Michelangelo's Playlist

If the question is "What was on Michelangelo's playlist?" the answer is obvious: nothing. He didn't have a playlist. Or at least not a digital one he could take with him as he clambered up the scaffolds to lie on his back while he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For hours everyday. For four years.

Back when I was teaching various creative media courses I would caution my students to avoid comparing their efforts to those of the G.O.A.T.s - contemporary or long past. It could, I opined, stifle their own efforts: "Oh! I could never paint, sing, dance, take photos, make movies, act, etc., . . like whoever!"

I sometimes fail to follow my own advice. I am fascinated by the lives and practices of those Greatest Of All Times. Particularly in the areas in which I dabble or have dabbled - acting, singing, painting, writing, sculpture - artsy stuff. Most of the time I am content to ascribe the vastly elevated nature of their accomplishments to the simple acknowledgment that their abilities far outstripped mine. But there are some things that I simply cannot comprehend. For example, set aside Mike's crazy genius skill level. Forget his youth. How did he lie on his back for countless hours for four years without music!?

Even before personal portable players - remember the Walkman, auto-reverse and mix-tapes? - I have no memory of engaging in any personal creative endeavor without music. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, some of that music was "self-produced." Humming or "whisper-singing" under my breath. But four years for the Sistine Chapel, more than that for The Last Judgment? Whew.

For me music is an integral part of the enjoyment I derive from my art. An alternate title for this post was "I Saw A Shadow Touch A Shadow's Hand." That's a line from the 1964 song Bleeker Street, by Simon and Garfunkel. For me the idea was - is - that when music combines with other art forms - drawing and painting for me these days - the activity becomes transcendent. Takes me to other places and other times, where I walk among shadows that no longer surround me, but obtain an almost tangible nature - hands I can almost touch.

It is an experience over which I have some varying degree of control. Pat Boone [No relation to Daniel for those of you for whom Pat is a historical figure.] had a 1959 hit song titled Twixt 12 and 20 [that he later turned into a book with the same title - no marketing newbie he] that asserts that those "years to remember" are exceptionally formative, and, I would go on to assert, fill that musical part of our brain with links to shadows that we carry around for the rest of our lives. And, I would further venture, there is really nothing entirely unique about that decade. Rather, it seems that all the various stages of our lives come with a soundtrack. All include songs we remember, and the shadows that live therein.

And it is that enduring link between our lives and our music that gives us some control over the shadows that inhabit our artistic-musical synthesis. I choose the soundtrack that I draw to, and hence the shadows I invite to join me. Pick a decade, or a world, grade school, high school, college, first love, favorite place, favorite person, whatever you like, and craft a unique playlist for that place, person or time. All today's digital music worlds - Pandora, Spotify, whatever, let you do this.

Then fire it up, turn up the volume, open the door and let the shadows in. Watch "a shadow touch a shadow's hand."

Which is why I am completely dumbfounded by the idea that Michelangelo had no playlist. Nor did Vermeer, or Titian, or Lebrun. Did they paint without music? Inconceivable! Perhaps it was all internal music?

That's a lot of humming.

Old Hickory

[With apologies to President Andrew Jackson.]

Wall posts get their beginnings from a variety of places; things I see, things I am reading, media intrusions. But strangest of all are posts whose origin is a mystery to me. They just seem to spring up out of some restless fold in the gray matter. Maybe a random crossing of neurons that sparks. I dunno. Anyhow this post began that way; a simile that was suddenly just there in my brain: "It's like trying to carve hickory with a butter knife."

"Of course it is," I thought. "Now what 'it" am I thinking about?"

So I decided to sort of parse the simile. See if the individual pieces might point me to what the mystery neurons were thinking about.

OK. Hickory. "Carving hickory." Don't think I have ever carved hickory, or any kind of wood for that matter. Sculpting is a close as I have ever come to carving, and that was coaxing shapes out of clay. Some use of tools, but gentle shaping as opposed to carving. So consider just "hickory" by itself, no carving. A little more play here. Back when I lived in Albuquerque, we had a wood burning stove, and I occasionally had to split some wood to make kindling. I remembered that hickory was particularly problematic. Very hard, twisty.  My faith in memory has decreased so I researched "characteristics of hickory wood."

Bingo!

Hickory workability: Difficult to machine due to its hardness, often dulling tools and causing tear-out.

So "hickory" would be a lousy choice for carving. Hence, perhaps something difficult, resistant to whatever shape you had in mind.

