My 32nd Winter Solstice

THE MAGI
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

-W.B. Yeats, from Responsibilities, 1916

Although I don’t usually go in for making a big deal of anniversaries – I hate birthday parties, for example – there’s something I really like about the underlying idea of seasonal holidays. I love that there are special songs and foods and color schemes and decorations for certain holidays. I spend months excited about the concept of Christmas and how nice it is that we have the holiday, then on the actual day of Christmas itself I can barely be bothered to remember that it’s not just a normal day. I like the fact that many holidays involve getting together with friends and family and eating a lot, but in general I like the idea of certain holidays more than actually celebrating them.

I think what I like is the idea of the holiday celebration as a time machine, where everyone pretends that they’re doing or observing something that happened a long time ago, or at least doing the exact same thing their ancestors did on that particular day. The best example of this might be Passover, which is actually a dramatic reenactment of something that happened way back when the latest in fashion was a little golden chin-mounted marital aid. Or beard protector. Whatever that thing was the Pharaoh used to have coming out of his chin. Anyway, the ancient Egyptians somehow lost their cultural memory to such an extent that now nobody can even agree on what color they used to be, while the Jews still faithfully rehash the story of Prison Break: Israelite Victims Unit every Passover. That may be the current duration record for a holiday-as-time-machine, and I can understand why Frank Herbert assumed there would still be Jews doing their thing in space 40,000 years from now.

I guess I imagine it as if the passage of time through the years is helical or spiral, and the holidays are times when we try to sort of open a window to something important that occurred on the corresponding point in the previous years. So each Christmas is in some sense every Christmas, every Passover is the first Passover, and so on.

The links that some holidays have to the seasons make this even more poignant, what with the holly and mistletoe and snow and solstices and equinoctes and so on. Plants and the sun go through the same thing at the same time every year, so people should too, is the idea, and the extension of that idea is that “we’re more or less the same as the people who went through this same point in the yearly cycle a thousand years ago. They spent this day in this way with these lights and songs and food, and now we are doing it too.”

One thing I particularly like about this historic dimension to holidays is the preservative effect it has on aspects of culture. Think of how old-fashioned the words to many of the Christmas carols are, or how medieval foods like fruitcake and mince pies are. “Wassail” is “wæs hale”, Old English for “be healthy”. Beowulf says it to king Hrothgar as “Wæs thu, Hrothgar, hal!” Eowyn says the same thing when she hands Aragorn his drink in Return of the King. If it weren’t for Christmas I seriously doubt whether anyone would still know the term “wassail”, and that would make the world a slightly less cool place.

I could probably go on forever but basically even though I’m not religious I’m a big fan of Christmas. Holidays have a lot of cheesy crap tacked on to them but they are also an effective way to maintain folkloric traditions unchanged for any number of years, and I like that. There is a dark side to all of this too, of course. This sort of thing is probably extra effective at fossilizing religious belief, keeping peasants in their place, etc. And cultural holidays can be exlusive or offensive to people from other cultures, those crybabies. But I’d rather dwell on the pleasant aspects of the whole thing. Wæs thu hal!

Leopold! Leopold!

I’ve always been ambivalent about classical music. I’m interested in it, but I feel intimidated, as if it’s beyond me. Some rare and fragile thing which requires a more refined sense than I possess. Like smision. I hesitate to really get into it because it seems like such a vast field of endeavour, and I worry that I will never develop a true appreciation for it no matter how I try. Sort of how I feel about modern art, except that I am almost certain that almost all modern art is ass, while I know that there’s a lot of good classical music out there impatiently awaiting my appreciation.

Note: By claiming that modern art possesses a distinctly asseous character I don’t mean Picasso, or whatever no doubt excellent artist you have in mind, I mean post-post-post-modern art or whatever they’ve been doing since around 1960 or so. Whatever they give the Turner Prize to these days. Goat carcases stuffed with the artist’s used tampons or giant crucifixes made of jars of earwax or whatever. Come on, admit it, that stuff sucks. Actually, after I wrote those last couple sentences I went back to find a funny Turner Prize-winning exhibit to link to, and the one I found was way crazier than I could have ever imagined. The guy who won in 2001 apparently got great acclaim for his masterful piece that involved TURNING THE LIGHTS IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM ROOM ON AND OFF AT FIVE SECOND INTERVALS. No joke could top that. In fact, here’s the entire description of this artistic masterwork from the website just so you don’t miss it. It goes beyond humor, beyond insanity into some unimaginable dimension of gibbering art-curator psychosis. I can only hope that the winning artist was actually performing an oral sex act on whoever wrote this at the moment it was written, because honestly I can think of no other reason for writing this orgasmic, mind-blowingly stark raving bonkers description of somebody turning a lightswitch on and off:

