Mini-Cast #11 - Assassins by Stephen Sondheim - Rough Draft - Too Long

I've seen Assassins live twice, and both times the thought occurred to me: could we be arrested merely for watching this?

Threatening to kill a President is still a Federal Offense: a Class-E felony under United States Code Title 18 Section 871. It is illegal to make “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Personally, I think that’s a violation of Free Speech that can make willing martyrs of insane people who could be provoked to commit mass murder by a parking ticket. But during the Obama Era, perhaps these free speech violations made at least a slight bit of sense, and now that we're living in the Trump era, well... let's not go down this road...

But whether you see it during the Obama era or the Trump era, you can’t see a creation as explosively relevant to our time as any work could ever hope to be, and not see that at some point this work has the power to change our world in the blink of an eye.

The change might ultimately be for the good or ill or a mix of both, but in an American era when nearly 300 million guns are held for private use, when Presidents of both parties are routinely compared to Nazis, when a day with mass shootings is practically the rule rather than the exception, there is no work of art that could possibly have more explosive power than this. This is the rare work of art that does precisely what Plato warned against in The Republic. It practically puts the gun in assailant’s hands.

Assassins is an unholy blast of drama that could be written by Satan himself. It is America’s answer to Macb*th. It’s practically an incitement to terrorism. It shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the American Dream was built upon dirt and shit, and does nothing to console us with any redeeming vision. It shows us that the “other” America of people’s nightmares is the true America, and that we’re all just fooling ourselves if we think the world is anything better than the world brought upon us by these agents of the abyss.

When Assassins premiered in the week before Christmas 1990, the mood in America was as happy as ever since the end of World War II. After forty-three years of worry that the Soviet Union could incinerate us in an instant, the Cold War was finally done and we were the victors. The Persian Gulf War was humming along ‘peacefully,’ its resolution in clear sight. It was the first moment since Vietnam when everyone but the most hardened Leftists agreed that the exercise of American power was a concept for good, not evil.

The reviews against Assassins were crushing and the show closed after 73 performances - respectable for anybody but a composer whose every work seemed as though it turned to gold. Eleven years later, it was slated for a Broadway revival in October 2001. I needn't tell you what happened...

This is a musical with all the trappings that have been in place since Rodgers and Hammerstein, that depicts more than a century’s worth of famous terrorists - terrorists always motivated by fanaticism and pathological loneliness, nihilists like Edmund from King Lear and the Underground Man and the Joker, who want nothing more than to spread chaos and suffering. Fifty years before Assassins, Rogers and Hammerstein gave Oklahoma, a vision of boundless hope - in Assassins, the American Musical comes full circle with a vision of endless despair.

This is the musical that depicted Sam Byck, whom, thirty years before 9/11, attempted the hijack of a commercial airliner to ram the White House. This is a musical that shows Charles Guiteau, the Christian fanatic who killed James Garfield, anticipating his death with all the ecstasy of a suicide bomber: according to the famous drama critic, Frank Rich - “you find yourself wondering if he’s expecting 72 black-eyed virgins as his posthumous reward.”

Or just consider some of the lyrics to what is aptly called ‘The Gun Song’:

“When you think what must be done/Think of all that it can do

Remove a scoundrel/Unite a party/Preserve the Union/Promote the sales of my book

Ensure my future/My niche in history/And then the world will see/That I am not a man to overlook...”

Is Assassins truly good enough to sustain a comparison to Macbeth or King Lear? I have no idea. What I do know is that like even lesser Shakespeare plays, Sondheim’s words are like a hallucinogen in which you can immerse yourself to a consciousness altering state. The pure voluptuous pleasure of hearing so many ideas fly past you at light speed is something you can only otherwise get from Shakespeare and Mozart. Yes, Sondheim’s that good, and I envy anybody who has yet to fall in love with his work.

Like Shakespeare and Mozart, like Tolstoy and Beethoven, Chekhov and (ahem) The Simpsons, Sondheim always leads you home. Every dark moment is balanced with a light one, every lofty sentiment with pure vulgarity, every piece of realism balanced with surreal magic. It speaks to the mastery of this creator who holds a mirror up to Nature that Sondheim has the balance which you can only find in the very most immortal.

But while other works of Sondheim, with all their cynicism and heartlessness, can still hit you squarely in the feels, Assassins has pure acid and black bile in place of its heart. It begins and ends with the song "Everybody's got the right...", the right to happiness; and since everybody has the right, everybody also has the right to kill the President... Sweeney Todd, often called the ‘Great American Opera’, is similarly dark, but it’s just a warmup act for what we get in Assassins. In Sweeney, there is always a wink, a nod, something that assures us that this is all a fairy tale or a Grand Guignol melodrama, a delightful nightmare. It pulls the cape away with a whoosh, and we realize it's all a joke.Assassins shows us a world where you can kid about the darkest subjects, only to pull the cape away again, and reveal to us at all that there was no joke at all.

Assassins is a comedy so black that it ceases to be funny. It’s so light that half the lines in the musical could probably be interpreted as laugh lines, but the stakes are American History itself. The purpose of Sweeney Todd is to make a delightful assault on the audience to enjoy the dark underbelly of human nature, but the purpose of Assassins is to insidiously worm its way into our souls until it can eat away at our faith in humanity.

But while watching Assassins this time, something shocked me. The customary wordplay, the mile-a-minute ideas in Sondheim's lyrics, they were all gone. The songs themselves were self-effacing to the point that I'm not sure there was any self left. The entirety of the heavy lifting Assassins is done in John Weidman's book, itself based on a play by Charles Gilbert Jr. Perhaps it's intentional that Sondheim severely mutes his palette, and so knows good theater when he sees it that all he needs to do is provide an ironic score that with different lyrics just as easily serve as the music for a Rogers and Hammerstein style show about the childhood of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan.

But since Sondheim had exhibited so little of his customary invention, perhaps it should come as no surprise that after Assassins, Sondheim’s industry slowed to a trickle. Three years later came Passion, which is generally regarded as his final great work. Since then, this once unconquerable master who seemed to churn out another masterpiece every three years has ground to a halt, just two shows in the last twenty years, both endlessly workshopped and retooled, with lukewarm reviews at every showing.

There's no shame in a creative block, particularly when you're an old man who was as productive when young as Sondheim was. But an unfortunate part of being a great artist is great luck, and Sondheim had luck past nearly any American. The rest of us would like to fancy ourselves more like Stephen Sondheim, but in terms of our luck and abilities if not our motives and plans, perhaps we're closer to Charles Guiteau.

Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - First Half - Much Too Long

It's still too soon to know much definitive about the atrocities transpired between Turkey and the Kurds in light of Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one for whose blood stains America's hands because of and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how the incompetence, of George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion, or perhaps even its very existence, now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times with a million dead for whom there is hopefully an afterlife where he must answer for it; or about how even Obama may bare enormous culpability for our new conundrums. How Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama put the final nail in the Arab Spring's coffin by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by not doing so he may have propelled the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that his non-interference in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

None of these notions about the Obama presidency, even Obama's downplaying Putin's threat, can be pronounced with anything like complete certainty. But if we truly mean to examine our own role in the world, we have to entertain the possibility that the truth will never stop shocking us.

I'm not jumping us down any of those rabbitholes today, and the longer I can put off facing these questions, some of which are uncomfortable in the extreme for both listener and podcaster, the better off both I will be and my few listeners whom I don't want to alienate by chasing the most controversial subjects right away. The difference between being gifted at understanding politics and being incompetent at it is the difference between people whose predictions come true three out of ten times, and people whose predictions come true two out of ten times, and the same goes for the private sector.

Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity and lots of help from wikipedia, is a history of the Kurds:

Nobody is genuinely certain about their origin, but the Sumerian tablets of 5,000 years ago refer to 'The Land of Karda', somewhere in what we now call the Anatolian peninsula, a protrusion that is Asia's western-most point and basically comprises the two-thirds of modern Turkey that are not disputed by Armenians. The Kurds use a calendar that dates from what we would call 612 BC, the climactic event of their civilization, meaning the same definitive occurrence like how the Western world's is the birth of Christ, is when the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was conquered by an ancient Iranian people called the Medes, a peoplehood hailing from North-Western Iran. Led by King Cyaxares, the Median Empire stretched at this time across the entire Iranian Plateau - to the West the Zagros mountains that bisect Iran and Iraq, to the north the Armenian Highlands and the Caucuses Mountains, to the South the Caspian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, and to the East the Indus River of Pakistan. This basically means, at least it does to the Kurds, that a little more than 2500 years ago, the vast majority of everything that lies between the Middle East on one side and India on the other was Kurdish property. As we have George Washington and the English have King Arthur, the historico-mythic father figure of the Median people, and therefore perhaps the Kurds as well, is the king Cyaxares, who was greatly praised by Heroditus. When he was born, Media was ruled by the Scythians, Cyaxares killed the Scythian leaders, threw off Scythian control of Media, and proclaimed himself king. He then reorganized the Median army, allied himself with the Babylonian Empire, and even made peace and an alliance with the Scythians, so that he could overthrow the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This is, as we said, the climactic event in Median/Kurdish history, and afterwards, Cyaxares conquered Northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and most of modern Turkey's eastern half.

Minicast #10 - How to Be a Dictator - Very Rough Draft

In a fit of manic fascination, I took out ten biographies out from the library, nearly all of which are well over five-hundred pages. After three weeks of Jewish holidays and an automatic renewal, I'm finally finishing biography #2 - Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I'm disappointed to say that it's a rather dull book which I've persisted with for fear of the precedent it will set that I can start still more books without finishing them. I don't know the actual figure, but I like to say that I read 400 books a year and finish seven.

Scholarly writing is, by its nature, a little dry. There are only so many ways to make a subject interesting to the layman when a scholar is beholden to the truth. The truth always conspires to make reality duller than we inevitably wish. There's usually no great conspiracy, no grand illumination, no sudden explicator which sets the truth out to us in a lacerating revelation of fire. Yet simultaneously, reality grounds a book to the point that our flights of fancy can weed out the true believers. The dullest books of all are usually the ones which excite a cult of the initiated. If we're part of the cult, the hidden meanings are endless, but if we're not, and it takes decades of study to understand the cult's fascination, there is no more boring experience. I could name a hundred thinkers for whom that's true, and I'm sure many listeners could do the same.

But substantial biographies are, by their nature, as grounded in the mundane realities of the moment as any book can be, and as such, give ample opportunities for a writer to set exciting scenes. You would think that the most effective mass murderer in European history would give ample opportunities for this kind of scene-building, but no, this biography is completely concerned with the little details of Kremlin intrigues - who was up, who was down, why Stalin had this or that one shot. So told is this story from the inside that one often forgets that this clique killed up to 25% of their own population!

What this biography does make clear is something scholars of all kinds have gone to enormous lengths to disprove - which is that Stalin was a dictator in every sense. He did not delegate. He controlled everything. He read everything. His instructions were detailed to the dotted i on every subject. Stalin was just as evil as Hitler, and in many ways just as unstable a personality. But if he lasted decades longer than Hitler, no small reason is because he made sure to become an extremely meticulous authority every subject. Hitler, as Montefiore notes and many before him, was a political gambler who ascended to power by daring the most enormous risks during a period when World War I left his opponents congenitally timid. Stalin, on the other hand, was a man who inhaled details before he made any decision at all. He ascended to power by being Lenin's General Secretary, basically a Chief of Staff to whom , and by the time Lenin died, so many of Lenin's advisors were Stalin appointments that it was a given Stalin would be his heir, even though Lenin warned in a memo against Stalin's election in the most ominous manner. Beginning with Stalin, the party's 'General Secretary' was the dictator.

Stalin was many evil things, but his evil compounded itself exponentially by the fact that he was very much a genius. I had generally assumed it a myth that Stalin took it upon himself to personally guide the development of every major artist in the Soviet Union, but after reading this biography, there's no question: it's no myth at all. Most dictators, perhaps most politicians, fancy themselves intellectuals. But eyewitness accounts state that Stalin read something like four-hundred pages a day on average, apparently not including government memos, and he was extremely eager to discuss his reading with the country's most distinguished intellectuals, whose work he of course watched like a hawk to ensure intellectuals came to the conclusions he desired. Intellectuals, probably out of Stockholm syndrome, consulted him all the time, and the more terrified they were of him, the more often they wrote him. Stalin, like a true Orwellian dictator, occupied their thoughts, and the more thoughts a person has, the more thoughts among them totalitarian can occupy.

This is where I should mention that famous dictum from Thomas Carlyle in 'On Heroes' where he introduced the 'Great Man Theory of History' which states: 'Find in any country the ablest man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him; you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit."

In the Age of Trump, this theory begins again to look better than risible. If democracy ends up giving us an authoritarian anyway, who in their right mind would not give up an election or two to ensure that the dictator is at least competent.

