Tales from the Old New Land - Missions and Monomyth

 

So here are the three missions of the book: 

1. To tell the story of Jewish historical migration. Every Jewish person carries with them the story of what their immigrant ancestors endured, and most can relate to you an astonishing amount of detail about it. And within the story of their grandparents or great-great grandparents is the animating story of all the immigration that happened before it. Historical migration is the Jewish story, and there is no book in the basic corpus of world literature that truly conveys the experience of how and why Jewish historical migration happened. My goal is to write that book. 

2. This book needs to convey the potential for an animating hand in Jewish history and historical evolution. There is no good enough explanation for why Jews still exist in 2022. We should have been annihilated at the hands of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mohammedans, Crusaders, Spaniards, Ukranians, Ottomans, Poles, Russians, and of course, we nearly were at the hands of the Germans. Why are we still here? Is it luck? Is it the Jewish national character? Is it the good deeds of people within our host countries? Or is it God? And if it is God, why does God keep us in the world after all this time, only to make us suffer so?

3. Why me? Why do I, such a black sheep within the Jewish community, feel the compulsion to write all this? The framing story of the whole book will be a simple but highly exaggerated autobiographical narrative told from the point of view of Evan Tucker's nom de plume, AC Charlap. It will not be all that long, but long enough to frame each story. The idea is that in the middle of telling every story, I have a new vision, and the visions are the tales. The stories are literally told from the point of view of mental delusions. But at the same time, the reason for having a kind of exaggerated autobiography in the middle of this is to bring these stories back to earth and ground them in reality. The tone is as life: tragicomic. These will be, basically, in the keys of Bellow, Roth (both Philip and Henry), Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Mordecai Richler, and Howard Jacobson. But from a very different kind of person than any of them from a very different generation with very different concerns. When the tenor of Evan's head grows apocalyptic, it would likely be told in imitation of the understated deadpan of Kafka. 

Here is what Joseph Campbell (or Dan Harmon) would term the 'monomyth' of our stories. We will use Northrop Frye's terminology to guide us through it: 

1. Spring - romance: Somewhere in the world, a not particularly prosperous place has a community of good people who stumble on the secret of improving their communities: hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better. And being so often the most down on their luck people in the world, Jews inevitably come, and find a kind of understanding from people who are simultaneously appalled by their suffering yet find them distasteful, are fascinated by their culture yet terrified it will pollute and pervert their own, and ultimately, realize that these people are improving their lives with astonishing speed, such speed that the natives can't resolve for themselves if these immigrants are entirely human. Here is one of the best half-paragraphs I've ever written: "Everywhere we've gone, we are the barometer of your civilization. We have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably say, but we have been the yeast that makes your society rise. When we are your honored guests, your civilization prospers, when you do us dishonor, your civilization declines. It's probably not because God is watching over us, it's because a civilization well-disposed to its guests is a civilization that values tolerance and progress and liberty and justice, and is therefore destined to improve."

2. Summer - comedy: This place grows incredibly prosperous, and it may or may not be because of the influence of Jews, or of immigrants generally. Nevertheless, the country/community/society is disproportionately successful, and even within that place, Jews are particularly disproportionate in their success. But this country's native born Jews, whose parents and grandparents dwelt in so much oppression, become very conspicuous in how they display their success, as the newly rich often do. It creates what seems like a golden age in the community, at least in retrospect, but so high is the prosperity that expectations grow of what the future will bring, and inevitably, the better future doesn't come, because it was already there.... So the new generation, who never knew a time without prosperity, rebel against the prevailing expectations of their society, and even the smallest rebellions against the society seem like earthshaking events (think of the sixties and Baby Boomers...). And in this new society, Jews are so conspicuous and eminent that they are both the leading figures in both the rebellion against the community, and the establishment who wants to keep things exactly the way they are. (think of the difference between Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg, or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman). The entire society becomes a kind of debate between Jewish opinions, and nobody sees anything weird about it. 

2 1/2. Fall Equinox - Cause of Ekpirosis: The moment of Jewish self-assertion that is the ultimate progenitor of yet another chapter of destruction, seemingly inevitable for Jews in every society in every period. In "Old Europe," that moment was the Dreyfus Trial, when the liberal consensus in Europe asserted that Jews (and therefore everyone else) were permitted equality and fair trial under the law leads in a direct line to the causes of the Shoah less than a half-century later. In the 'Middle Ages', that moment was Jews assuming the role of moneylending forbidden to Christians, which lead directly to blood libels. In the shtetl, that moment was the ability of Jews to own land, which lead to pogroms. In ancient Rome, it was the idea that Jews are allowed self-defense and the same sense of national pride that Rome allowed itself. And yet the paradox of the Jewish condition is that what Jews assert in these periods is, in fact, what should be allowed to all people from all demographics. Jews, in their unwelcome self-assertions, assert sentiments that speak for the underprivileged and nationless which those who have never experienced privilege would never have thought.would be due them, and therefore Jews have functioned as a kind of 'trial balloon' for other nations, and the shock of mass Jewish martyrdom eventually leads to the furthering of rights for everyone else, who eventually take on the privileges Jews have established for themselves. It is only because Jewish history routinely experiences both the height of privilege and the height of humiliation that enables Jews to synthesize their world experience into determining what world requires for to become a more just place, and only through their martyrdom that such justice becomes possible. As Eric Hoffer put it, "Everyone expects Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."

