standin for us all) would like the world to be against what the world really is. When Don Quixote sees a pretty farm wench, he transforms her in his mind into a princess. When he sees windmills with his eyes, he sees terrifying giants in his mind. When he sees monks accompanying a noble lady on a road, he believes them to be enchanters who have ensnared the lady – in the author's own time 'enchanters' would be equated automatically with paganism, ergo Men of God become Men of the Devil. In Don Quixote’s mind, every banal notion of what the world really is stood on its head so that the world can become a more exciting place in which the way by which a person can prove his virtue is simple.

And then there’s Sancho Panza, who is as stupid as Don Quixote is crazy. If Don Quixote is every dreamer who sees the world as something it’s not, then Sancho Panza is every hyper-realist who sees the world so close to what it truly is that he believes every single thing he’s told without thinking of whether or not it can be true. These two types need one another, there is a Quixote and a Sancho within every friendship, every partnership, every marriage, and every person. There always has to be a Quixote to tell us what the world is, and a Sancho to believe it.

Every person who’s ever made fun of another must often ask himself what it would be like to be that other person. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t feel the need to make fun of him. The reason Don Quixote is so funny is because we all dread being him – a person so out of touch with reality that we attract misery as magnets attract metal. Yet he’s so over the top in his grandiose aspirations that none of us can possibly be as awfully out of touch as he is. Yet we all fear that we’re far closer than we think we are – and how could it be any other way. We can either be mired in a Schubertian hopelessness, or we can aspire to something better. Perhaps such aspirations will make us feel more miserable in the long run, but we can’t help ourselves. The only alternative is to surrender to misery’s inevitability, and no person on earth would willingly do such a thing.

Just as one can make a comparison and say that Mozart is a better composer than Shakespeare is a writer, I can say with (not nearly) as much certainty that Cervantes was a better writer than Schubert was a composer. Schubert’s music, great as it is, seems like a dead end. Schubert’s music seems to accept the indignities of life as inevitable, and it feels as though he merely waits for death to carry him off. Cervantes may have lived a life of much misery, and he portrayed two characters who probably experienced more combined misery than any characters from ‘Great Literature’ short of a Dostoevsky novel. But both Cervantes and Don Quixote are testimony to the fact that there is a possibility that life, with all its bitter indignities and humiliations, is worth sticking around for until a ripe old age.
Cervantes also had more influence than Schubert on the history of the arts. Beethoven’s rough equivalent figure in literature – Christopher Marlowe – died when he was 29. In his absence, the idea that the author could be as important to a volume’s character and still portray characters of Shakespearean depth fell to Cervantes. Shakespeare and Cervantes lived their lives on calendars that were ten days apart, which created the illusion that they both died on the same day, April 23rd 1616, and together they make the twin poles of literature. Shakespeare, like Mozart, is virtually anonymous in his work – nobody could have much idea of either’s personality from their writing. But like Beethoven, Schubert, and Marlowe, Don Quixote is scrawled with the author’s commentary and force of personality on every page. In Shakespeare, like Mozart, the tragicomedy is in the characters. Mozart’s operas, like Shakespeare plays, teem with living, breathing characters. In Cervantes, like in Beethoven, the tragicomedy is in the author’s personality itself. Beethoven wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is more about ideals than characters. Cervantes’s novel has only two characters that matter, and the rest is simply carried along by the author’s grandiloquent personality. Shakespeare and Mozart seemed to draw characters out of thin air, but Cervantes and Beethoven couldn’t seem to create personalities outside of their own outsize ones, reflecting all their delusional aspirations. Who can doubt that when Don Quixote charged the Windmills, he was hearing the finale of Beethoven’s 5th in his head?

Quote of the Day:

Der Koosh: I know I forgot to carry the pi somewhere...

How To Play Slavonic Dances

Like this. Metronome be damned.