Yet at the same time, intellect has many, many limitations. And there is no better example of this than Stalin - who famously said: 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' Stalin and Lenin both were men of colossal intelligence, they understood that if they wanted to completely remake a society, they had to liquidate the people within it. But you cannot remake society without destroying it. How was Stalin to know how to properly arm for war against Hitler when he'd liquidated his entire general staff? How was Stalin to meet his farm production quotas when he'd liquidated the entire merchant class twice over who knew how to manage the farms? And how was Stalin to survive the sickness that killed him when he'd liquidated all the best doctors in the USSR? In so many ways, the greater the intelligence, the greater the capacity for stupidity.

Stalin was as meticulous as a human being becomes, but his pathological need to understand every detail was due in part to the grand sweeping theory of historical materialism that attracted him to the life of the mind to begin with. As the man who went further to put Marx into practice than any human being ever had, and ties with Mao for ever did, he had to master the details that not even Lenin concerned himself with nearly as much. But when so much mastery and control is put into the service of an overarching theory so obviously wrong, the detailed mastery can only serve to warp people's lives still moreso, not less. And this is why, (discover concluding sentence...)

Hillbilly Elegy - INEP

Minicast #1

Zubin: A Musical Retrospective

For the Times of Israel

Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - New Beginning

It's much too soon to know anything definitive about the atrocities transpiring between Turkey and the Kurds, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one for whose blood stains America's hands because of Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how the incompetence, of George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion, or perhaps even its very existence, now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times with a million dead for whom there is hopefully an afterlife where he must answer for it; or about how even Obama may bare enormous culpability for our new conundrums. How Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama put the final nail in the Arab Spring's coffin by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by not doing so he may have propelled the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that his non-interference in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

None of these notions about the Obama presidency, even Obama's downplaying Putin's threat, can be pronounced with anything like complete certainty. But if we truly mean to examine our own role in the world, we have to entertain the possibility that the truth will never stop shocking us.

I'm not jumping us down any of those rabbitholes today, and the longer I can put off facing these questions, some of which are uncomfortable in the extreme for both listener and podcaster, the better off both I will be and my few listeners whom I don't want to alienate by chasing the most controversial subjects right away. The difference between being gifted at understanding politics and being incompetent at it is the difference between people whose predictions come true three out of ten times, and people whose predictions come true two out of ten times, and the same goes for the private sector.

Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity, is a history of the Kurds:

Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - Beginning

It's much too soon to know anything definitive about the atrocities transpiring between Turkey and the Kurds, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one perpetrated by Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times. or about how Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama not only ruined the last chance for the Arab Spring to take hold permanently by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by doing so he may have taken the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that he almost certainly emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

We're not jumping down any of those rabbitholes today. Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity, is a history of the Kurds:

Mini-Cast #8 - Who Will Mourn Harold Bloom? - Rough Draft

Few people will mourn Harold Bloom who aren't dead already. It's amazing he made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.

Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...), and it's possible that the literary pages of every magazine (if they still exist) will fill entire back halves with dozens of other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher, and his most fawning students will pretend to be shocked at the extent of it. He was the pope from which the church seceded - a living embodiment of apolitical aesthetic worship. The church had hardly any new saints, and most of the new saints were just modernist updates of the old saints. The profiles by former students who earned his favor were practically hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on an essential question: what did he actually teach?

In his long dotage, Bloom was not a teacher or a thinker, he was a religious cleric, a preacher of literature's church in a revival tent, and by the time I came of age as a reader, the extent of his literary output was just book after book of literary cheerleading. When he was a young man, Bloom clearly had ideas. Everybody who's dipped into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, and the idea is a little ridiculous - that great poets wrestle with their greatest predecessors in a kind of Freudian struggle to declare independence from father-figures. If you take it as a metaphor, I suppose it yields insight when it helps you perceive how artists might have transformed the material of their predecessors, but if you read it literally, it's ridiculous, inspiration comes from literally any facet of life, and we still have no idea how the brain conjures inspiration; and yet as Bloom never tired of admitting in one of his many self-contradictions, literary theory is itself ridiculous. No one in their right mind would read the theory behind a work you love when you can experience the work again.

The point of the arts is not to be a tool to better understand politics or religion or ideology or sociology or systemic injustice or mythical archetypes... the point of art is to create something meaningful where nothing used to be. Once all the interpretations of theorists both Christian and Marxist expire which Shakespeare and Mozart and Rembrandt inspire, the primary works still remain, with new interpretations for the concerns of new generations. Artistic meaning can be reside within all those fields of study, but attempts to pigeonhole art's purpose within the realm of those other fields make art a servant of propaganda - and this is a practice indulged in as often by right-wing intellectuals as it is by left-wing, all of whom Bloom loathed and they loathed him back seventy-seven fold.

If my contempt for Bloom was slightly loving in spite of itself, then what I admired was mostly that he had all the right enemies. To be perfectly honest, I own more than a half-dozen of his books, and I still occasionally dip into them, mostly for suggestions for other books to read, because it's not like I could make heads or tails of much. I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am, but for a reader who could read thousands of books in his memory, Bloom was a shockingly bad writer - his critical judgments were simultaneously imperious and incoherent, his tone both egotistical and self-pitying, and his prose only compelling when he hurled invective. I agreed with many of the insults, but it's a sad person indeed who likes another only for hating everybody you hate.

Bloom mounted every defense for keeping the gates of high art up a critic could possibly mount, and by defending it so strenuously, he did as much as anyone to collapse the gate he claimed to defend. The question among intelligentsia used to be if it's a good use of one's time for a person who loves Dickens to read Bradbury and Tolkein, we now live in a world where the intelligentsia asks if its a good use of one's time to read Dickens if you love X-Men.

By not conceding that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (art), we're now long since living in a world where the 'A-words' are 'anything at all you like.' Even the quote/unquote 'postmodern' world of 'art is anything goes' is now dying, and perhaps we're now moving into a world where the 'A-word' is 'anything that promotes my values.' And by not conceding that a writer of differing identity can bring a valuable perspective by virtue of their uniqueness, he lent legitimacy to all his enemies who claimed that the perspective of the traditional geniuses is all the same by virtue of their white male privilege.

I had an indulgent contempt for Bloom, he was the guardian who fell asleep at the wheel. By his ilk refusing to regard anything which smacked of popular culture as worthy of serious consideration, who can be surprised that so many current millions regard anything that smacks of high culture as unworthy of serious consideration? The 'arts' as they've been practiced for three-thousand years are now a cultural backwater which have little to do with contemporary life as it's now lived.

It's ultimately fine that the literature most people now consume is TV, the music is electronic, the poetry is song lyrics, the theater is movies, the art is graphic novels and animation and cinematography. All of those new arts have long since proven their worthiness. But why is there so little place in common discourse for all five of those arts as they have always been practiced? Is the reason partially that people are simply lazy and uncurious? Of course. But that can't be the whole reason. Part of the story is how ignorant and insensitive the gatekeepers were to new developments. If you live too much in the past, the present evolves without your input.

