On this:



For reference:

The Bee Gees (authors and performers of "Stayin' Alive") were active beginning in roughly 1958 (i.e., nearly sixty years ago). They wrote "Stayin' Alive" as part of Saturday Night Fever's soundtrack. That film came out in 1977 (i.e., nearly forty years ago). The dancer in the video is John Travolta, who was 23 at the time (so he's sixty now). Two members of the Bee Gees are now dead. The surviving member (Barry Gibb) is now sixty-eight years old. Nelly released "Hot in Herre" in 2002, over twelve years ago. He was twenty-eight then; Nelly is now forty. DJ Lobsterdust, the composer of this mash-up, has been doing mash-ups since at least 2006, with this particular video being done in 2011. I don't know how old Lobsterdust is.

One of the reasons I like to read Aristotle and, in conjunction with my reading of Aristotle, Aquinas's gloss on Aristotle and then modern neo-Aristotelians on Aristotle, is that I feel like it connects me with eons of human intellectual activity. I feel like I'm participating in something larger and more significant than myself. But there's a continuity in a video like this, as well, between generations and musical styles. Disco is distinct from rap, and rap is distinct from the DJ's craft, but what this video brings together is three different takes on youthful self-discovery, that moment that every generation and every individual seems to have, when they say, "Yes, this is our moment."

I like to watch Travolta shimmy across the dance floor and imagine his performance somehow inscribed upon an enduring record of humanity's history, something that will survive our brief reign on this planet, as a kind of expression of our silly, monkey confidence. It's so easy to see that none of us matter, that our journeys of self-discovery are individually meaningless. Yet we never try very hard to escape that solipsism, do we? It is so incredibly valuable to us.

In Ryan's absence, I've been watching a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race. I've actually watched all three seasons that are available, in full, online, so I am basically "caught up." I've enjoyed these shows because I feel that they help reconnect me with the transgressiveness (no pun intended) of being gay.

Gayness in modern yuppiedom has nothing of the transgressiveness that drag or other approaches to questioning gender binaries continues to have, in the modern eye. Gay yuppies run for political office, go on parental leave, complain about schools, etc., etc. They are indistinguishable from their straight counterparts, and they have frankly no interest in drawing any but the most superficial and self-serving of such distinctions. They are "diverse" without drawing the attention of institutional forces that require conformity, happy to be mere tokens.

But the essence of drag - and I hope this never changes about it - is that it challenges our conceptions of masculinity and femininity, by drawing our attention to the ways in which gender is performed rather than embodied. A "successful" drag performance, as "female impersonation," is one that takes on all the meaningful signifiers of femininity and shows an audience how easily femininity is simulated. This is why, I think, celebrity impersonation meshes the way it does with drag, since celebrity personality is similarly simulated and put-on - there is a "Beyonce," for instance, that is distinct from the person whose performance of "Beyonce" is the one we take to be definitive. Thinking of drag in this way also helps us to understand what's going on with more progressive forms of drag - drags that dispense with full-on female impersonation and start to play instead on the conventions of drag, for example, or "genderfuck," which is its own take on the performative nature of gender. It also helps us to understand drag as a venue for satire - a "drag wedding," for instance, questions not just gender roles but the institution and conventions of marriage. Drag is, at root, still dangerous, not just to one's physical body but to our comfortable assumptions about the way our society is ordered (and it is plain that the two risks are connected).

I wish that being gay in yuppiedom carried that same kind of significance, but it simply doesn't. Instead, I find that my being a bike commuter - bizarrely - puts me much farther outside the mainstream than my being gay does. While my colleagues measure their career advancement as much by the accumulation of status as they do by their spiraling away from the urban center into the suburbs, I embrace an entirely different set of values. Walkability, vibrant neighborhoods, transportation networks that serve humans rather than cars - this is what being a biker has attuned me to, while my colleagues discuss the Frank Lloyd Wright down the street from their new home.

I recently came across this bit, by Mark Svenvold, from a poem titled, "Lines Composed an Hour and Ten Minutes by Interstate from South Orange, New Jersey, from a Title Written by a Student and Drawn at Random from a Hat, in Late August, 2011."

Sometimes nostalgia
sits down next to you on a bench and doesn't speak,
lights a cigarette, blows out the match, and looks
at the view of fields across an Etruscan valley
thick with gurgling agriculture, and waits for you to make
a smart remark. And sometimes there's nothing to say.

I'd love to share the whole poem with you, but that would feel a little copyright-infringey.

