Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
800 Words: John Williams Bigotry
“They’re butchering the classics! John Williams is rolling over in his grave!”
- Homer Simpson
(the last 15 minutes of ET, some of the greatest film music ever written)
I’m clearly getting older. John Williams turned 80 today, and I remember watching him conduct on TV when he was in his mid-fifties. It seems weird to think of John Williams as the last great film composer, but that just might be his epitaph. Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini are all dead. Who else is there? Some people say that Howard Shore is in his league, but few people have much to say about his work before or after Lord of the Rings. Many people love Elliot Goldenthal’s film music, but he often waits years between film scores. Perhaps Ennio Morricone trumps them all, but most of his music is for small European films we’ll never see. In the American film industry, it’s just John Williams at the top. At 80 years old, he still turns out at least 2 feature-length scores every year, and every one of them makes its movie better than it would be without him. He probably has no equal and certainly no superior.
For over a generation, John Williams has been an unfortunate euphemism in the classical music world for selling out...in every sense of the word. Many American orchestras can’t sell out for concerts of Beethoven and Mozart, but if they can guarantee a sold-out house if they program John Williams. Ask your average American to name a living classical composer, they will not know the names John Adams or Steve Reich, and maybe they’ll have once heard the name Phillip Glass, but they won’t remember it. The average American mind will go straight to John Williams, then draw a total blank.
Film music can be a thankless job that gets little respect from other musicians. No composer begins his first compositions with dreams of being a great film composer, no instrumentalist gives up her whole childhood to practice so that she can play John Williams for the rest of her life. But it’s steady employment, a chance to utilize creativity, and a better chance for most musicians to practice their craft than they’d ever get if they reached for genres with more prestige. Within the film industry, there are probably dozens of musicians who could have been Mozarts, Heifetzes, Leonard Bernsteins (to say nothing of John Lennons). But as ever, luck determines who gets to the top rung, and the rest of the arts world has to go to work like all the rest of us. Perhaps some people dream from childhood of nothing but a wonderful career in film music, but I find it hard to believe. Who knows? Most of them are probably happier being steady professionals than they’d have ever been with the impossible demands of the concert circuit.
Is film music somehow inferior to other forms of classical music? Certainly not. But it is different and it can’t be measured by the same metrics. How do you tell a great film composer? Well, it’s difficult and it takes watching a lot of mediocre movies, a subject on which I’m as much an expert as anybody who watches whatever’s on TV. A great film composer doesn’t necessarily score great movies, but he does make the movies the movies he scores greater. Because of a great score, bad films become decent, decent films become good, and good films become great. A great film composer needn’t be a great composer of non-film music, or even an original one. In fact, it’s sometimes better that he’s not. Great film music is an indivisible part of the movie itself, and performing great film music without the film can be as non-sensical as performing an opera without singers. You might be able to take the ‘greatest hits’, but it’s hardly as effective as listening to the music in the context of the movie.
You might be able to recall the themes of the great film scores, even if you haven’t seen the movie. But that’s no different than being able to sing a verse from a song that’s part of an entire album. If you want to appreciate the whole achievement, you have to see the movie. And because you have to see the whole movie, the film composer is a prisoner to whatever director hires him. If most film buffs were asked whom the greatest film composer was, they would probably say Bernard Hermann without skipping a beat. But was Hermann really any better than Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, or Franz Waxmann? Hermann was the preferred composer of Alfred Hitchcock, and did well-known scores for Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Brian de Palma, and Martin Scorsese. Except perhaps for John Williams, no film composer got better jobs. Was Hermann employed by such great directors because he was more talented? Did Hermann become a greater film composer because he had better bosses? Or was Hermann just a lucky bastard? These are questions nobody can answer sufficiently, and that’s why you can’t measure Bernard Hermann against Beethoven. They were artists in two completely different artforms.
(Mean Streets)
But there’s another reason that these debates are becoming ever more futile. Film music may die. Not film music as a whole, but film music as we think of it to this day. It’s been a long illness, but ever since Martin Scorsese cued up the Ronettes for the opening of Mean Streets (or Stanley Kubrick cued up Richard Strauss for 2001), the days of new music for major releases have been numbered. Why hire a 100-piece orchestra to do the job of a synthesizer? Why hire a composer when a soundtrack of existing music can do its job? Without John Williams, would there still be a film music industry? Will film music itself outlive him?
- Homer Simpson
(the last 15 minutes of ET, some of the greatest film music ever written)
I’m clearly getting older. John Williams turned 80 today, and I remember watching him conduct on TV when he was in his mid-fifties. It seems weird to think of John Williams as the last great film composer, but that just might be his epitaph. Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini are all dead. Who else is there? Some people say that Howard Shore is in his league, but few people have much to say about his work before or after Lord of the Rings. Many people love Elliot Goldenthal’s film music, but he often waits years between film scores. Perhaps Ennio Morricone trumps them all, but most of his music is for small European films we’ll never see. In the American film industry, it’s just John Williams at the top. At 80 years old, he still turns out at least 2 feature-length scores every year, and every one of them makes its movie better than it would be without him. He probably has no equal and certainly no superior.
For over a generation, John Williams has been an unfortunate euphemism in the classical music world for selling out...in every sense of the word. Many American orchestras can’t sell out for concerts of Beethoven and Mozart, but if they can guarantee a sold-out house if they program John Williams. Ask your average American to name a living classical composer, they will not know the names John Adams or Steve Reich, and maybe they’ll have once heard the name Phillip Glass, but they won’t remember it. The average American mind will go straight to John Williams, then draw a total blank.
Film music can be a thankless job that gets little respect from other musicians. No composer begins his first compositions with dreams of being a great film composer, no instrumentalist gives up her whole childhood to practice so that she can play John Williams for the rest of her life. But it’s steady employment, a chance to utilize creativity, and a better chance for most musicians to practice their craft than they’d ever get if they reached for genres with more prestige. Within the film industry, there are probably dozens of musicians who could have been Mozarts, Heifetzes, Leonard Bernsteins (to say nothing of John Lennons). But as ever, luck determines who gets to the top rung, and the rest of the arts world has to go to work like all the rest of us. Perhaps some people dream from childhood of nothing but a wonderful career in film music, but I find it hard to believe. Who knows? Most of them are probably happier being steady professionals than they’d have ever been with the impossible demands of the concert circuit.
Is film music somehow inferior to other forms of classical music? Certainly not. But it is different and it can’t be measured by the same metrics. How do you tell a great film composer? Well, it’s difficult and it takes watching a lot of mediocre movies, a subject on which I’m as much an expert as anybody who watches whatever’s on TV. A great film composer doesn’t necessarily score great movies, but he does make the movies the movies he scores greater. Because of a great score, bad films become decent, decent films become good, and good films become great. A great film composer needn’t be a great composer of non-film music, or even an original one. In fact, it’s sometimes better that he’s not. Great film music is an indivisible part of the movie itself, and performing great film music without the film can be as non-sensical as performing an opera without singers. You might be able to take the ‘greatest hits’, but it’s hardly as effective as listening to the music in the context of the movie.
You might be able to recall the themes of the great film scores, even if you haven’t seen the movie. But that’s no different than being able to sing a verse from a song that’s part of an entire album. If you want to appreciate the whole achievement, you have to see the movie. And because you have to see the whole movie, the film composer is a prisoner to whatever director hires him. If most film buffs were asked whom the greatest film composer was, they would probably say Bernard Hermann without skipping a beat. But was Hermann really any better than Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, or Franz Waxmann? Hermann was the preferred composer of Alfred Hitchcock, and did well-known scores for Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Brian de Palma, and Martin Scorsese. Except perhaps for John Williams, no film composer got better jobs. Was Hermann employed by such great directors because he was more talented? Did Hermann become a greater film composer because he had better bosses? Or was Hermann just a lucky bastard? These are questions nobody can answer sufficiently, and that’s why you can’t measure Bernard Hermann against Beethoven. They were artists in two completely different artforms.
(Mean Streets)
But there’s another reason that these debates are becoming ever more futile. Film music may die. Not film music as a whole, but film music as we think of it to this day. It’s been a long illness, but ever since Martin Scorsese cued up the Ronettes for the opening of Mean Streets (or Stanley Kubrick cued up Richard Strauss for 2001), the days of new music for major releases have been numbered. Why hire a 100-piece orchestra to do the job of a synthesizer? Why hire a composer when a soundtrack of existing music can do its job? Without John Williams, would there still be a film music industry? Will film music itself outlive him?
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
800 Words: Manning Up America with Clint
I know it’s just a commercial. I know it’s heavy handed. I know it’s in the service of a not-quite democratic message. But I got chills on Sunday night when Clint Eastwood told America that it’s halftime, and our second half’s about to begin. Clint is the only American who could use a football metaphor on a national television commercial to take an eagle-eye view of half-a-millennium’s history and make it sound like precisely the right mix of scholarly consideration and bar room philosophizing. After it was done, I realized that Clint just got away with telling America the one thing they don’t want to hear during the Super Bowl - that the country we know will not be around forever, it might even die. To point this metaphor in a different direction, it would seem that Clint is telling us that America is a spoiled, soft, middle aged man, in the grips of a narcissistic mid-life crisis, who needs to harden up to the responsibilities of seeing his children pass adolescence without a heroin addiction or a pregnancy scare - regardless of what it takes. After the ad was done, I felt an uncontrollable urge to invade Syria.
America declines everywhere else, but the cult of Clint thrives more than ever. He’s not just the standard by which every American male viewed himself for half a century, he’s transformed himself in old age into that extremely unmasculine thing, a great artist. Supposedly greater actors and directors have done their great things and long since burned out. But has any figure in American movies created as many great films over the last twenty years as Clint?
Time and again, we learn that we condescend to Clint at our own peril, yet everybody does it. Sure enough, come Monday morning, there was Karl Rove on CBS, accusing Clint of shilling for President Obama. Let’s pause for a second to think of how far discourse in this country has veered from reality that Clint @#$%^&* Eastwood can be denounced as a liberal stooge.
