Tales from the Old New Land: 1899 Paris - Scene 1 - Rough Draft

 

Marquss de Boildier: Tout et magnifique Monsieur Viscount! Everything was delicious but the ratatouille was simply merveilleuse, I was licking the plate.

Baroness: Merci beaucoup, our chef will be positively joyeaux.  

Marquess: Your chef must be Provencal.

Baron: He is. He’s been with Madame since when she was in Provence.

Marquess: Ah Provence Madame, you must be a Milhaud!

Baroness: Mais oui. Our family has been in Provence since the fifteenth century.

Marquess: Is there any way to persuade you to part with that chef fantastique?

Robert: I doubt it. He recently re-trained at Le Cordon Blue but he’s been making Mama his ratatouille since before 1848.

Marquess: Ah Madame, you’re so lucky you were in Provence for that year. Those sauvages, what did they want? What did they accomplish?

Bernard: They wanted the rights of man promised them in le code Napoleon!

Robert: Pas ce soir Bernard!

Bernard: Well so long as we’re speaking of le politique, it’s important to get things right.

Baroness: You’ll have to excuse our son, Bernard, he’s quite le progressiste!

Robert: If he could he’d chop his own head off. 

Marquess: C’est bon, it’s the missteps of the young.

Bernard: Peut-etre Madame, it’s not the young who’ve misstepped.

Robert: Ferme ta bouche Bernard!

Marquis: Mama. You actually would like Bernard very much. He graduated La Sorbonne first in his class and is becoming a doctor.

Bernard: Oui Madame, ministering the poor in the quartier Latin has been an eye-opening experience.

Marquess: Ah. Well I have nothing but le plus grand respect for the students of La Sorbonne, particularly the Jewish students. All those jeunes nobles who go to the Sorbonne but don’t work at all, you should meet me cousin Marcel, such a brilliant boy who never works, now he’s nothing but a flanner.

Bernard: And Madame Marquess, I have nothing but le plus grand respect for your great-grandfather Comte de Mirabeau. He had everything to lose in 1789, yet he sided with the third estate and the paysans. If he had lived, la Revolution might have been une grande success.

Marquess: Well Chere Monsieur, we are very proud of le Comte Mirabeau even if we may disagree with certain things he did.

Bernard: I disagree with certain things he did too but I agree he was nevertheless a great man.

Baron: Enough of le politique. Pierre!

Pierre: Oui Seigneur Bloch!?

Baron: Bring us the Armagnac!

Baroness: Madame Marquess you must try this Armagnac, Michel’s (the Baron) been saving this bottle from 1884.

Marquess: Quelle vintage!

(Pierre pours the Armagnac)

Baron: And s’il te plait Jacques, refill everyone’s champagne.

Jacques: Oui Seigneur Bloch!

Baroness: Jean send for dessert!

Jean: Oui Seigneuresse Bloch.

(Baron de Bloch taps his glass)

Baron: A toast, to my daughter Rachel and my soon to be son in law. Vraiment c’est miracle! If a d’Boildier can marry a Bloch and nobody bats an eye. (to son-in-law) Nobody’s batting an eye are they Guillaume?

Marquis d’Boildier: Well, a couple hundred de Boildiers are cursing me from the grave but my mother’s just relieved I’m getting married. (general laughter) 

Marquess d’Boildier (his mother): Et mon fils should have married Rebecca seven years ago! (more laughter) 

Baron: Well if a de Boildier can marry a Bloch and nobody bats an eye, then we truly are at the eve of a century of universal peace and happiness.

Bernard: Really petit pere, you know better than that.

Baroness: Pas mantenaint Bernard!

Bernard: Look around Paris!

Robert: Bernard, it’s a fiching toast!

Baroness: Robert! Ton longue!

Baron: Nononon. We’re clearly need to address this. It’s true, when my father was a jeune, we had a revolution every twenty years. My grand grand oncle, Meyer Bloch, lost his head in la terreur in spite of having left his Yeshiva in Rouen to join la revolution. Imagine, a Jewish communist...  Rest assured Madame la Marquess, the Bloch family learned very quickly the terrible cost of revolution et la modification. And by the time Robert becomes Viscount de Bloch, Bernard will understand it too. 

Bernard: You don’t understand the price of la meme chose! 

Baron: Meyer’s brother, Solomon Bloch, my great-grandfather, fought with Napoleon on the Italian campaigns. He became an officer in the War of the Second Coalition, was wounded at Austerlitz, commanded a division at Friedland, and an entire battalion at Wagram. 

Marquis: Sante!

Baron: D’Accord! He was a gloire de la France. When he came to Paris apres la guerre, he established the firm of Solomon Bloch which manufactured armaments for the greatest military in the world!

Everyone: Salut!

Baron: The firm of Solomon Bloch soon became Bloch & Son, and when my grandfather Edmund Bloch became old enough, my grandpere used Bloch & Son to create the fourth-largest bank in France. 

Everyone except Bernard: Salut! (Bernard grunts)

Baron: And then my father, Victor Bloch diversified the firm of Bloch & Son into coal mining, textiles, and railroads. Mon pere’s help was crucial in enabling Napoleon III to become Emperor apres l’1848 revolution, and in return, he was created Viscount de Bloch by the Emperor, that great man entirely worthy of his grandfather.

(everyone laughs)

Baroness: Really Michel, not even you can say without laughing. 

Baron: And my forefathers have so blessed us, and now look at our family, look at our nation, look at our world.

Bernard: Yes, look at it…

Baron: 1899…. None of the revolutions since Napoleon erupted into war of the world et l’age de revolution is over. The third republique is finally a government like the English. We will now have eras of prosperity, peace, and civilisation. Sans war, sans terror, sans death.

Marquess: Sante! Liberte, egalite, stabilite.

Bernard: And yet you’re all using your titles as though ‘71 never happened...

Baroness: Bernard pourquoi? You’re ruining dinner?

Bernard: Everything that brought les revolutions are still here. Poverty, violence, le fracture culturelle. 

Robert: Don’t do it Bernard.

Bernard: Look at the divide in the soul Francaise! 

Robert: Don’t say it Bernard.

Bernard: La France must wake up! Look at l’affaire Dreyfus!

(everybody groans)

Bernard: Alfred was always as stupid as a suitcase without a handle, but look at how much people hate him. 

Baron: Voyens Bernard, the hatred people have for us is un grande exaggeration.  

Bernard: It’s not.

Baron: Pierre! Do you hate us?

Pierre: Certainement non Seigneur Bloch! 

Baron: You served Alfred Dreyfus often enough, did you hate him?

Pierre: He did not speak to me enough to make any impression at all. 

Baron: How do you feel about l’Affair Dreyfus?

Pierre: I don’t know enough about it to make any comment.

Baron: You see?

Marquess: Beware Monsieur le Viscount, servants are much too careful to make their true feelings known. 

Pierre: Madame la Marquess I absolument do not have any feelings on l’Affair Dreyfus. 

Baron: For thirty years, Pierre has been the perfect butler. He came to us from la guarde nationale right before le commune. Outside was anarchy, but inside maison Bloch was pure order. Every meal on time, every dessert precisely as requested, every bed made. The perfect butler for la maison parfait. 

