Letter to Dad #1

OK Dad,

I haven't been able to write much lately, and I can't help thinking it's to do with you. I see your face every minute of the day. It has still just barely hit me that you're gone and my life feels no different than when you were here. If you're going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life, I'd better talk to you. I don't know whether I'm more scared of your answering back or not answering at all.

Whatever the source of the craziness, you made me this dinosaur: you filled my head with music and history and books and movies, I was your pet project to make into the one person you could regularly talk to about all the things that went through your head. The worst thing about my life is that you succeeded. You didn't understand how I couldn't figure out how to navigate my own direction, but how could I when my whole mind was owned by you? I'm now this strange 19th century man of letters adrift in the sea of a world who moved on long before I was born.

Whatever the disagreements, the worst thing you gave me was understanding of the world. By late 2006 I saw how the subprime housing bubble would lead to Great Recession before you did. Shortly after the recession I looked at the combination of Republicans' systemic gaming of the political system and a buttressed class divide and realized America would lurch into authoritarianism ten years before anyone would agree with me. I saw the worst of Trump coming and we fought like cats and dogs for five years until on January 6th, you finally acknowledged I was right. I didn't think it was that big a deal. I dont know how people kept up with the news and didn't see it.

As you never tired of pointing out, I also got many things wrong along the way and forecast doom at plenty of wrong moments. But a combination of your bildung and my own life story led me to the conclusion that something was rotten with this country at the fundamental root long before anybody else noticed. When they did notice, they misdiagnosed it, and now it looks like turtles all the way down. Your skeptical liberalism was the right way, I'm just an updated version of yours, but it's the worst possible attitude toward life in America to have in 2026: what profits a man to be pessimistic in an era that deserves pessimism when our only option is to fight it even as we know we'll lose? We have to believe in a better era, we have to believe in better lives, but you never showed me how to do that. You cynicism infects everything, and as a result, the world evolves with seizmic tremors, and we only know how to pretend it's somewhere between 1907 and 1954. Even Mom and Nochem are more of our time than we are. Right or left, nothing is more au currant than to hate liberals. We're not good exemplars of liberalism. Good liberals know how to fight for everything right even as they know that they'll lose so much of what they value in the process. You never showed me how to do that, but you did show me the world. I'm inestimably grateful, I love you more because of it, but it's the worst possible way to live a life.

Whether people realize it, what every Westerner hates is people exactly like us. Left, right, maybe even center. They hate everything we are, everything we support, every choice we make. The right may call it paternalism, the left may call it patriarchy, but we embody everything they resent: you and I both. We are the tragic, skeptical education that assimilated the world's knowledge and came to the conclusion that there are no moral absolutes: only millions of compromises along the way to solutions that are only livable moment-to-moment. We know there is no such thing as justice and equality just as we know there's no such thing as security and liberty, you can have tiny, unreliable bits of each, but nothing is guaranteed and if you take too much of it, you will eventually provoke those you steal them from into stealing from you. We are the people who tell conservatives they have to sacrifice money to protect their own country, we are the people who tell leftists they have to sacrifice non-violence to protect the world. We are the people who tell the right that they have to stay out of the bedroom and tell the left they can't cut people off just because their views aren't enlightened--or even that their actions aren't enlightened, we are the people who tell moderates that they procure their self-advancement and complacency at everyone else's expense, and eventually, everyone else will take revenge. I don't know if we are the education they were denied or if we are the self-education they didn't know how to give themselves, but we are the people who know that when you spend your life pursuing ideals to an impossible standard, millions die in the acquisition.

There is so much to talk to you about and I don't know where to begin. I blame everybody, but I find myself cowardly for not joining the fights without hesitancy. Even as I know the fighters will screw it up and screw it up even as I write, the pen is not enough, charitable contribution is not enough. I know that if I tell the truth about how people are enablers in what's coming, they will hate me, they will disavow me, they will find my provocative prognostications still more annoying than they already do. We need bodies that will put themselves in harm's way against the worst of society, which teems all around us now. I fear getting beaten up, but I think I can overcome that fear. What I can't overcome is that I don't want to get beaten up or worse for a tactical error. I don't want to be Alex Paretti or Renee Nicole Good, I don't want my friends to be them either, but still worse, I don't want the examples of people I know to be the one who leads America's protestors into a situation like Iran's. It won't happen any time yet, but it's probably coming. Still worse than that may come. Still so much worse. People talk about Trump like he's Hitler. He probably isn't, but if he is, he is SO MUCH WORSE. Hitler killed a mere 18 million, but with every danger in the world today, we could stand to lose 1.8 billion. Horror, horror, horror everywhere. Everyone affected. Everyone complicit.

