we need to talk about Donald.

Clinton v Sanders is important. they have crucial differences and those differences are worth litigating in the public square by passionate advocate-types and dispassionate referee-types. further, the resurgence of socialism as a legitimate political philosophy in american discourse is a development as surprising as it is inspiring, and worthy of its own discussion.

today, though, we need to talk about Donald.

i will not catalog his total disregard for the truth, which has been extensively covered elsewhere. he would also be the first major party presidential nominee in american history with zero political or military experience, but that's not what we need to talk about. the experience he is running on--managing real estate holdings, creating a celebrity persona, and licensing his name to various enterprises--is a parade of failure, fraud, and government bailout, but that's not the real issue.

Donald Trump is a gun to the head of Democracy. while his primary opponents continue under the delusion that they are running for president, Trump is appointing himself General and raising an army. he is drawing the support of the desperate and the frustrated, who believe themselves politically and culturally outnumbered. no conversation, no negotiation or compromise, will turn the tide in their favor. the only course of action is to smash their enemies to bits.

violence erupts regularly at his rallies, violence which he refuses to condemn, and in most cases actively encourages. in this he is clever but deeply unwise--the ghosts he summons have more power than he can possibly hope to control. conventional political constraints do not seem to apply: since the 60s, a vague awareness of the judgment of history has tended to check the racial pyromania of all but the most fringe politicians. Trump, however, appears unconcerned at his historical role as a warrior for white supremacy in the age of the first black president in a nation founded on black slavery. he is the political equivalent of a suicide bomber, an enemy you cannot defeat politically for political death is meaningless to him.

it's the violence that unsettles me most, for political violence is the death of Democracy. Democracy can best be understood as a concession to a rather bleak reality: that any group of people will necessarily disagree on questions large and small. when governments are founded on force and violence, it is the faction with the strongest and most ruthless army that will rule over the rest of us. disagreements are settled with blood. the winners are not the most righteous or deserving or persuasive or intelligent, but simply the most heavily armed. Democracy is the only governing system in human history that acknowledges the inevitability of our disagreements and devises a system to resolve them without violence. in theory, the weakest have as much voice as the strongest. this is the ideal, and while it has never fully been achieved, it is an ideal that we have tried to get closer and closer to as our own democracy has matured over the past 235 years. i am not a religious person, but the ideal of Democracy is as close to a sacred ideal as i hold.

Democracy is also very hard work, infuriating and unsexy work, full of half-loaf compromises and concessions to dastardly opponents. partisans of all stripes can easily find themselves daydreaming of a strongman who will bulldoze the opposition and enact our personal political wish list. the problem remains that there are 320 million of us and not one of those wish lists is alike. Democracy requires our acceptance of the fact that none of us will get exactly what we want, but each of us will have a say in the laws that govern us. the right of self-government was purchased with the blood of patriots from Lexington to Gettysburg to Selma. this right is precious, and it is not inevitable.

i don't believe Trump will win. i believe a majority of voters are embarrassed by the grossness of his racist and sexist persona, and do not wish to be represented on the global stage by his words and actions. what worries me is that the seal has been broken, that future politicians will be tempted to open the same poisonous toolbox when building their ladder to power. Trump, i believe, is not the end of a chapter but the beginning of one.

more on the monist and dualist aesthetics

i've been thinking through what exactly it is i mean by the "monist" and "dualist" aesthetics (see previous post here). it's important to clarify the distinction between aesthetic dualism and philosophical dualism, which i guess i could do by clarifying what i perceive to be the differing missions of art and philosophy.

philosophy is concerned with explaining reality (and the systems of thought that determine our perception of reality), while art attempts to describe our experience of reality. they appear similar, but in practice are so opposed to one another as to be almost incompatible. another way of putting it: a philosophical argument can be logically disproved, but a painting or a play cannot; a work of art is not considered to be "right" or "true" (or "wrong" or "untrue"); instead, we make the distinction between the works of art that come closer to describing what it feels like to be a person, and works that don't come as close.

philosophically, the notion of dualism--the mind existing as its own entity separate from the body--has been logically discredited; it is considered a fallacy (for now, at least). but fallacy is where art lives; you might even make the case that the whole point of art is to illustrate our illusions.

the dualist aesthetic describes not dualism as a philosophy, but dualism as an experience. it says: to live is to feel separated, from one's body, from the natural world, from other people. logically, we know this separation is not real, but we feel it anyway. i believe that in certain eras this feeling is much more prevalent than in other eras, and this manifests itself in our cultural record. we project our feeling of separation in all directions: it is in the sleek symmetry of an Apple product and the quantized percussion of EDM and hip hop. it is in the explosion of modernist art and architecture following the mechanization of the industrial age, and it is in the revival of classical ideals that flourished in the european renaissance and enlightenment eras. sometimes it celebrates this feeling of separation as a triumph over nature (as in classical art and architecture), and sometimes it condemns this feeling as a sort of curse (as in modernism's alienation), but the hallmark of the dualist aesthetic is that the feeling of separation is acknowledged.

i've also been wondering if this feeling of dualism might be built into christian and post-christian western culture. the fundamental christian myth is a story of humanity's separation from god; the expulsion from eden and the personhood of jesus christ are probably the two best illustrations of this motif. i fall into the camp of those who believe that the people make the myth and not the other way around, so i'm inclined to think that the rise of christianity as a world religion described some sort of budding awareness of this feeling of separation. (i haven't studied eastern religion or philosophy enough to make any authoritative statements here, but my general impression is that this feeling of separation is much more a feature of western religion and philosophy than eastern religion and philosophy. i'm not sure why this would be so, and i'm interested to learn more.)

so if the dualist aesthetic describes the fundamental human experience as one of separation, then the monist aesthetic does the opposite: it describes the fundamental human experience as being in balance with oneself and one's surroundings. it describes life's journey as something inevitable, rather than something strange. it contains an implicit criticism of the dualist perspective, effectively saying that dualism is nothing more than an illusion.

more on all this as i keep unraveling my thoughts.

The history of art is a dialectic between monism and dualism.

[Below are some thoughts on aesthetics I’ve been developing for a little while, and am still fleshing out.]

The history of art is a dialectic between monism and dualism; virtually all art falls into one of these two aesthetic categories. I use the terms “monism” and “dualism” in a slightly different way than they are commonly employed; I’ll explain below.



On Monism:

In traditional western philosophy, the term “monism” refers to a unity of mind and body. From an aesthetic perspective, monist art therefore describes the human experience as being contained within and part of the world around it, and especially as being subject to the laws and forces of nature (including human nature).

Realism, naturalism, romanticism, tragedy – these all traditionally reflect a monist perspective. Works featuring themes of interconnectedness, wholeness and unity, works that are built around archetypal or mythological motifs, works that emphasize instinct and human emotion (for good or for ill), fundamental unchanging truths (for good or for ill), tend to be works from a monist perspective.

Ironic distance is nowhere to be found in monist art, and is in fact the antithesis of it, as irony immediately creates a separation, simultaneously depicting the object and the critique of the same object: a dual perspective. Monist works do not seek to place the viewer/audience at a distance; instead, the goal is immersion, the suspension of disbelief. The monist work does not “wink” at the audience, it is played straight, intended to be taken at face value. This is not to say monist works are not often complex; in fact, monist works often operate at multiple levels simultaneously. However, the monist artist will take care to “hide the brushstrokes,” literally or figuratively, so that the viewer/audience does not necessarily have to be consciously aware of the many layers of meaning beneath the surface (in fact, it’s usually preferable for the deeper themes to remain at the level of unconsciousness, rather than calling attention to themselves). Genre storytelling—western, sci-fi, crime drama, romantic comedy—is traditionally monist, depicting a familiar moral universe that follows an agreed-upon set of rules in which the world is made balanced and whole by the end. Most popular and folk art (though certainly not all) is fundamentally monist as well; country music and folk music, for example, are prime examples of monist art, with organic, traditional instruments and familiar stories of fundamental human truths.

This description of monism can sound deceptively traditional; however, a monist perspective can be seen in many contemporary works of art. The second half of the 20th century witnessed a partial return to monist artwork: notably, the minimalist music of Glass, Reich, Adams and their contemporaries, which turn repetitive ostinato figures into immersive rituals; also, too, the action painting of Jackson Pollack and the later Rothko paintings, while abstract, could arguably be called monist, as they seem to depict the fractal patterns of the natural world (in Pollack’s case) or the pure sensation evoked by deep, saturated colors (in Rothko’s case). What these musical and visual works all share is an emphasis on art as something pre-logical and pre-intellectual, something to be felt physically as an emotional and intuitive experience.



On Dualism:

In western philosophy, “dualism” is the opposite of “monism” – the notion that the mind and body are separate entities (Rene Descartes is one of the most famous dualists). From an aesthetic perspective, dualist art therefore emphasizes, through form or content or both, the experience of feeling oneself, or even all of humanity, as something separate from the natural world; it often describes the self not as an organic whole, but as a fractured and fragmented construction.

