An odd request to share MY TOWERING WISDOM came in a recent invitation to speak at Princeton University. The subject? Christmas and Christmas cards. The venue? An intro-level course called "Sociology from E-Street: Bruce Springsteen's America," created and taught by renowned sociologist Mitchell Duneier.
~ Sample architectural symbol of aforementioned towering wisdom ~
Why me? For that matter, why Bruce? Because Prof. Duneier is not the usual theory-obsessed academic. He has a deep interest in empathy, both as observed in society and as practiced by sociologists and ethnographers. So his idea of greeting cards as an empathetically-imagined vehicle for social connection met his interest in exploring cultural issues through the lens of Springsteen's famously socially-aware songs (the raucous cover of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" is atypical, but fit this particular hour), resulting in a December 17th class about Christmas, Christmas cards, and associated social meanings.
It was cool. Prof. Duneier interviewed me and a fellow writer in a big lecture hall of about 200 students, with a little Q&A after. We then attended a small break-out section of the class for a conversation that ranged all over the topic. Such bright, sweet kids, so easy to talk to (I'm not sure what I expected... bluebloods with monocles and George Plimpton accents, maybe?), exploring a wide range of issues and sharing personal stories that illuminated them.
At the end of the first class, two kids got up on the stage of the big lecture hall and played the featured song on guitars and harmonica, and everybody sang and clapped along. It was the kind of day that gives a semi-cynical guy a little faith in the future.
Afterwards, a few students came up and asked about the job, internships, possibilities. It's the worst time to apply for work at Hallmark since the Great Depression, but you never know. I'm sure we'll hear from a few of these marvelous kids--either as job applicants or as movers and shakers in the world at large. There was a lot of soulful brainpower in and among those ivy-clad buildings.
~ Nassau Hall at Princeton, where I practice pedantry now and then ~
The school was founded in 1746. My photos of other magnificent buildings came out shitty, shot with an iPhone in low light. It's an amazing campus. If you ever get a chance to be a visiting PRINCETON EDUCATOR LIKE ME, don't miss it.
~ A pedant non-euphemistically "rubbing the tiger" at Nassau Hall ~
I thought I had a picture of Prof. Duneier and me mugging by a statue or something, but all I find is the one above. There's a squirrel in the ivy behind me, but you can't hear it scolding me for touching the big tigger on the steps, or for looking somewhat bloated from being wined and dined on the university budget the night before.
Beautiful place, beautiful people, beautiful day. A great way to close out the year. Happy 2010 from me, Princeton lecturer and holiday deadbeat who sent out only half the usual number of cards. Welcome, new austerity and laziness.
I woke up singing this song, for some reason. Maybe it was the soundtrack to a dream I don't remember. What I do remember is how gobsmacked I was the first time I heard it. Senior year of high school, standing in a record store, and the little gallop and kiddie gunshot noises came over the sound system--and then those first notes, with their syncopated accents that made it hard to tell exactly where the beat was. What in the world...?
I fancied myself a teen piano idol in the Elton John mode, with a little Rick Wakeman thrown in, a little Keith Emerson, Tony Banks, a little delusion of grandeur. I went up to the counter, and looked at the LP jacket on the "Now Playing" stand. I'd never heard of Andy Pratt and here he was just playing the ass off the thing.
The story goes, he spent 500 hours in the studio on this song, playing everything except drums. He's every bit as good on bass as he is on keyboards. How does a guy who's capable of this not become a huge star? I remember digging the whole album. But this song is definitely the piece d'irresistible.
There are a couple of other YouTube versions, including one that intercuts a performance video of Andy in his 50s, looking like Art Garfunkel, but it's all obscured by special effects. This little montage of stills will do. And you can see Andy then and Andy now.
Or just close your eyes. It's the fall of 1973. Maybe you weren't there for it. But this song has just galloped into the world, beating "Bohemian Rhapsody" to the punch by two years, a one-of-a-kind musical vision announcing itself, blowing away one delighted listener after another. I was one of them. Still am.
