A Further 600 About Ray Bradbury (Butterfly Effect...)

Having spent most of this workday reading Ray Bradbury (way to go, Evan) in a pathetic effort to cover my tracks and make sure I understood his writing correctly, it occurs to me that Bradbury’s strengths and weaknesses are still more complex than I gave him credit for being. As I’d thought before, Bradbury’s stories are a spectacular torrent of ideas and spectacle, packing more memorable incidents into a single page than many ‘literary’ writers find in an entire career. In reading a large chunk of The Martian Chronicles, I realize that he can also be funny and humanly moving – or at least he was in the book’s first few stories before a germ conveniently wiped all out all the martians – at which point the book reverts to Bradbury’s cool-headed moral parables.

‘Cool-headed’ is an adjective I didn’t touch enough upon in the last post. If you can measure writers by their emotional temperature, everybody would fit on a spectrum – if perhaps Dostoevsky could be considered white hot and Montaigne considered room temperature, then we could consider Ray Bradbury as close to absolute zero as any famous writer. Bradbury is not interested in humans and their predicaments; he’s interested in what humans do. In that sense, I was absolutely wrong yesterday when I wrote that he venerated technology as an absolute good, as anyone could tell you with stories like ‘The Veldt,’ and ‘A Sound of Thunder’ fresh in their heads. Bradbury’s problem is not that he’s overly optimistic about humans, it’s that he’s overly optimistic about knowledge itself and the idea that knowledge can overcome all problems. On the whole, he may be right, but the refusal to acknowledge all the exceptions to that rule is a very serious misstep – is anything truly gained by realizing that your family is actually a simulation created by Martians who will murder you whether or not you try to stop them?

And this leads us one of the oddest problems of sci-fi/fantasy, and of American fiction in general in our day. Millions of people flock to sci/fi fantasy because they crave its largeness of vision, and they (sometimes rightly) equate realist fiction with trivial subject matter about which nobody much cares except for a very small group of literati. But in its own way, the pure strands of science fiction/fantasy can be as limiting to fiction as any realist fiction, and the result in both cases feels uncomfortably claustrophobic, as though the focus is so single-minded on this one issue that we can never feel really liberated by it. Realist fiction’s strength is that its methods are battle-tested, a well built boat which can keep its writers and readers afloat; conceptual fiction’s strength is that it provides a new way of thinking – rather than examining our world, it examines how our world could be different. In the process, conceptual fiction by and large dismisses human concerns; realist fiction by and large dismisses all the others. It’s very difficult in either way of writing to create a vision large enough to make either into great fiction, but then again, that’s why artistic greatness is rare. The very best authors have a largeness of vision that can combine the best of ideas, of spectacle, and yes, of human character in a way that couldn’t possibly bore anyone willing to read them – this is what Shakespeare and Cervantes did four-hundred years ago, it’s what Amos Oz and Ian McEwan (among a number of others I could name) do in our day, and this kind of total vision is ultimately what I think people long for in what they read. 

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800 Contrarian Words about Ray Bradbury

Instantly we’re aboard a frozen ship, thousands of degrees below absolute zero, built with refrigerating capacity that can withstand the most excoriating rays of the sun itself. The ship edges ever closer to the sun, seven-thousand degrees, ten-thousand degrees, ever higher, until the icicles of the ship itself melt, leaving the vessel within a hare’s breath of meltdown, incineration, decompression, or god knows what else. And just when the ship seems on the verge of collapse, the Captain sticks his hand inside a metal glove, and out from the ship’s hull comes a giant replica of this glove that’s kinetically connected to the Captain’s hand. The captain literally scoops up part of the sun with his hand as we would a piece of earth, and puts his piece of sun into a sealed container as we might put sod into a plant pot. Here’s Bradbury:

“The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.”

There are a few lines afteward, but The Golden Apples of the Sun fundamentally ends with one of the most indelible images in any work of fiction I’ve ever read – as unforgettable as any myth or Bible story. Yet after the captain scoops up the sun, the story is practically over. There is no musing about whether or not this is a good or bad development, no personalities involved, nothing except for a terrifyingly beautiful image. To have that image, and then not see what comes afterward is like a literary blue ball. Is there any point to the story?  

…and then it occurs to you to go back to the sentences written just before the unforgettable image:

“My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: Drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man.”

And herein lies a much bigger problem than lack of memorable characters or fully-fleshed ideas. If Ray Bradbury were simply a great purveyor of images, it would be worth the time to read so much more of his output than I actually have. But in the stuff I’ve (attempted to) read, which I can’t imagine is so much less than many of those people who celebrate his work, Bradbury seemed to take it for granted that learning and technology was always on the side of goodness and light, and with enough proper application could tame the baseness of human nature itself. It purported to be a genuinely humanistic outlook, but it was just another form of transhumanism which states that technology will never let us down.  

