ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
There is no way to ignore Trump, but you can work around him. This seems to be what the world is finding. A personal answer might be: rediscovering connections to the significant people and circumstances that were part of one’s life history, reaffirming your values. For me this meant recognizing how I sustained myself for 91 years in this strange world. I tried various roads to avoid the sinkholes. Continue reading “After Trump, Making Connections”
Boredom is beautiful, a necessary component of human existence. Like good food, too much can be harmful. Like marijuana, take your boredom in small doses. Being bored for a whole day is way too much. Boredom teaches us what’s important. Seen reflectively, it can inspire us. Albert Einstein said, “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” Continue reading “Boredom and Its Variations”
I thought I’d reprise an old post to respond to some of the current doom and gloom. Here’s “Who Cares? 2.”
The old Gershwin song goes this way:
Let it rain and thunder,
Let a million firms go under.
I am not concerned with
Stocks and bonds that I’ve been burned with!
Continue reading “A Thought Post-New Year’s Eve”
We were talking here last week about memories. A poignant string of mine pertains to when I was eighteen and just off to college. Basically indecisive, I didn’t have much preference about schools, so my father and I took a brief tour of some of the “better” institutions—Amherst, Yale, one other I can’t remember, and of course Dartmouth, his alma mater. Continue reading “First and Last Days at Dartmouth”
Maybe she looks a little looney here because this photo was cribbed from a video of her jazz-buying spree in DC last year. Kamala Harris and her husband are big jazz fans, as some of you may know. Husband Doug Emhoff was written up in The Atlantic last month:
The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians. . . .He said, “Jazz isn’t constructed. It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.”
Anyhow, Kamala calls Mingus “really one of the greatest jazz performers ever.” Well, who is going to argue with that?
The fact that she bought Mingus’s most ambitious (and his favorite) album, Let My Children Hear Music, impresses me. She has good taste. The music is a little messy and a little disciplined, like democracy. Here is the opening number from the album, which has an almost classical feel to much of it, despite the title―“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.”
To accompany the album Mingus wrote a strong extended essay, which got some notoriety. Here’s part of what he said:
I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. . . .
Sy Johnson―my good friend, now deceased―orchestrated, arranged and conducted much of the Children album. You can find his comments throughout my book Mingus Speaks. Here’s one such: Mingus’s “music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity.”
I’d like to think that may be what appealed to Kamala. Her humanity is the foundation of her appeal. It’s what people tune in to. And it’s more important than all the money she’s raised and all the memes that have taken hold online. That is what will beat Trump.
Down the rabbit hole into the dreary land of SCOTUS came Alice, looking for clarity and judgment and finding none. She simply wanted to know if those things they called bump stocks―devices to make those nasty guns they called assault rifles―could be modified to kill even more people. Her White Rabbit was the ATF which had banned the stocks after a gun nut shot and killed 60 people out of a hotel window in Las Vegas.
Years had passed since then and Alice, like quite a few others, thought killing people at random should not be for fun or made-up revenge. The Mad Hatter told her that deer don’t shoot back. He maintained that firing off 30 rounds in 11 seconds would be sufficient to assault a school or Walmart with no problem. Who needs a bump stock? Maybe the justices were smoking some shit?
At the Mad Tea Party the jaundiced justices promoted the theory that you had to keep pulling the trigger to activate more firing. This entirely incorrect notion presented by Clarence the Cheshire Cat concluded the bogus trial, while three justices loudly dissented and the cat kept grinning.
Alice finally recognized that the whole thing was a house of cards.
Monk is right about music but politics is a different story. We are going through rough political times where far too many are just playing what they want. Trump says kill the compromise border bill, and the Party of No complies because governing means play what you and the boss, not the people, want. Congress and the Senate are split on this, and we remember what Lincoln said about a house divided.
Jennifer Rubin keeps on slamming them:
Republicans overwhelmingly were against Biden’s popular infrastructure bill and in favor of shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt and conducting bogus impeachment hearings that the voters do not want while opposing a tough border control bill.
Trump says he’s more popular than Taylor Swift and, yes, he’d certainly like to be. The GOP is doing its best to blow its chances to win the upcoming election. They did that with Roe v. Wade and are now doubling down on the issue. We could go on but it’s clear that their political actions are all self-serving.
