Thursday, June 18, 2020

'The Speech'

So I suppose my name is Evan Tucker: I'm 38 and looked exactly like this at 18, I'm a Baltimorean, extremely Jewish, a semi-professional musician, semi-violinist, semi-singer, semi-composer, and semi-sane. This is my third NMG. I completely stumbled upon the New Music Gathering in Baltimore on the very week I'd resolved to begin my musical life anew as an adult composer. It was, perhaps, as we say in Judaism, Bashert, a predestined meeting. And as an icebreaker to prepare you all for the level of honesty in this talk please let me confide in you that while it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I snuck into that whole gathering with a Johns Hopkins ID I hadn't thrown out ten years after I was a student there and still owe the NMG money for my participation that weekend, which I am happy to contribute whatever I owe as absolutely soon as this speech is over if related parties provide the venmo or paypal account.

For better or worse, if one can consider that humor then that's the extent I have to bestow. Because I come before you with open arms as both a complete outsider to your world and a complete insider to the world of classical music, and must beg your indulgence for a plea I entreat you born of decades of profound desperation. Please don't think of this plea as registered on my own behalf, but on behalf of the thousands of musicians over the generations, represented in every demographic, who should have been at gatherings like this yet were prevented by neurological conditions. I am most tremendously grateful for the existence of New Music Gathering, because had I not known of it, I doubt any but two or three other composers would ever have known that I exist. And in order to tell you why, I'm afraid I must relate to you some of the circumstances of my life, circumstances which I always seem to be telling as a way to explain what people are dealing with when they deal with me, because whenever I conceal them, that way disaster inevitably lies, but please try to believe me that however often, I have never, ever spoken these tales with anything but the greatest reluctance, and have been utterly exhausted of re-relating some version of this story for thirty years now. 

I am one of you, I am a composer and musician, and all I have ever wanted from my life is the ability to be a practicing musician, because as Clergy is called to serve god, so too was I called to serve music. Those who have achieved little can afford to be immodest far more than those who have many achievements to parade, so please forgive anything here which sounds pathetically boastful. Another famous Jewish saying is "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and to this day I have little answer to that question.

I don't know if I would have qualified as a prodigy, but there was no question that music chose me at the earliest possible age rather than my choosing it. At two or three, I was discovered to have perfect pitch, and to this day can identify every note of a hexachord and exactly which note is missing in any eleven note chord. At four or six I was harmonizing songs on the piano without a single lesson, by eight or nine were I asked I could probably write out dozens of orchestral scores in piano reduction, and to this day I could probably write out a reasonably decent facsimile of a vast plurality of the standard classical repertoire in full score, and quite a bit of early music and contemporary music too. From the earliest age I was reading generally at a comprehension past all but the highest achieving high school students and hold in my memory vast swathes of text, and an historical database of dates, places, and names that come to me with instant neurological availability, I've lost a trivia game twice in my adult life - it's not even fun. And through all this learning, I was barely ever directed. I discovered it all on the engine my own curiosity.

And yet I am utterly not one of you, and never could be. Most people at this gathering probably have a veritable infantry of music degrees and grants and awards, while I have a musical degree from a university whose course offerings, at least at the time, were paltry enough that when it came time to apply for a masters or doctorate in composition, I was told by university after university that my educational background rendered continued education impossible unless I began my musical education anew from the very first term of a bachelor's degree, a musical degree which itself I obtained because I was mostly left to my own devices. While my teachers always seemed sorely tempted to tell my battery of issues to shove it, I think they did on some level realize they were dealing with a savant who was either learning everything on his own or unable to learn anything at all. At the end of four years I held a composition recital in which twenty-six musicians took part, along with a forty-five minute pre-concert lecture and demos on both my compositions and on music history, and for the extra effort to which yet another organizational maelstrom almost killed me, I gratefully received five honors credits. 

Because, you see, any musico-harmonic terminology which I successfully learned, I learned as a very small child, and any technical terms thereafter of harmony, form, and counterpoint were somehow beyond my capacity for comprehension, and I therefore would have been, and very much was, laughed out of audition for any serious music program. It took me two years to learn any music software, and to this day I can still barely use it for anything but the most basic notation. And as for the organization required to mount performances of my own music - how possible is that for a guy who could not learn to tie his shoes until he was ten years old, who has not learned any math past the algebra he also apparently mastered when he was three, who would certainly have failed out of both high school and middle school but for full-time parental help, and who now has the capacity at thirty-eight for organization, time management, and spatial reasoning, which is roughly at the developmental stage of a small child. So too was learning and comprehending music as other musicians understand it impossible, the comprehension of which my own personal musical encyclopedia should have rendered irrelevant to any music program who ever took five minutes to realize that they were dealing with an incompetent of a completely unique variety. 

I have come to believe over the years that surely there must a God, because only a supernatural force could render tortures so exquisite. I, the person who once apparently was Evan Tucker, told from first consciousness that he was some kind of freakish changeling whose intelligence could change the curvature of walls, am in fact a person with the most profound mental impairments and disabilities. Thirty-one years ago, I was told I was the smartest person anyone had ever met. Thirty years ago, I was told I was in fact the dumbest, and would be so for the rest of my life. A sentence to life imprisonment within a brain of wide and deep comprehension and no ability to demonstrate that comprehension within any classroom or work setting as it has yet ever been structured. I spent a year studying politics at Johns Hopkins, and got myself accepting by sneaking in through a tiny back door that I was only made aware of due to luck, and the stress of organizing course work put fifty pounds on me and caused a chain reaction that landed me a stay in a psychiatric hospital.

A few years ago I taught music history at an adult education program. On the last day of class a student was was literally so moved that she cried, a second told me what he learned in my class had routinely become his family discussions, a third told me that one day I would be world famous. But due to administrators wanting not to deal with my organizational requirements, I was only offered six weeks of teaching for the next year and the administration excused themselves by telling me my classroom performance was sub-par.

