Saints be praised

Lots of good artists, leaders etc. but who’s someone you really look up to?

©2011 Vladimir, used under a Creative Commons license

Today’s Fun Friday is inspired by a sad event, but I hope it leads you to inspiration.

I’ve complained before about how the biggest problem with social media, bigger even than its firehoses of disinformation, is that it’s supersaturated with celebrity stuff. And I don’t mean just the super-popular people the masses celebrate — Beyonce and Taylor Swift and Marilyn Monroe and Robert Downey Jr. and John Wayne et alia. In fact, if you’re an smart-aleck like me you may not see those guys on your feed as much as you will see classy intellectual celebrities like, I don’t know, let me leaf through my Facebook right now… ah, Anthony Bourdain, David Lynch, Frances McDormand, Akira Kurosawa, Dorothy Parker — you know, celebrities for the collegiate set of a certain age. Whatever your demographic slice, you get celebrities to match.

And it’s not that the celebs themselves are bad. (Hell, the mass-market celebs are pretty cool too!) It’s that they when they’re all up in your feed they amount to a secular Calendar of Saints, and I know from my Catholic upbringing what that’s about: something to make you feel at least a little haunted by inadequacy.

Were there no social media, and assuming we aren’t by nature fan-mag devourers out of Nathanael West, we would admire these people in any case, but only on occasion; whenever they were brought up in conversation or whenever we came in contact with their work, we would reflect on their admirable qualities, and then think and talk about something else.

But being surrounded by them on a daily basis makes the relationship weird; over time it turns them into emblems of our values and virtues, constantly reflected back at us.

Put it this way: Imagine in your everyday life the real people you constantly walked among were all genuine role models who had each achieved a form of greatness (and were celebrated for that greatness). Wouldn’t that be pretty fucked up? Uncomfortable, unnerving? Maybe even infantilizing, since when you think about it that’s what very young children experience among adults?

Now imagine that these people did not actually exist on your physical plane and you had no relationship with them outside your admiration, yet they were always there anyway. Weird, right?

Anyway: A sorta-celebrity came into my feed this week who isn’t usually there, but whom I had long admired. He wasn’t there because of his clout but because he’d just died of a heart attack and that reminded a lot of people of how they felt about him.

And though it sucks that was the reason, his presence, and the lessons of his career, were not only refreshing but a blessing, because much as I admire the regular celebs in my Calendar of Saints, he was someone who was a little closer to my reality, and in whose example I find inspiration.

Steve Albini’s music you probably know — either the stuff he played or the stuff he made vivid as a don’t-call-me-a-producer. (If you need a clue or a reminder, listen to the first 60 seconds of “Kerosene.” And then listen to the rest of it.) It’s all really good, but there are a lot of good musicians and producers in his mode.

What most impressed me about Albini was how he conducted himself. From the beginning he was exceptionally eloquent about what he hated about the music business. (His 1993 essay on it is making the rounds and well worth your time; like much great writing, some of the vagaries are outdated but the lessons are not.). He was also eloquent about music he thought sucked, which gave him a reputation as a “hater.”

But over time — or right away if you agreed with him! — you could see there was a unified aesthetic behind his growls and grumbles. And not only an aesthetic but a morality, which became clearer when he grew as a human being and — as I wrote about a few years ago — took the time to explain where he thought he’d been right and where he thought he’d been wrong; that is, he had done the hard work of separating his righteous anger from his reactionary rage, using the same tools he’d used on the shitty music scene to dissect his own shitty attitude.

I related to that about him. And his development as a human being fit very well with his strictly principled behavior as a recording wizard to the great and the small — undercharging the little artists he liked while charging the big guys top dollar, being so often generous with time and attention in the studio that Twitter has been full of band reminiscences about it since he passed, and approaching his life’s work like work, with value in itself rather than as a series of paydays. That’s why some of the worst people on earth were dismissive about his passing and why so many good people mourned it.

He was, in short, a mensch. And on this Fun Friday I ask you: I know you have a lot of favorite artists and statesmen and intellects, but who is someone you feel this way about? You can admire some people despite themselves, but who do you admire as much for themselves as for the work? Tell me about these giants.