On the Virtue of Raising Hell

Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, which happens to be almost directly below where I live, started showing Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins this past Friday. There are very few films that I seek out as soon as they open, and even fewer of them that have nothing to do with either music or dance. However, there was no doubt in my mind that Janice Engel’s effort to chronicle the life and works of Molly Ivins in a documentary that runs a little over 90 minutes would be one of those films. Having now seen it, the first thing I can say is that my instincts were right on target.

I am not sure when I took my first hit of Ivins’ insight and the wit she engaged to seize and hold my attention. I am pretty sure that it was when she was being interviewed by Jim Lehrer, back when his television program was called The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her sense of humor was so outrageous that I could catch Lehrer himself squirming from time to time; but that was a time when Ronald Regan was the 40th President of the United States, making jokes about “We begin bombing in five minutes” during a sound check, not knowing that the microphone was going out over the air.

Ivins seemed to live by the mantra of never taking anything too seriously. To the contrary, she knew how to tease humor out of any number of dire situations. Many took offense at her style, but most of those had been responsible for getting our country into those situations. For the rest of us, her humor provided a release value and possibly the reassurance that there were clearer heads who could tell a naked emperor from one that could be taken seriously as a leader.

My one concern is the risk that the generations that have followed mine may not pick up on what this account of Ivins opinions signifies. Those who read this site regularly know my mantra that the prevailing culture is one that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Engel’s documentary reminded me that such a perspective was around long before we became a nation of zombies aware only of the screen on a cell phone. Ivins certainly knew about that culture. However, hers was an age when people still read text in print, rather than reading from screens; and, while her words may have offended some, they flashed on light bulbs for others.

Will Engel’s film flash on any more light bulbs? Damned if I know. I do know that Ivins mastered a sense of presence, both in her writing and when addressing an audience; and the nature of that presence reverberates, at least to some extent, in “new media” figures such as Jon Stewart and John Oliver. Indeed, I suspect that, were she alive today, Ivins would be impressed that someone like Oliver can deliver persuasive argumentation on the scale of a written essay and still, by interjecting just the right jokes at just the right time, command an attentive real-time audience. So I would like to believe that there was always a foundation of optimism supporting the plethora of razor-sharp barbs coming out of Ivins’ writing; and, if I can believe that, I can also hope that those now following Oliver will get around to realizing that “getting the message” should never be a passive response.

Being True to the Source

While it should be clear from my Examiner.com account that I really enjoyed the 25th Anniversary Concert by the Turtle Island Quartet on Friday night, there was one aspect in how a couple of their numbers were introduced that deserves a bit of attention.  One of them was Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower,” which was immediately associated with Jimi Hendrix and was included with other Hendrix selections on their latest CD.  Similarly, “Cross Road Blues” was properly attributed to Robert Johnson;  but, by similar reasoning, was then associated with Eric Clapton’s recording.

Now, in all fairness, I have to wonder whether Columbia would have gone to the trouble of releasing all of Johnson’s recording sessions had it not been for the efforts of the British pop musicians, particularly the Rolling Stones and Clapton, to return Johnson to his proper place in public attention.  So little is known about Johnson himself that the myths about the man vastly outweigh any actual facts, but even those myths are important to anyone who aspires to take up the torch as either performer or listener.  On the other hand Dylan had been a “hot property” for Columbia before Hendrix became a major source of attention.  Indeed, Dylan may have influenced what Hendrix was trying to do as much as the old Johnson recordings had cultivated Clapton’s interest in getting back to the “primal roots” of blues.

Another way to be fair, of course, is to recognize that Turtle Island as more interested in jamming than in giving any lessons in ethnomusicology (or any other branch of musicology, for that matter).  As I noted in my Examiner.com review, just about any genre is fair game when the Turtle Island members (and their friends) get together to make music.  However, this is a good time to recall that the authors of the Upanishads believed that knowledge resided in the connections that bound together elements from similarly unrelated realms.  What continues to impress me about Turtle Island is their conviction that “making music” is a practice that transcends more confining activities labeled as “playing jazz” or “performing the classics.”  However, that transcendence emerges from those connections established between “realms” normally assumed to be “unrelated.”  Calling attention to the audience cannot harm the listening experience and may even enhance it.

Voting on Issues

The California Primary Election for the Democratic candidate for Attorney General seems to be drawing out-of-state attention. That is because the favored candidate, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris is being challenged by Chris Kelly, listed as "Attorney/Businessman" on the ballot but better known among the digerati as the former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook. Enough mud has been slung through television advertising to attract the attention of CNET News staff writer Caroline McCarthy, who has her own column on CNET News called The Social. McCarthy files her stories from Manhattan; but Kelly's Facebook connection seems to have put a blip on her radar, at least since she saw the YouTube posting of Harris' ad attacking Kelly as responsible for Facebook's controversial privacy policies. As a writer with a "social software beat," she was probably justified in preparing a column that addressed Kelly's side of the story:

In response, the Kelly campaign has called the ad "patently false" and pointed out that Kelly, who took a leave of absence from Facebook and then formally resigned his post in March, has actually been critical of Facebook's handling of its most recent privacy controversy.

However, her next paragraph, while basically accurate, does not really tell the whole story:

Harris, who has been endorsed by California's current senators as well as several major newspapers, is still considered the front-runner in the field of seven total primary candidates. Kelly, who has financed his candidacy with $12 million of his own money, is considered to be her closest challenger.

The part that is missing concerns how much of that $12 million went into attack ads against Harris! Now I do not watch a lot of network television; so my exposure to locally-targeted advertising comes primarily from what gets run during local news broadcasts. Whether or not this is a valid sample space, I can report that, now that Election Day is here, I never saw the anti-Kelly ad; but I have lost count of the number of times I have seen anti-Harris ads. The attacks on Harris must have been having enough of an effect to prompt her team to respond in kind, but it looks as if they got to the boob tube with too little too late.

For the record I have already cast my vote; and, for this part of the ballot, I see no reason to hide my decision. I should begin by saying that I make it a point to read all information that the California Secretary of State provides about the choices I can make. That means that all candidates for Attorney General from all parties were invited to submit position statements; and, when I found the pages for the Democratic candidates in my Official Voter Information Guide, I discovered that neither of these candidates had submitted a statement. (In all fairness I should observe that Jerry Brown did not submit one for his gubernatorial contest, either; but that is another matter.) Among the statements that were available, I found one by a candidate who actually had a position and a philosophy to go with it. Alberto Torrico wrote about education as "the best strategy to prevent crime and rehabilitate criminals." This is admittedly a highly idealistic philosophy; but it is still an idea with some substance that, in this case, brings a lot more to the issue of law enforcement than no ideas at all. Torrico clearly did not have the sort of economic resources available to either Harris or Kelly; so the best he could do by way of promotion was a series of robocalls, which were basically as intrusive and offensive as any other robocalls. Nevertheless, they were not as offensive as the mud that Harris and Kelly were slinging at each other; and I continue to believe that his ideas deserve more attention. This should make it clear how I decided to vote for this particular contest!

Messy Reality

The title of Benjamin M. Friedman's latest piece for The New York Review, "Two Roads to Our Financial Catastrophe," refers to his examination of two recent books analyzing the economic crisis. One is by John Lanchester, who is not known for his work in economics and is described by Friedman as "a British writer better known for his fiction and criticism;" but that background would justify the rhetorical flair of his book's title: I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. The other is by John Cassidy, a journalist specializing in economics and finance. His title is less flamboyant but more fascinating for its substance: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.

Friedman provides an excellent précis of Cassidy's "logical analysis" that bears consideration:

… Cassidy is interested in the people behind what he calls "the triumph of utopian economics," and how their ideas came to be so dominant. As he rightly points out, "the notion of financial markets as rational and self-correcting mechanisms is an invention of the last forty years." Such advocates of market efficiency as the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, and contemporary economists like Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas (both also at Chicago) all receive careful attention. So do the political figures who championed their ideas, most prominently Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. Alan Greenspan, with his bizarre devotion to the Russian-born ideologue Ayn Rand, stands out as the chief villain in Cassidy's telling, guilty of not just flawed ideas and sinister influence but "much prevarication" as well.

Cassidy contrasts the "utopian economics" that each of these people helped to propagate with "reality-based economics," which suffers not only from the inevitable intellectual messiness that comes with attempts to analyze the world as it is, but also from failing to line up with the interests of the economy' self-aggrandizing elites. The centerpiece of Cassidy's analysis of the difference between the two economic worldviews is the prevalence and potentially damaging consequences of what he calls "rational irrationality"—a situation in which each influential actor does only what makes perfect sense from an individual perspective, but the combined effect of everyone's acting in this way leads to outcomes that make sense for no one.

Ironically, the logic of rational irrationality can be deduced from the very principles of game theory that lie at the heart of utopian economics; and game theorists are at least willing to acknowledge it as a dilemma, more specifically the "prisoner's dilemma." If utopian economics is all about building the right models against which one seeks to optimize payoff, then the prisoner's dilemma is the classic example in which optimization of the group cannot be achieved by each individual seeking his/her own individual optimization.

Beyond such counterexamples, however, is the question of whether or not reasoning grounded in a philosophy of positivism can deal adequately (never mind effectively) with that "inevitable" messiness of reality. This goes back to whether or not one can build those "right models" in the first place; and I have previous observed that all positivism can tell us is whether or not a model is internally consistent. The problem is that consistency offers nothing when it comes to recognizing that inevitable messiness:

Consistency is thus worse than Ralph Waldo Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds;" it is a pragmatically unattainable goal that distracts us from more realistic goals concerned with "living with the mess" (otherwise known as being-in-the-world).

This emphasis on verbs like "living" and "being" emphasize a further problem with utopian economics, which is that the mathematics of game theory equates optimization with finding an equilibrium point in a complex multidimensional landscape. In other words game theory is, from a grammatical point of view, noun-based and thus totally at odds with verbs like "living." This, again, is a point I have previously discussed invoking one of my favorite twentieth-century thinkers:

Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death!

I would therefore suggest that what makes "rational irrationality" so irrational is its analytic foundation based on the concept of state. That foundation basically clouds any vision of what we have now come to call "gaming the system," which is basically the search of loopholes through which the system may be abused for the sake of personal gain.

This, in turn, provides a lens through which we can think about getting out of the mess in which we are still bemired. If Greenspan has become "chief villain," then his primary act of villainy has been deregulation, which is why so much of the current talk about economic reform concentrates on establishing a new regulatory system. I do not object to such reform, but I think we need to be careful about where it takes us. By their very nature, regulations can only live in that noun-based world, which, in the spirit of gaming the system, can always be subjected to verb-based abuses. Regulations can be useful, but they can only go so far. We would do better to think of the "health and well-being" of economic activities in terms of "Udi Manber's metaphor for safeguarding against abusive and criminal practices on the Internet as an arms race." As I previously wrote, "the safety of the Internet will never be strictly a matter of technology;" and, by the same reasoning, economic health will never be strictly a matter of establishing and enforcing the right regulations. That is just part of the nature of the messiness of reality, which is why being-in-the-world is ultimately a matter of how we act to live with the mess.

Cool Born from Bebop

One of the more interesting side effects of my reading Ira Gitler's Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s was that it sent me back to giving a more serious listening to Birth of the Cool, the album that Miles Davis recorded for Capitol before going over to Blue Note. This was originally the title (apparently coined by Pete Rugolo) of a 12" LP of performances by what was called the Miles Davis Nonet. Eight of those recordings had been previously issued on a 10" LP in Capitol's Classics in Jazz series. The later release included three omitted instrumental tracks and one vocal ("Darn That Dream," sung by Kenny Hagood).

While there is no question that Miles was the leader for the three recording sessions (January 21, 1949, April 22, 1949, and March 9, 1950), I feel that the most important thing about the entire project was how much of a joint effort it was. Miles is sole composer of only one track, "Deception;" and he shares "Budo" with Bud Powell. Just "by the numbers," Gerry Mulligan would have to be counted as "principal composer," since he is responsible for three tracks ("Jeru," "Venus de Milo," and "Rocker"). Just as important is the contribution of John Lewis ("Rouge"); but the real sin of omission is the absence of Gil Evans' name from any of the basic credits. In the CD release one has to delve into the notes by Pete Welding to appreciate the role that Evans played, along with Miles, Mulligan, and Lewis in the birth of the Nonet and its subsequent recording sessions.

If we want to extend the birth metaphor to cool itself, then we might do well to consider it in terms of parentage. From this point of view one parent will be the small groups led by Charlie Parker and the other would be the characteristic big band sound from Claude Thornhill through the combination of his particular assembly of instruments and Evans' arrangements for that assembly. The Miles Davis Nonet thus inherited the genes of both the "Parker size" and the "Thornhill size." The CD also includes a "Special Note by Gerry Mulligan" that credits even more contributors. Most important in Mulligan's list is the presence of George Russell, described as one of the "more-or-less regulars at Gil's" and, in those early days, another arranger for Thornhill (not to mention Dizzy Gillespie's big band for which he arranged "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop"). Of those who appreciate just how many people were involved in the formation of the Nonet, Mulligan is definitely the most comprehensive and generous when it comes to giving credit where credit is due.

Beyond the fact that the ensemble is a nonet, the most interesting thing about it is its instrumentation. Mulligan's baritone sax shares responsibility for the bass line with a tuba played by John William (Bill) Barber, who, like Mulligan, came over from Thornhill's band. Then there was the decision to include a French horn, whose player changed in each of the three recording sessions (Junior Collins, Sandy Siegelstein, and Gunther Schuller, in the order of the recording dates). The result was a richness of sound that owed as much to Igor Stravinsky (whose name appears frequently in Gitler's oral history) as to the evolution of jazz in the forties.

The other side of the coin, however, is that, as those sounds were being explored, there was a certain sameness in how they established that "cool" mood from one track to the next. Diversity would emerge later, for Davis and Evans in their studio collaborations for Columbia. Birth of the Cool had more to do with accepting the nonet instrumentation as a premise and then homing in on its expressiveness with a very keen sense of refinement. Thus, as projects go, it was its own beginning and its own ending. After that all those who contributed would move on to other things, taking their experiences from the three recording sessions in different directions. From this point of view, that birth metaphor may be inappropriate; because what was "born" did not experience the sort of "maturation" that Gitler had documented in his oral history or that we would encounter in the subsequent period of the emergence and refinement of the free jazz movement (choosing that example because today happens to be Ornette Coleman's birthday, as well as Samuel Barber's). Birth of the Cool is a document of three splendid moments; but it did not declare the beginning of a "new era," as we might say, in classical music, of the opening measures of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or the riot that greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. We can listen to it appreciatively, but we should also listen with a sense of historical context.

The Direction Question

One of my friends reminded me of a Master Class we had attended at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music conducted by Robert Mann. She recalled Mann telling a first violin in a string quartet that she had a very polished sound but that her playing was "without direction." I realized that his observation resonated closely with my tendency to invoke a metaphorical use of the noun "journey," applying it to either an individual composition or the structure of a program for an entire concert. One property of Western music that seems almost universal is the presence of a well-defined beginning and ending, between which there is this continuous span of elapsed time. Is there anything more to the journey than this passing of time; and, if so, what is that "more?"

