Lamp-Post Mortem on the Election

Did we actually wake up Wednesday? Or are we in fact still in some Cartesian dreamland, where parrots dwell in Brooklyn, cars drive themselves, and Donald Trump has acquired a new piece of real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? From the parrot's outpost above the ruckus, the first is not all that strange (sqwuaak!), and the second we will probably get used to in some century or other. But Donald Trump the 44th Resident of the White House? (Washington didn't get to live there, and come to think of it, it ain't so white anymore.) Is this some sort of reality show? Maybe the Broadway version of The Plot Against America?

On the grinding fear that none of these suggestions explain what happened last week, here we go with 24 thoughts, in no particular order.

1. We could artificially extend our sanity for a couple of months by imagining some major medical event that relieves Trump of the need to fake governing the country. But do you recall the old buttons people wore during the Reagan administration: "Shoot Bush first"? In a FB post I referred to Mike Pence as an "innocuous Republican hack", but really he's no such thing. If I have to choose among anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-carbon-fuel, pro-business, anti-Muslim bigots then for sure I want the one who has absolutely no experience governing anything bigger than his penthouse.

2. Could there be some obscure tenet of domestic or international law that could rule the election results illegal? I mean, he's the one who said it was rigged, right? Isn't there some sort of penalty for vowing to scuttle international treaties? Can't global warming deniers at least be committed to a psychiatric ward? There is no reason the rest of the planet has to stand by and watch the seas rise because some maniac claims global warming is a "Chinese hoax".

3. So you say you are considering moving out of the country for a while? Here's a quick guide to the world. China is run by anti-democracy strongman Xi Jinping. Russia is in the hands of the aggressive KGB alumnus Vladimir Putin. England is wearing its xenophobia on its sleeve and is now led by Brexit champion Theresa May. In France, Francois Hollande, a putative Socialist, has lost virtually all popular support, and a victory next year by the far right Marine Le Pen is no more unthinkable than was a Trump victory in the U.S. Austria, never a bright light of democracy, may soon land in the far right column as well. From Poland to Denmark, rightwing governments are being installed all over Europe. So your choices are: Canada, of course, under the present liberal leadership of Justin Trudeau, and... Germany! Yes, the Germans suddenly look like the carriers of the democratic torch, under the conservative but practical Christian Democrat Angela Merkel. Her message to Trump on his victory: get with the program if you want to play soccer in our league.

4. The U.S. now joins the list of nations like North Korea, the Philippines and Venezuala where the leader is defined not merely as far "left" or "right" but as a complete loony bin who is off the chart of normal political behavior. Duterte has already expressed his admiration for Trump; can Kim Jong-un be far behind?

5. Lock him up! Possible grounds for sending Trump to jail immediately:

·      - Treason: conspiring with a foreign power to interfere with democratic process in a U.S. election.

·       - Criminal threat: suggesting that the "Second Amendment people"could take out his Democratic opponent.

·      -  Incitement to riot: recommending that his followers punch protesters in the face.

·      -  Tax evasion: claiming tax deductions for utterly worthless "partnerships" in his failed business.

Possible grounds for lawsuits to tie him up indefinitely:

·      -  Sexual harrassment: need I say more?

·      -  Unfair business practices: failure to pay employees and contractors in his failed enterprises while walking away with $millions.

·      -  Defamation: publicly stating that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. after his citizenship had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Surely some of these have to succeed? (I can't think of a crime associated with belittling veterans who gave or risked their lives in a war. It may be one of those perverse uses of free speech that has to be protected just because there are legitimate uses of speech that have to be protected.)

6. It is not clear what, in the opinion of 55 million people or so, is not acceptable for an American President to say, other than "here's a plan to provide affordable health care to millions of uninsured Americans". When the morally unthinkable loses its meaning, like a word repeated too many times, that is when a door is open for fascism to slip in.

7. Doesn't this feel a bit like watching a disaster film where the calamity unfolds in slow motion, the better to make your pulse churn while you await the horrible and entirely foreseeable conclusion, unable to warn those in danger?

8. There are really two countries here, two basic moral, cultural and political regions. One is defined by the broad swath of the nation from the Midwest to the Deep South, but is really rural America wherever it exists. This is the nation that elected President Trump. Look at an electoral map by county rather than by state and you begin to get the picture of what this country is about. For it is not as if Trump "lost" New York, for example; he, and every other Republican Presidential candidate in recent memory, overwhelmed the opposition everywhere but in a handful of counties dominated by big cities, primarily New York City. (Hillary barely won in Buffalo, which is much more like the industrial Midwest than like New York.) That's the way it is in Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and in all the other so-called "swing states". A "swing state" is one in which, in spite of the guaranteed rural white vote in favor of Republicans, the Democrats have a prayer of gathering enough urban votes to dominate. As long as the demographics of the nation stay more or less as they are and have been at least since WW II this is never going to be a country that embraces diversity, change, environmentalism or gun control.

9. I too was busy congratulating myself for helping in some small way to create in a country that elected a Black President, twice, and was about to cast more votes for a woman than for her male opponent. Forget all that; as Michael Moore rightly said in his post predicting a Trump victory, I was living in a bubble, deluding myuself. One sign of that was the venom that has been directed at Obama even by some of my more intelligent and knowledgable acquaintances, a vile and bottomless outpouring of nasty, empty vindictiveness that only a Black President would be subjected to. I never hear a single word of thanks for his lifting the country out of the financial and military disaster left to him by Bush amd his cronies. No sympathy for millions of Americans who can afford health care for the first time in their lives. Not even a thumbs up for finally taking out Osama bin Laden, or getting ground troops out of Iraq; just vitriol and a flood of baseless accusations. ("Look what Obama has done to Israel!" a Jewish acquaintance of mine declared the other day – Okay, what, exactly, has he done to Israel? – "I don't know offhand but I heard....") This country was not ready for a Black President, it was simply a matter of getting someone to undo the damage of the Bush administration, and the alternatives were the ever-unpopular Hillary and a Black man. People held their noses and voted for the Black man, and immediately turned around and told him everything he was doing wrong. It's the same old country, we just had a temporary bubble of pseudo-enlightenment.

