Dave, you suggested, above that I’m less uncomfortable than you are with the idea of greatness. That might be true. On the one hand, greatness is there–of the work, at least, if not of the artist (few people are consistently great). It’s there at least as experienced by someone who knows what’s going on. The way one person can tell a healthy moose just by looking at it, the same way another can tell if a sonata has been ingeniously put together.

On the other hand, you’ve had much more experience developing counter-cultural and idiosyncratic tastes than I have. I’ve only been doing it seriously for fifteen years, while you basically took it in with your mother’s milk. So, it’s no surprise if I’m still a little stuck on conventional categories like “great.”

For now, I’m willing to assert that high culture (of any origin) and low culture (ditto) are worth attending to, the latter because great things come out of suffering, the former because great things come out of technique and wealth. Be it Heian poetry or Appalachian fiddling, it can be great. What’s less interesting to me is the middle-brow stuff, the “Mozart is good for you” crowd, the stuff that’s calculated to appeal to mass taste.

This gimmick has been done before, by Yo Yo Ma, who played the Bach Cello Suites on a traffic island on 42nd street a few years ago. It’s a good gimmick, but it’s tasteless to make so much noise about it as Bell has done.

Well, there’s also a bunch of now-famous types who started out performing on the street. Whoopi Goldberg comes to mind offhand, as she was a bragging point around Cambridge MA. And it’s not Bell that’s making the noise here, it’s the clapper (that is, the paper).. ;-) Yeah, this stunt is kind of a standard demonstration, but still worth repeating once in a while.

biophila is an inborn inclination …. But like creativity and spontaneous affection, it’s an inclination that’s all too easy to stifle and overwhelm.

An excellent point!

Urban environments seem designed to desensitize, perhaps because they are designed by captives who love their captivity. But I don’t think it has to be that way.

Rather than invoking the induced masochism of slavery, consider these ideas:

First, desensitization can be a rational response to overcrowding. If you’re surrounded with a horde of humans who aren’t socially connected to you, that’s in and of itself a stressful situation, and withdrawal is a classic response. There have been studies made about to how, for example, the wide vs. narrow sidewalks of various neighborhoods in NYC affect people’s interactions, and yeah, more room means more social interaction and friendlier attitudes.

Second, a lot of our modern urban environment has built “on the cheap”, and it’s ugly! In this respect I agree with you, it doesn’t have to be this way. But even with more attention to aesthetics, I doubt that we can make urban environments as rich as a forest or suchlike…

And I have to say, I’m always a little bothered by variations on “that’s just the way I am.â€? You have as much ability to pay attention as anyone else; you just haven’t made a priority of it.

Well, actually… people do differ in their attentional abilities, just like in any other cognitive (or physical) ability. My own autistic disorder gives me a broader range of attentional states, but switching among them takes more effort, and i’m easily stunned by sensory overload. The upshot is that I really do need to “budget” my attention over the long term.

— Magic Trick
— Look Mama
— Don’t Let Him Catch You Looking (I really like this as a title of a poem, but maybe not for this particular one.)

I enjoyed the WP article very much. I must admit, I was a bit judgmental of the hurried drones; I would have stopped. And I’m not saying that to be snobbish. I say that because 1) Stacy (my boyfriend) used to be one of those performers in subway stations, and 2) I make it a point to stop for beauty. It’s not an easy thing to do and I have to work very hard at it. But I decided some odd time ago that I wasn’t going to live my life as a hurried along drone. I need beauty to survive. And between nature and people – there is much to be experienced!

So, to try and not be long winded — I felt sorry for those some odd thousands of souls that did not experience beauty that day — even if only for a moment. I used to speed to work, and then realized that it wouldn’t much matter in the long run if I made it there at 7:45 or 7:47. Two minutes less time to stare at a blank computer screen or two minutes of (in this case) musical bliss.

I hope that doesn’t come off as snobby — it’s just how I feel about…. life. (That being said: in order to ensure I can experience beauty I have made a conscious decision to not enter into fast-paced, high-powered jobs. That’s why I live in rural PA and not Washington D.C.)

David – I couldn’t have said it better. Kids are instinctive anarchists. We are at our best whenever we manage to recapture the kind of seeing (and hearing) that once came naturally to us.

bev – This is a very important corollary, and I thank you for bringing it up. I’ve watched a lot of little kids explore nature (without, of course, any notion that the world is divided up between two moieties called “nature” and “human”) — enough to agree with E.O. Wilson that biophila is an inborn inclination (and I don’t agree with E.O. Wilson on very much). But like creativity and spontaneous affection, it’s an inclination that’s all too easy to stifle and overwhelm. Urban environments seem designed to desensitize, perhaps because they are designed by captives who love their captivity. But I don’t think it has to be that way. Authentic neighborhoods are a joy to visit and inhabit; I agree with Aristotle that human beings are creatures made for the polis — even if that polis is a circle of temporary shelters around a fire, as it must have been for 95% of our history as a species. As conservationists, I think it’s imperative that we align ourselves with the New Urbanists in figuring out how to make towns and cities more livable and humane. Creating spaces for street musicians to perform is obviously one small piece of the puzzle — but it will have to be accompained by a slowing down of the pace of life sufficient to allow people to enjoy the music in the first place.

Teju – Oh, lord, a numbered response! I figured you might have something to day about this, my friend, and you didn’t disappoint.

1
I believe you. But then, you’re a grad student working on a part-time schedule, are you not?

2
Not me. I barely heard of him. I focus on composers rather than performers, I’m afraid.

3
The Post seemed unaware of that. A couple other parallels are cited in the discussion, though, and someone linked to a video of Bruce Springsteen playing on the street in Europe and attracting relatively little notice. I’m not one to pass judgement on tastefulness or lack thereof, being in real life a bit lacking in taste myself. I don’t understand why pro wrestling is not accorded the same respect as any other form of improvisational theater, for example.

3 #2
Thanks.

4
Very good point. (And speaking of tastelessness, I’m quite happy cooking with cheap, store-brand cooking wine, thankyouverymuch.) I particularly appreciate this point coming from you, since you don’t seem as uncomfortable as I am with the concept of greatness per se — correct me if I’m wrong — and I think you’re probably a better listener than I am, too. So I appreciate the nuance here. Yeah, it’s about branding and snobbishness. NPR had a good series on the history of music on radio last month, and I was surprised to learn just how great a role broadcasts of classical music played in the homogenization of the airwaves after the initial flowering of diversity. People were quite explicit about this being the music of social uplift, as opposed to the primitive sounds from the immigrant ghettoes and the mountains and the lascivious jungle music of the Negro.

5
The dialogic nature of performance: yes.

6
I like “parking valet” better than “butler.” Because let’s face it, even classical music concert-goers in this country can’t afford butlers any more. Or so I’d like to think.

You should come here for a performance of the Altoona Symphony sometime. This may be typical of community orchestras in general, I don’t know, but after the maestro strides onstage and mounts the platform, he always turns toward the audience, smiling, and gives a five-minute introduction to the music he’s about to play, in a very personable, down-home manner.

6 #2
Great! Do it! (And get a friend to videotape it, will you?)