Venerated Objects

A few months ago, I discovered David Hurwitz’s YouTube channel, which offers reviews of classical music recordings (as opposed to live concerts). Hurwitz shares with me (or is it the other way around?) an apparent fascination with the German symphonic repertoire. As executive editor of Classics Today, he has access to a far wider discography and, for purposes of comparison, delves into historical recordings from the 1930s to 60s far more thoroughly than I do. He deplores streaming services (I do, too), preferring physical media, though I will admit I stream plenty of recordings I don’t (yet) own, primarily to make a purchasing decision. (It’s a little weird that so much of the recorded repertoire is available to stream, essentially for free.) My opinions about specific recordings (orchestras, soloists, conductors) vary widely from those of Hurwitz, which is just fine since I’m not a newbie in need of guidance. Still, Hurwitz always has interesting things to say and some biases I find inexplicable.

Having heard quite a lot of Hurwitz’s discussions of various symphony cycles, I was prompted to go back and listen to discs (both LPs and CDs) not spun in a while. Just yesterday, I recovered a startling memory, namely, that in my early adulthood (pre-Internet), releases of new recordings were not publicized and it was only when one appeared in record stores (remember them?) that I was caught between the horns of an obvious dilemma: whether to purchase (with my rather limited funds) or defer. More importantly, I recalled febrile excitement when something appeared I really, really wanted to hear and own. On more than a few occasions, I had to prioritize and/or sacrifice in order to obtain to the venerated object(s), something less true now than then. Leaving something behind was disappointing but inevitable.

That singular excitement felt at the availability of some new objet d’art is commonplace in various fandoms, though individual tastes and predilections channel people toward different things. For instance, I’ve never camped out or even queued for the initial release of a new model iPhone (back in the day, derisively called the “Jesus phone”). Nor do I attend the opening night of a new movie out of a desire to be among the first viewers. Overpaying for tickets to a championship sporting event doesn’t appeal to me. I also don’t pay for pointless upgrades (e.g., airline tickets, valet parking) that function more as markers of status than as desirable, enhanced services. However, for many others, these are the venerated objects and services for which they are prepared to pay and/or sacrifice — sometimes quite a lot.

Age and wealth inform the calculus. The heightened emotionalism of my youth has been alleviated over the decades so that I now only infrequently venerate some object or experience. It’s too exhausting, but back when I had an abundance of emotional energy, it was commonplace. Also, had I the wealth to simply obtain everything I ever wanted without deferral or sacrifice, it’s not clear that anything would have gained special significance bordering on the sacred. This may well be one of the inevitable pitfalls of excess wealth: draining meaning out of things others are able enjoy with enthusiasm precisely because of scarcity or hardship.

Reflecting on these ideas, I also realized that there is still one category of venerated object for which I lust. It’s not a branded fashion item, luxury German sedan, pampered vacation, or second home on a secluded lake somewhere. Those are arguably within my reach but tend to be the domains of others far better situated financially than am I. No, my remaining venerated objects are obvious given what I’ve written above: high-end audio components. Whereas most recordings are quite easily obtained for less than what is now spent on a typical fast-food combo meal, the truly exceptional high-end audio I venerate starts around $15k and climbs from there. As with all luxury goods, diminishing returns set in early despite considerable emotional investment, so I have settled instead on an audiophile middle tier that frankly puts to shame the degraded listening environments most are only too happy to accept, typically out of ignorance and under-developed taste. Their veneration is projected onto other things.

Crystallizing the Moment (re-re-redux)

Is militarism the gift that just keeps giving? To war profiteers it is. From an article in Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 2021) entitled “Ad Astra” by Rachel Riederer, I learned a host of truly awful aspects to U.S.-styled militarism. Foremost among them is that time (July 8, 1962) the U.S. detonated a nuke in space to see what would happen. This event, known as Starfish Prime and a part of larger projects Operation Fishbowl and Operation Dominic, occurred toward the end of above-ground nuclear testing, an era that contributed significantly to the Cold War and was fraught with atomic angst (which resurfaced in the 1980s and yet again in the 2020s — as a culture, we repeatedly forget then remember). If I learned about these miserable activities earlier in life, I’ve since suppressed them forgotten; learning of them now is still absolutely horrifying. Another aspect is the existence of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1967. The main objectives of the OST include nonappropriation of celestial bodies (meaning that potential resources in space are a commons to be exploited freely, if not equally) and nonweaponization (meaning that weapons could not be deployed in space). Starfish Prime predated the OST.

