The Curdled Master

A musician recently died, and there is testimonial after testimonial about how he was the kindest, most wonderful person.

I've read a number of books about spies. Their trade secret is homework. Every action that seems to go right with a mere shrug is made possible by unimaginable hours of unseen preparation, backup preparation, and backup-backup preparation. A spy's edge over the rest of us is that they're willing to do that work, and we never expect it because we imagine we live in a world where people aren't capable of it.

This musician went so far out of his way to wrong me on multiple occasions that it defied all expectation. He "put in the work" whenever our paths crossed.

Was I rude to him? Did I steal work from him? Had I wronged a friend of his? Nope. My sin was that I was overly familiar and friendly with him once on a gig a very long time ago. I'd spoken to him with an easy camaraderie that he didn't believe I'd earned. That's it. Yep, that small. I noted his reaction immediately, an experience I haven't had before or since. There was a contemptuously curdled sneer that didn't appear on his face. It filled the room. His capacity for sour contempt was.....enormous. It was scored like a movie scene. It came with cellos.

I wasn't actually important to him, strangely enough. At all. A mere blip on his screen, so his efforts against me weren't constantly ongoing. But whenever I appeared on his radar, he'd get busy. I think he was a guy constantly on the lookout for radar blips.

I don't know how many blips he tracked, but I've observed, at a distance, several others. And I know for a fact that even one of his peers/friends saw him clearly. That musician (let's call him "Seth", not his real name) is a solemn part of the chorus of Facebook eulogizers. While Seth was never tortured by the guy (because he holds a prominent position in the business, so this guy was obliged to kiss up to him, not kick down), I once quietly complained about him to Seth, who rolled his eyes in displeasure at the sound of the name. So at least one knew....but kept it quiet.

I'm not uttering his name, you'll notice, and I'm no shrinking violet. Some people exercise an uncanny level of control. A guy who can curdle the whole room is someone you innately know not to mess with. Even after he's gone.

He taught me that there are predators moving among us, managing not to be recognized or explicitly acknowledged despite their egregious behavior. It's a horrifying thought, but at least today there is one less of them.


Sidebar
The above is, I think/hope, interesting even for non-musicians. And it's intended as a stand-alone. But I can't resist adding, as a sidebar mostly for any musicians reading along, this extra bit of color:

Truth is, there are plenty of awful, nasty-assed musicians near the top of the food chain in NYC. More garden-variety assholes, without the supernatural predatory component. I always tried to steer clear — easy enough, since Broadway pits and Nestle's Quick jingles were never my targets, even though that's where the money is.

As I sold my web site, which had grown beyond all intention, to a silicon valley corporation, I ran across all sorts of Silicon Valley characters. Guys with $100 million in the bank, who do enormous deals and drive super cars. Guys people have heard of. Guys so powerful that they can afford to be super-friendly and cool 100% of the time, because if they don't like something about you, they can simply eat you....and, as they do, they'd never stop grinning. Everything goes their way! Life's so great! :)

See the tale of Vrtra within the larger story of my sale of Chowhound.com

They each had reason to bully me or lie to me, because, for a cosmic five seconds I'd appeared on their radar because community web sites were the rage among the Big Boys and I had the most prominent food one. From one perspective, I briefly joined their league. But from a more realistic perspective, I'd become chum in their water, and thus imperiled. Just because they value you, or even "like" you, doesn't mean they want to do well by you. I, after all, love chickens and potatoes.

I got through it and receded back into obscurity. And while I never really got back into the music scene, I did briefly brush by a couple of the old music biz assholes, smelling their distinctive musk and remembering how they act — their malevolent gangster ways, hypercompetitiveness, and lavish self-importance — and it just made me laugh and laugh. Which was not what I expected.

Remember "Lil Archies"? The comic books where Archie, Jughead, Veronica, etc., are all 1/4 size because they're little kids? The music gangsters looked like "Lil Gangsters", and they just seemed absolutely ADORABLE. I wanted to pet them like bunny rabbits.

Why Everyone Seems Irrational

Every single person I've ever met is dumbfounded by the enormous irrationality of other people....even as they themselves are obviously irrational much of the time.

