Why Music Matters

This post + comments @ Crooked Timber and this response from Patrick got me thinking.  Set aside for the moment that this whole discussion is So Last Week (which in blogging is supposedly Ancient History), as I am notoriously Not Up To The Minute when it comes to posting online.  What came into my head is this:  The concept of someone’s else’s favorite music being overrated comes from the habit of intellectualizing that which creates an emotional reaction, which demeans & denies the legitimacy of the feelings that well up.  Music … art, creative action of any kind … is about FEELING.  So if, for example, The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows gets me all choked up, it has done what it was intended to do:  speak to a deep, honest, REAL feeling that is within me.  I’m as guilty as anyone of dismissing music, books, paintings, whatever that don’t speak to me as being Overrated or Trash, but I have to recognize that the Art that speaks to me does exactly what Art is meant to do:  Bypass the Mind entirely & speak directly to Feeling.

So, for me, Good Music is about Love.  Good Music, Good Literature, Good Art … are about Love.  Love is at the core of it, which is Why It Matters.

I’m not talking necessarily about lyrics.  Have you ever heard a melody that was so beautiful you had a physical reaction?  For me, it is when my throat tightens, and I realize I am holding back tears. 

I guess this is all elementary.  But when I hear hyperintellectualized, dismissive, irony-obsessed criticism of something that moves me or moves others, I wonder how anyone can be so unaware, so removed from what moves THEM that they don’t ‘get’ why someone would be moved by REM, The Beatles, or even by Brian Wilson. 

Meanwhile

I’m always running behind the times.  (Name that reference, kids)

While I was away, Hunter S. Thompson died.  My husband (who was not with me – he stayed home) called me (all praise to mobile phone International Roaming) to say, "Hunter Thompson’s dead.  They say he shot himself."  Stunned.  Just stunned.  I don’t spend hours reading the news & staying constantly informed about everything.  Life is too short to spend being regularly abused by media.  I didn’t know he’d been ill & then wheelchair-bound from injury.  I imagine the pain & confinement were difficult for him.  Once I’d learned a bit more, suicide didn’t seem such a shock.  The idea of Hunter Thompson as a dependant old man just doesn’t *gel*, does it? 

The opening paragraphs of ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ are famously funny.  The firsts time I read them, it was quite possibly the first time I’d ever laughed out loud in public without caring that people might look at me. 

Freedom.  Isn’t that why he wrote? 

The Last of the Giants

Arthur Miller died yesterday. 

The NYTimes called him The Last of the Giants of American Theatre.  I am no Theatre Critic, I am weak on my History of American Theatre.  But Arthur Miller was brilliant.  Yes, he was a Giant of American Theatre, a Giant of Twentieth-Century American Theatre, a critic & historian of Twentieth-Century American Culture … all those things for which he will be remembered. 

And I remember reading Death of A Salesman for the first time – the classic College Literature experience of juxtaposing the Tragedy of Willie Loman against the Tragedy of Oedipus, compare and contrast, define the Tragedy in the Classic sense and the Modern sense, explain "Hubris", one-thousand words on the differences and similarities between Loman & Oedipus …

What I remember is how Mr. Miller sought out the humanness, the usualness, the everyone-ness, in the daily drama of striving to be better, even in fooling ourselves that we are what we are not – in simply wanting to exist and to be remembered with some fondness.

I remember Mr. Miller with some fondness. 

Attention: Comic Fans

You comic-fan types out there on the internets really ought to check out my friend Chris Wisnia’s Tabloia.  He’s clever & wonderfully talented.  Also, ONE HELLUVA GOOD GUY.  Issue #574 (#3) is available now.  Order it from your fave comix supplier or bully your local shop into carrying it.

And the fact that I’m NOT particularly comics-oriented (not since my brief crush on Daredevil back in ‘89) should clue you in that this is really an extraordinary piece of work.  That, or I’m shilling for a pal who is already creating a buzz without my help.  Either way, check it out & tell your friends.  Word of mouth is what it’s all about.

Two is the beginning of the end

I have not yet seen Finding Neverland, but its release offers a splendid opportunity to share one of my favorite opening paragraphs ever. 