The best way to deal with this question is to look for counterexamples. The most obvious of these are those works by John Cage in which the composition is the passing of some specified duration of time. Anything that happens over that duration is part of the composition. One might be hard pressed to call this a journey, but one cannot call the composition static either. Alternatively, one may say that it is a journey that advances on the basis of "environmental conditions," rather than according to a path set by the composer (or, for that matter, the performer). In other words the music is a journey. However, any account of that journey cannot be predetermined; nor is it likely to be reproduced.

I am thinking about this while listening to tracks from my Miles Davis Columbia box of The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. On the first CD in the box, "Bitches Brew" is preceded by "Pharaoh's Dance;" and there may be some clues in how these two pieces (the first by Davis and the second by Joe Zawinul) differ. Both build on a very steady beat; but in "Bitches Brew" Davis punctuates that beat with almost violent declamations that evoke the rhetoric of a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon (although his own image probably comes closer to a witch casting a spell). The rest of the group works with rhetorical responses of their own. However, the exchange seems to be one in which Miles is up on the pulpit and everyone else is in the dutiful congregation. There is clearly a journey progressing here (although, given the artwork produced for the original release, the noun "trip" would probably be more appropriate).

In "Pharaoh's Dance," on the other hand, the beat seems to be more of a foreground phenomenon. The same instruments (including Miles' trumpet) get to speak; but it is almost as if they are mumbling in the background while the beat goes on (and on and on …)! This may just be my own irritability speaking; but I find that this approach to performance makes for a far more impoverished journey than the experience of letting the environment set the journey in one of Cage's "duration" compositions. Perhaps I am willing to grant that Cage has taken the trouble to lay down some rules, however unorthodox those rules may be, while there is too much of that do-your-own-thing self-absorbed (and drug-induced?) muddling in "Pharaoh's Dance." After all, once one becomes familiar with Cage's work, one can reflect on the journeys that emerged and perhaps even on some of the roads not taken. In "Pharaoh's Dance," on the other hand, it seems as if no one ever bothers to get up and go!

Beethoven, Eliot, and Time

I have to be very careful about how many reviews I read through my New York Times RSS feeds (lest I end up spending the whole day with them); but this morning there was one by Anthony Tommasini that was impossible to resist. It involved a performance on Wednesday night at the Baryshnikov Arts Center under the auspices of Lincoln Center's New Visions series. In this case the "novelty of vision" had less to do with the content itself than with the approach to presenting that content, which was made clear by the headline for Tommasini's review:

Eliot’s and Beethoven’s Voices Yoked

My immediate reaction to this headline was that I would finally work out just what the relationship was between the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot and the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, including the question of specifically which quartets inspired which poems and how.

Tommasini's review began by establishing the current state of play over resolving that question:

In 1931, while listening to a gramophone recording of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor (Op. 132), T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to his friend Stephen Spender, the English poet and novelist. Eliot found the Beethoven piece “quite inexhaustible to study,” he wrote.

“There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human, gaiety about some of his later things,” Eliot continued, “which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruits of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

Eliot did so in “Four Quartets,” his series of four lengthy, connected poems written over six years and first published together in New York in 1943. Among Eliot scholars, it seems, there is debate about how, precisely, this effort was inspired by the Quartet in A minor, one of Beethoven’s astonishing late works.

Thus, it appears that all four of Eliot's poems were inspired by a single quartet; and, reviewing the texts I realized that each of those poems has the same "five-movement" structure, which Opus 132 does not share with any of the other late quartets. So the idea that one quartet served as the inspiring force behind four poems is certainly a plausible one, plausible enough to provide the foundation for the concert Tommasini was reviewing:

Staged in the 130-seat Howard Gilman Performance Space, the piece began [the actor] with Mr. [Stephen] Dillane reciting the Eliot poems from memory in a continuous, soft-spoken and mesmerizing monologue lasting 75 minutes. After a short intermission, members of the Miró Quartet, facing one another like four players in a card game, performed the Beethoven, giving a vibrant, probing and personal account of this mystical 45-minute work.

At this point I realized that this was very much a you-had-to-be-there event. If the heart of Eliot's "response" to (interpretation of?) Beethoven took the form of four poems, each with a five-movement structure, was that structure at all evident in Dillane's "continuous" delivery; and how important was the relationship between the formal structure of both the poems and the music and the "content" (whatever that might mean) of each?

Tommasini made it clear that he was not going to delve into such profound questions in the column space allotted to a music review:

I hesitate to try to summarize the themes of the Eliot poems, which deal with issues regarding man’s relationship with time. Time is described as claiming man, holding him to the material world and preventing him from knowing spiritual transcendence. The past cannot be changed, and the future is unknowable, Eliot argues.

For my part I know better than to dig too deep without spending more time with both Beethoven's score and Eliot's texts; but I have a personal history with Opus 132 that definitely resonates with Tommasini's surface-level impressions. It had to do with that period last spring when I was receiving radiation therapy from a technical staff that appreciated how listening to the right music would help me keep still while getting my dosage every day. My initial candidates for listening were both the third and fourth movements of Beethoven's Opus 106 (the "Hammerklavier" piano sonata); but one of the technicians had the box of the complete Beethoven string quartets performed by the Lindsay Quartet. I realized that there were any number of opportunities for my dealing with the "relationship with time" (as Tommasini put it) that would see me through each treatment.

Even before I had gone into this therapy, I had written about the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart movement of Opus 132, whose temporal scale is practically that of an entire composition, rather than a single movement. There is no question that this movement stands out in the time-flow of the entire quartet. Just in terms of the numbering, it is the central of the five movements, its duration is approximately that of the two movements that precede it combined, and the two movements that follow it when combined take less time than either of those preceding movements. However, in terms of duration, that centrality does not translate into the third "movement" of any of Eliot's four texts; so it is unclear whether or not this particular structural feature registered with Eliot.

On the other hand there is that Lydian mode, which I last wrote about when I prepared my own obituary for George Russell. It might be unfair to say that Russell was the man who brought the Lydian mode to jazz. However, he certainly gave it a lot of attention; and, if it was only coincidence that some of his attempts to put a "Lydian twist" on jazz classics by Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk took place in a concert that he gave at the Beethoven Hall in Stuttgart, then the coincidence is a happy one. The power of the Lydian mode lies in the prominent position of the tritone, and the power of the tritone resides in its harmonic ambiguity. That ambiguity is critical to any understanding of Beethoven's Opus 132, and it is equally important in understanding why the Lydian mode was so important to Russell.

What, if anything, does that ambiguity have to do with "man's relationship with time?" One answer is that ambiguity can only be resolved through an investment of time. The Heiliger Dankgesang occupies such an imposing duration because that duration is necessary to tease out and ultimately resolve the ambiguities that are inherent when one tries to compose in the Lydian mode; and it is clear from the overall architecture that this movement is one that is "about" seeking and finding resolution. That resolution cannot be found in any of Eliot's "third movement sections;" if anything those sections lead us into, rather than out of, the maze of ambiguity. However, the coda of the Heiliger Dankgesang does make an excellent setting for the words that begin the final stanza of "Little Gidding," the last of the Four Quartets poems:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I would be so bold as to suggest that these words resonate far more with the Heiliger Dankgesang than with the final measures of the fifth movement of Opus 132.