3. Fall - tragedy: Just as Jewish success never lasts very long, a country's success never lasts particularly long either, and eventually it collapses (sorry but it's true) in war, or famine, or dictatorship, or anarchy. It seems to happen in every country and every era, I grievously doubt we will be an exception. The reason that happens is that success is a poisoned chalice. It always manages to highlight those ways in which we're all still lacking, and eventually the inadequacies seem larger than the successes, and because the inadequacies seem larger, the inadequacies BECOME larger because nobody has the morale to do the colossally tough work and sacrifice it takes to keep a society functioning properly. And so people turn to explanations for why life isn't better than it is, and these explanations become like an intellectual suit of armor for them that explains the inexplicable. At the time, their newly adapted identities seem to them like revelations which will change the quality of their lives forever; but life is tenaciously mysterious, and no explanation of why life is the way it is solves our problems any more than temporarily. But since Jews are inherently mysterious and ambiguous, both native to their countries and not, they inevitably run into trouble with people whose worldview is animated by totalizing explanations. The problems are inevitably blamed on Jews, who are inevitably the country's most conspicuously successful people, and they suddenly find themselves the most oppressed people in their society, whose fortunes decline as quickly as their parents or grandparents rose to success. 

4. Winter - Irony: Having cleared a community of its Jews, the newly cleansed society is supposed to take root in a luminously glorious new golden age. But it never does, because it turned out Jews were not parasites, they were yeast, and without Jews, the bread falls and burns. So depleted has this society become from its obviously misplaced priorities that the misfortune which was supposed only to fall upon Jews falls upon everybody. Here's one of the best full paragraphs I ever wrote: "If we're The Chosen People, it's not because we're a better nation, it's because God chose us for his laboratory. We're an unending scroll through which is inscribed the whole world's history. Every new century and country is a new chapter but the lesson of Jewish history is that everything Jews undergo, the world undergoes next. By enslaving us, Egypt eventually enslaved themselves. By crucifying us, Romans eventually crucified themselves. By massacring us, the Crusaders eventually got massacred. By putting us in a religious torture chamber, the Spanish put themselves in too. By imprisoning us in a ghetto, Russians eventually imprisoned themselves. By burning us, Germans eventually burned too. When Jews are accepted, others get accepted next. When Jews are rejected, others get rejected next. When Jews are killed, you get the point...

5. Spring equinox - rebirth: where Jews go next... A new society, formed out of the flaws of an old society and chastened by watching the older societies, corrects the mistakes of the older society to establish a new model, and the cycle begins anew as this society is built on a new model of communal rights and responsibilities, which inspires the optimism required for hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better.... Think of how Rome was built (supposedly) from Trojan refugees. Think of how Byzantium was built out of Rome's conquered nations. Think of how Caliphates were built out of Byzantium's most subjected classes. Think of how America was built from the outcast European emigres. 

Here, finally, is the formal structure. I would like to put a hard cut on 90% of the stories at 4500 words. Most will be much much less than that, 50% probably under 2000. And then for the 10% that might be a bit more epic, we can go as high as 7000 maybe 7500, but never more than 7999, and for every 7500er, there has to be twice as many less than 800. The whole thing must move extremely quickly, there is so much material at hand to get through. Furthermore, nearly everything from distant history (say, before 1700) would be written as 'found documents.' Some of them letters between people fragments of epic poems, some of them written as high-handed scholarly documents, some of them minutes of meetings, some of them even written conversations and dialogues whose origin we don't have to specify. There will occasionally be modern academic comments done in a parody of academic obscurantism. The basic source under which this tale is told is by the guidance of Heinrich Graetz's 19th century five volume History of the Jews, which to this day is one of the greatest history books anyone could ever read. 

1-3-5-7- etc. Partially Autobiographical Tales - this is a framing device, possibly to be written lastly. It will generally exist as five-hundred to a thousand words between each tale. 90% of them must be less than 1000 words, 50% less than 799, and 10% would go longer but never more than 1899. It is the story of AC Charlap, a man not unlike Evan Tucker, but not the same either. 

6

2. Tales from the New Land: ?-? - A revisionist rewriting of the Five Books of Moses that takes modern perspectives into account. Often comic, often violent. 

4. Bible Stories 1100-135 BC A revisionist rewriting of the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, including comic cameos from the biblical prophets and other historical figures of distant antiquity, 

6. Tales of Perversion 135 BC-300 AD - A retelling of the Jewish experience in the Classical Era, sources including Josephus, The New Testament and Gibbon, and then comic tales of the writing of the Mishna and Talmud, mostly consisting of internecine fights between egotistical Rabbis. 

8. Tales of Submission 300-1095 Probably beginning with Jews under Byzantium, the writing of the Talmud simultaneous to the origins of the mass adaption of Christianity and the origins of Christian antisemitism. And then tales of Jews in the Islamic Caliphate (Mohammed will not be a character.... we're stretching enough boundaries here), and eventually, the golden era of Islamic Jewish life. 

