From Deeeep in the Archives

I think this is from about 2000. Haven't re-read it all, but I remember writing it in an effort to summarize my musical convictions at the time before what I felt might be a major change in world outlook. So here it is. . .the "Vide" section in the middle was a nod to Bruckner who used the word (Vi - de) to indicate material that could/should be cut if it came off as too much. You can take it in that same vein.
D



When people ask me what I do, I usually have to explain:

“I’m a musician.”

“Wow, really? What kind of music do you play?”

“Classical.”

“Oh.”

And here things get a bit funny. This “Oh.” is filled with a sort of learned, that is, conditioned, reverence. The sort of reverence one has for something of which one has little understanding or experience but of which one “knows” to be of a higher order- way higher than one’s own present ignorance and shame could relate. I think the feeling must be similar to a lay person on the street who mid-conversation finds that he is talking to a Rabbi. “Oh.” There is the strange sense that the lay person must either repent or shamefully admit his ignorance of the higher truths of Judaism and, if Jewish, his sparse attendance at Synagogue.

This is a problem. Religion, in recent centuries, has moved farther and farther away from what could be called direct religious experience. By this I mean a meaningful personal encounter with the divine or numinous forces of the universe. These experiences have been replaced by a sort of ‘book-learning’ of Religion, which parallels the track of most of our ‘academic’ disciplines. Reading through the complete works of Shakespeare does not make one Shakespeare or give one the experience of channeling those works. It does not even make one an actor with the experience of the words and their meaning flowing through one in mid-performance as if from a source outside oneself. This is the essence of acting, and it is also the essence of Religion. Unfortunately, we have become so disconnected from this Religious heritage that for the modern atheist, such an experience is deemed schizophrenic, and for the modern believer, simply heretical.

So for most of us, to cling to the written word and the prescribed teachings is a pretty safe bet- and safe it is indeed. Organized Religion was once described to me as very similar to the process of immunization. You get tiny little dead bits of something which serve to prevent you from getting the real thing. Clever. However, behind all this is a very strange social phenomenon for the contemporary ‘educated’ urbanite: When someone approaches him bearing the badge of Religion, he still steps back with some uncertainty, even though he really doesn’t believe any of that nonsense, and would rather read Darwin or listen to U2. I have the sense, though, that he still, beneath it all, has some feeling that there’s something numinous back there, but he is very intimidated because he is receiving the impression that it’s ‘up’ there and that he is not worthy.

Needless-to-say, there are those of the cloth and of the baton who have rather enjoyed this awe and used it to their best advantage. The ‘Maestro Myth’ as it has been called is well known, as is the maniacal preacher. The same inflation is even evident in the pomposity of the fin de ciecle Austrian in his traditional garb. Yet, for most of us, since the war, and definitely since the 60’s, this inflation has lost some of its hot air, that is, steam. In other words, we no longer buy it. We no longer buy the hell and brimstone and eternal damnation, and we no longer buy the tuxedos and the heavy German accents, and we no longer buy the ‘fiery’ Beethoven. How can he compare, after all, to the noise of a Boeing 747 or Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Are we to be impressed by a well placed Augmented 6th Chord as we are led to believe they were ‘back in the day?’ It’s not possible. Yet we still have the diluted forms, the symbols- The Maestros and the fur coats hinting at a certain magnificence which they now fail to deliver. It is what Alan Watts calls ‘confusing the Menu with the Meal.’ You do not eat the menu and you do not experience the transcendentalism of Wagner in a tuxedo (and, no, not even in one of those Viking Helmets). There is a ‘realistic’ and ‘sensible’ public now, especially the young (about whom and in vain so many funds have been raised) who is not sold on the smoke and mirrors of the classical music ethos- which, in all honesty, he finds completely revolting.

And then there’s this estranged reverence. And at the heart of this is distance. “Oh.” That word drives a 4000 mile and 150 year wedge between us. It separates the listener from the performer. What could be worse? When I was young, every girl who could get near her dad’s credit card dressed like Madonna. Now it’s Brittany Spears. These kids identify full-on with their performers and their music. How can you argue with that? A rock concert is a trance-endental experience, full of contemporary, immediate meaningfulness that is impossible to deny- whether you like it or not. Now one could say that in the absence of an Olympic Pantheon, or even a beginning relationship with the unconscious, these kids are projecting enormous archetypal powers onto the superstars, and they (the superstar) are in a sense fulfilling a deep religious longing in the population. I feel this is quite true, and one experiences it even as a ‘classical’ musician. Then again, is this so wrong? Yes it is in a rather primitive and contaminated form, but haven’t music and religion always been welcome bedfellows? No religion has ever got along without music to vamp up the religious emotion, and every truly great musical experience has a palpable religious tinge to it. I think mostly of the early shamanic ‘religions’ where drumming and dance were the very sacraments of the culture and that contemporary dances, from the Froog to the Makarena to whatever, are our modern, secular equivalents. And they are secular only in that the religious aspect is consciously (via the superego) denied, and the religious experience (through the schools and the churches- on the same side in this one) is completely denigrated.

So back to music itself- and I mean now older music. “Classical Music.”

Usually when someone asks, “Wow, really? What kind?” I answer, “Classical- but it’s not lame.” That is followed by a relieved, acknowledging chuckle, the equivalent of, “I’m a priest, but you’re not going to hell.” Everybody knows it. Classical music is lame. And they’re right. Because beyond the average public’s so-called ignorance (yet it is very wise!), there is the equal ignorance of the classical musicians themselves as well as the so-called concert-going “music-lovers.” Here’s the secret: Nobody knows what the hell is going on. That’s why they hide behind tuxedos, snootiness, and champagne.

The musicians themselves, the priests, the oracles, the mediums of the Music have no numinous relationship with the music AT ALL. The concert-goers, in an attempt not to be/appear obtuse (remember the awkward reverence), always fake it. And I mean always. The concert-goer who asks, “Oh wasn’t that delightful (or lovely or beautiful or ‘lyrical’)?” is still asking. They aren’t standing on any kind of firm ground. How many times does one hear at intermission, “That was the best (or worst) performance of X piece ever. Here’s why: The phrasing was so and so, except in the recapitulation where they did it so and so. The dynamics were clear so that the usually obscured second flute solo was not covered by the bass trombone, etc. The conductor’s rhythmic sensibility helped to delineate the structure and the rhetoric of the piece, etc. etc.” When? Never, and it’s because nobody knows. Once again, don’t feel too badly- the players don’t know it either. So guess what: The bass trombone will always obscure the second flute solo, the phrasing will never be so and so (nobody phrases, period- so how would you even know what that means?), and the conductor will never delineate anything. What does a conductor do anyway? Ask a musician. They won’t know. Ask a conductor. They won’t know either. Listen hard- you’ll never get a straight answer about classical music performance from anybody. At best you’ll get lofty generalizations about ‘romanticism,’ ‘formalism,’ ‘dissonance’ or other intangibles- used to feign sophistication. In the words of the great pianist, Leonid Hambro, “It’s a lotta bullshit.”