Considering how long this madness has been going on, I paused to wonder whether 45’s creation of the Space Force wasn’t another example of a chief executive inadvertently crystallizing the moment (now the fourth in a series of blog posts). It was risible at the time, but that might have been naïveté on my part, as the article mentioned above suggests. The question for me was never whether the U.S. should deploy weapons and fighters in space (unequivocal “no!”) but whether it’s inevitable that the U.S. (or another country) does it anyway in defiance of the OST. Such a deployment would be a giant boondoggle, adding to the crazy portion of national resources already devoted to “defense.” Given the maniacal direction the military-industrial complex has been pointed for many decades, along with foolish investment in whiz-bang hypercomplexity (e.g., orbital communications and surveillance), I get that the U.S. has assets in place to protect. However, those assets are fragile and highly vulnerable to interference and attack should someone get it in their heads to move in earnest against the U.S. Furthermore, it should be obvious to anyone paying even a little attention that the leviathan humans created (i.e., industrial civilization) is creaking and groaning under its own weight and momentum and cannot be sustained much longer. Extending armed conflict into the final frontier, as it were, just might be the last, insane hurrah of leaders and despots behaving like boys with toys, unconcerned with the damage done by their actions.

On a darkly humorous note, I saw that Caitlin Johnstone named the various branches of the U.S. war machine armed services:

• Army
• Navy
• Air Force
• Marines
• Coast Guard
• Space Force
• Mainstream Media

As part of patriotic concerts every summer, I perform some version of the Armed Forces Salute/Medley, an audience favorite. Thus far, no one (so far as I know) has arranged a new version including a tune for the Space Force. I suggest the main title theme from Star Wars should be appropriated adopted unapologetically. No suggestion for the mainstream media, whose inclusion wouldn’t work for jingoistic audiences.

Update: I was just a few days early. The Space Force now has an official song:

Strong Female Lead

For this blog post, let me offer short and long versions of the assertion and argument, of which one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms is the short one:

Short version: Modern mainstream feminism is just one big celebration of the idea that women can murder, predate, oppress, and exploit for power and profit just as well as any man.

Long version: Depicting strength in terms of quintessential masculine characteristics is ruining (fictional) storytelling. (Offenders in contemporary cinema and streaming will go unnamed, but examples abound now that the strong-female-lead meme has overwhelmed characters, plots, and stories. Gawd, I tire of it.) One could survey the past few decades to identify ostensibly strong women basically behaving like asshole men just to — what? — show that it can be done? Is this somehow better than misogynist depictions of characters using feminine wiles (euphemism alert) to get what they want? These options coexist today, plus some mixture of the two. However, the main reason the strong female lead fails as storytelling — punching, fighting, and shooting toe-to-toe with men — is that it bears little resemblance to reality.

In sports (combat sports especially), men and women are simply not equally equipped for reasons physiological, not ideological. Running, jumping, throwing, swinging, and punching in any sport where speed and power are principal attributes favors male physiology. Exceptions under extraordinary conditions (i.e., ultradistance running) only demonstrate the rule. Sure, a well-trained and -conditioned female in her prime can beat and/or defeat an untrained and poorly conditioned male. If one of those MMA females came after me, I’d be toast because I’m entirely untrained and I’m well beyond the age of a cage fighter. But that’s not what’s usually depicted onscreen. Instead, it’s one badass going up against another badass, trading blows until a victor emerges. If the female is understood as the righteous one, she is typically shown victorious despite the egregious mismatch.

Nonadherence to reality can be entertaining, I suppose, which might explain why the past two decades have delivered so many overpowered superheroes and strong female leads, both of which are quickly becoming jokes and producing backlash. Do others share my concern that, as fiction bleeds into reality, credulous women might be influenced by what they see onscreen to engage recklessly in fights with men (or for that matter, other women)? Undoubtedly, a gallant or chivalrous man would take a few shots before fighting back, but if not felled quickly, my expectation is that the fight is far more likely to go very badly for the female. Moreover, what sort of message does it communicate to have females engaging in violence and inflicting their will on others, whether in the service of justice or otherwise? That’s the patriarchy in a nutshell. Rebranding matriarchal social norms in terms of negative male characteristics, even for entertainment purposes, serves no one particularly well. I wonder if hindsight will prompt the questions “what on Earth were we thinking?” Considering how human culture is stuck in permanent adolescence, I rather doubt it.

Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (DVD version) at home on my TV, which is where I see most films these days. Very few inspire me to trek to the theater anymore to overpay for seats and popcorn. Was pleased to enjoy this film quite a bit — at least before turning an analytical eye toward it. Let me provide a fun, glossy assessment before getting bogged down in troublesome detail.