No research was necessary to determine that a butter knife would be a bad choice of tools to carve any wood, let alone hickory.  So what were my crossed neurons trying to tell me?  The "it" in question had to be something "hard - hickory" to "achieve - carve" with an inefficient tool "butter knife." Think, think, think.

OK, I thought, what tool do I regularly contact that seems to be unsuited to the task at hand? Oh, I thought. The internet. Let me explain. As any of you who read the Wall have undoubtedly discerned my mantra: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm, does echo back across the centuries to my father's Mennonite roots and the family's more recent association with the AFSC - American Friends Service Committee - the Quakers.  A gentle, pacifistic heritage. 

Somehow the Internet knows that about me and I get 40 or 50 texts or emails a day from political candidates, environmental organizations, and opportunities to adopt children or foster puppies, asking me to contribute to their causes lest the world as we know it vanish in a puff of autocratic demagoguery. I have very occasionally responded - which undoubtedly increases the digital solicitations.

And yet the next morning brings more news of riots in Iran, continued war in the Ukraine, lethal ICE invasions in democratic cities here at home, "Donroe doctrine" claims to acquire any number of countries or resource caches, and continuing contentious clashes in Gaza. So I'm thinking my brain is telling me that my avalanche of humanely inclined digital solicitations is the butter knife and the hickory is the seemingly increasing autocratic intrusions here at home and around the world.

So, I ask myself, why does the butter knife seem so impotent against the hickory? I think to a significant degree the problem is that the butter knife doesn't understand the hickory. The butter knife frames its arguments in compassionate reason and logic, backed with science-based knowledge. The flaw here is a failure to realize that the hickory is knowledge-phobic.

Autocrats, in The White House, in Iran, in Russia, in Myanmar, in Sudan, wherever, are opposed to any research that uncovers new knowledge in any form. And to whatever extent possible the autocrat creates barriers to the exploration of new knowledge. They fear the uncertainty that new knowledge brings. Instead they mandate policy and actions based on "Private Knowledge" - i.e. "that which they chose to believe is true." 

So here at home wide-ranging policies touching areas from childhood vaccinations, to vaccinations in general, to "bad people weaponizing their cars," to "blue cities" being confronted with federal militant forces, to certain terms being banned in academic research, get implemented. Abroad policies evolve with Iranians being asked to endure a fragmenting economy, to Palestinians being removed from their former lands, to Ukrainians being asked to cede portions of the homeland to Russia, to Venezuelans being told the US now "runs their country",  and on and on. All these stem from an autocratic figure declaring that some version of "their truth" legitimizes their actions. 

Ah, ha! So my brain seems to be telling me that "it" is the attempts to open these autocratic minds to new knowledge that is "like trying to carve hickory with a butter knife." Hmm. Now having tracked my spontaneous simile to its potential insight, what is the answer?

Initially, I don't really have much insight into carving international stands of hickory. They are beyond my ken. Here at home, the digital butter knife may actually be the best option.  Trump can continue to wield an autocracy as long as he is in office and the Congress seems impotent, or at least unwilling to reign in his excesses. So putting opposition candidates in positions of power to curb the autocracy and re-empower democracy is the still preferred framework we put in place some 250 years ago. Although I do take just a smidgen of heart on the recent Congressional action pushing back on Trump's move against the fed. Maybe they will actually find their backbones.

And, come to think of it, that same butter knife driven process might well address some of the international excesses of autocracy. If, by voting out the "Donroe doctrine" advocates, the US may re-establish itself as a global moral compass and not an autocratic international police force, and hence the would-be dictators and autocrats around the world might find themselves in a far lonelier position.

At least I think that is what my brain was trying to tell me.

 

It Only Works When It Wants To

It has always been one of the most difficult of challenges for parents, grandparents, step- or biological. For any caregiver, really, who takes on the mind-bending, heart-twisting, daunting task of easing children into the future: "Sharing some truths, some beliefs, they can lean on as they move through life."

As I begin to wander through my 78th year on this big blue marble - surrounded by the lunacy, greed, arrogance, and naked aggression that still seems to swirl unabated - I continue to cling to my personal mantra: "Foster harmony, Enable beauty, Distill complexity and Oppose harm." And I suppose folks with more than a few decades in the rearview mirror might buy into that worldview. But trot it out for whatever youngsters on the shallow side of thirty are calling themselves these day - maybe "the whatever generation" - and their eyes will roll back under their eyebrows as they respond "whatever. . ." And probably rightfully so, since except for those delightful exceptions, older than their years, my mantra may seem more parental patter without relevance in their everyday life.

