LIVE RECORDINGS

It is often confusingly assumed that studio recordings (of classical music) are “more perfect” than recordings of live performances. I will agree with this assumption, but only as long my derisive use of the phrase “more perfect” has not been horribly mistaken for a synonym of “better.”

In fact, I find all studio recordings-- even the best of them-- demonstrably inferior to live recordings, where the presence of the audience is intensely felt, with its breathing, coughs, and sneezes, as well as its spontaneous reaction to the actual performance via applause, exclamations, and other emotional outbursts.

In my young years, I was raised on lterally live performances. For a while, I couldn’t even imagine listening to good music without being part of the audience. But there was an even better, aesthetical, reason to feel that way. I cannot imagine a musician of genius to be inspired by a studio recording. There is always something fake in “faking it” before a soulless mike. Just as a musical work of genius requires a performance of genius, to do it justice, so does the third ingredient in this wonderful recipe insist on being present. A live audience is, indeed, an absolute must, both for any performer’s artistic inspiration, and for the listener’s aesthetic appreciation.

…I am always so mad at the recorders of live performances for habitually cutting out much of the audience reaction to, and interaction with, the performance, and especially the essential part of the audience applause, which must be regarded as vital, just like the physiological necessity of respiration, for any living organism.

JULIUS FUCIK AND HIS MODERN-DAY JUDGES

Posted on September 8^th, 2013.

Dedicated to the 70^th anniversary of the tragic death of Julius Fucik, the Czech hero-martyr, fallen in the struggle against Nazi Germany in World War II, and celebrated as such for nearly half-a-century on that account, until in the post-Communist era he was disowned and vilified by his own, for the sole reason of having been a… communist!

The tragic case of the great Czech national hero Julius Fucik (1903-1943) serves as a cautionary tale in the annals of post-Communist history of Eastern Europe. An outstanding and fearless journalist, Fucik became a member of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia ever since its foundation in 1921. During the German occupation of his country, Fucik became an active member of the Resistance. In 1943 he was captured, tortured, and executed, his legendary status in post-war Socialist Czechoslovakia thus being eminently deserved. After 1991, however, his association with the Communist Party became a stigma, which posthumously removed him from the heroic pedestal, making his name anathema to the newest, “post-Communist” version of Czech history. Yet, he was a bona fide hero, and this act of blindness and prejudice on the part of the new Czech leaders is shameful and unpatriotic. For this reason, I have only disdain for these leaders, including their iconic wonder-hero the late Vaclav Havel. None of the Czech leaders who have been so base as to disavow their bona fide hero on such irrelevant and demonstrably prejudicial grounds deserve a place among those who had earned it without the obscene compulsion to build their glory on the disavowal of their nation’s best heroes of the past.

And in conclusion let me say this. Julius Fucik was a sincere and idealistic Communist who joined the Party when it was an “unpopular” and politically incorrect thing to do. Furthermore, he remained a Communist to the end, which in those years was virtually synonymous with being an antifascist. He could have saved his life by repudiating both of these allegiances, and the fact that he chose not to, speaks more to his credit than a million declarations of love to the newest twin idols of the free world: freedom and democracy, whatever these mean nowadays…

But today he is judged by a tribunal, consisting of those erstwhile “communists” who joined the Party when it was the most profitable and politically advantageous thing to do, but renounced their Party as soon as the political tide had turned against it. Let history be the supreme justice on this case, separating the real heroes from the fake ones, “gathering His wheat into the corner and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3:12).

THE MOTHER OF ALL FEARS

Solomon’s wisdom says: “All shall pass, this shall pass too.” It is so easy to infer from this that the “past” is some kind of safe haven, the peaceful grave of our present troubles and fears. But is that really so? Isn’t it more accurate to say that this allegedly peaceable grave is the actual source of all our worries and our fears? This entry addresses just this subject. Mind you, it concerns itself mainly with the philosophical dimension of fear.

