"official communication" from fickle ears staff, re: "the jobs that they were counting on"

We recently received the following "official communication" from the local of which we are a member and under whose auspices our present employment is conducted:

...The Eagles are on tour right now and are scheduled to perform a few times in the Southern California area. Although they are not performing in our jurisdiction, they are contracting the string students from California State University Fullerton to replace the professional musicians that would normally be contracted for these performances. This is not the first time CSUF has done this. ...

The institution is displacing professional musicians’ jobs with their students; jobs that their students are presumably training for in the first place. ... Under these circumstances, by the time their students graduate, the jobs that they were counting on for will be no longer be filled by professional musicians. ...

We of course find this part of such stories to be at best the fifth or sixth most important part.

Also, we do greatly value the privilege of being represented by a union, but we wish this union would be more coherent in its stated positions.

First: people who willingly attend Eagles-with-orchestra concerts can't tell the difference between student and professional musicians. Those who maintain this not to be the case have a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events.

Second: whatever the failings of such an audience, these are not moral failings. It must be said that they betoken success too: namely the smashing success of the education-industrial complex in taking up the cause of the performing arts. We are unfamiliar with the CSUF strings but generally we find it unsurprising that a college group could be adequate for much "professional" work. We've heard and played in several that were. We've also done extensive "professional" work and found the bar to be quite a bit lower than we, and ostensibly the union (but only sometimes), would prefer. In two different locals in two different states we have been left mystified and incredulous at the union roster on our instrument, which extends to anyone who knows someone they can borrow a tuba from. At that point, to get bothered at students taking over "professional" work is absurd. How much of the local "tuba" roster could carry the jock strap of a state-school tuba player?

Third: ditto above with regard to quantity as well as quality. It is not breaking news that more students train in the performing arts than can work in the performing arts. The industry and the union both get what they want when more musicians split a fixed amount of work. Predictably both pay lip service to "music education." Less often but equally predictably, they also pay lip service to audience outreach. But musicianship has proven more amenable to progressive reform than has reception. You can build a better mousetrap, but you can't train anyone else to notice or force them to care.

Fourth: the notion that pre-professionals "were counting on" pickup orchestra gigs with The Eagles is one which strains credulity. The union declares that they should, the industry that they shouldn't. In any case, we suspect they are not. They and their teachers are aiming much, much higher. This is as it should be, and this is what countless union and industry photo ops have goaded us towards: high motivation can come only from high aspirations. Those among the professorate who have had significant careers outside of academia know that students who are good enough to get admitted to 4-year college as music majors already play well enough to do pickup orchestra with The Eagles, no matter if the gig is union or dark. Anyone who maintains this not to be the case has a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events. They have an equally formidable task in explaining why the skills required to play pickup orchestra with The Eagles are post-secondary and graduate-level skills rather than elementary ones; why this is what music students should be doing while their peers are reading Plato and Kant, plotting regression equations, and extracting abcessed teeth; why and how this "aspiration" can be anything other than crippling and cynical in comparison to everything else the performing arts have to offer a young person. The indications are all around us that Eagles-with-orchestra skills are elementary skills, but many of us would rather hold out hope-against-hope of filling a couple more dates on the calendar than think too hard (or at all) about what is actually to happen on those dates. The cynical proposal that aspiring freelancers attend business school rather than music school speaks a certain truth, but it is not the truth that its cynical utterers think they are speaking. They think they are extolling the wisdom of markets; in fact they are pointing up an area of exceptional failure of markets and of the conceit to meritocracy, a failure so drastic that it is not the least bit representative of general market dynamics. For this and many other reasons, we ourselves prefer the idealstic outlook which challenges performing arts students to maximize their potential and to seek a distinctive artistic voice rather than bending themselves and their work toward an existing career path. But this does nothing to raise audience receptivity to those new voices. Nor does either industry or the union have any use for self-directed artists with day jobs. Prospectively we cannot really say what (if any) value self-directed artists might have. No one has any use for them, until they do.

Riesman—Abundance For What?

David Riesman
Abundance For What? and Other Essays
(1964)

"Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity"
(with Warner Bloomberg, Jr., 1957)
(pp. 147-161)

[149] Some workers responded to the exhausting demands of the workplace by a heroic effort to build up a counterlife outside the plant... Some retired into a close-knit family life and to home-improvement rather than self-improvement...

