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.But even here the most popular recordings are the most superficial, erotic recordings being the most popular.These teach us much about the shape and size and texture of each others’ bodies, but nothing of each others’ minds.There is a further hurdle.When one puts on a recording headset one feels an Immediate compulsion to feel something —something amplified.What do you say into a microphone? This contributes a sense of strain, often noted.Also, we do not spend our time wallowing in emotion; a rather dull or weary emotion is common to most people most of the time.But recordings consist of the peaks; the dull areas are cut because they slow the action, they take time, and they do not affect the development of the recording personality in any case.Thus we have a whole generation of people who believe that they are not really alive unless they are continuously at peak (or under a life playback).The milder, human emotions get cut along with the dull ones.Who notices a recording of the guy next door, the guy whose life is as dull as ours? Ah, but his thoughts? his moods? his emotions? This is the life we should be learning from life recordings, the inner life that is the most truly human thing about us.There can be no question about it.Life recordings must return to this human channel if they are to survive as an art form.This month’s most interesting recording is a collection of minor pieces, “essays” he calls them, of the great critic and man-of-men, Willis Lehman.Me, Myself, and I (Columbia) exemplifies just the cultivation of the inner life mentioned above, and for all the unimportance of these fragments of Mr.Lehman’s fleece, they are far more interesting and informative than anything else we have seen this month.Here is a fascinating piece from the early days of life recordings and of Mr.Lehman’s youth.In it Mr.Lehman simply reads the scene in Henry IV where Ancient Pistol keeps slapping his hilt and roaring, “Have we not Hiren here?” and Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly are half fainting.Shakespeare does not tell us what Falstaff’s mood or expression is throughout this scene, and we are fascinated by the young Mr.Lehman’s mental glimpses of the old man’s contemptuous amusement at Pistol’s antics and the women’s fear, of his sudden rage and the shrewd calculation with which he realizes that kicking Pistol out will endear him, Falstaff, to the women.Of course Falstaff is now known not to have been the cowardly blatherskite he was generally believed to be in the twentieth century.Here, too, is Mr.Lehman’s attempt to cook a meal of wild plants according to the instructions in H.Morgan Morgan’s life recording, the horrible mess he makes of it, and—in the humiliation comedy school of life recordings this possibility is never considered—here is Mr.Lehman’s analytical approach to his mistakes and the brilliant improvisations by which he extracts himself to produce a tolerable meal.For sheer joy-of-life and the gusto of living, this “essay” alone is worth the price of the recording.The bulk of the life recording is Mr.Lehman’s reactions to famous life recordings he has absorbed and on which he has written: recorded while he was absorbing them, a technique new to us and one that opens whole worlds of ghastly recordings.Will a recording of someone’s reaction to Mr.Lehman’s reactions to these recordings be marketed next? —Despite these forebodings, the trick is a huge success, again because of that warm and human inner life of Mr.Lehman, which shines through his reviews and makes him more interesting than the people he reviews.Here is his reaction to such classics as The Destruction of New Orleans, Death of a Saint, and Dr.Koenig’s close passage of the Sun, A Descent into Hell.Mr.Lehman’s reactions here suggest to us the failure of the younger generation in the recording of lives.So few of them are educated except via the haphazard manner produced by absorption of many recordings that they have no strong skeleton of knowledge to compare with what they learn, either firsthand or through recordings.Indeed, since opinions rather than facts are most easily implanted, opinions learned under the playback may prevent their accepting facts learned at first hand.Further, since they have commonly begun absorbing lives, even adult ones, at age seven and eight, their development has been fragmented; they are merely walking, ill-integrated heaps of castoff bits and pieces of other and stronger personalities.Such people are capable of nothing original, not even emotions.They have no life of their own.But Mr
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