800 Words: The Parallels and Paradoxes of Daniel Barenboim (part 1 of 2)

1.



A spell of fatigue and dizziness barred me from tonight’s Beethoven’s 9th at the Proms. Nothing else could have, and certainly no suspicions that some nut would use the appearance of an Orchestra uniting native Israelis and Arabs at the Proms as an excuse to stage a political protest (or far worse) on the night of the Opening Olympic Ceremonies.

I wanted to go desperately. Not because I thought the performance would have been so wonderful, or because it’s an Israeli-Arab orchestra. Rather, it’s Beethoven, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Proms, three subjects I’m as fascinated by as anything in my life. If there ever were a concert tailor-made for me to go, tonight was it.

It certainly wasn’t Daniel Barenboim that pulled me there. Daniel Barenboim’s view of Beethoven is as fascinating as it is dogmatic. Whereas most other musicians of our day pay heed to the advice of musicologists to play close heed to Beethoven’s metronome marks and a chamber-orchestra complement of strings, Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven as though it’s still 1932 - huge orchestras, broad and flexible tempos, weighty bass-heavy sound. There is no attempt made to play Beethoven as he saw himself, this is Beethoven as he was played accumulated after a century of accumulated performance tradition - with (nearly) all the moss and ivy unstripped from the varnish. It is neither Beethoven for the age of Beethoven nor Bjork, it is Beethoven for the age of Wagner.

2.



No conductor in the world - not Thielemann, not Runnicles, not Gergiev, and certainly not any of the other major opera house directors - makes Wagner as exciting as Daniel Barenboim. With Barenboim, those inevitable forty minutes at a time of boredom and bombast can be cut down to twenty or fifteen. No conductor has ever made Wagner sound like every note counts, but Barenboim usually comes closer than any living conductor and closer even than most from more fruitful ages of Wagner performance.

There is clearly something in Barenboim’s temperament: a mixture of showman and intellectual, that responds very deeply to Wagner. Many musicians clearly have such affinities with particular composers; Bernstein had it with Mahler, Schnabel with Beethoven, Casals with Bach. In each case, it manifested itself not only in a desire to play the music extremely well, but to explain the composer himself - to put the composer within the context of his time, of music history in its entirety, and his relevance to our contemporary world.

It should then follow that a conductor who has such a deep affinity for a composer should want to perform it in his homeland. As it happens, that homeland is unfortunately Israel. To perform it there is to ask to become an outcast, and that is precisely what Barenboim has become in his homeland.

3.



As so few Jews found themselves throughout history, Barenboim was uniquely situated to privilege. As a child, he lived in Israel full-time for only two years. His father was a great piano teacher in Argentina and close friend to Arthur Rubinstein, and Barenboim’s gift was nurtured as few others are from the cradle. At different points he found himself mentored by Rubinstein, Igor Markevitch, Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, Nadia Boulanger, Otto Klemperer, Isaac Stern, Gregor Piatagorsky, Edwin Fischer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and even that twice-over Nazi party member Herbert von Karajan. Did any other Israeli of his years generation that level of privilege in any other field? Any at all?

Barenboim is widely reviled in the country he still thinks of as home. He brought the opera orchestra he’s lead since 1992, The Berlin State Opera Orchestra, to Israel for the express purpose of breaking the Wagner taboo. He has not only criticized Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the most strident possible terms, but also made statements to the effect that Israeli society has become sick and rotten at its core. As it happens, I agree with most every gesture and statement he’s made. And yet there’s still something about it that sits very wrongly with me.

Barenboim says that Israel has lost the sense of mission and moral purpose which he loved as a child in the 50’s. Does Barenboim have any memory what happened in Israel between 1952 and 1954? Israel had no more (or less) sense of mission nor moral purpose even then - the sole difference was that the country’s survival was far less guaranteed. Israel was in such fiscal danger that they had to take $3 billion in reparations from West Germany. Even then there were nearly a dozen lethal incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some were government-sponsored, some civilian. Right-wing Israeli militants not only threatened violence against the government as they do today, they attempted to carry it out - like the 1953 attempt to bomb the Department of Education by the terrorist organization Brit HaKanaim.

Life in a tough neighborhood is always hard. It’s very easy to sentimentalize the scrappy underdog country which finds itself beset by problems on all sides yet still manages to pull through. But Barenboim himself lived in this underdog country for only two years, and since then has been able to look on Israel from the perspective of a Citizen of the World - welcome in every first-world country in precisely the way nearly all other Jews would not be (still). Israel has been faced with threats to its very existence from before it was even a country. Even if he doesn’t agree with every decision the Israeli government made, why should Barenboim begrudge Israelis for wanting a small portion of the security which he takes for granted?

4.



There is a similar question which besets the biography of Barenboim’s now deceased bff, Edward Said. Said is, still, the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual voice - and like Barenboim combined the role of intellectual with a showman’s flair for activism and agitation. But in Said’s case, as in Barenboim’s, there is a troubling question of how such well-off people can claim to speak for those less fortunate than they. How can a son of wealth who could simply live in his parents’ Cairo house after Israel took away his Jerusalem home have any idea what true exile from a homeland means? It not only discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Israeli violence, it discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Palestinian violence too.

The West-East Divan Orchestra may yet prove to be the cornerstone of both their achievements. I will never forget the tears in my eyes when I first heard their wind soloists in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K. 333. It literally felt to me as though they were describing a dream of a better world, a longing for the balance which still eludes everyone who lives in that region. Anyone who doubts that music cannot express concrete things must hear that recording.

Yet people as well-educated as Said and Barenboim must know that there is absolutely nothing which the West-East Divan Orchestra can do except make a futile, sentimental gesture toward the peace which the Middle-East clearly eludes. If it accomplishes so little for peace, then is there any point to it but self-aggrandizement - a kind of exploitative posturing that makes Barenboim taken more seriously as an intellectual and political, perhaps even musical, figure, but brings the conflict no closer to resolution. And if such an orchestra does not bring our world closer to peace, does it then mean that it brings us farther away?

But maybe, just maybe, on that 1% of 1% of 1% chance that some leaders will be so moved by the sight of Arab and Israeli musicians playing together in perfect harmony that they can imagine a better solution to the Middle East conflicts, it will have been an entirely worthwhile project. And if it is so, then even if the entire point of the orchestra is to massage Daniel Barenboim’s ego, it will have been entirely worth doing.

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800 Words: The Very Reverend Evan Tucker

(To the tune of “God Bless America”)

I am an Anglican,
I am CE,*
Not a High Church,
Not a Low Chuch,
But Apostolic, Catholic and Free.
Not a Lutheran,
Not a Presby,
Not a Baptist,
White with Foam.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.


If I could have one honor in my lifetime, it would be to be called ‘The Very Reverend Evan Tucker’ as a title - I would even take that over wearing a terrible toupee that everybody’s too polite to ever point out.  Of all the absurdities in the English language, there can’t be many as absurd as allowing bishops and deans to hold the title ‘The Very Reverend.’ Calling someone “Reverend” is bad enough, it’s a subtle way of claiming a priest as ‘revered’, but uses a form of English grammar so antiquated that it probably went out of use by Shakespeare’s time. Obviously they know this, but to refer to your priest as ‘Revered’ is generally a lie. But by compounding it by calling a clergyman ‘The Very Reverend’ they compound its absurdity and its pomposity by an exponential figure  - nobody even remembers that ‘reverend’ is supposed to be an adjective, not a noun. Imagine a congregation where the clergy is called ‘The Very Rabbi’ or ‘The Very Imam.’


