Sophistication

There’s a certain cliche of a person who subscribes to the New Yorker, but rarely reads the issues, and yet finds a way to quote the one article a month they actually do read in almost every conversation. That person is annoying. That person is me.

A few years ago, pre-parenthood, when I was actually reading an article in said magazine, I tripped over a word I did not know: philistine. So I Googled it, and then experienced the humbling realization that as someone who has to look up the meaning of philistine, I might possibly be one.

Now this isn’t totally fair. I’m genuinely drawn towards the realms of art and culture. But I also don’t know a lot. Many of the smart things surrounding my life remain shallowly examined, as if I’m living within a museum of failed attempts at sophistication. There’s a lot of me liking things in the abstract, without intimate knowledge of the specifics. For example, I know Bach is a genius and considered to be one of the greatest composer by many smart people, and so I will often put on the “Best of Bach” playlist, because I too want to be smart. I truly enjoy the music, but I could not tell you with any confidence what makes it so great. My relationship with art often lacks context, in this case it starts with Spotify and ends with my Airpods. It’s not that I don’t seek greater understanding, it’s that my current life only affords me so much time and brain capacity — and despite my more noble ideals, the reality is that studying the history of Bach is not high on my priorities.

I remember during parental leave, I attempted to get through a 500 episode series titled A History of Rock Music in 500 songs, based on a recommendation from Bill McKibben. I got to I think episode 50 before the demands of life squeezed out my listening time, and while I learned wonderful things (like the original version of Hound Dog), my main takeaway was wishing I could know as much about anything as Andrew Hickey, the host, knows about rock music.

And it’s obvious that Hickey’s relationship to rock n roll is profoundly different than the average persons. Greater education and context allow certain people to experience things on a deeper, or at least different, level, which is one of the reasons we societally value critics. But I also think this knowledge has its limitations. There’s the argument that the museum guards might understand art better than the educated patrons.

For me, despite engaging with various high-brow things, I still have to reconcile this with the fact that at 18 I chose, unironically, to go to the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate my high-school graduation. I got an A in English, but apparently didn’t want to go somewhere where you had to read a menu. Why waste the effort when you can just point at a picture and grunt to order your chicken parmesan. Also, if you don’t do math, you don’t know the calories. Ignorance tastes better.

Being raised within the bowels of strip malls, I’ve always felt a particular allure to sophistication. While I was pretend-smoking Swisher Sweets in the Chipotle parking lot on a Saturday night, I could imagine another teenager living in the West Village debating the merits of Freud, while smoking, and actually inhaling, a hand-rolled cigarette. This person is not real of course, a horrible cliche fabricated from the mind of an angsty, and slightly annoying, teenager who probably recently started to refer to movies as films. But maybe sophistication is a form of fabrication, its allure stemming from its otherness, a state of being always slightly out-of-reach. An idea of a thing is often more attractive than reality — we prefer the Hollywood behind the screen, not the boulevard.

Take a line from Sally Rooney’s book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, that captures this fantasy, where the main characters, Alice, is writing to her friend, Elieen, whose sophistication she admires.

I bet you never look for the bathrooms in museums, Eileen. I bet as soon as you enter the hallowed halls of Europe’s great galleries, you simply leave such corporeal practicalities behind you—if indeed they ever plague you in the first place.

One of my fond memories of middle school, surprisingly, was going to Cotillion. It’s a completely ridiculous affair. Sixth grade pre-pubescent boys (in my case), feet dangling from chairs, kicking wildly in anticipation of the next dance. Our suits fit like juice boxes over our meager frames, our heads like straws pivoting side to side on the lookout for a potential partner. Cotillion is often associated with stuffiness, formality, but I remember it feeling quite the opposite. We ditched our school uniforms and donned the attire of high-society in life’s after-hours. It was nothing short of a festival of make-believe. Shedding our immaturity at the door, we stepped away from our parental perimeters onto a wood-paneled floor of wild and abandoned freedom. As I’ve matured, surprisingly little has changed. My suits fit properly these days, and I can have champagne in hand, but there’s always a part of me that realizes a black tie event is all but a cousin of childhood Halloween.

As much as I’m attracted to sophistication, I’m even more drawn to moments where the veil of sophistication is broken. Our lives are full of pretense and so it’s incredibly cathartic when someone can puncture that barrier and let a little bit of the pressure out.

New York Magazine has this known approval matrix that ranks high-brown and low-brow culture from despicable to brilliant. It’s wonderful because it brings high-brow and low-brow onto the same plane — both can be brilliant. It makes me think of all these great moments in movies where the traditionally unsophisticated is inversely placed in a profound light: There’s the scene in Lady Bird when she finally admits to liking the song Crash Into Me; There’s the way the ubiquitousness of Drops of Jupiter becomes a comic, yet poignant motif in the film Other People; And then there’s one of the most notable scenes in Sideways when Miles drinks his prized wine from a styrofoam cup in a diner. There’s something about finding beauty in the mundane that’s more moving than finding beauty in the extraordinary.

A brief tangent: I also love it when people who we as a society have deemed sophisticated, love unsophisticated things. There’s a clip of Al Pacino that I think about a lot. It’s not from one of his movies, but rather him showing his Shrek phone case during an interview for the BBC. I can’t explain why I love this clip, just like I can’t explain why I enjoy Bach, but I’d like to think they both would fall within the far right plane of brilliance on the New York magazine matrix.

It seems important that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, because if not, sophistication might get the best of us.

I was listening to Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi on the Dialectic podcast hosted Jackson Dahl. My main take away was wow I am truly a philistine when compared to these people. But also one particular bit caught my attention: Tyler was asked if he experiences art primarily by thinking or by feeling, and he responded (edited for brevity):

I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it….I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me.I go to the museums of the world and nothing brings me at all close to crying—or laughing, for that matter….. It makes me suspicious of crying. In fact, I don’t feel like, oh, I should be crying at the Rembrandt painting. I feel, oh, I should be suspicious of crying.

Tyler then goes on to share that he finds the difference between emotion and cognition rather blurry, and that he hasn’t cried in decades. I do not share this as a means of putting crying on a pedestal — there are definitely sentimental tears — nor is this a judgement of Tyler — I quite respect his candor and honesty. Tyler is much, much more intelligent than I am, with far greater context and understanding of the world. But in hearing this exchange, I can’t help but wonder if this is an example of what can happen when we understand things too much. If everything is experienced through the intellect, we potentially dam up that subterranean current of emotions that resides beneath our thinking. And my potentially unsophisticated belief is that there’s something important in keeping that current flowing.

Just as psychologists consider intellectualization as a defense against our emotions, we might view sophisticated-ness (if that’s a word) as a defense against our animal nature. And sometimes our unsophisticated nature might have more truth to offer than our higher-ordered selves, a place far far beyond intellect or understanding.

Or, this could all be an excuse to rationalize my desire to go back to the Cheesecake Factory.

Closing quote

A great work of art is like a dream: for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal - Carl Jung

Parting song

Phoebe Bridgers is out with a new song, Lost Boys, that’s a bit about make believe and so much more. I’ve now watched her live performance on Fallon, the one with the kids, multiple times with Nina. We love it and sing it constantly in the car.