Anyway, I cite this bit because I love surprising juxtapositions of words or images. Here, a personified nostalgia, the phrase "gurgling agriculture."

I've been reading Terra Nostra, by Carlos Fuentes. This is a massive novel, with lots of different themes, but one of them emerges near the end of the book. One of the novel's prominent characters, Ludovico (a Spaniard), has been working for an eccentric and hermetic scholar in Venice (the time period being roughly the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century), who has just shown Ludovico a device the scholar had been secretly maintaining, a theater that illuminates all of the possible courses of history in a kind of shimmering, mechanical enlightenment:

Look again, monsignore; I shall turn the lights on again, place the figures in movement, combine spaces, that of your land, Spain, and that of an unknown world where Spain will destroy everything that previously existed in order to reproduce itself: a doubly immobile, doubly sterile, gestation, for in addition to what could have been - see those burning temples, see the eagles fall, see how the original inhabitants of the unknown lands are subjugated - your country, Spain, imposes another impossibility: that of itself, see the gates closing, the Jew expelled, the Moor persecuted, see how it hides itself in a mausoleum and from there governs in the name of death: purity of faith, purity of bloodlines, horror of the body, prohibition of thought, extermination of anything that cannot be understood. Look: centuries and centuries of living death, fear, silence, the cult of appearances, vacuity of substances, gestures of imbecilic honor, see them, the miserable realities, see them, hunger, poverty, injustice, ignorance: a naked empire that imagines itself clothed in golden robes. Look: there will never be in history, monsignore, nations more needful of a second opportunity to be what they were not than these that speak and that will speak your tongue, or people who for such lengthy periods store the possibilities of what they could have been had they not sacrificed the very reason for their being: impurity, the mixture of all bloods, all beliefs, all the spiritual impulses of a multitude of cultures. Only in Spain did the three peoples of the Book - Christians, Moors, and Jews - meet and flourish. And she mutilates their union, Spain mutilates herself and mutilates all she finds in her path. Will these lands have the second opportunity the first history will deny them?

Among other themes, Fuentes' novel laments Spain's lost promise and legacy of death in the New World, this being perhaps his most direct statement to that effect. (I suspect that it's also to an extent a lament of Franco and his legacy, although this might just be a convenient projection on the novel's despotic central figure.)

It makes me think about the cliched trope of the "Great American Novel." Setting aside most of what we can say about that notion, the one thing that I think is true of pretty much any conceptualization of what that would be, or what works embody its ideal, is the notion that it would somehow have to capture what it means to be an "American." Of a particular time, for a particular group of people. Whatever. It's about an ideal, in other words.

But I wonder if anyone has written the "Great Anti-American Novel," a novel that identifies and grapples with America's lost promise and our miserable legacy. It's hard for me to even imagine what that would look like, our collective national optimism is so firmly written into my constitution. What is our great, lost opportunity? What promise have we wholly failed to keep?

A few videos:

[Several YouTube Embeds Hidden]

Iggy Azalea:



DJ Snake and Lil Jon:



Nikki Minaj:



So I try to keep my ear turned to what's happening in contemporary pop music, just because I find the ways that it develops (potentially) fascinating, in a kind of musicological sense, while also being a source for new music that I enjoy for its own sake. When listening to this music, I try to listen to it in a respectful state of mind - not prematurely dismissive of strange sounds or musical approaches that abandon a lot of what "makes sense" in a classically-trained sort of way.

(Fair's fair, right? This is the kind of thing that pops up on my personal playlist:)



But despite this state of mind, I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up with some of this pop music. It's genuinely hard for me to hear what it is about this music that makes it appealing to anyone. To my ears, this sounds like music of the apocalypse.

(Again, in fairness:)




Aware of my own cultural limitations, I suppose all I can responsibly do is wait and see. But I am legitimately flummoxed by some of this music.

Ryan and I are moving to New York. Ryan, at the end of this week. Me, sometime in the next several months, after I've gotten the office transfer and bar admission stuff sorted. Hopefully sooner than later, but the bar admission process may dictate a certain schedule.

As I've written previously, Ryan is going out for a post-baccalaureate program at Columbia, where he'll focus on developing his languages (Classical Greek and Latin), as a step towards applying to (and hopefully gaining admission to) a grad school that would actually help him to get a job. The program is itself only one year, but he's potentially planning on being out there for two, since that will give him some time to develop relationships with professors before asking for their recommendations to programs. I am skeptical about post-baccs generally, but Columbia's alumni of the program seem to have done well, so who knows.