10. Tales of Fanaticism 1095-1492 Beginning with the Crusade massacres and 'dispuatations' (show-debates between priests and Rabbis which priests inevitably won), the development of Kabbalah mysticism that emulates the narrator's visions, ending with the black death and then the mass expulsions throughout Western Europe. 

12. Tales of Ghettoization 1492-1648 Beginning with the Spanish expulsion, arrival of Jews in Poland through Greece, life in the Venetian ghetto, ending with the expulsion of Spinoza from the "New Jerusalem" of Amsterdam (technically 1655). Beginning of the Charlap family. 

14. Tales from the Old Land 1648-1900 Beginning with the Chmielnicki massacres in Ukraine, the false Messiahdom of Shabbetai Zevi, British old Testament mania, the missing years of the Ba'al Shem Tov, the birth of Hassidism, a sprinkling of folk tales of general shtetl life, the life of Moses Mendelssohn. The birth of Reform Judaism, the growth of the Rothschilds and Lehmanns, the secret Jewish life of Benjamin Disraeli, beginning of emigration of Jews in America. The Charlaps through the generations. Failed Charlap excursions in Warsaw and Odessa. 

16. The Greenies 1900-: A large family called the Charlaps forced to leave the Shtetl, spread throughout the world, from whose eyes we experience the Jewish 20th century. 

18. Return to the Old New Land 1933-1945: Tales taking Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of European Jewry as its source. The less said for the moment about where this is going, the better. 

Supplementary: Interjections from Cain: Cain, an eternal wanderer of the earth, bearing witness to history, a living incarnation of the Jewish condition, telling the ignominy of what really happened at so many places in letters to Abel. 

When Verdi Works

Nearly a hundred years later, recordings of the 'big three' still haven't been bettered from those old Sabajno/Molajoli recordings with La Scala's B-List singers who can sing most later stars off the stage. No one can possibly equal their vocal security, their cohesive ensemble, their Italian diction, their grasp of every detail and secret. These are generations for whom Verdi accompanied every stage of their lives. They were literally put on earth to perform Verdi, and particularly to perform the 'Big Three.'

Listen to the violins in 'Che e cio'. It's reorchestrated for the recording, Verdi didn't even write their part. But their grasp of what Verdi needs musically is so innate that it's better than any woodwind playing reminiscent of an organ-grinder. This is some of the greatest orchestral playing on record. It is, quite simply, an ideal of playing to which we can only aspire through the decades ever since.

Later Verdi breaks his own mold, and there's a reason masterpieces like Otello and Don Carlo never achieved the love of Rig/Tra/Tro from the crowd faithful. Operas like Falstaff and Boccanegra can only benefit from outsiders to the tradition. When Kleiber and Solti conduct Otello, they can reach the stars, but when they do Traviata, they fundamentally sound more like themselves than Verdi. Imagine a Jon Vickers Alfredo - he could sing it, but it would be perverse. A Bryn Terfel Rigoletto? It would make us laugh in all the wrong ways.

Absurd as it often is, Verdi's high romanticism will never die. So long as listeners have a pulse they will weep at Violetta's plight just as they will hold their lover's hands when hearing the beauties of Chopin's arpeggiated thirds. The very sincerity and earnestness of such music is a vision of humanity we all need to experience, just as people today need the earnest humanity of our culture's own high romantics like Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. It's human oxygen, it makes us remember that everyone near us is deserving of compassion and that, so often, the people we look at askance are merely misunderstood.

I don't truly love Verdi. Unlike Mozart, the nature his transcendence does not survive any misunderstandings. His situations are just too absurd and extreme, and if the singers are anything less than great, all you're left with is laughable dramatic situations, full of coincidences and cliches. And unlike Mozart, Verdi does not generally laugh along with us.

The greatest friend of the universal experience is the particular, and the more idiomatically Verdi's 'big three' are performed, the more universal they grow and the less absurd they seem. Nearly everybody reading this has all been there on nights when the singing was just not that great, and when presented with something less than exemplary musicianship, you can't possibly get past Verdi's intellectual limitations. But on those nights when the hours go to the stars, there's no limit for how Verdi can move any of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn-XUKXd3WY

Underrated 'Classical' Musicians: Frank Zappa

 Frank Zappa may have been an emotionally stunted adolescent, but he was the most brilliantly gifted stunted adolescent since Mendelssohn. Just as Mahler provides an encyclopedic, often parodistic commentary on the long tradition of German music, just as Stravinsky does on the longer tradition of music from prehistory to the modern era, Zappa is a career long and ultra-sophisticated parody on American popular music in all its various forms with a sophistication that can only hail from a refulgantly brilliant musical mind who has a kind of loving contempt for all the music he's parodying. If you're looking for emotional depth like Mahler, Zappa's not the place to find it, but if you're looking for a rock'n roll Stravinsky who provides infinitely sophisticated parodies on every scrap of influence on American music, Zappa is where you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yaX-a3kuCE&list=PLMv8yWckeaRY7ZaQTUoc-37f5ZltD0wM8&fbclid=IwAR35HdJd6f830Jfc0VVWODAZZDdN08_xv0pFbLVtQeix08MWhoTwDQv57Rk

Really Hot Baltimore Take

 

Baltimore is heading to 370 murders or higher this year. If we were a foreign country we could be considered a failed state. Whatever the squeegee kid got charged with, it's just one small pebble in a pool of dysfunction and tragedy that virtually every solution enacted so far seems to make worse. The white people of the city get off scot free and then hand everybody else a death sentence because they, in their white privilege, believe they speak for people for whom they do not speak and never have.