All children, except one, grow up.  They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this.  One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.  I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!"  This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up.  You always know after you are two.  Two is the beginning of the end.

i thank You

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of allnothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~ e.e. cummings, XAIPE, 1950

Be thankful for what you see, hear, smell, touch.  Be thankful for imagination & memory.  Be thankful for discovery.  Be thankful for who you are.  Be thankful for love.  Be thankful for anger.  Be thankful for sorrow.  Be thankful for tears.  Be thankful for joy.  Be thankful for laughter.

Be thankful, even, for sappy posts ripping off masters during the Holidays, because it’s an opportunity to read e.e. cummings.  Happy Thanksgiving. 

Tyranny

I am currently reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich : A History of Nazi Germany, rightly considered a classic.

I am approx. 200 pages in – it’s 1933, and Hitler has just been handed the Chancellorship by means of a coalition with political leaders who OPPOSE him – they believe they can control him, and therefore his large (though not majority) following. If they give him just a taste of power, they believe, he will acquiesce to them to keep it. He turns the tables with a little public smooth-talking, and pushes through the ‘Enabling Act’, which ‘temporarily’ puts all governing power in the hands of himself and Reich Cabinet. He then outlaws all other (non-Nazi) political parties, and shuts down all Labor Unions. He has connived, terrorized, and deceived his way into ‘legal’ dictatorship.

It amazes me that this could happen. I am not naive, but neither am I terribly paranoid. But I read this history, read of Hitler’s rise, read of the systematic demolition of a free republic, and find my dreams at night are worthy of Heinlein & Dick at their most paranoid.

Interesting: the tale of the Hitler’s rise is awfully reminiscent of tales of the rise of other dictators. He took it up a notch, to be sure – made sure of his chapter in history by signing on to the obsession with ‘Racial purity’, and creating a killing machine devoted to the Final Solution. He’s not the only one to commit genocide, but if not for German organizational skills & the entrenched bureacracy with its files and forms in triplicate, we’d likely have no idea the levels to which the Nazi regime was willing to go. And, without the intact files, would the world have believed it? Who believed the camp survivors when the Allies first freed them? Fewer than we’d now like to think. The gas chambers were being dismantled when the Germans got the call to abandon the camps. They bulldozed the sites, but were defeated before they could burn the millions upon millions of files proving their existence.

Oops, I rambled. Sorry.

The point is, Hitler was not unique. At the right time, with the right political climate, a tyrant can rise through legal ‘democratic’ means and dismantle the government that birthed him. Take that however you will, but keep an eye on your Constitutional liberties in the meanwhile.

Marlowe

I just finished reading The Little Sister. It’s a definite rec – Chandler RAWKS, as always.

I have had a crush on Philip Marlowe for years. If I was in a jam, he’s the guy I’d want to get me out of it. He’s the perfect detective – intelligent, funny, and tough.

You can always count on Raymond Chandler for brilliant, on target, tack-sharp descriptions.

From Farewell, My Lovely:
His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave.

From The Big Sleep:
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

From The High Window:
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of a wet stones. There was lace at her throat, but it was the kind of throat that would have looked better in a football sweater.

Also from The High Window – my favorite Chandler bit of all time:
From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

Reading

I just started Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. Any book that brings honest tears half a dozen times within 40 pages is worth a recommendation.

But, then, it’s Elie Wiesel. We’d expect nothing less than honest tears.

More ‘Ring’ crap

I’m about 20 years behind. I only JUST got around to reading The Hobbit & The Lord Of The Rings. I was disappointed by the movie , but at least it got me figuring the time had finally come to read the books. Before you dismiss me as totally unlettered, just let me say this: I knew it was a series I would either bury myself in (as in, MUST READ all at once, no stopping) or hate outright (if it disappointed), and either way it would require a significant amount of concentration. So I put it off. So sorry.

Naturally, I buried myself in it – started The Hobbit Sunday & just finished Return of the King this afternoon. As much as I enjoyed the series, I’m left feeling let down. Is this a common response?

The scale of the plot & the history attached to it leave the characters rather insignificant in the end. The relationships which build up during the course of the ‘walk’ seem to dwindle, and poor Frodo just fades away. I’m a sucker for a compelling character – and this had several, but eventually the plot just rode over them; and in the end, they were insignificant. It’s Man’s History (and the dawning of the new Age) looming over the little halflings. And I assume that’s the point – but still, I’m a little sad.

Anyone else out there feel the same when they read it?