Liquorice Pizza

Highland Park 30-year-old Single Malt

2011-10-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

Found myself at Jack Rose last Monday. I knew that the place had a mind-boggling collection of rare and vintage Scotches. What I didn't know is that most of them are available by the half-ounce taste. Well-aged Scotch is infamously unaffordable, but in half-ounce increments many are almost accessible to working stiffs once in a great while. For $6/taste, C.S. and I ended up trying Highland Park's 30-year-old single malt. It wasn't the "standard" 30-year, either. It appeared to be some kind of limited edition, long since out of production no doubt, but of course I've neglected to write down the exact name. The experience, however, needed no writing down. Color: dark amber, far darker than any other Scotch I've ever tasted. It looked like maple syrup. Nose: pronounced butterscotch (no surprises there) with some citrus and a sharp burn of alcohol. Palate: Butterscotch on the front, noticeable sweetness, very intense. On the mid-palate, surprisingly tannic. I tasted strong black tea. Finishes with a bright, acidic, almost lemony note - a Highland Park family trait shared with the relatively more plebeian 12-year-old. Quite possibly the best beverage in any category I have ever tried.

New Beligum and the earthquake

2011-08-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

I guess I’m supposed to be writing about the earthquake, but there’s not a lot to write. Initially thought someone was jack-hammering downstairs, but as the intensity increased, people started coming out of their cubicles, saying “must be an earthquake.” One co-worker was seriously scared – the look on his face was the definition of paralyzing fear. All he could find the strength to say was “run fast.” I guess with both Fukushima and Haiti still fresh in everyone’s mind, I can’t blame him too much. The company sent people home. Cell phone service completely knocked out. The Metro was running, but on a 15-mph speed limit. I walked the five miles home, stopping for a pint along the way.

So instead, I am going to write about New Belgium. Long a staple of the craft beer scene out West, it is available here in Virginia as of last night. Rustico held a release party of sorts, which C.S. and I checked out. Once again I wasn’t taking notes, so I’m commenting from memory.

Ranger IPA (6.5% ABV, 70 IBU): Nice, clean-tasting IPA, balanced but slightly tilted towards bitter hops. Relatively light in body and color. Excellent when the weather is hot but you still want a pronounced hop flavor.

Trippel (7.8% ABV, 25 IBU): Seriously fruity and a little sugary for my taste. The brewers are mum on what they add, besides coriander (which I actually couldn’t taste), but some candy sugar has got to be in there. Not that there is anything wrong with that – adding it is an old Belgian tradition after all – but makes for a bit too much artificial sweetness for my taste.

Kick (8.5% ABV, IBU unspecified): Even more seriously fruity and sour cranberry and pumpkin lambic. Not at all my style. I only got a 3-oz. taste. It’s the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing.

I didn’t bother ordering a Fat Tire. Like everything else, it came in 12-oz goblets, which I thought was completely silly. Out West, it’s the quintessential session beer, and it will always remind me of weekend afternoons whiled away with friends on the rooftop of Grapevine in Scottsdale.

David Russell, For David

2011-07-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

David Russel's For David: Music Written for David Russell, Guitar is a useful record. It is a snapshot of the state of contemporary composition for solo classical guitar. It is also excellent ammunition for those looking for evidence that modern "serious" music has become an emotionless, over-formalized, self-referential morass.

Of the composers represented here - all themselves guitarists, and all writing specifically for Russell - the American Phil Rosheger is probably the odd man out. His self-contained, single-movement pieces are very much in the tradition of 19th and early-20th century Spanish composers like Tarrega and are the only works on the record that feature themes that the listener recognizes as such. Frenchman Francis Kleynjans' Arabesque en forme de caprice also starts out promisingly enough with a theme that pulls off one of this listener's favorite tricks - evoking a melancholy mood in a major key - but has plenty of time to get bogged down over its nine-minute length, even if the overall effect is less grating than much of the rest of the music.

The next step down is Welsh composer Steve Goss, who contributes a work of three relatively short movements inspired by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. The melodies, as a casual listener understands the term, are no longer there, and the development path of any given work is veiled at best, but Goss's saving grace is the same one employed by most other successful modern composers: space. He makes his point with a minimum of notes, and sounds honest as a result. The opening movement Cantiga, in particular, is effective - at less than two minutes in duration, it is essentially a miniature. By definition, it cannot say much, and that is precisely why it works. Too many people have a habit of saying too much in too many situations, and any work that bucks this trend is a welcome change. Listening does require some focus, but it's mental energy well spent.

The rest of the music - other composers represented are Sergio Assad and Ben Verdery - is fiendishly difficult, deeply chromatic and, to these ears, completely unappealing. Throughout the recording, Russell himself is, of course, flawless... and irrelevant. His prodigious technique is more than adequate, but on music with so little emotional content, the interpreter's personality is completely lost. The formal construction of many of these works is, no doubt, impressive, and a few hours spent with the scores would probably be very illuminating. But that is not what we have here. Performed, this music sounds like little more than aimless noodling.

Tyler Cowen

2011-07-05T20:35:00.000-07:00

Went to hear Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist, at Politics & Prose tonight. He was speaking in connection with his new book, The Great Stagnation. Not having read the book yet, I will refrain from detailed commentary. Suffice it to say that he had a few interesting things to say, and in the end I was glad I went.

The gist of his argument in the book seems to be that broad economic growth is driven by technological innovation, and that we have run out of innovation. "Broad" to him means something that the entire population benefits from, not just a narrowly-defined group. And the innovation has to be deep and fundamental to be meaningful -- something that transforms every-day lives of a vast number of people in readily recognizable ways. According to Cowen, for the past three hundred years, such innovation has been relatively easy to come by, and we started to take it for granted and assume that things will continue in the same vein for the foreseeable future. In fact, however, such life-altering innovation has now become very difficult to achieve. We have already picked off all the low-hanging fruit, and anything more will require exponentially more effort. Thus, phenomena like the leveling-off of income growth among many others.

Two points from the talk stuck with me. One is that the Internet is not all it has cracked up to be, at least when it comes to changing people's lives in fundamental ways. The intellectual elite in places like Washington, DC (i.e., all of us) don't recognize this. To us, it has fundamentally changed our lives, and we cannot imagine life and work without the Internet any more than we can imagine it without electricity or telephone service. The same is not true for the population at large, Cowen argues. For a middle-class family of four in rural Ohio pulling in $45K/year, it's a marginal improvement at best, and a bit of a luxury. I tend to agree with him on this.

The other point was a little more chilling. One of the reasons for the slow-down in innovation that Cowen has suggested is the lure of the financial sector for the best-educated. Because so many Harvard graduates (e.g.) go into finance these days, fewer talented people go into basic research, the sciences, and education. Someone in the audience, however, asked a provocative question -- how are we different in that respect from what was going on in the late 1920s, another major boom for the financial industry? Cowen's answer was that we weren't that different. In retrospect, of course, we all know where the events of 1929-1931 led to, especially in Europe. Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to ask him to comment on that during Q&A. I asked the question once the event proper was over, but I am not sure he got my drift. He was focused on the economic legacy of 1931 in the US, not the political legacy of 1931 in Europe. He advised me to pay off my mortgage. Thanks, Tyler.

James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief

2011-06-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief is a curious book. Carse - a former head of the religious studies program at NYU - starts with a bold claim that pretty much all commonly accepted definitions and, more importantly, understanding of religion is wrong, and sets out to provide the correct one.

The big problem for him are belief systems. Pretty much anyone would agree that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that, according to Carse, is precisely what has led to millennia of violence and intolerance in the name of religion. He spends the entire first half of the book deconstructing and analyzing belief systems and how they work. This he does with clarity, elegance and much nuance. In fact, this analysis is the chief appeal of the book and to many will be the only part worth reading. Carse points out, for example, that a fundamental feature of belief systems is the need for opposition, that they derive their vitality from not only espousing a set of beliefs, but from disagreeing with a set of opposing beliefs just as vehemently. If all of a sudden everyone said to a proponent of a given system, "Sure, you're right, I agree with you," the system would implode. He also points out - and that may be obvious on a bit of reflection, but he does it well nonetheless - that belief systems are by definition closed, i.e. they accept no evidence that does not support the beliefs already held. That is precisely why science does not count. Any scientist believes a great many things at any given moment, of course, but is always open to having his mind changed by new evidence. The mental process that is essential for subscribing to a belief system he calls willful ignorance - a notion that becomes important in the second half of the book.

So if religion is not a belief system, what is it? Here, Carse is far less clear. In opposition to willful ignorance, he posits a higher ignorance. A kind of sense of wonder at the ever expanding mystery of the world around you. The key here is that by definition you will always remain ignorant of the ultimate truth, and the more you learn, the greater your ignorance becomes. This is why science doesn't count here either, although he does not say that. Any self-respecting scientist would say that we could eventually know everything about the world. It might be that we never will, but we could.

Mere higher ignorance, however, even if you could pinpoint it exactly, is not by itself religion. Carse defines religion in terms of the Latin word communitas. It takes him a while to arrive at a definition. Mostly, he defines it as being in opposition to civitas (essentially, formal authority), but eventually arrives at this: "[communitas] is a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body" (p. 83). Finally, longevity is essential - communitas has to have existed long enough to be meaningful. Carse never defines "enough" - it's a case of "I'll know it when I see it." Thus, Catholicism is a religion (as is Christianity in general), but Mormonism is not. So religion, then, is a spontaneous gathering of people that has coalesced around a sense of higher ignorance and has been around long enough. Interestingly, on the same page where he defined communitas Carse says that we cannot really know what religion is. But it's something like that. Note also that I didn't say a religion. This is essential - there aren't many religions, it's all one thing. Christianity and Judaism are mere short-hands (though Carse doesn't use the term) for something that we cannot know and cannot even really name properly.

One of the interesting things is that in an entire book about religion and belief, there is no God anywhere. He is barely mentioned, and even then in passing, while discussing belief. Perhaps more shockingly, the same is true of faith. Again, Carse drops the word once or twice in an intuitively understandable context, but does not really examine it or address its relevance to religion, if any. If pressed, I suppose he would say that it is a requirement for belief, but not for religion.

All this is interesting as far as it goes, but ultimately frustrating. Carse says a lot about what a religion isn't, a fair amount about what it is (or at least tries to), but nothing about what it does. I suppose he would say it doesn't do anything, it simply is. But that's a cop-out. We humans are a practical bunch. Higher ignorance and a sense of wonder is all well and good, but for us to bother, we've got to get something out of it, especially a couple of thousand years ago when we didn't have the luxury of sitting around reading books by retired religion professors. But as soon as we draw the usual inferences - "it helps us explain the world around us," "we have something to blame when things go wrong," etc., we are in the territory of belief and not religion.

So does religion have essentially no purpose? I suspect Carse would say yes. I wish he did - it would have made at least the book useful to some people, if not religion itself. But advocating the utility of something would put is back in the territory of belief, wouldn't it?

Jason Wilson, Boozehound

2011-06-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

If you are going to go to school to study writing, don't do it at Drexel University. That is where Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits ostensibly teaches writing, and if the book is any indication, he is not very good at it. But I am getting ahead of myself. Boozehound is actually not a bad book. It's worth checking out by anyone who has any interest in distilled spirits and cocktails, primarily for the recipes. To his great credit, Wilson closes every chapter with a sizable selection of recipes, usually a mixture of classics and new-fangled concoctions, sometimes of his own creation. By the end of the book, all but the most obsessive amateur mixologist will be armed with a year's worth of experimental material.

As to the rest, Boozehound is largely true to food-writing form. Wilson travels around the Western hemisphere on his publisher's dime, visiting distilleries and bars, interviewing distillers and marketers and tasting a variety of spirits, some quite unusual, and marvels the whole time at his great fortune of being able to do this. Last I checked, this was called showing off.

Where Wilson really lost me, however, was the anecdotes of his supposedly misspent youth. Suburban New Jersey in the 1980s is an endless source of amusement to him, even all these years later. You would think that a college professor, ostensibly happily married with two kids, would have moved beyond this, and traveling around the world tasting exotic spirits would blow making out with a big-haired girl in a Camaro out of the water, but apparently not. Maybe it's just me. I never had the exhilarating experience of almost getting lucky with the most popular girl in the class on a high-school trip to Paris. But for my money, a well-mixed cocktail is best garnished with a twist of lemon peel, not a heap of teenage escapades.

The Astor Martini, or How I Failed to Broaden My Horizons

2011-02-19T15:45:00.000-08:00

Going out of your comfort zone now and again is healthy, or so they say. Try something new for a change, you may surprise yourself. It'll broaden your horizons. My friend Clive, who knows a thing or two about beverages, recently shared a recipe for what he calls the Astor Martini: graprefruit juice, Campari and - here's the clincher - vodka. Ketel One vodka, specifically. Well, it is definitely grapefruit season, and Campari has been a staple in my home bar ever since Clive introduced me to the Negroni all those years ago. The problem is vodka. I do not drink it as a rule, and I tend to avoid cocktails based on it. The sole exception is the Bloody Mary, but even that is a rare treat these days. This despite, or maybe because, my origins lie in a place that invented the damn thing. So Ketel One was out of the question.

When I inquired about the possibility of using another brand, Clive equivocated, relaxing his dictum a bit but insisting on a certain minimum level of quality. Well, no doubt to his great disappointment, vodka quality is a foreign concept to me, and I am not likely to change the situation any time soon, due more to a lack of available liver capacity than interest. So I reached for the only thing I had ready to hand - a bottle of U.K.-made Three Olives that I bought a long time ago for a party.

Clive's photos show an unmistakably ruby-red grapefruit, but I had a yellow one on hand (really a pale pink once you cut into it). After a minute of squeezing, measuring, pouring and shaking, I had my cocktail. The original is apparently served without a garnish, but to me there is something incomplete about an ungarnished martini-style cocktail, the minimalist appeal notwithstanding, so seeing as I've already sacrificed a grapefruit, I gave the glass a generous swath of its rind. Then I strained and looked. Clive's photos show a decidedly red, almost blood-hued concoction, but mine came out unapologetically pink. I am talking blatant, 1980s nylon windbreaker pink. Girly pink, if I may use the term. Good thing no one is watching, I thought.

I sniffed - not much. A little pleasant citrus scent. I sipped. I must admit the flavor was appealing. Nice balance of sweet and sour, with just enough of the trademark Campari bitterness coming through to make it interesting. A little coriander, I thought - probably an ingredient in the famously secret Campari brought to the fore by the grapefruit. And then... nothing. The drink was a pleasant fruity bauble. Not nearly sweet enough to fall into the liquid-candy category - the grapefruit's tannic character saw to that - but it didn't exactly pack a punch, either. Perhaps it's the comfort zone thing, but I expect most drinks served in a martini glass to be potent, occasionally even overwhelming. After you take a sip of a properly made martini, you shouldn't want another one for a good long time - this is the reason why they should not be made too large and must be served as cold as possible. Same with the Manhattan - the best ones are made with a high-proof spirit like Rittenhouse Rye and a rich, viscous vermouth like Punt e Mes. The Astor, by comparison, was a breezy, whimsical thing, smooth to a fault, best served over ice at brunch. To be fair, the drink did originate at a Miami Beach hotel, and Clive recommended using it to "evok[e] holidays in balmy, exotic climates." My mind must be so far removed from such delights that even a cocktail can't bring it back.

Or did I do something wrong? Could it be that the vodka really does make a difference? Would the legendary (and expensive) Ketel One have added a whole new dimension to the drink, a level of depth and complexity that my semi-swill-grade flavorless alcohol vehicle just could not match? Maybe. In fact, I hope so. I am definitely looking forward to tasting a properly made specimen made by someone who know what he is doing. Until then, seeing as my days of plying unsuspecting female guests with deceptively smooth fruity cocktails are long since over, I am unlikely to attempt another one.

Portland, Days One and Two

2010-08-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, after a long but mercifully trouble-free connection through Los Angeles. A much needed vacation. Our hotel, the deLuxe, though just outside the heart of downtown, was very nice, quite luxurious, with friendly and professional staff and one of the more comfortable beds I recall finding at a hotel. Our room - the most basic and least expensive - could have been a tad larger and could have benefited from an armchair, but on balance, it was a more than adequate base of operations.

Somewhat unpacked and marginally refreshed, we walked through the heat of late-afternoon downtown to Nel Centro, a hip Italian joint located in the Hotel Modera (a former Days Inn dressed up in imitation mid-century modern duds) for a happy hour-cum-early dinner. The patio, though attractive, was crowded and lacked any shade whatsoever, so we settled in at the bar for drinks and a couple of delicious small plates. The crowd was young and fashionable - a bit too much for us - but on balance we enjoyed it.

We had no plans for the rest of the evening, so we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel while admiring the downtown architecture and whiled some time away at the Driftwood Room, apparently legendary around Portland. When the hotel was thoroughly renovated a couple of years ago, the regulars fretted over the old bar's fate, but the new owners resurrected it in its original form - walls covered with planks of wood, pieces of namesake driftwood adorning the room, the organic curve of the bar and an almost total darkness, broken up only by a few votives on the small tables and a handful of obliquely placed colored footlights that spotlit the walls without really illuminating anything. My negroni was perfectly proportioned and delicious.

We started our Saturday morning with a breakfast at Mother's, a pilgrimage spot for locals and tourists alike. Arriving a few minutes after the 9:00 a.m. opening time, we found chaotic crowds but were seated almost right away, although not in the main velvet and brass room that contains the bar. The food - fresh berry pancakes for J. and wild salmon hash for me - was delicious, to say nothing of Portland's famous Stumptown coffee, served in an insulated French press and worth every penny of the $7.50 they charged for it.

We took our time finishing breakfast, then gradually made our way to the Saturday Market, a Portland institution, but not before making a detour into the legendary Second Avenue Records. The Market, though lively, proved to be a disappointment. I was hoping for serious local artists exhibiting and selling their work, but although we did see some impressive photography and even one artist who constructed her images out of long sequences of microscopic numbers, on balance we found too many cheesy t-shirts and flowing tie-dye dresses and not enough other things.

Tiring of the market (and probably spending more time there than it warranted), we strolled South along the Willamette River through the unseasonably hot and sunny day, admiring Portland's numerous bridges and eventually arriving at some impressive looking but very new and thus still isolated residential high-rises and, just beyond, one of the more outlandish examples of Portland's preoccupation with public transit -- the Aerial Tram terminal. The Tram took us to the OSHU campus at the top of the hill, where we got an excellent view of snow-covered Mt. Hood, about 45 miles to the South-East and took a few pictures in the small sculpture garden before heading back and catching the streetcar to the Pearl District.

The Pearl is probably the quintessence of pre-recession Portland - hyper-modern and undoubtedly very green condo blocks, boutiques selling hideous urban clothing, chic-looking restaurants. On the whole, though, the neighborhood did less for me than I expected. Some of the residential architecture, to be sure, was far more attractive and engaging than anything I have seen most other places - rooftop gardens, asymmetrically cantilevered balconies, matte exterior paint in muted but contrasting colors. But the neighborhood, while it had sterilized itself of the original grit so plentiful in the rest of the city, did not replace it with dense sidewalk life you might find in a city like San Francisco. On a Saturday afternoon, it felt empty and sterile. Sweaty and tired by this point, we escaped briefly into the Deschutes brewery for a pint of one of their delicious ales, then headed back to the hotel to clean up for dinner.

We had a reservation at Wildwood, located in the Nob Hill area of Portland, and having run out of time to walk or take the streetcar, we ended up experiencing our one cab ride in Portland. The driver, with whom we chatted amiably throughout the ten-minute drive to the restaurant, was a fellow in his mid-twenties, well-spoken and obviously educated. Not something you find in other large or even medium-sized American cities (and small ones have no need for cabs at all these days). He was only the latest example of what I had been observing since the moment we stepped off the airplane. All service jobs in Portland are done by - I have no slick euphemism to employ here - young white people. The city was eerily immigrant-free. I would have to wait another day to find out precisely why that was.

Our dinner at Wildwood proved to be delicious. I started with tiny house-made gnocchi served with fava beans, morel mushrooms and bits of bacon. J. opted for greens with feta, heirloom tomatoes and peas. Both were delicious, with mine decidedly more substantial. For the main course, this being our first proper dinner in the Northwest, J. chose Chinook salmon served over potatoes and green beans, sauced with just a drop of brown butter. Simple to the extreme but just about perfect. I took our server's recommendation and ordered the pork chop, which, though far too large even on a day when I had no lunch, was spectacular -the most tender and flavorful pork I've had in years served over potatoes and shockingly sweet braised leeks. Our wine was a local Pinot Noir from Apolloni - more Californian than Oregonian in style, but very satisfying.

Sated, we slowly walked through the beautiful summer evening back towards downtown and our hotel, admiring the lively bars and restaurants along 23rd Avenue intermingled with stately but still boutique pre-WWII apartment buildings. I must admit that more than once that evening, I caught myself imagining an alternate universe in which Portland was home rather than a destination.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

2010-05-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

W.G. Seblad is unique, in my experience, in that his fiction is classified as such but does not read like fiction at all. He is the flip side of someone like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood -- a piece of journalism that for all the world reads like a novel. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in particular, comes off like a combination of travelogue, memoir and, at times, textbook, but never a novel. Written in the first person, it is a meandering account of a man -- there is no doubt that it is Sebald himself -- wandering, mostly on foot, through the English countryside, occasionally meeting people, and seeing places and things that launch him on long historical asides that sometimes don't end up anywhere near where they started.

If this sounds like a curious book, it is, but ultimately, the strange style -- I'm not even sure if that is quite the word for it -- is largely irrelevant. For me, Sebald is all about the mood, and Rings is full of it. Subdued and melancholy, it never degenerates into outright brooding -- about the right balance for me these days. The thing that strikes one immediately is that large swaths of the narrator's world, at least until he meets whomever it is he set out to find, is almost completely devoid of people. The few that are present are always so remote -- fishermen on the beach observed from a tall cliff, an embracing couple on a distant hillside -- that they offer no human companionship at all. When he does finally meet his interlocutors, they are inevitably individuals, never groups, engaged in some solitary pursuit. It is a world that, while not entirely appealing, is one in which I instinctively feel comfortable. The darkness and weight do get intense at regular intervals, but even then I feel drawn in by the stark beauty of his scenes. One does not read Sebald to cheer oneself up.

The Emigrants, which I had read a while ago, uses the same approach, and I enjoyed it slightly more than Rings, perhaps because the latter book, during one or two of Sebald's historic/educational asides, does get just a touch polemical -- something I do not remember the other book doing, heavy on history though it was. And the last chapter, dedicated entirely to the history of sericulture, and from which the narrator is completely absent, feels tacked on as an afterthought. Still, on balance, The Rings of Saturn gave me many an enjoyable moment of contemplating the narrator's, and by extension my own, loneliness in the world.

2007 Leelanau Cellars Vignoles

2010-05-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

The last of the bottles I brought back from Michigan last summer. Vignoles is an obscure grape used for blending in France, but a couple of wineries in Michigan make it as a varietal. L. Mawby even makes it into a sparkler. Anyway, Leelanau Cellars' Vignoles -- very fruity on the nose, melon, maybe a little cucumber. Some sweetness. On the palate, just a touch off-dry, rich and viscous for a white, with excellent acid. Definitely a food wine. I paired it with some pasta with an asparagus and ricotta sauce, and it worked well, the richness of the ricotta offsetting the wine. But it would stand up to something significantly more garlicky as well.

Bill Frisell at the Barns at Wolftrap, 3/3/2010

2010-03-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

Went to see Bill Frisell at the Barns at Wolftrap a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really know what to expect. His music has been known to vary pretty drastically from one record to the next, with only his guitar tone maintaining some kind of consistency, and his current trio consists of drums (Rudy Royston) and viola (Eivind Kang)! The show was less weird than one might have expected. Frisell's unmistakable tone was there, and the band sounded surprisingly complete despite the lack of a proper bass voice or other chordal instruments, probably because Frisell himself is so good at filling a lot of space without sounding muddy. The band occasionally slid into free-ish bits of noise and open meter, but by and large stayed in the groove, mostly thanks to Royston who could have easily overplayed but didn't. Kang, for my money, was the least impressive of the bunch. I never really embraced the violin and its ilk as a valid voice in an improvised context, and the fact that Kang was amplified killed the rich overtone series of a good instrument, flattening it into a droning mess. Occasionally, the viola worked well as a sound effect, sounding at times like a whimpering animal or some evil, post-apocalyptic calliope - but as a soloist Kang was not memorable. But on the whole, the show was worth hearing. Frisell is fairly rare in today's world in that he is very idiosyncratic yet almost always accessible, and the live performance was no different. I won't run out to buy a copy of his latest record, but the evening was enjoyable nonetheless.

Sweeney Todd

2010-02-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

Saw a production of Sweeney Todd at Signature Theatre last night. J. got some last-minute tickets at a discount. There was a part of me that expected to hate it for the simple reason that it is a musical, but only a part, because I had seen it on Broadway many years ago, must have been 1989 or thereabouts, and I recall having liked it, although I remember no details aside from the general premise of the famously macabre story. Well, last night I did not completely hate it. To be sure, the "musicalness" of it grated on my nerves - the hokey love songs and the overwrought, hyper-theatrical singing style that instantly screams "Broadway" and makes me want to plug my ears. But there were a few redeeming qualities as well - seriously creepy set and costumes, generally solid vocals (with the exception of Anthony and, on some songs, Johanna, whose love story side-plot was kind of pointless anyway) and Sondheim's score that was surprisingly modern and dark, especially on the theme song (reprised throughout the show).

Above all, however, the reason Sweeney Todd works is because it has a hefty dose of tragedy. Todd is a tragic character, and the ending is only somewhat happy, in that the bad guy gets it, but so does everyone else. Only the young lovers - largely irrelevant as I pointed out - live. The thing basically ends in a blood bath. Great art, and even decent art, must reflect either the emotional state of an individual, or some essential aspect of the human condition, on a deep level, and to do that, it must contain a great deal of tragedy, for it is tragedy, more than anything else, that defines our essence and our interactions with one another. That is why most musicals miss the mark by a mile, and why Sweeney Todd gets closer than most despite staying largely true to form.

Edmunds Wilson, To the Finland Station

2010-02-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station is a minor classic, and having finally read it after it had spent years on my list, I can see why. The writing is extremely engaging and frequently quite beautiful. There were times when I found the book hard to put down. Because of this, I read without taking notes, so what follows is shorter and more shallow than it might have been otherwise.

...Station is an unusual book - it is the literary and ideological history of socialist revolutionary movements in Europe. Wilson starts with the earliest thinkers who left a significant body of work to which we can trace the Radical Left - Michelet, Renan and their immediate followers. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Marx and Engels and their written output. In the final section, which is somewhat less focused on written work, Wilson discusses the rise of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

One of the really remarkable things about ...Station, though, and the main reason why it is so engaging, is a very strong emphasis on biography. In particular, Wilson renders Marx, and his relationship with Engels, with such vividness and attention to detail that we get a very vibrant and complete portrait of both men. In fact, the middle section of the book would suffice as a biography of Marx for most readers. The portrait of Marx that emerges is that of an extremely unpleasant character. He was a mad genius, utterly incapable of functioning in society, unable to manage the simplest details of daily life without help, all the while driven inexorably to write. He was opinionated to the extreme, unable to suffer the slightest disagreement, disdainful of all interlocutors, even those who were largely supportive of his aims, and obsessed with always having full control of any movement that claimed him as its ideological foundation. He was doted on throughout his life by his long-suffering wife and financed by Engels, without whose handouts he would have probably perished, unable as he was to hold a job of any sort.

As to the substance of his subjects' work, Wilson is frustrating. He is an extremely keen critic of Marx & Co.'s work, and where their arguments, or methods, or both, don't hold water, which they don't in many places, Wilson deconstructs them with impressive subtlety and finesse until there is nothing left. He is unequivocal on the fact that for all the ink they have spilled on their theories of dialectical materialism, "the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their own point of view in any very elaborate way." (p. 213).

I am particularly grateful to Wilson for not ignoring the aspect most others do: their utter disdain for some of Europe's, and the world's, peoples that they felt were incapable of executing a revolution and should therefore be eliminated so they don't stand in the way. Engels in 1851: "The Poles have never done anything in history except commit courageous quarrelsome stupidities" (p. 270). And a little later: "Engels also approved when 'energetic Yankees' took California away from the 'lazy Mexicans' because... the former were better fitted to work the country..." (ibid.).

