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So tomorrow (today? I’m not sure when I’ll finish this) is Father’s Day in the United States, a completely idiotic holiday which we refer to locally as a “Hallmark holiday”, which is to say that it has no real organic origin but was invented to sell greeting cards. Mother’s Day, for instance, is a maudlin holiday invented by Republican PR specialists to remember and honour the mothers of those killed in the Civil War (and, specifically, those killed for the Union side), and thus really is not a Hallmark holiday. Father’s Day, on the other hand, evolved over time to encourage middle class families to spend more on gin, cigars, neckties, and prime ribeye steaks in mid June, roughly a month after post-Civil War guilt inspired the same middle class families to buy excessive bouquets, an early start to summer vacations, and to risk it all on bets for the Kentucky Derby for mothers.

All this means is that, while there might be some legitimate reason for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is basically a special from the boys in marketing, realising cynically that fathers will take what they can get, and that retailers will reward PR guys with a piece of the vig of whatever they create. And given that both the retailers and the wholesalers of cigars, gin, neckties, and bad cologne, have surprisingly large profit margins, they are reliable supporters of a Sunday in June dedicated to the sale and distribution of their products, even if really it’s just a vaguely disguised guilt trip for mothers, who had their day in May, but now are being forced – in the way that only a deeply engaged patriarchical process can – to feel guilty that their role in giving birth to the cannon fodder of a constitutional war built around the elimination of human bondage entails. I mean, no real guilt should entail, but if you’re shilling prime ribeyes, Cuban cigars, and golf equipment, hell, just run with it.

All of this makes me feel like ignoring Father’s Day except for the fact that it’s the same weekend as the USGA Open Championship in golf, or the US Open. I’ll note the US Open and its position on the calendar predates the Hallmark cult of Father’s Day, so it’s now just kind of a quaint coincidence – the third Sunday in June is the last day of the US Open but it also just happens to celebrate fathers, especially middle to upper middle class fathers who play golf as a means of frantically meeting societal class expectations, mostly, and not because they actually enjoy the outdoors or punching a small hard ball around in the outdoors, because most of them hate doing so, and would rather watch other young adult males playing sports instead of demonstrating their own failure at being able to play sports any more, and while this is a run-on sentence, I think it’s an important one, because Father’s Day is in fact that most interesting of modern phenomenons, a socially agreed upon event which only references social norms which don’t, really, have to exist, and in fact are rooted in things no one wants to perpetuate. Thanksgiving – US or Canadian – involves a falsehood of First Nations / colonial mutual love which, while false, is perfectly wholesome; Father’s Day involves a falsehood of fatherly concern for various material and sporting things which are completely, entirely divorced from the wholesome love of men for their children, and indeed, which material and sporting things are non-wholesome, embarrassingly commercialised distractions from the wholesome love of men for their children.

Which brings me to my day today.

I want to start by apologising to my son. I’m pretty sure all he wanted to do today was do online computer stuff (and by referring to such stuff as “stuff” and not “shit,” I officially earn a George Carlin “family empathy” badge and a well-mixed Beefeater’s Gibson, double, neat) – something involving an online chat service called Discord and its ability to enable simultaneous play in a Minecraft realm (the prior sentence had no meaning 20 years ago, and in 20 years, I have no doubt our ability to parse its historical meaning will have been as lost to the species as our ability to parse the Mayan temple ruins of Yucatan). His good friend came over – another child of a divorce, said divorce being differently messy than what the boy has had to deal with but let’s face it, every divorce sucks to an involved child. His friend is having a rough patch with parental transfers, and moreover, one of his classmates in fifth grade was about to move to Florida with his family. The young man wanted to spend Father’s Day – today or tomorrow, again depending on when I finish writing this – with the friend about to move away, which would mean two things. First, obviously, it would mean not spending the day doing artificially constructed “Father’s Day Approved” activities, most likely a lot of bowling or forcing divorced Dad to make barbecue hot dogs or or forcing Dad to teach a stereotyped male activity like woodworking or five-card stud or gapping spark plugs. And second, it would mean spending Father’s Day night at his divorced mom’s house, instead of spending it at divorced dad’s house, thirty miles away and thus hard to manage while still giving his friend about to move to Florida a proper sending off.

