The private-self fallacy

There's a moment during The Roosevelts where FDR, now president and nearing the end of his second term, has returned home to Campobello for the first time since he was stricken with polio there. He's sitting alone outdoors in an unguarded moment when some neighbors pass by, finding him with his head in his hands, a sorrowful expression on his face. In a moment, the look is replaced by Roosevelt's usual broad smile and good cheer. As the commentary puts it, "The mask was back on."

I immediately recalled a similar trope in Ken Burns's Jazz, this time about Louis Armstrong, another man who was intensely public, surrounded by people, and whose persona was one of ceaseless good cheer. Someone catches Satchmo in a private moment looking like he has all the sorrows in the world, and then the moment passes and he's back to his usual grinning self.

The way these scenes are presented, we are to understand that there are two selves, a public self and a private self, and that the private self is more authentic than the public self. We tend to believe that this is true, especially about public figures. It's rooted in a Freudian view of the mind, in which one's true self is hidden and covered over: repressed. What is shown is false; what is hidden is true. And this Freudian conception of the mind may go back even further to the idea of an immortal soul whose moral strengths and weaknesses are known to God, regardless of what you might have kept hidden from your fellows. 

But is all of this really true? Is the FDR with his head in his hands the real FDR, and the smiling, social FDR a false front? One way to test this assumption is to consider your own experience. Think about a moment when you were sad -- ideally, when you were sad and alone -- and then you spoke to someone, maybe someone close to you, like a good friend or a partner, and you immediately felt better. Was your sorrow more authentic or real than your cheering up? Or was the cheering up just as real as the sadness that preceded it? Maybe FDR and Satchmo were authentically tired and sad in moments, and also authentically loved people in a way that made them instantly cheerful when they had someone to talk to and fool around with. 

There's a reason why programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Landmark Education emphasize talking to others. When we're alone, we're more likely to be lost in our own miseries. Talking to others, engaging them, brings us out of ourselves and into the world. We are intensely social creatures, and being with others tends to cheer us up -- especially if we're helping others instead of dwelling on our own problems. 

That happiness and relief isn't false. In fact, the social self might be more genuine than our private sorrows. After all, the sorrows live in our heads, while the social self is at play in the real world. Rather than a secretly sad Franklin Roosevelt and Louis Armstrong, what we probably had were an occasionally sad but mostly gregarious and energetic FDR and Louie, whose constant action and engagement with the world made them, and us, happier people altogether.

Maximum minimalism

In the past week, I've made three big musical discoveries: the pleasure of seeing minimalism performed live, the weird post-Orientalist electronica of Fatima Al Qadiri, and a new (to me) genre of music I'm calling dishwasher beats.

Minimalism is not exactly new to me. My grandmother was an avid listener of New Sounds on WNYC, so when I lived with her I got exposed to John Schaefer's taste for Arvo Part, Alvin Lucier, Brian Eno (particularly My Life in the Bush of Ghosts), and the like. Nevertheless, I'd somehow never seen an actual performance of minimalist music, which is quite different from hearing it on recordings. (I might have missed this chance too, but my girlfriend is an artist who does things like 18-minute videos of lighting and shaking out matches, and she bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale.)

There's a tendency, when listening to minimalism, to let it fade into the background. In my grandmother's case, evenings of Terry Riley and John Adams served as a backdrop for reading The New York Review of Books or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. A concert hall forces you into a different relationship with the performers and the music, even if you do let your mind wander (I did). And there is a theatricality to the performance of these demanding works -- particularly the two pieces by Reich, Four Organs and Drumming. The former involved a surprising amount of headbanging and hand-waving by the musician leading the ensemble, while the former became almost a stark sort of Blue Man Group Goes to Indonesia mix of precision ensemble percussion and peculiar walking about. After the intermission, Philip Glass's gaudy pieces felt positively lush by comparison.