Quote of the Afternoon:

HaZmora: la donna e mobile is like the beatle's i want to hold your hand

Quote of the Day:

Der Koosh: I bet somewhere, little boys are touching themselves at just how beautiful it is outside ...Thoreau-worshiping bastards.

Quote of the Day:

The McBee: If Jim Henson designed a Muppet conductor, it would look almost exactly like Carlo Maria Giulini.

Friday Playlist #7: St. Patrick's Day Edition

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks



John McCormack: Angels Guard Thee



The Clancy Brothers: Whiskey You're the Devil



Extra Credit: Whiskey is the Life of Man

James Galway: Flight of the Bumble Bee



Thin Lizzy: Boys Are Back In Town



The Chieftains: Away We Go Again



Advanced Playlist:

Mussorgsky: Khovanshchina



So excited to see this in the movie theater tomorrow...

ah hell, one more...

Dances of Galanta by Zoltan Kodaly



(seeing this tonight at the Baltimore Symphony for the first time)

Nina Simone sings Randy Newman

beautiful.

h/t Der Fersko

Quote of the Day:

Der Fersko: I want to make a t-shirt that says E Pluribus Suckers

Quote of the Day:

The Harris: (I have a mind like a blocked toilet - it's full of stuff and I don't like to delve too deeply)

Friday Playlist #6: 30th Birthday Edition

Weird Al: Happy Birthday Song


Igor Stravinsky: Birthday Greeting for Pierre Monteux


Altered Images: Happy Birthday


Andrew Bird: Birthday Song


Aaron Copland: Birthday Song


Beatles: Birthday


Advanced Playlist

Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro - which I'm seeing at a revived Baltimore Opera tonight...not a bad present Mom and Bubbie, not bad at all.

800 Words: The Four Levels of Republican Insanity - Level 1: Mitt Romney - The Outcast as Aristocrat

It’s one of the oddest features of American culture that for over a century, the families who’ve risen to the very top of American ‘society’, with all its 19th century connotations of an aristocratic ‘WASP’ (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) class, were not at all WASP’s themselves. Both the Kennedy and Buckley families are almost purely Irish Catholic. The Rockefellers, the Bushes, the Lodges, the Alsops, have all intermarried with so many other ethnicities as to make them nearly indistinguishable in privileges from any other absurdly wealthy family. It’s now 2012, and the very idea of an exclusively WASP aristocracy is over a hundred years dated. It has not existed since the Roosevelts blew open the door to opportunities for everybody else.

And yet there are enormous reserves of people who persist in behaving as though it does. Remarkably, they rarely ever seen to be WASP’s themselves. For the most part, these are typical American ‘mutts’, occasionally even the children of immigrants themselves who preserve traditions like the Social Register, Polo, Country Clubs, and Cotillion - as though they denote special privileges in today’s American life. Perhaps they do, but so long as the membership is so inclusive, the exclusivity of such clubs is a mere shadow of what they were a century and a half ago (and Thank God for that).

Throughout his life, Mitt Romney exhibited an exceptionally divided identity. On the one hand, he is the chair of Bain Capital and Harvard Business/Law School graduate who spent two-and-a-half years in France during a period when he otherwise could have been drafted. On the other, he is the grandson of a Mexican compound - a Mormon outcast among Mormons who worked an extra job at Stanford so he could visit his future wife (when his father could have easily paid), personally mentored thousands of less privileged co-religionists. Is Mitt Romney at heart an aristocrat to the manner born or a poor Mormon boy doing his best WASP imitation, is he neither, or is he both?

His father was certainly a self-made man, exhibiting a Lyndon Johnson like drive to raise himself from poverty by any means necessary. George Romney also exhibited the self-made man’s need for attention, blurting out whatever came into his mouth, no matter how controversial. Rick Perlstein extemporized at length about the differences between the two Romneys better than I ever could. But there is one crucial observation he failed to emphasize: for the entirety of George Romney’s ‘68 Presidential campaign, Mitt was in France.