All Hallows' Eve PSA: Hey, kids. This Halloween, don't forget to shove sugar into your face until you turn into a monster. And if you get a mail-order werewolf costume and the shirt attached to it feels like a polyester nightmare, rip out the furry chestal area and then sew it into a nice, soft thrift store shirt that you got for 50 cents and tore up. Or have your mom do this while your dad kind of freaks over the mask, which is genuinely creepy and scares him every time you leap out to surprise him. Careful, he might poop his pants.
Better you should scare your fellow classmates, many of whom showed up in the Scream outfit that apparently was massed out at Target. Do not breathe of the Scream mask, which smells like a PVC meltdown amid cultural decline.
Try to uphold the old traditions, such as trick-or-treating with Isabelle, the girlfriend you've had since pre-school, who dreamily combines her first name with your last name, like something out of a beach bunny movie from the mid-20th century. She's half angel and half devil, and that can be a pretty good combination.
Be a good werewolf. Show up at your girlfriend's house with flowers.
She's a miniature of the late, great Tova. Same breed (Birman), same markings (blue eyes, gray points & professorial patches on her hind legs) same delightful disposition (lovey-dovey). If anything, she's even more affectionate than Tova was, lolling about on our laps and napping on Penny's shoulders during the day. We all fell in love immediately.
BUT. It's been two weeks, and we have yet to arrive at a name. Leave it to two writers and a verbally agile child to bollox up the naming process to the point where we all hate each other. We're sick to death of suggesting names and having the other two family members snarl, "No, I hate that, I hate you, and you're making me hate the cat. I hate all cats now. All animals. I hate Nature, the Universe, the fabled singularity. I hate God. But mostly, I hate you." You could probably set that to The Beatles' "I Want You," from the newly remastered Abbey Road," which I'd much rather be blogging about, to tell you the truth.
Penny came up with the best name: Kish. It means pillow in Yiddish, offering a cute diminutive, Kishela. Come here, little pillow. Wait, you're already behind my neck, like a good little Kish?
No wonder it's the perfect name. Jonah and I have been calling her Kish, Kishy, and Kishycat for days, but Penny has decided she hates it. She's around the cat more than any of us. She tried the name, and it just didn't work. Doesn't roll off the tongue or something. Here, let me strangle you so I can see that tongue, try to figure out the problem...
Update: To punish me for posting this, the darling spousette looked up Kish in the Urban Dictionary. It means, "A very swollen vagina." Seriously. I'm not Will Ferrelling you on this. A couple of other meanings, too--a latent homosexual, a warning that someone's coming, e.g., "Kish! Stash the weed! It's my mom!"
What other names are contending? The current top 10::
Ava Edie Cali (from Jonah's day 1 remark, "She smells like calamari.") Pie Simone Mimi Gia Jess Tess Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom
Of those, Pen likes Ava, I like Edie or Pie or Cali, and Jonah hates everything but Kish. I actually know a family who let their young son name a cat, and ended up with the last entry above. Everybody called the cat Indy, except for little Nicholas, who insisted on, "Come here, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom! Get down from there, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom! Mom, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom just coughed up something black!"
We could do worse. Go on long enough with naming, and some wretched things start to sound reasonable. Penny, at wits' end, keeps saying things like, "How about Pebbles?" or "I know--Talullah!" and I keep giving her looks like, "No, Wilma" and "I hate you AND Demi Moore."
Our marriage is in tatters. Our son is ready to be adopted by other, better parents. Please. Save us. Name this cat.
Update: As of New Year's Day, the cat's name is Tavi. Best little kitty we ever had. And that's going some.
Here's Jonah at breakfast on his first day of 3rd grade.
He's doing his Timid Pirate voice, which is like a bookish elf crossed with Woody Allen as Broadway Danny Rose. The basic Timid Pirate construction is: "If I, uh, might interject at this juncture...um...ARRR?" or "Could someone please, uh, tie that scurvy dog to the, um, yard arm?" Always with the index finger raised.
