Rick Warren

I have never had anything original to say about mainstream politics, and I don't see that changing any time soon, but this touched a nerve too much to keep quiet. Maybe I'm just in a cranky mood this morning. Needless to say, I hang my head in despair on a regular basis over the mere fact that there needs to be a religious figure at the inauguration of the US President at all. He delivers what, exactly? A blessing of some kind, in most people's understanding? Proof positive that the Constitution's non-establishment clause is not at all the same as a true separation of church and state, which we do not have. But Obama's choice of Rick Warren is deeply distasteful in a specific, as well as a general, sense. Details here and here. Yes, these details come from Christopher Hitchens, whose style is not exactly conciliatory, but for my money, he is almost always on point, and I am incredulous at the fact that now that Obama has been anointed the next god of the United States, his choice of Warren is not receiving any mass coverage, unlike his association with that other bigoted crack-pot pastor, whose name I've blocked out of my mind. Status quo we can believe in. Oh well, we slither on through the sewers of political pandering.

Lewis Wolpert

Just finished Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Big disappointment. I picked it up on a whim, without knowing anything about it, so I suppose I deserved what I got. The subtitle of the book is "The Evolutionary Origins of Belief," which led me to, ahem, believe that it would be dedicated to religious beliefs specifically, and how they enhanced humans' adaptability. In other words, I assumed that the book would be about the evolutionary origins of faith. What Wolpert in fact writes about is a much more abstract and formal concept of causal belief, i.e. an idea that, when held, purports to explain to an individual, whether correctly or not, why an event happens, and thus influences the individual's actions.

I found the book dry, boring, and not really helpful in increasing my understanding of the world or human behavior. It was really a summary of what anyone with a basic knowledge of the scientific method and a general awareness of cultural differences around the world already knows. He does pay some attention to religious belief, and in a couple of places, touches upon what could be a fascinating and deeply controversial idea -- namely, that humans may be genetically predisposed towards holding religious beliefs. He does not expand on it at all, however, dismissing it with the infuriating "there is some evidence that..," but even if he did expand on it, I am sure I would not have sufficient background in genetics and biology to make a stab at understanding.

Happy Holidays

I don't have anything fundamentally different to say about Christmas this year than I did a year ago.  There is a good reason why a holiday that started out celebrating the winter solstice has stuck around, and it has nothing to do with Jesus.  Nature is cyclical, and in today's hyper-charged world,  we could do well to pause and contemplate that.  Whether you are celebrating with your loved ones, or taking the opportunity to get some peace and quiet, my best wishes for a nice holiday to you and yours.

Christmas cards and gifts

The Christmas cards are rolling in. J. and I are happy to receive them, of course. A few observations.

This seems to be the year of the printed address label. Last year, if memory serves, every envelope we received was hand-written. Now, at least half a dozen were printed. Fire sale at Avery? Or did Google introduce a new address book application with a label printing feature that I missed?

The photo cards have not abated. We’ve received seven so far! As last year, only one features the entire family. The rest is just kids. At least my former co-worker M.P. gets points for being cute by snapping her three kids and the dog cross their street on an old-fashioned pedestrian crosswalk, Abbey Road-style. One card is even from a childless couple – the picture is of the two of them. Tacky? I guess you could argue that it’s nice for friends and family who haven’t seen them in a long time. At least they could have air-brushed the red eyes out.

The strangest thing is that our friends C.&S., whom we visited Saturday night, only have two photo cards in their batch. I have always seen them, incorrectly perhaps, as much more family-oriented and tolerant of children than us old cranks (well, me anyway), so I would naturally expect them not only to know more people with kids, but be thought of among their friends as people who would enjoy receiving the photos. But for some reason we got the brunt, not they.

Ranting aside, though, we are happy to be receiving the cards, especially from people who live far away and whom we don’t get to see regularly. Our friends may even be eating into my Christmas card trade surplus – I still sent out more than we received this year, but the gap has shrunk somewhat. I’m counting on J. to widen it back up once she sends out her traditionally late batch.

I should also point out that people are giving us really nice presents this year. Mostly books, and really excellent or very promising-looking ones at that. Makes me feel a bit like a cheapskate. I’ve been giving people books for years, but I must admit that my thought process is frequently something along the lines of “hey, that looks like X. might enjoy it.” But a few of my friends have clearly given a lot of thought to their choice this year, in some cases remembering the conversations we’ve had earlier in the year. The highlights so far: Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick, from S.G. S.G. always turns up with something interesting, and while I won’t presume to rank his previous presents in order of desirability, I have a feeling it won’t take me nearly as long to get to this year’s contribution as it sometimes did in the past. GULAG: A History by Anne Appelbaum, from C.S. Again, C.S. has come up with some fascinating additions to my bookshelf in the past, but I’ve been wanting to read Appelbaum ever since she published the book five years ago, and thanks to him now I have no excuse not to. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (hardcover, too!), from K.R. Very pleasant surprise, and way above and beyond the call of the occasion. Thank you!

PX

Went to the PX with my friend K.R. on Wednesday night. The PX was the DC area’s first entry into the craft cocktail scene that has been picking up steam over the last year or two. In craft mixing, the bartender is a chef, creating unique drink recipes from unusual, frequently purpose-made ingredients that emphasize seasonality. The PX reportedly makes its own bitters (no fewer than four kinds), squeezes its own fresh fruit juices, and even makes its own sweet vermouth, by which I assume they mean infusing it, rather than making the underlying red wine from scratch. Interestingly, this subculture very much favors the term “cocktail” rather than “mixed drink” or simply “drink.” As recently as the martini revival of the 1990s, a cocktail was something your grandparents drank long before they were grandparents. Something they set on top of the Motorola in the corner before they went to get another platter of deviled eggs for the guests. No longer, apparently.

Word had it that the PX’s theme was Prohibition-era speakeasy, and indeed the initial impression was that it was. You apparently had to have a reservation to get in. The place, located on the second floor of a large Old Town Alexandria townhouse, is completely unmarked, and is entered through a nondescript side door that for all the world looks like it leads into someone’s kitchen. A blue light hangs above the door, lit when the place is open for business. Ostensibly, a coat-and-tie for men and no-jeans for women dress code is enforced.

We duly made our reservation (by e-mail), showed up at the appointed 6:15 p.m. and, finding the blue light on, rang the doorbell. A young woman, exceedingly insincere in manner, led us upstairs with the words “I will show you to your table.” We passed the small bar on the way and found ourselves in a room, of residential, rather than business, proportions, looking and feeling like someone’s living room, and decorated in a decidedly non-1920s style. Four faux-modern couches lined the walls. The woman pointed to one of them. There was no table. What initially looked like a coffee table in the middle proved to be a pair of vinyl-upholstered ottomans pushed together. I asked whether it was possible to sit at the bar – we saw at least four empty stools as we walked by. She replied that another party had those seats booked. I made a mental note to ask for bar seats with my next reservation and sat down. K.R. and I were the only people in the room. The music – an off-putting kind of postmodern cabaret – was a little too loud. After a moment’s discussion of whether we would be violating protocol if one of us sat on one of the other couches, I moved, so K.R. and I could face each other and not sit in a perpetual about-face. We opened the white cloth-bound menus to study the concoctions on offer.

Though PX’s rumored speakeasy theme was being rapidly eroded by the room and the music, I was still hoping for extremely high-quality versions of classic cocktails. All I really wanted was a top-notch manhattan, preferably made with rye. Instead, all manner of madness adorned the menu – things made with ginger syrup and pomegranate molasses and topped with milk foam. Miss Fake came back to take our order. Seeing me on the “wrong” couch she paused but said nothing. I asked whether I could order a “regular” cocktail or was restricted to the menu. She said I could have whatever I wanted as long as they had the ingredients in the house. I asked if they had rye. She replied that they didn’t. Not all was lost, however, as the menu did feature a Manhattan, made with Maker’s Mark, the famous house-made vermouth, and house-made cherry bitters. Its name, inexplicably, was “My Wife’s Manhattan.” I ordered it. K.R. went with one of their custom creations that involved, I believe, tobacco leaves (I should have taken notes), and we settled down to chat. A couple of minutes later, Mademoiselle Plastique returned with a group of five besuited young professionals in tow. Seeing me still on my self-selected perch, she glared. “Would you like me to move back over there?” I asked with as disarming a smile I could manage (not my strong point), gesturing at my original spot. “Yes, please,” she replied coolly, arranged the yuppies on the other couches and left. I was starting to feel awkward, sitting as I was in an essentially private room with a bunch of people I didn’t know. K.R., whose supply of relaxed sociability I could not hope to match even on my best days, thought it was kind of cool. I could not possibly agree.

A few minutes later still, our drinks -- excuse me, cocktails – arrived, delivered by the Couch Nazi herself. To our delight, she informed us that the bar party had cancelled and we could have their seats if we were still interested. Damn straight we were interested! Once at the bar, it was as if a cloud had lifted. Though there were people on either side of us, we did not feel intruded upon. Bars are the ultimate setting for public privacy, I realized – with everyone facing either straight ahead or their companion, you do not see other patrons’ faces unless you go out of your way to do so, even though they are a scant few inches away. And the very mental concept of a bar – its meme if I may – is inextricably public. The bartender, whose name unfortunately I did not catch, was a down to earth, friendly fellow, and, to K.R.’s apparent delight, was happy to discuss his craft and the scene. The décor in the main room, too, was much more twenties-appropriate. Dark wood paneling, lots of mirrors, glass chandeliers. None of it was genuinely antique, but the look worked.

