Monday, August 29, 2022

The Friendship Recession

 

It's an astounding paradox of our time. We're all more connected than ever online, we have more chances to speak to our friends than ever before in human history. Even when alone, there is literally no reason to be alone, and yet most people are finding friendships more difficult than ever. In the most social years in human history, more friends than ever are growing apart, and often even breaking apart. And as the temperature heats politically and planetarily, connections of iron are melting everywhere.
The human mind is literally unreadable to anyone but itself, and therefore every man is an island. The right to privacy is inviolate because it's a necessity. We are not supposed to know what everyone in our life thinks about everything, and in many ways, the fact of knowing their opinion too often is an intrusion. There are some things which the people close to you do not approve of which we'd be far better off not to know, and once we do, the trust we once had in them is always in question.
Statistics show that men are suffering from this 'friendship recession' with extreme disproportionality, but I honestly think women are suffering from it too. So many married people I know, women and men both, are struggling with the years of early child care, and go through their days in terrified anxiety. So many single people I know, men and women both, are struggling with the crippling loneliness of an unattached life. Women may feel more connected to other women in unprecedented numbers, but such connection does not stop a march of history that seemed to be marching in their direction multiple times only to march farther and farther away.
Our generation of women have had a long series of moments when they finally thought their struggles might be alleviated, only to find them far from over. Any hard won gains of their struggles will likely be to the benefit of generations after theirs. In times of historic struggle, and who can doubt we're in one, everyone feels alone. No one can stop thinking about how close they were to something better, only for good tidings to be ripped out of their hands the very moment before they secure their grip. We have no idea what the future will bring, and in such times, you can only feel truly connected to those whom you trust absolutely to act in your interests, and everyone else is an object of terrible fear.
Something like 10% of the population belong in some sort of cluster of personality disorders that affect their ability to act in the interests of those they would love. Of that 10%, the number who are men is obviously larger than the number of women, and the reason is generally not, as so many critical theorists contend, that men are socialized to act toxically. The reason is on the cellular level. One cannot dismiss the bad behavior of men as 'toxic masculinity' when it's arguable that testosterone itself is a toxin. All those born with high levels of testosterone, including many women, are more prone to erratic, destructive behavior. For the vast majority of men, socializing them to treat the women in their lives better can be an overwhelming success, but there is that 10 or 15% of men who will react against the socialization and accountability with all the more will to power against it.
What do we do to protect ourselves against them? What can we do but band together? What can we do but make friends with people whose friendship is not necessarily something we're not always going to find worthwhile? We have to accept, even love, the humanity of those who see the world completely differently from us, because if we don't embrace people who believe things we loathe, even occasionally do things we loathe, there is a large population of Trumps and Putins out there who can easily exploit our fissures.
I know that I'm experiencing a small friendship recession myself. I was stunned by how much I enjoyed the quiet of the pandemic, the first time I didn't have to worry about socializing in Baltimore. My closest friends are almost all in other cities, and I kept in touch with them over zoom, and 'virtually' dropped nearly all my Baltimore friends. Suddenly, I stopped drinking, I stopped binge eating, and my weight suddenly melted by thirty pounds. But now that we're all starting to re-socialize, I find old anxieties and old habits returning, and a loneliness which I felt not at all when I didn't have to see people has returned with a vengeance in this era when I once again do.
I've had much more painful experiences, but I lost a good friendship this summer that was both extremely meaningful, and somewhat exploitative on the friend's part, and the moment I pushed back, I was of course abandoned like Haley Joel Osment in AI. I miss this person terribly, I do not miss what this person put me through. Was the friendship worth the trouble? Probably, because such is friendship. Friendship, real friendship, is not defined by calm waters, but by the fact that both protect the other through turbulent waters, turbulence that is in many ways self-inflicted by both friends. Friends are not only there to be supportive but also to challenge one another when being challenged is necessary, and this friend, well... oh my god...
But for me, this is ultimately just a small friendship recession. My 'friendship depression' was at the end of 2015. I came to Baltimore in 2012, and my first three-and-a-half years in Baltimore were, in retrospect, such an extraordinary honeymoon. Everyone in Baltimore who knew me thought me a shitstirrer, almost a 'social assassin'; to an extent well past how I was known in my Washington DC twenties, when I probably deserved such a label far more. But in spite of the fact that people found my refusal to curb my tongue infuriating, they wanted my friendship anyway. Why? Because I'm funny...
It was almost as though having a person around with a lack of inhibition about saying obnoxious funny things was like badly needed oxygen to people so constrained by ethical codes that they repressed a crucial part of themselves they refuse to acknowledge is even there. For most people, humor is as much the oxygen of life as love, and in many circles that used to welcome me, all the hookups in the world could not stop them from seeming completely repressed; and therefore there was hardly anyone around confident enough to crack a joke. Nobody seemed to approve of me, but for a number of years, everybody kept coming around for more. I had a few friends in DC like that, but in Baltimore, it was almost everybody.