The reason Eric Adams won in New York, a former police captain, was black, latino, and low-income voters. The reason Rick Caruso is now a general election candidate in Los Angeles, a Republican until three years ago... is black, latino, and low-income voters. You want the rest of us to listen more closely to underprivileged voices? OK, listen to them. The majority of them are clearly speaking the exact opposite of what you do, and yet you willfully contradict them. You only amplify the minority voices who are homogeneous to you. You have the privilege of not knowing what they do: they're burying their friends and family every day. Death is the one thing that can never be repaired.

If this trend comes here, Thiru Vingarajah is going to become mayor of Baltimore. However much dirt there is on him, there is more dirt on both those others. Very few people care in the bigger cities about that, and I'm not entirely sure they should. Whatever sinister joke 'Thiru' looks like now, he could win big, and the reason is because further left candidates do not take crime seriously.

The Real Creative Class

The current American economy is based on the idea that there is a creative class of 50 million people that is always striving to create something more out of the country, and always failing. Covid only exaggerated this truth about life in America which has been true for my entire entire lifetime and has only gotten truer. 

Globalization has, bizarrely, made American life more local than ever in living memory. I doubt that life in the US has been more local in the last hundred years than it's been in the early 21st century. On the one hand, everything is basically alike from town to town in amenities, on the other hand, everything is incredibly different and each place has its own personal spin on the same things.

On the one hand, you have these massive corporations that grow larger and larger that dominate every market - chain restaurants, stores that sell literally everything from clothing to hardware, record and film companies that provide blockbuster movies and concerts, and now, the behemoth of even online shopping and entertainment threatens to replace all that. 

On the other hand, there are always these little sub-markets and niches which corporations cannot possibly keep up with; and these little restaurants and stores and songwriters and theater companies innovating from the flimsiest of utilities out of necessity and doing things that can be found literally nowhere else in the world. But making a living requires the backing of a company, or a government, or a civic organization. Without one of the three, it is, in the long run, impossible. Every prosperous person in the entire country knows that, but their outsize prosperity depends on the hand-to-mouth existence of the various weirdos they went to school with who exist outside their nine dots. Most of these people spend their existences in jobs for which they are unfit and live lives of quiet desperation. Eventually, they develop the credit score that they can get a small business loan to achieve their ambition, for which they rarely get more one shot. And, almost inevitably, their ambition fails, and back to decades of quiet desperation they go. And somehow, the country thinks this is a sustainable state of affairs that will not result in guaranteed civil unrest.  

Every town in America has their own hidden places and communities which the town misfits have to construct entirely on their own. Every person in the country falls over themselves in competition to find those unique things nobody else knows about to which they can introduce their friends. And there are new ones constantly springing up, because the after two or three years, the older ones are constantly failing. In addition to all the colossal chain restaurants, there are always literally dozens of new restaurants in nearly every town in the US, most of which never last more than a couple years. The same goes for clothing stores, concert venues, bars and breweries, and interior decoration stores. Meanwhile, there are a colossal number of artists of all types that are trying to make careers and rarely ever succeed, some of which are far better than people with Hollywood contracts. Every city has hundreds of unsigned bands that have break up the moment they get good because they can no longer afford to rehearse. And there are literally thousands of independent films that are never seen anywhere but in film festivals. All this would no longer be true if there was any kind of meaningful subsidy at all for creative endeavors - whether this subsidy came from the government, from companies, or from some civic organizations, it almost doesn't matter - but the very idea of creative subsidy on American soil is a joke. Subsidies and grants are literally a cursory thing - something to point to to say that "we're doing something" while doing nothing at all. 

How much of these creative achievements are truly great stuff? Well, some of it. Not enough frankly. But the lack of subsidy also means a lack of quality control. The real creative class is so busy trying to make ends meet, most of whom spend decades in full-time jobs, meanwhile devoting so much free time merely to marketing and self-promotion, or finding ways of standing out as different from the much larger competitors, that there is so little time left over for actual work. The quality inevitably suffers. 

But the mere act of creating a small commercial business in America, of any type, at any point in one's life, is a subversive act. It is a declaration of rebellion against a system built to make us fail. There are literal millions of people here trying desperately hard to do it, but most of them can't, and they know that the reason is because the modern American system is designed around making sure they fail. There must be somewhere between 30 and 50 million Americans trying to make a creative living of some sort and failing, but it creates a truly huge community of solidarity between people who are trying to stay unique in a country where every pressure is on us to conform. This, as much as anything else, is why life in the United States of America is worth living and worth defending.

Without either corporate, governmental, or civic backing, it is so colossally difficult to create any security within a local market, that 90% of creative small businesses fold. Between occupancy expenses, marketing expenses, equipment and inventory expenses, costs of labor and payroll, to say nothing of personal living expenses that continually go up, there is no chance for people in creative jobs to make a living. Everyone with the power to change that knows it, but they would rather keep more money for themselves.  

