Sort Of

George Winston--"Rain" (mp3)
Ralph Towner--"Winter Solstice" (mp3)

It's a question that poets and artists, if not philosophers, have pondered: does the pale imitation undermine the real thing? Does commerce diminish art? Can B get you to A?

Was Hemingway right when he told Fitzgerald that F. Scott's commercial writing was weakening his "real" writing? Will a lifetime of Aunt Jemima's syrup bring about an eventual conversion to the more complex pleasures of Grade B Vermont Maple Syrup? Does the Quarter Pounder with Cheese make you want to know what all the Kobe beef fuss is about?

Yes, my friends, I have grappled with these very issues, and musically.

Back before there was New Age or any of that kind of stuff, before John Tesh became a household name, there was ECM. ECM was (and still may be) a record label specializing in a kind of jazz, a jazz of a type. There was a starkness there, a clean, crisp, but almost sterile production sensibility, airy melodies in odd keys, instruments with unusual tunings, and, for a college student in the late 70's, the sense that I had never heard anything like it.

While ECM never was the main focus of my listening, being the rocker that I am, it did intrigue me enough to follow my brother's lead into an exploration of this kind of jazz. For us, the twin gods of ECM were Ralph Towner, and, especially, Keith Jarrett. My brother once proclaimed, and I still ponder the idea, that he would like to have Ralph Towner's "Icarus" played at his funeral. Clarification: I don't ponder playing it at his funeral; he'll probably outlive me. But I still think, when I hear it, how Towner's composition captures both the desolation of a lost loved one with a kind of hope. Perfectly titled song. Keith Jarrett was the one we really listened to. His Koln Concert recording was eye-opening to me for two reasons: 1) it was absolutely beautiful and 2) it was completely improvisational, which was something I couldn't even fathom.

Of course, when we went to see him in concert, jazz neophyte that I was, I kind of went hoping to hear my favorite portion of the Koln Concert.

Uh, Bob, it was improvisational, remember?

Seeing Jarrett in concert was also my first experience of getting "shushed" by the artist (the other was Neil Young a year or two later, who quit playing in the middle of his acoustic set because people were yelling and clapping and cavorting during "Sugar Mountain;" Neil said, 'I'm sorry, folks, I love music too much' and left the stage). Jarrett did not want us to clap or make any noise at all during the songs because it would disturb his concentration. A bit pompous, I'd say, but who was I to know.

And then came George Winston. George was the popular, best-selling pianist who took ECM into its profitable stage and helped to usher in the New Age. I listened to him quite a bit in the late 80's as kind of an update of my jazz side. But, he wasn't really jazz, was he? You can listen to the selection above and decide for yourself. My sense is that he is kind of a Salieri to Keith Jarrett's Mozart, if you've seen the movie Amadeus. Not as talented, not as complicated, not enough variations in his cycles through the same melodic passage. We saw him here for a well-received show. Perfectly enjoyable and pleasant, but kind of ho-hum like an Alison Kraus performance. It just reminds you that there is better stuff out there.

And that is my point: Winston doesn't do much for me now (though, in the selection above, I do like that repetitive passage that begins at 1:02). But, I'd like to think that he did lead me to better things, that my appreciation of pianists like McCoy Tyner, Dave Brubeck, Marcus Roberts, that my smattering of forays into more accomplished jazz are the result of swimming in the kiddie pool with George Winston.

It's the same approach that I took with my children and music. I never tried to control what they listened to, but I did play what I liked along with what they liked in kind of a democratic attempt to lead them into different, what I consider better, areas. I don't know. I think it worked. It worked for me when I was a kid and my dad was blasting Glenn Miller all the time. And, my younger daughter enjoys studying to Mozart, and I heard her humming Tom Petty just the other day.


The entire stable of ECM artists, including other temporary favorites like Jan Garbarek and Pat Metheny, is available at Itunes.

Another Plug of Other People's Stuff

Seems like a good weekend to encourage education by promoting video work done by others. Besides, ever since that Van Halen video for "Right Now," I've always been fascinated by text-centric video. (The Denis Leary Ford commercials are another example, but nowhere near as informative.)



