More Entries from My Private Journal
A few months ago, I shared private entries from my journal. People seemed to enjoy reading them—so I’m doing it again.
Please be forgiving and tolerant. These writings were not intended as journalism.
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PRIVATE ENTRIES FROM MY JOURNAL
When I was a working musician, I was delighted when local restaurants decided to feature live jazz one night per week.
I didn’t realize until much later that this is the last thing a failing restaurant owner tries before going out of business.
Advice to musicians: When hired for “jazz night at the restaurant,” get paid upfront.
In Buddhism, the white lotus is a symbol of purity and enlightenment—and emergence from darkness, especially in times of turmoil or political crisis.
On TV, The White Lotus is an HBO Max series about rich people indulging in dissipated blow-out vacations in exotic locations run by a luxury resort company—called (of course) The White Lotus.
So these two lotuses could hardly be more different.
But the best way to understand the TV series is by merging these two worldviews in a single vision. The characters are so intensely vivid because they epitomize the different forms of attachment Buddhism warns against—and always to their great regret.
More than anyone you know, these characters need the liberation of detatchment and enlightenment linked to the white lotus, but—despite the name of the resort—they move in the opposite direction.
They are caught up in the Bhavacakra, the eternal wheel of life, where suffering repeats in endless cycles of rebirth. This rebirth is represented on the show by the eternal cycle of new vacationers who arrive at the start of each TV season.
But, like the vacationers themselves, viewers (and critics) are also caught on the wheel. So they fail to see the higher pathway here. They miss it entirely.
In a recent episode, set in Thailand, actor Sam Rockwell delivers an intense monologue on how he took partying as far as it could go. And he backs up this claim with a lurid account of excesses and fetishes beyond anything I’ve heard on TV before.
This obviously caught viewers’ attention. In the aftermath, dialogue went crazy on social media—with participants debating endlessly sexual identities, stereotypes, and various bedroom practices in prurient detail.
But nobody mentioned the key fact.
Rockwell talks about how he walked away from this wild self, and found serenity in a Buddhist life of detachment and enlightenment. And this shows in how he delivers his monologue, which grabs our attention precisely because its serene tone is such a mismatch with the activities described.
But, of course, viewers didn’t latch on to that—because that kind of message never shows up in a TV series.
Or does it?
It’s worth repeating this: the white lotus is a symbol of purity and enlightenment—and emergence from darkness, especially in times of turmoil or political crisis
“You’re getting what you asked for.”
That’s how people describe a punishment—the curse of getting what you want. And it’s been true since the Garden of Eden.
Consider this in the context of the algorithm—a feedback technology designed to give people exactly what they want.
In some traditional societies, drummers can predict the future. Among the Tungusic of Siberia, for example, shamans toss a drumstick into the air, and they will answer your questions depending on how it lands.
I wish they still taught these skills at music school— divination could be a new income source for their graduates.
I learned a riddle when I was a child. Here it is:
The man who made it didn’t want it. The man who bought it didn’t use it. The man who used it didn’t know it.
What is it?
The answer is: A coffin.
Nowadays, the answer would be AI slop music.
AI companies make it, but don’t want to listen to it—just like the coffin-maker. But they can peddle it to execs at streaming services, who don’t want to hear it themselves. But they can make a buck by pushing it on to playlists for consumption by deceived listeners who don’t even know they’re slurping up the slop.
People involved in this business model should ask themselves why they’re acting like funeral directors.
Musicians come and go. But the bartender always has a job.
I don’t take much interest in Kendrick Lamar’s music feud with Drake—it’s not my circus. (Yes, I have other circuses, closer to my psychic neighborhood.) But it validates my view that music is easily weaponized, and has been a tool for channeling aggression throughout history.
After all, every instrument in the orchestra originated either as a weapon or body part of prey. The bow was a hunter’s bow. The strings were the guts of animals. The drums were their skins. The horn was an animal horn. Bones were turned into flutes or percussion.
But one thing puzzles me. Why don’t musicians get into song battles more often?
As Drake and Kendrick Lamar prove, this generates clicks round-the-clock. All those TV singing contests tell the same story. Or consider those old battles-of-the-bands at dance halls.
The audience wants musician to go to war against each other.