More importantly, I finally took a sip of my manhattan. I must say that with all due respect to the bartender’s craft, I was disappointed. It was dark red in color, not as cold as I would have liked, and seriously sweet. I think of the manhattan as a winter drink, so I guess you can make a case for it being less than ice-cold. And I don’t begrudge the PX the desire to showcase their house-made vermouth. And who knows – maybe this is just the new way. But it was not what I was craving. K.R., on the other hand, was delighted with her liquid cigar. I took a sip and had to admit that it was quite good – a nice balance of sweet and sour, and pleasantly smoky, though far less intense than we were led to believe.

A few interesting facts about the place emerged as we chatted with the bartender. They did have rye, it turned out. Sazerac, no less. He gave me a taste of it neat. You do not have to have a reservation. In fact, the bar is where the walk-ins are seated. The bar party was obviously a figment of our rye-averse hostess’s imagination.

Fascinated, we watched the bartender at work. Eventually, it was time for another cocktail. K.R. picked another unheard-of concoction, this one with lots of ginger, while I made a one-eighty and ordered a martini. The bartender offered three choices of gin. I picked Plymouth, which I had never had before, and which he described as an “English gin, not a dry gin.” I thought gin was dry by definition, but what do I know? In the event, the martini it produced was excellent. He used the dreaded technique of the 1990s revival – put the ice cubes in the glass to chill it, pour in the vermouth and let it sit while shaking the gin, then dump it out with the ice, so all you have left are trickles of vermouth on the side of the glass, if that. But those trickles, combined with the not-dry nature of the gin, produced a delicious balance of flavors – it was neither bitter nor sharp, and had a clean, grassy complexity.

We watched the bartender some more. The place had gained quite a few customers by this point, and as his pace and the variety of his output increased, my friend’s curiosity and excitement increased proportionally. Every libation that passed in front of us on its way to the waitress’s tray looked fascinating and beautiful, if sometimes a bit bizarre. The drink that finally convinced us to stay for a third round was something opaque, pink, with white foam on top and garnished with pomegranate molasses. House-made, of course. It was not my territory, though when the bartender offered us a taste of the molasses (he squeezed some right onto our fingertips), I could not resist. It was intensely sour but delicious. And the drink needed it – just about any adjective I could think of would sound pejorative if not downright sexist. It was actually very distinctive in its own way. Just way too sweet and intensely fruity. Pure liquid candy.

My choice was a negroni – quite possibly the most serious cocktail in existence. A drink that demands to be taken on its own terms. A combination of bitter (Campari) and earthy (gin), with a generous dash of sweet vermouth to make it palatable, it is a beverage for contemplation. The PX’s version was spectacular – the sweetness was pronounced (that house-infused vermouth again), but it was more than adequately offset by the generous helping of Campari, for a counterpoint of two distinct but complimentary flavors with a less-than-usual amount of gin tying them together just enough to create a harmonious whole.

We thanked the bartender, paid up and ambled out into the unseasonably warm evening, resolving to bring our friends on the next visit and stick to the bar from the get-go.

More Perlman/NSO

I suppose it's nice that the Washington Post substantially agrees with my opinion of last night's concert.

National Symphony and Itzhak Perlman

Just came back from hearing Itzhak Perlman conducting the National Symphony. Apparently, Perlman still has a superstar status – I had originally tried to get tickets for the Saturday show, but all the seats I was willing to pay for were sold out, so J. and I had to go tonight (with a violin concerto on the program, for once we decided not sit in the chorister). Good concert, though it wasn’t the sublime experience I had hoped it would be. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Some of the words that come to mind are “academic,” “deliberate,” or, if you want to be more pejorative, “passionless” and even “flaccid.” In spots, anyway.

First up was Bach’s A-minor violin concerto, on which Pelrman soloed while conducting from the violin. The work is a real warhorse – I’ve heard my recording of Andrew Manze with the Academy of Ancient Music so many times that I could sing most of it in my sleep (though I do not recommend being present when I do so). It’s also one of those pieces, though, that I don’t think I could ever get too much of, and with Perlman being who he is, I was really looking forward to hearing it. The orchestra, reduced to Bach-appropriate size, sounded fantastic – very polished, almost slick. The counterpoint, obviously of paramount importance to Bach, was crystal clear – I could follow individual parts note for note when I wanted to. What was missing, though, was any kind of fire. I have heard smaller groups play baroque music with so much drive and brio that they practically leaped off the stage. On period instruments, no less. The NSO, on the other hand, was cruising an auto-pilot. More or less the same goes for Perlman’s soloing. Technically flawless, or nearly so, but I just didn’t hear any real feeling. He sounded like he was doing a job, not creating art.

Next on the program was Mozart’s Symphony No. 35, the Haffner. I could not recall having heard it before, and I think there is a reason – the work is a complete snoozer. Not one of Mozart’s finer moments. According to the program notes, Mozart was busy with many other projects when he wrote it. Maybe that explains it. Anyway, I tried to focus as much as I could, but other than the minor key theme in the opening movement, which has some distinctive orchestration, there just wasn’t much to keep my interest. Perlman’s and the NSO’s approach didn’t help. It was the same tepid and uninvolved playing I heard on the Bach, minus the interest of a solo part. Surely even this mediocre (for Mozart) music could have been played with more energy, but more importantly, they could have chosen a much better Mozart.

The second half redeemed Perlman and the orchestra almost completely. It was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, his last, usually subtitled “Pathetique.” It is a beautiful work, with an unorthodox arrangement of a slow closing movement and an essentially slow opening one (the tempo marking is Adagio – Allegro non troppo, but there is a lot more Adagio than Allegro). Here, Perlman was finally able to get the NSO cooking. Maybe late Romanticism, or the Russian symphonic tradition, or both, are closer to his heart, I don’t know. The dynamics of the opening were pretty extreme, but effective. All the winds, especially the brass, were fantastic throughout. Even the famous Allegro second movement was appealing. Hackneyed though it is, hearing it live made for a much richer sound and a better idea of everything that goes on in it, and there is quite a bit. Most people just know the main theme, but the development actually has some neat stuff going on, again mostly in the winds. The closing movement, tellingly marked Adagio lamentoso, is almost Mahlerian in weight, and essentially carries the entire symphony. The musicians outdid themselves – from the bassoon in the early bars, through the collective trombone passage, the subterranean tuba part and the gorgeous, and fiendishly long, horn solo, everyone sounded spectacular. It was great to hear the work again – my only recording is an ancient LP of Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, and it has been a long time since I listened to the entire thing, so it was familiar and new at the same time. Lovely way to end the evening – made me forget about the blah Bach and the mediocre Mozart very quickly.

Same-sex marriage

One of the hotly disputed issues in the most recent election was California’s Proposition 8, which proposed to allow same-sex marriages. I always found it odd that gays had such a strong desire to marry, though on reflection perhaps I shouldn’t have. The institution of marriage, as I see it, allows couples who choose to cohabitate and otherwise share their lives to claim that their union has been sanctioned by an authority. That authority is either religious or governmental. I have no issue with having your union religiously sanctioned, if that is meaningful to you. But that is not what the gay community is seeking. If all they wanted is an imprimatur of religious authority, the debate would have been confined to the religion(s) in question and would not have become a political hot button. It follows, therefore, that it is the government’s eyes in which they want to legitimize their unions. I have long found this desire odd, not only when applied to gays but in general.

Quite simply, the decision to be together, or not, is none of anyone’s business but the couple’s, and no government has any moral right even to express an opinion on two people’s choice to be together, much less pass legislation that can in any way affect that choice. Unfortunately, engendered initially by the authority governments have historically derived from religions (long and fascinating story there), for centuries governments have done exactly that. From what I understand (I admit that the minutiae of relevant laws is not my forte), most states in the US today confer some legal benefits on married couples to which non-married individuals are not entitled. Whether related to taxes, property rights, or something else, it is these benefits that groups which are not allowed to marry in the legal sense, such as gays, are seeking. The argument is that not conferring these benefits, or even a possibility of attaining them, on certain groups, is tantamount to discrimination. It goes without saying that unless you believe that the government continues to derive its authority from some divine source, it is way out of line in concerning itself with marriage. What I find deeply sad is that there isn’t a greater outcry against this shameless moral, philosophical and, in many cases, practical intrusion into people’s private lives. The very idea of a legal marriage, i.e. a union of two people recognized by the government, is tantamount to discrimination – against single people. It is incomprehensible to me why the unmarried – a far larger groups than gays – are not clamoring for this discrimination to be redressed.

So why in hell did J. and I get married three weeks ago then? A topic for another post.