Pierre: Merci Seigneur. 

Marquess: Well, what about Rebecca, wasn’t she briefly engaged to Monsieur Dreyfus’s brother?

Marquis: MAMAN!

Marquess: It does no good to pretend your fiance doesn’t know very well the most famous man in France. 

Marquis: She does not wish to speak of it!

Marquess: Have you even asked her?

Marquis: Why would I?

Marquess: Well, I wouldn’t have to ask if you hadn’t called your engagement off seven years ago!

Marquis: Rachel you don’t have to answer anything Maman asks of this. 

Rachel: I don’t mind. 

Marquess: What is the Dreyfus family like?

Rachel: (shrugs) Like us. They love France, they wish France loved them. 

Marquess: (pause) They do ma fille. Everyone who matters loves you. 

Everyone: Salut!

Marquess: Plus de champaigne Jean! 

Baron: Pierre bring in Monsieur Waldteufel. 

Jean: Oui Madame la marquess.

Marquess: Sante! A mon Guillaume and Rebecca! Le plus magnifique couple de France.  

Everyone: Sante!

Baron: Rebecca, it’s time. Don’t worry. Monsieur Waldteufel is here to help you.

Rachel (nervously): Baruch ata Adonai eloheiiiinu…

Waldteufel: Eloheinu 

Rachel: melech, haolam, sheh…

Waldteufel: Shehecheyanu.

Rachel: Shehecheyanu. V’Ki….

Waldteufel: V’Kiyemanu 

Rachel: V’Kiyemanu. 

Waldteufel: Ve’higiyanu. 

Rachel: Ve’higiyanu… La’Zman Hazeh!

(everybody claps… Brava! Excellent!).

Pierre: You may come with us downstairs to eat now Monsieur Waldteufel.

(they go downstairs)

Pierre: (under his breath) Jewish merde....

There Are More Important Things Than What You Think is Important

I realize this comes as a shock, particularly to 2021, but life itself is... how shall we say?... overrated. Even if we live our best possible life, it's not that great, and it ends in decline and death. All that striving and striving to make life better than it is..., only for our efforts to come to so little. We work and wait, some reach success, and even every successful effort has unintended bad consequences.

The truth seems to be that it's all an empty void in which we're saved by hope of something better, but amid our hope so many moments arrive us at something worse, and even the 'better' is just a series of moments; instant islands between seas of boredom and irritation when you feel love, amusement, pleasure, joy, only to find ourselves compelled like the Flying Dutchman to leave them and sail the sea of meaninglessness until the next joyful moment, which might not be until tomorrow, or next month, or next year...

Furthermore, the greater a person's capacity for joy, the greater their capacity for disappointment. Those temperamentally disposed to love too quickly, easily amused and pleased, are most prone to dismay. If we try very, very hard, we're somewhat saved by the hope that things eventually improve, but the hope of change is itself a leap of faith. Faith that a better life lies just beyond the next hill saves us from emotional oblivion, but there is no proof that it's true. And those of us who can only enjoy ourselves when we have proof that things will improve will never find what we seek. It's a Catch-22. There is no hope of something better until you doggedly work at it for years, and even if you put in all the work, the possibilities of improvement offer no guarantee.

And even if our lives improve from work, the improvement so often comes at others' expense. How many rise to the top of the world's privileges and professions at the expense of their subordinates: employees, servants, relatives? The world most rewards interpersonal steamrollers who steal happiness from the rest of us.

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And once we realize all that, what can we do?

Some take comfort in religion. They believe that if they behave well enough and keep the faith, there is a beneficent overseer who will reward their virtue. And therefore are they a little happier. Others take comfort in justice; that if they work hard enough to improve the world, the world improves. And therefore are they a little happier.

But where's the proof of either?

Christians and Muslims can point to the fact that their religions dominate the world for thousands of years, but for thousands of years, where is the proof of heaven or Jannah? And in the heavenly pursuit, they've created so many hells on earth of mass execution, genocide, torture, rape, and slavery.

And those who pursue justice on earth without god, where is their proof of justice? The guillotine and Napoleon? The gulags? The Great Leap Forward? The Killing Fields? The Rape of Nanking? Unit 731? The bloodlands between Hitler and Stalin? The concentration camps?

And others still who are on neither side but think religion a useful mass dupe take comfort in the individual's heroism. They believe that by the will of great men, individuals can improve the earth. But where is their proof? Millennia of slavery? The conquest of Empires? The fact that the earth might demand our extinction from their pollution? Perhaps those few who dominate the earth are truly happy, but their biographies don't make them seem happy. They frankly seem miserable; slaves to ego, full of anxiety that others will cheat them, full of fear that their assassination is imminent, who can only gain a modicum of joy from knowing others are their inferiors.

In spite of all that, the proof that life might be better is just as much everywhere as the proof that life gets worse. Would you really rather live in the 12th century than the 21st? But we don't know, and so many times to so many people, success feels like such a disappointment, if there's no point to success except to spare us from horror and remind us of what we still don't have, what point is there in striving for success at all?

But even if everything we ever do comes to failure, the failure itself is what's interesting about living on this planet. The one thing that never ceases is the fascination of why humans are what they are. Why do people pursue success when so much ends in failure? Why do people see the best in each other when there's so much evidence of their worst? Hope is based on faith, not fact, and that's fascinating. Many people can adjust to the fact that life is terribly disappointing by holding out hope that it can get better, others adjust to disappointment by settling for nothing more than life's small comforts. What's fascinating is that every person has a different response to the impossibilities of life. Every person has their own response to antagonistic stimuli that is all their own. Personally, I believe that studying the particularity of individuals in their response to challenges is, more than anything else, the key to improving the human lot.

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But whatever hope there is for the future, where is the proof that we should reserve our hopes for this world rather than a one which we don't know about? The vast majority of human beings who've ever lived on this planet believed this world cannot be healed. Of all the civilizations in history, the nameless and the grand; our civilization, the America dominated world around the turn of the millennium, is at most the fourth civilization in all human history to believe that progress is anything worth pursuing - it's the America-led world, Imperial-era Europe and their world, the Romans, and certain classical Greek city-states. That's it. Other civilizations certainly contributed to progress, and one could certainly argue that progress was one of the key aims of Golden Age Islamic Civilization and the very long Chinese Empire, nevertheless progress was not their PRIMARY aim as it is for the civilization in which we grew up. One cannot serve progress and an omnipotent and omniscient god at the same time as both Islamic Caliphates and theocratic Christian kingdoms did, nor can one serve progress and simultaneously base a civilization on the futility of striving as Confucian/Buddhist Chinese civilization did.

By current standards, all three of the progressive civilizations before us went colossally wrong. Many today think these civilizations practiced inhumanity even beyond the stagnant civilizations surrounding them, and many now think our civilization has already gone so cataclysmically wrong that rather than letting it continue they'd sooner pull it down with no guarantee of a new civilization to replace it. So is there really much hope that those who progress after us will do any better?

It really is an amazing irony that our brave new world is one that both believes in material progress, an almost entirely Western concept, and wants to bring progress to people of the East. The average person from another civilization would view our desire for their progress as the ultimate imperialism.

Why? Because even today, if we explained what we wanted for the average person from places who've barely heard of us, they'd be somewhere between mystified and offended. They'd think we've committed grave offenses against their gods and ancestors, and if they ever collaborated with us, they would be severely punished. If you want to really listen to people from other cultures and let their worldview affect ours, go ahead and listen to them, but their worldviews are largely based on homeostasis and the idea that there are much more important things in the cosmos than humanism and progress, and we must accept that we're just specs of dust in a greater plan.

They've certainly got a point. We live every day with the anxiety that every bit of progress we've made is an illusion - material, scientific, and political. Perhaps more important than improving our world is figuring out what existence is and getting a little closer to knowing our place within it. Maybe science is the way, but there is no definitive proof that science is a more beneficial force to us than anything else. Science gave us the technology to extend life and improve its quality. It also gave us the capacity to destroy every bit of organic life we've ever seen.

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The world is divided politically between those who believe science is our best bet and those who still throw everything behind religion. Both are mostly western concepts, and they both could lead us to destroying the world. I believe existence will probably not be solved through either politics or science or religion. The closest we currently come to figuring things out is the places where there is no solid divide between things which are and are not, should be and should not, can be and cannot be. These places are metaphysics, humanities, art, and love.

Metaphysics - space and time, cause and effect, necessity and possibility, mind and matter, ontology and being, identity and change - that philosophical place which is not quite science and not quite religion, where we speculate on what experience truly is and posit hidden dimensions beyond our crude material understanding that animate everything from creation of the universe to its evolution, to evolution on our planet, to evolution of humans, to history, to the motivations of modern humans. The study of which leads us to...

Humanities - archeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, law, philosophy, journalism, and only THEN religion and science and politics - that place where we take those possibilities of existence and apply them directly to humans; where we might understand the reasons for human existence better, and with a firmer intellectual foundation, we can better guarantee that our moves into progress won't collapse before we understand them. We approach the definite articles of politics, religion, and science not as true believers but as speculators about WHY we believe greater existence might be possible through these avenues which history clearly shows to be poisoned chalices that hurt as much as they help precisely because we believe in them too much. Maybe, just maybe, if we studied these vaguer human questions before we applied them to things of this earth which are so definite, our progress would have better aim.

Art - theater, literature, music, dance, drawing, painting, sculpture, movies, tv, even video games. If the art is good, it's where we can demonstrate the lessons of everything humans are. Art itself is like a scientific model that teaches us the complications ​of religion, poltiics, and science directly. without dogma. It's the place where we demonstrate the complications of living within history, living within or without the law. The art of the past shows how we're connected to archeologically distant civilizations, and how our worldview may be anthropologically different or the same to the human beings who live at distant remove from us. In a process the Greeks called 'Mimesis,' the direct experience fosters connections to the people we know, and after we experience a great work of art, we understand the people we know better, and we're better bonded to them. Which brings us to..

Love - Love of self, love of family, love of friends, love of physical being, love of country, love of distant peoples, love of humanity, love of animals and plants, love of the living and love of the dead, universal love, love of whatever there is in the cosmos both far and near.

What can I say about love beyond that, but every other pathway to love seems to inspire hatred on a mass scale. Maybe my way of prioritizing the world would be no better, but it's not like anybody's currently trying it. Everything in the arts and humanities now seems to serve a didactic political purpose, but politics currently seems a dead end more and more, whereas art and humanities and metaphysics can inspire you to view the world differently, not as an arm of activism. Whether your activism to remake the world is political, religious, or scientific, it will aim better if inspired by those vague, undefinable contemplations of metaphysics, humanities, art, and love, that do not strictly categorize the world into an exclusive us vs. them, but see connections between all sorts of disparate things of the universe that otherwise seem unrelated. I believe that is how we surmount the divides that are tearing the world apart, and that sort of deep contemplation of existence can inform our activism to remake the world in the best possible way. Not the other way around.

Dehumanization Part II

 Human beings took over the earth because we're nature's greatest problem solvers, but if our solutions were foreordained, they wouldn't really be problems. The world eventually acclimates to every problem, but the world does not acclimate to any problem at all before sacrificing millions of people along the way. Whether the selection is natural or artificial, that's how evolution works.

We weren't brought onto this planet to enjoy ourselves. Organisms have been struggling to survive on this planet for billions of years, why would we be any different? On the one hand, it's through struggle that things gradually get better. On the other hand, do they really get better? Did the world truly get better if the price for the industrial revolution was half the world living in totalitarian/imperial hells for their entire lives? Is the world truly getting better if the price of our greater technology is the mass extinction of a million species and a large part of the human race?

And even if the world gets better, the ways of improvement are completely unpredictable. It's only by the conflict of opposites that future generations find ways forward that synthesize the best of oppositional arguments into something new that provides better solutions, but solutions that solve problems always create new problems; which then create new divisions.

And sometimes, new solutions require a new civilization with a completely different perspective, because certain problems are unsolvable for hundreds of years and turn lethal along the way for millions of people.

Furthermore, it's only because of conflict that both sides can ever truly understand or hone their ideas, and it's only through conflict that neither side can impose ideas which common sense knows are absurd.

Still further, once your headspace is filled by the propaganda of your side, even common sense is warped, and no two ideological movements can agree on what common sense is anymore.

So what then do you do when either side of an argument believes that common sense favors them?

It's not provable that the truth is somewhere in the middle of every argument, and it's particularly not provable when neither side communicates with one another, but what's clear is that when no solution's agreed upon, the problem grows, infects other problems, which also grow from their symbiosis, and together they multiply in importance until the problems become existential.

It almost doesn't matter whether the truth is in the middle of every argument, what matters is that two sides of every argument come to a workable solution that temporarily assuages them both to the point that they won't go to war over it.

There is no absolute right or wrong, there's only context; there is only "this is right because of that." There is eventual good that finds its way through even the worst evil. Even the mass slaughter of Genghis Khan resulted in the reforestation of the world. Imagine if the Industrial Revolution had happened without it - would global warming occur before we even had the technology to fight against it? But I doubt anyone would ever crave a solution to any problem that drastic.

So what, if anything, can end the conflict with a satisfactory conclusion? Is there anything at all that could do it?

Well, something nobody wants to hear is that, at least some of the time, turning the other cheek works. What you call justice is often what other people call vengeance, and they're usually more powerful than you. It's sad, but when there is a true power imbalance, the powerful have many more ways of keeping things the way they are than the powerless do at overturning them. However many gains there seem to be now in certain causes, the establishment waits, regroups, searches for new and often brutal ways to put things back to the way they want it.

