Celebrity Deaths and The Realm of Petty and Shallow Minds

It's been one of those strange weeks when the dark and slimy side of human existence struggles for dominance in the world of chit chat. No where has this been more apparent than with the death of Michael Jackson. His dual existence of musician and depraved degenerate has exposed most of the world as no more evolved than some malicious nasty ladies sewing circle that meets once a week to spread lies, untruths, juicy rumors, innuendos, and vendettas disguised as truth.

I've spent some time this last week trying to figure out how we got to this low point in human existence and as far as I can tell by the most cursory of reading, society has always spoken ill of those not physically in their presence. It's always thrived on the nasty little rumor that requires whispered embellishments and embroidered lies to make it more interesting, more valid somehow. Throughout time it was never enough to merely have a lover, but to make it interesting one had to have a lover that was bad for you, or married to someone else, or simply so precious that everyone coveted him or her enough to make up nasty lies out of jealousy and spite.

No matter what the excuse, such malicious gossip is still the realm of  shallow and petty minds. It was once confined to the most isolated and inbred of small towns and communities, but in the last couple decades, it has taken the place of real news, investigative journalism, and politics that feeds on  the insignificant  crap that appeals to the lowest common voter.

Where it went really crazy was with the Clinton presidency. There was and still is a group of small-minded power hungry thugs that just couldn't accept their candidate lost so they resorted to the last refuge of small minds everywhere: they made the bedroom a public arena. They spread semi-truths and innuendos. They wasted taxpayer dollars and precious government resources better spent doing things for the people instead of feeding a demented sewing circle of vicious little gossips.

From this peeping tom sickness grew the obsession with same-sex relationships, other people's marital affairs, petty habits, strange societal quirks that didn't directly affect those most concerned about them, financial scandals that were once the private business of the consumer and his or her banker, and a compulsive and sick desire to deify anyone who was anything near celebrity status because if there's one thing gossip does well is expose the boring lives most people live--lives so tedious they have to go outside themselves for anything remotely entertaining to talk about.

And on a societal level, the more one group trashed another group, the smaller their ability became to converse about anything more profound than who was doing whom. Characters on sitcoms became more interesting than the people in real life. At no time did this become more evident than when I spent a couple months on a temporary job. Every day my co-workers would gossip in great and delighted malicious gossip about the minute details of some people's lives that I didn't know. It amazed me that everyone knew these people, that everyone had something "juicy" to contribute to the details being discussed. I didn't realize the people they were talking about as if they were longtime friends they grew up with, married, dated, buried, and moved away from didn't exist except as characters on a TV sitcom. It was during the decade I didn't have a television. I was astonished to discover these people I heard discussed every day were not real. I knew nothing about my co-worker's families and loved ones, but I knew every detail of the television characters they so ardently discussed...without owning a TV. They cared about them more than they cared about themselves or each other. It's all they talked about day after day.

At the same time I was living in a small and very inbred community of people who had known each other for several decades. The level of conversation wasn't any different. No one talked about things or ideas. They talked about the people who weren't there. And they talked about them in bad and hurtful ways. I saw a mean side of these people that eventually made me move away from them. They became in my mind no different than the people who trashed gays, liberals, immigrants or those who didn't come from their social class. They were bigots of mind and spirit even though they considered themselves open, tolerant, and filled with peace and love for all humanity. The hypocrisy of their disconnect from what they believed and what they lived sent me running away from them as fast as I could because I felt they were a disease that would inflict itself on me if I stayed too much longer.

For those who think my reaction to petty gossip was extreme, look around you. Look what it has done to our towns, our communities, our countries and our world. Spreading the simple lie is the quickest way to control a population and anyone who spreads lies and malicious gossip about others can never call themselves truly free. They are trapped in the tedium of their own lives and unless they hack off a limb or something, they can't escape and they're doomed to just degenerate into the type of people who will never be able to enjoy someone like Mozart because of his personal flaws or refuse to see the contributions someone like Michael Jackson has made to music culture because of rumors surrounding his personal flaws and sicknesses. And these same people will mourn Farrah Fawcett, a woman they knew just as little, whose personal life was just a patchwork of gossip they gathered from tabloids and each other. Because she was pretty, they assumed she was perfect. For her they saved their praise.

But no one is perfect. Everyone has their dark side, everyone has their secrets, their evil little personality twists that stay locked up in public and sometimes goes stark raving mad in private. Where it crosses the line for me is when people who have no business, no say, no right to interfere in someone's private life, make it take the place of truth, honor, integrity, and the right to live as mutual consenting adults in a world of our own choice. To them I say it's time to get a life of your own. You're way overdue.

As for Michael Jackson, I spent many happy years dancing to his music when I still had functioning knees. I'm sorry for his private life, but seriously, it's not about me. It's between him, any potential victims, the families of those victims, the authorities, the deals they made or didn't make. For me it was and still is all about the music. That's the only part of it that is any of my damn business, and so for all those delightful dance parties that defined the 80's and early 90's for me, I say rest in peace and thank you.

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Celebrity Deaths and The Realm of Petty and Shallow Minds

My Life Through Music

In our path through life we sometimes comes upon one of those things we like to call "defining moments," and I had mine this evening while listening to Bob Dylan. One of my friends lost his envelope of car cd's and I was making him another one as a gift.

When you do something like this for a friend or for yourself in preparation for a driving vacation, or just filling up your Ipod, it involves not just going through your music collection, but also doing a bit of time traveling in the process.

Music has always been part of my life. My earliest memories were of what we called PWCS, or people who could sing. This meant astonishing voices filling my early years of emerging consciousness. I grew up with Mario Lanza, Bing Crosby, Patsy Cline, Nat King Cole, and Perry Como. This was added to and filled out when my aunt and uncle immigrated and brought with them entire symphonies that entered my spirit one piano note at a time, and sometimes came out as Jazz when they got together with  friends and played for fun.

There were a lot of things about growing up in Las Vegas that sucked, but music wasn't one of them. I developed a passionate love of Jazz and Blues that stays with me to this day. It's what made me think the Beatles were kind of sissy boys and instead made me hand over my pennies for The Stones, The Doors, Cream, and most everything that came out of Motown, except maybe the Supremes. I preferred Aretha and Etta James.

The patterns of my life always come with musical accompaniment. Interwoven among the memories of a very serious activist who spent her days working against the Vietnam war and choosing Dylan as my visionary spokesman over other more pretty voices. It was an interesting paradigm shift for me to choose the message now instead of the music or simply the best PWCS.

This moment of wanting music to be more than sounds on a plate, was a moment of waking up that has continued to this day. I will always believe it was not politicans who brought down the wall, but rock and roll. I will always believe without the protest songs of the 60's, the anti-war movement would not have taken root so effectively. I could go on with examples, but you get the picture. For me, music makes up a large part of the tapestry I am and will become. It comes with faces of have loved, tears I have shed, places I have lived, and dreams I saw myself taking part in. Music, unlike anything else, has the power to change the world.

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My Life Through Music

Rhapsody in Trieste 1945

Third from the top left, my uncle. On the pillow is my mother. Third and fourth from the top right are my grandparents.

The Story Begins.

When you try and tell a story that lives in the past and has shifted and changed in memory, you risk getting a few facts wrong, a few dates out of place, a few pieces that don't belong but were inserted because the storyteller needed some message to come through from that time. But underneath, the story remains and that's what I choose to focus on for now. I'll be telling lots of family stories here and the facts may change as I learn them more completely, but at the roots, the seeds of the story will remain the same. Here is the first one.

This is a story my cousin recorded from my mother talking about the end of the war in Trieste. If you want to know more about what was ending, check out this vivid and concise account of just one small part of what it meant so you can understand how beaten down and demoralized the people were at this point in time. War always counts among its victims those who survived.

My uncle was born in 1912, about ten years before my mom. He was a pianist, a brilliantly talented artist who early on gained a reputation as a rare musical genius. It's hard to know exactly what his politics were before the war, other than to suspect they began as something quite different than what they became. I suspect his politics, if you consider that he was always so totally submerged in his art, were an intellectual exercise that he amused himself with at times. As a musician, he saw only one truth and that was music. It was pure. It was apolitical. It was his soul.

And even though he was perfectly and superbly classically trained and was a talented composer whose works still have the power to astonish, he was a child of the Jazz Age and that too was part of his soul. He could move from Chopin to Ragtime to improvised Jazz with an effortless flow from one to another as if they were one piece. And considering his fierce passion for music in all its forms, you can probably understand how the moment impacted him the first time he heard Gershwin's music.

And from there you can understand what it did to this musical purist, this classical idealist with a jazzman's soul when the Nuremberg Laws were passed and he was forbidden to play or listen to Gershwin because he was Jewish. In Trieste during the occupation, the only music allowed was German, Italian and French. No Jews. No Blacks. No Slavs. No Americans.

My uncle taught himself to play Rhapsody in Blue in secret froms sheet music he managed to get hold of during the war. He never heard it except from his own hands. He played it until it was perfect and then he played it some more. I imagine it became a sort of rebellion for him, a musical fight against the horrors going on outside his world.

How he survived is another story, but this one today ends with the day Trieste was finally liberated. I don't know the exact date of the concert this story is about, but it was sometime in 1945. After the horrors, after the celebrations, a concert was scheduled to help heal Trieste, to let it know it was finally free. And my uncle was chosen to play the piano, to begin the first baby steps toward healing a devasted city.

The music he chose to play was proof that the war was finally over. He played Rhapsody in Blue to a stunned room of people that I've been told listened in tears to this magnificent piece of music, this symbol of a new beginning after so much sorrow and pain.

But what they did not know as they listened to him play was that a couple hours before, my grandfather had died. My mother's responsibility was to keep my uncle from finding out before the performance, and to keep my grandmother from falling apart during the performance. When my cousin asked how she could do this she said that it was more important for Trieste to heal and the concert would have been cancelled if my uncle knew. She felt it was n't about them, about individuals. It was about a community who needed the healing power of music in its purest most powerful form. They needed this proof the war was over so they could go on with their lives.

Yes, this was a powerful and unselfish moment, a moment of pure altruism and caring for something beyond one's own needs and desires. It was a patriotism that is rooted in the very soil because the ground was still wet with the blood of those who weren't there.

But as future stories will show, one moment of humanity, one remnant of altruism does not erase the horrors of war and eventually the bad memories win. The war, as it did to many people, left my mother with a sort of functional insanity that is commom to a lot of war survivors. I'll write more on that in the next installment.

Rhapsody in Trieste 1945