Will it happen? Well, history tells us that some day in history it will. Not necessarily in my lifetime, not necessarily in Eli's and Joel's, but one day, it will happen. The point is, it always happens when people fight tyranny with their hearts without their brains. To do so is to enable people who fight with their brains without their hearts. The world must think with its heart so good can worm its way into evil, and feel with its brain to guard against how easily evil can worm its way into good. Nobody does that today, and if people don't start soon, the results of heartless thinking will begin to display their rot.

Is it a blessing you taught me to see that while no one else does?

For Jose van Dam (1940-2026)

 

One of the great singers of the 20th century. He was a favorite of mine. The only time I heard him live, I was fortunate enough to hear him sing Hans Sachs. He was not a huge personality, he was, rather, a singer of google intelligence, enormous dignity, and emotional restraint. Every vocal nuanced felt earned and apiece with itself. No grandstanding, and while probably as intelligent as someone like Fischer-Dieskau, none of DFD's pedantic bending over backwards to make musical points.

He exhibited a complete lack of vanity. Part of it is generational: the postwar generation put an enormous value in being understated and technically immaculate, but some of those artists always sounded to me as though they wanted credit for it (Abbado, Anda), but van Dam was born into nobility. Literally, he was a Baron. The understatedness seemed bred into his ethos. I think of him as the vocal equivalent to someone like Dohnanyi or de Larrocha. The understatement and intelligence never precluded warmth or communication, and there was never a lack of musical detail. Every bar had a nuance should you care to notice it. Self-effacement wasn't what he wanted to be, it was simply who he was.

A José van Dam Recital (1994) - YouTube

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Half of it

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

On vacation. 

It was supposed to be an overnight trip to see my favorite conductor and favorite orchestra play my favorite piece of music. A train up, one night in Boston, then a train home. Two glasses of wine in some bar while talking to some guy and our bartendress about... what did we talk about? Then back to my hotel room. 

Then on the way home, the train stopped in New Haven. Apparently power had gone out in Manhattan's Penn Station. No trains were coming in or going out. Nearly everybody else of the thousand passengers left the train, able to travel locally through Grand Central Station which would honor their tickets on another train. But being the passenger with the farthest distance to travel, I had to stay onboard and for two-and-a-half hours I did. Finally, with no end in sight, almost out of food, I went out into the train station. 

I immediately realized there were two options: catch another train, or take my first genuine vacation of a distance past Philadelphia in... I don't want to say... No matter how much my stomach blew up to Veruca Salt-like proportions, I would take the risk.  

And so I did what I'd been loathe to do and start regularly taking those beta blockers I've been supposed to take every day since late November. Not for belly bloat, but for heart issues. 

And yet the 10 I took it before this week, the biggest impact it had was not on my heart but my stomach, or at least once it had that impact on New Year's Eve. But I never really thought it did again. 

Until New Haven! I could eat! I could drink wine! I could go on vacations like a halfway normal person. For three days I went around Yale University, the closest thing America has to a gothic village like Bruges or Avignon where you can picture having a royal wedding then murder your in-laws. 

New Haven, full of Yale professors with nothing to do, is one of the best culinary towns in America. Not only is the food amazing, but the nutritional content is listed everywhere. There was barely a place where I was left unnotified of all the ingredients, even before ordering. All the problems and fears of ordering in Baltimore restaurants were nowhere to be found in this leisure resort for smart people. Simple things my body could not keep down were suddenly digested with no trouble: hard cheeses, chocolate, butter, even things I wasn't able to have for years as simple as cucumber and greek yogurt were able to be kept down. Even the carbonation of kombucha did not affect me, and it began to have the stomach settling effect everyone promised. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

On the other hand, if I die next week, it probably won't be from heart issues: at least not directly. It would be from an abscess I'm pretty sure I developed while on vacation after scratching a skin tag too hard in a train bathroom. Today when finally home and finished with a prescribed antibiotic, I had it cleaned. I was told to go to the hospital if it grows back, and now I find myself debating whether or not to go. They didn't tell me what it might be, but I made the mistake of looking up the symptoms, and the abscess is in an area where sepsis becomes a genuine possibility. 

