It seems strange, really quite strange, that sitting at the top of my music library tonight, the most recently added album, and there have been many recently, is Mahler’s 5th with the face of the MTT on the cover. Just three days after I added it, with the intention to listen to it in the next week, I read the news today of the death of the great conductor, composer, and arts leader.
The news broke into my feed from the Milken Center, via UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music ofAmerican Jewish Experience. While so many organizations and artists are honoring the Maestro, it is fitting for the Milken Center to acknowledge Tilson Thomas’ family roots in the Yiddish theater, and his unique position of carrying on the Thomashevsky legacy to new heights, a capstone on a story that mirrors, magnifies, and personifies the Jewish experience in America.
Juxtaposed with the complexity of Mahler’s thundering dissonant pageantry, I sit down to reflect on that narrative. And Tilson Thomas is considered to be a particularly masterful interpreter of Mahler, for reasons that I’m sure would be fun to learn.
From the liner notes, Mahler is quoted as writing to his wife Alma:
“Heavens, what is the public to make of this chaos in which new worldsare forever being engendered, only to crumble into ruin the next moment?What are they to sayto this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to thesedancing stars, to these breathtaking, iridescent, and flashing breakers?“
Maybe that’s where Tilson Thomas got the idea to name the New World Symphony. It was in this New World, cat-free, that the forms of Mahler, Schoenberg, and other Jewish free-thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century were able to find suitable space to explore.Now that I think of it, the UCLA performance hall is named after Schoenberg, so it all does seem relevant. And as high brow as it all seems—universities, institutions, atonal experimentations—it’s still showbiz, baby.
MTT’s grandfather, the great Boris Thomashevsky, was a pioneer in Yiddish theater, yes, but also in developing the model of touring acts around the country. We think sometimes of the Yiddish theater as high art, I mean, it’s THE THEATRE. But back in the 1880s, there wasn’t much in New York to entertain yourself with. No radios, no nickelodeons, no player pianos (almost though!). Much of the theatrical output of the time was shund.
And I’m going to get way beyond my expertise here if I keep going further on it. Suffice it to say, that these were enterprising times. The capacity to go where audiences were, to meet them as they are, to entertain them, that is something I always looked up to in Michael Tilson Thomas.
I got to see MTT conduct just once, out here in Washington D.C. in 2022. At the Kennedy Center, actually, just before it went to the birds. It was a thrilling night, with him conducting Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and his own fusion classical/jazz/theatrical experience, “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind,” based on the Carl Sandburg poem of the same name.
The woman named Tomorrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time and does her hair the way she wants it and fastens at last the last braid and coil and puts the hairpin where it belongs and turns and drawls: Well, what of it? My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone. What of it? Let the dead be dead.
…
It has happened before. Strong men put up a city and got a nation together, And paid singers to sing and women to warble: We are the greatest city, the greatest nation, nothing like us ever was.
…
And the wind shifts and the dust on a door sill shifts and even the writing of the rat footprints tells us nothing, nothing at all about the greatest city, the greatest nation where the strong men listened and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.
Last weekend, we held Friends Changemaker Weekend for the first time. A merging of Spring Lobby Weekend and Quaker Public Policy Institute, we brought an intergenerational mix to Washington D.C. (well, Arlington, mostly) for 3 days of advocacy training, community-building, and finally, a lobby day against funding for this absurd war in Iran.
One question that came up was “what was one of your earliest memories of advocacy?” I shared with a few people at my table memories of protesting the Iraq War on the street outside of my high school, a distinctly unpopular opinion in conservative Orange County. I still remember the smug, snide faces that Taylor Smith would make about it in Biology class. There was also a Beard for World Peace Facebook group somewhat soon after, though it must have been towards the end of high school, since we didn’t get access to Facebook until we got our .edu emails.
Early in the iPod craze, I was learning Photoshop. Some of the first stuff I ever made on Photoshop were political memes. I’ve tried to find copies of them, I could have sworn that I had seen them in the last few years, but to no avail. One was the famous photo of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, hooded, standing on a box. I silhouetted the prisoner and put the Apple iPod white headphones on and some snarky iSomething below it. I’m not sure. iAbuse Prisoners?
Friends Changemaker Weekend was a win. I designed… so much stuff… Programs, stickers, pins, photo booth props, banner stands, handouts, development giveaways, swag, nametags, podium art, powerpoint templates, awards interstitial slides. I co-led a workshop on Art as Social Action. I coordinated two photographers and a video team. And a talented illustrator, Joey Hartmann-Dow, who designed our cover art. Jumped in on A/V support when the hired crew couldn’t seem to mix someone talking into a microphone or control the PTZ camera we paid damn good money to rent from them. Managed changes on house lighting and stage lighting. Helped coordinate the staff photo, the group photo, the flow of Senator Van Hollen’s speech on Tuesday morning. Packed up the office materials to bring to the hotel. Packed up the hotel materials to bring to the Church. Dropped materials at the office. Schlepping schlepping.
