February 2009 Archives

I'm not at all trendy—I generally pick up on trends five to fifteen years after they emerge—but last night I went to Philadelphia's newest, hottest restaurant. It's only been open a week, and a journalist friend invited me to an familiarization dinner for the media. She said it was "a fab freebie, one of the last shreds of glamour clinging to the carcass of journalism." Let's see now, the solace of friendship, food, drink, joyful experiences that cost no money, all things I love immoderately—OK. I went.

I've written about food, but usually not in the food-writer way. I don't call things sinful or decadent—I don't think things that taste good are sinful or indicative of societal decay—and I don't say things have a "hint of saffron," tracing subtle tastes relentlessly to their hideouts like bloodhounds running down an escaped convict. Mostly I don't because I can't. Inability shapes much of what I do, to tell you the truth.

But I also am more interested in a restaurant's general approach. The thing about trendiness that I don't like is that it chokes out a certain natural profusion in the culinary environment. One restaurant does something new, and then everyone is doing that. The eclecticism of "fusion"—I mean, everyone's fusing stuff, all over the landscape. I just checked the menu of the fanciest French restaurant in this area, one where people wait long periods before they're vouchsafed an opportunity to finally spend their money there. One of the entrees was vaguely Caribbean, another vaguely Asian. All of it was utterly familiar. They're somehow making freshness itself unfresh. And there's something bloodless about it, too. I often tell people that I'd rather have a seriously good, honest expression of an unfancy food, an outstanding hamburger, say, than one more chicken breast with a ginger-mango-blackberry reduction on a bed of polenta. And years ago I dubbed the latter "Yuppie Chow." (Cute but that's my term so hands off.)

So anyway, you can't create perpetual freshness by continually throwing fruit and berries in the fry pan and what? Why are you shouting? The food? God almighty, the food was incredible. Some fusions aren't worth the bother, but when you combine Peruvian and Cantonese cuisine, the fabric of space-time is ripped open and this incredible profusion of dizzying dishes comes pouring out into our own universe. Imaginative, subtle juxtapositions of flavors. Friendly, no-attitude staff. A little too noisy but pobody's nerfect. Go there! Go go go! I mean, I don't like vain, empty trends. But I do like good food and this was.

During the day I may compose a post that I'm mentally writing—something poignant, evocative, multilayered, shot through with a sense of poetic transience straight out of Asian philosophy.

This one, however, is just silly. I was over at Wonkette, where the commenters talk obsessively about non-vanilla sex, and they were snarking down on this Utah state senator for talking obsessively about non-vanilla sex. And for some reason, I remembered half a lifetime back to this amazing rumor that went like a tsunami through the Philadelphia area to the effect that a local newscaster had shown up at a hospital for—let me put this as delicately as possible—the removal of a rodent.

Let me say parenthetically that there are lots of things folks do when they're at home that I really don't understand the appeal of, but hey, if everyone's consenting, it's your life. The problem here is that I have to think that any gerbil that would consent to this sort of thing would obviously need psychiatric treatment and the consent wouldn't be valid. It's like there's free speech guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, but you can't slander or libel people. There have to be limits, and I really do see a bright line here, so to speak.

So. Anyway. This newscaster. The rumor roars through in the course of a day—rumors got around fast even before the Internet, my children—and of course I watched the guy that night. He looked pretty mad, although I suppose that could have been my imagination.

As time went on the rumor was debunked. But just today I wondered if the rumors were echoing on the Web, and don't worry, they are, which is bad enough in itself. What really gave me a pang was some copy about the rumor in the Google listing for a site that was clearly the guy's booking agency. Can't be, I thought—it would be unprecedented. It would be like the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library having a diorama of JFK in a penthouse, Manhattans on the coffee table, a Brubeck LP playing in the background as he unhooks Marilyn Monroe's bra. But no, the guy's an actor now, specializing in playing reporters and newscasters, and a ways down in his bio it mentions his being remembered in the Philadelphia area for "being the victim of false rumors of a rodent (hamster, possibly gerbil) related fetish." I won't link—this is appalling enough as it is, without doing any more SEO on it. This thing is that firmly attached to the man, and for so long—it's as chilling as the chains on Marley's Ghost.

