Because I shall continue to try to orient my Examiner.com articles around listening experiences, however, I shall continue to engage in active research over the nature of those experiences and how we communicate them, whether in the domain of listening or performing.  In keeping with the more research-oriented posts I have “rehearsed” on this site, I expect still to regard both performing and listening as behaviors that take place in the social world, which means that the domain of my overall research theme may probably best be called “the social world of music.”  If I ever have “world enough and time,” I may even be able to turn that theme into a book, for which my Examiner.com efforts may emerge as a major part of my “field work.”  This would amount to eating the dog food I cooked up when I took Harvey Sachs to task for being too much of a hagiographer and not enough of an anthropologist in his book The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824.  I summarized the primary ingredient of that dog food as follows:

The problem is that this book is top-heavy with adjectives of adulation and far to sparse when it comes to addressing the “work practices” (to appropriate the terminology of those anthropologists cited in the first paragraph) of a man with considerable musical skills, many of which could be attributed to a rich education and the rest to an equally rich body of “workplace experiences.” Obviously, one cannot approach Beethoven as a workplace anthropologist, following him around at work day by day, capturing every activity with a handheld video camera and interviewing him to clarify what one observes; but there is an extensive historical record of documents by Beethoven and by those who worked with him. Sachs has been far to negligent of this record, perhaps because he wanted his book to appeal to a more “popular” readership or perhaps because he did not want to reproduce the scholarship of others. Whatever the reason, when it comes to trying to provide a sense of Beethoven as a “man at work,” this book falls far short of what it could have been.

In terms of my current “field work,” I would note only that, in my Examiner.com pieces, I try to approach that sense of the “musician at work” in terms that make sense from the audience side.  I am less interested in “dishing the dirt” on what happens in rehearsals and conservatory studies and more interested in how listening can be informed simply by recognizing that there are “work practices” in performance that may help the mind to find order in the sensory signals coming in through the ear.

Needless to say, the connotation in that last sentence of Friedrich Hayek’s speculative investigations into the nature of “sensory order” was deliberate.  Listening to music engages as much of our faculties of consciousness as does reading a book.  It may even engage more of those faculties because the experience is far more time-dependent.  Thus, I anticipate that I shall continue to explore the nature of those faculties in a broader context on this site, just as I anticipate that I shall continue to engage disciplines such as philosophy and social theory in my general reading practices.  Hopefully, this will make for an interesting and informative journey, even if my aspirations for a book to make sense of it all are never fulfilled.

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This was the week, however, that finally tipped my balance in her favor.  Yes, the news gets a bit slow during the holiday season.  If I were a serious animist, I might consider giving the award to “The Weather” for its timing in making so many people so miserable;  but the whole purpose of the Chutzpah of the Week award is to focus on outstanding instances of human. This was the week that Chapman demonstrated that, however much we in the United States may have tried to load down her reputation with lemons, she could still make a whopping pitcher of lemonade.  As the BBC reported on Wednesday, that pitcher was her prestigious appointment to the Public Council, which is basically the governing body of the Molodaya Gvardiya, the youth wing of Russia’s governing party (i.e. the party of Vladimir Putin). behavior.

Chapman is thus doing what she does best, maintaining a high profile in the interest of the State.  She has done this by taking her first step into politics.  However, is espionage really a useful prerequisite for those seeking to ascend the ladder of political power?  One only has to consult Russian history, perhaps starting with Putin himself (if he were willing to take the question)!

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As those of us who follow the international news should know by now, Bashir is a man who takes Sharia law very seriously, particularly when it involves brutal punishment for crimes against the precepts of Islam.  As a result the province of South Sudan, where most of the population follow either Christianity or older traditional beliefs (I am so glad that the adjective “pagan” is no longer used recklessly), will be holding of referendum on seceding from Sudan.  Bashir has now announced that, should this province declare independence, he will change the Sudanese constitution to make Islam the official religion (and therefore Sharia the basic legal code) and Arabic the official language.