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Beginning

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

More later...

Six months today Dad

You didn't live a short life and survived many health scares, but it was still much too soon. You may not believe me, but I miss you all the time, which is unbelievable even to me because I sense your presence every minute of the day. It still utterly feels like you're here and will send an email or call or enter a room at any moment. Such is the force of your personality that I do not even feel a void where you once were. You make yourself felt even in your absence.

Authenticity

So here's the problem: 

The guy who writes this page is a good writer, a really good writer, maybe even a great one. If he ever finished a book, people might be really impressed with what he does. He happens to also be a really smart guy who is extremely modest..., and so he hears from most, great company, always ready to make himself vulnerable, loyal to a fault, solicitous to the welfare of those for whom he cares, in spite of his physical ailments a 6'5 adonis, and does his admittedly mediocre best to be reliable in action. 

He's also a little crazy. 

He's no fool, he knows what's going on, but he's also not a model of balance. He's not nearly as crazy as he seems from description, but also crazier. He could try to conceal the extent of it for more than a short term, but if he did, it wouldn't be true to himself, and he'd lose a lot of the authenticity people find most appealing about him, not to mention; 50% of his best writing. 

He writes in the hope that the daemon (demon?) on the page is exorcized, so that he is free to live his personal life with the appearance of a (not particularly) normal person. Some people just have to be creative, and unfortunately it takes precedence over just about everything else in life, because if they do not sacrifice themselves to creating things, the creative urge devours them, and the mind creates situations that sail over its own resistance, even of people with great capacity for rationality. Over the years he's learned a few things about keeping this pack of hounds at bay: the usual psychiatric things of course, but also an extremely steady appetite for learning. The more actively the brain is learning other things, the less actively the brain works against itself.  

In terms of craziness, he's probably an 8 out of 10, maybe a 7.7 at this point. Going from 9 to 8 was extremely hard-won, and he'll exert continual effort to lower that number for the rest of his life. In terms of difficulty, at this point in his life, he's probably a 5.25: no pushover but also a person who goes along to get along and lives by a near-religious belief in the importance of compromise, and over the years the trajectory of his number has gone steadily downward. Recent relationships have been a bit stunned by how easy he is to get along with. 

No matter what people aspire to be, they have to be themselves, but they can't simply present themselves exactly as they are on the first interaction. That would be still greater madness than any he already knows, and no matter what is discovered afterward, it would be a terrible imposition to admit to a complex situation as a first interaction. One can allude to it, but one can't simply tell it. 

Some people manage to conceal truths over a lifetime, but the concealment comes at horrific personal cost of suffering and fear, what could possibly make that worthwhile?

He has learned to hope over the years, not because he's put any great store in hope, but because life has no improvement without the practice of hope, and over the years his hopes have borne out some improvements. 

He still doesn't have much audience, though he does have at least a couple dozen devoted readers. He's a little terrified of the concentration and distraction it requires to do serious publicity, but he writes in the hope that he can hold out hope to others in the still darker situations which he, like all of us, fears are imminent for us all. He's accumulated a lot of experience over the years, joy as well as suffering, fun as well as humiliation, courage as well as fear, hope as well as depression. What matters to him, what matters to us all, is the affirming flame, the importance of using the voice one is given as a call to our better angels. 

He tells his own story not for his own masturbatory arrogance (or so he hopes), he hopes that by telling his own, he is in fact telling a story of his time, his place, of people like him, even of people who aren't. He's writing about themes common to us all: loneliness and community, suffering and joy, history and the future. Every writer needs an address, a camera through which they perceive the wider world. This camera just happened to be the one at hand. You work with the material you have. This is, for the moment, his best camera, though he hopes to improve some of the others before too long. 

He would like to get away from provocative political prognostications, which have gotten him far too easy an audience (such as it is), and get to those things people really care about. The soul-feeding place from where people can derive the inspiration to keep going. 

It's a journey. Slowly but surely, he's getting there. As an artist, whatever that means, and far more importantly, as a human. He is not obligated to complete the work, but nor is he free to abandon it, and whenever the darkness deepens and helpers fail (whomever they may be), he will abide. 