We're working on a long skit for the cub scout den, in which all the other boys are regular pirates and Jonah is the Timid Pirate. It goes like so: "12 pirates walk into a BARRRRRR (all the boys chime in with ARRRR). Bartender says, 'What's your pleasuRRRRRe?' And the pirates all say (three groups of boys yell in sequence, 'MARRRRRGARITA!' and 'MARRRRTINI!' and "GROG!"). But one pirate steps up and says, (Jonah, index finger aloft): "Could I perhaps, uh, order a Wild Berry Capri Sun?" And the pirates all go, "ARRRRR! Stupid timid pirate...." Bartender says, "It's Happy HouRRRRR. Would you like any appetizeRRRRs?" And the pirates all order, "CalamARRRRRRRi!" Except for the timid pirate: "Um, could I trouble you for a small house salad with lite ranch dressing on the side?" (Jonah came up with these lines himself--priceless, in his high little voice.) Eventually the other pirates beat him up with their wooden legs...
We're still working on an ending that kind of reverses the roles. Please submit ideas if you have them. (First pack meeting is tonight. My love-hate relationship with this stuff remains intact, but a good skit can transcend the venue.) Seriously. Help me finish this goddamn skit.
In the above photo from August 17 (weird, summer being over so early), he's the Timid Eater: "If I might make a small request...um, could I eat this pancake without being photographed?"
This, along with fart humor (both real and armpit-generated), faking like he's just taken a painful shot to the crotch (we probably hear "oooof...my groin!" at least a couple of times per day), and anything having to do with pineapples (beats me, but he's talking about going as one for Halloween--I think he just likes the randomness of it), currently constitute 90% of the kid's comedic stylings. The rest is on-the-fly wackiness.
He really is one of the most spontaneously funny kids I've ever known. I hope he can keep that alive through the next decade of public school. It's been weird to watch him grow more like other boys as he adjusts to social pressures, the need to be cool. Yep, already. He was always way ahead of everybody his age, verbally, but was a late-bloomer emotionally, a strange combination of oversensitive and under-aware, as if the membrane between him and the world was too thin in some places and too thick in others. He seems closer to the middle of the spectrum now, as other kids have narrowed the gap intellectually and he's learned to deal a little better with what life throws at him.
I can't imagine that he won't always be exceptionally bright and at least somewhat acerbic. This is the kid who, having been called a "know-it-all" by several of his classmates last year, said, "They don't even know what a know-it-all is." I hope he can develop social grace without losing his unique perspective.
If I might make a small, um, addendum to all this, uh...I love you, kiddo.
Had a birthday and got feted, free-lunched, fully loved upon the earth. But within a week or two, I was kind of blah, holding back a certain low-level despair, appalled to see political machinations drag down progressive ideas, kind of pissy, not sleeping too well, feeling creatively stymied and generally feckless and fatigued.
Then my old friend Peter Stein sent me a link to this guy, Peter Mulvey, who will kill you softly, telling your whole life with his words, as it were, and playing the absolute ass off his guitar. Dig it:
I'm robbing two Peters to pay back an appall. And whaddya know, I had a little breakthrough on a script idea I've been wrestling with. Found a better way.
Here's a lovely vid my sister made for her wife, Pam, on their 5th anniversary (today). Why didn't I do this for my darling spousette on our 14th, mere weeks ago? Because I'm a deadbeat. Get off my back. Plus, I'd never heard this beautiful song until last week. Peter Gabriel's voice just slays me.
The E.E. Cummings poem toward the end is what I read at the wedding, though the version I read from had a typo and I remember mildly wigging out when I got to it, trying to make sure I got the line right. Pam's brother read the Dr. Seuss story, "The Sneetches," which had a huge resonance for this only-recently-legalized event.
