800 Words: What Inspires You (My Answer) Part 4

Glossary of Inspirations: C (part 2)

Cavalleria Rusticana - I have a dirty little secret. Short of Otello and Falstaff, I wonder if I don’t prefer Cavalleria Rusticana - that shabby shocker of vendetta opera - to all of Verdi. I love Verdi, but in its trashy little way, Cavalleria Rusticana is perfection itself. A masterpiece of melodrama that only the most perceptive conductors do justice to - Bernstein, Mitropoulos, Karajan, the composer himself. It should say something hugely significant that such good conductors were attracted to this one-hit wonder by a composer nobody ever hears much about otherwise. Indeed, it seems to require a great conductor to speak to us as it should. Under most conductors, it’s played far too fast and choppily. The score indicates it should go much slower than most conductors ever have the balls to take it. A sin that conductors commit so often in opera - as a rule of thumb, most orchestral pieces are taken too slowly, and most operas too quickly. I honestly don’t know anything else by Mascagni, but this is clearly the Sicily from which Francis Ford Coppola built his vision of The Godfather and the Sicily which Giovanni Verga conjures so vividly in his short stories. Listen to the first fifteen minutes. Immediately, you understand the sun-stroked lusts, rages, superstitions, and the endless capacity for self-destruction that was (is?) Sicily and why so many southern Italians were desperate to come over to America. Given that this was the archetypal verismo opera which so many Italians who came to America in the late-19th and early 20th century truly cherished, it’s even possible to view Cavalleria Rusticana as a great work of American art.

Chailly - During the two years of my late childhood when my early childhood ambition to be a conductor slaked, I decided that I wanted to be a baseball manager. It was basically the same job, only it was a more socially acceptable ambition for a ten-year-old. According to Tony La Russa, a great manager is ‘deep.’ That doesn’t mean he reads Schopenhauer, it means that he thinks obsessively about how his lineup on Monday will affect him next Thursday. He thinks about how a starter’s pitch count will affect another pitcher’s performance in two months. He thinks about the eight possible plays he can call with runners on first and third and every possible combination of players. If managing a baseball team is like conducting an orchestra (and I think it is), then no conductor of our time goes ‘deeper’ than Riccardo Chailly. Though his performances can be incredibly exciting, I don’t think anyone would point to him as the most inspiring or most spontaneous musician; but he is the most probing, the most rigorous, and the most prepared. No conductor of our time seems to know scores better and reliably push so hard for exactly what’s written in so many different varieties of repertoire. No conductor suits his gestures to the music and to his players more accurately. And of the few who’ve been able to operate on his level, none of them have been so un-tyrannical. If there is a by the book method of what conductors are supposed to do, then perhaps no conductor in recorded history has ever done a more exemplary job than Riccardo Chailly.

Cheers - Y’know, I could explain that this was the second most perfect comedy ever made on television after Seinfeld, and with many, many more warm fuzzies (EARNED warm fuzzies!!!) than Seinfeld ever had. But instead, I’m just going to leave a bunch of clips to explain all this to readers who are slightly younger than me and therefore ever so slightly too young to have caught Cheers during its run or when it was in regular syndication...

It's Time To Go

The Slap and Nose Grab Fight

Sam and Rebecca Bed Scene

Norm and Cliff - Lollipop

Cliff’s Electric Button

Woody and Kelly encounter a Lutheran problem

Sam & Diane at Diane’s Apartment

Cliff on Jeopardy

Cliff and the Shiny Shoes

The Guys Play Monopoly

Sam argues with an Umpire

Lilith Kisses Frasier

Frasier’s Suicide Attempt

Sam and Rebecca Want a Baby

Sam at Sex Addiction Therapy

Sam and Diane Goodbye

Magic.

