A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself.

In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline.  Loveline was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky, whose medical specialty was addiction recovery.  I would listen to the entire two hour show, and then drift off to sleep.

I had an awareness in the moment of why I was so dedicated to listening to the show every night.  By being where I was, doing what I was doing, I was presenting myself as someone who was making a fulsome and complete commitment to a radical mode of life.  But listening to Loveline was my way of opting myself out of this totalized paradigm.  It was a way of reminding myself and reinforcing to myself that I was in control of my own life, that I could do what I wanted and what I believed to be right.  I also understood on some level that I was doing something crazy and weird, and Loveline was a lifeline toward, frankly, normalcy.  In the moment, I saw it as a useful and necessary point of balance.  In hindsight, it was the leading edge of what would unfurl over the course of the next fourteen months--that I was not willing to fully and completely commit religious life in a way that would make it possible for me to really stick with it.

In any event, when I remember that year I mostly remember listening to Loveline.  After that year was over, I listened to the show periodically.  Carolla left the show in 2005, and despite the fact that I found Carolla mostly annoying, it became an objectively worse show when he left.  I think the last time I listened to Loveline was around 2007.  Wikipedia tells me that the show with Pinsky lasted until 2016, and has been rebooted with new people in podcast form.  I've basically forgot about Loveline in the interim.

I was reminded of it last week, when I happened to stumble upon a Twitter thread showing that both of the people that formed my experience in 2002 are total shitheads.  Carolla has been an obvious shithead for a long time, but this is not particularly surprising since part of his schtick was being a shithead.  Pinsky though is much more disappointing--he has become a full anti-Vaxxer, spewing the most unhinged conspiracy theories about the mRNA vaccines for COVID, stuff about alerting your genetic code and all of the rest of the QANON-level content sewer.  That bummed me out a lot, and not because I didn't already have a sense that he sucked.  I spent a bit of time watching Pinsky's Celebrity Rehab in the 00s before becoming convinced that everyone involved was exploiting the suffering of the celebrity addicts, and no one was more committed to the project of exploitation than Pinsky.  But to go down the road as an anti-vaxxer, especially as a doctor, shows that he was not merely kind of a shitty guy, but either a completely unprincipled shitty guy, or otherwise completely crazy.  So, big time bummer.  

All of this made me reflect on how important that show, and by extension Pinsky himself, was to me for admittedly a brief period of time.  This question of how to relate to things that you once loved, or maybe more importantly were meaningful to you, and now have problems with, is a complicated one.  Some people have an impulse to defend the thing or the people that they once loved, out of a fear that to abandon it now is to retroactively invalidate your previous experience.  Or worse, to bring you and your judgment into question.  I am firmly convinced that this is a destructive line of thought, because I believe it is absolutely essential to allow people to grow and develop and change and re-evaluate their prior experience and views.  Nothing good comes from shackling people to positions taken in the past.  Still, that commitment requires a theory of life and a theory of how to relate to your past that makes that coherent.  And I think the best way to approach this is through the lens of art.

At the risk of bringing in French Theory for a moment, I subscribe to a maximalist interpretation of the Death of the Author. Said simply, Death of the Author states that literature, and any work of Art, is absolutely and completely distinct from The Artist.  Indeed, I think the whole point of Art is that once The Artist makes a piece of Art and releases it into the world, The Artist has fully and completely severed his or her personal connection to that Art.  This is because the whole point of Art is to generate what is ultimately an idiosyncratic and bespoke experience in the mind and spirit of the viewer or participant in the Art.  Because that experience is completely personal, it is ultimately out of the hands of the Artist.

It is true that a skilled Artist often seeks to cause, and succeeds in causing, a particular category or type of experience for the individual interacting with the Art.  A couple of weeks ago when Danielle and I were in Chicago, we went to the Art Institute of Chicago.  I was very struck by a series of photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman, depicting women (usually the artist) in poses meant to reflect scenes from movies (here is an example).  I found them to be very disturbing, a voyeuristic look at women in distress and fear.  Now, I think that is in large measure the effect the artist was seeking to create with the work.  But the specific way it affected me was totally idiosyncratic, a product of my particular experiences, temperament, and mental state at the time I encountered the piece of art.  Danielle, for example, didn't have the same reaction to the photographs that I did--she certainly saw what the artist was trying to do, but it didn't impact her in the same way as it did me.  Other pieces of art impacted her, and that's the way this works. 