Prediction: If two mediocre B-level pop stars started attacking each other in their songs, they would rise to superstar status within 12 months. This is a surefire way to revive a declining career.
Side point: The heavy Auto-Tune on Drake’s music always reminds me of the megaphone singing fad of the 1920s.
In both instances, a tool for overcoming a limitation gets turned into an aesthetic preference. Are there examples of that in other art forms?
The megaphone singers gave up that distorted sound a few years later when high quality microphones became available—and I’ve never heard a single music fan say they missed it.
But when they write the history of vocal processing this is where it starts. Before you get to Drake, you need Rudy Vallée.
The Romans thought the music of the Germans sounded like whistling, squeaking and the sound of wheels (Source: Ammianus Marcellinus, circa 350 AD).
Make sure to mention this if I ever write an essay about Stockhausen.
Idea for a Jane Austen dating app. It pairs you up with people you dislike intensely. Hence you overcome your “pride” and “prejudice.”
And what about romance?
Side benefit: Couples fall madly in love after the fifth date, because (as is well known) opposites attract.
Okay, that’s a joke. But these things do happen (and not just in Jane Austen romances).
Question from a journalist: You cover a lot of ground. One day you’re writing music reviews, and the next you’re operating as some kind of culture critic. How do you make these leaps?
Me: There’s no separation between those two roles. In fact, I’m surprised public intellectuals and culture critics don’t focus more on music. It’s the clearest, most unfiltered expression of the zeitgeist you can find.
Things get cleaned up before they show up in a Hollywood movie or major publisher’s book. But music expresses where the people are right now—at this very moment. In fact, the songs are usually ahead of everything else.
Today’s music tells you tomorrow’s news.
Art criticism once relied on a terminology associated with emotions, with beauty, with judicious appreciation, with the luminosity of the creative work.
Today, critics rely on words about power. They describe the work as “strong” or “authoritative” or “imposing” or “challenging.”
The same adjectives used to describe fascist dictators are now terms of praise applied to paintings and songs and stories.
Back in the day of the twelve-tone row, the trains ran on time…
The implication is that the best audience is a weak audience. They get a kick in the ass from work of art—and if it hurts, they deserve it. If they keep complaining, they’ll get a punch in the stomach.
Do I detect a tone of contempt here?
We have certainly come a long, long way from Matthew Arnold, who actually believed that art conveyed “sweetness and light.”
The response of a contemporary critic might be: “Hah, prisoners don’t deserve those things.”
George Bernard Shaw said it openly, and without shame.
“There is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be such a superior person.”
Is that a proper stance for a critic. Maybe it is. Even so, I find this painful to read.
It’s all too fitting that Shaw wrote this about Wagner—the most power-obsessed of all the composers.
Jacques Barzun talks about the frequency with which audiences were described as shedding tears or weeping in response to music during the Romanticist era. (See his Berlioz book, vol. 1, pp. 372-375).
Aspiration: To be the critic who weeps.
I’m annoyed by protesters who deface works of art, but they are simply responding in kind. They have been taught that great works of art “exert power” and “make demands”—so protesters do the same in response.
I listen to lots of self-produced albums on Bandcamp. I sometimes find hidden gems, but even the mediocre music gives me a read on the pulse of the culture.
But I’ve learned the warning signs. It’s best to avoid
Any album in which every track has the exact same duration;
Artists who spell everything—tracks, titles, band name, etc.—in lowercase;
Bands that keep releasing the same album under different names;
Songs that last twenty seconds or less;
Musicians who release a new album every day (some do multiple albums per day!);
Anything with an emoji anywhere in sight;
Album covers featuring adolescent anime characters wearing brightly colored costumes;
Bands with names that look like passwords—especially if they use more than one punctuation mark.
On the other hand, I could be out-of-touch. Each of these might be the basis for future Grammy categories.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he would create video games. You can see the ‘player’ mentality in his plays—where role-playing and playacting are everywhere.
Consider the case of Hamlet. The title character wanders from scene to scene in a dark castle, encountering ghosts, villains, etc. But nothing gets resolved as he tries to level up—although eleven people are killed along the way. The play starts again the next night, with similar results.
Brilliant and often laugh-out-loud funny at the same time! More "Private Journal" please!
As with most of my favorite artists -- and these entries are art, without a doubt -- I just really love watching you think.