I really wish I could do this more justice

[mamajoan]

Yesterday I read this column from the Washington Post courtesy of a link from ww1614, and it had a profound impact on me. I don't even know whether I can fully express it. Go read the article. It's long, but worth it.

In brief, it's about what happened when one of the world's most talented classical violinists, Joshua Bell, played his violin in a D.C. Metro station at rush hour.

The entire article overall is just extremely thought-provoking, and I particularly admire the way the author, Gene Weingarten, makes it clear that he's not passing judgment on anyone who didn't stop to listen. This isn't a superficial "o ye philistines" article, which it so easily could have been. It's a much more nuanced, thoughtful discussion of our modern society.

Two parts of the article particularly moved/interested me. One was the part where it talks about a guy who was listening to his iPod and thus didn't notice the musician. Weingarten wrote:

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

This is something I often think about when I take online surveys from one particular company, which has a stock set of "attitude" questions that they ask in almost every survey. One of those questions is (paraphrased) "do you think it's a good or bad thing that companies nowadays know a lot about their customers and tailor their offerings to each person?" I never know what to select, because I think it's both good and bad. I mean, obviously I can understand why companies see the value in being able to offer targeted content to each consumer. But I think it's a potentially bad thing because of what Weingarten wrote in the quote above: it insulates us from new experiences, makes it harder for people to broaden their horizons and potentially discover tastes they didn't know they had. If you join a music club like BMG and tell them you like alternative rock, they'll send you tons of alternative rock, and you might never hear a single snippet of jazz in your lifetime...but who knows, maybe you'd really like jazz if you just gave it a try, right? But the more our world becomes digital, like he said, the easier it is to retreat into the "safety zone" of one's already-established preferences. And I think that's really unfortunate.

The second thing that really hit home for me about the article was, predictably enough I guess, the part about the children. First there's a bit about one particular 3-year-old boy (gee, why would that resonate for me?) who kept turning to look at the violinist until his mother rushed him away. And then Weingarten reveals that the children were the one demographic that day who universally tried to stop and listen, but were hustled away by their parents.

Believe me, I can understand it. I'm sure I've been that harried rushed mother many a time, and will be again. I'm sure those parents were focused more on where they needed to be and all the many hassles of daily life, feeling little more than irritation and frustration at their kids' desire to pause. I can't pass judgment, because I am those parents. But it makes me sad and it makes me think about how badly I want to not be those parents. I think about a hundred, a thousand, a million kids being rushed around willy-nilly, slaves to the clock, never able to take a moment to investigate an interesting blade of grass or listen to a street musician or whatever else takes their fancy. I truly believe it's our responsibility as parents to, to the extent possible, enable and encourage those little moments of discovery and curiosity in the midst of a humdrum day. I truly want to cherish and treasure the kind of spontaneity, and more, the kind of deep fascination with every little bit of minutiae, that characterizes the inner life of a child.

So I take it kind of as a wake-up call, even though I probably do better with this than many other parents. But I do hate how much time I spend hustling the kids around, quick quick, gotta get there, can't be late! I do want to be the kind of mom who says, yeah, sure, we'll stop and listen to the guy playing the violin. So I'm a few more minutes late to work, whatever. I strive to put my kids' needs ahead of my own in most cases, to the extent possible, and this is just another area where I feel it's really important to strive toward that.

Ah well. As I said at the beginning, it's hard for me to do justice to the article or the effect it had on me. I'm still processing it, in fact. But to reiterate: GO READ IT!

In more mundane news, today I saw a doctor about my ongoing sinus issues (especially since over the weekend I developed ear pain and was worried it was a sinus infection that had developed into an ear infection). She said I am not infected in any way and she thought it looked like allergies. She recommended Claritin. Grump. Well, I shouldn't grump. I'm glad not to have another course of antibiotics (and glad to have a doctor who doesn't just prescribe them indiscriminately), but allergies, ugh! OTOH, everyone has been saying this is a really bad year for allergies, so maybe if I can just get past this, it'll all get better. Hey, I can live in hope.

Anyway, I spent like an hour this evening searching the house for the Claritin that I knew was here. I found about three different sheets each of Sudafed and Benadryl, which I didn't want to take (both are considered iffy-at-best while breastfeeding, as opposed to Claritin which is considered quite safe), and was getting very frustrated by my inability to find the darn Claritin. But finally I turned it up, yay, and took one, and we'll see how it goes.

OK, time to go fall down.

Comments

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I read it, and watched the video clips.