The beauty of propoganda, as this example proves nicely, is that because I know next to nothing about financial matters, if you make my education simple and appealing, I'm naturally inclined to want to believe it's accurate. Thus, my inclusion of it in a blog post on a holiday weekend.

If you watch and are interested in the second part, click here.

Happy investing, and Happy Easter.

Make Your Own Virtual Movie Theater

To Be A Witness

Coast Is Clear (live) - Curve (mp3)

Wake Up Exhausted (semi-live) - Alkaline Trio (mp3)

In the late summer months of 2008, fellow BOTG'er Bob and I had a back-and-forth regarding the comparative joys and downfalls of recorded music versus the experience of a live performance. In that semi-debate, I begged to find live music lacking by comparison. After last night, although I still stand by much of my argument, I feel I owe an apology to my blog partner.

On Monday night, I witnessed the glorious sight of my alma mater, UNC, winning their fifth national championship on a TV screen in Chattanooga. I stood, nervous and fidgety and with a pitch half an octave above my normal range, with some 25 other alumni and family members in the pool house of one of Chattanooga's newer and nicer downtown condo complexes. The atmosphere and experience were fine. We won a championship, and the feeling was very cool.

Quite a different experience from my national championship memories from 2005 and 1993.

In 1993, I was a junior in Chapel Hill. We watched the game on our (at the time) huge 26-inch low-def TV with a dozen or so friends, and then we sped up (thank God for non-drinking friends!) to Franklin Street -- "downtown" in Chapel Hill is, for all intents and purposes, a six-block stretch of a single street -- and joined the 20,000+ people who were in the streets to celebrate a truly unifying moment.

It was a horrible night for such a celebration, to be honest. A freezing drizzle fell most of the night, and temperatures sank from the low 50s down as time passed. With the trusty assistance of Alka Hall, I managed to stay plenty warm, as did most of the other thousands around me. Those who were still cold found furniture and other flammable materials and burned them in the streets. (It was a humanitarian act, much like Han Solo slicing that Tauntaun with a light saber in order to keep Luke warm.)

By the end of the night:

• I'd been kissed on the lips by two great female friends who would never have otherwise kissed me and never did again;
• my beautiful cream-colored sweater (I've always been a sweater guy) had been spray-painted with "UNC #1"
• one of my roommates passed out in the bushes five blocks away;
  
• another roommate reunited (again) with the ex-girlfriend he would ultimately marry;
  
• I'd been quoted by a Daily Tar Heel reporter as saying, "Because they told us not to," in answering the question, "Why are so many people jumping over the fires?"
  
• I'd met someone who would later become a three-week girlfriend of sorts;
  
• I discovered that I love everything about a celebratory crowd so long as gunshots and rock-slinging never get involved.
  

Rumors of coeds having sex in the trees or in the street were greatly exaggerated. At least, in the streets and trees where I looked. And I did look. Still, as wild nights go, it was the wildest night of my life considering the numbers of people and the activities involved.

In 2005, I was in St. Louis with that same now-married roommate thanks to the incredible fortune of having, as one of my student advisees, a young man whose father was highly-connected at UNC. I sat with said family 23 rows from the floor, behind the very backboard where freshman Marvin Williams made the play that helped seal the victory down the stretch. While the post-victory celebration wasn't comparable in numbers or insane acts, the evening had with it this religious exhilaration of having witnessed something transcendent in person for the first and likely last time.

On Monday night, while we celebrated the victory by... cleaning up.

We stared at the screen, through myriad commercials, all to wait for the cheesiest season-concluding tradition this side of the credits to Solid Gold, Luther Vandross' "One Shining Moment." I received text messages from Frank, the young man whose parents gave -- yes, gave -- me that 23rd-row ticket. He's a sophomore at UNC, and he was kind enough to empathize with my jonesing to be on Franklin Street and send me cell phone pictures documenting the night. He at one point got hit in the head by a removed street sign, but no matter to those in such heightened states of existence. (One such picture included at right.)


