Caleb Burhans

There's a great profile in today's NY Times about Caleb Burhans, one of these guys who makes me look like one who is hopelessly backwards and stuck in the past...maybe I just need to get out more.

Mr. Burhans proves that the future of music seems to be eclecticism. Orchestras, you've been warned!

I'm singing now again, but this guy does everything. He makes me want to take up the cello again, and dust off my lute:

Thresholds

Three months ago, I took up running again. When I say "again", I had done it off and on for a few months about eight years ago, but never seriously, and once I stopped, that was it. Until three months ago.

The metaphors around running and self-improvement are tired, especially since the late 90's, when running essentially became all about self-improvement. However, and I simply cannot avoid this aspect, for me, running has had a transformative aspect to my life and how I think about things, and the reason for that is that I am not training to finish, I am training to win.

You see, nearly 20 years ago, I was a long distance runner. I was one of these kids who was encouraged to go out there and run, because I could, because I was good at it. Well, like everything else I was good at, being good was a license to stop trying. Who needs to try when they're good? Who needs to strive when the work that really matters (social validation) has been accomplished before you've even run your first 10k?

So I ran my first one, and I had to walk part of it, because I had not run at all. But I finished it, in under 50 minutes, so I felt that my label of "good", still stuck, especially because the doughy masses who followed me, you know, the ones who had trained for months just to stagger across the finish line in under an hour, they weren't as good as me.

And so it went. I ran four more races in a one year period, and never trained, and perhaps unsurprisingly, never beat my first running time. Not knowing my limitations was probably what got me to run that first one, and so I realised that if I just avoided pushing myself, I could always clock in a respectable time, people would be impressed, and I could be good at something.

So even when I stopped, I held up "good at running" as a label that suited me just fine. And I did that for 15 years. And then, for reasons which will not be divulged here, I came to a point where I needed to find an outlet for a particular kind of existential rage, you know, perhaps the kind that had been the result of 15 years of not pushing.

So I bought a pair of shoes, and the next morning, went and ran five kilometres. And I started to tell people I did this, and they started to say, "wow, that's really good", and I started to feel that this could very easily wind up getting me right back to where I started, right where I no longer wanted to be.

So instead, I set a lofty goal for myself. I would find a 10k to run three months from starting up, and try to beat myself at it. That is, I will try to beat the lazy 17 year old, the one who dropped running because his then girlfriend trained competitively and he realised that in competing with her, he might lose his status as being "good at running".

So that means running 10k in under 45 minutes.

When I started, this seemed ridiculous. The application to the 10k asked me when I expected to finish the run, so I put an hour, realising that I too am one of those doughy folks struggling to finish.

Except I am not. Right now, I am three minutes off my goal, and today, I ran 11 kilometres, which is the longest distance I have ever run. Not only that, but I ran it while pushing my son in his stroller.

Like many people, I have had this vague goal to run a marathon, and I had set it as a goal to accomplish before I hit 35. That doesn't look realistic, but I think I will make 30k in Hamilton days before my birthday, and it will be enough.

I'm kind of glad, because I have realised that the goal for me is no longer to finish these races, or "accomplish" something, which seems to be the great motto of our society, to buy the gear and strive for the minimum, in our lives, in our cultural consuption, in pretty much every aspect of our lives.

I want to compete again, to get in there, get dirty, and outrun everyone else. This is no longer about being good, it's about being better than anyone else. In other words, I'm not running a marathon next March because I don't want to run a bad marathon, even though I don't quite know what that means yet.

The dialectic of my body and the bodies of all these other runners has just begun. But the desire to compete has already started to infect the ways I think about other things, like my music, my work, and even this lowly blog.

To be honest, I don't know what any of this means for this blog, except that it will either get better, or it won't be here at all.

Trolling for the Arts

Perhaps the most depressing feature of our current media landscape is the blogification of newspapers.

If you want to read a paper, with editors and maybe even fact-checking and all that, you have to buy one. If you want it for free, as many of us do, you know have to endure "comments" after pretty much every news story or article.

