Left of the Dial

Expertise

So it’s a gorgeous day today, sunny, few clouds, tiny breeze now and then. I’m hanging out with Top Management and The Boy as she does a little bit of gardening out front and he practices going in a semi-circle, holding onto my knee as I sit on the front steps. He’s occasionally tempted to let go and see how far he can get but prudence is currently the better part of his valor. Considering the fact that just six months ago they weren’t sure he’d ever walk, I cut him a bit o’ slack.

We’re chatting and it’s extremely pleasant and then I look down and notice something odd I didn’t THINK I’d noticed before but with me who knows? And as is my oh so formal wont, I blurt, "What the hell?"

Top Management turns around and we both look at this puddle on the sidewalk which didn’t seem to have been there before. And it’s bright and sunny and there are no other puddles around. And obviously you’re all picking up on this much faster than we did. But we’re good in an emergency. Trust me, we are. Well, she is. I’m useless. What a shock.

So we notice that The Boy has a matching wet spot on his pants. I say, "Jeez, lady, when’s the last time you changed his diaper?" Which, yes, conveniently ignored for the moment the fact that nothing had stopped ME from personally changing his diaper.

I lift him up and his pants immediately fall and get stuck on his shoes. Turns out the diaper dropped down with the pants. Which means that, when his shirt rides up a little bit, his winky gets its first look at the world.

Top Management and I both burst out laughing, because she believes in solidarity and at a time like that it’s rude to let your husband be the only one with a thirteen-year-old’s mentality. Besides, it’s really funny when a baby’s winky suddenly pokes out in public. That's not opinion. That's simple fact.

The Boy’s amused, of course, because he’s being held up in the air and both Mom and Dad are making a big fuss about…well, SOMEthing, how’s he supposed to know what? So as usual, he assumes it’s about him. Which I guess it was, sort of. Or at least parts of him. Part of him. A little part.

Just then a breeze whips up. And the expression on The Boy’s face changes. Instantly. What had been mild amusement turns into a look of "What the hell is THAT?" as the wind tickles parts previously unused to any kind of weather conditions whatsoever. He turns to look at each of us, eyes wide, clearly thinking, "Seriously, what IS that? Do you know? Do you? Do you? You do? You DO? How long have you known about this? And what can I possibly do to get that going again?"

Howling with laughter, and much to The Boy’s disgruntlement, we head into the house to get him a new diaper and a change of clothes. And Top Management realizes that the neurosurgeon The Boy had seen earlier had taken off the kid’s diaper in order to look at his Unusually Protruding Tailbone (which, yes, needs to be snipped off) and had apparently not done a terrific job of redoing the diaper’s tape.

Which kind of gives you pause. This is one of the top pediatric brain surgeons in the world. Yet he seems unable to master the intricacies of Huggies. Are you sure this is the guy you want poking around your kid’s horned ventricles?

Turns out he indeed is. And I guess it just goes to show that we’ve all got our little areas of special expertise. For some of us it’s fixing toddler brains. For others it’s…well, for my part, I haven’t quite gotten that one sorted out just yet. But I’ve a feeling it’s going to be more along the lines of knowing how to secure a diaper properly rather than slicing and dicing someone’s innards with precision. Hey, it takes all kinds.

Comedy for Those Who Think Suicide’s a Laugh Riot

NBC’s newest comedy is called The Office. It’s the American version of a British hit by the same name. I’d heard about the British show for years but never had the opportunity to see it, although everyone I spoke to who’d seen it reported that it was the funniest show ever. When I heard NBC was bringing it over, with an American cast, I feared the worst.

Those fears were alleviated, sort of, when I discovered that Steve Carell was the star. Carell, as all should know, is one of the two best correspondents The Daily Show ever had and seems incapable of not being hysterical. The question, then, was: would the show be worthy of him or would it merely be hideous to watch such a great actor brought down by awful material?

The answer is: I should have been afraid—everyone should—and it is indeed hideous to watch. Not accidentally, though: it’s hideous to watch because that’s what they’re going for. They’ve taken office situations that are too real and too familiar to be comfortable and juiced them up so much even Bud Selig would have paid attention. As one review of the original series said, the paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable. This is one of those shows you view through your fingers. It’s brilliant. It’s incisive. It’s so freakin’ painful.

I don’t know if NBC is going to keep it on Tuesday nights at 9:30—they tend to jerk their best shows around until they die a premature death—but if you get the chance to tune in, I most highly recommend it. I mean, seriously, after this rave review, what could possibly keep you from being glued to the tube at that time?

Do I know how to give something the hard sell or what?

Driving Over Miss Daisy

I don’t understand where I live. Don’t get me wrong, I like it—in fact, I love it. Hell, I chose to live here. Well, Top Management chose for me, but I could have objected. It wouldn’t have done any good, but I still COULD have.

I didn’t, though, and I’m extremely happy with our house, our neighborhood, our area—everything. The whole kit and kaboodle. Except maybe for the roads.

It’s the oddest thing. The speed limits here are almost uniformly five to fifteen miles per hour faster than they would be on a similar road in New York or Connecticut. A winding road through the countryside which might be, say, 40 or 45 miles per hour in Connecticut will be 55 here. The main street in a small neighborhood development: 20 or 25 in New York, 30 mph here. The tiny residential sidestreets, with only a dozen houses? Five, maybe ten miles per hour up north, 20 mph here.

And it’s not just Connecticut and New York, although those are the two other states I know best. My time spent in Colorado would indicate that, in the Denver region at least, it’s the same thing: speed limits lower on average than here (although they do have a wicked 75mph speed limit on I-70 in some places).

I don’t understand. It’s clearly not that folks up there love their kids more than the people down here. And it’s not that northerners are averse to driving fast, as anyone who’s spent even the slightest bit of time up there knows. So what is it? What accounts for the discrepancy? The speed limit on the beautiful, windy, hilly road that takes us into town is the same as the speed limit on major interstates. What’s up with that?

Is it maybe just an instinctive distrust of government? Folks down here don’t like people telling them what to do; they’d prefer to say for themselves what the damn speed limit is, whereas there’s a history of strong government up there, from the days of Tammany Hall on down?

I dunno. And, as I said, I don’t understand. It’s really, really odd. And it’s not like the folks up there stick strictly to the speed limit, but then again, neither do the folks down here, not even close, even what the speed limit itself’s unsafe. I don’t get it.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that they build ditches for the rainwater next to roads—hello, people! Gutters! Sewers! Radical new inventions!

Trust in Clouds

Drove over the mountain to go to church this morning—our regular church holds Easter Mass in a UVa basketball arena, making it [for me] a less than spiritually-satisfying experience.

It was a gray, drizzly morning and as we drove up I-64 into the mountains, the visibility got worse and worse until we could only see about ten feet past the front of our hood and our speed had dropped from the posted limit of 65mph down to 35mpg at one point; I was very pleased with the lights the Virginia Department of Transportation embedded in the roadway, as they were my only guide as to what was road and what was two hundred foot drop in some places.

The girls were interested but a bit disappointed—we don’t go over the mountain often and its views are normally spectacular—but we discussed why the atmospheric conditions were as they were and that kinda junk. It was a little stressful but extremely pleasant.

Or so I thought. After church Top Management and I were chatting with friends Eileen and Travis and TM mentioned that, had she been driving alone, she wouldn’t have made the drive: once things got bad she would have turned around and headed home. Our friends commiserated with her; Travis mentioned that he’d driven over the mountain at times when he literally couldn’t even see a foot past the front bumper.

I couldn’t imagine making the drive under those conditions, although there are places where it’s about ten miles between exits and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do if the visibility degrades that much suddenly. You can’t stop—an awful lot of 18-wheelers use that road—and there are big stretches where there’s no place to turn around or pull-off.

So I was thinking about all this as we drove back. The girls had snacked on post-church scones and were all settled in comfortably. Max had had an upset stomach a few hours earlier so she was, for once, not reading under doctor’s (Top Management’s) orders. The Bean had fallen asleep, snoring softly to the strains of Beethoven’s Pastoral. The Rose was, as usual, looking out the window; of all our kids, she (and perhaps now The Boy, who has recently become a pretty good traveler, but who stayed home with Colorado Grandma and Grandpa) most appreciates the wonders of ever-changing nature flashing by the window.

