Sailing: An Odd Essay

One of Millions

Wow.  Back when I was hell-for-leather bent on being a concert pianist, I thought the fact that I could play the thing made me pretty damn special. 

Now it turns out that 30 million chinese kids are taking piano lessons.

Lessons are taken extremely seriously. Parents sit alongside their children while they are taught, making copious notes.

The Western concept of learning being fun is not practised here. It is about hard work and focus.

Once home, mothers and fathers will ensure their offspring practise for two or three hours a day.

This actually gives me some hope for the future.  We may soon have to bow to our new lords and masters, but maybe classical music won't be dying, after all.

Link thanks to Hugh MacLeod.

Jose Gonzalez

My new favorite acoustic singer/songwriter: Jose Gonzalez.  Think I'll put him right up there on that pedestal with Nick Drake, Devendra Banhart, Damien Rice, and, dare I say it, Joanna Newsom. 

(Although I still hold that Newsom exists on a higher plane all her own, one mere mortals can catch a glimpse of through her music but never completely comprehend.)

Gonzalez's music is more Earth-bound, bluesy, solid, understated and rhythmic with currents of suffering and cruelty.  He's got some pretty great videos, too: fantastical narratives that make me think of Italo Calvino for their absurdity and truth.



Thanks to Pandora radio for the discovery.

Joanna Newsom

“Long before we understood what the priest was saying, the music instructed us how to feel.”                        
        -- Karen Russell, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”

There is something about Joanna Newsom’s voice that I find absolutely entrancing.  Squeaky, nasally - I won’t say “childlike” because I’ve read that she hates that descriptor, and I can respect that - but it’s got an Appalachian lilt and a way of bending notes between in tune and out of tune.  At first it’s distracting.  It can seem amateurish.  But then this slight “off”-ness seems to bring it closer in line with some kind of universal truth.  This is a human voice, nothing re-mixed and re-mastered here.  So we listen more closely, falling in love with its flaws.  And then she loads that voice with rich, evocative and ambiguous lyrics that would make Emily Dickenson proud.  Slant rhyme and slant tuning, they give you room to get inside the song.  They give the music a chance to work its way into you.

“If you wanna come on down
Down with your bones so white
And watch the freight trains pound
Into the wild wild night

How I would love to gnaw
Gnaw on your bones so white
And watch as the freight trains paw
Paw at the wild wild night.”

Plus she seems to use very traditional instruments (the harp, primarily, but also the harpsichord and piano) in fun, nontraditional ways.  I can hear the ghosts of generations of harpists saying, “Man, why didn’t I try that?  That looks like so much fun.”

That’s the other reason I can’t seem to stop listening to her albums.  They seem to reflect such a pure pleasure and joy in what she’s doing.  It’s infectious.  She seems born to do this.  In one interview she explains, hesitatingly, that she has trouble expressing herself emotionally through language alone.  She almost seems like an Aspie, so focused on expressing herself through song that she’s lost some of the ability to communicate normally.  But that’s okay.

“Stretched on a hoop
Where I stitched this adage:
‘Bless this house
With it’s hearts, so savage.’”

Like that feeling you get from great jazz, or a spiritual hymn: that you’re having some great truth plugged directly into your hind-brain, at a level too deep and elemental for mere language to penetrate.  She seems to be connecting us to a realm of pure joy that doesn’t discount sorrow or brutality, and which in fact is enriched by it.

"Though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?"

Here’s Joanna Newsom’s Wikipedia article.  She’s got lots of Youtube videos on the web.  Here’s a favorite.  And Peach, Plum, Pear gives me the chills every time I listen.  Monkey and Bear is a favorite of the wife’s - a ten minute arrangement that’s a folktale as much as a song.  Some of these performances seem to be taking place at major venues, and she’s gotten an orchestra to work with her on her latest album, Y’s.  So it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Boston Landmarks Orchestra and Outdoor Performances

We went to hear the Landmarks Orchestra perform Hadyn’s “London Symphony” and Beethoven’s Ninth at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade on Wednesday.

(I know, I know, I really should have been parked in the library writing my novel at that time. But when I asked myself which experience would be more memorable to me in the future, I concluded that an outdoor classical music concert - something I’ve never attended - would make for a better memory than another night pounding on the keyboard, so I gave myself the evening off.)