In this way, he occupied almost precisely the opposite point of view from Kurt Vonnegut, the other pop-culture ‘hero-author’ of their day. Both writers acquired millions of fans who read their books not simply for entertainment but as a kind of secular scripture. Their most devoted readers would not merely see Bradbury and Vonnegut as enlightening authors, but as a kind of enlightment itself. Both writers provided their fans with an entire worldview– which is all the more confusing when one realizes that their opposite points of view were fundamentally taken as gospel by the same readers. But when one lives in 2012 America, Vonnegut and Bradbury don’t seem as far apart as all that. It’s very easy to see that either point of view is absolutely preferable to the combination of religious darkness and blind faith in American power that many rightly fear may engulf our country much more than it already has. But had we lived in the Soviet Union, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t see a certain similarity in Bradbury’s view of technological progress or Vonnegut’s view of human nature’s current state to the Communist Party’s official view. Context is all.

Not that it necessarily matters, but as it happens, Bradbury was fundamentally a conservative. He certainly would not be much of a conservative by present day standards, but he was a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian and one of his favorite movie was Ayn Rand’s screen treatment of her book, The Fountainhead. Unlike the socialist Vonnegut, he believed very deeply in the importance of self-reliance and optimism, and it’s difficult to imagine that his rosy view of mankind didn’t color his books as much as Vonnegut’s  view.

I’m clearly the wrong person for science fiction and fantasy. I listen to my brother Ethan and dozens of friends enthuse for hours upon end about their favorite books of conceptual fiction. They patiently indulge my crippling blind spot and tell me that the right book simply hasn’t come along – some of them are even nice enough to loan me books of their own, and I wish I could repay their debt by telling them that I ever find the books they’ve loaned me worth the trouble they’ve taken to convince me. But for whatever reason, there are so few books of conceptual fiction that do anything for me. Whenever I work up the willpower to read the spectacular scenes of sci-fi and fantasy, I first wonder to myself – what is there on this page that wouldn’t be 100 times more effective in a good movie or TV show? Perhaps my visual imagination is limited, but I could give hundreds of examples of this problem: I barely made it to page 100 of Game of Thrones, yet I watch the TV show with ever growing fascination. At times I still despair that I ever gave 12-or-so hours of my life to J.R.R. Tolkein, yet I have real affection for the Lord of the Rings movies. Hell, I could even just compare Ray Bradbury, whose work leaves me cold, to Star Trek, the existence of which would be impossible without Bradbury’s entire ethos and whose every episode I gobble up hungrily.

I then wonder, does reading really mean so little to us anymore that we have to create cinematic scenes in our books in order to make them worth reading? Even the most well-read among us – and surely there are some who are still much better read than me – read very little fiction in comparison to what people gobbled up 70 years ago (let alone 170). We’ve long since transferred our loyalty to the movies, to television, to internet content – and it’s to these mediums which we turn for truly enlightening entertainment. But there are certain things which only books can do – and one of them is to explain ideas, something which Ray Bradbury did admirably. But another is to get inside the heads of other people, to literally read their thoughts. It’s probably easier to grasp ideas from a single well-written piece of non-fiction than any amount of speculative fiction on the same issue. But to this day, nothing beats fiction at explaining people to each other – their thoughts, their personalities, their souls.

Currently I’m reading books of fiction by two Italian writers from the beginning of the 20^th century, Giovanni Verga and Italo Svevo. Svevo is a brilliant elucidator of ideas, and Giovanni Verga is a creator of spectacular scenes. But both keep these more sensational gifts as a great condiment to the main course, which is to understand the people who populate their stories. Writers like them, like Chekhov, like Bellow, like Tolstoy, are primarily interested explaining the human-ness of their characters. Does this automatically make them better writers? Certainly not, but it does give them a kind of ‘home field advantage’ in that they do what fiction has time and again been proven to do better than anything else.

It takes a very different kind of writer to be particularly attracted to the idea and spectacle drivenness of sci-fi/fantasy than to create stories that realizes the full implications of the characters who populate them.  I have to wonder if the popularity of so much fiction with a lack of memorable characters means that we’re less curious about one another in our era than we were in some previous ones. Surely that isn’t out of the question in this era when facebook and twitter can let us know virtually anything we want about each other. When we can learn anything we want about another person at the click of a button, what reason is there to go out of our way to find it?

Ultimately, the problem of most science fiction and fantasy is the problem of most realist authors too. Life is too complicated, too rich, too dynamic to be contained in a single genre. Sci-fi and fantasy limits existence as much and as little as any other genre, no more, no less. The problem is not this genre, the problem is genre itself.

This narrowness isn’t the only reason for which many major critics condescended to Bradbury, but it is one of them. Critics have ripped Bradbury apart for years for all sorts of reasons – some deserved, some entirely not. On the one hand, they said he wrote bad prose, and that was nonsense – Bradbury wrote gorgeously in a prose style that any number of writers would kill to recapture. They talked down to Bradbury for writing a fiction of ideas yet refused to talk down similarly to realists who wrote a fiction that was similarly one-dimensional. On the other hand, Bradbury’s work is limiting; it’s almost polemic disguised as fiction. It’s one thing to write about ideas, but if your books traffic in ideas, you should explore the implication of every idea to its fullest potential. Ray Bradbury had fantastic ideas, but he usually stopped following his thoughts before the ideas became a reality. 

