{"id":555,"date":"2008-04-10T07:05:20","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T12:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2008\/david-lang-is-also-my-homegirl-a-diatribe\/"},"modified":"2008-04-10T07:05:20","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T12:05:20","slug":"david-lang-is-also-my-homegirl-a-diatribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2008\/david-lang-is-also-my-homegirl-a-diatribe\/","title":{"rendered":"David Lang is Also my Homegirl + A Diatribe"},"content":{"rendered":"
I adore David Lang. I am so, so, glad that he won the Pulitzer! Listen to his piece here<\/a> (also good job to Carnegie for <\/a>streaming it, very important!) David Lang is a composer whose music is so awesome I hesitate to even stream any of it here, because I feel like it’s all too long to really excerpt properly, and too megabyte intensive for me to upload at this basement Starbucks.<\/p>\n So instead, everybody go buy some David Lang off of iTunes!<\/p>\n Anybody who doesn’t wish to listen to my diatribe should navigate away from this page at this time.<\/p>\n W<\/span>e need to briefly discuss that this abortion<\/a> of an article also won a Pulitzer. First of all, everybody I know emailed it to me when it first came out. Second of all, the comments attendant to this article on the Washington Post<\/em> were unreal; I don’t know where they are now. Anyway, the basic premise is that Joshua Bell, who is, like, young and talented and handsome, went into a subway station in our nation’s capital and played a little recital during the morning rush. Nobody paid any attention because they were too busy on their iPods or whatever. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. However, this article! It drove me to madness! I hope that everybody reads this thing and proves me wrong, that it’s not through-and-through offensive. <\/p>\n I’m re-reading it now and my heart is racing. The writing is as appalling as The Da Winci Code<\/em> but somehow striving for more. Check it:<\/p>\n Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or Pope or Medici ever did.<\/span><\/p>\n Hot Grammar, right? Or:<\/p>\n “I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”<\/p>\n Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Whyyyyyyyyyy is that two sentences? What is this weird halting style? This method of writing? This jerking? It continueth:<\/p>\n There’s nothing wrong with Myint’s hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.<\/em><\/p>\n Oh. Was he? Listening? To his iPod? What? What is the question. What does that mean? Jerky Jerky.<\/p>\n For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. <\/em><\/p>\n Gross.<\/p>\n “I didn’t think nothing of it,” Tillman says, “just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.” Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.<\/p>\n When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.<\/p>\n “Is he ever going to play around here again?”<\/p>\n “Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”<\/p>\n “Damn.”<\/p>\n Tillman didn’t win the lottery, either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What are we supposed to make of this little parable? Also whose voice is, “you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him?” What drives me crazy about this whole experiment is that it is designed to fail and <\/a>then give some random guy the opportunity to quietly pontificate (quoting KANT!) up in the Post<\/i>. The tone is “elevated,” the same way people change their discourse when they say grace before a meal. The writer feels free to <\/a>talk about how “we” as Americans rush around, his prime example being that we rush around during rush hour<\/i>. There is something additionally nasty, I think, about subjecting the Chaconne, which is so divine, to this treatment. It’s chamber music, not public art. I have many times stopped in Times Square for the nine seconds it takes to quickly appreciate the Lichtenstein murals, or the Jones\/Ginzel eye mosaics in the old World Trade Center stop: all examples of good public art making “us” do what “we” should: take a minute. Not fourteen minutes, are you crazy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I adore David Lang. I am so, so, glad that he won the Pulitzer! Listen to his piece here (also good job to Carnegie for streaming it, very important!) David Lang is a composer whose music is so awesome I hesitate to even stream any of it here, because I feel like it’s all too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}