Wednesday Musings

How do you know it was a good performance?

Well, a good musician doing a good job can control his instrument—in this case, her instrument, which is the human voice—but a great musician stops playing the instrument or the music, and plays the room. And the proof of that? The audience applauds on her cue, not on theirs.

That’s what the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, singing Handel’s Piangero from Giulio Cesare, does in the clip below, which I’m terribly sure was pirated off a cell phone from a live performance in the Teatro Colón. But wherever the performance came from, DiDonato is riveting; nobody, nobody, is going to clap until she relinquishes the experience, stops being Cleopatra, stops bewailing her cruel fate, stops realizing that she—a queen—has been vanquished and stripped of everything.

There’s no other aria that is quite as desolate, no other aria that has stripped the flesh off the character and burned it in the desert sun, until it is as beautiful and brittle as a Georgia O’Keefe skull. You touch it, and it disintegrates—poof!—into the finest powder; the desert wind takes it—the avenging angel—to its next state of existence.

This is not an aria. This is a person pulling an audience through the birth channel of inner pain and psychic anguish. This is a person who is drawn to a hideous flame, as is the moth, but who knows that the flame will consume her, and knows that it is not just useless but sinful to refuse the flame. The flame? That’s her destiny.

Is it sad music? No, of course not. We have left “sad” far behind, nor is it any other emotion, unless it’s an emotion for which we have still no word. For no one ventures back from this emotion, no one returns from this voyage, when you have arrived here, there is no return. Death could no be more final.

This morning, on my morning walk, I wanted to remember my mother, who died almost five years ago. Fortunately, that’s easy, since there is something about seeing—as I was—huge ocean swells crash against rocks until they explode into jets of water, spray, droplets and salt air…well, all that prompts thoughts of mortality. Each one of us is born somewhere deep in the ocean, stirred by the twirling of the plant, whispered by the phases of the moon. We travel through space and time, less a wave than the energy of one, the potential of one, and then, the rock! And for one glorious moment, the wave explodes into its potential, becomes the fusion of air and rock and time and water and space and…death.

And so, did I turn to Piangero, when I wanted to remember my mother?

Nope—rather, I turned to Bach’s Bist du bei Mir. And I was about to tell you that Bist du bei Mir is simply sadness on a human scale, whereas Piangero?

Could it be that a man or woman can move through personal suffering so acutely that he or she enters another realm: The suffering of the world? Or perhaps suffering as Plato imagined it: a form, an object as real as a rock. And as ephemeral as a droplet of wave water falling onto the rock.

And yet, not matter—because matter has changed, as well as time. It’s slower in this world, this world where we will meet the inevitable that horrifies us, that repels us, that is inescapable and inevitable.

Slower, yes—but there is a muted drum, or a throb, or a heartbeat heard through tissues and bones and amniotic fluid. Did I say heard? No—felt, for to pause to hear it would destroy the moment, the moment that is consuming you, the moment for which you have been born. The moment of dread and liberation.

I have been through the death of love and the death of a mother: This music is nothing of that. This music is about 3 AM, when I woke up and prayed for help, since I knew, I absolutely knew, that there was a musician inside me. And I knew the musician was good. So I sat in a darkened living room, and listened to the message, or perhaps the drum, the muffled drum, which was accompanying the coffin carrying the rotted, putrid corpse, stinking and oozing and repelling. The corpse that was my dream, the corpse that I had killed, since it was my doing, my choices, my temperament that had killed that dream. Music would be important in my life; it would not be my life.

The death of a dream—it was curiously more personal and less personal than the death of my mother. And it was cleaner and dirtier than my mother’s death as well. Because when my mother died, I was a witness, somebody who however dear I had been to her, was not experiencing death’s dark night. I was peering on, stunned and amazed as we always are, when the shadow of the sickle passes over a brow.

But that moment at three o’clock, when time had stood still enough for me to see it, when the world had decided that yes, it would cease its turning, stop in its track, stop the inane and senseless rotation, rest… And then, the coffin had come, and I looked in, and the stench and the horror and the burnt and charred flesh, the protruding bones, the visage of unspeakable anguish wrench across what had been a face…all that happened.

I looked, I saw the person I had neglected and starved, and poisoned and crushed into that state, all the while thinking that it hadn’t been I, it hadn’t been anything but bad luck and bad timing and bad genetics and maybe—just maybe—bad karma.

But no.

Piangero—I shall weep. But wrong—it is the only false thing in the aria.

For weeping is has been left far, far behind. We have left the world of feelings, where anyone might legitimately weep. Weeping is gone.