Chris Marker -

I have a split mind about Chris Marker. I have seen the barest fraction of his output and what I’ve seen is, for the most part, not very good. But I’m not so closed minded that I haven’t noticed the formation of a completely new language, a cinematic language that can convey information, concepts, an organizing principle, and a point of view. Film is so devastatingly effective at conveying emotion that next to it, the written word doesn’t stand a chance. Film has almost completely subsumed fiction as the most effective vehicle for fiction. But non-fiction and the essay are the arena in which the written word reign in supreme victory over any filmed method, just think of the most influential books of the years since World War II, after a few works of fiction, I draw a blank: 1984 and Animal Farm, The Stranger, Darkness at Noon, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Doctor Zhivago, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart, The Tin Drum, The Satanic Verses, Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera... what other works of high fiction ever inflamed even a reasonable segment of the world’s middlebrow imaginations? And more than half of these works owe their popularity almost as much to their thematic content as they do their of fictional vividness. The rest of the books which inflamed the wider literary public are almost all non-fiction - Understanding Media, The Medium is the Message,  Art and Illusion, The Story of Art, The Shock of the New, Ways of Seeing, Sexual Behavior and the Human Male, The Joy of Sex, Sexual Personae, The Conscience of a Conservative, The Conservative Mind, The End of History, The Clash of Civilizations, The Liberal Imagination, Syntactic Structures, The Civil War, The Guns of August, The Fatal Shore, The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Closing of the American Mind, The Road to Serfdom, The Virtue of Selfishness, Working, Hard Times, Capitalism and Freedom, Orientalism, Unsafe at Any Speed, No Logo, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, The Executioner’s Song, In Cold Blood, Notes on Camp, Being and Nothingness, Mythologies, The Plague, The Rebel, The Wretched of the Earth, Discipline and Punish, The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, The Female Eunuch, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Origins of Totalitarianism, Manufacturing Consent, A People’s History of the United States, Fast Food Nation, Doors of Perception, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Why We Can’t Wait, Guns Germs and Steel, The Mismeasure of Man, The Double Helix, The Selfish Gene, The Lives of a Cell, Six Easy Pieces, The Feynmen Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, A Brief History of Time, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, The Affluent Society, The Making of the President, The Best and Brightest, The True Believer, The Vital Center, The Imperial Presidency, A Theory of Justice, The Open Society and its Enemies, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Baby and Child Care, Alcoholics Anonymous, Darkness Visible, The Gulag Archipelago, Diary of a Young Girl, 

If This Be a Man,

Shah of Shahs, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, The Elements of Style, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - next to this by no means extensive sampling of important non-fiction books which have had immeasurable impacts on our lives, what are their fictional equivalents which inflamed the world? Forget the ‘high canon’ of writers like Joyce, Proust, Woolf et al,  barely read or even acknowledged by a wider literary public. The biggest printed fiction influence upon our lives is conceptual (Asimov, Ballard, Borges, Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Delany, Philip K. Dick, Gaiman, William Gibson, Heinlein, LeGuin, Leiber, Lem, George R. R. Martin, Murakami, Rowling, Corwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, Tolkein, Van Vogt, Jules Verne, Vonnegut, DFW, and H. G. Wells... among others...) whose authors feel the need to alter the rules of reality itself in order to make a sustained impression upon us.

We live in a very literate time, but literature is no longer thought by many people as an effective form of entertainment. Literature is now defined as the conveyance of information like any spreadsheet, and no amount of good documentaries have ever replaced the written word as the most effective receptacle for its delivery. Sure, there’s Ken Burns and the BBC, but they’re so grounded in literary models that they don’t seem to show the way forward. And yes, we have Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, but they had to derive their methods from somewhere, and that somewhere is Chris Marker. Yes, the form is highly literate, but it’s modernist literature in a different bottle - a perfect stream of consciousness that simply isn’t possible on the page. The style is so grounded in the form of movies, and yet so casual that it’s like watching the thought process itself. Are those thoughts he expresses as deep as he clearly believes they are? I’m not sure. But even if they’re not, he’s shown the way for real thinkers to express themselves through a medium much more dynamic than the printed page.

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800 Words: What Inspires You - My Answer (Part 3)

A Glossary of Inspirations: C. (Part I)

Cal - I was thirteen when Ripken broke the streak (2131 games in a row). It was a momentous day in Baltimore, but there was absolutely nothing exciting about the process. It’s only now that I’m older which I realize just how momentous that event was. Just what kind of presence of mind does it take to stay in a city and team gone to rot? This is why no ballplayer has ever meant more to their city than Cal did to us. In years when this city had no hope, Cal was our one constant. He was a shepherd for a flock gone awry.

Camus - What a difference there was between Sartre, the idiot smarty-pants who wrote incomprehensible prose and never met a totalitarian system he couldn’t praise at the expense of democracy, and Camus, whose no nonsense flat prose (which, admittedly, can sometimes be as dry as Sartre’s) disguised one of the keenest most common-sensical minds of the 20th century. There were two main differences between Camus and Sartre. Though he spent adolescence in the southwest,  Sartre was practically born to the privilege of Alsace protestants and the vagaries of German philosophy, his mother was a close cousin to Albert Schweitzer and his family was from precisely the upper bourgeoisie which he inveighed against so often. Camus hailed from a dirt-poor Algerian family. When the Algerian war occurred, the difference was as clear as ever: Sartre knew little about Algeria, supported the entirety of the rebellion and did not hesitate to point an alabaster finger at the entire French population as complicit in the crimes of occupation. Camus lived and breathed Algerian soil for his entire youth, and pleaded for a peaceful reconciliation to save his country rather than forcible revolution that would destroy it. The world never needed intellectuals so badly as they did to explain where civilization had gone so wrong in the hands of alleged intellectuals from the Nazi and Communist parties. The choice was clear. Few intellectuals could have been more wrong than Sartre, and few more right than Camus.

