February 14th, Forty Years Ago

One of the finer points of Catholicism is its view of  leisure time in general and celebrations in particular.  This was brought to the foreground in the Sixties when the concept of the “Saturday Anticipated” Mass, attendance of which, early Saturday evening, fulfilled ones weekly ritual requirement, thus freeing up Sunday for whatever it is that Catholics do when not in church.  But long before this marketing masterstroke, Catholics have always put feasting ahead of fasting.  After all, Jesus’ first miracle was to save a party.

Take, for example, the season of Lent.  This is a time dedicated to self-sacrifice, for one’s own good as well of that of the Church as a whole, parts both living and deceased.  Indeed, one was often reminded by the nuns at St. Mary School (where this one was enrolled) that it was considered quasi-saintly to “offer up” one’s own sacrifice for the benefit of “the Poor Souls in Purgatory,” to help them get paroled sooner.  To me, this seemed like a bargain.  Instead of having the Holy Accountant put the points for my suffering against my own debit, I have him give the credit to somebody else, to help quicken their release from the Last Waiting Room where they uncomfortably pass the time while their heavenly suites are prepared.  I get extra points for myself for the generosity of such an offer, thus shortening my own eventual stay in the Purg; sort of like getting double frequent-flier mileage.

It was mandatory, then, during Lent to give up certain personal pleasures.  During these grade school years, that consisted mostly of such treats as candy, causing mental and physical anguish in the siblings, and television, which in my house was unplugged from Ash Wednesday until Easter Morning.  Excepting, naturally, Sundays, which is the Lord’s Day, a feast day we celebrate all year, and  according to the Catholic canon, one can not feast and fast on the same day. And the feast always takes precedence.

The same concept applies to the non-Sunday feast days as well.  St. Patrick’s day is the most famous of these.  Although always occurring in Lent, it is always celebrated with the Christian equivalent of unbridled Bacchanalia.  In a Catholic grade school, we became aware of many more, if lesser-known, feasts, such as St. Joseph’s Day, which we always celebrated with gusto in St. Mary’s because of Sister Joseph, one of the most venerated of the School Sisters of Notre Dame stationed there.  Of course, we were subjected to the religious side of such holidays, never being able to forget that we were not simply having a good time, but were doing so in honor of one of the saints, and to those ends should “offer up” these times to some Poor Soul.  This presented an even sweeter deal: double credit against our sins while having a good time (a concept I carry with me to this day).

One holiday marked by these religious tie-ins was St. Valentines Day.  Although rarely, if ever, occurring during Lent, St. Valentine’s Day was a feast that even the civilians celebrated, so it was with doubled efforts that its true meaning was hammered into us.  Valentine was a saint, the Sisters made sure we knew, and that’s why we celebrate his day, not because Hallmark can’t make it on birthday cards alone in February.

This is not to say that we didn’t practice the usual grade school Valentines Day rituals.  We had the foil-covered box in the corner that served as a mailbox for those cheesy cards to be delivered on the fourteenth, all decorated in red construction paper hearts and little Cupid silhouettes.  I can see the afternoon sun glinting off that thing right now, taking me back to my last Valentines Day in St. Mary’s, and reminding me of the invaluable lesson I learned on that particular day forty years ago today.

I was in eighth grade, and, like my fellow classmates, was tightly in the grip of some brand-new hormones.  This was the last Valentines Day I was to spend with many of my classmates; St. Mary’s ended at the eighth garde, and not all of them would follow me to the Catholic high school.  This, then, was my last chance.  I chose my cards with utmost care, using all of the savvy my thirteen years had given me to sift through the package of cards my mother had bought for me for just the right messages:  subtle but not too, sincere enough to show my true feelings yet frivolous enough to be offhandedly dismissed if seen by the wrong eyes.

With that cream thusly skimmed, I carelessly filled out the rest to the remainder of the class, omitting only a few boys who wished only to see me with blood running out of my nose after socking me therein, and a couple of the girls to whom my very existence was unknown. Nevertheless, I filled out all of the cards that came in the bag, and plotted their deposit in the foil-covered box.

When boys reach the age we were then in other cultures, they are generally put upon to perform certain tasks to prove that they have grown into manhood.  In this country, we achieve and retain such recognition by not doing certain things, one of which is being seen putting Valentines in the classroom mailbox.  With modern technology in miniaturization and radio-control, I have no doubt that the National Geographic or the Discovery Channel will eventually capture on film this never-before seen rite of passage for the American male, but until then, even we doubt that it actually happens.  It is such a private event that we never talk about it, even amongst ourselves, and are certain the cards that seem to be from other boys are little more than clever forgeries.

Counterfeit or not, they are delivered with the rest during lunch period on St. V’s Day by two or three brown-nosed girls who leave the cafeteria early to break the sacred seal and distribute them to the appropriate desks.  I can remember so easily that cold February day all those years ago.  My anticipation was high as we lined up, two-by-two, for the march back to the classroom after lunch.  Would my most desired Valentine reciprocate?  Could this be the beginning of a lifetime of bliss with my most cherished, if secret, beloved?  Or would I discover the hidden passion for that girl who had longed for me from afar?  Certainly, I thought, this was the Time of Destiny; I had the right equipment, now knew how to use it, and would soon have the only missing element: the insight as to with whom I would share my quest.  This day would set the course for the thrillingly anticipated years in high school; the dances, the movies, the dates, the prom.  The world was my oyster, and I walked into Room 8-A with a fork in my hand.

We all quickly scanned the room as we ran to hang up our coats, looking for that certain desk, the one we knew now contained our special Valentine; not so much to see that it had been delivered, but to check the amount of competition.  Personally, I was harboring no doubts, no fears of what the taller, more handsome boys could say or do.  None of them could hope to match my own sincerity or devotion.  Quickly scanning the rest of the room as I headed to hang up my coat, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I noticed one of the desks was completely empty, had no envelopes on it, and just that thought took me aback.  At first, I didn’t believe it.  We twenty-odd people had been classmates together since first grade! How, I thought, could my classmates and I have been so cold as to totally exclude one of us?  How could we have been so selfish, so unthinking, as to leave one poor soul, one of us, Valentine-less?  I became lost in my own thoughts, as I realized I, too, had been a party to this oversight.  How could I, how could we, have been so cruel?  We are not young men and women, I thought as I hung up my coat, we are still children, and children, as it is often said, can be very cruel.

My heart managed to get even heavier as I walked to my chair, thinking of the poor slob who would sit at an empty desk while the rest of us reveled in the destruction of the tiny envelopes on ours, seeking the enlightenment that came within.  I vowed that this would not happen again, that I would, forever more, give a card to every one of my classmates.  And so would my children.  My lesson had been learned.

So immersed in these musings was I that I hadn’t thought to determine exactly whose desk was so cursed by its emptiness, and, as I sat down, thought that I must do so with subtle glances, not wanting to put the wretch any more ill at ease.  But all of this careful thought and preparation evaporated as I found myself sitting in my chair with only my desk before me.  My empty desk.  I was then suddenly aware that no thirteen year-old’s glance is subtle.

I can’t say what happened next.  I sat there and just stared at that desk, stretching before me as vast and empty as the Sahara.  My mind was just as empty, incapable of thought or feeling, impenetrable by sound or sight other than my prodigiously uncluttered desk.  I had learned two lessons in those few minutes: pity and despair.