Wonder remains.

        

(For better sound quality, and an amazing interpretation, see the above….)

Our Young Gay Prisoners

Statistically, it’s not a problem that I probably need to think about, since do they go after white guys in their fifties who are still clinging somehow to the middle class? Of course not, which is why I’m worrying about Montalvo, a 22-year old self-proclaimed nigger, who developed, while in a profoundly chemical state, a mystic attraction to a blue macaw. The attraction grew and grew until it took flight—no, not the macaw’s flight, but human flight, with the police in hot pursuit of a purloined parrot.

The whole thing was stupid. Yes, Montalvo was stoned; yes, Montalvo had walked off with the bird; yes, he had even taken selfies with the bird, thus providing nice evidence for the entire world to see that he was utterly and jubilantly guilty. So what would a sensible judge have done?

I don’t know, and it may not be the point, because we went wackoo back there in the 80’s and set up mandatory sentencing, which seemed like a good idea at the time. So that meant that Montalvo was not a stupid, stoned 20-year old kid but an adult felon, since the value of blue macaws is over 500$ or 1000$ or whatever it was. Which meant that we all sat around in the café, one day last year, scratching our heads about the monetary value of a used macaw. Presumably, the bird was not in the springtime of its life—so that was one strike against it. Still, it was a working bird—as anybody could see from the constant and blinding flashes produced for the pleasure of grinning tourists, since who could resist being photographed with five parrots / macaws resting on your shoulders and head? And each flash was twenty dollars, and that all added up.

So Montalvo was—in the eyes of the criminal justice system—a felon: What to do with him? The answer was to convict him, put him on probation, and make him go to a drug rehabilitation program.

Was it the right thing? Does Montalvo need a drub rehabilitation program? From my point of view, the drugs aren’t the problem—the problem is that we have a stupid kid with too much time on his hands and too ready access to a drug that has been manipulated to twice its natural potency. So what would I do with Montalvo? Send him up to the mountains and make him pick coffee for a couple of years, or have him repair all the basket ball courts that are in ruinous condition, or clean up the schools, which are rat infested. In short, put him to work, tire him out, and get some use out of him.

Well, I thought of Montalvo because of T. J. Parsell, a gay ex-con who got raped in the first 24 hours of being in a men’s prison. And how old was Parsell? Seventeen, and the crime for which he was convicted was of holding up a photo mat with a toy gun. A toy guy, you ask? Can anyone take this seriously?

Well, the cashier did, and so in the eyes of the law a toy gun is just the same as a real gun. Oh, and if the cashier had been eighty and had keeled over in a heart attack, Parsell would have been charged with murder.

Well it worked out well for Parsell, at least to the extent that he graduated from high school, went to the university, and wrote a book—Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison, which I’m now reading, and for which Parsell started a Kickstarter project in 2010, in order to turn the book into film.

The book is compulsive reading, and only the Bolshoi Ballet transmission of Swan Lake, yesterday, stopped me from reading it in one sitting.

Consider that last sentence, and consider the experience that separated me from Parsell, since he grew up white and blue-eyed in the Michigan four years after I grew up white and blue-eyed in Wisconsin. But he grew up in a family marked by alcoholism, divorce, abandonment, and incarceration. My world? Well, ever seen Leave It to Beaver?      

And so it was Beaver’s world yesterday, since the audience in the theater was elderly, white, cultured / upper class. All the things, in short, that Montalvo isn’t when he landed in jail for a week after being separated and adjudicated from the parrot, or that Parsell wasn’t when the toy gun was taken from him, and the state of Michigan decided it needed to correct him for two and a half years.

Going to the Bolshoi Ballet confers no protection against incarceration: Growing up, however, in an environment where people might know about the ballet and go to the ballet does, however. And gay people are—hold tightly to your seats here—not unknown among ballet audiences. So what has the gay community been worrying itself with for the last five or six years? Oh, and shouldn’t being gay confer some protection against incarceration? If—according to stereotype—we are the intellectual, artistic, introverted type, well, why would any gay kid land in jail?

Answer to the questions: The gay community has been focusing on marriage equality, which I support. But it’s feeling more and more to me that this is almost a classist issue, and especially when I read that…well, here’s Wikipedia on the “LGBT_People_in_Prison”

According to some studies, LGBT youth are particularly at risk for arrest and detention.^[34] Jody Marksamer, Shannan Wilber, and Katayoon Majd, writing on behalf of the Equity Project, a collaboration between Legal Services for Children, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Juvenile Defender Center, say that LGBT youth are overrepresented in the populations of youth who are at risk of arrest and of those who are confined in juvenile justice facilities in the United States.^[34]

A brief by the Center for American Progress found that each year approximately 300,000 gay, trans, and gender nonconforming youth are arrested or detained each year, 60% of whom are Black or Hispanic. These queer youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile incarceration system, compared to their overall population of 5-7 percent. Similar to how transgender adults are often placed into solitary confinement, allegedly for their own protection, these youth are “protected” in the same way. Often, however, it is because they are seen as sexual predators rather than potential victims. To add insult to injury, courts also commonly assign queer youth to sex offender treatment programs even when convicted of a non-sexual crime.

In short, we lock up twice as many gay kids as you would expect from their prevalence in the total population. But is that really any surprise? We know, for example, that there are a lot of gay kids on the streets, and where does that lead? To drug use, prostitution, and crime.

And what happens when we lock these kids up—especially these 17 to 20-year-old who weigh 150 or 160 pounds, and who are coming up against guys with 100 pounds more muscle? Guys who know the system, know how to play it, and know how to manipulate and conquer? The wonder is that Parsell lasted 24 hours….

And Montalvo? Well, I asked, and however much the prison scene might have changed since the passing of the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, it didn’t transfer to La Regional two years ago, on that day when Montalvo go sent there. Two things happened—catcalls and obscene suggestions / propositions, and the immediate question: What gang was he in? So he chose the most common gang, and was promptly initiated into it by having the shit beaten out of him, as well as being marked.

Part of the obscenity of this system—for me—is the sheer waste of it all. The prisons have been privatized, many of them, and a lot of money is flowing from the public sector to the “private”—quotes because presumably a lot of that money flows back in the form of bribes or “legal” campaign contributions to the politicians who awarded the contracts in the first place. But does society get anything from having prisons? A university adds value to society, but what good does it do us to lock up people?

Even worse, we are locking up people whose lives we have wasted in one way or another: Through poor education, broken families, draconian drug laws, and persistent and ruinous social stigmatization. And the final waste?

It costs, I recently learned, almost $40,000 a year to lock up a prisoner in the state of Wisconsin. Undergraduate tuition and fees are $10,410 at the University of Wisconsin, which means that we could give every inmate a college education for what it costs to incarcerate them.

Of course, the university comes a little too late. For a look at what might be truly effective, check out the video on the Harmony Project below…. 

     

Wisconsin--Beleaguered but Great

It was a comment that nagged at me, though perhaps “statement” is a better word, since Susan had written it and not spoken it (though I’m absolutely sure she’d be willing to say it, as well). But she had written, “I think the man is a psychopath,” and she was referring, yes, to the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.

It was interesting, I felt, on many levels, not the least of which was that when I was practicing as a psychiatric nurse—OK, three decades ago—the theory then was that true psychopaths are so rare that you might spend your professional career in psychiatry and never meet more than a handful of them. How rare was psychopathy? Well, am I wrong in thinking that we actually renamed the disorder as something like, “antisocial personality disorder?” I could look it up, if it mattered….

Oh, they were out there, and we were told: Beware of any friendship between a borderline personality disorder—of which the population was saturated—and that odd psychopath. Because the mix was supposed to be deadly. Here’s the way it might play out:

Borderline (to be known herein as “B”): Oh Jack, I know I can trust you, because you’re the ONLY person who understands me! (This was called splitting: setting one person up as the savior, versus the whole wide wicked uncaring world). And you’re so smart, and so kind (manipulation). And I feel so alone, and so helpless (play for empathy). I’m just so helpless, and I’ll never get better! That’s why I going to tell you: I’m going to KILL MYSELF (drama queen!) Yes, I’ve been cheeking my meds, and now I have enough! So between PM and night shifts, I’m GOING TO SWALLOW THEM ALL!

Psychopath (“P”): OK

Here, it’s not what happened but what didn’t happen, since the borderline was on a completely different train—and track—as the psychopath. Because the borderline assumed that the psychopath would run straight, although covertly, to the nursing / medical staff, to alert them. Then, the borderline would swallow the pills, arrange herself like Violetta in the last act of Traviata, and wait for the tenor—garbed in scrubs or whites—to come in at the last scene.

Wrong….

So I had been aware, in my forays through TED talks and YouTube, that we had all been seeing psychopathy wrong. Now… well, consider this quote:

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is a diagnostic tool used to rate a person's psychopathic or antisocial tendencies.  It was developed in the 1970’s by Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian professor and researcher renowned in criminal psychology, who has spent three decades studying the concept known as the psychopath and based partly on Hare’s work with prison inmates in Vancouver.