Where no other escape existed, the factory workers tended, like sailors, to fall back on the common denominator of the male sex as defining their leisure: gambling, fighting, whoring. ... Men became habituated to the factory, as children to school, but this "second nature" never overtook them completely nor turned them into enthusiastic addicts of monotony.

No wonder that a counterattack soon began against the central place of work on the simplest level of demanding shorter hours, with men choosing to take part of their increasing productivity in the form of time off rather than of an increase in real income. ...

[150] At a certain point, however, workers seem to want to buy leisure inside rather than outside the plant. No doubt this in part reflects still operative conventions as to a proper working day... And in part men may fear to have too much time outside—time perhaps on which their wives could make demands.

...

[155] ...the worker, as a parvenu, tends to have a more unequivocal relation to consumer goods than do people who have had a longer exposure to them. One of us supervised a study which illustrates this point. Working-class and middle-class parents were interviewed concerning their attitudes toward TV: for the former, this was an extrapolation of radio and the movies, and indubitably and good thing in a world of things, whereas for many middle-class parents TV presented a problem in self-definition, as well as in its possibly harmful effects on children.

This adherence to the tangible, then, characterizes working-class leisure activities in a wide gamut: the garden harvest which, like the fishing catch, can be counted and weighed; the travel mileages and car horsepowers which can be compared; and sex (whether marital or not), drinking, sports, and betting, which are all felt as essentially palpable. To be sure, we do not want to exaggerate...the lack of abstraction, nuance, and shadings of taste among factory workers. We know that even where the objects are the same, the meanings we assume to be attached to them

[156]

are of course attached only to their human possessors and that there is great variety here. ..

Beyond that, it is our impression that the simplicities of working-class leisure are under pressure not only from the tastes of the better educated strata as class consciousness and cultural encapsulation decline, but also from what we might term the feminizing of leisure. ...

"Leisure and Work in Postindustrial Society"
(1958)
(pp. 162-183)

[169] An informal poll a union local...found that the leaders did want a shorter work week whereas the rank and file did not. This was interpreted as suggesting that the leaders, better educated and more enterprising, feel cramped for time to do everything they want to do... Such men already had many hobbies... But the less active members...had no similar feeling of wanting the days to be longer. Such men, asked what they would do with an extra day, sometimes say, "sleep"; others could use it in hunting season—and already did so, to the dismay of the foreman. . . .

[In another study] some 80 per cent of industrial workers stated that they, in effect, kept on working for lack of alternatives, not for positive satisfactions. ... This clinging to the job is not simply a legacy of the Puritan ethic: it is rather a legacy of industrialism itself, of the old structures it has destroyed and the new structures it has created. Nor is it merely the feeling of shame in not having a job that is involved (although this is certainly an element). Work may not be an active presence in the life of American workers, but its absence would be an active absence. Or, more accurately, it is not so much work that would be missed as having a job...[as in] the self-definition (these data refer only to male workers) that comes from holding a job and the punctuations of life provided by regular employment.

...

[175] I have the impression that a general decline is occurring in the zest for work, a decline which is affecting even [certain] professional and intellectual groups... ...there is some slight evidence that application lists to medical school are no

[176]

longer so full, a decline which is attributed to the belief among young people that medical education is too arduous and takes too long before one is stabilized on a plateau of suburban life and domesticity. ... [In one study of medical students] three quarters of them are married, and, instead of sitting around waiting for night duty or talking about their work, they are eager to go home, help the wife get dinner, and relax with television.

Indeed, when I was an undergrad at The U, many of the grad students were both married and quite eager to go home. This meant, among other things, that you couldn't expect to get a practice room before 5pm, and that scheduling rehearsals was always difficult. It also was, already to me at that age, just really annoying to find music being treated like just another job. (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

[178] I have largely been discussing the uneven distribution of leisure in terms of differential attitudes toward work in different occupational groups. In comparison with the achievements of our occupational sociology, however, we have little comparable information concerning the sociology of leisure. ... A more systematic study than most...found that radio and TV listening were the top two activities for both upper and lower prestige groups, followed by studying in the upper group

[179]

and do-it-yourself activities in the lower. The latter spend much more time just driving around, as well as polishing the car; they also spend much more time in taverns. Only in the upper group do people go out to parties, as against simply dropping in on a neighbor... In both groups, commercial recreation outside the home, such as going to the movies, plays little part. This and other, more impressionistic studies point to the conclusion that the busier people, the professionals and executives and better-educated groups generally, also lead a more active life in their time away from work; as the saying goes, they work hard and play hard. ... Contrastingly, at the other end of the social scale, the unemployed as we know from several studies have in a psychological sense no leisure time at all...