Underrated "Classical" Musicians: Robert Wyatt

 

There are some rock musicians who are so inventive that they easily rise to the level of distinguished composers - to say nothing of jazz musicians.... If you can't appreciate the compositional inventiveness of Frank Zappa, Sufjan Stevens, Lou Reed, Christa Paffgen, Klaus Schultze, Randy Newman, Brian Wilson... I just don't know what to tell you except listen again. Is it Schnittke or Tormis? Well... no not quite, but who cares? There are so many modern classical composers who are not of this level of distinction yet are greatly praised.

I am obviously a person with enormous reservations about rock music - reservations I don't really have about older American musical forms like jazz and blues and bluegrass and especially R&B. The reason is that at least from where I sit, rock music is the music of ersatz rebellion and individuality. On the one hand, it purports to be the music of rebellion, on the other hand, it is so clearly the music of privilege. What rebellion is really necessary when you're from the most privileged societies, the most privileged generations, the most privileged social classes, in world history? ? So much of it just doesn't feel sincere, or like people who live authentic life experiences.

That's not to say that there isn't a large number of distinctive musicians within it who raise the bar tremendously, when there are so many tens of thousands of bands who made records, some of them have to be extraordinary. And among the extraordinary includes some of the most famous acts like The Beatles and Chuck Berry and The Beach Boys and David Bowie etc. etc. etc., but taken as a whole, factoring in the average band with a contract... I think it underdelivers in extremis on what its eminence seems to guarantee; as a teenager I was ashamed to say that out loud, and I'm tired of holding back.

But some of the high water marks in all rock music are so little known that it's another mark against rock music for being such risible custodians of their own tradition. Few are less known than Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt. It is just extraordinary - there are Debussyian 6/3 chords everywhere, modulations worthy of Faure, tone colors worthy of Messiaen, and polyrhythmic counterpoint so far beyond the homophony we usually get on the average rock album, this is great composition by any standard at all. And it is a personal statement so far beyond what we expect from most albums.

Robert Wyatt composed this album (and he really composed it) after a horrific accident in which he fell from a third floor window and was paralyzed from the waist down - no doubt he was high, but THIS is the sort of tragedy from which truly great art is made. Art exists to express the unsaid. Art exists to capture the elusive poetic truths that only come out of experiences too complex to be captured in simple conversation. So if the enormity of the experience is not sufficient, what is there that the work can teach us? Who can derive solace from it when life presents them with their darkest moments? Anything less is entertainment, and nobody should be ashamed of loving entertainment - great entertainment is some of the hardest stuff to produce on earth, but art needs something deeper.

Listen just to the first song on the album: Sea Song. Look at the lyrics of this:

You look different every time
You come from the foam-crested brine
It's your skin, shining softly in the moonlight
Partly fish, partly porpoise
Partly baby sperm whale
Am I yours?
Are you mine to play with?

Joking apart
When you're drunk you're terrific

When you're drunk
I like you mostly late at night
You're quite alright
But I can't understand the different you
In the morning, when it's time

To play at being human for a while
Please smile!

You'll be different in the spring
I know, you're a seasonal beast
Like the starfish that drift in with the tide
With the tide
So until your blood runs
To meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own
With my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
My very own

We're not alone

The Sea obviously has one of the most honored places in both music and poetry. The sea not only means itself but is our deepest poetic metaphor for the unconscious. It means sex, it means violence, it means death and rebirth, it means light and darkness, it means life itself in all its possibilities.

Imagine this song as Wyatt addressing life itself. "I like you mostly late at night... but I can't understand the different you in the morning, when it's time to play at being human for a while." "Your lunacy fits nicely with my own. My very own. We're not alone." This is the dual vision present in all the greatest art - day and night, alone and together, comedy and tragedy, spirituality and humanity, romance and loneliness, rationality and madness, reality and poetic metaphor. Life is a mad thing, it is also worth embracing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agCX2RQWN44&list=PLiN-7mukU_RGeUH0dtrx72FMM_ivXGmgJ

Sonny's Best Scene

 If you love The Godfather, you haven't really seen it until you've seen "The Godfather Epic: A Novel for Television." In 1977 Coppola recut it in chronological order for TV viewing and restored what must have been at least an hour of deleted scenes. However great a movie The Godfather is, the TV version is another level entirely, the extra scenes only adding to what we think we already knew. This is James Caan's best scene in the whole movie, and hardly anybody ever sees it because people only see the theatrical version - which they usually watch on their TV's.

The Godfather is one of the few three hour movies that seems too short. Not just because it's so good, but because it always feels like there are scenes missing that explain certain references. When Sonny exclaims to Tom in anger 'Pa had Genco, look what I got?' you're left wondering 'Who's Genco?' That's explained in a deleted scene when Vito comes to a hospital with all his sons to visit Don Vito's lifelong Consigliere whom Tom Hagen replaces, the dying Genco Abbandano, who literally pleads with Don Vito 'Godfather, call off the angel of death!'

