1. Let’s start with a heavy hitter — why wait? What a great 22-minute interview between Nick Cave and Colbert, covering grief, music, creativity, a desperate prayer from Johnny Cash, a Leonard Cohen Jesus reference, and more. There’s a reason Cave is probably our most quoted person ever on this site, and that reason is:
The letter he reads from is excerpted here:
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
Love, Nick
2. Mockingbird has been parsing the authenticity hoax as far back I can remember. Somehow it’s a mindgame one can never quite out-think and, even, grows more engrained the more “audience-focused” our lives become (necessarily, in many cases, since in this economy audience = income).
At Vox, Allie Volpe considers the moral overtones in play:
To be perceived as “fake” or “real” is a moral argument, [Brooke Erin] Duffy says… Being fake means “you’re being inconsistent, you are being duplicitous, you are concealing who you, quote unquote, really are to a particular audience,” Duffy says. … Duffy challenges the idea that the online self is ostensibly fake compared to the offline version. There are plenty of online communities where people feel safe to say and act in accordance with their values — sometimes it’s one of the only places people feel free to be their truest selves.
Still, the presence of an audience changes the ideal of authenticity. While we may strive for authenticity online, when we post anything for public consumption, we are focused on self-presentation, [Elizabeth] Seto says. Even if someone strives to share all aspects of their lives, good and bad, with their followers, it’s still difficult for people to discern reality from a manufactured persona. In videos where a creator is weeping or divulging painful news, they claim to, finally, be pulling back the facade to show their “real” selves. These posts are now seen as suspicious and a way to seek engagement.
Because we are constantly performing in one way or anotherin so many different contexts and for so many different people, we have more opportunities than ever to contort ourselves to someone else’s ideal. …
Another path to authenticity might be age. In one of her studies, Seto found people believe they are acting more authentically as they age, that they are inherently living like their true selves now and their younger selves were not. …
Understanding the impossibility of being wholly authentic in every single situation can reduce the burden of needing to bring your full self to each interaction.
On this topic Charles Taylor comes to mind: what he calls the “ethics of authenticity” frames these impulses in the wider context of their development in the Western/secular world. As he puts it, “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life…. If I am not [true to myself], I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”
Here is an apt analysis from an old Mbird essay by Charis Hamiltonius (does that name sound authentic?):
The ethics of authenticity flatten and narrow the meaning of our lives to what we can imagine for ourselves… The modern downsides of such a “me” morality are well documented here on Mockingbird (loneliness, anxiety, “alternative facts” and the loss of moral institutions, depression, etc.)… Even if we were to allow for the possibility that there is something unique and special about you, to which you should be faithful, would you even know it?
Whether we’ve realized it or not, the ethics of authenticity have won the day, or at least everyone I know (religious or not) sympathizes with its basic tenets. Discussions of one’s “spiritual gifts” are largely indiscernible from our cultural obsession with Meyers-Briggs or the Enneagram. We are gifted by God (supposedly) and its our job to “live into” that special giftedness.
3. SPEAKING OF “special giftedness” and the unique burdens associated with it: Constance Grady, also at Vox, questions the effects of school “gifted” programs. When viewed from the longterm, might these do more damage than good? Seems, yes.
[Psychiatrists] argue that gifted kids exhibit their behavioral quirks because of the adult pressure that comes along with the gifted label. … Over the course of her 35-year study, [Joan] Freeman found that those who were labeled gifted by their parents were significantly more likely to struggle with their mental health than were either of the control groups.
“As children, the labelled gifted were usually treated differently from the equally able non-labelled gifted by their parents and teachers, whether positively or negatively,” Freeman concluded. “Consciously or unconsciously, they were the recipients of adult attitudes and expectations, and because they were children, most did their best to comply.” The results could range from wild success to burnout and severe depression, both as children and as adults… Having above-average intelligence is an advantage in life. Being burdened with the expectations parents and teachers place on you, however, is a different story…
Those interested can proceed to the article for anecdotes of the “gifted” children whose lives became shaped by the quest to stay gifted. These, Freeman labels “Career Gifteds.” One even confesses to “peaking” as a child. “It’s been all downhill since,” she says seemingly seriously(!!).
“You either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset,” says psychologist Rena Subotnik, who specializes in gifted education. “A fixed mindset would be one of those where your sense of what you’re good at allows you to excel in those areas. But if you have to change in some way, you’re likely to hold back and not want your reputation to be threatened. You would not take a chance that suddenly you would not look gifted anymore.” …
We are not born with either fixed or growth mindsets innate to us, says Subotnik. “It’s the reinforcement that you get,” Subotnik explains. “If somebody tells you, ‘You’re so smart, and you’re so quick,’ that feeds a fixed mindset. But if you tell kids — and teachers are learning to do this and parents, too — ‘I really like that you try different strategies. I really like that you stuck with it,’ that’s really wonderful. That kind of feedback fosters a growth mindset.”