It was a unique, relaxing, and somewhat surreal experience. We walked from our apartment and got there just as the music began. Most of the crowd was already settled in, so we spread our blanket towards the fringes. Still, visibility of the orchestra on the elevated Hatch Shell was excellent, and speakers in the middle of the park carried the sound to the outer audience without overwhelming the live performance sound.

I found the laid-back, not-entirely-focused-on-the-performance attitude of the crowd was actually conducive to the overall enjoyment of the event. We were able to drink some wine, and to lie on our backs and watch geese and planes passing overhead. The occasional squealing of brakes on Storrow Drive formed a comfortably dissident harmony with the violins. The Red Line trains kept passing, distantly, along the Longfellow Bridge, disappearing in one direction and reappearing in the other from behind the orchestra.

Families talked quietly and played out little dramas around us: a discussion about a daughter setting herself up for disappointment by applying to graduate school at Harvard; an Indian, clearly a musician, giving his pale girlfriend a one-handed massage on the exposed section of her back with rapid and complicated movements of his dark fingers that echoed the melody; a hyperactive four year old black child running around and trying to hug random strangers until his white mother, with another younger child of (maybe) the same absent father on her shoulders, tracked him down and attempted, without success, to hold him still; the lower and darker clouds moving across the high wispy jet contrail and cirrus ceiling as if in time with Beethoven’s adagio; the back and forth struggle for dominance between the smell of pizza and the odor of hot dogs radiating in from the surrounding vendors; and the gradual darkening of the sky, only made obvious when the chorus stood for the final movement’s “Ode To Joy,” and I looked back to the stage to realize how illuminated it seemed now against the gathering darkness.

* * *

Let’s face it: there’s a certain sense of obligation in attending classical music performances. (And I say this as a recovering pianist.) You sit silently in a hall, firmly focused on a stage. You can enjoy the music for a few minutes at a time, and maybe for most of the concert, but now and then you wonder just how much more of this do I have to sit through?

And there’s this sense of moral superiority at the finish. A reward. You’ve just consumed something of value. You can brag to associates that you just took in a concert, as if it had been a lecture or a seminar. You have endured culture and you are better for it. (I’m taking some liberties with the second person, here, I realize. But you do feel that way at a classical music performance, just a little, don’t you?)

Another thing I’ve noticed about classical music performances: if you’re not already familiar with a piece of music before you attend, you’ll remember remarkably little of it when it’s done. What usually remains for me is this: the layout of the hall, the chandeliers, sculptures, and ornamentation, the (usually blue or gray) hair of the inevitably senior citizens sitting in front of me, the precise, geometrical movements of musicians working in concert, and the often quite complex and divine emotional reactions I felt to whatever it was I just heard.

I suppose that this last is what we go to performances for. (At least I should hope so. I should hope that the sensual, emotional thrill of music is more of a reward than satisfying the sense of duty that obligates us to attend to “high culture” in the first place.)

Anyway we had a great time. Best of all: the event was free. People were free to stop and listen. They were just as free to walk, jog, or rollerblade away, or to sail their dinghies back and forth across the Charles. I think that’s why I enjoyed this performance so much, and why I’ll remember it much longer than anything I’ve heard in an auditorium or hall.

* * *

Hey, this series is running on Wednesdays through September. We’re planning to attend the French Romantics performance next week. Anyone in the Boston area want to join us for a picnic? How about you email me. We’ll get together for a picnic and some cult’cha!

Elizabeth And The Catapault

We went to hear Amanda Palmer sing at the Paradise last week.  What a treat!  Amanda is the lead singer of the Dresden Dolls, who play a sort of Goth/Pop/Cabaret, and we've always found their music tons of fun and just dark enough without being pretentious. 

This was a solo show where she played some new music and a bunch of covers of songs I've never heard, so I definitely felt like I got my money's worth with material I couldn't have heard on a CD.  Plus the venue was cosy and small enough that we got to sit in a semi-private little booth area with a great view of the stage.  Given that Amanda is a rising national star, it was fun to see her up close in her native Boston (where she is the second most stylish person, according to the Globe).

She wasn't in top form, sweating quite a bit and apparently sick with laryngitis.  This only made her seem all the more hard-core and punk-rock in my book, as I certainly wouldn't have had the energy or the nerve to get up and perform while feeling that sick.  Plus it made the performance seem more intimate and personal, somehow.

The real surprise treat of the evening was hearing the opener, Elizabeth and the Catapault.  Another singer/keyboardist, she was accompanied by a guitarist, drummer, and bassist (the big violin bass, not the electric kind).  She plays a blusey, Norah Jones influenced folk-rock with a sarcastic edge, and her performance was completely spot-on and self-assured, despite the fact that she appears to be about 18 years old. 

We ordered her CD right away and I've been listening to it on repeat since it's gotten here.  Unfortunately it only has six tracks, but they're all very carefully crafted and worth repeat listening.  Here's hoping her next album comes out soon, and is a little longer.

Thoughts On, And From, Music And Time

I stopped on the way home the other day and dropped $50 on some CDs.  Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which my wife discovered recently and we’ve both been enjoying; some Sigur Ros that I hadn’t heard before; Le Tigre.  A mixed bag.  The Sigur Ros is even more gloomy and ethereal than the other stuff I’ve heard, but it’ll still serve as good background-to-writing music.  Most of the Le Tigre songs are fun new-wave pop while others are blatantly political and juvenile.  The Yeahs disc seems a little harsher than the other one we’d listened to, but since I enjoy a good girl-band rockin’ out, no complaint here.

It’s refreshing to have so much new music around all of a sudden.  My car rides have been getting stale, and I’d been listening to more audiobooks than anything else.  I had the craving for new music.

But just what is it that we take from music?  Emotion?  Some kind of catharsis?  Why do we feel a hunger for it, and then feel satisfied when we hear it?  I’ve always used music as a stimulant for imagination, a gateway to something more.  It was an inspiration for stories, setting the mood or suggesting a premise. 

But I know people enjoy music for its own sake.  I'm not sure I ever have.  When I went to that Bishop Allen concert with Chili, we wondered at the people who go to clubs and just stand there, entranced, staring at the stage and swaying slightly.  They never seem to enjoy it.  It’s like they’re trying to commune with something greater than they are, but they never seem to break through.  And the music is always so loud that most of the meaning is lost. 

Maybe the music doesn’t have that much to offer, after all, and so they take their communion from the high-volume assault instead, letting the music get inside of them not with any meaning but by shaking their bones.

I guess what I want from music is the stimulation.  Maybe, transformation.  Make me think new things; make me feel new ways.  Put me into a mental state so unique that I will never be able to share it with another human being (not even by playing them the same music).  And yet make me want to share it, so much so that the fact that sharing it is impossible will break my heart.  Because maybe this yearning will inspire me to speak, to attempt the impossible.  And maybe I’ll achieve a thing or two that are good enough.   

It’s not that I’m utterly alone, listening to music.  There is me, and there is the music.  The music understands.  After all, it is what’s doing this to me.  The music and I work together to create this mental state.  The great tragedy is that the music cannot create the exact same state in someone else.  Other people can love the same songs I love, but they cannot love them in the same way.  They'll never really understand it. 

Worse: I cannot understand it tomorrow the way I did today!

When I feel I’m going crazy it’s thoughts like these that drive me there.

Everything’s so mutable.  Every second gone forever.  And I will never honestly remember what it felt like to hear a song yesterday, to eat a pizza yesterday, to be in yesterday.  And yet – those times are still back there! 

I got married on April 4, 1997 and I always will have got married on April 4, 1997.  Nothing can change the events of that perfect day.  Yet I cannot feel them again.  Remembering it is 95% fabrication; it's self-storytelling.  Every second of that day and every other day is written in a four-dimensional medium stronger than stone, and yet it might as well be written inside a mountain. 

How small is a moment?  How wide is the slice of time we call “now?” Can we hold an entire song in our minds can call that "now?"  Or must we be satisfied with a phrase, a bar, a note?  Hold that note, we cry (silently, because we are holding our breath.)  Because as long as it lingers we don't have to move on, and begin to forget.

And where in space and time are the Alzheimer’s patients who talk as if it were years ago, whose children cannot be their children because these children are too old.  Their real children must be young now, and in some other room.  Have these patients found a way to burrow into the mountain, to excavate the past and feel it again? 

Or have they unhinged space from time, making their children truly young again, but moving them far away from where they are, from where the rest of us see them? 

