Tony Bennett & Me

Taking on the 5-day shelf life with a little help from Czech novelist Milan Kundera

When Tony Bennett died on July 21st, I time-traveled back to my sophomore year in college, when I attended his opening-night performance at the Copacabana night club in New York.

I had loved the singer ever since his name became synonymous with San Francisco. I even sang his best known song at an event during my senior year in high school, hitting all the notes only because our glee club director, famous in his own right, had trained my voice.

With Tony Bennett’s hit in the back of your mind, you could not sing that song without falling in love with that beautiful city by the bay. Or forgetting that it was Tony Bennett who made you feel that way.

That was his gift to us

Like all true artists, he understood that the purpose of Art is to convey feeling. We have machines to do the rest. But even Artificial Intelligence, with its disarming ability to replicate just about anything, cannot convey human feeling. It can copy Shakespeare, but it cannot be Shakespeare. It can duplicate a Van Gogh, but it cannot know what it feels like to be tortured enough to cut off your own ear.

In this day of memes and algorithms, we humans retain a unique power. The ability to tell other humans what it feels like to be us. Tony Bennett understood that. He was a master at reminding us who we are. From the inside out. Which is the only way that matters.

Several years after I saw him at the Copacabana, I had become a rookie TV reporter in Atlanta. Casting about for better pay in a top-10 market, I sent my audition tape to news directors in only two cities. Boston and San Francisco.

Today, I remain convinced

that an offer came from San Francisco only because I already had my heart set on it. The love I felt for that city had been put there by Tony Bennett. It was reinforced every time I sang his signature song, even if it was just in the shower.

And I sang it a lot, not realizing I was sending a signal to the Universe, asking it to sync my life with my feelings. Eventually, at precisely the right time in exactly the right way, the Universe delivered what I had been asking for, even though I had no idea back then that I’d been asking for it unconsciously for years.

I’ve been fortunate enough to reside in some mighty beautiful places during my life and had memorable experiences in each of them. But San Francisco is where I came of age. That is where I began to know myself as myself and not the various roles I played. San Francisco is where I began my journey from ego to self. I don’t think that would have happened in quite the same way had I worked in any other American city.

Beyond cable cars

My exposure to Asian cultures, opera, art, and ballet happened there. That’s where I found radio stations that played only jazz or classical music. Which led to hanging out in jazz clubs and regularly attending the symphony. San Francisco is where I found refuge from work in North Beach coffee houses whose customers had once included Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

It was fine to love those “little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars,” but it was exposure to other cultures, which helped me become more human. Of all the places I’ve lived, San Francisco is where race seemed to matter least. No wonder the city became a mecca for the LGBTQ+ community.

Shortly after Tony Bennett’s family confirmed his death, PBS/American Masters tweeted an important quote from its 2007 documentary about the singer.

Madison Avenue is out of touch with the public. They think you have to play to a 14-year-old mentality to communicate. You gotta be very commercial…. So you make money. You’re popular for about a year and a half. But then what happens after that? Everybody else makes money on you, and then they go on to the next over-dog. But for an artist to sustain, it’s caring that creates longevity.

Ignore this at your peril

What Bennett said in that interview resonated with me because I’d recently come across advice from an ‘expert’ about publishing online. It warned writers to beware of the 5-day shelf life. If readers do not click on your story within five days, they will not read it at all. Ignore this fact at your peril.

A corollary to this dictum is the 5-second rule, which applies the same principle to ebooks. On average, it takes five seconds for readers to decide whether to click on your book or not. So you’d better have an arresting cover-image, a catchy title, and a great tag line. Because it’s all about the scroll, baby. The scroll.

It’s not hard to figure out why the 5-day rule matters

The Age of Information overwhelms with content. It’s impossible to get to it all, even when you intend to. The 500 pieces that make their way to your inbox on Monday are soon replaced by another 500 on Tuesday. And so on till the end of the week. It’s as if everything in our brave new world prioritizes quantity over quality.