Candide - The perfect little book or the magnificent long-winded opera? 80 pages of bile-infused satire, or three hours of laughter and tears intermingled with boredom? I know far too little else about Voltaire, and far too much about Bernstein. In the coming years, I hope to remedy both.

Cantillation - I don’t think much of blood or collective unconscious explanations, but there are certain memories in the innards of all of us from which we cannot escape. Sitting in shul every Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur of my life as I have, listening to cantors intone the prayers to inscribe us into the book of life, creates a very deep, spooky impression. I can’t imagine that contemporary Christians who don’t remember life pre-Vatican II can understand what it’s like to watch and listen to a clergyman intone prayers in a language of the past and a style of the past. It is a primal, ancient theater that summons up the ghosts of history - seeming to tell you that even if God is not watching you, they most certainly are. Lewis Black once likened the Judaism’s most famous High Holiday prayer, the Kol Nidre, to watching bats fly out of an organ. That covers most of it, but it does not give voice to how moving it is. This is the sort of religion that inspires both fanaticism and awe. Whatever its moral implications, no one with a soul can help but be influenced by what they hear from cantors.

Capitalism - Lest anything from the last post make people think otherwise, I am no socialist. I believe in enterprise, I believe in industry, and I believe in investment. I do not hold with people who say that capitalism is corrupt at its very core, and there’s something comical about ultra-privileged intellectuals showing sympathy for people and movements which would put them in prison lock and key for uttering subversive thoughts. I do not, however, believe in capitalism as it is currently practiced. We in America are at war with the libertarian point of view, and moreso than any amount of social conservatism, libertarianism is the most destructive philosophy in our country. It holds that all good things happen only to those who are entirely self-created, and all the rest of us are ants undeserving of their assistance. It will be the ruin of all we know about our society if it is not stopped. For at least two generations, conservatives have enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy of prosperous liberals running down the system that made them rich. We now have an equally ridiculous stock right-wing figure, sucking on the government teet’s largesse even as he derides it and wants to destroy it. Libertarianism is simply socialism stood on its head, and as a movement, it comes ever increasingly close to Lenninist Communism (indeed, “Lenninist” is exactly the word Grover Norquist uses to describe his position on taxes). It has quite a few more miles to go before America becomes the Soviet Union on its best day in reverse, but how have we ever come so much closer in so little time?

Casablanca - The only proof we need that everything which was stupid about Hollywood was also amazing. A black comedy that makes you cry with hope, a weepie that makes you snicker with cynicism. A war film for girls, a chick flick for guys. A history lesson with music, a musical with important historical background. Casablanca may have problems as a film, but it is a perfect movie.

Cash - Occasionally, you hear a singer who makes you remember just how pre-packaged and micromanaged most American popular culture is. Such singers show you that this culture has produced some of the greatest art known to man even as it makes you despair that you ever grew up in a place so vapid. Johnny Cash was the adult in the room, singing about adult themes with the adult agony unvarnished for his adult audience. Unlike most stage ‘badasses,’ there was no sense of this rebel being a sociopath in disguise who takes you for a ride - he was simply a man filled with the righteous anger we all have a right to feel that life is not better than it is. An artist whose songs were filled with every conceivable human emotion and experience on the planet, within the simplest rockabilly means ever used by a great artist. And a great artist was exactly what Johnny Cash was.

Cather - My Antonia is just about the very last book which should be read in a high school English class. What can any 15-year-old possibly know about the ‘precious, incommunicable past’? What can any modern person know about the hardships of life on the rural prairie? It takes an enormous feat of imagination for any modern middle-class American to relate to Cather’s pioneer hardships. Cather will survive (and must survive), but her stock is no longer equal to writers in the generations before and after her (often less deserving writers). When I read Cather, I hear echoes of my grandparents’ stories of the shtetl and the rural farms. I’d imagine that many American immigrants, to this day, would recognize themselves in her books as well. It wouldn’t be as surprising if it seems that Willa Cather, an archconservative even among that right-wing group known as Great American Writers, were cited by some future Hispanic-American writer who grew up the child of migrant workers as his/her greatest influence.

