Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa hang out, listen to records, and talk about music.

Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa – Haruki Murakami (2016)

“Like love, there can never be too much ‘good music.’ “ - Haruki Murakami

The Japanese author Haruki Murakami has been one of my favorites ever since I first read A Wild Sheep Chase in my sophomore year of University (oh so very long ago...around 1992-1993).  I owe my love of Murakami to my man Elliott French, who loaned me his copy of that book.  I have also been aware of Maestro Seiji Ozawa’s work, as I spent 7 years playing cello in the school Symphony Orchestra.  Coupled with my father’s enjoyment of classical music at home, this left me with a life-long love of classical symphonic and chamber music.  When I read that Haruki Murakami’s newest book was to focus on conversations between these two giants, and their shared love of music, I grew restless to read it.  Thank Mario for the University of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Library and the bad-ass librarians there who keep the shelves full of fresh new books!

Previously on this Intellectual Journey, I had the chance to read and write about Haruki Murakami’s first non-fiction book, the moving and shocking Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.  Where that book delved into a tragedy that shook a nation to its core, and the after-effects of it all, this book is a joyous celebration in many respects.  Murakami has been a life-long fan of music, with a deep knowledge of Jazz and Classical music.  Ozawa has been working as a conductor since the 1960’s, where he was Leonard Bernstein’s principal assistant.  He was barely 30 years old, knew very little English, and eventually studied and worked under the tutelage of some of the greatest conductors of the 20^th century.  Both of these men have very strong opinions and ideas about music, but since one is a music creator and the other is a music aficionado, there is no rancor in any of their conversations, only mutual admiration and the joined love of good music.

The interviews recorded here were conducted over the course of several years, and include the time period when Maestro Seiji Ozawa suffered from a debilitating condition which required surgery and left him unable to conduct what was usually a quite frenzied schedule.  Through the course of these meetings, Murakami would pull out music from his vast collection of records and play them for the Maestro.  These included classic performances by Glenn Gould, and various world-renowned Symphony Orchestras.  Some of these were recordings of Maestro Ozawa’s performances, and others were from various contemporaries of his.  The insights that both men bring to the various recordings is just wonderful for a music nerd like me.  It is the next best thing to sitting in a room listening to music with them.  What a cream-dream that would be!

I learned quite a lot about music, about the art of conducting, about the art of teaching young students how to make good music together, and about the relationship between the conductor, the score, and the musicians that make that score come to life.   I also learned a lot about Haruki Murakami himself, and the deep musical knowledge that he has acquired over his lifetime.  Their discussions regarding the differences between a professional writer and a professional conductor make for enlightening reading.  As a writer, Murakami answers to no one, sets his own time-table, works completely alone, and keeps a very rigid schedule.  He awakens around 4 AM, writes for about 5 hours, then proceeds to go eat lunch and get on with the rest of his responsibilities.  Maestro Ozawa likewise gets up around 4 AM, but he states that he gets quite a hunger around 3 hours later, which causes him to interrupt his work.  He then spends the rest of the day in the myriad other duties of a professional conductor.  The quiet morning time is for his most difficult work, that of reading scores and understanding what the composer intended.  Murakami does not travel much due to his work, but Ozawa is all over the world, from guest conductor stints in Vienna, Berlin, Boston, etc., to his several once-a-year Orchestras that gather up players from around the world.  He has to be an organizer, a teacher, a musical genius, and above all, a leader of people.  

 While both men live in quite different worlds, their relationship only got stronger as the interviews took place.  One of the coolest things in the book is a short afterword by Seiji Ozawa where he discusses how him and Haruki met, how he grew to appreciate the talks with Haruki more and more, and how much he actually learned and remembered through the conversations.  Books like this give a great insight into the minds of genius.  I highly recommend it to anyone who loves classical music, and any fan of Haruki Murakami.  I learned a great deal.  

(On his website, Haruki Murakami lists a selection of music that he and Seiji Ozawa listened to during the course of this book’s writing, and provides links to listen to these recordings.  AWESOME.  Here is the link: http://www.harukimurakami.com/resource_category/playlist/absolutely-on-music )

(This book can be purchased here:  ABSOLUTELY ON MUSIC  )

Terence McKenna explores Mind-Expansion and the Human Condition

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution – Terence McKenna (1992)

            I first read this book when it came out in 1992, around my sophomore year in college.  Much of the insight of this book was lost on me, as I had not yet had time to understand the very far-reaching socio-historical implications of Terence McKenna’s scholarship.  Picking it up again, after 25 years of growth and reading and experience, only served to impress me even more.  This is a highly important book, and should become a foundation for the changes that humanity must make as a whole in order to thrive, and in order to better live in harmony with the life-world that we take for granted.

            One of the most intriguing questions regarding the development of our species is when and how the roaming primates developed a higher level of consciousness from the other primates on Earth.  There are many proposed ideas, most of them based on theology/mythology and not actual grounded empirical knowledge.  Terence McKenna was one of the very first to propose that the naturally occurring hallucinogenic plants and fungi helped expand the minds of the hominids, who would ingest these items in their search for food.  In a sense, he proposes that these hallucinogenic properties created the first “shamans” who then had to figure out a way to explore the rich world that natural plant hallucinogens open up.  He has much evidence for this, and it does help explain the sudden rise of what we call modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) around 100,000-250,000 years ago, and their/our amazing ability to process information and solve problems.