Part of the charm of seeing these works performed live is recognizing both their influence and their anachronism. Steve Reich's work in particular, going back to It's Gonna Rain from 1965, prefigures so much of hip hop and everything after (Jamie xx and Gil Scott Heron, anyone?) that it's almost impossible to imagine how weird it must have sounded when it was new. And I kept thinking of Suicide (the band, not the act) during Four Organs. But nobody today would think to phase two drum patterns, or three or four of them, by actually making musicians do it live on a stage. What was a necessity is now a stunt, a kind of artistic equivalent to having Rain Man do arithmetic really fast. There were wires and cables all over the stage for the electric organ amps, but no one had a MacBook, or even a Korg or a Moog. Contrast that with the enormous sound St. Vincent can produce with just four musicians (but at least two onstage computers), in a performance that owes a great deal to minimalism both musically and visually.

Earlier in the week, my girlfriend had complained to me that she needed new music to listen to, so I began digging around on various best-albums-of-2014 lists, and a name that kept coming up was Fatima Al Qadiri. Born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait, and now based in Brooklyn, she makes a kind of creepy Orientalist electronica that owes something to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and something to the spaciousness of minimalism. Her album Asiatisch opens with a piece that sounds like it was made for an international art exhibition because it was: a Chinese woman singing a song that isn't quite "Nothing Compares 2U" in nonsense Mandarin. It's as weird and as good and as bad as you think it is: Cremaster at the Beijing Airport. I'm not sure it's actually a good album, but it's certainly fascinating.

Even more fascinating, in its way, is what happens when you tell Google Play to create a radio station based on Asiatisch. What it plays is a genre I'm calling dishwasher beats. Last night we put it on while the dishwasher was running, and it was sometimes hard to tell which noises were from the kitchen and which from the stereo. Artists like Emptyset, Rashad Becker, Millie & Andrea, Andy Stott, and Logos make stark music that pulls together strains of minimalism, industrial, Detroit techno and noise rock to make background music for a post-industrial wasteland. (The album covers alone deserve some kind of genre designation; you can tell as soon as a track starts whether it'll be genuine dishwasher beats by whether the cover looks properly abstract and art school. If the cover isn't abstract or stark-black-and-white enough, you might find yourself with something actually danceable).

There is, as yet, no good way to share Google Play radio stations, so go try it out. It's the music of a generation that has grown up with Kraftwerk and Steve Reich far in the past and dishwashers all around.

Why were you born?

At my birthday party, a dear friend taught me a Korean version of "Happy Birthday" with the following lyrics:

왜 태어났니?
왜 태어났니?
얼굴도 못생긴 게
왜 태어났니? 

Why were you born?
Why were you born?
Also your face is ugly
Why were you born? 

The playful humiliation seems like an especially Korean way of celebrating a milestone, and I find that this is particularly appropriate, lyrically, on my kid sister's birthday (yes, you will always be my kid sister), which is two days after mine because she will never, ever catch up to me!

The New York Philharmonic of dinner

On Monday night I had my first dining experience at a Michelin 3-star restaurant. For my fortieth birthday, I chose to celebrate with the summer tasting menu at Jean-Georges.

To me, it felt like the New York Philharmonic of dinners, or like riding in a Rolls-Royce. All of the food and all of the service was precise, elegant, choreographed. Each dish was excellent, well composed, assembled from the finest ingredients, presented beautifully. A birthday cake showed up at the end with my name and age written in chocolate.

It was, all in all, an exquisite experience, but maybe not my favorite kind of food experience. Like the Philharmonic, it's a cultural event that feels fancy and unfolds over a couple of hours and is satisfying, where everything is right and there are charming moments and even surprising moments, but never anything really shocking or unexpected.

So the thing is, the New York Philharmonic is not my favorite musical experience. I am glad to have gone to the symphony a number of times, and to have grown up with regular visits to the San Francisco Phil. A couple of years ago, a night of Hungarian music at Avery Fisher was moving enough that it inspired me to go to Budapest and Vienna. But you know what I like more? A hot, sweaty night at a small club with a band that blows your mind with a groove you can't stop dancing to. Antibalas in Fort Greene Park, or Primus at the Warfield, or 25,000 people jumping up and down and screaming, "FUCK YOU, I WON'T DO WHATCHA TELL ME!" in unison for the cause of Tibetan freedom. Or else some music from the other side of the world that expands my whole conception of what music can be, like my first all-night concert of classical Indian music, or hearing gamelan and Kechak for the first time, or Tuvan throat singing.