All these observations must now be subject to the obvious disclaimer. This is, after all, my "rehearsal studio." Whether or not these thoughts will hold up to further listenings to Opus 132 or subsequent readings of Four Quartets (or, for that matter, further listenings of the George Russell Sextet at the Stuttgart Beethoven Hall) can never be anything but unclear. Perhaps, however, the real "relationship with time" that Eliot was pursuing has to do with the extent to which all of our thoughts are as ambiguous as that Lydian tritone and that what we call "knowledge" has less to do with how we can account (to use Plato's language) for what we know (or believe) and more to do with how we invest our time in "exploring" (shifting from Plato to Eliot) paths to resolve those ambiguities. Put another way, our time in rehearsal is when we explore; and the performance that emerges from rehearsal is when we "arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Yet Another Loss

This may well be the most morbid week I have encountered since I started blogging. I just discovered (due to sluggishness on the part of The New York Times in releasing the story) that this past Monday, when I was writing up my reaction to reading Joshua Kosman's obituary for Michael Steinberg on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, was also the day on which George Russell died. Perhaps the delay reflected that fact that Russell was not that familiar to the general public. To this day he may still be best remembered for his collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie on the two-sided "suite" recorded on a single RCA Victor 78, "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop." This was one of Gillespie's earliest ventures into Afro-Cuban jazz. Russell was his arranger; and his most notable contribution was the introduction to "Cubana Be," one of his earliest departures from conventional scales in favor of the modal scales that could be traced back to Ancient Greece.

Ben Ratliff's Times obituary provides a telling anecdote about Russell's sense of self in his practice of jazz:

He later moved to New York to play drums with [Benny] Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”

Like Lennie Tristano, he had an intense drive to get at how things ticked; and, again like Tristano, his reputation was far stronger within the "brotherhood" of practitioners than in the "external" world of casual listeners. (That need to understand how things ticked, of course, meant that his approach to jazz was analogous to the one that Merce Cunningham took to dance and Michael Steinberg took to the art of writing about music, which makes this week's sense of loss all the greater.)

Looking over my own collection, I discovered that I have eight Russell CDs (as well as the 2-CD collection of the complete RCA Victor recordings made by Dizzy Gillespie). I honestly cannot remember how I accumulated those eight CDs, but I think the collection began with the Jazz Workshop recording by The George Russell Smalltet. I may have been drawn to this recording because Bill Evans was Russell's pianist. That CD gave me my first taste of Russell's own compositional voice, after which I would go after every opportunity to add another one to my collection. When I started taking my business to True Blue Music, I encountered The African Game, which I think was his only Blue Note session. My wife fell in love with that recording from its very first notes.

Regarding Russell's theoretical interest in modality, I have to confess that I am still trying to get my ears around it, particularly his focus on the Lydian mode. I suspect that this mode appealed to Russell because of the prominent position of the tritone, the notorious diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") in the history of Western music. The Wikipedia entry for this mode illustrates it with the song "Maria" from West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein, of course, never concealed his enthusiasm for the innovations taking place around him in jazz; and I would be surprised if Bernstein had not been aware of Russell's pursuits. (His interest in Tristano's work has been documented.) "Maria" may well have been a product of Bernstein taking some of Russell's ideas and putting his own twist on them.

Nevertheless, by the middle of the twentieth century, the devil had been exorcised from the tritone as much as the structural functions of harmony had been emancipated from dissonance. By the time "Maria" came along, the tritone was not the big deal it once was. Consequently, whether or not Russell should be remembered for his theories may be little more than an academic question; but his practices played a vital role in how jazz progressed, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century. Thus, the last word on Russell may parallel the epitaph for Christopher Wren:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice.

[Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.]

If you seek Russell's monument, listen to just about any jazz recording after 1947 (the year of the "Cubana Be"/"Cubana Bop" session)!

Remembering Merce Cunningham

The summer of 1968 was not the first time I had seen the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. However, it was the first time I did any serious writing about Cunningham's approach to choreography and John Cage's approach to the composition and performance of music. It was a time when, in the words of the first of the 101 Zen stories in Paul Reps' collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, I was full of my own opinions and speculations, most of which were firmly entrenched in the structural formalisms of logical positivism. As in the punch line of that story, the cup had to be emptied before the master could begin to pour fresh tea.

Cage was the one who actually emptied the cup. We were all at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I had joined my thesis advisor as an assistant while he taught there on a visiting appointment. One day I saw a poster announcing that Cage would be offering a "Music and Mushrooms" course, explaining where and when to go for the first session. I was one of two guys who responded; the other had a wife taking dance classes with the Cunningham Company. It turned out that the Company was in Boulder to get their lungs in shape before performing at the pre-Olympic Festival in Mexico City later that summer. Cage's idea of a course was to go mushroom hunting and talk about things (which almost always included music). Since there were only three of us, this was not such a bad idea. The first day he explained the use of a taxonomic key (which I never saw again), which was necessary for determining which mushrooms were toxic. It was a dry summer. There were very few mushrooms but plenty of interesting talk.

Prior to those walks in the woods, I had thought about the use of chance procedures more as a game that one could play with notations rather than as a serious approach to composition. However, as he would later demonstrate during his Norton year at Harvard University, Cage spoke about what he did with a sincerity that easily transcended the bonds of logic. I was probably vulnerable to his style. I had committed several years to studying music theory, analysis, and composition; and all the logic of those studies had crippled me to the point that I could not write a note. That metaphorical cup needed to be emptied. I doubt that it was Cage's intention to do so, since he knew almost nothing about my background; but empty it he did with the grace of a Zen master.

Having dispensed with the bonds that constrained how to think about music, I could then watch Cunningham and his dancers in their classes, "events," and concerts with similar transcendence. Dance did not need to be a formal reflection of music, as George Balanchine had conceived it, a higher plane of drama in the spirit of the Royal Ballet, or even Martha Graham's quest for the core of human emotion. It could just be a matter of "time to walk in space," the title that Selma Jeanne Cohen gave to the Summer, 1968 issue of Dance Perspectives. That issue focused entirely on Cunningham, drawing its title from a remark by former student Marianne Preger cited in an essay by Carolyn Brown.

Returning once again to that Zen story, I came to learn that, where both music and dance were concerned, one could not begin to have opinions until one had descriptions upon which those opinions were grounded. Those who had ridiculed the music of Cage and his colleagues were more interested in glib observations that never really described the listening experience, often trying to support the conclusion that there really was no listening experience. Those who took a similar stance towards Cunningham tended to focus on their own restlessness and boredom in the course of looking for things that were not there, rather than trying to account for what was there.

I was working in Singapore when Cage died. I had a personal friend at Singapore Broadcasting who asked to do a telephone interview by way of an obituary, since I was apparently the only person in the country who had known him for an extended period of time. I remember being asked to give a summary statement at the end of the interview. I responded with: "He taught me to question my teachers."

This morning Alastair Macaulay broke the story of Cunningham's death last night on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times. The news was no surprise. Last June he had laid out very specific plans for the future of his company and his work after his death. Like Cage he was far more occupied with the present than the future, but unlike Cage he recognized an obligation to worry about the future of a company of dancers. The plan is that the company will make one last international tour over a period of two years and then close. After than, the rest of us will only be able to draw upon archival material. From my own point of view, I feel it is important that I learned the value of description, even if my contribution to that archival material is insignificantly small.

Keeping the Conversation Going

My What I Read list now reflects the fact that I have started reading Stephen Hough's blog. Since I am interested in conversation through comments, I wanted to comment in his most recent post. It turned out that, in order to do this, I had to set up a blog of my own on the Telegraph Web site. I found this odd in terms of most commenting practices, but I also found it cool that I could be maintaining a blog in London when I cannot even remember the last time I was there physically! In any event the blog has now been created with a subtitle of Beyond Rehearsal. I figure it might provide a good staging area for ideas that are ready to leave this "rehearsal studio." After all, we all know that anything uttered with a British accent carries more authority than when it bears an American accent!