There wasn’t much to appreciate this day, of course. At first there was, when we were in the foothills: rolling meadows, swollen streams, scenic herds of cows and even the surprise appearance of a bunch of llamas, making our mountainous trek seem that much more authentic and foreign.

But once we were again up top, there was nothing to see but our car, the roadlights and occasionally the brake lights of another car passing us slowly. The Rose mentioned that it was sort of creepy, but her tone of voice indicated that she very much approved. Max was looking around happily, her head swiveling from side to side, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything as the fog shifted and swirled. The Bean was drooling slightly.

I glanced over at Top Management, who was wearing a brave expression. I thought about the fact that of everyone in the car, I was the only one who really had much control over our fate. Everyone else was just along for the ride. Top Management was a bit tense, but nowhere near as much as I would have been in her situation; I’ve never been able to relax when riding—as opposed to driving—in the car with someone else, no matter how much I trust them. But the girls simply accepted our trip through the mist as another step in our journey, with complete confidence and not a shred of doubt—interesting in and of itself but mainly just a brief period on a long, long excursion.

When Top Management Says Jump…

So my imaginary friend Chris sent me this link today.

I had trouble getting it to work and, of course, as you’ll see if you actually go to the site, there aren’t a lot of clues to help someone like me figure it out. Eventually, though, it simply started, even though it was only audio and no video.

Top Management came in as I was playing it and stood in mute horror. When it was over she said, "Oh, we’ve GOT to start doing that."

I looked at her, confused (as usual). She laughed and said, "Can you imagine? From now on, at family gatherings, we should just start singing that. No reason, no prelude, just out of the blue." We started howling, imagining sister-in-law Theresa’s horror and brother John trying not to wet himself, while brother Jay simply smiled quietly or took several rolls of film.

We probably won’t do it, at least in part because now I’ve tumbled some of them to our little scheme. Mainly, though, it’s because we have too much love for our children. It’s gotta be hard enough having us for parents. If we were to start doing this stuff on top of everything else…

Still, I can’t help myself: every now and then I get a little bit restless and I dream of something wild. I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark. There’s nothing I can do…

[Post-script: my imaginary friend Chris claims he’s not imaginary. It’s been my experience, however, that that’s what ALL imaginary friends say.]

Sonic Youth and I Grow Old Together

I first heard of Sonic Youth back when I was working at Strawberry’s, the New England record store chain. Strawberry’s was far and away the best such chain I’ve ever encountered, unfortunately—it had a better selection than a Sam Goody’s or a Musicland but much better prices and more knowledgeable staff (obviously).

This was the mid-to-late 80s, and I knew of all the cool bands. R.E.M., The Replacements, The Dead Milkmen, the Dead Kennedys, The Pixies, Hüsker Dü, The Minutemen, Black Flag, Minor Threat, 10,000 Maniacs—no matter where on the alternative map they stood, if they had an album out, I probably knew of ‘em.

The funny thing was, though, that even though I knew which order the first three 10,000 Maniacs albums came out in, I didn’t actually HEAR them for several years. I kept up with the scene but I wasn’t in it, I wasn’t of it. I was still into classic rock—stuff like Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd…stuff I haven’t heard almost anything of in fifteen years now.

But I most certainly knew of Sonic Youth. One of the favorite bands of some of MY favorite bands, such as R.E.M. and the Replacements, Sonic Youth were the darlings of New York City and one of the most influential American bands since the NYC/CBGB’s bands of the late seventies: Talking Heads, Blondie, The Ramones and Television. It was impossible to be even remotely acquainted with new music in the mid-to-late eighties and not know of Sonic Youth.

The first time I ever actually heard them, however, was when my imaginary friend Chris brought home a copy of Goo, their 1990 album; I was working at DC and Chris (we’d been in a band together in college) was living with me while he had an internship at MTV. I listened to Goo. I tried to like Goo. I hated Goo.

The music was loud and abrasive (kinda like me), the band was in thrall to feedback (me too, actually), none of the three vocalists could sing if their lives depended on it (hello! That’s me in a nutshell!) and they all seemed allergic to any sort of melody (I love melody, I just can’t hum one). This was clearly The Emperor’s New Clothes. Feh.

About three years later I decided to give Sonic Youth another shot—by this time Nirvana and Pearl Jam and their ilk had taken over the world and as I loved those bands, I figured it made sense to at least investigate one of their main influences. I had a couple free CDs coming from joining Columbia House, so I spent one of them on what I knew was widely considered Sonic Youth’s best album, 1988’s Daydream Nation.

I loved it immediately. Yeah, it was loud and abrasive, but it had its gentle moments too, periods of sublime beauty, as the music followed its own twisted ebb and flow. Sure, there was feedback aplenty but it was used judiciously (well, by rock and roll standards) and seemed to be a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. True, one of the vocalists—bassist Kim Gordon—couldn’t sing, but she could sort of approximate a version of sprechstimme; more often she avoided the problem altogether by just shouting. Of the other two vocalists, guitarists Lee Ranaldo and group leader Thurston Moore, Lee could actually sing quite well, although somewhat paradoxically he preferred to recite stories over a musical background rather than sing. And Thurston …well, he could sing. Sort of. In a pleasant, talky sort of way, like a post-punk Lou Reed who at least tried.

As for melody, there was plenty. No, it wasn’t Paul McCartney or Stevie Wonder, but it was there. It fit the music perfectly. The entire thing bordered on chaos but was anchored by the reliable and imaginative drumming of Steve Shelley who always seemed to know roughly where everything was headed.

From there I started exploring their catalog in more depth, going both backwards and forwards at the same time. Their earlier stuff doesn’t work for me nearly as well, making me something of a heretic in the SY world. I appreciate what they were going for, but they didn’t quite pull it off successfully. As one piece I read about the band said, it sounds as though they like the idea of rocking out better than the act. That’s it exactly. They also had something of a fascination with serial killers which I found less unsettling than just childish.

Ah, but their later stuff…that’s rock gold. 1992’s Dirty, produced by Butch Vig, the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and the drummer/producer of Garbage (featuring the heavenly Shirley Manson), is a high-water mark. Having moved to a major label (back with Goo), and with The Hot Producer of the moment at the board, it would have been easy for Sonic Youth to sell-out, and undoubtedly some older fans felt they’d done just that. They hadn’t, they’d simply finally figured out how to harness their anarchy and marry it to the three-and-a-half-minute pop song. The results were blistering and beautiful.

Not uniformly, of course. Mixed in with gems like "100%" or "Wish Fulfillment" there’s too much pointless feedback or simple screaming for my tastes—it was, maybe, novel a decade earlier (although even there you could certainly cite antecedents such as, always and forever, the Velvet Underground) or, more to the point, what many of the fans wanted, but it does nothing for me and, in my ever so humble opinion, continues to hold the band back to this day. And enough already with the spoken word pieces. We get it. Move on.

In fact, that’s one of my problems with Sonic Youth. When they’re good, they’re great but when they’re not, they frequently suck. They’ve yet to release an album that’s absolutely consistent (although both Dirty and 1995’s Washing Machine come closest, as well as the previously-mentioned Daydream Nation).

Which isn’t to say that I want them to stay the same or become overly pop-oriented—not at all. Daydream Nation and Washing Machine both concentrate on long songs, frequently around the ten-minute mark, and have cuts which either have extended and unrelated intros or outros which suddenly take on lives of their own. Dirty and 1994’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star both feature shorter, more conventional song structures, although what they do with those structures is anything but conventional. [Actually, the idea of (seriously) one of their idols, Madonna, covering "100%" is intriguing, particularly as anyone who’s ever heard the mash of Madonna singing "Ray of Light" over a combination of the Sex Pistols songs "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save The Queen" can attest.]

So almost two months ago I was bedridden for a week with back and leg troubles. And as most folks in those circumstances would, I spent a lot of time listening to the two latest Sonic Youth releases, 2002’s Murray Street and 2004’s Sonic Nurse. And I was struck by not only how powerful (and possibly consistent—further listening required) both albums were but how mature.

A decade ago, I would have considered that a sign of SY’s impending death. Now I consider it evidence of the effect having children has had on three of the four (now five) members of the band. Not to mention that four of the five members (producer Jim O’Rourke joined a few years back) are now in their 40s. The tempos are almost uniformly slower, there are fewer blow-off cuts, and the lyrics seem a bit deeper. Poetry has never been what Sonic Youth’s about, of course, at least in the conventional sense—they clearly think that feedback is a form of poetry and in their hands I’m inclined to agree. Still, their lyrics have always been a bit hit-or-miss but they seem to be hitting the mark more often these days. And while the tempos may be slower and they may be more interested in ambience than previously and their textures may be more subtle by SY standards, no one’s going to mistake either album for anything but a Sonic Youth outing.