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800 Words: Wisconsin Recall Thoughts by 2nd Anonymous Guest Blogger

I won't be writing any sentence in all caps, as my argument is meant to be provocative and extreme in every single way.

This whole recall not just mindless partisanship (though it was, since the whole point was to flip the legislature and the governorship instead of beating the bill); it wasn't just unbearably stupid (though it was, since the unions could've guaranteed a higher turnout if they had waited until November with Obama on the ballot); it wasn't just undemocratic (because it came about for the sole purpose of undoing what the 2010 electorate put in place); but it was unrepublican, a term that isn't thrown around often enough nowadays.

The recall mechanism, which is often paired with the reforms of the progressive era in order to provide an electorate a means to remove corrupt officials, is a horrible, dreadful, no-good device that sabotages the very republic upon which we're based.  It, along with its filthy, repugnant cousins Referendum and Initiative, are particularly popular in the West.  Want to ask California how those are holding up, where three-quarters of the budget is determined by initiatives and the legislature has to fight a two-thirds requirement to raise taxes?  All these tools are designed to give the public an end-round alternative around elected legislatures and governors.  Guess what?

We're not a democracy.  Deal with it.  

We elect representatives to make the decisions we, as an electorate, can't make on our own, because we don't have the time or resources to educate ourselves on the proper public policy to weigh benefits and costs, or because we're fucking cowards when it comes to making tough decisions, or because we don't really care.  When we elect them, we make an implicit deal: yes, you can implement the programs you seek to put into place, but if we don't like them, we'll kick you out the next time elections come around.

Also implicit in this bargain: Short of doing something criminal (and getting caught, and convicted), we'll let you see your term through.  

So you know what?  I'm glad he didn't get recalled.  Just like I didn't want Gray Davis to get recalled in 2003 (my first ever time voting).  You know why?  Because as big of a flabby dick as Scott Walker is, he's still an elected official, and that means he gets to push through the legislature whatever he can get away with it.  If the people of Wisconsin don't like it, kick his ass out when his term is up.

Not before.  Living in a republic means that representatives shouldn't have to live and die based on public opinion polls (no matter how much Frank Luntz would love them to).  They get a little breathing room when it comes to their actual elected positions.  I'm not saying we have to shut up and take it, or that we can't organize against a piece of legislation, or that we can't organize to replace his allies in the legislature with others when their terms come up.  

But no.  I'm drawing a line when it comes to actually removing them from their positions because we disagree with something they're trying to do.  If it's unconstitutional, the courts will strike it down.  If it's unworkable, the electorate will replace him and his ilk with those who will move to restore what he cut.

If this line isn't good enough for you, you should move to eliminate the whole republican system and move for a 50 percent plus one vote for everything.  Because that's the only natural solution for recalls that will assuage the mob rule mentality being tossed around so brazenly in the name of social justice.

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800 Words: Wisconsin Recall Thoughts by Anonymous Guest Blogger

I'm sitting here in Everytown, USA on a cool night after 4 straight days of rain, more distracted from the basketball playoffs than usual, and thinking about Wisconsin and all of its broader implications. There will be a lot of noise, from the pro-Walker side, the anti-Walker side, and most obnoxiously from pundits who view elections the way a 14 year old views a video game. My suggestion to the more refined minds who read this blog is that we all step back, take a deep breath, and calmly examine the matter. Or we can just YELL AND SCREAM AND SEND ANGRY MESSAGES TO EACH OTHER IN ALL CAPS. Whatever works.

My thoughts, listed in numerical format but not necessarily in order of importance:

1) Walker's win has minimal, if any, implications for the 2012 Presidential Election.
    The same exit polling that led the networks to call the election for Walker showed Obama winning decisively amongst the same electorate. Why is that? Do voters just like the status quo? It's probably not that simple. First, the recall was - literally and figuratively - a referendum on Scott Walker, an extremely polarizing figure in only one state. His approval ratings in all polls have been 50/50. When it came to Walker, Wisconsin was truly a state divided. And Obama didn't factor much into the equation at all, except for in the enthusiasm of some of Walker's most ardent right-wing supporters. 

2) Walker's win was partially influenced by the strange dynamics of a recall.    Recalls are weird. And they're rare. Scott Walker was only the third governor in American history to face a recall election. Yes, he was also the first to survive said recall, but the fact that he even faced it is significant. And still, the fact of a recall is viewed with some trepidation by voters. Chuck Todd tweeted tonight that 60% of voters surveyed in the exit polls opined that public officials should only by recalled in instances of official misconduct. To be honest, they're probably right to feel this way. Ask most people, and they'll tell you that elections have consequences, and if you don't like those consequences vote them out when the time comes again. I despise Scott Walker (more on that later), and would have not only voted for Barrett tonight but volunteered for him, but direct democracy can be a fishy thing. 