In his personal life, he’s probably every bit the right-wing reactionary his on-screen persona makes him seem. He was once heard to complain that he’d never win an Oscar because he’s not Jewish. And how many racist, sexist, and homophobic epithets can he include in his movies before we start thinking he means them? But it’s Clint’s immunity to the Hollywood echo-chamber which toughened him up. In a town where left-wing sentiment is as cheap as a date with an aspiring actress, there are hundreds of stars who hold precisely the opposite views from Clint. Most of them are heralded as great talents, but they’ve long since disappointed and disappeared. Clint’s old-fashioned views of politics, of moviemaking (cheaply and quickly), of acting itself (don’t), made his career so different from every standard for how great movies were made that he practically became his own studio - proving that great movies can still be made in the old-fashioned way of a town that long since abandoned the model which made them successful. He is more than royalty, he is a national symbol - the final relic of Golden Age Hollywood.
It’s amazing to go back to those early movies and realize how stupid they are. Clint’s most famous action movies, appearing as they during the heyday of ‘New Hollywood,’ seemed to many like an extended middle finger in the face of liberal platitudes. When Dirty Harry first appeared, Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert both accused the film of advocating a ‘fascist’ point of view. But whether or not that’s true, it would be far easier to feel threatened by the movie’s advocacy of vigilantism if it didn’t suck. However authoritarian Dirty Harry’s message, it is an incredibly silly movie - full of cartoonish characters, primitive action sequences, and stupid catchphrases. Perhaps it is The Passion of the Christ for its day - gathering enormous controversy because people can’t get past the political point of view to see that the movie itself is awful.
But was there ever a case of an artist who evolved further Clint did over the next twenty years? When one compares the violence of Dirty Harry to Unforgiven, you see the difference between a movie which thinks violence is really cool, and a movie in which violence and horror are synonymous. For all its pretenses to right-wing disgust, Dirty Harry doesn’t seem to have a moral point of view past thinking that violence is fun to watch - whether meted out by a serial killer or the vigilante who takes it upon himself to stop him. But in Unforgiven, the act of murder is given its full due. Like The Godfather, Unforgiven is a movie told from the point of view of the murderers. We root for them because we see what shaped them, and we see the weight which murder holds upon their souls. Yes, Clint seems to be saying, violence is necessary, but the fact that it’s necessary is the great tragedy of our existence. It's a very conservative sentiment, but that doesn't make it any less true.
You don’t have to agree with everything Clint is to see the greatness of his work. In his old age, this Nixon-era antique became a Great American Artist and the last best proof that Hollywood might again be what it once was. The message of his movies is generally not one we liberals like to hear. But as always, we ignore what Clint has to say at our peril. If Clint says that America is exactly halfway through its history, it just might be true. If anyone can tell America exactly what it is, it's Clint.
800 Words: Back to 800 Words
It’s been an amazing six or seven months as I’ve written these semi-daily 800 Word posts that invariably tended to be 2-5000 words. The activity was - without a doubt - my highlight of 2011(don’t judge). At my most productive, I must have churned out as much as 15,000 words a week, and that doesn’t count all the pieces I didn’t finish. As I started writing, I realized that there was more to say about more subjects than I ever thought possible, and I followed my thoughts to whatever length it found me going - occasionally churning out a 10-12,000 word essay over the course of a week. And it would seem that a good two to four dozen of you seemed reliably willing to follow me to wherever I found myself going, and there are another four-dozen who would check in when things caught there interest. I’m glad you’ve found enjoyment in what I’ve written.
In one sense, and only one, I’m the victim of my own success. This attempt to create consistent writing was never supposed to be so extensive. My plan was to have 800 words of sharply defined commentary about any subject about which I would think of over the course of the day - an endeavor that should never take more than 90 minutes and can usually be wrapped up in less than an hour. The problem is, as most newspaper columnists should know - that there is no way to cover a subject in 800 words without sticking to base generalizations. Any real analysis of a subject requires tons more critical thought, digestion, background, and statistics than even the most fleet-footed essayist (Malcolm Gladwell? Tom Wolfe?) could give in 800 words. There was simply too much to say. How can you sum up Jon Stewart, Johnny Cash, or Disney in so little space?
For more than a hundred years, the 800 Worder was almost the exclusive province of newspaper columnists. 800 words is just enough space to endow the newspaper with a double purpose. On the one hand, a newspaper columnist functions as a filter through which the reader can interpret all the facts with which the rest of the newspaper inundates him every day. Whether the subject was politics, movies, books, or sports, newspaper columnists were people who taught hundreds of millions in the newly literate middle class how to think critically about the information you process every day. On the other, a newspaper columnist is a personality, selling not only her point of view but also himself. Whereas straight reporting should be anonymous, the newspaper columnist’s persona is a juxtaposition to the bland profusion of facts, figures, and events that make up our daily intake of news.
In the heyday of the columnist, it was something incredibly new and exciting - a combination of educator and entertainer who allowed millions more of people to be better informed and engaged. But in today’s world, the 800 worder is almost obsolete. Think of how many columnists in today’s mainstream publications are writers who encourage us to think deeper? Now think of how many encourage us to simplify our thinking. If your list of #1 outnumbers your #2, I’m envious of you, because you’ve wasted less time than the rest of us reading newspaper columns.
And yet, that’s precisely the appeal of the 800-worder. It’s so simple to write - any child can form a coherent opinion on a simple subject. Imagine that your 3rd grade class were the New York Times op-ed page asked to come in tomorrow with an assignment based on the value of homework: you’d have a Thomas Friedman explaining why homework is essential to help us compete with his pen-pal in Bangalore; you’d have a David Brooks longing for the days of 1st grade when everybody thought homework was fun; you’d have a Paul Krugman who uses it as an excuse mounting weekly assaults on the mendacious inefficiency of the teacher’s homework assignments, and a Maureen Dowd speculating about the teacher’s affair with the after school janitor.
My purpose in calling this series ‘800 words’ was neither to parlay this into a bad newspaper column (where would anybody do that in today’s world?) nor to pay homage to newspaper columns of any sort. It was to create an easily digestible way to force myself to write every day. I hoped to find a rhythm that would enable me to write more rather than less. But once I started these 800 words posts, 800 words became grossly inadequate. I wanted 7 new 800 word posts a week, but I was lucky in even my most productive weeks to put up three or four. The reason was all too simple - I got carried away every time. There’s simply too much to write about. If the subject grew too extensive, I broke up the essay into parts. But I rarely ever finished those multi-part essays, because there was usually another subject that ‘required’ my attention. By month 3 or 4, I found myself obsessed by this venture to the point that it came to the exclusion of most non-work related activities. I used to play music, remember?....
So now that I’m back to playing music, I have to curb the excess verbiage. For now until whenever, these blogposts will now be leaner. If I get past 800 words, I know that it’s time to wrap it up. If I get to 1000 words, I will simply stop. If I really have something so important that it can neither remain unsaid nor be fit into 800 words, I will resume speaking of it in the next day’s post.
Furthermore, tomorrow I will begin the process of retooling, and for a while the blog will resemble a construction site - with lots of links that don’t work. There will be lots of posts taken down (and saved) because I’m not particularly satisfied with them, for whatever reason. Some of those links will reappear over time, some of them probably won’t.
Aaaaand, we’re past 1000 words...
In one sense, and only one, I’m the victim of my own success. This attempt to create consistent writing was never supposed to be so extensive. My plan was to have 800 words of sharply defined commentary about any subject about which I would think of over the course of the day - an endeavor that should never take more than 90 minutes and can usually be wrapped up in less than an hour. The problem is, as most newspaper columnists should know - that there is no way to cover a subject in 800 words without sticking to base generalizations. Any real analysis of a subject requires tons more critical thought, digestion, background, and statistics than even the most fleet-footed essayist (Malcolm Gladwell? Tom Wolfe?) could give in 800 words. There was simply too much to say. How can you sum up Jon Stewart, Johnny Cash, or Disney in so little space?
For more than a hundred years, the 800 Worder was almost the exclusive province of newspaper columnists. 800 words is just enough space to endow the newspaper with a double purpose. On the one hand, a newspaper columnist functions as a filter through which the reader can interpret all the facts with which the rest of the newspaper inundates him every day. Whether the subject was politics, movies, books, or sports, newspaper columnists were people who taught hundreds of millions in the newly literate middle class how to think critically about the information you process every day. On the other, a newspaper columnist is a personality, selling not only her point of view but also himself. Whereas straight reporting should be anonymous, the newspaper columnist’s persona is a juxtaposition to the bland profusion of facts, figures, and events that make up our daily intake of news.
In the heyday of the columnist, it was something incredibly new and exciting - a combination of educator and entertainer who allowed millions more of people to be better informed and engaged. But in today’s world, the 800 worder is almost obsolete. Think of how many columnists in today’s mainstream publications are writers who encourage us to think deeper? Now think of how many encourage us to simplify our thinking. If your list of #1 outnumbers your #2, I’m envious of you, because you’ve wasted less time than the rest of us reading newspaper columns.
And yet, that’s precisely the appeal of the 800-worder. It’s so simple to write - any child can form a coherent opinion on a simple subject. Imagine that your 3rd grade class were the New York Times op-ed page asked to come in tomorrow with an assignment based on the value of homework: you’d have a Thomas Friedman explaining why homework is essential to help us compete with his pen-pal in Bangalore; you’d have a David Brooks longing for the days of 1st grade when everybody thought homework was fun; you’d have a Paul Krugman who uses it as an excuse mounting weekly assaults on the mendacious inefficiency of the teacher’s homework assignments, and a Maureen Dowd speculating about the teacher’s affair with the after school janitor.
My purpose in calling this series ‘800 words’ was neither to parlay this into a bad newspaper column (where would anybody do that in today’s world?) nor to pay homage to newspaper columns of any sort. It was to create an easily digestible way to force myself to write every day. I hoped to find a rhythm that would enable me to write more rather than less. But once I started these 800 words posts, 800 words became grossly inadequate. I wanted 7 new 800 word posts a week, but I was lucky in even my most productive weeks to put up three or four. The reason was all too simple - I got carried away every time. There’s simply too much to write about. If the subject grew too extensive, I broke up the essay into parts. But I rarely ever finished those multi-part essays, because there was usually another subject that ‘required’ my attention. By month 3 or 4, I found myself obsessed by this venture to the point that it came to the exclusion of most non-work related activities. I used to play music, remember?....
