Dial "M" for Musicology

Chamber bonbon or Political Statement?

Last January I put offered a blog about John Williams's Air and Simple Gifts, an attractive and enjoyable chamber piece played by Yo-Yo Ma and friends for President Obama’s inauguration.  This composition (“Air”) and arrangement (of the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts”) has been published, I’m happy to say: Copyright 2009 by MARJER PUBLISHING, under the Hal Leonard imprint.  Here’s the performance (or miming, since it was fifteen degrees out and what we heard was a recording), on youtube.

I will be curious to see if this piece begins to appear on chamber music programs; it has the sort of sound many audiences would appreciate, and is probably very grateful to play.  It is a chamber piece—all classical instruments, in fact (as I pointed out before) the Quartet for the End of Time ensemble: piano, violin, cello, B-Flat clarinet.  What is the likelihood that a piece for that ensemble would gain a currency and familiarity outside the highly limited classical/academic chamber music environment?

Side question: and will there be some political ramifications to playing it?  Despite the President’s care, resilience, and single-minded attempts to engage most shades of the political spectrum, the—well, Death-Eaters, for lack of a better term—are still hell-bent on obstructing any possible change, accomplishment, improvement, or invigoration of American society and culture.  One or two of the possible causes for this are too painful to contemplate, so I’m not going there, but is worth asking if playing Williams’s short appetizer or dessert of sweet Americana would be taken as a political statement in certain areas of the United States, resented (or even proscribed) as a partisan declaration. 

Of course, you’d have to be an idiot to make this argument seriously: it was a commissioned inauguration piece for a duly elected American president, and the fact that it’s on the market means that it’s not rental-only—so, the composer seems to be saying, go play it and have a nice time.  Still, consider the level of discussion on various pressing issues we’ve seen in the press and on cable TV and from (let’s say) certain legislators.  Such stupidity is not at all outside the realm of possibility.

My feeling?  Give it to all your student groups.  Play it all night long, as Warren Zevon put it (in a very different context).  Perform it, all over, until we’re sick of it.  The last “classical” (qualifying quotation marks are intentional) piece to be a hit was Rachmaninov’s C-Sharp Minor Prelude, right?  That was published in 1892, but quite a hit in the U.S. during the flapper era.  Or perhaps we should count Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924).  Fact is, though, it doesn’t happen very often.  I think it would be a worthwhile experiment.

And then let’s see what Michael Steele, John Boehner et al. trot out as a response.  Which country star will it be, do you think?  Or will it be something with Mike Huckabee on bass?  Lee Atwater: The Dungeon Tapes?  John Ashcroft singing “Let the Eagle Soar,” only this time with electronica background?

Or laugh track?

No Diplomacy; No Regrets

I am taken to task for my harsh assessments of the jury in the Ward Churchill trial (my April 4 blog is here, and the comments follow). 

I would change nothing of what I wrote.  I have never served on a jury, but am married to and related to and friends with people who have, and their testimony is consistent that very often there are people of average intelligence—“average” perhaps being a euphemism—sitting on juries.  Attorneys like to have them there because (they assume) such people can be easily led.  “The world is run by C students,” goes the old saw; what must that mean for the great numbers of people who serve on juries?  Not all of them, certainly, but some of them?  If in the course of living on earth one has not observed even reasonably intelligent people getting browbeaten, bullied, confused, panicked, and ultimately worn down by others around them, perhaps strong personalities disposed to glibness or the persistent mau-mau, then one is simply not paying attention.   Thus my lack of confidence in the jury.  It is true that I phrased my response in somewhat disrespectful terms.  This is not the first time I have been found guilty of disrespect.

For Churchill himself, my feelings about CU’s hiring, tenuring, and tolerance of him up to that point likewise remain unchanged.  I will say, AM, that the word “inane” (defined by my American Heritage Dictionary as “lacking sense or substance”) is in no way sufficient to describe Churchill’s characterization of those incinerated on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.”  For comparison’s sake, here’s Jerry Falwell famous take on the backstory to 9/11, courtesy of truthorfiction.com:

Falwell said, “The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

I see a clear parallel between Churchillian and Falwellian perspectives, here.  Like Churchill, Falwell ascribes blame (“helped make this happen”) for the events to a relatively small number of people who were NOT responsible, but whom he would like to blame because of his political views.  (One difference, of course, is that those Falwell blames weren’t incinerated.)  So, does this poison merely rate the civilized word “inane”?

Bluntness is not everyone’s cup of mead, I know.  Falwell is a preacher—a law unto himself—but Churchill was a professor, upon whom ethical and humanistic responsibilities ought to weigh heavier than on a power-mongering, thuggish loon of the Falwell or Robertson stripe.  Nonetheless, the jury was not, apparently, convinced that in addition to the varieties of academic malfeasance (misrepresentation of various kinds) and bona fide hate speech—forbidden on many campuses, and you know better than I if CU is one of them or not—is not just cause for getting tossed. 