-Vide-

But what more can you expect? Your average symphony concert gets between 1 and 4 rehearsals. So for two hours of music, you will be lucky to get eight to ten hours of rehearsal- enough to play the piece through a few times, make sure everybody remembers to take the repeat in the fourth movement and that the second movement will be in 16. That’s about it. What about phrasing? (Still nobody knows what it is- does it make a difference? Is it worth it? Will anybody notice? Still no one can answer these questions because they don’t know how to phrase. They don’t know how to listen- and I mean performers, not just the public). What about variety of sound? Of rhythm? Of articulation? Of dynamic? Has the conductor studied the score enough to have a conception of the piece (not just to imitate recordings of other conductors who have never studied the score themselves)? Does he know what to look for or how to study? Then when he has a vision (and this is VERY rare), can he communicate it to the orchestra? Then once he communicates it, does he get it? Does he check?

This is why most conductors now prefer to have only two or three rehearsals, because they can always bow out and say, we only have just enough time to run it through and hope for the best.

It takes about three months to really learn a complicated symphony and then mark a set of parts with adequate bowings, cues, rehearsal figures, phrasing indications, retuschen (look it up), and other necessary markings to convey the interpretation one has already learned. It is hard work. No joke. There are jokes about conductors who run through a piece three times and then talk about the beautiful sunset painted by the French Horn in the last movement. Then they play it again and that’ s it. No joke.

One basic factor that is often overlooked if the vibrato. This is something to which anyone can relate. We all saw bugs bunny cartoons as kids and watched their caricatures of opera singers with flabby, wobbly voices. Caricatures, I say, until you realize that it is quite real. They sound like horny chickens and their expression carries about the same weight. It is common ‘wisdom’ these days that this vibrato beautifies the tone and should therefore be used as often as possible- that is always. Do you know the sound to which I am referring? Make fun of an opera singer and your voice will do it automatically.

Now this vibrato is an expressive device, and you can imagine, in ordinary life that if you felt great emotion over something your voice would start to shake. This is the emotional effect that vibrating (it used to be called ‘shaking’) has on a listener. So when you are singing, “My son is dying, oh saddest day!” then you could perhaps expect some vibrato as a natural emotional ‘juicer.’ However, when you are singing, “Please pass the salt!” then such emotional extravagance would be entirely inappropriate (depending, of course, on where you’re eating). Contrary to contemporary sentimentality, not every word of an opera nor every instrumental note of a symphony is the end all –be all of the universe. Many, in fact, most are basically neutral and more or less benign. Therefore the continuous shaking which one sees in the left hands of virtually every string player is almost entirely superfluous.

What I am trying to demonstrate is that the audacious pomposity which so many of us associate with classical music (I remember French class in the 4th grade going around the classroom and saying, “J’adore le rock. Je deteste la musique classique.) has a direct technical root, and the stuffiness and flabbiness can easily be reduced by a little bit of clarity in performance (of course this must be rehearsed!). By the way, groups such as Anonymous 4, the Kings Singers, and the innumerable ‘period’ groups which have popped up in recent years owe an enormous amount of their popularity to the fact that they sing with virtually no vibrato- a pleasant foil to the over-done mutton we hear from the Big Five orchestras. There is an undeniable beauty in a basic transparency of the tone which allows the performers to channel all of the subtleties of the music. The continuous vibrato is a major hindrance to this. In discussing this with numerous classical musicians, I have had vivid flashbacks to Clarence Darrow and the Scopes Monkey trial. Fundamentalists are fundamentalists pretty much across the board.

Another surprising fact is that performers play virtually everything at the wrong tempo, that is, speed. Ok, ok- how can you say something is ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ in art? It’s supposed to be subjective, right? Well, yes and no. Since most of the musical choices people make are default non-choices based on the unconscious conditioning they have received from endless repetitions of the same recordings- whose performers themselves have made their same passive non-musical-choices from the unconscious conditioning of endless repetitions of endless repetitions of endless repetitions of endless repetitions of—Scratch! In other words, most of the subjective stuff isn’t coming from conscious choice, it’s just kind of there. Hang out at a quartet rehearsal some day (or watch the Guarneri quartet’s movie ‘High Fidelity’) to see how little active decision making goes into a contemporary musical “interpretation.”

So tempos: generally they’re too slow and they’re always the same. Ben Zander has made an excellent presentation of problems with contemporary tempo issues in Beethoven’s 5th symphony. Beethoven clearly marks one tempo and most performers brazenly perform the piece much, much slower. The effect of this is to produce a sort of stogginess in the performance which gives it a sort of blown-up, epic, titanic feel to it which sort of impresses the listener and gives him that feeling of unrelated reverence of which I have spoken earlier. Wow, that’s ‘profound’ he might say since the slowness and massiveness of the motion makes it seem awfully grave and important. Yet, it doesn’t sound like anything to him. One note does not connect to another, and he finds himself in an undifferentiated wash of sound- for 2 hours! What’s worse is that we have no other model for people to compare this with, a model that is clear and articulate and communicates a musical statement that is understandable, relatable, and not larger than life- but rather is life-sized and relevant- generating an immediate experience. This is critically important. The implication of the too-slow, amorphous approach to classical music is that this is so sophisticated that you can never understand it. As the kids my age say, “What the fuck?” What kind of self hating masochist would allow himself to be berated by an imposing ensemble of 100-odd people telling him that he is an ignorant fool? What the fuck?

Now in regards to tempo, let me say something extra about the so-called “slow movement.” There is another bit of common wisdom that expects people to fall asleep during the ‘slow’ movement. They’re boring and everyone knows it, so let’s get through it and back to the fast (but still not quite fast enough) stuff. This is ridiculous. With all the reverence we give the great masters do we really think they were that lame as to write a deliberately boring movement? Would they hope that people would doze off 10 minutes into their piece? Why write it at all? Another thing that has always interested me is that if you look on the back of your CD of some Mozart symphony, you see that the first and last movement are about 5 minutes long, the Menuetto is about 2 minutes long, and the Andante is about 18 minutes long. How is that possible? In the 18th century when formalistic balance was at its peak (I don’t really believe this, but I will certainly concede that a sense of balance was in the air) that someone –and Mozart of all people- could write a symphony so lop-sided as that? Basically, we have to realize that most performers play Andantes, Adagios, Largos, and Lentos, four to eight times slower than they were intended! Really, I mean it. Take your favorite piece of music, say Eine Kleine Nachtmusik- the first part that everybody knows. Sing it through and dance around a bit. Now sing the same thing twice as slow. Then twice as slow as that, then twice as slow as that. Now see if you can get through the whole movement without slitting your wrists or. . .dozing off.

Now you can do the opposite. Take the ‘slow’ movement of your favorite Mozart Symphony, say the Haffner, No. 35, as you heard it on your von Karajan (or worse still, Eugene Ormandy) recording. Now speed it up until you start to feel a ‘beat’ or a connection between the measures that’s not just note after note after note. To do this, however, you will have to change your conception a little bit. What I mean by that is, the way you’re probably used to hearing this, it may sound as if Mozart is trying to reveal the secrets of the universe unto you and that there is something really heavy in this piece (although you don’t know quite what it is). When you speed it up, you’ll have to put a little spring in your step. Make the notes a bit shorter and even swing them a bit (this was actually standard performance practice even as late as the 1930s. It is called noes inegales, or unequal notes, which gave a certain lilt to performances very similar to 20th century jazz performance {which not un-coincidentally began around 1930). Dance around the room a bit as you sing and start to feel the gist of the music. Or you can walk around the room and sing in time with your feet. Andante, which is what the movement is marked, means ‘walking,’ and the con moto means with motion. So walk around with motion and sing along and you’ll start to get a feel for what Mozart was trying to tell you he was feeling when he wrote that piece. It’s kind of skippy and sprightly and uplifting and not at all stupefying.

I mentioned briefly the problem of rhythmic flexibility. This and all further discussion takes us into the grave problem of lack of rehearsal time (and its glad acceptance by lazy and incompetent conductors whose primary job it is to rehearse!). Appropriate use of rubato (‘stealing of time) in all of its forms requires a feeling understanding of the work and the overall interpretation which takes time to ‘sink in.’ When we steal time by slowing down or speeding up, the musicians and the conductor must know how much we’re slowing up and over how long a time period, and when we stop slowing up, when to go back to the first tempo, stay at the same tempo, or start a new one. These questions are answered in a sort of felt way and if the conductor is good (very unusual) he is able to convey to the players his vision (assuming he has one) with his technique. But the players themselves are not robots (much as they often try!) and must themselves have a feeling for the ebb and flow of the piece. This is difficult, especially as it has fallen mostly out of practice. A conductor with an insecure technique and musical vision may attempt to try out this maneuver only to have a sloppy mess on his hand- and through no fault of his own: his technique may be flawless, but if one musician has his head buried in the music, he will not be in sync with the conductor and the thing will not work. The (usually) insecure conductor (after all, who else becomes conductors other than closet Napoleons?) will normally get ruffled and not try the trick again, feeling it to “risky” (risky to what?). So the interpretation suffers. These days, conductors use virtually no rubato except the canned, pre-packaged variety, with seemingly no expiration date that one finds on the Sony Classics recording line.


To pull off a really convincing performance, one has to plunge one’s way into these details and make them work rather than hiding behind the illusion of the aloof artiste. How many performances I have seen (and played!) in my student days. We would walk on stage having seen a piece for all of 10 minutes. Then we would put on the face. We could all do it. It was the, “Oh yes. Trust us, we’re experts. This is good for you even if you don’t know what the fuck is going on” face. We could only hope that we were convincing enough in our visages that no one would approach us and in an awkward moment ask what the fuck was going on. We were glad to see the three people in the audience stroking their chins, really trying to understand like the essence of the work. Of course 9 out of 10 times we weren’t even playing the right notes (yeah 20th century music!) and if we were, they were not at the same time. So what I wondered was, were they trying to figure out the actual piece or the one that we were kind of making up? When I started realizing that the third guy scratching his chin was the composer himself I started to get it.

Anyway, enough of this sort of thing. There are too many ills to mention them all, but another easy one is that people generally play everything the same – too loud. There’s a generic-ness which is in vogue in American music making (and many other aspects of out cultural life) which takes the good ol’ Henry Ford method to the max. One note is just like the next. So most groups generally don’t play soft enough, except maybe once during a concert and you can tell that the conductor made a big deal out of that ‘moment.’ But besides that it’s all kind of the same (after all, if you’re listening in your car, you would have to keep turning up the volume to compete with traffic noise, so better not to intrude). Just listen and you’ll hear it. Besides the gross blandness of volume, there are also the finer points of balance. That astute critic of the concert whom I quoted above said that the third trombone didn’t cover up the second flute in a certain passage. Well gosh darn! If the trombone always covers the flute (by playing generically too loud) then how do we (as innocent audience-standers) even know the flute is playing there at all? Or even that it has the main tune? How are we to understand the work if the performers don’t take the time to clarify amongst themselves? If an actor leaves out his lines (or they are covered up by the special effects technician’s thunder claps) in the final denoument of the play, then how are we supposed to know whodunnit? Where is the synchronization in between the players?

I feel this is very important, since the disconnection between audience and performers is already pre-staged by the disconnection between the performers themselves. This is where a performance can get really good- like magnetizing. When the performers each work themselves into each other’s energy field and they each know what all of the others are doing, then something truly magical happens. The group changes from a machine into a living organism. It is no longer the crankshaft turning and the alternator charging, it is the heart pumping blood to the lungs to exchange air molecules through the trachea to nourish the cells of the whole body and provide CO2 for all plant life. I would here accuse myself of romantic exaggeration if I hadn’t experienced it myself time and again with the Wild Ginger Philharmonic.

This, I believe, is a new ideal in classical ensemble playing. It transcends tight ensembleship and technical accuracy and becomes a new field of awareness (or consciousness for the Jungians) centered around the musical performance, and it is very powerful. In many respects I feel it is the most valuable element that classical music as an art has to offer the world in the 21st century: the power of 30-100 people all tuned into the same literal wavelengths harmonized together. It is truly awesome.

It does not come, however, without a great deal of conscious effort, and in our terms that means rehearsal time- and even more so, rehearsal time away from the normal distractions of life (for a time).

This principle is to be found virtually nowhere in the field of classical music. Even in the highest level ensembles, there is an unmistakable, yet difficult-to-articulate lack of. . .something. The artistic niveau at this juncture is truly pitiful, and the attention to the details of a musical performance which allow a performance to evolve from a string of disconnected notes to the experience mentioned above are almost (with the exception of the Wild Ginger Philharmonic) entirely lacking.

On the part of the audience, the few most common mis-‘interpretations’ I have described above ultimately serve to verify the listener’s hunch that this classical music stuff is for the birds and has nothing to do with him. The arrogance (or the feigned humility-same thing) which the performers convey reinforce this sufficiently to insure that the listener will never go back- and certainly will not respond appreciatively to a tele-marketer from the Ballet.

-Vide-

Now this may sound a bit harsh. Am I really saying that the whole classical music scene is a sham? Well haven’t you smelled it all along? Are those dirty, smelly, ‘uncultured,’ kiddies so off the mark? Where’s the Numen? Where’s the Eros? Where’s Bacchus? Where? Where! Not at Lincoln Center, folks. A buddy of mine works at the Metropolitan Opera as an usher, and he says to me, “Well basically, people come to the opera to relax.” There’s a Classical Music Radio Station in New York, which advertises on all the buses: “Before there was Stress Management, there was Classical Music.” Are you kidding me? So then what is all the crap about, ‘Passionate performances’ and ‘Dynamic Artists’ and what not? Which one is right? I’d say neither. Both ends are kidding each other. When the Marketing Director did his survey for the classical music station, he found out that people like to ‘unwind’ to the classics. I suppose it’s similar to the way people ‘unwind’ in church today. They can always gossip afterwards and sip Mimosas (church) or Champagne (classical). One wonders- is this why we (representing the young classical artists) have practiced and studied and sipped lattes – I mean, rehearsed, for all these stinking years? To help people unwind? For the price of one Met ticket, you could get a two hour massage from someone who has chosen his profession to help you relax. Why bother getting dressed up? or even dressed?

This brings me to another issue which is, I feel, the tragic underbelly of the rather sardonic commentary above. It goes back to us musicians who have practiced our whole young lives away (instead of playing soccer, instead of working a summer job, instead of yucking it up with our friends, etc.) for what? That’s where the real insidious evil creeps in, and it goes deep, deep into the bowels of the conservatories and even deeper into the wombs of our families. Of the most celebrated contemporary soloists- the ones who have really made it (CDs, concertos with big orchestras, etc.), 9 out of 10 (and this is an optimistic estimate) were physically coerced into practicing however long it took them to become the ‘outstanding young talent’ that they are. And by this I mean nothing less than what we today call abuse. Physical and emotional coercion is the backbone of classical music. Maybe it has always been that way, but I don’t care. The little girl in the pink dress after whom all of the geriatrics applaud had the shit kicked out of her by her parents from a very young age. No joke, no lie. Emotionally and spiritually raped, not nurtured, she is fulfilling her parents’ wishes for them, and this is quite literally a crime. If I had a dime for every story I’ve heard from my prestigious Juilliard and Curtis peers, I would have enough money to fund a young soloists competition. These are big boons for parents with unlived lives. Jung says, “The most dangerous thing for a child is the unlived life of the parent.” And this was long before Alice Miller exposed us to the deep reality of the situation.

