ANTITUSSIVE

Edward Said was a great thinker. And it was music that made him tick. Daniel Barenbolm remembers his playing partner

Daniel Barenbolm Monday October 25, 2004

The Guardian

Edward Said was many things for many people, but in reality, his was a musician's soul, in the deepest sense of the word. He wrote about important universal issues such as exile, politics, integration. However, the most surprising thing for me, as his friend and great admirer, was the realisation that, on many occasions, he formulated ideas and reached conclusions through music; and he saw music as a reflection of the ideas that he had regarding other issues.

This is one of the main reasons why I believe that Said was such an important figure. His journey through this world took place precisely at a time when the humanity of music, its human value as well as the value of thought, the transcendence of the idea written in sounds, were, and regrettably continue to be, concepts in decline.

His fierce anti-specialisation led him to criticise very strongly, and very fairly, the fact that musical education was becoming increasingly poor, not only in the United States - which, after all, had imported the music of old Europe - but also in the very countries that had produced music's greatest figures: for example, in Germany, which had produced Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Schumann and many others; or in France, which had produced Debussy and Ravel. Furthermore, he perceived a sign that bothered him exceedingly, a perception that was to unite us very quickly: even when there was musical education, it was carried out in a very specialised way. In the best of cases, young people were offered the opportunity to practice an instrument, to acquire necessary knowledge of theory, of musicology, and of everything that a musician needs professionally.

But, at the same time, there existed a widespread and growing incomprehension of the impossibility of articulating the content of a musical work. After all, if it were possible to express in words the content of one of Beethoven's symphonies, we would no longer have a need for that symphony. But the fact that it is impossible to express in words the music's content does not mean that there is no content.

The paradox consists of the fact that music is only sound, but sound, in itself, is not music. There lies Said's main idea as a musician who was also an excellent pianist.

In recent years, due to his terrible illness, he was unable to maintain the level of physical energy necessary to play the piano. I remember many unforgettable times that we spent playing Schubert pieces for four hands. Two or three years ago, I had a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York and he was going through a very difficult period of his illness. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon. Although he knew that I had arrived that very morning from Chicago, he showed up very early at rehearsal with a volume of Schubert's pieces for four hands. He told me: "Today I want us to play at least eight bars, not for the pleasure of playing, but because I need it to survive."

As you can imagine, at that moment, just in from the airport and with one hour of rehearsal before the afternoon's concert, the last thing I wanted to do was to play Schubert for four hands. But, as is always the case, when you teach you learn, and when you give you receive. And you learn when you teach because the student asks questions that you no longer even ask yourself, because they are part of the almost automatic thought which each one of us develops. And suddenly, the question addresses something that forces us to rethink it from its origin, from its very essence.

Naturally, I did it, with the greatest pleasure, because my dear friend asked me to do so. But when we played, those few minutes of a Schubert rondo - an extremely beautiful piece, which was not, however, the deepest or most transcendent - I felt musically enriched in a completely unexpected way. That was Edward Said.

Said was interested in detail. Indeed, he understood perfectly that musical genius or musical talent requires tremendous attention to detail. The genius attends to detail as if it were the most important thing. And in doing so, he does not lose sight of the big picture; rather, he manages to trace out that big picture. Because the big picture, in music as in thought, must be the result of the coordination of small details.

He had a refined knowledge of the art of composition and orchestration. He knew that in the second act of Tristan and Isolde, at a certain moment, the horns withdraw behind the stage and, a couple of bars later, the same musical note re-emerges in the pit orchestra's clarinets. So many singers I have had the honour and pleasure of collaborating with on that piece are unaware of that detail and look behind them to see where the sound is coming from. He took interest in these things, because he understood that this meticulous interest in detail conferred a grandeur upon the whole.

He also knew how to distinguish clearly between power and force, which constituted one of the main ideas of his struggle. He knew quite well that, in music, force is not power, something that many of the world's political leaders do not perceive. The difference between power and force is equivalent to the difference between volume and intensity in music. When one says to a musician, "You are not playing intensely enough", his first reaction is to play louder. And it is exactly the opposite: the lower the volume, the greater the need for intensity, and the greater the volume, the greater the need for a calm force in the sound.