Mitt Romney was a not particularly distinguished boarding school student who no doubt was accepted to Stanford due to family connections. He lasted a single year, then absconded to Paris - was it for academic reasons or the draft? We’ll never know, but Romney eventually received an extremely high draft number. Was that luck or his father’s influence?

Romney’s outward personality does not bear much stamp of anything except over-privilege. But one thing is abundantly clear - during his missionary work in France, Mitt Romney found himself. A student who spent his formative years in prep schools and governor’s mansions suddenly came face to face with people rejecting of his religion, beaten up by a rugby team while defending two female missionaries from harassment, and in a near-fatal car accident that killed the wife of the French Missionary president (not his fault). But by the end of his sojourn in France, Romney was the co-leader of the French missionary, overseeing almost 200 subordinates and guiding them through the chaotic riots of May 1968. The young Mitt Romney did not find self-posession in academics, or athletics, or the arts, the young Mitt Romney discovered who he was through religion.

By the age of 21, Mitt Romney was accepted as a leader in the highest echelons of a religion from which his great-grandparents were virtually cast out as heretics for their polygamy. When people compare Mitt Romney’s Mormonism to John Kennedy’s Catholicism, they ignore one crucial matter - John Kennedy never exhibited much evidence of sincere Catholic piety (Bobby’s another matter), whereas Mitt Romney’s devotion seems to emanate from his pours. Would he take dictation from Salt Lake City? Probably not, but it’s certainly not ridiculous to ask.

In some senses, Romney missed the 1960’s (by which we really mean ‘67 to ‘74) almost completely. He was in France until 1969, and he then enrolled in Brigham Young University - a place where student protests were nearly non-extant. After the newly motivated Romney graduated from BYU with high honors, he enrolled in a dual MBA/law degree program at Harvard, from which he graduated with extreme distinction. Again, Romney missed the student controversy - as he lived during that period in Belmont, Mass with his wife and first two sons. To the best of his ability, he avoided all ideological entanglements in the dogged pursuit of success.



During the next two decades, Romney was very much a businessman - rising with meteoric speed through the ranks of Bain & Company, becoming a Vice President in his second year and becoming the founding leader of a spinoff company - Bain Capital - by year 7. In his time at Bain & Company, Romney was fundamentally a consultant, known for the brazen self-confidence of his presentations and the extreme prudence of his advice, thereby acquiring a reputation as one of the best consultants in the country. The purpose of Bain Capital was to be more than simply a consultant but a veritable partner in the company, each of which would utilize Bain’s streamlining techniques to maximize profits. But true to form, Romney foundered in his first two years as President of Bain Capital. He was so risk-averse that he rejected nearly every project he was offered. Romney would not even agree to be president of the company until he negotiated a position that would put him at absolutely zero financial risk. It was only in 1986 that Romney became convinced of the growing market for office supplies and made a major investment in Staples Inc. The partnership proved so wildly successful that Romney became a multi-millionaire and sat on the board of Staples for over a decade.

Once he made his fortune with Staples, Romney proved much less risk averse. Bain capital bought many well-known companies, held them for a few years while they applied the Bain Way (streamlining and downsizing), and then sold them off at a higher value. Many of the deals in which Romney invested proved wrong, and sometimes fatal to that company. But a few of his investments proved wildly successful, and both Romney and his stockholders reaped the dividend. Romney said a number of times that his only ultimate goal was to increase shareholder value. Neither employee satisfaction nor raw business production mattered, only the money held by stockholders themselves was germane to his business model. Romney may have missed the sixties, but he was at the very focal point of the eighties.

While the employees of the other companies might have bristled at the potential layoffs, Romney was rather beloved by his own company. He rarely took more than ten percent of deals for himself, always dealt fairly with his employees, and even refused to take any profits from Bain’s Artisan Entertainment deal, since he did not want to profit from rated-R movies.