It is not my obligation, nor have I time or desire to tell decades worth of tales of daily humiliation, bullying, and guidance quackery. But they surely happened on virtually every day of my late childhood, the entirety of my adolescence, and all too many days of my adulthood. 

But of course, from those learning disabilities grew emotional disorders that only grew more profound as the years wore into decades. In my early teen years, the most severe emotional discombobulations, the details of which I will spare you, and in my late teen years the most severe psychotic delusions, the details of which I will spare myself. But for the past three decades, I have looked ten years past my actual age, three decades of daily battles with severe depression anxiety and psychosis can do that to anyone, so too does medication that at times causes one to be a hundred pounds overweight, as does a late Picasso's worth of unpreventable facial tics, a Heifetz worth of hand tremors, a Sandy's worth of hyperventilation, all provoked by anxiety which comes without warning, along with recurrent neurological psychosis, and the daily chest pain and accelarated pulse of a man my weight but a quarter century my senior. 

The possibilities of jobs as other people hold them, long-term romantic attachments as other people experience them, fulfillment as other people derive fulfillment, is something which human as I am, I cannot help but continue to pursue as I can, but I have come to pay dearly for any appearance of paltry success I have yet achieved in my life, with a tornado of unresolved organizational storms, and yes, emotional storms too, which others are perhaps understandably reluctant to take upon themselves once they understand the the risks' enormity. 

I am, as you can see, a white male, and thank god for that because were I of any identity more distasteful to the forces of history, I firmly believe the difficulties would quite possibly render a person like me deceased. There are literally millions of my disadvantages without my advantages in every generation left to the worst fates with no safety net beneath them. 

Whether I am anything but the least sympathetic demographical representative for them, the most severely learning disabled are too an underserved minority, and, one must add, extremely distinct and far less numerous than those of minor disabilities whose functionality is sufficiently unimpaired to live relatively uninterrupted careers and family lives. And furthermore, by definition, our community is utterly hamstrung in our capacities for self-advocacy. We cannot even explain to you the ways in which we are organizationally challenged, because if we explained them, that probably means we could understand them sufficiently to master them. The arts and classical music already have so much to answer for how they've left so many of their most devoted servants to rot, but we too of this demographic are of those who demand answers and reform, but by definition we are the ones least likely to know how to implement effective reform. 

So where have we been in a thousand years of musical history? The mentally ill of course have an honored place in artistic history, some of course would say too honored. And it's a little too easy to armchair diagnose the eccentricities of an historical figure by saying 'well, maybe Mozart had ADD...' Maybe hyperactive geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven were sufficiently abused into developing the necessary skills for composition in spite of their deficiencies, but how many great musicians were beaten that didn't develop the necessary skills to translate great improvisation into composition? We'll never know, and obviously an unfortunate genius like Beethoven was lacking in the one skill more crucial in music than learning. But the true blue learning disabled? Well... maybe there's Mussorgsky, for whom even the most historicism minded reader would tempted to render a modern LD diagnosis, and maybe there's John Cage, but otherwise?... It's difficult to imagine that anyone with the most severe learning issues could withstand the battery of complex tasks traditionally presented before the life of a composer.  

And yet the learning disabled are otherwise no less talented, many neurologists even speculate that their brains have compensatory skills, and yet their specific contributions to music history are probably lost to the sands of musical pre-history, because the only way many of them could contribute was through the oral continuum, so I suppose it likely that they became folk musicians of one sort or another, or they became performers who cleverly hid their deficits, just as Pavarotti concealed his inability to read music, but there was no chance of viewing the full gamut of musical talent which lay dormant until the microphones of the 20th century showed the palace of music to have more rooms than Mozart and Beethoven dared to dream. And one hundred forty-three years after the first acoustic recordings, classical music has yet to catch up with the discoveries or recover from the shock. In the span of the hundred-twenty years during which recorded music's been widely available commercially, music has evolved more than it ever did in the thousand beforehand. It was a cultural quantum leap from which we, who'd devoted a millennium to obsessively honing our musical skills with ever greater specificity of conceptual intent, and have still not made our peace with the idea that a person can simply play an instrument with absolutely no beforehand planning, and the results may in fact turn out more profound than had you worked on the piece for thirty years. 

When I was sixteen, I would be trapped in a school for three years that was basically a cult from which maximal mental pressure was applied to make sure no one left - a school for troubled teens who believed all learning issues are a function of a person's moral character and therefore all failures to comply with demands, no matter how strenuous nor unreasonable, ought to be met with various forms of corporal punishment. Instrumental lessons of any meaningful type were impossible during that period, preparing auditions for music schools was not even questionable. I would imagine that nearly everyone else in this gathering began their lives listening more popular forms of music and worked their way out to classical, but I knew barely anything of any music but classical music until I was sixteen, and then was thrown into a sink-or-swim situation where the only way music could be of any use was if I took my violin and turned it into a fiddle, noodling my way around a bunch of high school guitarists, one or two of whom were quite skilled and became pros themselves, but most of them only knowing three chords - playing their five-hundredth rendition of wagonwheel or wonderwall or we will rock you, and having to find yet another way to take a violin solo over the guitar chords that would impress poorly behaved teens who often came to the school as bullies who beat on kids like me. I had to find a way for myself in music that was completely disconnected from the music I'd discovered at the earliest imaginable age and no peer of mine had anywhere yet seemed to discover. 