"Some Issues in the Future of Leisure"
(with Robert S. Weiss, 1961)
(pp. 184-195)

[188] While for a few [industrial workers] this [response that given an extra hour in the day they would "sleep"] may bespeak an overfull life, and for others a general irritation with a nettling or silly question, the answer seems to us to symbolize the lack of interests and resources that could give point to the leisure time that is now available. ...

[189]

... This relative indifference has not always been the case: in the period before the Civil War, energetic workmen, in a burst of enthusiasm for science and literacy, created and attended the Mechanics Institutes. Presently our education system tends to siphon off from the working class the more literate and ambitious...

It is discomfitting to reflect on the complexity and scope of the programs that would be required to overcome this legacy of passivity and aimlessness. ...

At the level of the society the problems are no less grave. Where

[190]

the recreationist works for the public rather than the private sector, he has as little leverage at his disposal as the city planner has. One of us has recently had the chance to observe the enormous resistance that developed in a small Vermont community to a recreation leader's idea that the town should build a swimming pool, rather than some monument, as a war memorial: the project was fought by the town's elders as frivolous and a waste of money, in spite of the fact that the nearby rivers had become too polluted for swimming. Only great civic effort finally carried the project through, and now "everyone" can see what a boon it is to children and their parents, to farmers and workers after a hot day, and to otherwise idle teenagers, who can display themselves on the high dives, or, if they swim well enough, make a little money and gain some sense of responsibility from helping act as lifeguards around the pool. One consequence of the political weakness of public recreation is a tendency to overideologize particular leisure-time activities, exaggerating their importance and their potential contribution to individual character and the fabric of society. The President's campaign for physical fitness as a way of beating the Russians is an illustration. College sports may have suffered in the same way; it has repeatedly been shown, in novels and in the newspapers, that football or basketball do not inevitably build character. Yet it is hard to see how social forms adequate to the new leisure can be developed without an ideology that will mobilize people and strengthen the power of the few groups who are now concerned with the preservation of wilderness areas, the setting aside of land in our sprawling metropolitan belts for the play of adults and children, and the general release of resources other than commercial ones for experimentation and research in the field of leisure.

In comparison with the organizational forms developed for the integration of effort at work, there barely exist the social forms within which the energies of leisure might be developed or even illustatrated. Yet such comments evoke the whole paradox of planning for the use of what is an uncommitted part of one's life. Leisure is supposed to be informal, spontaneous, and unplanned, and is often defined as unobligated time, not only free of the job but free of social or civic obligations, moolighting, or more or less requisite do-it-yourself activities. One re-

[191]

sult of this outlook, however, is to discourage whatever planning is possible (except, perhaps, in terms of the family, not always the optimal unit for leisure when one thinks of the development of its individual members). When we confront such problems, we are inclined to think that significant changes in the organization of leisure are not likely to come in the absence of changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms, and its cultural style.

when you only ever move halfway toward acceptance you never arrive there

Like both of my parents, I have a hard time keeping my living space clean. The cursed blessing of full-time work had, for brief while, led to a slight improvement simply by preventing me from being home all that much; but by mid-pandemic I had scarcely left for months and had not an iota of structure to compel remediation of the gathering storm. The return to work, welcome as it has been in most every way, has begotten equilibriation but not remediation.

A longtime friend got wind of this last week and offered to help me clean. I think this is one of the nicest, most caring things anyone not related to me has ever done for me. We didn't have a whole lot of time and hence didn't get very far, but we certainly got further than I had gotten on my own; and of course the mere fact of our appointment did compel me to get started on my own a few hours early. "Momentum" this might be called in the prevailing therapeutic argot. Except that the only momentum I am capable of torquing myself off of is the kind that lives out here, in the shadow world of ideas and discourse, and potentially (though recently not so much) in what a certain dreadlocked mandarinate has dubbed creative music. (As opposed to...the other kind?)