So let's go there for a bit - into the lives of the "whatever generation," and increasingly into mine. Into the world of screens, technology and the internet. The world that was my academic speciality for half a century until its nebulous ambiguity helped drive me into the seemingly saner space of retirement and art. But, I suppose, not surprisingly, this new version of my former ivory tower has become infected with those same digital devices that swaddle the "whatever generation." Life "off the grid" is a fiction - even to those seeking a separatist world back in some rural redoubt. They too need space-based technology, if only to keep track of what the world from which they are hiding is up to.

At the moment my advice to the "whatever generation" is to remember that when it comes to the technology on their screens or in their ears, in their pockets, in their cars, on their wrists, and in their glasses only works when it wants to. It isn't that their devices just decide to stop working, it is that the incredibly complex systems of hardware and software aren't always compatible, especially when one underlying system, say Mac, "updates" their operating system without being really really sure that their various partners, say hospitals or air traffic control systems, will be able to adjust to the new operating system.

Those scenarios, along with the nefarious global hacks so popular in techno-thriller videos, are, of course, the extremes. But what about the very real, everyday glitches that make life in the 2020s more complicated instead of easier. [As I type this a little notice has appeared in the upper right corner of my screen telling me that "macOS Sequoia 15.7.3 is available and will be installed later tonight." Doesn't ask. Tells me. And my techie friends tell me I should always update to the latest OS version or bad things may happen! Anyhow, I digress as usual.]

OK, everyday glitches. I'm a Mac guy. Have been since 1990, when I was writing Taming the Wild Tube: A Family's Guide to Television and Video, in Wordstar, [You may need to slip into the WayBack machine for that one. 1979 - 1992.] and Mac came out with a better word processor. And the university finally allowed computers other than UNIX boxes onto the university system. Anyhow, my everyday glitches are usually the result of one Apple product talking to another, or not. I have four. 2 Powerbook laptops, an iPad and an iPhone - one up and running, a new 17 in a box waiting the attention of our Mac midwife.

Most irritating for me is what some system update or another has done with positioning various apps on the iPad screen. It seems to take some sort of perverse pleasure in sticking various apps off to the side of the screen, so you know they are there, but you cannot get to them. Then, occasionally, they let you grab a corner and pull them to the center of the screen - but not full screen. Sort of a 3/4 bubble, which sometimes you can grab a corner of and make full screen. Of course, other times, and with other apps the device works just as it did in the "olden days."

Second is "Car Play" when the phone talks to the GPS screen in the car and also plays music. Most of the time. Except when it choses not to, and then you have to go through 5 steps to "reconnect" the phone to Car Play. Which is a minor thing, except when you are driving. You know you should either continue to your destination - say the grocery store - without music, or pull over and reconnect to Car Play, but you are tempted to wing it while driving - endangering yourself and others. Still, it does charge the phone.

I could go on, but why bother. You all have your own list of irritating glitches, or suggestions as to how I can correct mine - "You just put two fingers on the upper left-hand corner of the screen and then double click while reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb . . . " But that is not the point. The point is to tell the "whatever generation" that technology is transitory. The newest and greatest will be "same-old, same-old" tomorrow. And it may not work the way you are used to. It may not work at all. So what?

I'm thinking there must be camps that teach kids how to acquire "old skills." Things like writing a letter on paper, putting it in to an envelop, writing an address and a return address. Putting on a stamp. Putting it in a mailbox. Or like reading a paper map, using it to drive to the next town, or the movie theater, or to the grandparents house. Or using and balancing a paper checkbook. Listening to music on a record player - vinyl is coming back! Using their phone to make a voice call. Talk to a friend. More difficult, but perhaps possible at their school or a local art center - learn how to shoot, develop and print pictures from film.

I know it sounds kind of silly. And for the foreseeable future it seems that technology will continue to meet many of these needs, hopefully with increasing reliability. But there are some truths, some experiences I think are worth passing along. I find myself going back to the third part of my mantra - Distill complexity. There is, I believe, value in getting back to basics. I remember changing the oil in my car. Filling notebook after notebook with these ramblings that now live on various digital devices that may soon become obsolete. Lying on my dorm room floor, my head between the two speakers listening to those two new guys with the weird names; Simon and Garfunkel. Cutting and gluing film for my senior project called Scratches on my Favorite Phonograph Records. Sculpting with my hands covered in streaks of terra cotta or porcelain. Touching real stuff, real people.

No batteries required.