Thanksgiving

It has become such a cliché to say that we have so much to be thankful for on Thanksgiving that many people have stopped paying attention. Truth is, I really do feel that way. Though I complain and criticize at the slightest provocation, and frequently with no provocation at all, I really am pretty fortunate in a lot of pretty important ways. So here is an annual thank you, to everyone and to no one in particular. I am thankful for J.’s being a part of my life – even with all she and I have gone through, I wouldn’t have it any other way. For my friends who put up with my antics and who, even though sometimes I have to beg and cajole and bombard them with e-mail, always come through when it’s important. For friends who trekked down from faraway places to celebrate J.’s and my wedding, even though by most standards, it was a tiny affair. For friends who never fail to send me a birthday card even though we have not seen each other in several years. For my parents, who have always supported me, frequently at a sacrifice to themselves, and despite my best efforts to subvert that support. For being in a place where I can live and work and write largely undisturbed. Sure, I love catastrophizing about the state of our society as much as the next guy, but any other society would be infinitely worse. So there. Thank you all and sundry. Next time my kvetching gets too much, please remind me of all of this. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Etiquette quandary

I am seeking advice from my paltry readership (paltry in quantity, certainly not in quality). What is the proper response when someone I know has a terrible tragedy in their life and I find out about it through that person's blog? This is not a close friend, but somewhat more than a casual acquaintance, I would say. I know the person enough to send a Christmas or a birthday card, though we have not seen each other in quite some time now. What, if anything, is the appropriate thing to do? Do I send a sympathy card? Or would that be presumptuous because I did not get the news directly? A sympathy e-mail? A comment on the original blog entry? That seems far less than the occasion calls for. I would greatly appreciate any advice.

Vote

My initial comment about the importance of voting was going to be something along the lines of having an ethical responsibility to do it because we can, and the vast majority of people in the world can't, etc., but so far that argument has moved people less than I expected. But I got into a conversation with a colleague recently. The colleague is a dedicated anarchist, in the sense that he believes that government has no purpose (not even a minimal purpose as I believe) and that all spheres of human endeavor, including criminal justice, are best handled privately. It is a fascinating viewpoint, far better researched and supported than one might assume, but that's a topic for another day. The relevant point here is that he does not vote for the obvious reason that the concept of voting is meaningless to him. One of the things we got to discussing is how, starting with an imperfect but functional democracy such as ours, a system of the sort he advocates could come about. Discounting instant and total consensus (really a form of a unanimous vote), we agreed on two possibilities – violent revolution, and democratic process. I don't think I need to remind anyone how I feel about violent revolutions and why. The democratic process, on the other hand, could be used to abolish itself, annul the Constitution and dissolve the US government. In other words, his system could be brought about by a vote. Conclusion: go vote tomorrow, even if you believe it is meaningless or would prefer a world where voting is unnecessary. Philosophical principles are at stake.

Coincidence?

The number of lines in the final version of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: 433. The title, and duration, of John Cage's most notorious composition: 4:33. Coincidence? Most likely. But if not, the joke is on Eliot, though through no fault of his own.

Beethoven

I’ve been remiss in keeping up with Andras Schiff’s cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas I’ve been collecting. Volume VI arrived over a month ago, and I have the last two, released simultaneously for some reason, on order. Volume VI has two very famous works – the “Appasionata” (op. 57), arguably the most frequently played of all the sonatas, right up there with the “Moonlight”, and “Les Adieux,” also quite well-know. For me, however, the revelation was in the two compositions that sit between those, op. 78 in F-sharp minor, subtitled “à Thérèse” and op. 79 in G. Both of these are written on a much smaller scale than the famous sonatas, but that is precisely why I find them so appealing – they pare Beethoven down to his essentials and completely avoid melodrama.

The thing I love about Beethoven in general, and his solo piano music in particular, is contrast, usually between major and minor keys in the same work, and frequently in the same movement, and both of these sonatas provide an excellent illustration of what I’m talking about. Op. 78, written in only two movements and, at under 11 minutes total, very short, has a minor-key snippet in the secondary theme of the opening, and while it doesn’t amount to much in and of itself, it gives balance to the whole work and keeps the listener interested.

Op. 79 is a more traditional three-movement, fast-low-fast, work. Again in the opening, there is the major-minor contrast, but for me, the sonata seals the deal with its slow movement in the parallel g-minor. It is a slow-ish (the tempo marking is Andante) barcarolle that opens with a gorgeous minor-key melody that could stand easily on its own. Beethoven is not out to write a tear-jerker, however. The development, and there definitely is one, is unequivocally in a major key. It is quiet, gentle and, to me, prefigures Chopin in some of its phrases, but it avoids sentimentality and one-dimensional melancholy in favor of an almost perfect balance. The closing fast rondo puts us back in a cheerful, positive territory, making for an upbeat and optimistic yet emotionally well-rounded work.

I do not have any other recordings of either of the sonatas, so I cannot offer any meaningful commentary on Schiff’s interpretations, but he sounds good to me. Both works, especially op. 78, sound quite challenging technically, more so than their “light” character would suggest, but Schiff sounds confident, his articulation is excellent, and both performances have that nonchalance about them that only a true virtuoso supremely sure of his skills can convey.

Anyway, highly recommended. I cannot wait for the last two volumes to show up. I have a feeling I’ll be eating takeout and ignoring housework for a few days listening to them.

Divestment

My good friend S.G. has been engaged in what he calls a divestment project over the last couple of months. The origins of the project are obscure – I gather that a friend of his gave him the idea – but the gist is that every day you get rid of one thing that you don’t need but are either too much of a pack rat to throw out or too lazy to figure out a way to donate. So you get rid of it in a “creative” way – leaving it on top of a gas pump while filling up your car, dropping it into the bed of a parked pickup truck, etc. You divest of one thing every day. After a while, you’re considerably less encumbered with stuff you don’t use. At least that’s the idea.

As much as I believe most of us own way too much useless junk, I’m not sure I really understand the appeal. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to just go through your closets, put together a couple of boxfuls of stuff, drive it to the local Goodwill and be done with it. But what I think is beside the point. Yesterday morning, I noticed a Vitamin Shoppe plastic bag sitting on top of a newspaper vending machine on a street corner outside my building. There was clearly something in the bag, for it was staying put despite the rather strong breeze. Wondering whether I should be wearing a pair of rubber gloves, I gingerly parted the folds of plastic and looked inside. I found a pair of worn-looking brown boat shoes. Did someone in my neighborhood divest of them the same way my friend was doing? Is this a cultural phenomenon now? Is there some underground message board on the internet dedicated to creative divestment of this sort? Probably. It’s just littering if you ask me, but then, there are many current cultural phenomena that I don’t get and probably never will.

National Symphony

Went to hear the National Symphony two weeks ago; the first concert of the season. On the program were Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto with Hélène Grimaud soloing, and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony - just about the perfect program for my money.

A guest conductor led the orchestra - a young South American fellow named Miguel Harth-Bedoya whom I had never heard of. Whether it was him or if this is a new post-September 11th thing (seven years behind schedule), I don't know, but unexpectedly, the orchestra started with the Star-Spangled Banner. I had never heard them, or any other orchestra for that matter, do this. It was very bizarre. Surprised, the audience hurriedly got up from their seats, but after that people weren't quite sure how to react. I had a good view from my usual perch in the chorister. Some people put their right hand on their chest, most did not. I saw one or two mouthing the words, but most just stood there.

I've always found the frequent playing of the national anthem, especially at sports games, strange, and felt it contributed no meaning either to the event or to the anthem, and in fact risked cheapening the anthem's value. Now that the NSO did it, I gave them, and other orchestras, retrospective props for not adopting the meaningless ritual. We'll find out in December (Itzhak Perlman conducting Mozart, Bach and Tchaikovsky; I can't wait) if this was a one-off, or if the anthem is here to stay.

Anyway, back to the show. The orchestra started with Beethoven's Overture to The Consecration of the House, as forgettable as you would expect it to be. The less said about it the better.

Then Hélène Grimaud played Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. In a perfect world, I would have wished that it was the Third (a strong contender for the simultaneous titles of Beethoven's best work and the best XIX-century piano concerto, if you ask me), or the Emperor (Fifth) that Grimaud had recorded a mean version of a couple of years ago. But the Fourth is no slouch, and with Grimaud, I'll take what I can get. I admit I have a bit of an irrational fascination with her. J. and I heard her in New York almost exactly a year ago, and loved it, and it was great to have another opportunity. Funny enough, that concert, too, paired her playing a concerto (Ravel) with a Shostakovich symphony (Fourth).

The solo parts of the Fourth's outer movements sounded hellishly difficult. Grimaud tossed them off with the expected nonchalance. I am tempted to say that I was very slightly disappointed; that her playing sounded just a tad perfunctory, but that wouldn't be fair. Beethoven's orchestral writing in those movements, especially the opening, is so gorgeous that I must admit I was paying more attention to it than to the soloist. Harth-Bedoya took a measured, deliberate approach to the score, and his tempo was quite relaxed. He could have been conducting Bach. Definitely an Apollonian take on Beethoven, but I didn't mind - so much the easier to hear that beautiful second theme in the strings in the first movement.

The slow movement, however, was all about Grimaud, and it was breathtaking. Much like the Ravel we heard her play last year. Beethoven's melody is gorgeous, and Grimaud articulated every note perfectly. I was hanging on to every sound, and actually had that feeling of being in the presence of overwhelmingly beautiful music well up in my chest.

It's worth mentioning that one of the reasons I admire Grimaud is her lack of flamboyance, and she lived up to that impression. No fancy evening gowns for her (admittedly, it would be challenging to play the piano in one of those, but I've seen it done) - she came out in black slacks and a simple gray blouse, bowed reticently, and just played.