A strident response in the face of this kind of land-of-upside-down amorality is justified.  I mean: really.

No one understands you

Following up on my last post:

When I was at Stanford, doing research at the Hoover Institution archive (a bottomless well of ephemera related to exotic and untenable political opinions), I was looking into the late-1960s/early 1970s historical moment in which countercultural notions of revolution seemed kinda-sorta plausible. On of the things I found in the New Left collection was a digest of the "underground press" called Source Catalogue Communications. It listed publications (some of them profoundly obscure) in order of affinity group -- black liberationist, women's liberationist, gay, Chicano, etc. One of the categories was "high school movement." Did you know there was a radical high school student movement analogous to the collegiate SDS? No? That's because there wasn't one. Not really, anyway -- at least nothing much beyond a few wildly self-dramatizing high-school publications that lasted one or two issues before disappearing (presumably after a stern lecture from Dad in the family den). But a "radical high school movement" could be posited in advance of any such movement actually materializing because it made sense to imagine that very young people would form an autonomous and radical political consciousness. This was the logical extension of an already well-entrenched habit of New Left thought. 

One thing the New Left borrowed from Marxism was a particular mechanism of radical critique. George Orwell somewhere writes of how the animals in Animal Farm develop a Marxist-style critique of human power: from the point of view of the animals, the class lines that divided men were really only illusions, symptomatic of transient and shallow eddies in the world current. Men might fight among themselves, but when faced with revolutionary animals they would unite against a common enemy. Thus it could be proven, in proper dialectical fashion, that the mechanics of class struggle are secondary to the true engine of world oppression, the domination of animals by humans. This is a parody of Marx's critique of the bourgeoisie: they only seemed to favor universal rights in opposition to the hereditary power of the landed classes, but when faced with proletarian revolution they would show their true colors and band together with their erstwhile enemies. Marxist critique then could argue that it got at a more fundamental truth than any of its competitors -- than, for example, the ideas associated with liberal politics. It was a style of critique that knocked the legs out from under its competitors by asserting a kind of radical consciousness that sees things at a deeper level.

This critique played out in the New Left, but in an increasingly fractured way. At the beginning of the sixties it is a critique leveled against liberals in a civil-rights context: northern liberals appear to oppose southern reactionaries, but in reality both are united in their opposition to black people. African Americans, then, had a consciousness of their own condition that liberals and reactionaries alike did not have -- a privileged consciousness of oppression. At about the same time, though, the young -- meaning the collegiate youth who made up the SDS -- started to think of youth as a category similarly left out of the consensus and with a similarly unique consciousness. And from here any number of groups could posit their own radical consciousness, each marginalized by all the others: Native Americans, women, gay people, Chicano/as, poor whites, etc. But no-one could agree any more on which radical consciousness was more foundational than any other -- or, to put it more crudely, who was the most oppressed. And as a result the New Left split into mutually uncomprehending groupuscles, and the vision of a grand unified movement of the Left faded in the early 1970s.  

One little line from Source Catalogue Communications underscores this point. It is a quote from Our Time Is Now, a publication of the “high school movement” that “explains that high school students are forming their own consciousness, and shouldn’t be treated (by SDS organizers or anybody else) as embryonic college students.” This was in 1970: whoever wrote was simply rehearsing a well-worn trope. By then, any New Left groupuscule could claim its own radical awareness, whose particularity and un-co-optedness would be jealously guarded. The thinking goes, We're young, but we're not college students. We are oppressed in ways that college students can't even begin to understand. As the more-oppressed we claim the right to have our own institutions, our own underground papers, our own movement, uncontaminated by college students. The pocket-sized radical consciousnesses claimed by the “high school student movement” foreshadows the similar factionalization of identity politics circa 1992. 

And it was as self-defeating in the 1970s as it would be in the 1990s, because once one claimed unique perspective as a warrant for one’s own group one had made an epistemological end-run. One had staked a claim to radical consciousness and said (in effect) shut up and listen, now, to this new voice of conscience; we have been silenced by you for too long. But while this rhetoric is powerful -- it gets people to shut up, at least -- it removes the theoretical possibility of real communication. If you assert the consciousness of oppression that privileges your voice as uniquely yours, on what basis could anyone understand you? And how then would anyone care about your oppression? Francis Davis once wrote about the free-jazz/poetry/political rantfests he remembers from the early 1970s, “the confusing gist of which was likely to be that only blacks were culturally equipped to understand jazz and white people ought to be ashamed of themselves for not supporting it in greater numbers.” And this is the same habit of mind one finds among hipsters of all stripes, who resent uncool outsiders and at the same time resent the cultural "mainstream" that doesn't understand their music. This is why hipsterism is ultimately self-defeating.

