Home | Away

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire

Now that Digby has informed everyone that “Tristero” is in fact the renowned composer Richard Einhorn, and Richard Einhorn has confirmed the fact that he is Tristero, I thought I’d reveal the related fact that Richard Einhorn and Tristero are the same person.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?  And just wait ‘til we find out that Digby is also Richard Einhorn.

No, that’s probably not true.  I met Richard in New York last week, and over lunch, even after I spiked his San Pellegrino with veritaserum, he told me he still doesn’t know who Digby is, even after guest-blogging at Hullabaloo for months.  But it would be fun to start the rumor that Einhorn is Digby anyway—and it would be fitting, too, because I first met Richard Einhorn through some Wacky and Daffy Postmodern Internets Hijinx eighteen months ago.

Here’s the setup.  First, I wrote this post on September 7, 2004, just after the Republican National Convention, during which I passed myself off for three and a half nights as one of those “I used to be a Democrat, but since 9/11, I’m furious that the Supreme Court took prayer out of the schools” converts.  The occasion of the September 7 post was a characteristically batshit-insane Weekly Standard essay by David Gelernter, in which Gelernter not only complained of Democrats’ “racist hatred of uppity white conservatives, who have developed the cheek to threaten the left’s cultural power,” but also spun out an extended analogy between Iraq and Kitty Genovese, accusing The Left® of ignoring Iraq’s cries for help.  (In an aside, I wrote, “Surely Gelernter remembers the travesties of the early 1980s, when Donald Rumsfeld’s organization, ‘Conservatives for Peace in the Middle East,’ held a candlelight vigil for Saddam’s victims while Jimmy ‘Friend to Thugs’ Carter snuck into Baghdad in a daring pre-dawn mission and gave Saddam caches of chemical weapons while the rest of the left rolled over and went back to sleep.”)

OK, so Mr. Tristero came across this post later that day, and decided it would be really funny to praise my “postmodern” blogging.  So he claimed that I made up both the Gelernter essay and the Weekly Standard website, and closed his reply by saying,

But what a tour de farce! The perfectly faked Weekly Standard site, the pitch-perfect rhetorical parodies, the properly amazed and bemused comments from the “real” Michael Bérubé, blogger. . . . For a while there, I was totally sucked in. I really thought Gelernter had actually gone completely off his rocker.

Goddamn, I thought to myself at the time.  This guy’s even more convoluted and pomo than I am!  Hey . . . maybe that’s why his name is Tristero! 

So there was nothing I could do but play along.  I followed up with a post in which I “admitted” that the David Gelernter essay was a hoax:

OK, so Tristero nailed me.  No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, who’s once been set his tryst with Tristero!  But, dear readers, even though I know some of you are tired of finding layer after layer of annoying postmodern irony on this humble blog, I confess that I really thought I could pull this one off with impunity. . . .  So with a little help from my English Department colleague Charles Kinbote, I downloaded the Eystein Reality Generator, an open-source device that tinges any website simulacrum with an eerie pale fire, and put together my elaborate Weekly Standard parody in the course of an afternoon.

And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your weird “Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn” cult!!!

Then I complained that Tristero’s discovery had set the Weekly Standard’s attorneys on me, and that I’d received a “cease and desist” letter from the legal firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, signed by somebody named Metzger.

Well, by this point people were plenty confused—even my friends and regular readers.  One commenter, under the nom de web Lowlife, wrote in:

I believed your original post.  When Tristero (whose blog is daily fare at Chez LowLife) revealed the fake I believed his post.  Now, with this post, I am convinced that Tristero was wrong and the original was right and true.  I’ll never trust you again.  I will, however, continue to read you everyday.

And Chris Robinson wrote,

This is better than “The Crying Game.” Camera pans downward to reveal Tristero is Michael Berube who is really David Gelernter who is, of course (and we discerning readers should have seen it all along) Karl Rove. Hopefully the real Berube, duct taped to a radiator in a dark closet, will escape in time to save us all from this right wing, android-driven, conspiracy. Let us pray.

Folks, I’d had me some fun with the Internets before, but until then, I never realized that blogs could be so infinitely recursive in a loopy Borgesian kinda way.  And I owe it all to Richard Einhorn.

More seriously, that encounter introduced me to a great contemporary composer, whose work will shortly be included in David Horowitz’s forthcoming book, The 101 Most Dangerous Classical Composers in America Today.  Last May, I had the chance to attend a performance of his 1994 masterwork, Voices of Light, which he wrote in response to (and as a score or parallel text for) Carl Dreyer’s stunning 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc.  I filed my review the next day, and demanded that all of you buy the DVD of Joan / Voices without delay.  Over the past nine months, I’ve noticed that a couple of you have delayed.  Stop delaying now.

Funny thing is (and I mean this in a completely unpostmodern kind of way), I was just re-watching Joan / Voices the other week, and I confirmed something I wasn’t quite sure of at first.  As I mentioned last May, I was struck by the violin solo two-thirds of the way through, which stands in such stark contrast to the more overpowering moments of the piece.  The vulnerability and tenuousness of that solo—at least up to the 1:30 mark (it’s right here in my personal stereo)—make perfect sense, because Joan is alone and defeated, having just signed her confession under great duress.  But then something strange happens: the music, which up to that point has been largely appropriate to the period (medieval chant, the first fumblings at polyphony, motets; the libretto is composed of texts written by female mystics of the period as well as the letters Joan dictated, all of which are sung in the original languages—Latin, Old and Middle French, Italian), gets wildly and weirdly anachronistic.  Just as Joan realizes that she’s made a terrible mistake, just when she decides to recant her confession and go to her death at the stake, the violin strikes a strained, dissonant chord, and then proceeds into the kind of impressionistic fury that won’t be heard in Western classical music until the nineteenth century.

It’s as if Einhorn is marking this moment as distinctly and indelibly modern, a moment of individual subjectivity that cannot be captured by the musical modes available at the time.  Now, the entire composition of Voices of Light is the work of genius, but this little musical frame-breaking strikes me as extra extra genius.

Of course, Joan’s antinomianism is at once heroic and fateful: one strand of it leads to the Reformation, and from the Reformation eventually to the Enlightenment; another strand leads to the belief that individuals can receive direct revelation from God, and gives us the American tradition that runs from Anne Hutchinson to Joseph Smith to David Koresh.  All the more appropriate, then, that her moment of martyrdom be marked by such a wrenching and multivalent chord.

So go buy the DVD already.  And let’s thank Richard Ein– er, I mean, Tristero– for all his fine work as a dangerous composer and a dangerous blogger.

Posted by Michael on 02/21 at 02:22 PM
(25) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages