The Very Latest in Death and Nostalgia

I know exactly where I was when I found out Robin Williams was dead. I was at home, having just posted on Facebook. Another friend had just heard about it on the news and posted what she had heard. Seconds later, Robin Williams’ death was “virally trending.”

I was hit hard by this news, and I know many people were, nationally and internationally, but particularly in California and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Mr. Williams was raised and where he honed is incredible talent. This news was on the heels of other celebrity deaths, and followed by other celebrity deaths, as well as the shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, MO.

All in all, it was a very depressing week. Everything in social media filled a spectrum from “death and depression” to “cute animals” to “don’t judge what you don’t understand.” The newspapers were not far behind that mode of “trending,” focusing on failures of all sorts (building failures, political failures, police failures; in short, failures of judgment in all forms).

When I went to the grocery store, I could not help but notice that the magazine racks were filled with retrospective magazines on Elvis Presley (died, August 16, 1977), Jerry Garcia (died August 9, 1995), Bob Hope (died July 27, 2003), Princess Diana (died August 31, 1997) and others. Robin Williams will be the next honoree of one of these, I am sure. And I have to say, this is very sad. We loved these people who led very public lives, but the inability of our culture to let go after celebrities have died is really unhealthy.

We are being manipulated by this constant parade of celebrity deaths, and we don’t even realize it. If you think about just those stars listed above, you realize that most people 14 years old and younger have no idea who those people are, don’t know their contributions to culture, and what’s more, aren’t interested in finding out. Why should they?

But for those of us who do know and remember these people, the fact of their mortality is a reminder to us of our own.

Friedrich Nietzsche posited that our harboring of nostalgia is a way of using the past to forge an idea of the future. Never mind that any nostalgic view of the past is utterly inaccurate and could never pass muster today, much less be put to work tomorrow.

“But wait!” as the young set says, “that is exactly what is happening!” And, to a great extent, it is true. Nietzsche would be railing against the same things, if he were alive today, as in those years when he was alive and his thought was in full flower. And that is very, very sad, indeed.

What most people don’t realize is this is a psychological and philosophical condition, called by Nietzsche ressentiment. The condition is characterized by defeatist feelings, cynical attitudes, belief that institutions and individuals are hostile and indifferent; this condition results in expressions of fundamentalism on all levels, as if returning to a mythical past, characterized by either extreme authoritarianism or anarchy, would be the solution to every problem.

Look at the unrest in our world. You can see it in every tabloid, not to mention in the more legitimate news media. Celebrity wars. Male culture bashing female culture. Heterosexual culture bashing homosexual culture. Race wars, religion wars, wars of greed and ambition, ad hominem wars of indifference and stupidity are being waged all day, everyday, everywhere. We say to our dead heroes, “rest in peace,” while fervently praying for a peace we cannot hope to achieve on this planet while we are in the grips of ressentiment, where every gesture is negatively judged, where the innocent are blamed for the bad things that happen to them, where corruption seems to trump all those human values we claim to uphold, where we decide to join ghettos, rather than learn to live with in harmony others and the environment, so that we can get together to solve real problems.

When I see on Facebook side-by-side images of Hitler and a liberal politician, with nearly matching quotes, I think, wow! This is really sick! Can the person who shared this really believe the sum of that life is equal to the sum of this one?

Not only is it crude. Not only is it simplistic. It is malevolent. Unfortunately, I think some of the people who post these things really do believe them; some are highly educated people, but they are frustrated by something they cannot even properly articulate. There is a festering of impotent rage in our generation, and to a great degree this rage is an inherited legacy. “Teach your children well” to some people meant passing on a rageaholic culture of negativity to the next generation. As Nietzsche pointed out, this is an individual’s act of revenge upon society.

Having grown up among people who were trying to make the world a better place, one that is color-blind, equitable, and harmonious, I must admit this is disillusioning and disappointing. What kind of a world have I brought my children into? What sort of people are these that build a life and behave in it such that machines and money mean more than the lives of people?

The media that daily pumps out such negative drivel exists to bring us down, to keep us cowed, to amaze us with our own stupidity, to get us all fighting with each other. That must be the intent, otherwise, why publish it? If we are all fighting with one another, then it is easy to bring out the guns and fill up the prisons, is it not?

Faith is an empty word unless it leads people to build a temple to Love, inhabited by people performing good deeds and working at breaking down barriers, to nurture and feed the hungry, to employ the willing and able, to build people (all people) up to something better than what the past offered. I don’t know much, but I am sure we cannot rest in peace until we conquer our natural tendency to self-destruction. We cannot honor the dead when we are such a tortured mess of ambivalence and misanthropy that we cannot honor the living by doing right by them.