So now that I’m back to playing music, I have to curb the excess verbiage. For now until whenever, these blogposts will now be leaner. If I get past 800 words, I know that it’s time to wrap it up. If I get to 1000 words, I will simply stop. If I really have something so important that it can neither remain unsaid nor be fit into 800 words, I will resume speaking of it in the next day’s post.
Furthermore, tomorrow I will begin the process of retooling, and for a while the blog will resemble a construction site - with lots of links that don’t work. There will be lots of posts taken down (and saved) because I’m not particularly satisfied with them, for whatever reason. Some of those links will reappear over time, some of them probably won’t.
Aaaaand, we’re past 1000 words...
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Quote of the Night:
Der Fersko: Did you see that Super Bowl ad where Clint Eastwood shot all those Auto Workers?
Some People by Wislawa Szymborska
Some people fleeing some other people.
In some country under the sun
and some clouds.
They leave behind some of their everything,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected.
On their backs are pitchers and bundles,
the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next.
Taking place stealthily is somebody's stopping,
and in the commotion, somebody's bread somebody's snatching
and a dead child somebody's shaking.
In front of them some still not the right way,
nor the bridge that should be
over a river strangely rosy.
Around them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off,
and, above, a plane circling somewhat.
Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or even better, non-being
for a little or a long while.
Something else is yet to happen, only where and what?
Someone will head toward them, only when and who,
in how many shapes and with what intentions?
Given a choice,
maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and
leave them with some kind of life.
- translated by Joanna Trzeciak
In some country under the sun
and some clouds.
They leave behind some of their everything,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected.
On their backs are pitchers and bundles,
the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next.
Taking place stealthily is somebody's stopping,
and in the commotion, somebody's bread somebody's snatching
and a dead child somebody's shaking.
In front of them some still not the right way,
nor the bridge that should be
over a river strangely rosy.
Around them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off,
and, above, a plane circling somewhat.
Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or even better, non-being
for a little or a long while.
Something else is yet to happen, only where and what?
Someone will head toward them, only when and who,
in how many shapes and with what intentions?
Given a choice,
maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and
leave them with some kind of life.
- translated by Joanna Trzeciak
Friday, February 3, 2012
Friday Playlist #1
A new feature. Every Friday, I'm going to post six links to music that's been on my mind during the week - sometimes thematically related, sometimes not at all.
Gogol Bordello: Forces of Victory
Bartok: String Quartet no. 2 (Second Movement)
Taraf de Haidouks, Kocani Orkestar and Tarik Tuxsiszoglu: A La Turk
Kodaly: Dances of Galanta
Balkan Beatbox: Cha Cha
Ligeti: Concert Romanesc 4th Movement
Gogol Bordello: Forces of Victory
Bartok: String Quartet no. 2 (Second Movement)
Taraf de Haidouks, Kocani Orkestar and Tarik Tuxsiszoglu: A La Turk
Kodaly: Dances of Galanta
Balkan Beatbox: Cha Cha
Ligeti: Concert Romanesc 4th Movement
800 Words: Writer's Block
I get writer’s block, awful writer’s block. I always have. For months, you can write at a steady stream with no interruption and make all sorts of plans for future projects which you see no reason to believe will remain incomplete. But one day the words dry out, you can’t imagine anything on the blank screen and the ability to merely face it becomes onerous. Eventually, you’d much rather watch TV.
And even in those moments when the words do come, there’s a 50/50 shot that you can’t finish it. Sometimes you’ve written four excellent paragraphs only for the fifth to fail you, so you skip paragraph five with the intention of doubling back. Six and seven come easily, but paragraph eight is similarly uncooperative. You begin to lose your concept, paragraphs nine and ten are muddled at best, and by paragraph 11, you’ve lost the entire train of the argument. The words don’t come, and there’s no way to form the concept you have in your head. “Onto the next post!” you say, only for the next post to be still more fraught with difficulty than the last one.
I’m sure that every writer has a different reason for writer’s block. Mine is usually a failure of nerve, not ability. The ability to write like me doesn’t necessarily require talent, but it requires an army of nerve. It requires the ability to have no compunctions about writing whatever personal stuff pops into your head with as little filter as possible, because once the censor gains a foothold, it’s nearly impossible to get him to back down.
Nerve is my most reliable friend. Without him, I’d have been lying for the last twenty years on my parents couch in a fetal position, my thumb in my mouth. It always surprises people when I say that I’m an extremely shy person, but I am, and I’ve been compensating for that ever since I’ve had memories.
In my twenties, I’ve heard over and over that watching me at parties is a bit like watching a cartoon character or performance art - in which I might say or do something so completely outrageous that it can’t help be remembered five years later. Knowing some of the stunts I’ve pulled in social situations, I can’t call this a lie. No one has less shame than I about making a fool of himself, or saying outrageous things about others. It’s my job. Wherever I go, I’m the court jester - and however debasing it is to be a such a clown, the jester is still the second-most powerful person in court, saying out loud with impunity what others never dare.
So whatever I say out loud to embarrass myself, others can’t say before me. But this description is entirely at variance with the person I know myself to be - not because I consider myself particularly deep, only because I consider myself extremely inhibited. I’m far too happy being alone for 48 hours at a time to be anything resembling an extrovert. The person I am in public, hilarious as I might find him (and as others do too - occasionally), is absolutely not me. I’m far too uncomfortable around people to let the real thing out. It makes me a very good performer and a very fine conductor for certain musicians (though an equally awful one for others). Like all introverts, I prefer a gathering of 3 friends to 30. And like all performers, I prefer an audience of 300 to 30. The problem is neither intimacy nor crowds, the problem is a large gathering of individuals. The small crowd is my mortal enemy. The worst part of any day is the moment after I’ve said something awful and am waiting for a reaction - it might be laughter, it might be a grimace, it might be a slap. How much more compounded is that reaction when you have to earn the laughter of 11 friends rather than 1? And because I so dread the small crowd, I’ve become uncommonly good at entertaining it.
Nowhere is this more the case lately than with my 30th birthday party. Thirty is not the worst of the arbitrary birthday milestones, but it is the first of the bad ones. Once you’ve hit thirty, you’re unmistakably ‘over-the-hill.’ From thirty until whenever it is, you are officially past the extent of your physical, mental, and emotional capacities. If some people, more worthwhile people, peak past thirty, it’s because they learn how to better manage whatever resources they have left. But what is worst about turning thirty is the knowledge that, for the first time in your life, you’re working with less potential than you ever had before. From thirty onward, the limitations just keep growing. So it’s safe to say that I’m dreading this birthday, and all the moreso given the new situation in which my life finds itself.
About two months ago, as the move to my new apartment reached a fever pitch of complications, landlord arguments, and DIY furniture disasters, a thought occurred to me that saddened me terribly. It’s only when all this moving is finally done that the real work begins. I may have grown up in Baltimore, but I’ve long since turned Washingtonian - for a decade, virtually all my friends have either lived or moved away from DC, all the hangouts I knew were in DC, and DC is still the only city around which I can drive without being guaranteed to get lost. Without having ever held a paid political position, I’d become fixated on following politics as only a longtime Washingtonian can be. I moved to Baltimore permanently to take a job in the ‘family business’, but aside from this business, I have no business in Baltimore. It’s a city I neither understood nor appreciated as a kid and swore that I would leave the moment I got an opportunity and never return. Now that the two-month nightmare of moving is over, I’m now living the second nightmare of making peace with the city I so hated as a teenager.
So I therefore thought to myself about how best I could ease myself into this ‘city transfer’ in which a mere 40 miles makes the difference between home and a strange land. I have no reason to think that my DC friends will ever visit me in Baltimore except to trust that they will visit this underrated city (and friend?) out of the goodness of their hearts - you will...won’t you??? Certainly, I will get to know plenty of Baltimoreans before long, but the road to social business currently requires two hours of driving. Perhaps I could have an event - not immediately, but soon - in which I can introduce my newfound cohorts in Baltimore to my eight divisions of DC cohorts so that I might create one giant DC-Baltimore legion. But I have no wedding and certainly no Christening with which I might summon friends soon from near and far. All I have is that dreaded, awful thirtieth birthday which I would prefer to call a regular day in the life of a twenty-six year old.
And so I decided to put on a thirtieth birthday party. I come down to DC all the time, it’s high time people came to Baltimore for me - and come they are. People look to be coming not only from DC but from Maine, Boston, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Phoenix, and San Francisco also. But such an event is no easy task to put together. Merely putting the date together has already been the cause of multiple awkward emails. Now, let’s be clear, these emails were in no way awkward - ok...that’s not entirely true... Most of these emails were in no way awkward. They were merely awkward in my head and shall remain so until the moment this party is over.
Just to give one example: there is a friend of mine, not a close one, but one whom I’ve long thought I could be better friends with, but for whatever reason we’ve always remained on opposite sides of the social circle. Perhaps this person doesn’t particularly like me, and frankly I’m long past the point of caring. But this person’s been dating a girl for a number of years, and when they first got together I made a point of being very nice to the girlfriend. In the three odd years since they became an item, they’ve become the inseparable couple “____ and _____”, one very nearly as much a part of the social circle as the other. And so after I sent out the email, I got an email back from the ‘girlfriend’, who says “As always, thanks for the heads up:).”
A perfectly legitimate, polite response. But the neurotic in me reads the “As always” and thinks “.....Oh dear...” To a normal person, this no doubt means ‘you’ve always been considerate.’ But this is me about whom she’s talking about, and I’m generally of the opinion that I’m quite obnoxious, so how could she possible think better of me? My instinct tells me that there is a 70% chance that this means ‘Shut the f&^% up already!!’
So after five seconds of thought, I respond with what I think is precisely the right balance of self-deprecation and sincerity. “As always, clogging your inbox is the least I can do:).” If I sent too many emails about the party, as I no doubt have, this is the perfect way to shrug it off/apologize. So I send it off, and I think nothing of it for fifteen minutes.
…”as always, clogging your inbox is the least I can do :)”....