For all that, however, Wilson, who is well known to have been sympathetic to the political Left, turns right around and expresses an almost unbridled admiration for his subjects' achievements. It is true that technically he is admiring the writing - the persuasiveness of their arguments, the effective responses to their critics, etc. - but the terms he uses are tantamount to admiring the substance of the ideas the writing contains:

These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous - in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation... etc. (p. 237)

To The Finland Station was first published in 1940, when the West, and thus Wilson, could still be forgiven for not yet having understood the full implications of Stalin's most egregious crimes of a few years earlier. By the time he reissued the book with a new introduction in 1968, the full extent of the horror was well known, and in fairness, I must acknowledge that he does make an effort to repent: "I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known..." (p. v). He also makes one of the most scathing character sketches of Lenin I have read. But he makes no effort to trace the beginnings of that tyranny to the work of Marx and his cohorts and followers that he so admired, so we are left with the deflating sense that the obviously brilliant Wilson is little more than another exponent of the fallacy that makes the continued appeal of the radical Left so frustratingly persistent: that Marxism was ruined by its implementation and at its core remains a good idea.

Keith Jarrett: Testament: Paris/London

2010-02-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

In television, it's called jumping the shark. The gimmick gets stale and the audience stops caring. It pains me to say this, but judging by his latest recording Testament: Paris/London (ECM, 2009), I'm afraid the same may have happened to Keith Jarrett.

But maybe I am being insufficiently charitable. I firmly believe that any music must be able to stand on its own, requiring no written or spoken commentary, introduction or analysis, but maybe, just maybe, with Testament you could make a case for starting with the liner notes. Like some of his music, Jarrett's notes have always been a little pompous and self-absorbed for my taste, and Testament is no different, but unlike his previous recordings, here we get way more about the man's emotional state than we bargained for. He tells us about his wife leaving him, about almost having a nervous breakdown before one of the concerts documented here, and about how people around him, both friends and strangers, lifted his spirits and, together with the categorical imperative of playing freely improvised music, helped him get through the ordeal. So those who might be inclined to indulge Testament as something Jarrett had to do out of desperation, and thus forgive whatever artistic deficiencies it might have, have my permission to do so. Ultimately, though, these confessions are neither here nor there. They do not absolve the music from the requirement of having to stand on its own, and that it comes close to not doing.

Jarrett has been playing and recording improvised solo concerts for decades. He would start with a strain or two of melody, or a simple chord progression, and extrapolate from it on the spot for as long as necessary, until the material had nothing left to give up. It did always amuse me that he ran out of steam, however gracefully, just before he would have exceeded the length of an LP side, though in his defense, I will mention that he took the advent of CDs in stride and would improvise non-stop for an hour or more in his late-80s and early 90s concerts. But I digress. Many of these recordings contain moments of sublime beauty and overpowering poignancy. As self-indulgent as they are, we do not need to make extra-musical excuses for their validity. The music itself has always offered more than enough. The guy sure knew how to get at your inner core with stuff that he claimed to have pulled mostly out of his head and mostly on the spot.

About ten years ago, however, after recovering from a long illness, Jarrett's style changed. As first documented on Radiance (2002), each individual improvisation became shorter and more harmonically and melodically dense. He was now communicating in discrete units instead of a long narrative arc. Far more significant than the length, however, was the fact that Jarrett tried to abandon all preconceived notions. He wanted to improvise from a completely blank slate. Much of the resulting music acquired, in the best cases, a certain brooding darkness, initially appealing but ultimately directionless, and in the worst, the seemingly random abrasive dissonance of hyper-modern atonal compositions. Much, but not all. One does not throw away thirty years of experience overnight, or even in the course of a single illness, however serious, and at least half of the material on Radiance betrays much of Jarrett's old style, only on a smaller scale. The heart-rending minor-key melodies are there, as are his trademark foot-stomping vamps that launch his right-hand lines into the sonic stratosphere. Also present is a strong whiff of the American Songbook which he clearly absorbed while working on his album of unaccompanied standards The Melody at Night, With You (1998). On Radiance, Jarrett is not playing the actual standards, of course, but their chords and the general direction in which some of that music moves are definitely in his fingers. There is plenty of incomprehensible, intellectually overwhelming and emotionally closed noodling on Radiance, to be sure, but with the judicious use of your CD player's programming feature, the two discs can be distilled down to about an hour of very enjoyable music.

Which brings us to Testament. Three discs, two complete concerts, no editing. Whatever the personal upheavals in Jarrett's life, it is obvious that he has been moving consistently in the direction started on Radiance, and has traveled quite a distance over the past decade. He still has a lot to say, and in the relatively short time limit of the individual tracks he has imposed on himself (most are in the 6-9 minute range), he has to cram in a lot of notes into each one. The melodic and harmonic foundation of his old style is not completely gone, but he has clearly shed much of what was still in his toolbox a decade ago. The result is that the communication between the performer and his listeners, or this listener at least, has broken down almost completely. Jarrett's thought patterns are so densely packed and idiosyncratic, and are so lacking in audible structure and organization, that when the music is over, I think nothing and feel nothing, but not in a meditative, mind-clearing sort of way. Instead, I seek meaning intensely while he is playing and find myself woefully unsatisfied when he is done.

A small handful of tracks - it seems silly listing names when they are all just Part 1, Part 2, etc. -- are still effective. Predictably, they are the ones that have retained the vestiges of his original style. Where recognizable chord progressions and motifs based on familiar intervals percolate to the surface, Testament momentarily satisfies. These moments are much too few and far between, however. The bulk of the music remains Sphinx-like in its impenetrability. For Jarrett himself, I suspect the recording is a triumph. He has come closer than ever before to being completely spontaneous. His audience, however, has lost a once eloquent improviser who has withdrawn completely into his own world.

Snow

2010-02-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

Greater Washington, DC, has been under two feet of snow since Saturday, and another foot is predicted for tonight. The temperatures have been hovering in the upper 20s and low 30s. The city, needless to say, is not handling it well. All government offices and schools closed even before the snow started on Friday, and remain closed. The subway was completely shut down all weekend, and above-ground stations didn’t open until this morning, with trains, which normally come every 3-5 minutes during rush hour, running as much as a half hour apart. The streets are a mess – practically nothing has been plowed, at least not in a way that is actually helpful, and for some incomprehensible reason, there is no evidence of anyone doing the most obvious thing: spraying salt.

I grew up in a cold place. The snow typically started falling in late October, would stick by mid-November and the ground would remain covered until at least late March, with a fresh dusting of an inch or two falling every few days. Temperatures in the single digits Fahrenheit were commonplace. More significantly, though, it was a place where both modern technology and a Western work ethic and sense of responsibility were in short supply in the best of times. So how did we do it? The subway – the city’s only piece of public infrastructure that worked almost flawlessly – ran on schedule regardless of the weather. The rest of the transit system didn’t, but then, it never did. The buses and street cars were antiquated, unsafe, overcrowded and filthy, but they stumbled along every bit as well (or poorly) in driving snow and frigid cold as they did on a beautiful summer day (itself a rare occurrence). Not once do I remember a complete cancellation of service due to weather.

Four-wheel drive was unheard of outside the military – the few people who did own private automobiles, my father among them, typically drove locally built replicas of 1960s Fiats: rear-wheel drive, 60 hp engines, skinny bias-ply tires and no safety features to speak of (power-assisted brakes were an extra-cost option; ours didn’t have them). Yet not once did my father refuse to drive because of the weather. He would take the battery out of the car and carry it indoors at night (giving himself permanent back problems in the process) lest it would be dead the next morning because of the cold, but not driving did not occur to him. Sometimes, he had to dig the car out with an ice pick, and it took a while, but off it went eventually down the slushy street, fishtailing and spinning its tires.

I do not remember seeing the streets being plowed. I am sure they were, but I cannot imagine it being done efficiently. Nothing else in that society and that system ever was, and the idea of the government, at any level, providing a decent service to its citizens without being bribed, cajoled, or threatened from above, was anathema to the very way the system worked. So while I am sure snow plows disrupted traffic in the center of the city regularly, I would bet money the streets weren’t any cleaner for it.

So how did we do it? How did we not only function, but took the miserable cold, snow and filth in stride every winter? Why is it that masses of people were absent from work regularly, but never because of the weather? Is it simply a question of being used to it?

Wgot 2008

2010-02-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've been promising my friend S.G. a review of the latest mix he had put together (or, rather, his computer running wget had put together for him) for a while, so here it is.

Keren Ann: Hallelujah
This is one of the rare songs where a specific version - the late Jeff Buckley's in this case - has rendered any version that would come after it irrelevant. I suppose one could argue that a genuinely well-crafted song such as this one lends itself to a variety of interpretations, and I suppose it does, but that does not guarantee those interpretations' success. Keren Ann deserves a few points for trying, but that's about it.

Max Richter: The Twins
I have a vague recollection of this track circulating around the internet a year or two ago, and if memory serves, there was a video associated with it that was in some way remarkable. Having never seen the video, I can't comment. The tune is a pleasant enough vignette that wouldn't be out of place on a soundtrack to an indie film.

Sven Libaek: Inner Space: Dark World
Speaking of film music, this guy is supposed to be a real film composer. Objectively, this is dismissable, but something about the mood it creates does it for me. The combination of vibes and electric piano - frequently difficult to pull off because the timbres of the two instruments are so similar - helps. A highlight in an otherwise dim set, no question about it.

Ratatat: Mirando
This style probably has a name, but I'm not hip enough to know what it is. A kind of jungle-meets-lo-fi. Some cool-sounding analog synths and Steve Hackett-like guitar bits, but the tunes doesn't go anywhere and quickly starts to grate on your nerves, or mine at least. Gains a bit on repeated listening, but not much.

Armin Van Buuren: Precious
What techno was meant to be - infectious beyond belief but manages to create a mood with some seriously dark minor chords despite a relentlessly pounding beat. Good stuff.

Voyager One: The Future is Obsolete
It starts out with enough promise, thanks to seriously floppy and echoey drums and exaggeratedly English vocals, but ends up sounding like a bad version of Ride (if anyone remembers those guys).

Breakbot: Happy Rabbit
The name of the band says it all. The headache arrives quickly, though the discoey bass line might have worked in a different context.

The Retail Sectors: The First Step to the End of Life
Ever heard an introduction that does not introduce anything? This is it.

The Postal Service: Brand New Colony
The sound is recognizable, but I've liked these guys' other stuff better. The interlude in the middle of the song is a nice touch.

Chakachas: Via Cuba
This has to be a joke. A polished but generic rhumba backing track that sounds like it was originally intended for a different, and better, recording, with seriously goofy vocals, in English but rendered in the most offensively stereotypical Latino accent. A musical equivalent of blackface?

The Coast: Nueva York
Piano-driven indie power pop with more than a touch of Crowded House and maybe even a little Springsteen. Could be a lot worse.

Man Man: Black Mission Goggles
Circus music on steroids. The fact that the first four bars of each verse are dead ringers for The Beatles' Come Together does nothing to redeem the track. There is an allusion to Tom Waits about forty seconds before the end, but I suspect most people would quit listening long before then.

Mystery Jets: Young Love (Shoes Mix)
Can't decide if it wants to be art-pop, techno, or 80s-retro. Next.

Cloud Cult: When Water Comes to Life
Another cinematic track, decently arranged with some strings... until the vocal kicks in.

Emily Jane White: Bessie Smith
The standout track on the whole disc. Who cares that she is a dead ringer for Cat Power? The song just works, propelled along by some gorgeous arco double bass. I think I'll get the album.

???:???
No tags on this one. Waltz time keeps your attention for a while, but the whiny vocals and generic arrangement lost me about a minute and a half into the track.

Can Joann: Endure en Vogue
Nice high-register bass. Now how about a song to go with it?

Voice of the Seven Woods: Satai Nova
Another track that sounds more like a vignette than a full-blown song, but the acoustic guitar is actually pretty slick.

Jim Noir: Don't You Worry
This guy really wants to be performing in the sixties, but since he can't, he feels compelled to add some gratuitously reverbed synths. The listener gains nothing.

The Walkmen: Lady Midnight
So this is alt.country? Or just a Johnny Cash rip-off? And why is it so boring?

Gnarls Barkley: Run
Words fail me. Take a James Brown LP and play it at 45 rpm, then mix it with the backing track played at the intended 33 1/3.

Stefan Zwieg, Beware of Pity

2010-01-25T17:42:00.000-08:00

I have neither the skill nor the inclination to analyze fiction, so there isn’t much that I could say about Stefan Zwieg’s Beware of Pity that wouldn’t be trite. My friend C.S., whose copy I borrowed, claimed that it was the best novel he has ever read, though he has since disowned that claim. I did not think much of the book for most of its duration, delighting in the details more than the overall theme, which I thought was spoon-fed to the reader to a disappointing degree. The characters, too, with the possible exception of Dr. Condor, were not portrayed with particular distinction or vivid color. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when the story, as it neared its denouement, steadily gathered steam and, in the last thirty or so pages, became almost overwhelming in its power and the palpable sense of inner torture Hoffmiller experiences. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that what I thought was going to be the climax (given away by the introduction I had made the mistake of reading), was not it at all, or only a small part of it. Hoffmiller is an anti-hero that the best (worst?) in literature will need to reckon with.

For some reason, I was imagining the novel as a movie the entire time I was reading it, preferably a high-budget period melodrama, with thoroughly researched and exquisitely rendered detail. True, a film of Beware of Pity would likely be British, despite the story taking place in Austro-Hungary on the eve of WWI, but for some reason I was picturing Paul Giamatti as Condor. I could also imagine someone like Ian McEwan writing the novel today – same setting, same characters, just a little more evenly rendered without sacrificing any of the power of the ending.

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane: Complete Riverside Recordings

2010-01-21T18:39:00.000-08:00

In their day, and to some extent still, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane were two of the most controversial figures in post-war jazz. Both have had their ardent admirers and fierce critics since time immemorial. The consensus today seems to respect them both as pioneers who pushed the art form into theretofore unchartered territory, while the aesthetic and emotional appeal of their music remains as open to debate as ever. It is all the more surprising, then, that the two hardly ever played and recorded together. Aside from a double set of their Carnegie Hall concert from 1957, released to great fanfare four years ago, and a barely audible bootleg from the Five Spot from around the same time, The Complete Riverside Recordings (Riverside, 2006) is the only other surviving document of their collaboration, and purportedly the only one recorded in a studio.

Recorded by Orrin Keepnews, then owner and producer at Riverside, over three sessions in the spring and summer of 1957, the set promises more than it delivers, but almost makes up for that by other unexpected revelations. This is an archival document, not a record to be listened to for pleasure. False starts, aborted takes, and even studio banter are plentiful. Whether you consider that to be valuable or distracting will depend on your perspective, of course. Suffice it to say this is a record to study, not to float away to into some magical jazz universe. Far more important, however, is the personnel. Monk, Coltrane's senior by nine years and the undisputed leader of these sessions, had brought in a septet (!) which included, in addition to Coltrane, Art Blakey on drums and Wilbur Ware on bass, the now forgotten Ray Copeland on trumpet, Gigi Gryce on alto and, unbelievable though it sounds, Coleman Hawkins on second tenor.