Cello - Everybody’s favorite instrument. If I could do it over.... I’d probably play the piano, but there are certain instruments we musicians will always regret being unable to play. For me, it’s the French Horn and the Cello. It can go almost as high as the violin, yet its resonances are infinitely richer. Whether it’s Dvorak’s cello concerto, or the five cello soloists in the William Tell Overture, or the twelve cellists of Arvo Part’s Fratres, or the Brahms cello sonatas, or the Bach Cello Suites, or the Swan. There is some sort of human warmth a cello reaches of which no other instrument is capable (except the French Horn). Even the cello is but one weapon in the arsenal of the orchestra, and even if the piano can imitate the cello’s warmth without reproducing it, the cello is without equal - the most human of all non-vocal instruments.

The Vital Center - This does not mean centrism. I am no centrist (unless you ask leftists). I’m weary of movements, dogma, and groupthink, but I am no lover of cautious moderation by either temperament or intellectual principle. I do not believe that the middle point between two random points is the correct one. I believe in facts. I believe in statistics. And I believe they speak for themselves. Most people would claim the same, but I don’t think they do much to support that belief. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people devote their lives to gathering facts with as much integrity as they can. Statistics are not perfect representations, but they’re as close as we’re going to get. In any functioning society, statistics are the center of any discourse, and any movement with either socialist or libertarian leanings is not the center of discourse around which a functional society exists. Any movement which wishes to frame facts to suit their theory rather than suit their theory to the facts gravitates to an ideological extreme. It is only liberals who will suit their theory to empirical evidence. If, by some miracle, indisputable empirical evidence showed that low taxes for the rich, illegalizing abortion and gay marriage, and drastic cuts in spending on social programs made a greater, happier, more prosperous society, any true liberal would change his beliefs unhesitantly. It is because facts and empirical evidence shows this not to be the case that liberals believe this is not true. A socialist would cling to their beliefs no matter what the result, because theory and dogma is more important to socialists than practical outcomes. But the tenets of liberalism have changed from generation to generation to suit the new empirical wisdom which every generation gained over the previous generation of liberals. Liberalism, not moderation, will always be the Vital Center of discourse. It was once the pluralistic and sometimes religiously motivated Vital Center between twin secular polls of fascism and communism. It is now the secular Vital Center between the increasingly prevalent twin polls of fanatical Islam and fanatical Christianity.

Chagall - Chagall died when I was three years old. But I suspect he will be the Jewish artist for all time. For any Jew with ancient associations to previous cultures, Chagall is our dreamscape. He’s the bizarro mirror through which we imagine what life was for ancestors we will never, and can never, meet. He is the supernatural world of Biblical and Folktale times when humans took it for granted that they mingled with spirits - their primitivism rendered in the most worldly, sophisticated painting techniques yet known to man. Has any painter, Jew or Goy, ever captured the language of dreams so well?

Chaucer - At the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, Harry Bailey, keeper of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, proposes that each pilgrim tell two tales on the way to their pilgrimage, and two tales on the way back. It’s been a while, but if memory serves, only 40% of the characters get to tell their first tale. Therefore, The Canterbury Tales as we’ve known them throughout history is roughly ten percent of its planned length.  Had it been completed, the world would be a very different place today. Even if there are parts of the book that are unreadably boring (and that’s the joke, Chaucer made them deliberately unreadable), The Canterbury Tales are still the greatest, most entertaining, funniest, most moving, and most disturbing representation of human personality in the history of literature until the arrival of Shakespeare - and arguably after him too. And far more than Shakespeare could, encumbered as he was by the reality of humans speaking his text, Chaucer could lay his work with the very limits of his imagination. Chaucer is the one writer who exceeds Shakespeare in coined English words. He can have a single tale burble on for the length of Hamlet, and another go simply for the length of a Biblical parable. The Canterbury Tales is not a perfect work of art, in fact it’s about as imperfect as great art gets. But its imperfections make it all the more magnificent.