‘Clogging your inbox....oh god....that’s a double entendre. Does that sound like I might be making a pass at her? Oh god, it kind of does. And if that sounds like I’m making a pass, it’s the single worst pass in the history of emails. Oh god, I honestly don’t know which bothers me more: the fact that it sounds like I’m hitting on her, or the fact that it would be the clumsiest pass ever...Well she is attractive, maybe you subconsciously inserted a Freudian slip. Isn’t ‘insert’ a Freudian slip? Oh my god, SHUT UP EVAN!’
And knowing myself as I do, I guarantee you that I will anxiously pursue this line of thought once a day nearly every day until this party. It’s bad enough to live in dread of being an inconsiderate douche who would hurt one’s friends. It’s bad enough to live in dread of being a total social idiot. But to be both simultaneously is a dread I don’t wish on my worst enemy. Furthermore, I guarantee that the one thing to make me keep worrying in precisely this loop is to write about it and post it. Which I shall soon do. As always, self-deprecating comedy is much more important than the stability of friendships.
And therein lies the problem. I have become far too self-revealing in what I’ve written on this blog. It’s become like a substance addiction whose presence or absence defines my life. I used to be the person who laughed at people who post personal things on blogs, now I’m that person with a vengeance, and it only took three months.
In my case, I’m positive it started around the time I started that series called ‘My Generation.’ I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it, it was a risky piece that contained some of my best and worst writing. But what it required was that I had no shame about writing about all sorts of things, be it my ‘struggles’ with family, schools, health, employment, or relationships, it would have required me to write as though I have no concern as to what I write online about myself. The reason I was able to do it is because, to a certain extent, I don’t. I don’t care what most people think of me, because frankly, most people are at least as idiotic as I am. Those who understand the spirit in which such writing is intended probably had certain moments in their life when they were as idiotic as me. Those who wouldn’t understand it are idiotic in completely different ways.
But eventually a few realizations face you whether or not you face them: the first of course is that the world is run by such idiots, and they’re usually of the latter camp - it’s amazing how often power and humor don’t correlate. The employment world might be able to take on a person who struggles with learning disabilities and depression, but they’d emphatically not take a person who struggles with some of the things I’d planned on writing about later in the piece. What are they?....Know me better, then maybe I’ll be idiot enough to tell you.
The second realization is that when you start trafficking in untrammeled self-revelation, the rest of your writing becomes a slave to it. Once you begin to talk about the more vulnerable parts of the self, you have to cross every “t” to make sure that everyone who might be affected by what you say takes minimal offense. Once you start dealing in ‘baggage’ and the effect it has on the people around you, you have to give every nuance of their side, even if it compromises your own. When I ended Part I of ‘My Generation’ with the line, ‘love will be what saves us.’ I’d been inspired to write the piece by the wedding of two friends, and I found myself quite moved by my own writing. It seemed like precisely the right note upon which to end the first part of that piece that would eventually build in part-five to a tableau from the wedding. But now, three months later, I can’t bare to look at it. I have no idea if love will save us or me or you or anyone else, there are plenty of people it hasn’t saved.
It was right around the time I wrote this piece that I started getting the complements of people from the ‘homestead’ who’d apparently been reading the blog and awoke quite suddenly to the fact that I could write. It’s wonderful to get those complements, but I can’t help wondering if my writing would even have been noticed had I written something less complementary, regardless of quality. The truth is, I have no desire to write anything uncomplimentary, and I don’t think there is anyone there deserving of anything uncomplimentary written about them publicly - it’s one thing to write about yourself, another entirely when it’s about others. And this problem wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t have so many more uncomplimentary things to say about myself than about others. So as the saying goes,...never look a gifthorse in the mouth, or at least that’s what I was taught in Pikesville.
The third realization, and perhaps the most important, is that writing about oneself can be like an addiction. There is only one thing more solipsistic than sitting at a computer to write, and that’s sitting at a computer to write about yourself. We’re not all Montaigne, and there is only so many interesting thoughts about oneself one can have without boring the crap out of us all. There’s no prize for digging into the ever more insignificant trivialities of your own existence except the one you give. The subject of this blog is supposed to be whatever interests me, and it’s given me a more inexhaustible stream of writing than I ever thought would flow. I would not like to learn in twenty years that the subject that most interested me was myself.
So I will try to get back to more substantial essays on this blog. However daunting it seems, however much hard work it is, I should write more like my ‘early stuff’, in which I wrote long essays on Jon Stewart and Johnny Cash and J.K. Rowling and other people whose names begin with Jo. As for all that leftover unfinished material, maybe it can fit into other essays. Perhaps I can use it as interesting anecdotal material that will add color to whatever ‘substantial’ essay I’m writing at the time. Though maybe it’s not defined enough...maybe it needs more back story....
And even in those moments when the words do come, there’s a 50/50 shot that you can’t finish it. Sometimes you’ve written four excellent paragraphs only for the fifth to fail you, so you skip paragraph five with the intention of doubling back. Six and seven come easily, but paragraph eight is similarly uncooperative. You begin to lose your concept, paragraphs nine and ten are muddled at best, and by paragraph 11, you’ve lost the entire train of the argument. The words don’t come, and there’s no way to form the concept you have in your head. “Onto the next post!” you say, only for the next post to be still more fraught with difficulty than the last one.
I’m sure that every writer has a different reason for writer’s block. Mine is usually a failure of nerve, not ability. The ability to write like me doesn’t necessarily require talent, but it requires an army of nerve. It requires the ability to have no compunctions about writing whatever personal stuff pops into your head with as little filter as possible, because once the censor gains a foothold, it’s nearly impossible to get him to back down.
Nerve is my most reliable friend. Without him, I’d have been lying for the last twenty years on my parents couch in a fetal position, my thumb in my mouth. It always surprises people when I say that I’m an extremely shy person, but I am, and I’ve been compensating for that ever since I’ve had memories.
In my twenties, I’ve heard over and over that watching me at parties is a bit like watching a cartoon character or performance art - in which I might say or do something so completely outrageous that it can’t help be remembered five years later. Knowing some of the stunts I’ve pulled in social situations, I can’t call this a lie. No one has less shame than I about making a fool of himself, or saying outrageous things about others. It’s my job. Wherever I go, I’m the court jester - and however debasing it is to be a such a clown, the jester is still the second-most powerful person in court, saying out loud with impunity what others never dare.
So whatever I say out loud to embarrass myself, others can’t say before me. But this description is entirely at variance with the person I know myself to be - not because I consider myself particularly deep, only because I consider myself extremely inhibited. I’m far too happy being alone for 48 hours at a time to be anything resembling an extrovert. The person I am in public, hilarious as I might find him (and as others do too - occasionally), is absolutely not me. I’m far too uncomfortable around people to let the real thing out. It makes me a very good performer and a very fine conductor for certain musicians (though an equally awful one for others). Like all introverts, I prefer a gathering of 3 friends to 30. And like all performers, I prefer an audience of 300 to 30. The problem is neither intimacy nor crowds, the problem is a large gathering of individuals. The small crowd is my mortal enemy. The worst part of any day is the moment after I’ve said something awful and am waiting for a reaction - it might be laughter, it might be a grimace, it might be a slap. How much more compounded is that reaction when you have to earn the laughter of 11 friends rather than 1? And because I so dread the small crowd, I’ve become uncommonly good at entertaining it.
Nowhere is this more the case lately than with my 30th birthday party. Thirty is not the worst of the arbitrary birthday milestones, but it is the first of the bad ones. Once you’ve hit thirty, you’re unmistakably ‘over-the-hill.’ From thirty until whenever it is, you are officially past the extent of your physical, mental, and emotional capacities. If some people, more worthwhile people, peak past thirty, it’s because they learn how to better manage whatever resources they have left. But what is worst about turning thirty is the knowledge that, for the first time in your life, you’re working with less potential than you ever had before. From thirty onward, the limitations just keep growing. So it’s safe to say that I’m dreading this birthday, and all the moreso given the new situation in which my life finds itself.
About two months ago, as the move to my new apartment reached a fever pitch of complications, landlord arguments, and DIY furniture disasters, a thought occurred to me that saddened me terribly. It’s only when all this moving is finally done that the real work begins. I may have grown up in Baltimore, but I’ve long since turned Washingtonian - for a decade, virtually all my friends have either lived or moved away from DC, all the hangouts I knew were in DC, and DC is still the only city around which I can drive without being guaranteed to get lost. Without having ever held a paid political position, I’d become fixated on following politics as only a longtime Washingtonian can be. I moved to Baltimore permanently to take a job in the ‘family business’, but aside from this business, I have no business in Baltimore. It’s a city I neither understood nor appreciated as a kid and swore that I would leave the moment I got an opportunity and never return. Now that the two-month nightmare of moving is over, I’m now living the second nightmare of making peace with the city I so hated as a teenager.
So I therefore thought to myself about how best I could ease myself into this ‘city transfer’ in which a mere 40 miles makes the difference between home and a strange land. I have no reason to think that my DC friends will ever visit me in Baltimore except to trust that they will visit this underrated city (and friend?) out of the goodness of their hearts - you will...won’t you??? Certainly, I will get to know plenty of Baltimoreans before long, but the road to social business currently requires two hours of driving. Perhaps I could have an event - not immediately, but soon - in which I can introduce my newfound cohorts in Baltimore to my eight divisions of DC cohorts so that I might create one giant DC-Baltimore legion. But I have no wedding and certainly no Christening with which I might summon friends soon from near and far. All I have is that dreaded, awful thirtieth birthday which I would prefer to call a regular day in the life of a twenty-six year old.
And so I decided to put on a thirtieth birthday party. I come down to DC all the time, it’s high time people came to Baltimore for me - and come they are. People look to be coming not only from DC but from Maine, Boston, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Phoenix, and San Francisco also. But such an event is no easy task to put together. Merely putting the date together has already been the cause of multiple awkward emails. Now, let’s be clear, these emails were in no way awkward - ok...that’s not entirely true... Most of these emails were in no way awkward. They were merely awkward in my head and shall remain so until the moment this party is over.