Or perhaps not so unbelievable - Hawkins was Monk's first steady employer in the late 1940s, and the quintessential swing-era saxophonist had done an amazing job late in his career keeping up with the bebop kids without sacrificing his trademark style. So the most obvious reason the recording is valuable is the opportunity to hear not the interplay between Monk and Coltrane, but the contrast between Coltrane and Hawkins. In fact, the first track to offer this - Gryce's Blues for Tomorrow -- does not feature any of Monk's piano at all (he is reported to have fallen asleep and wheeled out on an equipment cart, but Keepnews had to use up the studio time he had paid for). Coltrane solos first, followed immediately by Hawkins. Coltrane was on the cusp of his "sheets of sound" period in 1957, but here he betrays little of what was to come a couple of years later. His tone is much less edgy than what most listeners are used to, but the solo as a whole is unfocused, and already sounds unnecessarily busy. Hawkins wins hands-down - his statement is swinging, well structured, played with enough energy to keep up with the rest of the band but without compromising clarity.

Further comparison between the two is available on Ruby, My Dear - Hawk and Trane get one version each. Coltrane acquits himself better here - his solo is measured, relaxed and very "inside" (the same can be said of his solo on Epistrophy), while Hawkins pulls off a few boppy runs in homage to his session mates.

Behind all of this, or some of it at any rate, is Monk. He actually solos very little, preferring to play the role of glue, but when he finally does on Epistrophy and Well, You Needn't in the middle of Disc Two, it is very effective. His solos are firmly based on the themes, he does not show off, and where he uses the dissonance for which he was supposed to have been famous, he balances it perfectly with space - the stranger the intervals, the fewer notes he uses. His comping, too, is much in the same vein, though it is worth considering the fact that he plays much more behind some of the horns than others, and the one that gets short thrift is Coltrane. Whether it was a clash of two intense musical personalities, or a simple lack of familiarity with one another's styles, we will never know. Suffice it to say that Monk lays out a lot, and when he does not, as on Trinkle, Tinkle and, to a lesser extent, Nutty (he starts but seems to give up after a while), his playing behind Coltrane is far from adventurous. It sounds as if the two couldn't quite find a shared musical language, and Monk, being the more experienced of the two at the time, simply got out of the way.

His playing behind Gryce, by contrast, whether sparse, as on the short version of Epistrophy, or more dense, as on Well, You Needn't, is always appropriate. It really seems that of the bunch, Hawkins included, Monk is the most comfortable with Gryce, and in general, it would not be an overstatement to say that Gryce is the real discovery of the record. Boppy, but without the nervous jitter of Charlie Parker, he develops his solos thoughtfully and has a good feel for the tune and his accompanists. Definitely on this reviewer's list to explore further.

Whether Complete Riverside Recordings is essential will depend on your approach. For an historian of 1950s jazz, it is an indispensable document. For the rest, it tantalizes with possibilities while leaving us with little that is truly satisfying, while at the same time suggesting many areas for further exploration.

Kennedy Center Chamber Players, January 10th, 2010.

2010-01-14T16:18:00.000-08:00

First concert of the year last Sunday: the Kennedy Center Chamber Players with an all-Brahms program. Three string sonatas, one each for cello, viola and violin. In a word, excellent.

Cellist David Hardy opened with the E-minor sonata, Op. 38, which is possibly my favorite piece of chamber music, partly because it is so transparent. As great as much of Brahms's work is, a lot of it can be quite dense. So much goes on all at the same time, even when only two instruments are playing, that following the music takes real effort and can, in extreme cases, take away from the emotional enjoyment. Not so with Op. 38. Apparently written for a musician for whom cello was a secondary instrument, it is full of gorgeous melodies, unhurried, logical development, and interplay between the soloist and the accompanist that is immediately graspable but no less delightful for it. My reference version of the work is the recording Yo-Yo Ma did with Emmanuel Ax back in the mid-80s, but that's almost beside the point. Comparing a live performance to a recorded one is apples to oranges anyway, and is even more meaningless in this case because the early digital sound of the CD on my decidedly non-high-end system is so abrasive as to be downright unpleasant. If you are shocked at the idea of Yo-Yo Ma sounding scratchy, I would be happy to lend you the disc. Still, it does establish some kind of baseline, however low.

Hardy and pianist Lambert Orkis, who accompanied on all the works, sounded gorgeous, not only by comparison to the CD, but objectively. Their tempos were a bit more brisk than Ma and Ax's, but at the same time they managed to sound less metronomic, slowing down and stretching the beat just a little on the quieter sections. On the arrestingly beautiful main theme of the first movement, Hardy dug into the low strings with gusto and never let up. Orkis's accompaniment - typically of Brahms, he was really a co-soloist (Brahms even listed piano first when he published most of his sonatas) - was easy, confident, and never let itself be overshadowed by the cello.

Up next was the E-flat viola sonata which I had never heard before. The character of the work could not have been more different - it was full of Brahms's trademark density, but somehow managed to create a lighter mood, being neither dark nor melodramatic (the cello sonata, by contrast, is a bit of both). Violist Daniel Foster took a measured, analytical approach, and while I enjoyed hearing a new and interesting work, two days later I could not recall much about it; whether because it was unfamiliar music or because of Foster's detached approach, I do not know.

After the intermission, we were treated to Nurit Bar-Josef's rendition of the D-minor violin sonata. Bar-Josef, of course, is the National Symphony's principal, and as close as DC has to a violin superstar. She was fantastic - as much as I enjoyed the other two performances, she was on a different plane in terms of how much of herself she put into the music. Just her movement - she looked like she would start leaping about the stage any instant - betrayed her complete emotional dedication to the music. And the D-minor sonata is no picnic to play, either. The last of the three sonatas for the instrument Brahms wrote, it is the longest and the most complex. Probably because it is in a minor key, it is also my favorite. It is full of all kinds of stuff. In the opening movement, the jumps between high and low registers are so dramatic that sometimes it sounds as if a trio is playing. The entire work is full of Brahms' trademark baroque-like long eighth-note runs that he was so fond of using, especially in his late works. The last movement is marked Presto Agitato - enough said. Bar-Josef and Orkis took everything in stride but managed not gloss over anything. Or so I am remembering it now -- to be honest, I was too absorbed in the music to register many of the details. And that is exactly what you want from a first-rate live performance.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

A quick note with best wishes for the holiday season, before I sign off, in all likelihood, for the remainder of 2009. I've dealt with my share of grinches before, and while I'm no fan of the shopping-industrial complex that Christmas has wrought, to say nothing of the travesty that is Christmas "music," I continue to maintain that a winter festival is valuable. It gives us, or should, anyway, an opportunity to pause and reflect on the cyclical nature of, well, nature, and the passing of time. So a happy and prosperous new year to everyone.

Comments tightened up

2009-12-22T21:38:00.001-08:00

For those of you who comment, my apologies, but I had to enable word verification -- the spam has found me at last. I hope the few extra keystrokes will not discourage you from continuing to offer your unvarnished opinions.

Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music

2009-12-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

Why are so many jazz biographies so bad? There are some excellent ones, of course - Peter Pettinger's How My Heart Sings comes to mind - but in any other subject area, those would be all we would have. A manuscript of anything less would not even get past the desk of a junior editor at any self-respecting publishing house. But when it comes to jazz musicians, it seems that anyone who happens to like the music, regardless of their ability to write or their having had any actual connection to the subject, can write a book and have it published. The latest example to cross my path is John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter (University of Michigan, 1998).

I suppose I should be fair. Porter is a musician, and a professor of music at Rutgers, so he knows something about playing. An enormous amount, actually. But that fails to redeem the book. Porter bills his work as a biography, and starts out with an excruciatingly detailed examination of Coltrane's family roots in North Carolina. He spends three full chapters - 34 pages - doing it, and much of those are not even about Coltrane himself but his cousins, aunts and uncles, twice or more removed. Porter's excuse seems to be the fact that it has never been done before, but so what? Maybe there is a reason it hasn't. His conclusion seems to be only that the fact that Coltrane's father died of cancer when John was very young significantly affected the formation of his personality. I grant that this is valid, but it could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, or a handful of pages at the most.

At the same time, however, the book offers virtually nothing about Coltrane's personal life and lifestyle at the height of his success. Like most musicians of his generation, he had once been a drug addict but kicked the habit. He was married twice and had several children and step-children, the maternity of at least one of whom remains uncertain. One could argue, as Porter probably would, that dirt has no place in a serious biography, but I believe it is possible to write about these aspects of a subject's life in a way that is not prurient, and it is a pity that Porter barely tries. Where he does, he further undermines himself by claiming, early on, that his is the first biography to be based on objective research and then proceeding to fill the rest of the book with phrases like "it is reasonable to suppose" or "it was likely that..." and so on.

What Porter does focus on is Coltrane's music. His compositions and improvisational style are analyzed in mind-boggling detail with copious transcriptions for illustration, some of entire solos. This will have some use to a narrow audience - musicians who want to study Coltrane's style in depth and have a sufficiently deep understanding of music theory to make something out of Porter's analysis. But again, if this is a biography, this level of technical detail is excessive. If you do want to focus on it, call the book "The Musical Style of John Coltrane" or some such and dispense with biographical information altogether. But Porter can't seem to decide what he wants the book to be, or, rather, he seems to want it to be a technical analysis masquerading as a biography.

Yet for all these complaints, there is some value in what Porter has done. Pretty much everyone agrees that Coltrane was an innovator. I am not aware of charges of outright charlatanism ever leveled against Coltrane the way they were against, say, Ornette Coleman. The disagreement lies in whether the direction in which he took jazz was a good one. What Porter's analysis shows is why Coltrane's music was so innovative. Just looking at some of the lines on the printed page you realize that they look weird. He played stuff that no one had played, or even thought of playing, before, and Porter proves it. He is not afraid to take his analyses to their logical extreme, even if he ends up concluding on occasion that a particular fragment fits no known pattern or harmonic device, not even any of the ones Coltrane himself had used previously. Does that make Coltrane's music meaningless, at least from a formal perspective? Porter doesn't say, but he provides the raw material to let us decide on our own. I suspect, fully acknowledging my severely limited knowledge of music theory, that the answer is yes.

Finally, despite the distractions, Porter does manage to give us a smidgen of insight into why some of Coltrane's music, especially from Giant Steps onwards, sounds so abrasive. Long before he had given up tonal harmony and straight-ahead swing, his solos started to sound jarring, off-putting and unsettling, and not in a good way according to this pair of ears at least. He was the first, and is still the most infamous, exponent of the "where the hell is the melody?" school of jazz. Porter's explanation is that Coltrane was hearing multiple things - melodies, chord sequences, what have you - in his head simultaneously, and was unable to organize and prioritize them in his mind, resulting in his trying to play all of them at the same time:

...it was difficult to construct a smoothly flowing melodic line that would connect all of the harmonies he was hearing with a minimum of extraneous notes. (p. 158)

Porter doesn't suggest why he couldn't, but that's probably expecting too much from anyone. Just putting this phenomenon into words is valuable - it offers us a possibility, admittedly extremely daunting, to try to hear those individual threads of Coltrane's thinking the next time we pop Giant Steps into the CD player.

So approach John Coltrane: His Life and Music with caution. Lots of caution. I emphatically do not recommend it as a biography, but for those wishing to gain technical insight into Coltrane's style, it may be worth the effort.

New Orleans: Friday Lunch at Galatoire's

2009-12-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

Or how I had a martini for breakfast and lived to tell about it.

My most memorable meal in New Orleans has to be the Friday lunch at Galatoire’s in the Quarter. The restaurant is world-famous – it has been open continuously since 1905, and has been written up in numerous food and travel magazines. Friday lunch, however, is a tradition within tradition – a local institution where everyone who is anyone in New Orleans comes out to stand in the hyper-egalitarian line, socialize, gossip, and have a grand time. It so happened that T.S. and I had most of the day open while our better halves were finishing up their conference duties, so of course we had to partake.

As famous as Galatoire’s is, it is a little difficult to get a precise description of exactly how these bacchanalian affairs work. Some people will tell you to show up as early as 8:00 a.m., while others will insist that a half-hour before the 11:00 a.m. opening time is sufficient. I strolled casually by around 9:30, hoping to check out the scene, perhaps grab a beignet and coffee for breakfast before returning, but noticed that a dozen or so people were already lined up, so to be on the safe side, I stayed. T.S. joined me a short while later.

A young gentleman waiting in line in front of me – friendly and gracious true to the reputation of the city’s denizens – finally explained how the process works. At some point during the morning, though you never know exactly when, the maitre d’ comes out with a clipboard and walks the line, taking down names and – a key aspect of the experience –requests for specific servers. Most of the regulars have relationships with their favorite servers going back years. It so happened that a friend of a friend, who spends a lot of time in New Orleans, had recommended his favorite, so we were able to follow the protocol as closely as out-of-towners could hope to.

From there, the m.o. is “follow the crowd.” Sometime a little after 11:00, the doors open and everyone starts filing in and goes immediately upstairs to the bar for pre-lunch cocktails. The bar itself is tiny – maybe eight seats, and the room where it is situated is not much larger, so it fills up immediately with people who jostle, call out drink orders over their friends’ heads, and pass glasses back and forth. The din builds quickly.

T.S. managed to nab a seat at the end of the bar, while I stood nearby, surveying the clientele. At least 80% obviously locals; most, though not all, older than us. A well-dressed crowd. Ladies mostly in dresses, elegant but not contrived, men surprisingly well put-together. Not guys who pulled the default weddings-and-funerals suit out of the closet because they felt obligated, but genuinely well-dressed: properly fitting jackets, well-coordinated ties, pocket squares. I spotted a hat or two while waiting. The restaurant made jackets for men optional some years ago, but clearly the regulars were abiding by the old policy. A handful of patrons, and they all seemed to know one another, were dressed more flamboyantly – silk scarves (on both sexes), stylish glasses, designer shoes -- but they were the perfect seasoning in this dense soup of propriety.

The drinks were old-school. I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, that upon hearing me order a martini, the bartender asked whether I wanted gin or vodka, and whether I wanted it up or on the rocks. If it has vodka and/or served on the rocks, it is not a martini, and he, of all people, would have known that, I thought. But perhaps my age, combined with that certain East-coast dourness that I can’t quite shake, gave me away as an interloper. The martini, when it showed up, was in a tiny 4-oz. glass, and the well gin was nothing to write home about, but the drink was garnished with three enormous and delicious olives.

