As evidenced by AC Douglas and his "Eurotrash-innocent" friend, Wagner triumphs over banal productions, across all cultures, in houses great and small, even in the most suffocated reaches of society.

When Wagner's work first came to America in the mid-1800's, much of the concert and opera-going public, whether casual and fashionable or erudite and ensconced in the Italian and French schools, reacted with repulsion to his disregard for immediately palatable theater and music, often citing difficulties in everything from the haughty contrivances of the stories to the lack of melodic set pieces. Of Rienzi one Cincinnatian remarked that the overture was

"very much like the performance of a brigade of bedlamites in a rolling mill with a nail factory attachment."

Talk about a florid passage!

It took forty years, but eventually the feats of courage in Wagner's composition and concepts joined with the indefatigable devotion of conductors like Leopold Damrosch and the virtuosity of execution by singers like Emil Fischer and Lilli Lehmann into an macro-Gesamtkunst that transcended the vulgarity and self-satisfaction of a tested but tired tradition, as well as a the conventions of a conservative and dismissive audience. The sweep of change, though slow, was all-consuming, in many cases converting the otherwise unwilling.

Even Nietzsche, ever focused on critiquing decadence (of which he saw in Wagner the high priest), could not but offer a beholden, if reticent, genuflection:

"When in this essay I assert the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable?for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he needs to understand it best… I understand perfectly when a musician says today: 'I hate Wagner. but I can no longer endure any other music.' But I'd also understand a philosopher who would declare: 'Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out. one must first become a Wagnerian.'"

Today on the toilet I wondered what sort of slanted compliments and gratitudes writers and philosophers forty years from now will be paying to the musicians and thinkers of today. Will we be praising the sanctity and ritual of elegant repetition in Satyagraha or aching for the early exploration of the "extended vocal technique" of Meredith Monk? Will we place miniature busts of Bj?rk and Jandek next to our Precious Moments curios on the mantle? If the notion of new reverence for new music is unreasonable, then perhaps we already on a path to a new collective unconscious that recognizes and values impossibility and impermanence over novelty. Terrence McKenna talks about this a bit in his…

Gerechter Gott! I had one too many gins tonight. Nevermind about damn McKenna.