Chekhov - Tolstoy has not yet made the oceanic influence upon my life he has upon so many millions of others. His behemoths lie in various states of incompletion on my bookshelf, and while I enjoy them, I can’t say that I’m shaken to the core. Tolstoy was a Count, and he clearly understood virtually everything there was to understand about aristocratic life, and nearly nothing about the peasant life which he abandoned literature to so glorify. He clearly understood this weakness of his, but he thought that art itself was something aristocratic and therefore corrupt. Perhaps he’s right, but I think that Chekhov is the ultimate proof that he isn’t. And then there’s Dostoevsky. I don’t believe that Dostoevsky is the greatest writer since Shakespeare, but I believe he was the most inevitable and perhaps the most necessary. Readers like me can recognize the staggering brilliance of Dostoevsky’s vision, but we should be forgiven if we’re terrified by what that vision illuminates. No writer has ever seen human beings for the monstrous animals we are with the clarity of Dostoevsky’s hysteria - and yet no evil in Dostoevsky is half so creepy and disgusting as the fascist vision of Christianity which he proscribes as the only cure for our beastliness. If this is the ultimate vision of humanity’s inner psyche, then we were better off not knowing what was in there. Dostoevsky was no saint, he was a demon sent to trap us in a suffocatingly autocratic world. The only cure for Dostoevsky is Chekhov. For me, it is Chekhov, not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who is the greatest writer since Shakespeare - and I sometimes wonder if Chekhov is not in fact better than Shakespeare himself. Chekhov fully acknowledges the brutality in Dostoevsky’s vision, and because of its lack of Dostoevskian dogma, it is sometimes all the more brutal because it lacks the possibility of Christian redemption, but he also observes with perfect Tolstoyan irony how easily our anguish could have been avoided. He pities us our suffering, but he is pitiless in how he refuses to absolve us for how pathetically easy it would be for us to live happier lives. Shakespeare talks about kings and dukes and gives us lower class figures as ridiculous figures of comic relief. Chekhov gives lower class figures every bit as much dignity (and ridiculousness) as their upper-class foils. As a fiction writer, there can be no greater model - he shows every character in their glories and in their flaws. He is neither comic nor tragic, he is neither satirist nor romantic. Like very few artists: Mozart and perhaps Jean Renoir are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, who can represent all the facets of life as we human beings live it.

Chicken Soup - The basic building block of life, my life at least. Most grandmothers were the best cook ever, but only one grandmother was able to make Bubbe Tucker’s chicken soup, for which I was spoonfed by both my grandparents on either side until I was seven or eight if I did not eat plentifully enough at one sitting lest I grow too thin. If only they could see the fruits of their labor...

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For Roger (1942-2013)

At some point in the next few weeks, I'd like to put together an Ebert weekend of favorite movies of his for people who loved reading him and who got to know movies better through him. Below is something I wrote a few years ago when he first began to blog. All I can say is that he is the single most important inspiration and model I've ever had for how I write the way I write and the shape which this blog has taken. In an era when movies are a slowly dying artform, Ebert put us back in touch with all the best things they had to offer. On a cosmic level, he was a Samuel Johnson for our time and its artform. On a personal level, he felt like as much a friend to me as any person I'd ever spoken to. 

From 2011:

It amazes me how often we hear this same story: so many people of our generation didn’t come to reading Roger Ebert through developing a passion for movies. They developed a passion for movies through reading Roger Ebert. There was a period in the early-to-mid-90’s when every middle-class household seemed to have an Ebert movie guide. Soon thereafter, every one of his movie reviews and articles got posted on CompuServe, and soon after that he started his own website. For all those decades when Ebert was so omnipresent, it has been fashionable to rag on him for being too generous to mediocre movies and dumbing down criticism with the TV show "Siskel and Ebert" (would that most of today's TV critics could discuss movies on their level...). But what they (at times ‘we’) all missed was that Ebert’s zealous passion for all aspects of his job was clearly just a facet of his larger zeal for life: for food and drink (obviously), for books, for art, for women (and apparently they loved him right back..), for friends, for family, and anything else that enriched. But it was not until Ebert was so debilitated that he found a metier through which we could perceive his life for everything it is. 
And with his Pulitzer for Criticism now thirty-five years in the past, Ebert may have only reached the peak of his influence in the past year. Horribly disfigured by thyroid cancer and left without the ability to eat, drink or speak, Ebert has taken to the age of blogging and twitter with a naturalness stunning for anyone in their late 60’s. But there’s simply no adjective to describe the stunning ease with which a person in his condition took to an entirely new technology. Perhaps he understands things about how to use the internet that younger, more fit people never could. Roger Ebert’s blog is simply like nothing else on the internet. Like clockwork, a fully formed essay arrives every week on topics ranging from loneliness to alcoholism to politics to illness. Ebert delves into the most personal crevasses of his experience, and perhaps for the first time in my experience of the blogosphere, the result is wisdom instead of TMI. Self revelation rarely results in deeper appreciation, but Ebert has a humanity that few people are capable of allowing themselves, and through his emotional generosity he’s created a community of ‘the neglected.’ The comments section is filled with posts from all sorts of people who for the first time in their lives feel confident that there is a place where they can share the most personal parts of their lives, openly and without judgement or prejudice. Go to any Ebert blogpost and you find hundreds of extraordinarily well-written essays in of themselves which seem to be written by a confluence of hundreds of articulate, lonely teenagers looking to find a place where people like them belong, unwell people who are desperate to remember how they functioned in their illness’s remission, unhappy people who never got the chance they should have for life to hear their voices. These are all people who thought the world was divided into those who are broken and those who are not, but through each other they all seem to have realize that there is no such division....Or at least there should never be..
It is through Ebert’s example that so many of them found the courage to tell stories of their own: lives torn apart by tragedy, by mental illness, by the unfairness of circumstance. And yet through Roger Ebert each of them has discovered that they have a story to tell and a public who will listen. Only a man of very deep good will could have created something so consoling, so unique and so unforseen that (I don’t use this word lightly) it has enriched the lives of so many whose lives desperately needed enrichment. Had Roger Ebert died on the operating table, life would have been far the poorer for what all these people would have lost. 

Roger Ebert Weekend (We can watch North for five minutes...then we'll get sick of it...):

With selections from The Dekalog for whenever there's a free few minutes...

Friday (weird favorites):

5. Eve's Bayou

7: Aguirre: The Wrath of God

9. Prometheus

11. Dark City

Saturday (unknowns he championed):

9: Gates of Heaven
11. Who's That Knocking At My Door

1. 28 Up

3: Hoop Dreams

6. House of Games
8. Grave of the Fireflies

11. Fargo

Sunday (classics):

9. The Third Man

11. Bonnie and Clyde

1. Do The Right Thing

3. La Dolce Vita

6. Taxi Driver

8. Citizen Kane

10. Casablanca

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800 Words: What Inspires You: My Answer (part 2)

1. Fanaticism:

I was going to write an essay. And like many of the things I’ve been trying to write lately, I worry that my thoughts grow too extensive and unwieldy in my mind to organize. Maybe I’m going senile, or perhaps my thoughts on a subject like this have simply grown too extensive to be contained in a blogpost - perhaps even a 5,000 word one or a series of a half-dozen 2,000 word ones. Which is, perhaps, why I need to find a new form to contain them.

So let’s now get to the real goodies...

Glossary of Inspirations (A-B)

A.

Affluence: For all, not for some. I, thank God, come from a reasonably well off family. I do not believe in the redistribution of our wealth - that implies wealth was ever truly distributed before. Those of us who are part of the ‘higher’ classes need to be taxed at 90% of our marginal income with severe penalties (and possibly jailtime) for hiding our money overseas. As John Kenneth Galbraith outlines in The Affluent Society , if America were ever serious about maintaining its postwar prosperity and raising the income of its ‘lower’ classes, it would have invested still much more money into public transportation and social welfare programs. Investment in education would be at least doubled with thousands of commissions established for how to maximize the efficiency education spending. Doctors should be among the richest people in our societies, but so should research scientists, engineers, and at the top of the income pyramid should be teachers. Oh...by the way... I still haven’t read The Affluent Society.

Art: Once war is eliminated; once poverty and disease and hopelessness for a better life are things of the past, when the sword is buried into the ploughshare and the lion lies with the lamb, what are we going to do with all that free time? Well, there are three answers. One is that we’ll play games - sports games, video games, board games, whatever else we can think of. The second is that we’ll be entertained - go to shows that please us, and whatever other places give us pleasure.  The third is that we’ll spend our time in the creation and contemplation of Art with a capital A.  But only one of these would (hopefully) show us the value of maintaining a peaceful and prosperous society. It should come as no surprise that Peace and Art seem to flourish together. Cultural golden ages seem only to occur in places not blinded by war. Peacetime, and the leisure it gives, is the wellspring from which Art thrives. ... on the other hand, a society without conflict would probably create very boring Art - and fortunately there is no evidence that such an era is at hand. Art is the space where we can freely contemplate why there is not more space for contemplation.  And to the inevitable question: are video games art? Well, so far from what I’ve seen, a few of them are. But from what I’ve seen, they’re still bad art. It’s entirely possible that they’ll one day be good art, but not yet. But that’s just my opinion, and in case you haven’t noticed, I have some pretty odd ones.

America: “America! The only country that matters. If you want to experience other cultures, use an atlas or a ham radio.” - Ron Swanson  ... There are many things I hate, truly hate about America. Nevertheless, I still believe it is the greatest, most varied, most fascinating, most bottomless and endless country on Earth - even in what I can only hope is a temporary decline. Like Russia and China, it is large and diverse enough to be its own world - but unlike either, its people are allowed to be itself. One day, soon I hope, India and Brazil will probably join America in the endlessness of its fascination. And one day, still sooner I hope, Europe will unify to create a country very nearly as fascinating. But I never felt so American as I did this summer in Europe, where the harmony of European society seemed coalesced into a dull grey which made it a less interesting place. I realized all too quickly I could never live in Europe unless America were torn asunder by war. One day, sooner than we may know, it may well happen. If so, we can only mourn that what is truly the most interesting country the world has ever known is lost to the same sands of time as every other great civilization.