The joke in my family remains that none of us were gifted — I guess thank goodness! Certainly we could never do this:
4. The funnies: I loved “Coworker Asks If Woman Interested In Reliving Childhood Trauma On Work Volleyball Team.” And this “Middle of the Date Questionaire,” reposted from 2021, makes me laugh out loud.
For something cutting and funny at the same time, look no further than: “When Other People Interrupt It’s Rude, but When I Do It It’s a Sign of Enthusiasm.”
When I interrupt someone, it’s because I can tell that the conversation would be a lot better if I chimed in. This stands in contrast to the typical reasons someone interrupts: arrogance and incivility. I make sure that when I cut someone off in the middle of their statement, I am only doing it because I’m helping them out and introducing a fun new idea, which actually makes it okay and even cool. Some people could learn from this, even.
Other people interrupt with voices that are loud and crass, while I interrupt with the tone of a good friend or confidant who cares and loves deeply. This makes people want to hear me out. It even makes them want me to interrupt, such that I can lend my voice in enthusiasm for the topic. You see, when I cut someone off mid-thought, it’s because I care and I have something to say that I think they might just love.
Lovers of Old Bay, of which I count myself, look alive: the great Casey Cep pens an ode to the bipartisan power of “East Coast Glitter”:
Old Bay is the greatest condiment in America. I can hear your first objection: that it isn’t a condiment. But etymology, like good taste, is on my side, with “condiment” squeezing out of the tube labelled “Latin” and glopping into English from the noun for spice, seasoning, or sauce. At its core, “condiment” means to put or place together, which is what I believe Old Bay could do, in these trying times, for our divided nation. If you do not already know Old Bay’s bipartisan power, then consider this: a few years ago, Goucher College, in Towson, included a question about the condiment on one of its renowned political polls and found that Marylanders, regardless of their position on the governor or the minimum wage, loved the seasoning. “Opinions toward Old Bay,” the study director said, “transcend party, age, race, gender, and ideological lines.”
5. After bringing us together, why would I share this next link? Dunno; something in it spoke to me, despite the sass — but what other tone would one expect from Freddie DeBoer? His takedown of Deadpool & Wolverine is also a takedown of blockbusters generally. I recognize there’s a large Marvel fan base frequenting this site, and I love everyone in it, but maybe beyond DeBoer’s specific derision, there is something here?
For decades now, Americans have been living in a period of all-conquering artistic populism; our culture industry has fully absorbed the notion that there is no sin greater than snobbery when it comes to appreciation of music or movies or television. We’ve essentially gotten rid of the divide between children’s and adult entertainment, insisting that it’s perfectly fine — maybe even preferable — to have the same tastes as an adult that you had as a child. (Or, perhaps, the same tastes that your child currently has, given the size of the adult “Bluey” audience.)
If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.
This permission may seem freeing. But when paired with ruthless, profit-maximizing market forces, it’s contributed to the death of grown-up entertainment.
There are core aspects of the human experience that, I’m afraid, can’t be effectively captured in superhero stories. It’s unavoidably relevant that the narratives driving so many of these movies were developed by comic book creators who were producing stories written for children, marketed to children and sold to children.…
I worry that a well-intentioned desire to legitimize media and genres traditionally associated with children has led to a vast overcorrection, where the very idea of appropriate social pressure to embrace adult art is now frequently treated as a kind of discrimination.
Yeah, that seems like an overstatement, but I can admit to sometimes feeling a twinge of bashfulness upon loving something “serious.” It takes me back to middle school when someone told me a poem I chose to recite for English class was “too long.”
6. Bookending this weekender with another link about music and mystery of creativity. At Seen & Unseen, Oliver Wright asks: “Why is it that music and religion can sit so closely alongside one another?”
J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Elgar. The list could go on and on. That is – a list of composers and musicians who wrote music for and played music within the Church. The roots of Western classical music are in the church, as Jeremy Begbie shows in his book Resounding Truth. In fact, it was only relatively recently that ‘popular music’ meant music outside of the Church. The Church has been a great sponsor of the arts throughout modern history, not least in the great Michaelangelo. It is time for that sponsorship of human creativity, in all its forms, to return…
Roland Barthes called music a field of signifying and not a system of signs. In other words, even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another. This is why Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century found music so useful in the elaboration of his religious idea of Gefühl – an inward yearning and feeling, or, as he also called it, the intuition of the universal. And it is for this same reason that Karl Barth in the twentieth century, a passionate listener to Mozart, was so cautious of using music constructively within his theological system.
The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden. “To speak about God”, Ebeling continued, “means to speak about reality as a whole and therefore to speak about humanity, who is exposed to reality as a whole. Conversely, to speak about God is to deny that one can speak about the world as a whole as such, by speaking only about the world, or that one can speak about humanity as such at all by speaking about nothing other than humanity.”
Wright recommends oboist Rachel Chaplin, whose new album is “Music from an Inner Space,” and is designed to inspire time spent in contemplation. Happy listening!