10. We are still caught up in the defective political experiment known as the "electoral college", which this week for the fifth time delivered to us a Chief Executive who most of the active voters do not want to be President. Is it any wonder that the world generally holds in contempt our claims to be a shining model of democracy for everyone else? The principle of one person, one vote does not exist in this country, and if it did we would not be looking forward to an infantile, lecherous, ignorant, foul-mouthed buffoon leading the country for the next four years. In the election of 1888 Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland by 55 electoral votes but narrowly lost the popular vote, after insisting on high tariffs to appease Midwestern and MidAtlantic industrial workers and business owners. And you thought Trump don't know much about history – though he sure don't know much biology or science books.

11. A great deal is being made of the fact that people in certain areas are hurting where it counts, and largely because of a loss of manufacturing and basic industry jobs. Therefore, the logic goes, they voted for Trump just to have something different, someone who promises them jobs and is not a Washington insider. Yes, as dimwitted fantasies go, that is up there with the best of them. Industrial jobs began disappearing with the Reagan-Volker recessions of the early 1980's, which turned numerous parts of the industrial heartland into ghost towns, not to mention helping to bankrupt millions of small farmers. Many objective factors contributed to this, factors which only increased over time (see #13 below). The Great Recession was like a mopping up operation on basic industry; it was brought on in part by the Republican-led Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 which deregulated the banking system (not a good recommendation for Clinton either: Bill signed it into law). Later deregulations under George W. Bush also helped. Now, there is a huge demographic in the U.S. that would vote for any Republican who mouths some basic bullshit about the sanctity of life and the right to keep loaded weapons of every sort around the house. (See Trump's platform: "the government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own".) So the logic of bringing back basic industrial jobs is at best a deciding factor in a few "swing states" in or near the Great Lakes region. Not even that – it is the logic of the even fewer swing voters in those states, the ones who truly are open to either a Democrat or Republican and just want to make sure they get a promise of future employment and/or better employment. These people are extraordinarily gullible to believe that the guy who managed a billion-dollar empire into the ground is the one who is going to help them. They easily forget the damage that one Republican after another has done to the industrial economy. But they are relatively few in number. Most of the Trump voters would vote for King Kong if he professed to be a fundamentalist Christian, promoted the illusion that guns provide personal protection, and professed to dislike the government in general. Let us have our fun with a gun and we will vote for you, son. The alienated unemployed are a very, very minor factor in the election; they have drawn focus because of the electoral college and their resultant role, but they are not the core Republican constituency.

12. People are tired of political insiders (read hacks) so they want an outsider - like Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, for instance. These folks are really going to shake things up in Washington! Of course, people knew about all of them during the campaign, even if they didn't know that after his victory Trump would immediately hire numerous corporate lobbyists (Washington insiders by definition) to help staff his new administration. The wolves will be guarding the chicken coop at every single federal agency – as always during Republican administrations (but only usually during Democratic administrations).

13. Hillary Clinton and her sidekick Bill are also responsible for some of the worst legislation and regulations for the working class, including the Welfare Reform Act, the anti-crime bill, the NAFTA agreement and the "Don't ask don't tell" policy in the military. Bill Clinton signed into law the aforementioned banking deregulation act. Hillary's support of not only NAFTA but its successor, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is rightfully galling to displaced workers, and is as good a reason as any for her not to have been elected. But these workers are in la-la-land if they think that the decline of many basic Midwest and Mid-Atlantic industries is just about NAFTA. There are some basic economic realities like the declining efficiency of U.S. manufacturing in general, the availability of cheap labor elsewhere, the relative cost of coal as a fuel, the need to reduce carbon fuel consumption, the ability of foreign automakers to produce better and/or cheaper cars, the growth of the steel industry in South Korea and elsewhere, the automation of many factory jobs, and other secular factors. Globalization is here to stay, and though we don't have to help it along in ways that destroy American jobs eve more rapidly, many of those jobs are going the way of all flesh sooner or later, free trade or no free trade. I am not being unsympathetic, but refusing to face reality is no kind of political strategy. Some of those jobs will come back, in the form of retooled, more automated and less unionized manufacturing facilities; this will have nothing to do with Donald Trump, though a good industrial policy would help. But they will not come back in a way that makes use of old labor skills, nor at the wage levels that were briefly enjoyed thanks to our industrial dominance and a strong union movement. By the way, who led the charge against those unions?Anyone remember PATCO? Arise ye wretched of the earth and vote for more reactionary "make America great again" Republicans like Ronald Reagan, that will surely bring about change in Washington!

14. Hillary and her email server. What? How can an email server have anything remotely like the weight of these major economic and global environmental considerations? The answer to that is that most people barely understand the concept of a "server" at all, unless it's the person who brings them coffee in the morning at the local diner. But what they do understand is the power of metaphor: the "private email server" is simply a way of recognizing that Hillary is for Hillary, she is about Hillary, she would play fast and loose with national security because she's an insider and can do what she wants, she thinks she's better than everyone else who has to follow the rules. The fact that she trots off to Wall Street to give speeches and earn millions of dollars only cements the perception: she is about herself, and secondly about them, and not us.

