Transparent and Lola – Did the Kinks Get It Right?

Psychoanalysts discover (and create) the architecture of the mind.  Freud’s revelation that the mind is intimately and immediately tied to the body – and that the body, and therefore the mind, is foundationally a sexually driven space would, it would seem, make psychoanalysts centrally interested in issues of sexuality and gender.   But, following Freud’s errant lead – he was a guy who really didn’t get gender differences and who worked from a deeply heteronormative perspective - mainstream psychoanalysis, especially in the United States, tended to treat homosexuality and, later, transgender issues as anomalies – pathological states that needed to be fixed, treated, and changed – rather than understood.  The psychoanalytic organization started bypsychologists was more responsive to gay and lesbian and later trans issues, but the American Psychoanalytic Association – the stodgy and older arm of psychoanalysis – has been slow to recognize the importance of gender and sexual orientation variability as worthy of studying as “normal” phenomena.

So, imagine my surprise when the opening of the spring convention of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Chicago was a workshop that focused on understanding transgender, gay and other “queer” phenomena.  Not that there haven’t been small group sessions focused on this at the annual meetings for years – even decades – but these sessions have been at the margins.  This was a chunk of the convention – three hours – during which nothing else was scheduled.  Essentially all of the participants were expected to be there.  Of course, not everyone was.  Some were sightseeing, some came late, but the session was well attended.

Coincidentally, the meeting occurred on the Thursday following the murder of 49 people at a gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando.  The timing created an awareness of the ability of these issues to raise powerful – indeed murderous – feelings in people.  Understanding both the experience of the LGBTQ individuals, but also those around them were brought home as matters, literally, of life and death. 

After a brief introduction, mostly focused on helping orient us to the characters, a segment of “Transparent” was shown.  This show, streaming on Amazon, is written by a woman and her sister whose father “came out” as transgendered in his seventies.  While not autobiographical, it is clearly informed by the life experience of the writers.  In the show, the father, known for most of his life as Mort and played by Jeffrey Tambor, is divorced from the mother and has three grown children – an eldest daughter, a middle son and a youngest daughter.  In the particular episode that we watched, the father comes out to the younger daughter – she has come out to her eldest daughter but has not yet come out to her son – and the central dramatic moment is when she goes to the mall with her daughters, and, at the urging of her eldest daughter, goes with them into the women’s bathroom where that daughter outs her by calling her Dad, and she is shamed into leaving the bathroom by a self-righteous mother of a couple of teenagers.

 It was odd to be at a formal meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, to be plunged into darkness to watch and get caught up in a modern dramatic series episode set in California – and an episode that was, as I will return to in a moment, disorienting, and then to return to a room full of analysts and a formal discussion of it.  It was a jarring mixture of media and of mindsets.  And, as the discussants called attention to, the episode itself was one that disoriented the viewers just as the family was disoriented.  The opening scene was an apparent love fest between the father and the daughter she had just come out to.  The daughter is expressing adoration for her father’s new look, but it is clearly feigned – and the father, while apparently bathing in her daughter’s adoration, is also non-plussed and limited in her responsiveness.

After this, there were many scenes with family members sorting out parts of their lives, starting with the son having aggressive sex with a woman he had known since childhood who pointed out that everyone knew, including his parents, that he had regularly had sex with his 35 five year old babysitter when he was 15, and that far from being the “wet dream” that he imagined, it was creepy and abusive – if the genders had been reversed, she would have been prosecuted.  Later, when he goes to confront the woman about his newly perceived abuse, they end up in bed together and his confused confrontation is muted by action.  The elder daughter who has previously been aware of her Dad’s coming out is shown in a series of tumultuous scenes with her lesbian lover who is promising, but failing to let someone (her current lover?  He parents? Her husband? – perhaps it was stated, but I had no idea who the person was) know that she and the daughter (who has left her husband and children to be with this woman) are lovers.  Meanwhile, the younger daughter who, in contrast to the lesbian daughter who looks traditionally feminine, looks butch, cuts her hair in a boyish manner and, after the scene in the mall, connects up with the brother in a kind of loosey goosey dance.

The presenters maintained that the disorientation of the viewer is intentional – it mirrors the disorientation of the children and all those around the transgendered person.  Gender is – they didn’t say this, but I will – a foundational aspect of identity.  To have one’s father become a woman is disorienting.  Who has my father been?  Who have I been in relation to the woman I have always thought of as a man?  The daughter names him MoPa – a kind of bi-gendered name – and how can she not be bi-gendered in the minds of her children?