All of this is to illustrate what I wrote about more abstractly in the previous post: we understand people when we assume that they share enough of our experience and way of thinking -- that their minds are something like ours. This isn't the same thing as saying that people are exactly like us, or that people will always be as rational as we ourselves are. It is just to say that when you set yourself up on a hermeneutic pedestal, placing yourself above your interlocutors, you won't have a conversation. Classical performers are constantly enjoined to do this, but for the opposite reason: we're supposed to act as if we are puny vermin unworthy of lacing Beethoven's boots and put him on the pedestal. But the effect is the same -- no conversation, no interpretation. 

Torture and the Angel of History

Most of the discourse on music and torture has been about the use of music in torture, the most distinguished example being Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay, though I might also mention my own blog debate on the subject with Jonathan Bellman and the public discussion that followed the Society for Ethnomusicology’s statement against torture. But today I want to talk about the moral fact of torture—its terrible distinction as the final frontier of human degradation—and how we might use music and sound to mark our crossing into that frontier. When torture appears in our civic life, something final and irrevocable has happened, and the moral fact of torture falls with a thud on our collective consciousness. If Norman Mailer were still alive, he would doubtless call this situation existential: it is a moment that defines both torturer and tortured forever after, and in that moment, when a nation decides to “go there,” to pull that trigger, it is an act of existential will. This says nothing about the morality of the choice, merely that a choice has been made, and that we have signed up for the consequences, though no-one may know what they will be in the end. Quickly, then: I want to think about moments where state violence registers itself on the consciousness of a society, and how such moments might be depicted.

One of the peculiar features of the GWOT era has been the redefinition of torture as the “new normal.” What the Bush administration has done above all has been to move the goalposts of discourse, so that being in favor of torture has become a permissible—indeed, at times mandatory—opinion on the conduct of war. Torture has gone from being something against which we define our national identity to being something on which reasonable people might disagree. And under such circumstances the question of what intellectuals can do about torture finds one answer: they can preserve or build or simply inhabit a view of civilization to which torture can never be assimilated. And in their imaginative work they can depict a civilization that does come to accept torture as finding itself in some new, unknown, incommensurate state from which there may be no return. And this is what Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay does when she writes that torture is a “condition of sin”—a sin of self-betrayal—which leaves no-one untouched: “resistance to it, once the dynamic is engaged, is futile for interrogators, detainees, commanders, and citizens alike.”

And in a certain way this is also the approach of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, although I want to be careful not to assimilate that film’s Marxist view of history too much to my own bourgeois humanism. Franco Solinas, a Marxist writer who collaborated with Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers, would probably have thought my own attitude a typical bit of humanist sanctimony. The Battle of Algiers shows how the French government crushed the Algierian FLN (Front de Liberation National) with a campaign of torture and murder; Solinas singled out France because it was “at the same time a colonial power and the most representative example of the bourgeoisie, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. Politically she posed a contradiction between the slogans, phrases, rhetoric—in other words, the form of the bourgeois revolution—and its contents—the everyday practice of domination, oppression, torture.” The torture regime, then, is not an aberration from the ideals of liberal society, but a fulfillment of them. Thus Solinas wishes to show torture merely as a symptom of the pervasive rottenness of colonialism, and refuses to scold the French for torture as such. He makes the career soldier who institutes the torture regime, Col. Matthieu, an elegant, witty, reasonable, and intelligent interlocutor—indeed, radicals in the 1960s often debated whether he wasn’t just as little too sympathetic. Col. Matthieu embodies France and incarnates the force of a liberal state pushed by an opposing historical force to manifest its latent violence. From this point of view, neither the French nor the Algierians (who also commit atrocities) are doing evil: they are simply working through the historical dynamic by which decolonization proceeds.

There is something very cold about Solinas’s analysis: torture is simply a byproduct of capital-H “History,” which means that the broken and mutilated bodies of tortured men are simply the trampled debris left behind by the march of the world spirit. (A view ironically similar to that of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.)* Though it must be said that despite its chilly dialectics the film itself does not minimize suffering—quite the contrary. In one famous scene unnamed Algierians are tortured (in several cases with techniques used by American personnel in the GWOT), their screams silenced on the soundtrack and with Ennio Morricone’s chorale-prelude-like dirge as their only accompaniment. A woman watches silently, tears streaming down her face, and she is the film’s proxy for the viewer. And the music articulates our moral response to what we see as well, and not only in this scene. (In the film’s first scene, for example, a man whom the French have broken has just betrayed the film’s Algierian heroes, and as he comprehends his own betrayal we hear a strain of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.) The music is the thud with which the moral fact of torture is registered on our conscience. It marks the bright line between the present moment and what just happened, a line we have crossed in an act of existential will. What just happened may be the logical next step of history, but it is still an enormity. The extreme dissonance between Bachian music and torture reframes what we see within a point of view far outside the action; I think it is meant to be the point of view of History itself. I never had any idea of what Walter Benjamin’s famous meditation on the “angel of history” meant until it occurred to me that we see in these scenes what the angel of history sees, but what we hear is how he sees it:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. When we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