The Globe and Mail invites its readers to "join the conversation". Nice sentiment, too bad that the reality is more akin to people throwing up on each others shoes.

Like Mark Geelhoed, it's not clear to me what "value" these trolls add to anything, and I'm fairly certain that most journalists, hacks though many of them may be, probably don't appreciate the fact that their work is now essentially tagged by trolls just itching to get their message out, which is usually that they're really, really angry about, oh, I don't know, being alive.

Anyway, what's this got to do with anything? Well, further to my posts yesterday, I noticed that the consensus of the trollosphere towards Harper's comments was the old saw that in tough times, we need to buckle down, and frankly, supporting culture is just at the bottom of the barrel of things we need to support.

Why am I engaging the trolls? Because this line is pretty common wisdom. I asked a number of people yesterday, none of whom live under a bridge or eat bones, and they all said, yeah, times are tough and so we can't go funding the arts.

And besides, if the arts are such a big industry, what do they need government support for? Can't they be self-sufficient like everyone else? Stupid leeches!

Friends, let me present everyone else.

Artists, people in the know, people with a bigger pulpit than mine, why not pit the mirror down and instead of trumpeting how big the culture industry is, go out there and ask why automakers are deserving of a handout for their failed business, despite all that free-market and competition and stuff...you know, the things the trolls and everyone else seem to demand of the arts and pretty much nothing else?

Tough times for automakers? Here's a billion. Tough times for artists? Tant pis?

Anyone who's agreed with the whole line over the years, do you suddenly feel that you've been selling someones talking point all this time? And if so, why not ask yourself, why is it so easy here in Canada to believe that there's billions for industry but nothing for the arts, even though artists, uh, pay taxes and you know, contribute to society as much as the CEO and staff of GM do?

Or are we staring at something deeper? Something no one wants to talk about, which is the idea that most people have shitty jobs and crappy lives and that it's better for the government to support shitty jobs than it is to support people creating and performing, those who, at least in popular perception, deeply enjoy what they are doing?

Are we really so repressed and conformist that we would prefer to starve the artists to save the automaker? Or let me put it another way - which jobs are really worth saving in an ideal world, and which jobs would any of you prefer to have?

The Onion Rules

Further to my previous post. The danger in courting "working-class" voters, also known as people who don't care about the arts, is that they might actually care.

Yes, I know it's satire, but it's also one of the nicest appreciations of David Foster Wallace I've read! So there!

How did we get here?

Warren Kinsella is depressingly correct about our current Prime Minister's jab at "the arts" and how it must be handled. However, my suspicion is that it will likely be handled in exactly the way he cautions against...

But seriously, how did we get here? How did we get to a point where a major politician feels he can say something as radical as "ordinary Canadians don't care about the arts" and then wave his hands about arts galas as evidence for this?

Stephen Harper doesn't speak for ordinary Canadians any more than I do, but how did we get to a point where people, whose lives are in fact permeated by arts and culture, don't actually see it any more?

What we don't need right now is Paul Gross or Russell Smith talking about the arts cuts. Instead, people who oppose Harper and this approach need to find people like my mother, who, after years working various jobs, went back to school in her 60's to get a diploma in the theatre.

You can go and judge my blog and call me an elitist, and out of touch, but I dare you to call my mother one, Harper. She is exactly the kind of person you are very afraid of right now.

So my lone piece of political advice to anyone who's listening this election is, show "ordinary" people in the arts. Harper's comment is a clear indication that this is an issue that scares him, and gently reminding Canadians that "ordinary" people not only care about the arts, but are artists themselves, might be just the thing to knock him right over during this election.

Tautological Aphorism IV

The people prefer to hope for a better future, provided they don't have to think about the past. Dealing with the past is for historians.

Tautological Aphorism III

People are the bane of every democratic government's existence.

Hooray for the Star, but....

There is a profile in today's Toronto Star of Andrew Ager, organist at St. James Anglican Cathedral here in Toronto. (with video!)