My son’s friend has picked up long ago that divorces, either selfishly, or unconsciously, or simply implicitly, involves scorekeeping, a constant battle to determine on the part of each child which parent is “doing better” or “cares more for the divorced child”. In my experience, this scorekeeping is inevitable within the parents and children for a certain period, but can be overcome with good intentions and lots of conversation. The trouble is, the broader community of any divorce – the friends, the extended families, the new friends who come after the fact at school or work or day care or running for town council – that broader community just wants a celebrity meltdown story. And so the children and the parents – even when they try their damndest to get it right – are constantly navigating a social landscape which wants to assign winners and losers (“your dad is a much shittier parent than your mom” / “your mom is a much more loving parent than your dad”).

I’m going to pause here and point out that both parents of the boy’s friend seem to be acting in an exemplary fashion. Most people – and certainly most trollers of internet things – assume that divorced parents basically default to doing the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child. While I have to admit, in dealing with divorced parents, I’ve seen a decent amount of that, let me state (fully aware of the self-serving nature of what I’m about to say) that it’s not actually true. Parents do a lot of the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child, but interestingly, divorced parents do quite a bit less of it, because the very nature of their divorce – “Hey, I’ve done the Worst Possible Thing For Our Marriage!” – means they no longer have any credibility to be viewed as a reasonable practitioner of “I’m Focused On the Best Possible Thing For The Family I’ve Constructed”. Married parents get to do the Worst Possible Thing for Their Child because hell, they’re married parents – the law and society (except if there’s race or drug use involved) never peel back the curtain. But because divorced parents are already publicly viewed as being incompetent – by everyone except only occasionally their children, who desperately want to think of their parents as being Always Great, just like all kids, but at least divorced kids have that illusion shattered earlier – they can only beg their children to think of them as being halfway decent human beings. But in this case, of the boy’s parents, both of them are truly doing a great job.

What was tough was witnessing how hard the boy’s friend was trying to personally reconcile being both a good friend – to the boy who was moving to Florida in 48 hours and may possibly never be seen again, which to a fifth grader is a trauma equivalent to the unspeakable – while being a great son to a very human and flawed father, while knowing that the actions that would make him be a good friend would possibly be seen by both the father and the mother as a kind of favoritism – of rejecting divorced dad to stay an extra night with divorced mom. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the boy’s friend seems comfortable talking about these quandaries with us – or rather, around us; my son usually zones out, which I completely understand. His divorced parent experience is almost impossible to translate into his friend’s divorced parent experience, because as Tolstoy told us at the beginning of Anna Karenina, family tragedies are all unique; only family pleasantness is similar enough to be able to be translated, and thus also is similar enough to be of no interest to the novelist or, really, even to the individual trying to understand the human experience.

As I say, though, the boy’s friend opens up to us all the time about his challenges navigating his family situation, but pace Tolstoy, the boy and I can only make conversation. Today I talked to him about how the love your parents feel for you – if they’re good people, and I truly believe his parents are good people – has nothing to do with the time of day of the third Sunday in June – either a father demanding sole focus, or a mother lording over the fact that a son chooses her over the father, on a lame Hallmark holiday. The love exists outside of time, outside of space, because that’s what love is. So over the course of a Monopoly game (which I clearly was winning despite constant rule violations and cheating between the two boys to prevent the inevitable), and the course of a lunch at Subway, and the course of a long car ride, I ended up trying to explain my theory of love, which is a theory of total surrender, of where a parent lets a child being selfish because that’s what love is but also a child lets a parent be selfish because that’s what love is the other way, and both see that selfishness over time and atone for their human inability to demonstrate the perfection of love to one another but also pledge – not to the other, but to themselves in honour of the other, to try to be less imperfect, and in so doing, everyone creates the love required to love others even more.