And now that we live in a world where the study of art's long history as its own reward is barely acknowledged, we begin to live again in an era when art is a servant to other forces. We've been here many times before, and no matter how good and pure the intentions of the first generation ideologues, lots of people will eventually attach themselves whose intentionality is bad indeed. It's a shame, history is suddenly littered with the remains of artistic works that would alert people to these dangers.

Mini-Cast #8: Who Will Miss Harold Bloom - Rough Beginning

Few people will mourn Harold Bloom who aren't dead already. It's amazing he made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.

Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...), and for the next month, the literary pages of every magazine (if they still exist) will probably fill entire back halves with dozens of other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher. He was the pope from which the church seceded - a living embodiment of the apolitical, aesthetic worship. The church had hardly any new saints, and most of the new saints were just modernist updates of the old saints. The profiles by former students who earned his favor were practically hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on an essential question: what did he actually teach?

When he was a young man, Bloom clearly had ideas. Everybody who's dipped into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, and the idea is a little ridiculous. Yet as Bloom never tired of saying in one of his many self-contradictions, literary theory is itself ridiculous. No one in their right mind would read the theory behind it when you can experience the work itself.


To be perfectly honest, I own more than a half-dozen of his books, I occasionally dip into them, mostly for suggestions for other books to read, because it's not like I understood much of the content. For a reader who could read thousands of books in his memory, Bloom was a shockingly bad writer.

In every two-sided quarrel, both sides inevitably perceive one another's flaws.

I had a kind of loving contempt for Bloom, but I dread his successors.

Mini-Cast #7 - What Does a Great Conductor Do? Take 1 of Doubtless Many.... Rough Draft

(Play from where the link goes until hard cut at 19:33)

It's one of the hardest passages for a conductor. Near the end of the first movement of Bruckner's seventh symphony, a movement I've often imagined to be a depiction of heaven - the divine light, the play of angels on clouds, the ascension of the newly deceased to their reception into eternity.

It's almost impossible to hear properly on a recording, but getting this right in concert is the difference between noise and an array of musical colors that few other pieces could ever release. As the soul ascends toward the gates of St. Peter, the music of the strings and high winds ascends in tones higher, and higher, and higher, in the kind of longing and ecstasy that is Bruckner's alone among musicians. And in order to get a sense of just how high we have soared, the double basses and timpani intones a pedal point E in their lowest octave - as if to show how distant earth is from heaven.

But in most performances, you can't hear that low-E. Double bass is a very quiet instrument, and if a timpani roll gets too loud, it sounds like distortion. And yet in the performance I heard on Saturday night, the low-E was as pellucid as a triangle, yet the basses were not even playing. It must have been played by the tuba, though I couldn't see the tuba player from my seat. The conductor, Marek Janowski, must have rescored it, and it must be a ferociously difficult note for a tuba to play for so long, but orchestral musicians have much better technique today than they did in Bruckner's day. For anyone who knows basic orchestration, this solution should be obvious, and yet I'm not aware anybody had ever thought of it.

Nearly three years ago, I heard the legendary Daniel Barenboim conduct a performance of this symphony that was magnificent, but this particular moment dissolved in gibberish. Barenboim is a master of phrasing and voice leading and context, but no one ever hailed him as a master of technique. Yet Marek Janowski is such a master craftsman that he thought of a solution better than any thought up by Bruckner and perhaps any other conductor. This is the kind of thing a true maestro knows how to do.

Every concertgoer has asked this question for two hundred years: what does a conductor do? The answer is not so easy, because the job description of a conductor is so nebulous that a conductor can pretty much make up his job as he goes along. Think of it as a baseball manager or football coach, the low-key way that Joe Torre managed a team was almost the opposite of the high-octane intensity of Tony La-Russa. Both managers clearly were extremely successful, but their success depended on the responsiveness of the players they faced. Some workers are more motivated by bosses who let them figure things out for themselves, other workers require a boss who corrects their every move. Everybody is different, and success depends upon the organization's culture, and the director's ability to read the kind of boss their players require for the best results.

I was not a normal kid. During the two or three years of my childhood when I didn't long to be an orchestra conductor, I dreamed of being a baseball manager. As I got older, the more similarities there seemed between these two childhood obsessions. For better or worse, the performing arts have about the same success rate as baseball. Just as with batting averages, even the elite among musicians and actors will only get a hit 3 out of 10 times, and will only hit a home run one in fifteen times. In a lifetime, we all fail many more times than we succeed.

The recreative artists who give the appearance of universal success, like Carlos Kleiber or Daniel Day-Lewis, can only do so in artificial circumstances. They're so selective about their projects that there's no true sample size in their work.

Conducting is not a profession as rife with frauds as some allege, but there are many who are more mediocre than their reputations. A conductor great at every performance is a myth. Most good conductors, like any performer, have a couple dozen substantial works at most which they know well enough to excel, and everything else is a crapshoot.

And like in every profession, the best of all are almost never superstars. To be a superstar, you have to at least be good, but performers become superstars because they choose music that draws more attention to them than to the music. Yet music expresses so much more than sensory overload. I've heard Valery Gergiev give a Tchaikovsky 5 that could light up a whole city, and in the same concert he conducted a Tchaikovsky's Romeo whose playing came so unglued I thought they'd stop the piece and start over. I've heard Yannick Nezet-Seguin give a Petrushka for the ages, but in subtler music like Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok, he exhibited no understanding of what makes the music compelling. The same was once true about Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan. The really great ones, who are always studying more music as a matter of course and can find the music in the music of any time or place like Markus Stenz and Francois-Xavier Roth and Vladimir Jurowski, or Kubelik, Fricsay, or Mackerras during the Karajan era, were rarely noticed by the public unless they guested at your local orchestra. They're too curious about great music to keep playing the flashy pieces that make you remember them more than the music.

Occasionally you get a musical genius up there like Leonard Bernstein and Daniel Barenboim who can find the music in anything, but the nature of genius is that their brains work differently, and they can't always transmit their extraordinary understanding. On any given night, Lenny and Danny could be as risible as they were magnificent the night before. Is a conductor like Barenboim more valuable than a conductor like Marek Janowski, whose revelations are very subtle, but who never fails spectacularly?

In short, what does a great conductor do? After more than thirty years of being fascinated by great conductors, I still have no idea.