Dualist art emphasizes the artificial, the manmade, the unnatural structures and symmetries that civilization has imposed upon the world. Both Modernism and formal Classicism are prime examples of dualist art; Classicism by celebrating humanity’s achievements as breaking away from the primal state of nature, emphasizing smooth shapes and ideal forms, and Modernism as Classicism’s shadow, emphasizing the alienation of existing in a machine-haunted environment, even to the point of resembling a machine. In dualist art, the presence of humanity is always felt – grids and straight lines, visible brush-strokes, irony or “self-awareness” that calls attention to the artifice of the work itself (as in Brecht’s “alienation” technique); these are hallmarks of art expressing a dualist perspective. Picasso’s famous definition of art as “the lie that tells the truth” is a classic dualist statement, not only because it contains a paradoxical dualism in and of itself, but because it describes the goal of making the viewer aware of the artifice, awareness of the artifice being the quintessential dualist description of the experience of reality.

The dualist perspective, especially in modern works, often places the viewer/audience at a critical distance from the work, signaling that the viewer/audience should not be “fooled” by emotionally manipulative techniques often employed in works of art from a monist perspective. The fracturing of perspective itself is a dualist trait, as in Cubism, conceptual art, and a great deal of modernist and postmodern literature (e.g. metafiction). Most popular art is monist, but a notable exception is hip hop music: its mechanized grid-like beats and frequently-ironic use of musical quotation through sampling reflect a strongly dualist perspective.

personal guidelines for creating a musical

i liked this post from Peter J Casey; most of his advice is about making sure form follows function, which i totally endorse. he also appears to recommend having a show planned out from first to last before the writing begins; i'm not as sure about that. i've found that writing from an outline constrains my story and characters before the writing begins; i usually don't really know who these people are or how they will act until i've written from their perspective for a period of time. i like to have a vague sense of how things start and how they will end, and maybe i'll have a few key moments envisioned, but also i like to have some freedom of movement when the actual writing is happening.

still, there are some questions that i know must be answered before too long; if i'm halfway through a draft and still don't know the answers, it's probably not going to work. here are a few, in no particular order:

musical questions

- what does the show sound like? generally, what world am i trying to create sonically? specifically, what are the instruments and what are the genres i'm using to create that world? i like to narrow in on a suite of sounds that stays consistent; after i've written a few songs, this usually comes into focus. the question of genres is tougher, but just as crucial (and i use the word "genres," plural; there had better be a wide range of genres referenced over the course of the evening, or else the songs will wash together and numb the audience with predictability). i've lately thought of it in terms of putting together a band: great bands can evoke multiple genres within the framework of their particular set of sounds and instruments. so i start to wonder - what's the band? what types of rhythms do they like? do they draw on traditional forms but use modern instruments? do they do the reverse? are there enough contrasting sounds in the band to create a wide palette -- unpitched percussive instruments (drums, straight percussion, for pure rhythmic functions), bass of some kind (bass is its own category, obviously, but has a rhythmic and a harmonic function, though normally not a melodic one), pitched percussive (like a piano, guitar or banjo, or pizz strings, to create rhythmic lines that also function as melodic or harmonic lines), and sustained-note instruments (string, brass or wind instruments, or their electronic equivalent, to create sustained harmonies and melodic lines)? those four categories need to be all covered, i've found, especially when you're writing music that is driven by rhythm, as i believe musical theater mostly needs to be (you might note that three of the four categories involve rhythm, and i've found rhythmic counterpoint should involve a minimum of 3 parts unless i want the arrangement to sound really boring).

- what does each character sound like within the world of the show? this is partly about genre, and i really try not to have only one genre happening at a time; again, it gets too predictable. what usually happens is the instruments are each suggesting a slightly different genre -- for example, maybe the piano is playing a philip glass-style ostinato, while the strings are slurring and bending notes like bluegrass fiddlers, and the bass line is on a low synth in straight quarter notes, evoking new wave or EDM, while the drums play some version of the traditional "be my baby" phil spector girl group beat. so, with those four sounds all rubbing up against one another, what is being said about the character? what information do those four genres communicate to the listener about the person and the situation? what sort of conflicts are built into those contrasts? sometimes i start with the music, and let the music tell me who the character is, and sometimes it's the opposite, depending on how the writing evolves. by about the halfway point, though, i need to have a good sense of how the character sounds musically. genres will tell us other things about the character, also -- for instance, does the character wear their heart on their sleeve? are they guarded? are they tortured by something deep? are they blissfully unaware? are they always trying to "sell" something (a car, a point of view, a religious or political doctrine)? do they only express themselves ironically? again, there should be a contrast -- some characters reveal themselves and some work to conceal, and the music should reflect those differences. i find that no one should be too simple as to be reduced to one particular genre (this guy sings springsteen anthems! this woman only sings 12-bar blues!) but should evoke several at once, preferably in ways that the audience won't really have an immediate reference for. i've seen plenty of shows in which the book is doing a ton of heavy lifting with character development, only to have the music start and tell us from the opening bars that the song is going to be like a thousand others i've heard before, obliterating any uniqueness and specificity that i'd come to associate with the character. predictable music tells me i'm watching a predictable person.

story questions

- what is the point of the show? what about the human experience is being illuminated by the show? what makes this show necessary? a musical takes years to bring to fruition, and i don't want to invest that time and energy if i can't answer the question of why this show should exist in the first place.

- am i telling the audience what they want to hear, or am i getting as close to the truth as possible? this one doesn't require much elaboration, but is a question that i am constantly posing to myself, throughout the writing process.

- why am i drawn to this story? what am i wrestling with that is working itself out on this script? i find that i need to constantly interrogate my own perspective, and be brutally honest about why i want to write a particular story. i just finished a draft of a piece that is ostensibly about slavery and the civil war, but is, on a much deeper level, about loss of historical memory. i was about three quarters done before i realized that i was being pushed along by unresolved anger at a piece of family history that was swept under the rug for a number of years and only recently came to light. this realization helped me to focus that theme and bring it out as much as i could; it became the burning emotional center of the whole show.

- what is the dialectic? this is a fancy way of saying, what are the opposing principles or points of view that battle amongst one another? this doesn't need to be intellectual; it can be as simple and fundamental as, one character believes in the interconnectedness of all things while another believes we are each ultimately alone in our existence. the dialectic should be what i think of as an unsolvable riddle; the show isn't going to present an answer or declare a winner.

practical questions

- is this show about an event that happens to a community of people? if it's not, it probably won't work as a musical. there are exceptions (Hedwig comes to mind) but normally a musical is about a group of people going through some sort of change event -- a small town in Iowa, a small town in Oklahoma, tenement residents of the west side of manhattan, tenement residents of the east village. it's rare that a show can work that doesn't involve a community dealing with some kind of disruption.

- is the story in some way archetypal? if not, it probably won't be a good musical. musicals have one foot in the real world and one foot in archetype - i can't really think of a classic show that becomes part of the repertoire that isn't telling an archetypal story. this is what's tricky; it can be hard to create an archetypal story without becoming predictable.

more questions to come as i think of them...

about me

i am a texas-born brooklyn-based writer/composer/lyricist working mostly in the theater. my music incorporates both traditional instruments and electronic composition techniques, including samples, with a strong emphasis on fusing various "American" genres and framing older forms in a contemporary way. i'm obsessed with the mythology of the United States. and with rhythm. and with post-minimalist music. and with the fuzzy line between "high" and "low" art. i write a whole lot about race and the legacy of white supremacy in America. and sometimes about robots.

my shows have been performed in New York in various concert performances, and in full production at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (STREET LIGHTS, 2009; WHITE NOISE, 2006). after winning a Summer Theater Award for best score, WHITE NOISE was optioned by Whoopi Goldberg for Broadway. it almost made it there, but closed out of town. all my songs had been cut by that time. i'm not suggesting those two phenomena are related, just giving you guys the information. STREET LIGHTS got picked up by the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego for a production, but the creative team fell apart in rehearsals so it never quite happened. we all learned so much, though, you guys.

i studied composition for a year at Berklee College of Music in Boston, but left after a year. the tuition was too damn high. but mostly i just wanted to get to New York as fast as i could.

other interesting tidbits: i worked as the primary speechwriter for Howard Dean's failed presidential campaign in 2003, and got to write a number of great speeches, several of which Dean actually delivered. i didn't write the one you're thinking of. but i did get to write this one, which a prominent African American periodical called "the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years". i also got to write a 5,000 word essay on poverty in America for Vanity Fair magazine. under the name "Howard Dean", of course, but it was still pretty sweet.