The Shostakovich in the second half was just as much of a treat. I've heard the Fifth performed before, but not in many years, and as I don't own a recording (a shame, really), my memory of it was very vague. Harth-Bedoya is clearly really into this symphony - he conducted without a score. I'm not going to deconstruct the whole thing here. Suffice it to say I loved it. Though not nearly as sprawling as his Fourth that we heard last year, it was still vintage Shosti - plenty of buildups that move from consonance to dissonance, crippled-sounding march rhythms, mildly insane string writing, and some phenomenal solos, in particular the oboe, clarinet and harp (yes, harp) in the third movement. Reading some commentary after the fact, I learned that he scored it for three violin sections instead of the usual two. I admit, sheepishly, that I did not hear that.

The ending of the symphony has generated quite a bit of opinion over the years. After the Fourth, composed in 1936, nearly cost Shostakovich his freedom, if not his life, and was pulled during rehearsal, not to be heard until 1961, the Fifth was officially considered to be his work of redemption, one that conveyed the optimism and grandeur the Soviet censors wanted him to communicate. The ending, in particular, is supposed to be unequivocally triumphant. The triumph turned out to be very equivocal. A few critics caught on immediately, but the point was substantiated by Shostakovich himself in his memoirs (though their authenticity is disputed by some), who said that essentially, he wrote it under duress and that listening below the surface of the music would reveal that.

My own impressions of listening to the finale fit. Everything is going along fine; loud, consonant, powerful chords played with gusto by the entire orchestra until, just two (if memory serves) measures before the end, instead of resolving the way you would expect him to, Shostakovich repeats the previous phrase, in strings only, then resolves. A minor point, you might think, but the effect is devastating. That repeat, though only one bar long, throws off the listener completely, and leaves him unsettled and questioning instead of beating his chest at the triumph of man. Cantus interruptus for sure.

After the show, J. and I strolled to Circle Bistro for a post-concert cocktail. The place was dead - aside from an odd-looking woman seated at the bar drinking white wine, we were the only customers. I was surprised by that. We've had dinner at the adjacent restaurant several times (excellent food, by the way), and the dining room had always been full, so I expected the same to be true of the lounge area. I suppose at bottom it's still a hotel bar, located as it is in the basement of the Circle Hotel, too expensive to be a watering hole for GW students, and just enough off the beaten path for tourists to ignore it as they walk by. Worked for us, though - it was quiet and intimate, with downtempo electronica spilling unobtrusively from the PA, dim lighting, and candles on the low round tables placed before cushy banquettes along the wall. The middle-aged lady with an English accent tending the bar had something of a failed actress about her. As we relaxed, reclining, we saw the strange woman leave. Dressed in an ill-fitting gray pant suit and sporting a black beret and enormous glasses, she had awful, scraggly gray hair and horrendous teeth, and was visibly drunk. I don't see people like that very often, but when I do, I wonder. She probably comes in there every single night and spends her money, whether meager or overwhelming (both are equally likely) on several glasses of white wine, until she manages to drown whatever she is trying to drown, before stumbling to a place that has been her home since long before the neighborhood knew what a swanky bar was. What's her story?

Financial crisis

Until I find time and inclination to write something else about books, music, or the dinner at Vidalia J. and I had recently, here is something that I found more readable than most of the stuff on the financial crisis and the government bailout.

Waiter's Rant

Read Waiter’s Rant on a recent business trip. Nothing like two sleepless four-hour flights within a few days of each other. Written by the guy who for a long time kept the Waiter’s Rant blog. He was a waiter/manager at a prominent restaurant in New York. Though he is careful to remain anonymous, the name of the restaurant, and the name of the author for that matter, are out there. I just can’t think of them at the moment.

There are some movies that would have worked beautifully as twenty-minute shorts, but sag hopelessly as feature-length films. This book is kind of like that. It would have worked better as a magazine article. Not to say that it isn’t entertaining – it is. Anthony Bourdain’s dust jacket blurb to the effect that the book is the front of the house version of his Kitchen Confidential is more or less spot-on. You start out really sympathizing with the guy. Losing his office job at 31 and needing money, he gets a job at a completely dysfunctional Italian restaurant in the ‘burbs thanks to his brother. Fast-forward seven years, and he is the manager of one of the most respected restaurants in New York – professional, loved by most his customers, expert at dealing with the difficult ones, and being the much needed buffer between the staff, who love him, and the semi-insane owner. Pulling down very decent money, too, and writing about it all with a great deal of wit. You really want to admire that at first.

But the book isn’t just about what goes on in the restaurant (it probably wouldn’t have been published if it was) – it’s about the author himself. He takes every opportunity to lament his predicament of being a waiter, and single, at 38. Of never having made anything of himself. He is completely infatuated with one of his waitresses – the twenty-three-year-old Beth – and that infatuation oozes from every page. He paints a convincing picture of his own burnout, but his downfall at his own restaurant just about makes you lose respect for him – you realize after a while that he is becoming the selfish jerk manager of the type he deplored in the early days of his restaurant career. His staff turns on him, and his exit is far from magnanimous. I suppose there is a point here, whether he makes it intentionally or not – the business will ruin anyone. In the grand American happy-ending tradition, however, he resurfaces at the end as someone who is finally doing something with himself – he is a writer now, you see, and is waiting tables at another restaurant, part time without any management responsibilities, to make ends meet. He even gets the phone number of a cute girl. How predictable. I was still pulling for him at the end, but only half-heartedly.

I don’t want to be too negative – the bulk of the book is worthwhile. It really does give you a sense of what you don’t see when you come to a gourmet restaurant for a meal. Moral of the story – if you lose your job and need money, drive a cab.

W.G. Sebald

Finished W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the other day. Very unusual book, perhaps the most unusual I have ever read. It was apparently his first major work. I didn’t really know what to expect; I picked it up after reading his On The Natural History of Destruction – I looked Sebald up and discovered that he was supposed to be known for the dreamy, slightly surreal and deeply melancholy quality of his fiction, all appealing qualities for me. Thing is, The Emigrants is not entirely fiction. It mostly is, I suspect, but it does not read as such. I say “I suspect” because it is not at all clear where memoir crosses over into invention.

The book is a collection of four stories, all written in the first person, and in all four the narrator is basically real-life Sebald himself – a German professor who moves to England to teach languages and translation. They all start out by recounting an ordinary experience – traveling to Manchester for a semester of research, looking for an apartment – exactly the way they would, and most likely did, happen to Sebald in real life. A memoir of the quotidian, if you will. In every story, however, the narrator eventually meets, or comes to relate how he once met, the central character, and here the line quickly blurs, though since factual elements persist, or so it seems to me at least, to the end of each story, there is no real line; it dissipates subtly into invention until the reader feels like he is simply reading a story.

What’s even more unusual is that the book is illustrated, if that is the right word, with a large number of photos depcting people and places in the stories, initially giving everything an imprimatur of absolute, documentary certainty. The vast majority of these, of course, were never intended to be illustrations. Sebald merely found images that fit, or, perhaps in some cases wrote prose to fit the images. The effect is curious but powerful – rationally we realize a particular segment of the story cannot be literally true, and the photo isn’t really of the thing being written about just then, yet the image and the text on the page together draw us in more strongly than either would do on its own.

One of the four stories – the one about the narrator’s elementary school teacher – I suspect is straight reminiscence. All the details match up neatly with Sebald’s life, down to the towns he mentions. Though he uses only the first letters, they are in fact the first letters of the names of German towns where Sebald grew up. The accompanying photos of schoolchildren are almost certainly of Sebald and his classmates. The rest of the stories are far less factual. Each central character is probably based on a real person to some extent – the reclusive doctor in the first story, especially, has a palpable believability about him – but the events of their lives Sebald eventually comes to recount are the locus of his message and creativity. All four are Jews of German origin. All four had their lives upended by the Holocaust, but all survived and none experienced deportations or concentration camps, though they certainly had family members who did. Sebald’s concern here isn’t with surviving the Holocaust directly. Rather, it is with the experience of being removed from one’s origins, first physically but eventually, through the passage of time, emotionally. There is no lesson here. It may seem at times that Sebald implies a disappointment with how much personal history his characters lost over the years, yet at the same time he makes them continue to do everything they can to distance themselves from their past further still. The pain of even an indirect experience is too much for them.

There is really only one bit about the book that made me raise my eyebrows briefly. The character of one of the stories – the longest and most fantastical of the bunch, it had something of Mann’s Magic Mountain about it – is Sebald’s great-uncle, making Sebald himself, according to this story at least, part Jewish. In real life, he was not. The whole book, of course, is Sebald’s answer to the imperative that every post-war German writer deals with the Holocaust. This is his way. But does one have to pretend to be that which one is writing about? Especially in a book designed to blur the line between memory and invention? Has he gone just a tad too far? I don’t know. Suffice it to say that even if you see this as a fault, it is a small price to pay for the melancholy fascination of The Emigrants.

Tattoo

On a New Jersey Transit bus ride from Manhattan to Ft. Lee a few weeks ago, the man in the seat next to me – Asian, mid-twenties, sloppily dressed in ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt, but otherwise clean-cut -- was idly paging through an issue of Tattoo magazine. I couldn’t help looking over. One two-page spread somewhere around the middle of the magazine featured images of tattoo designs, chosen presumably for their distinctiveness or skillfull execution. The image in the upper left-hand corner immediately caught my attention. It was a picture of a young woman from the waist up, dressed in a white tank top, leaning slightly to one side. Her stylishly bobbed hair was rendered in a convincing punky green, her nails raven-black. She was covering her mouth with her left hand. The image, at least as it appeared on the page, showed a stunning precision, but what caught my attention the most was the unbelievable expressiveness of the woman’s eyes and face. Her eyes – blue – were obviously on the verge of tears, and her faced registered an unmistakable shock. I could easily picture her mouth, behind that hand, to be partially open in a quiet gasp. She had a clear look of instant but major devastation. This wasn’t just a great tattoo, it was excellent art. Obviously someone’s private, and very deeply felt, tragedy, depicted on an unusual choice of canvas.