This was, of course, the thought which occurred to me yesterday afternoon as the Very Reverend such-and-such intoned a greeting to me over the Westminster Abbey Audio Guide. I say ‘of course’ because this thought occurs to me at least once every few months - usually more often. And once the sing-song voice of the clergy stopped (is ‘sing-song intonation’ a course requirement at divinity school?), it was replaced by the unmistakable rasp of Jeremy Irons as my tourguide. As far as tourguides go, it was not as good as the creepily bug-eyed rector with black hair and an albino face I had eight years ago, but having Jeremy Irons as a tourguide ensures that the Church of England still knows how to keep it creepy. 


Months ago, when I was booking this trip, I thought to myself that I did not want to have one of those inevitable American trips to Europe in which we cattleprod ourselves into reverend awe over the fact that such beauties can exist as one finds in the great European historical sites. Big vacations are too precious to waste on nothing but ‘great art.’ Beauty is amazing, but is fun on a vacation too much to ask? Would it be too much to ask that we Americans actually enjoy ourselves in Europe rather than merely claiming to? 


So like an alzheimer’s patient I’ve visited Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral in my first two days. Better to get religion out of the way first I suppose. And as I re-toured the many stunning chapels and tombs at Westminster, I could not help the fact that the most striking thing about it was the IKEA lamp box I saw peeking out from underneath the tomb of an 18th century soldier (of course, the name already escapes me...). We don’t live in a reverential (reverendial?) age, and after a certain point, one reaches a diabetes like numbness in the face of so much beauty. 


I understand why Westminster Abbey is a truly stunning building, but like all the churches I will soon see in France, it is a relic from a completely different age of humanity. The French churches hail from the anonymous age of the Gothic Cathedrals when anonymous architects and stone carvers made churches so large and ornate that they gave their worshippers a foretaste of eternal life (more on that in France...). But Westminster Abbey was begun in 1245, the Gothic Age was already half-finished. Unlike Notre Dame de Paris, the purpose of Westminster Abbey has always changed throughout the centuries. It is not a pristine Gothic monument to God, it is a monument to the English State. After 1550, it was no longer even a cathedral. God has so many cathedrals, surely the English Kings can have a church of their own... Rather than glorify God, Westminster Abbey exists to glorify England. And so it has the tombs of monarch after monarch, poet after poet, military leader upon leader, musician, artist, tax-collector, patent lawyer...


England has Westminster Abbey, God has St. Paul’s Cathedral. Kings and Queens marry and are crowned at Westminster, but their funerals are at St. Paul’s. Westminster is Gothic with a captial G, St. Paul’s is neoclassical. Christopher Wren designed the Cathedral with a challenge to Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s in Rome with its Parthenon-like columns and proportions clearly in view. Having been to both, I couldn’t see much contest at first. When I went to St. Pauls eight years ago, it was under heavy scaffolding, dirty, and much of it sectioned off from view. ‘What a dump’ was my first thought. It has since finished its cleaning - itself a ten year project! - and it has a kind of pristine glory that today’s Westminster (clearly in a bit of disrepair itself) lacks. Westminster Abbey reflects the infinite Gothic aspirations of Medieval times, whereas St. Paul’s is presided over by a Renaissance god who wants even religion to be at harmony with its surroundings. The building itself is every bit as friggin’ huge as any self-respecting cathedral should be, but somehow I wasn’t surprised that the original St. Paul’s was still larger by a third. And yet even in this miniature version of St. Pauls, and even after the cleaning, the cathedral is still too big. Parts of it already look dirty again, and one wonders if even after ten years they couldn’t get to cleaning all of it. Nobody should wear white. 




But the biggest shock came when I went to Choral Evensong at St. Paul’s. The Choir of St. Paul’s was unfortunately on holiday, so instead we got a local parish choir. Anyone who’s been to a local (white) church service in America would utterly roll their eyes at this prospect - an out of tune mishmash of unmusical kids whose parents make them sing and too-loud-singing adults who still think a singing career is still an option. But even the parish churches of England apparently have incredible choirs with perfect blend and diction, and the perfect ‘straight tone’ (no vibrato) English sound. It would be nice though if English choirs sang better music than the cheap 20th century Anglican knockoffs which pale as much in comparison to the great composers of the English Choral Tradition as America’s Episcopal choirs compare to their Anglican equivalents. 


I did not find any part of this spiritually inspiring, not even remotely. In our day, we needn’t take things nearly so seriously. Why is Westminster Abbey such a miracle when wikipedia can give us a virtual tour of it? We neither understand nor need the high seriousness of a Choral Evensong. But I can understand why someone else would.


It was before but a blink of an eye in the world’s history that reverential awe was the step forward. In an era that knew barely anything of instant gratification, great workmanship was a state to which all humankind had to aspire. Three hundred years ago, all citizens of Christendom could look from the floors to the walls to the windows to the ceilings of the great cathedrals and see a glimpse of infinity: infinite space and time, infinite soul, infinite beauty, infinite justice, infinite compassion, infinite workmanship, infinite patience, and infinite effort. In an age when all work was done with hands, the cathedral was the sum total of man’s achievement. When a family of stonemasons or woodcarvers went to Westminster Abbey, they could see for themselves what could be done with their hands, and we should never doubt for a second that the reverential awe they felt at such sites was as ecstatically real as ours is forced.

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800 Words: The Proms Wakes Me Up

Had I returned to London any year before this one, reacclimation would have been easier, perhaps instant. For seven years after I lived here for a mere summer, I had looked back on London as ‘my city’ with all the fervor of a spiritual home: in which the people are far better educated, more polite, friendlier, funnier, than any other place I’d ever been. Hell, maybe it’s even true. 


But I could far easier make a claim for ‘my city’ to be Baltimore, Washington DC, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, perhaps even New York or Bethany Beach, Delaware and not have to be one of those stupid Americans who thinks of Europe as a kind of magic dreamland which exists completely apart from reality. On the other hand, London really is my kind of town to a degree no other city has ever been; not even New York or Boston. All the cultural amenities of America - the TV, the movies, the music, are thriving here with a public that boils with enthusiasm and make themselves present to a degree that would cause any American to feel at home. But on the other hand, there’s the old-world veneration of those things about which so many Americans have completely forgotten: old music, straight theater, the written word, Art with a capital A. Certainly some American cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, have those qualities as well, but none of them feel built to house both in tandem to nearly the same degree which London does. Perhaps Paris will, but whatever Paris holds, it will reveal some very different things from London. For me, London stands as the cultural watchdog between Old World and New, meanwhile becoming a playground for the best of both. Now if only I had unlimited amounts of money....


But this London, ‘my’ London, seemed almost absent for me on my first day. By the time I arrived early yesterday morning, my bleary-eyed self had barely slept in 24 hours. I spent the plane ride reading about France, failing to finish movies, and being woken up by crying babies and restless neighbors.


Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, but the alarming truth was that I spent an entire day in London without it entirely hitting me that I was back (poor me..). It was shocking how absent the frission was of seeing the city’s omnipresent green spaces, being back in the tube, walking around South Kensington, standing next to Royal Albert Hall... it was as though I’d completely forgotten what once thrilled me about this place. It just seemed so....white!


It’s just like the sense of entitlement a college student feels to see a place which resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale and decide that such a place is his birthright. But my first reaction was a sort of deadened hilarity at how homogeneous English people are. Certainly there is a large Middle Eastern and Indian population, but at first glance, the white population seems so secluded, so segregated from that population that it seems to affect them not at all - at least in America whites interact with blacks and hispanics by forcing them to serve as the underclass...


For a country so well known for its class system, today’s England is strikingly casteless. Interacting with today’s Englishmen feels not unlike interacting with the Americans of two generations ago. To a contemporary American, it can seem like a relic of the perfect (or perfectly dead) society which we will never know in which everybody gets a stunningly high base level of education, to a point which no cliques seem to have formed with each holding their own values and ‘languages,’ and everybody seems to interact one another with such security that nearly the entire country seems like an extended family. The different parts of English society have so successfully, seemlessly blended that there is hardly a melting pot of which one can speak. Compared to America, today’s England seems so secure, and so shielded from conflict, that it can almost deceive you into thinking it dull. Is this a sign that the country is on the precipice of an explosion, or a sign that it’s about to have half-a-millenium of uninterrupted peace?


It was only around 7:15 yesterday evening, upon us ‘prommers’ being led into the gallery of Royal Albert Hall after roughly hours of standing in a queue, shepherded into the most crowded imaginable space like Muslims on the Haj into the Grand Mosque to see Daniel Barenboim conduct two Beethoven Symphonies and a ‘modern’ work by Pierre Boulez, that I began waking up to an overwhelming sense of culture shock.




I was standing exactly four rows behind the conductor’s podium. And around me in that gallery was a panoply of ages, and at least half a dozen simultaneous conversations about classical music, all knowledgeable and completely audible. Two rows behind me was a young man talking up a beautiful woman and seemingly trying to impress her with his knowledge about Charles Mackerras’s career. One row behind me to my left was a man and a woman clearly on a date, both in their late fifties, and telling each other about the most memorable orchestral concerts they’ve seen in the last few years. In front of me was an older gentleman, telling an older lady about how Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven stacked up to all the other Beethoven cycles he’d seen. My friend, The Harris, and I struck up a conversation with another guy there; in his fifties, my height and vaguely Jewish looking (we were the only two people there under five-and-a-half feet tall) and spoke about Barenboim for some minutes. Near me was a German couple in their thirties, and from whatever little German I have I picked up that they were very excited for the Boulez. Next to me was a still more beautiful woman than the other who seemed to have come to a Proms concert completely alone. Near me another guy, early twenties and looking like an American popped-collar frat boy, standing completely on his own. Another guy in his twenties stood alone, and was reading some sort of music book. Clearly the older generation seemed more knowledgeable on the whole, but here was a city where classical music still clearly has a future.


It was only at intermission that I worked up the nerve to do what I barely had the nerve to do eight years ago - I spoke to nearly all of them. The kid reading the music book was a doctoral fellow at Kings College in Medieval Literature who hated Wolfram von Eschenbach. The ‘jock’ was an enthusiastic amateur violinist who loved playing Beethoven in semi-pro orchestras. The beautiful girl standing alone was a French girl with barely any English, but she played Beethoven on the piano and wanted to hear the symphonies. The German couple were jazz music lovers who wanted to determine if Boulez sounded like free-jazz, or if free-jazz sounded like Boulez (they also gave me some delicious olives). Of the couple on the date, I learned that the guy had been going to the Proms every year for thirty years and had been going to concerts of the Liverpool Philharmonic since he was a child, and of the woman I learned that she has a personal, not musical, hatred of Roger Norrington.  

The Proms is the greatest music festival in the world. Period. There is nothing in any other genre in any city which compares to the coordination it takes to assemble a different orchestra from a different part of the world every night for two months in a venue that can house six-thousand people with standing room 5 pound tickets in the front of the hall. It is now in its 117th year, and the seasons show only signs of growing in size and scope - there’s even an additional chamber music festival now at Wigmore Hall.


In America, a festival like this is utterly unthinkable. In order for The Proms to happen, there needs to be a massive government subsidy from a national broadcasting organization (in this case the massively funded BBC) which thinks classical music is in itself a public good - and they therefore produce, distribute, and advertise the concerts throughout the entire world. The whole idea that classical music, or even music itself, is a public good would cause many Americans to laugh themselves senseless - and perhaps rightly so. There is very little evidence that much good is done for the public by putting a hundred or so classical concerts. But ultimately, that is why The Proms are so awesome. Artists thrive on risk, and the best art is neither made when artists have too little money nor a too stable source of income - neither situation inspires people in the arts to their best. What inspires them is that tenuous middle ground where the funding to survive can be taken away at any moment - and they therefore must beg, borrow, or steal the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

Many music lovers in the UK protest the fact that the Proms, and the organization who produces them, are being irredeemably dumbed down (how spoiled can you be?). But unlikely as it sounds, should the economy of Britain crumble to the ground tomorrow, what program will be hacked up first? The Proms or the National Health Service? Its the very fragileness of a festival like the Proms that makes it such a miracle. I’m not sure if I believe in God, but I believe in The Proms.

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800 Words: I Need a Vacation

In recent vintage, the posts on this blog have gotten darker and still darker, more and still more self-revealing, less and still less well-advised. I’ve tried to make it a rule for this blog to keep some kind of balance. Something dark must be followed by something light, something serious by something frivolous. If it can be helped, no writer, and no person, should ever edge too far in any mental direction without returning the other way. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you; if you avoid the abyss, the abyss no longer gives a shit.

Even as I’ve felt no less happy in the last month (if anything, rather happier than usual), I’ve found my thoughts on these pages gravitating toward bleaker and still bleaker sentiments. The longer an anxious person goes without feeling anxiety, the more he feels anxious about the anxiety to come. And the more premonitions he has, the more likely he is to allow them to come true.

I’ve had two separate friends tell me that this blog is coming to resemble a Dostoevsky novella, one of whom said it weeks before I even mentioned Dostoevsky here. Lest you think I’m being overly egotistical by bringing this up, please understand that I often seriously question whether Dostoevsky is not an absurdly overrated author – and I don’t doubt that they meant it in precisely that same spirit. I can love Dostoevsky for fifteen minutes at a time, and then invariably get absolutely tired of him. But the sentiments in Dostoevsky, the long-windedness, the narcissism, the constant hysterical confessions by total strangers, the glorification of suffering, the proto-fascist longing to be told what to think by a higher power….those sentiments are all beginning to sound a little too familiar... I never wanted to write bad Dostoevsky, I wanted to write bad Chekhov and bad Pushkin. Ideally, this blog was meant to house well-proportioned writing which mingles every possible emotional state at a length that never outstays its welcome. Blogging, like life, seems to aspire to a state of Chekhov but ends in a state of Dostoevsky.

But all good blogs are good in the same way, all bad blogs are bad in different ways (I know, I know, that’s Tolstoy). When this blog is good, I like to think that in its small way it gets the whole flavor of experience. From day to day, I have new ideas for all sorts of subjects whose thoughts seem to write themselves, and they run the gamut from serious to silly, sad to happy, heavy to light, smart to stupid. When this blog is bad, the mental acuity slows, and I very much feel like I’m agonizing to think of every word. When that happens, the emotions gravitate more toward one end of those scales and forgets the other. Needless to say, lately it’s been gravitating more toward seriousness, heaviness, sadness, perhaps even stupidity…

Fortunately, the past year of writing’s experiences far number more in the former category than the latter – I’m damn proud of the writing I’ve done here, and would never take back a word of it (except the grammar mistakes). Like any writer who finds the process easy, in my best moments I don’t feel like it’s me who’s writing. It’s only in my worst moments when every individual word feels as though it must be sucked out of my brain and I have to tap into things which I probably shouldn’t’ be sharing on this blog in order to keep the writing at a pace.