For those interested, there’s a documentary below. And so I watched it, since a novel is looming on the horizon, the central question of which is whether there is higher than normal levels of psychopathy in conservatories, and if so, why? And how does it play out on both the faculty and the students?

And I knew that there were some professions that attracted, or maybe selected for, psychopathy. And that’s adaptive, in a sense: Confession—I give injections very well, to the point that I have had to show the empty syringe to the patient all to convince them that, yes, I gave the shot, though he or she didn’t feel it. I do this by caring not in the least about the patient, or whether he or she will feel it. Oh, and I absolutely do NOT say: “Now this is going to hurt, so take a deep breath, and I will tell you when I’m going to give the injection….” Duh, guys?

So am I a psychopath?

Wrong question, according to the documentary, since there are very few pure, 100% psychopaths: It was Ted Bundy, if I remember correctly, who got “only” 39 out of a possible score of 40. So maybe I would score a 1 or a 5 or even a 15: It doesn’t qualify me to play in the big leagues.

Well, one of the researchers interviewed in the documentary was actually from the University of Wisconsin, so that meant my problem was solved, right? Hey, just call the guy up—people in Wisconsin tend to pick up the phone, or at least answer message (might be that lingering duty towards the Wisconsin Idea…)—ask if Walker was a psychopath, and report in to all you Concerned Readers. Whew—my job done for the day! Beach time!

This tells you, perhaps, that my psychopathy is limited to piffling affairs like giving shots, because it took me several games of Sudoku (during which I mull things over) to realize: No amount of tenure would be enough to get a shrink to diagnose anyone he hasn’t met over the phone to a stranger. Oh, and if the patient is Governor Walker? Well, in his case, I fear that we’ll never know if nice guys finish last….

Right, so that wasn’t happening. And then I began to mull what I began to think of as the theory of historical inevitability. I give you the old question: How could Germany, the center of culture and scholarship, the homeland of Goethe and Schiller, have fallen prey to Adolph Hitler?

There’s one answer—and no, by the way, I’m not comparing Walker and Hitler—and that is that if it hadn’t been Hitler, it would have been somebody else, just as bad, just as totalitarian. The period—with its humiliation over the defeat in World War I, its massive inflation, it anti-Semitism—selected the dictator. And his name happened to be Hitler.

I’m on the fence on this, but it did stir me to wonder: Why did Minnesota, a state so similar to Wisconsin, go one way, while Wisconsin went the other? OK—let me rephrase the question: How many people know the name of the governor of Minnesota, versus the governor of Wisconsin? I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t, until Mary Jane, a very nice woman from Minnesota told me: The name is Layton, he’s very unassuming, completely inept at giving glib answers, and totally committed to the state. OK—maybe we now do know about nice guys finishing last….

But was it just coincidence? I had figured out that the rise of Walker coincided with the subsequent boom in fracking sand mines in Wisconsin, and who had put Walker in office? Right—The Koch brothers, and so I had written a post last year, entitled something like “Oil Barons Buy the State of Wisconsin.” But the question still nagged: Why Wisconsin, not Minnesota? Just bad luck?

Then it dawned on me: What are the characteristics of the victims of psychopaths, and could a state be a victim, as much as an individual? Here, I have no answer. But the documentary made very clear: Psychopaths are predators, who study their victims as a lion studies a herd, looking for the weakest victim. And here I checked on the website psychopathsandlove.com—and could I make this up?—and discovered what I had suspected: Victims tend to be trusting, loyal, caring, sentimental, and committed to helping others meet their goals.

Sound familiar?

And so I resolved another problem I had been having, since I’ve been feeling massively guilty about having elected Walker in the first place—true, a bit irrational, since I’ve been living out of state for 25 years, now—and especially guilty about possibly inflicting him on the rest of the country. Because guess what? Victims of psychopaths feel guilty, much like abuse victims. Gee, wonder why that could be?

Right—so I’m working on it. All of the things that made Wisconsin go for a good guy like Fighting Bob La Follette also made us perfect victims for Joe McCarthy and Walker. What makes us great makes us weak.

Oh, and the theory of Historical Inevitability?

…think I know which way I’m leaning now! 

Conservatory Days

For one reason or another, I spent the weekend pondering the education of classical musicians, since at one time that was what I wanted someone to do to me, and at another time, it was what I had to do to myself.