These are some examples that illustrate my conviction that his concept of life and of the world originated and lay in music. Another example is to be found in his idea of interconnection. In music, there are no independent elements. The character and intention of the simplest melody change drastically with a complex harmony. That is learned through music, not through political life. Thus emerges the impossibility of separating elements, the perception that everything is connected, the need to always unite logical thought and intuitive emotion. How often do we abandon all logic for the sake of an emotional need? In music, this is impossible, since music cannot be made exclusively with reason or with emotion. What is more: if those elements may be separated, they are no longer music, but a collection of sounds.

His concept of inclusion also derived from music, as well as the integration principle. The same could be applied to his book Orientalism. It speaks of the idea of Oriental seduction versus western production. In music, there is no production without seduction. Productive as a musical idea may be, if it is lacking the seduction of the necessary sound, it is insufficient. This is why I say that Edward Said was, for many, a great thinker, a fighter for the rights of his people, and an incomparable intellectual. But for me, he was always, really, a musician, in the deepest sense of the term.

· Translated from Spanish by Kimberly Borchard. The Barenboim-Said Foundation will open Ramallah's first Music Kindergarten in autumn, in memory of the late Edward Said. Most of the students come from refugee camps around the Ramallah area.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:44 PM 0 comments

HUMOR BY DAVE BARRY Miami Herald Posted on Sun, Oct. 24, 2004

Oh, swell: We have yet another survey showing that men, when compared to women, are scum. Just once, I'd like to see some survey asking questions that would highlight areas where men are more likely to be superior, such as:

1. If it was an emergency, could you open a beer bottle with your teeth?

2. How many hours per week, total, do you spend fretting about your thighs?

3. Do you have the emotional stability to make a meaningful lifelong commitment, through good times and bad, to a set of underwear?

4. Do you know the joke whose punch line is: ``But first, roo roo!''?

5. If another person is not saying anything, and you're wondering if this might be because something is bothering that person, and you ask that person what that person is thinking, and that person says ''Nothing,'' do you accept this perfectly reasonable answer, or do you proceed to NAG THE PERSON HALF TO DEATH?

But do we see these questions on surveys? We do not. Instead we see questions like the ones asked in a recent survey by the U.S. Department of Labor. Having apparently run completely out of useful things to do, the department asked 21,000 Americans how they spend their time when they're not working.

It turned out that women spend twice as much time as men on household chores and child care, while men spend more time on leisure. On the surface, this looks bad. But surface looks are often deceiving. A good example is the iceberg, which appears to be a big hunk of ice, but if you look beneath the surface, you find that it is ... OK, it is actually a big hunk of ice. So we see that this is in fact not a good example, and we should just move on.

But my point is that this survey is very misleading. Take the concept of ''housework.'' It may be true that women spend more TIME on it, but what, really, are they accomplishing? In my own home, my wife spends a lot of time picking up our 4-year-old daughter's doll clothes and laboriously putting them back on the various naked Barbies, the naked Snow White, the naked Ariel the mermaid, and the incredibly lucky naked Ken.

When my wife does this, she is clearly working, but she is not what a man would call ''working smart.'' A man knows from harsh real-world experience that all of these dolls will soon be naked again, and so he makes a conscious decision to leave the dressing of the dolls, and the cleaning of his daughter's room in general, until a more sensible and productive time, such as when his daughter enters college. But does this man get any slack from the so-called ''Department of Labor?'' He does not.

And let's talk about child care vs. leisure. For women, these are two separate activities, but men have perfected a productivity-enhancing technique called ''multitasking.'' Say a man is supposed to watch a child, but he also wants to watch a football game. Thanks to ''multitasking,'' this man can keep one eye on the football game, while at the same time keeping the other eye also on the football game. But in some remote sector of his brain he is vaguely aware that there is a child around somewhere, and if he hears anything suspicious, such as sirens or an explosion, he will respond immediately, unless it is a crucial third-down situation.

Speaking of which: I was once at a Thanksgiving gathering where there was a backyard touch-football game involving all the guys except one -- I will call him ''Fred'' -- who was watching us while holding his infant daughter. My team was short one player, and we were in a crucial third-down situation, so we looked over at ''Fred'' -- an excellent receiver -- and, after making us swear we would never tell his wife, he very carefully set his daughter down on the lawn and joined the game for a single play, which resulted in Joel -- excuse me, I mean ''Fred'' -- scoring a touchdown. This never would have happened if we had allowed ourselves to be shackled by the rigid, inflexible definitions of ''leisure'' and ''child care'' that have for so long enslaved women and the so-called ``Department of Labor.''

Am I saying men are perfect? I am not. There are certainly areas of domestic life where men could show more sensitivity toward, and awareness of, the imbalance between them and women, and I intend to address these areas in detail. But first: Roo roo!

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:40 PM 0 comments

By EMILY EAKIN NYT WinR Sun October 17, 2004

WITH the death on Oct. 8 of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close.

He had been among the last of a generation of thinkers, mostly male and invariably French, whose sweeping claims about the nature of language, existence and reality transfixed scholars on both sides of the Atlantic and, for several decades, beginning in the 1960's, turned humanities departments into hotbeds of productivity and debate.

Mr. Derrida outlived fellow theorists Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, but signs of theory's waning influence had been accumulating around him for years. Since the early 1990's, the grand intellectual paradigms with which these men were prominently associated - Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism - had steadily lost adherents and prestige.

The world had changed but not necessarily in the ways some of big theory's fervent champions had hoped. Ideas once greeted as potential catalysts for revolution began to seem banal, irrelevant or simply inadequate to the task of achieving social change.

Deconstruction, Mr. Derrida's primary legacy, was no exception. Originally a method of rigorous textual analysis intended to show that no piece of writing is exactly what it seems, but rather laden with ambiguities and contradictions, deconstruction found ready acolytes across the humanities and beyond - including many determined to deconstruct not just text but the political system and society at large.

Today, the term has become a more or less meaningless artifact of popular culture, more likely to turn up in a description of an untailored suit in the pages of Vogue than in a graduate seminar on James Joyce.

But even as theory, or at least its distinctive vocabulary, was seeping into everyday life, some scholars were renouncing it, as Frank Lentricchia, an English professor at Duke University, did in a 1996 essay in Lingua Franca magazine. Theory, he argued, had all but supplanted literature in English departments, reducing the literary canon to a litany of political and social wrongs, "a cesspool," as he put it, "of racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia and imperialism." Other scholars quietly abandoned big theory - writing at its most general and abstract - for more personal projects, producing memoirs and even novels.

A 2003 symposium on the future of theory hosted by the editors of Critical Inquiry, an academic journal, captured the bleak mood. When a student in the audience asked the panelists, more than two dozen distinguished scholars, what theory was good for, the answer came back amid much hand-wringing over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq: very little.

That same year, the British professor Terry Eagleton, who made his name as a Marxist literary critic, published "After Theory," in which he declared: "We are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them."

Why did big theories flourish, and why are they now in retreat? The most likely explanation involves politics. In this view, the rise and fall of theory paralleled the changing fortunes of the left. "The fate of major theories was very much bound up with a political moment," Mr. Eagleton said in a telephone interview. "The heroic period for that theory was the 1960's to the 1980's, a period in which the left was on the up." More than simply tools for analyzing literary or philosophical texts, theory was seen as a political weapon with which to challenge the status quo. As the English professor Stanley Fish put it in a telephone interview: "There was a general desire for there to be a political payoff for theoretical formulations. The hope was to revolutionize the world."

In the case of deconstruction, the idea that hidden power hierarchies and agendas could be exposed through careful close readings had tremendous political appeal. Analyzing Mr. Derrida's rise to stardom in a 1987 article, "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida," Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard, argued that among other things he "provided just the theoretical position that met and matched the political climate."