I do not regret becoming what many bloggers call an ‘oversharer’. If you want to write, then to a certain extent you have to draw on personal experience – where else can you draw? If people want to understand each other, then they unfortunately have to expose information to one another that might not be well-advised to expose. My red flags used to go up instantly when I saw someone share the private details of their lives online, as though somehow that was indicative of a person being particularly volatile or insane. But then I realized, who the hell am I to pretend that my bodily emanations don’t stink? And what the hell do I have to lose? I’m not particularly special, I’m just a nerdy kid from Baltimore who in his own way has led a fairly interesting life.

And then I remembered, this is what most if not all decent writers do – no matter how well a writer conceals the details of his life, all writing, even all fiction, is a variation on autobiography. Even if your unconscious dictates your material, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired to write something by what you read, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired by the details of someone else’s life – a friend, a famous person, a person you meet at a bar – that’s autobiography. In each case, it's you who has to process the information, and at least in that sense it's happening to you as much as it's happening to anyone else. Some writers are clearly more upfront about this process than others, and it makes little difference to the quality of their work whether they conceal the details of their lives in their work or share them – different processes work for different writers. But so long as human beings do the writing, we can only write based on what we perceive.

I’d like to think my perceptions are about to change rather drastically. Tomorrow, I’m headed to France and England for a month. This will be the biggest vacation I’ve been on in thirteen years and the first time I’ve been back to Europe in eight. Eight years ago, I lived in London for a summer – and in so many ways that was the summer which defined all the choices I’d made since then. It was in London that I began writing a blog, and blogging has been the most consistent activity I’ve had since then. I had the most horrendous internship with a British musical organization imaginable (not telling which), and it’s soured me towards office work ever since (not that I’ve successfully avoided it in recent years). I was in what is still my favorite city in the world, yet all I could think of was how much I missed my friends back home – friends who are still among my closest. Every night I heard new pieces of music and theater that made me want to stay in this city forever, and it made me broke three separate times during that summer – a financial state I became intimately acquainted with as the years went by. 

Like all Americans of some cerebral bent, I still put a cache on Europe that probably isn’t entirely deserved. To Americans, Europe is the place where fairy tales are reenacted. It’s less true than it once was, but Americans don’t understand history. The idea that we are who we are because other people got us here is completely antithetical to an American self-image. We believe we are masters of our destinies, hatched from our mothers’ wombs sui generis, and view the entire world as an orange to be squeezed. America has always been a vast, uncharted space of opportunity – a blank canvas on which we can all paint our own mural. Europe is a collage on which millennia’s worth of people already made their own forms. European cities seem as chaotically organic as any natural forest, on which thousands of years of growths collide, clash, and overtake one another – each generation splattering a new seed and pollen into the ecosystem. American cities are like planned forests, in which the buildings seem like trees planted in a straight line – no American city is more than 300 years old, and it’s impossible to obtain the diversity of style and spirit which each age added to the most mythical European cities.

Americans view Europe with a confused mixture of intimidated awe and the irritation with which young people have for nagging parents who try to shame their children in an unconscious effort to stop the kids from achieving more than they ever did. But Europe is even more confused by America, and their stereotypes are hilariously inconsistent. Americans are fat, yet obsessed with health. Americans are lazy, yet obsessed with work. Americans are warm and friendly, yet could not be more obnoxious. Like an older generation viewing a younger one, they dotingly observe everything about their ‘kids’ yet can’t understand a single thing they see, and just like when old people try to imitate the habits of the young, their oft-made attempts to be more like Americans are rather hilarious. To take some famous examples, no American would place the value the French do on Jerry Lewis, or the Germans on David Hasslehoff, or the Russians on McDonalds. Every person interprets other people through their own filter, and Europe and America continue to talk at each other in a series of blackly comic misunderstandings that grow more unstable every decade. Once upon a time, German physicists were imported to Chicago and New Mexico to work on a nuclear bomb; today American physicists tele-commute to Switzerland work on the Higgs Boson particle research. From the new American liberalism of Roosevelt partnered the imperial conservatism of Churchill, the Atlanticist political relationship evolved into the imperial conservatism of George W. Bush partnered with the old American liberalism of Tony Blair. Fifty years ago Americans flocked to movie theaters watch the Hollywood-influenced artfilms of Truffaut and Fellini, today Europeans buy DVD’s by the gross to watch European art-film influenced TV shows made for American cable in their own homes. Europeans once envied Americans for their social programs and efficient government…you know the rest…

Europe is different than America. I plan on enjoying every one of those differences for maximum contrast and updating this blog as often as I can to chart precisely how weird it is to be an apple pie American again on the strudel continent. If posts have gotten quite dark lately, I have a feeling (though can in no way guarantee) that balance will be restored, because the tone is about to get lighter in kind.

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 3 - The Beast in Me

This is the first internet meme I remember seeing. I laughed so hard I probably watched it twenty-five times in a row. One of the more modest accomplishments of my life is that I can honestly say I have never destroyed a computer in a rage, though I’ve come close thousands of times. I even banged on a computer that was stalling hard enough that afterward it would randomly, instantly shut down mid-session without warning. Even so, I’m sure there are people who have come still closer than I have to destroying their computers.

I have, however, thrown phones across rooms several dozen times in my life. I never broke them completely, but I did once come so close that the phone would only work after I duct-taped it together. I’ve thrown glasses, full ones, against walls and floors. I’ve slammed doors hard enough to break the hinges. When I was fourteen I tore a painting off the wall and broke the class frame into thousands of pieces. When I was sixteen I nearly ran over two classmates with my car. As an adolescent I tore books from their shelves, set fire to pieces of paper, and once threatened someone with a knife. I’ve yelled so many times in my life that I’m surprised I still have a singing voice. I’ve neither provoked nor been provoked into a physical altercation since I was a college freshman, but I probably got well over a hundred before that. More often than not it was picked on me, but far more times than I’d like to admit, I picked it on them.

Imagine, at least if you care to, what it’s like to be diagnosed as a depressive at the age of eight, as I was. A third of your childhood, the third you have no trouble remembering, has been stolen from you. Days which should be spent in the happy ignorance of the adult trials that await are spent in the throes of the worst emotions with which life can bequeath at any age, and there is as yet no part of you which understands how to view the awfulness of what may come in proportion to its merit. There is only the ineradicable sense that life is an unremitting agony, constructed for the sole purpose of tormenting you alone.   

And yet it’s not the childhood years which I remember with horror, I must reserve that for adolescence. The realization that other people did bad things to you is ultimately forgivable and in some cases can be remembered with a certain black humor. But what can never be totally forgiven is the moments when you acted badly towards others, because each of us must live with the choices we make. I don’t know precisely when it was, but there was a moment when I awakened to an almost inarticulable realization that life perpetrated a terrible injustice on me, and I had no idea whom to blame for it; so I blamed everyone. To this day, it shames me to say that whatever evil was done to me, I repaid the debt to the best of my ability in a thousand ways. And in my still too frequent lowest moments, it is not what was done to me which I remember, but what I did to others. There are worse things in life than knowing that other people’s sins are on your head, and one of them is knowing that you did not turn the other cheek.

Today, we read about another young man who opened fire in a crowded area simply so he could kill people. Every time we read about a new adolescent killer, I do have to wonder…how close did I come at that point in my life? How close did other angry kids I knew come? The truth is, probably, not very; most adolescents have rage in them which they cannot articulate, and sometimes that rage is truly black. But was there really that big a difference between Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold and myself?