Underrated Classical Musicians: The Hilliard Ensemble

 How has the world forgotten so quickly about the Hilliard Ensemble. Just fifteen years ago, this was the unquestionable standard bearing bar raiser among early music vocal ensembles. Other groups were good, nobody was this good. The King's Singers have declined over the decades, and let's face it, their pop music excursions were all rather lame, the same goes for Voces8 and Chanticleer and Polyphony. The world of vocal music is frankly paved wall to wall with soft-ass shit that isn't worth anybody's time. If you want to be entertained, don't listen to people do lame a capella in a church, go to a rock club where you can dance your ass off... Among the ones who know well enough to stay serious, there are larger ensembles who are wonderful and truly serious: The Tallis Scholars, Tenebrae, and of course, the Monteverdi Choir. Aside from the government subsidized Northern European 'VERY SERIOUS CHOIRS' like the RIAS Kammerchor, Swedish Radio Choir, and the Norddeutsche Figuralchor, which are their own separate world, and of course the Baltic choirs, which are yet another world of their own. My favorite is either the middle sized "The Sixteen", whose ensemble composition is in the name, or 'Accentus', who will easily get a post of its own at some point because of how incredibly innovative their manner of doing music is. But among the smaller ones, there's really just the Cardinal's Musick, who can go embarrassingly out of tune, there's New York Polyphony, whom I get the sense still has its best days well ahead of it. But back int he day there was the Hilliard Ensemble and their female equivalents, Anonymous 4. They were both ensembles of fearsome musicians, but of the two, Hilliard generally did much more interesting music.

What Hilliard did was miraculous. These must have been the greatest ensemble singers in the world. Again and again, intonation and diction which was generally so perfect that you could hear the overtones. Nobody really knows the stylistic manner in which these pieces were played, the oral tradition's been dead for half a millennium. But the music was played with supreme common sense, interpretations with middle-of-the-road tempi that let us savor the harmonies and the rhythms. No group ever drew us more plausibly into the distant world of the gothic, with its awesome, larger than life spirituality, meant to comfort and simultaneously disturb with music as immense as the divine that we have only begun to understand again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_ihA8tZaUA

Lost Youth in New York

I saw an article in the New York Times today that made me incredibly bittersweet. The new generation of New Yorkers is taking advantage of the newly evacuated and low-priced city to make New York the city of the young again. Young people are exploding with social energy, and every young person in New York is expecting this summer to be another Summer of Love or Harlem Renaissance - when all the pent up energy of isolation is released in an orgy of nightlife, romance, innovation, artistic movements, and hugs.

It's so heartening to read even as it's so sad. New York is the best place on earth, and the best place on earth should never be lived in for more than a week at a time. New York is the best place because it's the most exciting, the most interesting, the place where you can learn the most and the place where you can forget everything you ever learned. It's a place where smart people go to act stupid: to take the most lethal risks, to lend your names to the stupidest political causes, to pursue fame and fortune before you realize what a poisoned chalice those are, to believe in yourself and express it with the innocence of a twenty-something whom life's disappointments have not yet beaten down. As a city, New York should perpetually remain twenty-five, and for the first time since I was ten, it's a town for the young again. Once you're too old, you can never enjoy that town again with the fresh expectations of what its life can offer you.

Even if the perpetually young centenarian closest to my heart just passed away, I know I'm too old for New York now. Bubbie lived her entire old age as though she were twenty-five, but she knew better than the throw away all that stability to start over in a completely unfamiliar place whose dangers are all too well known. She quit socially smoking while young, she never drank, she used an exercise bike every day, no potential moment for learning was ever spent chasing romance, and she never travelled without a group that planned every activity for her. As you get older, you need to find artificial ways of remaining young, because the life of a twenty-five year old can kill anybody over forty.

New York is lovely because it's dangerous, and so is youth. When I was twenty-five I was two-hundred thirty-five pounds on a 5'4 1/2 frame; eating the diet of two 25 year olds as weight-gaining medication fought against some of the worst mental duress of my life, and then as now, preferring the cultural diet of an eighty-five year old to what even most intellectual 25 year olds loved. Moving to New York was not an option, neither was romance nor even much in the way of creativity. I tried to start a political science degree at Hopkins by enrolling in courses (which, I can assure you, I could only get into through a little known back door), and quickly dropped out because the stress was far too burdensome. I had so very many ambitions that would avenge me for my bad luck of a bad brain, and life quickly disabused me that I could ever rub the world's nose in my achievements while still young.

Then as now, I knew that New York was the place where promising young people looking to blow up the world's mountains went to seek their fortunes, and even if they never so much as climbed one, their experience of New York was something they took with them for the rest of their lives. Whatever they encountered in New York, for good or ill, was the their defining experience.

In my thirties, I spent just about all of my extra cash on visits to New York, saving what little an extremely impractical person knows how to so that I can have those long weekends in New York that remind me of just how much world there is still to meet. Most days might just be me and the city, and that can be terribly lonely at times, but there's always so much music to hear, art to see, food to eat, books to buy, bars to drink at and drunks to talk to. If I ever did it for more than a long weekend, I'd run out of money.

The older I get, the less desire I have to move to New York. Only the young have the nerve for risks that colossal, and moving to New York takes even more nerve than moving to Europe. The city is so big, the potential disappointments of New York so great. It is so obvious how easy it is to get lost in that place. It's so obvious how easily New York spits out anything but its favored children, it's so obvious how fake the friendships are, it's so obvious how obnoxious the people are and how psychopathic its powerful class is.

The fact that life in New York is so dangerous is part of its appeal. If you're a person in a high-risk/high-reward field, be it the arts, or finance, or sports, or food, every person wants to be the one who stepped into the world's largest arena, and won.

But what makes New York go is not the successes but the failures who learn that there's greater happiness and love in failure than success; not the Broadway stars but the chorus members and the techies, not the Yankee shortstops but the gym teachers at high schools in bad neighborhoods, not the investment bankers but the office managers and the financial planners for electricians - the realtors, not the real estate moguls. And beneath even them, a mill machine of immigrants and projects, who sweep your streets and clean your shit, not in the hope that their grandchildren will be masters of the universe but that they can be electricians and realtors who own half an acre in New Jersey.

To me, there's even a very specific kind of art that often comes out of New York. It's extremely glamorous, more than a little brutal, with movements that are very short-lived, and has very little to do with life as it's lived anywhere but New York, where the rules of life are different than anywhere else because they live at the center of modern existence. Fitzgerald could never have written Great Gatsby anywhere but New York, but Theodore Dreiser wrote novel after novel about city life from Terre Haute, Indiana. Jackson Pollock schpritzed canvases in Manhattan while Edward Hopper had to go to Massachussets for inspiration. So many people who create anything lasting in New York can only do it once, and making their one big score happen takes so much out of them that they can never do it again.

New York is a place for romance, it is not a place for love. New York is sublime, literally a thing of awe, but things which are literally awesome can kill you. Like every other generation of young people, most of the young will eventually be in their late thirties. They'll realize they have nothing to show for their great times, and realize that if they want to keep them going they'll be dead by 50. They'll watch as some friends fall victim to addiction and murder and realize that no fun is worth those horrors. Many of them will have children resulting from their fondest memories, and the continued partying of parents comes at children's expense.

New York is a place for a very specific time in your life, and then it's time to get out and pursue safer, more lasting things. New York is still there, and a whole new generation is ready to sing its siren song, only to realize that most of they're not sirens but the sailors torn on the rocks. Oh how I wish I could have been one of those people New York destroyed. Maybe I'd be one of those 1% New York doesn't spit out.

I never had my shot at New York, it's probably for the best. I remember who I was at 25, New York would have literally killed me. I'm almost 40, and no more ready for New York than ever before. The city is a hell where the demons are so beautiful you almost want to become one yourself.