The Democrats are not exempt from the stupidity of playing whatever you want. Senator John Fetterman, parading on the Senate floor in his gym clothes, demonstrates massive support for Israel while “simultaneously cheerleading the bloody bombardment of Gaza.” He wants no ceasefire because he’s too busy trolling antiwar protesters. Then we have the spectacle of Fani Willis, who should be deposed for ignoring the consequences of doing what she wants, namely messing up a serious case against Trump and his defenders.
But Monk was right about music. The public indeed will catch up if the music merits it. This was true of Monk’s music, Ornette Coleman’s, Mary Lou Williams’, Sonny Clark’s, and that of a number of contemporary players. Classical musicians were often late to be recognized by their publics. Among them, Antonio Salieri, Alexander Scriabin, Franz Schubert, Charles Ives, and of course Gustav Mahler.
Monk was also talking about his own reception, which took some years to flourish. His eccentric personality got him laughed at; his technical approach was misunderstood; and he had his run-ins with the police. Musicians appreciated his ground-breaking music in the 1940s but it took him 20 years to get famous with the public.
Other artists have understood what Monk was saying. Longfellow put it this way: “Art is long, and Time is fleeting.” Van Gogh: “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
My favorite quote about art, which also applies to music, comes from Picasso: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Monk’s genius made a music that was totally fresh and indeed washed away that dust of everyday life.
“The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.” He also wrote, “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”
Such thoughts are part of Gustave Flaubert’s lifelong diatribe against the bourgeoisie and the society brought about by the 1848 Revolution in France. I’m now reading his letters which are fascinating on several levels. Many are oddly relevant to our present sociopolitical troubles.
(I devoted much of my academic study to French literature, particularly the 19th century poets. My dissertation focused on how Symbolist poetry came to be absorbed in England. And its forebears, including Flaubert and Baudelaire, always pervaded my thoughts. Maybe I unduly glorified French rationalist thinking and its artistic renderings, but they have become subsumed into my life.)
I consider the MAGA fanatics to be part of the new bourgeois society that has come to dominate much of the American scene. These folks are the newest iteration of how capitalism and its aspirations and fantasies have transformed middle-class life. The zealots now want to break the system that gave them strength. Stupidity is their dominant characteristic.
By now, we all know what they believe. That’s summed up here. In an explanation of why they believe this way, one author attributes it to basic white supremacy:
Many of these bigoted beliefs and attitudes represent implicit biases that are outside the level of conscious awareness. It couches the rhetoric of white supremacy in the language of individual freedom and individual rights. Hate speech is justified as “free speech,” gun control is an attack on “the right to bear arms,” criticism of offending marginalized group members is seen as “political correctness” and vaccine mandates are seen as governmental intrusion.
These people, in other words, have romanticized their deceptions just as the characters in Madame Bovary did. In that book Flaubert crucified the delusions of his characters through irony, evocative description and, at the same time, narrative detachment. This brought a new kind of realism to the novel. Its withering portrayals of small-town life and its stultifying effects have all kinds of echoes in today’s MAGA followers.
The people of Madame Bovary are limited intellectually and culturally; they are sometimes sincere and well-intentioned, sometimes petty and vulgar, sometimes pathetic and confused, and sometimes unaware of the most obvious things or unable to take the most obvious action.
One of these characters struck me as a sort of analogue for Donald Trump. Homais, the garrulous pharmacist in the book, is forever making egotistical and pompous speeches, always inspired by his self-esteem. He indulges in shady medical practices but never gets caught out. In the last line of the novel Flaubert wryly records that Homais was finally awarded the Legion of Honor he had always sought.
If only the force of art and the achievements of a powerful style could protect us from such real charlatans. Flaubert brilliantly maligned them in his day; as writers we must continue the struggle.
I’m out of words today. Trump is too much with us, he makes our brains febrile. In Iowa he said, “You can’t sit home. If you’re sick as a dog . . . even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it.” Music may be the best way to tune this crap out.
Waltz for Debby is one of the great jazz albums. Put this music on and bathe in it.
I first broached the subject of bad taste (about which there’s no disputing) back in July here. My point was basically this: “If culture is enlightenment, the new bad taste glorifies most any excess and flouts the most accepted of values. Are the Barbarians at the gates?”