This leads me back to Bob's argument about live music over the recorded stuff and why I must apologize to him.

My experience of witnessing UNC's national championship on Monday was, basically, a recording. It wasn't the real experience. The concert experience is being in a town of tens of thousands whose spirit and focus and energy is aimed smack dab in the same direction as yours. The concert experience is watching the game itself play out before your very eyes not 100 feet away. Sure, I was totally giddy on Monday night, but it was a different and weaker kind of giddy.

The live version would have been so much better. And it's not even close.

Boys Will Be Boys (Even When They're Men)

Ryan Adams--"Boys" (mp3)
David Bowie--"Boys Keep Swinging" (mp3)

Yesterday, here at school, was a day of boys. Our annual "day off for fun and games in the spring" was a coed event for the first time (girls arrived in the afternoon), but it was still a day of boys. It was a day of:

running,
shooting,
throwing,
grabbing,
jostling,
diving,
chowing,
swinging,
swilling,
sweating,
belching,
squirting,
climbing,
kicking,
showing off,
gorging,
puking,
rocking,
swearing.

In short, a boy day.

Overseeing this day of fun were a group of (primarily) gentler (primarily) men. Even during this day of spring frenzy, we expect our guys to be somewhat gentlemanly. We expect them to respect guidelines, stay in boundaries, look out for those around them, adjust their competitive spirits to accomodate those girls, be gracious hosts to those girls, share in chivalrous ways, etc. We expect a lot. Example: as the day was winding down, I called out to some guys in the sno-cone line, "Hey, could you let the girls go ahead of you? They need to leave soon." One of them looked at me and replied, "They can leave now." He was half-kidding; I was half-shocked. But, he didn't let anyone ahead of him. And I didn't make him.

And then, alas, my mind takes me back just a couple of weeks to a "Guy Trip," a "Mancation," a bachannalian frenzy of a visit to New Orleans that I was a part of with a group of (primarily) gentler men. And, of course, it got me thinking. If you've never been on one of these "guy trips," first of all, you're missing out because, first, they are very fun, but, second of all, seen from a distance, these trips follow a fairly predictable schedule of:

drinking,
seeking out good food,
binging,
insulting each other's sports teams,
oogling women,
eating junk food,
making gay jokes about each other,
making bathroom jokes about each other,
making "that's what she said" jokes about each other,
trying to get each other to pay for drinks,
making jokes about each other's musical tastes,
farting,
playing quasi-sports like Golden Tee and Air Hockey,
dancing,
talking about what women do when they're together,
swearing.

In short, a guy trip.

Most of all, though, a guy trip is about sheer camaraderie (unless, of course, one of your pals is spending all of his time chasing bachelorette parties). You talk about things you wouldn't talk about around the lunch table. You learn things you might not want to know. You confront real fears and weaknesses. The facades come down, the daily issues that clog intimacy are not present, the need to impress in any way except the most ironic, self-depracatory way is pretty much gone. If anything gets too close, you resort to insults and put-downs.

Let's face it, whether or not we are all alpha males in the strictest sense, we are all alpha males in our own homes, we are all kings of our own castles, and so the managing of egos and desires on a "guy trip" is a delicate endeavor, one fraught with greater tension and compromise because a "guy trip" is always too short-lived to do everything that we thought we wanted to do. And that's what keeps us coming back. And next time, we'll do everything we did that we liked last time plus all of the things we didn't get to do and then some. We're guys. We're boys. We live in the world of endless possibility.

It's not unlike watching, in miniature, 650 boys cut loose on campus to do what they please with minimal supervision and mostly only each other to keep each other in check. There may be one-upsmanship, but there is rarely fighting. There may be ravenous hunger, but everyone gets the chance to eat (let it go by, and you may not get the second chance). There may be unchecked competition, but there will be concern when someone gets hurt. And above everything is that sense that whatever you are doing, you like it that a bunch of other guys are doing it with you. You stray outside that brotherhood, and maybe that's when you get in trouble.