Which isn’t really what you want to do with an eleven year old boy and one’s ten year old son when both are also drinking sugary drinks and while the dog is bouncing around and randomly setting off the seat warmer button.

Eventually I think I convinced the boy’s friend to simply talk to his parents about the quandry: not to tell his father that he wanted to skip out on the pathetic Hallmark third Sunday of June holiday but that he wanted to be a good friend, to tell his mom that he wasn’t choosing her over his day but that he was really choosing to be a great friend and was, actually, using his mom’s house as a convenient base of operations, and that he loved both mom and dad and just wanted their advice and counsel on what the right thing to do was. And he talked to his mom, who talked to his dad, and he’ll spend the day with the friend who is moving to Florida, and his dad will pick him up late after dinner, and the mom will be extra up front about timing and logistics.

My son zoned out on all of this.

Which is okay. I think it’s actually both rational on his part, and the right incentivising behaviour as well. Rational because really, the boy is 10 years old: listening and reflecting on a conversation his 11 year old friend seems to need to have with me, the boy’s dad, is a lot of emotional heavy lifting. The rational thing for him to do is to actually focus on the Van Hagar-era 80s rock coming from the car radio, from 100,000 watts of WBLM POWER! broadcast from the LA Basin (that’s Lewiston-Auburn for you hard rock newbies). He has to process his own divorced parent bullshit every minute of every day, and he and his friend talk about that a lot – but if his friend wants to download to me, one half of the boy’s divorced parent bullshit factory, it’s completely understandable that the boy himself would decide to not listen.

It’s incentivising behaviour, though, in the sense that if the boy’s friend engages me in “what should I do, Mr. Freilinger?” queries, my son probably is listening at least partially to figure out if I’m feeding his friend a line of fatherly bullshit that I clearly don’t deliver to my actual son. I do my best to be a good father, but of course, I suck at it – but when his friend asks for fatherly advice, my son has a chance to compare my intellectually and rhetorically refined fatherly bullshit delivered to his friend, to my actual delivery of parental behaviour in reality. So my son, by letting me dig my own rhetorical grave, is gaining ever more future intellectual ammunition to show me that, despite my best intentions, I was a crap father who didn’t live up to even my own expectations. And, therefore, depending on his maturity level at a given point in time, he deserves a Nintendo Switch, or he deserves getting me to bail him out of jail after he was busted selling eight-balls at the senior prom.

My goal, clearly, is that he won’t simply want material goods for fulfilment, and that he won’t realise that selling drugs to idiots is actually an effective way of making a living as long as you don’t get caught (or, for that matter, ending up too much of an idiot and just inspiring the next Scarface). My goal as a parent is that he’s a moral, good, wonderful individual, with the social skills and ambition and curiosity to make a living in a sustainable way on a planet which is not simply here to fulfil human whims. And oddly, I hope that’s the goal of his friend’s parents, but even if it’s not, my goal for his friend needs to be the same.

Hopefully, my son is holding me to account as a I talk to his friend, and my own self-reflection is making me better as a father than I would be if I weren’t asked to give fatherly advice to another. Hopefully, my advice is helping my son’s friend work his own way through a divorced parent situation which is harder than a “normal” family situation which doesn’t have to navigate the open wounds of post-divorce relationships. And hopefully, my son and his friend both are seeing me as doing my best as an adult – which isn’t to say I’m going it perfectly or even well, just that I’m doing my best, and that if they do their best in an unselfish way – knowing that they’ll still be jerks every now and again – they will be fathers in the future that are good and decent. Not perfect, not even “really good” – just good, just decent.

And tomorrow – it will be tomorrow; I’m going to finish writing this before midnight – it doesn’t matter if the boy is with me or with his mom, or if his friend is with his dad or his mom. If both boys are talking to their parents – and even better, if both have learned that it’s okay to trust good adults, and that they get good adults to help them navigate who aren’t just parents – then it will all be fine. It’ll be fine tomorrow: I have no idea what Monday will hold. But all I’m asking for is for two boys to enjoy a great Father’s Day, and for their parents to breathe more easily knowing that it’s happened.

Monday will be another day. We’ll face that on its own terms.

Last week, the football team I support played against our local rivals.  I followed the game on a live-text website using my mobile phone, checking on the score every few minutes for the first hour or so, until the result became foregone, which is the next best thing to watching the game live on television.   One of the great joys of sport is experiencing the changing fortunes of your team, or the individual for whom you are cheering, in ‘real time’: this is true for the ten seconds of the Olympic 100m final, the hour and a half of a Premiership game in North London, the five days of an Ashes Test match, or the three weeks of the Tour de France.  There is, no doubt, some pleasure to be taken from a long period of sporting success for a team or an individual, but this is not quite the same as the thrill of the live game or race, and as anyone who has played sport seriously knows, you are only as good as your most recent result.  It’s the short term – the present moment – that matters most.

In this respect, sport is quite dissimilar from the rest of our lives.  Most of the time, it’s the long term that counts and our pleasures, benefits, and advantages are accumulated slowly and steadily; likewise, pains, costs, and disadvantages pile up incrementally, often unnoticed, until the task of dealing with them becomes overwhelming.  Compounding is not just one of the wonders of the world, it is also one of its fundamental operating principles.  For which reason, if we want to know what is going on around us, to understand the deep causes that determine the way the world works, rather than look at day-to-day fluctuations and momentary variations, we need to study the forces at work over the long run; we need to attend to la longue durée.  I would rather watch a race between hares, but to comprehend the world we need to keep track of the tortoises.

Continue reading “La longue durée”

Would you swallow the blue pill or the red pill? 

The blue pill returns you to the invisible prison that is your artificially simulated reality, whereas the red pill allows you to discover the truth of your enslavement by the machines.  Have you ever wondered why you only have two pills to choose between?   If you buy a pack of chocolate M&Ms you also get brown, green, yellow, and orange options. 

In a famous poem, Robert Frost described his moment of choice between two paths in a wood, knowing that he might never pass that way again he surmised that the choice he was about to make would later seem to him to have made all the difference.  Did he never consider the possibility that he could reject both paths, and make his own, new track through the woods?   In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a famous book, Either/Or, in which he compared two approaches to the conduct of life, one primarily aesthetic the other ethical.  Is there not a third way?  And not just a third but, perhaps, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh way to live.  What is the attraction of binary choices?  In part, for the decision maker, choices become quicker and easier for there are only two option to consider.  Our bodies and our language normalise this way of thinking: on the one hand, on the other hand.  In part, however, the binary structure allows the person who is presenting our choices to us, to seek to persuade us to do something we might otherwise be reluctant to do, by making the alternative highly unattractive.  There is significant rhetorical force in the design of a false dichotomy. 

Continue reading “False dichotomies”

I went the the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today to view a new exhibit of JMW Turner – “Turner’s Modern World” – and frankly didn’t enjoy it. In the moment it really bothered me, because while I’ve always thought of Turner as the most modern of pre-Impressionist painters, and have loved seeing him in the Tate and elsewhere in London, today I just didn’t enjoy the exhibit at all. It frustrated me: how can I love an artist and his (or her) work, but reject an exhibition of that work and that artist?

What I thought about on the drive back to Scarborough – it’s a good two hours depending on traffic, and despite it being a Saturday, for reasons I couldn’t figure out the traffic was lousy – listening to a mix tape I had put together but had not figured out whether to send or not, and then when that was done listening to CBC’s Saturday afternoon line up of The Debaters and Under the Influence and of course Because News, was this dichotomy. It reminded me of a previous John Singer Sargent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago that I had been to – but it was different. The Sargent exhibit was fantastic, even though it made me question just how great a painter I thought Sargent was. The Turner exhibit today didn’t change my view of Turner, but it made me think “wow, I really wasted my time today.” Which was even worse: I love looking at beautiful art, paintings in particular. To think that my time had been wasted, that I could have been doing other things (namely, reading the next book club selection) that I’d have enjoyed that much more, but instead drove a total of four hours, spent $20 on parking, and the only thing on the plus side of the equation was a delicious omelette and a starter course of escargot at a Boston bistro, really bothered me.