ABC Primetime also did a segment on WHITE NOISE in 2006, so i can credibly say that my music has been featured on national television.

my first musical, SKY'S END, was produced when i was 18 at the Blank Theatre Company in Los Angeles. i got nominated for an L.A. "Robbie" award for Best Music and Lyrics. Back Stage West published a scene from the show, so i can credibly call myself a published playwright.

snippets of music to come...

On the Creation of Art versus the Creation of Porn

what is art? as one who considers myself/aspires to be an artist, i've lately felt compelled to answer this question. i've always had a vague, "i know it when i see it" approach to determining artistic merit (a standard once famously applied to pornography; more on that below). i've come to believe that this approach is not sufficient, and after some reflection, i've hit upon the beginnings of my own understanding of the term as i use it. the breakthrough happened when i hit upon what i believe to be the opposite of what i mean by "art": namely, porn.

i should note here that i'm approaching this as a practicing artist, not an academic; i have read some aesthetic theory, but am by no means an expert on aesthetics, so i'm sure that some of what follows is not original to me. however, i'm eager to hear about any academic writing that has been done along these same lines, if only to sharpen my ideas, so please feel free to enlighten me if i'm treading on familiar ground.



PART ONE: DEFINITIONS.

a definition of "art". my broadest, most comprehensive definition is this: art is the conscious attempt by an individual, or coordinated group of individuals possessing a singularity of vision, to comment on some aspect of human existence through the use of non-literal representations.

breaking the definition down a bit:

"...the conscious attempt..." this is to say that art is not simply anything we observe which inspires a revelation; art must be created with deliberate intent. a sunset or a flower or even the bustle of commuters at grand central station observed from above may be beautiful, may arouse emotion, may even trigger a breakthrough in awareness, but the end result is not enough. if these phenomena are art, then the definition of "art" can be applied to any and all aspects of reality, according to the subjective experience of the observer. if art simply means anything that inspires someone, the word becomes meaningless. art must be created intentionally, as it must contain a "comment" (more on this below).

"...by an individual or coordinated group of individuals possessing a singularity of vision..." see above re: deliberate intent. it is obviously possible to create a work of art through the collaborative process, but the difficulty lies in the singularity of vision, since individuals are very likely to have different and conflicting goals, either with regard to the substance of the "comment", the best techniques for achieving the "comment", or the goal of creating art in the first place.

"...to comment on some aspect of human existence..." the crux of my definition is this word, "comment". to be art, it must "say something". the substance of whatever is being "said", along with the artist's success at "saying" it, is what makes some art better than other art, but the comment is required. i'm not talking about anything political or pedantic here; in fact, any "comment" that can be reduced to rhetoric falls into the category of art's opposite (see below), due to its predictability. the perfect symmetry of a bach fugue or a da vinci painting, the multiple perspectives of cubism or "the rite of spring", the dada of duchamp's "fountain" or the absurdism of a kafka story -- all these are departures from reality which create a comment on reality in the audience's mind. bach's music--or da vinci's painting--says, reality is more beautiful and symmetrical than you realize. "the rite of spring" or "les demoiselles d'avignon" says, there are more perspectives existing simultaneously than you realize (and they can crash into one another with great force). duchamp's urinal sculpture says, art itself is more than you have previously envisioned. kafka says, life can be as ridiculous and inexplicable as the experience of waking up as a cockroach one morning. (these are obviously simplistic reductions of the effects of these works of art, but you get the point.)

"...through the use of non-literal representations." art must depart from a literal depiction of reality, and by doing so, draw attention to that particular aspect of reality. non-literalism is how the comment is achieved. a reproduction of reality, in other words, is not art, even though it may be created using the same techniques. it contributes no new information, it contains no comment. like the spontaneous phenomena discussed above, reproduction of reality may coincidentally inspire some sort of breakthrough or awareness, but it does so only by accident. art must depart from reality, and this departure is where the "comment" happens, as it is this departure from reality, this non-literalism, that catches the attention of the audience. (even duchamp's "fountain" discussed above, while seemingly plucked from reality, is a deliberate departure from the reality of an art exhibit, forcing the audience to reckon with a new notion of art itself.)

the opposite of art is porn. porn is faux-art, often produced with the identical techniques as art, but which does not go beyond pure gratification (which includes intellectual gratification – i.e., flattery of the audience’s assumptions and prejudices). i believe that most of what humans create, even in the guise of creating art, is actually porn. its goal is to satisfy, to gratify.

i will note there that these two distinctions -- art and porn -- are not hierarchal. one is not superior to another; both are necessary in their own way. gratification is a wonderful experience, and we long for it, as surely as we long for the revelation produced by art. that being said, the creation of art is a far more difficult task, as there are so many traps which the artist can fall into and in so doing, create porn instead. i would even venture to say all artists create porn sometimes, and some even do so most of the time (however, no one who is intending to create porn can create art, since the intent is not there, and therefore any comment is accidental). incidentally, i don't exclude myself from this category; most of what i have created in my lifetime would be categorized as porn. part of the reason for me writing this essay is to bring the distinction to light in my own mind, and apply it to my own process, so that i understand what it is that i am creating. there is nothing wrong with creating porn, i just don't want to create porn while deluding myself into believing i was creating art.



PART TWO: GUIDELINES FOR THE CREATION OF ART VERSUS THE CREATION OF PORN.

this is not a comprehensive list; it is a continuously updated work-in-progress.

first guideline: art is a form of communication, and therefore requires an audience. artwork with no audience is self-gratification, i.e. porn.

second guideline: art presents a point of view; it cannot be value-neutral. a work of art, by definition, takes a stand with regard to its subject. it presents a way of looking at the subject that says, in effect, it is this way, and not some other way. art that strives not to offend by not taking a stand on its subject defers to the gratification of the sensibilities of the audience; it is porn.

third guideline: the tension in art is between the fulfillment of the audience’s expectations and the subversion of those expectations; art ultimately must never err on the side of fulfillment. all art sustains its tension and momentum by maintaining a balance between the fulfillment of the audience's expectations and the subversion of those expectations, but if the ultimate effect errs on the side of fulfillment, what has been created is not art, but porn.

fourth guideline: art uses aspects of porn, but does not succumb to them. since it requires the engagement of the audience, much effective art uses the techniques of porn in service of the larger goal of the comment. "art" does not mean "boring" -- the artist must hold the audience's attention, often fooling the audience into thinking that they're watching porn by creating moments of gratification. incidentally, porn, too, may use the techniques of art (mostly to flatter the audience into believing they have had the experience of artistic revelation rather than a pornographic gratification).

fifth guideline: the subversion of expectations is how the comment is achieved.. this is related to the discussion of non-literal representation above. it is only by subverting the audience's expectations that art can call attention to itself and its intent. fulfilling the audience's expectations simply gives them information they already have.

sixth guideline: a work of art communicates that which is beyond the power of description and cannot be fully explained, only experienced. if the point of it is only to communicate an idea that can be explained rhetorically, it is pedantic, and ultimately predictable (ultimately fulfilling expectations), i.e. porn.

seventh guideline: a "good" work of art reveals something new to the audience. A "great" one forces the audience to acknowledge a reality which already exists, but which the audience has been concealing from themselves.This is what makes the creation of a "great" work of art so difficult; its intentions are almost indistinguishable from the intentions of porn (which is why attempts to be "great" are so often so bad). the task of revealing something already known to the audience is almost exactly the same as fulfilling their expectations; the difference here is that the artist is able to identify that which is being concealed, and know how to force an audience to admit it. this, for example, is the essence of tragedy in theater: with, say, death of a salesman, the title tells us the ending beforehand, but the audience has a hard time believing that either (a) willy loman will die or (b) if he does, that it will be not because he broke the rules and conventions that he is supposed to live by, but because he followed them. the greatness of the play is that the audience knows the truth -- that the conventions of the "american dream" can be a lie and a trap -- but hopes against hope that what they know to be true is not in fact true.

eighth guideline: with art, the artist is the ultimate dictator. In porn, the audience is the ultimate dictator.

ninth guideline: art exposes, and makes the audiences aware of, the gap between our personal or cultural illusions and the realities of our existence. as indicated above, the primary tool for exposing this gap, and creating the audiences awareness of it, is subversion of expectations. porn, on the other hand, works to conceal the gap between our cultural illusions and the realities of our existence. that is its goal -- to assure the audience that all is right with the world, and that the illusions they walked in with will not ultimately be shaken.

tenth guideline: the expectations of the audience are a constantly-shifting target; what was "art" yesterday is "porn" today. this is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of being an artist, to continually adapt his/her tools and techniques to stay one step ahead of the audience's expectations at all times, since today’s audience will be wise to yesterday’s subversions. a replica of yesterday’s "subversive" techniques produces today’s porn.

more thoughts as they arrive...