And then, in 2015, I found myself in a relationship of my own. After a few weeks it was... misery itself. I ultimately blame no one but myself for going into a relationship like that with my eyes completely open, but for all my friendships in those years, I was nevertheless lonely, and terribly jealous of all the people who seemed to find some semblance of happiness in each other's arms. By barely more than a month in, I was utterly wretched and the wretched state increased as time went on. I believe the misery and stress deposited upon me caused a chain reaction that caused me to deposit my misery elsewhere, which caused at least ten people I thought good friends to run screaming for the exit. During that period I exited a part-time job of six years on bad terms, I resigned in anger from the band I'd belonged to for four years that gave me more pleasure than any musical experience ever has, which thereby caused the breakup of my own band; which caused me to welch on commitments for my band to play at a friend's wedding - which seemed to cause an unspoken breakup of a good friendship with them. While at their wedding I realized that I'd only felt truly accepted and affirmed in the company of one friend, which caused me to fall in love, thereby ending even that friendship. All of which caused me to have a very nearly literal nervous breakdown, which of course caused me to be risible company, behave regretfully in a number of different ways, and caused the end of still another three or four good friendships.
Am I to blame for all that? Quite a bit of it, yes, of course. I do think just about every friend I lost in those events could have been 30-70% more forgiving, but when someone is well-liked spite of being kind of a schmuck, it's only a matter of time before people decide to dislike you for being a bigger schmuck than you actually are. Whether you're nice or mean to others, people turn on you all the time, it's one of life's many seasons, and later in life, people who loathe each other sometimes become one another's staunchest allies because of the bad experiences they've shared.
But just a month or two after all that came the Trump presidential candidacy, and nearly all of us had every expectation of life uprooted. Whether it would have been easier or harder with all those friends who turned out to be less friendly than I thought, we all faced the same dread that every expectation and value we have may end, and in conjunction with that, what is any loss of a few friends in comparison to all we could lose?
I was, and I suppose I remain, a bit of an interpersonal Trump. Not nearly so bad of course, but certainly that sort of person who butts in his opinion and presence much too often. It truly is a learned trait a naturally quiet person learned over decades of living with an extremely unquiet mind. However hard and unlikely, it's a trait that I hope to unlearn so that I may live something like a quiet, harmonious life that seems to be the last thing available to a person who puts up such a gregarious front; but as I hopefully get knee deep into 'bookwriting land,' the essays here will be less frequent as the writing and concentration is deposited elsewhere (he says yet again...), and socializing can be something much quieter as befits anybody in their forties.
But how does one live quietly? Well, sadly the answer is probably to do as quiet people do. Keep your opinions to yourself, keep most of your clever lines to yourself, distance yourself from situations before you lose your temper, and make yourself much less visible. Well... I'm down to half-a-dozen facebook posts a day from the forty I'd post around the time my social life went to shit, but realistically speaking, people are who they are. I'm probably stuck with this blustering bombast for good, and believe me, I like it less than you do. One does ones best to find the open avenues for improvement, but a closed lane is a closed lane when there's a bulldozer or steamroller sitting in it.
Some of us are just born to be barometers for how the rest of the world feels. In moments of relaxation, we're welcomed, in moments of stress, no one is less welcome. I'm hardly the first for whom this is true. It's the state of the Jewish people throughout history, and there are many moments when such a circumstance feels like the mark of Cain, but what is clear is that even people around Baltimore or elsewhere who can't stand me would much rather welcome me with open arms than 90% of those who vote for Trump or think Vladimir Putin's a great man.
So never mind me, I'm just a tiny pebble in a sea of multitudes you all find much more disgusting. Whether in 20 years (assuming I'm around) I'm ever back in the life of people who seemed suddenly to think of me like a dead raccoon in their wall, they all will have to welcome people into their lives they find so much more distasteful than me. At some point, some child, or parent, or sibling, will become convinced that Trump is a great man, or that abortion is murder, or that gay people are sick and trans people are faking it, that global warming is a hoax and the poor have themselves to blame, that men are the persecuted gender and Christians the persecuted Americans. But the more power such movements obtain, the more important it will be to embrace these people close to you who collaborate with the worst of them, precisely because their beliefs are so poisonous that they will poison the whole world. In a dictatorship, people viewed with favor by dictators are the only people who can guarantee the safety of people you love.
When Auden wrote 'We must love one another or die,' he didn't just mean to love those who are easy to love, he also meant that we must love those who hate all too easily, because hate met with hate only breeds greater hate, and the option thereafter is death.
Friendship, like love, is far more complicated than it looks. It's far more complicated because it's far more simple. You think you can choose your friends, but the truth is that for the vast majority of the time, circumstance chooses our friends for us and unless the person does something objectionable in the first week we all just sort of shrug and say 'ok, this is the person I'm in it with now.' In this era of the internet, we may think we have more agency over who our friends are than ever before, but the truth is that we have less agency than we have in a long long time. By choosing our friends carefully according to our values rather than our needs, we become hammers in search of nails, because there are always disagreements about fundamental values that can escalate into enmity. By cutting off friends who tell us unpleasant truths about ourselves, the person who abandons sets themselves up for far worse abandonments down the road. By avoiding friends we often find insulting rather than telling them their behavior's unacceptable and helping them reform, we are turning against us the very people who know how to damage our social lives the most.
Hans Keilson, a Dutch writer and Holocaust survivor, made the point better than anyone I've ever read: "Enemies never die out in this world. They are recruited from former friends." In an era when families are breaking apart, when people have less friends than ever - particularly men, when disagreements seem so rife that we protect ourselves in a cocoon of like minds to validate ourselves, we are courting civilizational death, from which even those who survive will bury so many friends they love.
Our friends are often not our favorite people, but they are our allies, our advocates, our cheerleaders, the people who know us and the people who understand our choices even when they don't agree with us. Friendship can sometimes feel like a marriage that isn't worth saving, but after family, friends are the second bulwark of survival in a world that eventually kills us all.
And besides... they can be a lot of fun.