If it were just a straightup 2 hour crime thriller that led to an exciting climax, nobody would have cared after 1972. But The Godfather movies showed that you can have a 3-3 1/2 hour movie with all the detail of a novel in which the visual only adds to the vividness of the experience. The line from The Godfather to Breaking Bad and Mad Men has no curve. Before The Godfather, long movies were usually historical epics that had pomposity baked in. But The Godfather was a movie which treated evil lowlives with all the dignity of Ben-Hur and Scarlett O'Hara, and consequently had more to say about life than Gone With The Wind ever did, in America and everywhere else. The Godfather is not just about crime, or about the immigrant experience, or about capitalism. At it's bottom it's about three subjects:

1. It's about the transition of American vice from alcohol to drugs and how drugs made cities much more violent places.

2. It's about how the Old World impacts the new. In 20th century New York, the most progressive dynamic city in the world, organizations control it whose code of conduct was defined by the Roman Empire.

3 and most important: The Godfather is the key movie, one of the key works of art ever made in any form or time period, that explains to us the appeal, the inevitability, the temptation, perhaps even the necessity, of evil.

Evil will always be with us. Everything that's created will be destroyed, and every morally good objective in life requires some things actions along the way that wade into, to say the least, moral grey areas. If the world is already filled with murderers, do we simply work to make a world without unjust murders and all the nearly as grisly things which accompany it, and if we do, what are we prepared to do to make it happen? If we're on the right, are we prepared to advocate for authoritarian methods? If we're on the left, are we prepared to advocate for terrorist methods? And if those methods fail to rid the world of murder, are we prepared to take those matters into our own hands and be the change we wish to see in the world? Or, do we just shrug and accept that injustice is simply part of the world that we can't change? Certainly the latter path is easier, which means that most people will choose it over the former, which makes life for those who choose the path of activism will become that much more exponentially difficult.

You can apply all that if you like to The Godfather or our current situation or just shrug that last paragraph off as stupid pomp. All the rest I'll say is that in this year, the 50th anniversary of the release, the age of TV bingewatching, and when Coppola is about to make the magnum opus he's threatened to make for 40 years, I don't know how this version hasn't been re-released with a publicity blitzkrieg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_3GZ7zYL8

Why I Miss Drinking

I don't feel like an alcoholic, yet occasional evidence always piles up. Where others have balance impervious to disturbance, the quarter of us with seesaws for minds exist with a segment of the brain that's a feculent carcass of disturbance. The mentally unbalanced have id that rages. Whatever lies there unsaid comes to fruition when not monitored with continual vigilance, and even when monitored, the wolf only needs slight provocation to turn round and feast. Sometimes an animal needs to defend himself, but it doesn't change that a beast is still a beast.

Like so many nerds of the particularly bookish type, I tend to view myself as born in the wrong time and place; a 19th century gentleman more comfortable among hard copy books and old music than people, who conducts himself person-to-person with a kind of courtliness even I find a little absurd. But like so many in the 19th century, all it takes is a little sherry or Schlitz to crumble the cultivated facade. I examine my behavior when I'm drunk, and even if I know there are many worse, it's an ignominious record. Amid the thousand hours of fun, the most rewarding conversations of my life and the confidence to speak in foreign languages: there's friendship ending fights and god knows how many fights ended near there, packs of cigarettes smoked, dozens of spontaneous 3000 calorie meals, two pullovers by police, a car accident, and obnoxious behavior around women - yes, with incidents of crepitude. There are plenty of people who consume more alcohol than I who never think of themselves as alcoholics, but if I keep drinking the way others take for granted, I'm not going to last very long.

I stopped drinking three years ago when I realized I no longer trusted my conduct. I began drinking again two years ago after a breakup and stopped when I realized the drinking would make me eat myself into a heart attack. I began again at a party two weeks ago, right before a long vacation started and I thought I'd earned the right after the pandemic and could control it just as well as I ever did before.... Whether a bender or not, three hours in came an explosive friendship ending fight by text, the drinking didn't let up until I came home. In the meantime, I was utterly depressed during the day, utterly elated by night; or at least utterly elated when I wasn't crying in bars without inhibition. As I cried I literally saw people point to me and say 'Wow, he just doesn't care...' Thirty minutes later in the same bar I was regaling Brooklyn punk musicians with tales of escapades in the Baltimore music scene: drinking with Dan Deacon and flirting backstage with Jenn Wasner from Wye Oak (I was drunk...).

The bars in New York are so not what they used to be. Many of them seem around a quarter their former capacity, and the prices are prohibitively expensive just to stay open. Yet the stats don't lie: binge drinking has increased 21% since the pandemic began. there will be 8000 more alcohol related deaths since the pandemic began, 18,700 more cases of liver failure, 1,100 more cases of liver cancer by 2040. There is 13% less driving since March 2020, yet there are 23% more carcrash fatalities; we can't pretend alcohol is not the main factor in those crashes. This is clearly drinking done alone. We were already #1 in the first world's binge drinking - a sign that we've been the most dysfunctional of all first world countries. We're now drinking as though we're not in the first world - these are Russian numbers, and like Russia, the rest of the first world views us with a snobby contempt that is both undeserved and entirely deserved. Abuse of all those substances that lead to worse lives is up: alcohol, hard drugs, nicotine, preservatives, and sugar. Statistics don't lie, the more unhealthy stuff you consume, the harder it is to have a stable quality of life.