On the question of fear, very few people ever experience the dread of the present moment. We must admit that finding ourselves in a situation of acute and horrific crisis, when people uncontrollably break into sweat and wet their pants, is an extremely rare situation, which is, of course, a category in itself. On the other hand, there is nothing more common among ordinary people than a state of fearfulness about something that has little or nothing to do with the present moment. (In other words, the present moment can never be a source of fear, as, finding ourselves within it, we usually act, and only very seldom contemplate or pass judgment on our situation, the latter valid only in retrospect.)

Also in a different category is the abstract fear of death. “Seeing that death--- a necessary end--- will come when it will come,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar puts it, the fear of death is a pathology, a mental disease, which, plain and simple, ought to be treated as such. Indeed, the fear of the unknown, of the unexperienced, just because it is an “unknown” and an “unexperienced,” is the most irrational of all fears as we do not even know whether this great unknown is a state of perpetual horror, perpetual bliss, or perpetual… nothing.

It is the fear of some future event, however, that constitutes the most common type of fear. Hence, the wise advice to the perpetually fearful is not to trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you…

Only nobody heeds this advice, for which reason it is easy to assume that the future is the real source of our fears. This is of course ridiculous, because the future is totally non-existent and unexperienced, and, having not taken place yet, it can indeed be a subject of a contemplation, but it cannot really be a source of anything at all.

In other words, the fear of the future is a fear of ghosts, a fake fear. In most cases (the exceptions are few), it has very little to do with practical reality, even though it surely feels the opposite.

Thus, the mother of all fears, literally speaking, can only be the past. That is, all fear is rooted in our past experience. The grave of all our worries and fears turns out to be not so peaceable, after all…

While all other fears get resolved this way or another, there is no resolution, no cure, no closure for the fear of the past. It is to stay with us for the rest of our lives.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE… PART II.

(This is Part II of 2. Part I was posted yesterday.)

…But whether our perspective is exoteric or esoteric, it is still a reflection of one and the same world above us, or below us, and thus, even though our creativity realizes itself in a variety of forms, there are still only two parallel lives in time, related to the horizontal axis of time proper, by their vertical correlation. A differently graphed multiplicity of lives can only be achieved by a multiplicity of the worlds themselves, from which we are escaping. And then, as our creativity starts reflecting the new world, as opposed to the old one, the meaning of ‘you only live twice’ changes dramatically, not just with reference to the difference of the worlds, but with reference to the life of our dream. As it happens, our dream is acquiring a different life and that gets both incredibly scary and incredibly exciting. It is exceedingly scary to coexist in our vertical lives, where the source of our happy reflection has suddenly changed, but the real excitement comes when we give up on the prospect of coexistence, transposing our whole life from the reality to the reflection.

To make myself better understood, I can offer the difference of what I have been describing (which, as the reader must have guessed, is a reference to my own life) from the normal life of a settler in the new world, who has uprooted himself from his old world. In this case, the same-level life in the new world becomes a potent substitute for the reflection, the settler’s old-world dream, and turns him into the regular member of the hoi polloi. I repeat: the reflection is no more, not exactly a Frau ohne Schatten, but, come to think of it, a lot of food for thought, which I advise the reader to ruminate on, before my answer to the riddle appears at the very end of this entry, quickly coming to its end anyway.

To be totally honest, the uniqueness of my excitement may not be sufficient value for the terribly high cost of it. Somewhere, previously, I compared myself to a very strange fish, which instead of going down to the bottom of its lake or leaping up into the air, to get back to its natural habitat, when the exploration is done, leaps over the lake’s bank on a journey of no return. The only reason, perhaps, that I am still alive is that I have now managed to separate myself thoroughly from the reality of my ‘new world,’ reuniting myself in a vivid reflection with my old world, and, as a result, turning all of myself into a 100% reflection: a “Schatte ohne Mann”…

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE… PART I.