Just to give one example: there is a friend of mine, not a close one, but one whom I’ve long thought I could be better friends with, but for whatever reason we’ve always remained on opposite sides of the social circle. Perhaps this person doesn’t particularly like me, and frankly I’m long past the point of caring. But this person’s been dating a girl for a number of years, and when they first got together I made a point of being very nice to the girlfriend. In the three odd years since they became an item, they’ve become the inseparable couple “____ and _____”, one very nearly as much a part of the social circle as the other. And so after I sent out the email, I got an email back from the ‘girlfriend’, who says “As always, thanks for the heads up:).”
A perfectly legitimate, polite response. But the neurotic in me reads the “As always” and thinks “.....Oh dear...” To a normal person, this no doubt means ‘you’ve always been considerate.’ But this is me about whom she’s talking about, and I’m generally of the opinion that I’m quite obnoxious, so how could she possible think better of me? My instinct tells me that there is a 70% chance that this means ‘Shut the f&^% up already!!’
So after five seconds of thought, I respond with what I think is precisely the right balance of self-deprecation and sincerity. “As always, clogging your inbox is the least I can do:).” If I sent too many emails about the party, as I no doubt have, this is the perfect way to shrug it off/apologize. So I send it off, and I think nothing of it for fifteen minutes.
…”as always, clogging your inbox is the least I can do :)”....
‘Clogging your inbox....oh god....that’s a double entendre. Does that sound like I might be making a pass at her? Oh god, it kind of does. And if that sounds like I’m making a pass, it’s the single worst pass in the history of emails. Oh god, I honestly don’t know which bothers me more: the fact that it sounds like I’m hitting on her, or the fact that it would be the clumsiest pass ever...Well she is attractive, maybe you subconsciously inserted a Freudian slip. Isn’t ‘insert’ a Freudian slip? Oh my god, SHUT UP EVAN!’
And knowing myself as I do, I guarantee you that I will anxiously pursue this line of thought once a day nearly every day until this party. It’s bad enough to live in dread of being an inconsiderate douche who would hurt one’s friends. It’s bad enough to live in dread of being a total social idiot. But to be both simultaneously is a dread I don’t wish on my worst enemy. Furthermore, I guarantee that the one thing to make me keep worrying in precisely this loop is to write about it and post it. Which I shall soon do. As always, self-deprecating comedy is much more important than the stability of friendships.
And therein lies the problem. I have become far too self-revealing in what I’ve written on this blog. It’s become like a substance addiction whose presence or absence defines my life. I used to be the person who laughed at people who post personal things on blogs, now I’m that person with a vengeance, and it only took three months.
In my case, I’m positive it started around the time I started that series called ‘My Generation.’ I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it, it was a risky piece that contained some of my best and worst writing. But what it required was that I had no shame about writing about all sorts of things, be it my ‘struggles’ with family, schools, health, employment, or relationships, it would have required me to write as though I have no concern as to what I write online about myself. The reason I was able to do it is because, to a certain extent, I don’t. I don’t care what most people think of me, because frankly, most people are at least as idiotic as I am. Those who understand the spirit in which such writing is intended probably had certain moments in their life when they were as idiotic as me. Those who wouldn’t understand it are idiotic in completely different ways.
But eventually a few realizations face you whether or not you face them: the first of course is that the world is run by such idiots, and they’re usually of the latter camp - it’s amazing how often power and humor don’t correlate. The employment world might be able to take on a person who struggles with learning disabilities and depression, but they’d emphatically not take a person who struggles with some of the things I’d planned on writing about later in the piece. What are they?....Know me better, then maybe I’ll be idiot enough to tell you.
The second realization is that when you start trafficking in untrammeled self-revelation, the rest of your writing becomes a slave to it. Once you begin to talk about the more vulnerable parts of the self, you have to cross every “t” to make sure that everyone who might be affected by what you say takes minimal offense. Once you start dealing in ‘baggage’ and the effect it has on the people around you, you have to give every nuance of their side, even if it compromises your own. When I ended Part I of ‘My Generation’ with the line, ‘love will be what saves us.’ I’d been inspired to write the piece by the wedding of two friends, and I found myself quite moved by my own writing. It seemed like precisely the right note upon which to end the first part of that piece that would eventually build in part-five to a tableau from the wedding. But now, three months later, I can’t bare to look at it. I have no idea if love will save us or me or you or anyone else, there are plenty of people it hasn’t saved.
It was right around the time I wrote this piece that I started getting the complements of people from the ‘homestead’ who’d apparently been reading the blog and awoke quite suddenly to the fact that I could write. It’s wonderful to get those complements, but I can’t help wondering if my writing would even have been noticed had I written something less complementary, regardless of quality. The truth is, I have no desire to write anything uncomplimentary, and I don’t think there is anyone there deserving of anything uncomplimentary written about them publicly - it’s one thing to write about yourself, another entirely when it’s about others. And this problem wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t have so many more uncomplimentary things to say about myself than about others. So as the saying goes,...never look a gifthorse in the mouth, or at least that’s what I was taught in Pikesville.
The third realization, and perhaps the most important, is that writing about oneself can be like an addiction. There is only one thing more solipsistic than sitting at a computer to write, and that’s sitting at a computer to write about yourself. We’re not all Montaigne, and there is only so many interesting thoughts about oneself one can have without boring the crap out of us all. There’s no prize for digging into the ever more insignificant trivialities of your own existence except the one you give. The subject of this blog is supposed to be whatever interests me, and it’s given me a more inexhaustible stream of writing than I ever thought would flow. I would not like to learn in twenty years that the subject that most interested me was myself.
So I will try to get back to more substantial essays on this blog. However daunting it seems, however much hard work it is, I should write more like my ‘early stuff’, in which I wrote long essays on Jon Stewart and Johnny Cash and J.K. Rowling and other people whose names begin with Jo. As for all that leftover unfinished material, maybe it can fit into other essays. Perhaps I can use it as interesting anecdotal material that will add color to whatever ‘substantial’ essay I’m writing at the time. Though maybe it’s not defined enough...maybe it needs more back story....
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Quote of the Day:
The Manning: you dont' have early onset altzheimers
besides
i have terrible long-term memory, and it makes my life awesome
besides
i have terrible long-term memory, and it makes my life awesome
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
800 Words: Memory Problems
I.
I woke up before 5:30 this morning. Like all people who just get out of bed, I’m both less and more alert than I’ll be at any point during the day. They say that your mind is a sponge during the first hour or two after you get out of bed - with a level of recall that can never be approached at any other point in the day. I think that’s horseshit.
I remember that there’s a book next to my bed: The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. True to my inability to keep on the same book for more than a few days, I’ve skipped between a number of books about which I have little to no enthusiasm. Some friends are trying to get me into Terry Pratchett, but after 70 pages of Good Omens I found myself bored out of my mind. I’ve recently tried my yearly assault on Proust, to no avail - there’s only so much you can write about a candle... And for ten years, I’ve tried to finish Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and inevitably find myself enthralled for three paragraphs before my eyes glaze over the sheer monotony of the prose and violence.
But true to my odd reading tastes, I’ve fallen absolutely in love with The Good Soldier Svejk, a book from post-WWI Prague in the throes of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Picture Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock trying to be a great Patriot in wartime America but derailed along the way by every person in our country, all convinced he can’t possibly be serious, and put through every part of the legal system for treasonous behavior, you have some idea of The Good Soldier Svejk’s plot.
I read a few pages this morning and, as usual, this book is amazing. If I ever finish it, it just might become my all-time favorite novel (a position currently held by The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow...for those who care). But there’s a point in this particular chapter when Hasek recalls something that happened a few chapters before. I thumb back to the chapter in which I think it happened,...but I can’t remember where it was. I then start skimming through the chapter and I don’t remember reading it. I then go back further to a different chapter, and I can’t remember reading what happened in this chapter either.
Thus begins my weekly memory panic. I try to recall all my grade school teachers. Mrs. Pollack and Morah Blake in Kindergarten, Mrs. Michaelson and Morah Feitelson in First Grade....etc....oh my God who was my seventh grade Hebrew Teacher?!?!?
For as long as I could remember, my memory has been both amazing and terrible. Over Thanksgiving, I wowed some cousins by listing not only all the American Presidents, but also all the Israeli Prime Ministers (including the interim ones). With a slight brushup, I can probably do the heads of state of a number of European countries (at least the twentieth century), and even European Monarchs and Popes stretching back a few centuries. I’m not sure if it’s an exaggeration to say that I have a few thousand hours of music in my head that I can listen to with instant neurological availability (and that’s not even getting into memorizing individual performances). There are substantial fragments of poems that I can recite without having read in years. As my cousin David said, “The stuff Evan knows about, he knows better than anybody.” As for the rest....
The breath of my interests is wide, it has to be. My competence doesn’t stretch any further than they take me. The list of subjects and tasks at which I’m utterly incompetent stretches miles, surpassed only by the stories that demonstrate them. Manual tasks that children understand implicitly take hours of explanation for me. My brother Jordan once said that he could film a television show called ‘Evan vs. Technology’ and it would be the hit of the decade. I am the ultimate proof that Attention Deficit Disorder exists. Anything I’m cursed enough to be interested in, I’m neither able to forget nor tear myself away. Anything I’m unable to summon up the fascination to remember, I’m unable to remember at all. Nothing is more irritating than those comfortable souls who say that people like me haven’t reached competence in life’s more simple tasks because we haven’t tried hard enough. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve tried for tens of thousands of hours. By now, I think we can reach a definitive conclusion.
But I’m beginning to wonder, is my ‘infallible’ memory failing as well? In recent years I’ve begun to notice creaks in the armor; forgetting small moments in musical pieces I’ve known all my life, having slower recall of facts I’d memorized for decades, having to look up synonyms when i write because I forget a word, often forgetting what I was talking about in conversation mid-sentence. Things that happen to everyone else, but aren't supposed to happen to me. Perhaps this is just me getting older, since we all tend to forget things. But I’m 29, not 58. In very neurotic moments, I begin to wonder if this is just a sign of early-onset Alzheimer’s - hilariously unlikely as that is, it’s not quite as neurotic as it seems, I have two grandparents who suffered from Alzheimer’s and dementia for well over a decade. And no doubt, there are plenty of people, particularly those who knew me as a kid, who would probably say ‘we knew it all along.’