For Tamas Vasary (1933-2026)

 Tamas Vasary was one of the greatest performing musicians of all time. Full stop. His playing is instant catharsis, his conducting scarcely less so, and he was conducting and teaching to nearly the end. In his youth, Deutsche Grammophon recorded and marketed him as a virtuoso. What a shame. In those years, DG's pianist of probity was his fellow Hungarian Geza Anda, whom I think never got to the level of Vasary. In Anda you heard technical perfection: utterly even passage work and balanced chords, god knows what practice it took to get him there, but I've never heard music.

There are a number of ways to make the highest level of music. But one of my favorites is art so subtle that it sounds as though they're playing the music as straight through as Anda, but they're not. It's just phrasing so subtle it can't possibly be noticed. You only notice it by the cathartic effect it has on you. One could call it flow or glow, but it's past even there. It's fully in the 'next world.' Who gets there? Well, it's so few, you'd probably have to look past just pianists. Along with Vasary, Sandor Vegh, Menachem Presler, Adolf Busch, Gustav Leonhardt, Helmut Walcha, Marcel Moyse, Josef Suk, Brendel and Schiff and Kempff at their best but only at their best, if I'm feeling charitable then Grumiaux and Lupu. There are a few who get close: De Larrocha, Pires, Rubinstein, Moravec, Lipatti, Curzon, Milstein, Enescu, Oistrakh... I honestly wonder if that's it. You'll notice how many of them were not just instrumentalists: they were all-around musicians--chamber musicians, teachers, and conducting being their very last priority. This is the very top of the mountain of musical performance, where full-time conductors don't belong. Neither crowd nor craft matters as much to them as music, and music is all they are.

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 - London Philharmonic Orchestra - Tamás Vásáry (piano) (RFH, 1981) 

Folie a deux

.

I made the mistake tonight of ingesting a slight bit of a spice my stomach couldn't take, so I'm up for the night to ponder tonight's interaction.

I was where I was because a good old friend came down from Philadelphia. Not a friend I've seen much for twenty years, but he's one of the more consequential relationships of my life. When I knew him best he was the coolest kid in school: every girl we knew was in love with him and it wasn't hard to see why. He was charismatic, he radiated positivity, he was the guitarist and lead singer to my sideman violin with all the connotations. To my disappointment, the bastard was thoughtful too, and always had answers at the ready to my practiced cynical poses--which were really a cover for terrible despair and doubts from which I had no idea how to recover.

We both were in Ha'Aretz (Israel) in our mid-twenties, blessed in a sense with time to figure things out, and in another sense, stuck. We were musicians trying to practice in the desert, but there was little else to do but drink. I think we did our mighty best to ply our trade, and had unforgettable experiences playing both in cities and in the desert forty miles away from any town at all. Clearly, the long and strange experience of Mizrach HaTikhon seeped into his pours and made the same searing impact on him it made on me. Twenty years later, he's clearly as affected by the experience as I, and we both have devoted large parts of our lives to figuring out the lessons we learned there. We were adrift in the larger half of Israel, the barren half, the desert Israel was supposed to make bloom, but most of we saw there was abandonment: abandonment of citizens, abandonment of moral obbligations, abandonment of dreams. Those of us there were left to contemplate: what went wrong?

The Israel of twenty years ago was a veritable united nations of Jews. The town we lived in was not just full of ignorant Americans like us but thousands of Russians who felt humiliated by their station and looked as ever to authoritarian leadership to deliver them from what they couldn't deliver themselves. It was thousands of Mizrachim, Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by the Ashkenazim: the European higher social class, educated and mostly liberal, whom, to their thinking, sold their homeland and peace of mind out to the very Arabs who so oppressed them in their parents' countries of origin. I met Brits, Scots, Swiss, northern Africans, and people of absolutely indeterminate origin. It was home to Amos Oz, Israel's writer of writers, but we never saw him, and rarely did anyone we spoke to. Israel is a place that collects Jewish eccentrics and misfits, nowhere moreso than in the forgotten towns of the south. I met people there from every conceivable European background: all of whom seemed to carry some kind of disappointment by what life promised them, and no less by what Israel promised them. If we wanted to see where the powder keg was for everything that came next, it was right in front of us.

