Are we doomed?

In this empty corner of the blogosphere, this ghost town, there's really not much going on.  I don't really read blogs anymore.  There are maybe three that I manage to still click on with some regularity, but like many people, once Google Reader was replaced by Facebook, my reading habits shifted and now instead of reading too many blogs, I find myself just constantly reacting negatively to all of the stupid Facebook posts I see.

So this is way of saying that, at this stage, I don't really expect anyone to read this either, but it's still my thing, a place to publicly muse about things, and so I will continue to indulge myself occasionally.  This is also a passive aggressive way of suggesting that if you'd like to comment, feel free

À propos, as many of my long time readers would know, I veer between talking about politics and talking about culture, with random things in between.  Given we're a few days away from possibly electing a Conservative government (again!), a government which explicitly rejects the existential issue of our age (as opposed to the Liberals, who acknowledge it while hoping they can continue to kick the can down the road) I have to say, it has been difficult to wrap up my dissertation on a 19th Century German poet and his relationship to medieval German culture.

I should say that it's not quite that I'm falling into the trap of "my dissertation is a waste of time, the humanities are a waste of time" kind of thinking that does trip one up often, rather it's more that I really feel as though I should be doing more than writing this dissertation, or blogging, or whatever it is I do on a day-to-day basis.

The earth is burning and I live in a country that will surely become a battleground in my lifetime, both in the figurative sense and the literal one, and most of my fellow citizens would prefer to either deny the reality of our situation, or kick the can down the road until the sliver of opportunity that we have now is gone. 

This is incredibly demoralizing - I mean, I really would just prefer to practise the piano or the organ and sing and conduct, none of which I do exceedingly well (or often enough), but it is generally difficult to do much when all one sees around them is the end of the world, and end that comes not as a bang but as a decay, and with it the end of the idea that there's a future that might be better for our children.

This prospect is made even more difficult because a) I have a child, a teenager in fact, and b) a lot of people with teenagers and little kids are totally fine in this country with electing someone whose policies will ensure that our children's lives will be worse than ours.  I mean, this has been going on for a long time (my entire adult life I'd say?  Or at least since the turn of the century?) but I don't know if I've ever really seen people be so brazen about it, about the fact that they'd trade their children's access to a healthy environment, and doom them to war because the world's resources are dwindling and Canada will be one of the last habitable places on earth, for a few hundred dollars in tax cuts so they can drive an SUV around for a few more years before the revolution comes.

In other words, when did nihilism officially become a telos in this country for oh, about 2/3 of Canadians?  I've always believed that Canadians are fundamentally pretty nihilistic as a people, with our soft sense of cultural and national identity, but this has always been offset by our newness as a country, and that the idea of Canada was still a largely unfinished political project, a project that could (and would) be improved on, a place where reconciliation could not only be acknowledged but actually happen, and where as as the second largest nation on earth, we'd eventually rise up to our unique role as stewards of this vast land, rather than fall back to our old ways as exploiters.  At this historical moment, a moment where we are so clearly running out of time, Canadians are not only failing each other in droves, we are failing our ancestors and our descendants.

This sense of the expanse of time opening before me and behind me is both inescapable and overwhelming.  Whenever I get into some dumb Facebook bunfight over some stupid post by someone whose brain has been curdled by the right-wing social media serotonin machine, the one thing I always want to say, but never do, is that I hope they remember what they wrote there, or how they voted. 

In 10 years, when things are so much worse because we decided our cars were more important than our children, and that a beer fridge in the basement was more valuable than clean drinking water for Attawapiskat, I really hope that, like anyone who gets ostracized because of something they said on social media, they will be held accountable, that they'll have to answer, even if only to their children, why they chose, at this crucial moment in human history, tax cuts over the well-being of future generations, or service cuts over ensuring that the most vulnerable of us can not only maintain an adequate standard of living, but have something resembling a flourishing human existence, an existence which we Canadians, could easily afford to provide for everyone, but don't. 

That I feel as though I am asking a lot of my fellow Canadians in wanting them to vote for idea of a better future over the (illusory) possibility of "cash" in your pocket, a literal bribe to ignore the devastation we are wreaking on this earth for another five years, is perhaps the most demoralizing thing of all. 

All that being said, and in an attempt to be true to this blog's mandate (as well as begin to develop some real social media synergy by posting identical content on a multitude of platforms, please enjoy this visualization of the first prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the piece we sent up into space to show the universe that intelligent life once lived here. Although I'm no longer convinced that listening to Bach might alter the course of history for the better, it certainly won't hurt .