After what must have been only ten minutes of real time, during which I aged seven years, order was restored and class began.  Only the sudden silence of the other students was able to break my own, and I returned to reality.  After the lesson, Sister Bernal, our homeroom, math, and science teacher, excused herself while we had a period of “quiet study,” which had never before happened in the history of St. Mary’s.  Upon her return after fifteen minutes or so, she walked over to me and handed me an envelope.  In it was a Valentines card she had just popped ’round to the corner drug store to purchase for me, so moved was she by my predicament.

God bless Sister Bernal.  She had nothing but the best of intentions with her lovely gesture, but it only served to deepen my despair.  On the most important Valentine’s Day of my life to that point, my only card was from a nun.  It was then that I vowed that this would be my last Valentine’s Day.

I know, I know that it was forty years ago, and that I should just get over it, for chrissakes.  But I can’t.  I knew I wouldn’t then.  It was my last Valentine’s Day.  February fourteenth does not exist on my calendar in any special way.  I wish there was a punch-line to this story, but there isn’t.  My heart goes out to everyone who won’t have a warm, loving St. Valentine’s Day; I certainly know how that feels.  But I feel most for those young women who, forty years ago, chose to ignore that young man who had already learned that love isn’t dependent on red-colored cards or other commercial, empty gestures, but on what is in one’s heart, and what fills one’s soul.

Hey, your loss, toots.

Watching Music (with footnotes*)

I recently spent an evening watching some great music, specifically the Talking Heads’ movie Stop Making Sense.  It’s not a movie per se in that there is no plot or dialogue, but it is a great concert film.  A great concert film.

I haven’t been to a rock concert in quite a few years.  In fact, I haven’t been to a rock concert since I stopped getting paid to be there.  (I have seen shows by the Roches,  Joe Jackson and David Byrne in the past several years, but I wouldn’t call them ‘rock concerts.’) I always agreed with the notion that the true test of a band is how it performs on stage. As Joe Jackson once put it, “the live concert has always been the most real and vital communication between artist and audience: the moment of truth. Having said that,” he continued,  “I’ve always hated live albums.  Mostly they sound like the original records, sped up  a bit, with a lot of echo added.”**  I couldn’t agree more.

Luckily, there are exceptions.†  There are some amazingly terrific live albums out there, but they are few and far between.  I can’t help, then, but wonder if that’s because so many bands fail that afore -mentioned ‘true test,’  that maybe they aren’t that great to begin with.

This is also true of concert films.  Most are amazingly dull, unless drooling over Punky Meadows for an hour and a half is your idea of a good time.  Others are forced, stilted, artificial productions by MTV. Some have a few bits of amazing concert footage edited literally to death with non-concert, mostly irrelevant crap.††  But a few, damned few, are actually great to watch and hear.

One of them is The Last Waltz by The Band.  While never a big fan of The Band myself, it is their last concert together, and the emotion there among the guys is palpable.  They truly knew how to go out on a high note.

Not one of them, sadly is The Concert for Bangla Desh. With George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, one would think this to be a great concert.  It was.  Sadly, it is not a great film.

Black and White Night was Roy Orbison’s come-back show, and it’s one of the best. Joining Roy in the litany of great songs are Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello,  Bonnie Raitt, Jacksone Browne, k. d. lang, and more, and the result is remarkable.  Shot in glorious black & white, it serves as a great tribute to an underappreciated song writer who left us a few months after the concert.

Yet Stop Making Sense shines above them all.  I recall when the Talking Heads were becoming popular and their music was saddled with the unfortunate label of “art rock.”  I didn’t know what that meant then, and I don’t now.  I think it might have been a lame effort by the mainstream critics to explain something that was obviously very good, but also just a bit beyond their grasp.  They didn’t quite know what to make of it, so in an attempt to seem ‘with it’ came up with the phrase “art rock” instead of putting any effort into meaningful critique.  Watching this film, I can see why these folks missed the point.

Does David Byrne do some weird stuff?  Sure he does.  Is it because he’s doing art?  Who knows?  But is he and everyone else on stage having a great time?  No doubt.  I’ve always said that the Talking Heads were the greatest dance band of all time, and watching the way these folks move onstage, well, it just seems to prove my point.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not the over-choreographed, insincere stuff you see all over the place these days (thanks, again, MTV, you bastard). It’s genuine, dancing for the fun of it kind of stuff. Now I’m not saying that they made up all their moves that night. Certainly some moves were done for the same songs at every show.  I’m sure most originated with Byrne, but it seems as if many moves came about spontaneously and were polished over time. And I say ‘polished,’ not ‘perfected’ for a reason.  These people, like most of us, are not professional dancers.  They are dancing for the sheer joy of it. Enveloped by the music they are moved physically as well as emotionally, which sounds much like the parties at college where we heard many of these songs, dancing as joyously and unabashedly as they do in this movie.

And, finally, if there was ever any doubt, this film proves irefutably that David Byrne was, and always shall be, Mister Eighties.

Although I always enjoyed the soundtrack, I never saw the film until I was surprised to see the DVD on the shelf of a man whose taste I always admired in such things.  Picking it off the shelf, “Mal,” I said, “how is this?”  “It keeps all the promises the sountrack makes,” he replied.  “Well worth your time.”  Next trip to Barnes & Noble, I picked up my copy.

So, go to Netflix or wherever you rent your video entertainment these days, and bring home Stop Making Sense.  Wait until the parents are out of the house, load it up, under the audio set-up choose the feature film 5.1 mix, crank up the surround sound system and enjoy.

Does anybody have any questions?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

*the essay, not the music

**from the liner notes to Joe Jackson’s album Live 1980/86.

†Exceptional live albums include Joe Jackson’s Live 1980/86 and Big World, It’s Alive! by the Ramones, as well as the entire You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore by Frank Zappa.

††Unfortunately, Zappa’s movies tend to fall into this category.  Although The Dub Room Special is worth it just to see his 1974 band play the song “Approximate.”  When I rented this video, I must have watched them perform that song a dozen times.

Milk and Sugar

This is a transcription of some writing I did today in my brand-new notebook with a long-owned pen.  I tell you this to dispell from within you the thought of me even thinking about taking this MacBook to the mall, and to assure you that I do not here travel down the slogging path that is metaphor.

I’m in the Barnes & Noble of the Menlo Park Mall.  It is about three-thirty in the afternoon of the sixteenth of January.  I am thrice embarrassed.

I am embarrassed that I had to buy this notebook.  There was a time in my life when writing implements were readily available to me.  I’ve small notebooks scattered hither and yon full of things that that caught my fancy, things that occurred to or near me, both physical and mental.  Today, here, in the dreaded mall, I realized both that I had a few things I wanted to say, and that I was bereft of the means to say it.  So I had to buy this notebook.  Thankfully, I have several pens and mechanical pencils in the Jeep’s console.

But here, writing this, I’ve come to realize that I must add a third item to my now complete list of New Year’s Resolutions: that I shall not again find myself bereft of the most basic of writing implements.

Next, I am embarrassed that I had to use an ATM card to pay for my $1.87 cup of coffee, as I suddenly realized that of cash I was also bereft.  (Okay, okay I’ll stop.)

I don’t even like using an ATM card for any purchase, let alone one so petty in cost, and try to avoid such transactions especially.  I don’t like that my whole life is now traceable.  Thus I try to avoid making any kind of card-fulfilled transactions, I don’t use EZ-Pass and I’ve turned off all the ‘location’ features of my iPhone (although I’m not sure how much that actually helps).  Besides, with cash, I’m painfully aware of how much I’m doling out; having a visual reminder helps keep things in check for me.

Lastly, I am embarrassed because I’m sitting in the mall on a sunny afternoon.

I came to the mall to try to burn a few gift cards, and because I hadn’t been out of the house since coming home from school on Friday afternoon.  Not that I hate that; I like being home.  It’s familiar.  It’s comfortable.  I know where everything is (more or less).  In short, it is everything a home is supposed to be.  This weekend especially was a good time to be home.

Friday evening, otherwise known as Pizza Night, a couple of friends dropped by. We ate some pie, conversed, laughed, then decided to watch a movie. The choice was Stage Door, which they had not seen.  A classic of the late-1930s American cinema, it tells the tale of a boarding house full of aspiring young actresses in a contemporary if fictitious New York city theatre culture.  Based on a play co-authored by George S. Kaufmann, it’s fast-paced, not bereft of wit (damn! sorry), and features Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Aldophe Menjou (who lives in my memory only as the punchline to a joke told on McLain Stephenson’s last episode of M*A*S*H), Ann Miller, Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn.  Fun film, great costumes, good script, Rogers in a role that shows she’s far beyond Astair on many levels, and Katherine Hepburn. ‘Nuff said.

After the film, we had time to watch the third episode of the second season of the best thing to come out of Canada since Dudley Doright, Slings and Arrows.  If you haven’t yet seen this amazing, three-season series set in a Shakespearean theatre company, well, give up hope of leading a hip life.  Our guests are newcomers as well, and it’s always great watching something you love with someone who hasn’t yet seen it.  And Season Two is by far my favorite.  They tell the story of one show per season; Hamlet, MacBeth (with a great subplot surrounding Romeo & Juliet), and King Lear respectively.  If you’ve ever worked in a theatre you’ll recognize these characters immediately. And the supporting cast is superb.  (Keep an eye on the security guard and the stage manager.)

Saturday I put the finishing touches on the kitchen, followed, of course, by the weekly regularly-scheduled movie night.  I did catch the last quarter of the New Orleans/San Francisco game, and what a quarter it was.  Thrilling, surprising, everything a playoff game should be.  Then, on a change of pace, the evening’s entertainment consisted not of a movie, but of the first episode of Downton Abbey, which has me hooked. Wonderful characters, great costumes, sharp direction, excellent locations, engaging dialogue, a great way to spend time in front of the television with a pint between. I haven’t been this hooked on a BBC series since Foyle’s War.  One thing, though, about Downton Abbey: I have a hard time saying the title.  When I first read it my mind pronounced it as a Pittsburgher would say the word ‘downtown,’ and I can’t shake it.  I know I’ve also just ruined it for anyone who knows what I mean, so next time you see me, feel free to chastise me for being such a jagoff ennat.

Sunday was a trip to the cinema for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Gary Oldman was great, John Hurt terrific, Colin Firth handsome, and the movie, eh.  It was difficult to follow at times, and I must admit it took me a good half an hour to understand what was going on within the threads of the story, and I know I missed some things in my confusion. This struck me as not necessarily the best way to present a mystery, as it made the pulling together of all these threads at the end a bit less than fully satisfying.

There were five of us attending this movie.  Five matinee adult tickets at the box office: $30.  Three large popcorns, four sodas, two candies at the concession stand: $55.  Fifty-five goddamn American dollars.  And people wonder why I don’t often go to the cinema.

The afternoon was taken up with football, it being a playoff weekend and all.  I was not so much rooting for the Texans as I was rooting against the Ravens.  The only NFL team that should be playing on the shores of the Chesapeake is the Baltimore Colts.  The Ravens?  Blasphemy.

I’m much like the Jets, Cowboys, Falcons and Packers: I can’t for the life of me figure out the New York Football Giants.  A month and a half ago: given up for dead.  After yesterday’s game: playing for the Conference Championship.  And that’s why I’m rooting for them the rest of the way.  I like a little chaos in my life now and then.

So today, after emptying the dishwasher, having breakfast, clearing breakfast, trimming the beard, showering, writing lesson plans, editing my lesson notes from last year to fit this year’s text, ironing my week’s school clothes and fixing lunch for the boy and me, I decided to drive out to the mall and burn those gift cards.

Sadly, burning the gift cards was the one thing I utterly failed to do as none of the stores  in which they are valid had anything I wanted to buy, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.  Today, people think it’s impersonal to give cash, so they give gift cards, as if there is a fundamental difference.  Please, in future, just give us the cash.  Spending the last three bucks from a fifty on a gallon of milk is far better than letting the last three bucks on a Macy’s gift card remain in their corporate pockets in perpetuity.

I was looking specifically for a double-breasted, dark (blue or grey) sport-coat.  After the clerk showed me three, I asked if he had anything that was not made of plastic.  He didn’t.  He doubted anyone did “these days.”

So I wandered through the dress shirt area.  I’m trying to add a bit more variety to my school clothes.  I’ve worn white oxford shirts almost exclusively for a long time now, and thought a few subdued patterns or colors might be a nice change.  Yet as good as that idea is in theory, in practice it breaks down rapidly and fully.  For me, wearing a blue shirt is a radical departure, so the garish colors and patterns with which I was surrounded just don’t work here.  Also, I don’t like spread collars.  I don’t understand why anyone does.  Point collars finish the lines of a suit cleanly, and perfectly frame the knot of one’s tie.  I am an oxford man at school, preferring the button-down collars with my Harris tweeds; I feel the point collars too dressy for sport-coats.  But with a suit, never button-down collars, and only french cuffs.

My grandfather Gyarmati would be so proud…

From Macy’s to the Barnes and Noble where I presently sit, I noticed a large amount of Giants wear, and rightly so.  These fans have every reason to be proud.

While passing the Disney Store I was treated to a family pushing a stroller that contained a distraught little boy.  Feet kicking, fists flailing, tears streaming and mouth producing that piercing, nerve-rattling cry of “NNAAAAAWWWWWW,” I was filled with pride that my son was never one of those kids.

But now, with this new, small pad before me, I sit in the Barnes & Noble cafe, pen in hand, scribbling down all this nonsense.  Looking over what I’ve so far committed to paper I can see that I really need to write more slowly.  I’ve tried many times, but I find it most difficult.  I’m afraid that if my pen doesn’t keep up with my thoughts that I’ll forget what I was going to say.  The downside is that years later I look at my own brand of cuneiform and wonder just what the hell I was trying to say.

Some quick, unobtrusive observations of my surroundings:

There are six laptops within sight.  Three of them are Apple products.

There are five cell-phones within sight.  One of them isn’t an Apple product.

It seems that more and more, at many of the places I go that I’m among the oldest people in sight.  Of the two dozen people I can see here, only four are possibly older than I, two of them realistically certainly older than I, and two about my age.  It’s weird being in my fifties.  It’s weird because it doesn’t feel fundamentally different from being in my forties, which didn’t feel fundamentally different from my later thirties.  I guess I was expecting a bigger difference, something more akin to napping as opposed to skydiving kind of different.