15. Hillary has been Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world. The world has continued to fall apart and is arguably worse now than when she started out. That's a recommendation to make her President? Don't expect people to understand that an entire army of Hillarys could not put Humpty Dumpy together again after the rise of Islamic extremism. But more broadly, other than her carefully chosen words, what accomplishments of hers did anyone have to go on? What has she done? Two terms as first lady, two as Senator and two more as Secretary of State, and what is her calling card? What does she have to offer as a memorable accomplishment? An act that expanded childcare? Give us a break; she has been around forever and doesn't have a single thing to brag about, just a lot of promises. She flip-flops on one thing after another. How was she ever supposed to mobilize anyone other than by being not-Trump?

16. 20-20 hindsight is good enough to see that by collaborating with the DNC to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination Hillary essentially handed the country to Donald Trump. Sanders had better numbers against Trump all along, had none of her baggage and had enough of a reform aura to avoid the "insider" label. No, I did not believe he could pull off many of his platform positions any more than Trump can do everything he says; in fact, Trump has a better chance, with a Republican Congress. I simply did not believe Bernie would do anything evil. Perhaps Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC were not the deciding factor in whether Hillary won the nomination, but they helped in their little ways to drive America into the hands of Trump. Imagine: right now we are anxiously awaiting the inauguration of President-elect Bernie Sanders, the first Jew and first Socialist ever to assume the office, while Donald Trump is already half-forgotten as he lands on the trash heap of American politics along with George Wallace and the like. How does that sound? Thanks, Deb. Thanks, Hillary.

17. Hello, President Putin, Sir? This is your faithful manservant Donald. Is it okay if I speak English, since I have at best minimal facility with that language much less am I fluent in Ukranian, I mean Russian? Thanks. Well, I just wanted to thank you for your help. I appreciate that you are a man of fine, upstanding moral character, a democrat with a small "d", and you wouldn't want to see Hillary win unfairly. Yes, I know, Sanders is a Socialist, there could be a conflict of interest there, but you guys have mostly gotten over the socialism thing, haven't you? Give Julian a big bear hug for me too, will ya? He and I have to have a talk about women some time, I think there may be a lot in common there.

18. Nothing energizes the left like a good kick in the pants. This should do it. We thought with Obama we had finally reached the seat of power. Partly correct, though he leaves a negative legacy in a few areas: failure to presecute the torturers from the Bush regime, permitting and expanding the collection of phone and email data (a program that will now be placed squarely in the hands of the most reactionary elements in American politics), and largely leaving in place many of the conditions that led to the financial collapse, among other things. We thought the same about Hillary – well, some did, though for reasons already stated I seriously question that. But now there is no question we are once again out. Forward ever, backwards never – don't get depressed, get active.

19. Does the name Joe McCarthy ring a bell? He came from one of our beloved "swing states", Wisconsin. "The State Department is infested with Communists" said McCarthy in his famous Wheeling (WV) speech. "Lock her up!" says Trump of the Secretary of State. November 14 would have been McCarthy's 108th birthday, but he had the decency to drop dead of hepatitis at age 48. Trump is a bit late in following suit, but as I said, January 20 is a good two months away.

20. Trump's support is paper thin and will wash out very quickly with those "swing voters" in those swingin' states. Many of them have been quoted saying they already view him with skepticism. But they hope he will bring back prosperity to their depressed industrial regions, make America "strong"again, "shake things up" in Washington. At the same time they hope he will not act on his ideological agenda of anti-immigrant bluster and anti-abortion rhetoric, or take away their newfound health care coverage. Too bad; he will act on exactly what they hope he won't, and he will fail to act on what they hope he will. But it will be too late by then to get rid of him, and the damage will be done.

21. Of course you can't be too politically astute if you voted for Trump because you didn't like Hillary, which means you could not be thinking seriously about things like the terrible impact of having Trump rather than Hillary nominate the Supreme Court justice with, yes, the swing vote. We will have to eat that one for a long time to come. Though Supreme Court justices occasionally disappoint their sponsors and fail to act consistently as tools for the ruling class, there is no reason to hope for such a benign outcome. The Neanderthal majority in the Court will be preserved now for decades.

22. I had thought that maybe the underappreciated cause of our electoral disaster was Bill, not Hill. She will always be Billary to most people, the one who stood by her man, not only his policies but his sleazy defacement of the oval office. So, perhaps the issue is that people don't want Bill as the first First Gentleman, a very reasonable consideration! But then, look what they chose as an alternative! Somebody whose sexual comments should be an embarassment even to his wife and children; and a first lady who does nude photo shoots with some light lesbian and bondage content. Well, admittedly it would be more pleasant to have to look at Melania than at Billary for the next four years, if only you could forget the proto-fascist politics she is there to put a pretty face on.

23. Predictions: Parrots are not very good at predictions, as they are better at saying what was just said than what will be true a few days or years from now. So with that thought in mind, allow me to make several predictions, which I hope will meet the usual fate mine tend to do:

·      > The economy will take a nose dive, as it typically does in conservative Republican administrations. Interest rates up, business investment down, the unemployed will have a lot of new company.

·      > Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil will dramatically increase; Trump will be a magnet for terrorists.

·      >  Social programs, health programs and the arts will be defunded.

·      >  Military spending will increase dramatically and there will be no more than a token effort, if that, to reduce wasteful expenses by the military, contrary to Trump's feeble comments on this subject.

