Mozart in the Jungle

I have thought, ever since reading his 1959 classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, that Erving Goffman’s distinction between the “front” and the “back” is a good starting-point for a lot of sociological commentary.

Here I was, for example, diarizing about a trip to Mexico that we enjoyed six years ago:

There is something here analogous to famous distinction between the “front” and the “back” of our social performances. In a restaurant, for example, the “front” is murmuring, deferential waiters offering carefully-arranged dishes in an atmosphere of hushed, orderly, genteel cleanliness; the “back” is frayed tempers, shouting matches, panicked chefs, and broken crockery in an overheated kitchen with clogged grease traps.

A nation, like any other social unit, has a “front” and a “back.” We didn’t get more than a glimpse of Mexico’s violent, corrupt “back.” The tourist “front,” though, is pretty darn nice.

The performing arts of course offer many instances of the front-back contrast. I tried to catch some of it as it presents in the world of opera in my novel Fire from the Sun, using gossip I’d picked up from opera magazines, memoirs, and conversations with actual opera singers.

Another (ahem) literary gem in this small genre is the late Blair Tindall’s 2005 memoir Mozart in the Jungle, which I read just this month.

Tindall, an American lady from North Carolina, died last year at age 63 from hardening of the arteries with, according to the county Medical Examiner’s office, alcohol poisoning as a contributing factor. She had made her living as an oboist, playing that difficult instrument mainly at concert performances.

Her memoir is unsparing about the concert performer’s life — those performers, that is, who are not world-famous superstars. Opportunities are limited, the pay is terrible, and working mainly evening hours severely limits your dating opportunities. Let the late Ms. Tindall tell us:

Indeed, a full-time symphonic job evolves into monotony for many players. Orchestra musicians saw away like factory workers, repeating the same pieces year after year. Once a player is employed by a desirable orchestra, career advancement is severely limited. Perfectionism and injuries wear musicians down. Nighttime and holiday work disconnect them from mainstream life. Players complain they forfeit autonomy to an omnipotent conductor who works a third of their schedule, is paid as much as twenty musicians, and gets credit for the music they make.

As well as giving us a graphic account of the low-life side of her trade — the book’s subtitle is “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music” — Ms Tindall also describes the ebb and flow, mostly ebb, of concert music through the later twentieth century as it responded to cultural change, especially as that change affected the funding of orchestras and the willingness of people to give up an evening and a sizeable ticket price to attend performances. Her memoir predates the COVID pandemic, but those years surely delivered another blow.

There has been technological change, too: radio to TV, vinyl to CD via cassette tape, and so on. That aspect of the story left me thinking how vulnerable concert music surely is to AI.

If you visit social media much you have seen the astonishing visual creations. Audio must be equally susceptible. How hard can it be to create, ex nihilo, a sound file precisely mimicking an oboe being played? Merge a few such files together, you’ve got a complete orchestral performance. What need for human players?

Blair Tindall quotes a Harvard researcher who found that orchestral musicians scored near the bottom in job satisfaction: “Only operating room nurses and semiconductor fabrication teams scored lower.” Perhaps hi-tech will soon relieve them of their drudgery.

Vocal discontent

As bad as things are for concert-music instrumentalists, they seem to be even worse for singers. Ms Tindall:

Up in the wooden choir loft, chorus members had already started gathering. Singers like these live even more unstable freelance lives than instrumentalists, often taking jobs at the largest synagogues and churches to sing during their services. They get rock-bottom rates for these gigs, without the union-mandated benefits attached to my check. Together with office temping during the week, they strive to make enough to pay for vocal coaching costing between $70 and $100 or more per hour. Except for the highest echelon of opera stars, even the most successful vocalists barely scraped by.

That touches on one of my present discontents, although it’s a very minor one.

Our church has a “worship team” to lead the hymn singing. The team consist of two female singers, an occasional pianist (female), and one or two guitarists, both male.

The lady singers do a great job. It seems to me, though, that there should be a male voice in there too. No, not mine: I can’t any longer sing worth a damn. In our congregation, though — seventy or eighty souls on a good Sunday — there must surely be a young guy with a voice.