One of those car crash fatalities was the dad of another former close friend, one of the closest I've ever had. I guarantee eith absolute security that the drunk driver was not him (it took me a few hours to realize the implication of that statement without that qualifier and oh my god I meant that he was victim of a driver in an 18 wheeler, not a perpetrator) And in yet another of the bizarre moments of my life when connections seem extra-human, he died on the same day as Bubbie, while her mother will struggle life long from the same accident to recover her brain function. I was certainly not drinking twelve years ago on the day our fight happened, but the fight certainly happened during another heavy partying period when my state of mind yo-yo'd with the moon.

Whether delusional or not, I have always prided myself as being the funniest person in any room. I'm obviously not better looking than most of you, and I may not be smarter, but I'm more articulate, and I'm funnier than you (fuck you too...). So if you're the kind of person with unplaced rage, humor is clearly the best possible use and it can bond you to people who otherwise would never take notice. It can even make physically beautiful people think that a short guy who was nearly 100 pounds overweight with unmistakably bizarre facial tics is worth hanging out with extensively. This guy was, in every sense, the court jester, permitted to say things nobody else was because he had funnier, more interesting things to say than the much better looking people the rest all went home with. They'd even let me get away with making fun of them and yelling at them for the various ways I thought they were stupid. One of my college roommates was the son of a general, and post-college I was regularly drinking in DC bars paid for by the largesse of the federal government. At one bar we were such regulars that the bartender simply comped us for more than a year. I was truly insane those years, my obsessional nature hearing voices and seeing magic signs in every room and streetcorner, making every decision for me and telling me that if I countermanded the voices, all the divine wrath of the world would come crashing upon me. But I covered it up relatively well by painting myself as a mere extreme neurotic, and when it came time to perform my one-man shows for friends, whiskey usually did the bulk of the work.

I had far too many close friends in those years - my late 20s. No romantic relationships, not a one, but as many as 50 intimate friends at a time and at any given point seemed to be fighting with half of them, the resentments engendered by their semi-functional lives overwhelming me with very real rage. Whether they knew just how insane I was until I lost my temper, I knew, and that most people would find it much easier than I to find work and love was the cause of rage unslakeable. In a life with many candidates, it was perhaps both the most enjoyable and the most agonizing period of my life. It seemed that half my life was spent in public telling funny stories, and half spent in private howling like a wounded animal.

Shortly before the pandemic, I tried something I wonder if I'd ever tried before. Partying while sober. Oh my god it was torture. I'm a person of words and notes, not of the people. You try your best to keep the anxiety under control and play the same role you once did with boozy effortlessness, but every moment was an agony of anxiety as all the boozy feuds of the past played through my head and the noise of my brain wondered which of them would be the next to turn.

Over the pandemic I discovered what I'd known all along. Every word in public is a dread-fueled performance, a performance I now prefer to keep to essays. When left to my own devices, I am introvert in extreme; the terror of each interaction disappearing within the confines of a piece of music or book, or when writing words on a screen-lain page that recounts the long, strange history of my life.

And yet, I miss drinking so. Not the drinking itself, but the interaction that comes from it. I miss the drunken conversations where two people stripped of inhibition's varnish arrive at speaking of permanent things. I miss when beautiful women touch you on the elbow when you make them laugh, and take you spontaneously into a one-armed embrace after you give them the ear and validation they've always wanted from their boyfriend. And I so miss the explosive drunken laughter and the sense (at least in my memory) that the center of everyone's night was my funny lines and stories.

And for one night in New York, I got to relive it, and so thrilling it was. I don't remember their names, we did not exchange contact info, but it was a night fit for the best of my DC years. It was the same night I broke down crying in a New York bar - a bar touted by New York Magazine as a bar virtually guaranteed to get anybody laid... so much for that. After a pickmeup from talking to a bunch of musicians, I left that place good and soused, feeling as though I could not possibly take in another drop.

But then I saw a bunch of people talking outside another bar to each other in suits. I figured this was a bar of young Republicans, and could not possibly pass up the opportunity to create memories where I could take in what truly goes on in the tragically ludicrous heads of an educated Republican in 2022.

It was nothing of the sort. It was a Brooklyn wedding having taken place a hundred feet away, the wife American, the husband an Irish ex-pat living in Berlin. I sat down at the only available seat at the bar, and for the first time at a bar in years, found myself on a stool next to a beautiful, intelligent, and very flirtatious woman. I don't recall her name, but she is Filipino, mostly long hair but the side of her head shaved. She lives in Berlin, the daughter of a career high-level diplomat who is now, I believe, an eminent member of the Congress of the Philippines and one of the leaders of the anti-Duterte resistance; she's a published poet whose favorite poets are Baudelaire and Marianne Moore, who spoke at very least English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, and Tagalog. Merely to talk to her was to feel as though I was somehow in the front seat of history with someone whose future was unlimited and would be remembered with some kind of posterity. With her I told a funny story or two of my week in Berlin, quoted my very little memory of Baudelaire in French, and got to speak German for the first time in god knows how many years, most of the words not coming to me that used to be relatively easy (or at least seemed easy when I was drunk and probably riddled with a thousand errors).