Lately I’ve been listening to their 1998 release, A Thousand Leaves (which has one of the most disturbing covers I’ve ever seen, incidentally, although it’s initially innocuous enough that flipping past it in the store I doubt anyone would look twice) the way I used to listen to music—once or twice a day for a week—and it’s really hit me that if I didn’t like this band I’d hate this band.

On tracks such as "Hits Of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg)" they find a groove and they by God stick with it come hell or high water. As the basic, minimalist, mid-tempo beat goes on and on and on, the guitarists quietly play simple patterns or make gentle noises—you can’t really call them solos, per se—for about ten minutes. I find it entrancing and glorious. Top Management would prefer to be waterboarded. She walks into the room when this stuff is on and I can actually hear her blood pressure rising. That’s okay, she’s always had abnormally low blood pressure. That’s what living with me will do for you, I guess.

It’s fascinating to watch these recent developments. Rock and roll hasn’t had a history of its artists growing old and continuing to develop. The first generation—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis—either died, was incarcerated or gave up; oversimplification, yes, but basically true. The next generation—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Dylan—lasted twice or even three times as long, but they were pretty much all done after ten to fifteen years. Dylan may be an exception, but then his best stuff since 1974’s Blood on the Tracks is only classified as rock and roll because of who he is and because it’s not exactly anything else either. Bruce Springsteen is an anomaly, as he so often is. He’s the Elvis that lived and grew up, emotionally and musically, the Dylan that continued in a rock and roll vein.

But it’s the post-punk bands that may be most intriguing. U2’s a subject for another time, as they may be the only band ever to have not only gained the summit, but been able to stay there, and deseveredly so. The Replacements never got there and broke up. R.E.M. got there but quickly shied away from the implications and then lost their drummer and, let’s be honest, without a good drummer you ain’t squat. It’s frustrating to imagine what another few Nirvana albums could have meant. And Pearl Jam consciously turned away from mass stardom, shunning videos, taking on the establishment, releasing unconventional albums.

Sonic Youth never had that kind of success. They’re an important band but perhaps a transitional one, generally more admired than loved, more influential than popular, showing a way for post-punk indie bands to enter the mainstream yet remain defiantly anti-commercial. If so, the transition’s been going on for well over two decades now. With luck, it’ll continue for two more. If nothing else, it’ll be a hoot to have grandparents listening to other grandparents produce ear-shattering feedback.

Perpetually Outside

Sometime in February of 1997, pal Keri asked me when I’d realized I was an adult. I told her I’d let her know when it happened.

Flip words which came back to me the night, just a few weeks later, that Max was diagnosed with leukemia. I remember thinking, well, I guess now I know the answer. If I weren’t before today, I reckon I am now. I have to be.

And it was true. The day we got that diagnosis was the day all the priorities in life snapped into place with an almost audible "snik."

And yet, just a few weeks ago, I went with brothers John and Pete to pick up nephew Jake from CCD. As we stood in the big meeting hall place, I looked around at the parents congregating in clusters, laughing and talking, chatting with teachers or other friends, and I looked over at a couple groups of kids.

Mainly I watched a couple different groups of boys, around ten or eleven years old. They were throwing paper airplanes up in the air and then competing to see who could catch them, banging each other out of the way, pushing, shoving, laughing the whole time. I watched one kid come when his mother called, but he was literally dragging his feet as he went to her side, good-naturedly exaggerating how little he wanted to leave, a goofy expression of mock sullenness on his face.

And I remembered being those boys. It was so clear it was as though I were still one of them. I remember running around the church basement while my mom talked with friends or the priests, smashing into each other, having races, seeing who could do the dumbest thing (I usually won that one with little trouble). I didn’t just remember being one of them, I *felt* like one of them. I looked at the adults and I looked at the kids and I had no doubt about where I fit in better.

I’m sure that to those kids I looked like just another adult, boring and old. And maybe that’s how I looked to the other adults there too. Maybe they couldn’t tell that even though I’ve got kids and a wife and a mortgage and all that stuff, that I wasn’t really one of them. Or maybe every one of them felt exactly the same way.

Instant Recall

So brother John was sympathetic when I told him about the family’s illnesses. He says he’s been cold-free for over half a year now and offered to share his secret regimen. As I enjoy a good cold slightly less than I enjoy bamboo under the fingernails, I took him up on his generous offer.

He says he starts every day with a can of V-8 juice. Since I’d rather have bamboo shoved under all ten of my fingernails and probably at least seven of my toenails WHILE I have a cold than drink V-8, that one’s right out. He also takes vitamins. Okay, I eat a Flintstones chewable when I remember and I’ve been gobbling the vitamin C like it’s going out of style—although with that tangy orange flavor, I don’t really see it ever going out of style. It’s a classic. It’s almost as good as those memories of St. Joseph chewable aspirin. Ah…childhood fevers…

John also washes his hands frequently and never touches his eyes. I wash my hands like a madman—a holdover from Max’s days on chemo, when my hands were cracked and almost bleeding from so much washing—but I’m bad about touching my eyes. When I know I’m not supposed to, such as when I’ve been holding a baby who has pink eye, I’ll suddenly realize I’ve just been rubbing both my eyes. On his goopy shirt. It’s inexplicable.

But he also said he uses Listerine first thing each morning. He started a while back, when he remembered they used to have commercials claiming it could help prevent colds. They don’t seem to say that anymore. John postulated it was because they couldn’t prove it. Like that matters.

I hadn’t had Listerine in I don’t know how long, but I’d guess it’s been about fifteen years, so I went out and bought some. And right there on the bottle it says it HAS been clinically proven to be as good as flossing at nuking the plaque and gingivitis between your teeth. Which is a really good thing, if kinda creepy.

When I got home I poured myself a shot of this miracle liquid and knocked it right back. And the instant the first drop hit my tongue every taste bud, nay, every cell in my body positively trembled with total recall. Oooooooh…that’s right. That’s why it’s been fifteen years since you’ve had this stuff. Because it’s pure evil. Because it makes the idea of bamboo under all twenty nails while drowning in V-8 seem like a vacation in Tahiti.

I forced myself to swish the vile fluid around for thirty seconds. I’m not sure if killed any cold germs or not but if I were a cold germ I know I’d choose hara-kiri over bathing in that stuff.

And it may not have eradicated the cold from my body but it certainly had one powerful effect: I couldn’t even taste the pizza we had for dinner. It looked like pizza, it smelled like pizza, it even felt like pizza. Yet it was devoid of taste. I think I either killed my taste buds or they’re trying to teach me a lesson. And doing a mighty fine job, I might add.

There’s been a lot of talk about finding alternative fuel sources. I’m pretty sure you could run a 757 on this Listerine stuff. Someone just needs to try. Not me, though. I’m going off in search of V-8. The pandas I scored the bamboo off of said they could hook me up.

Bleh

Not a great day at our house. First The Boy woke up two days ago with pink eye. Then he woke up yesterday with a cold. Then The Bean came down with a fever yesterday afternoon. No other symptoms, just a fever. Then this morning Top Management reveals that she’s got a cold too. About two hours and twenty tissues later, I realize I have one as well.

Not all is terrible. The Bean’s absolutely psyched about her fever, since it means she gets to spend the day in bed eating cinnamon toast (reserved only for birthday girls and sickies) and watching just about as much television as she wants…and she wants a lot. She actually ended up watching more television today than she normally gets in any two-week period. She’ll be crushed if her fever’s gone tomorrow.

Naturally it was a gorgeous day today, mid-60s, sunny, calm. Max and The Rose, spared from the plague of plagues rampaging through our otherwise happy home, were rudely forced—forced!—to go outside and get some fresh air. Max was pleased, though, since she’s barely ridden her bike since last fall and this weather was made for bike riding.

But The Rose has a problem. She learned how to ride a bike last summer. It’s been about six months since she last rode, however, and in that time she’s forgotten how. I explained that she CAN’T have forgotten how—it’s impossible, it’s a damn saying, for pete’s sake, NO ONE EVER forgets how to ride a bike. But no. There ‘tis. The Rose is single-handedly destroying one of the most cherished and honored maxims in the English language.