*Thomas Ricks' comparison to Bush and Jerry Rubin is weirdly apt here: “They really were going to, kind of, ‘groove on the rubble,’ as Jerry Rubin used to say. They were going to tear it down and see what happened.”

More Wordless Jazz

Recently Phil posted this example of word Jazz.  That was an example, obviously, of Life synching to Art.  This example is of Art synching to Life.

CLICK HERE BECAUSE I CAN'T MAKE EMBEDDING WORK.

I am in very much the same boat as Phil as far as productivity getting hammered because of the presidential election.  “Productivity” includes, in this case, blogging.  Sorry.

 

VOTE!  VOTE EARLY!

*****UPDATE (BY PHIL)*****

Here it is. Noob.

Notes Towards a Future History of Right Now

Fair warning: this isn't about music, it's about politics, so those of you who don't want to hear another damn academic for Obama should come back later. Thank you.

Last week I was talking about the election to a colleague in the hallway outside the music history and music theory offices, and I remarked that I'm probably going to be a lot more productive once the election is over. Another colleague, whose door was ajar, heard what I said and came out to join us. He knew what I meant, and we got to talking about the brain-sucking omnipresence of the 2008 presidential campaign in our lives. Normally when my wife and I are both home from work we pour a drink and talk about our days -- what our kids are up to, how the day's teaching went, who we ran into, etc. Nowadays that lasts for like 30 seconds before we start breaking down the day's polls. We reload 538 obsessively, follow inside-baseball political blogs (the Atlantic and Politico rosters especially), and watch MSNBC, Colbert, and Stewart after the kids go to bed. (And I HATE cable news. This does not stop me.) We talk and think about little else but the presidential race, and our moods go up and down with the little crises of each day. I've been in the United States for 21 years now, and I've never been this obsessed with an election, not ever. And what my hallway conversation with my colleagues showed me is that the same thing is happening to everyone else. We're all going to be more productive after November 4. It's funny, I write this musicological blog and don't talk much about the background stuff in my life very much -- I try to stay mostly on topic and write about music or academia. But In truth there's no real line between them, and trying to keep them apart has felt so strained and artificial I've just been avoiding blog-writing altogether. Intellectual history -- the causes and quarrels hashed out in public -- is always shadowed by hidden private experience. Ideas take on the color of their emotional environment. And right now there is an emotional environment -- private, mostly unspoken, yet collective, a movement stirring within history -- the sum total of all those writers out there, like me, hunched over the computer and staring at it like a crystal ball, hoping perhaps that if they just keep clicking the future will somehow come into view. 

Looking back over the last few years, you can see the ways that the Bush Administration has gamed and marginalized its opponents. But this belongs to the realm of public life, and some future history of this era will have to come to terms with the private dimension as well, the tiny invisible lines between the public and private realms, just as cold war historians have tried to do for life in the 1950s. And it seems to me that what has really characterized private life in this era has been a numbing of the historical faculty, a feeling that someone is making history, but it's not us, and indeed that history has nothing much to do with us. Although the time has gone by for me as quickly as time in a busy life ever goes, until very recently I had the feeling that time (historical time, anyway) had somehow stopped, that things had been this way forever and would go on the same way forever. Bad men were doing bad things in the name of authority and nothing anyone said or did about it seemed to make any difference. Political culture had congealed into a frozen eternity, it seemed, and so the routine was to start the day by reading the newspaper in mounting impotent rage, and then go to work, and then come home, listening to the news on the car radio (again with impotent rage), and start making dinner. Political awareness was no less acute than at any other time, but it had been contained somehow, walled off from the rest of life: it was not that you didn't know what was going on, it was only that it didn't matter. It would be wrong, a historical caricature, to say that this has been a time of ideological weakness or timidity, an era of conformity, etc., as historians so often do with the cold war. (I think it's wrong when people tell that story about the cold war, too.) But as I've argued before, the signal achievement (if that's the right word) of the Bush era, or the leader cult we might call Bushism, has not been the crushing of dissent, but the debasing of public language to the extent that dissent just doesn't matter much. The last eight years of criticism of Bushism has been like the turning of a stripped screw -- motion without force. 

