Ben Webster has appeared in my recent listening more often than any other saxophonist. A titan deserving of his stature: accessibly romantic and urgent but also more than subtle enough for the aficionadi. But Ben Webster presents a challenge to the modern school(s) of saxophone. Growing up, teachers exalted the virtue of versatility, and being able to do many things certainly leads to economic rewards in the current vulture-landscape of the gigging musician. Woodwind doubles, trad-jazz cosplay, wedding bands, the ability and means to drive a car…
But stylistic versatility comes at a cost to purity. (For what it’s worth, I still value technical versatility, by which I mean two things only: a wide dynamic range and many options for articulation.) Ben Webster is not particularly versatile; he has essentially two modes: boozy, whispery, melt-your-heart romanticism; and growling, exuberant swing. I haven’t heard Ben Webster leave his comfort zone — but I’m not particularly hungry to hear that either! I listen to Ben Webster for the Ben Webster stuff. There are other places to go for everything else; such is the marketplace of music. I dream of being so narrow, so distilled.
~ ~ ~
“Antisemitism is on the rise, again.”
I have heard the claim trotted out, again. It cannot be true on average over multiple generations; despite the best efforts of both far-right and -left goofballs, the Holocaust remains unforgotten, singular, and relevant. Ugly flare-ups come in spite of the long arc of history. Still, Black-Jewish tension is particularly heartbreaking to me. The two funniest groups in America, the greatest contributors to American English. Some of the most musical people in the universe. And ripe history for solidarity: fundamental origin stories of slavery and oppression, triumph against all odds. Impossible to kill. No one who has bet against the Jews has ever won. Black American identity is younger, but I will similarly bet with it and against the haters. My blood is Jewish and my heroes are Black. Push forward, not back.
What can these groups learn from each other? What can they teach the rest of the world? I ask the question in the context of a less-and-less-unlikely global catastrophe — “experts estimate the probability of nuclear war remains under 50%’’ — in which the death rattle of The Empire could wipe out far more than we are prepared to lose. (Want to spoil your mood? Listen to this.) And even if we evade WWIII or a financial apocalypse or a random solar blast, the surviving futures look mostly grim: Chinese-communism-style surveillance state, antinatalist hyperenvironmentalism, delusional internet cults awash in Christian nationalism… oy. I can’t help but add that all three flavors of dystopia are particularly bad for the Jews, but then again, we have gotten through worse. Don’t bet against the Jews.
Is there any way to zig against all those horrible zags? Better yet, any way to cherrypick whatever scraps of progress might live within those dystopias, to wrest a more temperate and egalitarian future from the clutches of many extremisms? Let’s see: a communist surveillance state can only exist on a substrate of technological interconnectedness, which could be a net positive if handled with some delicateness; the environmental zealots are right about the twin plagues of cars and trash, despite their extreme wrongness about energy and the value of life; OK, it’s hard to find the sunny spots of the QAnon world, but I will give them this: they hate the government the right amount.
Does any system carve these positives out of the unignorable negatives? For my money, the principles and implementation of Bitcoin come closer than one might think. Forget NFTs and tech-bros and high-risk speculative trading; that shit all sucks. Bitcoin 1) resists surveillance; 2) puts energy to good use and incentivizes cleaning up its sources; and 3) weakens the government. A zealous argument might include Bitcoin as a necessary condition for human flourishing, but even the most maximalist pundit would not call it sufficient. Money is not enough.
Another common word in these circles: decentralization. Being against centralization, I am pro-decentralization. But what does that really mean — where does it lead, taken to its logical conclusion? I find it hard to disagree with this article from June 2016 — before the election of Trump, before we took the portal to reality-TV reality. (Many many strong arguments against the American Empire have come screaming to the foreground since then.) The national-divorce-meiosis could even chain-react further than the level of the states. NYC residents feel little in common with inhabitants of the rural parts of New York; California makes no sense as a politically unified place — we are more ready for this than we might think. But breaking an egg is again a necessary but not sufficient condition for making an omelet. Enter the Jews.
Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness have existed in so many different situations across history, despite the best and worst efforts of many villains. Jewish identity is bigger than ethnicity, religion, geography, politics, and even culture. It is just that — identity: what makes you you. The secret to the survival of Jewishness is the selective running of different blocks of code in different situations. Judaism the religion is only a subset of Jewishness, and moral guidelines comparable to the teachings of Christ or the Buddha are only a subset of Judaism. The Tanakh also contains genealogy and civil laws — features not necessary in the texts of a religion like Christianity, which came to exist in the context of the Roman Empire, which had its own civil laws. Modern Jews selectively and purposefully “gray out” huge blocks of Judaism, and do so flexibly according to the times and places in which they live. Modern-day nutritional science does about half the job of the laws of Kashrut; the existence of weekends pushes Jews and non-Jews alike towards the profound value of the Sabbath; slavery is out, period. The discourse of the Talmud moreover upgrades Judaism by clarifying it, but not too much; it also shows how to upgrade thinking and interpretation — a precursor to the academic system as well as online message boards and Wikipedia. All of which is to say that Jewishness has morphed greatly over the generations and will continue to evolve and diverge. The only unbroken commonality is the continuity itself of the legacy and identity of a people.
Jews had their own kingdom once and they have their own state now, not without its flaws. But the vast majority of Jews in history have existed as minorities, religiously, ethnically, and ideologically. Attrition due to forced conversion and mass murder has always existed, but the flame never goes out. My hope for every individual person in the world is to feel a sense of belonging to some sort of group like this. The sense of belonging is the sufficient ingredient that will make a decentralized future work. In particular, one will need a flexible, larger-than-necessary identity that can scale up or down as needed. More likely, many such identities will coexist and compete, dancing in one’s soul.
America fragments — then what? The Jews will be ready, or will get ready quick. No time for the dough to rise. I worry for those who attempt to exist primarily in the Twitter-level national “conversation”: the people for whom the government acts as the arbiter of culture and belief. I worry for the YouTube atheist who purports to see all of humanity as one big team and therefore associates with no one at all. I worry for the TV-addled consumer for whom entertainment is religion and vice versa. I worry for the immigrant who makes no effort to learn English, who digs their heels in against any assimilation. I worry for the teenager whose whole life is mediated through three or four tech companies. I worry for the system-hacking arch-capitalist — when systems disintegrate, so do loopholes — no more “number go up.”
Each person needs a small handful of identities, a simple web of languages they can speak. Bitcoin can perhaps create a substrate of money and energy that acts as neutral economic piping. The threat of violence can perhaps create a substrate of mutually-assured security. But that’s not enough. If we ever become a zillion isolated points — the trivial and disappointing discrete topology — we lose. Human culture evolves in groups, and super- and sub-groups above and below. Inclusion and exclusion are equally important. Culture needs texture, and the big forces that smooth out that texture — corporations, governments, violence — deserve to go.
~ ~ ~
For the first time in my life, I have been experimenting with reeds below size 2. No spoilers, but I recommend you try it. At least once. A revelation — an ice-cold mirror held up to bad habits; a new path forward, or at least somewhere else. Stickshift. I will have something to show off soon but not too soon.