James Hillman suggests that rather than our childhood conditioning our adulthood, our ‘implicate’ (Bohm) adulthood demands a certain childhood in order for it to actualize. This is a brilliant, contemporary psychological synthesis, yet I would take it still further: that both ends of the scale are flexible and that they inform each other. That is, as the beginning changes, the ends change as well and re-informs the beginnings. This takes us far off into the not-that-hypothetical-anymore realm of quantum physics and multi-dimensionality; however by whoever’s view you chose to take of the matter, one must NOT escape the responsibility of confronting the 3-D reality and the moral question that faces us: do we condone overt child abuse in order to provide uninformed, un-artistic, non-erotic, read-throughs, of ‘great’ music by which pre-baby-boomers can ‘unwind’? The further you get into it the deeper it stinks. Yet I feel that it is absolutely imperative.

And this goes all the way back: Mozart was a genius, but he was also his father’s tool. I do not believe in historical arrogance which says that I know better with 200 years and an Earthlink account on my side to provide me with perspective. However, the one way attitude we have towards the masters must be reconsidered. I had always hoped to build a large bust of Beethoven, which, unlike the normal frightening pictures, shows him in the john shitting like everyone else to remind us that he, too was all too human. (It is also a healthy exercise to study his counterpoint exercises with Albrechtsberger).

Now with our generation, we make convenient escapes from our moral predicament by re-invoking the “greatness” of the music: that it involves sacrifice and discipline and, of course, suffering. This surely justifies the torture of these barely formed youths. Now hold on a minute. Where’s the Greatness, anyway? The vagueness and mystery which shrouds the realm of Musique Classique allows us to avoid differentiating between the great music these composers produced and the shitty, half-ass performances through which these abuse-survivors hack. Remember- nobody can tell the difference, not even the performers, so you can probably get off by confusing great music with great performances. Don’t be fooled! Don’t let yourself off the hook, and don’t let Gary Graffman, Mrs. Josephowitz, and IGM Management off the hook either! It is no longer acceptable!

I am reminded of another story which involved my own self: I had a 104 degree fever and literally could not move until 8:05pm on the night of a concert with no intermission- 90 minutes of music straight. No chair, no stool, nothing. A news reporter, a fan of mine, happened over to me around 7:55 and he said, “How are you doing?” I said, I’m sick as a dog, and I can’t move. “Oh. . . Well. . .Use it in the performance!” My tacit answer was basically: Fuck you. I’m sick. I’m a human being and not a circus monkey (at least if I were a circus monkey, the ASPCA would have something to say for me.)
So that’s when it became clear to me.

Given our culture’s lack of Religious differentiation- or simple consciousness through reflection- we are forced by the unconscious (this is how the unconscious acts: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit {called or not called, the God will be there}) to project our barely differentiated inner pantheon outwards in some highly destructive forms. This article in itself will not be enough for the old ladies to find something else to do on Friday afternoon than to sponsor and condone the mistreatment of (still another!!) 12 year old Wunderkind. They won’t do it. Because that wunderkind holds their unlived, unimagined youth for them, and they can’t give that up, because it would mean owning and experiencing inwardly the grief that comes with having passed up your life. It is a religious experience the child is providing (in that it provides meaning for the audience person), yet it is in a completely backwards way! I do not mean to say that a person must live out every aspect of his or her life in order to withdraw his/her projections from children. Jung and even more so, Robert Johnson emphasized the importance of the symbolic life as a technique for honoring the needs of the psyche within a modern context. However, a child of 6 can NOT hold that archetype for an adult. It is backwards. Rather, the adult, in an actualized maturity must hold the archetype of Man of Woman for the child to emulate as it grows older. Unfortunately, we have everything in the reverse- with middle aged women riding around on “Scooters” and following their daughters’ fashions. It is a true pity!

Now for most youths, they find a good outlet for this in the many teen cults, gangs, slam dances, and mall-hanging which populate America and (for some reason) trouble sensible Americans. It is obvious that these are compensatory measures for an Elder class which is not partially but ENTIRELY missing from American society. Now here is where the classical musician drowns for he doesn’t even have that: If he’s good enough, he’ll get caught in the trap of living the archetype (usually of the golden boy/puer aeternus) out for his parents and the small-e ‘elderly’ of the society. Of course, if he’s not good enough then he gets beaten, right? So which way do you go? (It might be worth mentioning the many instances of the incurable underachievers and losers who have found a viable escape route by being so bad that they are not even worth punishing. Very clever- and unconscious). By the way, did you ever check on how many suicides come out of the major conservatories when this stuff starts to enter consciousness (now that they have enough distance from their homes) of these students? Who is there to help them, since their teachers (in order to be teachers) have sold out their own goods? After all, since the teacher has not lived his own life, the student is there to justify it for him. In other words, if the student brings up questions about the validity and authenticity of what he is doing, then it brings up the same (as yet un-addressed) issues in the teacher. For the teacher’s sake the kid must do what the teacher does, and then there’s one more person whose life the student has to live.

So then what do you do? I met a cellist on the subway the other day. She’s a sweet-heart, great player, prodigy, Curtis brat, the works. Now she is out of school. She is about 28, didn’t fit into her pink dress anymore, and had been replaced under her nose by three more generations of ‘talented young. . .’ cellists. Hung out to dry, in other words. Washed up. She told me, “Yup, I’m trying to grow up now. Y’know, pay my bills, do the laundry. . .stuff.” This, I feel is very big. Nobody has ever wanted that from her! That she grow up, live her life, cook her food, get sick, fart, laugh, whatever. There’s nothing numinous about this, so the elderly can’t get their kicks off of it. But now she’s 28 and is over the hill. What does one do?

The original purpose of this article was to take a deeper look into classical performance, to annihilate the myth that anyone knows what they are doing. I suspect the response will be mostly, “Yeah, well I always sort of felt that, but I didn’t feel like I should say anything, since probably someone else knew better, and I just didn’t understand yet.” And there will be a few people who will puff back up and say, “Fie! Not so! This is Art, don’t you understand? The stars and the heavens and the zeitgeist and all that.” I’m not so worried about them, because you don’t get very much mileage on such a small tank of ‘vagueities.’

But the first response- “I didn’t understand.” What’s there to understand? Does one need to explain a sunset or the Arc de Triomphe? It’s there, and it’s between you and the Arc, you and God. Musicians need to learn a more useful technique: they need to learn how to channel meaning- mostly with their ears. They have very few teachers in this art, and so reading/studying/listening to early performers can help guide them, but they need to find the courage to acknowledge the myth (in the sense of illusion) and the strength to move beyond it. In my orchestra, people have borrowed the analogy from the Matrix: They say so and so took the red pill. Then we hook him up to a machine and do Kung Fu for a couple of weeks, and they come out playing with no vibrato. It’s awesome. But seriously, they need some nurturing because it’s not an easy pill to swallow. But the rewards, when you are willing to form a creative path, are immeasurable. That is what we aim to do with Wild Ginger: to move past the illusions, the pomposity, and the formality of classical music (which, by the way, is what really puts people off- most folks would get into the music if they didn’t feel totally alienated by the scene- again a clear distinction must be made) and re-examine our ways of playing in order to optimize communication between audience and performer AND facilitate direct musical experience in all its numinosity. Joseph Campbell warns us that the archetypes not be made opaque (this is the Third Commandment), but that they remain transparent to the Divine. Our classical music myth has all but blackened and calcified into stale concerts and wobbly-voiced divas. It is my hope that we can move beyond this state to find the deeper meaning behind the myth of classical music.

Professionalism and the American Soul

My computer says I started writing this on 10/26/07. That's quite a while ago, but the subject matter was compelling for me then, and it remains so today.

I haven't published it because the writing is far from complete, and I'm not sure it's entirely clear what I'm driving at- the place of emotions in professionalism when the profession itself is based on emotion. But that's my concise 2008 version. Please post if you have something to contribute. Would welcome any feedback or elaboration.
D




This one's going to be a work in process, the thoughts not yet completely formed. Would welcome input from readers as you are inspired.

(In my (extremely brief) research for this article I discovered that there exists a word - metempsychosis. Man that sounds like fun. . .)

So the crux of this has something to do with my fascination with "prodigious" youth, their exploitation, and the challenges of alienation and anxiety endemic in (and perhaps inherent to) American culture.

My first thoughts were in the course of a recent massage course I was participating in. In the course of my (growing more extensive) studies, I have worked on many different people, all shapes and sizes, and most genders. By and large I get excellent feedback from people and am pleased to bring my best to the table when I approach any new client. However, there instances when, well I just don't like the person. Sometimes it's personal, like the person rubs me (excuse me) the wrong way, but often it's because the person is so disconnected and lacking in presence that I feel that my best work will simply not be appreciated.

In these last instances I have wrestled with a question that plagued me during my musical career- does one dial down the energy one puts out to meet expectations of the situation at hand? My answer then was a resounding no- bring it no matter who is there, at the very least out of respect for the potential that person has to appreciate what you are offering. While difficult to execute, this was in many ways a very easy answer- absolute, lacking in fluidity, and predictable. However in looking down the road at a potentially new career path, I chose to re-examine my attitude towards what I would have to label "professionalism."

In short, Professionalism I define as being able to bring it even when you don't feel like it. In fairness to me as a younger man, I don't feel my attitudes were really professional in this sense- in a way they were more transcendent-professionalism (I would have liked the sound of that). For classical musicians, professionalism was really just that- getting it up night after night at least outwardly to play the right notes with an adequate display of feeling to convince the proverbial blue-hairs that you were the real deal. My feeling at the time was that this pretense of feeling in an art form based almost entirely on feeling was a sham. So my version of professionalism was that one had to whip oneself genuinely into the emotion one was intent on transmitting to the audience. By and large I'd say it worked pretty well. . .but there was a byproduct of resentment that was undeniable- the exchange rate between giver and receiver could become way out of whack and leave one feeling drained and exhausted (NB- let me say here that my audiences were generally amazing and a delight to perform for, but during those dead-hall performances I recall feeling this imbalance poignantly.)

But at the root of this was my then concern with professionalism in fields (such as music) in which feeling was essential. Professionalism is being able to sell the car, flip the burger, convict the defendant with complete disregard for one's personal feelings about the matter. But if one's job is to access feeling directly (such as in music, dance, theater, or massage), how can one be honest with one's own integrity and still deliver the real thing- or worse, if the fake is accepted as reality, then what does it say about the valuation of one's own subjective experience which is at the core of the work- am I making myself clear? If people are happy to clap for the Emperor with no clothes, then why devote any energy to design anyway? I would say that these questions plagued me endlessly during my career as a young musician.

And there's the rub (again)- a young musician. A young musician has not yet her or (especially) his emotions to the point where such detachment is really healthy. So premature professionalism, i.e. detachment is degrading to the individual's health and development. Strangely, classical music and other art forms such as ballet, are some of the only careers that young people can engage in legally in America, and yet they are the ones that require the most emotional dexterity (or sinisterity perhaps). What generally comes across, though, is that highly passionate, over intense sensitivities of children are channeled through adult emotional frames. This is similar in a way to the way that many porn stars who were victims of childhood sexual abuse exude an extraordinary sexuality that would seem to be the channeling of youthful feeling through prematurely activated adult sexuality (and I would say that the similarities between adult film stars and classical musicians do not end here- more later).

However, regardless of their twisted origins, both fields produce performers that can be hugely compelling. Of this there can be no doubt (except maybe in classical music, just kidding).

So I hope I've made that point clear.

Looking at bodywork as a career in which real intimacy, sensitivity, and personal touch are at the core of quality work, how does one exhibit detached professionalism? Anyone who has received many massages has somewhere experienced the spa-style, 10-minute oil change style of massage: impersonal, formulaic, and generally unhelpful if not actually stress producing. But this is what is required of certain professionals in this field. Hopefully massage recipients will have, over the course of their lives, experienced exceptionally attuned bodywork from highly sensitive practitioners. These experiences are incomparably superior in almost every way.

But how does such a practitioner "pay the rent"? Does he turn into a Carlos Kleiber Massage Therapist, performing one or two massages per year for half a million an hour? It's an intriguing thought really. . .

But this profession-aversion that the most sensitive artists, performers, and healers have - almost as a rule - seems to be directly connected not to the execution of their craft - or even the earning of money for their crafts - but to this concept of professionalism itself. So let me look at it a little further. Because this goes beyond simple Capitalism, which itself demands the subjugation of personal feeling to market efficiency. It has to do with an attitude of systematic denial in the very showing up to work. Bad mood, unhappy, fight with girlfriend- these are all the motivators of art - particularly for the young who have not yet worked out what these feelings are about - and their direct subjugation risks leaving one without the font of what makes one a professional in the first place. No wonder artists are so willing to give away their work for free so as to avoid the whole process of destroying what makes them who they are.

But much of this is capitalistic in argument. What is it about American Professionalism that is so particularly itself? It helps, I think, to compare it with European modes of professionalism.

Anyone who has worked or lived in Europe can not but be struck by the general lack of professionalism- willingness to serve the customer to his satisfaction, willingness to achieve a high level of expertise above and beyond what is called for, and general efficiency. This is largely due to culturalism there and the general homogeneity of the individual European nations. The American system is open to anyone to compete, whereas the European system is mainly open only to people who are already more or less like you. It's as if you could only work with people you went to high school with instead of anybody from anywhere in the country. If your colleagues were limited to your high school group, the pecking order would be pretty clearly established, and people would have no real reason to strive for excellence outside of their own pre-fab cultural niche. This is how the work system appears in Europe- a sort of fraternity-style working environment in which the mammalian comfort of place takes priority over achievement - what we in America would call working for the greater good of which there need be no concept in a closed system.

And that's America- cold hearted, sink or swim, and there's always somebody nipping at your heels to make you irrelevant. So that's the obvious part about why we're so fierce in our professionalism, it's at the very heart of our non-culture.