Turns out riding a bike ISN’T like riding a bike.

The Philosopher Update

So the other day I noticed Philosopher Bean was inspecting her elephant again. After a few moments of poking the tusks she said, "Huh...there's some clay on my elephant that's not hard like the west. I think we need to cook it some more."

I hustled her off for her nap.

But as with all children, she has a mind like a steel trap when it suits her purposes. She is incapable of remembering that jumping on the beds is against the rules, but any tiny imperfections on a clay elephant is forever stored in the lockbox of her brain. Which is why a few days later she started picking at the aberrationally soft lime-green clay on her elephant tusks. And what should she discover underneath but brownish—why, some might even say blackish—clay.

She gasped lightly (all our girls have melodramatic streaks; neither Top Management nor I can imagine where they got said streaks and frankly, we’re shocked, shocked at the very idea), then tipped her head to check it all out from a new angle and decided, "Oh, dat’s okay. Its ears were already burned anyway."

And whenever I look over at that still magnificent pachyderm in its place of honor in the center of the kitchen table, I marvel at two things: how flexible and resilient children always are and, even more, the fact that Top Management and I can’t even put one over on a four-year-old.

A Mother’s Instincts

Last night The Bean, as she does about once a week, got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Sure, most people do that at least occasionally. But as she does about once a month, in this case she got up to, uh…how to put this delicately…hmm…well, poop. Given that she’s my third child, I feel I can say with some confidence that while that’s not a unknown event, it’s also not quite so usual.

Having finished her bidniz, she calls out for someone to come wipe her. And given that it was the middle of night—around one-thirty in the morning, I think—she has to call again. And again. And again.

Finally her plaintive yet polite pleas for help falls upon ears which haven’t been ringing for two months. After about the fifth time, her voice finally penetrates the always deep and bizarre dreamworld of Top Management. With the kind of lightning-quick reflexes for which mothers of all stripes are known, the second—no, the very split-second, the millisecond, the amount of time it takes for light to travel Planck's length—Top Management realizes that one of her children needs help, she makes her move instantly, and I mean instantaneously: she rolls over, touches my shoulder and says, "Honey…The Bean’s calling."

Startled out of a dead slumber—a relative rarity for me, who’s usually a pretty light sleeper—I jump out of bed and am already running down the hall before I really have any idea of what’s going on or even what I’m doing.

I backtrack to the bathroom—since The Bean’s bed is empty and I dimly recall the bathroom door now being open, something it wasn’t when I, the last one up, went to bed—and sure enough, there she is. So I help her out and by the way her legs stick to the seat as I lift her off, it’s obvious she’s been there awhile.

I wash my hands, take her back to The Blue Room (where all three girls sleep), tuck her in, and stumble back to bed. Top Management asks what the problem was. I fill her in briefly, but she’s already asleep again before I’m done with my two-sentence explanation.

Not so much me, though: I’m exhausted but discombobulated and a bit wired from my initial sprint down the hall. I don’t sleep well the rest of the night, which figures, since The Boy picks today to sleep later than he has in weeks. Oh, he knew what he was doing. He just lives to push my buttons. People think he’s a cutie, but underneath that bubbly fifteen-month-old exterior with its disarming grin and adorable chortle, that child is all complicated schemes and pure spite. Trust me. He’s got everyone else fooled, but not me, pal. Not me.

But the thing is, it wasn’t until I came downstairs this morning and saw Top Management that it occurred to me to ask: why did you wake me up instead of just going yourself?

She looked at me for a second, her mouth dropped open as though she was about to explain, then she simply burst out laughing. "I have no answer to that," she finally said. Apparently it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

Which pretty much sums up our lives.

Love the eBay, Hate the eBay

I love the eBay. Love love love it. If you’re patient enough you can find just about anything you want in this whole wide world. In fact, and don’t tell anyone this, that’s where The Boy actually came from. Shh.

You might have to pay through the nose for it, of course—it’s remarkable what folks will pay for some stuff (although The Boy was cheap; he came with major undisclosed user fees bundled in, though). Used CDs that are available new from Amazon for thirteen bucks’ll go for twenty on eBay. On the other hand, I’ve picked up a goodly number of discs for three bucks, including shipping. I got a boxset of the Shostakovich string quartets, brand-spankin'-new for nine dollars, WITH shipping—the same set would have set me back forty bucks in a store. It’s a good thing.

Then there’s Herbert Blomstedt’s recording of Sibelius’s First and Seventh with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. New it would have cost less than twenty bucks in a store. Since Blomstedt’s never been anybody’s favorite conductor—except perhaps for me—it was quickly deleted from the catalog. Three copies have been put up for sale over the past six months, and the CHEAPEST it’s gone for has been two hundred dollars. One went for $330 this past week. Who are these people, what are they smoking, and can they give me the money they wasted on those discs? Seriously, I'd make much better use of that cash. Especially since, if the record label ever re-releases those recordings, these fools’ll be out $310. What maroons.

Like most things, of course, moderation is the key. It’s easy to get sucked in and find yourself checking it thrice daily to see what new treasures have been put up for sale, or what’s about to go. And it’s waaaay too easy to get sucked into a bidding war. Fortunately, I learned my lesson on that one early and without too great an expenditure of money. And, what the hey, I got a son out of the deal. So there’s that.

But there’s at least one common practice on eBay which drives me absolutely insane. After you complete a transaction, Buyer and Seller are both supposed to leave feedback for each other, so others can see how reliable any given person is. The problem is, the practice may have worked originally but these days it’s degenerated, so that now many people will only leave positive feedback for you once you’ve left it for them. Which obviously strips it of all meaning. It’s a fraud. It's an honor system devoid of honor, a code that's a con. And that simply kills me.

I try to leave great feedback whenever I feel it warranted, unless the person specifically says he or she will only leave feedback once you’ve left feedback first—I mean, jeez louise, they come right out and say that’s their policy, that they’re holding your feedback hostage. I never leave feedback for them, even if they’ve provided the greatest service in the world. Sure, my position is futile but it’s all I can do. You draw your line somewhere and you stick to it. That’s life.

My Philosopher

So it’s Thursday, which means it’s The Bean’s music class. She’s one of only three students and just loves the class—no big surprise there. Being the kind of oh so on top of everything parents that we are, we remembered that she was supposed to make a sculpture to bring into class today. No sweat—we’ve had a week to work on it and the class isn’t for nearly an hour yet. We can whip something fantastic up. Piece o’ cake.

And so with twenty minute ‘til class, the girls sit down with some sculpey clay and begin working. The Rose makes a Hershey’s Kiss. Max makes…I don’t even know what, but it’s mighty impressive. The Bean decides on an animal of some sort. I suggest an alligator, figuring there aren’t many animals as recognizable and yet easy to pound together in less than half an hour. But no. She wants an elephant. She doesn’t shoot small.

Being less than worthless in these matters, I retire to the office for my (first) cup o’ morning joe and to read the New York Times editorials and get irate—what better way to start your day? I come upstairs in time to take The Bean to her class, and Top Management’s just popping the sculpture into the toaster oven to fire it.

Their creation is a thing of magnificence: light brown body, dark brown ears and tail, bright orange feet, fiery red eyes and the crowning achievement, lime green tusks, presumably in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. One suspects the Lord above looked down and wondered why He hadn’t thought of this color scheme when making the originals in the first place.

We scurry around getting shoes on and coats ready and I look up to see Top Management with an expression of utter panic and horror on her face. Alarmed, I rush over but she quickly shushes me and turns around. Peering over her shoulder, I see she’s cradling the elephant, which has been burnt by our apparently infernally powerful toaster oven.

It’s not fatal for the poor beast: his ears are pretty toasty, but they were already a dark enough brown that it’s not terribly noticeable. Ah, but those wondrous green tusks aren’t looking so chipper anymore: the tops of each are a decidedly smoky brown. If one were honest, one might even say they were approaching a blackish kind of color. Like, say, black.

Ever resourceful, Top Management sends The Bean to go get a hairbrush for her weekly brushing of hair, and quickly slaps some fresh green clay atop the defiled tusks. Presto! Good as new. Not exactly rock hard, but hey, there’s a rock-hard interior hidden beneath those externally squishy tusks. Don’t mess with ‘em.

All this makes us late for class. We rush in, take off her coat and sneakers, toss her backpack and run over to where the teacher and the other two students are sitting in a circle. The Bean notices that they’ve each got their sculptures so she gasps, "Oh!" and runs back to get hers and add it to the collection. Obviously her fellow scholars have already explained their creations because the teacher asks The Bean to tell them about her sculpture.

This seems to throw The Bean a bit. She just stares down at the thing in her hands for a few seconds and I’m suddenly worried that she’s noticing it’s a tad singed.

But no. She finally says, very simply, "It’s an elephant."

She pauses, then adds, "It’s got a bwown body, and bwown ears and a bwown tail and a bwown twunk, but the ears and tail are a DIFFEWENT bwown, and wed eyes and look! It’s got owange feet!"

The other children seem to be appropriately appreciative of the orange feet.

"And," The Bean says meaningfully, "It’s got gween tusks."

One of the kids nodded at that—clearly a fellow connoisseur—while the other said quietly, "Whoa."

I stood about fifteen feet away, off to the side. All the other parents had left already—we come back for the last ten minutes of class—so I was only waiting for her to notice me so I could say goodbye. But she never turned. The teacher smiled at me happily—she adores The Bean—and I figured that was my cue to exit.

As I was leaving it occurred to me that my little girl had done what I always try to do and usually fail. She managed to see both the Big Picture and the vital details. She pulled back for the forest first: it’s an elephant. And yet she was still was able to focus in on each individual tree: it’s got wed eyes and owange feet and gween tusks. No bunch of blind philosophers, my Bean.

 

Look upon my trunks, ye mighty, and dismay.

 

Books I Read in 2004

At the beginning of last year, Top Management suggested we keep lists of every book we read. I was diligent for a while but got lazy about halfway through the year. Still, I don’t think I missed many, and there were none that I regretted, which is more than I can say about the movies we watched.

Hmm…maybe that’s an idea for next year…

JANUARY
Winter Fire by William Trotter
A neat bit o’ historical fiction, it takes place during World War II in (mainly) Finland. The protagonist is an up-and-coming German conductor who gets drafted and finds himself acquainted with Jean Sibelius.

Carl Nielsen by Jack Lawson
A bio of the greatest Danish composer; one of Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers series.

Jean Sibelius by Guy Rickards
A bio of the greatest Finnish composer; one of Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers series.

The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman
A horrifying look at where we may be heading.

FEBRUARY
Ender’s War by Orson Scott Card
An absolutely fantastic sci-fi novel. There were four sequels. The first was nearly as great, the next was really, really good, the third was good and the fourth made me wish I’d only read the first in the series. Let that be a lesson to you.

Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
Self-explanatory.

Maurice Ravel by Gerald Larner
A bio of the second-greatest French composer; one of Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers series.

MARCH
Indivisible by Four by Arnold Steinhardt
A look at the inner-workings of a string quarter by the first violinist of the longest-running string quartet.

Midnight Hour Encores by Bruce Brooks
A magnificent young adult novel about a brilliant and headstrong teenage cellist and how stupid even the smartest of kids are.

Sergei Prokofiev by Daniel Jaffe
A bio of about the fifth-best Russian composer; one of Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers series.

APRIL
Possession by A.S. Byatt
A gorgeous novel, part love story, part mystery, part set in the past, part set now. Most audaciously, Byatt has the nerve to create poems for a fictitious poet who’s supposed to be one of the greatest of the Victorian era. Them’s some cojones there.

MAY
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Never read it before. I suspect I will again.

Robota by Doug Chiang and Orson Scott Card
Beautiful sci-fi paintings which were later given a story by Card. Stunning art, decent ideas, not a waste of time but not something I’ll return to, I reckon.

Newjack—Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover
Non-fiction. The author, a leftwing journalist, wants to do a piece on New York’s penal system but isn’t allowed inside any prisons—no one but workers and the incarcerated is. So he becomes a guard at the notorious Sing Sing and finds himself, within weeks, become someone else entirely.

Against All Enemies by Richard A. Clarke
About what you’d expect only several times more terrifying.

JUNE
But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer
A collection of short stories/vignettes of jazz greats. Mainly fiction with enough history to lend it weight, and convincingly weaving in bits of jazz critics. Great stuff.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hadn’t read it since college. Better than I remembered…and I remembered it being great.

The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
A novel where the protagonist is a talking bear who’s also one of the great sax players in the world. Bizarre, captivating, shockingly believable.

Downsize This by Michael Moore
Self-explanatory.

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore
Written by Gary Gilmore’s younger brother, one of the great rock critics and a former editor at Rolling Stone, it’s a history of their entire troubled family and his relationship with Gary, the man executed by firing squad in Utah, as well as a brief history of Utah itself. Powerful and disturbing, I don’t know if I’ll ever read it again, but I will absolutely never forget it.

JULY-OCTOBER
Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Very frightening but, unfortunately, sabotaged by its own last chapter.

Where the Right Went Wrong by Pat Buchanan
Self-explanatory. (Top Management’s in love with Pat Buchanan.)

Bruckner by Derek Watson
A bio of the really good Austrian composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

Tchaikovsky by Edward Garden
A bio of the great Russian composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

Mahler by Michael Kennedy
A bio of the great Austrian composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

Sleeping with Schubert by Bonnie Marson
Saw it at the library and picked it up on a whim. Odd. Had the potential to be really, really good but threw it away on too many melodramatic subplots. A waste of potential, but not a waste of my time.

What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank
An exploration of why so many people vote against their own interests.

Reason by Robert Reich
The former secretary of labor explains why liberalism isn’t [quite] dead and what they should do to revive their noble cause.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Tried to read this several times growing up but it never worked for me. It worked for me this time. In a big way.

NOVEMBER
In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman
A sort of very short graphic novel, the book is the artist’s attempts to come to grips with pulling his daughter out of school at the base of the towers just moments before the first one fell, and watching them come down, sure it was the end of the world. Nowhere near as successful as Maus but then how many things have been?

Vaughan Williams by James Day
A bio of the greatest English composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King
One of King’s more accessible books for those not into horror, a young girl wanders off the path while hiking and ends up completely lost in the woods, and the only thing that keeps her going is listening to her favorite Red Sox pitcher on her little transistor radio.

Rachmaninov by Geoffrey Norris
A bio of the great Russian composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

DECEMBER
Brahms by Malcolm MacDonald
A bio of the great German composer; one of Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians series.

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
A young adult novel about a young English orphan sent to stay with her third-cousins who live deep in the Amazon. Recommend by marvelous librarian Wendy, it's one of the better young adult novels I’ve read and a pretty fine way to finish up the year.

Haiku Like White Elephants

So my boy Tom teaches at a most prestigious school, where the parents pay more for tuition than Top Management and I have earned some years. All part of the joy of freelancing.

Despite the outstanding quality of the staff, however, some students just refuse to learn (not that I'm one to talk). Which explains the essay from one youngster explaining how John Donne and Ernest Hemingway were very different poets.

The mind boggles.

Top Management was so inspired by this insightful comment that she immediately sat down, became world-weary, helped herself to a stiff drink—after all, no one else is going to help her—and penned the following:

Haiku Like White Elephants
by Hemingway

He poured the Pernod.
Or did the Pernod pour him.
What did it matter.

Mini-Me: the Sequel

Top Management, as is her wont, said something really interesting in the car today.

We were driving to pick up the minivan, which had been recalled (all is now well, they claim). We’d dropped off the girls at pal Lisa’s, so it was just the two of us and The Boy. A gorgeous day for driving or just about anything else, warm and sunny with blue skies and a few puffy clouds here and there, we had Suzanne Vega on for The Boy’s enjoyment while we chatted.

We looked back to make sure he was happy and indeed he was, simply looking around, staring out this window and then that, checking out the stuff in the car—he doesn’t ride in the Saturn very often and always seems amused by the idea, his smile wry—admiring Suzanne’s improbably pure vocals, his face seeming to reflect whatever was going through his impenetrable (if particularly vulnerable) little mind at that exact moment; like all kids, he doesn’t exactly have a poker face yet and his expression seemed to be constantly altering as he looked at this or that or the other thing.

And then suddenly he was asleep. It was amazing to behold. You’d think that after a combined forty years of parenthood we’d be used to it, but no, it really never gets old: kids are just so perfect when they’re asleep.

It was almost like Holly Hunter in "Raising Arizona": Top Management burst out, "I just love him so much." Not the tears or hysterics of Holly but the same sentiment.

