The Objectives of Objectivism

I'm not normally pointing out political opinion blogs, the world of culture and the cultural arts are my usual balliwick, but this recent essay really struck a chord with me.

Stranger still it was penned by Michael Gerson, a former GW Bush speechwriter and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who's conservative bonafides are iron-clad and not the guy I'd be apt to agree with. But here he is, distilling for me just what it was about Ayn Rand's philosophies that troubled me so. I couldn't put a finger on it, but Objectivism and the fast-paced trend to resurrect it, just seemed plain wrong. But when debated on the point, and you'd be surprised how many normally sensible people have fallen into the Galt cult, I would get flustered and inarticulate. I literally couldn't believe anyone would support such an obviously selfish and self loathing philosophy.

Hooray however for Mr. Gerson, who has so simply and plainly encapsulated the crux of my distress. In this opinion peice for the Washington Post, he likens Rand's fantasies of the worthy elite as boring as and and as predictable as a petulant teenager's adolescence. He further summarizes Objectivism's "principles," in his words, "on the back of a napkin."

He notes:
"Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible.

“The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”

Gerson is, like myself, bewildered at the promotion of Rand's ideas especially given her hatred of the Everyman (the little guy that Reagan claimed to champion,) and of the religious, who she thought were idiots.

He concludes:
"Conservatives have been generally suspicious of all ideologies, preferring long practice and moral tradition to Utopian schemes of left or right. And Rand is nothing if not Utopian. In “Atlas Shrugged,” she refers to her libertarian valley of the blessed as Atlantis.

It is an attractive place, which does not exist, and those who seek it drown."

I'll drink to that.

At long last...

Finally, a pop culture term for these snot nosed punks I have to contend with.

Anybody see 60 Minutes tonight? Boy was I happy to see that I'm not the only one who thinks this latest batch of kids coming up is entirely sheltered, over pampered and weak of character. Personally, I thought it was only in the performing arts field where I live and work. But it seems this "me, me, I deserve whatever I want because I'm special" spoon-fed, Mr. Rodgers generation is genuinely pathetic right across the board. (In Austin they tend to gather most regularly on a stage at a overpriced BBQ joint downtown called Lamberts if you feel like checking out such a geek show.)

To be clear, it's not their fault really, it's their idiot parents who thought Hawk a fine first name and that "little Billy just doesn't thrive in a structured environment, so we've worked to create a comforting place where he can find his true nature free of the strictures of traditional society" kinda horse shit I see everyday in my day job. Methinks the white slave trade will soon enough be filled to the brim when these dubiously enfranchised and fully empowered knuckleheads hit the cold reality that the rest of the world has to wake up to every day. ("Hostel, the Series: this time it's for real...")

George Carlin hipped me to this sad trend in 1999 when he riffed on an HBO special called "You Are All Diseased" about "these kids today, they're being raised fruity and soft." (Look, you read this rant and tell me it doesn't ring a bell with you.) Now they have a word for these folks, they're called the Millennial Generation, and boy do I really dislike the prospect of having to live in a culture where they'll be in charge. Today these dolts think the Weary Boys are Bluegrass and the Moonhangers are mistaken for Country. Amazing as the prospect is, it really could get much worse.

Spare the rod and then answer to these rudderless people of no manner. Argh! I'm so pissed I cannot even write about it without my head exploding!!! Here, read this stuff and pray for me:

Whassup? A Glimpse Into the Attitudes and Beliefs of the Millennial Generation
What ever happened to "show up on time or you're fired."

Here's what: Managing Millennials In other words, their parents screwed up and now it's your job to tell them how to behave like adults. Can you believe this shit?

Generation X and The Millennials: What You Need to Know About Mentoring the New Generations ("mentoring?" How about get a job, hippie!!)

Come to think of it, here's a generation that could truly benefit from a National Draft. And not like our old ones where you could buy your way out of it, or get drummed out for "emotional" problems (even our Military is reduced to molly coddling it seems.) Lord know we'll be making War somewhere in the world for years to come, generations I'll bet.

A few weeks dodging IED's in the Sunni Triangle and I'm sure we'll all be singing a different tune.

Gary Primich Followup

The funniest thing happened last month when I posted a deeply personal note about the untimely passing of my old running buddy and musical compatriot Gary Primich. Not funny "ha, ha," but funny really, really sad.