But what are the perks of Professionalism for us, besides competence, consistency, and quality? Well on a social level in a culture where we supposedly have no class system and in which we are all equal under the law, that leaves a pretty enormous social circle to have to deal with. Other cultures have ways of discriminating between people like me and people not like me- people I want in my circle and people I don't. A formal class system (such as used-to-but-still-sorta-does exist in England) is one way to maintain these distinctions. A formal and familiar 2nd person helps as well- It is hard to appreciate as an American what a difference it makes when you call somebody Sie rather than du in German. A "Sie" can be a lamp post, someone about whom you couldn't care a lick and still sleep well at night. A "du" is likely a friend for life. But for Americans, we are perpetually bombarded with each other without any great barrier other than, Hello sir, how can I provide you with excellent service today?

Class systems and social systems are themselves based on emotions- that primitive pecking order business which is pre-verbal, pre-intellectual. So by shutting that level down through dead-pan professionalism we can somehow "relate' to one another in a consistent way. . .


Emotionally prepared for capitalism. . .

How to Floss

I never thought I’d become a conspiracy theorist.

I wasn’t really around when Kennedy was shot, and I don’t really think Bush had anything to do with 9/11. If there are aliens walking around our planet, that’s fine with me, just as long as they don’t drive too slow in the left lane.

And the last thing I thought was that I’d become a Medical conspiracy theorist. But here I find myself, bam, squarely in that camp with no desire to leave.

The only thing that differentiates me from the rest of the conspiracy theorists is that I believe that something is only a conspiracy if you expect things should turn out differently than they do. That is, it’s only a conspiracy if you call it a conspiracy.

I am more an economist or a Taoist and believe that there are natural streams of energy (and capital) flow that, when interrupted or blocked, cause great destruction. If you expect to interrupt this flow and not have some backlash that looks dark and conspiratorial, then you’re just not getting the flow of life.

Most serious economists know that when you ban the flow of capital, say to something like drugs, the energies of supply and demand – or desire - must find other channels to flow through in order to be satisfied. This natural flow, now becoming ‘perverted’ turns into a tangled web of suffering, abuse, and criminality. It has weird side effects like swelling the prison industry and its power. It causes the rise of criminal organizations at home and abroad as well as unnatural sterilization of the earth where plants and flowers would otherwise grow naturally (through pesticide spraying campaigns). The blocks to the free flow of capital create the corruption.

In a parallel vein, mandates also create corruption, because rather than forcing the flow of capital, ideas, and energy in a certain direction they stop the flow completely. In nature, lack of flow creates a kind of festering- usually fungus, mold, and “scum” take over the stagnant area, such as in a swamp or in a pool along the edge of a stream. These organisms serve the function of feeding off of death and flourish in the places where death is prevalent – in those places lacking in flow. It is only a revival of the flow-through that relieves the stagnation, and that can only happen through the lifting of the mandate.

So (to take a non-leftist position) something like mandated child support from unwedded fathers creates the conditions for a sort of “scumminess.” It creates incentives for unmarried women to conceive children because it guarantees them income for a minimum of 18 years per child. Most civilized people would consider this abuse of life the lowest of the low in terms of humanity’s treatment of itself. But it is an occurrence that is very common. And one can decry the behavior, but one must also realize that the conditions of mandate set up a situation in which such behavior is inevitable: it is the nature of stagnant energy to rot. And mandates create stagnation. Only through the lifting of mandates can the natural flow through cleanse out the sickness. (This leads to a longer discussion about what to do about young, semi-orphaned children, which I am open to having at another time and place. There is an article about legal adjustment and gender on the way. This one is about flossing.)

So going back to conspiracies, the economist or the Taoist throws his head back and laughs, knowing that these things are inevitable when there is no flow, no transparency, or when mandates and restrictions are enforced through incarceration or financial ruin (jail and lawyers).

So for example, when the nation mandates that 50% of its budget be spent on doctors through Medicare, Medicaid, and various other programs it guarantees that the medical industry will become corrupt. The industry becomes a de facto monopoly and an autocratic state, independent of democratic oversight and review. We the citizens are expected to “trust the authorities” who know better than we what is good for us and what is not. This reeks of totalitarianism, but like all totalitarian systems, we the totalitarianated have elected to give our power (our money) over to the tyrants- in these cases through half of every dollar we pay in taxes. There is often a great outcry from the left when the government gives endless no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other war “profiteers,” but there is no outcry when Doctors and Hospitals are guaranteed half of the federal budget to do what they please. And the current round of debate that suggests forcing (mandating) every American to buy health insurance will increase the problem exponentially. This makes the Halliburton scandal look like a drop in the bucket.

So my feeling about medical conspiracy is that – of course there is one. But it’s not really a conspiracy since we have chosen to have it. Citizens are fearful for their lives, fearful of death, suffering, and pain and will gladly hand over their authority to anyone who will (at least claim to) protect them from same. This is like any other totalitarian system- the alpha-boss will protect you from the neighboring tribes, so you give him your allegiance, your land, your labor, and your service- all out of fear of losing your life. The paradox is, of course, that you give up your life in order to save your life. This is perhaps the deepest paradox of the fearful mind.

So we have, as a culture, generally done just this to our doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, and of course the insurance companies that lube the whole thing. Prostate check anyone?


But this is just the prelude to the prelude of this post’s topic of discussion, which, I hope you will find, is a very useful and pragmatic one- one that relates to the post on Toby’s Ring (which I have not yet written but hope to scratch out some time in the near future).

The prelude to this post’s topic of discussion is this:

Dentists. I hate dentists. I have always hated dentists.

As a kid I was forced, literally kicking and screaming, to be drugged and tortured by them, and the damage has left me more or less indentured (indentured, yes!) to them for the rest of my be-toothed life.

These sub-doctors have made a profession out of amputation, implantation, chemical poisoning, disfigurement, mutilation, and vile torture. All the while charging huge sums of money and feeding us candy when we’re done to ensure that we keep coming back for more. (My crack dealer should have it so good!)

Through the impermanent fillings that maimed us as children we seem to be doomed to a life of constant refilling for the holes which I believe were in the first place wholly unnecessary.

But for me, I will resist. . .I have made a (semi-)firm commitment to seek a new path towards dental health, trusting in the body’s power of self-regeneration and healing to provide me with the teeth and gums I need to live a happy and chewy life.

Down with the dentists. They may be the worst of the worst. Loading our bodies with heavy metals, which cause depression, suicide, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Cancer, and all manner of preventable ills whose effects destabilize families for generations.

And for what? A tiny hole in a bone? Aren’t teeth bones? Do we open up our femurs and fill them with guck if there’s bacteria in our legs or if we have a fracture? Bones grow back. That’s their nature, given a healthy environment and adequate minerals. Why should teeth be any different? Of course when they’re stuffed with Mercury and Nickel (goes right to the prostate, boys) the bones don’t fare as well- but then again, neither does the rest of the organism, so who will notice?

So I’m through.

But this means taking my dental health into my own hands, and to the best of my understanding, one component of that responsibility is going to have to be flossing.

Now I hate dentists, but I really hate flossing. It hurts, it gives me a headache, it’s bloody, it smells gross, and it’s 5 or 6 minutes of my day I’d rather spend doing almost anything else. It seems tedious, pointless, and an uneconomical (in terms of man hours spent) means of maintaining health. Also, if God had meant for us to floss It would have made it a whole lot easier. (But perhaps the same thing could be said about enemas, so hmm.)

I haven’t done too much experimenting with flossing vs. non-flossing while I’ve been totally raw in my diet, but I suspect it would become less of an issue then. We’ll see.

But in the mean time, I have decided that flossing will have to become part of my lifestyle, at least for the foreseeable future.

I took many months recently treating my teeth “badly” by medical standards. Infrequent brushing, no flossing, no check-ups, etc. So I think I’ve gotten most of the hate out of my system (karma-burn, as my friend Mark likes to call it) regarding teeth and teeth care. So I’m ready to begin my flossing regime.

I started about a week ago.

I was at Esalen in Big Sur, soaking in the hot springs and sitting in the sunshine. One day I sat in a brilliant afternoon sun that turned my head the color of my beard, and that color is red. Serious red. I was sunburned and dried out from the baths and had a splitting headache for about three days. No amount of water or skin oils would seem to re-hydrate me, so I just suffered through it. Around the same time, I tried flossing, forgetting that flossing gives me a splitting headache also when I start up after a long period of non-flossing. So the headache was extreme this time, and I said, basically, Screw this, no more flossing.

So just the other day, things were getting kind of funky in the mouth tasting department (blame it on the Jumping Monkey in Santa Cruz), so I started out again with the flossing.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

I thought to myself, if I start flossing again now, I’m going to bleed like a son of a bitch and have a big headache at least for the next few days. I’m going hang gliding in the morning, so I want to be comfortable and of sound mind and body. But I also wanted to floss.

So in a flash, I remembered a technique I learned in the manual from my Sonicare toothbrush ---

That’s the other thing – do you know how much crap I’ve bought from my dentist over the past 20 years? Special toothpaste in tiny squeeze bottles for 40 bucks, vibrating toothbrushes, special mouth rinses, strips for measuring bacteria, and whatever other crap they were hawking at the last dentist junket/convention in Tahiti sponsored by Colgate. My Sonicare, by the way, vibrates its plastic head against my upper teeth while I’m ‘brushing’ my lower teeth, ensuring that I’ll wear down my enamel just as I’m trying to save it on the lower deck, then in reverse for the next set. Maybe I’d just do better to suck on a few lollipops and then go to bed with some gummi worms in my mouth.

Excuse me. But the Sonicare directions tell you to brush in quadrants of the mouth. And a helpful (pedantic) beep lets you know when Dr. Statistical Average thinks you should move on to the next quadrant.

Well like I was saying, I realized that I could apply this approach to my flossing- so on day one I would floss only the lower right quadrant of my mouth. That would be it. It would be just enough to cause a little bit of pain and lots of bleeding, but on the next day I would not have a full blown headache – at most it would be quarter blown which I figured wouldn’t interfere too much with my hang gliding.

But flossing only part of your mouth leaves you feeling incomplete, kind of like the flossed quadrant would be out of sync with the unflossed quadrants, and the Male Problem-Solver part of me was chomping at the bit (more teeth references for the astute) to finish the job. But no. I would force myself to rattle around in my cage until the following night when I would only floss the bottom left quadrant of my mouth. Are you feeling me here? I’m creating a flow-through around my teeth, combining Yang accomplishment with Ying incompletion and motion to create a circular flossing rhythm which could keep me interested for years.

Now how about that? For all you stubborn, guy, non-flosser, Libertarians, this might be the program for you. Keeps it interesting, mixes it up a little, but in the end you get your flossing done without the headaches and without succumbing to the will of the Man or his dumb-ass subjects. Sounds good to me.

Long live the King!

D

Ok, Murphy, but just this once. . .

“Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.” – Murphy’s Law

Saeran St. Christopher's "a posse ad esse"

The first point I’d make is about politics, not science. The current round of Creationism debate is primarily political. There hasn’t been a national debate on evolution of this scope since Scopes. Why has it resurfaced now- along with the other red herring issue of the day- gay marriage? These are political hooks meant to solidify Republican hegemony. All of the serious intellectuals (and most of the adult homosexuals) in this country are stocked in the solidly Blue states of NY, CA, MA, and IL. These states have been lost to the Republicans forever, so there is no harm in letting the blowhards (pundits & professors, etc.) blow as hard as they like. Those of us on the Upper West Side will never pull the R lever no matter the candidate. However, in the 50/50 states that we now call Red States, the surest fire way to get the angry proles out to the voting booths to create that 51% majority is to wave around pictures of arrogant scientists from New York and Cambridge claiming that the middle-American religious lifestyle is bunk.

In other words, you’ve taken the bait, seeing an opportunity for self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. There really is no debate on this subject except with fairly narrow, provincial minds. You’ve fallen into the intellectual trap of believing that reason is the causal actor in life, that reason alone shall set you free. The emotional response elicited by threatening (intellectual) ideas is what moves people’s passions and moves them to act. And while the intellectuals pat their own backs for being “right” they watch the world go to hell around them with nothing but their own self-satisfaction to comfort them. The most recent result of this farce was the victory of Bush/Cheney in 2004.

You took the bait in the typically stupid manner to which most smart people are prone – an idiotic question was posed and you couldn’t resist showing everybody how smart you were by refuting it. But the people who posed the question have no concern for intellectual rigor or who comes out on top of the debate. It’s basically a give away. What they’re concerned with is raising emotions which cause people to act and override their reason. And my friend, it is working splendidly.

No intelligent person likes being condescended to. And no one who would take your points on faith I would consider to be an intelligent person. As for the rest, you’re just fanning the flames of their resentment of intellectualism in general, further widening the (unnecessary) rift in the social fabric.

“There is no conflict between Science and Religion, however there is conflict between stupid science and stupid religion” – Abraham Maslow

My second point would be religious. The assumptions you make about the nature and intent of the universe are profoundly arrogant and at the same time revealingly simplistic. I can empathize to a point, as I remember myself as a young scientist puzzled that any fool would spend his time majoring in Theology since we had already proved that God did not exist, so what was the point? Of course I was only fourteen at the time and had never seriously investigated faith, myth, religious history, or any kind of practical numinosity. But as I matured I began doing my own research into the more sophisticated spiritual worldviews and learned of their richness, depth, wisdom, and indeed, practicality.

In hearing what I could tolerate of your lecture I was taken aback by the wideness of the assumptions you make about what religion has to offer us – that somehow the primary religious tenets are that we are “meant” to live in a perfectly harmonious world where creativity is “efficient” and hostility to life is the exception and not the rule. Ignoring the fact that serious scientists ought to examine their own assumptions exhaustively, a step which you do not seem to approach in this segment, I would condemn the emotional weakness such assumptions imply:

It is a typical intellectual conceit (and in general a male prejudice as well) that there be some kind of fixed, harmonious, Euclidian order to the world. The intellectual’s feeling of superiority over the emotionally-driven population leads him (generally) to discount the emotional experience as irrelevant, or at best primitive and unworthy of very much respect. But if one takes the emotional person’s point of view, it is the imperfections, the vicissitudes of life that create the challenge, the drama, and the experience of life itself. While the intellectual spends his time breaking life down into meaningless bits, all the while searching for “meaning,” the life experience - which may be the meaning itself - passes him by. From a psychological standpoint this tends to be due to a weakened emotional stance in the individual forcing him to use reason to attempt to control-by-making-sense-of something which is not inherently reasonable. This tail chasing is evident in the current creationist debate.

Suffering, death, the ferocity of nature, the process of creativity - these are all the subject of serious religious thought, discussion, and philosophy. In Saeran's video post, you seem to be refuting an assumption about how these subjects are understood by religious persons. Making such assumptions, of course, makes your case seem all the more obvious and yourself all the more superior. But you have chosen those assumptions just for that purpose, ignoring the rich history and exploration into the deeper psycho-spiritual underpinnings of the human experience. It is an argument against Maslow's "stupid" religion, invoking Murphy's directive to stop arguing with those people!