Then, in this multimedia presentation, the presenters played Lola by The Kinks.  This song, an important song of my childhood, is on the album that marked the transition of the Kinks from their early incarnation as an English Pop group in the mop top tradition to a rock group that produced concept albums including rock operas that commented on modern life.  Their fans are divided.  They tend to like the early or the late Kinks, but not both – but all agree that the album with Lola on it is a masterpiece.

Lola was a disorienting song to me as a teenager.  My friend who turned me onto the Kinks was the youngest of a large family of musicians.  He played drums in a band where I played a pretty lame electric bass.  The song is an ambiguous one about a rube from the country who comes to the city and discovers Lola, who walks like a woman and talks like a man.  The final, ambiguous description of Lola, who becomes the singer’s lover is “I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola.”   I was surprised that my apparently straight-laced friend liked this song – I wasn’t sure if he got it. 

From the context of the times, Lola would have been identified as a cross dressing gay man who, today, might have been able to identify as trans.  The lyrics point out, as did one of the presenters, that it is “a shook up, muddled up, messed up world, ‘cept for Lola.”  And he contrasted the way in which gender bending disorients those in the vicinity of the bender, of the one who is transporting him/herself across boundaries, but can be creating a stable base for what was a formerly off base – even confused - person – one who feels that they have been the wrong person in the wrong place at the worng time and now things are as they should be.

The problem with this idyll had been made apparent earlier by the first presenter who proposed that gender is not binary.  No sooner do we find a stable solution, than the rug gets pulled out from under us.  The presenter maintained that we should change a central training requirement for psychoanalysts – we are currently required to analyze both a man and a woman as part of our training.  The presenter maintained that this reifies our thinking about gender as binary.  Indeed, transgender folks do this as well.  They say, in effect, “I’m not a woman (or a man) but a man (or a woman).”  If gender is fluid, then aren’t we all both male and female?  But if it is fluid, what do those two poles mean?  Lola was able to define his gender (Lola, too, if I am reading the lyrics correctly, is a man – one who dresses like a woman).  Perhaps that is at least a temporary solution – and certainly the solution that most of us likely experience – I am a man (or a woman) we proclaim – or don’t need to proclaim – we just know – and I am attracted to women (or men or both) – we don’t proclaim – we know – until we question it, and then things become fluid and confusing. 

Freud, the intrepid explorer, left gender and sexuality (gender more than sexuality) relatively fixed.  Why did he do that?  On the one hand, when everything is shifting, it feels like there needs to be some constant landmark – something that stays stable so that there is a sense of being oriented in a disorienting place and world.  But there is more to it than that.  Freud’s gender brought him tremendous privilege.  He was catered to and coddled – as a man: as a Jew, not so much.  From that position of privilege, much was expected.  He had to prove that he could provide for a family before he could be married.  He had to provide – through incredibly lean times.  Privilege is a double edged sword.  Those of us who are privileged – and I am certainly high among that group – have tremendous expectations, but also tremendous opportunities.  The discussions of privilege often seem to revolve around what is afforded to those who are privileged – and the wish seems to be an envious one to get what the others have, but there is (or should be) a commensurate envy of and interest in the opportunity to contribute to the well-being of others. 

William and Henry James were a psychologist and a novelist at the turn of the twentieth century.  They were both raised in tremendous privilege – their father was quite wealthy.  Their productivity has been attributed, in part, to a reaction to the relative indolence of their father.  They saw that he done very little with the position of privilege that had been afforded to him.  They decided to make use of their privilege to produce – one started a science (psychology) in the US and the other redefined an art form – the novel.  What would happen if we all used our privilege as well as they did?  Or as Freud did?  Freud used his privilege to create a position from which such things as gender and sexuality could ultimately be questioned – and the magnetic north which he used to orient his exploration could, as the presenters proposed, shift, so that we can more fully explore the human condition.