            After discussing the origins of the human exploration of mind-altering substances, Terence McKenna goes into a very depressing but integral analysis of the role that substance addiction and use affected our human culture.  After the matriarchal, communal, tribal stages of life, where the shamans (initially female, as they were the ones gathering plants and mushrooms and testing them as food, and then both female and male) would open up their minds with these natural compounds, to better understand the needs of the tribe or the patient.  After several millennia, humanity began to live in larger aggregations, in locations that were fixed, and the access to the natural hallucinogens waned.  In this time, the fermented juices and grains began to be used for intoxication as wine and beers.  This new substance was then used much as the old hallucinogens were.

            Once humans managed to distill alcohol, to get purity and strength, it all went to shit.  The problems we face today of alcoholism, rage, violence, and neglect have been around ever since humans distilled the “spirit” of the wine into a potent and toxic drug.  The next drugs to overtake all of humanity, and to continue helping in the degradation of the tribal units, were caffeine, sugar, and tobacco.  Tea initially carried the caffeine addiction but it was not until the spread of coffee, and of the mass manufacture of refined sugar, that caffeine addiction and abuse became a very real thing, and just as deadly as any other drug out there.  Combine this with tobacco, and you have a large amount of the population living constantly in an “altered consciousness” state.  The high from sugar is just as euphoric and the crash just as brutal, as tobacco or caffeine.  The massive and mind boggling extent of the human slave trade was a direct result of the addiction to sugar and the rum that can be created from it.  The Dutch and the British set up a very neat system.  They would gather up slaves in Africa, sell them in the New World to coffee, sugar, and tobacco plantations, buy vast amounts of rum, sugar, and tobacco, sell it all for a massive profit in the UK and Europe, and then go right back to buying humans and selling them off.  This lasted for HUNDREDS of years.

            Once these substances were in use, the state and the merchants combined forces to create vast networks of distribution for these substances.  The British government controlled the tea trade much like drug cartels do so today.  They then decided to get into the opium trade, purposefully flooding China with opium in an effort to make a nation of subservient addicts.  They almost succeeded.  At every step of the way, these drugs were refined and made even more potent and deadly.  Opium was refined to morphine, and thought to be a cure for opium addiction.  Heroin was refined from morphine, and likewise was supposed to combat morphine addiction.  The power of heroin to destabilize and subsume a population is evident when McKenna describes the purposeful distribution by the CIA of an exceedingly pure heroin brought in from Vietnam and surrounding areas.  It was called China White and was released to only the black neighborhoods, creating generations of junkies, unable to stand up for their rights.  Our government and in fact, most governments, use these drug cartels to their own ends.  Most of them are propped up by our support.  Pathetic.

            Terence McKenna continues on to describe his plan for the elimination of what he calls “the Dominator Culture” that we all live in today.  Instead of human unity, our culture pushes and prizes division.  Instead of legalizing natural substances capable of helping people deal with addictions, trauma, and which open the mind to possibilities unknown, our Dominator Culture sets hallucinogens as CLASS 1 drugs, meaning they have absolutely no medicinal, social, scientific value, which is a flat out lie.  It is solely a means by which to control those who would study these amazing plants and fungi.  However, they easily allow the deadliest and most addictive of drugs to be widely marketed and sold in every corner.  Alcohol, tobacco, and sugar products are what keep people subservient, diseased, and mentally dull.  It suits their interests.  It does not suit our own individual rights.  This is why there was such a crackdown on the hippies.  Their drug taking did not lead to subservience and a drone-like ability to do meaningless 9-5 jobs.  They had to be broken and humiliated.  We must all remain robots.  That is what they want and they are succeeding.

(This book can be read here:  https://archive.org/stream/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods.pdf/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods_djvu.txt )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Art & Science Make the World Go Round

Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet – Stephen Jay Gould, Rosamond Wolff Purcell (2000)

            Art and Science, my two most favorite subjects of human intellectual experience, are always conflated in my brain.  Art IS science to me and science IS art, in that the exploration of idea in Art mirrors the exploration of fact in science, and in how the creative impulse of the human brain is equally critical to the scientific method as it is to artistic creation.  These are not two separate worlds, and Stephen Jay Gould makes sure to repeat this refrain.  In choosing to write essays based upon the intricate and scientifically-informed photographs of Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Mr. Gould lets his mind roam, drawing from both his experience in the sciences and his love of the arts, creating connections which are otherwise unnoticed.