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Underrated Classical Musicians: Seymour Bernstein

 This is really extraordinary, a ninety-five year old conservatory piano teacher and former denizen of the concert circuit posting lessons online. I don't have the time for anything long today, but it's really wonderful to have this repository of wisdom here. Look at his list of teachers: Brailowsky, Curzon, Boulanger, and, oh my god, George Enescu, who wasn't even a pianist (though, of course, Enescu is said to have played piano beautifully). This guy is clearly not just another pianist, this a real musician.

Every pianist claims they're some beautiful cinnamon roll of a piano genius because they studied with the student of the student of the student x3 of Liszt and Beethoven. It's the musical equivalent of what we call 'yichus' in Yiddish, and it generally tells you very little about the actual wisdom passed on when the true genius is diluted by 5 generations, or even 1. I took a number of classes from a music teacher at university who studied with Schnabel, Serkin, and Brendel - literally the German triple crown, along with a number of other august teachers whom I will not mention lest I give his identity away, because even twenty years ago, this professor may or may not have been senile.
But to have studied under Enescu is a more impressive CV than nearly any pianist, save perhaps my very favorite two from whom I've learned more about interpretation in less time than any number of stars: Rudolf Firkusny, who studied under Janacek, and Lili Kraus, who studied with Bartok (a lot of conductors did, but not many concert pianists). There is no way to have studied under such pure mediums of music without retaining their most trenchant insights.
I'm in no position to confirm some of the interpretations of composers' markings he passes on here as accurate or not, but some of what he says here is really and truly shocking. I'm quite tempted to argue with his conclusions, but when you get your wisdom directly from Enescu and Boulanger, who am I to dispute it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRLBBJLX-dQ