·      >  Russia and China will expand their influence considerably, while the U.S. drops off the chart as a world leader. (After eight years of Bush and four of Trump who could take the U.S. seriously as a global leader? The periodic infusion of a Clinton or Obama White House is not enough to make us a reliable partner.)

·      >  Congress will turn over to the Democrats in the mid-term election, leading to an even more complete stalemate in Washington than will be the case with a narrow Republican majority. But this will blunt the impact of some of Trump's worst ideas.

·      >  Those displaced, unemployed, alienated, forsaken swingers will still be displaced, unemployed, alienated and forsaken in two years, three years, four years, and will return to their former instincts to vote for the lesser-evil in the Democratic Party.

·      >  The only people who even try to emigrate to Canada will be those who need health care coverage and expect to lose it here. No guarantee they will be welcomed there.

24. Ways to get through the next four years:

·      * Look forward to electing lots of Democrats 2 years from now. I know this is not very exciting but it is the best reality we can foresee right now. There are even a few who are more appealing than Hillary Clinton.

·      * Buy stock in all the companies that will profit from Trump's largesse – I'm thinking coal, and in general any regressive form of energy, real estate for sure, banks, biopharmaceuticals, and since you will already be morally corrupt at that point, why not short some healthcare stocks? Though you may be late to the game in all this, as Wall Street traders had this figured out before the end of last week.

·      * A steady diet of soothing or cheerful classical music – I might recommend for starters any of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti or Handel's Concerti Grossi Op.6, the Clarinet Quintets by Mozart and Brahms, Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata for violin and piano, Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin song cycle, Elgar's Enigma Variations and Sea Pictures, Sibelius' 2nd Symphony, Borodin's String Quarter #2 and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. (Note that I have not selected any Trumpet concerti.) For those who have already heard all these pieces 100 times or more I can also do a slightly more challenging list for you, or, if you prefer folk, jazz or rock I'd be happy to provide those too. I am convinced that frequent immersion in sounds of unparalleled beauty is the only antidote to the ugliness that will be streaming from every media device for years to come.

·      * Organize a protest at least once a day. Nobody will come to most of them, but who knows, one of them just might be the spark that starts a prairie fire, as Chariman Mao put it, sending people by the thousands to camp out in Washington until the Trump Empire crumbles into dust.

·      * Medical marijuana. A doctor can prescribe some for you. It may be no different from what you get on the street, but it feels like it's relieving pain better than what you get in a nickel bag.

What a world. Sqwuaauuck.

[Note: edited #3 for typos, #8 for clarity, #11 for an incorrect reference, added a hyperlink in #12, #15 for a typo. In #24 I really meant Handel's Concerti Grossi Opus 3, which I love even more than Opus 6, but since Opus 6 would hardly be an inappropriate choice in this context I'll let it stick.]

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize, and the Parrot Wins Prescience Prize

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature! This was worth getting up early for!

Dylan, who already won a special award from the Pulitzer Prize committee, has been mentioned before in connection with the big magilla of literary prizes. So it would not be especially interesting if I had squawked it again. But on September 19th I sent a letter to the editors of Poets and Writers magazine in response to a reference to Dylan in one of their features. Since they have not responded, much less shown any sign that they would publish it, I'm reproducing the entire text here:

Dear Editor,


Poets and Writers is a source of essential advice and deep insights into the writing process - the reason I have subscribed almost continuously since the time I first thought about trying to publish my creative writing. But as with any forum that dispenses literary advice it is also sometimes a source of narrow-minded prejudices. Such dubious views are sometimes found, for example, in "The Aha! Moment", where agents, editors and others point to what they did or didn't like about a story, a query letter, or in the latest (Sept/Oct) issue, an MFA admissions essay. Commenting on a candidate's use of an alleged quotation from Bob Dylan - "The purpose of art is to stop time" - Kate Daniels of the Vanderbilt University MFA program writes: "...I'm thrown off a bit by the reference to Bob Dylan at the end of the paragraph - why didn't she find a poet's quote on this rather frequent topic in literature[?]..." This comment just about stopped my breathing, if not time. First I had to find the source of the alleged quote, which, as far as I can tell, is an interview conducted by Allen Ginsberg in the journal Telegraph (#33, Summer 1989) on the subject of Dylan's film, Reynaldo and Clara. Ginsberg begins by asking Dylan, "What attracts you, as a poet, to movies?". Well, there's "a poet's quote", if you will. The Dylan quote itself does not actually exist, though it is a close paraphrase of some things Dylan had to say about his film. Next, I wondered if Daniels is simply ignorant of the existence of Tarantula, Dylan's 1971 collection that interleaves experimental poetry, micro-fiction and memoir; though an even greater worry is that she may be implying a  critical judgment of that book that would end up removing the label "poetry" from an awful lot of work whose poetic credentials we take for granted. Furthermore, is Daniels judging prospective (and current?) MFA students on a definition of poetry so narrow that verses like Dylan's do not count as poetry? That would be a pity, for I strongly suspect that history will not sustain her view. The "extraordinary poetic power" of Dylan's "lyrical compositions" has been cited by the Pulitzer Prize committee; his writing has been the subject of an in-depth literary analysis by Christopher Ricks and various philosophical works and the like. In the end, though, whatever may be the status of Dylan as a "poet" in some formal sense, the notion that he is not a sufficiently respectable literary artist to be a fine source of a quote on the purpose of art is very hard to accept. I should think there are few people on earth more qualified to offer their two cents on that subject than Bob Dylan, who is not only considered one of the greatest musicians and lyricists of all time but has also published six books of drawings, many of which have been exhibited in galleries and museums. No offense to Tennyson, Baudelaire, Stevens or whoever Daniels might be thinking of, but few people in the history of the arts carry quite the same authority as Bob Dylan.

No, I did not sign it "Sincerely, Parrot". I guess they don't need to publish it now anyway, since the good old Swedes have said it so elegantly for me.

Glenn Branca Ascends in Brooklyn

The New York Downtown arts scene – the music side of it in particular – is something I've touched at a dozen different points without ever grabbing hold of it. Like a leitmotif it keeps showing up on the edges of my life, and I keep resisting the idea of making it my scene. This is usually followed by regret, years later, when I see how rich and enduring it is and how lovingly its true exponents and fans embrace it.

Still, not really feeling a part of the scene doesn't quite explain why I have never been to a Glenn Branca concert until tonight, though I was aware of his music almost from the time he set foot in New York in the late 1970's. I suppose I have told this story before, but since most of the readers of this blog won't have heard it why not give it one more chance. When I was a student at the Mannes Conservatory – now a college of the New School – in the late 1970's, my brother and I formed a rock band. We quickly outgrew the Upper West Side bedroom we had converted into a music studio and started looking for rehearsal space – one that was all but free, since we had very little money. I can't recall how we found it – probably an ad in the Village Voice – but we managed to locate someone who wanted to share a basement rehearsal studio at 262 Mott St. That someone was Jules Baptiste, who founded the band Red Decade. At that time Jules was performing with Glenn Branca; that's how I heard of him, and his "symphony for 100 guitars". It sounded like a crazy idea, not to mention probably too loud for my tastes. Besides, since Jules was playing landlord – and, we assumed, having us largely subsidize his studio – we sometimes just barely got along, so running out to see him play wasn't a top priority.

Well, there it stood, for, um... about 37 years – until tonight. Today, the stars just aligned – thanks to my wife taking my daughter and mother-in-law on a cruise to Halifax (the purpose of it, lest there be any confusion, was not specifically to allow me to see Glenn Branca). Having that rare, momentary notion of myself as a "free man" from around 2:30 p.m. today until a few days from now, I was already more open than usual to the concept of an evening adventure. The notice of a Branca concert this very night – at Roulette, an easy trip on the R train from my remote Bay Ridge location – somehow slid beneath my eye as I leafed through the NY Times. Even more enticing, the premier of a memorial piece for David Bowie, with whom Branca had briefly collaborated and who was an admirer of his music.

So there I was at the stroke of 8:00, complimentary earplugs in hand, ready to experience my first Branca concert. What did it feel like? Well, not very different from the day I sat in a different Downtown room (The Kitchen, I think) waiting to hear my first (and last) Cecil Taylor concert. Expectations of an immersive but not terribly easy experience. Nothing I can take out on the street and hum as I head back to the subway. A feeling of obligation – to myself, to St Cecilia, to some spiritual link that I can only place by thinking of a lot of vague connections. I look around, and imagine everyone over 50 to be someone I either know, or should know, but can't recognize after decades of hair style and body weight changes. Patrons of the Downtown circuit who have either had works performed here or at least smoked dope with Phillip Glass, if not Andy Warhol. Feeling oddly at home, like I belong here, even though everyone knows everyone else, or so I assume.

The first item on the program was a set of six pieces called The Third Ascension, a recent work for four guitars, bass and drums. Each piece had a slightly different impact. The first, "German Expressionism", seemed to have more open sounds and events than some of the others, though it also featured a bit of energetic improv, not to say wilding, by Reg Bloor (who is Branca's wife). Next was "The Smoke (Guitar Concerto for Arad Evans)", hardly a concerto in anything remotely like your usual sense, and featuring smoother and more tonal sonorities than the first. After a change in the guitar tunings, the next two pieces also featured the trance-like continuities that make the Downtown music scene what it is. I found both of them too loud to enjoy, even with the deeply appreciated earplugs. (I did not wear them through the whole concert but for these two pieces they were hardly out.)

Another tuning change preceded what turned out to be my favorite piece of the evening, "Twisting in Space", a mutating cloud of appealing soundscapes that reminded me a bit of something Robert Fripp and Brian Eno might have come up with. The last piece, "Cold Thing (La Belle Dame Sans Merci)" is, I suppose, appropriate to its subject, though once again I found the sonorities a bit harder to take than, say, the sound of two Boeing 767's landing on either side of you.

Finally at the end of the concert, with no special announcement or fanfare, came The Bowie tribute, "The Light (for David)". This I have to say was a complete success, for me at least: I felt transported, mesmerized in the way this kind of music is supposed to achieve, and had no inclination to reach for the earplugs in spite of the volume. In fact I was sorry it ended, as I was about as close to feeling stoned as I have ever been without drugs. (Okay, one bottle of Brooklyn Lager – does that count?) Bowie, I think, would have been pleased.

As for Branca, he "conducts", after a fashion; at least he signals changes of sonority to the performers. His music is oddly metrical, sometimes even sporting a heavy backbeat on the drums, and with the energetic drumming of Owen Weaver behind the ensemble there is no real need to keep a beat. Instead, Branca sways, bends his knees and swoons, extends his arms like St. Francis receiving the stigmata, and sometimes ushers the performers towards a change of volume or tempo. When he speaks (with some difficulty) he offers comments that suggest he is well aware of how challenging his music is – "We're only just getting started!" (three pieces into the concert); "we have another tuning change, so go get yourself a drink – you may need it".

Well, that's one down on my list of obligations. I see four upcoming Rhys Chatham concerts in the NY area – will I manage to get to one? That would be after, not 37 years, but let's be honest, more like 47. Rhys was my classmate at the Third Street Music School back around 1969 or so. Our teacher, Tom Manoff, kept close tabs on the new music scene, and took the class to visit Morton Subotnick's studio, where he demonstrated an early Buchla synthesizer. Manoff was the first person to encourage me to compose music. I don't recall seeing Rhys again after a went to college and left the Third Street settlement. I should pay him a visit.

(P.S. - Why no pictures or video clips? They were recording the concert and asked us not to take any pictures.)

Wait Watcher: Foos, Talese and the Voyeur's Motel

Judged by the timeliness of my posts this hardly even counts as a blog. On the other hand, if something is not worth talking about two months after it was current it was probably never worth talking about in the first place. With that in mind, I turn to Gay Talese's provocative article in the April 11 New Yorker entitled "The Voyeur's Motel".

Talese describes a relationship he developed with a man in Colorado whose voyeuristic inclinations were so overpowering that he went to the length of buying a motel and outfitting the ceilings of the guest rooms with customized gratings that allowed him, from an attic runway constructed with equal care, to view his guests in their bedrooms and bathrooms without their knowledge. It is not the first time we have heard this sort of thing - I recall a guy who was eventually caught after installing two-way mirrors in his guest rooms - but Talese's subject, by the name of Gerald Foos, adds some interesting twists. 

Probably the most shocking is that his first and second wives were complicit in his activities, though neither one had more than a passing interest if any in voyeurism herself; indeed, the first wife helped him by acting as a subject and assistant to ensure both accurate placement of the gratings and his careful concealment behind them. Both apparently had sex with him regularly, unperturbed by his obsessive voyeurism. Another twist is that he not only kept this habit up for 15 years, but took copious notes, including what one might generously call philosophical, or at least sociological, reflections on what he was observing. (It sounds like masturbation was the first order of priority, though, with the notes "reflected in tranquility", if I may.) And the last is that he reached out to Talese and invited him out to the motel, shared his activities with him, sent him copies of what he had written and finally released him from any obligation to keep it private - brave stuff for a guy who spied on his paying guests for a decade and a half.

I have no intention of repeating the rest of the details here; by all means read the New Yorker piece, or Talese's new book from which it is excerpted, if you are interested (curious, excited, disgusted, outraged...) Quite a few people have commented on the ethics of Talese's lengthy relationship with Foos and his decision not to expose him to the police. That's all fair game but not my concern here. What I want to discuss is what Talese makes of all this, and what he doesn't. In the article, at least, it seems to me that he makes some great observations but avoids judgment on the deepest moral issues of the situation.

He does hit the psychological nail on the head a couple of times. One is the following general characterization of voyeurism: "A voyeur is motivated by anticipation; he invests endless hours in the hope of seeing what he wishes to see. Yet for every erotic episode he witnesses he is also privy to hundreds of mundane moments representing the ordinary daily routines..." Anyone who has been in a situation where there was an expectation of some discreet, sexually titillating experience of neighborly nudity, knows that this is exactly how it is: you wait, and wait, maybe staring at a dark window hoping a light will come on, or a lighted window hoping your subject will enter the frame, and if they do, you then wait, and wait, and wait as they do stuff around the house, entertain guests, or whatever, until something either happens, perhaps so quickly that you can rub your blurry eyes and miss it, or the light goes out and you just completely wasted a good chunk of time. 

Talese captures this feeling so well you can't help but wonder if learning about it really required studying Gerald Foos. Most guys have been there, by pressure if not by choice. Early in my first semester at college (I was 16 at the time) some guy talk over dinner turned to the matter of a very impressive young woman on the female side of the dormitory, and one of the group announced that she regularly disrobed with her curtains open right across the courtyard from his window, where he and his friends took in the show. Several of us were invited to participate in the viewing that evening. Unfortunately or not, depending on which side of the window you were on, no such performance took place on that occasion. 

Most men don't seek this stuff out in the obsessive manner of Gerald Foos, or buy a telescope like Dudley Moore in 10 - but then again, I knew a fellow, a co-worker at my first computer programming job, whose window faced the monumental apartment buildings across the Hudson in Jersey City, and who not only told me that he bought an excellent telescope for exactly this reason, but assured me that his attractive Filipino wife tolerated and occasionally participated in his astronomical pursuits. In any case, there are few innocents at this sport among men who have lived in an urban or college environment, and anyone who has allowed himself (or herself) to get particularly entranced with a certain subject can surely attest that there is no greater threat to human accomplishment than the time wasted waiting for some skin or lingerie to be revealed. One can only imagine what it must have been like for Foos, hour after dusty hour up in the attic, day in day out, hoping that some woman or couple, preferably not too unattractive, would put on a show, above the sheets, with the lights on. Adding up all the juicy moments he did observe might sound like grounds for some perverse jealousy, until you divide it into the hours he spent waiting, or the number of disappointments, which should have us thanking our lucky stars that we never found a motel to buy.