The answer, of course, is all about curation. The easy answer was that there was just a ridiculous explosion of too much Turner: they should have broken it up somewhat, they should have stretched it out, let each piece live on its own, had fewer total pieces. But that’s ridiculous, and actually as the curatorial notes alluded to, would have sort of been a betrayal of JMW Turner himself. He thought rather highly of himself, was a bit of a showman, and was constantly pushing for the Royal Academy back in his day to grant him exclusive shows, even though even back then there was an awareness that too much Turner in one place was a bad idea, like eating too many fried clams on the beach in summer time. Yes, delicious; but taken to extremes, your entire being just rejects it, and ultimately you risk destroying your enjoyment of fried seafood (or the preview of Impressionism and Expressionism that Turner represents, to bring us out of the clam shack analogy) in the future.

The curatorial choices were, in that regard, actually good ones: this was designed to be a surfeit of Turner, it was built to be over the top. The lighting choices were – until the final room – chosen with an eye towards what JMW would have been showing in back in the 1840s; the stacking of paintings in line with what a Royal Academy annual would have done had they granted a wall to him without breaking it up with a Gainsborough or a generic set of Derby horseflesh in oil or a boring but well-executed and celebrity-friendly group portrait of the Regent and his birthday entourage. That solid wall of explosive colour, so modern and imaginative and ruthlessly out of keeping with Congress of Vienna era norms, though, would have never been granted Turner back then because he was so odd; had he been, it would have been a kind of violation, and probably even his fans back then like Ruskin would have said “too much”. They surely knew – intuitively if not consciously – that he could only have his genius come to the surface by comparing it to the tired sea battle scenes and portraiture and landscapes, however competently painted, of his contemporaries.

I think part of the problem was that I visited my favourite MFA gallery to kill the half hour before my timed entry ticket kicked in, the gallery with the Copleys and the Wests and the “American” portraits of the late 18th century, so precise and glossy and realistic, portraiture predecessors of the hyperrealism of Chuck Close and Richard Estes, only with powdered wigs and knit stockings which, of course, represent fantasy to us today and thus allow us to break the notion of “hyperrealism” that the painting technique implies. The MFA has an almost comical Benjamin West group portrait of the Hope family – a banking family from Boston who oddly made their money in the Netherlands – which looks strikingly like the montage portrait that freezes at the end of the intro to Soap, a totally age-inappropriate situation comedy that my grandmother loved watching with me and probably warped me for life. The Hope family portrait is stunning in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Turner, even though it was painted roughly at the same time as Turner’s first major works. But rather than either seeming anachronistic, thought of together, they seem as relevant and perfectly capable of juxtaposition as what one might imagine as the 20th century equivalent, a Wayne Theibaud California realist cityscape against Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds above New Mexico.

The other piece that bothered me, though, was a missing work – Turner’s famous painting of early rail, Rail, Steam and Speed, which I’ve seen in the National Gallery in London regularly, often, and just always blows me away. This isn’t fair to the curators, but given the strength of the MFA collection – they have a collection which rivals that of any museum in North America with the possible exception of the New York Met and the Chicago Art Institute – they should have been able to secure it for what was proposed as a comprehensive Turner modern world representative exhibit. As it was, the only “steam” on display came in maybe a half dozen steam ships, but nothing of the power and expression of fear of the modern acceleration that marks Turner’s paintings of rail. The absence of that element of his work – and the sorry replacement of it that the MFA’s curators attempted with lesser watercolours of mine entrances and forges, or his famously indistinct seascapes with early fully-rigged steamships – was not successful.