So, having now over the course of the prior 48 hours burned through a coupla hundred pages of moderate-to-heavy book-reading, having harvested choice nuggets from a baker's dozen emails-to-self re: a wide range of journal articles and other online blather, and having prepared and formatted almost as many future blog posts on all manner of pseudo-scholarly topics so near and dear to our ongoing project here, I do find it very, very, VERY difficult to accept the interpretation that I have been unproductive this "weekend" simply because I have let the apartment cleaning and a few other mundane errands fall by the wayside yet again, just as they always have for me and, for the most part, for my parents too. And I find it equally difficult to accept the interpretation that I am not "ambitious" just because scholarship and creative music don't pay the bills. In fact my ambitions may well kill me, same as for a good capitalist or prospector as for an artist or scholar; or if they don't quite kill me, they certainly will take their revenge in any number of mundane or quotidian ways. Which is to say, they already have.

Stephenson, PTMC—Work and Play and Work

William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)

The child at play, Freud writes, is like a poet; both "rearrange things" in their worlds "to suit them better." Both child and poet distinguish between the real world of painful emotions, frustrations, hurts, and obduracies, and the play world, where these real-world fears and hurts are transmuted into humor, pleasure, and delightful wish-fulfillment. Play is escape from what goes on painfully in the real world. That something of the kind occurs is certain. But Freud overlooked the other half of fantasy, which "rearranges" not only things but the self to suit itself better. The self may grow, develop, and restructure itself in daydreaming and fantasy. The emotions that we did not realize we were capable of, the very things that Freud set out to explain, are an intimation of a growing self, of rearranging within oneself, rather than transmogrifications of painful experiences. Freud saw only mental sickness in daydreaming. The child wants to feel "grown-up," and thus plays. The adult gives up such playing, he thinks, but may daydream instead. We all create fantasies, as long as we live; but, for Freud, the more "normal" we are the less daydreaming we do. I would rather say that the more we work and live by work, in Freud's inner-directed world, the less we have time for daydreams. But by the same token the development of self is likely to have stopped when we lose ourselves in work.
(pp. 200-201)

This is an odd turn near the end of the book. Suddenly Stephenson has performed the same historically-specific pigeonholing of

work

from which he has been seeking the whole time to liberate

play
.

Would it not be better put to say that truly

losing oneself

in

work

affords one much the same potential for

development of the self

as does the ideal of

subjective play
?

And by way of much the same process?

It seems to me that the anti-ideal of work to which Stephenson appeals here, to work as pure necessity imposed on the self from without by the dark forces of social control, this anti-ideal need not be accepted ipso facto, and indeed is not accepted now nearly as readily as it was in 1967. Work-as-pure-necessity sounds terrible, sometimes it is actually terrible, but it is still possible to lose yourself in it, to be constructively "rearranged" in and through work, whether or not the overall experience is pleasant or even tolerable. This, at least, has been one of my enduring takeaways from several stints in the security industry, and from inumerable musical engagements which had me pining for my old TSA job by the time they were through. I can't really manage pure play-escape either, though I suppose it's time to accept that I'm in the minority (while nonetheless holding out stubborn hope that this reflects a culturebound rather than an essential condition of humanity). The maintenance lady at the Resort who enviously tells us we're "working at playing" is not all wrong; and it is precisely this rare opportunity for balanced playwork which I so value about the job from which I've been furloughed for the past year and a half, much to the incomprehension of both co-workers and outside acquaintances who know just how individualistic and self-regarding I am.

Stephenson again:

No doubt all this can be projected upon the poem [Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock], metaphysical, Freudian, Marxian, and the rest. But I would agree instead...that the poem is largely unadulterated fun. ... The incident is trivial, but the human delight is enormous. ...

Instead of dull Marx, nasty Freud, or ponderous metaphysician, all dealing with problems in the real world, Pope gives us a poem to play with in the mind, with joy, wit, fun, delight, freedom...all in step in unalloyed fantasy.

This is subjective play, regarded as pure communication-pleasure. Pope wrote with no thought of hurt or gain...he was having fun, as a child has when it plays. If we are so minded, and so open to joy, reading the poem gives us the selfsame satisfactions. And this is the core of our theory.
(pp. 199-200)

So the poet was merely

having fun, as a child has when it plays
?