All this while, Romney was also extremely active in the Mormon church - even refusing to take overnight trips so that he could always be on call for the Boston diocese. He was a Sunday school teacher, counseled troubled members of the community, helped other Church members with home maintenance, made hospital calls, and made sure that the diocese’s finances were well cared for. Many people in the community loved him, others bristled at what they perceived as an autocratic streak which did not accommodate most deviations from church dogma. Just as in his business approach, Romney seemed cared for those under him, but only to a point. He had a extraordinarily strict sense of duty, and as he did with his employees, he seemed to look after parishioners much as a principled member of the landed gentry would to his serfs. He always ensured that they were well cared for to the best of his ability, but with a refusal to tolerate anyone acting in a manner above their station.

For two decades, Mitt Romney lived in the state of Massechussets as a registered Independent. He only switched his affiliation to Republican in 1993, sensing that Ted Kennedy was particularly vulnerable, he went after the Senate seat Kennedy held already for thrity years. When the Kennedy tried to give him a ‘conservative’ stigma for liberal Massechussets, Romney could simply counter that he was an independent for all those years and could not be held responsible for the policies of Reagan and Bush. Romney eventually lost, but he provided the only serious challenge of Kennedy’s career.

By 1999, Romney was in the midst of something resembling a mid-life crisis. His parents had both recently died, his wife was diagnosed with MS, and risk averse as ever, he still felt listless from his Senatorial loss. Romney finally regained his ‘groove’ by becoming chair of the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Olympics, previously $379 million short of its fundraising benchmarks, arrived in 2002 with a $100 million profit in spite of an extra $300 million being required for security. The overall budget of the Olympics, including highway and transit, exceeded $2.4 billion. Four months after 9/11, Romney presided over America’s first incontrovertible triumph. From there, anything was possible.


(This man is the probable Republican nominee...)

Political office was the next obvious step. But rather than run for governor in the reliably conservative Utah, Romney chose to run in Massachusetts. Romney immediately branded himself as a progressive and unpartisan Republican. When Romney became governor in 2003, the State of Massachusetts faced a $3 billion dollar deficit. Through a combination of liscence fee increases, spending cuts, and closing corporate tax loopholes, Romney ended his term with a surplus of more than $600 million.

Romney’s appointments were universally hailed as nonpartisan and expert, and he used them for surprisingly non-ideological purposes - even for a moderate Republican. Romney may not have supported the idea of universal health care himself, but when faced with the option of paying back $400 million in federal grants because too many uninsured poor people were benefiting from government-run health care, he elected to enact universal healthcare rather than pay back the money. He may not have supported gay civil unions, but he realized that it might the only way to stem the immediate demand for gay marriage. Perhaps he actually believed in both, but it’s equally possible that he viewed both as practical accommodations to the liberal ideological pressures he faced as Governor of Massachusetts.

Arthur Schlesinger once posited that there are two basic kinds of conservatism. Both originate from the rather authoritarian idea that there is a central source from which power and privilege emanate which must at all costs be preserved. But these two types of conservatism diverge on their attitudes toward those less fortunate. The first type regards it as a moral obligation to look after the less fortunate. A nobleman sees the serfs under him as his property, and therefore he must take good care of his property. They can never be his equal, but they must always be provided for. Schlesinger called this kind of conservatism ‘Aristocratic Conservatism,’ which was the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The second type sees no moral obligation to look after the less fortunate. ‘We provide for ourselves,’ they reason, ‘so let them provide for themselves. And if they cannot, it is not our obbligation to help them.’ Schlesinger called this conservatism ‘Plutocratic Conservatism’, which was the conservatism of William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge. Mitt Romney has repeatedly shown himself to have leanings of the former type: always concern oneself with the less fortunate, but always ensure that they remember their station. For better or worse, this sort of conservatism - with its inherent elitism - is virtually banished from contemporary American Conservatism. Romney was just barely born into the upper class, and he has all the desire to maintain a facade of elitism which only those not born into it can have. The very idea of an American elite seems somehow ‘Un-American’, and has not been how anyone views this country in nearly a hundred years. Yet some people, people like Mitt Romney, feel the need to preserve that tradition. It is far preferable to some alternatives, but in 2012, it seems pretty silly.