And food-wise, it's pretty much the same thing. My birthday meal was incredible, and I'm glad I've had the experience. But I think I get more excited about discovering, say, Tajik food in Sheepshead Bay, or the crispy eel at Nice Green Bo Restaurant in Chinatown. Still, for my fortieth birthday, Jean-Georges was just right: indulgent, graceful, luxurious. Life is full of bumps and ruffles, and most of the time I love the excitement and the mess. But it's nice to know that as I enter my fifth decade, once in a while I can take the time to enjoy perfection.

Forty years later

I turn forty today. It's a big birthday, very midlifey, a time of a certain amount of angst, a certain amount of reflection. I could try to sum it all up, write a list of accomplishments or things I'm proudest of, but inevitably that becomes covertly a list of all the things I haven't accomplished and am least proud of. And that's not much fun. Besides which, the big things I've done in my life -- working at Google, graduating from Columbia University, buying a house, getting married, getting unmarried, getting sober, traveling -- are things that lots of people have done.

Instead of all that, here is a list of moments, experiences, quirks and flotsam that make me who I am. Instead of a greatest hits compilation that has all the songs you've heard a million times, this is that extra disc in the box set that has the b-sides and outtakes and poorly recorded live cuts. So here goes.

• When I was about four, my dad handed me the lid to the cookie jar. He thought I had it, I thought he had it, it crashed to the floor. I was startled and terribly upset and started to sob. My father told me everything was OK.
  
• In nursery school, I once forgot how to walk and could only march or run. This lasted for several days. Another time, I found myself wondering what would happen if I rode a tricycle at full speed into the side of the sandbox. I knew I couldn't keep moving forward, but I also thought it seemed wrong that I would just suddenly stop. I did the experiment and discovered that the trike stops but I keep going, right over the handlebars, and scrape up my face so badly on the big hard tire that I can't whistle for two weeks afterward.
  
• I know how to Korean dance. And swing dance. I am an award-winning Korean dancer.
  
• I've had some weird temp jobs. Once I did data entry for a week on a gambling boat while it was in port. The Filipino crew weren't allowed off the boat for visa reasons, so they hung around watching the same Bon Jovi concert video over and over.
  
• As a teenager, I had a fling with an ex-Soviet Russian scientist from a newly formed Central Asian state.
  
• Once, the muezzin of the Taj Mahal, after giving the call to prayer, tried to sell me toilet paper.
  
• I once spent the night at the Pairothapla Hilton (Pairothampla means landslide in Nepali), which had goat's blood handprints on the doors to the rooms. I do not believe it was formally affiliated with the international chain of luxury hotels.
  
• I have a brother. He's alive today because I reached into his throat and took out a piece of apple skin he was choking on. I'm not sure he knows about that.
  
• The most countries I've ever been in with another person (excluding the US) is four: Korea, Hong Kong, Nepal and India with my ex-wife, and France, Mexico, Ghana and Israel with my sister.
  
• I remember when the Internet was made entirely out of text (1993). I remember dial tones and busy signals. I know the sound of a tone arm lifting at the end of a side. I have lost Legos in shag carpet. I have ridden in station wagons with fake wood paneling. I remember Pac-Man when it was new. Not Pong though. I'm not old. Seriously.
  
• The highest I have ever been is about 12,400 feet, at Muktinath in the Annapurna region of Nepal. At that elevation, I felt stupid and sluggish.
  
• The highest I have ever been was after drinking a bhang lassi in Pushkar, India. At that elevation, I felt stupid and sluggish.
  
• I speak Korean well enough to have made some bizarre mistakes. Once I pointed to a rabbit and said, "Hey, it's a demon!" Another time I invited a girl back to my place to look at my phone.
  
• I didn't go to a single high school dance, and I only attended one sporting event, briefly, to meet a friend who had to be there because he was in band. I did go to the dances at summer camp, though, which is where I met my first girlfriend. We slow-danced to "Stairway to Heaven."
  
• My first car was my dad's old Toyota Corona, which I had painted black and upgraded with a better stereo (cassette deck, of course). It caught fire early on New Year's Day, after I'd dropped off a friend on the way home from a concert.
  
• I've only ever had three cars: two Toyotas and a Honda. I've had more bikes than that. I've never owned a skateboard.
  