I don't know. Occasionally you hear of some poor child in Ecuador or somewhere so horribly disfigured that it's as though the entire world takes pity and the child is flown to the States or Europe or somewhere and plastic surgeons fix him or her up and restore the chance at a normal life of which fate robbed them. I think we should pity this man the same way. Every time he meets someone, the person looks pensive, wondering why that name is familiar. For a quarter-century now! It's heartrending. We can fix a face, if we care enough. But alas, there's no operation to fix a horribly disfigured reputation, even when it's no fault of the rodent-related rumor victim. There's no operation for him. But I sure did wish there were, for a minute there.

Um—I should probably make breakfast and do something constructive now. Bye!

Just discovered this today—a passage from the The Gulistan of Saadi by Sheikh Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi. It was written in 1259, by the way:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one and from the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

Personally I have problems and cares aplenty and mortal goods are only part of it, but I'm going on a fishing trip in less than a week to a faraway tropic isle. I don't know if hyacinths grow there, but I suppose they very well might. I'll carry on hoping so, at any rate.

The trouble with people telling you to count your blessings is they usually say it when you've suddenly noticed that you have fewer blessings to count.

I'm at the liquor store, and there's this quarterly publication about things you can drink available, so I ask the checkout guy for a copy—I'm a writer, I say, and I have an idea for a story they might run.

What kind of writer? he asks. He's a middle-aged guy, facial hair and glasses, a hard-to-read face, short, intense but friendly.

What kind? I'm flummoxed; all kinds, I guess, magazines, whatever.

Now he wants to know my favorite writers. I flounder again—if I name one, you get a distorted idea, lacking nuance. Two or three, better, but really I'd prefer to give two dozen at least, so you have the right idea. It's not that I care so much about what people think of my literary tastes—I just don't want to give a wrong impression, it seems like a tiny little betrayal of the capacity to communicate.

Him, he loves F. Scott Fitzgerald, it seems. Someone gave him a book of short stories. He shakes his head, looking off in the middle of the store, shakes his head like he's remembering a long-lost lover, the kind that haunts you forever.

I mention that I've never really been a huge fan, and he recoils in shock. No no no, I say, he's obviously wonderful, just a cup-of-tea thing, not mine, in other words, but I've been meaning to revisit him and see if I missed something the first time around. The guy relaxes, gives me absolution. A woman comes to the counter, he really ought to attend to her, but he can't let it go—seems he's often thought about writing himself, he's got stories inside, that faraway look is on his face again.

I tell him he should, mention classes and writer's groups. And to give him a benediction myself, I say I'll read some Fitzgerald and we'll compare notes next time. This satisfies, and he turns to his customer and I push the door open and leave. One more of those moments—you're in line at the motor vehicles bureau, you sit next to someone on the train, and suddenly there's a whole marvelous inner universe revealed, and you're like Balboa, struggling up hill after hill in a part of Central America Europeans have never seen before, hot and sweaty, slapping bugs, then cresting yet another hill and stopping, silent, upon a peak in Darien, as Keats said, suddenly full of unimagined wonder.

Had lunch with a bunch of people today, and the economy came up and we seem to have settled on a phrase to describe the situation, because I hear it all the time: "It's bad." But I have some thoughts to offer.

I'm kind of a dunce about math—my mom may have dropped me on the math-learning side of my head when I was little—but there's a concept called "regression toward the mean" that I think can help us stay the course. I won't use the math terms, because if I do, I'll probably run the risk described by the writer John Gierach of sounding like a 14-year-old boy talking about women. But the basic idea is that if you do well on a test one day, you're likely to do a little worse the next time you take the same test, and if you do poorly you're likely to do a little better.

The Wikipedia article is written by someone who seems—I wouldn't know for sure—to actually know a lot about math and who warns against all sorts of ways you can misunderstand this. But I choose to believe that if a series of quite hideous things happens to you in a short time, the laws of mathematics which govern the universe are working to draw the circumstances of your life back toward the middle. This will not work as strongly for you if you're a big screwup. But all things being equal, it's something to sustain you when you have a run of bad luck. So hang in there! Which you should do anyway, of course. Whatever's going on, you're likely to muddle through. Ups and downs, ya know?

I suppose I'm like the last person to have heard about this Joaquin Phoenix interview on David Letterman—he basically doesn't respond to any questions during it—but it does raise a point I've often made: We shouldn't really have all these interviews with actors and actresses—actpersons—whatever. Why? I'm glad you asked. Because think about it: Actors and actresses make their living saying things that other people write for them to say. Yeah, yeah, some do improv, and there's no reason that an actor couldn't be an interesting person just because. But there just might be really interesting people to interview who happen not to be actors. There might even be people to interview who aren't even celebrities. Just sayin'.

By the way, I saw that Joaquin guy in a couple of movies. He was in Gladiator, and he played a callow, sullen young guy and did it with a realism that made me think callow and sullen might be one of his signature strengths as an actor. I also saw him in Signs, quite possibly the most boring, vapid movie ever made about attacking aliens. That M. Night guy—Chameleon? Simoleon? Himalayan?—whatever, I think he lives in my area, and if I ever see him I'm going to be strongly tempted to ask for my money back.

Huh? Cranky? I might be. 'pologize. As a matter of fact I woke up in the middle of the night and laid there thinking about my problems, one of which is that I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping. One hears good things about Ambien, however.

I think I'm going to stop blogging now. Work to do. Bye.

I was in newspapers and magazines, and still write for the latter, and over the years there are certain things I've come to loathe about the business. One is this business of asking people how they feel about family members dying. (It's about 20 paragraphs into the story.) Obviously the reporters know the answer in a general way; the point is for the stricken relatives to emote for the cameras. Maybe the people reading or watching feel a pang of genuine sympathy. But the pain is still transformed into a commodity. And I think it's despicable.

I'm celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday in my typical way—quietly, at home, trying to be rational. I strive to be rational the way a poor person will work and work and become rich—being rational doesn't come naturally to me, see, so I work and work at it all the time and never feel entirely confident that I really, truly have a lock on it.

So. Anyway. I admit—actually, I'm a little proud of it—that I've poked a little fun over the years at people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible or any other holy book. In Catch-22, the chaplain would agonize in low moods over just this question: "Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once heard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall?" But to many people—more than 40 percent—it evidently does seem probable. People arrived on earth all set to go, no evolution about it. The overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Why, it was put there to test our faith.

I used to think that people who thought that way were blithering idiots who couldn't get through the day without a trip to the emergency room because they were forever cutting or burning themselves or drinking antifreeze or whatever. But today I suddenly got a different take on it—for the most part, these are folks who are nutso on one subject but more or less sensible about whether they should get the car fixed, or get a new one, that kind of thing. They put aside rationality when it suits them, for emotional purposes or whatever. And now I understand. I'm not religious, but taking an occasional vacation from being rational is something I can very much relate to.

Now, I'm not one of these people who's all rah-rah about everything European and thinks they're superior to us in every way. I mean, I've heard French pop music, OK? And I don't think the BBC is perfect, but they do have lots of interesting funny little stuff, sciencey things and all. Today we're informed that if you're sitting around wondering whether humans and Neanderthals interbred, the results are in, and evidently they didn't. But now that I know that, it seems sad. A Neanderthal boy, a Cro-Magnon girl, walking and talking. Looking so sadly into each other's eyes. Holding each other. Crying until there were no more tears. Whispering goodbye, and walking away, never to see each other again. Because it just wasn't done, back then. They each found someone else, by and by, I would think, someone from their own species. But they never forgot each other, did they? Of course not. Once in a while it would all come back. They'd put down the hand ax or bone awl they were working with, and just sigh, with a faraway look. Their mates would say "There's that look again! What ails you?" and they'd say, "Nothing, dear." And go back to work. Call me sentimental but that seems like a high price to pay, just to keep the respective genome sequences unsullied. The real thing just doesn't come along all that often.

With apologies to Christina Rossetti:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I,
But when the roof rips off the shed
The wind is passing by.

Robin Hood, as everyone knows, was a legendary figure from medieval England who did pretty much what he felt like doing, and that's the kind of person young boys like to hear about, so the story is about six, seven, maybe even eight centuries old and going strong.

I read about him when I was a kid, and I loved how good he was at things. In the version I read, he came in disguise one day to an archery contest. It came down to him and another archer, whose next shot hit the exact middle of the target. Then Robin shot, and split his rival's arrow. This happens in real life—you'd be amazed how accurate you can be with a bow—but to a young boy who wasn't allowed to throw things in the house this was an intoxicating example of deadly mastery.

So here we are a few decades later, and I'm going on a fishing trip to a faraway tropic isle in a matter of days. Yesterday I went out to the park for two separate sessions to practice casting my fly rod. That sounds like sloth but isn't. These trips cost a lot of money that I worked hard to get, and if you can't cast a fly with consistent accuracy at least 40 feet or so through wind strong enough to ruffle your shirt while following the movement of a faint, ghostly shadow in the water, you've wasted your money. You can't be thinking about the cast at all; it has to be ingrained.

Let us forswear false modesty: the friends I'm going with are that good, and so am I. Not a master, but quite a bit better than average. Study and practice over time, that's the only thing. Take heed, my young friends! But I've gotten rusty, and I found I had trouble keeping my form at its peak when I focused on a tuft of grass as a target and didn't watch the rod going back and forth. This has troubled me in previous practice sessions, and yesterday morning it was so bad I gave up and went home to work. I had other things on my mind, so practicing wasn't going to help and I knew it.

But I got back on that horse, went out again in the afternoon, and applied some critical thinking to the problem. I took the muscle memory of the usual good-form cast and concentrated on reproducing that while I watched the target. And bingo—that was it. Cast after cast arrowed out straight and clean. Problem solved.

So I'm walking back toward the car, the rod balanced lightly in my left hand. A well-made chef's knife or shotgun feels lighter than its weight because of the way they balance, and so do good fly rods, When relaxed, confident anglers walk along a bank, they carry their rods with a certain lightness and grace, the way lovers hold hands, utterly naturally. I thought about that, and about old Robin Hood, strolling away from the contest, holding that bow lightly, like it was part of him.

One is never a total master at anything, of course—the greatest masters feel frustration at their shortcomings far more than any duffer. And partial mastery in one realm, a fine thing in itself, is no bulwark against abject failure in others. But once in a while you do achieve a certain mastery over yourself, don't you? Insight, work, discipline, self-control, concentration, and suddenly you're like a magnifying glass, setting things on fire. Once in a while, it all comes together, and you outdo yourself, splitting your own arrow. And even just once in a while, that's an awfully good feeling. I went home, did some good work for a client, and when I poured myself a drink at cocktail hour, I felt like I'd earned it.

I can think of many problems and difficulties I would just as soon skip. But a minute ago I went out on my back porch, and a rare winter thunderstorm was brewing up, the wind blowing and the air unnaturally warm, and the threat of bad weather gave me a fierce joy. No idea why, but since I was a little kid I've loved it when bad weather comes on. Could there be a crusty ship captain in one of my previous incarnations? The wind blows, the trees toss, and a gleam comes in my eye. Bring it on, I think—we'll see who wins. I'm quite the quaking soul with other things I could name, but with bad weather I'm a Viking. That eye-gleam glows, and I don't really care who wins, me or the storm, I just want to know how the contest will come out. I remember when I was little, four or five, my family huddling in the basement during a hurricane. I enjoyed it—it was different. And I also remember melting snow for water when a blizzard killed the electricity and there was no water from the well in the rustic inn I used to live in. Some of my favorite memories come from bad storms, actually. I suppose that's because it isn't about me. The storm doesn't care if my clothes are unfashionable or my musical tastes unhip. It's not about me at all. It's about existing, or not existing. Nothing personal, in other words. The weather doesn't care if I live or die—it doesn't care about me at all. And I like it that way. Strange, no?

There are people you can talk to, aren't there? People who get what you're saying, with whom you have an implicit understanding. You can relax, be your absolute self, and it's all right with them—they actually like you as you are. The relief of it! There ought to be a word for such people. In Bokononism, the religion Kurt Vonnegut invented for the novel Cat's Cradle, the term "karass" signifies "a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will." They're linked, in other words, brothers and sisters under the skin. That's really not what I'm talking about, but it made a cute headline and I felt I had no choice.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning about how everyone has met people they feel that way about, but they haven't met many of them. I hate to say this, but most people, if you're injudicious enough to say anything halfway original or interesting or insightful or true, they stare at you with a sort of stolid bovine incomprehension. Why aren't you talking about movies and sports and what a jerk the boss is? It's just sad. I thought of the predicament of a person who lives in a town with a universal smoking ban, a person whose one great talent, alas, is blowing smoke rings.

Happened to be reading about the film Casablanca, and was struck by this:

[Co-writer] Julius Epstein would later note the screenplay contained "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better."

Hmm! When corn works, there's nothing better. Very interesting idea. When I googled the quote, I got a number of pages about ethanol and such, and Mr. Epstein is not currently available for further interviewing, so I'm going to guess at what he meant. To me the movie recalls Kurt Vonnegut's description of another work as "a sugar pill with a bitter coating." It features cheerfully cynical, amoral characters who nevertheless fall all over themselves to act nobly in a crisis, risking their lives for causes and each other. This is a bit at odds with one of the main themes of so-called "serious" art of the modern period: that human life is bleak and hopeless, that each human is alone in a hostile and meaningless universe.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a pretty good example of this seriousness. It was written two years after Casablanca, and Epstein and Beckett were contemporaries. And surely Epstein was aware of this and similar works, and thought his own was corny by comparison.

Me, I try to straddle these views. I happen to be an agnostic existentialist myself: I don't think there's any meaning to life other than the meaning we assign to it. But I reject the idea that virtues flow only from religious belief, that life without God leads only to madness and amorality. Beckett risked his life in the French Resistance. If he had been caught, and he nearly was, he would have in all likelihood been tortured to death. You can't ask more from anyone than that.

I don't know what set of influences made him able to do that. But cooperation and self-sacrifice is hardwired into most social animals. A bear will defend her cubs quite enthusiastically without ever having read the Bible, and a dog will protect a member of its pack against a stronger opponent—it's just how they are. People are more complex, of course. But we've got that sense in our psyches. The greater complexity, however, means we need more sophisticated models for our behavior, and it's been long noted that stories can help people remember and act upon a society's ideals. For all its cynical winking at the ways of the world, Casablanca strongly suggests that meaning of a kind can be found in serving others. It's not philosophically sophisticated. It's much more about the ideal than the real. But as Beckett's contrasting life and work show us, and the daily lives of most people who strive to be decent also show, the real and the ideal, despair and hope, cynicism and cheerfulness are inextricably intertwined. The one movie undoubtedly called "corny" more often than any other is also a dark vision of how bleak life can be. And it's widely shown at the end of every year, because it also cheers people up, to the point that they cry for happiness. Casablanca is not philosophically rigorous, as we've noted, but the damn thing makes you feel good. In a crisis, it might help you act with more altruism and nobility, remembering the characters. Maybe every story that gives you hope is by definition corny. But I pity people who can't derive hope and inspiration from a story. If it's corn, okay, it's corn. But if it works, I think I'm with Julius on this one—there's nothing better.

Oh, and sorry for the long post. I've been asked to do a brief presentation, just a filler really, on some thoughts I've had about literary charm, and this seemed a propos so I wanted to sketch it out. Later!

Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof, we say, which is an expression I like. First, it suggests that there's such a thing is insufficient evil. I once heard a guy complaining that when he was younger he had wanted a certain guitar, and his dad had refused to buy him the guitar. A friend of mine named Jim was listening, not saying anything, and I inwardly winced because Jim's dad had died when Jim was in his early teens. Jim used to make a point of eating liver now and then, if I remember correctly, because his dad had always urged him to do so. At any rate, the unbestowed guitar didn't seem like such a big deal, under the circumstances.

And having troubles focuses the mind, doesn't it? It gives you problems to solve and happier days to look forward to. Anyway—sufficient evil today for the likes of me, but I'll spare you the details. Same old stuff, nothing so unusual. But the sufficiency of evil hardly ever means you don't have reasons to be of good cheer. It's early February here in the northern hemisphere, but we're having a sudden warm spell where I live, and when I left the house this morning, damn if the birds weren't singing. Can't remember the last time I heard that, and I stopped on my back porch for a moment to listen. Then I got in the car and went out to see a fly fishing buddy, and we tied flies and practiced casting for an upcoming trip. And nearing home, around dinnertime, the moon was painting a silvery glow on the snowy fields. And now the cat is lying on my lap as I type. He almost died, not quite a year ago. Almost. Which only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, to coin another phrase. Birdsong, fishing buddies, moonlight on the snow, a purring cat. Sufficient to the day are the blessings thereof as well, the way I see it. The cat isn't complaining, at any rate, and neither am I.

I got curious, after becoming bloated on infopellets at Facebook, and it seems that solace and meaning do, in fact, have URLs. (Don't even bother clicking, trust me.) 

I just deleted a post because I judged it flat and banal. Has that ever been done in the history of the blogosphere? Are you even allowed to? Confused.

In my twenties—since when, alas, a goodly number of years have gone blurring past—I was nuts for the piano. A friend came back from his first year at college with a bunch of jazz albums, and we played and played them and in time I developed a deep passion for jazz piano.

It's not that easy to learn an instrument after childhood, but I sure tried. I practiced all the time, and took lessons. One teacher was a phenomenal musician, but as time went on I came to have some doubts about his approach to teaching, and I wasn't so sure about his approach to life either. The teaching was pure technique, no songs or anything. Scales, chords, sight reading, lots of other elements of music, but no actual music. I asked him when I'd start playing songs, and he thought about it, and said in about two years.

It was hard to argue with him—he was a prickly, irascible person. We were talking in his driveway one day—he lived with his parents—and the family dog came cringing up to him, and he kicked it hard. It stayed by his feet, whining. He looked down—there was some of the dog's fur stuck in his sole. "F---er got hair on my boot," he said. And kicked the dog again.

For sight-reading practice he gave me a book from Bela Bartok's beginning piano series "Mikrokosmos." I'm no expert on musical theory, but from what I've read, Bartok didn't care much one way or the other about tonality. Beethoven and Mozart are tonal, and so is almost every form of music people actually like to listen to. After hearing a Bartok chamber piece one time, I remarked to a musician acquaintance that I just couldn't figure out how to enjoy the piece. He furrowed his brow, thinking. "I don't think it's meant to be enjoyed," he said. He didn't elaborate, but I supposed that he meant the music was an intellectual exercise to which we were to listen in respectful puzzlement. Atonal music provokes that response among most people, if it gets listened to at all. If you haven't heard anyone going around lately whistling tunes by Anton Webern or Alban Berg, believe me, there's a reason for that.

Anyway, I hated the Bartok stuff. It might as well have been random notes. I didn't enjoy it, certainly, and it wasn't all that great for sight-reading practice because I literally could not be sure I was playing the right notes. I said so, and the teacher predictably snarled at me: "Ya want me to give you baby stuff?" I said no. But one day I called him and said I didn't want to take lessons from him any more. He sounded like he was going to cry, said I had a strong attitude toward practicing, but we parted company. A friend saw him in a bar afterward and said the teacher was calling me unpleasant names. Not long after that I was told that he had dropped dead of a heart attack. I sifted my feelings to see if I felt bad about it, and I didn't.

I kept learning, and eventually I was good enough to play in Top 40 bands. We'd play jazz for the dining crowd. I spent six nights a week for a couple of years in bars, but eventually the raffish fun of it wore thin and I got out of the business—I realized  that I was wasting my life playing bad music for bad money for bad people. But I kept a piano at home.

Life went on, and for long stretches I wouldn't sit down and play more than three or four times a year. But in the past couple of years I've been playing a lot more, practicing every day, and it's coming along. I get together with a bass player friend and people don't run out of the room or anything when we play. And lately I've been practicing my sight reading with easy classical music, because I like the classical at least as well as jazz.

Yesterday I went out and bought more easy piano books, the easiest I could find. Baby stuff, in short. It's what I need to sight-read. You need practice in seeing groups of notes at a time, and reading ahead of what you're playing, and seeing the patterns so you're not trying to read individual notes.

And the music is pretty. This isn't the made-up stuff from the instructional books, you know, "Dance of the Leprechauns" and so forth. These are simple melodies with simple harmonies, but they're also original music by Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and that gang. Pretty little melodies, and it's nice, awfully nice, to sit down and actually play them. They're like music-box tunes—some cheerful, others wistful, all pretty. And if you really listen, there's something about it, something profound. Haydn, for instance, wrote lots of pretty little tunes. But if you read about him, you'll see he had a pretty hard life, with much that he could have chosen to be bitter about. But instead of kicking the dog, he made pretty music. Baby stuff, some call it. But it's charming. There's delicacy and tenderness in it, and often a trace of poetic sorrow. It's fragile. vulnerable, and your heart goes out to it. And it's meant to be enjoyed, at least, and I do. 

Snow in Britain, or the Isles, or that part of the world, at any rate. Snow here too. The little town sleeps under a blanket of it, but for the moment I don't. Woke up in the middle of the night, decided I wouldn't drift off again, got the laptop to—to do what?—I don't know. Consult the oracles, I suppose. Pretend the screen was a crystal ball. Something.

The cat came down and installed himself on my lap. The oracles murmured their cryptic phrases, smoke swirled in the crystal ball. And some music started playing in my mind, and if memory served it was one of Bach's two-part inventions. Stately, beautiful, as real and right as the stars in the skies. It's a good thing to have this in my mind, I thought. And I thought of a night two and a half years ago:

6/14/06
A Hole in the Head
My excuse for not blogging yesterday? Sinus trouble. I know, I know, there've been people in iron lungs who composed 67 symphonies and so forth and so on. But I just felt run-down and draggy. Today I'm a bit perkier, and thinking about the concept of "tastiness." Certain musicians will describe another musician's performance as "tasty." The one word connotes a great deal: crispness, economy, effectiveness. A tasty solo, let's say, is played with clear articulation and good rhythmic drive, it's done with confidence, and it uses the most effective sorts of musical phrases to generate an emotional response in the listener. Tasty stuff is often up-tempo—the adjective is rarely applied to minor-key, sad songs, no matter how effectively done—but typically it's not a display of lightning speed, and pointless displays of technical prowess are the opposite of tasty almost by definition. Tasty works, in a word.

I was thinking about this because I saw a musician named John Pizzarelli at a jazz festival last week, and I really enjoyed him. Didn't know much about him, just that he's the son of the famous father Bucky, and when he started up I thought maybe he was a cynical sort, because he did a number of swing-style tunes and I thought he was capitalizing on the swing-dancing fad of some years ago. (See below for how much of a trend-follower I am.) But he was good. And the solos, all of them, were tasty. As his set went on, I became more and more impressed. He was smooth, well dressed, practiced patter, all that. But he cared about the music, and about its communicating effectively, far more than many of the other acts who pretended to a greater seriousness and dedication. If music doesn't make you feel something, if it's just the same styles that were fresh 30 years ago that you're rehashing decades later with no real inspiration, well, that ain't tasty. Pizzarelli and crew made you feel something. He did a lot of Brazilian music toward the end of his set, and it just washed over us all, sitting there on the grass in the city park, the night sky overhead and the buildings surrounding us. You just felt a little closer to Rio, for a few minutes, and when he finished I joined the rest of the crowd in honestly clapping and cheering because I wanted him to know he'd done a great job. He acknowledged the applause, of course, but just before he left he looked up, away past the park, where the moon was rising over the buildings to the east. He seemed lost in thought. "Music is good," he said pensively—into the microphone, of course, because we heard it, but mainly, it seemed, to himself.

Warm night, then. Cold night now, the town still sleeping, the cat still on my lap. There's a piano at the other end of the sofa, with books of music on it. I've been playing a lot lately. As Mr. Pizzarelli says, music is good, winter or summer. You wake in the night, your heart not entirely at ease, but if there's a nice little cat on your lap, and snow lies on the lawns and rooftops and sidewalks, and Bach melodies pipe in the background of your mind, somehow your own circumstances otherwise don't seem to matter as much. Ups and downs, like the weather. Music is good, and life is beautiful. It just is. And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, gang.