This commits precisely the fallacy Sennett warned against in his Debussy anecdote. It is as if the obvious speciousness of so many accreted interpretations has cowed the author into an equally severe overeaction in the other direction.

One can only hope that somewhere between the too-knowing interpreter and the blissfully ignorant child there is a whole world of what can only be called adult self-development, conspicuous by its absence here just as it is in most academic/educational settings.

From Sutton-Smith's introduction (1987):

We live in a world in which the economic distinction between play and work exercises its own evaluational coercion; where the scientific distinction between object and subject also exercises its epistemological coercion over the way we come to think about play. But, to the contrary, the movement of players in and out of play is often much more indistinct...
(p. xiii)

[Stephenson] would find little disagreement if he stated that the individual purpose in all of this is self-enhancement. There is not much power to the "explanation," however, since little is known about self enhancement. Stephenson does stress the importance of the player's freedom of choice in self-enhancement and that concept has become a salient twentieth-century way of defining a person at play: Play is something one does with freedom, or when one is moved by intrinsic motivation. This was also a major point made by Huizenga.

The problem with this stress on freedom of choice, however, is that it is also a culturally-relative reflex to our traditional distinction between work and play—assigning pain to the former and pleasure to the latter. ... Since the event of philosophical, political and poetic romanticism at the turn of the Nineteenth century, Western culture has idealized the freedom supposedly found in art and play... The contrary case would seek to show that although modern play is not usually seen as an obligation, its players are often coerced by their own addictions to the excitements of gambling and contests of a physical or intellectual nature. Inner compulsions may still exact what society may not longer require. None of this need deny that subjective play is what mass communication is about, though it does suggest that we need to modify Stephenson's defense of his position.
(pp. xiv-xv)

The most serious recent critique of Stephenson's work is simply a reiteration of the view that he overlooks the great extent to which the public is manipulated through the mass media, something of which he is quite aware. He does not suggest that this does not occur only that, even if it does, the populace is also engaged in mass communications for the purposes of its own play. It is a fact that those who are addicted to certain kinds of play are made vulnerable by their own enthusiasm... They are exploited...but they are still at play. Once we divorce play from the romanticism of free choice and idealistic notions of value, there is less need to see any contradiction between a player's addictions to his or her own excitements and the efforts of others to manipulate those needs for their own profit.
(p. xvi)

Détournement as Resistance to Ownership of the Commons

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

pp.40-41—Détournement as resistance to ownership of the commons

The only problem I have with this is that it deprives the person making the reclamation of the transformative struggle which comes with striving for a unique, original accomplishment. Perhaps wholesale appropriations are crucial for their potential to remind collective society of its collective aspects; but the perpetrator has, as I take Debord to have said repeatedly, not accomplished much for themselves. They have Never Worked in one important sense, and again, while someone's gotta do it, a whole mess of such someone's isn't socially sustainable.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[The passage:]

Michel Foucault (1926-84) undermines the romantic theory of authorship by speaking of discourse as a distribution of author functions. For Foucault, a statement is authorized by a particular form of discourse, a regime of truth, a procedure for assigning truth-value to statements. It's not hard to see why this captivated the minds of academics. It made the procedures in which academics are obsessively drilled the very form of power itself. As if that by which academics are made, the molding of their bodies to desks and texts, that about which they know the most, even more than they know their allotted fields, were the very index of power. Reading Foucault is like taking a masterclass on how the game of academic scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other. Détournement, on the other hand, turns the tables, upends the game.

The device of détournement restores all the subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths. Détournement makes for a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the symbolic remnants that it restores. Détournement founds its cause on nothing but its own practice as a critique at work in the present. Détournement creates anti-statements. For the Situationists, the very act of unauthorized appropriation is the truth content of détournement. (40-41)

Pre-Endgame Strategy

In my current situation I find the long-term rather than the short-term impacts of the quarantine most concerning, and perhaps for this reason I've frequently found myself thinking about one particular long-term concern.