Perhaps my memory was never as good as I made it out to be, and maybe I’m not as incompetent at the rest of those tasks as I sell myself. Then again, I have plenty of experience to corroborate both.
II.
There’s a story by Stefan Zweig which absolutely I love called ‘Buchmendel,’ or ‘Mendel the Book Peddler’ in English. Jacob Mendel is a Jewish bookseller in pre-War Vienna. Born in Eastern Europe and trained as a Yeshiva bocher (Rabbinic student), he has a talmudic memory capable of memorizing anything he reads at first glance. When people want to learn about a topic, he offers himself to them as a kind of Google, from whom they can learn what precisely what books to read (and inevitably there are dozens), and where in Europe to locate each of them.
Buchmendel is a celebrated Viennese eccentric. feted as one of the city’s most valuable citizens. He practically lives in his favorite Viennese coffeehouse, where he shuckles back and forth in the manner of all orthodox Rabbinic students, memorizing books. To interrupt him for a consultation is thought a very high honor indeed. But when World War I begins, the Austro-Hungarian government accuses Mendel is of being a spy because of suspected connections to foreign book dealers. Mendel, utterly lost outside of the world of books and unaware of how he might incriminate himself, tells the government all about his foreign connections and is sent to a concentration camp for his indiscretion. When Mendel returns to Vienna after World War I, it is a changed city and Mendel a changed man. His eyes can no longer see the words to read, and what he manages to read he no longer remembers. His cafe comes under new ownership which knows little of who he used to be, and bars him from the premises. Mendel passes away shortly thereafter; helpless, penniless, forgotten.
III.
I’ve heard this over and over again from friends who regularly smoke marijuana - they remember very little from their past. They rarely seem to connect the two in their minds (perhaps lack of memory impairs that), but it would appear from all sorts of first-hand testimony of people I know that those ads from our childhood about marijuana’s effect on memory is absolutely true. Apparently, other scientific findings have surfaced since then which show that cannabis actually improves memory retention. As difficult as I find that to believe, it can’t be dismissed outright.
I am not, have never been, and shall never be, a weed person. That’s not to say I’ve never tried it, but I find the whole experience somewhere between unsettling and stupid. What does it say about the quality of people’s lives that for recreation they like a drug that helps them to check out mentally?
But like most people who’ve smoked weed, I also feel paranoia from the experience. The paranoia didn’t happen at the time, not usually at least. But it was right after the roughly three weeks of my life that I tried it more than once every six months that I began to notice gaps in my memory. Did pot cause memory lapses? Or did pot cause paranoia about memory lapses? Or is pot responsible for the memory lapses at all?
IV.
It’s a Friday night during the summer of 1992 and I’m ten years old. My Zayde is calling us once every five minutes, yelling at my father to come over immediately because “somebody stole the Challahs.” My father tells him that he will be over as soon as we’re done with dinner.
My father arrives. Surely enough, the challahs were in the drawer over the stove. My father then asks “Where’s Mom?”
“Oh. She went to visit her mother.”
My Bubbe’s mother was shot by German troops in 1940.
My father immediately calls his brother and the police. My dad, my uncle Harold, both their wives, and my uncle’s twin sons immediately get into their cars and start combing the streets of Northwest Baltimore to find my grandmother. While this is happening, I have to watch my two younger brothers.
Late that night, an 77 year old lady who apparently spoke only Yiddish is picked up by the police around Har Sinai congregation. By 1992, my Bubbe’s ability to walk was reduced to a mincing shuffle, yet she’d walked two miles away from her house through intersections of enormously dangerous traffic.
In my father’s opinion, Zayde knew that something was very wrong, but he could no longer articulate what it was.
V.
I’m a terrible linguist. There are probably a few people reading this who would be surprised by that statement. Like many pretentious nerds, I have that terrible propensity after a few drinks to find the idea of speaking with friends in foreign languages a little too attractive. No doubt, we all feel very smart and smug for doing so, but in my case it probably makes me sound mentally challenged. The fact remains, I speak terrible Hebrew, miserable Yiddish, awful French, disgusting German, and passable English. I’m a terrible linguist because there is no one I’ve ever met who’s ever passed up more opportunities to learn foreign tongues correctly.
Foreign language is something resembling a way of life in my family - we are an immigrant Jewish family with living relatives born in America, Israel, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Sweden, Cuba, and Quebec. At holidays and simchas, it’s not unheard of for conversations in five - occasionally even six - languages simultaneously going occurring around the table. My father alone learned seven languages - English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, German, Romanian, and Italian - all of in which he is still conversant. His parents grew up bilingual in Yiddish and Polish, doubtless they had to learn Russian too during their period under Stalin and they learned to speak something resembling English when they came to America. My uncle Nochem is the only foreign service officer in the entire US State Department certified in Yiddish, and while I’m not sure how many he speaks currently, at various times in his life he’s learned English, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, German, Russian, Farsi, Japanese, and I think Arabic too. My mother is fully bilingual in English and Yiddish, and there was a time when she was nearly fluent in both French and German. Her mother, equally bilingual and a college German major, recently told us for the first time that her job during World War II involved not only translating Nazi documents but also meeting with defected Nazi scientists.
Until I was four years old, Yiddish was my first language and the language I spoke best. Most of my family considered it important that kids in my generation would be able to speak the language, and since I was the oldest, I was the guinea pig. The only people who objected to my learning Yiddish were my father’s grandparents, the only actual native speakers in the family. So while all my American relatives spoke to me in Yiddish, my Bubbie and Zaydie spoke to my exclusively in English. The result to this day being that my natural inflections can occasionally sound like a cross between Tevye and Dr. Zoidberg. If anything, my disasters in Yiddish sound more American than my English. A couple years ago, I learned that I can pretend as though I’m a decent Yiddish speaker surprisingly well if I have to - a fact which until now I’ve tried my best to keep secret from my family lest they try to guilt me into learning it again. How do I know this? Because I interviewed to teach at a Hebrew School, and after speaking to me in Hebrew and Yiddish, they offered me a job as a Yiddish teacher.
For whatever reason, around the time I was four years old, I refused to speak Yiddish any longer. In my head, the way I remember it is that it had something to do with my American Zaydie dying. In real life, it probably had more to do with the fact that I reached the age for which it occurs to you that not only did no other four year old have any idea of how to speak Yiddish, they also had no idea that Yiddish is a language.
But it wasn’t just Yiddish I was being taught at that age by family members, it was also some rudiments of French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, complex computation, Algebra, Astronomy, even Farsi. I was a fact suppository who could repeat whatever I heard like a playback - the only person who refused to indulge this apparently limitless possibility to learn was my Polish Zaydie, who told my father, rather ominously, that everyone was setting me up for disappointment.
VI.
I’m losing control of this essay.
I woke up before 5:30 this morning. Like all people who just get out of bed, I’m both less and more alert than I’ll be at any point during the day. They say that your mind is a sponge during the first hour or two after you get out of bed - with a level of recall that can never be approached at any other point in the day. I think that’s horseshit.
I remember that there’s a book next to my bed: The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. True to my inability to keep on the same book for more than a few days, I’ve skipped between a number of books about which I have little to no enthusiasm. Some friends are trying to get me into Terry Pratchett, but after 70 pages of Good Omens I found myself bored out of my mind. I’ve recently tried my yearly assault on Proust, to no avail - there’s only so much you can write about a candle... And for ten years, I’ve tried to finish Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and inevitably find myself enthralled for three paragraphs before my eyes glaze over the sheer monotony of the prose and violence.
But true to my odd reading tastes, I’ve fallen absolutely in love with The Good Soldier Svejk, a book from post-WWI Prague in the throes of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Picture Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock trying to be a great Patriot in wartime America but derailed along the way by every person in our country, all convinced he can’t possibly be serious, and put through every part of the legal system for treasonous behavior, you have some idea of The Good Soldier Svejk’s plot.
I read a few pages this morning and, as usual, this book is amazing. If I ever finish it, it just might become my all-time favorite novel (a position currently held by The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow...for those who care). But there’s a point in this particular chapter when Hasek recalls something that happened a few chapters before. I thumb back to the chapter in which I think it happened,...but I can’t remember where it was. I then start skimming through the chapter and I don’t remember reading it. I then go back further to a different chapter, and I can’t remember reading what happened in this chapter either.
Thus begins my weekly memory panic. I try to recall all my grade school teachers. Mrs. Pollack and Morah Blake in Kindergarten, Mrs. Michaelson and Morah Feitelson in First Grade....etc....oh my God who was my seventh grade Hebrew Teacher?!?!?
For as long as I could remember, my memory has been both amazing and terrible. Over Thanksgiving, I wowed some cousins by listing not only all the American Presidents, but also all the Israeli Prime Ministers (including the interim ones). With a slight brushup, I can probably do the heads of state of a number of European countries (at least the twentieth century), and even European Monarchs and Popes stretching back a few centuries. I’m not sure if it’s an exaggeration to say that I have a few thousand hours of music in my head that I can listen to with instant neurological availability (and that’s not even getting into memorizing individual performances). There are substantial fragments of poems that I can recite without having read in years. As my cousin David said, “The stuff Evan knows about, he knows better than anybody.” As for the rest....
The breath of my interests is wide, it has to be. My competence doesn’t stretch any further than they take me. The list of subjects and tasks at which I’m utterly incompetent stretches miles, surpassed only by the stories that demonstrate them. Manual tasks that children understand implicitly take hours of explanation for me. My brother Jordan once said that he could film a television show called ‘Evan vs. Technology’ and it would be the hit of the decade. I am the ultimate proof that Attention Deficit Disorder exists. Anything I’m cursed enough to be interested in, I’m neither able to forget nor tear myself away. Anything I’m unable to summon up the fascination to remember, I’m unable to remember at all. Nothing is more irritating than those comfortable souls who say that people like me haven’t reached competence in life’s more simple tasks because we haven’t tried hard enough. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve tried for tens of thousands of hours. By now, I think we can reach a definitive conclusion.