3) When one candidate outraises and outspends the other by an 8-1 margin, that candidate usually wins    Not much I can add to that. This is simply a fact. 

4) On a related note, Goliath rarely loses.
     You will be shocked to learn that I agree with Jonathan Chait's take. It wasn't just all of the money that Walker raked in. Walker understood the principle that in politics, sometimes brute force wins out. He wins a close race in 2010. He sees an opportunity to give himself some breathing room by busting up a key element of his opposition - public sector unions. So he busted the union. In the process of busting the union he exempts police and fire (unlike in Ohio), understanding that doing so would look better politically and maybe even move a section of the enemy to his camp. He broke them, and thus when the backlash came his opponent had shattered kneecaps. And that's not all. He also participated in the nationwide GOP effort to disenfranchise voters. He rams an onerous photo ID bill through the legislature...and then closed several DMVs in traditionally Democratic parts of Wisconsin. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's a fact (and it's happening all over the country; the worst current case being Florida). These factors don't fully explain the result, but they play a major role. But then again, so does this...

5) Scott Walker's ideas were not broadly unpopular.

    This is one of the most uncomfortable facts for me. I have read some of the polls from the past week from this race, including the one conducted by Marquette University. The voters surveyed don't generally like Walker's approach...but they liked a lot of what he is trying to accomplish. Voters don't like his style, his bullying, his embarassing outbursts...but...they think they know someone who is cheating public assistance. But...they're not doing so great economically meanwhile these damn state workers get solid salaries and excellent benefits, and they've stood in line at the DMV and clearly those workers don't deserve it more than they do...

In other words, resentment runs deep. It's there, and its a major factor for all political actors, especially those on the liberal side, to deal with. Good pivoting can get these voters to prioritize something else above these resentments (like job creation or something else deemed more important), but the resentment is there. And for someone driven by resentment, Walker seems like a hero. Someone who is "doing what needs to be done." It doesn't matter that they cannot point to what kind of a tangible impact these policies will have in their lives. Voting behavior is strongly influenced by emotion.

6) "The object of power is power." ~George Orwell

What do we mean when we talk about being pro-business? What do we mean when we talk about "working families?" What do we mean when we talk about "union thugs?" We are ultimately talking about power relationships. How equal is power distributed in a relationship? Who has the upper hand? Who controls whom?

This is the broader dynamic and the broader implication of the Wisconsin recall. For all of the empty pundit talk that apparently thinks the only thing that matters is red and blue trendlines, the fact is that elections - again - have consequences. Real-world, bread and butter consequences for real people. These consequences do not appear to be of much interest to the Meet the Press hacks of the world. 

The resentment I spoke of above plays out in many ways: ugly scapegoating, backlash attitudes, and resignation. Private sector workers who have seen their wages go down while costs for things like health care (most of the Affordable Care Act is not in place yet), food, gas, etc have gone up. They resent union workers for the comparatively stronger salaries and benefits they have...so they focus their anger on unions. When in reality, what they could use is...a union. 

Yes, there are plenty of examples in history of union officials behaving badly. Greed, corruption, thuggery, etc. But the history of bad behavior in the labor movement is no more insidious than the history of bad behavior in business. All one needs to do is look at the Gilded Age, or frankly to September 2008, to see this. Where there are humans, there is bad behavior.

Getting that out of the way - the principle of unionism is collective bargaining. That in solidarity as a bargaining unit, workers can exercise more power than they can when left to their own devices. Without it, in most cases management can simply run roughshod over employees. Employees are still employees, but union employees cannot be abused. A union would have been nice for the 100 or so people who worked at the Lowe's in Everytown USA - which closed suddenly, with many employees finding out via a sign on the door when they showed up for their shifts one day. A union would be nice for loggers in my state - who hold one of the most dangerous jobs in the world for long hours and crap pay. Their conditions are like this because the Canadian timberlands owner of most land in my state forced these loggers to become independent contractors - thus no collective bargaining. To make matters even worse they bring in Canadian workers illegally because they're cheaper (the whole universal health care thing helps). The result? Depression. Proud people feeling beaten down without recourse. 

What the people funding groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity want is control and autonomy. They want to do what they want to whom they want with impunity. Measures like union busting that give them more power means they can get more of what they want. It's not about freedom for a society; or freedom for individuals. They don't much care about the freedom of individuals besides themselves. It's what leads people like that insufferable Facebook co-founder to move to a State like Singapore. You don't move to Singapore if you're interested in freedom. You do this if you are a petulant child who doesn't understand that you can't always get what you want. 

I am not anti-business. Hell, I would love to see a lot more businesses in downtown Everytown USA. But I am against absolute power, because it corrupts. As Orwell says, you seek power so that you can obtain power, so that you can use it. That's why it corrupts, because it is both the means and the ends. It's why a well-regulated economy that balances out the various power-seeking interests of the world tends to result in the most individual freedom. I hope we can move back in that direction. 

There is an analysis I like about Wal Mart's business model - choke out the economies of various local areas so much that people can only afford to shop at Wal Mart. Is this freedom? I don't think so. 

