Slivers and Slices for Venus Day
[George Roux, “Spirit”]
A prayer:
God, in your infinite grace, grant me the ability to abstain from wishing hateful things on the people who, after using it, leave the toilet paper in public stalls tightly rolled, refusing to give the next person the courtesy of a little bit of paper hanging down so you can easily find the end, rather than having to turn the accursed thing round and round endlessly in a mostly fruitless effort to discern where the end is purely by feel because the fiendishly-constructed device that holds the roll is placed so close to the ground that you’d have to lie flat on the repellent stall floor and look up to see it.
I was in a(nother) Kobe Bryant mourning mode recently and rewatched a bunch of his on-court exploits.
As someone said in a YouTube comment to one of the videos, more or less, I have still not come to terms with this man’s death. He is so intimately connected to the time I spent in southern California, and his passing finally made it real to me that the time and the place are gone and will never come back.
Watched parts of his last interview, with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson on their excellent podcast. This moment in it, where KB is talking about his daughter Gianna, who died with him on that helicopter, got me. Was almost in tears before Stephen Jackson, bless him, made me (also a father of girls, and utterly of the same sentiment as Jackson about this) laugh asking Bryant how he was going to prepare for his daughter’s first date: “When it’s time for that first date, they gonna get that Mamba 81 point stare?…Like, look, bruh, I put 81 on the court, don’t make me put 81 of these on you!”
The last pages of Kazantzakis’ Freedom or Death.
Captain Michalis, in the midst of a bloody fight with the Turkish rulers of his native Crete, is shouting the novel’s title when he is interrupted by the arrival of the last term. But everything that has gone before in the narrative makes the reader certain that Michalis’ struggle will continue, and it will eventually triumph. Magnificent.
I was pleased to find Rick Beato saying things about the decline of popular music that I have believed for a few decades now.
This is not just curmudgeonly “get off my lawn” substance-free vitriol. It’s clear he isn’t looking down on this generation of musicians so much as bemoaning the fact that the craft is declining and offering encouragement for young musicians to up their game.
And this is not just hypothesis. People have done quantitative analyses of this, for example, taking top 100 songs from today and comparing them with top 100 songs from the past and showing how much more harmonically and melodically complicated older pop music is.
Popular music is in trouble, and it needs help. It should watch more Rick Beato videos.
The intellectual conceit: Everything is infinitely complicated. It’s of course true (and yes, I say it all the time myself).
But it’s also false. All the human things can be boiled down quite neatly to one, simple fact: Our Mortality. Sort that out (simple task, eh?), and the rest becomes manageable.
Descended from the Substack skies right on schedule in light of my Monday post last week, here’s a thoughtful reflection by a respected geneticist on the question of whether we should allow Woke morality to dictate what scientific research can and cannot be done.
A little bit of music: This is on Miles Davis ‘58 Sessions Featuring Stella by Starlight, and this is the ridiculous band he put together from 1958-1960 that had Bill Evans at the piano and John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, beautiful solos from Adderley and Evans on this track, “On Green Dolphin Street.”
I found a transcription of Cannonball’s solo online.
On the people who reject having children as a political/moral act.
This seems to be a growing phenomenon among the young. They always clothe this in abstract and high-minded concern for all humans and for the entire planet. “I cannot contribute to the burden on our sacred ecosystem by bringing another life into the world. I love the Earth and its existing denizens too much!”
It is not, not, not a selfish act, they tell us in seemingly earnest terms. Just the opposite! Selfless and altruistic.
I think they protest too much. What they are in fact doing is reneging on the primordial pact of exchange that goes back to the beginning of our species, at least, and that made their own lives possible.
Their parents raised them, and fed them, and dressed them, and brushed their teeth, and read them stories, and cleaned their little butts after they went potty, and combed their hair, and bought them toys, and played games with them, and got them off to school on time with a healthy lunch and clean clothes and a washed face, and encouraged them endlessly, and told them their mistakes weren’t that important, and sacrificed for them, and put a roof over their heads, and counseled them about the future, and paid for their education, and gave them voluminous abstract and practical advice on how to think about the meaning of our lives, and loved them without question or condition.
Somebody did all that for them, and now they are refusing to pass the same gift along to the generation to come.
Whatever their understanding of this, what they are saying is “It ends with me.” Kant’s categorical imperative is useful here for deciphering the true meaning of their action: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
“I reject the chain of the gift of life” made a universal law is "Life ends.”
This comes to me often during the not infrequent though mostly low intensity suffering involved in dealing with my own children, especially on difficult mornings when they don’t want to get out of bed, or eat breakfast, or brush their teeth, or pay attention to the clock so we can get into the car and to the school door on time. How demanding it all is, I sometimes think. And I’m so tired and this seems so much to have to do. I just want to go back to bed.
But then I remember that all this was done for me. And I will not be the one to break the sacred chain.
I will pay it back.
“Arrange your library in fair order, so to avoid wearying yourself in searching for the book you need.”
Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, a Jewish philosopher of the 12th century, mocking me a millenium before the fact for my propensity to spend a whole day looking unsuccessfully for a book I needed for a one-sentence footnote to a text I should have spent that day working on.
I have documented here and elsewhere my frustrations with NPR. I was once a fairly regular listener, way back in the days of Garrison Keillor (who was unpersoned a few years back) and the Magliozzi brothers. But in recent years, the organization has descended into full-blooded Wokeism, the same lens applied to every topic under the sun, mercilessly, in every single segment of their programming. It is close to unlistenable now because of the political evangelism that they do in nearly every minute of air time.
How long, I have asked myself, can my local affiliate, which still plays music from the Western art music tradition during the day, get away with that programming before station higher-ups condemn it as inconsistent with the blazing obsession with antiracism of the national headquarters? Isn’t all that music, after all, white supremacist to its very core? It existed for all those centuries and never once did we get, say, a symphony from a first-rank European composer vigorously denouncing slavery and the whiteness that made it and the structural racism that has followed possible, or celebrating the morally superior and infinitely humane accomplishments of sub-Saharan Africa prior to the arrival of colonialist white men there, or self-flagellating in some other way consistent with the new cult. Where are all the Western art music works trashing the Western art music tradition as exclusionary and elitist, which is of course we now know the only kind of artistic work that merits being done, in any genre?
The researcher in me still brings me to tune in sometimes during the 10 minute drive back home after dropping my oldest daughter off at school. That is to say, I’m listening most of the time these days to find juicy imbecilities to write about here—and there’s the fact that I’m mostly too lazy to hook my phone up to the car and listen to a podcast or something on the Wondrium lecture series instead.
Last week there was a segment on an opera singer. Oh, that’s outside the realm of expectation, I say to myself. Why would they be paying any attention to the obviously elitist art form that is opera when there’s so much good Woke contemporary music to talk about (and indeed they spend a lot of time on that)? They say her name: Latonia Moore.
From that, and from her speaking voice, I discern her race. Now, I am certain of the direction the program will take. “Opera is full of racism! What can be done to revolutionize it?” I’m waiting, fingers poised on the record button on my phone so I can speak some notes in for the eventual writing I’ll do on this latest example of NPR’s embrace of Woke World.
But then, Ms. Moore gloriously refuses to play NPR’s game.
The host—a new person at NPR, Leila Fadel, who is an immaculately politically correct Arab Muslim woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, tries mightily to get Moore to go where she wants. Isn’t it difficult to participate as a black woman in an art form so (ick!) European? Are there racial barriers to her success there (hint, hint: of course, there must be)? What does she think of white singers playing the roles of non-white characters (harmful in every conceivable way, yes?)?
Moore is having none of it. “Being a Black opera singer, not a challenge — not really,” she says. “I have no obstacles.”
I’m listening attentively now.
The art form is what matters, she says, and anyone with the performative and vocal chops can do any role. What?! She talks of members of her own family trying to move her away from opera and back into jazz, where she had started: “[They said y]ou’ll be more successful in jazz…I didn’t care, it came down to what gave me fulfillment…I knew this is what I’m supposed to do, I felt it in my bones…When I started…I didn’t think about the fact that I was black, that didn’t matter to me at all. My idea was becoming a chameleon and being someone Italian, or being a 15 year old geisha in Nagasaki, Japan…It didn’t matter what my skin was because this is an art form that is based on suspension of disbelief.”
Fadel (who I’m imagining gleefully must be in a near faint at this point) makes one last courageous effort to get Moore away from this Thoughtcrime: “But we live in a world where skin color comes up so often because of the history and because of the world in which the operas were written.” Moore responds: “I tell you this: Very little causes me offense…I don’t take my preconceived notions and judgments and prejudices and bring them into the opera house or into any form of art because that means you’re not embracing it.”
God bless Latonia Moore. She has made a new fan.
A melody, with some lovely variations, that can always bring my spirits up when, as I too often do, I clutter my mind with worry and anxiety.
Such bits of aural bliss are the best language we humans have to communicate our understanding of a love supreme. ‘Trane is more articulate on this than a thousand scribblers and philosophers could ever be.
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for more than six months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.
Now, the other reason for this little note.
I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option.
What does a paid option mean?
It means it’s an option. At present, everything on this account remains open to all subscribers, paid or free. Even if I move at some currently unforeseen point to separating material here into paid and unpaid categories, I still plan to always make the great bulk of it available when it’s produced without cost to everyone interested in seeing it. I’m tremendously appreciative that you read this site and want to do everything I can to ensure you continue to be interested in doing so.
I am hopeful though, and I make so bold as to ask, that if you have a few extra dollars rattling around, you’ll consider kicking some of them my way to help make it more feasible for me to spend more time on this project.
Inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I have two kids who eat and are in constant need of new clothes and a house in which things are constantly breaking down. Add to that the fact that, to my great regret, I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.
If I can generate some paid subscriptions, then, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable. If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard they say.
I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and, whatever your decision on that, I look forward to writing more for you as All Things Rhapsodical Phase II gets underway. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.
Cheers, and thanks again! And very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!
ATR