I am following because I've realized that I, well - need him. He is an important part of what keeps me sane. I will go insane when he's not around.

Our planned apartment is going to be in Long Island City - LIC, as it's been rebranded. I have mixed feelings about this. It's not really a "hip" neighborhood, as far as I can tell, and it is plenty expensive, so I expect to be surrounded by a certain population that is extremely familiar, shall we say. Our apartment is straight-up yuppie, though the corner of LIC it's in is more near-yuppie. It's hard to describe. It looks a bit like some neighborhoods in the near northwestern parts of Chicago, complete with elevated trains. Court Square is a bit like Wicker Park, etc.

Also as I've written previously, to a certain extent, this is a development that we've both for some time felt was coming. Me, perhaps, longer than him. Chicago is a smart place to set down roots; it is inexpensive relative to New York, and its midwestern roots make it feel unthreatening. No one would say, "If you can make it in Chicago, you can make it anywhere." More like, "If you can make it in Chicago, then Chicago's probably a good fit for you." But it's not challenging, it's not a place to dream. And while New York is less a dreamer's tinderbox than it once was, there seems to be enough chaos there and enough real commitment to making it work, for it to bring out the best in at least some of its residents. I'm not sure that the U.S. has any better place for it besides other places still so under the radar that I'd never know about them.

So anyway, that's coming. I'll have to give up my long rides on the lakefront, the proximity of excellent bookstores, and the dream (still unrealized) that I'll make serious use of my alumni privileges at the UofC. Instead I'll be diving into the war that is New York.

I'm looking forward to it.

I've been looking over my friend-of list. A lot of old, well-remembered names, attached to accounts that now seem entirely defunct.

There's 1144, the mood-swingy objectivist. booksoverbombs, pintofmalaga, turkishb, each of them a genius, each of them no doubt gone in search of higher levels of engagement. moremi, the corrupted soul who thought I would find his charm irresistable. Three of my siblings are there; two of my former law-school classmates. And then there are the dozen or so friendly interlocutors with whom I've crossed paths over my years on LJ, come and gone. None of them are active; most have been wholly inactive for several years now.

I am not to blame for their inactivity, but I haven't helped. I myself have gone largely silent, as my vulnerability to real-life scrutiny and my lack of anything worthy to say have undercut a substantial number of potential topics. That seems to be grown-up life, really, when you have a job like mine. What am I going to talk about - the commute?

The other day I walked past a random piece of litter on the ground, a bright yellow square of packaging for Juicy Fruit. It immediately brought to mind the familiar jingle from my youth, a thirty- or fifteen-second generic riff in a genre that I find hard to describe as anything other than "jingle music of the eighties." My first response to this mental phenomenon was a kind of indignation. I was irritated that the marketers of that era had so deeply implanted this useless, horrible jingle into my brain that it would re-emerge whole, unbidden save for the mere words "juicy fruit," decades after I'd last heard the jingle - or chewed any piece of gum, for that matter.

But that indignation pre-supposes the existence of some "proper" mind or self on which the jingle has infringed. I resent the intrusion, but into what? What is my mental space, but the emergent phenomenon of millions of impressions and thousands of time-worn habits? In a sense, the "juicy fruit" jingle is as much a part of "me," this mental phenomenon that also motivates me to write this blog post and hope that someone, somewhere, might read and appreciate it, as is my vicarious experience of the Challenger accident and 9/11, of the pornographic magazine a classmate in grade school showed me once while we were walking home after school one day, the events that led to my broken arm in a game of kickball in the third grade, the parties in college, the night at O'Hare with a copy of Infinite Jest, and on and on. Isn't it? And if it is, then whence this critical faculty, which hopes to sift between that which is "me" and that which is mere ephemera, something unworthy of inclusion within my self-conceptualization - if not those same things?

The truth of it, I have to suspect, is that my critical faculty is just as much a product of an arbitrary history of personal experiences as the rest of my "mind" is. There is no, and there never was, any intentional guiding of its formation save what might have occurred by happenstance over comparatively brief periods of time - a college class here, a friendship there.