As if you hadn't noticed, this here "blog" is just for me, my family and anyone else stupid enough to read it. I never imagined that anyone else would turn to it as a news source. Well imagine my shock and surprise to receive at least a dozen of the most hateful and vitriolic comments from anonymous posters using the death of my friend to make vicious personal attacks on me. It's a blog, fer chistsakes, read the description in the left column. Of particular issue to many these gutless cowards was my noting that it was evidently Gary's addiction that killed him. I really should have saved all of them so you could all see just how churlish and mean spirited these missives were, but ultimately I felt no need to infect that sort of negativity into Gary's memorial, a guy who from what I recall never said a bad word about anybody. At least not in my presence.

True enough, I had no possible way of knowing what killed my buddy, but I have had a lot of junkie friends and the one's who died too soon, they died of junk. There's no way to sugar coat it, or speak in codified language; the path of heroin is death. Period. Maybe today, maybe years from now. Just like everybody dies eventually, though most folks try to deny it evidently, junkies (and fat people like myself) die much, much quicker. It's tragic and sad, but as the 400 lb comedian said "it ain't exactly unexpected."

In my opinion to turn your gaze away from this simple truth, to sweep it under your rug, is to be in fact an enabler. Made all the more ignoble in postmortem. "The truth," as my old man was fond of saying, "only hurts a liar."

My old friend Danny Barnes was on all of those Steve James sessions with Gary and me. He too has had his own hard fought battles with substance abuse over the years and on the occasion of hearing of Gary's passing he shared with me these thoughts on the gruesome nature of addiction. I think they bear repeating.

He said "i been thinking about your pal gary and sobriety and the whole thing. you know, alcoholism, drug addiction is a progressive disease. in other words, even if you are not drinking at the moment, the disease gets worse and if you start up again, things get real bad and real dark and real fucked up real quick.

in any AA group of size, once you get in there and get to know everyone, you lose one or two folks a year to the shark of the disease. without fail. maybe more. some guy will quit coming to meetings and the next thing you know he blows his brains out in a drunken rage. or does something really weird and goes to the pen. if a person with the disease doesn't get the program, that's his other options.

i had heard that GP was going to meetings and had put together some sober time. i'm sorry he didn't make it. lots of folks don't make it. he probably did experience some sobriety and maybe had some light in his life. but he must have turned his back on that and went back to the dark place. we've all done that. sometimes it kills us. one of the things that makes sobriety really hard is that you can get fucked up once in a while and it won't get you, but eventually, it does get you. you just don't know when. so better to just stay sober and go to meetings and work the steps and read the book."

Pretty damn wise words if you ask me.

Now to business. An open letter to all you folks who felt the need to drop me a line, hike yourself up on my friend's corpse and use my personal expression of love for him and his life as a platform to tear me down:

I wish you love. I wish you a ray of sunlight that illuminates what must be a very dank place that you find yourself in to spew such bile and hatred. I hope that in your darkest monets, you will hear the sound of Gary's harp and that you will use the purity of his love and honesty as a key to unlock your evidently diseased and withered soul to open to the spiritual commonality of all beings. I hope that you will use the message of the end of his life to inform the rest of yours.

Either that, or you can go fuck yourself. Whichever works for you.

Great, now that's out of the way I'd like to share with you a note a got from Gary's sister. She's referring to the memorial gathering where a lot of Gary's musico pals gathered to celebrate his life, share stories and play his tunes. (Most did by playing his tunes way too loud and playing the harp poorly, effectively putting into sharp focus just how much better he was than anyone else. He would have loved the irony.) It was a generally positive and uplifting event all told, which I hope seals Gary's spirit in our collective memory. I did an acoustic tune with Steve, when my emotions got the better of me and I pulled the bridge clean off my bass when I was playing, wrecking the bass entirely. I wandered around the stage while Steve kept playing looking for some way to rescue the tune, when I saw the drum sticks out on the house trap kit. To save face I sat down and played out the tune on the drums. I had to split so I could wrap up the Rob Curto session I was producing, so I didn't get a chance to talk to any of Gary's kin.

The next day, I got this from Gary's sister:

(The family has asked me not to publish any personal communications. Suffice it to say, I feel quite vidicated.)

And I promised myself I wasn't gonna cry.

And don't forget: Change your oil every 3000 miles.

Just Another Day on Eldridge Street

So I was interviewed for the Forward.com about a strange event that took place in NYC recently. I was not invited to it, nor did I think it was a very good idea in the first place. But for some reason I "said publicly want many others would only say privately.." Just my luck, huh? I do appear musically on the podcast as a member of the Klezmer Brass All Stars.

For the record I said quite a bit more in fact, but interviewer John Kalish used only my most charitable statement about the event's dubiously talented organizer. However, the less said about such ill conceived and poorly rendered wastes of time and resources (like a $150K Rockafeller Grant for instance) the better.

