Sunday, February 15, 2004
Learning from narrow-minded bigots...
In 1968/69 I worked at the great Harmony House record store on Rt. 22 in Springfield. I was twenty years old, a rock n roll organist who loved music. One of the areas in the store I took care of was "budget classical," inexpensive recordings of everything from Gregorian Chant to early Steve Reich & Pauline Oliveros. One of our regular customers was a misanthropic middle-aged man who believed fervently that everything composed after the classical era - Mozart, Haydn, early Beethoven - was worthless crap. He was a fanatic - his viewpoint obviously insane. So I hit the guy up for his recommendations of classical & baroque bargain records; it was all terrific stuff. He had a great ear for those periods. But it didn't bring a bit of credibility to his harsh, irrational opinions of Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Mahler, etcetera much less any of the "modern" 20th Century music he detested with his whole being. Which of course included jazz & rock n roll.
One finds narrow-minded, angry bigots occupying all sorts of niches, in the arts, sports, history, literature, religion, politics, business, spouting what they perceive to be commonly accepted, common sense orthodoxies, but which are actually like reflections from warped funhouse mirrors, peculiarly applicable mostly to themselves. Family, friends, coworkers offer little opposition, it's too predicably disagreeable to do so. Some of these xenophobic souls have a genuine expertise in a particular area - baseball of a specific era or team, early New Orleans jazz, rockabilly, Biblical geography, Civil War battles, are but a few of the many I've encountered - one taps the savants' petrifying brains for what is worth learning & then leaves them in their fortified worlds, raging endlessly for or against their selected slice of the past, present or future.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
One finds narrow-minded, angry bigots occupying all sorts of niches, in the arts, sports, history, literature, religion, politics, business, spouting what they perceive to be commonly accepted, common sense orthodoxies, but which are actually like reflections from warped funhouse mirrors, peculiarly applicable mostly to themselves. Family, friends, coworkers offer little opposition, it's too predicably disagreeable to do so. Some of these xenophobic souls have a genuine expertise in a particular area - baseball of a specific era or team, early New Orleans jazz, rockabilly, Biblical geography, Civil War battles, are but a few of the many I've encountered - one taps the savants' petrifying brains for what is worth learning & then leaves them in their fortified worlds, raging endlessly for or against their selected slice of the past, present or future.