The best of the young people, as ever before, will have so much fun, then end their youths by thirty before the lifelong effects of alcohol set in, raise children in the suburbs, vote Democrat and contribute to liberal causes, attend a progressive church, go into the city for a show or an exhibit once a month, and teach their children that there's a place in life for fun and new experiences, but fun is no substitute for building things for people you love and teaching the generation after them how to do the same.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/style/nyc-summer.html?fbclid=IwAR0tDcbiz9-uS53ZCHIpVPEgLjLMzGTd3aRac8K5pB8QshKPzqppQBNqC2w

The Unsinkable Mollie Witow

My Hero:

October 20th, 1920-June 8th, 2021

Infant Refugee from the Russian Civil War born in the Free City of Danzig after her parents took the last train out of the Soviet Union before the border closed for 70 years. One of the first Jewish woman students at Catholic University in Washington DC. German to English translator at Wright-Patterson airforce base for defected Nazi scientists, names classified but most likely including Werner von Braun. Investigated by the Pentagon during the McCarthy era. Librarian to H.L. Mencken. Friend of John Hope Franklin. Friend to and regular shopper in the record store of Benjamin Glass - father of Philip Glass. Traveller to at least 59 countries. Collector of autographs, books, travel souvenirs. Everyday fashion plate for weird clothes from her many travels which she spoke of like hunting trophies. Witness to the the near-entirety of the 20th century and one of the last living links with its beginning. Lifelong lover of classical music, astronomy, archeology, and art.

I will miss you every day of my life Bubbie. You were the inspiration for everything.

Dehumanization Part 1

 I went to the store today to get morphine for Bubbie. We thought she wouldn't make it through the night last night and at 2:30 in the morning I sat next to her bed and wept as I said what I thought would be my final goodbye. Even if it wasn't the finale, she's been fast asleep since Friday and will probably never wake.

When leaving the Giant, the ignition in my car locked, I tried to get it to work for five minutes, then I realized I'd left my phone at home. I had to go to the store's customer service, where there was a long line. I learned I could only call from a landline if they would dial the number for me, and I had to tell my parents what happened on speakerphone as everyone could listen in. After I was done, there was an old, pushy, grouchy New Yorker in back of me and she raised her voice at me for not clearing away from the front of the line, which I didn't do because I was waiting to see if my parents would call me back. I got home and had to be on the line with GEICO for twenty minutes (and it's usually much longer...), I was constantly thereafter being asked to get my own new phone set up when all I wanted was to nap, and then finally bordered on an anxiety attack in which I fought against the urge to hyperventilate as my hands shake and my esophagus feels as though it's carrying a five pound weight and my eyes blink ad infinitum.

I then had to go back for the car to meet the GEICO tow truck. The operation which everybody thought would take five minutes took two hours. During which I literally just had to sit there as yet another thing the guy tried didn't work. In my mind, the car is still in the Giant lot, forever, until like Orwell's elephant a soldier decides to shoot it, and then its corpse sits in the street as everyone in the crowd picks it apart for meat before it rots.

I realize that this one wasn't my fault. But whether or not it's my doing, this is a regular day in the life of a person with learning disabilities and adjacent emotional difficulty. It's generally at least a once a week experience here, and if this were the worst mental experience I encounter over the course of a week, I might count myself a blessed life.

In many ways, if you're feeling humiliated rather than numb to the experience, that is evidence that you're otherwise living a very comfortable life. I have never grown used to all these things going wrong, perhaps it's because my life is otherwise rather blessed, but the feeling of humiliation is always there. Perhaps it comes not because of what goes wrong, but the humiliation happens because every new experience of it is salt in the original wound of a person who either was led to believe life would give him much more, or misremembers what he seemed in his younger years in one of his many delusional faults of memory.

My life particularly was supposed to be so much better than this. I was supposed to be spoiled by life beyond compare. Read my dreamy prose, discuss any subject with me, any at all... bathe in the translucency of my wit. I shit these essays out more easily than you shit out unrefrigerated sushi. So if you find me an incorrigible turd (and many obviously do...), it's because I'm smarter than you, you know it, and you plebes just can't take it... The view up here is very lonely. To whom could I speak that could follow the thoughts of my Brobdinagian brain?

When you're dealing with crap like I deal with all the time, you have that much more need to lord it over everyone you meet or else you're going to forget anything that's good about yourself and jump into the grave with your grandmother. If that makes me a narcissist lacking in empathy and baseline humility, so be it (and for the record I'm not, for anybody who cares I'm just a run of the mill bi-polar manic with continual delusions of grandeur... along with intractable self-loathing depression and obsessive thoughts and accompanying anxiety that causes my emotional state to be perpetually fraught at an existential level. So there....).

We all need our ways of growing thick skin, mine is knowing in my bones that I was supposed to be fucking Beethoven or Tolstoy, being entirely aware that this spark is somewhere in me, and assuring myself that one day, my time will come.

It's certainly not that I view any fame or posterity as my future (for so many reasons I'd rather not have it), or that such an achievement is any guarantee of lasting satisfaction, if anything it makes satisfaction much more difficult.

The reason is that when you're in that rare moment of real creation, the possibilities of the world are stretched out before you, and you feel as though God is working through you as a mere instrument. There is no heroin, or sex, or love that can ever compare to that manic feeling of being chosen for some kind of ultimate knowledge. You literally feel as though the universe is in your palm, and whether anybody else likes what you produce, a rare moment of that inspiration can carry you for months at a time.

But when you experience yet another of life's little humiliations, every small humiliation feels colossal, because it's yet another reminder of the incompetent you really are. This same guy whose mind is a steel database of memory is the guy who can't get through a single menial task without bungling everything, ho could barely get through school, can't exist in a life on his own without the most humiliating limitations, and can never get the help he needs without colossal resentments building in both the helper and the helped, because both of us are stuck with the question: how can a person so smart possibly be so dumb? And how can a person so smart not figure out how to solve these problems?

And would that these were the largest problems of my life. Would that my anxieties and obsessive thoughts had to do with being an incompetent rather than a monster, would that I were continually thinking about how I failed myself rather than how I failed others, would that I did not have obsessions and obsessive compulsions that spiral, and spiral, and spiral until my mind satisfies itself that it's arrived at the theoretical center of a mental galaxy that lost whatever center it had while still a child. Would that my steel trap of a memory not have black holes where delusions can embed themselves in the very mental faculties that always seemed more perfect than everyone else's. It's the ultimate joke: superrationality and super-irrationality locked in the same brain, with neither side able to convince the other of its veracity, and all left in its wake is the anguish of a mental house divided.

People think they can understand, people think they can be compassionate. But they're not. Just as I do, they choose to frame their lives in a narrative that best fits themselves as the good person or the smart one and others as bad or stupid. We all do our best to concern ourselves more with what others did to us rather than what we did to others. If we didn't, we'd all die of shame.

It's one of human beings' greatest paradoxes. We can only gain our full measure of humanity by dehumanizing others. Material well being is almost always procured at the expense of someone else. Hundreds of people die to pick your fruit, make your computer, make your cars, collect your garbage, build your houses, heat your rooms, line your electricity, and no amount of regulation can stop any of that.