--
So there you have it. I don't think Walker surviving the recall will have a tangible impact on the Presidential race. It's not even a death blow to the American labor movement. We shouldn't forget that organized labor stood up in Ohio just last year and successfully repealed a law that was even more repressive and anti-worker than the one Walker passed. But it does hurt for those of us who believe in basic fairness and freedom (both in the ACLU sense and in the sense of FDR's Four Freedoms). It hurts because the Koch brothers are toasting another conquest. And it hurts because Wisconsin's teachers, DOT road crews, social workers, public health professionals, business developers, and all other types of workers in the public sector have seen their living situation worsened, their power diminished, and their morale destroyed. These are people like my mother-in-law (a kindergarten teacher). The quality of service from the public sector in Wisconsin will be worse for this. And we are all worse for it. 

Because Scott Walker understands power.

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800 Words: Culture of Offense

Jason Alexander is not Michael Richards, after spending my youth watching Seinfeld on loop, I can tell you definitively that Michael Richards is an actor who does everything on instinct. There is not a moment when he even thinks what he’s doing, the ideas simply pour out of him as though he’s a vessel for a talent larger than himself. But while Michael Richards doesn’t even consider planning his ideas a moment in advance, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and particularly Jason Alexander are actors who consider every possible shade of line-reading and gesture, and go with the one they think is best only after long thought.

When you look at their respective reactions to scandals in which they used offensive language, the reaction is utterly telling. Michael Richards was dumbfounded in the face of his instinct going awry - appearing on Letterman to give a dead-eyed apology which no one took seriously. The same instinct which twenty years ago made him appear the essence of laid-back hipsterdom made him take off like a rocket when faced with the slightest pressure. Is Michael Richards really racist? The only answer that does his personality credit is to say: absolutely, at least at the moment he uttered those words.

But Jason Alexander is a very different person. Last week, when appearing on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Alexander used the word ‘gay’ to describe a sport, cricket, as something effeminate – a description which most of us have probably used at one point or another in our lives without a second thought to whom it might hurt. He was called on it by fans for using it offensively, and used the as a lynchpin for a 1000-word apology in which he expressed solidarity with the gay community and traced the entire stereotype back to its origin. Jason Alexander is clearly a thoughtful person, but I can’t help wondering…

Is this a sincere apology, and if it isn’t, should it be?

As far as stereotypes go, Jason Alexander’s offense was clearly an offense, but it was at the lowest possible level, barely even meriting a mention except apparently on twitter. Now, one would expect that a Seinfeld star would be particularly sensitive to this kind of trouble after what Michael Richards did, and one can’t doubt that if you’re going to apologize, the way Alexander handled it was the best possible way. But the end result of this is that Mr. Alexander will not be vilified, he will instead be congratulated on his thoughtfulness and sensitivity, get his name back in the press, with the hope that it will lead to an offer for a new TV show or starring role on Broadway.

Jason Alexander is not Michael Richards, and compared to what Michael Richards did, his offense was so bland that it barely merited a second thought by all but a few people.

All over our lives, we hear stories of famous people saying the same offensive things we hear on a daily basis from various people in our lives, and we pretend to be shocked and appalled that these people we don’t know would say something so awful. What could the end result of this be but people on television growing ever more circumspect in what they allow themselves to say. It’s one of the terrible ironies of today’s America that the same PR consultants who are hired to manage un-politically correct gaffes are the same firms who enable politicians and corporate executives to hide their true intentions behind mountains of bullshit. We can’t have it both ways, either we want our public figures to speak their minds in public, or we don't. And since we don't, we live with the consequences of a society where no media outlet feels compelled to make powerful people speak their true thoughts.

And if you still think that eliminating offensive language is a total good for our society, look at a simple case like Mel Brooks. A living legend he may be, but he got there by making fun of Jews, Women, Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, Catholics, Hippies, Hillbillies, the Irish, and countless others – and he did so because he realizes what only true comedic greats do: even in its most benevolent form, humor is an expression of superiority and relief. Just as we’ve evolved to cry when we require protection, we’ve evolved to laugh when we realize we need none. If it doesn’t hurt someone else, it ain’t funny. In his two greatest films (The Producers and Blazing Saddles), Brooks respectively uses every offensive situation imaginable against Jews and Blacks. But anyone with a modicum of sense realizes that he's not using racial stereotypes to portray either Jews or Blacks negatively - he's using racial stereotypes to negatively portray those who use racial stereotypes. 

But if a comedy writer started out today with Brooks’s brand of humor, (s)he wouldn’t even be allowed to write a sitcom pilot. In the Obama era, Mel Brooks is a bigger legend than ever – a symbol of how offensive humor can be used to bring people together and throwback to the brief era between the Production Code breaking down and the advent of Political Correctness when people could make fun of whomever they wanted without fear of retribution. Mel Brooks’s best movies and comedy routines are still amazing because they have a liberating power; a power which allows us to laugh at all the things that are now forbidden to us. When a woman in an elevator accosted Mel Brooks and told him she thought The Producers was vulgar, Brooks replied “Lady, the movie rises below vulgarity.” Forty-five years ago, Mel Brooks could make comedies in Hollywood which dared to suggest that stupid people still live among us who think Hitler was a great man, or that people who love John Wayne films are nostalgic for an American era that considered blacks an inferior race. Today, Dan Harmon gets fired from Community, the utterly unique (if slightly overrated) sitcom he birthed and ran for three years, merely because he offended Chevy Chase and speaks his mind in public too often on the internet.  