Fast forward fifteen years. Classical or popular, I was never a huge musical success, but I discovered I had some gift as a violin improviser, and found some tiny way forward in music with my violin putting an improvisational spin on a number of genres, and around the age of thirty I found myself the violinist in what a briefly popular local band of Balkan folk music - I suppose I was an f-list local celebrity impressing his friends by how often he was recognized on the street as a musician not only in Baltimore but also in DC, and branching off to do my own klezmer side project. But like all bands, the amount of work it takes for a band to become successful is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes before the band members stop getting along. And since these two bands had mostly the same musicians, when I lost one band, I lost both, and that was almost the least of my worries during yet another annus horribilis. 

What saved me was a project that I had despaired for more than five years I'd ever be able to bring to fruition, the idea of which came to me on one of my many manic highs - to set all hundred-fifty Biblical Psalms of David to music, and to do so because of an engineer I'd met in my sojourns into popular music. And for those who do not know the miracle worker of Baltimore: Mat Lefler-Schulman, he should be used as an engineer for any and all musical projects around the globe so long as they don't impede on mine. For the last five years, I've used whatever extra cash I have on-hand to arrive at the studio once a week with barely even an outline of the music, and do my damndest to record, improvise, and electronically shape music completely unwritten out into text. Work is agonizingly slow, and in five years, we have just barely completed seventeen psalms. But if we're both around another forty-five years, we should be able to complete the project. 

This is concrete music, unable to be reproduced in any capacity but private consumption, but in the era of pandemic when live music is still a theoretical speculation, there's a truly unfortunate possibility that musique concrete may be every musician's future. 

Such are my own incapacities that I will always be unable to understand the technical means by which I make my own music. But musicians whose capacity to absorb tech proficiency are much wider than my own will be able to create music by our processes much more cheaply, more quickly, and more fluently.

But in the meantime, my plea is simple: the world of music composition can be so vast. For thousands of years, talented musicians with disabilities have most likely been unable to contribute what could have been a vast storehouse of great notational music to the world, if only people were there to assist wherever they fell down. It is perhaps precisely their disabilities which may have given them completely different conceptions for what music can be, and just as the unwritten music of the potential great women composers and composers of color is a loss to the world, so too is the lost music of disabled musicians. By definition, cannot ascertain the nature of our problems, but if you ever gave us the time of day, you can, and you would, and the reward would be yours as well as ours. 

Even so, I regret to tell that my life is most likely an advanced scouting report, either for your lives or your students' and children's. My trials by fire are the trials writ small which classical music must now undergo in the viral age. Classical music has still never truly adjusted to the presence of the microphone while hundreds of other musical forms are only made possible by the microphone's presence. Mechanical reproduction changes everything about the human relationship to music, both creative and consumptive. The next generation will undergo the biggest retrenchment of values at very least since the transition to homophonic common practice tonality, and quite possibly since the invention of polyphony itself or even the invention of modern musical notation, and made all the more difficult for the fact that the retrenchment is well over a hundred years overdue as previous generations of classical musicians have leveraged credit for which their societal futures must foot the bill just as entire modern societies have. This payment is blood itself, and its pain is almost unendurable, but just as I have survived, so too will you, battered and bruised, devalued and demoralized for years at a time, on a completely different and far more arduous journey than we thought we'd have to take, but also possibly, far more meaningful, and far better equipped to light beacons through darkness so that future generations may continue to walk paths that we are the generation who set.  

I thank you for your time, your ears, and your generous presence. Please listen to the results of my music when you get a chance at evantucker.bandcamp.com and I particularly recommend the Psalms beginning with Psalm 11, and just so you know, the Billy Joel quote on my page is a joke because I fucking hate Billy Joel. 

Monday, June 15, 2020

Tales From the Old New Land #2

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.

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Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1899:

We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Ticoczki, and formerly before that Moishe Kharlap.

The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, the very same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against forced baptisms and blood libels. But 1264 was also when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, which apparently did exist, and genuinely adorned with a kind of sparkling Renaissance architecture and art one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would find true international fame under the personage of its Archbishop Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II.

One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.

All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit."

So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid on the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in the same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags."

The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be.

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In the beginning, or 'at the beginning,' or 'in principle cause,' or 'in primal cause,' or 'in the head of the cause;' in the beginning was the word: 'B'reishit', the primal document of civilization beginning with a primal word so enigmatic, with meanings so infinite, that it is no beginning at all, and rather implies an infinity of presence before the beginning.

There is an infinity of presence before every beginning: no definite first cause or initial yesh, but either an infinite yesh or an infinity of beings who were present before we were able to record any definite shekhina. And yet most of our definite presences begin not at the rosh, not even in the biblical tekufah, but in the modern era. Before the Kharlap family whom we shall follow through the 20th century, there must have been 80 generations who preceded them merely of Jews, and an infinity of beings: prehistoric men, primates, mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, annelids, porifera, protazoa, bacteria,... going back to inorganic matter of the earth, formed from rock, which itself comes from the stars, perhaps separated from one another as far back at the Big Bang, which may be the instant of separation into distinct parts of a single whole, the whole of which may have either been the divine totality of which we are each a part, or was matter that only came together for the smallest instance - previously divided in a completely different permutation, or perhaps before the beginning existed an infinity of other possibilities to us either unconceived or inconceivable.

And yet only in the 19th century did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did.

And while Reb Yaakov Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environs of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in good faith into some of the most reliable composites we've had yet of whom and what humans are.

What was Reb Yaakov Kharlap? Well.... he was a Jew, and a Rabbi at that, and like so many unlucky Rabbis down the millennia, a Rabbi of no particular prestige so far as we know. Had he any great Talmudic insights, he never wrote them down, and if he wrote them down, nobody preserved them - neither his sons nor his students. He may have been a rabbi, but he was just another Jew, undesignated by Hashem for a life of any distinction, and rather condemned to make his living teaching the same dafs of Talmud, triennial year after triennial year, to the boys of a Kheder in the same town, for seventy or more years, and subject, like any Jew, to the laboratory Hashem seems to have chosen Jews as his test subjects in a laboratory of endless permutory experiments, in which Jews are compelled and commanded to wrestle with endless turahs and tzurahs of Yesh, for which he uses (and some might say: abuses) his Jews as test subjects for all states of being; for Jews a people for whom human issues can still exist in a state of tohu va'vohu, before he releases these tzuris upon the general public with much more definite tophes and tupos.