My reading of this action is that it is a dare to the Christians of South Sudan.  Bashir is basically saying to them, “If you want your religious freedom in the south, your fellow Christians in the rest of Sudan will be penalized for your action.”  In other words he has taken an attempt to solve a major human rights problem through legitimate political means and turned it into what amounts to a hostage situation.  Any effort to influence the outcome of an election tends to involve some degree of chutzpah, but the degree in this case is high enough to warrant receipt of the Chutzpah of the Week award!

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Mr. Leigh wrote that he “always had serious misgivings about coming,” adding that he almost canceled after an incident in May in which Israeli commandos raided a Gaza-bound flotilla. The “last straw,” Mr. Leigh wrote, was the proposal of legislation by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, requiring that Israeli citizens pledge a loyalty oath to the “nation-state of the Jewish people.”
Mr. Leigh added that these and other actions by the Israeli government had left him “in an untenable position, which I must confront according to my conscience.”

Under most circumstances this could simply be accepted as an act of conscience;  but what makes this particular episode interesting is the way in which Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, director of the Spiegel School, chose to respond to Leigh’s statement:
Mr. Schorr wrote to Mr. Leigh in a letter dated Oct. 15, “I am certain that the decision is sincere and that it reflects your detailed, legitimate political views,” but added, “Boycotts and ostracism are the antithesis of dialogue.”

Mr. Schorr wrote that “the public will interpret your decision as indicating an irrevocable rift between us, a boycott of Israel, and a rebuke of its current and future artists.”
“To me,” he said, “this is a red line. Thus, I cannot justify your decision.”

Schorr basically escalated Leigh’s rather simple statement of conscience into an insult that required riposte, oblivious to the extent to which this intuitive reflex to counterattack would be fraught with irony.  At the simplest level we have the “surface” reading of Schorr’s motive in his final sentence.  If Leigh was following the dictates of his own conscience, Schorr’s “justification” is at least irrelevant and at most intrusive.  However, the strongest irony lurks in that sentence about dialogue.  Schorr is perfectly correct in asserting that ostracism is antithetical to dialogue, but his own ideological blinders prevent him from recognizing the extent to which that same spirit of ostracism by Israelis continues to undermine any substantive dialogue taking place between them and Palestinians.
In other words Schorr’s primary refutation actually serves to reinforce Leigh’s conscience-based motives.  Leigh turned his rejection letter into a judo-like act of disarming his opponent through his opponent’s own weakness.  In the context of the current volatility of the Middle East, such an act may be appreciated as an act of chutzpah, even if it was not initially conceived as such,.  So, while there is always the possibility that a stronger case will arise later in the week, I am going to stick my neck out and name Leigh as the holder of this week’s Chutzpah of the Week award.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Tuesday that it would not take advantage of a utility-backed proposal that would saddle customers with uninsured costs from catastrophic fires to bill the public for last week’s deadly San Bruno pipeline explosion.

However, PG&E did not rule out the possibility that its 6 million customers could be stuck with some of the bill. The utility said it will abide by the state’s current system, under which regulators decide whether customers or utility shareholders must pay for fire damage that the company’s insurance doesn’t cover.

Note the phrasing in that first sentence. Yesterday’s account at least implied that the proposal had been initiated by PG&E, but this was not the case. As Egelko observed in today’s piece, the proposal had much earlier origins:

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. sponsored the current proposal in response to Southern California wildfires in 2007 that caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Furthermore, it turns out that PG&E has a “Division of Ratepayer Advocates,” which has now issued a statement on behalf of Main Street:

A lawyer with the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which represents consumer interests before the commission, said the division still opposes the utility proposal on wildfire costs.

“We don’t think it is fair to ratepayers to be insurers of last resort,” the attorney, Jack Stoddard, said after the hearing. Utility shareholders, he said, “have to have skin in the game,” potentially exposing them to liability if the company neglects public safety.

This could, of course, be window dressing; and, when it comes to chutzpah, deeds definitely count for more than words. So I am not inclined to rescind yesterday’s award. It would do better to display it prominently in the PG&E Board Room as decision-making continues over just what this utility company will be doing about the damage it has done and its potential for causing further damage.