But then she threw me. She said, "It’s different for me. You’ve had a little Mini-Me before. Three of them, in fact. But now I finally have a little Mini-You."

I thought about that. Whenever people would ask me if I wanted a little boy, I’d always respond, why? Why would I? Max was the greatest thing I’d ever been given in my life, so why would I want anything different? And then The Rose came along and even though she was completely different from Max in every way, she was a little girl, too (obviously) and absolutely perfect as well. And then along bounced The Bean and once again I had a little girl who was utterly perfect in every way. Why on earth would I want something different? Not to mention that I’ve known for well over three decades that girls are just way better than boys in every single way.

And she’s right—of the many, many things I loved about each of my little girls, many of them tied in to the fact that they were little Lissas. Max looked EXACTLY like her mom when was she was tiny and now has all her most basic personality traits. The Rose has Top Management’s efficient streak and deep love of nature, as well as her never-ending desire for a backrub. The Bean has her same sunny disposition and inexhaustible energy. I’ve got four variations on the greatest woman ever created.

So no, I never wanted a son. And she didn’t either—or, at least, she didn’t think she did. But now that she’s got one, she realizes she’s got what I’ve had all these years. And she’s mighty pleased about it.

I still wouldn’t have given him that Y chromosome, had I really the option. But now that he’s here? Yeah. He’s okay. He looks like my grandfather, which is kinda funny. And he’s got my oh so sophisticated and subtle sense of humor. Unfortunately, he’s also got my sense of hygiene. I’ve got him on the hearing thing for now, but in another few years we’ll probably be about even on that too.

And he likes me more than his sisters did at this age. Oh, don't get me wrong—they liked me. I'll even go so far as to say they loved me. But he likes me more. He's just as attached to his mom as his sisters were, but he's way happier to see his dad than they ever were.

The funniest thing is, he’s the first kid to be entranced by the sound of music—when Lissa sings, he’s captivated. Put him down by the piano and he’ll walk back and forth for twenty minutes, playing the bass notes, then the treble, then the bass, then the middle register and over and over, exploring this sonority and that, what happens if he presses a bunch of keys or very carefully picks out just one to press again and again. Isn’t that like us? The kid who can’t hear is the one who loves music.

All this leaves the real puzzler, of course: why on earth would she WANT another me? For that matter, why would she want the original?

Hm. Best not to question, methinks.

Office Space

This is one of the great comedies of the past decade. It sank almost without a trace at the box office but it’s frequently re-run on cable. Even better, rent a copy, since the opening music is apparently too offensive (it’s not) for television and has been replaced, with the result that the lips of the incredibly white character spewing gangsta rap in time to his car stereo don’t actually synch up to the soundtrack. And there’s a fair amount of profanity, all of which is utterly necessary to the enjoyment of the film. So just freakin’ rent it, for pete’s sake.

The first hour is unbearably brilliant, especially for anyone who’s ever worked in a cubicle. The details are just spot-on, almost painfully so at times. The frustration of commuting in traffic, the numbing boredom of doing the same task endlessly, the idiocy of most middle-managers…it’s all there, only somehow Mike Judge (the creator of, yes, Beavis and Butthead) has managed to make it hysterically funny.

The second hour is still really, really good but if it can’t quite match up to the first half of the film, well, few comedies could. Don’t be disappointed if the last half isn’t quite as good—it’s still more than good enough—just be pleased that there’s a film with an opening act this magnificent.

And speaking of, Jennifer Anniston has a small but vital role in the movie and she’s terrific. You’ll recognize several of the actors—including Gary Cole, really good as the current vice-president on The West Wing and spectacular as Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie—but there are no big stars. Doesn’t matter. Go check it out and be properly horrified in all the best ways. This may not quite be the catharsis Aristotle had in mind when he codified the structure of Greek tragedy, but it’s a beautiful and purifying experience nonetheless.

But, uh…don’t watch when the kids are around. They're not ready for beauty this powerful yet.

Bigger'n the Beatles

So a favorite game Top Management and I like to play is coming up with new band names. Generally this comes about when one of us utters a particularly odd or pungent combination of words which strikes us as having potential. My all-time favorite (that can be shared) remains Idle Worship, although Übërsphïnctër still holds a mighty place in my heart (followed by its country and western spin-off side-project, Goobersphincter), but we’ve invented hundreds.

This morning she came up with one for the ages: Tasty Hobos.

I won’t tell you the train of thought that led up to this noxious yet brilliant nom de rock. But it's just one more reason that I love her so much. (Another is that she's up for pizza almost as much as I am. And she's really cute.)

Great Fluff

If you should happen to stumble across the teenybopper flick 13 Going on Thirty, watch it. It’ll be a fine use of your ninety minutes.

Starring Jennifer Garner—of Alias fame and Elektra infamy—as a teenager who suddenly finds herself an adult, the film treads well-worn ground, but does so with such charm and enough unexpected twists that it'll keep you more than entertained.

The performances—including Mark Ruffalo as her childhood best friend now all grown up and, as her boss, an outstanding Andy Serkis (better known to millions as Gollum)—range from really good to pretty damn great. I’m particularly impressed with Garner’s comedic chops and the casting of Ruffalo as the love interest, as he’s not exactly your typical Hollywood pin-up.

It would have been simple for the creators to take several easy ways out, but they avoided temptation each time the opportunity arose, delivering instead fare with a heart and perhaps a little bit more. Make no mistake, this isn’t just a romantic comedy, it’s a light and fluffy romantic comedy, a simple teen flick, but an awfully good one for that, and better than it perhaps should have been. Would that all films in that sub-genre were this well done. There are far, far worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

How to Improve Your Life and the World

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was the one great composer to come out of the Soviet Union—he wasn’t even yet a teenager in the revolutionary year of 1917—and possibly the last great classical composer ever (hopefully not, but it’s not looking promising).

His best known works are his symphonies, particularly the Fifth, the Seventh (his war-time "Leningrad" symphony), the Ninth (a superficially cheeky and cheery rebuff to those who expected something grand and heroic like Beethoven’s Ninth), and the Tenth, which includes a scherzo purported to be a musical portrait of Stalin; no fool he, this movement wasn’t premiered until after The Great Leader was dead.

Most folks consider Shostakovich’s string quartet cycle his finest works, and it’s tough to argue the point. All fifteen are brilliant, easily one of the two greatest cycles of the 20th century, along with Bartók’s. They vary in tone and quality, but none are less than outstanding. For my money, they’re the finest cycle since Beethoven.

But for his absolute best single piece, I’d vote for his 24 Preludes and Fugues, opus 87. Although Shostakovich was a pianist—and in his youth, a most promising virtuoso, before he largely put his performing career on the back-burner in favor of composition—he wrote surprisingly (and disappointingly) few works for the piano: an earlier set of preludes, two piano concerti, a pair of piano trios, a pair of sonatas and a piano quintet are the only major pieces. All are good, but only the quintet and later trio really fall comfortably into the "great" category.

His 24 Preludes and Fugues, however, trump them all. It’s the greatest work for solo piano post-Debussy and is not out of place alongside Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s late sonatas and Diabelli Variations, Chopin’s and Schumann’s cycles, and the piano works of Brahms, Debussy and Ravel. I’d argue his opus 87 is, in fact, the finest solo piano work by any Russian composer ever, including some magnificent pieces by Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Prokofiev (although, to be fair, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky wrote little-to-no serious pieces for solo piano, so it may not be quite as impressive a claim as at first glance).

Stylistically, the Preludes and Fugues are all over the map, from the frenetic and ironic prelude in A minor to the perky prelude in B major, and from the pastoral, idyllic D major prelude to the eerie, foreboding Eb minor prelude.

The set gets off to a deceptive start, as the first prelude, in C major (the cycle travels through the circle of fifths, with each major key prelude matched up with a fugue in the same key, and then both being followed by a prelude and fugue in its relative minor) is a pleasant but nondescript opening, giving little hint of what’s to come; of the forty-eight pieces in the set, it’s among the least engaging—which isn’t to say it’s not a fine piece, just that it can’t compare with some of the brilliance to come.

In fact, the fugue which immediately follows is a much better representative—lyrical and intricate, it reveals a mastery of the fugue of which Bach himself would have approved. Throughout the cycle Shostakovich proves that this old form is, in the right hands, ground as fertile as ever.