The name Kharlap is itself shrouded in mystery. It is clearly an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish grifter who realized he could mark up the prices of whatever he sold if he lied about the eminence of his Yichus. And yet of that 'Pay' at the end of the name there also is mystery, because it may not be the head of the exiles in Poland, but rather in Portugal. So rather than an Ashkenazic family who moved to Poland from the Holy Roman Germany of Charlemagne, it may be in fact an eminent Portuguese family moving to Poland after the Portuguese expulsion of 1496. But Portuguese or Polish, it may just be some low-class Jewish fraud adapting an important sounding name to get some better deals.

The Russian Imperial Census of 1897 lists Yaakov Kharlap as born sometime around the 27th of January 1845: one hundred years to the day on the secular calendar before the liberation of Auschwitz, but Reb Yaakov always insisted he was born on Rosh Hashana 1844, which would put his birth exactly a hundred years before the Warsaw Uprising.

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And so Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. And just as all circumstances of the world are incarnated in primal mystery, so will the Kharlap family's incarnation come to us, and to Reb Yaakov, in mysterious, mythical circumstances. Perhaps akin to a hassidic tale by Reb Nachman of Bretslav or a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he incorporated editors' suggestions - which like Gabo this self-deluded author will only accede to with great reluctance).

According to hebcal.com, Hanukkah came early in 1899. Beginning on the sunset of November 26th and the eighth night on December 4th. It's a whole month before 1900 and the 20th century--a century whose vistas of progress most Europeans could not look forward to with more eager anticipation.

Tales From the Old New Land #1

A Beginning, obviously to be revised as each new post comes in... peruse at your leisure:
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What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
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Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1899:
We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.
The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, and genuinely adorned with sparkling Renaissance architecture and art which one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would truly find its true fame in the personage of Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II.
One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.
All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit."
So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in that same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags."
The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be.
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In the beginning, or 'at the beginning,' or 'in principle cause,' or 'in primal cause,' or 'in the head of the cause;' in the beginning was the word: 'B'reishit', the primal document of civilization beginning with a primal word so enigmatic, with meanings so infinite, that it is no beginning at all, but implies an infinity of presence before the beginning.
There is an infinity of presence before every beginning: no definite first cause or initial yesh, but either an infinite yesh or an infinity of beings who were present before we were able to record any definite shekhina. And yet most of our definite presences begin not at the rosh, not even in the biblical tekufah, but in the modern era. Before the Kharlap family whom we shall follow through the 20th century, there must have been 80 generations who preceded them merely of Jews, and an infinity of beings: prehistoric men, primates, mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, annelids, porifera, protazoa, bacteria,... going back to inorganic matter of earth, formed from the rocks, who themselves came from the stars, separated from one another at the big bang, who may in fact have separated in an instant as distinct parts of a single whole, which itself may have be either the divine totality of which we are each a part, or have been previously divided in a completely different permutation, or could an infinity of other possibilities either unconceived or inconceivable.
And yet only in the 19th century did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did.
And while Reb Moshe Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environes of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of skilled statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in some of the most reliable composite we had yet of whom and what humans are.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Y'know... I've been warning boomer moderates and conservatives for fifteen years about how easily the further left can and eventually will take over the country because everybody else refuses to evolve with the times and still see the world as it existed from 1985 to 1992 as the immutable way the world works. So they never ever believed me, and all of the sudden, they finally see it now, and they've gone from saying the left will never have any power in this country, to panicking like a chicken who's already been beheaded and comparing this movement to Lenin and thinking everybody who isn't a leftist is about to be treated as a kulak sent into the fucking gulags.
There's no concession to reality with these people.... They're determined that no matter what they believe, even if it's the opposite of what they believed yesterday, they're right and you're wrong. And they wonder why the country might be on the brink of a revolution....

Underrated Classical Musicians - Terje Tønnesen


It's going to be a long time until people feel safe with an orchestra of 100 on stage in a full sized concert hall with 2000 people in the audience. 2/3rds of American artists are currently unemployed and that number is only going up. I can't speak with much detailed authority on too many arts, but this is going to be one of the most painful moments in the history of classical music, perhaps the single most painful. The World Wars decimated populations, but so endemic was classical music once to the fabric of daily life that there was never a question about institutional continuity. But now, orchestras who've been around for well over a hundred years may disappear in a puff of smoke. All that may be able to survive is much lighter-complemented ensembles, flexible in composition, that learn to play together in highly concentrated and focused rehearsals. Such may be their scarcity that they will fortunately endow much less chance for a conductor to become a star at the musicians' expense, but the concentration of rehearsal time makes a singular authority figure in the ensemble that much more likely to coalesce around.


And that's why violinists like Terje Tønnesen or Richard Tognetti become a prototype for something so much more crucial in this new ensemble makeup - like Rudoph Barshai or Szymon Goldberg before them, and before them musicians from Handel to Corelli leading from their position in the orchestra. Keyboardists like Trevor Pinnock or Richard Egarr sometimes have nothing to do, and therefore take their place in front of the chamber orchestras like any other conductor, so they are not truly a new model. But a principal string player leading an orchestra, rather, is very much a new and workable model of musicmaking, because, unlike woodwinds or keyboard, there is a part for them in virtually every score. 