            I love books like this.  Some of my favorite photographers work in the manner of Wolff Purcell.  She searches the sometimes-forgotten archives of museums and institutes for items to add to her imagery, creating beautiful photographs which function as a work of modern art while also drawing the critical intellect to explore the subject matter empirically, as a scientist would.  Mr. Gould uses the images chosen, one or two per essay, and then riffs upon what the artwork makes him think of.  Sometimes it is an exploration of the affinity humans have for bilateral figures over radially symmetrical figures, and at other times he describes the deluded and self-righteous work of the person whose collection is being photographed.  It is whatever comes to his fertile mind.  Many of these images contain fossils, and as a paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould has an instant affinity with them.

            In one essay, following an image of a painting in mid-restoration showing a “correction” once made to reduce the painting’s lewdness but now removed to show the original offense, he describes the concept of “layering.”  This concept is evident in medicine, where most of the disease and infirmity occurs invisibly, under the skin.  So many medical breakthroughs have been solely methods by which to look under the skin, such as the X-Ray, CAT scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, etc.  In an essay following a photo of an old disused fish fossil, Mr. Gould describes the concept of an “overlay.”  This is the idea that a thing (1) must be older than another thing (2) if the first thing overlies or modifies the second thing in a manner implying the original presence of thing (1) alone.  For example, you have a photo of yourself.  You spill some ketchup on it and it dries, then a while later, part of it gets torn right where the ketchup was, then even later, someone puts a piece of tape over it all to keep it from tearing further.  Someone presented with the final object could safely deduce that the tape was younger than the tear, which was younger than the ketchup, which was younger than the photograph.  Geology works very much in this manner to differentiate between sedimentary layers.

            This is actually the third such book in this series.  I am going to have to request the other ones through the Inter-Library Loan system here at the University of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Library.  They will make for some very thought-inducing reading!  Bad ass. 

(This book can be purchased here: Crossing Over  )

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge – Abraham Flexner (1939)

            One of the most disheartening developments in education in my lifetime has been the emphasis placed on teaching students only the knowledge and subjects that have practical, or “useful,” content.  Every year more and more people want their kids to study only the fields in which a great salary is guaranteed.  Learning for learning’s sake is frowned upon by helicopter parents who push their kids to fit a predetermined mold.  This is a huge disservice to the students.  One of the greatest advantages of a University education used to be that you learned how to educate yourself for the rest of your life.  This was what a well-rounded education was to provide.  Critical thinking skills, deep curiosity about the world, a variety of experience and wisdom from a wide field of human intellectual endeavors, and the ability to be a well-rounded adult were all worthy goals in and of themselves, without regard to future employ-ability or salary.  It is quite eye-opening to read Abraham Flexner’s essay from a 1939 issue of Harpers Magazine.  He was confronted by the same problem 80 years ago. 

            I have never read a better argument for letting students, artists, researchers, and scientists explore anything and everything that may cross their minds, regardless of whether it applies to their respective titles or fields of study.  Mr. Flexner explores the many fields deemed “useless” and finds that in each and every case, these useless ideas or curiosities either contribute greatly to the well-being of humanity as a whole (as in the case of the arts, music, and literature) or they end up adding another piece of knowledge to the vast amount collectively gathered by humanity, to be filed away until some other curious person finds it and uses that knowledge to create a new mechanism, or technology, or even just a new use for something already existing.  There is no way to determine what field of study will lead to something “useful,” which is the whole reason that nothing a human is curious about is actually “useless.”

            Mr. Flexner provides examples from various fields, each a seemingly unimportant exploration by a human mind that turns out to shine a light on a previously unknown corner of knowledge.  He cites the then very current issues arising from totalitarian fascist states in Germany and Italy curtailing “frivolous sciences” and “useless” explorations.  This led to many of the most genius humans on the planet to make their way to the United States, where they could join places like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  This institute was solely dedicated to the search for knowledge and had such a minimal infrastructure that any one person could cooperate and learn from any other, allowing geniuses in science and the humanities to explore wherever their curiosity led them.  Learning itself is what was cultivated.

            I have always been intellectually curious about nearly everything in the world around me.  There are many people who think that specialization is the true mark of genius or dedication, or intellectual rigor.  These people, while they may achieve much, are missing out on the whole picture.  I personally am an artist.  I paint and draw and I love to study art.  I am also a hardcore music fanatic.  These two fields are not mutually exclusive to most people.  I am also a deep, deep lover of all things scientific, especially the field and history of Physics.  In this case, countless people cannot fathom that a human can be artistically inclined and scientifically inclined and enjoy both equally.  I feel that, beyond the pure joy of learning itself, my scientific knowledge informs my art, and my art knowledge informs my scientific curiosities.  I am also a hardcore sports fanatic, especially my beloved American Football and all my Houston, Texas sports teams.  I have been ridiculed by sports people who do not think I am a “true fan” because art is not for jocks, and I have been ridiculed by the arts crowds for showing up to a gallery wearing a Texans jersey.  These close-minded fools will never understand, and they will never learn, until they decide to explore what intrigues them without the fear of ridicule by the people in your chosen peer group.  If only this great essay by Mr. Abraham Flexner was required reading in the schools.  Share it with someone that has been stifled in their curiosity.   It may change a life.

(This essay can be downloaded in PDF format from Harpers Magazine here: https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf )