Lost Knowledge

I've always been fascinated by the field of lost knowledge.

We don't know how the Stradivarius family made their fiddles sound so good. More broadly speaking, we've lost that entire era's know-how for this. And we likely will never get it back. No professional classical violinist that I know of plays a modern violin. It's amazing (and humbling) if you'll think about it.

Highly influential philosophers and historians are mentioned in Ancient Greek and Roman texts for whom nary a word survives.

My elderly Swedish friend Sten-Åke lived in a cool apartment aboard the historical tall ship docked at South Street Seaport because he was the only man alive who knew how to tie all the knots.

There are more such losses than you'd imagine. In fact, you could even question the the normally firm assumption that technology improvement has been a straight upward arrow (you can also take this too far the other way, believing that early civilizations with sophisticated tech have vanished into the dustheap ("All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again").

There are so many such points of loss, all the time, that each of us may serve as a final repository of some doomed know-how. I don't mean your knowledge of how Aunt Ethel liked her eggs. I mean significant points of fact. We don't realize we carry such information due to normalcy bias.

Opposing some people's visceral notion that EVERYTHING is significant, the vast majority of us are inclined to deem NOTHING significant (among other things, this accounts for my claim that "If Pablo Picasso grew up in Akron, Ohio, he'd have been considered one of the best painters in Summit County"). We naturally compress extremes, which makes us miss bona fide significance.

Here are two points of nearly lost knowledge I happen to steward.

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In the early 90s, I helped run a few forums on Compuserve, a dial-in computer networking service. And because this wasn't the loosey-goosey Web, where everything can be faked and stats are all approximated, every last click and action were logged; ascribable to one certain user. We forum admins reaped interesting and useful data, like the ratio of posters to mute lurkers.

It always came out to something like one or two hundred to one. So .5 - 1% of regular forum members post something. I believe this metric held true through my reign at Chowhound, and remains accurate to this day. You can spot evidence by comparing YouTube viewing stats to commenting stats (though YouTube is, of course, a different animal; certain types of videos provoke far more or less comments). My informed speculation is that 10% of users like/rate/favorite, and 10% of them comment/contribute/post. And while every forum manager has a loose feeling for this, virtually none of them started from the solid ground of a service like Compuserve, offering data which today's admins could only dream of (even with the modern assistance of cookies, trackers, log-ons, etc).

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We've lost a tempo. It's called "loping" (pronounced "lopin'") and I'll go out on a limb and claim that no jazz musician under the age of 80 knows the term. Loping is between a draggy slow tempo and a medium walking tempo. Not quite walkin', not quite draggin'. Lopin'!

Tempos can't be meaningfully ascribed to metronome markings. A tempo is also a feel. An environment. A habitat. Every musician knows what a "bright" tempo is, but you'll never get two to agree on a prescribed metronome range. Like pornography, we simply know it when we see it.

When the term "loping" disappeared, so did the tempo. Players may serendipitously arrive at loping-ish tempos, but, not knowing how to lope, they either do a slightly-faster version of dragging or a slightly-slower version of walking. No one, alas lopes.

The Pose is Usually a Cover

A few weeks ago, I explained the pervasive role of poseurs in society. They are the rule, not the exception. Seemers always win, so posing's become so pervasive that doers - the genuine article - are spurned. Actuality has no value when we're fully occupied by posing.

This is why severe autistics get so disoriented, twirling themselves into oblivion. They don't understand posing, so their whole experience here feels like being trapped inside an asylum. Which it is.

Seemers are not only a different breed from doers; they're usually the very opposite thing. It took me a lifetime to figure this out (which shows how hypnotized we are).

Consider homophobes, who think about gay people an awful lot, which is not something heterosexuals do. In fact, there's a word for people who think about gayness a lot, and, I'll give you a hint: it begins with a "G".

Such people don't trust their impulses. And this insecurity drives them to turn the amp up to eleven, making themselves so extremely ungay that there's no question.

Super ungay people reveal their impulses and insecurities. Straight people don't make such effort to seem ungay. Which can, in turn, make them seem gay. Because people buy the pose more than the actuality. Extra ungay-seeming people are the apotheosis of heterosexuality, it goes without saying!