They are neither quite concertmasters, conductors, nor soloists, and yet their authority over their ensembles is unquestioned.  If there's no money to afford extensive rehearsal time, a truly collaborative effort among musicians becomes more difficult, not less. And yet, because of the space allowed in performance by not having a conductor shape the music moment-to-moment, spontaneity among the more rank and file musicians becomes much more possible, and interpretations can grow in liveliness and meaning as musicians respond from one another's interpretations phrase by phrase into interpretations entirely new, possibilities unreplicable when there is a figure who is literally on top of them, dictating the spirit of every musical moment. 


When you listen to one of the seemingly many ensembles Terje Tønnesen's leads, you hear a level of detail that is truly astonishing, results which very few conductors are able to elicit from their ensembles. Much of the music he leads is done, as it was in the 19th century, not in the original instrumental composition but arranged for whatever ensemble happens to be on hand - in his case usually a string orchestra. It seems as though it wouldn't work. And yet when you hear him lead a string ensemble in Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, it is one of the greatest performances you will ever hear - twenty-odd musicians creating a far more intimate and sacred atmosphere than most string quartets would ever allow themselves to create. When you hear his string ensembles play the Tristan prelude, at a slightly faster tempo than a full orchestra generally does, shorn of its metaphysical baggage (some might even say bullshit...) it sounds both completely apiece with Verklärte Nacht, and also like true love music. And when you hear a Norwegian string ensemble play the piece it was of course born to play: Grieg's Holberg Suite, you realize just how special this ensemble must be because they do what they have to to shield what must be an incredibly overfamiliar piece to them from routine: taking their interpretive skill to an entirely next level - sometimes adding folk dance choreography that is completely apiece with the music's meaning. I have to imagine that never in the history of this overplayed string piece has it ever been played with so much magical meaning. 


Now that orchestras and choirs are outright safety hazards, classical music may now be entering the true age of the Chamber Orchestra, and leaders like Terje Tønnesen may prove themselves more crucial to the history of music than most famous traditional conductors of his generation. In such a formate, we may learn the traditional repertoire completely anew as we discover the chamber aspects of orchestral repertoire and the orchestral aspects of chamber repertoire, but if this is our future, then hopefully we will find an entirely new repertoire, meant for such ensembles. Not just the instrumental Bach and Handel (and what a shame if we no longer would be able to cover the glories of their choral repertoire), but for actual chamber orchestra, is there a Mahler, a Bruckner, a Shostakovich out there whose work will provide those kinds revelations? Will a modern composer rise to the challenge? I look forward to finding out, because classical music's future may depend on our finding them. 

Tales From the Old New Land - Opening Paragraph - Final Draft

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is, where to look, where or when we'll find it; but the material who, the how and whither, the warp and weft, the length, width, depth, and time; the dwelling, foundations, splendor, and even eternity, are all mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space within the space, the dimensions between where exist possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap: a place of the world of no end that by wrestling within its unbounded bounds, we bring, so it seems, a very few of its tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific indeed finite time, if only in a small indeed definite place. It is that land within which all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we glimpse its possibilities, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Underrated Classical Musicians: Nashville Symphony Orchestra


Yesterday we got news that the Nashville Symphony was furloughed all year. An orchestra without a season is an orchestra whose chances of folding is probably over 50%. Orchestras much more august reputations like the New York Philharmonic and the Met are cancelling their entire autumn season. This is all a terrible prelude to what might be happening to orchestras all around America.

But it's doubly a tragedy because while nobody thinks of the Nashville Symphony as even one of the Top 20 orchestras in America, it's easily one of the most important. Tackling repertoire and unheard composers more supposedly distinguished orchestras wouldn't dare. The Nashville Symphony is a crown jewel in American music - serving music rather than its own prestige.
For more than 20 years under the direction of Leonard Bernstein's former indispensable assistant, Kenneth Schermerhorn, the Nashville Symphony was everything an American orchestra should be - playing everything for everyone in some of the most wide-ranging and diverse community outreach America has yet thought of. In one of the three or four most musical towns in America, the Nashville Symphony became as embedded into the city's cultural fabric as any orchestra in America.
The list of composers they've championed on record under both Schermerhorn and his successor, the also underrated Giancarlo Guerrero from Costa Rica, is a who's who of underrated American music: Michael Daugherty, Roberto Sierra, Richard Danielpour, Joan Tower, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beach, Terry Riley, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Harbison, Joseph Schwantner, Elliott Carter, and George Whitefield Chadwick. They've done classical crossover with Bela Fleck, and while everybody gives lip service to many of the Great American Scores, the Nashville Symphony put the money where the ears are, and recorded perhaps the three Great American Operas: West Side Story, Porgy and Bess, and Amahl and the Night Visitors, all meticulously researched to be according to the composer's exact specifications. They've recorded South American music too, including the complete Bachianas Brasillieras by my beloved Villa-Lobos and the rollickingly brillian classical compositions of the Argentinan national musician, the tango composer Astor Piazzolla, along with one of my two favorite 20th century operas: Ravel's mystifyingly underperformed L'Enfant et les Sortileges
This is everything a great orchestra should do, and now they're paying the price for the crime of showing that you can simultaneously serve music, musicians, and the community, with their livelihoods, and such is the ruthlessness of modern American life that nobody's in a position to step in and save this national treasure of Americana.