A Quick Brahms Playlist

 Brahms (and Schubert) is the hardest composer to understand. Like so much standard repertoire, playing him well is almost a completely lost art. Overdramatize Barhms and he just sounds hectoring, overprofound Brahms and he just sounds pretentious. To find both the profundity in Brahms, you often have to play him like light music. Brahms is both the flow of life and the glow of the next world. He's the world of complex emotions that are constantly evolving through time and flitting with the omnipresent shock of new circumstances. He's the divided self between private thought and public appearance. He's my first musical love, I've listened to more Brahms than just about any other composer. I'm more convinced than ever that understanding of Brahms is (or at least it was...) the largest fundamental sign of a truly cosmic musician. Here's a very small list of the performers who have convinced me that they fundamentally 'get it.' I'm not gonna spend time finding chamber music, singer and choral links...:

A list of performers who 'get it.'
Conductors (surprisingly and sadly they do the best):
Walter
Ansermet
Munch (really)
Busch
Steinberg
Wand
Masur
HM for kinda getting it...: Weingartner, Klemperer, Abravanel, Mravinsky, Kubelik, Sawallisch, Dohnanyi, Jansons, Bychkov
Violinists
Huberman
Szigeti
Busch
Milstein
HM: Kreisler, Oistrakh, Stern, Gitlis, Suk
Pianists:
Backhaus
Rubinstein
Firkusny
Lupu
Ohlsson (really)
HM: Schnabel, E. Fischer, L. Kraus, Kovacevich, Volodos,

Dear Boomers

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/us/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-democrats-gop.html?fbclid=IwAR26YsrLgpR17sStnwh3ZcMJLaHQ0KmJiJXmZTfTqaot7dyCRJVjdN5dDJQ


If you knew the stories of debt most of you have saddled my generation with, those of you without antisocial personality disorders wouldn't be able to sleep at night. My parents basically live like Puritans, so I'm one of the lucky ones. Whatever the solution is, life has blessed 67 million of you beyond any demographic of people in the history of this planet. You've lived your entire lives on the expectation that life would work out, you promised your kids that life would treat them the same way, and every decision your generation cheered on ensured it wouldn't from upper class and capital gains tax cuts to the repeal of Glass-Steagall to the slashing of welfare and education funding to the belief that Democrats and Republicans exist in a state of moral parity; and let's not even get started on tech utopianism and global warming procrastination. This is on you. My generation is now dealing with the shock that life will not work out for the majority of us just as we have our own children whom we have to prepare for a hundred gathering storms without any example for how to do so still in living memory. You created this mess and once we try to get out from under it, you complain about something for nothing. You are the something for nothing generation, and after Vietnam, there was no sacrifice asked for you. Many of us may be asked to provide the last full measure of devotion to our children and grandchildren, far more than passed in Vietnam. We will do so happily, but knowing that we only have the example of previous generations who are now departed, who provided the world from which you reaped unprecedented rewards while going decades without thinking how you could pay it forward. 

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Oh How I Try with Sci-Fi

 I try, I try, I try, oh how I try. Oh how much better would be my life be if I were cool enough to be nerdy, but I just don't get it. Please pity me all ye nerds for I have striven to be as you all for so very very long, and have failed nearly as spectacularly with you as I ever did with the cool kids. For thirty years, the nerds and I have eyed each other across a lunch table of outcasts with mutual suspicion and recrimination; but so much as I always wanted to be but one of you, I have never finished a science fiction or fantasy book and said to myself at the end, "I'm so glad I read that." Mostly because I couldn't finish it.