Work # 227: The lights going on and off. Nothing is added to the space and nothing is taken away, but at intervals of five seconds the gallery is filled with light and then subsequently thrown into darkness. Realising the premise set out in Work # 232, Creed celebrates the mechanics of the everyday, and in manipulating the gallery's existing light fittings he creates a new and unexpected effect. In the context of Tate Britain, an institution displaying a huge variety of objects, this work challenges the traditional methods of museum display and thus the encounter one would normally expect to have in a gallery. Disrupting the norm, allowing and then denying the lights their function, Creed plays with the viewer's sense of space and time. Our negotiation of the gallery is impeded, yet we become more aware of our own visual sensitivity, the actuality of the space and our own actions within it. We are invited to re-evaluate our relationship to our immediate surroundings, to look again and to question what we are presented with. Responding to the actual condition in which he has been asked to exhibit, Creed exposes rules, conventions and opportunities that are usually overlooked, and in so doing implicates and empowers the viewer.

Holy. Quacking. Mother. Of. God. Words fail me.


Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Classical music has always struck me as something for true connoisseurs, like tasting a sip of wine and being able to detect hints of loganberries, dander, walnuts, Palmolive and pencil shavings, or like watching a fashion show and swooning over the bold use of pleats, or watching people play cricket without wanting to kill yourself. I don’t know if I have the ear.

As I keep saying over and over again as an excuse when I don’t hear something properly: “I am a visual learner”. This sounds so much less humiliating than the actual responses, which would be “I wasn’t listening to a single word you just said because I was mentally going through World 1-1 on Super Mario Brothers,” or “I am only 31 years old but I seem to be going deaf, would you mind repeating that? Perhaps the sound waves have trouble traveling through the thick tufts of hair which have recently been sprouting from my ears.” But I really do, deep down, think I’m a visual learner.

No, that’s wrong – I learn best through reading things. Is there a term for that? I get drawn to things because they’re connected to something I’ve read. If I see a beautiful landscape, chances are I’ll be reminded of some book where someone describes a beautiful landscape. I might even recall the exact words the author used to describe the stupid landscape.

This strange reliance on text is why, in my younger years, I tended to easily fall into the trap of reading a record review and believing that I would like a certain album based on the review. This is of course impossible. No record review in history has accurately described an album. But I keep falling for it. So technically speaking, I’m probably not a visual learner, it’s more that I relate to the world best through remembering facts I’ve read on paper – literature, poems, quotes. Trivia. I would say I’m a trivial learner with krapaesthetic tendencies and good outerspatial relations.

It is therefore with great surprise that I find myself currently listening to all of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, one after another, although I’m still not sure what I think. But at least I’m listening. And I’ve been going to great lengths to acquire and listen to a lot of other classical music lately. Over the past few months there has been a lot of activity on the classical-music-appreciation front, me-wise. What gives? The reasons are, like certain parts of a car’s engine, manifold.

Reasons Why I am No Longer Intimidated by Classical Music

1) I’m getting very, very old. I hate to say it, but I’m no spring chicken, and as you may have noticed the last time you went to a classical music concert, it’s a genre that has some sort of special appeal to the innermost souls of those wispy-skulled specimens who are teetering over the grave. I think I’m more able to sit for longer periods of time and appreciate subtleties than I used to be. Or perhaps my decades of life lived to the fullest, the constant roiling tumults of fierce passion and sorrow have given me a more complete palette of memories and emotions with which to appreciate the sublime outpourings of some dead guy in a wig.