Here was the standard thinking: Music was a demanding art, requiring the highest discipline, and very, very few of us would do much of anything except, if we were lucky, manage to get into an orchestra. There, we would scrape away or toot away or bang away (can’t forget the percussion guys) for forty years at the standard repertoire, which meant that we would have memorized Beethoven’s Fifth. All of this for the delectation of blue-haired ladies who had dragged their husbands—all yearning for the golf course—to the concerts.

So it was a schizophrenia that was almost ordained. We were being trained for something that we would never be. We spent enormous amounts of time in practice rooms, where we learned pieces that almost none of us would ever play. I have memorized, for example, over 10 concerti, each one lasting about 30 minutes. So that’s five hours of music, but how many minutes in my life have I played them with an orchestra?

Forty minutes, since I won a concerto competition in high school.

So we were learning pieces that we would almost certainly never play in careers that we would almost certainly never have. That bad, but hardly the worst of it. The real problem was that our teachers were professionally obliged to stifle any innate kindness or altruism, and instead assault us in ways ranging from the subtle to the outright abusive. Why? To toughen us up, since it was a dog-eat-dog world out there, and only the tough survived.

And of course, to us it made sense. We had practiced five hours, but Betty? She had done six, and that last hour would make the difference…or so we thought. And perhaps it did, if Betty believed it, and if it made her more secure for the competition, the recital, the concert or—especially and most dreadfully—the audition.

So Betty would sail into the audition, sit behind the curtain—that essential if make-believe pretense of impartiality, since everybody knew what Betty was playing, as well as what everybody else was playing—and perform magnificently. She had done her work, she had braved her teacher, whose preferred way of receiving whatever Betty had brought into her lesson was to sit in utter silence for one or two long minutes, after which he would light a cigarette (you could do that then), and tear into her.

I now know—he was probably an unhappy man, this teacher that we all (perhaps most of all himself) put on a pedestal. In my case, the teacher had been one of a family of musicians, had performed early on with the Chicago Symphony, and then had gone—without a degree—to teach at the university. There he had stayed for forty years or so, turning out students, only a few of whom had made their careers in music.

No, I suspect he wasn’t a very happy man, because here’s the thing about classical music: For some reason it’s OK to be a good doctor or a good lawyer, but a musician who is simply good? Who is a serviceable cellist, but not Yo-Yo Ma or Rostropovich? Well, he’s second best at best—often he’s just a hack.

So he was unhappy, and he was teaching us as he had been taught, which was to play despite an unceasing flood of negative commentary. Which meant that for a student to be “good,” he had to be hard on himself. For an overachiever like me, that meant variously swearing at myself or biting myself. Oh, and curiously, I had this little problem breathing: I held my breath until anoxia forced me to gasp. Nice metaphor—right? I was being strangled, though only my body knew it at the time. My brain thought I was just being weak.

Right—so into this mix was added the instruction: If only I would “relax,” I would play so much better! So the “work” then became to “relax,” and what was wrong with me, since I was trying really, really hard to get those shoulders down—they had been tickling my ears for a decade or so. Anyway, I was working so hard on the shoulders that I was actually forcing them down artificially low, which was causing its set of tensions, so that accounted for my own thin, strained sounds, whereas Betty—well, she seemed immune to any tension whatsoever, and her sound? Rostropovich would have melted!

It wasn’t Betty, of course. Or rather it was, since she was a girl, and girls didn’t come in for quite the same level of toughness that boys did. Since I was going to have to make my living, but Betty? Guys, this was the 70’s, but even now it’s the same. She could have a career, yes, or she could play chamber music and let her lawyer husband support her….

And we all knew—Betty had an instrument to die for: Not a Strad, but a gorgeous Italian instrument from the same period. So she was rich, which is a nice cushion for the arrows that might come her way, as she made her way through the forest primeval. So Betty had never quite got the toughness the rest of us got, and she had that ease of dealing with people that people with money have.

Betty went on to do well: I did not. Or did I? Because at last, I conquered the inner voice, I learned to “relax,” which was just the opposite of what I had been trying to do. And along the way, I had been a nurse, been a teacher, repaired antiques, done construction work for a summer, moved to a foreign though domestic land, learned another language, and written a book. To a classical musician this is dilettantism, the most awful face of amateurism. But is it?

He had a technique I’ll never have, that teacher of mine. He undoubtedly had the skills to pass the auditions I never could pass. And now, he is old, a professor emeritus even without a degree. He has, in short, gone far beyond me.

Or has he?