In some sense, Romney exhibits almost the exact reverse pathologies from Bill Clinton. Over his career, Bill Clinton seems to have embraced every ideology during a period when most Democratic politicians almost eschewed ideology itself. At heart, Clinton is probably made of the same neo-liberal technocratic timbre as Michael Dukakis and Sam Nunn. But at various points in his career, he seemed almost pan-ideological, selling himself as liberal to liberals, conservative to conservatives and everything in between. Mitt Romney seems to have embraced no ideology at all during a period when the ideology of Republican politicians means everything. So if Bill Clinton has a need to seem pan-ideological, then Mitt Romney’s need is to appear aideological - with an almost pathological need to be apart from whatever ‘ism’ holds sway at the moment, and to avoid all personal entanglements that might detract from his goals. Whereas Bill Clinton was the child of poor outcasts who presented himself as a ‘democrat’ (deliberately lower-case) who could appeal to all groups, Mitt Romney is the child of a poor outcast who presents himself as an Aristocrat (deliberately upper-case) who is above the petty problems of ideology. And whereas Clinton went further than all others by giving in to unrestrained appetites and refusing to be disciplined, Romney may go just as far through nothing but restraint and discipline.

The end effect of these two opposite pathologies is almost exactly alike. We can reasonably assume that like Clinton, Mitt Romney would be a competent, practically minded president with one eye directed towards results and the other away from visionary thinking. There are certainly appealing qualities to this kind of president. But if Clinton’s presidency was hidebound by the ideological certainties of conservatives, how much more hogtied will Romney be when he can’t even depend upon liberal support for being the lesser of two evils? Bill Clinton depended on conservatives to not block his agenda, Romney depends upon Conservatives for his very election. His insanity comes from the thought that he can govern in a practical manner against a party so hogtied to so much ideology. During his years at Bain Capital, he might have made a genuinely good president. But there is no such thing as a sane man in an insane world.

Quote of the Day:

(On Roberto Benigni's Oscar Acceptance Speech)
me: that was better than his movie (meaning Life is Beautiful)
Der Koosh: so is a steaming pile of my cat's recently-released stool
your point?

800 Words: The Four Levels of Republican Insanity Part 1

Politics, like life, is the art of the possible. We cannot simply dream things and expect that they will become our reality. The ability to achieve our dreams involves years, sometimes decades, of hard work. It involves an infinite number of possible setbacks and compromises along the way. The achievement of our dreams neither guarantees that we achieve a reality precisely as we dreamed it, nor is there any guarantee that the achievement of our dreams was worth all the hard work to we subjected ourselves so that we might see them a reality.

Today’s Democrats and Republicans find themselves on opposite sides of dreaming’s problems. What remains remarkable about the two’s approach to dreaming is how easily the Democrats’ problems are to solve, and how intractable Republican problems will prove.

For the first time in over a generation, Democratic politicos have to face the uncomfortable reality that their dreams are taking shape in reality. Universal Health Care may not be a reality, but it’s 45 million people closer than it’s been in after a hundred years of trying. Extraordinary rendition may not be banned, but one of the two wars is over, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and American torture chambers are (so far as we know) a thing of the past. Obama has withdrawn support from dictatorships, reduced nuclear weapon stockpiles, raised fuel efficiency standards, raised funding to prevent violence against women, helped gay marriage to pass in eight states (so far, YAY MARYLAND!), raised fuel efficiency standards, begun to redivide commercial and investment banks, lifted the ban on stem cell research, begun the rebuilding of American industry, prohibited insurance and credit card malpractice, cut taxes for small businesses ,and about to enact a tax increase on the top 1%. Is it everything liberals and Democrats want? Of course not. Reality is never as easy as it seems in dreams, and the process of making all these things happen will take another 40 years. Our generation has the potential for liberalism to dominate as it has not done in half a century. But even then, some of our fondest dreams will not be achieved, and those which were achieved might look like terrible mistakes in retrospect. History fools us all, and what seems like a great solution might be terrible in hindsight. But what is clear is that liberals have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to present their view of the world to the public. Some initiatives will not pass, others will not work. We think our view of the world is better than others, but we have no way of proving that our solutions work until we try them in reality. So to those who are frustrated that Democrats have not achieved more in the first three years of the Obama era....