2) I now have an iPod. Before this summer, if I wanted to listen to a Wagner opera, I had to juggle four CDs. Now I just have to hit a single button. Of course, in either case I fall asleep 15 minutes into the opera, but now I don’t have the theoretical CD-switching looming over me, disturbing my blissful slumbers. It is nice to be able to have long musical works all on one portable device. Even some symphonies, like Beethoven’s Ninth, sometimes come on two CDs, and it used to be a pain to swap them out. And I’m not complaining about the new format – I’m certainly nowhere near being able to discern the fact that MP3s are usually of far lower quality than CDs. Come on. I can barely tell the different notes apart. I don’t give a rat’s ass about sampling quality or whatever. If I can put 20 or 30 CDs worth of music on a flash drive, the world of classical music suddenly seems a lot less like a spinning plates act and more like a pleasant one-button trip to opera-filled slumberland.

3) Bittorrent. I don’t want to say that I have illegally acquired any music, but I will say that in the past I was a bit hesitant to go out and randomly buy a lot of classical music CDs because of the bewildering variety and high cost. Which conductor should be conducting this piece? Is this a good recording? Is it a good orchestra? Is it digital or analog? I never used to f*#king know, and I still don’t, but now I don’t necessarily have to spend as much as I would have 15 years ago to listen to some things and find out what I like and what I don’t. Back in the day I was always panicked that I’d get home and find out I absolutely hated it, or that I would read something online saying that I’d bought the worst version possible. This leads me to another reason why I feel more confident in liking classical music lately, namely

4) Online research. As I exhaustively described above, I like things more when I have read something on the subject, and thanks to the Internet I can find out crucial information about music without having to hang out with the ponytailed mouthbreathers in the music section of the bookstore. I was able to recently hold a brief conversation about the differences between Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” and “Stalingrad” symphonies, neither of which I’ve ever heard a note of, but I’d picked up the info while randomly reading Wikipedia entries on composers. Again, I would never sit in a bookstore and flip through “Mammoth Biographical Encyclopedia of Great Composers” or whatever, but online I can find out more or less the same stuff in seconds. I try not to base my opinions about music on what I read, but I feel nevertheless that the Internet gives me the initial foothold I need to start really appreciating the hell out of something.

5) I’ve given up on the idea of progress in art. I honestly used to believe that it was somehow wrong to enjoy art from an older and less enlightened time. Let me explain: when I was in high school, all my classes started with people from way back in the past, and ended up with people in the early 20th century. All your classes were probably like this too. History started when a guy invented the wheel, and reached its fullest flowering when Henry Ford invented the Model T. Obviously anyone before Ford was a nobody. Only a moron would be interested in that prehistoric guy’s stone wheel, now that something better had come along. Same with science, philosophy, art, etc. The Renaissance became the Enlightenment became the Industrial Age, and things got better in every way as we went along. The previous people’s inventions and artwork always seemed clearly inferior to the later peoples’ and the implication was that human history had been a pretty much uninterrupted series of bold steps forward. At least that’s the subliminal attitude I somehow absorbed and held while growing up and even into the first year or two of college.

I thought that to appreciate something you had to know its place on the evolutionary scale. This made me feel silly for liking Beethoven, because I assumed that something far better must have been invented since then. Something terribly modern involving twelve tones or polychronous atonality or absolute silence or something. So since I liked Beethoven I decided I had bad taste in classical music, and I sort of gave up for a while. It’s taken a long time, but I think I’ve discarded the whole absurd notion that human history has been one long climb upwards towards perfection. I think the first time this really hit home to me was in an art history class in college, when I realized that I vastly preferred Romanesque architecture to Gothic. But Gothic came later, interrobang!? And then came colossally crappier things like Baroque and Rococo, interrobang!? I finally wrapped my head around the idea that newer was not always better. So now I’m able to listen to Beethoven without feeling a nagging guilt that I should be listening to somebody further down the evolutionary ladder instead. I mean up the ladder. Stupid metaphor getting me all turned around. There is no evolutionary ladder for art. Well, there is, but it has nothing to do with quality. Older things can be better. Same way that cockroaches are more successful than a lot of your fancy modern bugs. By the way, Henry Ford was a complete dickhead.