We live in a culture of offense – no matter what interest group we belong to, we all feel entitled to take offense when someone says something that isn’t to our liking. In many ways, it’s probably a step forward from the era when bullies could say whatever they like to any minority with impunity. But before long, Political Correctness can harden into Newspeak no less dangerous than that which exists under any authoritarian regime, and no matter how bad their intentions, people bland enough to never give offense can rise to power, while no matter how good their intentions, people interesting enough to sometimes give offense can be barred from success. We've already seen the beginnings of how this problem takes effect on media outlets as diverse as Fox News and al-Jezeera, both of whom exploit the culture of offense stir up resentments against causes for which nobody should take offense. Because if we even give an inch wiggle room to people looking for a way to exploit us, the bullies will always find it. 

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800 Words: More Cultural Heresies on Composers (1700-1900)

-          By and large, Bach’s instrumental music – dominated by his unmatchable sense of form - is almost infinitely more interesting than his vocal/choral music, which can ramble as long as he likes and seems to need obscure theological interpretations to be taken seriously for analysis.

-          Bach’s keyboard music is too nuanced for the harpsichord, too linear for the piano. To be a great Bach player, you either need to play the harpsichord as though it were a piano (Landowska) or play the piano as though it were a harpsichord (Gould).

-          The greatest of Bach’s major choral works is the St. John Passion – anti-semitism or none, it’s the only one of his largest-scale works which hangs together dramatically and doesn’t feel like he inserted forty-five minutes (or more) of filler between bouts of inspiration.

-          There is no way to make the St. Matthew Passion hang together dramatically. You either have to cut it severely or accept that there will be dull points and let the spirituality of its best moments shine forth to make the lesser numbers worth listening to.

-          Nothing does Vivaldi more damage than the gentile, restrained, “English” manner of performing Baroque music. His music is a voluptuous sensory assault and can only be performed by musicians with fire in their veins.

-          No composer has suffered more dilution in quality from performers in the recorded era than Handel - truly sympathetic performers of his music are absolute rareties in the classical music world of our day. Handel requires absolute seat of the pants spontaneity, a willingness by conductors to rearrange the music for every run of a show, a willingness by performers to improvise new embellishments at every performance. Handel would have demanded no less from the performers of his own day, and without that commitment his music falls utterly flat.

-          CD’s of singers singing excerpts from Baroque operas are almost guaranteed to be more interesting than recordings of whole operas.

-          Haydn is still scandalously underrated in the canon – the true father of classical music in its dominant period – the absolute master of the classical symphony, the string quartet, and the piano trio. In order to truly surpass Haydn, Mozart had to add an instrument to each of these combinations.

-          The smooth sostenutos of the nineteenth century are a world apart from Haydn, who for all his court refinement retained the roughness of his peasant roots for his entire career.

-           If the Early Music movement has done one true service to music, it’s to put Haydn back on the map as a real composer and not a classical-era lightweight to toss off in concert before the ‘real’ music.

-          The Magic Flute, while for the most part truly amazing, is overrated in the Mozart canon. More than any other Mozart opera, we have no idea how it was meant to be presented, what allegory it was meant to represent, and the character of Tamino is a flat-out bore. On the other hand, The Abduction from the Seraglio is utterly underrated – a miracle from first bar to last.

-          Stop making corrections to the Requiem, we’re never going to do better than Sussmayr did for it, and some of Sussmayr’s added music is good enough to wonder if Mozart actually had a hand in composing it.

-          Mozart meant for the tempos of his operas, by and large, to be far slower than the tempos we standardly hear, let alone the zippiness of the period instrument crowd. He was wrong.

-          When Mozart writes ‘piano’, play it like Mozart. When Mozart writes ‘forte’, play it like Beethoven.

-          The Marriage of Figaro is the second-most perfect work of art in existence. You do not tamper with perfection: do not perform it too fast, do not make sudden lurches in tempo, do not overact, and for god’s sake DO NOT CUT BASILIO AND MARCELLINA’S ARIAS!

-          Don Giovanni on the other hand sprawls uncontrollably and cannot be performed fast enough. If you don’t feel your pulse go up by the time the Commendatore dies, it’s going to be a long night.

-          Period instruments work just as well in classical repertoire as non-period instruments, no better, no worse. The most important factor is the musician holding the instrument.

-          Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is a greater symphony than the Fifth, which is pretty damned great itself.

-          If Haydn were played correctly more often by more people, there would be no condescending to Beethoven’s lighter pieces as ‘Haydnesque.’

-          Beethoven intentionally set his metronome marks beyond the realm of playability, and even the fastest and most technically able performances can’t consistently maintain his fastest speeds. Most of the metronome markings are not meant to be followed literally. Rather, they are some of the many warnings and system-shocks in Beethoven scores designed to drag the musician out of his complacency – lest he elect to play everything at a comfortable Giulini speed.

-          Give Fidelio a break. For all its problems, it’s pretty awesome.

-          Approximating the metronome marks (or something thereabout) is crucial in the more ”Haydnesque” Beethoven symphonies (1,2,4,&8), which otherwise sound like inferior works (and are absolutely not). In the bigger symphonies, do whatever the hell you want long as it’s convincing.

-          If you’re going to go for the metronome marks, don’t try to be precise, you won’t be and you’ll only inhibit the musicians (yet another reason Herman Scherchen is awesome).

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No pianist has ever done all 32 sonatas well. No pianist can.

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          Just as the metronome mark in the first movement of the Hammerklavier sonata is ludicrous, there’s no reason to extend the slow movement well past 20 minutes. Just as there’s no reason a conductor has to play the first two movements of Beethoven’s 9^th at breakneck speed, there’s no reason to slow the third movement down to complete stasis. The ideology of how great music is performed is not more important than the content of how the music’s performed, and dogma makes people do all sorts of weird things they’d otherwise never stomach.

Beethoven has all sorts of passages, particularly in his late works, that have to be played as though they were improvised. It isn't just inadvisable, in a few cases it's downright impossible to play them as written.

-          If you’re thinking about harmonic rhythm in classical-era repertoire, your priorities are misplaced. Other things matter much more, like RHYTHM(!).

-          Rossini’s not supposed to be funny, he’s supposed to be fun.

-          Schubert does not sound like Beethoven, bad performances of Schubert sound like Beethoven.

-          Schubert is a better composer when you don’t understand German (as I do on occasion…).

-          By all means over-interpret Schubert lieder, but if the poetry sucks, best not to draw attention to it.

-          In 49 pieces out of 50, Schubert’s melody is absolutely continuous, if you shift the tempo, you disrupt the melody.

-          Playing Schubert late sonatas at a super-slow tempo does not make your playing more profound. It just makes people question whether your technique sucks.

-          If you’re a conductor trying to make Berlioz into a great classicist with an amazing sense of form and balance, you’ve missed the point.

-          If you say that it’s a refreshing change to hear Berlioz done by a smaller orchestra, you’re missing the point.

-          If you play Mendelssohn with lots of rubato and a huge sound, you’ve completely missed the point.

-          Given the evidence that is Elijah, had Mendelssohn lived longer, Mendelssohn might have moved wholeheartedly into bombastic Wagner territory.

-          Schumann was a crazy person, stop playing his music like he was sane.

-          Do not take any of Schumann’s instructions seriously. For all we know, Clara Schumann wrote them all in – and she clearly had different ideas about his music than Robert.

-          All of Schumann’s most interesting orchestral music is still rarely performed.

-          Change the orchestration, don’t change it, nobody cares.

-          Within half a bar, you can tell a great Schumann pianist from a mediocre one.

-          If as a musician you don’t have the patience to play the same thing so many thousands of times that you think you understand it perfectly, you probably won’t understand Schumann.

-          Chopin is perfect, do not interpret Chopin.

-          The shorter the Chopin piece, the more amazing it is. Why spoil the perfection with another perfect Chopin piece right afterward?

-          Listening to Liszt was a lot more fun when nobody took him seriously as a composer.

-          Wagner’s anti-Semitism is not a valid reason to dislike his music. His antipathy to Jews was merely a symptom of the problem, which was his disgusting egotism.

-          Wagner’s music is bombastic in a manner completely different than the stereotype of Wagner’s bombast. His ego allowed him inflate his operas well past the length they merit, to write his own dreary librettos (text), and control his musical language to the point that he kills his own momentum to squeeze in as many leitmotivs as possible. He was very much a genius, but less talented composers were far greater artists. Occasionally seeing his operas is as close as I ever want to get to living in a totalitarian regime.

-          Wagner’s music is best performed with cuts, generally fast but with widely variable tempos, and with singers who can actually sing the music instead of bleating it.

-          Verdi and Wagner both have suffered in recent generations due to the simple fact that perhaps 10% of the singers who perform them at major opera houses can reliably sing their music properly anymore. Such is history’s way.

-          Dear conductors, if a singer tells you how to perform something in Verdi, do exactly the opposite.

-          Dear singers, if the conductor says he’s doing it this way because it’s what Verdi wrote, quit.

-          If you’re not willing to monkey around with Bruckner scores to give him the tempo changes, edition mixing, and occasional scoring changes he needs, stay away, stay far away.

-          When it’s good, Faust is so good that it’s a shame the rest is so terrible.

-          How is Ma Vlast not performed everywhere all the time?

-          There are three ways to perform Brahms: like Mendelssohn, like Wagner, and like Brahms. Only one of them is right.

-          The way we can tell that our era is in permanent decline is that Brahms is not as frequently performed as he once was.