Friday, June 12, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging


When you grew up among Jews in my generation, you know a shitload of overachievers. So many people I grew up with seemed to be (maybe still) in a veritable arms race to accumulate as many official sounding titles as the world bestows. And yet for all the supposedly qualified people in America to run this country, they were all sailed over by the dumbest men on the planet. To me, that's the real indication that we know just how fucked we all are. There wasn't a single alleged meritocrat who knew how to prevent a hostile takeover of the entire democratic process; not just by criminals, but by America's dumbest criminals.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging



I was, at very least, pretty pissed off about Tom Cotton getting space in the New York Times, and anybody who is madder at the Times Op-Ed board for giving into leftist pressure than what's currently going on in the streets is obviously someone who let us get into this mess in the first place. But people who believe that journalism and scholarship are the same as political advocacy are only political allies of liberals at this particular, extremely ephemeral moment, and soon enough they're going to be coming for us just like they are for the Trumpkins currently. Everybody who believes that people's ability to get a platform to express themselves is subordinate to having the correct political affiliations knows exactly who they are, and that belief takes so many different insidious forms that it's fruitless to try document them all. One day, sooner rather than later, they will try with all their might to kill off liberalism just like they're trying to conservatism, which they see as indistinct from each other. We are a country at cold war that is in grave danger of turning hot, and the war will in no sense be over once Trump and the authoritarian right is beaten. Once they can, they're planning on giving us the option to either convert or get the sword. It's probably a metaphorical 'cancel-sword' rather than anything literal, but who can be sure? And whatever form that sword takes, I'll gladly take the sword fuck you very much. But if or when that comes and I'm either thrown out of my tiny corners of facebook or blogs or get a couple weeks in jail for something I write or get beaten up by some person even crazier than me in the street, I'm sure that a hundred people who currently think of me at least as friendly acquaintances will cheer it all on and say I had exactly that coming, and it all will probably be for some trivial offhand sentence or action, and for an instant that moment will get me all the thousands of readers I never otherwise had.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Today was a stressful day for a number of reasons. On stressful days i permit myself an outing into town for one reason: ice cream. It gives me a reason to live. But every day i go out for ice cream, which lets face it is most days and lately not always in the drive thru baskin robbins, i see full parking lots, people walking everywhere, a vacation town that has barely stopped.
I realize that I'm a hypocrite who can't help himself and is going out even as he points the finger, but lets all make a deal America: whatever we're all doing, let's do one less. If you're going out for a desert or coffee, find a place with a drive through. If you're going out to eat with friends, just get delivery with them and sit on a porch. If you're going on vacation, just stay as much as you can in the house and spend it in nature rather than in town or on a highly concentrated beach. Every little sacrifice counts. And even if you're only making little ones, just make one or two little ones more every day.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging


Again, and yet again, politics have been getting me very seriously down. I'm trying to find anything within myself for optimism in what comes next, but I just can't find it.
Shitposting on facebook is not a life, even in an era when nobody else is living much of a life; and writing about politics isn't much of a life either. Even if you get paid for it, which I obviously don't, the best get it wrong more than 50% of the time and end up looking like idiots. If you're ever read, the whole world can point to risible predictions you made, opinions you've given, and write you off as an idiot or worse for all time.
I'm trying to find the brainpower/willpower to write something deeper, whether a book or music, but getting into the same arguments about politics every day for seven years is not the way to do it. Every new article, every new piece of news, every doublethinkpiece, takes you away from a book you should be reading, every post I write may take me away from a book or piece of music I could be writing that who knows, might be of interest... to some people... someday.... How many new ideas could I have thought through in the time it's taken me to post all those half-dozen old ideas I've tried to hammer here, over and over again? Last night I decided to snooze anybody who chose to share a political meme, and before I knew it an hour had gone by and I'd snoozed seventy people in my feed.
But the problem is the addiction, and the source of the addiction is the attention you know you receive. The simple fact is that every time I've tried to be more thoughtful than the mere drollery/trollery/patrolery/blowholery/assholery of this fucking site, nobody ever gave any inkling that they had any interest in anything I've ever had to say about anything at all. I don't know why all you fuckers listen to me here that would never listen to me anywhere else, this is the one place were I know for absolute certain that I have never done anything worth listening to, but it's the only place where I know there are people who care, and care you do so very, very, very much. And yet anything else I write or do might as well fall into a black hole.
Thank you for caring, genuinely I'm grateful, but the very fact that you care so much on social media and do so little homework anywhere else should be enough to let us know just how fucked we all are.

Monday, June 8, 2020

Why Didn't I Condemn The Police?

I have been absurdly, unconscionably slow in realizing the necessity of police reform, only coming to the realization at the very moment when the consensus  itself did. Insofar as personal beliefs are the same as personal conduct, then it's a personal failing and a flaw of character. I will live with that guilt  for the rest of my life.

In whatever defense/justification could possibly matter at a moment of this portent, I do have a slightly selfish personal reasons for giving the police the benefit of the doubt and being grateful for the police having an outsize presence in my life story, and much more importantly, my family's life story. If I'm being honest with myself, the reasons are probably mostly personal, and not intellectual or political.

It is not my place to tell some of the stories of crime in my family, and they will most certainly remain out of print. But crime seemed to follow my family from the moment we set foot on American soil, and has not yet let up even in the era of militarized police. Whether or not it was ever the right move to militarize police and give them the benefit of the doubt: again, and again, and again, I can tell you that the American people acceded to their outsize power for a reason, and the reasons were damn good.

I will not tell the bloodcurdling stories of harassment to which my mother's family was subjected until the stress of the intimidation compelled them to leave their Forest Park house on Maine Avenue, where they were for all intents and purposes compelled to stay until 1970, two years past the Baltimore riots when my Bubbie and Zaydie were literally escorted home by tank, and years after every other Jew had moved out of the old neighborhood, while my grandparents stayed because my Bubbie now four months from her centenary,  , Mollie Witow, had to take care of her own mother, Tessie Katz, whom because of a botched brain operation in the early 50s, was paralyzed on the entire right side of her body for nearly the last twenty years of her life. Had the operation happened a generation later, the doctor could have had his license revoked. But the stories of those years are harrowing. Irving Kristol, godfather of the neoconservative movement, said that a neoconservative is a 'liberal mugged by reality.'  So if my mother's entire family turned right wing from the severity of the experience, it's quite rather understandable. My Bubbie and Zaydie's parents did not come to this country only for their children and grandchildren to receive the exact same treatment at the hands gentile neighbors they received from Cossacks in the Pale of Settlement, yet there they were in West Baltimore, subject to precisely all of the same forces and threats to their persons.