My sis posted the video along with a quote from Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage in the state: “Marriage...bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family…Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”
I'd forgotten about this clever piece of work by my old Full Metal Jacket friend, Matthew Modine. It still seems relevant, as our country recovers from the international-stature-damaging Bush/Cheney years and presses on in military and economic conflicts around the world.
The confluence of events this month--death in the family, freelance consulting gig, a new script underway, travel, various graduations of nephews and nieces, the boy's goddamn Cub Scouts, my darling's ailing back, and plenty of work at ye olde Happiness Factory--all this has kept me from doing anything on ye olde stale blog.
THIS BEING A DEPICTION OF MY BUSY BUSY MARTYRDOM
I did update my big music post, from which the mp3 player suddenly disappeared (provider went bankrupt) so you can't hear the referenced tunes anymore. At the end of that post, I promised a follow-up where I'd presumably take apart a melody to show...something. I still hope to do it for you few, you happy few, you hopeful, cheated few who read this thing. But I can't see it happening for awhile. Just too much to do.
So. This is a placeholder, a whine, an excuse, a gob of spit, a scrap of proof that the Spulge is not dead, merely busy to the Nines.
Sooner or later, I'll unchain myself from the wheel and put something worth reading up in here.
My friend Stacey Donovan wrote a poem a day in April, and they weren't just little nothing poems. Big, juicy, full of feeling and imagination and lovely phrases, is what they were. Crafted, not sloppy. Fine prosody from one of the superfinest people I work with.
I watched from afar, remembering how I used to write poems relentlessly, always something in the works. Not so much lately. I did teach a writing workshop to some 2nd-graders this month, but even that was mostly watching others create. So I was feeling like a spectator. And egregiously envying those with time and energy to apply such devotion to the art.
And now the month is done. So on this, the last night of NaPoWriMo, I present a little snideswipe from the sideline. My shame is great.
*
Spectators On Parade
The parade for National Poetry Writing Month seemed long and aimless, wandering toward the end of a street with no identifying sign, most of the marchers distracted by themselves, trying to remember dreams, scribbling notes, slouching toward dressing the part of a poet, some glancing at their fellows, resenting the notebook scribblers or the ones texting God knows who—can we not just experience this event? The oneness, the solidarity, the living poetry? Must everything be grist? And then there came a complicated turn
around the intersection of form and subject, a ramp, an elevated expressway, a blind alley that seemed to stand for something else. By now, the new proxyism had people trading places, rank and file observing the spectators’ meanderings—"Say I am you!" someone shouted— and a child on a tall man’s shoulders piped up, “This is the most boringest parade I ever saw.” A hush, a lull, a caesura. The procession stopped. And then a dozen poets pounced, quoting the phrase, embellishing it, throwing rhymes at it, interviewing the child, learning by going more or less nowhere where to go.
*
Forgive me, Erato (and Stacey--you're your own magnificent parade). That's all I could manage this year.
An insane idea I had: to develop a Unified Field Theory of Music. Insane, because I don’t know what a “unified field theory” is, really, and I was a music major for only two years. I’m a hack pianist. My credentials suck. But I compensate with enthusiasm. I love the idea of describing how music works, where its essential power comes from, irrespective of era, genre, or my ignorance. ♫
Researching, I found record producer Daniel Levitan’s revelatory This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Expanding on Stephen Mithen’s “Singing Neanderthals” theory, Levitan says music represents a critical step in human evolution. This is probably the least interesting idea in the book, every page of which has some fascinating insight into the physics of music or the way our brains perceive sound.
Oliver Sacks’s amazing book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain says that Darwin called music an evolutionary aberration with no adaptive purpose (I think he was listening to Air Supply at the time). The preface cites E.O. Wilson, whose theory of biophilia (our innate feeling for other living things) causes Sacks to wonder if music might be a form of it, since music often feels alive. He adds, “There is now an enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception...”
Great. Way bigger brains than mine have stolen my thunder for their rhythm section. I’m both unqualified AND irrelevant.