Oh, and the coffee is bitter, as are most decafs.  I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in a dozen years.  I have found some excellent decaf tea, but coffee?  Gone.  Hardly worth the trouble any more.  Just as well really.  Can one truly enjoy a cup of joe, decaf or not, bereft of a smoke?

Let Him Sleep On

I’ve been looking at scripts lately, trying to decide what to direct next season at the community theatre in which I am all-too-heavily involved.  I’m hooked on Stoppard, but have yet to definitely choose between three of his scripts.  But that indecision hasn’t stopped me from looking ahead to the 2013-2014 season.

I’ve decided to finally direct Waiting for Godot.  Sadly, I can’t do it at the theatre in which I am all-too-heavily involved.  The space just isn’t conducive to what I want to do. I want to do it in the round, and will apply to do just that at a different community theatre.  Naturally, I’m rather nervous about having to actually write up a proposal and apply for a slot, but am hopeful of the outcome.

Discussing this play with one whose opinions on such things I admire greatly led to a more heated than expected exchange in which I was all but challenged to direct the play.  I was accused of not really understanding Godot.  To be honest, I was just a bit insulted.

That being said, I offer here a ‘reprint’ of an entry on my old blog on just that subject: Beckett’s great Waiting for Godot.  I leave final judgement to you, and apologize to the three people that might have read this before.

—  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —   —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —

Twenty-some odd years ago this past autumn, that is to say ‘October,’ I enjoyed one of those amazing experiences that did exactly what great art is supposed to do. It was something that, naturally, I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but have come to see as one of life’s great episodes. It was something that caused me to look at art, theatre, life, and myself with different eyes. Which, in fact, is precisely what makes it great art.

This episode, and its inherent epiphanies, was my involvement in my college’s production of Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. It was, if I may be so bold, one of my few truly great, and perhaps greatest, experiences on stage.

I auditioned for the part of Pozzo for several reasons. First, I thought myself perfect for any role whose lines include “Is everybody looking at me?” (I had a bit of an ego problem back then. Imagine!) Second, knowing who was auditioning, I knew who the rest of the cast would be: two of my dear friends and an Actor. Dear friend Bob and dear friend Keith were obvious fits to Estragon and Lucky respectively, and the Actor, who had graduated the previous spring, had been asked back for that fall semester just to play Vladimir. That left Pozzo to me. Easy.

To be perfectly honest, I had totally forgotten about the auditions by the day they actually occurred. I was in my shoddy apartment enjoying the early evening in typical undergrad fashion when good friend Keith arrived. “So,” he said. “Ready?”

Not fully understanding the question, I replied “I guess so.”

“Let’s go.”

With that I grabbed a light jacket and followed him out the door.

“By the way,” I said after we crossed the street, “Where are we going?”

“Auditions,” said Keith lightly, adding with a grin, “of course.”

This exchange left me somewhat nonplussed. Sudden clarity was followed by a moment of pure panic as I realized I was completely unprepared for an audition that evening, followed by an instant wave of relaxation as I remembered the cast was already known. No problem, I thought, confident that my auditioning skills would make up for any lack of preparation (or talent), as was usually the case in the past.

At the auditions, though, an odd thing became apparent. That I was reading for Vladimir along with the Actor. In my calm, confident state, I saw myself as the ‘sacrificial lamb,’ if I may; the actor who reads alongside the pre-cast Actor to give the illusion of choice to those in attendance. So, I figured, what the hell. I just went balls-to-the-wall with it. And it felt pretty good.

The next night, at callbacks, the cast shaped up predictably. It was blaringly obvious that Bob and Keith were getting the roles mentioned above, and I kept getting paired with the Actor, reading for Vladimir. Convinced deep in my heart of heart that this was some kind of gag, that everyone knew why the Actor had been asked back, and now that he was here it would look pretty bad if you didn’t hold up your part of the bargain, I, again, threw caution, and most of my self-restraint, to the wind. I knew the part was his, so with nothing to lose, I reared back and just let it fly.

The director, whom I’ll call Ed, for that’s what I’ve always called him, eventually released all the auditioners but for the Actor and myself. We were given a cigarette to prepare the same speech, then called back into the space. The Actor was called up first, which clearly pleased him, thinking it gave him the advantage of the first move, as white has in chess.

I was just as pleased in having the last ups, as home does in baseball.

After the usual platitudes from the director to us, the Actor read.

It was good. I guess.

Then me. I swear it was the best acting I’ve ever done. Ever. The best performance of my life, there, in the dingy “studio theatre” on my college campus, in front of four people: the aforementioned Ed, Lisa (god I hope that’s her name) the SM, Ann the AD, and the Actor. I blew him out of the water, acting-wise speaking, and everyone there knew it.

I left happy. I knew I was going to get Pozzo, and the Actor Vladimir, and that was totally cool with me. I said as much at the bar where I met up with dear friends Keith and Bob half an hour later. They pretty much agreed. They also agreed that no matter what the casting, everyone there knew the score, and that was as good as any role.

The next morning, I found the cast list to accept the role, and a most curious thing happened. My name was next to Vladimir’s. I was stunned. Truly stunned. I mean a step back a pace, look to both sides, shake your head and look again kind of stunned. Stunned.

So into the role of my life I waded. I had always played characters, never was a leading man, never expected to be. Never want to be again. It’s hard as hell. But that play, those words, that fuckin’ Beckett. . . Jeeziz.

I love being around people when they discuss Godot. I love hearing the details on Beckett’s grasp of existentialism, his representation of life and its absurdity, how it is that the fruitless, indeed, hopeless, pursuit represents not only our own lives, but is also the driving force of the play, the thing that keeps Vladimir and Estragon dedicated, however unhappily, to their wait.

These points, naturally, are all defensible, and in some cases, strongly so.

Oddly enough, I take a different view. I don’t mean to argue against any of the points mentioned above, or any that I have yet to have heard. It’s just that, well, as Ed put it last summer while discussing the play: “At the risk of sounding snobbish or elitist,” which had never seemed to bother him before, “I firmly believe that you can’t truly understand Waiting for Godot until you’ve lived it.”

The power of this play is so clear to me that I find it hard to describe either the script or my own reactions to it. My powers of interpretation fail the among details: I can see the forest but can’t describe the trees. Which, perhaps, shows how I’ve managed to miss the point entirely.

My take on the play is a bit more optimistic. Yes, the power that Godot exerts over Gogo and Didi is sizable, yes yes, but I don’t see that power as the compelling, the driving interest in the play. For me, it has always been the unshakable friendship between the two men.

Many say they are weak, Vladimir and Estragon, because they have allowed themselves to be chained to that dreary spot awaiting a goal, a triumph, that even they know will never come. I disagree. I see the path away from that spot, that tree, that bog, as the weak man’s road. Together, Estragon and Vladimir forge a strength beyond both of them, they find within themselves and each other the immense strength needed to stay, voluntarily, at that spot. The strength to see through just one more day, one more sunset, one more failed expectation, the strength of two true friends, it is that strength upon which the play stands. It is that strength that keeps Gogo and Didi waiting, and that strength that gives us all hope, as fragile and transparent as it may be.