On the cusp of noon, people started to move downstairs. There was no announcement or even a change of tone in the din of the room – the crowd has acquired its own emergent power of decision-making, honed by years of morning cocktails. There is a second dining room on the same floor as the bar, but eating downstairs is part of the experience – the upstairs, in our contact’s words, is “Siberia. May as well not bother.” The main dining room was smaller than I expected, with mirrors and marble on the walls and ornate brass sconces. The table settings were fairly formal. Most of the tables were large, but there was a handful of two-tops kept for couples or unfortunate souls like T.S. and me who did not have friends and associates with whom to conduct business or merriment.

Our waitress Shannon, a friendly, well-spoken middle-aged blonde, was spectacular. We sent our contact’s regards. She knew him instantly and asked us to take back a message – they weren’t kidding about relationships with your servers – and proceeded to orchestrate our meal for us. Galatoire’s menu has no descriptions, and with most names ending simply in maison, is fairly useless, but we only took a cursory glance anyway. Shannon recommended a cold seafood appetizer – shrimp remoulade, some crabmeat, maybe one or two other things, and advised us to throw in some oysters en brochette – wrapped in bacon and flash-fried. With the monsters from the gulf, you can do that, and they were absolutely delicious – salty, and a perfect combination of soft and crunchy. The rest of the components were delectable as well – just mayonnaisy enough, not too cold, and obviously freshly made. This was not modern, cook-just-enough-to-get-away-with-it cuisine, but it was immensely satisfying.

For our entrees, T.S. and I ended up with the same thing – pompano, another local fish, served with a sauce that seemed to consist of little other than melted butter. It was delicious. Perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned, it was more flavorful than the redfish, and immensely satisfying. The butter sauce certainly didn’t hurt, but did not overpower the fish. Our side dish – a la carte as expected – was Brabant potatoes, recommended by the blogosphere and seconded enthusiastically by Shannon. They were a paragon of simplicity: cubes of potatoes, fried and tossed with butter, parsley and garlic. Once again, a throwback to an earlier era, but proof positive that classic cuisine needs not be complicated and can be ridiculously good even to our modern palates used to the hyper-fresh and the minimally cooked. I can’t quite remember at this point what we drank – again something from Oregon (in the one concession to current taste, the wine list was surprisingly diverse), a Gewurtztraminer maybe, or perhaps another Pinot Gris. It went well with the meal, and I must be honest – by about half way through our entrees I didn’t care nearly as much as I normally would. We skipped dessert, sticking to coffee. The coffee had no chicory in it – according to Shannon, that would have been déclassé when Galatoire’s first opened in the early part of the last century.

We were not the first to leave around a half past two, but a large number of the patrons were still at their tables when we did. Now you know why no one picks up the phone when you call a company in New Orleans on a Friday afternoon.

New Orleans: Commander's Palace

2009-12-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

Although New Orleans has its share of modern cuisine - one of its pioneers, Emeril Lagasse, got his start there, in fact - one of the distinguishing features of its culinary scene is a number of old, storied restaurants. Really, really old. The oldest, Galatoire's, more on which later, has been open continuously since 1905. Antoine's, Brennan's and Arnaud's are some of the other legendary names. On the recommendation of our friends P.&T.S., who were in New Orleans with us for a part of the time and wanted to share a highlight meal with us before heading home, we chose Commander's Palace in the Garden District, open in its current form since 1944. Very formal by today's standards and swarming with staff (we would discover that one attendant's full-time job is escorting patrons to restrooms), it is a throwback to an earlier era.

We arrived almost twenty minutes ahead of our 8:30 reservation (streetcars get you around the city faster than you might guess), but got seated right away, or almost - first we had to navigate a long series of relatively small and very traditionally decorated rooms - white table cloths, overstuffed empire chairs - climb up to the second floor, and then weave our way through some more rooms (the place is absolutely enormous) until we finally arrived at our table, located in a slightly larger and marginally more cheerful, though still very dimly lit, room with a glass wall overlooking the large patio, unused that night due to cool weather. The menus were a surprising dose of casualness - giant (at least 11 by 17, but probably larger) single sheets of cardstock, with the menu proper on one side and a garish abstract design in red and purple adorning the reverse. We listened to the specials, described by our young, cheerful but very professional server, ordered cocktails and settled down to contemplate the choices. My cocktail - a rye manhattan - was the first disappointment of the night - bland and watery, much like Bourbon House's version. T.S. fared better with his choice of one of the house creations, the Vieux Carre (rye, brandy, Benedectine and bitters).

This being Louisiana, I was determined to have something that was deeply local but not a touristy gimmick like alligator, so I opted for turtle soup as my first course. It was excellent - dark brown and relatively thick, it was deeply flavored, salty and had a slight bite of spice. It reminded me of the delicious fish chowder J. and I had in Bermuda. The turtle meat, which was finely diced, reminded me more of seafood - clams, maybe - than anything terrestrial in texture and flavor. Our entrees - J. and I both fell for our server's mouthwatering description of one of the specials, as did T.S. - proved to be far less satisfying, unfortunately. It was redfish - a local Gulf species similar to grouper - topped with crabmeat and wild mushrooms, served in a rich cream sauce. There was nothing objectively wrong with it - the fish was tender and not overcooked - but the dish completely lacked balance. Redfish is mild, a bit bland even, and both the giant pile of mushrooms - intensely woodsy and earthy - and the Olympic-size pool of cream sauce the fish was swimming in completely drowned out what flavor it might have once had. It didn't help that in true old-school style, all side dishes were served a la carte, and I was too distracted to order any. Only P.S. went against the current and ordered duck, which proved to be a wise choice - though slightly more well-done than is the norm in modern restaurants, it was still juicy and its skin was nicely crisp. Unlike the fish, it came served over some potatoes, which did wonders for the balance of the dish.

The wine list is worth a brief mention. Unlike the unexpectedly casual dinner menu, the wine list was a thick leather-bound book of the sort that I thought had become completely extinct years ago. Pages upon pages of wines, organized by region and, for new world wines, further by grape, it featured something I had not seen before - complete vertical selections of top-tier California reds. Every vintage of Stag's Leap Cabernet going back to 1984, for example, and a few others in a similar vein. The most expensive was $1,375 a bottle. I neglected to jot down the winery and vintage. Needless to say, we drank a human-scale wine rather than a god-scale one - a Pinot Gris from Adelsheim in Oregon. It was a quality bottle on its own, but could have used a little more weight to do battle against the sauce.

As I looked around the room throughout dinner, I began to get a sense that Commander's Palace wasn't quite the eminence grise of New Orleans dining it was made out to be. Most patrons were playing at the game of fine dining. On one side of us, a group of college-aged youngsters, spending their parents' money on the one indulgence of the semester, the guys not quite settled into their slim-cut black suits, the satin of the girls' dresses a little too shiny and new. On the other side - a large-ish group out for some kind of special occasion, dressed to the nines, and talking to the waiter in overly solemn tones that some people feel they need to assume at an expensive restaurant. The staff, on the other hand, though I must give them full credit for operating with the precision of a regiment on parade, went out of its way to be causal and friendly, no doubt to offset what some would perceive as stuffiness of the atmosphere. A table across the isle from us ordered bananas foster for dessert (yes, this was the kind of place that actually served them), and the excessively bubbly waitress preparing it tableside did it with the maximum possible flourish and spectacle. A bit later in the evening, she swooped over our table the moment she saw T.S. taking a camera out of his pocket and insisted on taking several photos of us. I feel a bit guilty saying this, especially since on balance, we did have an excellent time with our friends, but whether you're looking for a classic or a modern meal, better dining than Commander's Palace is to be had in New Orleans, especially at the price. Or, if you must experience the Palace, go at lunch, when 25-cent martinis can reportedly be had.

To be continued...

New Orleans: Food

2009-12-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

New Orleans is justly famous for its cuisine, though like anywhere else, it is easy to eat badly, and pay too much for it. The French Quarter is chock-full of restaurants, most of them tourist-grade "Creole" joints serving cut-rate versions of the same few local specialties - red beans and rice, gumbo, shrimp po-boys -- and charging too much for them. J. and I did end up having a late lunch at one, recommended a couple of days earlier by a cab driver, and while my bowl of red beans and rice was decent - reasonably creamy with nicely greasy andouille sausage -- it was not particularly memorable.

That said, at least a couple of places, though touristy, are worth the trouble. The first, of course, is Café du Monde. Located across Decatur Street across from Jackson Square, it is it open around the clock and is justly famous for its beignets - French-style donuts. A little over $2 gets you three large, hot puffs of fried dough, dusted with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar, and I must admit they are good. Not earth-shatteringly, transformatively good, but tasty. They reminded me of nothing so much as zeppoli - the Italian version of the same concept - that I used to eat at pizza parlors in Queens as a teenager. The thing to drink is Café du Monde's café au lait, which was also excellent. Served in normally sized coffee cups instead of giant mugs, it is a true au lait, made with equal part coffee and hot milk, not simply a couple of Mini-Moos dropped in as an afterthought. The black coffee is good as well. Spiked with ground chicory root - a throwback to the times when coffee was expensive and had to be cut with a cheaper substitute to be affordable, the story goes - it has just a slight bitter bite, but is otherwise balanced and smooth. Always fresh, too - the place goes through so much of it.

The other must, located almost directly across the street from Café du Monde, is Central Grocery. Most visitors think of New Orleans as the most French of American cities, being as it was the center of French Louisiana at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, but Italian cultural legacy is prominent as well, and dates back almost as far. Central Grocery is the oldest Italian store in the city still in existence, and is famous for its muffaletta - a giant sandwich of Italian cold cuts, provolone cheese, and olive salad. A vinegary mixture of coarsely chopped green olives and god knows how many other kinds of marinated vegetables, it is this "salad" (really more of a relish) that elevates the muffaletta into the realm of the sublime. Many restaurants in the Quarter offer them, but Central's is the only real thing. The trick is not to eat it right away (if you can resist - good luck), but to let it marinate a while so the flavors meld and the brine of the salad soaks into the bread just a little. When I first got into town, J. had already arrived, and had bought a muffaletta (half of one, technically - a whole, also available, is made with an entire loaf of bread) for lunch. Half or her half had been sitting, wrapped, in her bag for a couple of hours before we met up and I had a chance to eat it. It was unbelievably good - sharp, vinegary, with a great contrast of textures between chewy olives and soft bread, heavy on the cheese and relatively light on the meat, it was utterly unique and delicious. I immediately wanted to run and get another. We got them again on our last day in town, just before leaving for the airport, and while they were good, they didn't pack the punch they did after they've been sitting for a while. Evaluated objectively as a sandwich, they could stand to be a little more generous with the meat.

On two occasions, after having had late lunches and no specific plans for dinner, we ended up at the Bourbon House, located in the Astor Hotel on the edge of the Quarter. Most appetizers and entrees are overpriced and uneven. J.'s shrimp creole was decent one night, lousy the other, my soup barely qualified as mediocre. But the place is more than redeemed by its oyster bar. I had not had gulf oysters before, and they were a revelation - salty, strong-flavored but not metallic like some other varieties, meaty, and absolutely enormous - each one easily the size of three normal ones. They more than made up for other disappointments.

Bourbon House's other claim to fame is that it is the official bar of the Louisiana Bourbon Society, and as such features a mind-boggling selection of bourbons and ryes. On one of our visits, I had a manhattan made with Wild Turkey Rye, which I had not had before. It was a letdown - watery and bland. I blamed the bartender, not the rye. On the other visit, however, I ordered a pour of Four Roses bourbon, which apparently had just become available outside of Kentucky, for dessert. It was delicious - sweet and intense, and much better priced than most quality dessert libations would run you nowadays.

To be continued...

New Orleans: The City

2009-11-30T19:19:00.000-08:00

Although visitors naturally view the French Quarter as the focal point of New Orleans, for the city as a whole it is the Central Business District, or CBD as the locals call it. It is a fairly conventional high-rise downtown, full of office buildings and multiple representatives of every major hotel chain. The main drag that separates the CBD from the French Quarter is Canal Street, with its requisite stores selling vaguely hip-hop clothing at what they claim to be deep discounts and overpriced electronics shops full of dual-voltage radios and (still!) Pal-SECAM camcorders. With its oceanic width, streetcar tracks running down the middle, and a near-complete lack of any identifiably local businesses, Canal reminded me of nothing so much as San Francisco's Market Street. Go a few blocks up the street away from the river, and the building facades and the sidewalks, none too smooth to begin with, deteriorate further, and the Hiltons give way to Clarions, though a block-long monolith of luxury condos, converted from what looked like a turn of the last century theatre, loudly announces its availability with two-story-high banners, a bit out of place among cut-rate parking lots surrounded by rusting chicken wire.

Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.

I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.

A typical French Quarter exterior

Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.

Napoleon's House

A fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.

At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.

Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different, however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.

A house in Faubourg-Marigny

The Warehouse District, located to the South of the Quarter, is home to some museums and galleries and said to have suffered mightily at the hands of Katrina. We didn't take too good a look at it, as the only time we were there was at night in pouring rain, but even so, the luxury condos and lofts were obvious, and the reason we were there - dinner at a hyper-modern restaurant Cochon, more on which later - was telling from more than a culinary perspective. All this was post-Katrina construction. Clearly, neither the private developers (as it should be), nor the city government (as perhaps it should not) want to waste the commercial potential of the place. We certainly would not have found the same in the Lower Ninth.

While on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.

East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.

The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.

To be continued...

How not to play Beethoven: F.F. Guy at the Embassy of France

2009-11-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

Friday night, J. and I joined our friend K.L. at the French Embassy to hear a performance of some Beethoven piano sonatas. The pianist was one François-Fréderic Guy, whom I had not heard of until then. He was actually performing the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, in chronological order, over a period of a couple of weeks. When K.L. first told me about it, my initial reaction was to try to hear every one. The complete Beethoven cycle performed live is an extremely rare event, the undertaking being so Promethean. I'm still kicking myself for not having gone to hear Robert Silverman do them a few years ago. The commitment on the part of the listener is equally great, however, so reason prevailed and we settled on last Friday's performance, where Guy was doing Nos. 22 - 26, No. 23 being, of course, the great Appassionata.