Video Mensa?

The title of Ari Melber's latest article for The Nation is impossible to ignore: "YouTube for Smart People." Appropriately enough, it was only published in the Web edition. This was probably a good idea, since, without the ability to quickly check up on the story through the hyperlink provided at the end of the second paragraph, it would have been easy to dismiss that story as an April Fool's Day joke for those of us who continue to prefer The Nation to YouTube. Here is the basic theme of Melber's piece (complete with the necessary hyperlink):

Apart from search engines, YouTube is now the second most popular website in America, drawing the average visitor for a solid sixteen minutes of video surfing--a web eternity. The site hosts a long tail of clips on every item imaginable, but the top videos actually track the vices of television: sex, celebrities and sensationalism. And as the web morphs from endless text to an increasingly video-focused platform, YouTube is ground zero for some of the dumbest crap online. Yet web videos don't have to be vapid, according to the entrepreneurs behind Big Think, YouTube for the Harvard set.

After working as producers for The Charlie Rose Show, Harvard grads Peter Hopkins and Victoria R.M. Brown saw an opening for thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos targeting online audiences. The idea was simple: take the brightest, most creative thinkers alive, plunk them down for a conversation straight to camera--reality-show style--elide the moderator and provide an intimate window into the "big ideas" of our time. The erudite site drew investments from heavy hitters like Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Facebook angel investor, and Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and treasury secretary.

The most important thing about Melber's article is that its very existence demonstrates what may be the most critical weakness in the Big Think business plan (and, make no mistake about it, once you see the word "entrepreneurs," you automatically know that "it is all about the business plan," rather than any more elevated concepts such as "public service" or, God forbid, "public trust"). That weakness is right there in the Hopkins-Brown "vision," in the failure to see that the phrase "thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos" may be inherently oxymoronic. Given the task of writing a "thoughtful" piece about Big Think, Melber had the luxury of not being constrained by "short-form" thinking. He could examine the issue from several points of view, drawing upon several sources and examples, thus avoiding the Scylla of evangelism and the Charybdis of flat-out condemnation. Could he have done this in a "short-form intellectual video?" I doubt it. Such an approach would not have allowed him to rise above the sound-byte trivialities than have made such a mess of our options for getting news on television.

Bearing this weakness in mind, however, I still felt it important to visit the Big Think site, particularly since Melber had mentioned that music, the topic about which I am most passionate, was one of the categories. The first thing you encounter at that site is the motto: we are what you think. That was cute enough but more glib than meaningful, rather like that fodder from the business world about working smarter instead of working harder. Next to the motto is a box informing you that 8,718 "ideas" (your mileage may differ) have been contributed. This is how you are welcomed to a business plan for the marketplace of ideas; and, if you have your wits about you, you will proceed with the same strategy you bring to any marketplace: caveat emptor (even if your only "expense" is your own precious time)!

Further impressions were heavily influenced by one of my strongest aggravations, which is the complete and utter oblivion that purveyors of "social software" seem to have to the role that Usenet played as a pre-Internet attempt to enable expert minds to interact within cyberspace. Just because Usenet was limited to "raw text" is no reason for it to be ignored by those who now seek such interaction through video, whether or not, as Melber put it, "Everyone knows video is taking over the web." Those of us who thrived on Usenet enjoyed not being confined by "short-form" means of expression; and the result was that a reader was as likely to encounter the first draft of a serious essay as a simple answer to a simple question.

More important than how Usenet thrived, however, was how it ultimately failed. With its complex system of gateways, Usenet anticipated what the Internet could be; but the Internet turned out to be its primary undoing. On rec.music.classical, where I spent most of my time, detailed discussions of the proper execution of a phrase in a Beethoven piano sonata or how much the "serial rules" matter when you were actually listening to twelve-tone music were displaced by the annoying recurrence of newbies who only wanted to talk about their top ten favorite recordings. So what caught my eye on the Big Think music page?

What are the top 10 greatest rock and roll bands of all time?

Who isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but should be

Who is the greatest rock bassist of all time?

It was not the focus on rock music that annoyed me but that lowest common denominator of what I have called "top-dog thinking." If this is what constitutes "thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos," then I feel my time is better spent with The Nation and The New York Review, thank you very much.

I doubt that such observations will have much impact on the Big Think entrepreneurs. Usenet was not born out of a business plan. It actually emerged to satisfy a very low-level need for communication among software engineers maintaining and developing the Unix operating system. Only after that foundation was laid did it occur to users that it would support the computer-mediated discussion of other topics; and the rest became history. The problem is that such computer-mediated discussion is just not the stuff from which business plans are made; and those who promote such business plans are a bit like vendors hawking their wares in the agora where Socrates met with his followers.

This will probably be the point at which someone decided to draft a comment taking me to task for ignoring Facebook. To that person I say, "Save your (digital) breath. Just remember what happened when the business planners decided to beef up the "marketing potential" of Facebook. As I put it in my own analysis of the blowback from that decision, far from being "social software," Facebook had finally been revealed as the antisocial artifact it really was. That little episode was actually one of the first to get me on that hobby-horse concerned with the failure of the social software set (both developers and evangelists) to ignore Usenet as a valuable source of lessons-learned.

Am I arguing that those most important of those lessons was that the "quality of ideas" (to invoke the terminology of the Big Think header) declined as Usenet became less elitist? That is probably the case to the extent that "thoughtful" and "intellectual" interactions tend to take place within relatively small social networks (see, for example, the network graphs in Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies); and business plans for social software do not think very highly of small networks. However, I think network scale is only part of the problem. Another significant part is the extent to which the software encourages reflective (rather than merely reactive) behavior. Reflection is not particularly well served (if at all) by the exchange of "short-form" content, regardless of its medium. Arguments have to play themselves out in the space they fill most naturally, just as Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a man's legs should be short enough to reach the ground; and, when those arguments are first beginning to emerge, they often require a fair amount of space in which to "grope around" before the core of the reasoning can be identified and expressed. The ultimate oxymoron of the "value proposition" that drives the business plan is the fundamental opposition between a "big think" and a "short form."

John Dewey and the Ghost of Heinrich von Kleist

As I continue to work my way through John Dewey's Art as Experience, I found myself confronting a sentence that embodied an interesting reflection back to the early nineteenth century:

As the writer composes in his medium of words what he wants to say, his idea takes on for himself perceptible form.

This is very much the spirit in which I launched this blog in the first place. While language may not be the embodiment of ideas, ideas only achieve functional value when they are made sharable; and they can only be made sharable once they are rendered in some "perceptible form." That perceptible form may not necessarily involve language (which is one of the key points that Dewey develops in Art as Experience); but, at least in the history of Western civilization (such as it is), text has probably become the most popular of perceptible forms when it comes to sharing ideas. Hence the motivation behind the title of this blog: a place where I can "rehearse" ideas by composing them in the medium of words. This "rehearsal" is not just for the benefit of those who choose to read my words; it is also for my own benefit, as I wrestle with the process of composition to bring the idea to a point where it is as perceptible to me as it is to others, after which my attention can shift from wrestling with the text to wrestling with the idea.