But I’m beginning to wonder, is my ‘infallible’ memory failing as well? In recent years I’ve begun to notice creaks in the armor; forgetting small moments in musical pieces I’ve known all my life, having slower recall of facts I’d memorized for decades, having to look up synonyms when i write because I forget a word, often forgetting what I was talking about in conversation mid-sentence. Things that happen to everyone else, but aren't supposed to happen to me. Perhaps this is just me getting older, since we all tend to forget things. But I’m 29, not 58. In very neurotic moments, I begin to wonder if this is just a sign of early-onset Alzheimer’s - hilariously unlikely as that is, it’s not quite as neurotic as it seems, I have two grandparents who suffered from Alzheimer’s and dementia for well over a decade. And no doubt, there are plenty of people, particularly those who knew me as a kid, who would probably say ‘we knew it all along.’
Perhaps my memory was never as good as I made it out to be, and maybe I’m not as incompetent at the rest of those tasks as I sell myself. Then again, I have plenty of experience to corroborate both.
II.
There’s a story by Stefan Zweig which absolutely I love called ‘Buchmendel,’ or ‘Mendel the Book Peddler’ in English. Jacob Mendel is a Jewish bookseller in pre-War Vienna. Born in Eastern Europe and trained as a Yeshiva bocher (Rabbinic student), he has a talmudic memory capable of memorizing anything he reads at first glance. When people want to learn about a topic, he offers himself to them as a kind of Google, from whom they can learn what precisely what books to read (and inevitably there are dozens), and where in Europe to locate each of them.
Buchmendel is a celebrated Viennese eccentric. feted as one of the city’s most valuable citizens. He practically lives in his favorite Viennese coffeehouse, where he shuckles back and forth in the manner of all orthodox Rabbinic students, memorizing books. To interrupt him for a consultation is thought a very high honor indeed. But when World War I begins, the Austro-Hungarian government accuses Mendel is of being a spy because of suspected connections to foreign book dealers. Mendel, utterly lost outside of the world of books and unaware of how he might incriminate himself, tells the government all about his foreign connections and is sent to a concentration camp for his indiscretion. When Mendel returns to Vienna after World War I, it is a changed city and Mendel a changed man. His eyes can no longer see the words to read, and what he manages to read he no longer remembers. His cafe comes under new ownership which knows little of who he used to be, and bars him from the premises. Mendel passes away shortly thereafter; helpless, penniless, forgotten.
III.
I’ve heard this over and over again from friends who regularly smoke marijuana - they remember very little from their past. They rarely seem to connect the two in their minds (perhaps lack of memory impairs that), but it would appear from all sorts of first-hand testimony of people I know that those ads from our childhood about marijuana’s effect on memory is absolutely true. Apparently, other scientific findings have surfaced since then which show that cannabis actually improves memory retention. As difficult as I find that to believe, it can’t be dismissed outright.
I am not, have never been, and shall never be, a weed person. That’s not to say I’ve never tried it, but I find the whole experience somewhere between unsettling and stupid. What does it say about the quality of people’s lives that for recreation they like a drug that helps them to check out mentally?
But like most people who’ve smoked weed, I also feel paranoia from the experience. The paranoia didn’t happen at the time, not usually at least. But it was right after the roughly three weeks of my life that I tried it more than once every six months that I began to notice gaps in my memory. Did pot cause memory lapses? Or did pot cause paranoia about memory lapses? Or is pot responsible for the memory lapses at all?
IV.
It’s a Friday night during the summer of 1992 and I’m ten years old. My Zayde is calling us once every five minutes, yelling at my father to come over immediately because “somebody stole the Challahs.” My father tells him that he will be over as soon as we’re done with dinner.
My father arrives. Surely enough, the challahs were in the drawer over the stove. My father then asks “Where’s Mom?”
“Oh. She went to visit her mother.”
My Bubbe’s mother was shot by German troops in 1940.
My father immediately calls his brother and the police. My dad, my uncle Harold, both their wives, and my uncle’s twin sons immediately get into their cars and start combing the streets of Northwest Baltimore to find my grandmother. While this is happening, I have to watch my two younger brothers.
Late that night, an 77 year old lady who apparently spoke only Yiddish is picked up by the police around Har Sinai congregation. By 1992, my Bubbe’s ability to walk was reduced to a mincing shuffle, yet she’d walked two miles away from her house through intersections of enormously dangerous traffic.
In my father’s opinion, Zayde knew that something was very wrong, but he could no longer articulate what it was.
V.
I’m a terrible linguist. There are probably a few people reading this who would be surprised by that statement. Like many pretentious nerds, I have that terrible propensity after a few drinks to find the idea of speaking with friends in foreign languages a little too attractive. No doubt, we all feel very smart and smug for doing so, but in my case it probably makes me sound mentally challenged. The fact remains, I speak terrible Hebrew, miserable Yiddish, awful French, disgusting German, and passable English. I’m a terrible linguist because there is no one I’ve ever met who’s ever passed up more opportunities to learn foreign tongues correctly.
Foreign language is something resembling a way of life in my family - we are an immigrant Jewish family with living relatives born in America, Israel, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Sweden, Cuba, and Quebec. At holidays and simchas, it’s not unheard of for conversations in five - occasionally even six - languages simultaneously going occurring around the table. My father alone learned seven languages - English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, German, Romanian, and Italian - all of in which he is still conversant. His parents grew up bilingual in Yiddish and Polish, doubtless they had to learn Russian too during their period under Stalin and they learned to speak something resembling English when they came to America. My uncle Nochem is the only foreign service officer in the entire US State Department certified in Yiddish, and while I’m not sure how many he speaks currently, at various times in his life he’s learned English, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, German, Russian, Farsi, Japanese, and I think Arabic too. My mother is fully bilingual in English and Yiddish, and there was a time when she was nearly fluent in both French and German. Her mother, equally bilingual and a college German major, recently told us for the first time that her job during World War II involved not only translating Nazi documents but also meeting with defected Nazi scientists.
Until I was four years old, Yiddish was my first language and the language I spoke best. Most of my family considered it important that kids in my generation would be able to speak the language, and since I was the oldest, I was the guinea pig. The only people who objected to my learning Yiddish were my father’s grandparents, the only actual native speakers in the family. So while all my American relatives spoke to me in Yiddish, my Bubbie and Zaydie spoke to my exclusively in English. The result to this day being that my natural inflections can occasionally sound like a cross between Tevye and Dr. Zoidberg. If anything, my disasters in Yiddish sound more American than my English. A couple years ago, I learned that I can pretend as though I’m a decent Yiddish speaker surprisingly well if I have to - a fact which until now I’ve tried my best to keep secret from my family lest they try to guilt me into learning it again. How do I know this? Because I interviewed to teach at a Hebrew School, and after speaking to me in Hebrew and Yiddish, they offered me a job as a Yiddish teacher.
For whatever reason, around the time I was four years old, I refused to speak Yiddish any longer. In my head, the way I remember it is that it had something to do with my American Zaydie dying. In real life, it probably had more to do with the fact that I reached the age for which it occurs to you that not only did no other four year old have any idea of how to speak Yiddish, they also had no idea that Yiddish is a language.
But it wasn’t just Yiddish I was being taught at that age by family members, it was also some rudiments of French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, complex computation, Algebra, Astronomy, even Farsi. I was a fact suppository who could repeat whatever I heard like a playback - the only person who refused to indulge this apparently limitless possibility to learn was my Polish Zaydie, who told my father, rather ominously, that everyone was setting me up for disappointment.
VI.
I’m losing control of this essay.
Mitropoulos does The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Another amazing performance from a conductor whose amazing performances are still undervalued.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
800 Words: The 25 Most Influential Pieces of Music
Purely as an exercise, I’ve put together a ranked list of what is, in my not-informed-enough opinion (can anyone be?), the 25 pieces of music without which music today would be completely different. I had originally meant for this to be a hundred, then I got lazy. This list is designed so people will rip me to shreds and tell me that I have no idea what I’m talking about: perhaps because this is still entirely too classical (and Beethoven) heavy, perhaps because it's not classical-heavy enough. As impartial as lists like this are designed to be, they are also designed to be wrong. The explanations are only a few sentences long, though I suppose someone could write a book out of an idea like this...maybe even me.... But I also reserve the right to utterly rewrite, expand, and expound upon this list in a few days, weeks, months..... Finally, when I say ‘now,’ I mean now from the long view of history, in which what matters now will matter nearly as much or a little more in ten years. So NOBODY ASK WHERE’S LADY GAGA!!
1. Beethoven: Symphony no 9
Beethoven invented musical expression as we still know it today. No piece of music ever written expresses more passionately, more deeply, more universally.
2. Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
Still the textbook definition of what form is supposed to do - form is the container in which the parts are shipped. No piece of music takes more thousands of disparate elements and fuses them with more perfect balance, it’s a three-and-a-half hour opera that has ten main characters, effortlessly glides between comedy and tragedy - form is never an end in itself, it’s what the form carries within it that matters.
3. Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier
The whole Western definition of harmony comes from this one (actually 96) piece(s). Now that the West means less and less, perhaps this piece will dwindle in influence too...but not yet...
4. Beatles: Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (album)
The day it was released was the moment when the artistic possibilities of electronic music-making incontrovertibly surpassed acoustic.
5. Louis Armstrong: Studio Work from 1923-34
It was Satchmo in his early years who flipped the musical switch on the world - composition to improvisation, refinement to rawness, harmony to rhythm.
6. Machaut: Mass for Four Voices
Eight-hundred years later, we’re still figuring out the puzzle pieces Machaut assembled from his four-voice counterpoint.
7. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
Far moreso than either Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, this album represents a new way of thinking about harmony that can be mined for hundreds of years. If anything replaces Well-Tempered Clavier as music’s harmonic future, it will be Kind of Blue - which reemphasizes modal harmonies and liberally incorporates scales from all around the world. No longer does musical harmony have its routes in the church, it is a constantly developing invention to be interpolated from whatever chord progression of which you can think.
8. Beethoven: Symphony no 3 “Eroica”
The ninth expresses the emotions of all people. The third expresses the emotions of the individual.
9. Stravinsky: Rite of Spring
Rhythm, pure, animalistic, rhythm becomes music’s reason for being. The Rite wiped the palate clean for non-classical musicians to regrow something completely different.