I have little to say

However, I wanted to at least get more than 3 posts out this year.  Here's to hoping I will have something to say soon!

Actually, one thought.  50 years ago today the Apollo 11 launched.  Despite many great strides in terms of how we treat previously marginalized peoples, it is difficult to say that, 50 years after putting someone on the moon, humanity is closer to transcending our instincts and building a better future.  Instead we appear to be not only slipping into barbarism, but doing so at a moment when the earth might not be able to survive that barbarism.

BWV 129 - Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott

This coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday which, for many Christian churches, effectively ends the half year of seasonal changes in the liturgical calendar, leaving the churchgoer with a sense of stability and presumably, boredom, until the church year ends with the coming of Advent.

It also happens to the day I was meant to conduct the above Bach Cantata 20 years ago.  For reasons not worth going into here, this was delayed until the Fall of 1999, making it less a liturgical experience and more of a service with an orchestral and choral accompaniment. 

If you read far enough back, I had a strange plan to blog through all of the Karl Richter recordings of the Bach Cantatas in 2009, doing a blog post for each and every one he'd chosen in order.  I managed to get the first one out, but then missed the second week, and I guess decided I needed to wait another year to start again (How silly of me!).  

Well, it's ten years later, and now I'm blogging about a second cantata, which also has the virtue of being one I've conducted, nearly 20 years ago. 

What can I say about it?  It's a really beautiful chorale cantata, which means, the cantata is based around a Lutheran chorale.  This one is by Johann Olearius, called, uh, "Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott".  As is common with Bach's chorale cantatas, there are five movements: the first movement has the first verse of the chorale as a cantus firmus in the top voice while the everyone else sings and plays around it.  In this case, the first movement is quite triumphant and a lot of fun to sing (and conduct).

The middle movements are solo sections with a reduced number of players, much like the solo sections of the St. Matthew or St. John Passions, with the text usually a commentary on the themes of the chorale text.  The final movement is then a harmonization of the chorale melody with orchestral accompaniment.  All in all very satisfying, although the chorale, interestingly enough, doesn't really have anything to do with the Trinity, which is probably for the best.

It's odd feeling listening to it all these years later- firstly, I'm currently the organist at the church where I first conducted this cantata.  Secondly, my German is a lot better - I can actually understand what they're saying in German instead of having to rely on the translation.  Thirdly, I am a much better musician and conductor than I was then.

Our doing this piece back 1999 had a lot more to do with my ambition than anything.  But we did pull it off, and some of the people who sang there, who I see occasionally back in the church, still comment on the performance, which remains a highlight for me, even if the video recording of it is long lost, and the orchestra we hired to perform with us is long since disbanded.

Indeed, the music is still at the church, sorted carefully away, probably never to be used again, although I suppose, given I'm the organist right now, that's an overly pessimistic view on my own part!

Pokémon Detective Pikachu

The film's opening scene presents us with the telos of the world of Pokémon:  Tim Goodman (in case one wasn't sure of his role in the movie) is cajoled by a close friend, who we never see again, into attempting to catch a Pokémon.

Like the game that inspired it, the movie sets the stage by focusing on that quintessential Pokémon experience - subduing and entrapping a wild creature in order to force it to fight repeatedly for the honour and glory of the one who entrapped it.

However, unlike the game, which is refreshingly open about the power relations that exist between Pokémon and humans by simply forcing you, the child player, into capturing a Pokémon in the name of scientific discovery, the movie does away with this and opts for a saccharine "explanation" that the Pokémon must choose their trainer....effectively consenting to their enslavement.

Although this opening might lead one to believe that Pokémon Detective Pikachu will continue to mystify and obscure these power relations, (although one could admittedly read the Pokémon's willingness to enter the Pokéball as a metaphor for our own lack of willingness to overthrow capitalism) the central conflict of the movie itself not only exposes this unequal relationship for all to see, but actually doubles down on the slavery-as-friendship motif and turns the only true revolutionary figure in the film (Howard Clifford, played by Bill Nighy) into (Spoiler Alert!) its main villain.

Howard Clifford is the founder of Ryme City, where Pokémon live freely side-by-side with humans, and where Pokémon battles are illegal.  Ryme City is presented as a virtual paradise - a densely populated, technologically sophisticated mega-city that simultaneously flourishes with stunning biodiversity.  Outside of Ryme City, the old ways prevail, where wild Pokémon are caught and stored in balls until their trainer decides to let them out, so that they can fight another enslaved Pokémon until one or the other passes out from its injuries and people live in quaint but deeply boring villages and countrysides.