But boys will be boys. And men, well, God forbid we ever lose that boyishness. That's when we die.

Ryan Adam's criminally-underrated Rock N Roll and David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" are both available at Itunes.

Suckers

I'm Coming Home - Wild Sweet Orange (mp3)
Bleed Like Me - Garbage (mp3)

As my wife and I were enjoying a nice, just-the-two-of-us restaurant dinner over the weekend, she told me a strange little tale.

Seems my oldest daughter came home from school on Friday with some strange-looking marks in the crook of her arm. J asked her, "What happened to your arm?" and Carolyn sorta did the guilty, oh crap I did something I shouldn't have thing. So J said, "It's OK, you can tell me."

And Carolyn said, "I was sucking on my arm."

"Um, why?" J was a little flabbergasted.

"I dunno."

"You don't know?"

"Hmm-mm."

"How bored do you have to be to suck on your arm for so long that you give yourself hic... marks??"

At this point in her story, I had one of those classic '60s movie moments where my body is sprawling around on its back with a little vertigo-spiral thingy spinning behind me, and there's that flashback music playing, and I'm being flung back into my childhood.

"Jesus," I said.

"What's wrong?" J (my wife, not Our Lord and Savior) asked, as I had probably turned green, and it wasn't from the scallops.

"I totally did that when I was a kid."

J laughed. She thought -- with good reason, having been married to me for a baker's dozen of years -- I was kidding. But I was all too serious. I can remember, quite clearly, sitting in class, or at recess, or at home, and participating in this strange little habit.

I would place the inside of my elbow in my mouth. Usually a few centimeters up on the forearm section. I'm pretty sure I had to use my left hand to grab the elbow and keep the arm securely in place. Once my lips were securely around the flesh, I would engage in this little waltz of gentle biting and sucking. The spongy reaction of the flesh to my biting it was a slightly hypnotic and surprisingly soothing. It didn't hurt. It was like the difference between combing your own hair and letting someone else. When someone else bites you, the pain tends to be more noticeable (yes, even when it's the good adult kind of pleasure/pain), but biting yourself isn't nearly like that. We seem to have an almost surgical accuracy of knowing how much we can tolerate when we're doing shit like this to ourselves.

Unknown quantities of time would pass, and I would eventually remove my mouth to see a huge... well, dammit, there's no other real word for it, but I didn't know the word at the time... HICKEY. At one point in this little habit, I even started working up my forearm. I'd have two or three hickeys in the crook of my elbow and have one or two more on the inside bone of my wrist.

Four or five hickeys at a time. On one arm. And no one ever said anything to me about it. Which is kinda weird, now that I look back on it.

Don't know why I did this. It probably wasn't too far removed from the reasons kids suck their thumb or do anything that's repetitive and soothing (insert your own thoughts or lurid jokes here). But seeing J's concern about Carolyn, who was doing the same damn thing at the same damn point in her life made me both defensive and... well, guilty.

I didn't teach my daughter this particular quirk. She never came downstairs in the middle of the night only to discover me, sitting in the dark of our living room, guiltily sucking away on the crook of my elbow, the lifelong addiciton I could never kick. The self-hickey act hasn't even crossed my mind in close to three frakkin' decades.

Yet there it is. A sin of the father embedded, osmosis-like, into the brachioradialis of his daughter. Same place on the same arm. That's just weird, dude.

How about I up the freakazoid level one more?

When we went to pick up our son from my babysitting mother, I told her about Carolyn and the fact that I had somehow passed along some genetic coding from my system to hers that compelled her to give herself hickeys. Know what Mom said?

"You know, now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure I used to do that, too. In fact, I'm almost positive I did that. Isn't that strange?"

I've always believed nurture trumped nature in that classic duel, but now I'm all confused. Which kinda sucks. Suddenly, I'm inclined to blame so many more of my shortcomings on simple genetic fate...

This post was written prior to my attending the national championship game between UNC and Michigan State. Should I be capable of operating slightly heavy machinery upon my return home, and should my Heels prove victorious, I will post the songs prior to collapsing on the softest surface available.