In a case presentation later in the day, an analyst was presenting a case of working with a gay man.  The analyst and the patient experienced a “lovefest” where they were very pleased with a piece of work that they had done.  We, as a group of analysts listening, were as mistrustful of this love fest as we had been of the one depicted on film.   The work that they had done was good – but there was a tremendous amount of work left to do.  And, among other things, they needed to wrestle with the conflicts between them, not just the common ground.  None the less, it was useful for them to pause – in the long and difficult passage that is an analysis – and to be pleased; and in that moment, if only for a moment, to feel that all was right with the world.  Tomorrow there will always be time to discover that these things that we have come to count on as solid – as orienting – are merely resting points, places from which to chart a new path across a trackless sea.

Ok, that would, speaking of resting points, be a good place to stop this post.  And if you don’t want to keep reading, or feel satisfied, that is fine.  But I have left out an important piece of the presentation and of the episode of transparency.  The episode revolved around the center of the scene about the bathroom.  And bathrooms have long played a role in Civil Rights.  They played a central role in the Jim Crow south (as depicted in TheHelp and other places), and they are certainly playing a role in our current national debate about transgender issues.

The presenters talked about bathrooms as the places in which intimate and poorly controlled things happen.  Pooping and peeing, which involve smells and noises that escape from the confined areas of the stalls – but also more adult things – anonymous sex between men.  And these are the stuff of shame.  We are, first and foremost, creatures of our bodies.  Our bodies, and the things our bodies produce, define us in the early going, and continue to do that across time.  The boundaries of our bodies, which define us from birth, are softened and hidden by clothes, but are exposed and we are vulnerable when we are in places of nakedness, like bathrooms. 

Psychoanalysis is a process of exposing those vulnerable aspects of ourselves in a place of relative safety – the analytic consulting room.  Over time, we explore the boundaries between ourselves and others – those in our past – and the analyst in our present.  As we do this, we reclaim a sense of ourselves as reasonably bounded.  We come to feel more and more comfortable with those parts of ourselves that we have disowned or disavowed because they feel shameful, we have been ridiculed for exposing them, or they have been forced into the open or violated by others.

A poignant scene in the middle of the Transparent episode is a flashback to a moment earlier in the father’s life where she has met another man who is questioning his gender in a hotel room.  They have each dressed as a woman – one in the bathroom, one in the hotel room.  They reveal themselves in their dressed up glamour to each other and the other man asks the father what her name is.  She responds, “Daphne Sparkles.”  The man responds, “No.  That’s a stripper’s name.  Your name is Maura.”  The father reflects for a moment and agrees.  There is a sense, in this moment, that things may be mixed up in the world, but in Maura’s mind, things have come to rest.

The problem is that this will, inevitably, be a temporary resting place.  It won’t last.  For Maura, who has a lot of developing to do as a person and as a woman (don’t we all), but for our understanding of the human condition more generally.  Is gender binary?  Is it fluid?  What are the intrapsychic and social implications of magnetic north wandering?  Moving across boundaries is upsetting to people – it can, as this week has certainly shown, be violently upsetting.  And the purchase that we get in the new place is temporary – no sooner does one thing become fixed than other things go into motion.  Hopefully across time we come better able, through analytic and other types of understanding, be able to keep our bearings even as the reference points move.

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Don Juan DeMarco – Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando Take On Love

Don Juan DeMarco was released relatively early in my clinical career.  Though it is clearly intended and presented as a fable, my sense was that it was a movie that presented a pretty good outline for how a successful treatment might go.  I have shown a clip from it in my Rorschach class for years (Rorschach jokes onscreen are hard to come by) but have not seen it in its entirety since it was first released.  After watching “Through the Looking Glass” with the reluctant stepdaughters, we decided to sample some of Johnny Depp’s early work.  Though the film was originally probably rated R, it is pretty tame by today’s cable standards and the material was not overly uncomfortable for family viewing with savvy late teenagers, though the film was just not particularly interesting to them.

The reluctant wife and I, though noting that it is somewhat dated, enjoyed rewatching it.  She noted that it is constructed much as Life of Pi, with two versions of reality that are being considered.  In both movies, then, there are defenses against difficult material being mobilized.  In Pi, it is against the monstrous within us that is revealed when we do something terrible in the world, while in Don Juan it appears that what is being defended against is the possibility of having done something wrong and/or the failure of the idealization of a loved person.  But what is clearly different between the two movies is that Don Juan invites us to join in the more beautiful – more romantic view of life and to avoid the hum drum quality that life can bring.