Weddings

I lost some friends recently. They didn’t die, they just stopped being my friends. I didn’t come to their wedding. When they first got engaged, they boasted that they hated traditional overblown and overpriced weddings and that theirs would be the opposite of that. Great, I thought. I can’t stand these obscenely expensive exercises in self-absorption for the bride and groom (really, mostly the bride) and their parents either. So I was looking forward to seeing what they would come up with.

Some time goes by, and I receive an e-mail telling me that they were selected by the Washington Post to be featured in an a wedding-themed issue. Theirs would be the anti-wedding. Interesting, I say, but don’t give it much thought. Eventually, an Evite arrives with the date and time, but no other information. I reply in the affirmative. Details begin to trickle in by e-mail. One of the messages says, attire: summer casual. I call to clarify. “Are you sure you want summer casual,” I ask, “to most people these days, that means shorts and flip-flops.” “We are absolutely sure,” comes the reply. Then the shoe drops. The wedding is going to be… a scavenger hunt. All guests show up at the bride and groom’s house in the morning, get introduced to their team mates, get handed Metro fare cards and are given hints on what to look for and photograph in this great city of ours. After a few hours of this, everyone meets back at the bride and groom’s house. I instantly recoil from the idea. My reaction is irrational at first. I just know that I will not participate in this, and not only because I find it a bit presumptuous to send people trekking all over DC by train and foot in heat and humidity of a late-June day. I call to say that J. and I would rather not participate in the scavenger hunt. The bride is instantly and deeply offended. “Is there still an opportunity to stop by afterwards and wish you guys a nice life?” I ask. “No,” she says.

Only later did I think about it enough to realize what it was that I found so repugnant about the idea. It reminded me of nothing so much as team-building exercises at company retreats, where you are forced to do things that make you uncomfortable with people you don’t know.

The wedding day came and went. J. and I sent a modest gift and enclosed a note to the effect that we hoped that it could serve as a token of our continuing friendship. We got a thank-you note in return, and even though in the note our friends said they were disappointed we weren’t there, I though there was hope. A few weeks later, I called. Clearly, their feeling have not changed. The gist of my friends’ opinion was that if I really couldn’t stomach the idea of participating, I should have told a white lie and said that something came up unexpectedly. “I didn’t want to be untruthful,” I said, “you know me well enough to know I hate lying no matter what the cause.” That because I made it clear that I simply didn’t want to participate, they felt judged. They felt that I was telling them that what they decided to do was somehow wrong. “Not wrong for you,” I insisted, “merely wrong for me.” It is amazing how many people take statements of individual opinion and preference personally. In fact, I would argue that everything anyone says is nothing but a personal opinion and should always be treated as such, but I digress. I was speaking, once again, to the bride, now wife, of the couple. She considered my reply for a moment and appeared to accept that I did not intend it as a personal affront, but clearly the bridge had been burned.

Perhaps, in retrospect, she was right. Perhaps it would have been a decent thing for me to do to tell a white lie and bow out without letting my feelings show. But what I could not fathom at the time was that participating in the scavenger hunt was the price of admission. I could not imagine that there wasn’t an opportunity to drop in at the reception later in the day, hug them, have a beer, and give them my best wishes. Isn’t it about sharing the special occasion in whatever capacity?

Turns out that there was much more to the day that I initially realized. I am not going to get into the details, because the Washington Post article has since been published, and you can read it here. After reading it, I was glad that I didn’t know everything from the beginning, for in all likelihood, it would have caused me to criticize the event even more. While the scavenger hunt in isolation was merely an unpleasant activity, the entire package came dangerously close in spirit to what my former friends set out to avoid – like a conventional white-gown-and-tiered-cake wedding, it was a circus. A lot less expensive, it’s true, and they deserve credit for that, but even while subverting what the article authors cleverly called the wedding-industrial complex, they managed to focus the attention unequivocally on themselves.

Nabokov

I finally read Nabokov’s Lolita a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going to write anything at all about it – what can I possibly add to everything that has already been said about that book – but my friend S.G. asked me to trade comments, so I obliged.

It was a bit of an accident that I read it when I did. It had been on my list for years, but for some reason I just couldn’t get around to it. A couple of months ago, my father asked me whether I had ever read any Nabokov. He was rediscovering his Russian books then, and was absolutely blown away by the sheer artistry of his language. He asked me how his English prose compared. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be of any help. A little later, however, on the way to New York to visit my parents as a matter of fact, I left a book on a train, and ended up with nothing to read. So I walked down to the local Borders and picked up a copy of Lolita. If not now, then when, right?

It took a few pages to gain a full (as full as I could, anyhow) appreciation for Nabokov’s writing, but relatively quickly it became obvious that his English was every bit as idiosyncratic and brilliant as his Russian, at least on my father’s report. This was not just beautiful language, this was utterly unique, multilayered prose sparkling with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns that kept me marveling at how someone could come up with something like that. Here’s a mild example. Humbert has just been talking to Lolita’s mother, whom he cannot stand, but whom he pretends to love, and he goes to the refrigerator to make some drinks:

I set out two glasses… and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its heart. (p. 102)

I couldn’t choose the most impressive of Nabokov’s linguistic devices, but if I had to, I might have to go with the pun. These are not the lame puns you and I would make (well, I would…). This is punning at stratospheric heights. My personal favorite, if indeed I could pick one, is probably Humbert’s casual statement that while traveling through rural Alabama, he and Lolita saw a museum of guns and violins. In a three-word pun, Nabokov encapsulates his entire view of the rural South.

This actually brings me to the one aspect of the novel that I feel I could say something about. It has been written that an important theme of Lolita is America seen through the eyes of a European. I would adjust that a bit by saying that it is the “inner,” for lack of a better word, America, the cultural heartland that needs not be in the heart. And the eyes need not be European. Those of an urban Northeasterner would suffice. Large chunks of the book are dedicated to two road trips around the country Humbert and Lolita take. Nabokov’s eye for the roadside tourist trap, the beyond-tacky gift shop, the small-town soda fountain, is razor-sharp. Thing is, I have seen plenty of these places personally. In Arizona, in rural Virginia, in Michigan, just about everywhere my travels have taken me over the last twenty years. The places certainly changed since the early 1950s, but not nearly as much as you might expect, and not in any ways that are germane to Nabokov’s observations. And let me tell you, the museum of guns and violins is no figment of his imagination. Not the idea of it, anyway. I do have to ding him for getting Phoenix streets wrong – Seventh and Central both run north-south and do not cross – but that’s just the nit-picker in me.

As amazing as the novel is, I did think the story sagged a bit towards the end, and turned noticeably darker (the amount of wit throughout most of the book was another shock to me) but the ending, both with respect to Lolita’s fate and Humbert’s final act, is priceless.

Another friends who recently read it said that though enjoyable, it did not carry a fundamental revelation about the human condition for him. I disagree vehemently. You cannot possess another human being, and the harder you try, the harder both you and the object of your attempted possession fall.

Michigan, The Rest

For the next four days, we J. and I visited with G.&N. The details are of no interest to the general public, so I will not get into them here. Suffice it to say that happily, it was much like previous visits, and we did everything I've come to love so much about these trips – used book shops, Ashley's, Zola, the Arboretum (“Putting the 'Arb' in Ann Arbor since 1907”), late-night dinners on the porch, G.'s creative cocktails and delicious wines, lazy mornings outside reading, drinking coffee and watching the groundhogs (apologies for the excessive digital zoom in the photo -- he was a skittish critter).

One brilliant idea of G.'s that's worth mentioning was what he termed the upscale pub crawl. The idea was to visit three, possibly four local restaurants, having a drink and an appetizer or small plate at each. We made it to two – West End Grill and Vinology – before we realized that it was getting late, and more food and drink would be good neither for our stomachs nor our ability to drive home. But the idea was fantastic nevertheless and I hope to repeat it.

We left Monday morning. I for one, would have happily abused our friends' hospitality longer, but politeness and jobs, both theirs and ours, called. We actually drove West, back to Kalamazoo, where we were determined to visit another place I had been trying to get to for several years now – the Gilmore Car Museum. Gilmore is a private museum located in five or so large barns in the middle of rural Kalamazoo County. The collection focuses on American cars, with just a handful of classic European models thrown in for contrast. We went through the exhibits fairly quickly, not wanting to get home too late, but got something out of the visit nevertheless. Highlights included an entire pavilion dedicated to Pierce-Arrow (headquartered in Buffalo, NY, which I had not known), several immaculate Duesenbergs, an example of the DeSoto Suburban (no relation to the modern Chevy Suburban, but in essence America's first minivan, with three rows of reconfigurable seats), a Chrysler Airflow (the first American car developed in a wind tunnel), a Bantam (inspiration for clown cars everywhere), and the last Buick to feature wooden wheel rims, made in 1928. One of the things Gilmore likes to advertise is their muscle car exhibit, which I found good, though not overwhelmingly fascinating. My favorite, improbably, was the 1970 Chrysler 300, not so much a classic muscle car, which were small for their day, but a souped-up luxury dreadnought, absolutely enormous in size and so rare that I have never seen one anywhere else. Most of the cars on display were owned by the museum, but one barn's worth belonged to the Classic Car Club of America, an organization of owners of cars built between 1925 and 1948. It was here that we saw most of the Europeans. My favorites were an immaculate late-1930s Delahaye with custom white-on-red coachwork and a 1938 Mercedes 540K, arguably the most beautiful Mercedes ever designed (toss-up with the 1950s 300SL, I suppose), buried by its German owner during WWII and not discovered until almost 40 years later. We even saw an Auburn Speedster driving around the grounds of the museum. On the way out, I came across a brochure for this outfit. Pricey, but something I absolutely must do before I die.

