Dopamine Fast, Dopamine Feast

I recently read an article titled The Junkification of American Life by David Brooks. He laments the decline in culture from Art to mere Entertainment and then goes further, claiming a further de-evolution from Entertainment to Distraction and then from Distraction to Addiction. Of course, the “junkification of American life” is not exactly new. We’ve always had Grade B movies and potboiler books and muzak in the dentist waiting room and sugar pumped into just about every processed food and drink. But two things have changed:

First is the long term effect of the junk that defines our culture and its steady advancement into all corners of American life. Rest stops off the highway now give you a choice between McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy’s, with Subway at the highest level. Classical and jazz radio have disappeared—heck, radio has disappeared and the idea of being introduced to a new song or style or genre is replaced by circulating endlessly within the algorhythm of what you think you like. The 1964 top 100 Hit Parade on pop radio included the Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison, Barbara Streisand, Mary Wells, Herb Alpert, The Supremes, the Beach Boys and Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto! By the time my kids were ready for their generation’s Pop Culture, everything had been reduced to the same tempo, some drum beat, same instrumentation, same singing style, same lame lyrics. (Compare the pop music of the last thirty years and excuse my geezer-grouchiness, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the Beatles, Smokey Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, etc. in both lyrics and musical sophistication.) And the level of political discourse— and yes, I’ll say it, mostly from one side—has sunk so low that a swamp looks like a mountain lake. 

 

Second is the immense power of the engines of distraction via social media and such, the trickling stream of junk culture now a roaring river washing over us all 24/7.  What was once entertainment is now a formula of distraction driven by constant explosions, sex and super-hero powers that sink us down to the brain stem and the lower three chakras, all human evolutionary adaptations designed for survival and shared with snakes and lizards. The things that make us human— the capacity to nurture and love and speak eloquently and think deeply and imagine creatively— are all higher up the energy centers (chakras) in the spine and in the next two layers of the brain. The ones at the bottom are given for free and the same more or less in all living creatures, but the higher ones require effort and need to be beckoned forth and drawn upward by something called culture, something that used to be known as education.

 

Now we simply go from one dopamine rush to another and the results are good for exactly no one. It infects our emotional life, it lowers our capacity to care and nourish the feeling body, it rots the brain and leaves us vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories and most dangerously, in the hands of the criminal dopamine drug pushers who purposely manipulate us for their own profit (and pave the way for others to manipulate us for their own power), moves us yet further into the hellish regions of the human psyche by making such distraction addictive. 

 

What to do? Brooks article suggests three strategies:

 

1)   Consciously choose to limit your easy access to the things that tempt you.

2)   Choose to enjoy the live you already have around you.

3)   Replace a low desire with a high desire, as in pregnant women giving up alcohol out of love for their coming child.

 

In a parallel article by Maia Szalavitz titled “A Dopamine Fast Will Not Save You from Addiction,” she agrees with all three strategies above:

 

“Consequently, America’s problem isn’t that we’re a bunch of hedonists hooked on capitalism’s “dopamine hits” — it’s that so many of us aren’t able to get our social, physical and emotional needs met in healthy ways. The solution, then, isn’t to ban or quit potentially addictive escapes, though they should be regulated to minimize harm. Instead of a dopamine fast, what we really need is a dopamine feast — one that makes us want experiences we actually like, rather than compulsively responding to cravings. “

 

Bingo! The best strategy for diet might include a month of no sugar and not going back for seconds, but ultimately works best when the pleasure of eating a good raw carrot or fresh tomato is as pleasurable—or more— than going for the cookie. And diet is the perfect metaphor for all this. Rather than take the Puritan route of banning ice cream cones, what works best is to simply balance the diet, with a healthy appetizer, a nutritious and delicious main course and sure, a little dessert at the end. It’s when dessert becomes the main course that the havoc begins. 

 

And so with culture. I read Mary Oliver’s poems and Dickens’ novels, play Bach and jazz every day of my life, eat oatmeal for breakfast and a lean vegetarian cuisine for lunch and dinner, but still enjoy a pinch of John Grisham, James Brown and a good dark chocolate bar. And as a teacher and a workshop leader and a performer, do my best to create instant communities of great joy, humor and depth of feeling. The best antidote to addiction is deep connection. What I offer is better than a Facebook hit! Come join! 