• Sometimes in high school I would drive up to the parking lot blasting Chinese opera, just to mess with the dudes who would drive up blasting rap. Sometimes I would detune my acoustic guitar to play Lady Sniff in the Denny's parking lot.
  
• Once, outside Covelo, California, some friends and I stood in the middle of a river and smoked a bowl so that we could tell people we'd stood in the middle of a river and smoked a bowl. So now I'm telling you. Mission accomplished.
  
• Google is the job I've held the longest. The shortest was Yes! Burgers and Malts at the Northgate Mall in Marin County, California. When I quit on my third day, my manager -- Patty, seriously -- warned me that if I didn't give two weeks' notice, I wouldn't get references. I've done OK though.
  
• I have always had a rich fantasy life. I've also always had a pretty strong sense of the difference between fantasy and reality. I liked to play army and dress up in a camo uniform, and one time my mom took me to a Marine recruiting station to get me some patches. The recruiter asked if I wanted to be a Marine someday. "Oh no," I told him. "It's very dangerous. You could get hurt or killed."
  
• I grew up pretty free-range. I used to walk all over my neighborhood, down into the creek, and up into the surrounding hills when I was a kid. When I was old enough to do it, I rode my bike to the movie theater and the mall. I managed all this without a helmet. I fell down many times, and because I was by myself, I had to get back up again. If I'd been seriously hurt, I would've yelled, and someone would've found me. But I was never seriously hurt. I ate a lot of blackberries though.
  
• I've lived in Lucas Valley, California; Morningside Heights, Manhattan; the Upper West Side; Forest Hills, Queens; Seoksu 3dong, Gyeonggi-do, Korea; Gowanus, Brooklyn; Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; and Brooklyn Heights.
  
• My first computer was a Commodore 64.
  
• I worked at Starbucks in Manhattan the summer the Frappuccino was introduced. Try one with a shot of raspberry syrup, but not if there's a long line behind you.
  
• My first word was "dog." Probably pretty soon after that I learned to say "dumb dog." That was our dog's name. (Her other name was Joplin.)
  
• After I graduated from college, I lived with my grandparents for a couple of years in their book-lined Upper West Side apartment. It was vexing and grand. That was the same apartment I used to visit as a teenager. I came once with my friend Joey, and we shot bottle rockets attached to paper airplanes out the 8th-floor window during a thunderstorm. We also saw Danzig and Soundgarden at the Beacon Theater and got terribly sick with neck pains that resembled meningitis but were not meningitis. My grandparents' weird old doctor wrote a prescription slip for Gatorade, and our grandparents forced copious quantities of the stuff on us.
  
• Among the things I have learned how to do and then forgotten: play the violin, speak Spanish, shoplift vinyl records from the mall, walk from Thamel to Durbar Square via Tahiti Tole, solve quadratic equations, ride Muni, use PageMaker, program in Logo, recite all of Bottom's lines in Midsummer Night's Dream, win Super Mario Bros. Among the things I have learned how to do but not done in a while but still mostly remember how to do: play guitar and harmonica, drive stick (in San Francisco, too), set up a tent, throw a football, say no in Hindi, write a keyhole essay, solve a sudoku, work an ATM entirely in Korean (the top choice is always withdrawal).
  
• In college I took a class on Native American literature with Karl Kroeber, who claimed not to understand Native American literature. I figured that if this guy who'd been studying it his whole life still didn't get it, what chance would I have during a single semester? I think I got a B. The best thing I learned in college was that I didn't know anything about anything. Somewhere in my late thirties, I felt like I finally knew a little something about something, and now I'm getting a master's degree in it.

If I had to do it all over again, I would change lots of things, of course. Life is full of embarrassments, mistakes, wastes of time, stupidities. But you don't get to do it all over again. You don't get to live then knowing what you know now. But you do get to live now, remembering what you did then. Happy birthday to me.

Supernatural

In Religion in Chinese Society, from 1961, the scholar C.K. Yang does an admirable job of separating the idea of religion from Western preconceptions of what the term might mean based on our history of theistic Christianity, and particularly of strong church organizations overlaying relatively weak and fragmentary states -- the opposite in many ways of what one found historically in China.

But there is another term that creeps in, particularly in his discussion of Confucius and whether the ancient sage could be considered "agnostic" in terms of beliefs in gods and spirits. That term is supernatural.