The other great observation Talese makes follows from this. He says of Foos's journal, "The more I read, the more convinced I became that Foos's stilted metaphysics were his way of attempting to elevate his disturbing pastime into something of value." That says a lot more than might appear at first glance. The voyeur is torn by two passions: the desire to make something of himself, and the obsession with watching others. In fact they are more or less the same thing: the creative impulse is there in the naughty act of getting some kind of sensual gratification with minimal effort, a vicarious sex act without all the preliminary engagement that having sex usually involves. The voyeur locates himself outside the social world, looking at it, judging it, using it, and that impulse could equally be the pose of an artist or writer. In fact that is precisely what an artist is, a voyeur of other lives, only not of a strictly sexual sort. The voyeur's entire creative impulse has been hijacked by one of its components, the sexual one, and he struggles with that and tries to do what he can to even it out. Foos is brilliant in a slightly cockamamie way, for he has managed to close the gap - by his own less than perfect logic - between the time-wasting, energy-sapping, often demoralizing pursuit that he is literally addicted to, and the true Foos that he believes is inside: the astute observer of humanity, the writer with original thoughts on the human condition. 

By my lights, Talese gets high marks for these insights. Foos, too, gets high marks, in a way, for the occasional honest reflections that Talese reports him making. After numerous clandestine observations of dishonest and degrading activity by his guests he begins to refer to himself as a "futilitarian" - the word put me in mind of the aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick rather than British moral theory, not because Kubrick once famously depicted a deranged hotel manager, but because in film after film he offers glimpses of a human psyche that mounts a tremendous, but ultimately futile struggle against its own fatal flaws. Elsewhere Talese quotes Foos referring to voyeurs as "cripples" who are "flawed and imperfect" (as writers too, apparently). Foos may be slimy but he is neither stupid nor entirely deluded about himself, and that is part of what makes him an object of interest for Talese, and for us.

But apart from the interesting psychology and neo-Victorian titillation of the story there are moral issues that Talese is somewhat reserved about confronting. Foos makes it clear that he does not think his spying is morally depraved, and he has arguments to back this up. The arguments are essentially: (1) nobody can be considered harmed if they never know they are harmed; (2) there is no other way to acquire untarnished sociological data on human nature and sexuality, for letting your subjects know they are subjects would alter their behavior, and the purer data is valuable in itself; and (3) given the extent of government and corporate surveillance in society today, there is no one with the moral authority to criticize his extremely limited and petty form of surveillance. I have reformulated these theses a bit, but I believe they represent the key points of Foos's defense of his behavior as reported by Talese. There are also strong suggestions that Foos thinks most people are bigger slimebuckets than he is and don't deserve his respect, but this is an indefensible general judgment and not really a claim worth considering.

What to make of these claims? Talese does not really engage with them, at least not by way of assessing their value as arguments; but they point in the direction of fairly fundamental moral issues. Let's take them one at a time.

The easiest to deal with, I think, is the second point. There are ethical standards for conducting scientific research, and to accept Foos's view would mean jettisoning some of them wholesale. That in itself doesn't prove anything, but the consequences can be ramified. The suggestion is that it is okay to conduct research on human subjects without their knowledge or consent if it is the best way to do it and may have benefits. Suppose we want to test a new drug that we know has a negligible effect on the vast majority of people - let's say it turns one hair on their heads a slightly lighter shade of their actual hair color - but where that effect can give us important information about its use in curing an insidious disease. Let's also say that people who know they are being given the drug immediately develop resistance to it. May we dose some unaware members of the population at large with the drug? It seems obvious that we are not allowed to do that, for many different reasons. One is that we can't be sure that there won't be a few people who have severe allergic reactions to the drug; just as Foos can't guarantee that he won't slip, causing one of his guests to become aware that they have been viewed, whereupon they might suffer severe psychological harm at this knowledge. There is virtually no personally invasive act that can be guaranteed never to have consequences, so we cannot utilize subjects in this way even if we intend to cause them no harm. Kant says that we cannot use people as means to our ends no matter how great the benefits, for to do so is to devalue one of the things that defines them as human beings: their ability to exercise free will. That is a thought worth pondering whenever one is tempted to minimize the damage done to others by using them in ways they would not choose to be used.

This point has some relevance to a broader debate in another context: the use of aggregate Internet usage data for commercial or security purposes without the consent of those whose actions are being accumulated. Even if individuals cannot be identified from the data, there is no getting around the fact that it is specific actions we have taken, many of which we would not choose to share if asked, that are the source of the aggregate facts. There is something very disturbing about knowing that someone - via some software robot - is gathering information on your buying habits, Google searches, Facebook posts and the like, and either selling it to others for marketing purposes or mining its security value. We want to have a say even in this remote and apparently harmless practice because it just seems wrong that anyone can track the actions of ordinary people and use the results for their own purposes. We want to be the judges of whether our actions should be collected, categorized and cross-referenced, not Google and certainly not the likes of Gerald Foos.

So I think the research excuse goes out the door pretty swiftly. What about the  surveillance argument? If everyone does it, who is going to throw the first stone? Well, I have just more or less committed myself to the idea that Foos's "research" is on the same unsound moral ground as Internet surveillance, so clearly I think there is a relationship there. But what of the fact that civil society permits this surveillance to go on, and the government and private entities actually do it, so no one has the moral standing to call what Foos was doing "wrong"? This point is valid, but it doesn't make his activities any better, it simply means that we have failed to correct the larger social problem. Ask yourself: would we consider the government better or worse if it simply threw up its hands and overlooked invasions of privacy in every form after recognizing its own transgressions? The answer is obvious, and points to a fact that the clever but not bright Foos overlooks: that he is a kind of predator, and we always want to be protected from predators, regardless of what other faults there may be with the executive function of government. 