(Having reread this entry about the exoteric and the esoteric, I have found it slightly esoteric, that is, in need of a serious simplification. However, any simplification will be ruinous to the splendid mystique of the interplay of Richard Strauss’s Frau ohne Schatten with my own Schatte ohne Mann. For this reason, I shall leave this entry as is.)

 “You only live twice: one life for yourself and one for your dreams,” as we have a chance to learn from the song in the eponymous 1967 James Bond movie. Ironically, in any creative activity, philosophy prominently included, we are indeed invited to live a second life where our dreams through the magic of putting them on paper, or on canvass, or into marble, or bronze, are transformed into solid reality, while never losing the ephemeral quality of a dream. There is an incredible charm in such a combination. Creators are very lucky people, indeed!…

There are two perspectives on living twice: synchronic and diachronic. We are living horizontally, in time, and vertically, in our “dream life.” Nietzsche, in the passage quoted below, contends that the philosopher’s perspective, be it exoteric or esoteric, is not horizontal but vertical, seeing things either from below or from above. Here is the passage itself:

(Jenseits 30): “The difference between the exoteric and esoteric, known to philosophers who believe in the order of rank, and not in equality and equal rights, does not so much consist in the exoteric coming from the outside, not the inside, but that it sees things from below, whereas the esoteric looks down from above. There are heights of the soul, from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic.”

Interestingly, and quite instructively, in both the philosophical and the psychological senses, the difference between the exoteric and esoteric seems to be horizontal for those who have experienced both perspectives in their lives. The exoteric may be called the ‘learning perspective.’ The learner, to his credit, much as the creator in later life, does not settle into the hoi polloi routine of identifying himself with the world, but he distances himself from it first in order to study it. (Let us not forget that he studies both the very best and the very worst of it, before becoming an accomplished creative philosopher.) In the capacity of the student, that makes the world the teacher, and it explains the exoteric perspective from below. Thereafter, having earned high grades, he graduates and can now afford the esoteric perspective, which is a higher, more sophisticated form of escapism from the vulgar plane, allowing the creation of the fiction of parallel reality, so strong and so powerful, that his life now acquires an independent existence in a world of wishful thinking of one’s own (“You only live twice: one life for yourself and one for your dreams,” sort of!), and, having thus acquired a comfortable and happy intellectual existence, one can finally enjoy the luxury of looking down, esoterically, on the world down below, and the only reason why even tragedy ceases to look tragic is that one no longer belongs below that world of tragedy, so the danger of the tragic collapsing on you and crushing you to death simply ceases to excite the corresponding emotion of fear…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

CHRONOLOGICAL REFERENCE LIST FOR THE HISTORY ENTRIES. PART IV.

(I have this ongoing list on my blog now, posted in installments, as the best way out of the serious predicament caused by sporadic postings of historical entries, to the detriment of chronological continuity.)

Three Bullets Pointblank.. Beria, Khrushchev. 1953. Posted on August 23-25, 2013.

Khrushchev And Stalin As Opposites. Stalin, Khrushchev. 1922-1964. Posted on March 5, 2011.

The Man Who Destroyed The Soviet Union. Khrushchev. 1953-1964. Posted on January 26, 2011.

Politics And “Marshal” Arts. Khrushchev. 1953-1964. Posted on October 17-18, 2011.

An Awkward Dance: My Father And Khrushchev. Khrushchev, General Artem. 1953-1964. Posted on August 26-27, 2013.

Vanechka! An American Victory In Russia. Khrushchev, Van Cliburn. 1958. Posted on March 19, 2011.

The Mystery Of The Berlin Wall. Khrushchev. 1961. Posted on August 13, 2011.

What Do You Know! A Postscript To The Berlin Wall. Khrushchev, Adenauer. 1961. Posted on August 17, 2011.

“Comrade Ché.” Ché Guevara. 1959-1967. Posted on August 28, 2013.

Cuba: Khrushchev’s Dangerous Windfall. Khrushchev, Artem, Fidel And Raul Castro. 1958-1962. Posted on October 20, 2011.