PS For those who want to read the original articles, here they are:

The “Junkification” article:

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The “Dopamine” article:

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Nothing New

The Orff Echo is the quarterly journal of the American Orff Schulwek Association and in my closet is just about every copy since 1985. I was curious about an article I remembered writing and pulled them out from the closet to look for it. Four hours later, I had found every magazine I had written something for and had-re-read most of what I wrote, somewhat surprised and astonished that they held up. In fact, I could have written just about any of them yesterday. So much for forward-moving growth!

 

When you are tuned in to the guiding inner images that direct your thought and life— and these articles and my journals and my 13 years of blogs are testimony to this truth— you basically are saying the same things over and over and over again. There will be new little twists and more contemporary references and new ways to say them, but the essence stays the same. 

 

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but again, I was, to read that first article published in 1985 and see a heading The Class As Music, an idea that blossomed into my book Teach Like It’s Music 34 years later. There in 1989 were my views on teaching multicultural music, which are exactly the same as recently expressed in my Blogpost Cultural Appropriation or Appreciation? As early as 1996, I was warning people about the danger of too much screen time for kids. There in 1998 was my first of many articles to come about Jazz and Orff Schulwerk. In 2004, The Zen of Orff Schulwerk pointed the way forward to my new first-draft book titled Zen, Jazz & Orff: A Life in Three Worlds. In 2007, my articled Confessions of an Itinerant Music Teacher predicted this Blog started in 2011. Forty years of basically saying the same thing over and over again.

 

And how has my little voice helped shift the cultural landscape?Have the things that I cared about and warned about and offered more tonic and less toxic alternatives to finally come to blossom?

 

Dream on. Everything—and I mean everything— is much worse than before. Inspired musical teaching of music has been reduced to the Powerpoint presentations and list-checking of someone else’s standards. The beautiful promise of multicultural sharing has been shamed down to cultural appropriation. The screen time has… well, no need to tell you. What was a tiny firecracker explosion in 1996 is now of nuclear bomb proportions. Jazz has been reduced (by sales) from last on the list of all musical styles at 2% listening audience to 1.5 %. 

 

Oh well, I tried. And knowing it will have no big effect, will keep on trying. I have to remember the starfish story, repeated here yet again:

 

A woman was walking a beach filled with stranded starfish who had been washed ashore. Without water, they soon would die, so the woman began picking them up one by one and throwing them into the sea. A man came walking the other way and asked what she was doing and when she told him, replied: “Why bother? There are thousands of starfish here. What you’re doing won’t make any difference whatsoever.” She picked up a starfish, threw it into the sea and said: “It made a difference to that one.”

After all my efforts, the beach is still filled with dying starfish. But I do remember, helped by their written or spoken testimonies, particular starfish who were grateful that my work or words helped return them to the water. Perhaps that's all one can expect. 

 

ORFF ECHO ARTICLES—1984-2023  (35 articles)

 