But maybe I’ll naively stumble into some observation that a colder-eyed observer might miss, if I ditch science to come up with some good guesses, vague notions, and intuitions about how music do what she do. ♪
UPDATE: Come to find out, none of the music samples in this post show up anymore, because SeeqPod, the company that made the ingenious little widget I stuck in here several times, apparently went belly-up a couple of weeks after I posted this. I take full responsibility. And if I get time, I'll replace the widgets with Blip links or something. WAY less convenient, but it'll look nicer than those big gaps in the text. Sorry...
Before We Ditch Science What’s the unified field theory in physics? Apparently, when quantum theory came along, its implications for atomic and subatomic physics contradicted Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Quantum physics can make sense of electromagnetism and the two (strong and weak) nuclear forces, but gravitation bolloxes everything up. Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to unify the four forces, coining the phrase “unified field theory” for what he was after.
Physicists say that the grand explanation for the interaction of those four forces will describe a oneness, a singular essence that manifests itself in all matter and phenomena. This holy grail is thought to be in the realm of string theory. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, says what he and his fellow nerds are seeking is “an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God.” This great little vid concludes with Kaku describing what he thinks the mind of God is.
Some specialists in M-theory (the M stands for “mother of all theories” or “mystery” or possibly “magic”) describe Kaku's "hyperspace” in 26 dimensions. But all seem to agree that matter is fundamentally “vibrating strings” a hundred billion billion times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. I love that it’s either 10 or 26 dimensions. Sounds like they’re really closing in on it. ♫
Wasn’t This Supposed To Be About Music? The physics ruminations on harmony make me think that musicians should be working on string theory. Sound is all vibration, so maybe these subatomic vibrating strings are at the bottom of it somewhere, like zillions of tiny cigarbox banjos.
Let’s apply the four forces metaphorically. Maybe there are musical parallels for them: rhythm, melody, harmony…and what would the fourth be? dynamics? timbre? In a song, the lyric? There might more than four. In any case, it may be easier to describe how these things interact in music than it could ever be in physics.
But is there a problem to solve? What questions would a unified field theory answer? Could it define why some music is great and other music sucks, so that it’s not just a subjective matter of taste? Could it explain how music can give you goosebumps or make you cry? Is our question here something as simple as, “What makes music beautiful?” ♪
Vive Les Contrarieties The biggest truth I know about beauty: it’s the oneness of opposites. This isn’t original with me. The ancient Greeks considered every art a reconciliation of opposites. Shakespeare was the Great Synthesizer (pre-Moog) of antitheses (“To be or not to be” is one example among thousands). Bach believed that the contrapuntal balancing of opposites in a perfect Fugue connected the human soul to God. Coleridge’s framework for literary criticism was his “principle of polarity,” Marcel Duchamp wrote an essay about the reconciliation of opposites in visual art, and the poet Eli Siegel developed a whole aesthetic theory of human life based on it.
There are others. Those three are pretty obvious, though. Anyone who’s ever marveled at the “simplicity” of a song like The Beatles’ “Blackbird” and then tried to play it on the guitar knows how true that first one is. Even if you don’t fully understand the math that all music is based on (patterns of rhythm and pitch intervals can all be described numerically), you may sense the logic in a piece of music—but what makes it move you is something else, something emotional that seems to be communicated directly from the composer or musician to you. And I can’t think of anything more satisfying in music (or any art, really) than the fulfillment of an inevitable pattern in a surprising way. Think about the piano coda at the end of the original “Layla.” It seems to come out of left field (left ventricle?), and yet somehow is completely prepared for. Perfect.
All those pairs of opposites imply a meeting of the familiar and the strange. I don’t remember where I first heard the idea that the difference between something genuinely beautiful and something merely “pretty” is that beauty has an element of strangeness in it. That’s always seemed true to me. Those Asian-sounding semitones in the bridge of “Julia” by The Beatles, especially the way John Lennon sings them, are unlike anything else in popular music, a strangeness woven through a familiar, lilting guitar pattern. Update: Dammit. The Beatles MP3 police apparently put the kibosh on "Julia." But the rest of the tracks in this post should play.