I bring it up at church meetings. I have no problem with the worship team, I explain; but as an opera fan, I want to hear a male voice in there with them — a baritone or tenor. (Baritone for preference; tenors too often want to steal the show.)

Our pastor nods at my suggestion, other members roll their eyes or snigger, and we move on to the next item of business.

Our culture seems to have drifted into an era when, outside the concert hall, it is considered peculiar for a man to sing. Even in church, most male congregants don’t join in with the hymns, and the handful who do look embarrassed about it.

This is a real loss. There’s pleasure in singing, especially in company with others. I cherish memories of a coach-full of high-school classmates singing lustily to and from an away rugby fixture, of sing-alongs in the pub as closing time approached, and, yes, of a congregation joining in the lovely old Anglican hymns.

Get off the lawn!

Yes, I’m going to lurch off into geezerish grumbling about the decay of our culture.

One evening in late August when we both had time on our hands, the Mrs and I decided to watch a movie on Netflix.

Neither of us is a movie buff. I know nothing at all about movies. The Mrs is only a little better; but sometimes she hears from friends that such-and-such is a good movie, and remembers.

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So it was this evening. The movie name she had heard and remembered was Equalizer, a thriller. I powered up Netflix on the TV and did a search. Two movies came up named Equalizer. One was from 2014, the other — a remake, I supposed — was from 2023. We agreed that the newer one was likely a better bet and settled down to watch it.

Fifteen minutes in, we were baffled. The movie made no sense. Who is this guy? Why did he do that? And what, exactly, did he do? …

At that point our millennial daughter Nellie came in. “Oh, you’re watching Equalizer?” We affirmed that we were, but couldn’t make sense of it.

She: “Did you watch the original?” We: “Uh … original? Wha?”

It turned out that the movie we were watching was Equalizer 3. The Netflix promo picture for the movie just made the “3” really easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

Telling the story to a young friend afterwards, he laughed. “Derb, you are so behind the times. Every movie nowadays comes with a number.”

He’s not far wrong. Checking movies due for release in 2025 I see just among the first fifty listed Mission Impossible: 8, Mortal Kombat 2, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, The Accountant 2, Now You See Me 3, The Black Phone 2, Zombies 4, Nobody 2, and Salaar 2, along with movies whose titles include no number but are obvious sequels: “Live-action adaptation of …,” “The third film in the ’28 Days Later’ franchise,” Jurassic World Rebirth, Freakier Friday, “Live-action remake of …,” Halloween Aftermath, “Sequel of …,” “The fourth in the series of …,” and more that I can’t be bothered to transcribe.

There have of course always been sequels and adaptations. They used to be exceptions, though. Now they are pretty much the norm.

Well, I’m wiser than I was this time last week. Now I know that when checking the promo picture for a movie I should look carefully to see whether the title is followed by a number, colored and shaded to blend into the background.

Comedy collapse

Now come on, admit it: you really can’t deny that comedy has collapsed.

I lived all the way through the golden age of broadcast comedy: the great British radio shows (Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh, Take It From Here, The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half-Hour, Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne, …), into black’n’white TV comedy shows (Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, The Army Game, and American imports like I Love Lucy and Abbott and Costello, …), through to the late twentieth-century classics (Yes, Minister, Cheers, Married with Children, Seinfeld, Two and a Half Men, …).

My life, like yours and everyone else’s, has had its ups and downs; but up to 2010 or so there was always, at most a day or three away, a half hour in the evening when I could sit back and laugh at absurd situations, word-play, and physical humor.

And now … where is it? Well, if I dig through the ninety-odd channels on my remote or do some serious online browsing, I might find The Office (not bad, but I get bored and flip halfway through) or old reruns of Two and a Half Men (yesss! but it died when Charlie Sheen left).

Let’s face it: Outside the zone of technology, we’ve become deeply uncreative. We have sold our birthright for a mess of gadgets.

A joke for the 2020s

Wait, though: humor? I got humor.

In my December 2011 Diary I recorded a joke I had made. That’s “made” as in “created”; to the very best of my knowledge, the joke was original with me.

I don’t create humor very often — well, not intentionally. Introducing that one I wrote: “About once a decade I come up with a joke out of my own head.” So I guess that was my joke for the 2010s.