The reasons the Columbine massacre happened are extremely complicated; a confluence of too easy access to weapons, righteous anger, bullying, a culture of violence, family pressure, ignorant faculty, and (primarily) sociopathy. It takes an extremely fragile combination to provoke the correct chain reaction to result in a massacre. But frankly, if it hadn’t been the two of them, it might have just as easily been fifty-thousand other young adults that year, perhaps even a hundred kids I knew, or me. The fact that some angry kids outgrow their rage and progress to a fruitful maturity while others remain forever remembered as murderers may be simple luck.

But luck is never simple; it’s a relative term. I’ve been lucky to outgrow this adolescence into a reasonably content adulthood, with many good friends and a family that loves me. But perhaps a truly lucky person would never have undergone those dark years I did.

I freely admit, in the worst moments my temper is still the absolute poison it ever was. In order to keep it in check, I have to keep myself on guard every day of my life. When the alternative remains crippling depression or horrendous panic attacks, anger can seem like the best of all possible options. But aggression puts the pain which you feel onto others, and at least sadness does not transfer the blame for your lot onto innocent bystanders. If I have a surfeit of loyal friends, I don’t doubt that it’s because to an extent that surprises even me I’ve learned to shield my worst moments from them. Those moments certainly still exist, but to the maximum extent I can help, no one shall ever see them but me. Sadly, I have not yet learned how to shield many of those moments from my family to nearly the same extent. I pray that the day I can will come very soon.

(Part of why Crimes and Misdemeanors is an over-rated movie is that this is actually not a bad definition of comedy.)

When you live knowing you have faults like these, and I suspect more people have similar ones than would ever like to admit so, what is there to do about it except to confess your faults and open yourself to the ridicule to which people would subject you anyway if they ever saw you act so stupidly? I have yet to meet a person better at self-deprecation than me (how’s that for an egotistical statement?), and for many years it’s been the best weapon I have to ingratiate myself. Some people can live their lives in blissful unawareness of their own ridiculousness – others have to embrace their inner clown head on. The anger which once coursed through me so viciously through my insides is now something I wear on the outside, a court jester’s outfit – ready at a second’s turn to do something outrageous.

(try telling me this wouldn’t be awesome…)

For three years, I’ve been trying to finish every page of The Brothers Karamazov – that great and greatly flawed novel among novels which my uncle gave to me as a present while I lived with him in Israel. I haven’t quite finished it for a couple reasons – some having to do with aesthetic concerns. But fundamentally, the biggest problem I have with this book is that it is far too great to not hit far too close to home. At heart, this is a book about a father and his four sons. When I first read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with myself and my relationships to my Dad and brothers. But as I got further, I began to perceive that every character in this family is me: Dimitri the well-meaning hot-head is me, Ivan the intellectual whose nihilism drives him insane is me, Smerdyakov whose meanness hides a lifetime of terrible experiences is me, even Alyosha the saint who forgoes his own desires in an effort to be compassionate to the sufferings of others can be me. But even the character who I thought could never be me is me.

If there was one thing in this book of which I was sure as I was reading, it was that the boys’ father, Fyodor Karamazov, was my Dad: nature’s provocateur; always doing what he could to be the center of attention, always trying to find the most outrageous thing to say, always trying to shake up people’s self-conceptions, picking at their insecurities and inflaming their resentments for his own entertainment; playing the part of the fool so as to mask a great intelligence, and so as better to make others uncomfortable. In my least charitable moments, this was how I always viewed my Dad, and here was an image of him staring directly at me from the page.

Yet that does my father as much a disservice to much else that he is as any description could. As a bookworm and as my father’s son, I must say that this description neither does justice to Fyodor’s evilness or to Dad’s goodness. In fact, if this comparison were in any way made seriously to either Dad or a real life Fyodor Karamazov, it would be incredibly insulting. And if anything, at this point Fyodor Karamazov is a better representation of my personality than my Dad’s.  

If Dostoevsky can create a family of five such characters, all of whom resonate so clearly within the same person, then clearly the book’s clearest insight is that we all have emotional beasts of burden; demons carried within us which gnaw as painfully as any cancer, and which will only fester without a proper outlet. Each of the Karamazovs is a part of us, carrying that same demon around which we all have and each trying to find a proper outlet for it.   

Perhaps these next questions get us off the hook a bit too easily, but are there really demonic (or even evil) things within us, or are what we see as our demons simply misdirected passion?  The will to live life intensely is there in us all, but if we’re (relatively) lucky, we can direct that will towards something that helps others, or at least doesn’t hurt them. I’m not a person given to quoting Bertrand Russell (and I read this quote in a classical CD review) but there is one by him which I love: “Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.” Some people have ready-made ways to be passionate, and find hobbies and passions which so inspire them that they feel at peace with themselves, utterly contented by what they do. I want to beat the shit out of such people.

Because no matter how much misanthropy and vengeful feeling is inspired by depression, anger, and anxiety, it is not bad feeling which inspires such terrible emotions. It is good feeling. It is the knowledge that somewhere, there is the possibility of a better life which we seem unable to lead. It is not a hatred for life that inspires black feeling, it is love of life.

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 2 - Being in Hate

We have all felt that energetic fission of the instant attraction – the moment when two people catch each other’s eye and feel as though they’d been hit by a thunderbolt. It feels as if the universe has conspired to bring them to precisely this moment at this place, and from the split-second they lock eyes, each sees their destiny bound up in the other. That destiny may last an hour, it may last fifty years, but they know at that moment that life as they know it is over, because after realizing the existence of that other person, colors look different, words no longer carry the same meanings, and the songs on the radio make sense. And from the numinous shock of that first contact they hate each other with the Promethean fire of a million supernovas and desire nothing more out of life than to devote their remaining years to making the other person miserable beyond measure.

It’s like the time oil first laid eyes on water, or the dog on the mailman, or fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally a person comes along who so toxically offends your sense of everything beautiful in the world that you can only thank God every day for such a gift as a person who so conveniently explains our world’s division of good from evil. Had people like this particular person never born, the world would be a far better place than it is. All it requires is a single interaction, a particular emphasis laid on a certain word, a well-placed comma in an e-mail, and all the world’s evil makes sense.  In the annals of human villainy, there’s Hitler, Nero, Genghis Kahn, and this person.

Just like in love, if we’re lucky, we get the pleasure of being in hate more than half-a-dozen times during our life. Food tastes better, drinks are more potent, and the weight of life’s burdens disappears from our shoulders. When we’re in love, we experience a respite during which we think the awfulness of the world could be redeemed. When we’re in hate, the feeling is savory rather than sweet, and just like with savory food, it is sometimes more pleasurable than any amount of sweetness.  Rather than we having a respite from life’s torments, we possess something potentially better - a mastery of life’s bitterness, and an explanation for why life must be so. The act of living, with all the tragic messiness and misunderstandings which that carries, has meaning and explanation for the first time, and with such a divine gift the sour becomes more pleasurable than the sweet.  

We all have such people who offend every concept of what we think is good and decent in the universe. If we’re wise, we’re simply thankful they exist. How could we make sense of the world’s horrors without them?  But like love, hatred is fickle, and as a species we’re no more evolved to remain monogamous with the object of our sworn animus than we are to the object of our sworn affection. Human stuff is frail, and a surfeit of emotion makes him sway from the ground: too much love causes men to fly above the earth into the decompressed airlessness of the heavens, too much hate causes men to dig themselves into the suffocating dirt of the ground.