They’re not only at the gates, they have sacked the city. Well, you say, one person’s bad taste is another’s flair or style. True, but relative standards of discernment have all but disappeared, if they ever truly existed. The Guardian’s fashion editor recently said the following:
The notion of good taste has always been problematic. Taste gets tangled up with class, status, knowing the unwritten rules, even with breeding. It doesn’t have to be. Having a good eye and a discerning sense of taste is nothing to do with snobbery, although the two are often lazily conflated.
Really, it’s more complicated than that, which is why I am trying to write a book about it. Bad taste now moves the world, as we saw all through 2023. It is the new cultural standard, and our complaining or ranting won’t change that. Trump offers a thousand examples. So does celebrity culture and the false status it accrues. Traditional education has caved to the world Claudine Gay represents. Pop culture could well be considered the godparent of ChatGPT. And so on.
Whatever cultural bona fides I have came through a lot of education and a lot of communications work in different fields. The late 1950s were my incubation period. American class and culture changed radically after World War II, becoming more democratic in word if not in deed. The war created an economy that floated a lot of boats in a culture that sustained them—for a while.
As an example, in that era the art world of Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and the abstract expressionists represented a culture that aligned itself against the world of money, which happened to be the province of their patrons. A few like Warhol got rich, while others created a taste for the new that reflected or ignored the personal poverty their producers had to live with. Most musicians also lived “on the edge” and still do. But wealthy buyers created that taste for the new art even while its creators looked down their noses at money and the money culture that supported it. The art world is still dealing with the aftereffects of this.
In other words, the money culture, or consumer capitalism, now more than ever dominates our lifestyle and, I think, has produced the recent epidemic of what old traditionalists like me call bad taste. The digital world has enabled it to thrive, and our complaints and protests won’t change anything. Our culture now provides us with everything—and nothing.
The kitschy and the tacky are all around us, and they have defined much of pop art for a long time. This won’t last forever, but old-fashioned culture-lovers like me are hiding out until it’s over.
“Fear of bad taste envelops us like a fog.” —Gustave Flaubert
I heard via the grapevine that some folks consider my posts too negative. Well, if the world was just about flowers, good dogs and sunshine, we could all wish it were so. Maybe my critics want relief from the incredible amount and frequency of bad/horrible news that we hear each day. Anyhow, you’re always going to get my unvarnished opinions here.
Many seemed to like my last post, Nobody’s thinking about you, which was really how the present culture fails old people. Today, let’s talk about how it fails all of us.
First, a bit of good news. A judge in Charlottesville, where my family lives, just advanced the claim to melt down the Robert E. Lee statue that has caused so much commotion. The City Council gave the statue to a group whose plan is to melt it down and use the ingots for local artists to create something new and noble. The group behind the effort is Swords into Plowshares.
So about the decline of what we used to call culture: Wikipedia defines it this way, “Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.”
I take it personally, and we all do. It’s expressed in how we dress, eat, speak to each other, experience art, and all the rituals we follow. It’s how we engage with the world and react to it. Traditionally—especially in the arts and before the digital world came on—progress, understanding and creativity came from how we learned and created from history.
Elie Weisel gave us my title for today. Here’s the rest of what he said: “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.” You can take memory in several ways here. He seems to mean that history is how we remember it.
But our present culture isn’t built that way. It thrives on chaos, narcissism, and detachment from what our forebears considered culture. Jason Farago wrote a long comprehensive view (Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill) of what’s wrong—and sometimes right—in present day, mostly pop, culture. Being an old putz I miss most of these references. But the point he makes is this:
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press . . . The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten. Our museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market except the very people they once systematically excluded.
And the public has been willing to buy and promote, with a few exceptions, shards of crap. Ray Bradbury noted: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Well, the audience is there; the problem is what they are reading and reacting to.
Cultural decline comes also from what Farago calls the age of digital underachievement:
But more than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense. . . . If there is one cultural work that epitomizes this shift, where you can see our new epoch coming into view, I want to say it’s “Back to Black,” by Amy Winehouse.
If you like this grim take on “our new epoch,” let me know. The internet and its pop culture has become a zoo for diseased animals. Some of the consequences are explained here. I know, I’m ending on a sour note and I wish things were different.