Caleb Fox

Can you twist your mind around these strange facts? Richard Wagner was a vociferous anti-Semite and wrote operas full of cosmic love. Frank Baum wrote THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, but as Kimberly Roppolo pointed out last week, also called for the genocide against the American Indians. Luigi Pirandello had his Nobel Prize medal melted down into a bullet for Mussolini's soldiers. Ezra Pound supported Mussolini loudly. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, an anti-Semite and Fascist, is considered one of the master novelists of the last century.

How can the same mind churn with hate and produce art of extraordinary beauty? The Lakota visionary Lame Deer pointed out that, even if a shaman is a bad man, Spirit may speak through him. Does something similar happen with artists?

Even the first minute of Wagner's "Prelude to Tristan and Isolde," with its surges of love and longing, convinces me.

How and why? Who knows? Maybe art transcends all and lifts the artist above his ordinary self.

Should we read/listen to such artists? For me, how can we not? What are your thoughts?

As an artist or member of the audience, do you get any help from the critics? I don't, but how about you?

I used to review music (and later theater, movies, and books) for the big Los Angeles newspapers. After years of writing criticism on and off, I made friends with one of the great and celebrated concerts pianists of our time. On a river trip, I asked him whether he'd ever learned anything from a review. (Mind you, one of these reviewers was me.) He answered in one word: "No."

I thought about my own writing and concluded, "Me neither."

I left doing criticism behind because I was tired of commenting while other people were doing. I felt like the guys who went to the senior prom, leaned against the nearest wall, and made wisecracks about the dancing styles of their buddies. BUT WHO GOT TO TOUCH THE GIRL?

I wanted to do, not talk.

I admit that I remember negative reviews (fortunately very few). But whether the review is positive or the opposite, I try to give a quick smile or frown, remind myself of the source, and forget them.

--caleb fox