Now here we are, well into the 2020s — about 46.6465918 percent into them as I write. Have I generated any comedy this decade?

I’m not sure it counts as comedy, but I have come up with words that make people laugh in one particular narrow situation.

The situation is, when I’m giving Basil, Hound of the Derbyshires, his daily two-mile walk around my bosky suburban neighborhood. These hot summer months the bugs are out in force, and they seem especially to favor me. Perhaps leukemia has made my blood particularly tasty, I don’t know.

Being old school in the matter of personal accessories, I always have a linen hanky in one of my pockets. When walking Basil I use it as a fly whisk to keep the bugs at bay: holding it by one corner and flicking it at wherever my skin is exposed.

Sometimes, when thus flicking, I encounter someone — neighbor or stranger — taking his own morning walk. We greet each other — it’s a friendly neighborhood — and exchange brief light pleasantries.

Among those latter, it often happens that the other party remarks on my hanky-flicking. I then give the following in return.

“Yeah, it keeps the bugs off me. My wife said it looks kind of gay, but I told him: ‘I don’t care.'”

Hey, it gets a laugh. Onward to the 2030s.

Lips and teeth

New York Post editorial, August 13th, headline: Elites decide Hunter Biden can finally be a scandal now that Joe is out.

Opening sentences:

Hunter Biden is a corrupt con artist who used his father’s position to leverage the government and make himself millions.

Now that Joe Biden has been pushed aside, officials are allowed to admit this, and the New York Times is allowed to report it.

It’s rotten, unscrupulous, cynical hypocrisy.

Yes, it is. It’s also a Chinese idiom.

The actual Chinese idiom is 唇亡齒寒 (chún wáng chĭ hán, audio here): “When the lips are gone the teeth are cold.”

This particular idiom tracks back in Chinese literature to the Zuŏ Zhuàn, a detailed chronicle of Chinese history from 707 b.c. to 476 b.c., written down probably in the fifth or fourth century B.C.

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Zuŏ Zhuàn has since 2016 been available in a Chinese-English parallel text by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yi Li, and David Shaberg under the title Zuo Tradition. Before you leap out to buy it, though, please note that it is a big, dense book: beautifully produced in three hardback volumes, 2,243 pages total, masses of footnotes. Just the Introduction is 66 pages, plus 12 pages of footnotes.

This particular idiom shows up in Volume 1, page 277. In very brief: During the two-and-a-half centuries covered by the Zuŏ Zhuàn China was not unified, except culturally. Political authority was divided among a mass of states, some of them tiny, regarding themselves as independent but frequently at war, with much secession and annexation.

Now it’s 652 b.c. Three of those states are in play here, Jìn, Guó, and Yú.

Jìn was much the most powerful; Guó and Yú were smaller, allied together. However, Guó was a nuisance to Jìn, so the ruler of Jìn wanted to crush Guó. To do so, his army had to pass through Yú; but if Yú let him do that, they would be violating the Guó-Yú alliance.

The ruler of Jìn sent an envoy to the ruler of Yú to ask for permission to pass through his territory, with gifts to sweeten the deal. The ruler of Yú had a wise minister; there is always a wise minister in these stories. This wise minister’s name was Gōng. He advised his ruler thus, in the Durrant-Li-Schaberg translation, slightly edited:

Guó is a buffer for Yú. If Guó perishes, Yú will certainly follow it. Jìn cannot be encouraged; aggressors cannot be trifled with … The proverb says: “The chariot and its running boards depend upon each other; if the lips perish, the teeth grow cold.” Surely that applies to Yú and Guó!

The ruler of Yú was weak and easily bribed (there’s always one of those in these stories, too). Ignoring wise minister Gōng, the ruler of Yú yielded to Jìn. The result, as mathematicians say, followed. (Wise minister Gōng got away in time.)

Note, however, that Gōng introduced our idiom with: “The proverb says …” (in Chinese 諺所謂 yàn suŏ wèi). If he’s correctly reported, “lips gone teeth cold” was current in folk wisdom long before the Zuŏ chronicler, whoever he was (we don’t really know) wrote it down.

There’s a fuller version of the story here.

The idiom is occasionally relevant in everyday life. A story from my own career.

In 2006, following the right-to-life fuss that followed the death of Terri Schiavo, I published in New English Review a review of Ramesh Ponnuru’s book Party of Death, which argued the right-to-life case with skill and vigor.

I took the other side of the issue without, I thought, being unfair or unkind to Ponnuru. I wrote at one point, for example, that “Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the best advocates a cult —cause, movement, whatever — could hope for.”

Ponnuru and I were both contributors to National Review at the time; so to publish in another outlet a review of his book that was not totally positive was ill-mannered, I now confess. It was also not smart; the more so as he was a salaried employee of National Review while I was only a freelance contributor.

Ponnuru and the late Kate O’Beirne headed up the more intensely Roman Catholic faction at the magazine. They didn’t much like me even before my review, I suppose on the grounds that I was insufficiently deferential to the Pope and his doctrines. They lobbied Bill Buckley — another Roman Catholic, of course — to fire me.

There was a meeting on the subject. I wasn’t present, but I heard about it from other participants. Bill Buckley, who liked my work, refused to drop me. He vetoed the Ponnuru-O’Beirne faction and the matter was closed.

Forward six years to 2012. I was still contributing to National Review. In a different outlet I published a column titled “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” In it I mocked the weepy columns then current by black commentators about how they had to give their children The Talk about the danger of evil white people lurking round every corner waiting to lynch them.

The editors at National Review considered “The Talk: Nonblack Version” to be beyond the bounds of propriety, so they dropped me from their contributor list.

Bill Buckley had passed away four years previously, in 2008. I quietly wondered whether, if he had been still alive, he might have vetoed this cancellation as he had the previous one in 2006. Might he? I really have no idea.

Whether he would or not, I could not help recalling the idiom I had heard many years before, during my early explorations of Chinese culture: 唇亡齒寒 — When the lips are gone the teeth are cold.

Hunter Biden, please take note.

Irony defined

We lost a small package to a porch pirate the other day. It wasn’t anything important, just some trinket that Nellie (who lives with us) had ordered online. It came in a small cardboard box. The thief opened the box, took the trinket, and left the empty box on our doorstep.

Now Nellie is nagging me to get one of those home security systems from Ring. I’m currently dithering about it, but I’ll probably get one.

I knew about these systems but vaguely supposed you had to hire in a contractor to install the thing for you. Browsing the internet, I see that in fact you can just buy a kit and install it yourself. It doesn’t look difficult. Home Depot stocks the kits, so of course does Amazon.

So: drive over to Home Depot and pick one up, or just order online?

Discussing it with Nellie, she raised the interesting possibility: “What if you ordered the system online and Amazon delivered it, but it got stolen by the porch pirate?”

Me: “That would be a pretty good real-world definition of the word ‘irony.'”

Math Corner

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) used to be a sensible outfit whose periodicals I could read without coming across anything that got my teeth a-grinding. No longer.

Here’s a page from one of those publications, the August/September issue of MAA Focus. It’s advertising three new books from MAA Press. The third book sounds like the one most in need of burning.

Justice Through the Lens of Calculus is for anyone interested in building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive math environment into their teaching and departmental practices … [T]he volume presents struggles, challenges, opportunities, and achievements from our colleagues as well as theoretical frameworks and approaches to help us thoughtfully consider the impact of our intent …

That last phrase, “the impact of our intent,” sounds as though it escaped from a Kamala Harris speech.

Here’s a picture of Allison Henrich, editrix of MAA Focus. Ah, now it all makes sense, right?

Brainteaser. I don’t think I have ever put a cryptarithmetic puzzle in this spot; so now, with proper regard for the impact of my intent, and acknowledgments to Manan Shah, here is one.

The ten letters D, E, H, I, L, N, O, R, T, and W represent the ten decimal digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in some order: one digit per letter, one letter per digit. The following sum is true, and the solution is unique. There are no leading zeroes. Find the values of D, E, H, I, L, N, O, R, T, and W.

N I NTH
+ N I NTH
+ N I NTH
+ TH I RD
+ TH I RD
—————
WHOLE