When I first introduced this motivation, I made no mention of Dewey. His books were occupying a rather modest portion of shelf space; and they were all in the to-be-read-sooner-or-later category, always being pushed back into the "later" category by other books. The source I did cite was the essay, "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking," by Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist predated Dewey by roughly a century; but, while he would later be a major influence on Nietzsche and Kafka, he was probably virtually unknown in Dewey's America. Kleist was also sufficiently eccentric that, as I cited in introducing this blog, it is unlikely that any of us will ever know how seriously Kleist took the thesis of this essay; he could just as easily have been playing with the style of the expository essay to explore a proposition that he felt was absurd, just as Jorge Luis Borges would later play with the style of the book review by applying it to non-existent texts. Nevertheless, Dewey's proposition deserves to be "haunted" by Kleist's essay, since thoughts that are "gradually fabricated" "while speaking" are no different from those that assume "perceptible form" as they are composed in written text. Indeed, Kleist's proposition predates Dewey's, since it taps into the question of how knowledge had been made sharable in the earlier generations of oral cultures.

Note that I have used the verb "haunt," rather than "influence," to reinforce my assumption that Kleist probably had no explicit influence on Dewey when he was preparing to give those William James lectures at Harvard in 1931. Kleist's "ghost" is present only to those of us who have read him, which is why I have tried to connote a "spectral" relationship between these two minds, one of which may have been "just messin' with us," while the other was preparing for the august and critical audience one would expect among those attending a lecture at Harvard University. These are radically different "realms of being," to invoke a phrase coined by another great Harvard lecturer, George Santayana (part of Dewey's audience for all we know); but, as I have previously discussed, the authors of the Upanishads believed that knowledge resided in the connections that bound together elements from similarly unrelated realms. We are capable of making connections that would have been beyond the realm of conception for Dewey's Harvard audiences, but that means that we are also capable of understanding Dewey better than his original audiences did. Indeed, at the risk of sounding a bit too arrogant, we are capable of understanding Dewey better than he did himself, simply because we can do so much more with the "perceptible forms" of his ideas.

Owning up to the Mess

Last July I cited a passage of text by the novelist Andrew O'Hagan because it had so skillfully captured a critical character attribute in a few words. I few weeks later I had the opportunity to see the video recording of O'Hagan interviewing both Günter Grass and Norman Mailer at what could fairly be called a "superstar event" at the New York Public Library. This was visibly not a pleasant experience for O'Hagan. Grass pretty much mopped the floor with his efforts to ask penetrating questions about the recent revelation of his SS service during the Second World War; and Mailer just played the grand old man to the hilt as an opportunity to ramble away in monologue, thwarting O'Hagan's every attempt to salvage a conversation out of the engagement.

Now O'Hagan has a piece in the Telegraph that is supposed to be a celebration of literary festivals but degenerates into an attempt to recover face from his embarrassment in New York. As is often the case where embarrassment is involved, what O'Hagan has written does not align very well with what got captured on video, at least as it was broadcast on Book TV. (Unless I am mistaken, O'Hagan has created a few characters in his novels who have a similar problem with what they write.) He does own up to a rather blatant ineptitude at his first encounter with Grass ("The hero of your youth murdered my grandfather"); but dismisses it as a gesture that "failed both as humour and as wind-up." (What did he think it would succeed at.) As he continues the account, he seems to assume that, because Grass did nor react to this remark he was therefore oblivious to it, rather than worrying that Grass might just be waiting for a time to get even (such as a time in front of a large audience). Thus, Mailer, as an expert in boxing, could pick up of Grass exposing weakness on O'Hagan and then proceed to exploit that weakness during his own time in the spotlight.

Aren't novelists supposed to be aware of such devices?

Imagination and Mind Rot

There was a lot to be learned from watching Günter Grass being interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan at the New York Public Library on Book TV. Most interesting was getting beyond what Grass had to say about Germany to his thoughts on how the United States in currently perceived in Europe. I had not anticipated what he said, but I could understand it. His observation was that, during the period of recovery from the Second World War, Europe looked to the United States for inspiration, whether it involved the lofty ambitions of space travel or the imaginative use of media. In that context Grass asserted that Europe no longer finds the United States inspiring, and one has to look no further than the current operation of our government to understand his position. Will Bill Clinton be remembered as the last President who inspired American's to turn out on Election Day? If so, then the days we face are likely to be dark ones.

Grass shared this event with Norman Mailer, who also made a striking comment. He made the claim that television damages the mind because it interrupts narrative. Mailer is certainly not alone in recognizing the role that narratives play in how we make sense of the world in which we are embedded, but he is the first one I have encountered to recognize that interrupting the act of storytelling is inherently pathological. The consequence is that we have lost our capacity to both enjoy and be informed by uninterrupted narrative. Mailer views this as a form of mind rot, and I think I agree with him!

National Idiosyncrasy in the Age of Globalization

Had Tolstoy been given to generalization, he might have asserted that every unhappy government is unhappy in its own way. However, having considered the proposition, he might then have taken a deep breath and realized that, while it was not particularly difficult to write about a happy family, finding a happy government to serve as the subject for a novel was a lot more difficult. On the other hand both the Levin family at the end of Anna Karenina and the Bezuhov family at the end of War and Peace are a bit far-fetched in their happiness; and neither novel would have amounted to much had it not devoted most of its attention to the instances of unhappiness.

If we invoke harmony as a metaphor for happiness, then, when we consider governments, we should view unhappiness in the light of social discord, either within the borders of the state or in relations with other states. In the period between the first inauguration of George W. Bush and 9/11/2001, such discord was in abundance on both fronts. Indeed, the very election of Bush was born of a discord that divided the nation when the votes were cast and spilled over into the process by which the results of the election were decided. Such divisiveness was not new to our history; but it was disconcerting to many of us that, for all of the unpleasant experiences it had invoked in the past, it was still with us.

More problematic, however, was the external discord that became so central to the neoconservative policy of the new Bush administration. At a time when social unrest was breaking out at every meeting of the World Bank and similar institutions, the administration chose to thumb its nose at two of the nobler efforts to invoke global thinking in the interest of the greater good. One was the rejection of the Kyoto Agreement on climate control; and the other was the refusal to accept the conventions of the newly-formed International Criminal Court. From the vantage point of those of us within the borders of the United States, it seemed as if, long before the divisiveness brought on by the ways we ultimately responded to 9/11, our country had set itself in opposition to the rest of the world. The "New World Order" was one of a single superpower with the authority to dictate which rules it would deign to honor and to reject the others out of hand without any need for discussion or debate.

Nevertheless, the United States is hardly the only government that has pushed back against global agreements and conventions that had been proposed in a sincere (if overly utopian) effort to make the entire world at better (or at least safer) place. Today we learned from a Reuters report filed from Kuala Lumpur by Jalil Hamid that Malaysia never ratified the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. As a result, Malaysia views all refugees as illegal immigrants. Hamid's story summarized the penalties for illegal immigration as follows:

Illegal immigrants face a mandatory jail sentence of up to five years and up to six strokes of the cane. Males above 50 and women are exempted from caning.

The reason this is newsworthy is because the refugees currently in question are from Myanmar (Burma); and many of them are Muslim:

Of the total ["an estimated 46,000 refugees" currently in Malaysia], about 12,700 are members of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority, another 12,000 are members of other Myanmar minority ethnic groups.

The Rohingyas came in the 1990s from Myanmar, but the government there disputes their origin and refuses to let them return.

Hamid's report asserts that "dozens" of these refugees have already been caned and that 300 Rohingyas arrested over the weekend are likely to receive the same sentence.