Me, I don't have the slightest doubt about my preference, so I never lift a finger to seem ungay. This makes some homophobes suspect - or even insist - that I'm gay. While I'm daydreaming about female secondary sexual characteristics, these guys, consumed by their obsession with gayness, parse my disinclination to conform to the prescribed super-ungay behaviors. This supposedly makes me the gay one.

It's insufficient to be straight. One must also go to lengths to seem straight; to demark oneself as ungay. Because the "seeming" is what matters. And it's hard, because suppressed gay homophobes have really raised the bar, having spent years painstakingly honing their super ungay posing. How could a merely straight dude like me ever hope to compete?

It's a familiar paradox to me. In the above-linked article on posing, I complain about being forced to compete with highly-accomplished poseurs to pass for the sort of person I actually am:

Having been successful in a half dozen unrelated fields, with my name on a bunch of books and records and media stuff, having inspired a generation of Spanish and Portuguese jazz musicians and had some minor rippling effect on how folks think and write about food and use the Internet, is it also incumbent on me to seem like that person? Have I ignored a critical chunk along the way? Am I going around obliviously without my pants on? Do I need to fix this?

I can't imagine anything more foolish than posing as the sort of person I actually am. Isn't that backwards? One dons an aloof "That Guy" persona - too busy with important importance to do whatever - if one is a bluffer who hasn't done much but wants to seem like he has. I get why people strike that pose, but why would we expect the genuine to match the pose; to imitate the imitators?

Why would I pose as me? The question makes my head explode. None of my insight re: human psychology helps. And the awful and dopey truth is that even if I put effort into posing as someone like me - to look the part, whatever that even means - I'd surely wind up in the lower 20th percentile of me-posers. I'd be terrible at it!

I'm quite good at doing things, but horrendously bad at posing as a thing-doer. There are specialists for that! Thousands of them! And they're good! They can do something I can't, and I truly admire them! Me, I could never fool anyone into imagining I could do something notable. Even if I actually have.

I'm amazed more people haven't fully awakened to this craziness, because we've all just experienced a massive reveal. After watching generations of Conservative leaders waving the Constitution over their heads, pounding their chests in devotion to the red, white, and blue, and proclaiming themselves super patriots and stiff-spined tyrant obliterators, the moment a two-bit con-man real estate guy started riling up the yahoos, every one of those ham-fisted brawny he-men shrunk into mini Neville Chamberlains. Meekly terrified of losing their jobs or elected positions or Fox News exposure or fundraising streams, they quivered and quaked, kowtowed and appeased, all while quietly recognizing the immense peril to the republic.

This revealed that it was all a pose all along. Beneath their flamboyant alpha patriotic barking, they were always submissive, impotent, spineless weasels - the antithesis of their pose. That's precisely why they've been posing so long and so hard all this time. Real strong people don't feel compelled to act strong. They ARE strong.


People who aren't racist simply aren't racist. People who grab the mantle of Anti-Racism - who spend their leisure time uncovering shlubs unwise enough to have attended 1965 Halloween parties in blackface so they can CALL THEM OUT - such people are insecure about their own impulses, so they turn the amp up to eleven, making themselves so extremely anti-racist that there's no question.

Consider my definition of racism, and consider how many loudmouths comically trap themselves in that net. In fact, strident anti-racism (remember, we live in a Taoist world) is racism.

Balls-to-the-Wall Luxe Blowout Celebration

As longtime readers know, I bought a slew of shares in a small biotech company, SIGA, 16 years ago, at about $3/share. They'd developed a cure for smallpox, useful for governments to stockpile in case Russians or North Koreans or freelancers (it is shockingly easy to create weaponized smallpox in a lab) resorted to biological warfare (if that sounds unlikely, read up on how the Russian military is messing up Ukrainian nuclear power plants they've commandeered, even though fallout would easily spread to Russia).

I've unloaded some shares over the years, but retained a sizable cache. And, guess what, SIGA's drug also cures monkey pox. Which is a current pandemic. So the stock's up to $24.

I gave up living my life as if I were starring in some glorious movie a long time ago. And this makes celebration difficult. There's also a moral issue. For example, I am militantly against birthdays and holidays, which strike me as obscene in the context of modern First World life.

And even after this windfall, I still, alas, can't afford a Tesla - the only materialistic bauble I salivate over (I'm super into the notion of waking up to fresh firmware which makes my car do new cool things; it's the perfect encapsulation of my utopian dream). I also still can't afford to fly business class, which would be nice.

I guess Teslas and business class are for people who've sold more than one startup to a major corporation, and who've had multiple investments appreciate 10x. Who are these people, anyway? Why am I still middle class when I've done all the things???

Irony of ironies: In the early 90s, when I was one of the poorest people I knew, I flew 1st class on TWA many times per year. I was traveling enough for musical work that I qualified for premium status, back when that really meant something. I was also staying in 5-star hotels on jazz tours, paid for by promoters. So - typical for my extraordinarily disorienting life - I felt way richer back when I was poor. I can't afford any of that stuff today!

So here's how I've celebrated my windfall:

There's a very good sushi place near me, serving cheap lunches and more expensive dinners. I lunch there a lot. Problem is, lunch options are limited. The best stuff is only on the dinner menu. But what reasonable person goes to a cheap local lunch place for an expensive dinner? Even if he's getting tired of the lunch options?

Well, check it out. I've ordered dinner takeout from them twice in the past two weeks. It feels soooo luxurious. It honestly feels like I've won the lottery. I HAVE ARRIVED!


By way of explanation, I am an adherent of Nano-Aesthetics

Reframe or Die: The Shift of Perspective Required to Deter the Coming Civil War

Remember how a few years ago I started going on and on about framing? The detour repelled 75% of my previous readership, most of whom were here for food porn, not to hear the jolly chow guy expound abstract philosphical bullshit.

The rest of you were dubious but patient (and I thank you). You figured I was indulging some obsessive yaya, even when I linked it in with such practical concerns as human happiness, autism, addiction, depression (here and here), creativity, art, theology, messiahs, and much more.

Well, here is the opening message of this year's CPAC, the most important mainstream American conservative gathering and forum:

I shudder at the prospect of existing in 2022 America without some acquaintance with framing. Because framing is how we got here. Without that, it's just "THEY'VE ALL GONE CUCKOO!!"

Historians will shrug fatalisticaly and explain that everyone went crazy. Or, my favorite, "BRAINWASHING!!" But we're actually alive, so we have on-the-ground experience, and know that our MAGA friends and neighbors, who were always super nice people (just never never engage them on politics!), are still entirely themselves...aside for their propensity to swallow the spin and regurgitate the talking points. I have baseball superfan friends who hang up phone calls with "Go Cubs!" and live or die on a foul call. This is the same thing. Neither is crazy or brainwashed. Everyone's got a Thing, and everyone's allowed their Thing, and this is just another Thing, despite the appallingness and the danger of it all.

None of it is deep. We are still who we are, despite our Things. But, as I explained last time, light fixations, aggregated en masse, can yield heavy real-world ramifications. And, sorry folks, but everyone gets to fixate as they'd like. The bedrock individual human right is to choose your Thing, and everyone is as free to do so as you are. If you imagine restraining someone's stand - their framing; their fandom; their Thing - because "they're wrong," that's even more fascistic than what they're unwittingly supporting. In fact, brutishly imposed morality is a big part of what provoked all this.

Anyway, now do you understand why I've been stressing framing? And encouraging people to foster a more lithe perspective? It helps you understand (and perchance empathize with) people who seem to have lost their rockers. Baseball fans and proudly self-described "Domestic Terrorists" and all the rest are just playing.

Don't abstract real people into cartoons. Don't hate the seditious radicals. That's the reaction of a frozen perspective, and frozen perspective leads to civil war.