Good thing we didn't spend money on tickets for more than one of these. The concert was a huge disappointment. Guy played with no feeling or emotion whatsoever. There was no lyricism or subtlety to speak of. His tempos were way too fast (most fast works are usually played too fast, but that's a whole other discussion), he left no space between the notes, and as a result ended up glossing over every significant detail. Appassionata's gorgeous finale, while certainly fast, lives and dies by the relaxed fluidity of the performer's approach, but Guy hammered through it like an automaton. No. 25's Andante movement can be achingly beautiful in the right hands, but we heard none of that beauty on Friday. Guy seemed to want nothing better than to get to the next fast movement so he could so some more mindless shredding.

This kind of butchering of sublime music breaks my heart, and in the case of Beethoven sonatas - some of the greatest piano music of all time -- makes me angry. J., a lifelong musician and classical music fan, has inexplicably been skeptical about Beethoven's solo piano music, and Friday's concert has done nothing to change her mind. Thank you, Mr. Guy, for scaring off another potential fan.

Google

2009-11-10T07:15:00.001-08:00

You know how Google sometimes modifies its logo on their home page to incorporate a graphic related to an anniversary of a historic event? I wonder why this week they chose to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street rather than the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to come up with a cartoon of a crumbling graffiti-festooned wall, or, better yet, a disintegrating hammer and sickle.

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist

2009-11-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

Warning: Spoilers follow.

Finished Alberto Moravia's The Conformist a few days ago. I picked up the book many years at a local bookstore's sidewalk sale. Until then, I had not even known that Bertolucci's brilliant 1970 film with Jean-Louis Tritignan as Marcello was based on a novel. I don't have too much to say about the book, but on the whole I enjoyed it. The style, or perhaps the translation, was off-putting at first - Marcello's every thought and emotion explained, with nothing left for us to infer or deduce. But it grew on me, and somehow the writing ended up being fairly powerful despite the overly literal style. I kept referring back to my memories of the film, of course, which probably made the novel more vivid for me than it otherwise would have been, but it also reminded me how many details of the film I had forgotten. It's definitely going on the re-watch list. It's probably worth pointing out that Bertolucci stuck to the book very closely until the end, but then diverged sharply - in the book, Marcello isn't even present at the scene of Quadri's murder. And for the life of me, I could not remember the very final scene, where Marcello and his family die when their car gets strafed by an Allied plane, in the film at all. Either Bertolucci chose to omit it - I can't imagine why, though, its absence changes the overall character of the work significantly - or my memory is worse than I realize.

Virginia Elections

2009-11-03T06:42:00.000-08:00

I admit, with a fair amount of guilt, that I did not vote today in Virginia's gubernatorial and state house elections, even though on previous occasions, I have implored others to vote whenever possible. I simply could not bring myself to vote for a candidate who had views that are abhorrent to me in a deepest possible way, and since all candidates held at least one such view, well, there you have it. My equivalent of a vote of disapproval of all.

We realize that mathematically, the idea that each individual's single vote will affect the outcome of an election is absurd. I should concede here that if every voter took the previous sentence to heart, the system would collapse. But still, that is not why we vote, or at least not why I do. As I've said before, I vote because I can, while many millions of people around the world cannot, and because it is an opportunity to make a gesture of approval for a certain set of ideas and principles. The gesture is mostly to myself -- I don't go around shouting the names of the candidates I voted for and why I chose them. Still, I see it as a moral responsibility to make that gesture.

Needless to say, this becomes impossible when the likelihood of finding such a set of ideas and principles embodied in the stated opinions of a single candidate is pretty much nil. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, we've been told a thousand times, and that you pick the least of all evils, that you vote for the candidate whose "bad part" is less objectionable than the others'. And there have been occasions in the past where I have done that. But there is a limit. I believe that it is possible to reach a level of objectionableness beyond which my moral principles do not allow me to go, and I have reached it this year. Let's hope that for our society's sake, that does not become a pattern, though I frequently fear it it might.

Anne Appelbaum, GULAG: A History

2009-10-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

A few of us will some day read Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus of Soviet forced labor camps, Gulag Archipelago. For the rest, there is Anne Appelbaum's GULAG: A History (Doubleday, 2003). The word "Gulag" has come to be synonymous with the camp system itself, and is even frequently misused to mean an individual camp, but is in fact an abbreviation for "Central Administration of Camps," the Soviet bureaucracy that ran the system. Though the KGB, and its predecessors OGPU and NKVD, have frequently vied for control of the camps with the Interior Ministry, the KGB won, as it did in most aspects of Soviet life, and in light of the fact that the KGB's archives were the only ones that were not opened to researchers after 1991, Appelbaum's study is as comprehensive and precise as we can hope to find until that situation changes.

Those who have no meaningful knowledge of Soviet camps will find more than they will have bargained for. It's all here - the unbearable weather of Russia's Arctic regions, appalling sanitation, starvation rations, inhumane working hours, and beyond-cruel punishments for the slightest disciplinary infractions. She does not skimp on details, some of which may come as a surprise even to those who think themselves knowledgeable. Prisoners on the verge of starvation who spend the last days of their lives crawling around garbage dumps in search of scarps. Women gang-raped literally to death on the transport ships plying the waters of the Russian Far East. It goes on.

The value of Appelbaum's research and writing, though, extends far beyond these topics, as valuable as they are. She masterfully analyzes the complex social structure of the camps - the informers, the bribery, the gangs and the rivalries among prisoners. What will no doubt come as a shock to many Western readers is the revelation that the line separating the guards from the guarded could, and frequently did, blur. Prisoners became guards with regularity, often going directly from one status to the other.

In the West, more often than not Soviet camps are mentioned in the same breath as political prisoners, so I am particularly grateful to Appelbaum for the attention she pays to the professional criminals that have always, even in the darkest days of political repression, constituted the majority of the camps' population. The Soviet Union having been a society under which the most minute aspects of an individual's life were controlled by the government, many readers do not realize that the country has always, even under Stalin, had a large class of full-time criminals, complete with its own code of ethics, distinctive style of dress and, famously, a patois that at times barely sounded like mainstream Russian. As a primer on this underworld, one could do a lot worse than Appelbaum's book.

Nor does she skimp on the government's administration of the camps and the dismal failures that usually accompanied it. From its inception in 1926, GULAG was always intended to be a bulwark of Stalin's economic policy, but in fact had not had a single profitable year in all of its existence. That does not surprise us today, of course, but what might is her revelation that also throughout its existence, the system was plagued with intense conflict between the central administrators in Moscow and the local commanders at the individual camps. The local bosses, expected to fulfill completely unreasonable production norms, and occasionally, Appelbaum is careful to note, out of genuine desire to improve their prisoners' lot, constantly harped on the bureaucrats for woefully inadequate supplies, lack of support, and the general fact that the bureaucrats simply did not get it.

Appelbaum's writing style is perfect for the topic. She is direct, clear, and most importantly, completely unsentimental. This is a documentary work based on research, and the lack of fuzzy, emotional language in no way diminishes its power or makes us appreciate the plight of the tens of millions of GULAG's victims any less. And her research, needless to say, is impressive to say the least. Communist apologists will no doubt find fault with it, citing, among other things, her reliance on the writing of Varlam Shalamov, who, while a survivor of the camps, has only published camp-themed fiction. But that's just squeaking of a discontented few. Remove Shalamov completely, and the book will lose no more than a few pages and none of its power.

In the closing chapters, Appelbaum does offer some thoughts on why the history of the camps has not played nearly as prominent a role in Russia's social and political discourse after 1991 as many have expected. More significantly, she takes a few pages to lament the West's relative indifference to what we can reasonably view as the largest case of mass murder, if not genocide, in history. Yes, nothing Appelbaum says in conclusion is different from Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," but of countless things we, as a civilization, would never want to repeat, the GULAG is right at the top, and in English at least, it has no better chronicler than Anne Appelbaum.

Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part II

2009-10-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Our original plan was to come down the Western side of the state of Michigan and stop for a visit at two legendary breweries in the Grand Rapids area - Founders in Grand Rapids proper, and New Holland in Holland, MI, a few miles away. We were now completely off schedule, however. Determined to catch at least one, we headed for Founders. After an uneventful two and a half hours on US-131, we rolled into downtown Grand Rapids.

Founders, located in the warehouse district on the edge of downtown, turned out to be a block-long hangar, with several roll-top gates, all of them open, separating the cavernous interior from an equally capacious raised deck. At nine o'clock on a Tuesday, the place was well peopled with a stylish twenty-something crowd, but we had no trouble finding two seats at the end of the bar opposite the stage. A singer was performing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the place was so vast that we could barely hear him in our corner. Founders has made a reputation in recent years for being a hotbed of extreme beer, and they did not disappoint. They are most famous, or infamous, for a beer called KBS. It used to stand for Kentucky Bourbon Stout, but seeing as they were nowhere near Kentucky, authorities intervened. Thanks to our generous and enthusiastic bartended, we tasted it. A 11.2% ABV monster aged in Bourbon barrels, it was so intense that the ounce or so he poured for us was more than enough. I cannot imagine drinking even a snifter of the stuff, much less a pint. We had to be a bit careful, seeing as we still had a couple of hours of nighttime driving ahead of us, but I did enjoy a snifter of the Hand of Doom, which is founder's double IPA aged, once again, in Bourbon barrels (definitely a signature of the brewery). It was enormous - huge hops, huge fruit, big funk and pronounced alcohol (10.4% ABV). Evidently, it is not bottled, so we were glad we got to experience it at the source. There were many, many other fascinating-sounding beers on the blackboard, so we made a mental note to come back (the annual release of KBS in March is supposed to be worth attending), and 130 miles later, were back in Ann Arbor.

Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part I

2009-10-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

Our second day in the wine country blessed us with the sort of pluperfect weather that I had been disproportionately lucky to experience on my previous visits to Northern Michigan - blindingly bright sun, temperatures in the low sixties, no humidity, and the overpowering blue of the sky that I had only seen in the Southwest. Since wineries didn't open until 11:00 at the earliest, and some not until noon, we had time to kill, so we enjoyed a leisurely and hearty breakfast at the Omlette Shoppe in downtown Traverse City (all the better to absorb Leelanau Peninsula's bounty), then walked around along the lake shore a bit, admiring the views of the bay and discussing G.&N.'s recent idea of leaving dry land altogether and living full-time on a sailboat for a while. I must say that to my myopic, risk-averse mind it sounded completely insane, though if I know anyone who would not only be able to pull it off but actually enjoy it, it would be them.

Our first winery of the day was L. Mawby, and I completely shot ourselves in the foot by not bringing along detailed directions. The place proved to be impossible to find. We drove all around the lower half of Leelanau for at least an hour, stopping to ask for directions and at one point passing within 500 feet of the entrance without realizing it, until we finally arrived by a combination of unmarked, barely paved roads and sheer intuition. I'm glad we persevered. Mawby would be a rarity in most wine-growing regions. To find it in Michigan was downright shocking. They make nothing but sparkling wines, the vast majority of them using the traditional mèthode champenoise, where the wine is fermented in bottles, rather than tanks or barrels. The bottles are arranged on racks and turned periodically to ensure even distribution of yeast. It is an expensive and arcane method of winemaking, but it is what makes Champagne Champagne. In addition to the traditional sparklers, Mawby makes a line of tank-fermented wines under the M. Lawrence label.

The tasting room was small and sparse, with a small deck in the back, and although you could not see the bay, the views of gently rolling hills covered with rows of vines still made for an idyllic location. The tasting is normally paid, and geared towards helping the visitor select their favorite wine, of which they would then buy a glass and enjoy it on the deck. G., however, gently brought his industry connection to bear, and we were able to taste through most of the wines free of charge, poured by the very knowledgeable and pleasant but refreshingly unsalesmanlike middle-aged woman whose name I'm kicking myself for not having asked. The wines were delicious and stood up admirably, in my opinion, to anything from the West Coast. We focused on the traditional wines, though our hostess did talk us into trying one of the tank-fermented ones. The two lines seem to serve radically different markets. The traditional wines are carefully labeled with the French designation of their sweetness (Brut, Sec and so on) and are named either after their types, Champagne-style (Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs), or with some appropriately hoity-toity sounding moniker (e.g. Cremant Classic). The sweetest of the bunch, Jadore, is fairly sweet, but still balanced and would not be out of place on any dinner table that would take an off-dry Riesling. The tank-fermented wines, on the other hand, all have gimmicky names intended to evoke stereotypical sparkling-wine-drinking occasions (Us, Fizz, Wet, etc.) and are one-dimensionally sweet. The one we tried is the perennial favorite that is actually called Sex. It is a rosé, cloying, with an off-putting, unintegrated finish. It sells like crazy, according to our hostess, for a whole bunch of wrong reasons (the fact that no one wants to say "I don't like Sex" out loud is only the beginning). The pun in the name is no doubt lost on the vast majority of buyers.

Raftshol Vnieyards

Our next stop was going to be Forty-Five North, but we arrived to discover that it was closed, so we moved on immediately to Raftshol Vineyards. We arrived to find a large, dilapidated barn with a small concrete tower, and adjacent to it, a prefabricated single-story structure that claimed to be the tasting room. The interior was a single large room, and it was in complete disarray. A high counter, something you might find in a cut-rate reception hall, to be used by itinerant bartenders, ran alongside one wall; this would prove to be the tasting area. Across the room from it, something akin to an office - desk, a computer, some bookshelves, peeked from behind a mountain of empty cardboards boxes. Various other objects were strewn about, dominated by a bottle labeling machine in one corner. During my research, Raftshol caught my eye because they appeared to emphasize red wines. Reds are notoriously more difficult to make than whites, and the room we were now in did not exude the sort of discipline required to make good reds. A few people were milling about by the counter, but left shortly after we arrived, leaving us in the presence of an elderly gentleman in suspenders and a flannel shirt, sporting a Lincolnesque beard. This turned out to be Warren Raftshol, owner, vine grower and winemaker. He was so self-effacing as to appear almost uncaring. His answer to many of our questions was a shrug of the shoulders followed by "I wasn't paying much attention." Never have I met anyone in the wine world who had so little need for the trappings of wine commerce and the image that frequently goes along with it.

I would have loved to report that the wines were spectacular, smashing once and for all the myriad myths associated with winemaking and wine drinking. Sadly, they were not. The Pinot Noir, which we tasted from dusty, mismatched glasses, was exceedingly light in color and flavor, murky (bottled completely unfiltered, if memory serves) and tasted home-made. The Bordeaux blend (to think that a place like this even made one!) was not a wine I would reach for expectantly, but was at least convincing, the unmistakable flavor combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc detectable, even if muted. When I asked whether Mr. Raftshol has had much luck with Cabernet Sauvignon, his reply was a non-chalant "Not really." The straight Cab Franc, not surprisingly, aquitted itself the best, and at $9, was a bargain. G. and I bought a few bottles between the two of us, and Mr. Raftshol labeled them for us on the spot, putting the foil over the necks of the bottles and setting it with a hair dryer before handing the bottles to us and asking us to let them sit for a couple of weeks as he had bottled them only a few days before our visit.