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Also apparently, the Department of Defense then had an “oops!” moment. The BBC cited The New York Times reporting that the Department is now “in negotiations to buy and destroy all the copies of the book.” This seems to be a combination of Gabriel García Márquez’ injunction against playing a game whose rules have been agreed by the competitors in the context of George Orwell’s warnings about efforts to rewrite history. I suppose that those who sympathize with the Department will see this as the most expedient way to clean up the mess. However, if the mess is of the Department’s making (possibly thorough the machinery of the clearance process), this effort to change the rules ex post facto is better perceived as chutzpah (at least until further evidence arises, which may never happen if that evidence is not cleared for public distribution). This would be the third time the Department of Defense has earned an “institutional” Chutzpah of the Week award, not least because it is unlikely that we shall ever know what led to a decision that, on the surface, is a carnival of absurdities.

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Here is the account as Al Jazeera compiled it from their wire sources:

A far-right party in Austria has sparked outrage by launching an online video game which allows players to shoot down minarets and muezzins calling for prayer.

The game, called “Moschee Baba”, or “Bye Bye Mosque”, gives players 60 seconds to collect points by placing a target over cartoon mosques, minarets and Muslims and click a “Stop” sign.

It is being used by the Freedom Party (FPOe), which has a link to the game on its website, to encourage voters to elect Gerhard Kurzmann, the party’s candidate in the picturesque region of Styria.

“Game Over. Styria is now full of minarets and mosques!” it says at the end of a session, before inviting players to vote for Kurzmann on September 26, when local elections are being held.

The website then invites viewers to take part in a survey which asks them whether the construction of minarets and mosques should be banned in Austria, and whether Muslims should sign a declaration in which they accept that the law takes precedence over the Quran.

The Al Jazeera page includes a screen shot from this game. I suppose that there will be any number of ideologues who will cheer this effort by saying that it is about time someone got even with Hamas for Tomorrow’s Pioneers and Farfur, but that would just affirm Ghandi’s precept that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. This is nothing more than raw hatred cultivated as a means of winning votes. Europeans know about that strategy all too well, but that does not lessen the risk that Austria will succumb to it. Meanwhile, the FPOe has earned itself a Chutzpah of the Week award whose connotation is about as negative as one can imagine.

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English professor Lynne Rosenthal has become a cause celebre after she was thrown out of a New York branch of Starbucks cafe by police for clashing with staff over the wording of her bagel order.

The academic had wanted a plain, toasted multi-grain bagel but said she became infuriated when the server insisted she use the phrase “without butter and cheese”.

According to Prof Rosenthal, the exchange proceeded thus: “I yelled, ‘I want my multi-grain bagel.’

“The barista said, ‘You’re not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese.’”

It seems a bafflingly trivial incident for both parties to get exercised over, and the fact that none of Starbucks’ staple product was involved in the contentious order makes one wonder what would have happened had Prof Rosenthal had the temerity to ask for a small white coffee.

Standing up to Starbucks is, itself, an act of chutzpah. Challenging their fascist (as George Orwell would have put it) warping of the English language (for no reason other that furthering the dominance of their own brand) is the leaven that makes the dough rise; and, to continue that metaphor, basing the challenge on a product that has nothing to do with coffee itself adds the icing to the cake. (In this context it may have been better to say “sprinkles the sesame seeds on top of the bagel;” but I decided to opt for the more familiar metaphor.)

In fairness I have to say that on my (relatively seldom) encounters with Starbucks, I have made it a point to use my own plain-speaking nouns and adjectives. I have never had to deal with any reaction from the server (word chosen to emphasize my usage choices) other than a faint smile that could be either disparaging or sympathetic; but this episode took place in New York City, where, for example, you expect to be yelled at when you try to get your bagel with cream cheese at Zabar’s, just because that is part of the culture of the establishment. Thus, while Kelly quoted an “official” statement from Starbucks that there “are no rules and customers have always been able to ask for drinks any way they want,” one can easily imagine that this statement was issued by some drone with absolutely no experience of the high intensity of Manhattan life during working hours. In true New York style this was a confrontation of two immovable forces, and Rosenthal deserves her Chutzpah of the Week award for her own immovability.

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The US government is to start charging UK travellers $14 (£9) to apply for permission to enter the country.

The compulsory Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (Esta) is free at present, but from 9 September visitors to the US will have to pay for it.