I met Andrew a long time ago, at a house on Palmerston boulevard, which I believe he was housesitting. He seemed like a great guy, and it is wonderful to see the Star do a big profile like this. Except...

Well, how about that title? Rebel Without a Choir? Come on! St. James has two choirs! And yes, he is the composer in residence, but he's also the Music Director, in fact, that's his title.

Why do I get the impression that the Star's classical music critic, John Terauds, didn't even look at the St. James Cathedral website? Does anyone fact check anymore?

Oh, I know, why am I nitpicking, the Star at least printed something, right? And Harry Potter gets kids into reading, right? Sure, fine, but here in my little tiny corner of the world, I know a bit about what the article is talking about, and it's factually incorrect. What's up with that?

And yes, there's the tone. Having watched the David Byrne Die Soldaten dust-up, I must admit that it is tiring to read yet another article premised on the idea that the "tonal" composers are somehow in some kind of West Side Story style confrontation with the "atonal" composers. It just doesn't happen that way.

One day, maybe, I'll get into my time as a composition student, and speak a bit about the Hegelian vision of history that pervades how people think about music in music departments, which seems to drive this thinking. I will also get into how "atonal" composers appear to hold a kind of position akin to that of analytic philosophers in North American philosophy departments, which is that being a "composer" or a "philosopher" means, to many people, being a composition or philosophy professor.

But not tonight. Just go read the Andrew Ager profile, and not only will you see what I just mentioned pervading the article, you will also get to read about (and watch) an interesting guy with a really, really, cool vocation.

Batman Returns

Our morning breakfast program, delivering the latest, up-to-the-minute action news to us in real time, led their newscast with, of all the stories in the world to lead with, the premiere of Batman Returns.

To demonstrate the importance of this story to the viewers, we are given moving images of the large static lineup just south of the TV studio of people waiting to view the new Batman movie. An anaconda of mostly sleepy young males, teenagers who would normally not be roused on a summer day for anything, they were standing waiting, for the cameras, at 7 in the morning, to see a movie.

There they stood, waiting to see a movie they have been told contains within it an Oscar-worthy performance. Some would say this, my friends, is the power of art. And you know who would say it, those film studies people who know they are looking at art but have to go to great lengths justify it because the medium they love so much also produced Porky's.

So even Porky’s must be considered, and these kinds of problems have led to the construction of an enormous conceptual infrastructure that begs us to look at the art of cinema.

However, the only thing this morning’s queue signifies is the power of marketing.

So what are all those teenagers doing there? Why was I there, waiting in line nearly 20 years ago for the first Batman film, with Jack Nicholson's Oscar-worthy performance?

BECAUSE WE WANT TO BE THE FIRST!!!!

Being the first is everything these days. More precisely, being the first to personally experience, or in less jargony tones, to buy something. Like, say, being the first, or nearly the first, does first day count?, to own an iPhone, so you can liveblog your waiting in line to see the new Batman movie and it's so sad that Heath died the way he did.

Without your iPhone, or our local morning show, no one would know that you woke up at 4 in the morning to share in this month’s collective act of consumption, these lingering signs of social solidarity.

But you needn’t feel the least bit guilty, because you, my friends, are not in the presence of Porky’s, you are in the presence of Art. The movie publicist's remarks about the Oscar-worthiness of Ledger's performance are picking up steam, and the Academy needs the love of the people again. Even the critics know when to shelve their misanthropic shivs, and, stuffing this talking point deep into their normally cool bosoms, they are promulgating it.

We are witnessing here, in real time, the birth of a real Oscar moment.

But thanks to the iPhone, the kids these days can all talk about the movie, and how Heath Ledger should get an Oscar, and if he doesn’t it will be because the Establishment controls Hollywood, and Heath was an outsider.

They will say this, as we all do, even though none of these kids, none of us, really, have ever seen an Oscar-worthy performance, because being Oscar worthy isn't something one divines, it is something one is told. But the story is there, a dead, promising young actor, a movie to sell, and a DVD release timed to just before Oscar night.

But it doesn't matter, not to these young men, and women. They know this one is the real deal, because they don’t think they will be lining up for anything else this summer.

Radio Two - Moving On

Russell Smith has again devoted his precious column space to the fight to keep CBC Radio Two overtly classical.

Smith's polemic is great reading, in addition to being absolutely right. What follows are merely some footnotes to what he's written, as well as my own meagre contributions to this "debate".

One of the amazing things about this whole debacle is the success of CBC's communications strategy. Whether we like it or not, there is a deep dislike of anything that smacks of elitism in this country, no matter how padded with straw, and the CBC has very successfully manipulated this feature of Canadian life to their advantage.

Moreover, the Canadian capacity for tolerance is being well abused by the CBC. No matter what anyone writes, the one thing people really seem to pick up on is this whole bit about "diversity". As Smith writes:

Perhaps the most irritating of the propaganda lines put out by the CBC is that such a limiting of available culture is done in the name of musical "diversity." If we do anything at all, we must at least loudly denounce this fraudulent line of argument. Let's be clear: Nobody is against a diversity of music on the radio. It is precisely because we desire a mix of freely available music that we want there to be one - just one! - national radio station that broadcasts music composed before the 20th century, and music from an intellectual tradition from that century and this. Without such a station, there will be no mix. Without a public broadcaster supporting this crucial but unpopular art form, there will be no choice.

Pretty solid counterargument, right? (If you don't think so, feel free to supply another) And yet, right there in the comments after his column, there are the parrots, squawking about how great it is that there's finally some "diversity" on CBC.

Why do people take the bait? I suspect there are a few reasons, some of which are partly the fault of the keeping Radio Two Classical side.

There has always been a diversity of music on CBC Radios One and Two, AM and FM. Does anyone remember the first wave of changes a few years ago, when CBC killed Brave New Waves or the Radio 3 website?

Actually, does anyone actually remember why Radio 3 existed at all? Back in the 80s CBC was going to have an entire Radio station devoted to all the other music out there in Canada - and even more importantly, and this is the real secret to CBC's past success, they were going to talk about it.

There's a question we should be asking - if this music is so pressing, if CBC needs to get it out there so badly, how about an entire radio station devoted to it?

Our collective memories are woefully short. If we want to look at the day things went south, it was the day CBC Radio 3 died.

So what about "diversity", then? There's a great book out there that talks about the trouble with diversity - it's called, er, The Trouble With Diversity. (I'm linking to a discussion on a literary blog so people can check out the discussion around it)

Walter Benn Michael's point is this - while the left has focused on "diversity", they've neglected inequality. And we can see here that in speaking about musical "diversity", the CBC is pulling the same kind of seemingly well-intentioned scam.

No one, and I mean no one, wants to be seen as somehow "repressing" voices, especially in a forum where public money is involved. But that's exactly what's happening here, and it's happening because classical music is seen as some kind of white male upper crust bastion. In other words, getting rid of classical music is about getting rid of "The Man".

What's the cost of "diversity", CBC style? It's taking the CBC and making it more and more like a private broadcaster. The diversity here is to create more inequality, fewer opportunities for classical musicians, hardly a wealthy class.

No, behind the diversity scam is the real "ity" - profitability. The Man is back, except it's not Beethoven, it's a music industry executive.

That is why no one at CBC talks about the real victim in all this, the whole idea that we can have conversations about music and the arts in a public forum.

No, Radio Two is now about the music, about listening to music, not about participating, it's about listening, passively, to the sea of "great" music out there, no discussion, just getting it all out there, and hey, maybe at some point, when you're used to listening to lots of popular music on CBC, you'll get used to something else - commercials. Or you'll buy CDs, celebrating CBC's "diversity".

So I ask all those angry classical music lovers, maybe our rallying cry shouldn't be "save CBC Radio 2", but instead start asking, "What happened to CBC Radio 3?"

That's the question I doubt they've got an answer for.