There are, of course, other troubling terms -- "gods," for one -- but supernatural is a term that I have seen frequently in texts on religion, and it's problematic for a number of reasons. At its core, it means above nature, which suggests phenomena that don't follow any natural order. But historically the study of what we call supernatural phenomena -- spirits, gods, magic -- was not considered beyond the realm of the knowable. It was hard to know, and only wise scholars or profound mystics who devoted a great deal of study could truly understand these things, but that's pretty much how we think about physics today. Do you really know what goes on inside your smartphone? Or inside a particle accelerator?

So when we talk about a Korean shaman who feels herself to be possessed by different spirits, and who dances and "plays well" with them, and prescribes the right sacrifices to keep them happy, are we really talking about something that, from the shaman's perspective, transcends the laws of nature? Or are we talking about an extension of nature -- of how the world works -- that isn't normally visible, but that is discernible with study and insight? And if the latter, is the term supernatural merely an imposition of a Western scientific episteme anachronistically and aculturally onto other worldviews?

To demonstrate the awkwardness of supernatural as a category, let's think ourselves back into history, say, five hundred years. And now we will consider a series of beings in whose existence a Chinese scholar might believe, though he has never seen any of them: elephants, yetis, dragons, gods, the ghosts of ancestors, Heaven, giraffes, Indian people, qilin. Which of these is a belief in the supernatural? From the scholar's perspective, every single item on the list can have manifest, measurable impacts on the visible, physical world. Some can't be directly seen, but neither can radio waves, and they're not supernatural in our thinking. They are a part of nature, amenable to study, manipulable by various means -- like gods, spirits, etc.

As such, an enquiry into whether Confucius himself believed in the supernatural seems to me fundamentally misguided. One might enquire whether he believed in particular sorts of gods or spirits, and what his beliefs were about those beings. But the very idea of the supernatural depends on a modern distinction between a realm of superstition and falsehood and a realm of empirically measurable truth: science, in a word. (Ironically, many of the scholars who formulated this distinction would have found it absurdly superstitious to believe that a dead general could become an intercessionary god, yet believed profoundly in the redemptive power of the death and subsequent resurrection of a man who was born to a virgin mother and whose father was the God of Heaven. One man's superstition is another man's truth about the world.)

We might need a replacement term for the realm of spirits, or we might not. But it seems to me that supernatural is decidedly not the right word to use for scholars and practitioners who engage directly with that realm, based on knowledge, insight and experience.

Godzilla vs. Kim Jong-il

At the welcoming party for the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia, I met a visiting scholar from Japan whose research focuses on Godzilla as a global phenomenon. Happily, I was able to tell her about Pulgasari, which she'd never heard of: a North Korean Godzilla movie from the 1980s. (The trailer is full of explosions and highlights the hwacha, a sort of primitive rocket launcher that Koreans are rather proud of.)

I have never actually watched Pulgasari -- I need to get to it one of these days -- but the story of the making of Pulgasari is one of the very weirdest tales in all of cinema. In 1978, North Korean agents kidnapped the Korean actress Choi Eun-hee in Hong Kong. Her ex-husband, the prominent director Shin Sang-ok, went to Hong Kong to investigate and was promptly kidnapped as well.

The kidnappings were the work of Kim Jong-il, whose father, Kim Il-sung, was then still the leader of North Korea. It took several years, and Shin spent some time in North Korean prison, but in 1983 he was reunited with his ex-wife in Pyongyang. Under pressure from Kim Jong-il, they remarried. From then until their eventual escape in 1986 at a film festival in Vienna, Shin worked on North Korean films, the most famous of which is Pulgasari.

The aftermath is almost as weird. Shin and Choi escaped to the US embassy, and they were granted asylum. Back then, South Korea was under the right-wing military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, and Shin feared that the government wouldn't buy his kidnapping story, so he stayed in the US until 1994, when the politics in South Korea had changed. He eventually died of hepatitis, supposedly while working on Genghis Khan, a musical, which sounds like an Asian Springtime for Hitler.

The full Pulgasari film, with subtitles, is available on YouTube.

The role of government

It never fails to astonish me that the same conservatives who argue that every last aspect of big government is irreparably broken and corrupt inevitably see a capital punishment system that is perfect and just. If you genuinely believe that the state can’t even fix a pothole without self-dealing and corruption, how is it possible to imagine that police departments and prosecutors’ offices are beyond suspicion?