We meet Don Juan DeMarco as he is preparing to kill himself.  He is the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest lover”, though we get to sample his exploits and (he is Johnny Depp after all) the sample is quite convincing.  He has been frustrated in love by Dona Ana and is threatening to throw himself from a billboard depicting her.  The problem is that this is not Castilian Spain but Manhattan and he is the only one around who is dressed like Zorro.  The police call in Dr. Mickler, played by Marlon Brando who, overweight and 10 days from retirement, may once have been the world’s greatest psychiatrist (and onscreen a red-hot lover) but is now just dialing it in.  He has an inspired moment, however, when he announces to Don Juan that he, too, is a Don - Don Octavio - and he invites Don Juan to his Villa to discuss this matter before doing something so irreversible as killing himself.  Don Juan agrees and they meet the next day in what is apparent to everyone but Don Juan to be a psychiatric hospital. Don Juan asserts that he is visiting Don Octavio in his Villa.

Don Juan’s romantic view of life is infectious.  The female orderlies are clearly smitten by him and even the male orderly, Rocco, precipitously decides to move to Spain after spending a few days with him.  More centrally, Dr. Mickler begins to see the world – and his wife, played by Mia Farrow – through rose colored glasses, and their love for each other is reignited – as if Don Juan’s passion is infectious.  (I think it worth noting that there is a long tradition of the patient’s impact on the therapist being an essential element of the “cure” of the patient that is depicted in films.  The idea that the therapist is not simply a technician but a human being involved in a deeply human relationship is apparent to film writers and directors if not to insurance companies and some designers of “therapeutic” interventions that focus on the content of what is delivered rather than the process through which it is delivered).

The medium of infection is twofold.  First Don Juan is devastatingly handsome and charming.  Second, he tells the story of woe that brings him to Mickler’s villa in an engaging and romantic style.  Through flash backs we see his parents meet – his father and mother fall in love at first sight when he, a travelling salesman, visits her remote village in Mexico, and then we see Don Juan as a young boy being driven by his love of women – and having a mother with strong sexual morals teach those to him – but who also inadvertently puts him in harm’s way by having him be instructed in morality by a beauty who is married to a man twice her age.  Ultimately, this woman seduces the young Don Juan, her husband discovers they are lovers, challenges his father to a duel, kills his father – Don Juan retaliates by killing the man he cuckolded.  He must now flee – and his mother states that she has “lost them both in one day.”

Don Juan’s view is also patently absurd.  When he goes to sea and his boat is taken over by pirates and he is bought as a slave and has to sexually service one of the sultan’s wives by day the other 1500 in the harem by night, we have plunged into the world of fantasy.  What is intriguing is the detective work that Dr. Mickler does to try to piece together the elements of this delusional world with what he can glean about the biography of the kid, born in Queens, who is also sitting with him (along with Don Juan) each day in his office.  One of the inspired connecting pieces between the two stories (in the alternate version he was raised in Arizona by the same father who was killed in an automobile accident right before his mother ran off and he has now returned to Queens to live with his paternal grandmother) turns on the phrase “lost them both in one day.”  Mickler wonders aloud whether his mother is referring to losing her husband and her son or losing her husband and her lover: so that his father’s death is caused not by the son’s promiscuity, but by that of his mother - whether it was she who had the affair and lost both her husband and her lover on the same day.  From the perspective of the son, he may have chosen to take on the guilt of having directed the sword of the lover to the heart of his father to avoid feeling the shame of having a mother who is morally reprehensible.

These two versions of his life that seem to lie right on top of each other but in fact reach into very different ways of configuring an internal world seem to say something true about the ways in which we use memory to reconstruct our lives so that we have lived as heroes rather than as victims of circumstance – or to suggest that we can live as heroes as a way of distancing ourselves from the fact that we are largely victims of circumstance.  Wouldn’t it be preferable to be a noble from a far away country than to be the son of the Dance King of Astoria – which is the alternate version of his life that Don Juan’s delusions (partly) protect him from.

What Mickler enacts is a process of bearing the truth of the less palatable version of his patient's life in a manner that, in turn, helps Don Juan to bear up under the mantel of that lower truth.  He leaves the hospital cured not by the pills he takes on the last day, but by the realization that Mickler’s regard for him is real – and that it is a regard that takes into account both versions of himself.  He can return to being the kid from Queens (whose name I can’t remember) without losing his essential dignity.  This allows him to voluntarily cast aside the mask that he has worn to hide his shame.