UPDATE:

eleventh guideline: all art is, by definition, experimental. if art requires comment, and comment is achieved through subverting expectations, it follows that every new work must be, in some sense, an experiment. if there is no part of the work that is an experiment, if it is using techniques in ways that have already been proven to "work", then the piece comes with a set of pre-existing expectations that will be fulfilled. this is porn.

twelfth guideline: most of the experiments required in the course of making art will fail. this does not push the experiments into the category of porn; however, it means that the artist is constantly running the risk of having his/her experiments fail to connect with audience in the way that the artist intends. repeated failure is often the price of attempting to create art. this is also what makes porn so seductive; any experiment risks failure, whereas sticking to a tested formula is more likely to create (temporary) "success".

this

TNC:

I don't have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality. And I now feel myself more historian than journalist.

the sexless musical genre known as "musical theater"

it was never supposed to be its own genre, really. american musical theater grew out of the vaudeville tradition, where wildly different sensibilities were thrown together on the same stage for the sole purpose of entertainment; imagine something between the Ed Sullivan show and "America's Got Talent," but bawdier and more brazen with ethnic and racial stereotypes (blackface was a staple), and you have a fair idea of what an evening at a vaudeville theater was like. one thing it was not was cohesive, especially musically. a harlem dance number (the word "jazz" came later) could be followed by an aria from a popular operetta or a cohan-style patriotic tune.

it took several decades of gershwins and berlins and kerns and rodgerses to shape the various musical strains into what we now think of as the "golden age of american songwriting". it's hard to imagine now, but in its time, this music was dangerous and sexy and not a little bit transgressive. in the 20s and 30s, anything with jazzy rhythms conjured the same association among small town whites that hip hop currently does -- it was urban, decadent, promiscuous, and very "black". at the same time, the lyrics of the golden age carried a whiff of effete sophistication that further emphasized the cosmopolitan outlook of the tunes. these songs were on the cutting edge of american pop culture, snatched up by recording artists as soon as they appeared on the broadway stage. and from Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" to Gershwin lyrics like "s'exceptional", the songs pumped with sexual energy. and it wasn't just the lyrics; the rhythms were earthy and physical and encouraged all kinds of inappropriate dancing and drinking and rulebreaking. "jungle rhythms," is what they were called.

what happened? the 60s, for one. sex and trasngression were culturally appropriated by rock n' roll (and later, plain old "rock"). the loud, electrified sound was hard to reconcile with dramatic storytelling, and musical theater (with a few exceptions) mostly ignored it, paving the way for its own cultural obsolescence. this can't be the whole story, though; there were other pop music trends that could have worked in a dramatic format (the motown soul sound, for example). it's still not clear to me why the major musical theater composers of the 60s and 70s -- i'm thinking of Sondheim and John Kander especially -- were so reluctant to experiment with these new sounds. instead, Sondheim and Kander, both gifted at the art of pastiche, mined past musical paradigms for their shows of the 60s and 70s which, while off-the-charts innovative from a theatrical standpoint, featured music that was explicitly retro. in the 60s and 70s! just when a new "golden age" of pop songwriting was happening all around them. it seems to me to be the most spectacular missed opportunity in musical theater history.

i suspect it has something to do with the audiences, also. in the late 60s and 70s, the audience for musical theater didn't look like the Bobby Kennedy or George McGovern set; it looked like the Nixon set. and i respect the idea that in order for innovators like Sondheim and Kander to tell the stories they wanted to tell to the audiences that were keeping broadway alive, more traditional music was probably the best vehicle.

however it happened, the consequence has been that several generations of musical theater composers have mostly reacted to pop culture in the same way that contemporary jazz and "classical" composers have; that is, by defining themselves in opposition to it. this is suicide. musical theater thrives when it synthesizes contemporary pop music sounds into something greater than the sum of the parts, but comtemporary musical theater composers, by and large, have been stuck for a while, recycling a a sound resembling sort of a watered-down sondheim or steven schwartz (whose music is like a watered-down version of the singer/songwriter pop balladeers of the 70s). rhythmic invention, forever a staple of american pop music, took a backseat to post-impressionistic harmonic noodling in theater music (that is, when songwriters didn't revert to a Amy Grant-style christan contemporary-ish uplift). almost every musical theater composer since then has been a piano composer, a "chord composer". the sound became more localized, kept alive by countless cabaret singers and shows (Songs for a New World, for example) written to be performed in such venues, abandoning the goal of communicating with a larger audience that continued to be interested in music that sounded modern and danceable and sexy. it's true that every so often, a show will come out that has "modern" music (which usually means music that would have sounded modern two decades prior) and everyone will herald it as The One, the savior which will finally bridge the gulf between theater music and pop music. Rent, say. or In The Heights. or Once, the savior-du-jour. but institutional pressures will revert everything back to form soon enough, and whether because of timid producers or songwriting talent that doesn't come to the new york musical theater scene if it has an ear for what's modern, new musicals will continue to be written by the current crop of very gifted keepers-of-the-flame who are good at using music to describe the vulnerable inner monologues of white twentysomethings (themselves!), but not much else.

sex is really the key concept, i think. of all the theater folk i have met, i don't know anyone who finds modern musical theater music sexy. as in, i would put this Wicked OCR on to get me and my baby in the mood. (or, if you're more highbrow, Light in the Piazza. nobody is getting busy to Adam Guettel.) modern musical theater songs can certainly describe sex (usually in a gee-whiz-my-first-time-was-so-awkward-but-tender sort of way), but that's a function of lyrics. the music sounds absolutely nothing like our popular cultural musical description of sex. (here's a test: picture a sex scene in literally any hollywood film, and then imagine the music that would be used: does it bear any resemblance to anything written for the modern broadway or off-broadway stage?) again, what is lacking is a rhythmic sense. this is amazing to me; rhythm is the heart and soul of 20th and 21st century pop music, including all the great musical theater music of the 20s and 30s. in a great pop song, every part of the song is driving and contributing to the rhythm. every single element. the melody, the lyrical rhyme scheme, the bass line, whatever harmonic instruments are being used (guitar, piano, strings, whatever), they're all contributing to the rhythm, and each in a different way. (even if they're not contributing to the harmony or the melody!) my friend sonny paladino, who conducts on broadway and gets this concept more than anyone else i know in the theater business (admittedly, not a huge universe of people), says that in a pop song, every single instrument is playing a hook, by which he means a rhythmic hook. pick apart the arrangement of any classic pop song, and you'll see what i mean -- every part is filling in the rhythmic space in a slightly different way, and every part is signable as its own little "hook", a good drum groove included. i blame a lot of this on the piano-bound songwriting technique most of my colleagues employ, but gershwin obviously had no problem writing intricate, swinging rhythms on the piano (then again, he was one of the most brilliant stride piano players of his day, so that's a pretty high bar, but i guess that proves my point; gershwin was thinking in terms of multiple competing rhythmic lines, trying to make his piano sound like an entire swing band).

among other things, sexless music does a huge disservice to the hard work that the bookwriter does. a character who sings songs set to music entirely drained of sex is no kind of character at all; it's a puritanical fantasy of a character. and the lyrics really can't compensate for this; an audience member will trust what the music is saying first, and sometimes only. (case in point: the least convincing moment in Wicked is the sex scene, even though there's no song being sung; based on the music we've heard, these characters have no sex drives, and the scene therefore feels totally false.)

there is some fantastic, thrilling, sexy pop music to be heard on broadway, though, and audiences flock to hear it. it lives in the confines of the dreaded "juke box" musicals. every theater professional i know disparages these shows, but audiences are not fools. they want to go to broadway to hear great singers sing and dance to great music that will wow them, turn them on, make them want to sing and dance themselves. if contemporary composers aren't giving it to them, they'll take The Four Seasons. this is depressing, but i can hardly blame them. is there any musical theater song written in the last 30 years that's as tuneful, singable, danceable, romantic as any song in Motown? we should all be ashamed of ourselves for this reality. once the place where pop songs were born, the broadway stage has lately become their graveyard. as for contemporary musical theater music, to paraphrase gershwin, it's got no rhythm, and audiences are asking for literally anything more.

health care is the great moral cause of our time

the invective coming from the uglier corners of the right wing aimed at the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has always been colored by a particular cruelty. here's senator ted cruz saying that those who lack health care should just get a job. here's mitt romney blaming his 2012 loss on the affection minorities have for obamacare, which he also described as something like a bribe in exchange for votes. the video above depicts a republican crowd cheering for the death of a hypothetical uninsured man.

recently, though, the rhetoric has escalated from garden-variety poor-bashing all the way to DEFCON 1. opponents are reaching for the grandest, most spectacular historical crimes in describing the dangers of the law: the holocaust, slavery, eugenics -- no atrocity is too great to warrant a comparison to the health care bill.

there's a particular--and in my opinion, fascinating--focus on american slavery; elected officals, respected pundits, gubernatorial candidates have each mentioned slavery in discussing the law.

there is, i believe, a good analogy to be made here, though it's not the one the opponents are attempting to make. like slavery, or civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, health care is the great moral cause of our era. it shares with those struggles a debate over who is to be considered worthy of protection by our society.

we are currently in the midst of an extremely bumpy rollout of what may or may not be a successful piece of legislation, but the details of website functionality or even the individual mandate should not obscure the fact that the question itself -- whom should we let live, and whom should we let die -- is the most consequential political question we've tackled in several generations. i believe that there are many ways to get to full coverage, but the principle should be beyond question: no american should be denied the right to live. the rancor inspired by the health care bill shows that many americans believe otherwise.

i further believe that history will judge opponents of this principle in the way that history has always judged those who seek to deny equal protection to certain groups of people: that is, damnably. it will be difficult for future generations to explain why radicals shut down the government to prevent access to health care, just as it is difficult today to explain how anyone could have taken up arms to defend slavery, but take up arms they did, and if nothing else, the ugliness of the current debate will serve as yet another perennial reminder that equal protection requires constant struggle, and the brotherhood of humankind is not a given.

i am a government addict.

hi.

my name is joe drymala, and i am a government addict. in fact, i've used government probably hundreds of times today already. i can't stop. i don't know if i'll ever stop.

it's just so much easier not to stop.

i guess you could say i was born addicted. it happened in a state hospital, funded and sustained by government, delivered by doctors and nurses each licensed and certified by the government without my knowledge or consent. government regulated and approved the medical equipment used to assist my birth and monitor my health and development even before i left my mother's womb.

i was driven home, strapped into a car seat mandated and approved by government, in an automobile built according to government specifications, in an auto factory that not only relied on government subsidies but benefitted from the destruction of foreign competitors by the U.S. army in world war two. i drove home on a government road. A. GOVERNMENT. ROAD. paid for by government, monitored by government traffic lights and stop signs and all manner of other governmental regulatory constraining my father's ability to operate his vehicle like a respectable member of a free society.

government taught me to read and write and add and subtract and reason and speak in front of a crowd and understand musical notation. i quite literally don't know who i am without it. every building i inhabit has been built according to government specification, every job i do pays me according to minimum amounts set by government and is monitored by government for safety, and if i have a grievance, government judges are there for me to complain to, in courthouses built by government. without government, i am powerless.

every bite of food i eat and drop of liquid i drink in this country, indeed, even the air i breathe, is monitored and regulated by government. the thought of it makes me sick to my government-insured stomach.

i dream of kicking the habit once and for all. it's just a dream. but i dream it anyway.

i long for a world in which i can eat food free of government inspection and regulation, a world where i can build and drive my own vehicle at whatever speed i wish fueled by whatever energy source i can burn. a world where i can conduct business without government interference, relying not on the justice system to insure fair dealings, but instead on whatever weapon i have handy.

i long for a world in which minorities of all kinds, be they racial, sexual, religious, political, or otherwise, will finally be at the mercy of the brute force of whatever majority they find themselves on the wrong end of.

i long to raise my children in a world where they never see the inside of a government school, where if they go to school at all, it will be with children not from all walks of life, but children of those who have the means to pay for it. i long to fight my own fires, police my own neighborhood, construct my own roads, conduct my own scientific research, build my own hospital, make my own medicine, deliver my own baby and purify my own air.

some would call this crazy. i call it freedom.

i am an addict. but i long to be free.

self-interest for me and not for thee

it's old hat to point out the prisoner's dilemma of capitalism: that cooperation yields much better outcomes for everyone than a hobbesian war of pure self interest, "all against all".

i've been thinking recently, though, about another paradox that dogmatic capitalists do not address: namely, that the only way to maintain a "pure" capitalist society is for the majority of people to deny their self-interest.

in theory this paradox should never take place; econ 101 says that everyone, maximizing his or her rational self-interest, will lead to the best possible economic outcome for the whole. in practice, lenin and marx were correct in their assumption that unfettered capitalism leads to monopoly and imperialism; i.e., concentration of wealth and power in the hands of just a few actors. (and i suppose this is where i'm obligated to say that they weren't correct about everything, so consider this my offical disclaimer of marxism-leninism.)

in other words, history makes it quite clear that without a strong regulatory regime, powerful entities will dominate the marketplace and squeeze out competitors through means legal and extra-legal.

however, in order to maintain this "pure" capitalist state, free of regulation, everyone else in the marketplace ("the 99%", if you will) must be persuaded not to join together to form labor unions or political parties (or wage full-scale revolutions) to redistribute wealth or enforce regulations on the 1%, even if they'd be much better off doing so.

and here we have the paradox: the 1% justify their obscene wealth and power with a philosophy of self-interest, but ask the 99% to deny their self-interest out of fealty to the Great God Capitalism.

you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and you don't need a mathemetician to tell you that this equation is unsustainable.

it seems, though, that in the philosophy of free-market capitalism, some kinds of self-interest are acceptable and some are not. the self-interest of the Koch Brothers is capitalism, but the self-interest of the janitor who votes for a higher minimum wage is socialism.

this applies to groups also, it seems; a coalition of businesses like the Chamber of Commerce promotes capitalism, but a coalition of garbage collectors promotes socialism.

i wonder what the distinction could be.

the Church of Gun

i grew up in the suburbs of san antonio, a military town in the south-central portion of the gun-loving-est state in the gun-loving-est country in the western world. this was the 1980s, when president reagan was building a nuclear arsenal capable of eliminating all life on the planet and the conservative backlash against all things brown, female, and homo was in full bloom; popular culture was saturated with Rambos and Commandos and Robocops and all-around jingoism that was audacious even by riefenstahlian standards.

which is to say, the equation of White Guys + Guns = USA seemed self-evident. equally self-evident was the danger of Nonwhite Guys + Guns; 1992 was the year that crime peaked in America, and in the bucolic suburban community where i was raised, crime meant "inner cities", which meant young black and hispanic men.

san antonio itself was (and still is) segregated to a shocking degree; there is actually a demarcation where several railroad lines run parallel to one another, side by side, which indicated a division of richer and poorer parts of town; we literally had a "right" and "wrong" side of the tracks. the wrong side meant mexicans, which meant gangs, which meant certain death for an undersized white kid like myself, or so i fervently believed.

my home life had always been treacherous; the specters of divorce, substance abuse and mental illness were constant companions. it was therefore no surprise that my best friend at the time came from a loving, two-parent family that seemed (and apparently was) functional and healthy in every way that mine wasn't. what was a surprise, though, was the passion and pastime of the friend in question.

andrew (as i'll call him here) was obsessed with weaponry. even in junior high, when we began to grow close, there was scarcely a square inch of his bedroom wall left uncovered by weapons and weapons-related propaganda: toy guns, real swords, throwing stars, arrows, shooting range targets, and pro-gun and anti-government bumper stickers and posters, including a large sign referencing the second amendment to the constitution that andrew himself had handwritten, which said simply "...shall not be infringed?" he was also a self-described martial arts expert, having taken years of training in several disciplines, and seemed to be itching for a confrontation.

i should emphasize that andrew was hardly a troubled kid; practically the opposite. he was gregarious, popular, disarming (no pun intended), loyal, and blessed with the kind of social skills that not only made him a natural leader among his friends but helped him attract just about any girl he took an interest in. he loved his parents and sister, was close to his extended family, had been placed in accelerated and gifted classes from elementary school onward; in short, he had, to my eyes at least, an absolutely perfect and care-free life.

and yet he was not only fanatical about weapons of all kinds; he had a streak of paranoia which had convinced him that threats lurked everywhere, a strange fearfulness borne not of experience but fantasy, fueled by movies and television and pulp stories and selectively-read history books. coupled with this paranoia was a religious devotion to weapons, and firearms in particular. andrew was a fundamentalist disciple of the Church of Gun.

i think of the paradox of andrew's worldview as almost a microcosm of american culture at that time: overflowing with abundance bequeathed by prior generations, yet armed to the teeth in order to ward off the barbarians that were always just beyond our gates, ready to destroy our very way of life if we let down our guard for even a moment.

in my seventh grade year, andrew and i were walking home from school, possibly dreaming of imaginary battles and vanquished enemies but more probably discussing the new roundness of our female classmates' upper bodies, when we were approached by two latino boys our own age, one of whom i knew from school. the one i recognized greeted me, shook my hand, then without provocation put the blade of a large knife up to my neck and backed me up against a telephone pole. i was terrified. andrew stood by and watched helplessly, his years of martial arts training apparently melting away at the possibility of actual danger. the knife-wielder whispered a threat i don't recall, then backed off, laughing with his companion. andrew and i walked to his house and he told me i was "ready". he said that he'd been assembling a group of like-minded friends to create a sort of neighborhood crime watch to prevent happenings like the one i'd just experienced. he had been giving his friends "combat training", focused on both hand-to-hand fighting and shooting skills (practiced with pellet guns in his backyard). i was thrilled.