So asks an excellent Slate article about two mentally retarded teenagers who were falsely convicted of murder and have just been released, 30 years later. One could ask the same question about the military, which most conservatives also believe ought to be run by the state and properly funded.

And liberals like myself ought to ask ourselves carefully why we think a government that so badly mishandles justice ought to be trusted with our health care or our environmental protection. The same self-dealing and corruption that leads to false convictions and unnecessary military hardware might also lead to unfair over-regulation or mishandling of patient care.

These aren't questions with easy answers. They're questions we need to keep asking and asking. That's pretty much the whole point of a democracy with a free press.

Goryeo and the construction of tradition

I've been reading Martina Deuchler's The Confucian Transformation of Korea, which addresses the way that Neo-Confucian values came to play such a prominent role in Korean society during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). To make sense of it, she tries to piece together a picture of social norms -- marriage, inheritance, mourning, and the like -- during the preceding Goryeo period (918-1392), which is exceedingly difficult because of limited sources.

Deuchler's scholarship is admirable. She's obviously put tremendous effort into reading a ton of Goryeo documents, and it's not like they're nicely indexed to let you know when they're going to start talking about marriage laws. Reading them is presumably difficult, since it means reading Koreanized medieval Chinese as preserved in some very old hand-written books. Furthermore, the existing evidence is almost entirely for the upper classes, as it is for Heian Japan (784-1195) around the same time, so we have to make do with a limited picture of the upper echelons of society.

What Deuchler finds is interesting. Though the evidence is fragmentary, it appears that women had far more power in Goryeo than in later Joseon, just as they did in Heian Japan and in Tang China (618-907). That is not to say that they were equal to men or that there was anything like a patriarchy. But inheritance laws meant that estates were divided at the discretion of their owners, and it seems that they were customarily split evenly among both sons and daughters. Matrilineal prestige was important in claiming oneself as an aristocrat, and men often moved in with their wives' families rather than vice versa. There also seems to have been a lot of what we would consider incest: marriages with cousins, even with half-siblings, which kept wealth contained in a tightly knit family unit.

There are two points that I want to make about all this. The first is about shamanism, where some theorists have claimed that shamans were probably men in an earlier period, and only later shifted to women when shamanic practice became disparaged. I find this idea unlikely, and there's little evidence for it. It seems far more likely to me that shamanism became a less diffuse, more specifically identified set of practices only when it was distinguished as heterodoxy, but that shamanic practices probably went on long before, and probably had plenty of female practitioners.

Secondly, the evidence about Goryeo and how different it was -- and about Heian too -- should remind us that "traditional" culture is generally a modern invention, developed in contradistinction to modernity. What's considered traditional culture in Korea -- hanbok, Chuseok, all the traditional music and dances -- is largely Joseon, and late Joseon at that. Typical presentations of traditional culture make it seem as though people lived a certain way statically since time began, and then suddenly they got modernized (European sailing ships, the first streetcar, an ethnic man in eyeglasses, a war of some kind, skyscrapers). And modernity does have certain distinct characteristics. But what's labeled as "traditional" is often something like "How I remember it from before modernity arrived," or "How my grandmother used to do things in the old days." Most of the scholars doing the remembering that established traditional cultures across Asia were doing it in the 1890s forward, which has meant that traditional culture is whatever people were doing in the mid-19th century. Those scholars, further, had particular motivations: to make their societies seem legitimate in the eyes of the West, to establish a national culture and character, to make the case for or against modernity. So certain things get kept in as legitimately traditional, and others get tossed as hillbilly nonsense.

This is important to remember no matter what culture you're looking at, including American culture, where pundits are often trying to reconstruct an imaginary 1950s or 1960s, or an imaginary time of glorious freedom back in the late 19th century. It's true in Judaism, where the Orthodox like to dress the way their rabbis did in 18th- and 19th-century Europe.

Tradition is a construction, always. The actual past is more complicated, and far more interesting -- and we can always plunder it to construct new traditions.

A short story in one picture

I happened to find these in the office, things that had been left behind during a major workspace reshuffle. Kind of fascinating, and a little sad when you put them in this order.