Michigan, Day Six

On day six, we left the UP. We hit the road early and drove south, then west, much of it once again through dense fog and some of the most otherworldly views of scraggly, distinctly Northern-looking pines menacing us from the side of the road, bathed in the diffuse light of the rising sun. Around Seney National Wildlife Refuge, we saw two sandhill cranes again. I would like to think they were the same ones we saw on the way up and that they came out to say good-bye. We stopped to take a good look, and they stood there for us, unfazed by the presence of a car a scant few feet away. After about three hours, we were over the Mackinaw Bridge and back on the lower peninsula.

We got off the interstate almost immediately and made our way west to the coast of Lake Michigan. Two years ago, I had an entire day to drive what would normally be about a five-hour drive, so I glanced at the map, saw the dots of an official AAA scenic drive along Route 119 and decided to check it out. The spur of the moment decision proved serendipitous – it was one of the most distinctive roads I’ve ever driven. This year, I was looking forward to sharing it with J. The signs along the road read “Canopy of Trees” and it was literally that – the narrow, unmarked strip of tarmac wound gently through giant, extremely dense trees, so dense and close together that the branches intertwined high above the roadway, blocking out the sunlight and giving the road a very cinematic feel. Eventually, the outrageous houses of Harbor Springs begin to appear on the side of the road. I believe they are summer, or at least weekend, homes, not full-time residences, but the vast majority is exceptionally large, meticulously kept up and visibly expensive. I must admit that most of the designs are infinitely more interesting, in a rustic sort of way, than a typical exurban McMansion. Two years ago in Ann Arbor, I briefly met someone whose family hailed from the Harbor Springs area, but she was unable, or unwilling, to tell me where all that money comes from up there.

Eventually, the trees parted, the road widened somewhat and picked up some traffic, and around 11:00 a.m. we entered downtown Harbor Springs. It was an idyllic few blocks along the water, with upscale boutiques and gourmet sandwich shops, the masts of sailboats, owned, no doubt, by the people in the big houses, swaying in the background. We considered stopping for coffee but decided to press on to Traverse City. The next town of consequence along the coastal drive was Petoskey, and that was where I realized that my memory was playing the worst trick of my life on me. I remembered the town – similar to Harbor Springs but on a slightly larger scale and just a tad less upscale – well, and thought it would make a great lunch spot. However, I also quite simply forgot that it existed, and was convinced that what I was remembering was Traverse City. In reality, I had never been to Traverse City, and two years ago, cut back into the interior and onto a major highway immediately after passing through Petoskey. So now we were in uncharted territory.

We did reach Traverse City a little while later, and were glad we did. It opens up with a strip of lakeside resort hotels – a curious mixture of old-school motor lodges and snazzy new chains. The downtown, however, is lovely – clean and attractive, full of shops and restaurants and, most importantly, in mid-afternoon on a Thursday, foot traffic. We parked the car and had lunch at North Peaks Brewing Company, where I had an excellent fried calamari salad and their seasonal spiced summer ale whose name escapes me but whose flavor was delicious – slightly hoppier than a typical summer seasonal, with a pronounced flavor of citrus and coriander. Afterwards, we checked out a few shops, bought souvenirs for a couple of friends back home, got in touch with our friends in Ann Arbor, whose house was our ultimate destination that night, and got back on the road.

We headed south on US-131 and sometime around 6:00 or 7:00 reached Grand Rapids. The sky was clouding over throughout the afternoon; the day was hot to begin with but became more humid as we traveled south. Now it was oppressive. The contrast between Grand Rapids and the UP was striking – gray, tree-less, stewing in the humidity and muck of an unseasonably hot late August evening, filled with decaying brick factory buildings, mile-long warehouses and rusting rail yards, it was a shock to our systems that have not yet restored their defenses against this hyper-urban onslaught. After some reflection, I realized that Grand Rapids looked like a classic steel belt city, decaying but also probably attempting to reinvent itself, along the lines of Pittsburgh and even Buffalo, and surely urban gems were hiding in its depths – funky neighborhoods, distinctive coffee shops and bars, local lore. From the highway, however, it was little more than a reminder that we were back to civilization of the sort we weren’t necessarily ready to confront.

We continued south to Kalamazoo, where I insisted to stopping to visit Bell’s, the pub of the legendary Kalamazoo-area microbrewery of the same name. It is somewhat of a pilgrimage spot for beer geeks and I had been wanting to go ever since I started making my yearly trips to Ann Arbor five years ago. Kalamazoo was all warehouses and rail yards too, smaller than Grand Rapids, with a few none-too-friendly-looking neighborhoods we drove through on the way downtown. Downtown itself was attractive enough, but small, and completely dead though it was only about 8:00 p.m. We found Bell’s on its edge, and it proved to be a smaller operation than I expected. Not a full-blown restaurant, it was instead a large hall, with a handful of tables but largely empty, and a small window in a corner where you could order food that you would then have to pick up yourself. Their claim to fame, besides the beer of course, is their beer garden, but by the time we got there a band was setting up, and in order to drink out there, the beer had to be in plastic cups. We had a light snack – surprisingly good given the barebones kitchen – and I tried the McGinness Spiced Stout, a half-pint since I had more driving ahead of me. It was excellent, with a pronounced spicy character. I neglected to write down my tasting notes, unfortunately. Afterwards, we bought a few bottles of their limited edition beers at the gift shops and hit the road.

A little over an hour later, we were in Ann Arbor, at the house of our dear friends G. & N. Drinks, stories, jokes – all the stuff I look forward to so much every year. J., tired from the road, turned in shortly after we arrived, but I stayed up a while, catching up with G. and N., who are complete night owls, knowing that there was little danger of an early start the following day.

Michigan, Day Five

Our original plans for Day Five called for hiking another section of Pictured Rocks in the morning, then driving down the scenic coast of Lake Michigan, through Harbor Springs and Traverse City, and lodging in Grand Rapids for the night with the intention of visiting the Grand Rapids Art Museum the following day.

We started the day at the aforementioned Falling Rocks Cafe, where I had a smoked whitefish sandwich for breakfast. It consisted of smoked whitefish, cream cheese and a slice of tomato served on a toasted bagel. On the one hand, makes total sense, right? We eat lox like that, and in fact whitefish, though probably not caught in Lake Superior, is an important part of New York Jewish cuisine. On the other hand, Munising, MI is about as far from New York, culturally and gastronomically, as possible, so it was a little shocking that someone up there came up with the whitefish sandwich. What was even more shocking was that it was absolutely delicious. Not just good, but really, really excellent. Even the bagel tasted like the real thing. No, not quite like what I used to get on Queens Blvd. in Rego Park back in the day, but it was a hell of a lot better than all but a handful of bagels I can get in DC. I asked the young woman at the counter whether they made them on site, she said they didn't but did not elaborate.

We hit the trail around 9:00. It was another beautiful day, a little too warm if anything. Unfortunately, the hike proved to be just a tad disappointing. Two years ago, I had hiked west from Twelve-Mile Beach, where I camped, and saw some of the most unbelievable cliffs, some of the same ones we saw from the kayak the previous day, but from the top. It was that hike, in fact, that made me resolve to kayak the Rocks before I died – I saw kayakers directly underneath me, paddling right up to the cliffs. I was hoping that we could reach the same area coming from Miner's Castle, but my estimates were off, and most of our hike actually took us through the woods with only occasional glimpses at the lake, much like the hike we did two days earlier. We hiked as far as Mosquito Beach, about five miles away. The name is well-deserved, I should point out – we were all but devoured on the last mile. I guess I should have expected this – they don't call mosquitoes “Michigan Air Force” for nothing – but two years ago I didn't get a single bite, and I was there a week earlier in the season, so I figured they'd be gone by now. Anyway, by the time we reached Mosquito Beach we were tired and sweaty. We went for a leisurely swim, and had a lunch of protein bars and trail mix. By then, it was getting close to 1:00 p.m., and J. pointed out that there is no way we would have time to get back to the car, make it back to Mackinaw Bridge, and drive half-way down the coast on winding lakeside roads. At best, we could go straight for the interstate and gun it to Grand Rapids, arriving close to midnight for a few inadequate hours of sleep. And, while the Art Museum was no doubt very nice for its host city, and its reputation for unique energy-efficient architecture well-deserved, it was probably not essential viewing for someone with easy access to DC and New York museums. I had to concede that she was absolutely right. Once the decision was made to remain in Munising for one more night, the sense of urgency disappeared, we hiked back to Miner's Castle at a sane pace and went for another swim before driving back into town and getting a room at the Munising Days Inn next door to Sydney's.