Kurt Vonnegut thought it might be possible to come unstuck in time.  You still had your one life, but you’d bounce back and forth in it, experiencing now the birth of your child, now your military service, now the time your grandfather sink-or-swim threw you into that pool.  Once you came unstuck like this, you lost your childish belief in free will.  Yet he seemed sanguine at the possibility.  “The trick,” he said, “is to ignore all the bad times and focus on the good.”  And also, I suppose, to live through as many good times as you can while you still believe in the possibility.  Make it good, he implies, because you might be coming back here.

I wonder if losing free will is a fair exchange for this kind of immortality? 

But haven’t we lost it already?

The past is written and buried in the mountains.  Why isn’t the future, too?  Why are past and future so different?  Is listening to a song we love again and again like a little time-loop? 

Or are we just moles, burrowing through the rocks, examining the strata of our lives, then leaving them behind?

I Do Have A Brother

I may have mentioned on occasion that I have a brother, and you may have said, "Whaaaaaaa?"  But it's true.  And he's some kind of big deal.  He already has 560 friends on myspace.  And he does this thing where he talks into a microphone and you can hear him on the radio.

Redbones plus Bishop Allen plus Ladies Wrestling equals Sausage Party

I had a boy's night out on Thursday.  I don't get many of these.  In fact, I even slept at my man C-dogg's (I never call him that) house and it was the first time I've slept separately from my wife in over seven years.  Weird.  It's taken us a little while to realize that, now we have two cars, we don't both have to be in the same place at the same time.  So while Donna went off to celebrate lady-time with a hot girl-on-girl pillowfight (or maybe they were doing craft projects and watching one of those celebrity chef shows), and C-dogg's wife was off canoeing in the Adirondacks or making White Mountain chairs or something, C-dogg and me got it on with a total sausage party.

We ate at Redbones and sat at the counter by the kitchen, where you can watch the cooks stack rack after rack of ribs up in a macabre pile of deliciousness.  I had a friend once (and still do, I hope) who couldn't stand to eat any meat that resembled the animal it came from.  A chicken breast was fine, or a steak.  Ribs or chicken wings were marginal.  But those supermarket rotisseries with the thirty rotating chicken carcasses would send her over the edge.  She wouldn't like Redbones, but I do.  I couldn't decide on which animal to consume so I got the BBQ hash where they just chop up a bunch of them and lay them on top of some beans and collard greens.  (I was reminded of Monty Python's Meaning of Life, where the fat guy orders everything on the menu and has them throw it into a blender.)  The cooks surprised me by handing our meals to us directly across the counter, about 30 seconds after we ordered.  Delicious, and straddling that line between spicy and painful that rewards just as it punishes.

We rode the subway, which I do rarely enough to absolutely love it.  I am starved for faces, in this mostly-rural life I lead, and most of the faces I do see are mediated by cathode ray tubes or glossy magazine pages.  But there are faces on the subway that would never make it onto TV.  These faces are rich with hope, pain, dirt, and wrinkles - details that would also never make it onto TV.  They are faces full of stories which cannot be summarized in half an hour or 500 words.  It's a little overwhelming.  It would take me a year to work through what all these people have done and what they hope to do, and we're only on the train for four stops.

We went to the Middle East club to hear Bishop Allen play, which was the whole point.  We like this band.  They're unique in that they sing about more than love ("I love love") or Rage ("Stick it to the Man").  They have a song about a battleship, for example, and one about an iron-works, and one about restoring a discarded piano.  They tell stories, like Nick Drake or Harry Chapin.  I dunno.  I don't know much about popular music.  But these guys are local, clever, fun.  I felt like seeing what they looked like, watching how they do what they do, showing some support for the new guys.  And it all would have been great if they hadn't turned the volume up to painful levels.  I mean, I might be getting to old for clubbing, but come on, 85% (and that is an exact measurement) of the music was lost to distortion, to the point that the heating ducts gave off a dry rattle like massive locusts' wings and threatened to drown out the music.  I guess there is some pleasure to be had in the chest-cavity rattling, bowel-loostening vibration of it all, but this sort of music wasn't really meant to be cranked.  IMHO, listening on the CDs is more pleasurable.

Bishop Allen was followed by B.L.O.W.W., which as 30something aging bohemians we had some reservations about.  "I just hope that nobody gets hurt," C-dogg tells me, and that's when I realize that the name C-dogg is never going to stick.  Anyway though I couldn't help but get a little excited about watching women wrestle, and watching women pretend to wrestle actually was kind of fun.  It was like a cross between those old WWF shows that my stepdad used to get drunk to (are they still on?) and a high school play, plus a lot of cussing.  I'd have to say Malicious Mile Heidi was my favorite, although that you had to hand it to Tammy Tagalong for grit and determination.  I mean, she showed up to wrestle and she wasn't even invited!  Cute.  Cute stuff.

We skipped out on the last band and passed midnight somewhere on the subway.  C-dogg has a thesis to get to in the morning, and I have to save my strength for...you know, all that stuff that I do.  Aging, I guess.  Then the next day I read that Pretty Girls Make Graves are playing the same club, one week later.  Now there's a band that can stand up to some cranking.  I may have to go back.  The wife may have to come.  I'll buy some earplugs before we do.

Zombies and Pianos

I’ve retreated from the world as of late, I realize, offering very little in the way of either feedback or contribution to a universe which is doing its level best to sustain and edify me. I have, rather, become a sponge. Reorganizing my time has allowed me to absorb more movies, books, and music than I have at any other time in my adult life. Meanwhile a vast reduction in the amount of booze I drink has allowed me to retain them. The discovery of the audio book has played a part, as has, I suspect, the arrival of my grand piano, a 1926 Steinert. Piano practice is good for the memory. It used to seem a futile endeavor to me: working for hours to learn and refine a few minutes of music which would only fade if not refreshed by daily practice. But now that the manuscript of my life has thickened to that point where patterns and revelations are emerging that simply could not be sustained by a shorter story (and where I feel uniquely wiser in a way as mundane as the human race) I realize that the sections remembered most clearly are those periods that involved a daily effort of rewiring my synapses as I reached, zombie-like, towards the divine but fleeting living food of music.

I’ve been reading David Wellington’s Zombie Trilogy, and you should, too. The guy gives it away for free, here, and soon you can support him by buying it, here. He thinks big and has fun with it, and if you think Zombie fiction is as tired as, well, zombies, you’ll be amazed by the number of twists and startling, yet sensible, explanations he provides for a world overrun by the living dead. It’s a fugue of horror conventions, zombies, liches, science and magic woven into something completely unexpected. It’s the sort of horror you can’t put down, to say the least. But more: it’s horror that creates a world so compelling and so terribly bleak that you emerge from it with a happy variant of post traumatic stress disorder. How wonderful it is, you realize, to live in this world and not that, drinking coffee in the morning and commuting to our jobs, rather than scavenging for food and ammo and scrambling to keep our souls in our bodies while we spend another day blasting away at the shambling horde. The fact that he can create this happier version of PTSD (and I we need a name for this waking-from-a-nightmare-experience which is not really catharsis and not quite waking from a nightmare) is a testament to his skill as a writer. The fact that he got a book deal after posting a serialized novel on the internet is a testament to this just and wonderful world.

Reflections on a Deerhoof Album

This album from Deerhoof has been growing on me lately.  The first couple listens come off as so much noise, more pretense than art.  But eventually, through repetition (made easier because it's a short album, barely over 30 minutes), you start to look forward to the bits of harmony that alternate with the ugliness, and to savor that adorable, accented voice, cooing at you and spouting its melodic nonsense.

Because that's life, right?  Patterns of ugliness and beauty, unpredictable, maybe, but also repeating without end.  Philip Glass knew it, and lord knows I hated him for a long time.  I'd be practicing some sonata for months on end, and he came along and played some alternating sixths and arpeggiated chords and called that classical music.  I was pissed off, too, that he could evoke so much of an emotional response from me.  I couldn't like him.  If I liked him, it would invalidate all my hard work.

But I was betrayed by my senses.  Either that, or I got older and realized that art doesn't have to be perfect to be a success. 

Anyway, repetitions: play this album (or any album) at the beginning of your daily commute each day.  It becomes a tissue tracing of sound over reality: this song at this place.  If you brake and accelerate the same, day after day, the tracing will get darker, and if there's traffic and unexpected starts and stops, it will start to blur, double and treble vision broadening into a haze, dark sonic outlines surrounded by a cloud of possibility.  And then move on, and wonder: how long can a song mean an overpass, a gas station, a pot-hole, or a dilapidated hot pink house?  And what will those landmarks mean when those sounds have left me for something new, but I'm still driving the same route?