This point stands even if we make more allowance than we probably should for Foos's alleged "research". Let's say his research amounts to something of value; that doesn't change the predatory nature of his behavior. Keep in mind that jerking off came first - he even claimed to have sex with his wife in his attic perch, turned on I guess by what he had seen that night. One seriously doubts that he would have created this attic of iniquity if he had for some reason been unable to receive sexual gratification and only conduct his putative sociological observations. Voyeurs do not deserve to be categorized with rapists, child molesters or other sexual offenders who directly take hold of the bodies of their victims, but they are predators of a sort, who know they are (often, at least) taking advantage of subjects in a way they would not consent to. Back to Kant, someone I suspect Foos never read (or at least understood).

That leaves the victimless crime argument. Here we get into some nasty tangles. Can someone be called a victim if they never know they are a victim? Can someone be said to have been "harmed" if they did not suffer in any way whatsoever? Let's say someone breaks into your house while you are gone, but does it so carefully that they leave no trace, take nothing from you, and leave before you get back. Can we say they harmed you? Assume you live in remote woods where there are no neighbors to see these breakins. Now let's say they happen every day of your life and you never notice a single thing - have you been harmed? 

This is a little like such "metaphysical" questions as "If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it does it make a noise?" and "Isn't it possible that the universe disappears for a split second while you are asleep and comes back exactly as it was?" It's the knowledge issue: to what extent does our judgment of what is depend on our understanding of what we can know? Aristotle asked if it was possible to harm the dead. Most people don't worry about such things, but Gerald Foos and his ilk force us to consider these sorts of questions.

I will admit that my response to this argument is somewhat colored by my response to another issue of sexual ethics, specifically the issue of child pornography. As disgusted as I am that it even exists, I do not feel that viewing it should be a crime, nor even downloading it or possessing it except with intent to sell or distribute it. I have a serious problem with the notion that the mere exercise of one's sense faculties should be a crime under virtually any circumstances. You can perhaps point to viewing classified information as a counterexample, but once I again I would say, if the person has done nothing to facilitate or abet the release of such information, but just, for instance, went to some ordinary location where they had heard that such information would be available, they are guilty of no morally reprehensible act. People who create or in any way abet the creation or distribution of child pornography should face severe penalties, but people who do nothing but view it - especially online, where the practical obstacles to receiving it may be minimal - should at worst be referred for counseling.

The question for me is, what is Gerald Foos guilty of other than observing what was readily available to his senses? Certainly he was not merely opening his eyes, and allowing them to remain open as a person disrobed in his visual field. Foos created these opportunities, but what does that mean, exactly? If I happen to know that a woman regularly disrobes in front of a remote open window that is viewable from a certain angle, and I place myself there at the right time to catch a view of her, I am also creating an opportunity. What have I done wrong, exactly? Here you could say that I took advantage of the trust, built into our every day lives, that people will not go out of their way to create opportunities that involve utilizing us for their own ends. The situation is perhaps something like stealing someone's identity for a purpose that does not directly harm them financially, but entangles their personhood in something they would most likely not do if asked. Now what about Foos? He went well beyond standing in front of a window. Actually he apparently started out doing just that. (You can read the lurid details in Talese's article.) But how does his motel operation differ from that?

As I see it, the motel operation involves a similar kind of betrayal of unspoken trust, but also something even more objectionable: it involves an intent to deceive. Foos carefully constructed his viewing opportunities in such a way as to ensure that the grating in the ceiling would deceive his guests into assuming that they were simply air control ducts. He adjusted them to hide his presence, and designed the attic to keep his activities secret, all the while expecting guests to walk innocently into his lair. In handing them the keys to their rooms he conveyed an unwritten code that they would experience a certain level of privacy common to such situations, all the while knowing that they would be maximally exposed. 

This is a little like handing in a plagiarized term paper or dissertation: you actively take advantage of the code of trust (which may or may not be explicit) that this is your own work in order to get something that the other person in the transaction would not otherwise give you. It is also a bit like undisclosed corporate surveillance of office workers - keystroke counters, hidden cameras and the like. But it is not like federal surveillance of suspects for whom we have strong evidence that they may be committing crimes. This is a mistake Foos makes, perhaps a result of his experiences seeing or hearing guests do things that might throw questions on their own integrity. There may be no angels among us, but it is a fundamental tenet of a democratic society that no one can be subjected to such invasions of privacy on the basis of something like Foos's "futilitarianism". Even disregarding legal restrictions on warrants and the like, without a reason to believe that a particular individual is violating your trust you have no legitimate reason to invade their privacy. 

Foos betrayed and deceived his guests, violating the norms of society that operate in these situations, but did not refrain from charging them a fee for providing him with an opportunity to fulfill his urges and fantasies. In the big picture, they paid him for the possibility of maintaining the palace of perversion in which they were abused. What he should have done is open a motel for exhibitionists and announce to them at the outset that they would be watched, perhaps receiving some money from those who sought out such situations and offering a reasonable sum to those who might otherwise be reluctant. This might not have made him enough money to maintain the operation, but that's life.

So I have answered the third question indirectly, because I think we have to accept the idea that the notion of "harm" should be restricted to injuries that have a material effect on us, which usually means we have to be aware of them directly or indirectly, immediately or in the future. That is not the case when someone is merely watched, without further consequences. But betrayal is not limited to "harm" and carries its own moral weight. No one can be called innocent for having an affair that their spouse never finds out about, at least if the spouse would feel betrayed had it become known to them. Thus there are moral standards where the bar is lower than that of causing "harm". And in most of those cases, we as a society know what Foos's subjects may not personally know: that if we let things like this go by, we are all in danger of become the sorts of victims that Foos's guests became.