The sentencing for illegal immigration was originally designed to discourage foreign workers from entering the country illegally (which should sound familiar to anyone who has been following our own recent debating and wall-building); but, as is often the case, it was written to cover the broadest number of cases. However, if Malaysia, as a country, has decided not to acknowledge a global convention on the status of refugees, the rest of the world can do little more than think long and hard about applying statecraft (probably along the lines recommended by Dennis Ross) to convince that government to adopt a more humane policy. This is probably the way many nations in the world now view the United States in regard to its own defiance of similar efforts at global agreements.

Speaking in Coherent Paragraphs (again)

My recent observation about Andrew Keen's "ability to speak in coherent paragraphs" has made me more aware of the communicative skills of others when facing an ostensibly intelligent audience. My own words revived in my consciousness yesterday while I was watching a recording I had made (again from Book TV) of Dennis Ross talking about his book Statecraft. From the very beginning of his talk, Ross made it clear that the very concept of "statecraft" was far to subtle to be neatly wrapped up in a few "take-away" clichés. Consequently, the entirety of his talk, prior to taking questions from the audience, was designed to familiarize the audience with the concept without either reducing it to triviality or drowning it in complexity. Ross is one of those rare speakers who seems to have no urge to "perform" (in the showy sense of the word); he believe that the center of attention should be his topic material, rather than himself. I do not think I can say this about many lecturers. Even Keen seems to know how to deliver the right amount of performance when administering his logic; and, for all my admiration of the man's ideas, I doubt that anyone would accuse Harold Bloom of scrimping on the performance factor!

The other thing that struck me about Ross was his (possibly intuitive) command of text type theory. Ross approaches his subject through the text type of description. This means, at least for me, that he sets up a representational framework for the concept and then proceeds to develop each of the components of that framework. Each such development is basically expository, which, for me, is a matter of situating the component in a suitable context. That context, in turn, can be established through the remaining two text types. Argumentation is invoked when the context is a matter of examining evidence and justifying conclusions drawn from that process of examination. However, since Ross' qualification to speak on the concept of statecraft in the first place is grounded on his personal experiences in practices of diplomacy, he can also establish context through narrative accounts of those experiences.

The result was a truly compelling lecture that "spoke for itself" without any "cheap tricks" of rhetorical performance. Of course the structure was sufficiently elaborate that I strongly doubt that it was delivered extemporaneously. Most likely Ross had prepared a text in advance; so there was an element of performance. I suppose, then, that what I am really trying to say is that the performance element was sufficiently subdued that the prepared text was neither tedious nor overwhelming. At the conclusion of this portion of the event, I was ready to go out an read Ross' book, which, I suppose, was the primary motive behind his preparing this talk in the first place!

A Passion Play for the Deep South

Matthew Bigg has written an interesting report for Reuters from Monroeville, Alabama. This is the hometown of Harper Lee, and it inspired the setting for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact the courthouse scene for the film based on the novel were shot on location in Monroeville. The popularity of the book and the film have made the town a major tourist attraction, which has led to a new approach to Lee's story:

Every spring, thousands of Mockingbird tourists flock to Monroeville to visit locations associated with Lee's life, the book and the courthouse used in the film.

They also come to watch a stage adaptation of Mockingbird. Act One takes place in the grounds of the court but for Act Two the audience and players move indoors to the original oval-shaped courthouse where the book and film are set.

That setting allows the drama to unfold with audience, judge, lawyers and defendant occupying the same positions as they would have held in a real trial. Black cast members are even confined to the gallery as they were under segregation.

For the audience, part of the fascination is being witness to injustice. For the volunteer actors, the annual productions have also allowed them to reflect on the book's message.

When one realizes that, in a reader survey, To Kill a Mockingbird was ranked second only to the Bible as the book that had most affected readers, this dramatic strategy takes on a bit of the feel of a Passion Play, complete with the roles being played by volunteer residents of the town. The Passion Play, in turn, has its roots in the tradition of retelling the key stories that shape a culture, in this case by acting out the story. Some would argue that this is the foundation of all religious ritual. This is not to imply that reading To Kill a Mockingbird (or telling its story) is a religious experience. Rather, it shapes the culture of Monroeville by keeping the memory of segregation, and the injustices that it entailed, alive. This is important to a community that has transcended its segregationist past. It is always important to remember who you are and where you came from, and this applies as much to the community as to the individual. Lee's novel may have "affected readers" almost as much as the Bible; but, in Monroeville, that impact has resulted in cultural growth. Few works of literature can make such a claim.

Historical Chutzpah

This was the week that the San Francisco Chronicle looked back on the Summer of Love, primarily through a series of articles by Joel Selvin that ran on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Selvin's theme, expressed in his first headline, was that this was the "stuff that myths are made of." Bearing in mind that this was very much a "local" story, I just have to wonder why the Whitney Museum could not have been as perceptive, at least on the basis of the New York Times report of their show, “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.” That report was enough for me to select the Whitney as the recipient of the Chutzpah of the Week award. However, before I build up my argument I should establish two points of context:

1. I was not part of the Summer of Love.
2. I have never been a great fan of the Whitney.

These points are actually related, so let me elaborate a bit on this context. I graduated MIT in the spring of 1967. I was part of the first graduating class to receive diplomas from a president who had previously been on the Business School Faculty (which I did not recognize at the time for the omen it was). I cannot remember if any previous graduating classes had worn black armbands in protest of our "adventure" (the same word I now use in reference to Iraq) in Vietnam; but quite a few graduates in my class did. (For the record, I did not; for better or worse, I was too involved in other matters, which I shall get to quickly.) The only other thing I remember is my parents telling me that Lorne Greene's son was in my graduating class (I never met him); so his dad was there signing autographs.

More important was that EUTERPE, my first serious venture into computer music, had been my senior thesis; so I was looking forward to spending the summer working at Marvin Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, continuing that work before starting in on my doctoral program. This was also the summer I started to build up my writing chops, particularly in writing about the performing arts with a primary focus on dance and a secondary focus on avant-garde music. This "beat" led me to many trips to New York, none of which involved the Whitney. My greatest "rebellion" was to take a down-and-dirty approach to my subject matter; and, for all the ferment in the art world, the Whitney always felt far too detached and posh for my personal tastes.

So the summer of 1967 was not particularly memorable for me. I had my "own things to look at," as Douglas Adams put it many years later; and I was of an age when that was all that mattered. My own personal revolution came in the summer of 1968, because that was when I got to know John Cage and most of the other members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Without that encounter my doctoral thesis could not have turned out the way it did. It was literally a life-altering experience (which began with mushroom hunts but never involved anything psychedelic) that kept me in touch with Cage on and off until I left for Singapore in 1991.

Cage died while I was in Singapore. Apparently, I was the only person Singapore Radio could find who had a personal experience with him; so I allowed myself to be interviewed by way of an obituary. As a "punch line," I concluded with the observation that Cage taught me to question everything my teachers told me. Today, with the wisdom of a talk that Jacques Derrida gave at Stanford, I would revise that slightly: I would say that Cage taught me to question all professions, taking the word, as Derrida did, to simultaneously denote an institution and the statement of an assertion. This is the basis for my argument about the Whitney show!

Now all I have to go on is the report that Holland Carter provided to The New York Times. I have no idea how old Carter is. My guess is that he is not older than I am, just because anyone of that age seems to have been "ejected" from the newspaper business as a casualty of rampant cost-cutting. However, regardless of whether he had any relevant life experiences in 1967, Carter follows the same rules I used to follow in my own performing-arts writing: Start by reporting on the experience, and save the opinions for whatever column space may then remain. He may have been a bit heavy on introductory context (but, given what I just wrote, how can I attack him on that?); but the text he writes to retraces his steps through the exhibit demonstrate that he has what it takes to be a good reporter. As I have previously written, I agree with Plato that good descriptive language is critical to knowledge; and Carter seems to be in my camp on this.