And just as we can only gain material well-being at others' expense, so can we only gain spiritual well-being at others' expense. There are all sorts of dreams, left and right, of a world where people come together and treat each other with liberty, equality, community, decency, and humility. And yet the more we believe in those goals, the further we seem to get from them. It's easy to act decently to a community of like-minded individuals. Long as you're rallying around the same banner, nearly every disagreement is solved by an appeal to the common goal. But whether you're conservative or socialist, libertarian or progressive, Christianist or intersectionalist, what do you do about all those billions of people whose goals are different from yours? What do you do when they resist your preferred vision with every ounce of effort in their being?

Well, for many people, the answer is pretty simple. There's no motivator in the entire world more powerful than war. You may think you're immune to war fever, but there is no drug in the world more intoxicating than self-righteousness. There is no more effective way to band a community together than the sense that people are trying to kill them. There is no way to reclaim your humanity that gives more meaning to your life than to give it away of your own free will to something you believe in. There is no self-esteem higher than the person who fights for what they love, but in order to fight for what we love, we need other people to hate.

You may not have heard or read, but gun sales are going up yet again. Maybe it's purely for recreational purposes because they think gun restrictions will soon happen, but it may or may not be a matter of time before people start using them on us for political purposes in serious quantities. If they do, what choice will people on our side of the ledger have but to buy the same guns? What choice would there be but discriminatory practices until we figure out who's a threat to us and who isn't? So where would your dreams of an equal world be then?

Where's The Guy Who Writes My Fiction?

Writing essays is easy. Look at the frequency I post them, I obviously fart these things out. All they mean to me is a momentary impulse to get things down on paper. For whatever reason, it regulates my emotional welfare in the way running or sex does more fit people. It usually takes two hours for a short piece, three and a half for a long one. I post them with the intention of not thinking about them afterward - write it, post it, forget it. But after posting them I inevitably think about them all day, go back to read them and read with pride until I realize I've made twenty typos in grammar, spelling, and syntax. I correct them, and by the time they're corrected it doesn't even matter because whoever would read them already read it, and if this one sucked, there's always the next essay...

Writing fiction is hard. When you're doing it and it's working, you feel as though you're divinely inspired or a god yourself. All the world's chaos humiliates and burdens you, but on a laptop at a desk, you create your own private little world of meaning, and it's as though God dictates to you on a private hotline. And then the line goes dead, and even if one story's any good, there's another still to tell, and no guarantee that God will ever call you again, and even if he does, it may be months before those clouds of heaven open up again and give you the clarity to know you're writing is any good. And you work and you wait, but between every visit, there is no guarantee that God will ever visit again, and what you're left with is little fragments, because the translation from the story's first vision to the page's reality is stunningly untranslatable. Nietzsche said that words can only describe what's already dead in your heart, so perhaps if you believe too much in what your project, the writing never gets done.

When it's non-fiction, it's me writing, when it's fiction, it's an entirely different person. I doubt that person is god, but whomever he is, that person is not always there.

I've taken to calling him "AC Charlap" - a portmanteau of my Hebrew name. AC Charlap is Evan Tucker's alterego who never had Evan Tucker's disturbed youth: who made his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic when he was six, but now spends only eighteen weeks of every year on the podium – six for orchestras, six for operas, six for early music (Bach and before), and no more than eighteen weeks because any more feels utterly limiting for an artist of such burning creativity as himself. Another eighteen weeks of the year are spent writing Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, plays, poetry, history, and even the occasional symphony if he has a week to spare – every book he writes makes the New York Times Bestseller list and his books have initiated a new golden era of reading and writing for American society. Inner city children wander the streets quoting his poetry, graduate students hang on his every word when he lectures at colleges. The rest of the year he spends touring with his grammy-winning classical/jazz/blues/roma/bluegrass/soul band for which he's lead singer, violinist, and co-songwriter. He was an early widower who bravely raised three children by himself with the help of his many girlfriends who all get along perfectly well with one another.

I have also called him "Ivan Ticoczki," which would have been my name if my grandparents stayed in Europe. Ivan Ticoczki is, by common consensus, the worst composer of the 20th century, but he wrote an infamous 2800 page three volume memoir in which he claimed he was the most culturally significant figure in world history since King David. He was born in a small shtetl on the day Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was shot, he was photographed as a three year old next to Lenin during the October Revolution, at eight he was the personal chauffeur of Germany's foreign minister Walter Rathenau (he claimed he was fifteen) and was unwittingly responsible for Rathenau's assassination. He tended bar in the 1920s at the Moulin Rouge in Paris where he lost his virginity to Josephine Baker (they did it on the bar). He then went to Weimar Berlin and wrote the better draft of the Threepenny Opera, not Kurt Weill's watered down second draft. Ticoczki's score was entirely twelve-tone jazz which would bring the working class into the elite. Though Jewish, he tried to join the Nazi party in 1933 and was only spurned when his circumcision was discovered at a party meeting. He then emigrated to Vienna where he lived at a table in a 24 hour coffeehouse and people would surround him to hear his tabletalk witticisms. He attempted to compose a musical oratorio for orchestra and 300 member chorus whose finale would be the mass suicide of the performers. He claimed in the memoir that he survived Auschwitz but there is indisputable evidence that he lived in London during the War and had an affair with Virginia Woolf, whom he may or may not have murdered and framed to look like her suicide. ...Anyway I have a whole biography for this guy that goes up to the present day... He's currently 107 and composing an entire cycle of music for Jewish services, though he hasn't set foot in a synagogue since 1924, the work is for for 200 piece orchestra and 1000 member chorus.

He is occasionally "Rabbi Herbert Swamley," who is technically the son of my father's fake name, 'Wayne Swamley.' Herbert Swamley is a Rabbi living in Pikesville, MD who may or may never have been ordained. He has undiagnosed borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. He's worked at every Hebrew school in Baltimore and been fired from all of them yet never lacks for employment. While a teacher his students always bullied him, while an administrator for Jewish organizations he always bankrupted them, and while a pulpit rabbi his congregation literally chased him out of his own synagogue in the middle of a sermon, and while working in a Jewish media office he tried to kill his boss so that he could be the org's new spokesman. He seems to deliberately take offense in every interaction he has and speaks with a Hebrew accent so everybody just assumes he's Israeli, but in fact was born in Duluth, Minnesota to Lutheran parents, and like Rachel Dolezal decided he was 'trans-religious.'