Stay-at-home orders are nearly superfluous in my case, hence the lockdown has, for me, so far been little else than a welcome sabbatical from rat-racing, and a fruitful period of study (both self- and other-). The near-total lack of structure is nonetheless something which I've always found slightly hazardous. And so here is one extrinsic benefit of music education that I'll toast to: as a brass player, I figured out even before the clickbait psychojournalists did that having a routine would be essential not just to parochially musical concerns but to the general preservation of sanity. Thus the tuba hour commences at noon daily. It is really more like 20 minutes and almost never starts before 1pm. I hesitate to call this "discipline," since the timing is too loose and too brief to qualify. If it is "maintenance," then disrepair carries the day. The main objective is not to forget how to play. There are a couple of mild conceptual challenges involved and no technical ones. Part of me laments that this is what it has come to for someone who veritably haunted the practice rooms in college, and who, gun to head, still claims the tuba as the center of his increasingly entropic intellectual and creative universe. All of those misgivings being as they are, I have no doubt that I'm making made good on my frequent admonitions to young students that even this amount of practice, when it is logically structured, narrowly focused, and adhered to daily with the devoutness of a sacred ritual, can be productive and worth the trouble.

It never occurred to me to promote this ritual as a prospective lifeline to structure, invocable if the rest of the world seems to have frozen in time. Maybe I'll try that if and when I next return to teaching, since none of my other spiels have ever been the least bit effective in inspiring commitment where it did not previously exist. I am of course reluctant to expose students to the multi-layered ambivalence of the mid-career professional; that sort of radical honesty might be a bit too radical even for me. To take music and, more specifically, a musical instrument as not just a specialty but an identity, to face society as a tooba player, encompasses, as I have probably already written enough about, quite the dizzying array of privileges, struggles, and absurdities. In the present absurd conditions I do feel quite fortunate to have a readymade vehicle of routine, and I do believe the sanity-preserving function to have been borne out by this experience, but all of that merely represses the reality that it has been a decade and a half since I last found rigid adherence to a practice regimen fun and fulfilling for its own sake, and that both the duration of adherence and the intensity of "fun" have steadily diminished with time. This, taken together with the long-term inevitability of physical and mental decline, paints quite the discouraging picture of the aging brass player. Can this downward curve ever be flattened?

For all that I've invested in book learning, I am guided on the endgame question almost exclusively by two fond anecdotes which I've never bothered to investigate. First: a friend is fond of remarking that 50 year-old drivers have the fewest accidents and the lowest insurance premiums. They sit at an optimal point on the x-y graph of accumulated experience (lots) against physical decline (not yet). This seems to me a supremely relevant consideration for brass players as well, i.e. with an eye toward balancing cumulative achievement with quality of life by determining the optimal time to walk away. On which point the second, more morbid anecdote is salient, a nugget of my mother's dime-store-Marxist antisheltering, and a burden which more conventional American parents would never reveal to a pre-adolescent child: when all people do for 50 years is work, they often don't know what to do with themselves upon retiring, even if they thought they would; and when people don't know what to do with themselves in this profound sort of way, even when they thought they would, they often just die.

If the "x-y graphs" and "optimization" of the first anecdote sound too fully rationalized or mathematical to be useful in Real Life, then the urgency of death inspired by the second anecdote ought to be motivation enough to embrace them. Overlaid on all of that, for me at least, is the question of what Erikson called "generativity," essentially the province of culture's 50 year-old drivers, and for me split (not always happily) into generativity that pays the bills and generativity that feeds the soul. While I certainly tend to look forward to a day when I have played my last corporate ice cream social, even I would grant that a withdrawal from that kind of work represents a certain loss of identity in a society where your work defines you. (I think I want to live in a society that is not like that, but this is unlikely to happen.) By the same token, having developed out of tuba playing all kinds of peripheral intellectual and creative interests, the thought of someday making those peripheral interests central, without the tuba there to ground them, has always been both superficially appealing and deeply scary. Be it a privilege or a chore depending on the day, tuba playing is both the initial inspiration and the ultimate outlet for those other pursuits. Hence I fear equally the old-age regret of having stopped playing too soon, leading to a loss of focus in the other areas, and that of hanging on too long, wasting time doing subpar tuba work when that time could be more fruitfully devoted to the other areas. To be sure, both of these prospective regrets seem, literally, deadly. Thus I think it is reasonable to consider such scenarios ahead of time, before moments of choice are upon you. Tweeting about having a "no regrets" outlook regarding the things you can't control is no substitute for seeking foresight and taking initiative regarding things that are very much within your control.