But all of us have those people who simply make the world lousy. Just as there is someone – perhaps a thousand someones – in the world for every person to develop a life-long loving bond in the correct circumstances, there are perhaps a thousand someones in the world with whom in the right circumstances we all can seal a lifelong bond of hatred.

Just as in love, there must be precisely the correct mixture of similarities and differences – both in interests and temperament. But there must also be that extra special something – a bond that can only be sealed in the moment when destiny conspires with coincidence who colludes with happenstance to bring two people together so precisely that the right circumstances of vulnerability, aspiration, and sensibility are met to produce this extra special bond. All one has to do is think of the other person, and the world’s confusion makes sense.   

Why do we feel this way? What is it within us which provides the dopamine and adrenaline, either in love or in hate, which simplifies the world so? Why do we feel so completely as though our instinct is completely right, and no rational consideration is necessary? Why can’t we separate ourselves from these powerful emotions to realize that we currently have no greater claim on how our understanding of the world is correct than we did before we met this person? What if such a person does not share our hate? Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, and is there any worse feeling than knowing that we reside in the mind of the object of our animus or affection with none of the intensity with which they reside in ours?

Is hatred more powerful than love? And if it isn’t…how terrible would it be for us if we found a way to make it so? Really. Would it make the world any worse a place if we found out hatred is more powerful than love? And would anybody really be surprised if that were the case?

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Russian Sailor's Dance

Just because...

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy; Part 1 - Politics

The New York Times ran an especially interesting op-ed last week from the president of the AEI (American Enteprise Institute, h/t Der Schneider) claiming that all statistics point to conservatives being happier than liberals. Given the reasonably nuanced, even-keeled tone of his article, perhaps the main point was not to crow about conservatives being happier people in the New York Times – though I can’t imagine such considerations were not in his mind – but to state an important fact of life about America.

Alright, so conservatives are happier than liberals. I know a lot of liberals, and many of them find their lives pretty miserable – sometimes with justification. I know a lot of conservatives too, for a liberal at least – and while they don’t really strike me as happier, in many cases they do seem more accepting of the personal flaws and foibles of people they like than liberals – and perhaps that goes a long way to making them happier. Perhaps you’d think it a paradox that conservatives are more tolerant of people than liberals, but consider then how the two philosophies work. Liberalism is an empirical philosophy: for liberals, trust, approval, and respect for the establishment must always be earned and can be taken away at any point. Conservatism is an instinctive philosophy: if a person is part of the group or establishment worth conserving, then a large degree of approval, respect, and trust must be given automatically. It is not a question of conservatives being authoritarian and liberals being meritocratic, it is a question conservatives tending towards belief, and liberals tending towards doubt. I know of no better example of the difference in these two philosophies than my own parents. My father is a moderate liberal, yet I think few people (himself least of all) would think of him as a person satisfied to give respect to those who do not meet his requirements. My mother is a (somewhat less) moderate conservative, and is probably the best example I will ever meet of someone who can live her own life as a model of tolerance, forgiveness, and open-mindedness (she lives with Dad and raised me…).

I probably should have said this at the beginning, but in case there’s any doubt: politics is a horrendous way to gauge happiness. Political beliefs are of such little consequence to our everyday lives that they are perhaps the easiest way we have of projecting an imaginative world that would better meet our requirements for a happier life. How many liberals do we all know who came from tight-knit families with good values and came to their belief-system as a way to justify breaking out of from a good family’s grip? How many conservatives do we all know who came to their belief system as a means to justify doing everything it takes to raise themselves up from dissolute beginnings? We all know people like this, and there is no shame in reading into them a bit of the bad faith we all have in how we make the choices we do. Much more often than not, a person’s politics is a way of projecting what they want from their personal lives. This, and not that our lives have such potentially world-changing importance, is the true meaning of “the personal is political.”

Speaking for myself, I consider myself a liberal resolutely and happily stuck in the year 1954 who wishes all American history since the downfall of McCarthy should be wiped clean. Civil Rights should be redone, and done better. The marginal tax rate for the top 1% should still be over 90 cents to the dollar, with plenty more money to invest in better education, better research, better health care, better business regulation, better building and road maintenance, better job creation, better hospitals, better futures. Military might is inevitable so we might as well use it for good rather than evil. Support of an authoritarian dictatorship is a horrible moral choice, but if alternative is a totalitarian dictator, it's one the US should make with no regrets. And incremental liberal progress is better than conservative regression, so we should make whatever ideological compromises it takes to prevent conservatives from gaining power. How did I come to these conclusions? I can make a litany of reasons, but it would be sophistry to say that it came solely from impartial judgment. It is at least as much a matter of personal experience and wish fulfillment. My personal experience, which is perhaps inaccurate to the larger public, is that the family members in the generations before mine were better educated, as are my friends in European countries  – in large part because their schools were better funded. Without military might, much of my family in Israel would still die, as would members of my family in World War II without whom I’d not be here to write this.

I consider myself a liberal. I always have and I always will. But for years, many liberals have considered me a moderate – an accusation I find truly appalling. In a properly functioning society, a philosophy based on empirical data - for which hundreds of thousands of people in the world devote their lives to gathering with integrity – is the center of discourse; and liberalism is that ‘vital’ center. It is a philosophy whose core belief is the absence of a core belief. Socialism and conservatism are both belief systems in which the belief is more important than the facts, liberalism suits its beliefs to whatever the facts are at hand – and every generation creates a new version of liberalism to best fit the facts of its time.

But there are very few properly functioning societies, and we certainly don’t live in one: we live in the era of Bush v. Gore, of a mismanaged two-front war, of political appointments trumping expert credentials, of congressmen trying to let the debt ceiling collapse to score political points. We live in an era when a large membership within one party (and ONLY one party) insists again and again on bringing our country to the brink of economic and political suicide. So the thought that people to my left believe that to not agreeing with them about every little detail of their ideology is the same as giving tacit consent to the Republican’s worst excesses is simply maddening. So to all sixty of America’s lefties/socialists/progressives (every one of whom I seem to know…), you’ve been completely shut out of power now for 40 years and Barack Obama has finally given a chance for some of your agenda to be enacted. Being so picky about your friends that you can exclude Barack or me from your soiree is a luxury you cannot afford.  

But then again, my own political beliefs are as much wish fulfillment as personal experience, and as much wish fulfillment as anybody else’s. The way I’ve lived my personal life is every bit as extremist as any communist’s political beliefs. My biography (such as it is) is one long litany of refusals to compromise that have set me back for decades on virtually every front of my life. To put it simply and without going into detail, the idea of doing things according to other people’s instructions terrifies me. Any learning disabled kid (or adult) who can’t remember a time when he wasn’t yelled at or insulted for not properly following directions will understand this problem implicitly. The rest of you probably can’t.

The very idea that a person like me has to follow someone else’s directions is not just nauseating; it’s an active source of unimaginable fear. And even if a person like me realizes that (in most cases) such fear is completely irrational, there is no way in which it can be overcome except to subject yourself to a completely fresh batch of horror during every day of your life in which you try to fight it (again, I’m not going into detail). People tell you that once you master the details, the terror will go away. Perhaps it will for that particular task, but then a new task arises, with a new infinity of details to master, and the cycle of horror begins anew. One can either resign oneself to a level of anxiety at getting things wrong with which no other human being could cope better than you, or one can simply go one’s own way and refuse to do those things which so many others find such an ordinary part of their existences. Out of necessity, my wit became quicker than other people so I could make quick work of anybody who decided to take practice on a target as easy as mine. It made me spurn decades worth of well-meant advice from teachers because they had no idea what fortitude it took to simply persist in classes. And after years of bad jobs, no jobs, and dashed dream jobs, I became as close as I could to my own man, a ‘professional idiot son’ in my father’s business and otherwise free to pursue my interests without the interference of the outside world – perhaps with all the loneliness which such solitary pursuit implies. Hopefully I do something of value for my family, but I’m glad my brothers have many talents I don’t. Hopefully there’s a way to include others in my musical and literary ambitions without my going completely crazy about the organizational end of it.  