Then the political climate changed, and big theory's fate was sealed. The Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Advances in neuroscience upended Freudian assumptions about the brain, and psychoactive drugs replaced psychoanalysis. And for the most part the social revolutions that big theory had seemed to portend did not take place.

Today, humanities departments are quieter places than they were when Mr. Derrida's ideas first caught on. The insights - especially the powerful idea that language is not a transparent medium for representing reality but rather a cultural system that shapes our values and beliefs - are here to stay. But these days, few scholars are producing discipline-transcending, paradigm-breaking new work.

The emphasis has shifted to what Ms. Lamont in a telephone interview called "finely grained, empirical research." She added, "There are not many huge theorists to be hired out there."

But that may not be such a bad thing after all. In retrospect, Mr. Fish said, it was a mistake to believe that theory could change the world.

"Once theoretical questions cease to be questions in the realm of philosophy and become questions about how to live our lives, that places a great burden on theory," he said. "No theory can make good on that promise. It's the difference between the claims one can legitimately make and the claims that one probably should not make for theory. On the one hand you can say, as a theorist, 'Follow me, and I will show you an answer to an important, vexing and longstanding question.' Or you can say, 'Follow me, and I will lead you to the promised land.'

''The first is, of course, the appropriate claim and necessary claim made by scholars and theorists. The second is the language of prophets or even of gods. And theorists, thankfully, are neither prophets nor gods."