One of the things I've been writing about recently is how the revolutionary left in the 1960s felt the nearness of history, almost as if history were a living thing, a great beast they could feel moving beneath them. That historical faculty, that sixth sense by which we can feel the movements of history, has been long disused, gone cold and stiff, atrophied and pinched, forgot we had it. But it's warming up, unclenching, we're feeling it again. I apologize for all the "we" stuff. As Wayne Koestenbaum says, "I say 'we' wishfully, hypothetically." But it's a hypothesis with a certain number of data points now. I can feel it when I talk to people here, even when we're not talking about politics. You can see it in the huge crowds that Obama draws, in the news stories about long patient lines for early voting across the country. No-one knows what's going to happen on Nov. 4, but something is going to happen. Things were static for a long time and now they're starting to move very quickly indeed. Who knows where it's all going? It could be disaster just as easily as triumph. (Things didn't work out so great in the 1960s, after all.) But one way or the other, we are now all (to continue my metaphor) on the back of this beast, very big now running very fast indeed, and we know it: we can feel it. 

A side note: since I started typing this post, the ATF announced that it has foiled an assassination plot against Obama and Ted Stevens has been found guilty of corruption. It reminds me of a joke Dennis Leary once made about how much TV guys his age watch: they turned on the TV in 1963 and saw Oswald get shot, so they never wanted to turn it off again.  

Obama figured all this stuff out, y'know, which is why he'll probably win. (Though let's not get complacent.) "Yes we can" turned out to be a pretty appropriate political slogan.

Hiphop Friday: The Presidential Dance Battle

You're not reading. I know. The presidential race is almost over and music, musicology, and related matters just isn't commanding the same intensity as politics, politics, and more politics. Fine.

***UPDATE***

Hiphop for Obama. (Hey, if thereminists have a button, why not hiphop? That's not right.) Sean, the bass player from Hieruspecs, sends this block-rocking song. I usually ignore it when people send me links to things their band does, but this was awesome.

I assume that all hiphop heads have already heard Nas's "Black President," but here it is anyway. Great track.

You say "professorial" like it's a bad thing

One of the great perennial academic-blogging topics is the effect that student evaluations have on their professors. It's worth noting that the practice of mandatory, anonymous student evals for every course is a post-1960s phenomenon, and it seems to me that one of its effects has been to kill off a certain kind of professorial persona -- the Prussian-officer type, harsh, judging, and peremptory, the kind of professor who brooks no opposition and whom students hate and fear. No professor who has come up the ranks in the age of student evals can afford to maintain this kind of posture. Professors who are mindful of student evaluations have learned to reconcile their professional sense of standards with a more informal, empathetic, feel-your-pain kind of teaching and to invent new classroom personas and strategies. Which brings me to Friday's presidential debate.   

I talked to my Mom, who lives in Canada, and found that she had been as tense about the debate as we were. People around the world are following the presidential election with bated breath, and most of them, it seems, are rooting for Obama. Sarah Silverman says Obama is "probably our last hope of ending this country's reputation as assholes of the universe," which is certainly how my Mom sees it, but she was worried that McCain came off better in the debate -- tougher, more forceful, landing more punches. But as the post-debate polling has made clear, it was exactly because of this that McCain came off worse to American voters. A lot of pundits have noticed that something seems to be working for Democrats in 2008 that baffled and exasperated them in 2000. Back then, all the pundits and political professionals agreed that Gore "won" by nailing Bush on the issues again and again, but Gore actually lost with the voters because he kept sighing and rolling his eyes when Bush responded. This seemed an incredibly superficial reason to prefer one candidate over the other, but as media analysts from McLuhan on down have pointed out, potential voters pay less attention to the message than the medium -- the way things are said, rather than what things are said. People personalize performative gestures:

Mr. Bush’s biggest boost among married mothers might have come unwittingly from Mr. Gore. In a focus group of Democrats, Republicans and undecided voters assembled by ABC to watch the debate, the women deemed Mr. Gore obnoxious and arrogant.

All those sighs and eye rolls! Married women know those sighs all too well. They have heard them from their husbands and know they are meant as condescending putdowns.

In Friday's debate McCain looked stiff with anger and refused to look Obama in the eye. Obama, by contrast, not only looked his opponent in the eye but opened his body profile to him, gesturing courteously towards McCain even as he landed his own shots. Apparently, the thing that viewers really hated was when McCain would say that Obama "doesn't understand" this or that. Again, Obama's approach was the opposite: he began his counter-arguments by outlining the points on which he was in agreement with McCain. So if Gore in 2000 reminded women of their overbearing first husbands, what archetypal role did McCain fill? Who else but that contemptuous prick of a professor everyone can remember from their college days? You know who I'm talking about: the guy who asks you a question and then cuts you off and says "let's hear from someone who knows what he's talking about"; the guy who cannot stand disagreement or argument and cuts dissenters down to size by ridiculing their knowledge; the guy who says, in effect, that only someone with a Ph.D. and has spent a geological age in academia has the standing to speak. This is the kind of guy for whom knowledge is privilege, and privilege is to be protected from the likes of you.