SeeqPod - Playable Search And is there anything more oddly affecting than the almost affectless bleat of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet over the lush chords Bill Evans lays down on “So What” or “Mediterranean Sketches”?
Melodies Maybe the best way to open an inquiry of opposites, and thus, beauty, is with melody. We all know melodies, we hum and whistle them, they stick in our heads, and they burn lyrics in our memories. They’re most of what we mean by “I know that song.” A memorable melody makes a claim on your brain that you can never renounce.
Because of the way we experience music, Oliver Sacks says that remembering a melody isn’t really remembering at all, but reliving the music in the present. He quotes the philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl: “Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.”
Even that explanation is paradoxical, holding opposites together. To me what it means is, when you sing “I heard the news today, oh boy” to yourself, the whole song is there with you. Your ears may actually hear only the melody and the words, but by singing the song, the rest of the music comes alive in your mind and body. You’re experiencing the feel of the song.
To get to the meaning of that, we need actual melodies to point to, hear in our heads, and explore the workings of. So I’ll end this first post with my starter list: unique, memorable, carved-in-rock melodies from nearly every Western genre (classical, sacred, folk, jazz, show tunes, country, pop/rock), trying to find in each category at least one “pure” melody (unforgettable even without words), at least one transcendent marriage of music and words; and one that plays against its orchestration or chord changes in a remarkable way.
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring “Ode To Joy” The Willow aria from The Ballad of Baby Doe
Ave Maria (Schubert) Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming Were You There?
Better yet, look up tunes you think should be on the list, then check them out to make sure the melody's as distinctive as you thought. You may be surprised.
I thought I’d be most sure of the pop/rock melodies I wanted to use for this, but the genre in which I’m least versed (country) seems like the best, most exemplary group of all. As a little bonus coda, here's a pop melody I didn't know was great until I heard a country singer spin it into gold:
Next, I'll take one of these tunes and pull it apart to show how it works. It may be like dissecting a frog, but I hope to learn something new. Meanwhile, I’d love to get some suggestions for other great melodies, especially from rock and pop songs. What’s stuck in your head? Is there a song whose melody simply delights you? Why do think it’s so memorable? Any ideas you have, really. I’ll share my Nobel Prize winnings with you. ♪♫
Here are my nephews—my brother's son Sam and Debra Winger's son Noah, flanking the divine Ms. Winger herself—after the lads' triumph at the Oxford Film Festival, where they won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary. That's Noah clutching the coveted Hoka statuette. Noah, Sam, and a third partner (hence, Couple 3 Films) spent much of last year working on Crude Independence, their unique look at the oil boom in North Dakota. I saw a version of it before the final sound mix, and it's splendid. Apparently, the festival circuit thinks so, too. Last week, Crude Independence made it onto the prestigious SXSW schedule, a fifth festival acceptance.
I love these guys like mad, and am so freakin' impressed by their talent and tenacity. I almost said "proud" instead of "impressed," but pride seems to imply something more self-reflective than the sheer admiration and respect and "wow, is this cool or what?" that I actually feel about their work and its much-deserved success. I'm avuncular, though. Don't punk the unc.
Keep up with Couple 3 via the link in my sidebar, labeled "My filmmakin' nephews." Are they ever.
Still stewing on my massive music post, but feeling the need to celebrate inauguration day, I present "Why I'm Happy, Why I'm Not Satisfied," from the Ill Doctrine blog. Exuberant, yet realistic; inclusive, yet focused; didactic, yet superfine. Pretty much sums up the moment.
~ Sample architectural symbol of aforementioned towering wisdom ~
~ Nassau Hall at Princeton, where I practice pedantry now and then ~
~ A pedant non-euphemistically "rubbing the tiger" at Nassau Hall ~