This play, then, in short, only makes me appreciate my friends more, and makes me feel even more in their debt. It makes me want to attempt to find the words to thank each and every one, face-to-face, for their contribution to my own ability to make it through the day. I guess these will have to do.

And for this I have two people, especially, to thank. (The following story came to me from each of those people, individually, on different occasions. I hope I’ve remembered it accurately.)

After the Actor and I read our last assignment (Vladimir’s superb “Was I sleeping while others suffered?” speech from Act II), we were dismissed. Ed, Ann, and Lisa (god I hope that’s her name) trudged up to Ed’s office where he sat down at a typewriter. He typed these words at the top of the page:

WAITING FOR GODOT
Cast List

He then types “Estragon . . . . .” and without hesitation types the full name of my good friend Bob.

Next line of type goes down as “Vladimir. . . . .” and then Ed pauses. He sits back and says to no one in particular, “[The Actor] could do this part in his sleep.”

At this point, both Ann and Lisa (god I hope that’s her name) loudly protest, telling Ed “You HAVE to give it to Bill!  You HAVE to!!” Ed then somewhat reluctantly typed in my name.

Without that protest, none of these other amazing things would, or could, have occurred. Ann, Lisa (god I hope that’s her name), I am sure I never thanked you properly. For that, I apologize.

As far as offering those long overdue words of thanks, I guess these will have to do.

Theme: Songs

First, there was the Walkman.  It saved my life.

Sometime in 1980, I became aware of the existence of this amazing device, and I acquired one as soon as possible thereafter.  It saved my sanity and thus my life while in the service, where it daily gave me a near-total escape from the weirdness of my surroundings.  It was large by today’s standards (rough guesses being something along the lines of 4x6x2 inches), powered by four AA batteries for about four hours, but did have two headphone jacks, which came in handy a few times.  It played cassettes.

Not to brag, but I never fell for the Great Eight-Track Con.  It was always cassettes for me.  (TDK SA-90s becoming, eventually,  the favored blank cassette.)  So by the late 1970s, I had put much of the music I had on vinyl onto tape, in the form of what became knows as “singles tapes” or “mix-tapes.”  It was a painstaking, time consuming process, but all my efforts paid off with the arrival of my first Sony Walkman.

I have always been a big fan of Sony audio components.  Perhaps not the best stuff out there, but it sounds damned good and isn’t excessively expensive.  My current home system is entirely Sony components driving Bose speakers.  (There’s a lesson for you kids out there: when it comes time to build your own butt-kicking stereo system, don’t skimp on the speakers.  A $1500 amplifier sounds like shit through hundred-dollar speakers, but a $300 amp sounds pretty damned good through $600 speakers.)

As wonderful as the Walkman was in the service, it proved essential for college life.  I always lived off-campus, and learned the beauty of living at least a thirty-minute walk from campus: near enough for a not uncomfortable walk to and from, but far enough to discourage casual company in the form of people dropping by only because they could think of nothing to do on their own.  The Walkman filled that hour each day wonderfully.

The original Walkman performed very well for four years, and would have continued to do so had not an inattentive friend lost the battery compartment lid.  That took me to the newest Walkman which ran for about four hours on a single AA battery, and was scarcely bigger than a cassette case in size.  It was great.  Slipped into any pocket as to be out of the weather as opposed to the first Walkman, which had a belt-clip.

Best thing ever with a Walkman, no kidding:  Everyone I knew in undergrad school had a Walkman of one brand or another.  One guy whose casual acquaintance I had made lived in this most amazing house smack in the middle of a pretty upper-crust neighborhood, the denizens of which despised college students to the point of neurosis.  The basement of this house, however, was fully and very nicely finished including a hardwood floor.  In short, it was begging to host the best dance-party in recorded history.  Sadly, the volumes at which we were required to play our music would  bring a swift, severe, and costly response from the local constabulary. Someone, I don’t recall who, then had a moment of genius, and The Great Walkman Party was born.

Everyone there wore their Walkmans.  Everyone there danced to loud, favorite music that no one else could hear.  The noise level never got above spirited conversation.  It was just amazing.

However, I digress.

Then came the CD version, called the Discman.  Heavy, bulky and the definition of unwieldy, it required a four C battery power pack that strapped over your shoulder, but it was portable digital music.  Remarkable. Loved it.

Eventually came the Sport Walkman which made it into my Jeep with the help of a cassette adapter.  Not soon afterwards I acquired the ability to burn my own CDs.  Heaven on Earth.

At first I resisted the iPod, I admit.  Even after getting one, I still wasn’t its biggest fan until discovering the AAC compression, and re-importing all my CDs in that format.  (Yes, the difference is that great between AAC and MP3.  Trust me.)  But now I’m hooked. I adore the idea of the overwhelming majority of my music being available at all times.

Three years ago, I bought a brand-new car.  My first one.  First brand-new car, ever.  It had eleven miles on it when it first saw my driveway.  It’s another Jeep, of course, and one of the main reasons it is another Grand Cherokee, beyond my sometimes unnervingly adamant brand loyalty which extends into such realms as shoes, sport-coats, electronics, lighters and so forth, is that at the time Chrysler/Jeep was the only American auto company currently offering a full iPod interface into their cars’ stereo systems.  In the glove compartment of my Jeep is a  dock/jack/whatever the hell they’re calling it now.  I plug in the iPod, and have full control and access to it from the controls on my car’s stereo system.  It charges the iPod as well.

I’ve gone from the Walkman to the Driveman.

I just can’t quite yet decide if that’s a step forward, or backward.

One of my longest and most adamant brand loyalties has been to Apple.  In college I had a work-study job in the university’s graphic arts department, where I worked with two amazingly cool guys, John and Doug, and had the kind of boss people dream of having, my dear friend Walt, who was such a great boss that it was only after I’d come to work for him that he became a dear friend.  It was there, in that office, that the very first Macintosh computer arrived not long after its introduction.  It changed the way we did things within an hour.

I managed to afford my first Mac in the spring of 1995, as Apple teetered on the brink of oblivion.  It was, as I recall, a Performa 6200, sporting a CPU that clocked out at an amazing 75 Mh, with more RAM than anyone could want or need, a staggering 16 Mb. The hard drive was a gig, but one that seemed to stretch to the memory horizon.  Never had a single problem with it.  Mostly played “Myst” on it.  Loved that game.

A steady stream of Macs came and went, never seeing a virus, never having a fatal crash, never losing a byte, or a bit (which one is smaller, I can never remember; I think they made them that way on purpose to keep us confused and afraid) of data.  I knew, in my heart of hearts, that some day, Apple would be cool.

That turned out to be one of the rare instances where my heart of hearts was spot-on.

Not too many years ago, Apple was giving away iPod Nanos with the purchase of any Mac computer, as long as you showed a student ID.  This promotion, which ran in two or three consecutive Back-To-School seasons, neatly coincided with the upgrades of several machines, and the folks at the Apple store honored my faculty ID as close enough for the free Nanos.  Soon, my home was experiencing an iPod glut, as I had purchased one prior to this promo.  The last year of its run, the loot was in the form of an iPod Touch, which I gave to a neighbor kid.  But the Nano I kept for myself.

Every spring, I load up the Nano with music, as full as it can get, with tunes chosen more-or-less at random from my iPod backup drive, trying to vary the choices as much as I can around the core of the “A” List, and hit “Shuffle Songs.”  I have an armband that neatly holds the iPod out of harm’s way, and I wear it while mowing the lawn, washing the car, battling the feral grapevines in the backyard; in short, I call it my iChores.  I love it.  Sometimes, I’ll invent something to do in the back yard just to be alone with some tunes for an hour or so.  Not often, but it has been known to happen.

During these times alone with the music, unfettered by the rapt attention one must hold while driving in central New Jersey, the music will often inspire images, memories and feelings from my past.  And these particular firings of those particular neurons always have people attached to them.

I have been chided of late about the frequency with which I update this blog, which is to say the updates have no frequency whatsoever.  So here’s what I’ve decided to do:

After each of my iChores sessions, I’ll go backwards through the iPod’s to the first song I heard, and will write what I thought about when hearing that song, what images, memories, people I associate with that tune.  Naturally, not all will have such things yet attached to them, but it will give me a purpose, a goal to pursue in my writing, of which, I do admit that, I, too, feel I should do more.  These won’t be my only entries, but it will, hopefully, avoid long periods of virtual silence.

I’ll try to use only first names, but won’t change any of them.  I’m not that creative.  Please feel free to dispute anything you read here.  All accounts will be true as I remember them, but any resemblance to historical fact will be purely coincidental.

Grey Matters

(a review of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler; The Case Presented  by Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams)

As one who has been reading and wondering about German history for the better part of forty years, I picked up Grey Wolf on first sighting.  I was hoping for an intriguing  new viewpoint on the the end of the Third Reich and the ultimate fate of its Führer.  Sadly, I found the book lacking in many ways.

The first problem I had was the method of citation.  Endnotes are annoying enough as it is, but the way Messrs. Dunstan and Williams chose to format theirs is maddening in the extreme.  There are no superscript numbers indicating citations; one is forced to look up the note by the relevant line of text.  Also, many of the lines I wanted to look up were missing from the notes; on the first page of the Preface is written that the “famous ‘Hitler Skull’ fragment held in Moscow for decades has finally been DNA tested,” yet there is no citation given for that rather crucial tidbit.  Even some passages given such citation are lacking; for example on page 157, in support of the contention that the “last officially photographed appearance” of Hitler was actually that of his double, Gustav Weber, we are treated to the endnote stating that this was concluded by “[f]acial analysis by Alf Linney, professor of medical physics, University College London, commissioned by the authors…,’ followed by a brief biography of Professor Linney, who, we are then told, “has proven scientifically that the man depicted … in frames from … [the] footage … is not Adolf Hitler.”  But we are not given any idea as to what such scientific proof entails, or how such a conclusion was made.

The first third of the book is a brief history of the Second World War, information with which it may be safely assumed that anyone reading this book would be familiar.  The stories of the espionage of the period might not be as well known, and their inclusion is forgivable, but the detailed retelling of the rocket attacks on Britain and Allied positions seemed rather superfluous.  Instead of this, I would have thought the authors’, as well as the readers’, time better spent in a more detailed description of how these conclusions were reached; for example, the DNA testing on the “Hitler Skull,”  a description of the afore-mentioned scientific proof of it being Weber, not Hitler in the film, and a bit more evidence and explanation of the existence of Hitler’s daughters, which seem so casually mentioned in the book, to name but three examples.  Perhaps many of the questions about the authors’ conclusions may have been assuaged with a more thorough explanation of their methods.

(It seemed a bit negligent to me that the authors did not follow up on the idea that the Hitlers had two daughters.  I would have thought them the ultimate source, the crowning achievement of the book, and the final, irrefutable proof of their “case presented.”)

To be perfectly honest, I viewed the authors’ research methods with more than a bit of skepticism after page 102, where it is stated that in the US election of 1944, “Roosevelt had no choice but to ditch [his vice president] Wallace and nominate the senator from Arkansas, Harry S. Truman.”  If Messrs. Dunstan and Williams or their publisher can’t be bothered to do a Google search to confirm that Mr Truman was, in fact, a senator from his home state of Missouri, or, perhaps worse, that they just took at their word the first person they asked, it doesn’t speak well of the ‘fact-checking’ in the remainder of the book.

Sorry, Messrs. Dunstan and Williams, but from this teacher of history’s perspective, until you present a less speculative, more empirically-backed case, I will continue to doubt the validity of your conclusions.

The Fifth of October

The drive from Pryor, Oklahoma to Coffeyville, Kansas was just over an hour, so we left early.  Not that Dennis instantly agreed; after the strike and load-out the previous night he wanted to sleep in, and who could blame him.  But an argument based on the fact that he could sleep on the way as it was my turn to drive, then pass out for the rest of the day won him over.

It had been decided long before that the driver had control of the radio, and I routinely tuned to NPR.  We had started out listening to oldies stations, but that grew old as the oldies stations across America bought their tapes from the same place, and it got to the point where we knew that if The Platters were singing about this great pretender guy, it must be 11:30.  Finding NPR stations was a bit more difficult, but I don’t recall many drives wherein I couldn’t find some decent, intelligent radio. On this particular trip, I heard Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture performed on six accordions.  It was brilliant.

In about an hour we were checked in to our room in Coffeyville, Dennis was face-down on his bed, and I was on my way into town for some breakfast.  I made it a point to avoid the national fast-food joints and restaurant chains, and I found a nice little place off the main drag and sat down.  Not to brag, but I was almost instantly the subject of conversation at every table there.  The waitress, a cute gal in her late thirties came over with a welcome cup of coffee, and happily took my order of two eggs (over easy), crispy bacon and wheat toast.  When she returned with my order and a fresh cup of joe, she smiled sweetly and asked “So, are you in town for the anniversary?”

“Well, that depends,” I answered.  “What anniversary is that?”

She rather enthusiastically explained that that day, October 5th, 1992, was the one hundredth anniversary of the Dalton Gang’s last raid, and there was going to be a reënactment of just that that very morning.

“Yes,” I said.  “I am here for the anniversary.”

A palpable thrill went though the place.  The simple fact that someone so obviously not from around these parts was there to see the Dalton Gang’s raid just made these folks’ day.  Again I was the subject of conversation at every table, but this time I was included in a few.

The spectacle was wonderful.  I sat on aluminum bleachers with what I assume was most of the fine citizenry of Coffeyville and was entertained and educated. Later, when I returned to the hotel, the actors had just arrived, I described my morning, and one of the actors, a certain Jeffery Courrier, asked if I would take him into town and show him around.  It was my pleasure to do so.

(For those of you who know me through Facebook, there are three photos of Coffeyville, including one of Mr Courrier, in my album “Smoke On The Mountain” tour.)

Being that today is also October 5, I thought I’d recount what I learned of the Dalton Gang and their last raid.  Any resemblance to historical fact is coincidental.

The Daltons were natives of Coffeyville, Kansas, and thus, despite the fact that they were a dangerous, and murderous band of desperados, were something of folk heroes to the kind folks who lived there, or so some said.  Despite that, the Gang decided to do something even Jesse James had never attempted: they would knock over two banks in the same town on the same day.

Downtown Coffeyville’s main drag comes to a Y in the center of town; to veer left takes you into the residential section of town, go right and you’re quickly out of town and into the deep prairie.  One bank was at the inside point of the Y, the other across the street to the right.  The plan was to park the horses between the banks, split up the gang to hit both banks simultaneously, then jump on their horses and ride out of town.

The plan was doomed from the start.  It seems there was some kind of construction crew on the road to the right, thus putting the kibosh on the plan to park the horses between the banks.

In any case, with their original parking spaces gone, they decided to tie up their horses to a fence about half way down Death Alley, which is off the left road of the Y.  (I’ve always considered that to be an odd choice of parking places.  “Hey, Grat, where are we gonna tie up the horses?’  “Beats me, Emmet.  Hey, Bob, you wanna tie up on 9th Street or in Death Alley?”)

So, they tie up in, really, Death Alley and head to the banks.  The Daltons knew they would be recognized, and so wore wigs and false beards as disguises, which worked not at all.  Some said they were confident that they wouldn’t get shot at because of their presumed folk-hero reputation.   However, the kindly folks of Coffeyville didn’t cotton to anybody taking their hard-earned cash, folk-hero or not.

They and their intentions were instantly recognized, and a gunfight ensued.  Needless to say, they don’t get to their horses in any kind of timely fashion.  Fifteen minutes later, the Daltons and a number of townspeople lay dead.  And I got to see it all reënacted on its centennial.  And that was nineteen years ago today.

Nineteen freakin’ years.

Christ on a bike.

Since then, I’ve spent a bit of time musing on the makeup of an 1892 road construction crew.  I have this image of guys in fringed orange vests, wearing big orange cowboy hats.  One guy is standing holding a sign that on one side reads “WHOA” and on the other “MOSEY.”

And that’s precisely why I probably shouldn’t be teaching history.

Artefactors

I’ve come to see that I am really not the kind of person who should go to museums.  I spent the better part of last week wandering about the various buildings of the Smithsonian Institute and its immediate environs.  It was amazing.  I find wonder in everything.  And that’s the problem.

Day One: Arrive at the hotel in Washington at about one in the P of M.  Check in, lug the aptly-named luggage to the room, then off to walk the five blocks to the Air and Space Museum.  Mistake.

This is the part of the Smithsonian to which I am most emotionally attached.  I spent a good bit of my pre-pubescent years, and most of its money, building scale models.  Some ships, a bit of armor, but mostly aircraft, and most of that from the Second World War era, which was the focus of most of my reading and attention as well.  Except, of course, to my utter devotion to NASA’s manned space program.

Seeing again the Apollo XI command module, the LEM and the Gemini capsule, touching the moon rock, all reminded me instantly of how closely I followed the space program, sitting glued to the television for every liftoff, report, EVA and splashdown from Mercury to Apollo/Soyuz and into the shuttle program.  I built and painted models of the Mercury and Gemini capsules, of the entire Saturn V spacecraft in small scale and of the command, service and lunar modules in 1/32 scale.  I drank Tang.  I ate these examples of food simulation called “Space Food Sticks.”  I cried for Apollo I.  I cried for Apollo XI.  I prayed for Apollo XIII.  I lived for the manned spaceflight program.

In sixth grade, on the morning of Monday, April 13, 1970, I stood before Sister Benjamin’s science class with my Saturn V model and explained what the Apollo XIII mission was going to accomplish that night, to set up that night’s scheduled telecast from Odyssey (the command module).  I showed how Odyssey (and its attached service module) would separate from the top of the S-IVB stage; how the stage’s top panels would open to reveal Aquarius, the lunar module.  I demonstrated this on the model, then showed how Odyssey would move ahead, turn 180°, then move to dock with Aquarius, and then, with Odyssey and Aquarius now moving as a single spacecraft, would leave the S-IVB behind and continue on towards the moon and the third Apollo landing, this one in the Fra Mauro area.

As the world knows, the landing didn’t happen because of an explosion in the service module minutes after that evening’s broadcast.  They interrupted regularly-scheduled programs with the news, and I stayed up, glued to the TV, as late as my parents let me.

The next day, I was again called before Sister Benjamin’s science class, where she asked of me “Bill, could you tell us what exactly happened last night?”

“Sister,” I replied, “even NASA doesn’t know that.”

“Will the astronauts be okay?”

“Nobody knows that either, Sister.”

But again seeing those displays, those precious artifacts, I felt compelled to delve back into that era, those missions, the discoveries, and learn all I could about manned spaceflight, just as seeing the Spitfire, P-51D, Me262, Zero and Bf109F made me want to re-examine that time and those machines as well; just as walking through the Sackler Gallery wanted me to dive more deeply into Asian culture, just as the National Museum of the American Indian inspired me to return to that history and cultures,  just as the Holocaust Museum moved me to sharpen my understanding of that chapter of human existence, just as the National Gallery of Art reminded me of how much art history I need to learn (it was there that I truly nearly swooned when I saw my first da Vinci, and it was my personal favorite: “Ginevra de’ Benci”)— and that’s what sends me to the book section of the gift shops immediately upon entering. And that’s exactly why I’m the wrong kind of person to visit museums.  They serve only to remind me how little I know, and how little time I have to learn it all.

Yet that’s exactly why I have somehow been lucky enough to manage to find myself in the perfect job.  Because I teach history, everything fits.  Everything ever said, done, thought, seen, hidden, written, all of it is history, all of it is relevant to what I do.  And because I teach a course called “World History,” I’m not hindered by the burden of specialization.  If I may steal a phrase from a dear friend, I invented ADD.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to decide what book I’ll be starting tonight from the stack before me.

Listening

As with most regular folks who might wear tennis shoes or the occasional python boot, I find my musical tastes run in cycles.  I’ll typically run through a phase that might last for a couple of weeks to half a year in which I’ll spend most of my time listening to a particular band, composer, genre, era, and so forth.  Among typical phases are such things as, be bluegrass, punk and opera, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Cole Porter, the eighteenth century, the twentieth century, and the college years.  Some phases repeat, some are one-shot deals.  Within any phase I make it a point to listen to pieces rarely or never before heard, but most songs come back as seldom heard-from old friends.

Recently, the Beatles remastered box set joined the library, and I made it a point to listen to every album, in order.  I did an album a day.  It took seventeen days.  It was wonderful.  Some of those songs I hadn’t heard in decades. I still knew all the words. But when “When I’m Sixty-Four” didn’t skip in the “we shall scrimp and save” section, it was a bit distracting.

I think my longest sustained phase was the year and a half in which I listened to nothing but Tom Waits.  His triple-CD and worth-every-penny Orphans got the ball rolling.  I listened to Orphans for about three months, then went back and did the entire catalogue.  I know I’d heard them all before, yet often it was like a new discovery, a lost gem that somehow was overlooked upon first glance.  “Filipino Box Spring Hog” and “Walking Spanish” made it to every Tom Waits mix-tape I burned in fourteen months, I swear. (Yes, yes, I know they are CDs now, but ‘mix-CD’ just doesn’t snap off the tongue the same way.)

But there’s one guy who stands out.  One guy whose music, no matter how many times I go back to him, is full of such gems.  One guy whose music really taught me to listen to music.  One guy whose music just seems to get even more full of wonderful, amazing moments with each listening.  Listening to this guy’s stuff taught me the rewards of paying attention to music.  Well, he and Chip Salerno.

Chip is without a doubt the finest musician I’ve ever called a friend.  My regular readers, both of you, may recall Chip being instrumental in turning around my anti-Christmas attitude.  The more I hung out with Chip over the years, the more I heard some great music, most of which he’d composed, and the more I learned about music.  Which was also great.

One evening in the fall of 1984, as I recall, on a rare occasion that a television set was present and turned on before us, Hogan’s Heroes came on, and we both mentioned what a cool theme it had.  Chip then said, “When it comes around the second time, listen for the trumpet.”  I listened.  The second time around, for the first time in my life, I heard the trumpet.  After the trumpet part ended, I looked at Chip and he said “That’s counterpoint,” to which I replied “Cool” or something equally as erudite.  Best music lesson I ever got.

That lesson came at the nick of time as it was not long before a phase that I hadn’t had in a number of years, the phase of the guy I first mentioned, Frank Zappa.  Frank’s music is so full of hidden gems, layers upon layers of sounds and instruments, applied here, peeled off there; each discovery only shows you how much more there is to discover.  I find myself once again in the throes of a deep FZ phase.

Kicking it off was the first true listen to Everything Is Healing Nicely.  I am quite enamored of the work FZ did with the Ensemble Modern, probably the best musicians with whom Frank ever got to play (and that’s saying something).  The Yellow Shark just gets better with every listen, and has pushed me to gain as much FZ/EM material I can find.   I remember buying EIHN.  I remember listening to the first few tracks, and putting it away.  I think I might have found Todd Yvega’s liner notes a bit off-putting.  They begin: “If you are looking for polished music, this CD isn’t for you.”  I don’t think I read farther when I first opened the package.

My loss.  My great loss.

See, I always knew FZ to be a perfectionist, and although mistakes were made (his charts must have been insane), you could always count on a well-rehearsed, tight band.  So I wasn’t as thrilled about the prospect of this one.  Although I greatly admire and enjoy FZ’s music, I will admit that I’m not smart enough to “get” it all, so this wouldn’t be the first of his albums to remain just off the main rotation playlist.  Into the drawer it went.  Until a Monday morning two weeks ago.

Wading about in that morass between musical phases that happens just before the next one kicks in, I pulled EIHN out of the drawer and fed it to the CD player in the Jeep.  I had just finished reading Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay (actually, I didn’t finish the book, but stopped at page 500; that, however, is for another time), and was more upset than I had been by Mr Gay’s exclusion of even a mention of FZ in his sections on modernist music.  Mr Gay defined modernism, if I’m interpreting this correctly, as being created not by people who broke the rules so much as people who totally ignored them.  Their goal was a new art, completely free from all previous notions and conventions.  How does Frank Zappa not fit that description?

At any rate, I was, I must admit, rather pleased that I own recordings of all of the musicians of whom Mr Gay spoke as modernists, and have long professed a liking for them.  I was in the mood, then, for some twentieth century music.  And something of which I was rather unfamiliar.  And a little Zappa, Mr Peter Gay be damned.  Everything Is Healing Nicely beckoned.

It is remarkable.  A few old favorites (“T’Mershi Duween,” “None Of The Above”) and four absolutely remarkable songs that stand above the rest of the remarkable songs: “Jolly Good Fellow,” “Roland’s Big Event/Strat Vindaloo,” “Nap Time” and “9/8 Objects.”  Especially the last two, and especially “Nap Time.”  And these are rehearsals??  Every other musician in the world wishes they could play the way these people do in freakin’ rehearsals, for chrissakes.

So I’ve now collected my favorite FZ/EM tunes from all three available discs, the afore-mentioned Yellow Shark, Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa and Everything Is Healing Nicely.  It’s all I’ve been listening to for two weeks.  I recently read that there exists FZ conducting the EM in a selection of Edgar Varése compositions.  My jaw dropped a foot and a half after reading those words.  A gift from on high!  Please, please, Mrs Zappa, for the love of humanity, release those precious gifts.

Please?

Harder Than It Looks

I was reading the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine when I came across a full-page ad for a sterling silver ring adorned with two carats of “Genuine Tanzanite,” on the purchase of which I could “Save near $700!”

Uh huh.

So I did a bit of research and found that tanzanite is, in fact, a real gemstone, a blueish type of zoisite. Most of the other things I read on it had no meaning to me whatsoever.  It’s crystal system, for example, is orthorhombic, its cleavage perfect {010} imperfect {100}, and its Mohs scale hardness is 6.5, between feldspar and quartz.

That got me to thinking about the hardness of objects, of how we judge that particular characteristic.  Of course, many things have become hard over the years: rock, liquor, times, but I mean the tactile sense of what leads us to describe something as “hard,” like wood or rocks.  That got me to trying to imagine what these first attempts at defining hardness might have entailed, how they went about it.

Picture, if you will, an Early Scientist and his Assistant.  The test sample, a short length of two-by-four, is attached to a rope of a fixed length, held to a fixed height above the floor and away from the Early Scientist.  The sample is released by his Assistant, arcs downward and at perigee strikes the scientist flat on the forehead.

“Okay, that’s pretty hard,” reports the Early Scientist, perhaps a bit on the woozy side.  “I’m thinking a five.”

The Assistant writes down “5.” The process then repeats with a frying pan.

“Yow.  Much harder.  Eight.”

Again, with a shoe.

“Yeah, not as much there.  Three —no, four.  Three point five.”

And so on.

Today, scientists use a sclerometer (from the Greek word for ‘hard,’ which I’m sure isn’t nearly as funny as the one you are currently imagining), more accurately a Turner-sclerometer, to perform a test of the scratch-hardness of the sample in question.  The 1924 edition of Machinery’s Handbook has this to say about said test: “In this form of test a weighted diamond point is drawn, once forward and once backward, over the smooth surface of the material to be tested. The hardness number is the weight in grams required to produce a standard scratch.”

My mind stalled on that idea, on the concept of a “standard scratch.”  I question neither the wisdom nor necessity of such a benchmark; upon first glance, however, it just took me by surprise.  The very idea of having a scratch standard just never occured to me, yet it is essential to the scale.  It removes the objectivity so apparent in the earlier test described above.  Thus the Turner-sclerometer test returns far more consistent and accurate results, even if far less entertaining to watch.

Fortunately, the Machinery’s Handbook goes on to clarify this standard to which all scratches aspire: “The scratch selected is one which is just visible to the naked eye as a dark line on a bright reflecting surface. It is also the scratch which can just be felt with the edge of a quill when the latter is drawn over the smooth surface at right angles to a series of such scratches produced by regularly increasing weights.”

Wait a minute.  “… just visible the the naked eye”?  Whose eye?  “… the scratch which can just be felt… “ Felt by whom?  By what?  So it would seem that there is a bit of objectivity, a bit of humanity, left in these such things after all.  And that warmed my heart a bit; that for all the objectivity espoused by science, there is still a need for a human touch and a human opinion.

A more objective test, however,  would seem to be the classic Shore’s Scleroscope.  Here you take a smooth sample of the material in question, then, from a height of ten inches, you drop on it a pointed steel cylinder of a known weight, and measure the vertical rebound.  More fun, certainly, and noticeably noisier than Turner, but still doesn’t beat the Forehead Test described above.  Please, science, let’s go old school on this. Let’s find out who the real mineralogists are.