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October
2008: Head Butler Quarterly Report
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Beyond Classification
October, 2008: Head Butler Quarterly Report
Payback’s a bitch. And unfair — you and I don’t have silly mortgages, but life is like school: “I’m going to punish you all for the actions of a few.” So here we are, coming to terms with the after-shocks of a stock drop that makes us feel as if we were in a plane at 35,000 feet and, seconds later, are re-gathering our wits at 25,000.
What to do?
One of the actually smart business gurus, Warren Bennis, once told me: “In moments of crisis, style dissolves into character.”
Like, perhaps, now?
I like to think that we are, together and separately, dealing with our real selves here — our true Character — and that, as a result, HeadButler.com readers are better prepared for this moment than others.
For one thing, you have at least one foot off the cultural grid – you’re not just looking to Entertainment Weekly/Vanity Fair/Time/The New York Times for cultural guidance.
For another, you’ve endured my rants about Quality and don’t seem to care that I avoid a lot of pop junk with a sell-by date of next week. Just that gives you an advantage over the “American Idol” throng.
Finally, the thrust of this site in recent years has been what I think of as Emersonian self-reliance — Dad’s dead, no one seems to be in charge, we’d better learn how to take care of ourselves and our loved ones. I don’t see this as a solitary, individual effort. Over and over, I have been guided by your suggestions, and, on good days, I imagine you share my ideas with others.
So as I ask myself what I can do to be helpful as we lurch into Q4 of 2008, a few things come to mind:
— We’re going to be staying home more. That means network TV for most Americans; for you, I hope, it’s visits with friends and neighbors that involve the old collegiate pleasures — listening to music or watching a DVD of a wonderful movie no one has seen. And, of course, there’s always reading, ideally in the same room as another reader; there are few experiences more delicious than minds silently absorbing greatness, interrupted only by “You have to listen to this.”
— We’re going to be cooking more. Already, wine sales are up in posh Greenwich, Connecticut, where hedge fund managers are discovering that if they cook their own steak, they can afford better Bordeaux. I bet you knew that all along.
— We’re going to be healthier. You can only cook so many meals, drink so much wine, snuggle so many times. So you may find yourself with “leisure” you would never have described by that term. Solution: get out there and feel weather on your face, joy in your blood.
— We’re going to seek what might be called lifestyle alternatives. Our American reality is no fantasy — this is a chair, that is an Amex bill — but it’s not all there is. You may not be able to detach, and you may not want to; there’s nothing wrong with wanting the old-fashioned American dream. But there are other dreams, and maybe this site can help you free your mind so your can explore them.
— “You gotta serve somebody,” Dylan said, and for me, that’s a home truth. This service may take a spiritual form, and it may not — I cast a wide net for wisdom that helps you figure out whom best to serve. And how to cleanse yourself so your gifts really are gifts.
— We’re going to need beauty in our lives more than ever. It’s obvious: when the wind howls, we’re suddenly aware how badly we need to get warm. And nothing warms you like a thrilling idea artfully expressed, music that touches the heart, images that dazzle and thrill. If a random walk through the Head Butler archives — see those words up top? Books, Music, Movies, Products — doesn’t produce a dozen possibilities, I’d be very surprised.
Over and over, these last few days, I’ve often stuffed my Shure headphones into my ears and turned on Bon Iver, a deceptively simple-sounding piece of home-made music. It gives me the same reaction every time: involuntary tears that are tokens of a great pleasure. (Yeah, I’m the guy in the sunglasses on Madison Avenue, iPod on and cheeks moist.) By the time I get to the end, I feel restored. And this is how it ends:
This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me.
Which, finally, is what I want from Art — majesty and ambition and spirit, of course. And challenge, always. But most of all, a special kind of comfort: the sense that someone else gets it, that I’m not alone here.
I hope you’ll find, each day here and in the bulging archives, reasons to feel that.
