Essays

Self-promotion is the part of professional music I'm least comfortable with. It's always been an awkward process for me. The most offensive component has always been the bio. Musicians, artists, and everyone else trying to compete for the limited leisure-time attention of America's distractible public all find themselves, willingly or reluctantly, having to write self-congratulatory bios lauding their own prodigious talent, notable associations and historic achievements. To make it palatable, the standard form is for bios to be written in the third person. Here, I will try to account for who I am in a way for which I'm not ashamed to take credit.

Recently, a friend pointed me towards an edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which the preface contained a number of critical reviews contemporary to the book’s writing. Not surprisingly the critical response was overwhelmingly negative. Naturally, my first inclination was to pooh-pooh the critics and lament their failure to recognize something great in its time. But another, more important idea struck me.

For hundreds of years, the increased specialization of labor drove greater productive capacity and increased efficiency across all sectors of the world economy. Philosophers like Karl Marx noted the potential damage of such a division of duties to man’s soul. But few could have predicted then that the over-specialization of labor could spell financial catastrophe on a massive scale for those married to very specific skill sets.

Twenty-one months ago, my brain stopped working. Something might have been amiss for some time before then, but in January, 2008, I first knew beyond any doubt that I was broken. Before the month was out, I had seen a neurologist to rule out the possibility of multiple sclerosis or a brain tumor. Nearly two years later, I am not yet sure what I am fighting, and, at times, why I am fighting.

After two years of cycling between ten percent and fifty percent of my former cognitive and physical capacity, I have progressed little but learned much. I have acquired more knowledge than I can currently process about my own health, the myriad families of medical conditions that can cause neurological complications, and the problems that plague the healthcare industry itself. In this article, I will elaborate on some of the horrifying discoveries that I have made on my medical odyssey.

As my twitter feed has already suggested, my confidence in the Obama administration has been shaken, perhaps beyond repair. Given the wide range of reasons, more often illegitimate than justifiable for shaky faith in Barack Obama, I feel compelled to elaborate on my specific sources of concern.

At risk of sounding curmudgeonly, and perhaps being hypocritical, I feel obliged to join the shrinking chorus of individuals who protest the demolition of standards in written language. When I was a child, teachers ineffectively forbade the use of spell-check on school assignments. Spell-check – we were told – would foster a dependence that would leave us unable to spell in the absence of a computer.

Often, when systems are automated, adapted to great scale, one necessary trade-off for the efficiency gained is a gross oversimplification of the information being captured. Email is archivable, searchable, easily stored in less than 10kb of memory and easily transmitted to any number of recipients. The downside of this miraculously efficient representation of a human letter is that it lacks all of the nuance that can't be represented with ASCII symbols. Handwriting, sketches, personal stylistic choices of layout that once characterized the written exchange are lost. Similarly, the healthcare industry has oversimplified human health in way that leaves unacceptable gaps.

A profound lack of talent and ability characterizes the majority of music created today. This seems especially true of music that exists outside the mainstream. The surprising aspect of this phenomenon is that the bands taking themselves more seriously seem less likely to offer anything resembling serious musicianship.

At rare times when fear, furiousness, and frustration ebb as the dominant emotions that I associate with episodic altered consciousness, curiosity rises to fill the void. Moments of clarity bring not only a rush of sensation and cognitive potential, but also a stream of questions concerning my identity and what my precarious situation implies about it. Clearly, at this moment, ‘I’ refers to me, the one who can read a chapter of a book and remember it for longer than three seconds. Surely, it refers to the man who can taste his food, and smell it toו. And it refers to the guy who can play a modest amount of music, has respectable mathematical abilities, and craves independence.

I have been a lifelong Yankee fan. For this I have never made any apology, nor do I have any plans to. In the sense that fandom is an unquestioning instinctive knowledge instilled from an early age, I can only be a Yankee fan. My relationship with the Mets was never acrimonious; in fact, it was downright cordial. My gloves and hats were signed by Mets greats at baseball camp. Bobby Bonilla was the first big leaguer I ever met, and I shagged flies delivered by the bat of Ed Kranepool. But if I had to click on a radio button, I have always been a Yankee fan.

Half a year later, the world, still, likely neither requires nor desires another self-indulgent report on the tragedies befalling my brain and the ludicrous circus that constitutes the effort to revive it. However, participating in the act of writing is vital to rediscovering the connections that have long lain dormant between my ailing neurons. If I sound whiny and pathetic, I have earned that right and make no apology for it; in fact, I preemptively retract any apology that I might make for it in the future.

A problematic question central to my dilemma is "how does one detect problems of the brain?" This might seem a trivial task, but it is not. Sure, one could easily detect drastic changes of the sort that grossly distort sensory experience, and it would not be that hard to notice severe malfunctioning of the peripheral nervous system. But if one needs to be in the business of detecting any of these problems before they become lifestyle altering, personality-changing, all-consuming paths to misery, the question becomes frighteningly more difficult to answer. If one needed to detect changes to any other observable body part, this would not be so bad. You could look at your feet, detect pain from them, compile this information and raise an alert when it seems to change markedly. Whether in the normal or deviant state of affairs, the information is detected with the same equipment, the same eyes, the same brain. The problem, which Oliver Sacks identifes correctly in his book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", is that, as concerns matters of the brain, both the subject of investigation and the equipment used to observe it are altered.

A couple months ago, before my last relapse and subsequent progress towards recovery, I wrote an essay published here entitled Art in the Cloud. While it contained the germs of several important ideas in whose merit I strongly believe, it also suffered several major shortcomings. Some people complained of the essay's vagueness, unsure of what tangible things I was advocating. Others outright dismissed the entire essay, suggesting that it was merely a collection of pompous declarations. A few people criticized the essay, suggesting that people do not want a more 'robust' connection to artists, they just want the music. Additionally, many asked of me, why should artists be sharing more information? Simply because they can?

Stripped of ability, strength, I find myself suddenly somewhat renewed and left to embark upon the long road not to the point from which I fell but to something resembling the point towards which I was striving before life got in the way, albeit from a different angle. While the malady that caused my deviation from the path is rare, fortunately the general story line common; our society is rife with tales of such role models, prototypes for my quest to heal stronger. I would like to identify three of them.