Mini-Cast #7: What Does a Great Conductor Do? - First Two Thirdsish

It's one of the hardest passages for a conductor. Near the end of the first movement of Bruckner's seventh symphony, which I've often imagined to be a depiction of heaven - the divine light, the play of the angels and cherubs on clouds, the ascension of the virtuous newly deceased for their welcome to eternity.

It's almost impossible to hear properly on a recording, but getting this right in concert is the difference between noise and an array of musical colors that few other pieces could ever release. As the soul ascends toward God himself, the music of the strings and high winds ascends in tones higher, and higher, and higher, in the kind of longing and ecstasy that is Bruckner's alone among musicians. And in order to get a sense of just how high we have soared, the double basses and timpani intones a pedal point E in their lowest octave - as if to show how distant earth is from heaven.

But in most performances, you can't hear that low-E. Double bass is a very quiet instrument, and if a timpani roll gets too loud, it just sounds like distortion. And yet in the performance I heard on Saturday night, the low-E was as pellucid as a triangle, yet the basses were not even playing. It must have been played by the tuba, though I couldn't see the tuba player from my seat. The conductor, Marek Janowski, must have rescored it, and it must be a ferociously difficult note for a tuba to play for so long, but orchestral musicians have much better technique today than they did in Bruckner's day. For anyone who knows basic orchestration, this solution should be obvious, and yet I'm not aware anybody had ever thought of it.

Nearly three years ago, I heard the legendary Daniel Barenboim conduct a performance of this symphony that was magnificent, but this particular moment dissolved in gibberish. Barenboim is a master of phrasing and sound and context, but he's no master of technique. But Marek Janowski is such a master craftsman that he thought of a solution better than any thought up by Bruckner, or perhaps any other conductor. This is the kind of thing a true maestro knows how to do.

Every concertgoer has asked this question for two hundred years: what does a conductor do? The answer is not so easy, because the job description of a conductor is so nebulous that a conductor can pretty much make up his job as he goes along. Think of it as a baseball manager or football coach, the low-key way that Joe Torre managed a team was almost the opposite of the high-octane intensity of Tony La-Russa. Both managers clearly were extremely successful, but their success depended on the responsiveness of the players they faced. Some workers are more motivated by bosses who let them figure things out for themselves, other workers require a boss who corrects their every move. Everybody is different, and success depends upon the organization's culture, and the director's ability to read the kind of boss their players require for the best results.

I was not a normal kid. During the two or three years of my childhood when I didn't long to be an orchestra conductor, I dreamed of being a baseball manager. As I got older, the more similarities there seemed between these two childhood obsessions. For better or worse, the performing arts have about the same success rate as baseball. Just as with batting averages, even the elite among musicians and actors will only get a hit 3 out of 10 times, and will only hit a home run one in fifteen times. Nobody

The recreative artists who give the greatest appearance of success, like Carlos Kleiber or Daniel Day-Lewis, can only do so in artificial circumstances. They're so selective about their projects that there's no true sample size to their work.

Mini-Cast #1: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance - Final Draft

Liberal journalists rejected a Republican coming to them, bearing a gift we've sought from any eminent Republican at all, long before a Donald Trump presidency was possible - that what animates Trumpism is not the language of the unheard, what animates Trump supporters is nihilism; pessimism in no small part self-inflicted, a culture of grievance; a refusal to practice their espoused values, and a belief contrary to reality that the world is out to humiliate particularly them. Beware of critiques bearing gifts I suppose...

It should be music to liberal ears, yet since its first ecstatic reception, left-liberals closed ranks against a book everybody else knows is a masterpiece of personal memoir for which politics peppers only the slightest flavor, flavors easily excised if you're warned about the few pages upon which JD Vance uses conservative political cliches with admirable frugality. There are millions of American stories like Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think it fair to say that there are equivalent numbers of white stories to black stories, or male stories to female, but I do think it  fair to say that for every two stories, not even per capita, like Between the World and Me, or The Other Wes Moore, there's at least one story like Hillbilly Elegy. 

I have no doubt that rejection of the book is traced to the pundit JD Vance became in the years following his celebrity as the Republican talking head who explains Trumpism. And to a certain extent, Vance's soundbite interpretations of Trumpism differ from the anecdotal thoughtfulness of his book; but I believe what people resent in Vance's TV persona is not his explication of Trumpism but rather his explanation of why Trumpists resent those who resent Trumpists. He raises all manner of David Brooks-like straw men about the pseudo-sophistication of elites like me and you, but come on...

I could throw statistics at you, but there are only so many ways to quantify classism. Search your mind for anecdotes. There are moments in every liberal life when a later-to-be-Trump supporter wanted a friendly conversation, and sensing this person would be an annoyance who'd take an hour, or a day, or years, to get rid of, you did everything you could to ignore him. I have on multiple occasions. There are two sides to this story, and I guarantee that every person who shouted at a Trump rally has just as many stories of the humiliation of being on the other end of his reluctant monologue.

Humiliation is part of life's cycle; a mind that does not feel humiliated creates events about which to be humiliated. Those seeking to understand internet flamewars, look no further. We gain our self-worth by the adversity we overcome, and therefore, I believe that when there is insufficient adversity, the mind invents adversity, and by overcoming adversity, we feel pride. Therefore the mind is programmed to be more assertive on issues of pride than on issues of survival.

And as I see it,, this is why thousands of rural Trump supporters are so much more assertive than other Americans. They're more threatening and potentially more violent to those who disagree than urban African-Americans whose basic survival is continually challenged, and yet whose violent elements direct themselves mostly at one another--often for slights of pride, rather than threaten violence upon the millions of more fortunate whom they believe do not understand their mentalities. Disproportionate policing of African-Americans cannot alone account for such a wide disparity.

The disparity can only be explained through that overused, constantly misused term, culture. Whatever a person's culture, it is their cultural pride that makes their life worth living, and therefore worth dying and killing for. The American Culture Wars are the ultimate wars of pride, but forget pride for a moment: who has more reason for rage? A white liberal flirting with radicalism - entertaining that free speech is a manifestation of privilege, or a black resident of urban blight? The average resident of urban blight is too busy trying to survive to focus on their humiliations, they have no time to focus on their opinions. 

 Perhaps it's selfish, but most of us would rather die than go through life in constant humiliation. The more pride we have, the more pride we can lose. And who has lost more pride than a person who was once able to feel himself better than others merely by virtue of his identity? 

Again and again in these podcasts, I will bring up Eric Hoffer, and in the book The True Believer, for which my esteem approaches true belief, he writes: 

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause."