Our long search for L. Mawby had thrown us off-schedule, and we were now well into the afternoon. While at Mawby, we learned that one of the grapes they grew was Vignoles, an obscure French blending grape that seemed to do well in the local climate. Furthermore, we found out that another local winery, Leelanau Cellars, made a varietal Vignoles. Their tasting room was in the village of Suttons Bay, which happened to be only a couple of miles away, so we headed there to try it. They turned out to have not one but two Vignole-based wines. We found the basic, dry, table Vignoles to be good, though not really unique - crisp, but with a decent body and good fruit. A solid, everyday white wine. It was well worth stopping in at Leelanau Cellars for other reasons, though - the winery features a large tasting room, strikingly finished with maple planks on the interior, with an enormous panoramic window overlooking the bay. It was a lovely place to spend some time, and the wines we tasted from Leelanau's enormous portfolio were in tune with the quality of the wines we had been tasting. The biggest surprise turned out to be the other Vignoles - a botrytis dessert wine. Botrytis - a fungus which, under the right conditions, can remove enough moisture from grapes to concentrate the sugars without killing the grape altogether, is, of course, what makes Sauternes, probably the world's most famous dessert wine, Sauternes. Making a botrytis wine is an enormous amount of work, but Leelanau Cellars pulled it off. While I could not describe the flavor with any precision, it was delicious and enormously complex. There is a bottle in my fridge, waiting to be revisited.

At this point, the afternoon was starting to bend towards evening. We relaxed for a while on the deck of the restaurant next door to the tasting room, enjoying a glass of wine and mesmerizing views of the bay, then got on the road and headed South, for we had one more place to visit before returning to Ann Arbor.

Road Trip 2009, Days Three and Four

2009-09-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

I spent an uneventful but very pleasant Sunday in Ann Arbor, catching up with my friends, walking leisurely around downtown and eating a delicious meal of quesadillas with home-made pico de gallo and guacamole that my friends prepared. At 7:00 a.m. Monday morning, G. and I, leaving N. behind to a much-needed couple of days of peace and quiet, set off for Traverse City. Here, I should give props to G., who would win a gold medal if staying up late and sleeping in was an Olympic sport, for being up and out at the crack of dawn, making the travel tyrant in me very happy.

The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon. We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.

Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.

There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.

From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.

Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.

Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.

It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.

It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.

Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part II

2009-09-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

Heading out of Pittsburgh, the road passed through the city's Northwestern suburbs - Avalon, Elmsworth, Sewickley -- generic and somewhat dusty, but not the ghosts of their former selves I was expecting (I would get that soon enough). A pristine brown E-Type , an early, six-cylinder model, passed me, its driver waving back when I gave him a thumbs-up. I crossed the Ohio at Rochester, PA, where the river bends sharply to the West and a few minutes later was driving through Beaver, PA - a gem of a town with a textbook Main Street running through the heart of downtown. This was to be the last bit of prosperity I would see all day.

Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.

As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.

I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.

Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.

US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.

Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.

From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.

Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I

2009-09-09T19:58:00.001-07:00

The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.

The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.

Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.

The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?

While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.

It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.

Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part II

2009-08-31T19:55:00.000-07:00

Late afternoon found me heading North-West along a stretch of US-40 I had driven before. I took it as far as Uniontown, PA, stopping along the way at General Braddock's grave. Even though I live within easy reach of Braddock Road in Alexandria, I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.

I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.

Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.

Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.

I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.

It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.

Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part I

2009-08-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

For the past six years, I have been making a trip to Ann Arbor, MI, to visit my dear friends G.&N. I usually spend three or four days in Ann Arbor, but I felt like I needed more time than that away from home and work this year, and J. was not able to travel with me, so I decided to make the entire trip using back roads, stopping along the way to see random things and places and attempt to capture what little local color might be left over from the pre-interstate age of automobile travel. It would take me two days to get from Alexandria to Ann Arbor, instead of the usual nine hours, and I would spend the night in Pittsburgh.

Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.

Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside. I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.

Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.

To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.

Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.

A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney. When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.

Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.

I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.

Catching up

2009-08-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

A few brief notes on recent things, for lack of a better word, that I haven't written up in a more timely manner

Céline
Finally finished Céline's Death on the Installment Plan. A slog if ever there was one. It had its moments, no doubt about it. The English boarding school, and especially its headmaster, were exquisitely chilling and powerful. Some characters, too, are priceless, or almost - in addition to the headmaster, De Pereires was downright cinematic. Every scene that involved him I could imagine on screen. On balance, however, the book got to be too much too quickly - when I've had enough, I realized I still had several hundred pages to go. Celine pushes the envelope, then pushes it some more. After a while, you just want to say, "Ok, I get the point. Let's move the story forward a little now, shall we?" But he spends a dozen more pages pushing the same envelope. Yes, when the book was first written, this was innovative, sensational, even scandalous. Perhaps this, like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (albeit for completely different reasons) is another example of a good book that did not age well.

Dogfish Head Grau Dunkel
J. and I go to the beach at Cape Henlopen, DE once or twice every summer, and like to stop at the original Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth afterwards. They usually have one or two beers that are difficult, or in some cases impossible, to get anywhere else. This time, I tried Grau Dunkelwessenberg - a German-Belgian mongrel of a brew made with a mixture of wheat, rye and barley, some of which is smoked. Really smoked. I was not taking notes, so I can't give a formal review here. Suffice it to say that it had a serious bacon thing going on. Unique, but not necessarily delicious.

Dogfish Head Sah'tea
Another one of their exotic limited edition brews, I brought this one home in a bottle and opened it with my friend C.M. a couple of weeks later. It appears to belong to the series of reproductions of ostensibly ancient recipes that they started a few years ago with Chateau Jiahu. This one apparently takes its inspiration from an ancient Finnish proto-beer called Sahti, and Dogfish-Heads it with the addition of spiced chai tea. I did take some notes on this one, so:

Appearance: Slightly reddish caramel color. Murky. Thin head, dissipates quickly.
Nose: Nutmeg, allspice, overripe fruit.
Palate: Bananas. Bananas. A bit of tartness on the back palate, but not enough to balance things. Oh, did I mention bananas?

C.M. gave it a qualified endorsement by saying it was kind of like a hefeweizen without the bad parts. Another beer I am glad I tried but probably would not seek out again.

Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen
I really waited way too long to write this one up, and it really deserved a proper entry of its own. The Embassies of Sweden, Finland and Iceland held a week-long Nordic Jazz Festival in early June, and one of the shows featured Norwegian trumpeters Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen. They both hardly ever play in the US, so of course I had to go hear them. It was absolutely riveting. The show was long and featured two other bands, both led by young unknowns, so both NPM and Henriksen were sandwiched into the middle hour, which I thought was weird, because both musicians are masters of the long form, so to speak, and because NPM at least is a mega-star in Norway, and I was frankly surprised that he condescended to play for a half-hour in the atrium of an embassy. Henriksen went on first with his long-time collaborator Jan Bang, who worked the electronics. Henriksen would play, or sing, a phrase, which Bang sampled in real time (onto something that used floppy disks - I saw him swapping floppies throughout the performance), then altered it electronically, also in real time, to provide a background for Henriksen's subsequent phrases. It was breathtaking. NPM went on half-way through while Henriksen and Bang were still on stage and matched a long droning note of Henriksen's for a few seconds, allowing him and Bang to walk off. NPM, with two other guys accompanying, then proceeded to play a few typically NPM-esque tunes - heavy drum-n-bass beat and loopy electronics supporting an absolutely ethereal trumpet. I did not recognize the tunes, but it was sublime nevertheless. Musical experience of the year.

Henry Louis Gates

2009-07-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Glad to see someone is paying attention to the important stuff, although I kinda disagree with him on Red Stripe.

Rant: Michael Jackson

2009-07-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but I do not get it. 17,000 people for the funeral of a pop singer, and one who hasn't recorded anything in years, busy molesting kids when he wasn't screwing himself up in a plastic surgeon's office? Ridiculous, don't you think? Only Elvis probably got something on the same scale, and unlike Jackson, he almost deserved it. Frank Sinatra didn't get 17,000 at his funeral -- and that was a pop singer! What is that? Sinatra wasn't innovative? Well, neither was Jackson, but fine -- how about Miles Davis? He didn't get 17,000. And Sinatra wasn't Black? Miles was, as was James Brown, who didn't get 17,000 either. Messed up childhood and adolescence? Try Billie Holiday. She didn't get 17,000. So what gives?

Artomatic

2009-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

Went to Artomatic - the giant annual exhibit of local artists' work - the weekend before last. I've been meaning to go for several years now, but for one reason or another, haven't made it until now. This year, two friends were exhibiting, and although I've seen the work of both before, I went partially out of a desire to show support.

The exhibit was absolutely enormous - nine floors of a giant office building-to-be, filled wall to wall with displays. There was absolutely no way we could see everything in a single visit, so I focused on photography, partly because one of my exhibiting friends is a photographer, partly because I just love a good artistic photo, but mostly because even among no-name local photographers, the quality tends to be far higher than among their painting, drawing or, worse, installation-creating brethren.

Our group managed to cover three of the nine floors, and even there I could not mention every photographer worth mentioning. Some highlights were Jeffrey Boodman's Ansel Adams-esque balck and white landscapes, Chris Campbell's digitally tweaked mix of shiny, colorful exteriors and decaying interiors, and - perhaps my favorite - Barry Schmetter's series "Memory and Forgetting" - shot with vintage medium and large format cameras, it was dreamy and chilling at the same time. It put me in mind of W.G. Sebald's book The Emigrants.

Of the non-photographic material, though I wasn't paying attention, Amy Combs' charcoals definitely jumped out.

Next year - several visits, no question about it.

Happy Independence Day

2009-07-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything even remotely interesting to say about Independence Day and its significance this year, so let me wish everyone a safe and happy Fourth of July weekend by saying that I am conflicted about how, and even whether, to celebrate it. On the one hand, even the slightest display of nationalism is repugnant to me, especially the empty, flag-waving kind. On the other, I do feel very strongly that this is the absolutely best country in the world in countless respects and that I would not want to live anywhere else, and surely the creation of such a place ought to be celebrated, no? Happy grilling, everyone.

Ikea, Slight Return

2009-07-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

I guess I should have expected the filing cabinet I bought at Ikea a couple of weeks ago to have been designed for A4 hanging folders. Not for nothing are they known for selling the same exact products in every country in which they do business.

Ikea

2009-06-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

In a blurb in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ellen Ruppel Shell exhorts us to demonstrate responsibility in the face of economic difficulties by resisting the disposable nature of many of today's products and instead buying lasting quality. Her whipping post is Ikea -- the world's largest furniture retailer -- whom she takes to task for selling essentially disposable, low-quality crap under a thin veneer (pun fully intended) of striking design, while engaging in environmentally and ethically questionable business practices and being otherwise ungreen, all in the name of meeting a low price point. Well, having moved recently, and never really having owned any decent, or even coordinated, furniture, J. and I have been shopping at Ikea, and I can report that while relative to other stores, Ikea's prices are indeed somewhat lower, they are by no means cheap. Which brings up a side question -- why is furniture so expensive, anyway? Even $500 for a sofa seems excessive to me, and that's the low end, in the grand scheme of things. I mean, some wooden planks and polyester stuffing with some fabric stretched over it all? How difficult can it be?

But let's grant Ms. Shell her premise that Ikea is cheap. I've seen some gorgeous, heirloom-quality, artisan-built furniture. I have also seen its prices. Is that what we're supposed to buy during a recession? Well, both J. and I still have our jobs, have not had to take any pay cuts yet, and we live in a part of the country that seems to be weathering the recession better than some others. And even at Ikea, we have to be very careful not to overextend ourselves, buying one large item every month, if that. And The Atlantic wants us to spend five times the money in this economy? Thank you, Mr. Bennet, for demonstrating yet again how utterly disconnected the lifestyle coverage of your magazine is from the everyday reality of your readers' lives. There are far more egregious examples of the abiding cluelessness of the self-appointed cultural elite in the same issue, too.

But all that made me think of something else. Could we not say that the disposable nature of most of our personal belongings, especially furniture, however unsatisfying it may be to own, in fact contributes to the dynamism of the American economy? From an economic standpoint, we want our workforce to be as mobile as possible, right? The easier it is for people to get to where the work is, the more quickly the work will be done, increasing productivity. Americans move seven times in their lives on average, and we want to make all that moving as painless as possible. This is especially critical in a recession, when you should be far more willing to go where there is work than normally. So go ahead and leave all that low-quality, cheap furniture behind and go forth unencumbered. When you arrive, there's probably an Ikea there.

Leo Kottke at the Birchmere, 6/12/2009

2009-06-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

Life is slowly returning to normal. Went to hear Leo Kottke at the Birchmere on Friday night. Kottke is a legendary name in acoustic guitar circles, but even though back in my guitar-playing days I've heard him mentioned and read about him countless times, somehow I've managed to avoid hearing any of his actual music for the most part. I came across an LP some years ago, and played it once or twice, but it has been so long now that I can't even remember the record's title, much less any of the tunes on it. When the show was announced several months ago, I figured better late than never and got tickets, with plans to check out the highlights of his discography and prepare myself for the concert in the interim. Well, we all know what's paved with good intentions. I have not had an opportunity even to plug in my stereo, much less listen to anything, between then and now, so I went into the show with very few, if any, expectations. In retrospect, this was refreshing and helped me listen with as open a mind, and ear, as possible. I've said this before, but this is how music was consumed through most of human history -- if you wanted to hear something, you had to go hear it performed. Recording changed the way we consume music, and the meaning music has in our emotional lives, in a fundamental way. But I digress.

The show was good. Not incredibly, earth-shatteringly, life-changingly good, but enjoyable. Kottke's playing was jangly and bluegrassy. There wasn't much musical depth, but he made up for it with rhythmic drive and a technique that was impressive but not flashy. He flubbed a note or two early on, but otherwise was spot-on. His basslines were particularly amazing. He often sounded as if he had two or three thumbs, each with a life of its own, playing intricate basslines on the lower strings, while the rest of his hand merrily picked out a melody or some improvised runs in the high register without breaking a sweat. The whole thing was definitely more about guitar than music in the abstract sense, but one did not need to be a guitarist to enjoy it.