Then I met her dude, an Irishman living in Berlin who has not been to the US since he lived in Chicago for two months in 2009. I can't recall most of the details of our conversation, nor his name, but it was a whirlwind of permanent things; history, philosophy, politics, and the future, which seems so much more ominous than the early Obama years when I was at my drunkest. Like any good European of our time, he was a socialist, but no Corbyn or Melanchon-like fanatic. For all our problems, he loves America dearly, and his fondest wish for us was that we realize, as I readily agreed, that the time for passive electioneering resistance is over. I recall vividly him saying that America has answered the call to defend the world so many times before, and honorably answered it as no other country has, and now America is called to defend the world as never before: to defend the rest of the world from ourselves.

When it came time to go home, I had no charge left on my phone and no idea what direction I was going. Somebody in the bar, maybe part of the wedding maybe not, called an uber for me, no questions asked, and simply paid the charge for me to go back to my hotel.

This is the cameraderie of drunks I forever miss, and will forever call to me, even if I remain sober for the next fifty years.

Why We Need Catharsis

 Some of us are snobs. I don't love musicals. Sondheim is not musicals. I don't love opera. Mozart's not opera. I don't love action movies. Spielberg's not action. High notes and big productions only mean something if they express something real and deeper. Some of us aren't in a secure enough position in life that we can wait for something else to give us the catharsis we need to keep going. There are moments when you see yourself in what you watch or listen to, and you feel less lonely. And some of us need it every day of our lives.

When Bobbi shouted 'who will take care of me' (and the line is usually 'who will i take care of') after a whole show of holding back and trying to minister to the problems of married friends, I exploded in tears and for the rest of the show. I probably rocked the seats of the whole row.

This is why some of us keep coming back, keep reading, keep watching, keep listening. Even when life doesn't work out, art can. It shows you what it means to be a fucking human being without you're having to go through it again yourself, which you inevitably do, and reminds you that other people have been and will always have been in that place even when you're not. You don't necessarily become a better human being, but it does open the door and give you the opportunity for improvement.

If you decide to take it.

What is New York Becoming?

 I'll come back to Baltimore tonight mourning as ever my inability to live in New York. But as I come back the thought occurs as ever. The life we want shouldn't be anywhere near this expensive.

People who blame capitalism for the nature of a world that's always been bad are dangerous. If they ever give us that better world they talk about, it will be at the price of hundreds of millions of lives at least. And even if they're right about capitalism (and they're not) a billion people are willing to die and kill to prove them wrong. And the problems of right-wingers are too obvious to repeat again and again and again. But all this, all the problems today, is the fault of supposed moderates and centrists who claimed to be wiser than the people they claimed are extremists and should have known better; but they didn't, because complacency breeds complacency. If things are going better now, why not assume they always will and who cares if we cut a few corners in providing for the future? Taxes go down, education funding slashed, welfare programs gutted, wages frozen, communities hollowed, regulations stripped, and voila, a public that can't make money to live properly and any service to help them out is unreliable, they're no longer educated properly to figure out the cause of their problems, and companies, in their search to dominate a worldwide market, are allowed to move their jobs anywhere to find the cheapest labor.

So back to Baltimore I go. A city I don't particularly care for and doesn't particularly care for me. If you're white, the city's livable. The prices don't break your bank account. People really are noble in Baltimore. They try so hard to save a city that cannot be saved. Nobody comes to Baltimore to live their best life, and if they do, somebody misinformed them.

But look around New York next time you come here. For the first time since I was a kid, there's graffiti everywhere, and not the artistic kind either. There are sex workers all around Times Square again. Even the most prosperous streets have boarded up businesses. If Baltimore became New York once upon a time, New York is about to become Baltimore.

Even if I moved, the whole country is clearly turning into Baltimore. The only difference between living in Baltimore and elsewhere here is that Baltimoreans are living in the American future. It's not a particularly nice place, but most of us survive, and that's the best most of us can ever ask. Occasionally there will be those moments of transcendence that recharge our batteries for the next insurmountable obstacle. But in the meantime, life goes on, as unrewarding as it's probably supposed to be.

When FAcebook Becomes Blogging

 

Some of us are snobs. I don't love musicals. Sondheim is not musicals. I don't love opera. Mozart's not opera. I don't love action movies. Spielberg's not action. High notes and big productions only mean something if they express something real and deeper. Some of us aren't in a secure enough position in life that we can wait for something else to give us the catharsis we need to keep going. There are moments when you see yourself in what you watch or listen to, and you feel less lonely. And some of us need it every day of our lives.

When Bobbi shouted 'who will take care of me' (and the line is usually 'who will i take care of') after a whole show of holding back and trying to minister to the problems of married friends, I exploded in tears and for the rest of the show. I probably rocked the seats of the whole row.

This is why some of us keep coming back, keep reading, keep watching, keep listening. Even when life doesn't work out, art can. It shows you what it means to be a fucking human being without you're having to go through it again yourself, which you inevitably do, and reminds you that other people have been and will always have been in that place even when you're not. You don't necessarily become a better human being, but it does open the door and give you the opportunity for improvement.

If you decide to take it.