So why then reject the Vance diagnosis? The only reason I can think of is that it casts an unflattering light on our own culture. A light which shows that we claim excellence for values we lack in ourselves; a light which already shines every time we write off all forms of capitalism as evil, append censorship into the classroom, make so little distinction between forms of sexual misconduct, reject the relatively often necessity of military involvement, and... of course, espouse liberalism and equality only to clearly view those who disagree with us with contempt and hatred. 

Mini-Cast #2 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Nobody likes Cormac McCarthy, but you have to reckon with him. There are no rewards from his books, all you need is twenty pages to understand how much more they demand than they give - no humor, no compassion, no fun, no character observation. What you get from McCarthy is hundreds of pages of nature description, and the pure, unmitigated darkness of our worst fears - for our country, for our people, for our selves, for our souls.

Much moreso than George R. R. Martin, McCarthy is only interested in human beings for the way they die. What really interests McCarthy is the desert, the western American landscape, described more ripely than any John Ford movie can. There are none of the traditional Western myths where manly heroes kill outlaws and Choctaws. For McCarthy, there's no higher human being - humans are no less part of nature than animals, and humans kill as animals do, squalidly, gorily; they kill to enjoy themselves, they kill to eat each other, they kill to use the dead's features as jewelry.

There is nothing unique about human beings in McCarthy novel. To McCarthy, we're all ridges on the ancient mesas, natural manifestations of a dead earth who don't belong upon it, born merely to die in a climate that kills everything, and therefore have a barely suppressible urge to end one another's lives, perceiving the out of place within each other which we do not see in ourselves.

I'm currently reading the infamous Blood Meridian. Was the American West as brutal as Blood Meridian makes it seem? I doubt it was in every particular, but I have no question if Blood Meridian conveys the West's spiritual reality. The meaning Blood Meridian reckons with Manifest Destiny - a doctrine with genocide seared in.

In an era when we wonder anew what bigots are capable, remember please how little control we have of their rage. Even at its peak, Manifest Destiny was not embraced by more than an American public's portion. Raised against Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were voices from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln, but even if you prevent the slaughter a hundred times, there will always be a hundred-first. Grisly murder is part of the American condition, and McCarthy is its prophet.

In every country, there are people who believe that the country's owed more land, but America is too big to be a mere country - there are too many facets, too many peoples, too many cultures to govern something so unwieldy without intentions going awry. Perhaps no continent should be its own country, and within that continent there are so many foreign places and peoples that many facets will always be foreign to each citizen.

For those of us hailing from plentiful vegetation, nothing's more foreign than desert. Nothing more foreign than a climate of death who installs a homing device in its citizens to return each other to the land of the dead as we can before we are duly ourselves returned. And yet, the desert of McCarthy and the southwest may be our truest future, a worldwide desert, a universal desert, in which all remaining life is alone for all time. This is the image of climate change that haunts our dreams -universal death. It clearly haunts Greta Thunberg, it haunts her generation, and it will more than haunts the following generation.

So it's simultaneously stunning and unsurprising when I read an article the other week reported that Cormac McCarthy edits science articles for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It makes a perverse kind of sense that a writer who spends hundreds of pages chronicling every hue of sky and rock would be interested in their formation, and would also take an interest in what might happen to the landscape after the age of sentience.

I've spent so little of this podcast talking about The Road. Suffice to say it's a book so perfect that a critic can say little. The Road's journey's spiritual as much as physical - of a father to keep his son alive post-apocalypse when most food humans can eat is each other. It's as much about preserving souls as preserving life. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy's fascination with violence deadens our horror to it, you almost feel him rooting for the killers. In The Road, the desire of a nameless father and son to survive is so basic that our horror never ceases. This is real horror, not the macabre gore of Stephen King whose disgust you're meant to enjoy, this is what it means to live in a place where the homing instinct to return all things to nature is so strong that it obliterates nature itself. This father's desire to raise a decent son may be the last good impulse in the universe. It's such a simple story, and yet how many reverberations does it have to history and the all too many stories of cannibalism during World War II, the civil wars of Africa, the Communist and Imperial famines?

And how many reverberations will the future hold? Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 - part of the same pessimistic generation as Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick who first heard of the Holocaust and the Bomb when they were adolescents, spent their adulthoods haunted by nuclear war, and are now in their dotage must hear about planetary death. The specter of planetary apocalypse has been with us nearly seventy-five, yet it has not come. When the generation born between 1925 and '42 passes, the 'Silent Generation', will we remember their era as an age of anxiety, beset by premonitions that never came, or will their anxieties be vindicated?

Mini-Cast #3 - Sweat by Lynn Nottage

I recently saw a very bad production of a very good new play. I won't say the name of the company. It was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater's merciless. It exposes every way which actors aren't up to their material, undoing even the best actors, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers deserve mercy they rarely got from  me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weakness like performing for others, and before we criticize performers, we have to commend them for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.

But it's doubly a shame that by all accounts I missed a very good production last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore - nearly the equal of any company in this country where movies are king and 75% of the best performers move to Hollywood.

Is Sweat a great play? ...No. It's a good American play about social issues, in the grand tradition of those from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. If anything, quite a bit better than many from this tradition. My friend complained that this play's characters weren't characters but ideological mouthpieces. I couldn't disagree, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the typical good vs. evil.

For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop flourishes - good is good, evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates too have names - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know more about theater than politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same sermon about the evils of this or that, capitalism more often than anything else, to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe everything the dramatist does, and drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon from his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.

By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, ideas are ready for assisted living. International socialism existed for seventy years before 1928, when the Threepenny Opera hit the theater like a terrorist with a bomb. Before that, class issues were one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest of socialist playwrights, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, theater's most reliable villain is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some working in this model could live forever, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. It's hard though to escape the idea that class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.

In the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School are around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of left-oriented play, based not on class but identity.

In the years before Angels, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined, to varying extents, that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.

The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival. It's a legitimate point of view, and as relevant as it's ever been. But the points have been been made, over, and over again.

This is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Lynn Nottage spent significant time in Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the country's highest poverty rate - 40%. She interviewed the entire panoply of residents, and it's quite apparent that she listened because we watch a very modern American story. Yes, there are the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families so bonded that they celebrate every occasion together. The divisions of this America are not the divisions of the Wilson era, they are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who would work for wages long-rooted Americans find insulting.

While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may yet commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. Class was the killer of the 19th century, race the killer of the 20th. The great killer of the 21st is not race, it will be immigration, and for better or worse, the two are different. The greatest dramas of a century with weather patterns that uproot whole countries may well be about immigration. May we all live to see them.

Mini-Cast # 5 - The Future of Verdi - Final Draft

For this, our first music podcast, we're going to begin by listening to six of my favorite minutes in any opera, in Aida during the Egyptian sacrifice to P'tha.