But the fact that I have taken this latter ‘road less traveled’ is as much a source of pain to me as the fact that it was necessary. This desire for compromise comes from that honest-to-god wish I have, a wish that I perhaps carry with me more devotedly than any other, that I could simply let my guard down and compromise – to do what I’ve been told to do, and to learn at least some of those practical tasks to which a brain like mine could not be more ill-suited. Surely, even in the best of circumstances the process of learning some of them will be every bit as horrible as I imagine, but surely some will not be. But after a certain point, one has to realize that the anxiety of not knowing which tasks will be which, after so many years of precisely that struggle with tasks which others find so absolutely basic, is dangerously close to insurmountable. Other people dream of drawing lines in the sand because they’ve seen the damage which compromise does to their lives. I dream only of compromise, because I see the damage which its lack thereof has done to me.

It wasn’t long ago that this post was about an op-ed... In any event, after a certain point this op-ed alleged that all statistics point to the fact that the happiest of all people are extremists. Again, we have no way of knowing whether this is true. Do extremists feel coerced by fellow extremists into saying they’re happy? And if they’re told to believe that they’re happy, is that in some cases the same as believing they’re happy? I know a number of people whom I’d reluctantly classify as extremists (if you’d classify me as one, that’s probably a sign…), and by and large I have to conclude that yes, they do seem a little happier than the rest of us. Not much necessarily, but a little. They have a built in, ironclad network of solidarity. They believe they know exactly whom to trust, and whom not to. Their minds are unclouded by that pernicious human folly: doubt. The least happy are, of course, moderates.

It was moderates, by far, who came out the least happy in this survey, and one can easily see why. Moderates, true moderates by the standards of 2012 America, get a lot of shit – much of it deserved. They split the difference evenly between two ever more diametrically opposed ideological camps with little if any regard for what’s true, and for their troubles they find their position increasingly attacked by every side. In their effort to keep a part of themselves in two worlds, they are mistrusted and insulted by both for not pledging fealty to either. Many people’s political beliefs are a mere projection of opposite of their personal lives, but if the opposite of right is left, then what is the opposite of centrism and moderation except more centrism and moderation? It would be like multiplying zero against itself. Most people who consider themselves moderates in their political lives are probably moderates in their personal lives too – insulted by their parents for not going to church more often, insulted by their children for going to church at all. They, not liberals, are the true textbook example of people plagued by doubts and stuck between two diametrically opposed worlds. They may not deserve our intellectual respect, but they certainly deserve our pity.

It should also be noted that even among these extremes, the extremely conservative were quite a bit happier than the extremely liberal. Is this just because conservatives are nuttier than liberals? Well, considering that we still don’t know what motivates people to say that they’re happy, this is clearly not a valid thought. What is valid is to say what’s so obvious: that belief inspires greater happiness than doubt. Skepticism may be a good tool for understanding the world, but it takes an enormous emotional toll on those who use it. To have a system of belief which one can affirm in a community with others, and which tells you that a much greater future is in store, is the greatest potential source for happiness our misbegotten species yet possesses. In our era, it is still most easily derived from religion; the time may yet come when such beliefs are derived from collectivist anarchism or transhumanist science worship or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Who knows?

But there is one group curiously missing from this survey. Where are the apoliticals? What about those people who don’t bother themselves with politics and have no beliefs? My guess is that it would cast a bad pall over the whole poll – it would tell us something which no political person wants to believe. The happiest people in the world are the ones who never bother themselves with politics. 

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800 Words: The First Anniversary

A year ago today, I posted my first 800 Word topic, a review of V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River - it's the one of only true book reviews I've posted this year because my reading habits are so haphazard that I rarely read a book from start to finish. I often even find that I have more success finishing books if I read them backwards, starting with the last chapter and letting it progress in reverse order. In the meantime, my deceptively illiterate self has written hundreds of thousands of words on topics as diverse as Aaron Sorkin, Leos Janacek, Bashar al-Assad, Mad Men, Homeland, Ray Bradbury, Religion, the Euro crisis, Billy Crystal, Clint Eastwood, Thomas Quasthoff, Diablo Cody, Handel's Messiah, Christopher Hitchens, What constitutes a "Jewish" movie, what the 21st century 'classics' are, The Beatles, Occupy Wall Street, Christopher Columbus, my generation, Jewish music, Bach, Sibelius, Lieber & Stoller, the American Prairie, Joseph Epstein, the Orioles, Barack Obama, The Simpsons, Johnny Cash, Jon Stewart, The Producers, Twitter, La Regle du Jeu, Vanya on 42nd Street, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Johnny Cash, Harry Potter, China, and the differences between Baltimore and Washington. I've shared all kinds of details from my private life - the type of which I always poo-poohed when other people did the same. God help me, I've even tried my hand at some fiction. And most amazingly to me, I feel only as though I'm just getting warmed up.

So I suppose it’s fitting that right as I approach the one-year anniversary of my beginning this 800 words thing, I should get hit with a minor case of writer’s block. The whole point of this exercise was to prevent writer’s block. No matter what the quality was, or what the subject, I would issue 800 words a day on whatever topic I could. If I have not managed 800 words a day on whatever subject I like, it’s because my ability to conquer writer’s block turned out to be successful beyond my wildest imaginings.

In the last year, I’ve written 190 of these 800 Words posts, but on average each post is probably about 2000 words long. I’ve had a number of posts that well exceed 4,000 words, and the subjects just keep coming. And that doesn’t even count all the various posts I never finished – at least a quarter of the ones I begin exist in an unfinished state on my computer. How the hell did I write so much?

I hope that when I say ‘writer’s block’ I mean it entirely tongue in cheek because there is no such thing. It’s not that we ‘writers’ should all have endless facility and craft, it’s that to even call myself a writer would be incredibly presumptuous, as I suspect it would be for anyone to define themselves with such a specific identity. For years, writing was something I compulsively did as I pursued other activities. As the failures began to stack up – as a poet, actor, theater director, film director, philosophy student, composer, conductor, violinist, journalist, newspaper critic, political operative, and investor – I couldn’t help noticing that writing was something to which I kept coming back. I began to wonder, what would happen if I just wrote for myself? Just me and a keyboard, no trying to compete with the world, no trying to garner any sense of outward accomplishment. Even if nobody else knew that I was doing something really well, I would know. And thus was this project born.

I could, of course, try something other than self-publishing and attempt to market myself to magazines, newspapers, websites, group blogs, but that runs the risk of another disappointment setting in. No longer would I have the time to do as much writing as possible, and no longer would I be able to keep this part of my life completely separate from all life’s other disappointments. Such an act would be a fool-proof recipe for “writer’s” block.