The film introduces and trades heavily on characters from a supposed multiverse (a multitude of parallel universes branching indiscreetly from arbitrary decision points into an infinity of possibilities) “verse-jumping” into our universe to fix and repair damage done in one or more of the others. As plot devices go, this one is now quite commonplace and always (perhaps inevitably, given our preoccupation with ourselves) positions our universe (the only one we know until someone from outside intrudes) at the center of the others and as the linchpin in some grand plan to save the space-time continuum. It’s a worn trope yet allows storytellers immense freedom to conjure anything imaginable. Everything depicts disorienting alternative universes quite well, most of them (for no particular reason beyond having fun, I surmise) absurd variations of the familiar. Indeed, unlike most films where I sit in stone silence no matter what is presented, this one generated laugh-out-loud moments and gestures across the couch to the effect “did you see that?” In short, what that means is the film produced reflexive responses (it goosed me), which is quite unusual considering how most films, despite lots of overwrought action and drama, fail to register more than a checkbox “yup, got it.”

Actors portraying the three or four main characters do well in their respective jobs, playing several versions of themselves from different universes with diverse experiences. Most of the film is chase-and-evade, devolving at times into a familiar martial-arts punchfest that has frankly lost all possibility of making an impact in the era of overpowered, invulnerable superheros and magical unpredictability. Why filmmakers believe audiences want to see more of this drivel is beyond me, but I guess the animal curiosity to find out which make-believe character will prevail in a battle royale never gets old with mouth-breathers. I’m quite over it. The central conflict, however, wasn’t about the strongest punch. Rather, it was about persisting in the face of revealed meaninglessness a/k/a nihilism.

So here’s where hindsight analysis kinda ruined things for me. Although I recognize storytelling as elemental to modern cognition and consciousness, I don’t regard most narrative forms as art. Cinema, because of its financial interests and collaborative nature, rarely rises to the level of art. There are simply too many diverse elements that must be assembled under a unified aesthetic vision for that to occur often. Cinema is thus more entertainment than art, just like sports and games are entertainment, not art. Impressive skill may be demonstrated, which often produces enjoyable results, but I don’t conflate skill or mere craft with artistry. (I also tire of everything that provides moral and epistemological orientation being conflated with religion). So when films introduce super-serious subjects that really trouble me (e.g., overpopulation, institutional corruption, the climate emergency) but treat them lightly, I’m bothered. Everything does that with philosophy.

Coming to grips with nihilism and the absurdity of existence is the central feature of more than one 20th-century philosophy (and their variants). Downstream (or parallel?) are artistic genres that also express the idea, though in far less overt terms. One can easily get lost down a hole, seeking the bottom (alternatively, the root of things) but finding only the abyss. For that very reason, I have acquaintance with philosophical themes but have not truly sunk into them deeply. Nihilism is not something to mess with, even as a thought experiment or intellectual inquiry — especially if one is inclined to connect strongly with those same things. In Everything, the nihilist conclusion (i.e., that nothing matters) manifests absurdly as a giant, black, everything bagel that can literally suck a person into its hole. Well and good enough; probably best not to overexplain that McGuffin. But it demands a conclusion or resolution, which comes in the form of the mother rescuing the daughter. Ironically, it was the mother (from an alternative universe) who had introduced the daughter (also an alternative) to verse-jumping, who then (the daughter) got lost down the hole and threatened to collapse the multiverse into the everything bagel in a final gesture of despair. In effect, the mother had tinkered with powers well beyond her control, unwittingly created the daughter-monster with out-of-control feeling and unexpected powers, and had to clean up her own mess. How does she (the mother) do it? Through the power of love.

OK, fine. Love (especially unconditional love, as opposed to romantic or familial love) is a universal salve capable of healing all wounds. Except that it’s not. When the film finally depicts the rescue, saving the daughter and multiverse from destruction, it comes across as flat, obvious, and ineffectual (to me at least) and breaks the tone and pacing of the film. Lots of films resort to the power of love to save the day (typically just before the stroke of midnight), but they usually (not always) have better set-ups, which is to say, their film universes cohere and deliver cogent conclusions rather than waving a magic love-wand over everything to solve and resolve. The writers of this film are adept at the enjoyable absurd parts that launch and propel the story but could not stick the landing. Introducing (albeit comically) doomsday philosophy but then failing to treat it seriously enough left me deeply conflicted and dissatisfied. Perhaps it’s a case where my suspension of disbelief was not complete enough. Or maybe I brought too much into the film from outside, but we all have inescapable frames of reference. I wasn’t exactly triggered, merely frustrated. YMMV