To wit, I would conjecture that the optimization function f(tuba) is bimodal: either (a) give up playing young enough that a new generative identity can form, or (b) hang on to the one you've got til the bitter end, perhaps reinventing your aesthetic as your declining technique dictates. The third, more conventional option, as mutually determined by social and structural norms, is Retirement at the socio-structurally appointed Retirement Age. Many musicians simply aren't able to pursue this the way people with real jobs can, and some who could and should pursue it neglect to do so. The denouement of COVID will have a lot to do with whether or not this course is even available to me. That aside, I think that Retirement is plainly incoherent with not one but both of the above anecdotes; it is incoherent with considerations of identity, aesthetics, and achievement alike; in a word, it is incoherent with psychobiology itself. And so without denying that Retirement represents a privilege of sorts, I think it is my third choice. I view it as a privilege only relative to the fourth option: working myself into the grave. And so as events continue to unfold, I will be focused on playing a good pre-endgame.

Millennial Ambivalence: Deadlines

I’m someone who needs deadlines, and who for that reason finds the moment itself painful and anti-climactic. I feel acutely the truism that, “You don’t finish a project, you abandon it.” This month has been tremendously fruitful in expanding the reach of this work-in-progress into areas that have become important to me since the last bout of productivity, but at the cost of the work itself being almost uniformly undercooked. This is what Blog Month has always been about: imposing deadlines as a change of pace and M.O. I would like to have done better justice to the issues, but some justice now is better than never. This is the give and take that all creative and intellectual laborers face, whoever it is that they work for and in what capacity. Here, however, there is a socially constructed notion of maturity which I am willing to accept: as we age and our portfolios grow, there is less and less need merely to announce our presence and what we’re all about, and there is an ever greater need to hit the proverbial nail on the head with whatever our next product is to be. I wonder if seeing this issue through the lens of age, and by extension of generations, does not go a ways toward explaining so many conflicts between artworks as capturing essential ideas and artworks as contingent results of a process. The process currently on display here is for me a necessary kick in the pants, but it risks becoming just that with each passing year, so much so that I have started to view blogging more as rough drafting for more formal productions which take the time needed to reach their essential form. Let’s all look forward to that, but without holding our breath.

Millennial Ambivalence: Work

I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said something I immediately regretted about never wanting to retire. In that moment, conceiving of my profession as playing tuba in public, it seemed like a fair statement. What I really meant was that I hate being idle and I hope never to stop doing the work that I care about. A decade and a half later, it seems like no one in any profession cares about work, period, not even those whom many others envy. Work is, definitionally, unimportant, usually involving offering up something others don’t really care about either and convincing them that, in a moment of weakness, they could take it or leave it and don’t want to miss out. A great many people are idle at work in precisely the way I can’t stand being idle anywhere. If I was stuck in that bind and couldn’t ever retire from it, things would be dark indeed.

So, as of the precise moment that I am clicking the “Post” button, I do not like idleness and I do hope to retire someday. But I also self-identify as part of the silent majority who likes work, not just activity; who finds the structure helpful, even if it is minimal; and who is mildly to moderately unhappy being totally unemployed. Because there is so little dignified work, this seemingly adaptive and salutary characteristic is functionally the reverse: however much you dislike idleness, you can always find a job that you hate even more. Slowly but surely, pre-millennial generations are having to admit that millennial altruism only looks idle and destructive because the structures these generations bequeathed to us are insidiously designed to punish initiative, shame creativity, and enforce idleness as a defense mechanism. The scholars who foresaw this almost perfectly were dismissed as extremists, so the realization has had to proceed literally block by block, industry by industry, until enough scattered individuals have become upset enough at the meaninglessness of work that they actually start to relate to us a little bit more. Some have long since accepted that money can’t buy happiness while insisting that consumption is good for the economy. But now, production is not good for the worker, and no rate of growth will make it any more possible to buy our way out of that abyss.

Bring Back The Muzak (or something)

One of the lengthier and more in-depth chapters of Anthony Haden-Guests's 1973 book The Paradise Program is about the Muzak company. Among other things, it makes clear that Muzak was doing very interesting and timely Music Cognition research decades before that term achieved wide currency. Also that the human and material resources the company devoted to this and all other facets of their business were anything but lightweight even as this process dictated that the programming itself could be nothing but.