No?

Mark Vs. Jimmy Sturr

Several months back I got a call from what seemed to be a nice journalist fellow in Boston MA. Evidently he had been assigned to do a story on a well known East Coast Polka performer named Jimmy Sturr. While researching the story he did a Google search (and that seems to be just about all journalists do these days it seems for research) and found this cute thread on the newsgroup:

"Subject: Re: Question - Who is Jimmy Sturr ?-WHO CARES?
View: Complete Thread (17 articles)
Newsgroups: alt.music.polkas
Date: 1996/07/25
Dave Bedrich wrote:
 
For the sake of real polka music, Jimmy Sturr should be
banned from performing. This guy gives Czech, Polish and
German music a bad name. pure commercialized CRAP.
Amen Brother!
There's an old Yiddish saying that the Grandson wants to know most what the Grandfather has tried hard to forget.
It's probably easy to target Sturr, you can't begrudge his commercial success. But what he has to do with polka is beyond me. I've seen the Sturr show twice in as many years, and while I'm sure some would consider him an engaging showman, I found his performance glitzy and hollow, devoid of the very elements of soul that drew me to polka music in the first place. A few more generations subjected to Sturr, and the many others who follow lockstep in his "crossover" wake, and they'll be no tradition left in polka music.
I can't see that happening here in Texas, though. Folks 'round here still attach a great sense of community, a shared heritage and cultural pride in their polka, whether it makes them any money or not.
Just one fan's observations.
Mark Rubin"

Well, I'll tell you I learned two valuable lessons the day this guy calls me. 1) what you say on line stays around for all to see FOREVER, and 2) I still feel very much the same way 8 years later.

So Mr. Big City Paper Writer asks me to elaborate on my on line comments form so long ago. I commence to spend around 2 hours on the phone with this fellow all the while trying real hard to choose my words carefully. I've heard lots of negative squak about Sturr's bubble gum version of Polka culture from just about every musician I'd encountered here in Texas, Mr. Bedrich (see above) included. I was VERY important for me to make clear that I am not a Polka person, just a geeky fan, and that I spoke entirely from the perspective as an outsider. More importantly I felt it was important to give voice to those musicians that I had met and worked with who ARE polka people and would never get a call from a writer from Boston.

I hoped that I could reasonably speak on the nature of folk music created within a specific community, the multiple levels of context that informs that cultural expression through dance and music. And how that wasn't necessarily a purley vocational pursuit and that maybe that in fact wasn't such a bad thing after all.

I also brought up what I though was a provocative question as to why someone born and raised an Irishman, like Mr. Sturr, would want to change his surname for professional reasons and pass himself off as a "polka person," (the accepted codified language for Slavic-Americans.) Only to then bemoan the low pay scale of his career choice all too late in life. It seemed more than a little bit sad and pathetic, on many levels.

It's a situation that I, an Okie Jew, have been presented with on many, many occasions. I myself have performed on Festival stages literally across the world representing the cultural expression of groups that I AM IN NO WAY A MEMBER OF; Texas-Polish, Texas-Moravian, Texas-Mexican, Persian, Armenian and even Anglo Texan. At no time have I ever been confused that I was in fact an Okie Jew just lucky enough to be playing with these groups. And I tend to feel that reason I am afforded any respect from those communities is because everyone Iπm involved with musically is quite clear about my identity and my intents. I will never forget the first time I performed with Santiago Jimenez, Jr. outside of the US. Moments before we went onstage he stopped me, looked me straight in the eye and said "Tonight, you represent the people of San Antonio. Don't forget it." I took that to mean that I must hold myself to the highest professional standard onstage and off, all the while not forgetting I am not actually a hispanic person from San Antonio.

From interviews I've read in the press, I think Mr. Sturr has most likely forgotten that he's "not from San Antonio" if you get my drift...

OK, that's what I though I said. Here's what made it to print:
Mark Rubin also checked out the boys, but for a different reason.
Rubin played bass and tuba in the Bad Livers, an acclaimed
Texas-based roots band that released a half-dozen albums from
1992 to 2000. He's produced polka bands, and he knew about
Sturr's Grammys. He wanted to see the man behind them. He
wasn't pleased.

``It reminded me of a really smarmy Vegas act,'' says Rubin. ``It
was really quite depressing.''

As Rubin sees it, Sturr is so desperate to commercialize polka,
he's forgotten why people play it.

``It's just an indicator of how culturally void the American culture
  has become,'' says Rubin. ``Polka is not supposed to be  
commercial. For me, it was kind of sad.''
 
 Other detractors have not been quite as tactful.
  
 ``For the sake of real polka music, Jimmy Sturr should be
  banned from performing,''  one disgruntled fan writes on the
  alt.music.polkas newsgroup.
 
  ``This guy gives Czech, Polish, and German music a bad name. Pure commercialized CRAP.''
 
The criticism does bother Sturr.
 
``They're not purists,'' he says. ``They're dumbbells.''
 
For context's sake,you can read the whole article here.

Well, I guess I can blame the editors. After all these years I should really know better than try and have an actual conversation with someone who in fact is only really listening when what you tell him someting that fits into his preconceived agenda.

Personally, I didn't think much of it until someone directed my attention to the, um, reaction to the article right there on the old chat room again. Most involved me getting my ass kicked by a gentleman with the delightful e-mail address "polkabiker," (now there's two communities you don't see getting together enough.)

Most disturbingly, tucked in all the discussion was this missive from the PRESIDENT OF ROUNDER RECORDS (not coincidently Mr. Sturr's record label, who has made quite a good coin selling his music) who felt the need to address this pressing issue and evidently had the free time expend on the subject. As I had originally feared, he felt the need to "out" me as a Polka nobody. Oh yeah, that and my old band sucked too. Read on:
From: Ken Irwin (keni@rounder.com)
Subject: Re: Globe article on Sturr   
Newsgroups: alt.music.polkas
Date: 2003-09-09 14:07:09 PST

 
In correspondence with the writer following the release of the
article, I pointed out that it was inappropriate for a writer to quote
an anonymous contributor to a list and further went on to say that
if I were to do so, I could find negative things to say about the
Pope,or anyone else on a given list serve. Geoff conceded that
that was a good point as he did about my point that Mark Rubin
was not necessarily the most appropriate person in the polka
field to check with. I went to on to point out that if you were to
speak to a traditional old-time musician, many would likely have
scandalous things to say about Mark's group the Bad Livers.
 

Wow.
Until then, I had always counted Mr. Irwin as one of the good guys in the business, and had shopped quite a few Polka releases to his company. Now I see why he passed on all of them without comment. Disappointed is not quite the word.

I will however tell you that since all that ruckus came up I have received so many positive e-mail and letters from hard working polka musicians from all over who appreciated my comments and wished they'd said the very same thing. As long as they all buy me a beer when they run into, it will have all been worth it.

Lessons learned from this experience:
1) Don't EVER post to newsgroups unless you care to talk about a decade later.
2) No matter what you say prepared to have it taken down wrong.
3) Evidently I'll never be a Rounder Records recording artist!

Caveat internet!

On "No Depression" Bands

On the "No Depression" phenomimon:
from Exclaim Magazine, Canada, 1999

"During the '80s, you'd have these bad new wave bands wearing country hats and bolo ties," recalls Bad Livers bass and tuba-player Mark Rubin with distaste. "I'd hate to think we had anything to do with that." Rubin still rankles at how Bad Livers were saddled with the country-punk tag, despite the diversity of their influences, ranging from Western swing and bluegrass to punk and klezmer.

"When we first started playing," Rubin explains, "we didn't have a lot of original material and had acoustic instruments, and the only way you could play was in clubs where you'd play from 9 to 2 a.m., so we needed a lot of covers. We played Mississippi Fred McDowell and [Thelonious] Monk, and we'd also play stuff from our collective memory, like Roky Erickson. Then people from the punk scene started seeing what was happening, and journalists, being a lazy bunch, they'd fasten on to the one Motörhead or Stooges song, not the Art Tatum or Charlie Poole or Son House. It's true that we were drawn to punk, but more because of our anarchic disposition and the punk DIY ethic, but to call us a country-punk group is just lazy."
"It's easier to sell to a scene than to sell quality," says a caustic Mark Rubin. "If a label has a band that doesn't belong to a scene, they have a conundrum. I mean, we've been taken to task because we weren't playing to a reviewer's scene. I think this alt-country stuff runs counter to punk rock. The spirit of punk rock was do your own thing, don't suck off on mine, and now, all alt-country is concerned with is appealing to an audience, not making music. The musicians are continually told they're this that that, and now they're expected to reference this thing they have nothing to do with. The Uncle Tupelo guys were embarrassed by being tagged with bluegrass and No Depression labels. If the guys in Wilco or Son Volt died in a car wreck, they'd be eulogised as alt-country; [Bad Livers would] be eulogised as punk-bluegrass. But they had nothing to do with that crap then, and they want nothing to do with it now, and neither should anyone who's just interested in good music."