6) I don’t believe that I’m underqualified to be “cultured” any more, and that takes some of the fear out of certain subjects. I guess growing up in a normal American family I always subconsciously assumed that there was some master race of incredibly sophisticated people lounging around in Europe or somewhere, with perfect taste and an encyclopedic knowledge of the finer things in life, and that I was somehow never going to be in that league. Classical music seemed to be something for those people, whoever and wherever they were. Then I worked with a lot of people who seemed pretty “cultured” in Munich, and I started to realize that everyone’s faking it and that everyone’s utterly full of sh*t. Sure, I’m not perfectly refined. Sure, on a recent trip to the Philharmonic I had to be issued a jacket and shoes by the ushers because my attire was so far, far below the minimal standard of sartorial decency, and then I was so amused by the whole thing that I giggled uncontrollably for the first 10 minutes of the concert. But somehow I’ve made my peace with my level of refinement and damn it I definitely have just as much right to pretend I know something about a pretentious and complicated subject like classical music as any other jerk. So I’m not as intimidated by classical music as I might have been years ago.

So there you have it. I now feel fully qualified to successfully appreciate classical music, whereas I didn’t before. I had no idea I had so much to say on the matter. I guess I haven’t posted here for a while and my blogging mojo must have been building up like a magma pocket under Krakatoa. If you’ve read through this whole thing I apologize from the bottom of my heart and I can only hope that my little jokes here and there made up for the astoundingly boring topic.

a really good video game

I would like to make a brief plug for Eternal Darkness, perhaps the best video game ever made, if you like the genre of horror time travel and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. I realize that this is a small target audience, but I would still like to spread the good word. Like “Beyond Good and Evil”, it was probably doomed to be a cult classic from the start. Oh well.

Merry Xmas, Xmas people! Xmas!

Just a brief and hip-shatteringly jolly Advent-season note to point out that what’s seen as the most commercial and crass way to write “Christmas”, that is, “Xmas”, is actually a literate and historically conscious way to write the name of the holiday.

The “X” in Xmas is not an invention of Hollywood, McDonald’s or Wal*Mart, but is in fact the Greek letter chi, the first letter in the Greek “christos”, Jesus’ title. Rudolph may have been a department-store marketing scheme, but the X is hard-core.

X as shorthand for “Christ” has a long history. For xample, at the battle of the Milvian bridge in 312 A.D., legend has it that the Emperor Constantine saw a floating mystical “chi-rho” (XP) symbol in the heavens, a portent of victory if he accepted Christianity. He ordered his soldiers to put the symbol on their shields. This was, you will note, far before the age of crappy American nu-skool spellings like “donut” and “dri-kleen”. This is about as old-school as an abbreviation can get.

This whole issue clears up a poorly researched and utterly useless factoid I read and memorized as a child in, I believe, The Book of Lists. For some reason I more or less memorized this book as a kid, although I now realize that it wasn’t as dependable as its all-list format made it seem. It was kind of like the Guinness Book of Records in that way; you knew it was sheer raving madness but the statistics-based format lent it some kind of believability. Kids are suckers for that combination of freak show and official list. I remember staring at that picture of the man with the record for longest fingernails for hours. But fingernails are at least theoretically measureable. Why was the guy with the beard of bees in the record book? What measurement did they use to calculate the record-breaking nature of his beard of bees? I call shenanigans.

Anyway, the factoid which I think was from The Book of Lists was: “Christopher Columbus always signed his name ‘Xpo Ferens’. Nobody knows why.” I barely know the rudiments of Greek or Latin, but it’s blindingly clear to me why – why nobody involved in compiling that book had half a brain cell is the true mystery. I guess this was before the Internet, when it was easy for people to propagate urban legends and claim that things were mysterious when they were really nothing of the sort. “Xpo Ferens” is just a slightly strange way of writing “Christopher”. “Xpo” is short for Greek “Christo”, which looks like “Xpisto” in Latin characters, and “ferens” is Latin for “bearing”. Christopher means Christ-bearer or Christ-ferry, as everyone who’s seen a painting of Saint Christopher must know. He was basically a kind of Blaster to Jesus’s Master, a mythical giant who carried baby Jesus across a stream, which is why he’s no longer really a saint and was dropped from the calendar. You almost expect Baby Jesus to screech, “Who rule Bartertown?” At least I do.

Anyway, my point was that if you want to say or write “Xmas”, feel free. You’ll be using an ancient Greek letter, not being cheap and commercial. Merry Xmas.

p.s. This post is dedicated to my dad, whose birthday is coming up on the 8th and who spent a lot of time and effort devising well-researched and historically inquisitive Sunday School lessons in a similar vein when we were kids. I might not be as religious as he is, but I think we both appreciate the history of religion in a similar way.