Turner – more than any French painter of the age, more than any American painter of the age – saw that what was characteristic of his world was change. Not dynamism per se, although he is rivalled in my mind only by Winslow Homer in his ability to show the power and action of the sea, exceeding any Dutch master in his understanding of storm clouds, approached and only occasionally exceeded by the designist precision of Rockwell Kent in his understanding of the purity of the colour of sky / sea / earth in one place. But more than any of them and only really inherited by future generations by rare instances, by Ray Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns who saw the impact of media in the same way he understood the impact of speed and connection, Turner was a master. The MFA exhibit, though, missed the point. Turner saw that the world was changing, but the exhibit was less about that understanding than it was about explosions.

Maybe in a time where movies have lost their focus on ambience and dialogue and focus instead on comic book narratives and colour, and in a time where in political dialogue we ignore the potential for collaboration because its simpler to live in echo chambers of self-reinforcing violence, the MFA exhibit makes sense. But it ignores what makes Turner great.

Thinking about it a little more, part of that greatness is his prescience, which was alluded to (ironically) in a quote from a security guard that was at the end of the exhibit. The MFA, in its final gallery which had no paintings, had a wall of pictures of MFA staff, and how they’ve reacted to Turner’s work in their careers. The security guard had a posting in the room with Turners The Slave Ship; the guard is African-American, and he insightfully pointed out that the picture was painted well after the Atlantic slave trade was over: such ships no longer plied the seas. He understood that Turner was seeing a deeper, more lasting injustice that still existed, and that the muscle memory of being chattel was something with a much longer fuse than simply Wilberforce’s campaign to end the trade could put out.

Turner was, really, a prophet, whose communication was in paint. He saw over the horizon what other artists – Hopper, Kent, Dali – would have to contend with in the full force of lived reality, but he recognised it even in its birth in Birmingham and Liverpool and on the Great Western Railway viaduct. He was to visual arts what McLuhan or Walter Benjamin were to our understanding of media. And despite that, despite the name of their exhibit, the MFA just liked throwing up lots of pictures of waves and fog and ships.

On the plus side, lunch was truly special. If you’re in Boston in the near future, I highly recommend Aquitaine, on Tremont Street. And if you’re heading north to Maine, seriously, it might seem convoluted, but take I-93 North to Route 128 – the Tobin Bridge route that gets you up through Danvers always seems shorter on paper, but just don’t do it.

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents to buy me a guitar so that I could learn how to play.  I had been given a vinyl recording of classical works transcribed for the guitar, performed by Andrés Segovia, and I decided that I would learn to play like him.  I duly received a small guitar, with nylon strings suitable for a beginner, and I started going to weekly lessons to learn the basics of how to position the fingers of my left hand against the frets and how to use the fingers of my right hand to pluck the strings.  In due course, I bought some music scores for guitar – works by Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and Schubert simplified for those just starting to learn to play – and I was delighted when, after much practice and having overcome many mistakes, I was able to play a few bars. 

I never achieved my goal of becoming as good as Segovia.  There were, I now understand, three reasons for this failure.  First, I did not practice often enough or long enough.  After an initial burst of enthusiasm, my desire to learn how to play scales, read music, and improve my finger technique quickly diminished, and anyway was never able to compete with my duty to complete my homework and my desire to play sport.   Second, my taste in music changed.  For a while, I imagined that I could become as good a guitarist as Carlos Santana; then I lowered my expectations and decided that it would be sufficient to become merely a competent player, so long as I could write songs that were as good as Bob Dylan’s.  I bought an acoustic guitar, with steel strings and a plectrum, and switched my attention from Baroque to Blues, but the results were not much better.  The third and most important reason for my failure to become a great guitarist was my inability to distinguish sounds accurately.  I have met people who can listen to a melody once and then play it, whereas I struggled to tune the strings of my guitar.  Generally, I have no idea what key a song is in, nor can I judge the intervals between notes, nor do I really understand how the chord sequences work.  Whether this is at root a physical problem – that the sensitivity of my ears is just not good enough – or, rather, the consequence of a lack of training of my sense of sound, I do not know.  At some point, however, it became clear to me that I was never going to become a competent musician, let alone a great one.

Continue reading “Changing the tempo”