I have never looked at a cosplay and said to myself "You absolutely don't look like someone who would fashion design for Hitler." I could not understand what was great about graphic novels until I found Will Eisner and realized they could touch on universal emotions in addition to whiz-bang action. It took me years of listening to whichever hard/thrash/grind/crust/metal/industrial/death/sludge-core music friends would play for me before I could hear anything likeable in these bands who 'just don't care what we think.' I have sat patiently in rooms with friends watching anime and manga for decades and 90% of the time received no pleasure from the experience.
I have sat patiently with books of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlen, Octavia Butler, Terry Pratchett, Phillip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, George RR Martin, and have failed to finish a single one. So many of these books were a thousand pages long and yet action felt as though it whizzed by me at light speed. I had no idea to whom anything was happening. Sometimes I felt these stories so unremittingly grim and violent and humorless that who could possibly want to spend time in their company? Other times I felt as though I was being subjected to Ayn Rand-like lectures about the utopian possibilities of the human race, still others I felt I was enduring yet another Marxist lecture on how the world is so magnificent for some at the expense of others. But in every case of science fiction and fantasy I've ever read, including JRR Tolkein, including Stephen King, including Rowling and CS Lewis and Shirley Jackson and Vonnegut, is that I felt like I was reading a movie, and then I wondered why I wasn't watching one.
Maybe the problem is me, no doubt hundreds of people who know me would heartily agree that it's not the worst of my problems. But even with all the evidence to the contrary, I still can't believe my perception of reality is so entirely screwed up that I'm missing what millions of people see, and that the problem is entirely me.
Sci-fi/fantasy movies? They're great, they're what movies were meant to do. I have no problem sitting through any alternate world setting, any non-human characters, any outlandish situation or scientific jargonspeak. So long as it has a rudimentary sense of fun (so no Blade Runner or 2001... no Tarkovsky either...), it's absolutely what movies were made for best, and it takes you so far past your imaginings that you can only feel grateful to be alive. Whether it's completely goofy like Back to the Future and WALL-E, or cthonianly magnificent like Dark City and Arrival, or whether it's any of the thousand flavors in between, so long as it has even the slightest awareness that the world is not the way it posits, I will watch it in awe. And Pan's Labyrinth is, simply, the best movie I've seen in.... ever? Unlike some fellow snobs, I enjoy the hell out of Marvel movies (that's another essay...), and I look with astonishment at everything from Children of Men to AI. I defy anybody to look at landmarks from the earliest eras of movies and not gaze open mouthed at the beautiful things on screen, whether they're well-known like Metropolis, or little known like La Jetee, or from the earliest days of cinema like From the Earth to the Moon by Georges Melies. This kind of wonder is exactly what movies are built to do.
TV? Depends on the show of course but I love it in a completely different way. On the one hand, I find Battlestar Galactica entirely grim and humorless, just a deeply unpleasant experience, and Westworld almost a carbon copy of BSG in tone and delivery. I always thought while watching Joss Whedon that I was watching someone market a pandering product to a base of smart women who felt misunderstood, and it seems finally as though the women agree with me. I sat through the entirety of Game of Thrones, and I liked it, but every time I've tried to rewatch it's been a miserable experience. But I will watch Star Trek with delight when Captain Picard quotes Melville (incorrectly) and Data plays Brahms, and I will watch Star Trek with even greater delight when Dr. Crusher has an affair with a lamp and Abe Lincoln gets into fistfights with aliens. I will watch The Twilight Zone every day for the rest of my life happily (some days I think I live it...). Black Mirror is one of the very greatest shows ever made. And even if it doesn't really count as sci-fi... I recently started watching Mystery Science Theater, and I'm already convinced it's a treasure of the world that belongs on a UNESCO list of (alternate) world historic sites. And of course, you now know, dear reader, of my love of Stranger Things.