A solemn rite as sublime as any music in the Catholic Church, conjuring a civilization dead for two thousand years. Only the slightest appropriation, how much can one appropriate musically from a culture whose music hasn't been heard in millennia... - but an invocation of a time and place for a different era who could barely imagine Ancient Egypt (how different from our Information Age when Egyptian history is a Google search), done with awed respect, not exploitation. A tribute to one culture in its prime from another. And if Ancient Egyptian sublimity seemed tyrannical and bellicose, it obviously called tyranny of modern imperial states to mind.

When I wrote this cast's rough draft, it was the day Baltimore's Charles Theater showed the second half of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, a five-and-a-half hour cinematic fresco about the breakdown of Italy's time immemorial way of life in the 20th century. The first half was great, the second half sucked. What matters is that the movie begins with a peasant announcing on horseback that Giuseppe Verdi died. For Italy, Verdi's death signified the nineteenth century's close; the end of old lifestyles, old achievements, old dreams.

Much as Steven Spielberg is modern America, Giuseppe Verdi was Italy of his time, perhaps much more. Born just before the Napoleonic Wars' end, his international star rose just as the 1848 revolution made Italian independence and unification inevitable, and Verdi became the cultural voice of independence as Mazzini was the political voice and Garibaldi the military. He lived to almost ninety, long after Italy turned into a democracy with a monarch as its figurehead - and if democracy was unstable... well, so is modern Italy's - even after 75 years of dysfunction modern Italy's not a dictatorship. There was little reason to foretell the turmoil which awaited. 

Verdi, like Spielberg, is emblematic of a country at the height of its achievement, and at the time of America's dominance, many couldn't get enough Verdi. American singers at the Met like Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill were on Ed Sullivan before Elvis and after Chuck Berry. It was a different era. There was not yet  the enormous catalogue of American music, and most intellectuals didn't move to New York or Chicago. So if small town intelligentsia wanted to hear music better than Top 40, they had to hear it on classical radio or television variety shows. If Metropolitan Opera divas like Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland weren't as well-known as movie stars, they were close. Opera was mainstream, and no composer wrote with an ear for the mainstream like Verdi. 

A cynical era has so much to make fun of in Verdi: the melodrama, the sincerity, the stupidity of characters, the oom-pa-pa orchestra, the cliches of libretto, the death scenes when sopranos sing their lungs out for thirty minutes. But when a cynical era curdles into an angry era, there's still more to hate: the glorification of male rage and frail women, the exoticizing of eastern culture, the near-monopoly Verdi's held over opera for a century-and-a-half. Verdi's the face of extravagant opera productions that strew money about the stage for the rich's pleasure - sucking out money from generations of composers who never got a proper public. 

Verdi didn't used to be this. In an era when we say what we mean and mean what we say, Verdi means little, but in an era when Austra's censors guarded all art for intimation sof treason, Verdi put Italian suffering and longing for freedom into the mouths of the world's most oppressed: Jews, Romanis, Ethiopians, Moors, the disabled, and, most of all, women. The state or clerics were from far away lands, but he portrayed them both in the most totalitarian terms. In code, Verdi sang of freedom, and every Italian of his time deciphered it, along with millions who lived in the world's worst regimes. 

Except for Beethoven, there's no composer more synonymous with liberty. But towering as Verdi is, he's not quite so universal that he translates to every era. While performances of Mozart thrive more than ever, Verdi faces a clear decline in his popularity. In an era complaining about opera's interminable nostalgia, its glamorizing women's alleged frailty and men's alleged strength, its orientalizing of distant cultures, Verdi's cliched tropes are ground zero of everything which today's intelligentsia finds offensive about opera.

It's easy to forget the liberty's necessity in an era of illiberal democracy. When liberty is an oppressive force of its own enabling the rich to implement plutocracy, you can't quite blame people for finding Verdi difficult, even if you find their ideologies stupid. Verdi encountered similar pushback in the late 19th century from radical ideologues and aesthetes. Just like our era, the era of Puccini and Strauss was more decadent.

And yet a new society across the Pacific Ocean emerges with exponential quickness, one accustomed not to illiberal democracy, but to dictatorship. 40 million Chinese children learn the piano now. Their whole lives will exist in a social credit system; government by algorithm that only distributes opportunity to citizens whose activities the government finds palatable. If they long for freedom, and I imagine they do, they'll will never be permitted to express their longings aloud. As in the Soviet Union, artists and writers are policed with draconian severity. It can only be in the unspecificity of music that the Chinese may feel free, and it's only in the longings of unfathomably distant lands and eras and persons that the Chinese can find their longings articulated with specificity. However insulting and dated Verdi seems to many Americans today, he may seem very current indeed in the East. Even if Verdi leaves America, he may find a home among the non-Western people opera long orientalized.  

Quick fade at 2:10

Mini-Cast #4 - Proof by David Auburn - Final Draft

Proof is a play. It knows nothing about math and everything about mental illness. Math in Proof is what Alfred Hitchcock called the 'MacGuffin', which means the device that moves the plot. It doesn't matter what it is. Proof barely mentions math. Where's the understanding or atmosphere of the math it portrays? The same play could be about chess or sports.

I don't know much about mathematics either. The last math I learned was when I was three and my grandfather taught me algebra, and since then I never learned any high math. If Proof mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I'd believe anything they tell me. Proof barely makes the effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes - that's it.

Higher mathematics isn't so essential there needs to be great art about it. But if there's a great play about math, everybody agrees it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn - about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside Copenhagen between the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant and head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed mirrors the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - atoms and electrons are so small they can't be observed in their natural state because light's mere presence changes their movement. The principle is a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memories' uncertainty, our uncertainty about the meeting's purpose, our uncertainty about World War II's lived experience, the uncertainty of war, uncertain lives under totalitarianism, and the uncertainty of being itself.

But I don't think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know  Proof's mathematicians' discoveries. At the story's center is the relationship between father and daughter - the father a mad genius, the daughter possibly as well. The father, Robert, is obviously modeled on John Nash, a Nobelled mathematician with schizophrenia, made famous by A Beautiful Mind. I hated that movie, loathed it, but even A Beautiful Mind tried to explain Nash Equilibrium - though mathematicians said they failed.

Yet as a case study of mental illness, Proof is one of the most convincing I've seen, and unlike math, I'm in a position to observe its veracity with expertise. I'm sure we will get into reasons why as the podcast continues.