as it turns out, the training was more theoretical than practical; we did a little bit of shooting and there were a few hours spent learning how to block punches and the like, but nothing substantial or regular enough to retain. what was not insubstantial, though, was andrew's fantasy life: he dreamed of one day taking his crew out in the dead of night, dressed like ninjas in all-black, and "taking back the neighborhood". in the future, he believed, society would collapse due to nuclear war or scarcity or some other mad max-style scenario (andrew's favorite film character), and when that happened, he promised, we would be kings (and he would be the king of kings, naturally).

needless to say, neither scenario took place, and yet as we grew into our high school and college years, andrew's paranoia did not subside; pellet guns were replaced with real ones, and the worldview of Threats Are Everywhere + Guns Are Fucking Badass intruded on our every interaction. he attended gun shows almost every weekend, and the few times i came along, a witnessed vendors selling not only formidable arsenals but a disturbing amount of nazi artifacts and various paraphernalia that could only be described as white supremacist; this was the point at which i first began to draw the connection between gun culture and racial paranoia. meanwhile, racist comments from andrew became more frequent, from his warnings that NAFTA would mean a mexican taco vendor on every corner of our neighborhood, to the near-certainty of a coming race war, to suspicion of the jewishness of his college roommate, to a deeply weird phone conversation after i'd moved to new york city in which he told me, in great detail, how he drove by a cotton field and stopped for a few minutes to, in his description, actually pick cotton with his own hands, so that no black person could ever lecture him about slavery. even our junior high neighborhood watch seemed in retrospect to be less a valiant defense of our community (the safest place i've ever lived, incidentially) than a racially obsessed wannabe lynch mob. andrew was clearly angry, but the focus of his anger kept changing; one minute it was directed at "the rich", then at any girl who rejected his advances, then at "minorities" who were getting "handouts" while "we" got nothing, then at a clinton-led government that he saw as tyrannical (this in spite of the fact that andrew himself had been extraordinarily well-served by government, attending elementary, junior high and high schools all recognized as "national exemplary schools" and a low-cost education at one of the finest public universities in america).

meanwhile, i had been growing more politically active and leftward leaning, and felt myself getting further and further from not only andrew's worldview but texas culture in general (and texas gun culture in particular). we drifted apart, and when a romantic betrayal finally sealed the fate of our friendship, it felt not like a bolt from the blue, but the straw that broke the camel's back. we still kept in occasionaly touch, "liking" family photos on Facebook and having coffee on those occasions when i came back to texas, but our infrequent interactions only left me feeling that we were living in entirely different universes -- mine a multicultural cosmopolitan reality, and his an isolated, rural one fueled by conspiracy theories and armed to the teeth for the coming apocalypse.

my alienation from the Church of Gun has been a gradual one, but the final schism came with the Newtown massacre; in the aftermath i finally had to "block" andrew on facebook, along with several other self-appointed high priests of the second amendment, lest my anger get the best of me and i lose a workday furiously arguing with those whose opinions are almost certainly unchangeable. admittedly, mine is just as hardened: i now believe american gun culture to be a cancer on our social and political life, impossible to unwind from racial animosity and white backlash to the civil rights movement, a proudly bloodthirsty dogma that not only defends the right to bear arms as a necessary evil, but celebrates and worships as gods the cold steel instruments designed for the sole purpose of shredding the bones and organs of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. my suspicion is that i'm not alone; rational conversation on this and other politically-charged topics has all but ceased in the aftermath of the 2012 election, and a cold war of attrition has commenced, with each side grinding out the victories it can until one is finally defeated through either societal collapse or inexorable demographic change in the body politic. andrew has become a symbol in my mind of the Church of Gun, and though he is many things besides (a father to three beautiful children, a loving husband, a loyal friend to those in his circle), i don't think he would shy away from identifying first and foremost as a soldier of the Church. i would not be surprised if he views me similarly as a symbol -- the city-dwelling bleeding heart liberal whose good intentions have the effect of robbing the rest of us of our constitutional freedoms and leaving us in perpetual danger from a government itching to fire up the gas chambers. there is no middle ground between these two views. once a cancer has been diagnosed, the only option is to cut it out.

lately i've found myself having imaginary arguments with an imaginary andrew, raging against phantoms just as i once privately criticized him for doing. i say this to my shame; no one deserves to be reduced to a strawman, and i usually stop myself once i realize what i'm doing, but the imaginary andrew keeps appearing in my mind, bristling with weapons, daring me to take them from his cold, dead hands. it was a surprise, then, when the real andrew called me several weeks ago, leaving a message as friendly as ever: "hey bud; you popped into my head yesterday and i was just wondering how you were." i didn't return the phone call. maybe someday, after the war is over and all our dead are buried, i will.

aurora

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably my favorite writer working right now, and with regards to the massacre in Aurora, CO (where, weirdly, I used to live when I was about 4 years old), he wrote this, in response to the argument that an armed audience member could have decreased the casualty rate:

It's worth considering the wisdom of waging a shoot-out in a crowded theater with a mad-man in body-armor. More than that, we should consider the import of the the argument's implication--a fully, and heavily, armed citizenry. If we all are going to agree to be armed, surely I don't want my arms to be inferior to the arms of my potential adversaries--a category including virtually any other citizen. The Aurora shooter was evidently in full body-armor. I need to upgrade to hand-grenades. And so we arrive at a kind of personal arms race, and we arrive at a world with minimal trust in the state's ability to deploy violence on our behalf--a distrust of the authorities whom we pay to protect us, a cynicism which says those authorities are beyond reform, and that only through this personal arms race, can a person sleep at night.

And too we are left with the deeply held belief that, somehow, we can always outgun those who would do us harm, or at least our end can come at the place of our choosing. Now we are cousined to immortality. Now we are chin-level with our various Gods.

It's worth considering what we mean by a safer society, and whether it can be secured through a cold war of all against all. It's worth asking if the world really needs more George Zimmermans.

there's a kind of circular logic to the pro-gun argument: there are guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, therefore i must have guns, therefore we must have guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, etc. it's an unbreakable circuit.

guns are for shooting other people. as long as they're manufactured and sold here, people will be shot and killed here with them. this is indisputible. as i mentioned several posts ago, those numbers are around 10,000 per year in the united states. i'm extremely unimpressed by the "freedom" argument in favor of owning firearms; if you're a gunowner, your freedom to carry that gun comes at the cost of 10,000 of your fellow citizens surrendering their freedom in the most permanent possible way. if we're talking about shopkeepers, or people working in dangerous occupations (bounty hunters, say), the gun is obviously a tool that one hopes to never have to use. on the other side of the spectrum, as TNC pointed out, there are the George Zimmermans.

perhaps I'm safe from being accidentally targeted by the likes of Zimmerman. i'm white. but i'm not asshole enough to believe i'm the only person in this country affected by these laws. if i were a black man, and i saw this, i'd feel threatened. maybe buying a gun would help me feel less so. maybe I'd start to see Zimmermans everywhere, and chase one down with my new gun, if he looked threatening to me.

i'm not sure how or why this all started, but i'm pretty sure how it ends.

forces

I've been thinking about goals lately, and not in terms of accomplishments or possessions or any of the other usual list items.

The more I question myself about what it is I really "want" and what makes me feel "fulfilled" the more I am aware of my obsession with understanding the world around me. This is a lifelong thirst and can never possibly be quenched. Which is good, actually. It's the kind of "reason for being" that will always be there to get me up in the morning, a mountain whose peak I can never reach or even see (and if you think I'm mixing metaphors now, just you wait).

Speficially, I want to understand the forces that capture us, that shape our lives and our destinies - historical forces, social forces, economic forces, political forces, genetic and evolutionary forces, astronomical forces, quantum forces...it's as if we're all born caught in a vast, multidimensional web of innumerable invisible forces that bind reality together and propel it forward, and we spend our lives desperately trying to learn the contours of one or two of these invisible forces, like walking tightropes while blindfolded, except the ropes are constantly shifting, the patterns and pitfalls continually making fools of us as they rearrange themselves so that what is sure footing one day becomes treacherous the next. History repeats itself, until it doesn't. People behave a certain way, until they don't. This political party is fighting for me, until it's against me. One day it's atoms, the next it's vibrating strings. Genes are selfish, or do they cooperate? Remember where the rope was yesterday, but keep your step light or risk falling off completely.