All of these traits, hobbies, interests, seem to continue without interruption, from at least the age of 12 or 13. These passions all persist for photography, design, peace, music, gathering, prayer, and protest. And pogonology.
I left Friends Changemaker Weekend on Tuesday to fly directly to Cincinnati for the Religion Communicators Council conference, where I’m a board member. More on that maybe tomorrow. Now, to sleep, perchance to dream.
I’d like to thank Spotify for raising their rates two years ago for pushing me to accept the fact that the continued enshittification (thanks Cory Doctorow for the word) will not relent, that we will keep getting screwed by subscription services, that we are products, and that I need to take my data back.
It set me off on a journey of self-hosting. I started with a two-bay Synology NAS and realized that I was quickly running out of space to hold my entire media library as well as my archive of photos, videos, documents, stories, and memories. I upgraded to a 4-bay NAS (DS9723+) sporting 2x 10TB and 2x 14 TB drives. Those are sitting at about half full, so a cool 12.1 TB of data currently stored, with a redundant copy.
The powerful force of nostalgia has been on my mind. The tensions between memory and prayer, between returning to and creating toward. I create maps of covers, this artist with this song, this artist covering that artist, the way the songs fill time and space and connect us to subtle hints about who is valued, who is remembered.
And so this blog, relaunched, redesigned, with a certain time in mind, when writing was easy and emotions were strong and the consequences of honesty seemed to be less than the consequences of lying.
It’s hard now in my 30’s to feel like I can write honestly, freely. Every word seems to be a trap. Why this one or that one? Why this narrative or that one? What am I withholding because of the publicness of the forum? We’ve seen so much of the internet disappear. So little new is made. So few words are written when we used to write like our lives depended on it. For many, our lives did depend on it. Those days on LJ with our small circles of being known, with very real struggles and very dangerous consequences.
We will see what comes out of this latest edition. If nothing else, to get my hands moving and my mind connected to the choice to hit ‘Publish’. There’s a lot I need to publish over the next 10 years, so let’s get writing.
On my last trip of the year, through Sonoma County, I stood at the gates of Camp Newman, outside Santa Rosa. Fire consumed much of the property and the surrounding area. Yet, across the street, some properties operate seemingly untouched.
Now, instead of campers and counselors, its inhabitants are maintenance and security staff, EPA and insurance inspectors. No one is sure of the future of the camp.
Fire has nipped at the heels of most of my childhood retreats. Years ago, much of Camp SWIG suffered the same fate. It was sold off. The Yosemite fires nearly consumed Camp Mather, and Strawberry Bluegrass Festival may never return to that magical home. I remember when flames have threatened Brandeis-Bardein Institute in Simi Valley.
And in this year, fire has consumed homes of many I hold near and dear. Farms, animals, livelihoods. Some will rebuild. Some will leave it all behind. I weep for you.
These reflections, on physical space in rubble, weigh heavy on my understanding of Community. That is, the people that are bound together by some invisible or physical space: common belief, shared experiences, family bonds.
The most powerful of these forces is the physical venue. Shared space allows for repeated exposure, nostalgia. In the nooks and crannies of outdoor retreat, in particular, a sense of ownership builds a deep connection to the land.
Community, in the digital realm or ultra-temporal shifting festival circuit, lacks ownership. Rare is the place with permanence. Like in so many movements before us, the call back to land ownership is being answered all over the world (NuMundo catalogs so many of them including Heartland and Trillium).
But repeated fires remind us that neither land ownership nor standing walls protect communities from the wild. Ravaged, one day, it will all burn down. Through fire or erosion, we, and our memories, disappear.
In our earlier evolutionary states, we could not so much as leave a community without suffering a deep sense of loss, and potentially, death. To the modern observer, the idea of excommunication or exile seems a bit silly: just find a new home. It didn’t used to be so easy.
The state of being separate, Other, or cast away were once deeply traumatizing. It still is. So many of our decisions are based on avoiding the pains of Shame, Loneliness, and Disconnection.
When we avoid it, when we pretend like we are calloused from the pain of disgrace, we’re being delusional. We’re showing strength when what’s needed is weakness. The fear of loneliness, of being without Community, is built into our DNA, and when we deny its force, we delude ourselves.
Memory is not tradition.
When homes burn down, and especially the communal spaces that we return to in retreat, we lose a place where we feel welcome, where we can be ourselves, where we can reconnect with the selves that we discovered beyond our normalness. We lose the shortcut to center and we must start anew, often without the physical realms that we once traversed in our own personal journeys.
This is the place I kissed her. This is the place we fought. This is where we all held hands under the stars and I realized that I was one of many.
Now, our social networks give a sense of continuity: those that we knew one place are still in our lives. The memories, in pictures or thoughts, live on. They flood us in their significance, but they don’t sustain us. Memory is not tradition. One is past, one is present. You don’t mourn a memory, you mourn the tradition which is no longer available to you, to sustain you, to keep you at center.
Even if it was many years ago, the loss of physical retreat dizzies us. Grief is the realization that you cannot return.
The idea was always that you could come back and be reminded. But you can’t go back. You can only start over.
energetic
accomplished
nostalgic