Professors like this are deeply, seriously hated. And if any professor is so stupid as to come on with this kind of attitude in a class, their students will make them suffer for it in the evaluations. I simply cannot imagine any halfway clued-in academic of my generation thinking they could get away acting like this. And they don't; as the older generations retire, this Prussian-officer type of professor has come to exist largely in movies, where they play the role Margaret Dumont played for the Marx Brothers -- the dowager under whose ample bottom the whoopie cushion is always to be slipped.

Obama, on the other hand, managed to near-perfection a recognizable type of professorial persona that has been adapted to handle the post-student-eval landscape. In beginning his own arguments by saying "I agree with John that . . ." he reminded me of the clever and tactful professor whose student has said something he wishes to correct. You don't say "no, that's wrong," much less say "no, you're naive to think so." (Much much less "no, HE'S naive to think so," as if the student didn't even deserve to be acknowledged in the second person.) You begin by finding the part that might be useful, the kernel of truth or insight, however small, that you can work with, and you work with it. You make the student your conversational companion and make his contribution a thread you weave into the class discussion. And if you're keeping it real and trying to lead your students to some point or proposition that you hold to be more right that others, you work constantly to channel the class discussion towards it without shutting down the opposing point of view. You amend the opposition, you gloss it, you inflect it, you co-opt it, but you don't try to crush it, because that doesn't work. Bend, don't break; move, don't stick; water wears away the stone.

It's worth noting that Obama is actually a former professor. True, he didn't have a very long academic career, though it has certainly stuck to him -- it's something that's supposed to prove that he's an "elitist," I suppose. When pundits go on about his "professorial" demeanor they don't mean it as a compliment, but maybe they should. Our students are often prickly and defensive because they're anxious: they're in a situation where what's between their ears will be judged, and in front of their friends to boot. They are Americans, which means they want, more than anything, to improve themselves, to get ahead in life, and in America these days that means education. When they come into our classes it is always a fraught situation, and managing the tension of that situation requires considerable skill and poise -- a lesson that Obama seems to have learned. 

Orwell's snake

Someone (Andrew Sullivan?) wrote that George Orwell was "the first blogger," and the Orwell Prize has taken this thought in an interesting direction. Starting today, the diaries Orwell kept from 1938 to 1941 will be published as a blog, with each diary entry appearing as a blog post exactly seventy years after it was written. Today is the first, an entry Orwell wrote when he was recovering from wounds received in the Spanish Civil War. It is an entry about a snake:

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx [Orwell's dog] interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”.

A while ago I wrote about going through phases of imitating the various writers I was most taken with, mentioning Adorno and Orwell in particular. This might seem surprising, since the two can be (and have been) thought to be opposites. James Miller an essay in the Lingua Franca collection Quick Studies called "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" that argues that each man represents a model of Left social engagement. (In short: Adorno believed that a too-ready assimilation of the world to concepts is the great modern enabler of tyranny and so booby-trapped his writing against easy understanding; Orwell believed that calculated verbal obscurity is the great modern enabler of tyranny and so made his writing unmistakeably clear. Discuss. Though I don't see why we have to choose -- Adorno was a fine writer in his way.) But when one Christmas I was given the Penguin four-volume paperback edition of Orwell's collected journalism, letters, and essays, it deeply affected me. I read these volumes constantly for the next couple of years and tried to understand what Orwell was doing that made even the least of his writings -- the little "As I Please" columns he wrote for years in the Tribune, for example -- so valuable. For a while I did imitate (semi-consciously) his forthright style, with predictable results, but in time I realized that Orwell works best as a more general kind of model, a model for how to think and see -- clear writing flows from clear perception. Honest perception, too—what was perhaps most impressive to me was how Orwell remained so vigilant against letting some received opinion, some cant borne of enthusiasm or righteousness, carry him away from the truth. Of course, there are those on the Left who have never forgiven Orwell for being (as they see it) a traitor, and there is at least one academic study that argues that Orwell was a kind of literary Bob Dylan, a political lightweight whose great accomplishment was to craft a rhetoric of authenticity, an artifice that gives the illusion of political substance. So there are doubtless those who are reading this and rolling their eyes at yet another tribute to Orwell's honesty. (Didn't Orwell say something about avoiding cliches?) And it is true that, whatever Orwell's own commitment to a particular truth, his writings have lent themselves to remarkably elastic interpretations. Christopher Hitchens thinks Orwell would have approved of the Iraq war, Norman Podhoretz thought that he would have approved of nuclear proliferation, etc. Orwell was never himself very consistent, and he's dead anyway, so he won't give anyone the lie. What is left is this literary image of plain humble rightness, easily exploited by hustlers of every political persuasion.   