No, nay, the problem is not when all that fantastic fantasy and sciency science is on the screen. The problem is when it hits my mind, when it hits your mind, when it's just words on the page and we're supposed to interlocute what these words mean. What, in god's name, is in these books that make books books and not just movies on a page? Maybe I'm just not that visual a person and can't imagine the beautiful worlds they convey without a good production designer, but in these books, everything I value in books goes missing. Everything I hope other people value goes missing too, and it is a very depressing thing to perceive that you're the only person in the world for whom any of that seems to matter.
What I value in art, is the sense they give me, on the one hand, that they understand that life is and will always be a terribly miserable thing, full of humiliations and horrors; and on the other, that life is still beautiful and full of love and light and always worth living. You certainly don't have to use human beings as the focal point of a book to make points which touch on that dual premise, but I have to imagine that it's far far easier when you do.
So when I see so many people respond to things I don't, and not respond to things I do, I wonder... I can't help it... do they not see how horrible life gets? Do they not see how beautiful it gets either? Humans are, to a stunningly large extent, trapped within their own experiences. So even when you're creating something other than what you already know, you're creating something within the tropes and markers of what you already do. And this, not Harold Bloom, is why so many genre fiction writers are wildly popular when first released, and then nearly forgotten fifty years later. To understand Ray Bradbury (assuming I do...), you have to understand the optimism of the American 1950s. To understand Jules Verne, you have to understand 19th century optimism about the future of science. To understand JK Rowling and the values that animated her books, you may have had to have had to live in the world and values of New Labour. In 50-100 years, some people will still read Rowling just as they read Bradbury and Verne, but there will always be new great writers of popular fiction (and many of them are, objectively speaking, great writers), and part of living within any generation is experiencing that electricity which accompanies every new scrap they release. But then the kids wonder what the big deal was, and they have their own stuff that speaks much more precisely to their own worldview.
Most art dates very quickly because most opinions about the world date very quickly. Most books are a testament to how people saw the world in one particular time and one particular place, and that is their value. But some books last from age to age, not because FR Leavis says they did, but because the new era finds entirely new meanings within it, and the books speak to the concerns of the next era in a manner completely different from the way the book was read by the last one.
So when I read a lot of this (and clearly not read it deeply enough), I do wonder... Do the leftists who love Vonnegut and Butler not see that exploitation is the permanent state of the world? And will future generations not realize that they only tell a quarter of the story? Do the people who so love Bradbury and Heinlen not see that they too are only telling another quarter, and that amazing future they promise will be pretty bad too? And how long will it take the people who love Douglas Adams to realize that HE'S NOT FUNNY!!!!???
I don't doubt it's terrible arrogance to doubt other people's capacity to appreciate the world, but none of us can help the thoughts that bubble through our heads even if we control responses to them. No doubt it's wiser to keep these thoughts to ourselves. But there has never been a better time to be a 'nerd' than right now (or at least a few years ago...). The nerds are now the cool table while the jocks spend their lunchtime canvassing for Trump. But just as it was for the cool kids, there is a very prescriptive way to be a nerd from which deviation is absolutely unacceptable.
So I will keep trying to like this stuff, and I don't doubt I'll keep failing, but as the cool kids long since proved, life is oh so much easier when we all like the same things.

Monday, August 15, 2022

Stranger Things Hot Take


.
Stranger Things is ten times the show either Game of Thrones or Westworld is, and it keeps getting better. I can't possibly keep up with all the eighties movies it references, but of the ones that I've seen it's better than just about all of them. The reason Stranger Things is better is that Stranger Things goes into fantasy from a base of reality, whereas the other two shows are trapped in their grim fantasies - places without relief or humans that behave like human beings, and just the barest whiff of humor. After a while, it just gets predictable and boring. Game of Thrones and Westworld couldn't sustain their concept because they frontloaded every idea they had in the beginning and the limitations just got clearer and clearer with every new twist that was exactly like the first. Stranger Things lets the darkness gradually seep in, until by season 4 it's overwhelming.
When fantasy and scifi are done right, they can be as great as anything in the world, but only when they're done right. They need to operate FROM a base of reality, so that we see the world of the imagination from people's lives, and why they imagine what they imagine. Otherwise, it's just escape from reality for people who find reality too grim - there's value in escaping from reality, but when you have a show or series of movies with lots of installments, the fanbase inevitably grows disappointed, and wonders why the fifteenth incarnation isn't as good as the first, the reason is that there are only so many times you can bank on the same conceptual ideas without letting human beings do their part.
So this is why Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro are great artists, it's why even Stephen King or Jack Kirby might be. It's also why George Lucas and George RR Martin are not. The reason Lucas and Martin have barely made anything in decades is that they can't find any idea that feels different than the ones they already had. It is so much easier to build a fantasy world than it is to make characters interact plausibly within it. People crave escape from life, and if you put the work in, you can entrance people with all the details of a fake world, but if you don't have a nose for how human beings interact with each other, the plausibility of the fake world always comes undone. So many groups of nerds seem to come out of every new sci-fi/fantasy movie disappointed as hell, and then go home and have the experience of a lifetime doing role playing games where they tell their own story and make the rules for themselves. When it's your own story, you don't worry nearly so much about the plausibility of a fictional world because that world only exists in the heads of you and your friends.
A self-sustaining thing that maintains quality over an enormous arc is sooooo much harder, and that's why Stranger Things is such a miracle. Time after time the Duffer Brothers recreates the world of 80s small towns exactly as they felt, they take chances on completely unknown young actors, surround them with production design and editing that's frankly better than a lot of the 80's movies they're paying tribute to, and use their alternate worlds not just as a cheap thrill, but as a projection to talk in depth about how trauma haunts us.
Think about all those deaths. Yes, Hawkins, Indiana seems to have more deaths than any small town plausibly did in those years, except... no they don't. The upside down from within the ground claiming lives? How different is that really from all the diseases spread by industrial toxins that seemed to turn whole towns into cemeteries overnight? What is the Upside Down but the world which small town America is turning into? A dark lord, or force, praying on teens with a history of trauma? Anyone whose traumatic experiences as a teen led them to bad choices knows that this is barely a metaphor. A demagorgon sent by the Soviets to kill along with Americans kidnapping kids and ruining their lives in the fight against them? Do any of the thousand metaphorical meanings there have to be spelled out?
Is Stranger Things ultimately as great as it sometimes seems. No, it's not Mad Men, and it's not supposed to be. The point is not that Stranger Things is some towering masterpiece of Art (though how close it gets is occasionally astonishing), the point is that so many fantasy/sci-fi shows/movies/books which are supposed to be towering masterpieces of art eventually fall flat, because they treat things that are supposed to stay silly with absolute seriousness, and the seriousness makes them far duller and more humorless and predictable than realistic shows where people can still behave like plausible human beings who can tell a joke. But because Stranger Things has that silliness built in from the ground level, it can get devastatingly serious and feel entirely real.

