Twitter and Tár
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
A warm hello to everyone who signed up for this newsletter in the past week! I’m happy to have you here, no matter what Twitter’s fate may be.
Super quick explainer for new friends (skip ahead if you don’t need this)
To head off any confusion about how the free/paid posting thing works here: every week I write one of these little posts and they go out to paid subscribers. At the end of each month all free subscribers get a newsletter that features a summary of updates and little morsels from the weekly posts.
Paid subscribers also get access to semi-weekly practice videos that I post, and those who subscribe at $20/month or higher also get handwritten mail that I send to your actual physical mailbox.
I’m happy to comp subscriptions for music students or musicians on a budget; you can email me at substack [at] sharonsu [dot] com to arrange this.
More info on how everything works can be found here.
Today’s post is a paid one, so free subscribers will see a paywall cut-off below; I’m planning to have the free monthly post go out next week.
I haven’t left Twitter and plan on sticking around as long as the platform is 1) still up and 2) relatively tolerable for me to be on, but I have set up camp on Mastodon just in case. If you’re interested in following me there, my handle is @doodlyroses@space-pirates.org.
In other news, I saw Tár last weekend, and may be low-key obsessed. I’ve spent the week debriefing and analyzing it with the friend I saw it with (also a conservatory alum; we were cracking up and gasping in the theater) and when another friend asked me for my thoughts on the ending, I may have sent them 10+ minutes of my rapid-fire thoughts over multiple voice memos.
Some non-spoilery thoughts about Tár
My immediate reaction to any movie/TV show about classical music is deep, deep mistrust, because Hollywood almost always gets it way wrong.
My love of Cate Blanchett really fighting my innate distrust of media representations of classical music hereTÁR. October 7. https://t.co/aMFYIeYNzu
Focus Features @FocusFeaturesI was extremely surprised by how right this movie got things, and how deep it got. There were so many references to classical music events and figures that the movie didn’t over-explain; the movie hired actual musicians as actors, rather than having actors badly fake instrument playing; and there were so many moments that they just nailed. In a master class scene, I felt a cold jolt of familiarity at that moment when a student gives the “wrong” answer to the ego in charge and you can tell that a power trip—delivered under the auspices of a lesson—is coming, and it’s too late to turn back.
Cate Blanchett is absolutely magnificent. (She absolutely deserves a Best Actress nom for this, however! I am fully gunning for Michelle Yeoh to get that damn Oscar for her jaw-dropping performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and if someone else—even Cate—gets it, I will riot.)
There is a major character named Sharon. I realize this does not matter to anyone but me. (Sharons are very underrepresented in the world, okay?)
This movie so beautifully and so accurately depicts, above all things, power. (It is so hard not to say that without shouting it Jeremy Clarkson style.) One of the things I’ve been unpacking with friends is the degree to which dynamics of power play out, and how obsession and control are tools for maintaining—and abusing—power.
Book of the Week
It feels so oddly fitting that my book of the week is Marie Le Conte’s Escape, which is a clear-eyed but affectionate accounting of the rise and fall of the internet culture that made Twitter such a cultural juggernaut. It’s an extremely insightful analysis for anyone with any interest in how social media got here, but it was especially relatable to me, as a terminally online Millennial who participated in a lot of the same internet developments that Le Conte describes. (I am super nostalgic for 2010s-era personal blog culture; Substack, as much as I appreciate it, just isn’t the same.)
Rather than treating weird and niche internet subcultures as being discretely separate from “real life,” Le Conte observes how online platforms and movements reflect what we get—and what we lack—in society at large. It’s also just a funny, enjoyable, bittersweetly relevant read.
A quick note that I don’t think Escape is currently available in the US; I had to order my copy from the UK.
Articles I Enjoyed
John Paul Brammer: The Unbearable Mundanity of the Very Rich Man’s Mind (¡Hola Papi! on Substack)
These past few years, especially, have felt like being locked in a theater where the only actor on stage is holding a gun and telling us to clap. Attention is being demanded, and the person demanding it doesn’t really think of any one of us as being on the same level of personhood as they. We have little choice but to suffer them, to some degree.
And so we analyze them. We dig deep into their personalities, their backstories, their psychology. It’s like doing a Rorschach test on a picture of a circle. There is, in truth, so little to consider, but the stakes have been inflated to such a degree that there is real incentive to try.
As you can probably imagine, I’ve read a lot—dozens!—of articles about the fast-moving trainwreck of Twitter this week. However, I found this piece about the psychology of ego and the helplessness we all face at the hands of great wealth to be the one that really stuck with me.
Sarah Fritz: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann (Clara Schumann Channel)
In 1843, Hensel went with her family to newly married Clara Schumann’s house for an evening in Leipzig, though they don’t seem to have gotten to know each other. Clara was still young, only 24, and Hensel was 38. Robert’s diary notes, “Frau Hensel, whose mind and depth of feeling speak through her eyes,” and we can assume Clara felt the same. Hensel notes hearing Clara play some of her husband’s compositions, but that she did not like them very much.
This week was Scorpio queen Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s 217th birthday, and I thought this article was a great summary of the crossover of two legends in the Clara Schumann Cinematic Universe.
Caitlin Flanagan: The Petulant King (The Atlantic)
It fell to Elizabeth—older daughter of a man who never wanted or expected to be King, a woman with many interests of her own that she would much rather have pursued—to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning.
[…]
More than anything, what Elizabeth was able to do, for an astonishing 70 years, that her feckless son will not be able to do was prevent a very large bill from coming due. She was allowed to keep the Great Star of Africa and the palaces and the untold billions of pounds because she was Elizabeth.
I blame Netflix’s The Crown for making me invested in the British royal family. (I have not seen the new season yet—no, uh, spoilers, even though I totally know what happens.) I found this piece utterly fascinating and am now deeply, morbidly curious about the fate of the monarchy.
What I’m Listening To
Back when I was on Patreon, I shared an Apple Music playlist I made of pop music I was obsessed with at the moment. I thought the obsession would fade, but…nope, still obsessed.
It is mildly embarrassing how much I put “current pop music smorgasbord” on shuffle these days. I’ve added more tracks to it (like Betty Who’s “WEEKEND”) and it’s just the perfect dose of relentless, upbeat catchiness to clear my brain and get me through the day.
Miscellany
Back in 2020, when things were looking really politically fraught in the US and I needed to do something, I wrote hundreds—literally, hundreds—of letters to voters in swing states, as part of a grassroots campaign to get out the vote. (I have, personally, minor reservations about how effective letter campaigns are, but I figured that every little effort counted, and as a conflict-avoidant person I am far more comfortable writing and sending letters than I am phone-calling or text-banking.)
I spent way too much time this past week and a half obsessively tracking the results of our midterm elections and reading analysis after analysis of What This All Means and What Could Happen, etc. etc. before I realized that this was both unhealthy and unproductive. As a way of 1) doing something instead of nothing about it and 2) redirecting that energy, I logged back into Vote Forward and started writing and mailing letters to voters in Georgia encouraging them to turn out for the Senate run-off.
If you’re in the US and have a little bit of time on your hands and a few envelopes and stamps lying around, this is a pretty painless and oddly soothing activity. ✉️