It lasts for two years; people who already have a valid form will not have to pay until their current one expires.

Ostensibly, this is all a matter of “preprocessing,” taking care of paperwork that used to be handled at the port of entry:

The Electronic System for Travel Authorisation form, which takes up to 72 hours to be approved, gives air passengers prior approval for entry to the US.

It replaced the green I-94 card which passengers have previously filled in on their flight into the US.

Most people who fill in the form should receive approval from the US Department of Homeland Security within a few minutes.

But British Airways and American Airlines are advising travellers to apply at least 72 hours in advance.

Both airlines have said people without valid Esta forms will not be allowed to board flights to the US.

This seems fair enough; and the $14 covers the actually work behind the processing, right? It turns out that this is not quite the case, which seems reasonable enough when you consider that most of the work is probably being done by software. No, it is that logic behind the financial charge that shifts the domain from the convoluted logic of “Government work” to the domain of chutzpah:

The fee has been introduced to fund a programme which aims to promote tourism in the US and attract foreign spending.

In other words we encourage foreign visitors to spend their money in our country by “warming them up” with a $14 charge just to get into the country! Furthermore, since this is “Government issue,” we have no idea which division of the Government came up with the idea or just which part of the Federal budget is responsible for the aforementioned program that will benefit from this “toll booth for foreigners.” However, since that is the way our bureaucracy works, let’s just make a blanket presentation to the United States Government of the Chutzpah of the Week award.

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For my part, when I have felt it necessary to tease out the finer semantics of the word, I have always turned to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, which is my source for appreciating the rich context of any Yiddish word. I was therefore glad to see that the “wisdom of the Wikipedia crowd” had taken the trouble to consult Rosten; but the article still falls far short of establishing context as well as Rosten did. Indeed, there is a fair amount of material on the Discussion tab, which is prefaced by a statement attesting that the entry has not yet been rated for either quality or importance by the “WikiProject Jewish culture, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Jewish culture on Wikipedia.” In other words, in true Talmudic tradition, there is a lot of haggling going on over just what to do with this piece of text.

I have no intention of joining that haggling. However, when I say that the current entry does not capture the spirit of Rosten’s in The Joys of Yiddish, my primary warrant is that the Wikipedia entry says nothing about wit. To be fair Rosten never uses that word himself; but, in the rather broad palette of usage examples he provides, wit is always present, often as the most salient ingredient. Far more important than the question of whether the word can carry a positive connotation (and I believe that it can) is the question of whether or not wit figures significantly in the account of chutzpah. I may not have always followed this rule as strongly as possible in assigning Chutzpah of the Week awards, but that is a fault of my own judgment rather than a question of semantics and pragmatics.

This provides the perspective for considering what I actually wrote:

Nietzsche took himself far too seriously to admit any spirit of chutzpah in his writing (which may have led to his descent into madness, if I may exercise some chutzpah of my own); but Žižek has no such compunctions.

While Nietzsche’s language can be poetic, it is hard for me to read it in any tone other than dead seriousness. Hence, my implication that Nietzsche might have staved off madness had he been more amenable to the lighter touches of wit from time to time. (Jack Point makes this sort of observation in The Yeomen of the Guard, but at the end of that operetta he is so thoroughly devastated that those more romantically inclined might think him capable of suicide.) Žižek is diametrically opposed to Nietzsche where wit is concerned. His wit is so virtuosic that he is positively manic about it, which may yet lead to his own descent into madness. Nevertheless, as John Cage once put it, Žižek has a “sunny disposition;” and that may be sufficient for him to maintain society’s arbitrary criteria for sanity!

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Rather, it’s his range that impresses – he’s equal parts forbidding theorist of the contemporary political and cultural scene, and contriver of entertainingly elaborate paradoxes. If it weren’t for the hangdog persona and residual communism, he’d be an intellectual dandy: the closest thing we have to the mock-aristocratic socialist Oscar Wilde.

Dillon even goes so far as to assert that Living in the End Times makes a single unifying point (the sort of claim that is likely to have a jaw-dropping effect on anyone who has heard Žižek speak):

At the heart of the book is an argument that will be familiar to readers of his recent work. The language of social liberalism espoused in the West on the Right and Left alike is, Žižek contends, nothing less than the purest form of intolerance. In fact, “tolerance” is precisely the problem: a weasel word that allows politicians of any ideological stripe to claim that they act in the name of freedom.

What Dillon seems to have missed, however, is that this is Žižek-as-performer in action; and, if, in the spirit of Jacques Derrida, rhetoric is the key element of a Žižek performance, then the actual unifying force is the rhetoric of polemic. When we then look at what the polemic is attacking, we discover, as Matthew Sharpe did in his Žižek entry for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that reading Žižek is “oddly reminiscent of Nietzsche;” and that reminiscence is readily triggered by Dillon’s above observation.

There is, however, one element of Žižek’s “texts” (scare quotes to allow for his diversity of media) that definitely does not remind the reader of Friedrich Nietzsche. That is the element of chutzpah. Nietzsche took himself far too seriously to admit any spirit of chutzpah in his writing (which may have led to his descent into madness, if I may exercise some chutzpah of my own); but Žižek has no such compunctions. Consider the final example of his work that Dillon examines:

Take, for example, his – on the face of it, bizarre and tasteless – comparison of the crimes of Josef Fritzl with “a much more respectable Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music”. Fritzl’s incarceration and rape of his daughter, his abuse and neglect of the children she bore him: all of this is appalling but, Žižek ventures, also entirely of a piece with kitsch visions of the perfect nuclear family. Fritzl, to an admittedly extreme degree, had merely fulfilled the deepest fantasy of the patriarchal father: to “protect” his family to the extent of destroying it.

Žižek’s point – which he surely shares with a long line of philosophical moralists, from St Augustine to Freud – is that it is our most “natural” and “caring” urges that can lead us either into the silliest fantasies (the “sacred intensity” of The Sound of Music) or the horrors enacted by the likes of Fritzl. It’s a thesis with vast geopolitical implications, and Living in the End Times elaborates some of them with extraordinary wit and rigour.

Pauline Kael once said in a radio interview that she would rather take an eight-year-old child to see La Dolce Vita than any full-length Walt Disney cartoon, her point being that the latter was far more traumatic than the former. It is no secret that many of our favorite myths are just as traumatizing. We need only look at the original sources collected by the Brothers Grimm. However, turning this observation of a Christmas institution of a television-watching community by drawing an analogy with such an extreme act of depravity requires far more chutzpah than “the average bear” is capable of mustering. If we are to accept Dillon’s “intellectual dandy” label, then Žižek sports the apparel of chutzpah. Thus, while the Telegraph may wish to celebrate the release of his latest book with such a perceptive review, I would prefer to celebrate by offering Žižek a Chutzpah of the Week award!

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Two Spanish activists and a journalist arrested in a raid by Israel on a Gaza-bound flotilla are filing charges against Israel’s prime minister.

The three accuse Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, six cabinet ministers and the navy commander of illegal detention, torture and deportation.

This is the sort of action that, under other circumstances, would be dismissed as frivolous; but, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. In this case those measures amount to the transformation of frivolity into chutzpah. It is now up to the Spanish judicial system to decide whether or not this case should be accepted; but, since it has been filed on grounds of contravening international law, those making the case deserve a Chutzpah of the Week award for their innovative approach to bringing the Israeli government to account in a manner beyond the scope of any internal investigation.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Reviewing Wright’s text, I discovered that Mattis had a motto:

Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Also, his call sign in battle was “Chaos.” From a realistic point of view, this may square well with the assessment of Defense Secretary Robert Gates given in the BBC report, even if Gates does not realize this:

He described Gen Mattis as one of the US military’s “outstanding combat leaders and strategic thinkers”.

One wonders if Gates knew about Mattis’ motto before releasing this statement, but all signs point to Mattis having a personal disposition towards leading with chutzpah. Whether the connotation of that chutzpah turns out to be positive or negative remains to be seen, but he seems to be the sort of leader who sees innovation emerging from chaos. It takes chutzpah to bring that kind of thinking to Central Command, which traditionally tries to serve as a stabilizing force; so, under the assumption that he will not get much positive recognition for his new assignment, it seems proper to let him enjoy a Chutzpah of the Week award.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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