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:20 AM 0 comments

By Bryan Keefer Washington Post September 11, 2004 Perhaps it's because I'm young enough that I missed the Vietnam War by the better part of a decade and would rather hear about Iraq, where people my age are fighting and dying. Or perhaps it's because I think that political campaigns should turn on more than trivia and silly political point-scoring. Whatever the reason, the last few weeks of presidential campaign coverage have struck me as symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the establishment news media from a young person's perspective. The media's obsession with getting the latest minutiae about John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or the latest gossipy tidbits about President Bush's alleged past drug use, is misplaced. The endless he said/he said reporting and the airtime given to questionable allegations highlight the reason why so many young people like myself are turning away from mainstream outlets such as newspapers and network newscasts. Instead, we're increasingly choosing to get our news and analysis from the Internet and even turning to unconventional outlets like Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" in pursuit of the straight story. To be blunt, the mainstream media don't give my generation what we want. We want the news and we want it now, of course -- we're spoiled that way. But more than anything, we want the entire story; not just the he said/she said, not just the latest factoid, but the truth. To me and others raised in our media-saturated environment, where 24-hour cable news and Internet access bring us more information than we can possibly digest, the mainstream media seem trapped in the age of "All the President's Men." They're still wedded to outdated ambitions like getting the "scoop" or maintaining a veneer of objectivity, both of which are concepts that have been superseded by technology. We live in an era when PR pros have figured out how to bend the news cycle to their whims, and much of what's broadcast on the networks bears a striking resemblance to the commercials airing between segments. Like other twenty-somethings (I'm 26), I've been raised in an era when advertising invades every aspect of pop culture, and to me the information provided by mainstream news outlets too often feels like one more product, produced by politicians and publicists. The first thing I'd say to the "old media" is, forget the scoop. Like corporate press releases, much of what passes for hot news these days isn't a scoop by any stretch of the imagination, even though it's often presented as one. News leaked by the White House, for example, which is likely to come out eventually anyway, is information, really, not news. I'd wager that among my generation, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could remember the byline from the latest accusation about what Kerry did or didn't do in Vietnam to earn or not earn his medals. (Ditto for any story about the latest incarnation of the iPod.) What many young media surfers do remember are the media's great successes -- and their great mistakes. What sticks in readers' minds are enduring successes like Watergate -- not the flash-in-the-pan scoops like whether The Washington Post beat the New York Times by a day with the latest accusation about Kerry's war wounds. The media's big mistakes live in infamy. Nearly everyone I know could tell you that it was Fox News that first called Florida for George Bush during the 2000 election (they turned out to be right in the end, of course, but they were six weeks premature). Likewise (thanks in part to post facto hand-wringing by the media), most news junkies could tell you it was the New York Times that, in the run-up to the Iraq war, broke the ultimately debunked story of the aluminum tubes that unnamed administration sources claimed could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Both of those stories were mistakes that might have been avoided if media institutions hadn't succumbed to the all-too-prevalent scoop mentality. The irony is that the Internet and cable television have generally liberated print journalists from having to break news instantaneously. We younger news consumers don't read newspapers to find out what happened the day before, because we already know. Print media, in particular, are now free to do what cable and Internet news sources can't: provide the sort of context and analysis for readers that other outlets don't. What's particularly striking to me is how politicians have figured out how to use the media's weaknesses against them. I've always been a news junkie, but after watching the coverage of the 2000 campaign and the spin from the candidates (and even the interest group I then worked for), I couldn't take it anymore. Along with two friends, I founded Spinsanity.org to truth-squad politicians and political spin. And for the past three years, I've seen how politicians have exploited both the media's desire for the scoop and their pretense of objectivity -- something both Bush and Kerry are doing repeatedly in this campaign season. Here are some examples. The Bush campaign has repeatedly suggested that Kerry's plan to raise taxes on those with incomes above $200,000 is tantamount to raising taxes on small businesses. Yet the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a think tank about as close to nonpartisan as they get, has shown that, while many of those who would be affected by such an increase have some business income, only about 3 percent of all small businesses would be affected. Most journalists' accounts, however, have reported the Bush talking point without contradiction. The Kerry campaign has its own library of misleading statements, such as that 1.6 million jobs have been lost on Bush's watch. That, however, is the number for the private sector; because of gains in the public sector, the net job loss is only 900,000 since Bush took office. Part of the problem stems from journalists' reluctance to appear as though they're taking sides. Suggesting in print that the above campaign remarks are misleading could lead to screams of "Bias!" But when the candidates have become so good at spin, the media need to understand that pointing out the truth isn't the same as taking sides. Bombarded with political coverage that has more in common with advertising than with hard news, my generation is increasingly turning to alternative outlets to get the real story. Yet the mainstream media have yet to fully take advantage of the Internet. To my infinite personal frustration, for instance, most news organizations have yet to support newsreader programs. These are programs that collect links to bits of information, such as Weblog postings and sports scores, and make them accessible from a computer desktop. To someone of my generation, it would seem natural for news organizations to provide such links (as online-only publications such as Slate and Salon do). One of the best aspects of the Internet -- and what makes it particularly good as a medium for fact-checking -- is the ability to link sources of information so that news consumers can read (and judge) for themselves the truth of what is being written. After all, much reporting is based on statements in the public record or other information that's available online. If you're writing about job losses, you can point readers to a specific place on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Web site so they can decide for themselves if you (or Kerry or Bush) are doing the math right. It's hard to get away with a lie (or even subtle misinterpretation, as any blogger who has ever had to correct a piece will attest), when you link to the evidence itself. Yet as far as I can tell, no major news outlet provides such links from the online versions of its stories. People -- young people in particular -- sense that they aren't getting the whole story (or the right story) from the established media. That's why an Internet culture of fact-checking has sprung up to keep the media honest, such as campaigndesk.org, where I work, and others such as factcheck.org and snopes.com. A number of bloggers -- ranging from the partisan (instapundit.com, atrios.blogspot.com) to the professional (pressthink.org, www.j-bradford-delong.net) -- have also leaped into the breach and helped foster a culture of fact-based media criticism. Where can people go to get the real story on issues like Kerry's Vietnam service? The sad truth is that there isn't one single place where they can go, because hardly anyone in the mainstream media is putting the real story together effectively. Until the media begin understanding that many young people are turning away from mainstream news outlets for precisely this reason, we'll continue to go elsewhere for our news. *** Author's e-mail: bryan@spinsanity.org Bryan Keefer, an editor at Spinsanity.org and CampaignDesk.org, is co-author of "All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth" (Touchstone).

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:37 AM 0 comments