10. Bizet: Carmen
Everything 20th century music doesn’t owe to Beethoven it owes to Carmen. Carmen was the first piece of music to posit seriously that perhaps we’re just a bundle of electro-chemical wiring which requires nothing more than pleasure to be satisfied. After Carmen, light music was serious.
11. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
Somewhere in this album, the melody, harmony, rhythm of songs became completely subservient to lyrics. As single tracks grow more important to the history of music, the influence of Dylan will probably grow still more exponentially the years/decades/centuries go on in ways we can’t yet imagine.
12. Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
The first truly successful test of the idea that theater and music can be combined into a whole. One of the first operas, yes, but every music theater junkie owes a prayer at night to Monteverdi.
12. Beethoven: Pathetique Sonata
All it takes is one person at a good instrument to express every emotion on the planet.
13. Arcadelt: Madrigals Book 1
With the first great madrigals, all it took was a working knowledge of sight reading for any person who can carry a tune to sing in harmony with friends in his or her own home.
14. Coltrane: A Love Supreme
A single tenor saxophonist defining what a free solo improvisation means. In eras for which electronic music is ascendent, actual instrumental prowess will become rarer and rarer.
15. Palestrina: Pope Marcellus Mass
Machaut set the world on the course for counterpoint, Palestrina kept us there. Without Palestrina, we might all be singing Gregorian Chant.
16. Bartok: String Quartet no. 2
Folk music has influenced ‘art music’ for millenia before Bartok, but Bartok was the first to view art music as something that could be improved by becoming more like low folk music, not the other way around.
17. Bach: A Musical Offering
If form becomes an end in itself, this is as far as it can ever go.
18. Mozart: Don Giovanni
The ph7 of pure musical expression. Is it comedy or tragedy or both simultaneously? One of the only pieces of music that expresses every emotion at the same time.
19. Chuck Berry: Chess Record Sessions
After Chuck Berry, it was definitive. A single electric guitar could be louder and more visceral than a 150 piece orchestra.
20. Michael Jackson: Thriller
After Thriller, music became almost inextricably linked to music videos for nearly an entire generation of music lovers. Not only was music more tied to the other arts than at any point since Wagner, but it also was thought possible for music to appeal to every demographic - white and black, male and female, old and young. We’re still living all Thriller’s implications today. For how much longer?...
21. Beethoven: Symphony no 5
A long musical composition can feel completely unified, but does not need to end in the same spirit in which it began. That is another Beethovenian contribution.
22. Afrika Bambaataa: Planet Rock
The moment Hip hop and Rap became more music than poetry and the new ‘Absolute Zero’ of music’s essential elements. Spoken words set to a beat with the barest suggestion of harmonies underneath. For seventy-five years, music underwent a process of wiping the pallate clean - there is a direct line from early Stravinsky to Afrika Bambaataa.
23. The Alan Lomax Collection
Without Lomax, interest in the folk music of America and well beyond would be something approaching nill. By obsessively recording every genre of American folk music we know today, Lomax took oral history to a level only possible in the age of electronic recording. Part of appreciating the music of the past is now to do so through hearing recordings, which allows for a whole new level of influence for the past upon new music.
24. Erich Korngold: The Adventures of Robin Hood (score)
It was with Korngold that movie scoring became an art in itself. Like in Wagner, musical motifs became a way to identify characters, things, ideas - each of which should help the audience feel a particular emotion synonymous with each. But unlike with Wagner, there isn’t the added help of connecting the score to voices. The dialogue and action of movies happens independently to the music, therefore movie music requires much more precise content than in opera, where all the elements can be controlled so that the music is the most important feature. And while we're on the subject of Wagner...
25. Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
The harmonic revolution which Tristan presaged turned out to be a failed one. Tonality did not break down, it merely changed course. But the effect Tristan had on the entire music world continues to be tremendous. Before Tristan, it was a given that music had a single harmonic function - with all roads leading back to the tonic chord. Tristan changed the harmonic, I’m tempted to say poetic, purpose of music. In Tristan, a chord doesn’t resolve for hours, perhaps the chord doesn’t have to resolve at all. No longer was music a heirarchy of notes, it was anything you wanted it to be - for years Tristan was supposed to be the presage of Modernism, it is now the presage of PoMo.
1. Beethoven: Symphony no 9
Beethoven invented musical expression as we still know it today. No piece of music ever written expresses more passionately, more deeply, more universally.
2. Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
Still the textbook definition of what form is supposed to do - form is the container in which the parts are shipped. No piece of music takes more thousands of disparate elements and fuses them with more perfect balance, it’s a three-and-a-half hour opera that has ten main characters, effortlessly glides between comedy and tragedy - form is never an end in itself, it’s what the form carries within it that matters.
3. Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier
The whole Western definition of harmony comes from this one (actually 96) piece(s). Now that the West means less and less, perhaps this piece will dwindle in influence too...but not yet...
4. Beatles: Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (album)
The day it was released was the moment when the artistic possibilities of electronic music-making incontrovertibly surpassed acoustic.
5. Louis Armstrong: Studio Work from 1923-34
It was Satchmo in his early years who flipped the musical switch on the world - composition to improvisation, refinement to rawness, harmony to rhythm.
6. Machaut: Mass for Four Voices
Eight-hundred years later, we’re still figuring out the puzzle pieces Machaut assembled from his four-voice counterpoint.
7. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
Far moreso than either Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, this album represents a new way of thinking about harmony that can be mined for hundreds of years. If anything replaces Well-Tempered Clavier as music’s harmonic future, it will be Kind of Blue - which reemphasizes modal harmonies and liberally incorporates scales from all around the world. No longer does musical harmony have its routes in the church, it is a constantly developing invention to be interpolated from whatever chord progression of which you can think.
8. Beethoven: Symphony no 3 “Eroica”
The ninth expresses the emotions of all people. The third expresses the emotions of the individual.
9. Stravinsky: Rite of Spring
Rhythm, pure, animalistic, rhythm becomes music’s reason for being. The Rite wiped the palate clean for non-classical musicians to regrow something completely different.
10. Bizet: Carmen
Everything 20th century music doesn’t owe to Beethoven it owes to Carmen. Carmen was the first piece of music to posit seriously that perhaps we’re just a bundle of electro-chemical wiring which requires nothing more than pleasure to be satisfied. After Carmen, light music was serious.
11. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
Somewhere in this album, the melody, harmony, rhythm of songs became completely subservient to lyrics. As single tracks grow more important to the history of music, the influence of Dylan will probably grow still more exponentially the years/decades/centuries go on in ways we can’t yet imagine.
12. Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
The first truly successful test of the idea that theater and music can be combined into a whole. One of the first operas, yes, but every music theater junkie owes a prayer at night to Monteverdi.
12. Beethoven: Pathetique Sonata
All it takes is one person at a good instrument to express every emotion on the planet.
13. Arcadelt: Madrigals Book 1
With the first great madrigals, all it took was a working knowledge of sight reading for any person who can carry a tune to sing in harmony with friends in his or her own home.
14. Coltrane: A Love Supreme
A single tenor saxophonist defining what a free solo improvisation means. In eras for which electronic music is ascendent, actual instrumental prowess will become rarer and rarer.
15. Palestrina: Pope Marcellus Mass
Machaut set the world on the course for counterpoint, Palestrina kept us there. Without Palestrina, we might all be singing Gregorian Chant.
16. Bartok: String Quartet no. 2
Folk music has influenced ‘art music’ for millenia before Bartok, but Bartok was the first to view art music as something that could be improved by becoming more like low folk music, not the other way around.
17. Bach: A Musical Offering
If form becomes an end in itself, this is as far as it can ever go.
18. Mozart: Don Giovanni
The ph7 of pure musical expression. Is it comedy or tragedy or both simultaneously? One of the only pieces of music that expresses every emotion at the same time.
19. Chuck Berry: Chess Record Sessions
After Chuck Berry, it was definitive. A single electric guitar could be louder and more visceral than a 150 piece orchestra.
20. Michael Jackson: Thriller
After Thriller, music became almost inextricably linked to music videos for nearly an entire generation of music lovers. Not only was music more tied to the other arts than at any point since Wagner, but it also was thought possible for music to appeal to every demographic - white and black, male and female, old and young. We’re still living all Thriller’s implications today. For how much longer?...
21. Beethoven: Symphony no 5
A long musical composition can feel completely unified, but does not need to end in the same spirit in which it began. That is another Beethovenian contribution.
22. Afrika Bambaataa: Planet Rock
The moment Hip hop and Rap became more music than poetry and the new ‘Absolute Zero’ of music’s essential elements. Spoken words set to a beat with the barest suggestion of harmonies underneath. For seventy-five years, music underwent a process of wiping the pallate clean - there is a direct line from early Stravinsky to Afrika Bambaataa.
23. The Alan Lomax Collection
Without Lomax, interest in the folk music of America and well beyond would be something approaching nill. By obsessively recording every genre of American folk music we know today, Lomax took oral history to a level only possible in the age of electronic recording. Part of appreciating the music of the past is now to do so through hearing recordings, which allows for a whole new level of influence for the past upon new music.
24. Erich Korngold: The Adventures of Robin Hood (score)
It was with Korngold that movie scoring became an art in itself. Like in Wagner, musical motifs became a way to identify characters, things, ideas - each of which should help the audience feel a particular emotion synonymous with each. But unlike with Wagner, there isn’t the added help of connecting the score to voices. The dialogue and action of movies happens independently to the music, therefore movie music requires much more precise content than in opera, where all the elements can be controlled so that the music is the most important feature. And while we're on the subject of Wagner...
25. Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
The harmonic revolution which Tristan presaged turned out to be a failed one. Tonality did not break down, it merely changed course. But the effect Tristan had on the entire music world continues to be tremendous. Before Tristan, it was a given that music had a single harmonic function - with all roads leading back to the tonic chord. Tristan changed the harmonic, I’m tempted to say poetic, purpose of music. In Tristan, a chord doesn’t resolve for hours, perhaps the chord doesn’t have to resolve at all. No longer was music a heirarchy of notes, it was anything you wanted it to be - for years Tristan was supposed to be the presage of Modernism, it is now the presage of PoMo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)