COVER -> DAY ONE
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Perhaps it was the sluggish start to the new millennium but I could not work up any great enthusiasm for the leading political stories. While some were speculating about the health of Saddam Hussein with the sloppy febrility which characterises contemporary journalism I was celebrating Alfred Brendel's 70th birthday. While President-designate Bush was selecting a depressingly, predictably blinkered, cabinet I was enjoying an arrestingly heterogeneous bunch of talented friends giving Little Red Riding Hood at our village theatre. While British Conservative politicians were getting angry because the Labour Party was receiving major political donations from millionaires I was stimulated by the dense, minutely perceptive account of money and ethics in George Eliot's Middlemarch.
This orgy of self-indulgence culminated in a comparative analysis of recorded Beethoven Symphony cycles by Abbado (his second) and Zinman. It won't last; soon we will be back to front pages and luridly covered paperbacks.
It would be too much to expect unalloyed enjoyment of such a series of pleasures. Self doubt, if not guilt, is the birthright of the bourgeois liberal, the current reinterpretation of Original Sin.
Why should anyone have seven complete sets of Beethoven Symphonies when millions are starving (?) in --- well, I don't precisely know where they're starving at the moment --- but somewhere.
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Not for the first time I was rescued by a variant of Benjamin Franklin's remark that the problem of being intelligent is that you attribute reasons for the actions of others, this particular variant being that the great virtue of being intelligent is that you can find a reason for anything.
What engages me in the playing of Brendel, Richard playing the pantomime dame, the characterisation of Dr. Lydgate or the way Abbado takes the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth is the particularity of it; nobody else on earth at any time or in any place could have done or will ever do precisely what these people have done.
It is not enough to be vaguely interested in pianists, to enjoy the theatre, read improving books or like the occasional Beethoven Symphony; what counts is the relationship between the material, the interpreter and the listener or viewer.In reading, the relationship is peculiarly intense because it is direct between the author and the reader which is why I dislike audio books. In music, the relationship is more uncertain because of the scope for interpretation; and in pantomime in particular there is always an element of uncertainty and surprise brought about by traditional but loose scripting interpolated with contemporary references and ad libs more often the product of the bar than the bard.
I largely abandoned television, except for political coverage, because its entertainment does not concern itself with the particular. Even the "soft cop" is a caricature. There is never doubt whose side you ought to be on or how it will turn out in the end. Such entertainment is worse than a poor means of understanding oneself or society, it is a positive hindrance, raping Spring growth and instantly fossilising it.
The point about relationships is that they are, families excepted, matters of choice --- but you cannot have a relationship with a caricature, with a generality, with a catch phrase or a leitmotif. You can be moved to near hysterical laughter before a comedian brings out the long anticipated line but that, if it is a relationship at all, is a power play, a piece of deliberate manipulation.
As a pupil of George Steiner I need no rehearsing in the conundrum at the heart of Western culture, Nazism born out of Beethoven and nourished by him. Yet the argument has that rather forlorn comprehensiveness which atheists use when damning (joke, honestly) religion for warfare. Nonetheless, I believe as well as think that culture is worth preserving and nurturing.
At this point in my reveries I emerged into the bright light of my daily round and addressed myself to the intriguing matter of world intellectual property rights.
The problem I was addressing was the conflict between cultural diversity and Americanisation. If you treat media operations like meat wholesaling then the matter is quite simple; trade in intellectual property should be like any other trade. In this case the in-built commercial advantage of Hollywood is unassailable. It has a massive infrastructure, a large internal market on which to base exports and it uses a kind of English. What it lacks, I hope I have explained, is any degree of particularity.
Almost as bad, it does not mind deliberately lying for the Dollar, not only the general lie about the triumph of the goody over the baddy but real, actual lies about history. Lying is, after all, the ultimate denial of the particular.
You will be pleased to learn that in the course of my presentation I congratulated the French for flouting international trade law and exercising a domestic preference in favour of its own language and culture.
Just as no industrial power in the 19th Century could survive without access to raw materials, no society in the information age can hope to survive if it becomes dependent on external supply.
There are parts of the world where judicial murder is abhorrent, where racial prejudice is conscientiously fought, where there is more to life than the greenback and the hatchback, where guns are hardly ever used, even by the police, and where meat is animal-shaped. There is a dystopic analysis, spearheaded by Bill Joy that the human race will one day be taken over by artificially intelligent machinery. Not if Beethoven has anything to do with it but Bart Simpson is quite another matter.