The reason this is important is because the fear lurking behind these discussions is the worry that an Artist who is a shitty person will somehow transmit that shitty-ness to the person who appreciates their Art.  And I don't believe it really works that way, at least not without an explicit didactic component to the art.  If you find Lohengrin beautiful and moving to listen to, I do not believe you are in danger of somehow absorbing Wagner's thorough-going anti-Semitism by osmosis.  Now, if you like Wagner and then say "Wagner is awesome, and he hated Jews, so I will hate Jews as well," then that's a different story.  But that's a conscious choice to embrace an explicit ideological program, which while perhaps spurred by the Art is not directly connected to the Art as such.  Or, to use a  more modern and perhaps more relevant example, you can love Harry Potter and hate J.K.Rowling's politics and gender views.  Harry Potter is beyond Rowling's control (at least on an artistic level), and what you take from the work is wholly your own.  You don't have to answer for Rowling, anymore than you have to answer for anyone else.

[As an aside, the reverse of this is also true, and I think this position is probably my biggest departure from the philosophy of High Church forms of Christianity.  I think the notion that exposing people to beautiful liturgy will somehow cultivate positive moral qualities is ridiculous magical thinking.  The way to cultivate positive moral qualities is to cultivate positive moral qualities, not through listening to Palestrina or having fancy vestments.  Those things are fine on their own terms, but the idea that it will somehow do something is silly.]   

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I think that you are not in any way responsible for, and certainly should not feel guilty for, finding meaning in something produced by terrible people.  There is, however, a specific complication as it relates to Pinsky and Loveline, and that is that the whole point of the show was to give advice to people.  If Pinsky is a quack, then his advice is at least questionable, and the whole purpose of the program is called into question.  This criticism is particularly salient in light of the Celebrity Rehab show, which (IMO) was affirmatively exploitative.  So I think the question with regard to my experience with Loveline is not whether the show is made retroactively bad, but whether it was bad all along.  

Honestly, I'm not sure.  But my engagement with the show was only tangentially related to the advice that was being provided to the callers by Pinsky and Carolla.  Most of the calls were mundane, so the overall stakes of the show were relatively low.  As I previously mentioned, the reason Loveline mattered for me was that it provided an anchor to an experience of life outside of the one I was living at the time.  Once I left the Dominicans, and was actually out in the "normal" world, my engagement with the show decreased enormously--I didn't need to be reminded of the rest of the world, as I was in and among it.  

To be honest, I think that was the attraction of the show for most people who consumed it without calling in.  For teenagers and 20-somethings of the time, it was a way of normalizing one's experiences.  At the risk of becoming a generation warrior, one of the most salient qualities of being someone born in the mid to late 1970s--then, but also now--is that you are basically ignored and treated as irrelevant.  Whereas the following generation, the Millennials, receive too much attention in the form of being obsessively blamed for absurd things that are clearly not their fault, us in Gen X (especially late Gen X, as I am) are just passed over.  Loveline's value was that it was a place where people who were not normally heard got to be heard, even if that hearing was to be made fun of by Carolla and given perhaps dubious advice from Pinsky.  

It would be much better if Pinsky truly was the calm font of wisdom that he portrayed himself to be.  But failing that, he was present and he listened to people who often did not experience that reaction.  There is something to that.  While my experience of the show was weird and particular to my unusual situation, it reflected something broader--the natural and reasonable desire to be treated as someone whose life and experience are worth acknowledging.  

So, in the end, I don't apologize for having a connection to Loveline.  In a particular season of my life, one where I was trying hard to make something work and feeling (not without reason) like I was doing it on my own, I needed to feel like someone was willing to listen.  And I got that from a weird radio show, which is a good thing even if the people behind the show suck.  We can, and should, separate what we get out of something from the people who make the something.