I see the very latest in the world of death and nostalgia, and I do not like it. It makes me feel shame for the whole human race. I do not want to go down that path—for the way is down, indeed.

I hope you feel the same way. I hope you will add yourself to movement and uprising. It could be that I mean “a movement” or “an uprising” – but what I am saying is do not go down. Go up, and bring someone along with you! Let us all rise to our very best potential, however we can. That is honestly the only way to honor the experience of life and all the wonderful people that have lived it.

The $1.98 Opera Circuit Revisited: 21st Century Communications and Trending

Those of you who have known me for a lllllooooonnnnnnnggggg time may remember the series of articles I wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called “Singing on the $1.98 Opera Circuit.” These articles were all about young opera singers starving for our art, as we built up our resumés. Wacky things seemed to happen in every production (opera company sued by blind bass player, citing discrimination against the visually impaired; three conductors in a row come down with pneumonia before opening night of the show; rehearsal space burns down after volunteers throw linseed rags in a container on the hottest day of the year… stuff like that), and it seemed only right to document these happenings.

I may have those original articles somewhere, but here is a new one. And I mean NEW.

This is a story from a friend of a friend.

This friend of a friend sang for an event, and one of the other singers came up to her afterward. “I love your voice,” this lady enthused, “I would love to talk to you about this classical music group I am trying to put together.” The friend thanked the woman and said she would enjoy speaking to her about it, at some point; she didn’t have a business card handy. The woman said, “oh, that’s okay; I can get your email address from the conductor.”

My friend thought nothing more about it. Weeks passed, busy and full of adventure, heartache or whatever.

Suddenly, from out of the blue, a Doodle poll message appeared in this friend’s email inbox. The poll was requesting that people fill in dates to meet about a new Opera Company. My friend gazed at the many people who had been sent the email in utter bewilderment: reviewers, composers, directors, and singers were among the people whose names and email addresses she could identify. My friend, being rather busy at the time, decided not to respond; she and the woman organizing this new “classical music group” hadn’t actually had a conversation. If my friend had known the venture was an opera company, she would have declined immediately because of the huge amount of travel that would be involved, and the number of other projects she was involved with. She figured that if she did not respond to this unsolicited poll, the non-response would be understood as meaning “I’m not interested.”

Well, reminder messages started coming in. As well as messages from a messaging service that requested the information of the recipient in order to read the incoming message. My friend didn’t really want to be receiving ever more communications from yet another message service, and with the recent hacking incidents occurring across the entire spectrum of retail and other computer network services, she didn’t want to give her information out to one she had never heard of that had “terms of service” small print. So, she was never able to read the additional messages.

Finally, another email, addressed to slightly different huge group of people, arrived in her inbox. This message contained a rebuke to everyone because they had not answered the request for Doodle poll responses.

“‘If you do not fill out the doodle pool, I may have to start calling monthly mandatory meetings,’ was the officious threat.”

“You’re kidding! But,” I said, as we were talking about this over coffee, “you hadn’t agreed to do anything, had you?”

“No!” she said, “I never spoke to the woman prior to getting spammed.”

“Wow.”

“I am not the only one irritated. One of the reviewers who had been among the group emailed replied to everyone, asking how could they get off this list, as requests to be deleted from it had gone unanswered.”

The three of us had our heads together, but fell silent. There was quiet coffee sipping. The whole thing was just too ridiculous.

“So, finally, I did respond to one of the emails, saying I could not commit to anything, at this time. I figured it would all stop, after that.”

“I gather it didn’t?” I asked.

“Well, she wrote me back, telling me she would keep my name, and to let her know when I was available.”

“So, what are you going to do, now?” asked my friend.

“I was hoping you could give me some ideas… See, I just got another email with the ‘company roster’ attached. I am listed as a ‘comprimario.’”

“No way!”

“Yes!”

“But, you never, like, auditioned or signed a contract or anything…”

“Nothing. And now I don’t want to get near this thing with a ten-foot poll. If the gal running it is so pushy with all these unwanted communications, I cannot even imagine actually working with her.”

“I don’t get it…”

“Well, I think she is trying to validate her start-up by including the names of people who have a presence in the music community. I mean, I think I am being used…”

“Sort of a weird compliment. Geez…”

“I don’t think I can get off the list! And I am worried that being on it will come back to haunt me, at some point. I mean, what if this group is bad or a scam or something?”

“Crazy! Most of the time, we are trying to get on a list, somewhere… I don’t know what to tell you. This is really the most bizarre thing I have ever heard of.”

“Maybe I should fill out the Doodle poll, make myself unavailable for all the proposed dates?”

“That might just mean you’d be required to come to mandatory meetings.”

We laughed.

But really, although this is a joke, it isn’t funny.