Doubts

So this whole aesthetic shift has fallen on Platonic lines—retaining music believed to be harmonious and didactic, jettisoning that which explores struggle and strife, dismissing catharsis, assuming tension is exercised rather than exorcised through metal, punk, and pop.  What a fascist. 

Beyond that, classical music as homeopathy?  So lame.  The record industry has a long tradition of packaging classical music as instant culture.  But it seems to have grown past that, now promising a cure for stress, a way to cultivate a baby, a means of promoting thought, a sleep aid, in short, a panacea for modernity, a product of and response to capitalism.

Suite for Toy Piano

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a theory of linguistic relativism and determinism—thought is shaped by language, language is shaped in terms of categories, categories are language specific and differ across cultures (the most commonly cited example, which turns out to be false and unsupported, contends that Eskimos perceive reality differently because they have hundreds of words for snow).   I don’t know whether or not this is true, but I do imagine the indigenous peoples of America, when they first saw Europeans, believed them to be a collective hallucination—an unreality, because it couldn’t be described through pre-existing categories of language. 

Anyway, what may or may not be true of language, to me anyway, is true of music.  If, for the last 15 years, I’ve been thinking in terms of the categories music has provided me, then I’ve been thinking in terms of narcissism, nihilism, angst, etc.  I’ll be the first to admit this. 

In Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel, the narrator has a conversation with a friend about popular music:

Evan: “So suppose people are projecting.  Take the ghetto-blaster person or the secretary with the Walkman listening to the worst possible music.”

Nina: “Yeah, so she’s listening to ‘I’m Just a Woman in Love.’”

Evan: “She’s mapping her life on to this really lousy music.  Isn’t she simplifying, romanticizing and generally distorting?”

So, this Greek idea of mimesis, that music, as art, reflects life becomes inverted.  I’m not matching music to my mood when I turn on my stereo; in fact, the opposite is happening.  I’m taking a very nebulous mood, and imposing a shape on it—“Skulls,” “An Ugly Death,” “The More You Ignore Me (The Closer I Get).” 

Basically, what I’m saying is “you are what you eat” and that I’m going dieting.  So, starting two days ago, I began an experiment.  For the next month, only classical music.  Right now, to me, classical music is homogenous, is the soundtrack to expensive car commercials, and, of course, is pretentious.  At the same time, it’s appealing that it’s “just sound” to me, and, as a consequence, lacks that overt rhetorical simplification and distortion.  Some people will say it’s the origin of the cult of personality—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.  To me, it’s completely anonymous.  No idea about the performers, the composers, the social context.  It’s resistant to mass marketing; or, rather, mass marketing is resistant to it—unwieldy, diffuse, and made by ugly and smart old men.  Why not techno or electronica then (It’s equally anonymous, pretentious, lacking in vocals; just a soundscape to an untrained ear).  Because, at its heart, electronic music is making a very depressing statement—like life, it’s repetitive and synthetic.

hott off the presses

…is not amused.

Look at the syntax of facebook, myspace, and twitter and you see a reflection of the socio-economic means of production that allow for such apparatus to exist.  Peruse the insipid clichés in such examples as: “is buying new shoes; is eating more chocolate; is very drunk” and you see a desire to efface the agent of action, the nominative-subject, and a privileging of the predicate-object.  The goal here is obviously to maintain self-reification, to promote objectification and suppress any potential subversive agency in a consumer-driven society. 

The Ascendancy of the Vampyre and What It Means

Recent years have witnessed the appropriation of the vampyre; main stream media has adopted it as the mascot for the sexually repressed (i.e. the sexually abstinent), the sexually deviant, the socially marginalized, the outsider, the teen age.  In being made the protagonist, the vampyre has experienced a humanizing that, by very definition, signals its own dialectic negation. Moreover, the vampyre’s new symbolic function points toward the most rapidly growing corner of the market–tweens, who occupy a “nether-space” like that with which they so readily identify.  

One might assume all this commercial packaging would send Bram Stoker spinning in his grave, but this, too, reveals a misreading of his biography.  Born Irish, developing characters in Europe’s own nether-world–Romania, before importing them to England suggests the rising twin spectres of capitalism and colonialism.  Of course, the perpetually moribund centre of imperialism and its only means of sustenance–the labor and crop of its colonies–requires a parasitic (i.e. vampyric) relationship with the other.  

It should come as no surprise, then, that the vampyre has been appropriated from antagonist to protagonist in modern popular culture.  With a constantly expanding global market and outsourcing of labor, with growing global disparities between haves and have-nots, advertisers have re-molded the face of the vampyre into a misunderstood anti-hero.   Just look in the mirror.

Michael Jackson.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Gabriel Garcia Marquez recounts the historic and political solitude that stems from despotism and madness: 

General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Beyond Latin America there are the well-known excesses of Imelda Marcos and her 2,500 pairs of shoes, Omar Bongo’s 33 different Parisian estates, or Kim Jong-il’s insistence on live lobsters being airlifted to his armored trains to accommodate decadent tastes and a fear of flying (paradoxically, David Geffen’s privatization of miles of beach-front Malibu property is often heralded as a “right” of democratic capitalism).  In these instances tragedies do not stem from the death of national icons, but that over one billion people must live on less than $1/day to afford these lifestyles.  Sadly ironic, it’s the same dispossessed that fill television screens in fits of mourning.  

So what of Michael Jackson?  Besides his favor of militaristic epaulets, reclusive paranoia, banners of iconographic portraits and silhouettes, conspicuous consumption, there’s his own cult of personality, just as manufactured as the aforementioned.  Keith Obermann reports on his strategic campaign efforts for lifetime achievement awards in developing nations (where his reputation has yet to be tarnished), where lobbyists are systematically employed on his behalf. Pepsi and its metonymic extension in Jackson have been instrumental in neo-colonialist hegemony.  