Critic-At-Large: Cuba and Carib

Steely Dan--"Third World Man (live)" (mp3)

It's funny how things line up sometimes. Now there is news that Obama will begin loosening travel restrictions and financial restrictions between the United States and Cuba. Nothing certain yet, but perhaps the beginning of the long-needed thaw. It was one of his campaign issues and he's stuck to it. The first step will allow Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba and to send more money back to Cuba than had been previously allowed. The hope, at least among us liberals, is that this will lead to a broader softening of our foreign policy towards Cuba.

Though I've never traveled in the Caribbean at all, I've had a desire to go to Cuba for some time, as always, for the food, but also because I wanted to see what is supposed to be the best of the Hemingway houses. And, heck, it's only 90 miles from Key West. I could dust off my copy of The Old Man and the Sea, pop a couple of Dramamine, and hop on a high-speed ferry and wake up in Havana. Anyway, a dream for the future. The near future, I hope.

But it is funny how things line up sometimes. Last week, while I was in Florida and eating books like candy, I had brought a book along with me that I bought last summer and was just getting around to finishing--The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. When I arrived, I was about halfway through with it, and it took several days of library binging before I got back to it. The last book I read before I returned to it was a thriller, albeit a literary one. Fidel's Last Days deals with a contemporary, fictional plot to finally get rid of Castro once and for all. A thriller and a Pulitzer Prize winner wouldn't seem to have much in common, would they?

Fidel’s Last Days by Roland Merullo.

If you wanted to kill Castro, how would you do it? Who would you trust? Can you trust the Cuban-American community in Miami, or has it been infiltrated by Castro agents interested in ferreting out plots to eliminate Castro? These are kinds of questions a female ex-CIA agent in Miami and a doctor in Cuba, both of whom have been drawn into the plot, will have to answer. If you fail, you lose everything, and your family loses everything, and control becomes even tighter as a result. Imagine living in a country where, 50 years after the fact, the overthrow of the Batista government is still considered an ongoing revolution, and where to voice even the slightest doubt about that revolution is to face destruction, even though no aspect of your society functions properly. The layers of deceit are unfathomable; the challenge of getting close enough to the great man, who has understandably become quite paranoid, to administer a lethal anything is almost insurmountable. As is the dramatic irony of knowing that Castro is still alive.


The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

Like most great works, this one reduces to an unrevealing simplicity of plot: fat kid wants to get laid before he dies. Of course, that isn't the half of it, or even the fourth of it. The "fat kid," Oscar, is from the Dominican Republic, and to understand the depths of his bad luck, you have to grasp the last 60 years or more of life in the Domincan Republic. I can't speak for you, but I was stunned, in reading this book, to discover how little I know about the history of a country that is so close to us. The history itself is perhaps not all that surprising: for most of the 20th century, the Dominican Republic was dominated by a cruel, meglomaniacal dictator who had the tacit support of the United States. The extent to which this man and his desires and his police force's desires dominate even the smallest decision or utterance from the mouths of one of his citizens is incomprehensible to us in this country. But, as an example, one doctor's decision not to make his beautiful daughter available to "El Jefe" has dire consequences for a couple of generations.

The connections should be pretty obvious, but I'll make them anyway. The dominance of repressive, harsh governments in the Caribbean has disjointed life there. We don't begin to understand the extent of these repressions. Both of these books illuminate those extents; in fact, in both books you get quite graphic accounts, both fictional and historical, of boundless acts of torture and violence. But, really, the subject matter, as compelling as it is, is almost secondary to superb writing, especially in the case of Oscar Wao. As told by Oscar's sister and her sometimes-ne're-do-well boyfriend, the story becomes the intimate story of a few characters and the story of a family of immigrants and a country.

Both books engaged me fully and taught me a lot, but Oscar Wao is the Great American Novel, much of which doesn't take place in America. Highly recommended.


"Third World Man" comes from Steely Dan's Alive in America, available at Itunes.