This fairy tale is then a too clean description of what we experience everyday – the “choice” to live our lives according to any one of a number of narrative themes.  In fact we are likely to shift between many – being at moments lost in daydreams that include unlimited power, strength, beauty, intelligence or a host of other components – and drabber, more real, but also more complex, nuanced and guilt or shame tinged aspects.

Johnny Depp’s real life – one that appears to filled with problematic aspects – seems to be filling the airwaves these days.  The star’s lives – lives that have frequently been a focus of interest for us – must be hard to navigate.  Johnny Depp’s characters have traditionally had a tilt towards the fabulized – there is a hint of Peter Pan to them.  Navigating the reality of moving from a young, lithe movie star like he was in this film to the mature character played by Marlon Brando would take a particular kind of psychological transition – one that we are asked to make in everyday life (we go from being children to being parents or parental figures in what seems like the blink of an eye) and we make that transition with varying degrees of grace.  It is as if the young Depp is saying to the old Brando - don't quit being vital and sexy - you still are - as I can be when I am your age.  We don't have to grow old.  The Brando character is saying, in return, "Thank you for reminding me that I am not dead yet.  That said, we are who we are, and I am an old man - one with some grace - but still the mature one - and you should be ready to emulate that."

The movie, as Hollywood is want to do, provides a happy ending.  The kid makes the transition to ordinary boy, but gets to keep the fantasy, too.  This may make for a happy box office, but it leaves something to be desired in modelling how to live a life. The character will now, presumably, be faithful to his Dona Ana, but he will be able to find her and keep her - something that is not possible from the position of being the kid from Queens who was fantasizing about a pin up star.  What would it take for Depp to mature into Brando?  How mature was Brando?  How mature can we become while still having the spark of life alive within us?       

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The History of Psychology (and Rock and Roll)

History and Systems of Psychology is a class that I am prepping to teach for the first time in the fall.  History is not my strong suit.  I was not an undergraduate psychology major – I went to a school where we read the great books.  The two historians we read, Thucydides and Herodotus, an Ancient Greek and Roman respectively, were not my favorite authors.  I would have liked to have known more about the history – the context – of the great books that we read.  I would have liked to have known about the Reformation when we read Luther, and to have known more about Elizabethan England when we read Shakespeare, but the ethos of the school was to read and discuss the great authors’ books and to struggle to make as much sense of them as we could.  Perhaps an exception to this was a music class that was offered sophomore year.  In this, we visited the great musical works (we spent a great deal of time on Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion – parsing it much as we parsed Greek and later French writings), and it was the only class other than language classes in which there was a text book (in math we read Euclid for Geometry, Descartes for Algebra and Newton for calculus) – and this text taught us about how classical music developed from monotonic forms – the Gregorian Chants were examples of these – through simple harmonies into more and more complex musical forms that were more and more capable of articulating the human experience – especially the affective components of that experience.

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published an article about the imagined history of Rock and Roll – the article asked the question: how will Rock and Roll be remembered in 300 years?  The focal way that it asked this question was who among the Rock and Rollers will be remembered?  This is, of course, also the question that is asked by the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure set in 1988.  In that film and its sequel, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Adventure, Bill and Ted (one or the other – they are essentially interchangeable – is played by Keanu Reeves in his first screen appearance) are exceedingly poor high school students who travel through time to bring back historical luminaries (Socrates (whose name they pronounce Soh – Krates) and Freud (whom they pronounce Frood) among them), to their high school in San Dimas, California.  They are able to do this because the citizens of a Utopian state in the year 2688, founded on the principles of the rock music Bill and Ted will create only if they pass their high school history class (so that Ted or Bill doesn’t get sent to a military academy, breaking up the band), send an emissary (Rufus played by George Carlin) with a time machine to help them out.

The New York Times view of the future of Rock and Roll is much more jaded.  Chuck Klosterman, the author of the article, proposes that, just as is the case with Marching Music, where Sousa has become synonymous with a genre written by many, Jazz, where Louis Armstrong is the remembered and highlighted figure, and I would add Waltz and nominate Strauss as the exemplar, Rock and Roll will eventually be remembered and associated with one key figure.  Klosterman reviews a number of candidates starting with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but, through a very interesting process of elimination (including the possibility of a two poled system with Elvis and Bob Dylan as the emissaries) he lands on Chuck Berry as the quintessential rock and roller.  One of his songs, Johnny B. Goode, is nominated as the single tune that will be played by professors of the history of music in classes three centuries from now, and he proposes that the students will be no more moved by this music than the representation of music from ancient Sumeria.