1. 1985/Winter—V. 17/n.2—A Question of Discipline
2. 1988/Winter—V. 20/N.2—Summer in Bali
3. 1989/ Summer- V. 21, n. 4—Teaching the Music of Many Cultures
4. 1991/ Winter—V. 23/ N. 2—A View-and Thoughts—from Salzburg
5. 1993/Spring—V. 25/ N. 3—What Is Real Music?
6. 1994/Fall—V. 27—Multicultural Music: President’s Panel Talk
7. 1995/Summer—V. 27/N. 4—The Myth of Creativity
8. 1996/ Spring—V. 28/ N. 3—Early Childhood Education and the Electronic World
9. 1997/ Fall—V. 30/ N. 1—An Open Letter to the Orff Community
10. 1998/ Spring—V. 30/ N. 1—Jazz Goes to School
11. 1998/Summer—V. 30/N. 4—Milt Jackson Meets Orff Schulwerk
12. 1999/Spring—V. 31/ N. 3—Musica Poetica: The Word in Orff Schulwerk
13. 2000/Spring—V. 32/N. 3—Orff Schulwerk and Contemporary Music
14. 2000/Fall—V. 33—Crossing the Boundaries (Liz Keefe/ Xephyr)
15. 2001/Spring—V. 33/ N. 3—An African Odyssey
16. 2001/ Summer—V. 33/ N. 4—The Musical Community
17. 2002/ Fall—V. 35/ —The Drummer in Golden Gate Park
18. 2003/Fall—V. 36—What Is Aesthetic Education?
19. 2004/ Winter—V. 36/ N. 2—CD Review of Bessie Jones
20. 2004/ Spring—V. 36/ N. 3—Book Review: Music Education
21. 2004/ Fall—V. 37—The Zen of Orff Schulwerk
22. 2005/ Winter—V. 37/ N. 2—Sing Around the Dishpan: Jean Ritchie Interview
23. 2005/ Fall—V. 38—Portrait of Avon Gillespie
24. 2006/ Spring—V. 38/ N. 3—Book Review: Music, Education and Society
25. 2007/ Winter—V. 39/ N. 2—Confessions of an Itinerant Orff Teacher
26. 2009/ Spring—V. 41/ N. 3—Carrying the Torch: The Legacy of Carl Orff
27. 2009/Fall—V. 42—Pause and Consider: Electronic Technology and O.S.
28. 2010/ Spring—V. 42, n. 3—Book Review: Music, the Brain and Ecstacy
29. 2011/ Spring—V. 43, n 3—Jazz History in the Classroom: An American Story
30. 2013/ Fall—V. 46, n. 1—You Just Have to Be There
31. 2018/ Winter—V. 50, n. 2— International Orff Teaching. What. How. Why. 
32. 2020/ Winter—V. 52, n. 2—The Wisdom of Uncertainty: The Next 50 Years of AOSA
33. 2021/Spring- V. 53, n. 3—It’s a Ping Pong! Talk About Process (w. Wolfgang Harmann)
34. 2022/ Summer—V. 54, n. 4—Jazz, Joy & Justice: New Directions in Orff Schulwerk 
35. 2023/ Fall—V. 56, n. 1—Improvisation: The Pleasure of Survival

 

When You're Smiling (Take Two)

 I continue to be baffled by the censored version of my When You're Smiling post. Apparently you can read it by clicking on something that shows you understand it was edgy. I could leave it at that— not the most inspired writing I've ever done. But figured since I wrote it, I might as well repost it without the sentence that I think (wrongly) got it flagged. (See post "Confused.") Let's see if this gets through. 

“When you’re smilin’, when you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you…”

 

This old jazz standard is part of my Happy Songs for kids (and adults). Alongside songs like Side by Side, The Sunnyside of the Street, My Favorite Things, High Hopes, Pick Yourself Up, Accentuate the Positive— mostly songs written during the Depression—they do their job of uplifting kids and bringing positivity into their life. One of my favorite examples was a time when the whole second grade was working on a difficult math problem and one student (Isaac) threw his pencil down in frustration and sighed, “This is impossible!” His classmate Sophie, without missing a beat, responded by singing“Nothing is impossible I have found, for when my chin is on the ground, I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again…” All the class joined in and then went back to work. (My memory is they still didn’t solve it, but had a happier time trying!)

 

Amongst many things I love about Kamala Harris is that virtually every photo of her shows her smiling or laughing. Such a refreshing change from the angry, dour old sourpuss. No surprise that all he had to offer in last night’s debate were his exaggerated—no, truly outrageous and off-the-charts unbelievable— lies poking at people’s fears. Millions of violent criminals are crossing the border, schools are performing forced operations on your children (!!!????!!!! WTF?), nuclear war is right around the corner unless he's elected. 

Meanwhile, Ms. Harris kept her calm and countered everything with actual facts and sometimes with a smile. Her message is based on reality and hope and commitment to serve others, his based on fantasy designed to dupe, fear and his Me! Me! Me! pathological narcissism. We humans are designed for both, often needlessly (but sometimes wisely) stoking our fears and longing to feed our hopes and dreams. Beyond all the rhetoric, party-allegiance and money raised, it all comes down to this— fear or hope, people. Pick one and vote accordingly. 

No Regrets

In an upcoming interview put together by an Orff book dealer, this intriguing question came up: 

 

“As a seasoned teacher, what would you tell your younger self now?”

 

My initial response: 

 

“You’re on the right track! Keep experimenting as you are, keep studying a variety of musical styles and instruments, keep noticing what makes children happy and what doesn’t connect with them and adjusting your teaching accordingly. I can testify almost a half century later that all your intuitions were correct and I have the testimony from hundreds of children to prove it. So carry on, young lad!”

 

Of course, I could have suggested actually doing some of the things I always thought I should do: Take lessons on drum set, sing in a choir, actually learn how to play that Bulgarian bagpipe better. Maybe a Kodaly or Dalcroze training. Don’t wait until I’m 60 to play in a jazz band. And so on. But hey, there’s only so many hours in a day and if I did any or all of that, something else would have had to give. 

 

But all in all I realized that the life I lived and the teaching I did and the thoughts about teaching I thought were exactly what was right for me and all necessary to how it turned out. No regrets. 

 

And the same could be said of my life in general. Of course, there were a thousand things I could have done better and things I could wish I hadn’t done or said. But again, I believe they all were necessary to everything good and true that happened. The only regret worth having would have been to refuse to take a risk, to have said no to something because I was worried it would be too hard or I might not do it well or others would have criticized it. 

 

If I am to claim any success in my life, it would be my commitment to saying yes to everything that felt true to my vision of what is important. The putting myself out there in many places I wasn’t necessarily wholly ready for at the time— the Orff workshop, the jazz stage, the book published, the Keynote speech, the Flower Piano Concert this Sunday, etc.—simply because it felt necessary to the way I am put together, a beckoning finger from my Daimon/ inner guide that brought me one step closer to merging the person I was born to be with whoever I was at the moment. 

 

And so, younger self, you did precisely what you had to do and older self, there is more ahead. No regrets.  

Morals and Manners

I was tempted to write another book report about two excellent books (the second a continuation of the first)— The Searcher and The Hunter, both by Tana French. Although they’re in the category of mystery, they’re much more about character, relationship and the impressive poetry of Irish speakers and folk wisdom of the people. With a good mystery in each that untwists slowly and keeps you wondering. 

 

Meanwhile, there’s also some Dickensian commentary on matters of universal human issues relevant to the times. This gem from The Searchers so eloquently articulates my impatience with political correctness by acknowledging that it has its place— manners— but when imagined in the wrong place—morals— confusion reigns. I’ll let the passage speak for itself. (Boldface mine):

 

“Over the last few years, it has been brought home to Cal that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that the young people he knows spend plenty of time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as he can see, have to do with what words you should or shouldn’t use for people. Based on what problems they have, what race they are, who they like to sleep with. While he agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals. …

 

In Cal’s view, morals mean something more than terminology. At Thanksgiving dinner, his daughter’s boyfriend Ben damn near lost his mind when talking about the proper term for people in wheelchairs and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that. But he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair. 

 

On top of that, the right terms change every few years so that someone who thinks like Ben has to always be listening to other people to tell him what’s moral or immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a person goes about having a sense of right and wrong. 

 

Then the police department went the same way, bringing in a mandatory sensitivity training , which was fine by Cal, given how some of his colleagues treated people from bad neighborhoods or rape victims. Except the sessions turned out to be all about what words they were and weren’t allowed to use, nothing about what they were doing underneath all the words and how they could do it better. Everyone was always talking about talking and the most moral person was the one who yelled loudest at the other people for doing the talking all wrong. “

Confused

 For the first time ever, one of my posts "When You're Smiling") got tagged with a warning .

 

“ This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines.”

 

Huh? I opened the Community Guidelines, which I post below and heartily endorse them all. But I just have to wonder which one I violated. The only one that comes to mind is the sentence about “involuntary sex-change operations” for kids, perhaps picked up by some AI Bot without looking at the context. That context is me simply reporting the lie one of the Presidential candidates continues to repeat. If this post is tagged because I included that sentence again, that will solve the mystery.

 

Meanwhile, thanks to Blogspot for being alert about the misuse of free speech!

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When You're Smiling

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