I'm seduced by the idea that there are deeper patterns, though, than are dreamt of in our current philosophies. Perhaps as we collect still vaster amounts of data, the larger, intersecting networks will begin to emerge. I'm not sure if we are learning more or just forgetting less, but we have more wealth of observation, and tools for recording data, than previous generations could begin to fathom. More data in the past ten years than in the previous 4.3 billion. What are the possibilities? What could all this data lead us to understand about these forces? Is everything quantifiable? Not just nature, but history? Human behavior? Society? Love? Hate? Can we amass enough data, and quantify enough of these forces, that we would be capable of predicting or even replicating our whole reality all over again based on the right equations, even down to the last neutrino, in a way that encompasses everything from the empire state building to the inevitability of me kissing my wife for the first time on 51st street? I hope so. The optimist in me dreams that there's a sort of clockwork to it all, and I want to someday catch a glimpse of it.

externalities

we are built to believe. without beliefs, we have no guide for how to behave, what to hope for, who to trust. there's nothing we can do to avoid believing in one thing or another; it's impossible to make our way through the world without forming some opinion of the place.

what's more - we admire belief in one's beliefs. to be true to our beliefs is a virtue: "maybe i disagree with him, but i admire him for standing up for his beliefs," is a commonly expressed sentiment; i'm sure i've said it, and thought it, more times than i care to remember. to assure ourselves of the value of our own beliefs, we often point to great historical believers, whose sturdiness of belief was the fulcrum on which history turned - martin luther king, for example. see, we say: there is a man who stood for his beliefs in the face of violence, hatred and even death, and his belief in his own beliefs changed the world.

i'm not sure that this is a choice. we appear to be wired to cling to our beliefs, perhaps as an evolutionary tactic to foster tribal unity, or perhaps for some other reason. and for every inspiring historical example of the triumph of belief, there are a dozen tragedies of beliefs gone berserk that we'd rather not mention. if dr. king was standing strong for his beliefs, so was lester maddox.

a strange thing happens when one of our beliefs -- or even worse our entire "belief system" -- is contradicted. rather than revising our belief to fit reality, our instinct is to ignore reality to preserve the belief. if history is any guide, we are prepared to do great harm to one another to ensure our beliefs are not challenged. we will lie and cheat, destroying or obscuring any evidence that disproves our belief, or willfully propagandizing in favor of beliefs which have been shown to be erroneous. we will shun members of our community and even our own family whose actions, or whose very existence, contradicts our beliefs. we are not merely prepared to die for our beliefs, but to kill for them, to wreak vengence upon those who commit the unforgiveable sin of believing something other than what we believe.

in the economics game, they have a Rumsfeldian word for an event in which any outside person is affected by an agreement to which he or she was not a party: an "externality". for example, if i take your money to let you dump nuclear waste on my property, and my neighbor's cattle all die of radiation poisoning, that neighbor's loss of property is an externality, an unintended (but possibly inevitable) consequence of our contract with which he had no involvement. once you start looking, you can find externalities everywhere - victims of secondhand smoke contracting fatal illnesses, teachers being laid off because of reduced tax revenue which was the result of a financial crisis caused by overleveraged banks, and of course, the phenomenon of global warming, which is perhaps the mother of all externalities.

beliefs often have externalities as well, even the ones which superficially appear abstract. in my home state of texas, for example, many residents have a fanatical devotion to their right to purchase and own any firearm of any caliber and function, as a matter of principle. it's clear that there are externalities to this belief; tens of thousands of people die each year as a result of our resistance to stricter regulation of firearms, and everyone who supports unlimited gun rights is forced to make the moral calculus that their right to purchase and own any and every gun currently in existence is of greater import than these thousands of lives lost. (occasionally, this crowd will attempt to provide a moral justification for this in the form of an argument that more gun ownership reduces crime and therefore saves lives, but numerous independent studies have shown this argument to be bunk.)

similarly, the conservative stance against universal health care (or, if you prefer, "socialized medicine") in america reflects a willingness to let 45,000 people die annually (nearly half of them children) as an externality to this seemingly abstract principle.

this is not to say that principles are not sometimes worth making sacrifices for; i have no doubt that my good friends in texas who support unlimited gun rights are comfortable in their belief that tens of thousands of annual deaths is a small price to pay for their freedom to buy and own any weapon of any caliber, regardless of the effect on crime rates. and i only bring up the gun rights debate as an illustration of a larger point; our society is full of these sorts of trade-offs, where a little more liberty for me results in a little more suffering for someone else. these are complicated issues. we restrict the freedom of business owners to discriminate against black people because it collides with the freedom of those same black people to get a fair deal in the marketplace. many business owners (such as the aforementioned mr. maddox) feel that is a bridge too far, and that their property rights supercede the rights of their fellow citizens to be treated fairly. there are externalities on either side. what becomes dangerous, though, is when an unwillingness to challenge core beliefs shuts down the conversation and we commence the battle royal.

i recently read that liberalism (in the 18th century/Locke/Enlightenment sense) is a philosophy of unilateral disarmament in the face of intractable differences. which, i suppose, is my point. each of us has our own history and our own set of lessons that we draw from that history, but none of us can see the entire picture. if we're to continue to live in a society side by side with one another, compromise, rather than total fidelity to one's personal worldview, is required. our beliefs must always be tempered by a healthy skepticism and a willingness to evolve when those beliefs interact with someone else's reality.

Things that make me say "hell yeah" right now

Big Boi's new one.

Jeremy Rifkin:



This week's Village Voice cover story, White America Has Lost Its Mind.

Matt Taibbi (the greatest journalist working today) on the tea party.

jesus christ.

jesus christ, howard dean.

thoughts on politics.

one of the reasons i started this blog was not just to document the process of recording my own music; i also wanted it to be a place where i could periodically dump my thoughts on other matters, even if just to track the evolution of my worldview and thought processes.

so, if reading about a musician's political point of view is not your idea of illuminating blog material, this probably isn't the blog post for you. i promise i'll get back to music business with the next entry.

i've been thinking pretty hard about this recent bubble of self-described libertarians that's been rising in american politics over the past year or so. one might even trace it back to the 2008 campaign of ron paul (which happened mostly in 2007, of course), but since obama's election, and certainly since the debate on the health care bill began last summer, there has been a very loud minority (and for a laughably enormous percentage of them, it is literally the only sense in which they can be described as a minority) asserting that obama's economic policies represent nothing less than an end to capitalism and the free market system.

the "tea party" movement was launched by cnbc commentator rick santelli on february 19 of last year, and flogged on the fox news channel virtually every single day after that, particularly around the time when fox news organized nationwide "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" (i'm not sure how it is that a news network can organize rallies on behalf of any one political party, but whatever).

everyone seems to have a theory on the tea party. it's been fascinating/embarrassing to witness the media "observe" the tea partiers, studying their strange codes and customs like anthropologists deep in the bush. the pundit/reporter/gossip class was convinced for a while that tea partiers were the children of the gingrich revolution, and we were about to see 1994 all over again. many seem less convinced of that as time passes, but that seems to still be the general view--the tea party voters are angry about deficits and long for smaller government, goes the logic, and in november, the democrats are in for a bloodbath, etc. i think both of these conclusions are understandable but lazy.

at first i dismissed the tea party phenomenon as a purely astroturf affair -- a fake grassroots movement ginned up by out-of-work, out-of-power republican operatives, inflated by breathless coverage in all the old familiar places (fox, rush, drudge, etc). the rallies seemed to be a short-term temper tantrum by folks who were used to their team running things (and not a small number of angry sarah palin supporters obsessed with darker conspiracy theories about obama). i still think it's mostly that, but short-term it's not. i now feel like it's the inevitable byproduct of the current historical moment, and it's somewhat connected to obama's election, but is actually a result of forces that have been building for some time.

i'm no political expert. but, i'm not uninitiated, either. i did some work in democratic politics for a while, and even landed a gig as a speechwriter on howard dean's '04 presidential campaign (and that's the last time i will namedrop that guy, i promise). i still keep in touch with many of the people i met during that period, and have never lost the passion for the political arena, even as an observer, though it's been years since i worked on an actual campaign. my strength has always been discerning the "big picture" -- the slow, generational swings that occur back and forth between our two political poles. political change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it doesn't happen overnight, either; it tends to be more like a 30- or 40-year cycle. roughly, as i indicated above, the span of a generation.

every two years, the voters want something slightly different. this not because they're fickle or uninformed (though plenty are); it's because every two years, you're literally talking about a different set of voters. some people have died. others have just turned eighteen. some people have immigrated here. others have moved away. from one election to the next, it's sometimes hard to see the movement, but when you're talking about the long view, you're talking about a very different set of people voting today than the set of people voting 30 years ago, with a different set of shared cultural experiences, and most importantly, a very different set of conclusions drawn from those experiences about how the world works.

in my view, the presidency of george w. bush came at the tail end of a generational political cycle that began with nixon, peaked with reagan, and breathed its last gasp in 2004. there are similar figures in history, but we really only have two in the modern age -- herbert hoover presiding over the collapse of the republican coalition that ended with the great depression and the election of FDR (which admittedly stretches the definition of modern) and lyndon johnson trying to hold together the crumbling new deal political coalition amidst the shock waves of inner-city riots and the tragedy of vietnam. both analogies have their usefulness when it comes to bush, and the hoover analogy has certainly been made elsewhere, but i think it's worth examining the johnson presidency for clues as to what it looks like when a political coalition that has held for decades begins to self-destruct. it is a long, painful process for everyone involved, especially when it's not precipitated by one big event like the crash of 1929.

the New Deal coalition was, in its way, a historical anomaly, made possible by stubborn conservative southern voters with a reflexive hatred for the republican party (which was at that time still associated with lincoln and reconstruction). roosevelt and the new deal coalition basically built 20th century america, but the coalition couldn't hold together forever; politics is just people, and eventually, different groups of people who once had aligning interests will start to diverge. what held them together from 1932 to 1968 wasn't just the force of FDR's personality, though that helped; it was a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in the national effort to overcome the depression and prevail in world war two. government not only worked; it was capable of doing big things. government wasn't scary; it was a safety net. it certainly wasn't treated with the same mistrust reserved for unscrupulous businessmen who were accountable to no one and had driven the economy off a cliff; government, unlike business, was the "people's voice," and could be kept in check and held accountable by voters (again unlike business).

in the 1960s, though, huge cultural changes were afoot, and the biggest one was television (which unleashed all the others). suddenly, the public couldn't just ignore the civil rights workers being beaten on edmund pettus bridge; it was in their living room. so were the watts riots -- for four straight days of uninterrupted live coverage. so was vietnam. so was the kennedy assassination, and oswald's shooting. seen in the magnifying and distorting mirror of television, the unstoppable U.S.A. appeared to be falling apart. government couldn't control it. soon enough, life imitated television, with race riots occurring in over a hundred cities and the vietnam "conflict" hemorrhaging at breakneck speed. the economic base of the cities was collapsing as the televised images of black rioters drove millions of white people to the suburbs, where their televisions reassured them for the next 40 years that the world outside their door was a dangerous, dangerous place. the social safety net, one of the new deal's most proud and lasting accomplishments, began to be viewed as little more than handouts to undeserving minorities (a misconception that was only exacerbated when a series of impressive civil rights bills and a "War on Poverty" seemed only to inflame the inner city riots even further). so, when people talk about the 1960s as having shaped our country and our politics for many decades hence, this is what they mean -- the 1960s, far from ushering an era of liberal freedom and harmony, did the opposite: it set the stage for a 40-year period primarily dominated by reactionary racial and economic politics and a deep suspicion of not only government itself, but of the enemies within -- liberals, communists, atheist schoolteachers, welfare queens, city dwellers, black people in general -- who always had their hand in your pocket when they weren't pointing a gun in your face. we became a suburban nation with suburban values: high walls, locked doors, layer upon layer of insulation to protect each one of us from the reality of other people. the "american dream," in other words. in 1961, kennedy urged us to ask what we could do for our country. by 1981, we were back to asking what our country could do for us.

when a coalition falls apart like this, though, it's messy, especially for those people who had internalized the values of the previous coalition. in the 1960s, young people in particular became more and more hostile to the idea that american society wasn't what it had been promised to be -- namely fair, inclusive, moral, just. some of those young people became radicalized and acted out, often in ill-considered ways, especially in the case of groups like the weathermen and the black panthers. these extremists, far from achieving their goals, became a 30-year lodestone around the neck of any democratic politician trying to get elected. even bill clinton, in 1992, had a suspicious hippie past. (hell, even barack obama had to disassociate himself from former weatherman bill ayers, who apparently shook hands with obama a few times, and who many conspiracy theorists believe is the secret author of barack obama's memoir.) because the truth is, when an ideology is pushed into extremism, it is because that ideology is dying, at least for the foreseeable future. the 60s radicals raged against the american system when it became clear that the american system no longer shared their values. the less revolutionary-minded among them simply dropped out of society completely.

today we have another coalition that has collapsed -- the reagan coalition of evangelicals, businesspeople and national defense hawks. there are many reasons for this collapse, having in large part to do with the "people" factor (old people dying, young ones turning eighteen, minorities growing as a share of the population, etc.). but the precipitating crises were both foreign and domestic--the Iraq war and the housing market crash--and they both were a direct repudiation to the core philosophies of the reagan coalition itself. in reality, the demographics had been getting tighter and tighter for republicans since 2000, when a center-left majority appeared in the combined vote totals of gore and nader, which hadn't existed since, well, johnson. 9/11 artificially inflated the republican bubble for a bit, but the total dismantling of the regulatory state under the bush administration, along with an invasion of a huge country under false pretenses with no plan for stabilizing said country in the aftermath, led to a series of self-inflected wounds that caused a majority of voters to lose confidence in the republicans as a competent governing party. it wasn't just the housing crash (which was itself a cruel joke played on those who placed too much faith in the suburban american dream), and it wasn't just the wall street meltdown; it was enron creating an artificial energy crisis in the state of california, it was the outdated levees in new orleans, it was the bridge in minnesota collapsing; the philosophy of no government, no regulation, no investment in public works, no aid for newly homeless hurricane victims, no answers to the worlds problems other than military aggressiveness abroad and tax cuts for the wealthy at home that led to the end of the age of reagan.

but like the end of the age of roosevelt, the transition isn't a peaceful one. like the young hippies who felt burned by reality, the reagan-inspired radical individualists who are now being confronted with crises large enough to require collective action are very angry. this is understandable; believing for 30-odd years that the world operates in one way, and then being confronted with a wildly different reality, is incredibly unsettling. i'm fascinated by how closely the tea party movement resembles the hippie movement (minus the cultural and creative output, obviously). they are even self-consciously emulating it -- witness the planned "Tea Party Woodstock". (i have far less sympathy for their cause, of course -- a 50-year-old upper middle class man protesting a 3% tax increase doesn't really carry the same moral heft as an eighteen-year-old facing the vietnam draft -- but the similarities between the two groups are fascinating.)

one thing it's not, though, is the dawn of a new republican or libertarian era. demographics, recent events, technology, self-inflicted wounds, and finally the embrace of extremism will put the republican party out of power for a long, long time. sure, there may be an eisenhower down the road, just as there was a bill clinton during the republican era, but like eisenhower and clinton, they will govern by accepting the new political reality, not by trying to upend it. this november, the democrats will lose some seats, and they may even lose the house (though i doubt it), but the republicans who are fantasizing about 1994 are dreaming. it was literally a different set of voters that was voting at that time, and they had plenty of southern democratic holdovers from the new deal era just waiting to be picked off; in a way, 1994 was the completion of the reagan realignment. this year, though, republicans don't have a gingrich. they don't have a contract with america. they don't have a campaign. they don't have a leader. voters don't just vote for the other party by default (the democrats spent years learning this the hard way).

which is not to say that it will be a big victory for the democrats. we've just had two democratic "wave" elections in a row (2006 and 2008), and the democrats are very much due for a haircut. but in the 2012 republican primaries, the republican dilemma will become painfully clear. it was the dilemma faced by democrats throughout the 1970s and 1980s -- namely, that no one will be able to win their party nomination without taking unacceptably extreme positions, in order to satisfy the only base voters they have left. hell, this is already happening -- rand paul and sharron angle are the new face of the republican party. and therefore in 2012, the most likely nominee is sarah palin -- not only because she is by far the most popular figure among what's left of the republican party base, but because she can win big in early primary states like iowa and south carolina. there may be an "establishment" challenge to her in the person of mitt romney, but the republican "establishment" ain't what it once was. palin has fox, she has rush, and she has her facebook page; meanwhile mitch mcconnell, the most powerful republican in washington, can't even get his guy elected in a republican primary in his own state of kentucky. but even if somehow palin doesn't win, whoever the nominee is will be forced to pander as hard as possible to the base, and will be saddled with the baggage of a party that quite visibly lost their shit for the past four years or so.

no, we are at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another -- the republican base is shrinking, and in doing so, is being forced to take more and more extreme positions to satisfy the ideological purity of their base. this posture has already led them into another historic blunder--this one in arizona, where their mean-spirited immigration law has become a national symbol of racial divisiveness and has almost certainly driven hispanic voters into the arms of the democrats for a generation. it's almost pitiful to watch, this slow-motion train wreck that is today's republican party.

UPDATE: I rest my case.

revolution (take me in...)

well, holy shit. i was experimenting with latin rhythms the other day, and this song came out.

this could be the most exciting song i've ever recorded in any genre.

new band devoted to exploring this sound coming soon...

new things!

been a long time been a long time been a long lonely lonely...

here are some new things!

i'm working on an alternate album cover that i like a lot more, which contains a description of how i've been thinking about the music -- "American Country" combined with "African" rhythms:



download a new version of "Leave it all behind you," now with much more rhythm inspired by the continent of Africa.

download a new track, "Brand new heart attack," featuring cassie singing beautiful/creepy background vox.

i am looking for musicians to fill out my band.

and, download a new (final) version of an older tune -- "The first time" -- which now has a more fully-produced sound (and, more rhythm elements to drive the beat forward).

more new things to come!