American Judaism: There’s an argument to be made that even the American Carnival itself is a Jewish invention. We weren’t here for the beginning of American history. And frankly, except for the Founding Fathers, Mark Twain, and a side order of genocide, America seemed like a pretty dull place. But once we Jews arrived, along with everybody else, this country got a lot more interesting. A British/Jewish friend in Baltimore recently told me he’d never think about moving back to England.  Contemporary Europe may have many things better than America, but the liveliness of America, the sense that the world never stops moving, seems completely missing from that continent. Until I was sixteen, I longed for the great wide world I only saw on TV, and it was all these Jews in various types of show business who showed me that the American carnival is waiting for all who want to take part like an orange to be squeezed.Thus far, America is the true promised land of Judaism, and the only reason we currently thrive as never before.

African-American Culture:  I’m a perennial candidate for the title of Whitest Person on the Planet. Furthermore, there’s a lot of music and literature created by black people which I don’t much like. In recent decades, a lot of Black culture seems to have taken its cue from the worst of white culture and embraced all the nihlism, resentment, and self-destruction of people more privileged than they. But that doesn’t change the fact of Black America - manifest in everything from the music of spirituals intoned by Paul Robeson, to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, to the exuberant dignity of Soul, to the wrathful movies of Spike Lee, to the roaring twenties joy of Langston and Satchmo, to the earned optimism of Ellington and Joplin , to the cut short greatness of Coltrane and Otis, to the spiritual cadences of Mahalia and Mavis. This is THE cornerstone of the American experience, and to ignore it is to ignore America itself. If you want to understand what America is, and why America is great in spite of all its terrible sins, you begin and end at the awesomely joyful resolve of the Black Experience.

B.

Bartok - Schoenberg banished tonality, Stravinsky stayed in a museum of old music, Webern banished everything except music’s barest essentials (and a few of those too). Only Bartok was ready to reconcile the modern world with music of the people. Imagine this little man going from town to town with his gramophone, recording the peasant music of the Balkans just as Alan Lomax did in America, but infusing as much of his findings into his music as any musician ever could - infusing our great art with healthy minerals nearly unseen in any other classical music of the 20th century. Bartok is the music of globalization, and his contemporaries will be a generation still not yet seen.

Beethoven - What’s there to say, everything about him is the model for every musician who came afterward, and should be. There is no rock music without him, it’s debateable whether there’s jazz or modernism, there is certainly no grand romantic symphony,, and without his example, no artist would be brave enough to put his intimate thoughts down on a blank page.  Beethoven was neither Mozart nor Bach nor Schubert nor the young Mendelssohn, he was not divine. He was human, and there are many weak passages in his music. He fought for every inch of greatness he ever attained. He is the greatest model of courage and compassion, and tenacity and humanity which an artist can hope for. In everything from his reach to his grasp, he is the greatest model of us all - and therefore perhaps the greatest artist in any form. I don’t believe in God, I believe in Beethoven.

Berg - If you want to peer into the pure, dark heart of the twentieth century, you begin and end with Berg - the true heir to Mahler and the musician who peered all the way into the decline of Germany, the decadence of European music, and the end of Old Europe. He was the greatest of the Second Viennese School. After Berg, music could not grow more chromatic, more violent, or more luxuriant. He was the true end of the line.

Berio - If the second half of the twentieth century has an equivalent to the Rite of Spring, it is neither a Beatles nor a late quartet by Shostakovich. It is Berio’s Sinfonia, the postmodern answer to Stravinsky’s modernism (even though The Rite of Spring is actually a postmodern piece, but that’s for another day). If it is not quite as great as either The Beatles or Shostakovich, it’s because you have to be well-acquainted with the music he references to make his musical collage appear to you as it should. But what we hear in this music is not the music itself, but the experience of hearing music. We are listening to the very stream of consciousness.

Berry - Not Mark Berry of Boulezian, inspirational as he is. Chuck Berry is one of those moments when America becomes America. He is not simply a great guitarist, he is one of the great American songwriters, the composer of happy songs full of sadness, anger, and irony. With Chuck Berry, it was official, no orchestra could equal the visceral thrill of an electric guitar, but rock didn’t have to hit that point home so hard in its later years. No amount of decibels in later groups can equal his electricity and vitality. Is the composer of Roll Over Beethoven the American Beethoven? Who knows? But being Chuck Berry’s enough.

Berlioz - The ultimate outsider among composers. A literary man who barely played the flute and the guitar, so he made himself at home in the house of music by exposing precisely what was lacking in music before him. Until the twentieth century, music never felt more free of the hidebound rules of craft. And at no point did music ever feel more fun. Berlioz was the first great composer after the Golden Age, and after music reached its zenith, only Berlioz could demonstrate where music still had not gone. A music defined not by harmony, but by sound.