I am aware that the typical Creationist point of view is moronic- from a scientific point of view. And if Saeran had posted one of their rants on her site, I would be telling them that their simplistic and shallow view of religion was provoking this inflated reaction in the scientific community and that they would do well to seek out the deeper truths in their faiths rather than the fatuous "Thou Shalts" that make them all sound like Philistines. The people that promote these simplistic religious ideas are just as guilty of opportunism and self-promotion as you are, only on the other side – none of which is to the public benefit. The “sensible” Christians and the “sensitive” scientists don’t get air time on Bill O’Reilly – or even Charlie Rose. It’s only the sophomoric fringe that get the play in the public forum – and it’s for exactly the same reasons – they stir emotions, get people to act (i.e. tune in) and boost ratings – again to no great public benefit.

Just to iterate, the cleverness of this tactic politically is that while there is indeed an emotional reaction in the intellectual elite to the silliness of the creationist rhetoric, it is a reaction that is impotent to effect change, due of our political landscape. No matter how angry the folks get in Harvard Square or at Northwestern, the political outcome will not be any different than if they had all been asleep- whereas in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, those few angry rednecks are just enough to push the conservatives over the top. And you are the one luring them on. “Stupid Design.” What better way to get a redneck out of bed on a cold Tuesday in November than calling Jesus stupid. And here we are today. "Four more years!"

A third point is this: Have you ever been to Kansas? Have you ever seriously opened your mind to what you consider to be the ridiculous? As a middle-class, prep-schooled New Yorker myself, I had what must be a similar aversion to life beyond the Hudson. But in a recent bout of courage I made my way to Kentucky – or was it Ohio? – to the new Creationist museum. I had heard the blurb on NPR which declared it to be an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual political tool and decided to see for myself – a little scientific inquiry, eh? I’ll spare you the story of my entire adventure (unless you’d like me to elaborate) and say the whole thing was really quite civilized. From a technological view it made the Museum of Natural History on the West Side look like something my uncle threw together in his basement. They used (perhaps ironically) the full power of modern scientific technology to make their case. It was indeed an impressive display.

But as for substance, when I tried to suss out exactly what they were getting at, it turned out to be a very simple point, and one that I find wholly worthy of discussion. They chose the medium of film to show a young girl asking questions about her life, who she was, what was her purpose, and why was she here – questions that most thoughtful people ask in their lives. During the film, the hipster-looking angels sweep down (accompanied by vibrating seats and surround-sound speakers) and attempt to assuage her concerns that she was here only as an accident of random genetic mutation and that her life had no meaning, purpose, or significance whatsoever.

Now this is a fair point, I’d say. Highly intelligent people have criticized the idea of random mutation as the driving force of evolution – and the nihilism that logically follows from it. In their plain little film, the creationists suggest that there are holes in much of the scientific evidence (points I’m sure you’ve addressed in your many public engagements) and that therefore the world must have been created in the way the Bible says it was. This is certainly an enormous leap in logic. But by failing to adequately address the underlying concerns of the Creationists – not the self-serving explanation of weak-minded theologians - the scientific community is missing an important issue that will never go away. This is not surprising since science has never been able to adequately address such issues of purpose and meaning, so it behooves scientists to ignore them and fight on grounds for which they are better equipped, carbon dating for instance.

It has always been my feeling that scientists have handled the question of Darwinian purposelessness by assuming for themselves the purpose of bringing reason to the ignorant. This is a sort of intellectual sleight of hand that allows them to feel a sense of purpose while at the same time denigrating the concept of purpose (as espoused by traditional religions) through reductionism and, in this case, the concept of random mutation.

By the way, I got through about 3/4 of the exhibits and didn’t see anything about abortion or ”gay marriage.”



So getting back to you, Mr. Tyson, I am not really arguing with your science. I am not really interested in your science. Science will go round and round as it always has, oblivious to what it chooses to ignore- that is irrational, unquantifiable forces that act in reality but which are excluded from scientific inquiry. I am suggesting that science is by and large besides the point. I am taking issue with your tone, your manner, and the other aspects of your presentation that deteriorate the public good to the benefit of your personal career. Science is not the only force in the universe. It is but one perspective, even though it is the dominant one in our culture. So, as a fish in water, it is hard for an intelligent person to realize that there is anything else besides it, yet there most certainly is. And that which we ignore will always come back to haunt us – in ways that not even science can predict.


I have further thoughts on this topic, but I'll leave it here for now. Would be happy to discuss further at your pleasure.

All best,
David Goodman

The Girl from Ipanema

So I give myself credit for coming up with the idea and TR for exploiting it for financial gain. Way to go, us.

So we’re all out at a jazz club in the Village. I’m tired, it’s late, and I hate jazz, so the likelihood of me enjoying myself is low. They’re playing standards, and I’m drifting away, and then it hits me- Sander, I’ll give you one dollar if the next song they play is not Girl from Ipanema. But you have to give me ten dollars if it is. Quick, what do you say?

Well Sander sort of agreed, and we listened attentively as they fiddled around before the next song. The tension mounted as they counted out the next tune, and although the first two notes of the song were a descending minor third, the following notes bore no relationship to Girl from Ipanema, so I pushed a dollar bill across the table to TR, defeated but not outright dejected. After all, what were the odds?

I gave it a minute just to be sure they weren’t doing some kind of extended introduction before they broke into the song, and then after a few minutes I had given in to my loss.

A little bummed, and a little poorer, I sat there – again bored, the thrill of the bet having worn off. I looked over at TR and the words just fell out of my mouth- If they play Girl from Ipanema any time from now until the end of the night (we were at the end of the first set) he would have to give me twenty dollars. If not, I’d drop one more.

Well this made the whole thing more interesting, and I eagerly awaited the next song to earn back my money.

TR, feeling the same excitement (in fact, ten fold) leaned over and said- this is how you could fund your orchestra, Dave. Just don’t write up a program and have people place bets as to what pieces you’ll perform. It’s just like standards in jazz- everybody’s heard them, and they’re probably a little tired of them. But if you wait on the edge of your seat to see if you’ll profit from the opening measures of the Reformation Symphony, you might just get a little into it.

Now I should stop and say that with my orchestra, nobody was tired of the pieces when we played them. Even when we programmed Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, veteran musicians approached me saying they had heard stuff they’d never heard before in that performance. So that’s that.

But if I were to start an orchestra in Vegas, this is exactly what I’d do.

When the musicians walked on and there were four clarinets, the odds would go up that it was Mahler and not Monteverdi, for example, so there would be a little skill and knowledge involved. And it wouldn’t matter how boring the concert was, because people wouldn’t be listening anyway except for the first four measures (which maybe is all you’d get out of them anyway). But the concert could be as boring as you please, and there would still be the thrill of expectation in the air. ‘How much would I make?’

Ugly, TR, but I’ll betcha if somebody comes across this little blog, it will pop up out there in no time. Or maybe one could set up some kind of OTB and base the orchestra in Belarus or something and simulcast to dirty hovels across the world. The possibilities are endless. Clearly.


I left the club early that night, so I’m living a bit with Schroedinger’s bet, not knowing whether I’d lost or won. But the thrill carries on nonetheless.

D