Other than him and maybe two others, all my closest friends on the program were the Europeans: British, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch, Scottish, French, and yeah... Israeli too. Most of the Americans and I never really figured each other out. They were the cool kids and as ever, I was a strange nerd: too cerebral and acerbic for American Jews, whom in our generation were still taught to be optimistic and full of action.

But somehow this guy saw fit to take me under his wing, his protection, and playing with him, talking to him, traveling with him, made a lot of the time there worthwhile. He's clearly of a far more optimistic bent than I, and it's served him well. He turned outward to activism, I turned inward to books (not that I'm reading anything like enough lately...). He turned to people, I turned to ideas. He's one of those guys whose answer to every question is 'yes.' No matter what the challenge, he takes the plunge, whereas I have always listened to the instinct for caution, perhaps even fear. My answer to every question has always been 'no'. I think I'm right, the world is what it is, the folly of humans persists from age to age, person to person, but what has being right ever gotten anybody in the world? He is writing the music he was ever meant to write, engaging with the people he was meant to engage. I write a steady stream of personal essays when all I want is to write the fiction and music that boils in my head but I have not the courage to make daily practice of setting down. What point is there setting things down when the majority of what you know how to write is doubts? I have some small degree of faith in God, but my God is not particularly benevolent. He, I would guess, has not made up his mind about us. Whether or not there's a god, we were sent here to make the world what we make of it. If we want to make it better, we have to see past the void and imagine better. Maybe it's not my nature or temperament, maybe life experience has taught me so to be, but imagining better has never been a great gift of mine.

He performed tonight, songs of his own composition in Hebrew and Arabic as Mizrachi as the roots Americana I remember us performing, and what I saw from him is something I'd never seen before. A righteous anger: not a personal anger, but the anger of the prophets, an earned anger that is the anger of our generation. I didn't agree quite with everything, I didn't need to. I wasn't even supposed to. The point of his message was that we all needed to hear points of view that jar our own, and hopefully he jars a lot of them, because few things need jarring more right now than Jewish complacency, which is writ small the complacency of both Israel and America.

But as he's gotten more angry, I've gotten more serene, and I don't quite like it. At the beginning of the night, someone said that they did not know a single Jew whose perception was not shifted by October 7th. At that moment, I realized, I was that Jew. Nothing for me changed on October 7th. I felt as though I was the only Jew prepared for the event and most of what would happen next was clear to my mind as a diamond. Nothing about what happened next surprised me. I felt terrible despair for the loss of life, I felt even more despair at saying goodbye to the world as I hoped it would be, but I felt no shock. Only 40 I may have been, but I'm acquainted with history, i'm acquainted with folly, and I'm acquainted with its grief. I felt a bit like I could be a guide through the new era for those who needed it, but it's not as though I much liked the situation I've been guiding through.

But then he did something that made my jaw drop. He had the courage to say aloud the question that is in every Jewish mind right now, even if they repress it--the question I write repeatedly but dare say to barely anyone in person: did Netanyahu put the defenses down on purpose? Has he done it before? Will he do it again? Will it be still worse next time? The sheer boldness, fortitude, self-security it takes to say it aloud right now is something so far beyond most of us, and here he was prepared to say it in front of a group of strangers, not knowing who might call him a traitor, a self-hating Jew, an antisemite, or worse, in a public square. The sheer bravery of it is something I can only aspire one day to emulate. I'm just a writer who puts ideas into people's heads, this guy is a true leader. We may disagree on a few particulars, but this person has a level of bravery and moral backbone so far beyond most of us that we can only aspire to be more like him even as we fail. When true moments for bravery come, most of us will have doubts about how well we'd handle ourselves. This guy will never flinch in pursuit of what's right.

We probably never thought it would happen, but we're now the middle generation, promised things in our youths by America and Israel both that never materialized, and now the first generation to take the reins of a society we know will get worse. Yet we have to drag it through, solving very little, but salvaging everything we can so that the next generation muddles through until such time comes when things can be solved, in the hope that it will be their generation's destiny to solve problems of whose making they are entirely yet innocent. We did not ask for this burden, but so long as there are enough people who can live up to his example, we will solve them.

Abi Gezunt and thank you for being a balm for my doubts, now as well as two decades ago.

Evan