Growing up, I never set out to be a writer. I wanted to be an orchestra conductor, and over the years I tried my hand at all those professions I listed above with varying degrees of success and less varying degrees of failure. Frankly, my disorganized self was not well-matched for any other calling than this one. Writing is the most basic artform there is, and the most learning disabled person can become a great writer. If you can talk ,you can write; and oh my, how I can talk…

I recently met a rather interesting person at some social functions. Like me, this person is clearly a marathon talker, but he’s also everything I’m not – tall, thin, extraverted, self-confident. Unlike me, he’s clearly supremely good at selling himself and frankly has already gotten me to go to some parties to which I didn’t even want to go. He’s also an accomplished writer, with long articles published in some of the most famous newspapers and magazines in the world. A few days ago, I saw him again and asked how much writing he does aside from what’s published – and his answer, while disappointing, was in no way surprising. The morbid egotism of the writer’s life apparently holds no appeal to him, and he would much prefer a life of action to the isolation which a writer’s life requires.

What sane person wouldn’t prefer a normal life to the writer’s life? No one has an obligation to develop their talents, and if a person is capable of an easier, more enjoyable life by doing something other than creative work, why would they subject themselves to the endless toil, frustration, and misunderstanding which defines an artist’s life? Great artists are made, not born. The talent must be there, but there has to be an endless series of setbacks to make a person believe that retreating to solitary confinement for hours every day to dwell in a private world of their own making is a good idea. ­­­­There has to be a bottomless source of existential angst to make a person want to wrestle with weighty subjects rather than merely entertaining ones. Nobody grapples with the unanswerable questions of existence unless life forces them to do it. For any person to whom life’s been unceasingly kind, the weightiness of life’s real problems is a stupefying bore. Some of these people may become writers, musicians, filmmakers, but they only know how to strive for entertainment, not enlightenment. Their sights are lower and they do not crave a greater understanding of the world, because all they know about it is how to enjoy it.

Whatever I’ve accomplished in the last year on this blog is for other readers to say (if I have any…), but I will be arrogant enough to say that what I do on this blog is art – good art, bad art, it doesn’t matter. I have now done an average of more than 800 words a day on this blog for a whole year and for the first time in my life, I can say with a clear conscience that I am finally an artist.

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800 Words: The Aaron Sorkin Problem - Part 4

Seventy years ago, Aaron Sorkin would have been screenwriter to the giants - a writer who can write eloquent dialogue beyond our wildest imaginings, capable of fusing humor and sadness together as firmly as a diamond; capable in the right mood of Shakespearean eloquence and Chekhovian pathos. Seventy years ago he would have been a  creenwriter of choice to Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Wilder, Cukor, Huston, Minelli, Ray, Sirk, and would have made better movies for them all (Oh dear, I sound like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay).

The studio system was far from perfect, it was a factory which churned out product for a focused grouped audience on schedule. Whether good or bad, the product must come out on time. No envelopes were pushed except by mistake, and studio heads did everything they could to drive difficult talent out from the industry. But Golden Age Hollywood also nurtured talent from cradle to grave - if you exhibited talent, there was always steady employment. In 1935, a young writer with Sorkin’s talent would be personally supervised by Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick, and producers like them would consider it a mission for him to create the best possible product for their pictures. The studio system did not produce most of the greatest movies ever made, but they cared about their product in ways most studios today can never be bothered with, and as a result produced a stunning amount of damn good movies. Some greater movies may have been made later, but so did a lot of far worse ones.

How many contemporary writers of Sorkin’s talent find those types of opportunities? Today’s screenwriters, like everybody else in Hollywood, are free agents; forced to claw their way to the top because there is no mechanism in place to ensure that talent will ever get the opportunity it deserves. And when a talented person is lucky enough to be promoted up the food chain, there are scant people to navigate him on the journey to utilize his talent.

In so many cases, Aaron Sorkin teleplays can be viewed as recreations of the studio system - or any other functional workplace. His shows derive their interest from watching benevolent places where authority figures can always tell us what is right, and derive their danger from less benevolent people standing in their way. Would that Aaron Sorkin worked in the studio system..., a screenwriter and script doctor of genius who could write on order for whatever situation Hawks and Hitchcock demanded.

Aaron Sorkin writes romances about people who do bold, innovative, extraordinary things. Yet the manner in which he writes about them is as artistically timid, conservative, manipulative, and formulaic as words can possibly be. Through television, artists like David Chase, Matthew Weiner, and Larry David may have created the American literature of our age and expanded the capacity of human thought in ways we still can’t imagine. Aaron Sorkin uses his gift to recreate a formula best used seventy years in the past. He is an extraordinary artisan, perhaps the most extraordinary wordsmith on television, ever, or on any screen. Yet like any competent artisan, he is in dire need of a great artist’s guidance.

One can’t help noticing a steady trend in every one of his shows as the reviews get worse and worse. The trend is not the reviews, the trend is the shows, and they’re absolutely steady. Aaron Sorkin has applied precisely the same formula to every show he’s ever done - whether the workplace is a TV show or a political office or an administrative building or some melange of all three, there are absolutely consistent archetypes at work - the brilliant but arrogant young men, their benevolent father figures, the women made ditzy by emotional damage, and...of course...the snivelling moral midgets who remind the other characters that the real world exists. Sorkin’s shows have been almost completely consistent in their brilliance to idiocy ratios - it’s the public that’s finally tiring of it.   

Is The Newsroom really as bad as everybody says? No, it’s not. The first three episodes have some genuinely good moments, but few people can watch it without noticing that the good stands next to moments fully as cringe-inducingly horrible as anything on TV (Studio 60 for example...). No one will ever accolade this show with the plaudits of The West Wing or The Social Network, but it takes an effort to not notice that it’s at least better than terrible....though perhaps not too much.

The entire Sorkin approach is grounded in screwball comedy - the fast paced repartee, the unconsumated sexual tensions, the elegant social mores, this is all the Golden Age Hollywood which anyone can watch in Bringing Up Baby, Some Like It Hot, The Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story. Even The West Wing has its roots in the old Hollywood talkies in which great writers who could never get a novel published tried to fit a script the length of a novel into ninety minutes. But whereas Preston Sturges fit Huck Finn into ninety minutes, Aaron Sorkin could fit Moby Dick. Sorkin isn’t writing screwball comedy, he’s writing eightball comedy (speaking of cringe-inducing...). But the pleasures of verbal sparring seem superficial to most people, it seemed superficial to many people at the time. Many famous classics with this approach used a sermonizing tone to assuage their guilt that perhaps this pleasure of watching people talk fast was too substanceless and morally lax. The result was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 12 Angry Men, On The Waterfront and the entire career of John Wayne. Art, and particularly movies, do not exist to create sermons. Sermons are meant to simplify the world and create the idea of a particular action for the listener to enact. But unlike sermons, art is not a hammer with which to bang society into whatever shape we see fit. Art is about contemplation and making our perception of world more complex, or at least it is in my world. Everyone has reasons to act the way they do, and a worldview which frames characters either as beacons of moral strength or as moral midgets sending us to Sodom and Gemorrah is simplistic at best, and fascist at worst. But if all this is true for the speed of the sounds emanating from Golden-Age Hollywood, how much truer is it for the light speed of an Aaron Sorkin show?

If the talent of Aaron Sorkin can be divided into something similarly simplistic, it would be ‘fair’ to say that the better angels of his talent reside within his sheer verbal enthusiasm. Like Hepburn and Tracy, Bogie and Becall, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Sorkin’s characters exist solely for the sake of verbal sparring.  The entire Aaron Sorkin experience is grounded in the idea that it might be fun to watch His Girl Friday on cocaine; and when the high comes down, it might be nice to put on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington again to put your conscience at ease. Within Sorkin’s personality is a Mozart of dialogue, yet that same brain houses a Jonathan Edwards worth of fire and brimstone.  

...more as this story develops....

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