It stems from each of us feeling robustly capable from our experience operating in some narrow realm with clarity and competence. We feel comfortable forgiving our failings outside that realm. An otherwise competent person is naturally prone to err a bit, so it's forgivable!

It only feels like "a bit", of course, because the 98% of life outside our remote islands of competence and clarity feels like a junk drawer. Our self-image remains intact, so self-forgiveness is generous.

And we most often see others outside their remote islands of competence and clarity — especially on social media, hurling confident nonsense about politics, epidemiology, international relations, economics, etc.. We disregard their narrowly-earned self-respect as they rave on, aware only of the raving itself. And we do not share their inclination to forgive it.

Random interactions most often catch others outside their expertise. And we have more discretionary time than ever to pay attention, and to judge. We also have far more time to wander outside our own corridors of rationality.

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I hired a really expert retired auto mechanic as a handyman once. He had no experience with home improvement, but he felt that nothing could come up that would be harder or more complex than his previous experience, so he felt qualified to do anything mechanical. He then proceeded to pretty much wreck my house.

Reverse Engineering Intellectual Humility From Fruit Selection

Choosing oranges is easy. Heavy = good, light = bad. Heavy is juicy. Light is dry. Water weighs more than dry pulp. Duh!

Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform this check. They poke, inspect, admire color, avoid blemishes, compare shapes. Even in Portugal, where oranges are everywhere, I watch shoppers deplete the various bins evenly, even if one contains noticeably heavier fruit.

How can anything so obvious remain so utterly invisible?

Even stranger: it took me six decades to see it, myself.

We should be trained by now. We choose heavy oranges and are sensually REWARDED. We choose light ones and are PUNISHED. Even mice can be trained. Why not us?

The orange trick is like a spooky invitation from an invisible dimension to consider what else we're missing.

It feels like we've nearly filled in the map of knowledge, so at this mature stage we are simply adding minor details to First Principles which feel like solid bedrock. But what if the "unknown unknowns" are far, far more numerous than we imagine?

We never knew we were walking around unable to choose oranges. No one knows the orange trick until they're told, so the rest don't perceive a gap. In our ignorance, we feel reasonably whole. What if, despite our blithe confidence, it's a landscape of gaps, and we never notice because the thing about gaps is that there's nothing there?

Is it possible that we have not, in fact, done anything like filling a map? Have we, instead, been plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched? Missed truth, leaving no evidence, can't be weighed. And yet we imagine — both as individuals and as a species — that we have some real sense of "where we're at.”

As a side note, even those spindly lines — our proud "First Principles" — might not be broadly foundational, after all. What if our First Principles are nothing but a tentative first try? Maybe our "First Principles" are more in the sense of First Batch of Pancakes? Idunno, I'm just asking questions.

Recognitions of missed truth do tend to accumulate in daily life, don't they? And if we're intellectually honest and not comically over-proud of human accomplishment, we might wonder whether the total mass of overlooked a priori "duhs" — the myriad latent epiphanies — might titanically outweigh everything we've figured out from a few centuries of plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched.

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I have not devised some brilliant new orange choosing system. I have simply pointed out the obvious. So obvious that one absorbs it without a sense of prior absence. My point here is that there are many widely-know things no one knows.

Let's call them A Priori wormholes. Latently obvious insights that remain utterly invisible until they suddenly become boringly inevitable. Assimilation erases subjective evidence that they were ever missing.

Cosplay in Oppositeland

Truly competent people embrace challenge and correction. They never assume they've got the best or the only solution, and this makes them good managers and leaders.

Incompetent people despise challenge or correction. Whatever solution pops into their head is instantly canonized. It's not just stubborn vanity and over-self-confidence. They’ve mistaken the performance of leadership for leadership itself.

There is a clear but underrecognized pattern in the human world: Every loud THIS is a compensation for some uncomfortable THAT. So as one gains experience, this gradually begins to feel like Oppositeland:

Selfish people feel overly generous, while generous people feel overly selfish.

You can be smart or you can feel smart, but never both.

Super patriots have a magnetic attraction for tyrants.

Bullies become bullies because they're terrified.

Machos act macho because they're sexually insecure.

Smiley people can be the most vindictive.

Pomposity and arrogance are hallmarks of the dimwitted.

The most artsy-seeming people are almost never the most creative.

Flamboyantly aggrieved victims are usually coddled aristocrats.

Homophobes seldom recognize that straight people usually don't spend much time thinking about gay people.

And people never seem so low-class as when they try to act high-class.

It's mostly about the pose. The peformance. Let's try flipping the framing and see if the point settles more clearly:

Secure heterosexuals don’t try to act flamboyantly heterosexual.

Secure non-racists don’t try to act flamboyantly anti-racist.

Kind people don't plaster on flamboyant smile masks.

Genuine people don’t flamboyantly project genuineness.

Honest people don’t flamboyantly project honesty.

Smart people don’t flamboyantly project intelligence.

Helpful people don't flamboyantly offer to be helpful.

And great singers became singers because they wanted to sing, not because they wanted to be singers.


See also "Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You"

Dylan on Aging

Bob Dylan squeezed gobs of mileage out of his poetic license. He was so palpably gleeful to let listeners Rorschach his lyrics that he could come off like Exhibit A of the old slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

But I must concede that some of his thin, vague images — like "the answer blowing in the wind" — do stick with a person. Useful framings are made more accessible. And that's a high aim of art, so I oughtn't complain.

A new NY Times interview upon Dylan's 85th birthday shows that he remains gratuitously ellipitcal, but the points he's slipperily encircling seem more fully-formed. Even, shockingly, kind of sharp.

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

The Needlessness of Kübler-Ross

Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable. So maybe the problem is in the red lines we draw.

If you sit with this realization, and apply it as you go forward, you may find that you no longer need to laboriously struggle through every one of the Kübler-Ross levels to reach acceptance. You might find that you can perfectly well accept on the fly.

The thing to bear closely in mind is that acceptance is not approval. As a society, we've lost the ability to make that distinction. Acceptance doesn't mean a lovely day. Acceptance doesn't mean being totally cool with it. Acceptance just means opting out of performing theatrical resistance to the inevitable.


Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." - Anthony de Mello

A Realm of Skinner Boxes

A friend asked me the meaning of life. Here was my answer. I also threw in God, as an extra:

Skinner boxes.

You know, those lab experiments where you offer a chicken a red button that produces treats and a blue button that produces punishments. The chicken slowly learns.

That's what this is. A realm of Skinner boxes.

The world is nothing but Skinner boxes, though we don't frame things that way, because it's like trying to get a fish to understand water, which to a fish is just EVERYTHING, so it's essentially invisible.

This immediately explains an enduring mystery: Why do we jade?

The moment someone gets what he wanted — his dream come true! — it's only a matter of time before his joy fades into colicky sourness and he pines for some other thing; dreaming some other dream. Most billionaires never stop wanting more money. Most people with extremely attractive partners never stop seeking other partners. Etc., etc., ad infinitum.

It's not because aspiration is the wind beneath our wings, nor is it because we're spoiled children. The counterintuitive truth is that we're right to quickly turn tepid, because the rewards are never so great.

The unrecognized truth of Skinner boxes is that while they are surefire ways to fire up enthusiasm, they are, by their nature, pretty meh. Pretty "mid". The rewards aren't so great. They're mere trinkets.

And the punishments aren't so bad, either. Mostly propositional, often a matter of "standing". Abstract score-keeping. Fluffy stuff, as punishment goes. That's why we're sloppy and incautious, and even self-destructive. Of course, the other players, watching along, are horrified to see Hugh declining to PUSH THE RED BUTTON! Earn your PELLET, Hugh!!!!! C'mon!!!!!

What's wrong with that guy?

