A Refuge Against the Culture of Degradation
Put this in a bigger context:
The most Los Angeles thing in the history of the city happened a few days ago in MacArthur Park, which I write about constantly because it sounds such a clear alarm. The place was once celebrated for providing beauty and peace in the middle of a city, and it used to be depicted like this, with the old name it had before 1942:
That’s…not what it’s like now. The coroner takes bodies out of the park on the regular, these days, and it’s been plagued by rumors that there are also bodies that don’t leave, because the gang members and drug dealers who hang out in the neighborhood tie them to heavy things and toss them in the filthy lake. So a volunteer organization that uses sonar to search for things hidden underwater offered to pay a visit, and they got permission to put their equipment in the lake this week. But then Eunisses Hernandez found out about it.
Councilmember Hernandez, you’ll remember, is waging a battle to declare the park healthy and safe. She says it’s time to stop noticing how repulsive the place is, so the city as a whole bows to the weight of her wisdom. City park rangers threatened the sonar team with arrest if they put their equipment in the lake, ironically-but-not-that-they-noticed surrounded by the daily filth and degradation that no one ever does anything to stop. Smoke meth in the park, good; search for guns and bodies in the park, straight to jail. Here, at last, the secret is revealed, and we know what Los Angeles is willing to protect.
A city council is a legislative body, and its members have no executive authority. They can’t show up and order cops and park rangers around like they run the place. And yet. The third-worldness of the scene: a dismal sloptard idiot politician waddling around in a fury, using her fake power to order people not to search for dead bodies, and all the minor officials snapping to attention and warning everyone that there will BY GOD be immediate arrests if they dare to disobey the asinine diktat of the dimwitted nobody. It’s Milan Kundera plus the Three Stooges plus a meth lab in a Brazilian favela parked on top of a garbage dump. Los Angeles is shit, and it’s run by ignorant trash.
However.
In Los Angeles, the county-owned Music Center is a bunch of performing arts venues next to the big county government office building downtown, and it’s magnificent. It’s a big urban castle complex that might as well have a moat. They protect it: In a city where no one takes care of anything, the Music Center has its own well-staffed and highly visible security force, and they actually keep a close watch on the place.
The venues are highly pleasant, and if you give them a lot more money than I ever have or will, several have a “Founders Room” where you can drink your pre-performance cocktails without encountering anything as socially unpleasant as a Chris Bray. This is the one at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Ballet perform:
Scratch and sniff: doesn’t it smell like not-2026?
I mention all of this because I recently took Miss Teenager to Disney Hall, where we saw members of the LA Philharmonic performing chamber music.
It was very not-Eunisses-Hernandez-preventing-people-from-searching-for-bodies-in-a-park-full-of-drug-addicts. People dressed like adults, and mostly behaved like adults. There were cocktails, although I never understand why anyone bothers during a 15-minute intermission and with a long line at the bar. Musicians do something you haven’t seen in a few decades: After they play, the gentlemen stand aside to allow the ladies to leave the stage, then follow politely.
And above all, the world of classical music is the least-DEI-infected cultural institution I can identify. Symphony orchestras conduct blind auditions, with musicians hidden behind a screen to be judged on their sound alone. (Of course there are people who are trying to change that.) It’s a world of excellence, of people who’ve spent their lives working diligently to do something freakishly hard, with great discipline. They take pleasure in the thing itself, in the way it sounds. Nothing falls outside the frame of excellence, discipline, beauty, and craft.
Like the man said: the decorum, the craftsmanship.
Shostakovich, Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67:
We heard Varty Manouelian and Ben Hong play this together, sitting side-by-side, watching each other closely. There was also a pianist back there, somewhere, but I was fixated on the pleasure of watching Varty Manouelian just absolutely play the shit out of the thing. Ben Hong “won his native country’s National Cello Competition three years in a row before leaving home, at age 13, for The Juilliard School,” for crying out loud. “Is there a better crystallization Western Civilization’s values than an orchestra?”
The one thing better is to do it in Sioux Falls, where the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra combines the music with discussion and history. You can sit there after the performance and talk to the conductor and the musicians. In Los Angeles, everybody just walks to their car and leaves. But we live in Los Angeles, so we have to get home to take our Xanax, I guess. It’s high-cultural “Bowling Alone.”
If you have a symphony orchestra where you are, go see it. In a moment of widespread slop and decline, it’s time travel. I haven’t studied music, in practice or theory, and I don’t listen with the trained understanding that a bunch of people in a concert hall obviously bring to the experience. But who cares? It’s pretty, and it’s a break from…Eunisses Hernandez. From all of the versions of Eunisses Hernandez who are shitting up the world. And we certainly need that break.
"She not gonna let you search for no bodies"
She's eaten 3 or 4 of them herself.
Your piece gives me hope that there *are* pockets of resistance against the general enshittification of everything.
One of the things that strikes me about this, though, is that it takes *will*. You don't just buy a fiddle and waltz into a national concert hall and expect to be lauded. You have to buy the fiddle and spend hours and hours and hours (and then some more hours) honing whatever natural talent you may have - and then, only then, do you get a *chance* to play at such a level.
I learned to play the piano way back when - and practiced hard. I got to the point where I could play the honky-tonk/harpsichord solo bit in Wakeman's Merlin (I could also do classical, but Wakeman was the thing for me). It took practice, concentration, and I could just about get it right about 90% of the time. I went to see Wakeman in concert. He played it, note perfect, whilst bobbing about like a bloody pendulum. I realized at that point that maybe a musical career was not for me.
The mother of a friend of mine, who was a professional musician, told me that the difference between a professional musician and a (good) amateur is that the amateur practices until they don't make a mistake whereas the professional practices until they can't make a mistake.
The thing is, though, you can't hide it. You can't pretend. If you're not all that good - or haven't put in enough work - it WILL show.
You can't hide behind platitudes, or posturing, or spaff some glorious woke word salad, or appeal to whatever systemically unjust wotnot is the current flavour of the day. It's just you and the sound - it lives or dies with you.
It is meritocracy writ large.