But I will tell a few of the more harrowing stories of my father's family, who survived the entirety of Hitler's lacerations--at least those who managed to survive..., only to arrive to America and many to get exactly what Hitler longed to visit upon them all.

In my Zaydie's shtetl of Bransk, 3000 Jews lived in 1939, by 1945, that number was 37. Nearly all of them came to Baltimore because my other Bubbie, Eva Tucker, formerly Chava Ticoczki nee Slodka, had two much older sisters in Baltimore who'd arrived thirty years earlier, long established. One married to a wealthy businessman, the other left by a husband in penury, both sponsoring the remaining 'Bransker' to come to Baltimore.

I will omit the names of the two Bransker murdered in America, but what happened was not merely murder, it was murder most foul - zeroth degree murder. One of them, an extremely close albeit ten years younger friend of my grandparents, father to my father's oldest and closest friend, probably a third or so cousin to Zaydie, and a Shoah survivor just like Bubbie and Zaydie, was murdered in his own home, in front of his wife, who was tied up and, I believe, left with the corpse until whenever they were discovered. A few days later, at the inevitable funeral at Saul Levinson Bros., Baltimore's monopolized Jewish funeral home, the wife threw herself on the coffin.

And then there's the other murdered Bransker. When this man was a poor shtetl boy, my Zaydie gave him the money for him, his mother and his sister to make it out before Hitler rounded them up, and somehow they bypassed the Jewish quota for immigration to make it to Atlanta. After fifty years in America, he went missing, and was discovered weeks later, his body burned all over, charred to such irrecognition that he was only identified by his dental records. At the shiva house, the wife could only gaze at the headlines of his murder and recount every harrowing detail of how he might have suffered.

These men were the truest American success stories, businessmen both, whom having escaped the worst conditions on earth, came to a country which gave them success denied to 2000 years of Jews, only for the underbelly of the country who gave our community everything to prematurely claim their lives as remittance for their success. The identity of the killers is both completely immaterial and also an explanation of how widely held biases are formed.

I will not tell stories of Maine Avenue, but I will briefly relate a few stories of Woodholme Avenue, where I and my brothers grew up, and where when I was four my father had to clasp me by the mouth with maximum force to relocate me into their own room as robbers were in the front part of our rancher stealing every piece of hardware they could find while I was trying to scream at the top of my lungs. I will tell of how my father was mugged just last year in his own driveway, screaming while my mother and I were inside the house, thinking he was screaming about another stupid problem we didn't want to hear about. Within thirty minutes of the crime the muggers were apprehended by a team of at least half-a-dozen policemen on a high speed chase. No one has come back to my parents' house for any kind of retribution against my dad for testifying in court, but that kind of policing is over now. Will someone now show up on his doorstep for revenge?

And I will tell of an incident I've kept quiet about for thirty years which my addled mind has told me was true for decades, but my flocculent memory seems to have invented so much that I have long since no longer known what is true in my long term memory and what is not.

Until I was 13, my father's job was to administrate a nursing home he owned in Lower Park Heights, one of the roughest most drug-addled neighborhoods in Baltimore. He constantly had to test drug test orderlies and janitors and kitchen workers, and my mother spent his eleven years at Pleasant Manor Nursing Center fearing for his safety. And yet by all eyewitness testimony, my father was a beloved boss whom in spite of having to constantly fire unreliable new workers who may have been addicts, set up 401K's for all his longtime employees, tutored their children to raise their grades, loaned money with no real expectation of payback, and along with my mother was the only Jew at every one of their family simchas and funerals. In an era when Jewish Baltimore divorced African-American Baltimore to lifelong Jewish prosperity and lifelong black cataclysm, my father was the mensch who stayed behind and the community servant which every self-interested Jewish overachiever had long since chosen not to be.

In the early 90s, my father decided to give a better paying job to whom he thought was an extremely responsible employee, Mrs. Allen, who left the nursing home to become our family's housekeeper.  I'm sure that like every upper-middle-class household of the 20th century, we treated our 'help' with condescension that we didn't even realize was condescension, but she quickly established herself as the indispensable node around which the whole house turned, coming at first once a week, then twice, then three times, then virtually full time, and when my youngest brother was a baby he always preferred her company even to our mother.

But cash would begin to go missing; of course it couldn't possibly be Mrs. Allen, my parents just simply kept losing it. Then items from the house - Evan or Jordan probably hid them somewhere...

And then, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving Weekend 1990, when my mother was pregnant with my youngest brother, my parents pick me up from babysitting at Bubbie and Zaydie's house. We return home, the house was broken into, and every piece of the jewelry my father yelled at my mother for buying was gone - not just my mother's wedding ring and other such much more newly acquired items, but heirlooms that had been with our family since 1850. It looked like a random breakin, but the cops said that this break-in could only have been made to look like a break-in, and that there is no way the robbers could have found the 'stash' unless they knew exactly where it was.

The reason they knew where it was was because Mrs. Allen complained to eight-year-old me that my mother wouldn't tell her where she kept her jewelry, and in my eight-year-old trust, I told Mrs. Allen that I would tell her where it was, but not first without going back on my word because I knew that this was wrong, even had I no idea how wrong it was. When I went back on my word, Mrs. Allen seized me by the arm and squeezed as hard as her thirty-something year old self possibly could. I did my best not to cry, I relented, and I showed her the location, which I will not repeat online for fear my mother still keeps it there.

