It’s time for the annual ritual of making promises to ourselves about what we will change in the coming year. In that spirit, consider a few resolutions that would make us and those we care about better communication partners.
Resolve to be a better listener.
Becoming an engaged listener is like losing weight: it’s harder than it sounds. It requires momentarily giving ourselves over to what another is saying. That must include minimizing other distractions, turning off the far too loquacious chatterbox camped out in our brains, and accepting the challenge of bringing our full attention to another. We can’t do this with everyone all the time. Listening for nuance is work. Start with the people that matter most.
Protect your soul by deciding to be a more thoughtful gatekeeper and information consumer.
We allow a lot of worthless messages into our lives: junk journalism, junk advertising, aimless web-browsing, mean-spirited trolls and the self-obsessed. As tech writer Farhad Manjoo noted last year in the New York Times, the Internet is “loud, shrill, reflexive and ugly.” It “now seems to be on constant boil.” So it takes far more personal discipline to keep this stuff at bay and to hold on to our social equilibrium.
The key is to stay in the discursive world of long-form discourse as much as possible, spending time on articles rather than tweets, in-depth journalism instead of ‘news summaries,’ films in place of youtube videos.
Work to put a reasonable limit on the time your children spend with all kinds of screens.
The American Pediatric Association recommends that children under two spend no time in front of screens. They need more interactivity as they begin to grow. Remember that “virtual reality” is a desert compared to the natural world. Rediscover local parks or just the simple pleasures of a walk around the block. With my own grandkids it’s been fun to relearn the truth that even young children are naturally weatherized. Most love to be out and active even in the cold.
Resolve to save important feelings and information for face to face discussion.
Proximity with others usually brings out the best in us. Media that act as surrogates for ourselves (even misnamed “social” media) offer only selected approximations of the real deal.
Listen to more music.
Because it’s almost exclusively the language of feeling, music unites us in ways that ordinary rhetoric can’t. A friend reports that Mozart has been a nice escape from the numbing effects of recent political news.
Help seniors take a break from television news.
We have convincing research that many older Americans succumb to a deep and unhealthy pessimism fed by too much news and mayhem. Television is often how they pass the time, especially if they live in a facility. Do what you can to show them the more normal world outside their door.
Don’t believe everything you read.
Apply some healthy skepticism to both real news stories, as well as the paid “clickbait” stories that are often nearby. In 2016 has shown us anything, it’s that too many Americans form attitudes from conjecture and misinformation, often from low-credibility sources.
With the possible exception of those strange relatives up in Duluth,resist dividing the world into “us” and “them.”
We may think in simple binaries. But In the end, the complexities of individual lives will always deal the deck that we and others have to play. Even after this brutal presidential election we need to find the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the inadequacies of our labels.
Grant me a rhetorician’s right to stretch the meaning of word about as much as clothing that seemed to fit better in the summer. Music dramas have always been popular and show no sign in disappearing.
Attendance in the nation’s opera houses may be thinning a bit. But there can be no denying that Americans might surprise themselves to be reminded they often love opera as a form. Grant me a rhetorician’s right to stretch the meaning of word about as much as favorite pieces of clothing that seemed to fit better in the summer. Music dramas have always been popular and show no sign in disappearing.
I was reminded of this recently while watching the final hour of Steven Spielberg’s much-honored E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial (1982). The last half is pretty much given over to John William’s rich score that soars as high as the kids fleeing the feds on bicycles. The music leaves us breathless, not all that different from the second act conclusion of a Puccini opera. Williams voices most of the melodic highs with lots of strings, but keeps the traditional Hollywood trope of shimmering brass puncturing through. Let’s face it: E.T. is an opera on bikes. And we’re the better for having it.
It turns out that most commercial films are scored with wall-to-wall music. A lot is what composers call underscoring, meaning music meant to be heard in a mix of voices and ambient sound. For example, the haunting Schwartz and Dietz ballad Something to Remember you By goes mostly unnoticed in a party scene of The Band Wagon (1953). It deserved a better fate. We are sometimesnot fully conscious of the great stuff that drifts past our consciousness.
I was amazed recently to see a new documentary on director Alfred Hitchcock, who carried on an extended discussion with French ‘new wave’ director François Truffaut in the nineteen sixties. The book was later published as Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966). In the documentary the two auteurs talked endlessly about lighting, shots and set ups, mostly in reference to Hitchcock’s landmark films. And yet, strangely, they were unusually mute on the subject of music, even in what is often considered Hitchcock’s best film, Vertigo (1958).
No one can fault a director for being a visual person. Even so, I think of Vertigo as an opera created as much by the composer Bernard Herrmann as by Hitchcock’s relatively static shots. The film’s is not much into verbal repartee. So it’s little wonder that a full scale screening of it these days may well be in a concert hall, with orchestras like the San Francisco Symphony accompanying a showing of a pristine print. Interestingly, the music from Scene D’Amour, one of the many sequences featuring James Stewart lurking behind Kim Novak’s enigmatic character, has since shown up in films such as The Artist (below), the not-so-“silent” French film that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2011.
Luckily we have the recent work of the young writer/director Damien Chazelle, who is carrying the tradition forward in his new award magnet, La La Land ( 2016). In a conversation in our offices last year Mr. Chazelle confirmed that he grew up watching old MGM musicals. That seemed rare enough for a man born in the 1980s. But only then did we learn how serious he was. He mentioned that he needed to fly back to L.A. to deal with an 80-piece orchestra ready to lay down his new film’s music tracks. New directors are not usually packing scoring stages with whole symphony orchestras. Chazelle was finishing La La Land partly as a homage to larger-than-life Technicolor classics like Singing in the Rain.
American operas can show up anywhere and be embraced by almost anyone. I remember myself as a nervous new husband trying to deal with a sometimes overbearing father in law. I hated the time we spent doing illegal “drag-fishing” in the beautiful waters off of northern California’s Point Reyes. With beer and buckets we ventured forth in his too-small boat to snag some halibut. Yet I can also remember his reverie during rides back to the beach house in his beat up truck. He loved listening to his 8-track recording of the music from Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon (1969). It really wasn’t much of a surprise that the crusty former member of the California Highway Patrol had turned himself into a lover of horse a opera.