In contrast to the usual fetishization of the rural or natural, Ryme City is framed as an utopian space while the natural is positioned as dangerous.  Indeed, the violent car crash that frames the movie's narrative takes place over a rural bridge, and the dystopic lab where Pokémon are subjected to genetic experiments is in the remote countryside.  Over and over again, the movie shows us that untamed nature is violent and dangerous - indeed, Detective Pikachu himself suffers a nearly fatal injury in the midst of a forest upheaval which in and of itself is the result of a number of giant genetically-altered Pokémon.

Now you might be asking yourself - what is the central conflict of the film?  Well it turns out that Howard Clifford is a transhumanist, and not content with creating the paradise that it Ryme City, he intends to reshape humanity itself by fusing Pokémon with their companions, effectively turning every Pokémon into a synthesis of man and animal.

Our heroes, Tim Goodman and his friend, the plucky reporter Lucy (of course she's a reporter, what other profession better signifies impotent opposition than a member of the press?) uncover this plot and, unsurprisingly, manage to foil it, and separating Pokémon again from their trainers.

But what are the implications of this?  In the context of the film Ryme City was built on a lie, and its founder, Howard Clifford, has been exposed as a transhumanist fraud and thrown in jail.  How might the city react?  Well, presumably it will do so in a reactionary way, by returning to the good old ways, and re-enslaving Pokémon in order to use their pain as entertainment for the masses.

But wasn't Howard onto something?  Shouldn't his radical, Pokémon liberating ways actually be celebrated, and not condemned?  The movie's response to what made him bad was that he did not ask people's consent to reverse the power relationship, to enslave humanity by turning Pokémon into Pokéballs for humanity.  One could argue that, in the face of a global climate catastrophe, a humanity that lives on within the biodiversity of the natural world, rather than in opposition to it, is in many ways a vastly more elegant and hopeful path than the one presented in the film as the "happy ending", which is to basically affirm late capitalism, but this time with someone at the helm (Howard's son) who will be a "gooder" capitalist than his father.

And in a supreme ironic gesture, it is revealed that Detective Pikachu himself has been this very synthesis all along - the reason Detective Pikachu speaks is because MewTwo ( the most powerful Pokémon, who is incidentally the product of human tampering) fused Tim's father Harry into his Pikachu.  At the core of the dramatic action of the film is the very thing that the film itself explicitly repudiates at the level of the political.

All in all, it gives new meaning to "Gotta Catch 'Em All - Pokémon".

The end that never comes

It's been over three years since I wrote anything on this blog.  I have no explanation as to why it's taken me this long to post something again, except that blogging has been dying for years and I was never very good or reliable as a blogger anyway.  I also went on Facebook again, which substituted for blogging, albeit for a much smaller audience, but clearly provided a dopamine rush that blogging has never been able to match since oh, maybe 2004?

I always felt that I would be shutting this thing down officially, or, failing that, Blogger would simply remove my blog without telling me, and this archive of my thoughts would be gone forever.  Instead it seems that it will just continue to hobble along on its own, with or without me. 

But this thing has been around for 13 years, which is kind of amazing, and it recalls to me all of the plans I'd made, the various postures and tones I'd taken, how often I can hear myself writing something, and how often it doesn't sound like me at all.  But it was all me! 

I am also aware that this, like a lot of my posts, is a content-free plea for time, yet another request for my reader's indulgence. But the door is still open, so I may as well let myself in here once in a while.

What will I post about?  Who knows?  And really, who cares?  I never did.  

It's the Humanties, Stupid

The Toronto's Star's top story right now is about how employers are saying that young people don't know how to read and write.

Keeping in mind that the "employer survey" is not a terribly scientific document, and are usually used to signal employers' desire to flood the market with a particular kind of workers (whose wages coincidentally go down due to the glut of people) The solution  being proposed would be something akin to an SAT test, which generally test you more on test taking than critical thinking! 

However, the thing that really shocked me about the article was how the obvious answer, that there has been a decades-long assault on a humanities education at virtually every level of secondary and post-secondary education, was completely ignored.

Instead we're treated to the usual bromides about how kids these days are all sheltered babies who cannot be more than five seconds away from their cell phones without going into withdrawal. Or that schools have lowered their standards.  All of which may be true (although in my teaching experience I don't really see it, except for the cell phone bit), but the reality is that the place where students best learned critical thinking was in a good old well-rounded liberal arts education.

However, universities, starved of public cash and hungry for private money, listened to these same employers who, in the 90's, declared that learning a foreign language and reading Chaucer would ill-equip you for the "real world" and have been shutting down or reducing the sizes of humanities departments, a culling that has only intensified since the 2008 financial meltdown.  Now it turns out that those things also, coincidentally, benefited employers, who are now seeing the results of their influence in the 90's come back to haunt them! 

So instead of blaming these anecdotal problems on the Internet or bad parenting, perhaps we could look at the actual systemic changes we have made to education over the past 20-30 years, and question that.  Or failing that, simply stop listening to employers. 

Very, very Slow News Day

Despite the very many things going on right now, here in Canada and around the world, the Toronto Star managed to make one of today's top stories the fact that the Department of National Defense is buying a bassoon.

Could this be the stupidest non-story ever to grace the Star's pages?  Maybe not, but the "reporter", Oliver Sachgau, perhaps trying to obscure the fact that he comes from the land of classical music, manages to open the story with the following:

How much would you pay for a bassoon?

Probably nothing, seeing as you can just buy a fog horn for cheaper, and get more use out of it.

A-Hyuk!  I can just imagine young Oliver, sitting in the Star bullpen thinking "This is it, this is my chance to really make a difference.  We've all heard those stories about expensive screwdrivers - who would pay good TAXPAYER (cue angels) money on a musical instrument for a military band? I'm really going to have to pull out the stops on this one.   Think Oliver, think  -what does a bassoon sound like - a foghorn! And a foghorn is more useful than a bassoon!  This story is going to bring down the entire military musical industrial complex!  I'll be a hero!"

This, my friends, is journalism in the digital age - a mere 5 minutes of research would have revealed to him that actually, a professional bassoons could cost this much money. 

Moreover, why shouldn't a military band have a good instrument to play?  When I was in high school, I was lucky to receive a brand-new professional Yamaha tuba to play on.  The instrument cost $7,000 20 years ago.  Go on, Oliver, go write a sanctimonious hit piece about how the TDSB is wasting money on musical instruments for students.  Hey, you should really look into this - I bet they buy music for the bands too, new music at full price!  What an outrage!

I guess that's why I'm bothering to right about this - this is sanctimonious garbage reporting on the part of the Toronto Star, where they take something that's probably, on balance, in the public good, but turn it into a criticism of government spending.  The underlying message is: the government is wasting your hard-earned money on these things when they should be giving money to "better" causes. 

Here's a novel piece of information  - governments do a lot more then issue you a driver's license every 5 years.  I thought the Star knew this, but playing the arts for laughs doesn't really sit well with me, and they should be ashamed.

Relieved but disappointed

That's how I feel today.  About what you may ask?  That's for you to figure out!

Jon Vickers

has died.

I know I never write on this stupid blog anymore, but man, I really felt this.  He was 88, so it's not as though there was some tragedy to this, but he was probably one of the most distinct and emotionally powerful opera singers ever, and the fact that he is no longer around is really sad.

Something I spent listening to last year, over and over, was his singing of "So starben wir, um ungetrennt" from Act II of Tristan und Isolde.  So amazing, and really, it's the part of the opera that you need to hear before the Liebestod to really punch you in the gut, because Isolde is there, alone, singing what she and Tristan had been singing together.  I would encourage you to seek it out, to hear that voice of his. 

Glenn Gould - Off the Record/On the Record

I discovered yesterday that the National Film Board has made its 1959 documentary about Glenn Gould available on YouTube.  The first part is entitled Glenn Gould - Off the Record/On the Record and it's fantastic! Here's Part I:

I am amazed that in all the years I've been writing on this blog this is only the second time I've ever mentioned Gould.

I used to borrow (and renew) a VHS copy of this documentary back when I was in high school - I couldn't get enough of it.  Watching it again, the sheer energy that comes from his Bach playing is something that never fails to amaze me.



It also reminds me of just how my own musical tastes, even today, are very much a reflection of Gould's. I was pretty impressionable, but I already loved Bach, so it would be natural that I would discover Gould.  Given how much I enjoyed his playing, his opinions came with a certain authority that I couldn't really object to. 

Although I've moved on considerably, I cannot help but think that one of the main reasons Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier is my favourite opera has a lot to do with Gould's advocacy of Strauss as a composer. 

These documentaries are also a wonderful window into late 1950's North America.   It is difficult not to watch these and think "wow, Mad Men really nailed that era", but also the fact that classical music, at this time, still had a fair bit of cultural credibility, which is something I've long written about, and which I may find myself writing about again!

Here's Part II:

Enjoy!