Or so it seems

Recently, I decided to get a copy of Abraham Verghese’s first novel Cutting for Stone (2009) from my local library. But it wasn’t there. All copies in every format were in use. No doubt, all the attention on Verghese’s newest book brought renewed interest in his first one. But when I finally got my hands on a copy of Cutting for Stone, I understood why its staying power has lasted 14 years. In three words—Depth of feeling.

It is impossible to write such an emotionally affecting novel without caring for each character. As Tony Bennett said, “it’s the caring that leads to longevity.” In Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese made me aware that doctors who leave India to work in Ethiopia experience the same feelings I do. And that they, along with everyone else in the human family sometimes hide those feelings, just like I do, especially when they’re painful and difficult to acknowledge.

Around 50 thousand books were published in 2009. But most of them do not have a lengthy waiting list today. I’ll never forget the people I met in Cutting for Stone. Nor will I forget the way I felt while reading it.

Depth of feeling resonates because we are always hungry for the emotions that connect us with ourselves and with each other. They nourish and sustain us.

Tony Bennett understood that. So did Milan Kundera

Photo of Milan Kundera by Eliza Cabot via WikiMedia

Ten days before Tony Bennett left us at age 96, Czech novelist Milan Kundera left us, too, at age 94. Hashtag R.I.P flooded Twitter streams alongside quotes, photographs, and clips from his best known novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

To make us pay attention to the Prague Spring of 1968, Kundera produced a doctor who could seduce any woman simply by saying, “Take off your clothes.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of med-school applications grew a thousandfold afterwards. But that didn’t prevent Soviet tanks from rolling into Czechoslovakia in 1968, putting an end to its brief period of liberalization behind the Iron Curtain.

Before anyone ever heard about the 5-day rule or its 5-second corollary, Milan Kundera understood the stakes.

“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity,” he wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being—16 years before Facebook. He could see what many Americans could not see until the rise of the 24/7 news cycle and social media’s scroll culture.

Is the Age of Information making us stupid?

In 1978, Milan Kundera said yes.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.…

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.

―Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Has the smartphone become the eyes and ears of George Orwell’s Big Brother? Has the Internet’s demand for instant answers and 5-second decisions made stupid experts of us all? Are we the new know-nothings who believe that knowing about something is the same thing as actually knowing and understanding it?

Awash in too much information, is it now impossible to synthesize what it all means? If so, doesn’t that make us vulnerable to false narratives, fake news, and political slogans masquerading as easy answers?

I don’t know the answers, but I think the questions are important. Because these are the tools used to divide us.

Tony Bennett wanted to connect us

He built a reputation singing the same songs over and over most of his life. Most were standards from the Great American Songbook. But we never tired of listening to him sing them.

“There’s no such thing as an old song,” he said. “There are only great songs.” During his career, he invited many other great artists to sing those songs with him. I have copies of those duets, his performance on MTV Unplugged, and his sessions with Count Basie.

When I saw him perform on opening night at the Copacabana night club all those years ago, I had just reached the legal age for consuming alcohol. Frank Sinatra was in the audience. So was comedian Nipsey Russell. Other celebrities too. The place was packed. My roommate and I had saved up to get good seats up front, but the table was so small there was barely enough room for our drinks and the little yellow candle in the middle.

Those were days when the night club was owned by a mobster who would die a few years later during a war between Mafia crime families. He was gunned down like Don Corleone in The Godfather.

No doubt some of those same mobsters were present at the club when I was there. But on that night, everything at New York’s Copacabana was copacetic. Because Tony Bennett made us feel that way. He didn’t just leave his heart in San Francisco. He left it in his music and with those of us who love it. Because every time we listen to it, there’s a good chance we’ll remember how it feels to be human.

©2023 Andrew Jazprose Hill (All rights reserved)

Thanks for reading/listening.