The upside of staying, besides not having to rush, was that we could now take a cruise of Pictured Rocks. They offered several sailings throughout the day, but the last voyage, which left at 6:15 p.m., was what they called their sunset cruise, with the boat still on the lake when the sun set. We booked two spots by telephone from the hotel, and went next door to Sydney's for a not-quite-lunch, not-quite-dinner, the trail mix having worn off long ago. While I could have probably happily eaten more whitefish, both J. and I opted for the other UP specialty – the pasty. Most people think of it as an English thing – in the UK, the full name is “cornish pasty” -- but up here for some reason it is associated with Finnish immigrants who came to log the place in the mid- to late-1800s. Anyway, it is an oblong pie stuffed with diced root vegetables -- traditionally, rutabaga, potatoes and carrots -- and shredded beef. I had had one on my first visit at a roadside joint on US-2 not far from the Mackinaw Bridge, and it was not good. But J. insisted on trying one, and Sydney's appeared to be rather proud of theirs, so I figured I'd give it another shot. I can report that while it was far better than the first version I had had, it was still not an experience I would be eager to repeat. Dry, heavy and starchy to the extreme, it was only partially redeemed by Sydney's delicious coleslaw and gobs of ketchup. It was very light on the meat – probably authentic, what with poor immigrants a century ago needing to stretch expensive ingredients as far as possible, but disappointing in modern times. A pint of Edmund Fitzgerald helped.

A few minutes before six we showed up at the dock, picked up our tickets and boarded the boat. The crowd was sizable – other than paddling, this is the way to see Pictured Rocks – but we managed to get seats on the upper, open, deck, and were off. The narrator made way too many really lame jokes, but we did learn a few interesting facts about Lake Superior (deepest and cleanest of the Great Lakes, in addition to largest, and the largest surface area in the world, plus kids' stuff like “if it were as deep as a swimming pool, it would cover all of South America, etc.”) It is here that we learned the alternative explanation for the Pictured Rocks name. Apparently, early explorers saw all kinds of images of actual things in the colors, hence the name. I doubt the Ojibwa smoked peyote, it being a cactus, but whatever they used to achieve the same effect they must have shared generously with these explorers. We saw no images. We did, however, see several amazing rock formations that we either didn't reach or were too close in to see in the kayak. Indian Head is probably the one that looks the most like its namesake, but there were sterns of ships, birds, and all kinds of other things. Overall, seeing the Rocks from a larger boat was a nice foil to the experience of the previous day – you get a more holistic, though slightly less involved, feel for the cliffs. You see more at once, and get a panorama rather than a zoomed-in view we had when floating a few feet away from the towering sandstone.

We covered about twelve miles of coastline. On the way back, the sun was low enough that the cliffs achieved a beautiful, deep golden glow. The timing of the cruise was impeccable – the sun set right as we were leaving Lake Superior proper and entering Munising Bay. The noise of the motors and the commotion on deck didn't allow for a meditative experience, but it was gorgeous nonetheless, especially since we knew it was our last unobstructed sunset of the trip.

Michigan, Day Four

We would spend Tuesday kayaking along Pictured Rocks, but I had done some poor planning, and while we spent the night in Grand Marais, we had to make a 9:00 a.m. departure in Munising, sixty-five miles away. So we left Grand Marais at the crack of dawn and drove along deserted Northern Michigan roads, through some of the densest fog I have ever seen, with two enormous sandhill cranes along the side of the road as our only witnesses. We arrived in plenty of time (I had been kicking myself for not arranging things better, and compensated by getting on the road at six a.m.) and had a mediocre breakfast at a cheerfully decorated and, thankfully, well-heated (it was 52 degrees outside) place called The Dogpatch in downtown Munising. A few minutes before nine, we arrived at Northern Waters Adventures on the edge of town.

Northern Waters was little more than a giant barn, most of it filled with junk that seemed to have only remote relevance to kayaking. We checked in with Linda, who behaved like she was the owner, though did not introduce herself as such, then met with the rest of what would be our group – a friendly, talkative man from Wisconsin with his two daughters, a high-schooler and a tween, and a quiet couple in their forties, from Ohio if memory serves. Our guide was a tall, lanky fellow named Meir who spoke with the unmistakable monotone of someone whose lack of enthusiasm for anything that goes on around him was induced by many years of regular marijuana smoking. Actually, I don’t even know if that was how his name was spelled. Even though Meir looked too young to have been born in the sixties, I could easily imagine a pair of pot-smoking pinko hippies naming their son “Mir” back in the day. We had already signed a bunch of forms absolving the outfit and its guides from responsibility for all kinds of terrible things that were sure to happen to us once we were out on the water, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should have been more worried than I was.

I have to give credit where credit is due, however – Meir sure knew his boats and his paddling. Once we got to our put-in point at Miner’s Beach, he gave us a much longer and far more detailed primer on kayaking on open water than we ever got on the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick last year, though that outfit seemed more professional and better organized in every way. Meir gave us detailed instructions on what to do if the boat flips, why it was not a good idea to push the paddle too far back in the water, how to give the paddle extra momentum by executing a punching movement with your airborne hand, and dozens of other useful tips. Just from that half-hour or so on Miner’s Beach, I feel like I am a better paddler.

Evidently, there had been some conflicting marine forecasts earlier that morning, but by the time we were finally on the water, the weather could not have been more perfect. There was not a shred of cloud in the sky, there was only a slightest hint of a breeze, and the water was a deep, bright and amazingly clear turquoise. Bizarre though the comparison may seem, it reminded me the most of a photograph an old friend showed me many years ago of her vacation to the Cayman Islands.

Once we were on the water, we first paddled west to Miner’s Castle, one of the most prominent rock formations in Pictured Rocks, a rough stone pillar of sorts sticking up from a high outcropping that buts out into the lake. Near the pillar, a hundred feet away or so, there is a flat platform. Another, similar pillar had once stood there, but it collapsed into the lake a dozen or so years ago. You can still buy postcards in town that show both of them.

After seeing Miner’s Castle, we turned around and paddled east, where most of the otherworldly rock formations of Pictured Rocks were. The cliffs of Pictured Rocks themselves are predominantly sandstone, but the soil of the surrounding area is rich in a great variety of minerals, and since sandstone is very porous, the many underground streams and rivers carry the minerals to the surface, where they oxidize, creating a staggering variety of the most unusual colors. In fact, this was the first explanation for the name “Pictured” Rocks (Colored Rocks would have been more precise) I had heard on my first visit two years ago. We would hear an alternative one the following day, as well as having the unplanned opportunity to see them from a slightly different vantage point.

In the meantime, we were paddling right under the towering cliffs, following the jagged coastline. The wind had picked up a bit, but the paddling was still relatively easy and our loose group was making decent progress. Attempting to describe the rocks in detail would be futile, and photographing them, which I would do the following day, only slightly less so. Suffice it to say that they are overwhelming. Imagine plopping the Red Rocks of Sedona, AZ into Lake Superior and you’ll begin to get the general idea.

A little over an hour into the trip, we stopped for lunch at the end of a beach, and Meir, in a long-winded version liberally sprinkled with “and stuff like that” told us the story of the Ojibwa Indians, specifically the pacifist offshoot on Grand Island, which we could see to the northwest; the story which, through the diaries of Henry Schoolcraft eventually made it into Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. After lunch, we spent almost three more hours on the water, seeing more gorgeous cliffs and beautiful weather, though the wind continued to kick up steadily through the day. By the last half-hour, we were starting to feel the day’s work in our arms and back. We took out well after three, the group helped Meir load the boats onto the trailer, and broke up in the parking lot with smiles and handshakes. J. and I stayed on the beach for another hour or so, swimming in a bracing but wonderfully refreshing and shockingly clean water.

Our lodging for the night was Sunset Motel, another minimalist establishment. It was a little further from the center of town than I had hoped, and not walking distance to anything, but it was spotless, and true to its name – every room looked directly out onto Munising Bay and Grand Island beyond, with benches and picnic tables placed in the front with the express purpose of allowing guests to watch the sunset. Strangely, it also proved to have one of the most comfortable mattresses I have ever slept on, orders of magnitude better than any other hotel, and even better than our very decent one at home.

We had dinner at the improbably named Sydney’s Shark Bay Bar. Located right on the main drag just before downtown Munising proper starts, it is probably the best known restaurant in town, or at least the most written-about. I had seen several mentions. The owner, apparently, has a life-long fascination with Australia, and though she has never been there, she decided to give her restaurant an Australian theme, complete with kangaroo crossing signs and old license plates from New South Wales. The main dining room had a decidedly institutional, cafeteria-like feel, but the bar area was cozy and inviting, with a real oak bar that curved around one side of the room, seventies-vintage faux leather captain’s chairs instead of stools, and several candle-lit booths around the perimeter, into one of which we settled. The menu was extensive, mostly standard pub grub, but several varieties of local fish – they had walleye and lake perch in addition to whitefish – were featured prominently. On our waitress’s recommendation, we stuck with whitefish – apparently, it had been pulled out of the lake a scant few hours earlier. J., who was starting to get tired of road food, made the mistake of ordering hers broiled – it was overcooked and dry – but I went with fried, and it was delicious. It wasn’t heavily breaded fish-n-chips style, being lightly dusted with cornmeal instead, and I finally got a good idea of whitefish’s flavor. It is a mild fish, not particularly complex, but when it is as fresh as it was on my plate, it had a pleasant, clean taste reminiscent of cod, and had a distinct scent of a Lake Superior breeze. A very different animal than it is in smoked form.