-          If the performance of A German Requiem is over 70 minutes long, you should have left after the first ten.

-          Beethoven is fire, Mozart is wind, Schumann is water, Brahms is earth.

-          Saint-Saens should have spent his entire career writing pieces like Carnival of the Animals.

-          How great is Carmen? It’s one of the few slender works that survives fat performances: fat singers, fat orchestras, fat sets. That’s how great Carmen is.

-          There is no correct edition of Boris Godunov or any other major Mussorgsky piece, you simply play what you think sounds right.

-          Russian operas are the only 19^thcentury operas in which you’re still guaranteed to get a first-class performance when you go to the opera.

-          Tchaikovsky never wrote a greater symphony than his first. From then on, his greatest music (with a few exceptions) is found in his operas and ballets.

-          The last three symphonies are great in their way (particularly the fourth), but it’s a little bit like listening to a drunk couple fight at the next table over.

-          If Brahms is earth, Dvorak is the flowers that grow from the earth.

-          Dvorak is a towering master who never gets enough credit because is, unfortunately, not quite a complete master of form. Who cares?

-          The most beautiful single movement of music I know is the slow(est) movement of Dvorak’s Dumky Trio.

-          Dvorak’s 8^th Symphony is still greater than either the 7^th or the New World symphonies.

-          I take it back, the three most extraordinary giants of the 19^th century were Beethoven, Schumann, and Dvorak – there is no sentiment those three were incapable of expressing.

-          Rimsky-Korsakov should have stopped editing Mussorgsky’s music and just written more showpieces.

-          Brahms was right, Hans Rott’s Symphony is a pretty awful piece of music.

-          The greatest violin concerto ever written is by Edward Elgar.

-          Elgar was a wonderful composer in dire need of a good editor.

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-          If a Mahler conductor talks about the dangers of ‘overstating’ Mahler, he’s not a Mahler conductor worth listening to.

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Anyone who says Pelleas et Melisande is a fascinating opera is lying.

-          Debussy wrote some towering music, but could not write more than ten minutes at a time without his concentration ebbing (which is longer than Chopin could go).

-          There is a difference in Debussy between watery and water-logged.

-          Strauss tone poems are amazing pieces of music in the same way that pinball is an amazing game.

-          If you take Strauss’s music seriously, he is dead on arrival. If you play his tone-poems as the greatest showpieces ever written, he is perhaps the most fun composer to pick up a pen.

-          Salome and Elektra are dumb, Der Rosenkavalier is a jewel – Strauss spent the rest of his opera career waging a battle between these two poles.

-          The worst thing to happen to Sibelius was that he became appreciated as a composer.

-          Rachmaninov’s compositions are entirely too well-written to be great music.

-          Ravel is every bit as mechanical as Prokofiev, yet he’s everything Prokofiev is not. Ravel delights, Prokofiev burns.

-          Appreciation of Vaughan Williams is a sanity test. If you’re not moved by the fifth symphony or the Five Mystical Songs, I question your membership in the human race.

-          If one needs any proof of Schoenberg’s sometime brilliance, simply watch how many people are horrified by it a century after it was written.

-          Bartok‘s music is awesome, and oh how I wish it expressed more.

-          Bartok’s string quartets, the most fantastically aggressive pieces of music in the classical canon, are still played with kid gloves.

-          There is no sane reason to take more than 8 minutes in the first movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.

-          Stravinsky’s greatest works are Petrushka and Les Noces – the only two works in which his true self is completely revealed. His music was never again quite so extraordinary.

-          Szymanowski is a great colorist often mistaken for a great composer, the accusation that is usually leveled at Debussy is true for him.

-          Webern clearly had an amazing ear for sound, but he put it in the service of the most stupidly puritanical aesthetic imaginable. This is a man who could have written like an Austrian Debussy, but instead wrote three and a half hours of music over the course of his career, music so subtle as to be non-existent.

-          Berg is the true genius of the Second Viennese School. Had he outlived Schoenberg, atonality might have integrated itself into the wider world of music instead of becoming a destructive cancer that helped to turn classical music into a cult.

-          Prokofiev’s music is for the most part shrill, mechanical, and unpleasant. If I want well-designed neo-classicism, please give me Bohuslav Martinu.

-          Why do people listen to Darius Milhaud?

-          Frank Martin is a sleeping dragon waiting to be discovered.

-          Not everything he wrote was equally great, but Arthur Honegger is arguably another giant of the 20^th century. The fact that the symphonies are not performed all the time is one of the great faults of modern orchestral life.

-          In the next fifty years, all Gershwin’s musicals will move into the opera house, and he will take his deserved place at the top of the heap with Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss (hopefully Janacek and Britten will go with him, but I’m not holding my breath)

-          Poulenc’s music is beautiful, but I’m not sure it’s great.

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Chopin is Perfect

Chopin is perfect. Don't interpret him, don't over-think him, don't listen to him too much, just take a warm bath in three minutes of his music once a day and your life will be twice as meaningful.

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