DEAL WITH IT!

The Republicans, however, have a very different problem. One that might take fifty years to come to terms with. Republicans had nearly a half-century to impose their worldview on the country (and by extension, the world), and contrary to what many of them believe, they succeeded brilliantly. If the policies they enacted have failed, it’s not because they were incorrectly implemented. It’s because their policies were bad policies.

From Roosevelt until John Kennedy, the marginal income tax rate (every dollar over $250,000) was over 88%. In 2012, there is no longer a marginal income tax, and no rich person (basically over $400,000 in yearly income) ever pays more than 35% of salaried income, and no more than 15% on capital gains - which is where most of wealthy people’s income originates. Meanwhile, the national debt now tops $14 trillion and American’s personal debts are nearly twice that.

In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president, not only refused to intervene in either Hungary or Suez, but threatened sanctions on those who did. Eisenhower reasoned that it was against the United States’s interests to provoke the wrath of the Soviet Union in two places where the United States had few vital strategic interests. By doing what he did, a potential World War III was avoided. He did this against the strenuous objections of the Republican party, and particularly John Foster Dulles and Allan Dulles, the hawkish brothers whom he appointed to head the State Department and the CIA. In 1982, Ronald Reagan announced a nearly uniltateral invasion of Lebanon to stop the sending of Ketusha rockets into Israel and stabilize the pro-Western Lebanese government. He achieved neither objective. In 2003, George W. Bush invaded Iraq, a country proven to have so little interaction with al-Qaeda as to be of no consequence. The Iraqi national government remains on the precipice of chaos, and the war has cost an additional 110,000 lives to the 1 million already killed by Saddam Hussein.


Dearest Conservatives,

A list like this could go on for the length of a book. The point is this: you got what you wanted. You had your chance. This is exactly what success looks like. I know you think that this is a small pittance compared to all the policies you’d like to enact, but life doesn’t get better than the way you’ve had it for the last forty years. If your policies were good, they’d have worked. Your policies were tried, and all of us seem to agree now that you’ve failed to make America a better society. So America will now try something different for a while.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the four different responses to this dreaming. Not surprisingly, they are thoroughly explicable through the four remaining Republican candidates.

Correction: In an earlier draft of this I said Guantanamo is closed. That is clearly not the case, there are still 171 prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

Friday Playlist #5: Borschtbelt Comic TV Edition

Sid Caesar: The Clock


Closest Modern Equivalent: Tina Fey (I'm serious)

Milton Berle: Sparring with Sidney Shpritzer


Closest Modern Equivalent: Conan O'Brien

George Burns and Gracie Allen: Two Scenes


Closest Modern Equivalent: Any Male/Female Double Act, didn't exist before them.

Jack Benny:


Closest Modern Equivalent: Stephen Colbert

Ernie Kovacs: Chef Miklos Molnar


Closest Modern Equivalent: Tracy Ullman

Henny Youngman: On the Steve Allen Show


Closest Modern Equivalent: Mitch Hedberg

Advanced Playlist:
Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (on Parks and Recreation Tonight)
The Two Thousand Year Old Man







Closest Modern Equivalent: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner

Quote of the Day:

Le Malon: EVERY USE OF PERD HAPLEY IS GOOD