For me, the heart of the entire work is the pairing of the G major prelude and fugue and its E minor partner. Both are brilliant, but in the larger context, the G major almost seems to simply be setting the stage for the E minor. In fact, it’s the E minor which best represents for me the wonders of this piece. Initially gloom-laden, the prelude starts in a soundworld so oppressed it’s a miracle the pianist manages to play the first half-dozen measure without slitting his or her throat. And yet, the music finally manages to break through into the sunlight, if only temporarily. The fugue isn’t nearly so dark, yet has a certain weary beauty, and eventually comes to an episode in a much faster tempo that somehow is able to convey victory in an unending struggle, albeit a perhaps temporary one.

Am I reading too much into this music? Almost undoubtedly. After all, Shostakovich himself never attributed any kind of program to this piece; then again, it was rarely safe for him to attribute any kind of program to any of his pieces. But I’ve listened to this work dozens of times and never once been less than overwhelmed by its beauty and power. Not to mention it’s just gorgeous stuff, melodic and accessible.

Nor is it all gloom and doom, of course—the prelude in Db starts with the first seven notes of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," showing the humorous side of this brilliant composer which is too often overlooked. A coincidence, you say? Possibly…but the piece WAS written the last week of December.

Unfortunately, this brilliant piano cycle is not nearly as well known as it should be. Here’s your chance to rectify that situation, at least a little bit. Go out and grab a copy at your first opportunity. There are at least five versions easily available: two from Tatiana Nikolayeva, and one each from Vladmir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarrett and Konstantin Scherbakov. All are good, although Jarrett clearly brings up the rear. Two tend to be much cheaper than the others: one of Nikolayeva’s recordings and the Scherbakov. Since the work was actually written by Shostakovich for Nikolayeva, it’s no surprise that hers is the finest performance. But Scherbakov is nearly as good, is a bit less expensive and has better sound. Any way you decide to go, however, your life will be at least a bit better for it.

My Ántonia

So my boy Tom mentioned that Willa Cather’s novel "My Ántonia" is one of his all-time favorites, having fallen in love with it (and her) back when he was a teenager. Rather embarrassed and horrified to realize that I’d never read any Cather, I decide to bite the bullet and give it a go.

I don’t think I’d read more than a page and a half before I turned to Top Management and commented that I was clearly in the presence of a master (well, I guess, two masters, counting Lissa).

Everything about Cather’s writing here simply announces, quietly but with complete assurance, her mastery of writing. Lyrical and powerful but with the sure hand of a storyteller upon the helm, the book draws you in from the very first and keeps you there until the last. Her characters are fascinating and unique—no two-dimensional clichés here—and her ear for dialogue is pitch-perfect.

One of the most interesting things about the novel, however, is that it’s not, technically speaking, a story, at least as we’ve come to accept such things over the past few thousand years. But as pal Tom pointed out, Cather manages to "give the illusion of a tightly structured plot" despite its lack of a traditional structure. It’s really more a collection of vignettes centered around just a few characters—mainly the title character and the narrator, and each chapter is quite short, generally just a half-dozen or so pages—which, in the end, doesn’t truly add up to a story in the standard sense. Instead, it adds up to a gorgeous and deeply moving collection of smaller stories about the lives of characters who may never actually have been real but most certainly feel that way.

My Favorite Piece of Writing Ever

      The following essay was actually written by a student, Hugh Gallagher, applying for admission to NYU in response to the question "Are there any personal accomplishments or significant experiences you have had that have helped define you as a person?" The author was accepted and graduated from NYU in 1994.

***

      I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees. I write award-winning operas. I manage time efficiently.

      Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes.

      I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

      Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. I was scouted by the Mets. I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays after school I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

      I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

      I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

      I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life, but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four-course meals using only a blender and a toaster oven.

      I breed prize-winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

      But I have not yet gone to college.

Atrophy Be Gone!

After running upstairs to move the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, I realized I’d just run upstairs. I ran upstairs. Took the stairs two at a time. Without even thinking about it.

Each time I’ve thrown out my back, I’ve had to walk oh so gingerly on the stairs for a week or two afterwards, and each time I’ve wondered if I’ll ever be able to run upstairs and jump downstairs again like the carefree pup of days gone by. And each time there’s come a point where I’ve done just that and eventually realized I was doing just that. This was that time for this go-round.

Of course, even though I ran upstairs without thinking about it just now, when replaying the moment in my mind I realized I was still cognizant enough of my condition to go at least a little easy on my right foot, which has been asleep for about seven weeks now. So maybe it’s not quite atrophy be gone time yet. Maybe it’s just atrophy getting its ass kicked, slowly but surely. We can hope, can’t we?

Relativity

Sitting in the Portuguese restaurant with brothers John and Pete, I had no choice but to listen to the easy-listening/soft-rock music that was being piped-in. We were in a private room—not by choice but because it was late on a Wednesday night and the only people in the joint were either at the bar or worked there or both—and there was a fire burning and plenty of, in fact perhaps too much, great food and copious amounts of Chilean wine as well as the sparkling repartee for which the family is known far and wide. Okay, there were mainly a lot of dirty jokes. It was an awfully pleasant scene.

But I kept finding myself noticing the music, frequently against my will. Cheesy pop songs followed by that nasty creation "lite jazz" and topped with a generous dollop of soft-core r&b. Two songs in particular stood out from this hideous aural concoction: Debbie Boone’s "You Light Up My Life," a song so inconsequential that its status as the number one song of the year 1977 is almost impossible to wrap your head around. What was it that so appealed to people? It’s not the worst song ever by a long shot, but there’s just no there there, so what can possibly account for its gigantic success? Inexplicable.

The other stand-out of the night was Peter Gabriel’s "In Your Eyes." One of his finest songs, it’s always nice to encounter it again, even when surrounded by fluff, treacle and assorted detritus. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether proximity to Kenny G and Al Jarreau can somehow have a deleterious effect on a song. Surely it can have an effect on how one perceives that song. Hopefully the effects aren’t permanent. You can’t blame the Mona Lisa for being hung in a garish museum. You can just hope that people will still be able to appreciate it for the great work of art it is, even if it’s surrounded by paint-by-numbers versions of The Last Supper and a bunch of sad clowns holding drooping sunflowers.

Tripping

Drove up to Connecticut on Wednesday morning and back Thursday morning—about 1200 miles in 36 hours, all to celebrate brother John’s birthday. It was supposed to be the two days before, but snow all up and down the east coast put the kibosh on that. I enjoyed insanely good Portuguese food, decent wine (like I’d really know one way or the other), outstanding conversation and, in the car, sixteen hours of brilliant music. My ears are ringing, my back hurts and I'm exhausted—five hours sleep the night before the trip, four and a half hours at Johnny's, and about six hours last night. I’m a tarred boy. There are worse things.

One neat side effect of the trip being delayed by snow storms was how gorgeous the drive was made. I went up I-81 for about 330 miles of the drive which, if you don’t know, goes through the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The interstate also passes through West Virginia and Maryland (for about ten miles), of course, but those states aren’t mountainous at that point. The roads were cleared of snow and bone-dry, but the mountains on either side were snow-frosted and just bizarrely gorgeous. Blue skies with fluffy white clouds and no traffic made for a marvelously pleasant driving experience.

John routed me through the Torrington/Barkhamsted/Winsted area in northwestern Connecticut, so as to avoid Hartford traffic. That was an area I’d driven in quite a bit with pal Karen back in high school and college. We never had any reason to go there, really, we’d just drive around and sort of see if we could get lost and find our way back. It’s extremely rural, by and large, hilly verging on mountainous, and simply beautiful. Since our exploring was haphazard and aimless, however, we (or at least I) got to know the area but not in any systematic way, so I’d frequently be surprised to find myself somewhere I knew well but with no idea of how I’d gotten there.

Driving those roads again after fifteen or twenty years was a pleasant but strange and disconcerting experience. I’d suddenly find myself someplace I knew quite well—and it’s pleasantly shocking how little most of it had changed—but with no idea of how THIS place I know well connects to THAT place I know well. I’d get flashes suddenly, images or memories and realized I’d eaten at that place when I was going door-to-door for ConnPIRG back in college, telling folks about the pollution in their local rivers and why they should give me money to fight the good fight. And I knew I’d spent the next five or six hours walking those roads but I had no idea where those roads were or what they looked like. As I drove over the Barkhamsted reservoir, I knew I’d gone to the beach there a couple times but had no idea where it was in relation to my current location—no idea where we parked or what the beach really looked like, just that I’d gone. It was as if someone said a line from a movie and I could quote the next three lines but had no idea what movie those lines came from, when it was made, who starred in it or even what the plot was.

At one point on the way back down, somewhere around the Front Royal area of Virginia, I think, you come up on this one section of what I believe are the Blue Ridge Mountains where you’re sort of looking straight at the range from the tippy top of it, so you can see both the western and eastern faces as they stretch away from you for a few dozen or hundred miles. It’s an odd and initially confusing perspective, but just gorgeous. And there’s something about that part of the Blue Ridge for the next twenty or so miles that’s really rough-hewn and jagged and gives you such a clear idea of the violence that must have been done by the receding glaciers—you can really see how they just ripped huge chunks out of the mountainsides. Just one more reminder, in case you’d gotten complacent, of why it’s a bad idea to take on a glacier.

The Great American Band, Lost

Tonight we happened to flip to a 1996 movie called "Feeling Minnesota," despite the fact that it had Keanu Reeves in it, because it also starred Vincent D'Onofrio who, Top Management frequently informs me, is perhaps my only serious competition for her lifetime affections. Given that her ardor is inflamed mainly by the character he plays on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Bobby Goran, a manic depressive, perhaps slightly schizophrenic genius with Asberger’s, this is a tad disturbing. Then again, so am I.

Anyhoo, when I first turned to the channel, we saw Keanu driving in a car with Cameron Diaz, whom I hadn’t realized was in the film. Since I’d never heard of the movie until this evening, it’s not surprising that I’m not an expert, but I do find it a bit surprising that of the two names listed in the online TV guide, Cameron’s wasn’t one.

So they’re driving in the car and a song comes on and they both look down at the radio in annoyance. One of them changes the station, and an upbeat shuffle begins to play, just a clean, distortion-free electric guitar, soon joined by bass and drums. Keanu and Cameron (or, more accurately, their characters), smile at each other and start bopping their heads back in forth in time to the music. And at the same time as the singer starts singing, they start singing—clearly this is music they know and love well. And why not? It’s by one of the greatest bands in the history of rock and roll.

I turn to Top Management and say, "Who is this?" And with a look of utter disdain, not too different from the look Keanu and Cameron had recently given their radio, she answers, "The Replacements. Please." As it’s almost certain that she’s the only other person in our small town who could have given me that answer, I immediately fall in love all over again.

Of course, the Replacements are from Minnesota, so it makes sense that a movie set in Minnesota with characters of the right age should be playing their music. But it was still a delightful surprise. Because with the possible exception of the Velvet Underground, never has there been a band so good and so commercially unsuccessful.

When the ‘Mats were first really making waves in the early eighties, R.E.M. was also just bubbling up to the surface from down in Athens, Georgia. The conventional wisdom had it that R.E.M. was going to be sort of alternative rock’s answer to the Beatles and the Replacements were going to be alternative rock’s answer to the Rolling Stones. (Of course, this was before the term "alternative rock" was really in use, and therefore long before the term fell out of favor. I still use it, though, because I’m a rebel. Actually, I’m just a crusty bastard.)

Things didn’t work out that way. R.E.M. was sort of like the Beatles in many ways—and unlike them in almost as many—and did go on to have massive success, both commercially and artistically. The ‘Mats, though, had almost nothing in common with the Stones, other than playing a lot of very basic rock and roll.

In hindsight it’s easy to see or at least believe that Mick Jagger, in particular, did most of the things he did because of his oh so calculated scheme to make it huge. So what? In the process he and Keef and the boys gave us all some of the finest rock ever. And even if he did go on to become an utterly soulless corporate stooge, selling out every principle he and the band ever pretended to believe in, and now finds himself incapable of creating any decent music, including an inability to even be a half-decent Stones cover band, no matter how overinflated their ridiculous reputation remains, well, we’ve still got those original records.

The only thing calculated about the Replacements was their deeply held belief that if it looked like things might start going their way, it was best to pull out the shotguns and start blasting away at their own feet as fast as possible and to repeat if necessary. Again and again and again they had the brass ring brushing against their fingers and every single time they pulled back, then got drunk and fell off the merry-go-round and usually ended up kicked out of the amusement park as well.

Got a big show in New York City with all the most important record label executives and promoters and DJs in attendance? Get drunk, vomit on stage and play nothing but Cher and Black Sabbath covers while switching instruments mid-song. Quit each song after ninety seconds or less and walk off stage after about half an hour. So infuriate every big wig there that you’re almost guaranteed to never get airplay, then go out the next night and in front of maybe two dozen people play one of the greatest shows Manhattan’s ever seen, a blistering set that practically sets the place on fire and has the ghosts of Elvis and Jimi weeping from the sheer beauty.

Since about 1985 I’ve been telling myself that their time will come. It finally did for the VU, and Lou Reed found success even before that, so surely, surely folks will glom onto the fact that this is one for the ages, a monumentally great band who write and play magnificent, moving, raunchy, tender, funny and insightful songs. And, as always, they’ve got a beat and you can dance to it.

But it still hasn’t happened. I don’t get it. Some teenage flick names itself after one of their best songs, "Can’t Hardly Wait," and uses the tune over the credits. THIS’ll be the thing that breaks ‘em wide open, even if by this point they’ve been broken up for five years. But no. Nothin’. Paul Westerberg, lead singer and writer for the ‘Mats, writes the songs for Cameron Crowe’s movie, "Singles," which has huge success. But no. Nothin’. A greatest hits collection comes out. Nothin’. Nothin’ nothin’ nothin’.

And I just don’t get it. I’ve recommended the Replacements to some of my closest friends, people who have outstanding taste in music. It hasn’t clicked with any of them. They WANTED to like it, they just didn’t. My pal Keri was even kinda upset—she didn’t want to let me down because she knew how much I dug ‘em. But they just didn’t work for her.

And, again I say, I don’t get it. What is it about this band that is so fabulous but which doesn’t resonate with a larger audience? Critics have always loved them—they got nearly as many kudos from the early days right up to the end as R.E.M. ever did. But no. No airplay, no sales, no clicking with large numbers of people.

And yet. When Top Management bought me that greatest hits collection a few years back—bundled with a disc of rarities—I put it on the stereo, turned the volume way up (hmm…wonder if that has anything to do with my ears ringing…) and got ready.

12 Left of the Dial

The first thing you hear is someone saying, almost but not quite out of the range of the microphone, "Okay." And then a rock and roll guitar starts, the rest of the band comes crashing in, the drummer leads the way, and they’re off. A few seconds of this, and then they pull it all down, and it’s just the singer over some sustained chords and a pair of clicking drumsticks, singing, "Read about your band in some local page—didn’t mention your name." And for three minutes, they play this song with the precision of diamond cutters and the passion of pilgrims on their way to Mecca, random lines that every band who’s ever tried to tour in a beat-up van can feel even if the lyrics are almost impossible to understand clearly as they drift up out of the mists.

And I just sat there, listening to this song I’ve heard a hundred times, thinking once more, this is rock and roll. Everything about it just screams This Is Rock and Roll and All That Is Good About It. If an alien landed and wanted to know what rock and roll is, I do believe this is the song I’d play.

And nobody else I know gets it. Oh, sure, every professional critic does. The members of R.E.M. and Sonic Youth and Pearl Jam and Nirvana do. Hell, the Goo Goo Dolls are nothing but a watered-down version of the Replacements, with better looks and weaker songs and minus the drunkenness. They not only get it, they’ve made millions and millions off their rare and precious knowledge. Meanwhile, all eight Replacements albums together have almost certainly sold less than any one Goo Goo Dolls album. Great. The Goo Goo Dolls get it. But no one else does.

That’s not exactly true, of course. Top Management gets it. She knows quality when she sees (and hears) it. That’s why she’s with me, and not Vincent D'Onofrio.

And when those aliens land, they’ll get it too. They’ll be converted and become true believers. I just know it. Or at least I believe it. Because I have to. Quality will out. It always does eventually. Maybe in this case it’s just waiting for those aliens to take the message of the ‘Mats to the rest of the universe.

Either that or they’ll be so freaked out they’ll get their little gray asses back to wherever they came from, because they’ll know that any planet capable of producing stuff this powerful is capable of ANYTHING.