So maybe there's a good reason for the hatery.* But a lot of Orwell's best writing isn't even political. This despite what he said somewhere about how everything he wrote was political because in a politicized age there's no keeping out of politics. Orwell, like Adorno, was much given to gloomy totalizing remarks of this kind, but he wrote wonderful pages about the simple pleasures of plants and the weather and beer in old-fashioned pink china cups, things that he treasured because the pleasure they offered was still free, which is to say, as yet uncolonized by ideology. In a broad way, his enshrining these pleasures in writing was a political act, in a negative sense. "All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia," he wrote. Against the Communist left he asserted that politics was a disease, not a cure; the Communist enthusiasm for suborning every little corner of life to politics was not a liberation, he believed, but slavery, and in writing about little things he was at least hoping to put off the final subjugation a little longer. And, coming at the end of the GWBush presidency -- an era whose thuggish, brutal politicization of science, religion, sex, entertainment, etc. has given it a strange flavor of inverted Communism -- this is more attractive than ever.

*Though my god, what a stupid, malicious, mendacious article this is -- academic resentment writ small.

In the mix

I really meant to make myself scarce for a few weeks and get out of the way of our guest bloggers. (Good lookin', Brent.) But Ralph Locke is joining DIal M later (after May  25), so I figure I might just poke my head up from my Secret Undisclosed Location and do you all a favor and point out that one of the best blog posts in the history of the music blogosphere is up at Do the Math, the blog of the jazz trio The Bad Plus. I've never mentioned the Bad Plus here before, despite the fact that they're teh cop show. Their drummer, Dave King, was a mainstay of the Twin Cities music scene back when I lived there. His other big group, Happy Apple, played everywhere in town, including a festival I helped organize at the Weisman Art Museum, and it pleased me when I picked up Give a few years ago and heard King's immediately recognizable (BIG) drum sound. I like how unaffectedly sweet The Bad Plus can play (like on "Frog and Toad," which pays homage to a lovely series of books I've read to my kids since they were small), and I like their Ornette moods, but I also like the fact that every now and then they just want to kick you in the nuts. How does an acoustic jazz trio play a cover of "Iron Man" that's almost as heavy as the original? Like this:

Download Iron_Man.mp3

Anyway, Ethan Iverson, the Bad Plus pianist, wrote an 18000-word post on Lennie Tristano at Do the Math, along with a constellation of side posts, including an email from Stanley Crouch that's more thoughtful on the subject of Tristano than you might expect. As Matthew Guerrieri has commented, these posts on Tristano comprise about as good a use of the blog medium for music as can be imagined: "A lot of the promise of the Internet circles around hyperlinked and non-linear texts, but this illustrates what is, to me, an even greater virtue—a platform to stretch out and explore a subject without having to worry about restrictions on length or scope or focus." (Although the fact that Iverson has linked to so many wonderful pieces of music and video clips is also not to be sneezed at.) This sort of thing just makes me realize how little I care about major newspapers cutting back on their arts reporting. Folks have been saying, yeah, I don't like Bernard Holland, but at least the NYT had someone covering classical music, and they won't now that Holland's retiring. But who cares? The arts pages of the NYT (to say nothing of lesser dailies) suck, and they suck in the same way as the comics pages: everything that ends up there is deformed by the pressure of having to fit some abstract notion of consensus culture.* The people who have particular cultural interests -- for example, an interest in classical music -- are going to find it, and a better version of it, on the internet. If I want to read something interesting about music I can click through by blogroll and I know that I'll find something good. The only thing I'm only sorry about in Holland's imminent departure is that the Detritus Review won't have him to kick around anymore.

Anyway, back to my point. This glorious wide-screen Technicolor appreciation of Tristano is entertaining reading even if you don't care about Tristano (though I do). But more than that, it's a meditation on race in jazz that has the particular virtue of not seeking to apportion blame or take sides, but simply to understand. Of course we're all thinking a lot about race just now, with Barack Obama the almost-certain Democratic presidential nominee and some pretty ugly racial dynamics floating up from those dark places that a lot of Americans pretend don't exist.

It's been infuriating to watch obvious racial double-standards come into play over Obama's candidacy, and how whenever someone points them out (and of course there are always Americans who will point them out) people act shocked, shocked, that anyone could possibly impugn the good will of Americans, who are TOTALLY NOT RACISTS anymore. We've worked through it! What's up with you, anyway? Think you're better than us?