Our evening’s beverage was also one of the more satisfying of the trip – the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, made by the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland. Sydney’s had it on tap and advertised it with large posters depicting the beer’s namesake. The Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the best-known bits of local lore. It was the last ship to have wrecked on Lake Superior to date, in November of 1975, killing all 29 people on board. At just under 800 ft., it was also the largest ship on the lake at the time of its launch. On the night of November 10, 1975 off the coast of Canada, it encountered thirty-five-foot waves and 60+ mph winds, took on water, broke in two and sank just fifteen miles from Whitefish Bay which would have provided sufficient shelter for the ship to wait out the storm. Gordon Lightfoot recorded a song about the wreck a couple of years later. Today, the story is told often as the closing (hopefully) chapter of a long history of shipwrecks on Lake Superior, as well as a reminder of the savagery the lake is capable of – something that I admit was a little hard to imagine as we paddled along Pictured Rocks in light breeze and bright sunlight earlier in the day. The beer named after the ship was delicious – pitch-dark, thick and robust, it had a faint malty sweetness around its very porter-like bitter core, but also had more hoppy notes on top than a typical English porter. We enjoyed it thoroughly.

After dinner, unable to stay indoors on another of Michigan’s interminable evenings, we wandered downtown, largely dead, but home to the least expected and most welcome establishments in Munising – the Falling Rocks Café. A coffeehouse-cum-bookstore, it served delicious coffee roasted somewhere in the general area, a good selection of books, and lots of comfortable chairs and tables at which to sip and read. We resolved to come back for breakfast.

Upon our return to the motel, we watched the sunset – I finally realized my dream of having J. see one. Though it set over Grand Island rather than directly over the water, it was still beautiful, and the relative lack of wind, though it took something away from the previous night’s drama, helped J. to stay warm long enough to see the entire thing.

Michigan, Day Three

In the interest of time, we started the following day with a breakfast at our hotel, which was included in our room rate. It was terrible – cold, gloppy and greasy, washed down with weak lukewarm coffee. It was also a bit surreal, held as it was in the hotel’s enormous, oak-paneled formal dining room, with a few guests eating in silence, no doubt oppressed by the unnecessary gravitas of the space, and one of John Coltrane’s less listenable recordings being piped in through the PA. I was really ready to leave Mackinac Island. Once again we caught the 9:00 a.m. ferry back to the mainland.

Our destination that day was the town Grand Marais, on the Eastern end of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. With every road in Michigan seemingly under a permanent state of construction, we finally arrived around 1:00, wolfed down a quick lunch of protein bars and trail mix and headed for the trail. The Eastern end of Pictured Rocks is home to Grand Sable Dunes, some of the largest in North America. We started at Log Slide, once really a slide that lumberjacks used to send freshly cut logs down to the waiting barges moored in Lake Superior. All of what is today’s Pictured Rocks, and in fact a majority of the entire UP, had been clear-cut in the mid- to late-1800s. It is said that UP timber made most Midwestern cities possible.

The trail wound its way along the edge of the dunes, mostly covered by a canopy of trees but with regular openings onto some of the most breathtaking views of the lake and the sand bluffs below us. The day had started out sunny and quiet, but by early afternoon a solid cloud cover had rolled in and a strong wind had picked up. The surface of the lake was covered with serious-looking white crowns. Every time we stepped through a break in the trees, the cold North-Easterly wind hit us in the face. Standing on one of those precipices high above the water, looking out at the turbulent lake, with not a boat in sight, really made us feel like we were at the edge of the world. We hiked to the Au Sable Lighthouse about two and a half miles away before turning back.

The lighthouse, which I had hiked to from the opposite direction two years ago, is exceptionally well preserved and is still in operation. Originally built in 1874 and powered by burning oil, it was converted to electric power by the Coast Guard in 1958 and completely automated. The original keeper’s quarters are occasionally open for tours, but were closed when we got there.

We returned to the car and drove back into Grand Marais. With a permanent population of about 200, twice that in the summer, it is a real backwater – perhaps the most remote place I have ever stayed, not counting the Twelve-Mile Beach campground, reached by 22 miles of dirt roads, where I camped two years ago. Tourism, such as it is, is Grand Marais’ only means of income. There is a large private campground with RV hookups in the middle of town along with two or three motels and a public dock. In the winter, it is a major center for snowmobiling. All this is not enough to give the town a sense of self-worth, however. It appears out of nowhere when you drive up to it – Michigan Rt. 77 simply ends, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of a town, and before you even get out of the car you realize that it is a place that has stopped caring about how it looks to visitors. Decrepit, though large, houses, line the main street, kids’ bikes and old chairs strewn about on lawns, a rusty trailer with a pair of old snowmobiles ogling the street with their gaping headlights. The sole gas station’s pumps still have rotary dials.

Our lodging for the night was the Beach Park Motel – a gray, barrack-like two-story building a block away from the center. Curiously, even though there are no telephones in the rooms, it claims to offer wi-fi. When we walked into our room upon check-in, we quickly discovered that it had not been cleaned. Thankfully for us, vacancy was plentiful, and Andy, the proprietors’ son who was on duty that evening quickly moved us to another room. Showered and changed, we left in search of dinner.

In a town like Grand Marais, needless to say, choices were slim, but Hunt’s Guide (an indispensable resource if you're thinking of going) claimed that there was an actual brew pub in town, the Lake Superior Brewing Company (no relation to the commercial micro-brewery of the same name in Duluth, MN). This proved to be a large house at the lake end of the main drag. It did not look like a restaurant, but a faded sign above the door claimed that it was, and once we stepped inside we were pleasantly surprised to find a clean and cheerful, in a rustic sort of way, dining room, with a long bar running down one side and a good number of customers seated around several tables made out of old pickle barrels. We sat at the bar whose décor was a bizarre combination of taxidermied minks and 80s-chic backlit glass tiles. The bartender, a dead ringer for Willie Nelson, informed us that despite the town’s sad appearance, the previous weekend witnessed an unexpected onslaught of tourists, causing them to run out of several things, including whitefish and all but two of their beers. Not all was lost, however, as their stout was still available, and with the temperature outside quickly dipping into the low fifties and the wind showing no sign of subsiding, it would have been my choice anyway. It looked and tasted home-made – yeasty and young, but deliciously fresh and clean – and both J. and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Whitefish being unavailable, we risked pizza, and were pleasantly surprised. It had too much bad cheese and too little of everything else on it, of course, but the crust was very decent and actually tasted like pizza, not flattened Wonderbread.

Looking about, I was not sure whether most of the clientele were locals or tourists, but eventually concluded that it being Monday, it was mostly the former. A pint of the local stuff was poured now and again, but the big seller seemed to be cans of Miller Lite. To our right, two men in trucker's caps, on a first-name basis with the bartender, drank Seagrams VO on the rocks and played cribbage (!). To our left, three thirty-something women, incongruently well-attired in dresses or slacks, kept up a lively chatter among themselves and with a steady stream of far less impressive-looking guys wandering in and out of the bar. By the time we left around eight, it was freezing-cold outside, but, it being the UP, still light. J. returned to the motel to keep warm while I wondered onto the wind-swept beach to watch the sunset.

I would venture a guess that most of us urban and suburban dwellers have not seen a sunset – a real sunset, where you see the sun descend over the horizon, not behind a highrise – in so long that we forget they exist. I was reminded of this two years ago right there in Pictured Rocks, when right from my campsite I watched the sun set over Lake Superior on a perfectly clear evening. The last time before that was when I was about ten. When I walked out onto the beach in Grand Marais, the sun was still high enough and bright enough that I could not so much as glance at it directly, even with sunglasses on. The wind was steady and strong, the surf making the lake sound just like the ocean. The sky had cleared up over the course of the evening, but there was still a thin layer of grayish-purple clouds hanging low over the water, adding to the drama. The sunlight refracted as it passed through them and acquired a spectral quality, forming a deep pink halo around the fireball. The sun itself was a deep but intensely glowing orange – imagine a slice of smoked salmon draped over a floodlight. When its bottom edge hit the water, for a few moments it still looked perfectly round, as if it would ooze over the surface of the lake instead of disappearing behind it. By the time it was a quarter of the way gone, I could look directly at it through a pair of twelve-dollar Target sunglasses. After the bottom half had disappeared, I could watch it growing steadily smaller and see the Earth's rotation in real time. When it was all gone, the sky retained the glow that to me was more heart-rending than the sight of the setting sun itself. Same color, but many degrees less intense, at the lake's surface, it morphed into the steely gray of the twilit sky through an infinity of intermediate colors that I am convinced have no names in the English, or any other, language. Walking away from the beach, I glanced at the house closest to the water -- shutters drawn, no lights inside -- and wondered whether the overwhelming experience of seeing what I had just seen would eventually dull if I could simply walk out onto my deck on any given night and casually glance at a sunset. In the parking lot, two middle-aged gentlemen in expensive hiking gear were perched on the hood of their car, enjoying the spectacle, with two goblets of red wine, the oversized Riedel kind, in their hands.