Lots of mental health problems strike me as flailing responses to a dawning recognition of this predicament. Depressives find it all tedious and dreary (which it kind of is). The anxious over-dramatize their win/lose stakes (which seems natural). Manic-depressives dive in way too deep on both ends (understandable). Addicts desperately seek something to cling to for a sense of dependable constancy while riding this crazy-making happy/sad, good/bad machine (who can blame them?). And psychopaths shortcut to reward by disregarding or manipulating anyone in their way. Given how encouraged we are to give winning all we've got, you could make a case that psyhopaths are the ultimate players. To them, we all look like Hugh, needlessly leaving money on the table.

Let's consider addicts a bit more. They're trying to do something sensible: to find something to hold on for a sense of level constancy as they careen through the ups and downs. It might be healthy if they'd chosen something less harmful than drugs, alcohol, shopping, gambling, etc. In fact, this explains the basis of Alcoholics Anonymous, which proposes swapping in a less malign stability. A "higher power." "God".

You needn't visualize some bearded dude on a cloud. A far less specific stability point can suffice. In fact, the mere intimation that there might be something behind the omnipresent Skinner Boxes is extremely helpful. One can be restored and stabilized by a mere ray of hope that that's not all there is. So it scarcely matters what attributes you assign to that other realm.

It needen't be a fleshed-out scenario of angels and clouds and virgins. Just some silence beyond the game; some spaciousness amid the pressure. Any shift of attention away from the reward/punishment cyclotron represents Liberation. And that's the gateway to beauty and love and happiness and all the good stuff (way better than trinkets) lying close at hand though we frame them as distant rewards we must paddle towards.

God is what's not Skinner Boxes.

Stability

Stability is manufactured calm.

Bifurcated Absurdity

Earlier this week, pretty much all of Portugal went on strike because the government was considering bad new labor regulations. The president had already promised to veto if it ever reached his desk, but the unions went on strike anyway just because the whole thing upset them terribly.

The country, which is poor and struggling, lost tons of commerce and tax income, and the people, who are just trying to hang on, were severely stressed. But the president cheered the action, saying it was essential for unions to “strongly express themselves.”

Conservative kooks make me want to start a vegan commune, but Liberal kooks make me want to don (no pun intended) a red hat. It's no wonder things are becoming so bifurcated; everyone is radicalizing in reaction to the "other" side's absurdity, which is actually quite symmetrical.

We don't have a "them" problem, we have an "us" problem seen through two distorted lenses.

Pretending You're Not Enlightened

Every one of us is enlightened, though most of us are remarkably committed to pretending not to be.


Throw it on the pile along with these.

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Spirituality is a subtractive process. It's not about attainment, accomplishment or enhancement. Quite the contrary, it's about dropping vast useless weight — posing, contriving, dramatizing, self-centering, and rote striving.

Once you've released your obsession with such exhausting ridiculousness, it feels great, but it's hard to take pride in the relief. Consider this, the very first joke I learned as a child:

Q: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?
A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

Zeno's Jazzy Xerox

When Scott Hamilton (a minor but well-respected player who's been in and out of the limelight for decades) entered to play the melody here (I've queued it up to the right point, but fyi it's 2'40"), I felt conflicting emotions.

First: NICE! Like, yeah, that's the feeling! That's the craft! No bullshit, just proper thickly-spread jazz tenor saxophone butter. Nice!

But then, as he kept going, it grew uncanny. I knew everything he was going to do. It was jazz butter, yes, but the pre-portioned Hotel Bar butter we've all experienced umpteen times with not one iota of surprisingness or spontaneity. Like taking the standard postcard shot of Mt. Rushmore, shamelessly gratifying expectations. Not really personal.

I mean, it sounds incredibly personal, though, because the first guy who first played like this was full of personality. But Hamilton's imitating that guy (Prez, or maybe more Ben Webster). Imitating uniqueness and simulating spontaneity.

Yet it feels great to me. Like a breath of fresh air.

Finally, I've figured out my ambivalence.

Hamilton is playing like a xerox copy. And in a world with few if any originals left, and also few Xerox copies, and where the xeroxes-of-xeroxes are leading lights and the xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes are acclaimed, and there is no shortage of xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes, a first generation Xerox copy feels like the *real thing*. Sweet authenticity!


Note that the problem is not just imitation, per se. It's framing.

See also my Open Letter to Jazz Musicians