Beyond situating Jackson in the tradition of despots, he’s also the inheritor of a different legacy.  From the bloated King to the emaciated King of Pop, idiosyncrasies unite the two.  For example, the profit-motivated desire to reify their auras: Elvis sent his car on a national tour in his place (inspiring the Beatles to write “Drive My Car”); Michael Jackson had a statue of himself tour the world (not to mention buying the skeleton of the Elephant Man).  Interesting that the regal nomenclature extends into incestuous practices, Jackson briefly being married to Lisa Marie Presley.  Their humble origins of Tupelo and Gary, respectively, undermine a complete one-to-one correlation to European monarchy.  

Needless to say, Jackson’s pragmatic function is to serve as amnesia and diversion from larger pressing matters like political unrest in Iran, so in death as in life, truth remains obscured.  His death, which has already prompted large demonstrations and outpouring of emotion on behalf of those who never knew him, surpasses any empathetic connections people might have with their actual neighbors.

The Musical in My Head.

I’ve been working on a production of Assassins in my head for the past two years.  It should be noted I’ve never seen a production of the musical (or really any musical for that matter).  In a way, this might work to my advantage, freeing up some directorial decisions.  The way I picture the musical in my head is that it’s set in Lee Harvey’s head; since I’m producing this, that puts Oswald’s head inside my head.  Inside his head are the voices of all past assassins, successful and not, manifestations of his mental illness wrestling with his conscience.  

Once the multiple frame narratives are established, it gets chronological, starting with Booth.  Lincoln will be in the “actual” audience, watching My American Cousin on a stage on top of the stage.  The audience, in turn, becomes part of the cast: an audience playing the part of the audience.   As Hamlet refers to his distracted globe on the stage at the Globe, so the theater becomes a symbol for the mind, a collective consciousness of what it means to be “American”, and just as “everyone has the right to shoot the president” is a perversion of the American dream, so the contradictory and disparate components of the audience suggest a sense of national schizophrenia–allusive to the schism that divided the nation and allowed for John Wilkes Booth to exist.  To quote Lincoln quoting the Bible: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” so it is with the mind in Jim Stevens’ poem “Schizophrenia”.  To recap…we have voices inside the voices of the voices, we have symbols inside the symbols of the symbols, and we have allusions to allusions inside allusions.  

“How I Saved Roosevelt” presents the same opportunities of experimentation with the fourth wall, since it’s a song from the crowd, where individuals attempt to rise above their anonymity (and, in doing so, parallel the assassin they thwart) by taking credit for saving the president’s life.  These actors are also spread throughout the audience.

“Gun Song/The Ballad of Czolgosz” is one of my favorite parts of the musical–a Marxist analysis of the labor required to produce a gun (“It takes a lot of men to make a gun, hundreds, many men to make a gun.  Men in the mines to dig the iron, men in the mills to forge the steel, men at machines to turn the barrel, mold the trigger, shape the wheel.”).  And then, the actual Marxist–Czolgosz.  A Marxist analysis of a Marxist (again, all in the head of Oswald, a man who wrestled with his own conflicting attitudes toward U.S.-Cuban relations in a cold war era), represented in a Brechtian method (himself, a Marxist).  

The score itself does a fine job of complementing setting–period pieces and genre hopping from banjo’d folk (Ballad of Booth), Sousa-style marches (How I Saved Roosevelt), Copland-esque song for the every man (Ballad of Guiteau) to AM gold (Unworthy of Your Love).  The eclecticism creates a pastiche, a simulacrum of precedents, like Oswald himself in relation to all who came before him.  With this in mind, I want one actor playing all the assassins, distinguishable only through costume.

The Allure of Fishing

Ryan and I are co-authoring a book on fishing.  After a few laborious months of research, we’ve finally written the page numbers.  Here’s a brief excerpt: 

78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86

A School of Fish…

Your Bait of Falsehood Takes This Carp of Truth

During our introductions yesterday, I mentioned two goals of mine for the summer: to become a better teacher by attending the UIWP and to become a better fisherman.  Whereas I’ve had four years of education and five years of practice with the former objective, I’m a neophyte in the dark when it comes to the latter.  This isn’t for lack of opportunities, however.

After my mother remarried in 1990, my step-dad was eager to establish a rapport with me through the age old tradition of fishing.  He outfitted me with a fishing “starter pack” that included a rod/reel, tackle box, and some lures.  Fishing might provide bonding opportunities in tranquil environments; but,  it also provides plenty of awkward silences and exposes one’s ineptitudes.  After a few frustrating and failed attempts to catch anything in the Kankakee river other than debris and detritus, I went home and, unbeknownst to my step-dad, gutted the contents of my tackle box.  In place of lures, I filled the box with what was my true passion at the time: candy.  We had a terrific wholesale candy store in Manteno, meant, ostensibly, for vendors.  To a young entrepreneur like myself, however, bulk quickly translated itself to value, and I was buying large quantities of Ferrara-Pan candies (Lemonheads, Johnny Appleseeds, Red Hots, Boston Baked Beans, and Alexander the Grapes).  In their co-opted display case, each filed in a separate shelf and bin, the candy took on a tantalizing appearance (for full disclosure, it should be mentioned that my Dad is a dentist, so in a way, this act was a double-rebellion against father figures).  

Eventually, my step-dad saw what I had done with the tackle box, and our fishing trips ended.