As a lover of music – including Rock and Roll – I am much more powerfully drawn towards Bill and Ted’s version of the future, even though I find Klosterman’s argument, at least on the surface, to be more compelling.  My wish for the music of my youth to live forever probably doesn’t distinguish me from most of my baby boomer cohort.  As perhaps one of the most self-absorbed groups in history, we would like to believe that we were (and are) onto something special and would like to keep it (and ourselves) alive and young forever.  As a member of a particular subset of that cohort – we used to be called generation X, I think – the group that witnessed the summer of love as recent history (I turned nine in 1968) rather than as lived experience, we tended to romanticize a period that was much grittier as lived than remembered.  Overdosing on acid at Woodstock with, at best, primitive medical response was just no fun – and skinny dipping in the muddy lake may look neat in the film, and while it likely was in person – having no place to shower afterwards followed by a long bus ride home probably raised the stink level to a new notch.  Visiting my sister in California a few years ago and seeing aged hippies hanging out in vegetarian restaurants made what once seemed like a new and idyllic cultural shift seem shopworn at best (and a more recent trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also made rock seem less hip and current and more musty and old timey - especially as seen through the eyes of my kids).

How can we, like Bill and Ted, produce something that lasts?  Something that will live long beyond us and not be bottled or, worse, dried and hung up to be looked at?  I think that we do that by producing something that is living, breathing and contemporary.  Something that resonates with people and that helps them articulate themselves and feel themselves more deeply and more authentically.  I blog about psychoanalysis in the hope that, by applying it to current art and issues, I will demonstrate that it is a powerful tool for living our contemporary lives more fully.  I think, for instance, that we will always dream, and if we have a tool to understand how those dreams can become allies in our efforts to understand ourselves and our place in the universe, the tool will not be put in a museum, but sharpened and adjusted so that it can more artfully shape our visions.

Teaching the history of psychology, then, should not be what the ghosts at Hogwarts do – for it is only ghosts who teach the history of magic there – while the students slumber unnoticed by the incredibly boring drones.  History should not simply be a recitation of what happened then, but it should be a portal into what is happening here and now – an opportunity to catch some of the excitement, in the case of psychology, of discovering what it means to be human at this very moment – and a sense of how those who have gone before us can contribute to our deeper appreciation of this moment. 

Too often psychoanalysts have retreated behind the content of what the psychoanalytic method reveals to us – they have tried to jam material into an Oedipal configuration because that is a frequently observed familial structure that becomes a dominant psychic structure – particularly of middle and upper class western folks.  All of us, however, have conscious and unconscious lives – or lives that we are unwilling to acknowledge to others and frequently to ourselves (Mark Solms asserts that our darkest secrets are more known to us than we are willing to admit), that they, when we learn to embrace them rather than shun them, can enhance our lived experience.  The process of engaging in a deeply felt conversation with another human to access these experiences, to help them come to our lived current awareness, is one that others, Freud especially, but many others as well, have helped us learn how to do.  They have also described the apparatus that must underlie our ability to engage in this process – sometimes accurately, sometimes fancifully, and it is our task to sort the actual from the imaginary.

I won’t, in the fall, be teaching the history of psychoanalysis – or that will occupy only a corner of the class.  But I will be teaching something that I hope is more like the history of music that I learned in college and that Bill and Ted would have us learn – that what we play today can move us in the ways it does because of what those before us were able to articulate.  Our palettes have broadened as we have woven together the classical repertory with the “slave” repertory; the highbrow understanding of how tonal patterns work with the urgency of our wish to love and be loved – in both “mature” and “primitive” forms; and the craftsmanship of fine musical instruments with the electronic marvels of recording, reproduction and amplification.  We should stand on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us so that we can more fully articulate what it means to be human. 

Postscript:  Having now taught the course, I fear that I failed to live up to all of my hopes and dreams, but it was clear that the students responded to much of the material.  It helped a lot that we were studying during what increasingly became clear to me was an historical moment - the fall when Trump was elected President.  I think this made the issues of history feel more relevant, alive and pregnant than they otherwise might have been as we related what was going on in the there and then to what was going on currently.

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