An Inspired Idiocy: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev, Fidel And Raul Castro. 1962. Posted on October 22, 2011.

Götterdämmerung. Khrushchev, JFK. 1963-1964. Posted on October 23, 2011.

Expecto Patronum: Kisunko And Basistov. Kisunko, Basistov. 1959-1980. Posted on August 29, 2013.

Filling In The Blank. Brezhnev. 1964-1982. Posted on January 26, 2011.

Kissinger: A Superman And A Scholar. Kissinger. 1969-1977. Posted on August 30, 2013.

Deep Throat. Kissinger. 1972-1974. Posted on August 31, 2013.

Quo Vadis, Gorbachev? Gorbachev. 1985. Published in Marin Independent Journal in two parts on August 14 and 21, 1987.

Ubi Venisti, Gorbachev? Gorbachev. 1985-1991. Posted on January 26, 2011.

History And Propaganda: Bush-41 And The Three Drunks. Bush-41. 1989-1991. Posted on February 28, 2013.

Russian Democrat American Style. Yeltsin. 1991-1999. Posted on January 26, 2011.

Julius Fucik And His Modern-Day Judges. Fucik. 1903-1943, 1989---. To be posted on September 8, 2013.

The Best And The Brightest. Putin. 2000---. Posted on January 26, 2011.

WHO MAKES HISTORY?

The decisive role of the masses in history has been emphasized, frequently, totally out of proportion, by a great number of philosophers, and an even greater number of philosophies. (I trust to be forgiven this little hyperbole as soon as the intent of my paradox has been clarified, which is to suggest that certain schools of thought, especially in the field of social activism, contain no philosophers within their ranks.)

My own Soviet background has put the works of one particular philosopher, and one among the greatest, I dare say, into sharp focus. Not that I have ever been a Marxist myself, but Soviet preoccupation with Karl Marx had made his figure quite conspicuous in my eyes (unfortunately, as my ‘counterbalancing’ reaction to Soviet propaganda, I used to underestimate the historical and philosophical significance of Marxism in the wide variety of its aspects, and only now, completely removed from the Soviet society, having plunged into the cold waters of my new life (waters that had felt so deceptively warm from a distance!) I can give it its due (which, again, is the subject of my several other entries, articles, and, perhaps, a whole book, or one of the main sections of my booklet Capitalism And Christianity).

In this case, now, I do not particularly agree with Marx, but I am grateful to him for bringing up this subject, and thus setting up the parameters of a most instructive debate. So, who makes history?

In my judgment, it is not the masses who make history, changing its course in most radical ways, but their populist leaders, their ‘führers,’ who hit upon the most effective way of taking control of the masses. In this sense, the revolutionary significance of Marxism is not in discovering some new objective laws, governing the evolution of human society, but in providing a marvelous how-to guide to aspiring revolutionary minds.

In this regard, what would then be the proper role of the masses in history? No one has put it better than my indispensable Nietzsche in his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 9:

“History from the standpoint of the masses? The masses seem to me worthy of notice in three respects only: first, as blurred copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates, further, as resistance to the great, and finally, as the tools of the great; beyond that, may the devil and statistics take them!”

...Curiously, it was precisely in the role of the tools of great men that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin saw the masses. Hence, his doctrine of the Party as the leader of the masses. It goes without saying that the Party itself cannot function without a tightly centralized chain of command, that is, without its own leader, and Lenin naturally saw himself as that leader…

…They say that the Leader Principle was invented by the Russia-born German Graf Hermann von Keyserling (1880-1946), who gave it to Hitler. I say that this principle may have been preexistent since the dawn of history, but Lenin must have passed it on to the honorable Graf…

No further comment needs to be made after such a salvo of powerful pronouncements, except to say Amen to them all, and to my whole History section as well. At least, until the next time when I shall revisit it for the purpose of accretion and/or revision.