I noticed, after several paragraphs, that although the article cites women who were passersby (or worked nearby, in the case of the woman who shines shoes), there are only two references to other women by name in the article: "a naked Greta Scacchi" in The Red Violin, and Clara Schumann, as the recipient of a letter.

[thinking-lotus.livejournal.com]

I read it and am listening to the audio now. Amazing!

I think the same thing about my preferences being tailored to me ... but also I think that the whole system in some ways makes it easier to try new stuff because there are lots of snippets around and you can taste from the smorgasbord and be just a click away from downloading stuff. Or you could hear about just a bit of something and then easily find more, all online.

SO I suppose for some people it could narrow things but for me I feel as though it's opened them up and made it easier to experiment.

About the hurried rushed mum thing--I always refused. We always stopped and looked at things. Hence my current state.

My overall reaction to this article was to think that what did they expect from a bunch of bureaucrats and lawyers? At rush hour? And people who buy lotto tickets are a lost cause anyway. And the description of DC as a "sophisticated" place made me lol, but I am a chauvinistic NYer. The last time I saw a guy playing in the subway it was an older Chinese guy with an erhu and he was great and I gave him $2. And he drew a crowd and people applauded. But it wasn't rush hour. And it was the lower east side, not midtown.

Would I have stopped and looked? No idea. I like the think I would,as I generally do, since I can't pass by anything beautiful, but who knows.

[linabean.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I haven't read the article yet, but I'll be sure to. (I used to read The Washington Post online every day, but now with my shoddy and irregular Internet access, I haven't looked at the site in months.)

I really recommend other articles like this by Gene Weingarten--they're always very thoughtful, and they stick with me because of that. I mean, mostly he just writes a humor column, which isn't bad, though he's better at analyzing/evaluating humor than actually producing it (his weekly chat on the Washington Post site is fun for that). But he really shines at more serious pieces like this--he wrote something last year about a guy who's brilliant at entertaining at toddlers' birthday parties with his personal life in disarray, and it was just pretty unflinching but also sympathetic. He also had a good piece about visiting a very remote Eskimo village. I think in all these cases, he starts out just wanting to approach it as an opportunity for jokes, but then he feels compelled to look at all the implications in front of him honestly. It's good stuff!

[munoz.livejournal.com]

"a really bad year for allergies"?

Good God, that doesn't even come close! Last week, Atlanta broke its pollen count record for this time of year. On the scale they use here, a pollen count of 120 is considered exceptionally high and a great risk to allergic people. They say you should try to stay indoors at all costs if the pollen count is 120.

Last week, Atlanta's was 5000. FIVE THOUSAND. That's almost 42 times higher than where the scale normally stops.

[adooma.livejournal.com]

There is a great response to the Joshua Bell article by a NYC subway musician in her blog: www.SawLady.com/blog
She interprets the situation differently from the Washington Post reporters... I thought you might find it interesting.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I think that "Saw Lady" makes the same mistake that a lot of others in the discussion have made, in her statement that Weingarten is judging or criticizing the passers-by for not stopping. As I said in my post (note where I said it isn't an "o ye philistines" article), I don't see him doing that AT ALL. His point is NOT, "these stupid people don't recognize genius" but "isn't it too bad that our society doesn't value moments of 'found beauty' like this, that our culture has brought these people to a point where they can't or won't stop to notice." I think a lot of people are READING the article with much more of a knee-jerk reaction than it was written with!

[angledge.livejournal.com]

I wonder if I would've stopped.

Also, I spent five minutes sneezing this morning. And I don't normally have allergies.

aaaaaargh

[jorend.livejournal.com]

1. Crummy experiment. Nothing to compare with. They should have run the same experiment on a different day with a crummy violinist, and again with a very good (but not famous) pop singer with a guitar.

2. Since the article gives basically zero information, I'm free to speculate...

I think the explanation is pretty simple. Most people don't like classical music. Therefore most people do not spend a whole lot of time listening to classical music. Therefore most people can't tell the difference between a really good classical performance and a so-so one. Therefore they rely heavily on circumstances (framing) to tell them what's good.

I put myself in all these categories. It's not a matter of being a philistine. These are all just facts about our culture. If you listen to classical music for 30 minutes every day, really listen, there's no way you're going to walk past a performance like that--or, you'd have to be very, very distracted. Just like if a really good alternative band were playing in the subway, I wouldn't be able to overlook that. But my taste in classical music is not refined enough.

...Plus, most people do not like street performers. There's something fundamentally passive-aggressive about busking. There's also a general feeling (maybe unfair) that giving money to any street performer encourages them all.

If one person out of the thousand that walked right by was listening to his iPod, that probably has no significance whatsoever.