I for one find this history newly relevant in light of the poor musicianship and uninspired curatorial sense that I've recently heard piped into so many LA establishments. One musically astute non-musician acquaintance of mine is known to react even more viscerally against this than I do, and, claiming a well-placed source in the local Whole Foods hierarchy, is convinced that simple nepotism is at work. This seems to me at best a partial explanation. For one thing, the Wild West of digital music distribution is finally starting to stabilize into fixed settlements, the squatters are jockeying for position, and the Spotify playlist game is among the biggest pile of crumbs left to fight over. There is, in absolute terms, more music being made specifically for this purpose than ever before, yet with the Gatekeeper summarily deposed there is nowhere near the level of care going into curation that Haden-Guest unearthed in his fieldwork. In Econ101 terms, the market pressures are, if anything, more intense on today's individual music creators than they were on the small handful of Muzak's competitors, and the barriers to entry into this market have been reduced to an almost negligible level; yet this is still a race to the bottom, it just has more contestants and fewer rational actors.

As a teenager I worked for 3 years at the Bruegger's Bagels at East Hennepin and University Avenues in Minneapolis. In addition to learning a few of the many life-lessons such jobs are supposed to teach young people, I also had the opportunity to passively consume a relatively constant selection name-brand Muzak. Only the classic Miles Davis rendition of "Someday My Prince Will Come" made any impression on me whatsoever; in fact I now can't recall any other specifics about the song rotation. But The Paradise Program did bring back to me one crucial detail: the 15 minutes of dead air for every 45 minutes of programming. Cue the obvious snark about how that sounds like the best part of an hour of Muzak; but it turns out that this recovery time was a carefully-considered, deeply-investigated, research-led decision, one which I wish every retail proprietor would consider. If we've lost those programmed respites forever, then I for one will have to stop using the word "Muzak" pejoratively.

December Is Blog Month/Twenty-teens We Hardly Knew Ya/I Have Plenty To Say and Will Get Around To Saying It Eventually/Bandwagon Packer Fans and Other Signs of the Apocalypse

To borrow something a friend said to me recently, things have never been better and never been harder.

Doors have opened for me in California that I never could have anticipated when I moved here. (The one that remains closed was wholly predictable.) I get to work at playing, mostly with musicians who are as good or better than I am. I've been able to graduate from Valley Boy to Gentrifier. After years of uneasy compromise I've been able to return to my roots and ditch my car. I've replaced basketball with Scrabble, to the great benefit of my knees and ankles and who knows what other body parts I might have ruined.

Things couldn't be much better, but they could get much worse at any time. It is not pessimistic to say that, just realistic. There's no meritocracy to be found here, just chaotic systems and revolving doors. Uncertainty and insecurity reign even among very successful people. This mirrors the concurrent inability to establish and agree upon basic facts in the political arena. If it once was hip and new-agey to Live In The Moment, this choice has since become a stifling imposition which precludes setting goals or even knowing what realistic goals would be. Radical empiricism and anomic strain carry the day. I think often of the role that trust plays in behavioral economics and wonder how we are managing to have an economy here at all. I am being conditioned to treat successful people with more suspicion than respect and to accept that reaction in others as I've moved up the food chain.

Things could be worse, but they could also be better. Just in the last six months there have been two appalling train-vehicle collisions along the line that I take to work. A local LA Scrabble player whom no one would suspect of such a thing was accused of cheating and kicked out of the Nationals. The vaunted diversity of Southern California increasingly seems only skin deep. US life expectancy has declined three years in a row. There are rear-guard hipsters and bandwagon Packer fans everywhere. Something is very wrong.

The freelance life may be supremely insecure, but the cycling between frenetic overcommitment and chilly underemployment is ideal for creative artists who are anything less than robotic in their work habits. I understood this in the moment and I understand it even better now. Working at playing has intensified my extra-musical interests, dulled my musical ones, and left less time for both. It has helped me understand why so many doctors and techies seem to have listened to so many more records than I have. When work is scarce it never feels like an imposition; as I write this, meanwhile, I am less confident than ever before that I can run the gauntlet of Blog Month given the slivers of time I'll have to piece together in order to make it happen. Stay tuned for the pretty much meaningless conclusion?