Another is Miroslav Zuckerman-Rabinovich: Professor Zuckerman-Rabinovitch has been a Professor of Marxist Theory at the University of Bratislava since 1980 but has been on leave sinc 1993. In the mid 1980s, MZR (as he's commonly known) rose to prominence in Czechoslovakia for refusing to sign his name to a document condemning thirty-two of his colleagues fired for counterrevolutionary tendencies, though recent evidence shows he was in fact the document's author. In 1993 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Sexuality at the Freiuniversitat of Berlin on account of his treatise on perversion: "Die Geschichte der Perversionen von der urzeit bis zum Dritten Jahrtausend und von der Saülingsalter aus dem Totenstarre. Eine historische und soziologische und psychologische betrachtung über die Ursachen und Wirkungen und so weiter" which became an international bestseller. In 1999, he was appointed Distinguished Fellow of Lacanian Fetishism at the Ontological Institute of Social Action at the London School of Economics following the runaway success of his second best seller - Capitalism: A Degenerate's Instruction Manual. In 2003, he was appointed Professeur Distingue at the Sorbonne for his French bestseller: "La Dialectique, l'autre, et la jouissance dans Bush, Saddam, et Jerry Lewis." The book did not do as well in translation. In 2006, Columbia University appointed him University Professor, their highest Professorial chair given to only twenty people throughout the history of the school. In his case the Robert Guccione University Professor of Pornographic Cinema on account of his third international best-seller: The Phenomenology of Ejaculate.

A still more involved backstory is Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman at the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation who leaked key documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara that he hit Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. He was briefly a talking head in the 70s but his period as a television personality ended in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a Distinguished Congressional Aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Tim Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed himself, though some have disputed his account, being the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who enacted Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem.

But my most involved backstory is Hauptmann Rinderherz (put the name through google translator...). Hauptmann Rinderherz is the 53-year-old, crew-cutted, 6’6, 350 lbs German man who’s crashed on Evan’s couch since September 2013. They met one day at bar trivia in East Baltimore, and Evan quickly learned this was a kindred spirit with a bottomless knowledge of classical music, but he'd been evicted from his apartment a week earlier. In a moment Evan endlessly regrets, Evan invited Hauptmann Rinderherz to crash on his couch for the night. Since 2013, Hauptmann Rinderherz has never left the couch except to go to the bathroom. Evan would later find out from a friend that there was, in fact, no apartment, and he’d been moving from couch to couch until his host tires enough of him to call the police. On Evan’s coffeetable is Hauptmann Rinderherz’s 400-CD collection of Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache bootlegs, which the good Herr Hauptmann hasn't bothered organizing or even listening to because they all are found on his youtube channel, the views of which he seems to check as often as possible. From the little information Evan can get out of him, Hauptmann Rinderherz was a rising star in the East Berlin police who specialized in interrogations (only violent criminals, he always specifies, not political prisoners), but his career was tragically derailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because he refused under oath to acknowledge he was ever a member of the Stasi, he spent two weeks in jail was disbarred from continuing his police work. He then decided to pursue the music career he abandoned at the behest of his mother who told him daily that her fondest wish for her son was to die for Germany. Hauptmann Rinderherz was a childhood prodigy who claims that as a teenager he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory under Emil Gilels, but Evan has yet to see Hauptmann Rinderherz approach a piano or even hear him speak a word of Russian. For ten years after the wall fell, Herr Hauptmann made his living operating a floor-buffer in the lobby of the Berlin Philharmonie. But when Simon Rattle was elected the next leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, Hauptmann Rinderherz was so disgusted he elected to leave Berlin for America. Hauptmann Rinderherz lived for the next few years as a hobo, jumping coal train to coal train through all the American cities until he caught an episode of The Wire through the window of a Radio Shack in Toledo. He immediately realized that of all American cities, Baltimore alone had the gritty dinginess to remind him of the good old days of East Berlin when everybody was banded together in the communal solidarity of mutual misery.

There are still others. 'Ferdinand Dickisch' was the suggestion of one friend, and I have yet to find a backstory for him. A friend of my parents recently suggested the pseudonym "Pierre Saponite" - since Evan means 'rock' in Hebrew ("pierre" en francais), and Saponite is the name on a 19th century poster of a French detergent ad in my parents' living room. I haven't decided on a biography yet, but I'm thinking he's a playboy intellectual who flies to warzones in a chartered plane immaculately tailored and coiffed, then writes articles about his experiences and plagiarizes in all them.

Whomever this muse is, their presence in my life is fleeting, and I like to think they are on a beach in the Big Sur around Carmel, and eventually they will come back, tanned, rested, and ready, and we will write something more than a backstory.

Conductor Comment: Christoph von Dohnanyi, Mariss Jansons, Kirill Petrenko

 Brief conductor comment:

I'd say 25% of any profession are truly good at what they do. 5% are better than good. And 1 in every 1000 are truly, cosmically great. So there are few truly great ones. 50% of conductors, like professionals of any type, have deep strengths but are hidebound by flaws just as deep, and 25% just are bad.

Purely in terms of performance, there are exactly three conductors I've ever heard live whom I am absolutely positive are nothing short of cosmically great: Mariss Jansons, now gone. Christoph von Dohnanyi, now well in his 90s and at very least semi-retired. And Kirill Petrenko, who will hopefully be among us for another fifty years. All three give the kinds of performance that can never go out of fashion because they are so clearly skeptical of every approach. They approach every performance problem as close to its exact root as mortals can get, and so often they hit the exact mid point between classicism and romanticism, objectivity and subjectivity, old school tradition and historically informed performance, clarity and atmosphere, fidelity to the score and freedom in performance. They keep their eyes on the total form of a work and maximize the personality of every detail within. I can understand people thinking this approach tries to be everything to all people, but I think of what I hear from them as the thing in itself.

That is not to say that they are great in other ways. When I think of my true performance heroes, they have broader repertoires and are willing to put their reputations on the line for music people dislike. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is a hero of mine, Rostropovich is a hero, Marc-Andre Hamelin is a hero, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a hero, Lorraine Hunt Liebersen is a hero. These conductors are not heroes, they are just masters of what they do and maestri in the truest sense.

Jansons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqrGkYarIJY

Dohnanyi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMIP4ygm334

Petrenko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ZIPNermbc

Old New Land: Still Another Beginning

1.

What was Eliezer to do?

All he could as scribe for the House of Abraham was write to the House of Terah. Hopefully the letter would reach Haran, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Haran then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom surely by now has grown into a righteous and honest man, may he too be blessed with all the cows and dirt and cooperative bondsmen.

As Abraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fell to him. Abraham had met the accursed fate his father Terah predicted for his blasphemously non-idolatrous son. Everyone who knew Abraham knew his inclination to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, they exiled Abraham away to carry on his craziness in a distant land where Terah had been given a deed to an abandoned double cave far beyond the furthest borders of the Sumerian Empire.

Eliezer did everything within his not particularly distinguished healing powers to lead Abraham back to the better gods of his nature, but Abraham’s vision of an invisible, silent god was long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. Year by year, the god became less silent, and Abraham conversed with it all day for fifty years.

As his faithful bondsmen, they told themselves his god was benign, and humored their master with pretense to believing everything he saw. They sacrificed three times a year to Abraham’s god in whom they didn’t believe, prayed to this god they couldn’t see every Saturday morning, gave money for some place Abraham screamed about called the State of Israel, and sent their children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where all the kids do is play sports.

A cheerful heart does good like its medicine, and all was righteousness until the invisible god commanded Abraham to kill little Isaac, burn him, and eat him. Such a scandal. Everybody loved little Isaac, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall, so really he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, this isn’t actually weird. Everybody sacrificed their children in biblical times, but for Abraham, this was really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the guy who made enemies by screaming that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37 they should probably be left alone. Anyway, everybody liked Isaac, and even Abraham must have known they would stop him if they’d ever heard about what the voice commanded, but everybody saw that their venerated lunatic was particularly anxious for that very brief time before the sacrifice, say... seven years.