Emil Gilels and the Sixth Dimension of Music

 I wonder if I've gotten my taste in pianists all wrong. Listening to Gilels and Serkin the last few days, whom I've always liked without loving; their playing has an austere, square jawed... not rightness, but moral authority. It does not capture an awareness of the expressive nuances and ironies which you get from a truly great brain like Schnabel or Brendel, but in the face of so much spiritual air and core, I wonder if that's as important as I long thought it was.

Listen to Gilels doing the Symphonic Etudes. He probably always did it better than anybody else. What other pianist can conjure a full orchestra like that while still maintaining that complete structural rectitude? But there is something deeper than that, as though this is an artist who knows what it means to come through the other side of suffering. This, like Lupu, is a pianist who has mastered what I call 'the fifth dimension of music.' Perhaps I should call it the 'sixth dimension.' First comes the notes themselves, then comes the quality of sound, then comes the language - dynamics, phrasing, color etc.; then comes the interpretation - which has to capture the expressive meaning and interpretation, then comes tailoring the interpretation to fit the composer's idiom and put it within the context of the composer's geography of imagination - what were his influences? What were the sounds he heard? What life circumstances and historical circumstances most affected them? Then comes what is, perhaps, the highest interpretive goal, at least the highest I know of, past which only composers can ascend.
This sixth-or-so dimension of music is the spiritual, healing powers of music. Hopefully you know when you hear it. It's when you feel the world behind this world, the world of essential meanings. It's a meaning almost beyond even the work itself and can only be conjured in the very specific moment of performance - I have to imagine it's still much more difficult to conjure in studio circumstances. It's a moral mission beyond serving the composer, it is using music for its ultimate purpose, which is, I must believe, to provide light in dark places. The music plays us as much as the player it, it communicates to the listeners that their tribulations are understood, and have meaning and reason beyond the existential absurdity of our life circumstances.
This is why Radu Lupu was so mourned earlier this year. Did audiences speak of any pianist of our time whose concerts would journey us to that dimension so often? That's the moral purpose which you hear in so many Eastern European pianists living under dictatorship, who devoted themselves spiritually to the great German masters in a manner that you don't necessarily hear from the Germans themselves. As I've said many times, I have trouble warming to a lot of Eastern European piano masters - Chopin even, but moreso Rachmaninov, Scriabin, and especially Liszt. But when so many Eastern European pianists devote themselves to Beethoven or Schumann or Bach, our eyes we can literally see the musical dimension with our ears. What so often is 'merely profound' in the hands of a pianist like Edwin Fischer is fraught with suffering and joy under the hands of Richter and Gilels. Beethoven never meant more than it did under the ears of dictatorship.
I could make yet another long list of the pianists in which you generally hear that moral light, and a still longer list of the pianists in which you generally don't. But beyond the level of thinking through one's interpretations, I think you can hear very well which musicians live suffering lives and which live fundamentally charmed ones. Simply to be an artist, you need to communicate something fundamental about life. If music is just pleasant noise, it's worthless. It's just a recreational drug to be cast aside at the end of the night - merely another pleasant way to spend a few hours whose memory doesn't matter at all. Whether through joy or suffering, any true artist communicate their worldview. The flame of art is there to light our way with meaning, and provide a roadmap of morale for all those who struggle mightily to find it.