Civil wars arise when righteous-feeling people shut down any empathy for The Other within neighborhoods, social circles, and even families. Everyone in a Civil War feels righteous and sane, though no one actually is. If you feel wholly righteous and sane, you're the bad guy. You're sending us over this cliff. The MAGAs are NICE PEOPLE. If you don't know any, shame on you for your insularity! And whoever you are out there, you're believing/supporting really awful stuff (as a Centrist, I see you all clearly). The extreme right's going Fascist, but the extreme left's going Stalinist. Each clearly sees the awfulness of the opposite extreme while remaining willfully oblivious to the excesses of their own side's extreme.

It's hard to see. But it's essential to see. Hopefully I've made it easier by urging you consider how everyone frames a different world; how those framings are highly socially contagious; and how each of us owns a universal remote control that allows us to easily (easily!!!) blink into someone else's worldview.

The goal is to gain some detachment from your own worldview so you can see how fucked up it is, and, rather than crumble in despair and futility, keep enjoying your brief residency on this colorful planet - generously stocked with free oxygen, water, and sunlight - along with the other loonballs, who you love and tolerate.

Easy-peasy. If you don't freeze your perspective. If you retain your ability to reframe at will.

It will need to get much, much worse before most people (even most Slog readers) really buy it and develop some empathy for The Other and some distance from their own kookiness and some sense of perspective and priority (all of which comprise re-framing). It's all in place, all perfectly clear to anyone watching thoughtfully. But some people refuse to budge their perspective until their world blows up. Why wait for that?

Some people can spot a doomed chess position from a mile away. Others must hear "Check" hollered a bunch of times and see one player turn frowny. Still others need to actually hear the word "Checkmate". Me, I never wait around for that. In fact, as a child, I made a deliberate effort to remind my future self not to dawdle around a solved maze.

Knowing Me WAY Better Than I Know Myself

I amuse myself by trying to observe post-Covid psychological skews. Most existed pre-Covid, as well, but have mushroomed into far greater prevalence. Here are previous postings tagged "Post-covid narcissism".


This has happened to me three times this week, and a bunch of times since Covid shutdown (aka "The Veil of Ultimate Narcissism"):

People don’t listen carefully, so they misinterpret what you're asking or explaining.

You go back and forth several times trying to clarify, but they persist in their original conclusion.

Eventually, they grow angry at you for occupying their time. They've painstakingly answered you a number of times. They completely understood your question/explanation, but you're just refusing to accept the answer they keep needing to repeat to you.

A simpler (and thoroughly maddening) version of this appeared sometimes pre-Covid:

"Wait, you're misunderstanding me."

"No, I'm not!"

HOW DO YOU KNOW? HOW WOULD YOU POSSIBLY BE IN A POSITION TO GAUGE THIS? Sigh. Drives me cuckoo for cocoa-puffs. I seriously grok hermits.

A friend contributes:

It’s partly a failure to listen carefully, and partly a refusal to consider the possibility of anything not fitting preconceived /existing views.

But overarching all is the assumption of primacy. If you imagine that you outrank me in the ability to gauge what I’m trying to say - if your second-hand hearing supersedes my first-hand speaking - that means I am a mere cartoon for you.

Creativity and Empathy in Business

A friend runs a brewery. It's successful, but what he really wants is to open a second location; an intimate tap house with live music. Ideally it would serve beer brewed back in the mothership, but he has a business partner with no interest in such an endeavor. So my friend would need to open this venue on his own, which would mean buying beer from his own brewery at full price. Ugh.

In his mind, he's trapped. But my mind roils with possibilities. There are always creative solutions. If you frame your world as chock-full of potential alternative routes and workarounds, that fosters a spaciousness of perspective which really kindles creativity.

As inspiration, I told him this story:

I own some "junk" silver as part of my coin collection, and I didn't want to bring it with me when I relocate abroad. But I don't want to sell it now because silver's price is currently at a low. So I contrived an offer and emailed it (Subject: "Potentially Saving Your Life") to a friend. After explaining my situation, I wrote:

Can you stow it for me in your basement? If your house is burglarized or burns down, it would fall under your homeowners policy, and I'll eat your (entire) deductible.

If society devolves into a hellscape where only precious metals have value, TAKE IT AND LIVE! IT'S YOURS!

If not, when silver prices rise, I'll ask you to sell it and transfer the $$ to me, minus enough for a very nice dinner for you and your wife.

I'd turned a rather difficult "ask" into a good deal for him. The hellscape scenario might strike you as a longshot, but millions of people hold a cache of precious metal just in case. It's not nutty, it's prudent. Protecting your family means planning for bad scenarios.

And paying the deductible was also meaningful. Deductibles are eternal bitter pills. Between the two, I was offering a solid dose of peace-of-mind. And I could wait as long as I wanted for a nice high silver price, because, the moment we sold, the peace-of-mind would vanish. So the longer the better, from his viewpoint!

There is always a way to conceive and fine-tune incentives to get what you want, if (and only if) you're empathic - i.e. able to reframe from your own needy grabby selfishness to see the world from the perspective of the other guy. Load the other party up with value, even more than strictly necessary. Load and load full-heartedly to your outer limit of feasibility. The key to getting what you want is to fully apply your generosity.


My friend turned down the offer, fwiw. I understood why; I hadn't considered everything (e.g. homeowner's insurance might not cover it). Fine. I'll sell the silver now and take the loss. I stay lithe (also: SIGA is currently at $24).

All A Game

I noted last time that...

Most people are very tightly gripped by the hoo-haw of swirling drama they opted into, suspending disbelief to orchestrate the most thorough possible immersion. No one's born a diehard Yankee's fan. One starts with mild interest, and eventually voluntarily works oneself into a crazed froth where absolutely everything hinges on playoff results. Baseball's just a game, sure, but we can easily will ourselves to forget that. And everything on this planet - even your most sacred and meaningful stuff - is like that. It's all a mere game you chose to invest in. This is a light world for light entertainment in which we invest - to enhance the emotional ride - to the nth degree. But, in the end, every bit of it is "just a game".

We get it with baseball. Even kooky die-hard fans whose cars are plastered with team stickers, who never miss a game, and who live or die based on final scores will readily admit, with a dopey smirk, that, sure, it's just a game.

But how about your mortgage payments? When the Yankees lose, nobody comes and takes your house away. The consequences are steeper, so the stress and fear level seem more appropriate. It's no game!!!

Unless, that is, the whole living-in-a-house thing is also a game. And that, I fully understand, is a much harder sell, though, yes, that, too, is ultimately a game.

You'll be fine. You'll find another living space. It might suck. You may be uncomfortable for a short or long while, and you may need to undergo things you'd previously declared Unacceptable.

But the universe hardly heeds such declarations. In fact, again and again over the years, it's inflicted upon you the Unacceptable, yet here you are, perfectly fine. It escapes our attention (because it would interrupt our willful suspension of disbelief) that every happy regular person is a survivor of multiple encounters with the supposedly Unthinkable. So maybe the problem is in those silly red lines we draw, rather than in our outcomes.

Anyway, you'll live in this house, or some other house, or a homeless shelter, or a sleeping bag in the woods. You and your kids may cry and gnash your teeth, but it will all play out while swathed in delicious life-giving oxygen and sunlight on the only colorful and salubrious world in a cold, dark, vacuous, instantly-deadly universe.

FRAMING!!!

But what about bona fide tragedy, e.g. your kid (god forbid) getting cancer? I gently tackled that in one of my more provocative postings, "Why 'God' Lets Bad Things Happen" (keep that page open in case you read all the way through this posting and feel you need more). Now I'll tackle it a bit less gently.

First, you have to trust me on this: I've found (and been corroborated by those who've spent their lives working at lucid dreaming) that while we remember dreams as thin, sketchy experiences, they're not that way at the time. The thin sketchiness is in our poor recollection, not in the original experiencing. The dream world is as real-seeming as ours while we're in it, even though its operating laws are a bit different (e.g. you can fly, events are less linear, and time flows less smoothly).

The following comes with a trigger warning. It may spur disorientation because you'll realize, with gnawing discomfort, that it's true; this is something you've known and forgotten tens of thousands of times. So it's a surprise that packs a powerful punch of deja vu:

Every morning, when you open your eyes, you leave behind loved ones.

Do you mourn? Do you try to get back?

No. You trudge blithely into the bathroom and pee.

Strong suggestion: read (or re-read) this.

Don’t Stuff a Rising Threshold

I wrote last year about the Sanskrit term satchitananda, which has perpetually been tough for swamis to define. You may have heard of a celebrity guru by that name, but he didn't coin it, he just copped the term, which dates back millennia.

I offered the word "bulletproof". Modern English coughed up this gem, and no serious swami would quarrel with its suitability. FWIW, I retconned some of the writing in this extract:

Once you begin to realize that you're here to pretend you're in a dramatic narrative - you've essentially been playing a role in a movie, raptly viewing yourself on-screen in real time - you no longer have reason to inflict stress and suffering on yourself. Such is the power of reframing. You're bulletproof!

With less sense of embroilment and stakedness (the "attachments" Buddhists keep going on about), the world seems less enthralling. You no longer get bent out of shape from needing things to go any certain way. It’s all mild entertainment, a Disney ride despite the horrors and heartbreak. It’s all worn lightly. It’s like serenely walking home from a horror film.

Meditate enough (I use this very stripped-down system, and strongly suggest skipping the rest of the web site) and you will become bulletproof.

Here's the surprise about gun shots to a bulletproof chest. Even if you deflect them - ala Superman or a cop wearing kevlar - the bullets still really hurt.

Bulletproof does not mean numb. You feel pain. You just don't suffer from it. Suffering stems from the stories we tell ourselves about pain (present or imagined), not from the pain itself. Pain is compulsory, while suffering is optional. So here's something to bear in mind:

As you settle into satchitananda, there's a compulsion to act like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Whoopie, nothing can touch me! You tightly pack the fantastically expansive space. As your threshold rises, you fill it in with work and commitments and stress. Much more of those things than would normally be viable.

It works ok if you're working for a higher purpose. Helping people. Being of service. This is how useful change happens. You'll be consumed in the process like a charcoal briquette - i.e. "leave it all on the field" - but it's a noble endeavor.

It's problematic, though, if you take this course while mired in the banal American grind. Running a business. Aspiring. Hustling.

There are levels of pain no quantity of morphine can touch. There is a point where the pain from deflected bullets aggregates into bona fide trauma. You remain peaceful, disengaged, and bulletproof, but you are torturing your mute, obliging body. This is self-cruelty even though you feel fine where it counts.

Most people are very tightly gripped by the hoo-haw of swirling drama they opted into, suspending disbelief to orchestrate the most thorough possible immersion. No one's born a diehard Yankee's fan. One starts with mild interest, and eventually voluntarily works oneself into a crazed froth where absolutely everything hinges on playoff results. Baseball's just a game, sure, but we can easily will ourselves to forget that. And everything on this planet - even your most sacred and meaningful stuff - is like that. It's all a mere game you chose to invest in. This is a light world for light entertainment in which we invest - to enhance the emotional ride - to the nth degree. But, in the end, every bit of it is "just a game".

We grip tightly (again: just to enhance the emotional ride) on many levels, mostly unconscious. So when we first experience satchitananda, it's only from the outermost layer. You're still prey, under the hood, to fraught grippy neediness, even having relaxed and surrendered a bit.

If you maintain your meditation practice, satchitananda will bake in deeper. In time, you'll assume it's complete saturation. But it's not. It's a few percentage points. Your experience of the world has become so different from most people's that you imagine vast transformation when it's really just been a quick haircut.

So if you subject yourself to more and more gunfire due to faith in your bulletproofness, you will create - beyond the body trauma I described above - unconscious trauma in the parts of your psyche not yet saturated with satchitananda. Your unconscious grippy artifacts may be quietly freaking the fuck out. Yikes.

That's the main problem, and it must be handled. This is where self-love comes in. I'm not a fan of self-love. I grew up among severe narcissists in a country that tends strongly toward narcissism. I have the tendency, myself, though I've been Clockwork Orange-ing it for so long that it's a pathetic stunted whimper rather than a monstrous roar. So it takes a lot of pivot for me to recommend self-love. Most of us need self-love like the Sahara needs sand.

But whatever you've done to raise a threshold - or if a threshold has risen spontaneously - you must take pains not to infinitely pack infinity. In the case of satchitananda, you must methodically manage the pain level in those parts beyond the halo of deep peacefulness. Don't load up your peace with strife, even though peace is vast and strife is illusory. There are levels of pain no quantity of morphine can touch

---

I'm describing a fairly common predicament, per this posting's title, "Don’t Stuff a Rising Threshold", though I chose the most arcane possible example (satchitananda is not something most people experience beyond brief moments, aka "peak experiences").

Normally I choose relatable examples to ensure accessibility. Not this time. But I invite you to extrapolate this advice to more relatable realms. Two examples:

John Henry
Consider the tale of John Henry, a steel-driving railroad man whose heart exploded trying to keep pace with the mechanical engine designed to replace him.

John Henry was no weakling. John Henry was mighty. He was great. John Henry had a lot of heart. Just, alas, not infinite.

Heating the Ocean
Don't ever try to heat the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Small

You can get far in life by simply nibbling at the serendipity.


A tenet of Nano-Aesthetics

Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and the Origins of Priss

I'm digging deeply into Stravinsky right now. His big three ballets: Firebird, Petrushka, and (especially) The Rite of Spring were brazenly provocative, deemed little more than noise when first premiered (the latter incited a riot). But Igor won in the end. These three pieces have baked so deeply into Western art that they're like Stairway to Heaven - at this point, one needn't ever have heard a single Zeppelin tune to effortlessly follow along.

They're called "ballets", but that's just a proposal from the composer. Sort of like if I wrote a movie screenplay and typed "Blasé Tuesday: a Film by Jim Leff" on the cover. It's not a film, it's a piece of writing until some dude with a camera shows up. Luckily, Stravinsky had the whole package worked out from the get-go with a choreographer, the immortal Vaslav Nijinsky.

In a previous discussion of dance, I griped about how dancers and choreographers mostly follow a karaoke approach, layering terribly clever and difficult presentation atop music which serves as mere wallpaper. As a musician, it makes me roll my eyes.

I mentioned that Jerome Robbins strikes me as a full-fledged musician. He didn't erect visual presentations atop audio backdrop; he understood music with a musician's sensibility, and his choreography was as musical as the music itself. Pure magic!

You can add Nijinsky to the small group of true choreographers (find a dvd of "The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky" if you can; here's Roger Ebert's swell review). His original choreography for Rite of Spring was restored in the late 1980s by the Paris Opera Ballet and by the Joffrey Ballet, and it's great. Here's Marie-Claude Pietragalla of the Paris Opera Ballet terrifying the bejesus out of you:



Credit Nijinksy for genius choreography and Stravinsky for genius composition. But check out Pietragalla, revealing the raw soul of dance. 

This is wildness - pagan and primordial rites from the woods of ancient Russia. She's not depicting wildness - seeming wild - she is that. 

For contrast, here's the Joffrey Ballet performing the Nijinksy version in the same year, demonstrating why 1. they're great, but 2. dance is considered prissy affectation by most of the public (nobody would ever use such a word to describe Pietragalla's performance). I've cued it up to the same portion, and you can see the Joffrey's skillful and talented lead performing the movements with wonderful grace, but she's seeming wild, not being wild. A depiction of wildness ("this time it's me!"), not the real thing. 

She depicts Nijinsky’s depiction. A photocopy of a photocopy. Feh.

Naturally, snarky cognoscente are largely nonplussed by Pietragalla's performance. I contributed this comment beneath the YouTube video:

To all who think Pietragalla is less than awe-inspiring here: You're demonstrating the problem with dropping the acculturated trappings and manners of ballet to utterly inhabit the wildness of such a character (rather than skillfully and tastefully depicting that wildness, as seen in the Joffrey version): the dancers, critics, and audiences who inhabit the ecosystem of acculturation will icily insist that she's doing it wrong.

There is no trace, no whiff, of a wasp-waisted lady-in-leotard at the barre in Paris starchily plying dainty pliés with tight hair bun and haughty countenance. Gone. Wiped clean. Here, instead, is a pagan primordial presence from the ancient Russian woods. The actual thing.

And these f-ing people want their starchy French lady.