What further compounds a disturbed mind are the vagaries of human behavior surrounding a mind's personhood. A disturbed mind, thoughts already compounded by mental and emotional delusion, contends with behaviors of people dealing with them, whose true motives are never ascertained. There's no one worse at understanding others' motives than a person already beset by delusion. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, and even the motives of those who love the mentally ill are compounded by resentments, doubts, even exploitations. The vast majority of the mentally disturbed are wired to view their lives with excess negativity rather than positivity, so the petty betrayals of loved ones at their worst are exaggerated by our brains - still further complicated by the inevitability that complaints about our treatment are written off as the illness's exaggeration rather than realistic complaints.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a more admirable artistic rendering of this process than Proof, where vagaries of romance and family wear the mentally ill down until they resolve to live with as few attachments as possible, because demanding anything more may ensure a horrific cocktail of grief and terror that lasts every day for months, years, even decades.

The reciprocal to mental illness's ambiguities is the unfashionable notion that the cerebral overactivity of mentally illness enables creative leaps which the more stable regard as otherworldly. Even though today's intelligentsia are as dissatisfied as ever, few notions are more disparaged today than one that suffering is a necessary part of inspiration and preparation.

And this is a crucial point. Many non-creatives use the idea of the 'suffering' artist to keep creatives in squalor. At its core, it's little different from the Sermon on the Mount's quote: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." This is the old justification used to keep Christian masses suffering while priests accumulate all the knowledge and wealth for themselves. Furthermore, the suffering creative is an excuse for powerful artists and intellectuals to behave abominably.

So let me conclude by positing a different theory of the suffering artist, not original though I don't know its origin: An artist's suffering isn't what creates great art, creativity's motive is often to create a distraction from suffering. The easiest way to stop a destructive obsession is a constructive obsession. Only somebody in pain would endure the masochism of a perilous task.

Psychologists sometimes speak of 'depressive realism,' meaning depressed people, free from positive delusions, see the world more accurately. This is ass-backward. If the mentally ill see parts of the world more accurately, it's because their brains are wired excessively for that kind of reason to the detriment of other kinds. The obsession required for a brain to more accurately perceive things means that other perceptions go to seed, and that lack of perception severely damages a person's life circumstances - which depresses them.

Creative people are different from uncreatives, not worse, not better, but a large part of your legacy is how you deal with people different from you, and the closest people different than you are creative people. They, more than anybody else, render your lives' judgement for posterity. Be nice to them, because whether deliberately or accidentally, we render all manner of creative means for ironic punishment.

Mini-Cast #6 - Pan's Labyrinth: Final Draft

Two or three weeks ago I saw Pan's Labyrinth for the first time in twelve years. Since 2006 it existed in my mind as one of the greatest movies I've ever seen, maybe the best movie since 2000. But on reacquaintance, I wonder if I've underestimated it. It's so good that it exists on the kind of plane to which a once-or-twice-in-a-generation movie ascends: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Pan's Labyrinth... That great.

I've never seen it except in the theater. The first time I was an emotional wreck, and when we emerged under the lights, I saw that my friend was even more a wreck than I. The second time I dragged a bunch of friends, who all seemed to agree it was incredible. I made my father see it, and he liked it but didn't like it nearly as much because he didn't think Pan's Labyrinth was realistic....

(pause)... It always comes back to questions of real versus not real. Consuming sci-fi and fantasy is a matter of time beforeaudiences to cry betrayal over series which obsessed them for years but can't possibly meet all their expectations. The whole point of conceptual fiction is that you can do literally anything, and because all manner of series take us through every conceivable narrative permutation, there inevitably comes a point when no trick is left. The author exhausts every possible option, and like in George R. R. Martin, it becomes an arms race of storytelling, so many spectacular scenes going in so many directions that every new scene has to one-up the shock of the last. What is left for the ending? There's no way to tie it all together to create an ending both satisfying and surprising.

But my biggest distaste with Game of Thrones isn't with the fantasy per se, it's with how fantasy so often panders to an audience's need for overstimulation, and how the need of so many millions around the world for overstimulation like you see in Game of Thrones becomes a narcotic whose requirement they can't help bringing to their real lives, where they seek experiences well beyond what an ordinary life promises; and if they can't find good experiences they'll pursue bad experiences - like electing fascists president or trying to overthrow capitalism forever.

I know that's a dubious claim. I don't know if it's any more true than the idea that the insane might get violent ideas from consuming violent video games and movies, or that men will be more likely to treat women badly if they consume media that demeans women. All three notions are simultaneously true and false.

But while Game of Thrones became a cautionary tale about Fantasy-lit's problems, Pan's Labyrinth is an examplar of its glories. Fantasy's minefields are so easy to step on that when an artist gets it righ, the achievement is that much greater, and by using the tools of infinite imagination, the artistic sublimity reverberates that much further into infinity.

I don't think it gives anything away to tell of the end of Pan's Labyrinth because the end of the movie's also the beginning. It's not only Ofelia caught in this Labyrinth, the Anne Frank-like doomed heroine, it's Captain Vidal, and more even than they, it's us. By the end of the movie, we have no idea what's real and what's fantasy. The movie begins and ends with Ofelia's death in 1944, a year when so many children faced Ofelia's fate. And in Ofelia's final reel, what do we see? Is it the magic of an anthropomorphic supernatural faun - or of a supernatural being even more powerful? Is it the final imaginings of a dying girl whose brain was always dangerously imaginative? Or is it in the mind of Captain Vidal, caught in the middle of a battle in a drugged state - and is the battle even real or is he hallucinating? Is it all of the above and many more, or is it just a movie?

...A few weeks ago, a particularly provocative acquaintance tried very hard to trap me into drawing parallels between Pan's Labyrinth and our contemporary political world, and it made me deeply uncomfortable. My problem was not with the idea that Pan's Labyrinth is political with contemporary relevance, it obviously is. But the movie is about things far more elemental than politics. It's about how humans require fantasy to come to terms with the world's barbarity.

There's no question, art is political, but politics are very complicated, and the political aspect of art is just one arm on a Hecatoncheire-like entity with a hundred arms or more. Many conservatives allege that art's purpose is beauty. Many progressives allege that art's purpose is empathy. Many think that art's purpose is emotion, and ideologues of all stripes think art's purpose is its message. The last one is closer to the mark, but because it's closer, it's correspondingly more dangerous in how it simplifies. All four of those concepts are mere tools at art's disposal.

The purpose of art is meaning, and artistic meaning is simultaneously universal and very personal. Meaning comes to us in an infinity of forms - forms intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, it always evolves upon reacquaintance, and the meaning is different for every person. But how you know that a work like Pan's Labyrinth is that great is that it seems to make that stunning impression on so many different people, who take so many different meanings from its content. This is art.