Having dealt with description, Carter has his grounds for moving on to opinion:

“Summer of Love” is stuck on the style, or rather stuck on the effort to make one style the whole ’60s story. It pushes hard, covering wall after Whitney wall with posters for concerts at rock emporiums like the Fillmore West and East, or British clubs like UFO and the Fifth Dimension. (The show has a substantial British section; it was organized by Christoph Grunenberg, director of the exhibition’s originating museum, the Tate Liverpool.)

Here is where the Whitney chutzpah begins. Lots of things were happening in the Sixties, particularly after 1965; but both the reality and the myth of the Summer of Love were anchored in a very localized San Francisco experience. Since the heart of that experience was Golden Gate Park, even the Fillmore (only someone on the "other coast" would call it "Fillmore West") was a side show for this particular event. Any attempt to link this experience to related experiences in New York or Britain (even with the Liverpool connection to the Beatles) misses the point of the concept; and any major misconception that is reinforced by the "professionalism" (Derrida-style) of the Whitney crosses the line from a blunder to an act of chutzpah. In other words it is not just that the Whitney has missed the point but that they have now institutionalized their misunderstanding!

Now Carter steers clear of saying anything about what did or did not happen in San Francisco in the summer of 1967 (which means he is also a good student of Jane Austen). He prefers to write about the broader context of political ferment, which was certainly equally strong on both coasts. He takes the Whitney to task for ignoring this aspect of the experience, building up to the following conclusion:

So, we discover in 40-year retrospect, love was never all you needed; in the 1960s, in fact, it was barely there. “Summer of Love” doesn’t feel like a particularly loving show, and the ’60s, as seen through its lens, isn’t a loving time, unless by love you mean sex, which was plentiful, as it tends to be in youth movements.

But altruism, selflessness? Young people are by definition narcissistic, all clammy ego. They want what they want. There is no past that matters; the future isn’t yet real. Some might say — I would say — that American culture in general is like this, though not all of it. And if the kids in “Summer of Love” are stoned on self-adoration, there were also an extraordinary number of young people during the Vietnam era who engaged in sustained acts of social generosity. And they made art.

I mention this in light of the Flower Power revivalism of the past few years, in contemporary art and elsewhere. Psychedelia and collectivity are back (and already on their way out again). But the revival is highly edited; a surface scraping; artificial, like a bottled fragrance. No one these days is thinking, “Turn on, drop out.” Everyone is thinking, “How can I get into the game?”

The Whitney show, maybe without intending to, suggests that this was always true, and makes such an attitude seem inevitable and comprehensible. So, let’s have another ’60s show, an incomprehensible one, messier, stylistically hybrid, filled with different countercultures, and with many kinds of music and art, a show that makes the “Summer of Love” what it really was: a brief interlude in a decade-long winter of creative discontent.

This was a good way for him to wrap up his perspective; but I think he missed one crucial point, which is that the kids "stoned on self-adoration" in 1967 probably constituted a good chunk of the public now coming to this Whitney exhibit! They are all grown up now; and (guess what?) most of them are probably still stoned on self-adoration! In other words I read this whole affair as a massive attempt to pander to an audience that probably has the affluence to keep the Whitney afloat but needs to be titillated with a nostalgia for a past they never really had. My guess is that this whole affair was basically a fund-raising strategy; and it will be interesting to see whether or not it succeeds. Whatever the case may be, there is definitely an element of chutzpah in passing an act of pandering off as a major artistic event; but I hope the Whitney will accept the award with pride!

Boredom

It would appear that Andrew Keen wanted to be more than playfully self-referential when he wrote a blog post entitled "Blogs are boring." (I sure hope so. The last thing the blogosphere needs is a surfeit of Douglas-Hofstadter-like self-referentiality!) Now, while I agree with the premise, I am hoping that I can explore it a bit without getting mired in boredom.

Perhaps the problem has to do with reading. One of the things that makes a good author is the ability to deliver a message that does not bore the reader. (This is why Hofstadter-bashing is one of my guilty recreational pleasures!) This is particularly the case when the author happens to be writing about "the history of ideas," because, in the interest of good writing, you end up reading about the ideas and the paths leading to them. All the dead-end paths are excised from the historical account. It's not that different from reading mathematics: You read the proof of the theorem rather than the tortuous and frustrating process that eventually resulted in that proof. To appropriate the idea behind the title of an essay Seymour Papert once wrote, you are reading mathematics rather than reading about being a mathematician because the interest-level of the former vastly exceeds that of the latter.

So, if the Internet is the new "foundry" or "crucible" for new ideas, it stands as a corollary to the preceding paragraph that the whole Internet is boring! The interest comes only from evangelists and historians (if there are any) and the filters they apply. This then leads to another corollary: Guess what? Life is boring (at least most of it).

Now let's take this as an Oblique Strategies move and try to come "part way back." If we take a hermeneutic stance, then blogs, the Internet, and life itself are what you "read" them to be. The interesting is always there to be mined, but it will not shoot up of its own accord like the gusher in Giant. It is the product of our ability to react to what we encounter both cognitively and emotionally (without playing games about sides of the brain). As Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki used to teach at Columbia, with the right kind of examination and over enough time, the boring can become interesting!

Future Claptrap

It cannot be that long ago that I found myself at an event where John Battelle was flogging his Google book and promoting his vision of a future blog-based society, realized by his Federated Media Society. During the general chatter that emerged while waiting for the elevator, I let my sense of polemic get the better of me and interjected, "The great thing about being a futurist is that no one will be around to prove you wrong!" I suppose this is why I enjoy Andrew Keen's skills at polemic, particularly since the community of Internet futurists never seems to run out of a supply of targets for him.

Every now and then, though, it is nice to let a cooler head prevail; and it is even nicer when that cooler head comes from a past that we can view with a better sense of perspective. It is for this reason that I decided to take a look at "The Nature and Design of Post-Industrial Organizations," a paper by George Huber that was published in Management Science back in 1984 (such an appropriate year). I guess Daniel Bell was responsible for introducing the adjective "post-industrial" in his 1973 "venture in social forecasting," The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; but, as a reputable Harvard professor, he was very up-front about the limitations of what he was called "social forecasting." The intellectual honesty of his work probably had a lot to do with the publication of an "anniversary edition" in 1999. I have not yet given his 1999 foreword a detailed reading; but it looks like Bell realized that the best way to deal with the claptrap of the "post-industrial futurists," such as Toffler, Ferguson, Masuda, Marin, and Naisbitt, was to ignore as noise that had finally been filtered out of the signal. However, since he was writing in 1984, Huber felt is was more important to take these guys to task without agonizing over which of them (if any) would sustain the selective processes of time. In this paper he homed in to the key element of fallacious reasoning that could be found among all the post-Bell futurists:

Assuming transition-based trends to be indicators of the future conditions is certain to result in accepting a large number of false hypotheses.

Unfortunately, the way of the world seems to have led to either forgetting or ignoring this little gem of professorial wisdom. These days we are virtually drowning in false hypotheses, most of which even lack the honesty of calling themselves hypotheses; and (wouldn't you know it?) just about all of them are grounded in ("inspired by" would probably be more accurate) wishful thinking emerging from the myopic examination of "transition-based trends!" The only difference is that in 1984 the channel of publication served as both filter and buffer limiting the number of players in the game. Today any damned fool can get into the blogosphere and play; and it is rather impressive to see just how many of them do, which is why epithets such as "the web's endless cacophony" are so appropriate! Besides, why should it matter that your hypotheses get refuted if neither you nor your audiences are around to witness the refutation?