Bernstein - My hero. From earliest childhood to this day. I’m tempted to leave it to L so I can call him “Lenny.” Yes, his music is amazing, so is his conducting, and his pianism was pretty awesome too. But it is his teaching that will always remain with me, teaching which many other musicians degraded as masturbatory pseudo-scholarship. In an era when the relevance of classical music is disputed everywhere, it’s Bernstein who showed the world that this music still means something and that a great world is impossible without it. With Bernstein, music was more than simply music. As much as music ever has in any musician's hands, his music making truly meant something. From now until whenever my memory dies, short of family and friends, Lenny will be my hero.

Bizet - His was the only way forward. By the time Carmen gripped the world in 1877, Wagner made music too serious, Brahms made it too beholden to the past, Tchaikovsky made it too narcissistic. Bizet knew what they didn’t; we have to lighten up. Anyone who listens to Rossini, Mozart, Haydn, Liszt, Schumann, Johann Strauss even Beethoven and Berlioz, knows that classical music was not always the reflexively pompous, self-serious thing it eventually became. He was perhaps the last naive, divine composer in classical music history - writing music that was totally at peace with itself without feeling the requirement to make a point or take a stand. And in writing Carmen, he created light music as a serious pursuit and divided the music world into those willing to move to an era where music needn’t always be a Temple of capital-A Art, and those who believe it must. The fact that he died so young is yet another tragedy that set classical music apart from the main wellspring of 20th century music.

Bloch - I go back and forth on the music of Ernest Bloch. The talent he exhibits is fully the equal of Bartok and Berg, but but there is something about his Jewish music that feels kitschy and overblown, like C. B. De Mille Judaism. But then you hear a performance like this, and you know that it’s possible for classical music to do full justice to Judaism.

Brahms - It’s a sure sign of of our era’s decline that the world is beginning to forget Brahms. Brahms is the ultimate upholder of civilization. He has been my favorite composer from the earliest age, and he is home. He is the modest aspirations of every middle class household which tries to squeeze as much out of every dollar as they can get, wants nothing more than a good community, and is worried that the world is about to turn on everything they hold dear. He is meeting the inevitable tragedies of life with as much strength as we can bear. He is the small consolations of family and friends. He is life itself as we ought to live it.

 Brel - Jacques Brel isn't much remembered anymore, not at least in America. If he's remembered at all, he's remembered for the rather stupidly titled "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris." A reasonably oft-revived cabaret review that does the good work of exposing his songs to people who'd never hear them, even if the singers involved usually butcher the songs. Nevertheless, there are songs by Brel which are heartrendingly beautiful enough to stand as some of the greatest musical glories of the twentieth century. He is everything which people tell you Bob Dylan is - a true genius of songwriting whose music captures every mood and whose every song cut is from fabric so unique that it's almost as though they're all written by a different singer. It's amazing if you speak French (and that's pretty debateable for me...), but even if you don't, the music stands by itself. Perhaps the greatest songwriter of them all.

Brian Wilson - He was basically written out by 25, but he showed it was possible to create music of real value in the rock genre. It can be done, and we can make music just as beautiful as in the classical world which operates by classical rules, but with completely different instruments, sound, and style.

Britten - If America were more like the country I’d like it to be, then composers would be more like Benjamin Britten. A composer who writes music which alienates no audience at the same time as he presents them with overwhelming challenges. A composer who faces all the darkness of the world with unflinching courage and hope, and yet lets unceasing light into his universe, and therefore into ours. A gay composer able to write for a huge public on unreservedly gay themes without fear of discrimination. Able to capture the world in all shades from tormented to bizarre to luminous. An educated composer, for an educated public.

Bruckner - There’s an elephant in this lettered room of composers - a missing B which should be clear to you all by now. Where is Bach? How is the alleged greatest of all composers nowhere to be found on this list of inspirations? The answer, unfortunately, is that Bach is too scary. He is too much perfection itself. He invites no inspiration because there is no way to improve upon his compositions, and he is therefore lacking. He is beyond individuality, he is the music of heaven. The positivism of Bach, the idea that there is a God as perfect as a Swiss watch who can order a perfect universe in which all suffering is rewarded, is not just anti-individual, it’s almost offensively so. Give me Bruckner’s religion, a religion of humility and revelation which can give us shelter from the world’s confusion. A religion howling with as many doubts as anyone who ever experienced the agony of true belief must ever hold within their minds. A religion that acknowledges that God gives us suffering and burden greater than we ever can bear, and that there may be no reward.

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