My disorganizedly deranged mind seems to have fabricated other memories over the years for which I shall neither ever have closure nor catharsis, but I somehow doubt at all it fabricated this. I have another more trivial memory, when my father had brought home a packet of ten rare candies that I was usually not allowed: my favorite, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups--perhaps for Halloween, perhaps for Purim, perhaps just because they were leftovers from some party at the nursing home, and told me that I could have one a day as an after school snack. Somehow, in spite of this rare gold, I'd forgotten they were there for a few days. But I vividly remember the rage I felt when I came home a few days later and discovered that nine of the ten Reeses were gone. I immediately called Mrs. Allen in and pointed to her and said 'YOU'RE A THIEF!!!' The entire room went as silent as the grave, and my mother, probably understanding all too well that Mrs. Allen had in fact taken the Reeses, patiently explained that Mrs. Allen probably just had a sweet tooth, and better her eat the candy than me, whom Dad shouldn't have brought it home for.

But if there ever was any doubt that Mrs. Allen was behind the robbery, that doubt was erased about two years later, during which time she became ever more needed with a third baby in the house, my father's work becoming more and more strenuous, my mother having less and less time for housekeeping, both of my father's parents developing severe dementia at the exact same time, and their oldest son beginning to exhibit all the signs of severe mental duress - a violent temper tantrum every evening followed by overwhelming sobbing of remorse followed by the added stress of trying to maintain an appearance of functionality in the face of schoolwork and socializing with other kids for which his all-too-severe learning disabilities were ill-equipped in extremis, and therefore both of them lodging the complaints with each other that all overstressed married couples experience at times - but all of that with the added pressure that the essential Mrs. Allen became ever more bold in the betrayal of her thefts, and therefore in her betrayals. In such a moment, Mrs. Allen could not possibly be fired, she may have been the only thing keeping the family together.

But checks from my mother's bank account were starting to be cashed, missing from her checkbook which my mother most certainly did not tear out, write, nor have any cash from. Of course they knew who did it, and they could allow it no longer when a person can with the stroke of a pen separate them from their life savings. Finally, Mrs. Allen was let go; never reported to the police of course, how could such a beloved family member be reported merely for theft? But family too can betray family. For months thereafter, when we drove to my Dad's nursing home, my youngest brother would see African-American women in Lower Park Heights from his carseat, and would hauntingly call out in his not yet formed language: "Mrs. Al"... "Mrs. Al"...

I guarantee that thousands of white families in Baltimore County have some semblance of stories like ours, precisely because what white families like ours experienced is probably nothing next to what Mrs. Allen experienced when she went home. Was she a drug addict herself? Was her life in danger from owing money? Were her family members in danger? Did she have to post bail for siblings or nephews wrongfully imprisoned? Did she have to post it again and again when they were locked up for merely loitering on a corner? She probably needed the money much more than we did, but she was otherwise so beloved, what would my parents have refused her had she but asked?

I similarly have no doubt that the murderers of the Bransker had similarly harrowing stories of watching family members die, of mutilations beyond recognition, of terror after horror which were visited upon their loved ones too, and perhaps more often than they ever visited them upon anyone else.

But in the face of all that suffering, police seemed to promise goodbye to all that for middle class white people, and so, white Americans reasoned, may the police ensure goodbye to all that for African Americans too. Policing is the obverse of education, and in both cases, the more money you spend on it, the more lives you save. It's true enough, American crime is still a horror show, and there still are parts of every American city where life is as deadly and violent as anywhere in the world. We also are now as tough on crime as anywhere in the world, and yet crime is as proliferant as ever. It has not even slowed down, and the reasons is because we neglected to be as tough on the causes of crime as we were on the crimes themselves.

In the City of Baltimore, police are funded to the tune of more than half a billion dollars per annum. Public health gets $41 million; while homeless services, employment, civil rights--not even ten million dollars of funding each, perhaps not even ten million dollars between them. Like so many American cities, there is no civil community in West Baltimore, there is no incentive for better lives, there is only poverty, there is only crime, there is only drugs, and there is only police. West Baltimore is by any metric a police state, but it became so for a reasons of social impairment just as now the police state is about to end for the same reason. Perhaps Baltimore became a police state for the wrong reasons, but the reasons for the paranoia about crime were all too real.

Americans are a democratic people, and perhaps therefore a fickle people. We evolve with evidence, but we either don't learn lessons or we overlearn them. The moderate consensus that clamors now for defunding the police is the children of the moderate consensus that fifty years ago clamored for militarizing them. There is no universal standard for what's true and good, and problems evolve from generation to generation. Fifty years from now, our own children and grandchildren may well demand the reinstatement of radically hard police tactics, and they may well demand it much sooner. Every generation responds to the challenges of their epoch as best they know how, but at this moment, the key statistics for our era are that a thousand people die every year at the hands of American police, and that one in a thousand black men will die by the hands of police. The matters of life and death are the essential matters: no life, no quality of life.

About twenty years after Zaydie first came to this country, he and my great uncle Isaac owned the E-ZEE Market in extremely working class Hampden, and their building is now the property which houses The Wine Source - Baltimore's most pretentious liquor store. 2020 Hampden is prosperous, progressive, and pretentious in the extreme - gentrified well past the point of being both bourgeois and bohemian. But 1960's Hampden was crawling with Ku Klux Klan.

Zaydie Tucker, all not quite five feet of him, speaking English with his almost incomprehensible Yiddish accent, would have been such an easy meal for the Klan. But Zaydie was the smartest small businessman in Baltimore, and for years, he put a sign right outside the door which said 'Cops Get a Free Corned Beef Sandwich.'

The Klan never got him.