Pearls Before Breakfast (8 April 2007) - washingtonpost.com
woke up to an article from one of my best boys. he later called to make sure i read it. i did & wanted to share it with whomever will read it+
I just read this and here are my thoughts. There are parts of it i think are great, and parts I think are awful. Let’s go:
It’s obviously a travesty that so few people stopped and recognized or acknowledged a professional violinist playing beautiful music, giving commuters a glimpse of a performance who truly embodies classical music performance as an art form (and one whose performances, we’re not-so-subtly reminded on several occasions, few of these people would be able to afford normally) that should have been a wonderful treat that brightened everyone’s day.
Still, I take issues with these kind of pieces. All the pieces are there for a gimmicky story: the performer so respected in his art that people in-the-know would pay hundreds to see him perform, the mid-level government bureaucrats bustling to their dead-end jobs, immune to the beauty around them (preferring porn and the lottery to violin music), the train conductors too poorly educated to pronounce a simple french word…. it’s just too easy. The parts they leave out?
The fact that these people aren’t well enough educated about music to recognize classical pieces being played classically, as the author clearly believes they should (“It’s Bach! On a Stradivarius! For free! Ugh, these simpletons.”)
The fact that these people have normal jobs: the kind you have to show up to on time; if you don’t, you risk being reprimanded or losing your job.
The fact that people, saddened by (and accustomed to!) homelessness and poverty and feeling as if they can’t do anything substantial to help, would rather walk past and actively ignore someone they perceive to be a bum than confront the fact that somebody who can make beautiful music may be unemployed and spend his days playing for tips in a commuter hub.
When it comes down to it, my opinion is that this is gimmicky, self-admiring, and cheesy (and easy) journalism on the part of the newspaper.
For instance:
The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.
Let’s count the number of cheap modernity tropes this hits on:
- coffee/starbucks/the $4 latte
- cellphones/technology addiction (see also, from today’s NYT)
- ID tags — a subtle reminder that these aren’t normal commuters like you and I, but rather government employees off to their jobs to make our lives more difficult (see also: this week’s TSA abuse-of-power news meme)
- bellies — oh, these people have to be fat too (unlike you or i, obviously), in order to “work” as typical middle America types.
- throw in a French word the more fastidious readers will google — a reminder that this would never happen in France (or Brazil)
- aaaand close with “the dingy, gray rush of modernity”
I also take issue with the way the author plays up the issue of these people preferring to spend their money on lottery tickets rather than supporting a prodigious musician. He complete ignores what behavioral economics tells us about people below a certain income level (or perhaps better, income stability level) using the lottery as a type of savings account (that’s a whole other issue for another time, and I can’t find a good explanation to link to), taking a navel-gazing stance that attempts to look down on all the culture-less, unenlightened proles of DC, who prefer the instant gratification of spending irresponsibly on lottery tickets and skin mags than the deeper and more fulfilling pleasures of classical music.
This piece is not all bad. The stuff about Josh Bell’s feeling on music are really interesting, and the writer is clearly good at piecing together a story (the irony of the song by The Cure the guy with the iPod was listening to is well assembled), and the piece does well as an interesting analysis of the ecosystem of daily life in that train station. On the other hand, it fails as a journalistic condemnation of the fast pace of modern life and our growing immunity to low-tech, Old World beauty. To me, the only thing that begins to save that part of the argument was the inclusion of Kant’s argument that beauty depends on context, and the commuters couldn’t be expected to identify and appreciate beauty in a context like the early-morning train station. Even still, the author touches on that briefly before pushing on deafly:
So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?
“He would have inferred about them,” Guyer* said, “absolutely nothing.”
And that’s that.
Except it isn’t.
I apologize if this is a bit of an overreaction, but this piece really rubbed me the wrong way and I felt compelled to respond with my two cents. Because to be completely honest, I’m not sure that I would have stopped, had I been one of the commuters that morning. Just something to think about.
*Love that the Penn scholar is the voice of reason here.
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