The oldest brother of Abraham was named Nahor, may his memory and cattle be a blessing. Nahor told Eliezer that upon their exile, it was imperative that Eliezer always speak his mind to Abraham at all times, may Abraham be blessed with a hole in the head balancing the one already there, to make him remember which world is the real world. After sixty-two years of this, Eliezer was half mad himself, but for the entirety of those three-score and two, Eliezer took every Abrahamic eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that idiot in good faith. Every time Abraham heard the voice, Eliezer pretended the voice was as real as though Abraham were still the small child who once broke all the idols Eliezer just shelved in Terah’s idol store.

The problem though was that Isaac’s mother really loved him. After they left Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised, she spent the next twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Abraham concupisced got pregnant - and in all fairness, it's not like Abraham brought any new women home. Almost all of them were the young priestwhores Terah procured for Abraham to lure him back to a morally righteous life of idolworship. All of Abraham’s illegitimate children were not only still alive but had children or grandchildren of their own which Sarah had to watch every day. So Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Abraham and understandably loved her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Abraham killed their son, she died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her.

The last the House of Terah heard from the House of Abraham was thirty-eight years ago when Abraham ordered Eliezer to take dictation for a letter: stating that three angels came to him to announce that Sarah would be great with child. In this next letter, almost forty years later, Eliezer would have to tell them the truth which he never told Abraham: these were no angels. They were Canaanite healers Eliezer sent for to examine Sarah. The problem was exactly as Eliezer thought - that special diet Abraham was always such a zealot about; no dairy and meat eaten together, nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal, and all the blood drained from the little meat they could eat ... Who'd ever want to eat at all? Eliezer explained to the healers that Abraham was a little mixed up, so just go along with whatever he says.

Well, Abraham asked immediately if they were angels. They bemusedly looked at Eliezer and what could Eliezer do but shrug? OK, so they were angels. And when the angels wanted a little butter to go with their meat, could Abraham really tell them no?

Two of the healers distracted Abraham during the day and every day fed him oranges and pomegranates by the mina, which, by the way, is a biblical word for a weight measurement. They served Abraham tea from the East they called ‘ginseng’, but while Sarah would bring them those stupid ‘ashcakes’ she always made - and everybody wondered why she was so thin… the healers cooked Sarah special meals.... They fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, they fed her pig liver and testicles, and at first, when Sarah got disgusted with the idea of eating testicles, they ground the pig testicles into a powder and served it to her in a potion; and while Abraham ate the good cuts from the veal and lamb, they fed her the heart and the kidney. They sawed the bones of animals to get the blood inside and put the special blood in a stew. They even made a broth from shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Abraham so he’d shtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk.

Sarah was astonishingly svelte for her age, but that was because she barely ate a thing for decades. Why? Because she fucking hated Abraham’s diet. If she could she’d have eaten fried poultry giblets every day of her life in Israel, but even had her husband long since gone insane, he still watched the kitchen tent like a hawk to make sure no member of House Abraham ever ate anything his brain deemed unclean; but Abraham was now occupied in all-day conversation with angels he could actually see, and the other ‘angel’ served Sarah the best food she’d eaten in forty years. In three weeks she looked healthier than she had in decades, and within a week of that she was clearly pregnant.

All that was nearly forty years ago. It had been well over sixty years since Ur banished Abraham and his devoted servants. Never again would they lay eyes upon Ur’s beloved mudbricks and tombs and cuneiform documents. All the members of the House of Abraham longed to return and many eagerly awaited the day when Abraham may return to sense and could convince the Sumerian government to readmit him. “Next year in Ur” they all chanted in secret as they prayed to the east, and now more than ever they awaited the second coming of Abraham’s sanity, An & Enlil and Enki be praised.

But Abraham’s good senses seemed farther away than ever. After Sarah dropped dead, Abraham too dropped to the ground and those who saw him thought Abraham too had deceased. Eliezer was slightly ashamed by his silent jubilation, as he thought of how the return to Ur was at hand by virtue of slavely inheritance to the House of Terah, but Abraham returned to them; yet upon return, he was even less Abraham. He could neither walk nor ride, and only speak from the side of his mouth. In addition to the physical maladies inflicted upon him, divine Nergal, may his spirit be assuaged with bounteous flesh from people we don’t like, took from Abraham his short-term memory, and it is only a matter of time before all memory of his offering to the silent god is no more. In a few months, were Eliezer even to tell Abraham what happened, he would forget after ten minutes and ask “Where’s Isaac?” Abraham now barely speaks, believing he was justly punished for mishearing the invisible god. Not that one should be punished for mishearing things, but one must admit the punishment isn’t at all that bad considering that he did eat his son.

So it’s only a matter of time before the Canaanites discover that Abraham is demented and Isaac is dead. The House of Abraham is leaderless. It longs to return to Ur, An & Enlil and Enki be praised, but so long as Abraham is alive, they are banished, and whether they stay or go, they are putzing around like men already dead, unable to elect a war leader or even organize for proper battle training.

It’s been roughly fifty-three years since Sarah demanded Abraham to banish Ishmael and Hagar because Abraham seemed to prefer his head bondswoman to his wife, who never bore him a son. Under cover of night at Abraham’s orders, Eliezer brought them back to Ur to live as servants in the House of Terah as Eliezer gazed upon his beloved Sumerian wheat and mud from afar, and by the waters of Mesopotamia, there he sat down and wept.

Ishmael was just a kid at the time, but the illegitimate son was already a watermirror of his father, just as was Isaac until that divinely inspired schmuck put him to death. The seed of Abraham is obviously strong even if the brain is feeble, and if the physical resemblance continues, then Ishmael must still look exactly the image of both Abraham and Isaac.

Eliezer then knew what must be done.

In the most obsequious, pleading terms, he begged the House of Terah to send Ishmael and Hagar back to Hebron, where Eliezer was positive Abraham would immediately recognize Ishmael not as Ishmael, whom he had not seen in a generation, but as Isaac. He then could marry Hagar to Abraham as perhaps she always should have been, and while everyone here would recognize Ishmael and Hagar, Ishmael will become known to people all around Canaan as Isaac, and Hagar and Abraham’s second wife. She could even live under an assumed name and continue to take care of her son, and our enemies shall be none the wiser.

Eliezer sealed the letter with Abraham’s personal seal, which he had wisely taken from Abraham’s person decades earlier without Abraham's god noticing. To send the letter, he chose Paebel and Keret, precisely the same two servants whom Abraham chose to accompany him to the sacrifice. They ran away in horror when they saw what their master had done and immediately told Eliezer, but they were chosen both by master and servant because they were reliable as mules and stupid as a pillar of salt. Eliezer ruefully included instructions to kill them both after receiving the letter so that none would know what actually happened. He knew Paebel and Keret would understand.

Two years later, a bronze scroll arrived by post with a seal from “House of Terah Global Partnerships,” written on the “9th day of the Seventh Month in the Reign of Iddin-Dagan Year 8,” addressed to the “House of Abram, cc: Eliezer: Master/Slave Representative.”