And if this is so - then how can I privilege any particular view of what I am, what I am to do with my life, as being in some sense "correct?" Intellectual application and inquiry are things that - I feel - make my life worth living. I want my intellectual practice to build towards something, to amount to something. Now I am accustomed to treating this desire as no more respectable than, say, a desire to play as many video games as possible, to do as much good in the world as possible, etc., because I am skeptical about the kinds of vindicating (or disapprobative) standards our society uses to assess such desires. I am not sure, so to say, that they amount to much. But what if, further than this, I cannot even claim any genuine authorship for my life's purpose? If the very notion of shaping my own life to a particular end is, itself, a fiction that covers how deeply and beyond my rational control even my most existential projects are?

Perhaps that's why, ultimately, what I want from this life is an inquiry that ends in constant confusion and frustration. There's no reason to expect a coherent answer to a question motivated by a desire that is irrational. My personality is just an assemblage of litter, layered on top of itself, several meters thick, that takes shape and substance in ways that feel like having a self, but it's nothing but random, accumulated junk all the way through. I might just as easily yearn to reach the stars, as to hope that my intellectual efforts might amount to anything. We're all just mimetic beasts.

I don't think I've ever shared this before.

Two videos of the same scene, from Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. The opera generally follows the fairy tale we know; the scene is the witch's showstopper in the last act, as she prepares the children for their imminent transformation into gingerbread.

The first video is from a relatively recent Metropolitan Opera production, which was also brought to Chicago for a recent Lyric season:



The inspiration here is supposed to be a kind of mad Julia Child. The production was (as far as I know) relatively well-received, particularly in its rendition of the second act. And I suppose you might as well acknowledge that it departs from the traditional staging, which was something of a risk for what is, in most opera seasons, a reliable audience attraction for the holiday season.

But then there's this, from Glyndebourne (an annual summer festival held south of London):



Whereas the first production finds an edge on the American cultural lexicon, in an opera that's often received as a Dickensian fable about hunger, the second production aims squarely for the political and transforms the opera's 19th-century message about hunger into one about modern-day malnutrition by cheap, processed food. Whereas the first production takes a recognizable female personality and simply en-"witches" her, the second production explicitly exploits our gender-normative intuitions and invites us to react with disgust at the witch's lack of femininity. (Note that the role is not necessarily sung by men; that's just the case in these two productions. The one I saw in Chicago was sung by a woman.)

These kinds of thoroughly modern productions are, it's commonly felt, often hit-or-miss, and sometimes they are so aggressive with the source material that it results in total incoherence. (For example, Bayreuth put on a new production of Wagner's Ring cycle which was broadly criticized for, among other things, this reason.) But I love it. The first thing I did after learning about the Glyndebourne festival's production was try to figure out how to get there sometime. I just want to run to the culture that tolerates and celebrates this kind of experimentation - away from the safe, the wearily time-tested and audience-approved, simply canonical repertoire of works and interpretations that is typical of the American classical music scene.

It takes me a minute, sometimes, to remember that these cultures are often just as deeply flawed as the American is. I'd really like to live in France someday - or I think so, anyway - but then I realize I'm talking about a country that is still deeply sexist (even misogynistic) and racist, in ways that seem to be unacceptable in at least some parts of the U.S. The same can go for much of the continent and the U.K., to varying degrees and mixes.

I will be 36 in just over a month. The number is not significant except for drawing comparisons. At 36, for instance, I'll be able to say that there are people now passing into adulthood who were born only after I had myself done so. At 36, my father had five kids, the oldest of us (i.e., me) only 8 or 9 years old.

Astonishing, to think of it. I don't remember being 9 very well. I recall snippets. I remember learning cursive and my third-grade classroom, which was really a hybrid classroom - a single teacher for two grades stuffed into the same room. I was not yet the bookish, socially-awkward, friendless nerd that would be my identity through roughly high school (when I became slightly less antisocial), but all of the seeds were there, I'm sure - all of that would begin in the fourth grade. I try to imagine myself, raising a nine-year-old child while also raising all of the younger children - an infant, a toddler/preschooler, and a kindergartener among them.

I see more of my father in my face these days. Not that I think I look like him - maybe I do, but that's not what I see nor what I mean. I mean more the world-weariness, the rough skin. Every once in a while I'll see the shadows the sun casts across my face in a mirror and I'll recognize the lack of youthful smoothness that I found kind of gross, as a child. But no, that's me, that's my face, that's the layers of my skin beginning the slow process of aging decay.

It won't be long before I'll have to recategorize my existential quandaries, no longer as the product of a delayed youth or stunted maturation enabled by a lack of child-rearing responsibilities, but rather as a bona fide midlife crisis. I'll have to figure out what to call them when I'm sixty.