The thing I can't let go of is the whole Jeremiah Wright stupidity, even though it seems to have died down lately. (Though you can bet your bottom dollar it won't stay down.) The 24/7 media saturation of Wright's diatribes demands some comment, because it's so obvious that the real problem wasn't that a radical pastor was saying crazy stuff: it was that it was a black radical cleric was saying crazy stuff. A post from Washington Monthly the other day makes this point: John Hagee, a white pastor associated with Republican politics, was caught on tape saying that the Holocaust was God's punishment for Jews.** Kevin Drum writes "of course, this whole thing is just garden variety white crazy," so don't expect to see this clip in heavy rotation on cable news. But this is maybe a bit blunt, and this is where the social-commentary dimension of Iverson's post might come in handy.

It's true that there is a garden variety of white crazy, and Americans are used to hearing it from this or that radical pastor. And every time there's a dust-up, some people do get a bit mad about it, like they did when Pat Robertson said that hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on an impious city, but the thing is, I think a lot of Americans don't get mad about it because they understand that this is crazy talk and filter it out. A lot of Americans understand that seeking approval from fire-breathing pastors is a political ritual, that every serious American political candidate is expected to make a "statement of faith," (i.e. kiss the ring of conservative religious ideologues), and they're not really going to hold it against a politician for currying favor with pastors who say crazy stuff, because they assume that those politicians are in on the game, just as they themselves are. The majority extends a charitable interpretation to politicians and assumes that they, like us, are just kind of acting out a script. (An very American script.)

What seems very clear is that this charitable assumption was suddenly withdrawn when the radical pastor in question was black. The (white) majority can hear Hagee's sermon and say, well, yeah, he's nuts, but I don't believe that John McCain really believes anything he's saying. But Obama and Wright . . . well, who knows what black people believe!

Now, my first impulse is to say that this is straight racism, though a lot of people who might have been inclined to care about the Wright affair would object. You could say, there is a difference between saying you won't vote for someone because he's black and saying you're not sure that black American culture has the same complicated, compartmentalized way of interpreting the statements of radical preachers that white American culture does. The one is a straight statement of prejudice, while the other is simply a product of the limits of cultural understanding. But I don't think that settles anything. Appeals to "culture" and cultural difference can become a blind for racism: I remember shortly after 9/11 James Lileks saying he wasn't an anti-Muslim racist because he though Muslim culture was inferior, not that Muslims themselves were inferior. But when everyone subscribes to a kind of cultural maximalism where "culture" determines everything about a person, this becomes a distinction without a difference. In other words, if the tacit distinction people are making between a crazy black pastor and a crazy white pastor is not racism, it's not not racism either. You see how this gets complicated.

This is why I like Iverson's coinage: "in the mix." Writing about racial tensions in the jazz world (and impolitic statements from white and black jazz musicians and critics), he acknowledges that those tensions have always existed and are fundamental to understanding critical debates within the jazz world. You won't really understand what's going on with an artist like Tristano if you don't start from the fact that he was a white guy in a mostly black music. Iverson also acknowledges that calling people "racist" or "crow-jim" or whatever doesn't get the conversation moving. So he dials down the tone a bit and comes up with a new expression for racial tsuris: "In the mix." I like this because it acknowledges the shades between racialized discourse and racist discourse, and acknowledges the impossibility of always telling them apart: it's all in the mix. Quoth Iverson:

Racial stereotyping is best avoided in elevated dialogue, but nonetheless racial stereotyping will occur in any serious discourse about jazz eventually.  At that point valuable discussion is often suddenly halted when one side or the other perceives racism or is worried about being racist. 

I actually don’t mind racial stereotyping too much.  America is the melting pot of diverse cultures, and all good American art has race “in the mix” somehow.  Hopefully my earnest and underdone phrase “All in the Mix” doesn’t shut the door to further discussion the way “racist” does. 

*Achewood is a particularly good example of the kind of honest-to-god funny strip that could never, ever, in a million years, appear in a major daily comics page, despite the fact that not one of those strips -- NOT ONE -- is funny. Chris Onstad talks about online vs. print comics here and points out that the only funny strip in memory was the Far Side. Well, I liked Calvin and Hobbes too, and Doonesbury was funny in the 1970s. But that's pretty much it.

**Audio here, framed in such a way as to play the same guilt-by-association game with John McCain as has been played with Obama. My own feeling is, two wrongs don't make a right. This soft McCarthyism of are-you-now-or-have-you-ever, this game of six-degrees-of-separation-from-Hitler, etc., can't end soon enough for me.