Kottke's twelve-string playing is worth a special mention. Back in my guitar days, ill-advised to begin with, I've picked up a twelve-string once or twice just to try it. Thank goodness I had the sense never to let anyone hear me play it. The things are absolute beasts to handle. You need both twice the physical strength in your fretting hand to hold down the extra metal, and twice the dexterity in both hands to fret and pick cleanly. Pretty much a non-starter in my book. But Kottke tossed off tune after tune on a twelve-string, and he sounded great. Same intricate basslines, same bouncy picking, just more of it. What he played did not change at all, which is more than I can say with respect to just about any other guitar player I've heard, and I've listened to plenty of guitar music over the years.

The tunes were mostly instrumental, though he did sing two or three in a casual, unforced baritone. There was also much banter and joking, which I understand has always been an important component of his shows. Some jokes were actually pretty funny, though they definitely tended in the guitar and music geek direction. The audience response both to his playing and his talking was surprisingly enthusiastic -- the outbursts of applause were an almost shocking contrast to the generally quiet and casual nature of the performance. Clearly, he has some long-time rabid fans.

I haven't been to the Birchmere in ages, but was reminded how great of a venue it is for these types of concerts. Even the food was surprisingly enjoyable. Good time was had by all, and at relatively recession-friendly prices, I should point out. I will make a point of not waiting so long before my next show there.

Crystal Ride

2009-06-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

I rode in the Air Force Crystal Ride last Sunday, a 50km amateur bike race around Arlington. It was my first organised cycling event. The ride actually offered three options – 25, 50 or 100km. My friend C.S., who roped me into participating in the first place, and I chose the medium option.

The route was a series of laps, four in our case, that started on Crystal Drive in Crystal City (right behind my office, as it happened), headed North through the no man's land of Old Jeff Davis Highway (Arlingtonians know what I'm talking about), past the Pentagon and up to the Air Force memorial on Columbia Pike. The course was flat with the notable exception of the long climb up to the Memorial from the Pentagon parking lot.

The morning started out with pouring rain, and it was still coming down pretty hard when I parked my car a mile or so away from the starting line about 6:30 a.m., and C.S. texted me that he wasn't going to ride in this weather, but would show up just in case it improved. It did improve, as it happened, and by a few minutes before the 7:30 a.m. starting time, the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to part. It would prove to be a gorgeous morning for a bike ride.

The ride was, all in all, uneventful. I pushed pretty hard on the first two laps, with C.S., who is a far more experienced rider and a veteran of several centuries, both metric and imperial, loafing alongside. Scrambling up the final hill was no problem on the first lap, though considerably more challenging on the second. By the third, though I was still going pretty strong on the flat sections, I had to give up all pretense of being able to keep up, shifted the bike down to the lowest possible gear of my wimp-approved triple crank, and crawled up the hill, passed in the process by several of the spandex-clad poseurs that I was able to fend off until then. By then, C.S. lost me completely and I finished out the last lap and a half in solitude. Final time: 2:09:45, for an average speed of a hair over 14 mph. Now my right knee hurts, though given the lack of any riding practice this winter, and the generally ill-fitting nature of my bike, the rest of me is surprisingly intact.

Advertising

2009-05-28T06:26:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that a few months ago, I finally got roped in. On most pages on that site, there are some ads in the sidebar, tailored, so we are told, to the user's interests. Then why was one of them for this today? I don't even own a television right now. Oh, wait, could it be the fact that "foreign languages" is listed as one of my interests? That's some definition of "tailored."

A Miracle at City Hall

2009-05-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

Three things, in increasing order of improbability. Someone out there has read Kafka. That someone absorbed the lessons Kafka had to impart. The person has a position at, or influence upon, the City Hall of the city where I now live. It took me all of fifteen minutes both to pay the city property tax on my car (never mind the fact that I had to pay one at all) and to obtain a parking permit for my new neighbourhood this morning. There were no lines, I had to talk only to two people (the clerk and the cashier), and both payments, although different creatures legally speaking, were handled in the same transaction and by the same person. I did not have to fill out a single form, and I even got credit for a portion of the money I paid to Arlington last year. The most amazing thing is that I had neither a utility bill nor a lease agreement to offer as proof of address. In a feat of creativity, I offered up a copy of the deed of trust, and they took it with only a minimal furrowing of the brows. Strictly speaking, the deed does not prove that I live at the stated address, it only proves that I owe someone money for the property at that address. But the fact that both my name and the address were listed on it was evidently enough. Way to go! Would that every interaction with the local government in all locations was that painless.

Moving

2009-05-16T06:40:00.001-07:00

The blog will have to remain on life support for a while longer. I'm typing this while sitting on the floor, surrounded by the last few remaining boxes and an unnerving number of miscellaneous things that keep appearing from closets and kitchen cabinets. I spent my first night at the new place last night, where I discovered that at least in the living room, where I slept on a futon for lack of another suitable spot, with windows wide-open, I could hear the railroad and the occasional bass-mobile passing along the street at an incomprehensible hour. I also discovered that the neighborhood's avian population is quite large, and begins to make itself heard around 4:30 a.m.

As luck would have it, J. had to leave town unexpectedly for a family emergency, leaving me to do 90% of all the work involved in the move, including the actual moving of things, which I decided to do myself, in the back of her VW. Quite a job. One always has tons more stuff than one thinks, but that's hardly news. At the new place, I piled everything in what will be the guest bedroom, and neatly stacked in one place like that, it really didn't look that bad. For two people in their thirties who love books and records, we could do a lot worse.

Great big thank you to my colleague B.L. whose generous offer of his pickup truck, to say nothing of his time and energy, saved me from the U-Haul nightmare.

Up next: Probably stories of woe from City Hall.

Real Estate

2009-05-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

I suppose I ought to post an update, even though I have had no time to write anything of any consequence. So a few loosely connected observations.

J. and I finally took the plunge and bought a dwelling of our own. So our largely debt-free and carefree existence is over. Scary time to buy real estate in this economy, but our guiding principle was that a house is no different than any other big-ticket item -- you buy one when you need one. So we are now the proud own... er, make that residents of a lovely two-bedroom condo, owned by the people who lent us the money to buy it.

The local real estate market makes less sense than ever. Everyone acknowledges that at the height of the real estate bubble, the prices were obscene, here no less than elsewhere in the US (more, if anything), yet they are down no more than 3% from their height. In desirable neighborhoods at least. The bubble does not appear to have burst -- on the contrary, it appears to be hardening in its inflated state. Elsewhere, in the meantime, house prices are down as much as 40+%.

The laws of supply and demand do not appear to apply. On any given Sunday anywhere in Arlington or Alexandria, the sidewalks are flooded with Open House signs. So there is no shortage of properties on the market -- on the contrary, it is flooded. Yet the prices remain sky-high. The best explanation I could come up with was that these properties are being sold not by residents who need to move, but by investors who are trying to cut their losses. I don't know if this is enough of an explanation, but thank goodness there is no house exchange the way there is a stock exchange, and that you still have to find a specific buyer for every house you are trying to sell. On the other hand, maybe the prices would have dropped noticeably if we did have such an exchange, and you could simply make a phone call and sell your house(s). Just look at the stock market.

Further insanity: while doing the final walk-through of our new condo before closing, our agent casually mentioned that the previous weekend, another client of hers offered the asking price with no contingencies on a property, an did not get it because there were four other offers. I've got your bubble right here, for anyone who's looking. I consider ourselves lucky -- our process was so normal, I felt like I was back in the sixties.

You would think that the subprime debacle and the generally sad state our banks are supposed to be in would inject some sobriety into the mortgage market. Yet the first lender we contacted, after hearing my unofficial (but accurate) account of our financial situation, literally offered to lend us an order of magnitude more than what we were comfortable borrowing. J. and I do ok, income-wise, but we are not Beverly Hills plastic surgeons, for heavens' sakes! Are these mortgage people insane? The modest (by these people's calculation) amount we did end up borrowing is a huge commitment for us, far more than we ever paid in rent, and they were perfectly willing to let us pay thousands and thousands more every month? Why have they not learned their lesson? Yes, I know, we are a good credit risk. But this was off the scale! And this lender was supposed to have been a solvent, responsible one who did not take any bailout money. We went with someone else.

No matter how hard you look, you never find all the problems in a place you're considering until after you've bought it. And a home inspection is designed to detect major problems, not minor headaches. Furthermore, even minor headaches look worse after you've been looking at them for a while. Net result -- J. and I spent the last three days painting our living room. And that's after I had to deal with the consequences of the previous owners' inept picture hanging jobs. Now the hallway looks disgusting by comparison, so we have to paint that, too. We're paying more money than we did in rent, yet have to do our own painting. How does that make any sense? At least everything we found so far is, indeed, very minor. Let's hope it stays that way.

We have some old furniture to give away -- shelves, a desk with a matching printer stand, a coffee table/end table set, and a drop-leaf dining table. None particularly nice (least of all the dining table), but all usable. Free to friends -- contact me if interested.

NSO

2009-04-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

Went to hear the NSO Saturday night. Interesting program – Webern’s Langasmer Satz, Shoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and Brahms’ Fourth. The Webern’s piece did not sound familiar, Shoenberg’s did, but I was pretty sure I had never heard it performed, only mentioned. So I expected the kind of twelve-tone thing that the composers are known for. I was looking forward to the show more for the idea of Webern and Schoenberg – the radical modernism expressed with the fewest possible notes – than because I genuinely expected to enjoy the music. I could not have been more wrong.

Langasmer Satz is an extremely early work, written when Webern was only 21, never published (hence no opus number), lost shortly after it was completed and not re-discovered until the 1960s. Originally for string quarter, the NSO played a string orchestra arrangement. It was gorgeous – lovely melodies, lush, Mahlerian strings, and only slight hints of the tension that would become Webern’s stock in trade a few short years later. The original quartet version was no doubt fascinating, but the orchestral rendering we heard worked perfectly – I would not take away a single part.

Schoenberg was also lush, beautiful and Mahlereqsue. My only complaint was its length – at over half an hour, it was too long by half, I thought. This was program music through and through, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, so he needed the two separate development sections to match the narrative arc of the poem. Better to have stuck the violin arpeggios from the end into the first half and closed early. But that’s just me.

The Brahms, needless to say, was glorious. His Fourth is one of my favorite symphonies ever, if not the favorite, and hearing it live was nothing short of magic. Even though I know my recording (Solti leading Chicago) forwards and backwards, you can’t help but hearing more detail live. The forte sections pressed you into your seat with sheer energy, the flute solo in the closing movement took on a whole new dimension, and the trombones in the same movement sounded even more medieval and mysterious than they do on recordings. Great, great stuff all around.

One man's trash...

2009-04-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

I had an old laptop. Six years old, 40 GB drive, 256 MB memory, USB 1.0 ports, no wireless. Obsolete, right? I was all ready to recycle it, but then decided to see what happened if I put it up for sale on Craigslist. I listed it at $75, pretty much arbitrarily. I mean, I wouldn't pay $75 for something like that. Would you? I probably wouldn't take it for free -- it's just another thing to take up space in my house.

Well, between 10:00 p.m. last night and 9:00 a.m. this morning I had 19 e-mail messages, most willing to pay full price. I don't get it. What's more, the person who bought it didn't even open the box. It could have been filled with old magazines, for all she knew.

Bermuda

2009-04-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

J. and I spent last week in Bermuda, on a belated honeymoon. It wasn’t the sort of trip that warrants one of my usual day-by-day travelogues, but I’ll offer a few impressions.

Bermuda is a pretty interesting place. A local told us that it was currently the wealthiest place in the world, though a more unbiased source puts it at number three, presumably behind Switzerland and Dubai. Still impressive for an island of 30 miles long by a mile across, where a hair over 60,000 people produce a GDP of over $4 billion per year. Some will go so far as to claim that there is no unemployment, but even those who do not endorse that claim generally agree that the 2% typically cited is largely voluntary.

Your worst enemy in Bermuda is the weather. Very strong winds – up to 40 knots on some days (46 mph) – combined with relatively chilly water (about 69 degrees F at the surface) precluded us from doing most of the water activities we had planned. So we did not go whale-watching even though April is officially Whale Month, did no snorkeling and no kayaking. The most unnerving thing is that while on the island, the winds are not obvious, but the whale people warned us of 12-foot waves less than a mile from shore, and the marine forecast on local television backed them up.

On the one truly nice day, we got out in a glass-bottom boat for a tour of the local coral reefs. It was gorgeous and absolutely fascinating. Corals of every imaginable shape, size and color practically brushed up against the bottom of the boat. There were some that looked like shrubs with blue branches, others resembled salad greens, and still others – J.’s favorites – were dead ringers for human brains. At least a dozen varieties of fish swam under the boat, ranging from a couple of inches to a couple of feet in size, from plain gray (but evidently very delicious) chubs to brightly striped sergeant-majors. We even saw a small shark and, later, a sea turtle surfacing to take a breath of air.

On our last day on the island, we did spend a couple of hours on the beach at Horseshoe Bay (until a passing rainstorm drove us off) and got into the water, which was crystal-clear, beautifully blue and delightfully refreshing. Bermuda’s sand has a reputation for being pink, but in person it’s not really. There is a bit of a reddish tint to it, thanks to microscopic crustaceans whose skeletons turn pink when they die, but mostly it looks like normal sand, just finer than what we’re used to on the Atlantic coast of the US.

For the rest of the time, we were confined to the island. Two of the major attractions are the Royal Naval Dockyard and the town of St. George. The Dockyard has historically been the largest of Bermuda’s forts and the center for its defense. It was borrowed by the US Navy during WWII to serve as a base for the support of its Atlantic supply convoys. Today, it features a large historical museum, some shopping and local crafts, and one of the most famous pubs in Bermuda (and the only one that brews its own beer) – the Frog and Onion. The museum, which we saw partly out of interest, but partly because we needed a place to get out of the rain, was interesting but offered far more historical detail than we could reasonably absorb. For a military and colonial history buff, it is a godsend. Beyond the museum, the biggest Dockyard attraction is probably the Bermuda Glassworks, where you can watch local and visiting artisans create colored glass pieces. Most of the works are attractive in a sunny, cheerful sort of way, and the prices are reasonable. We bought a Christmas ornament and a few small snail figurines as souvenirs for friends and relatives back home.

The Glassworks shares its building with the Bermuda Rum Cake Company. The rum cake is an island specialty – essentially a round pound cake soaked in dark rum. It is delicious, though a little goes a long way. Though several brands are available throughout the island, the Bermuda Rum Cake Company claims to be the only one that bakes theirs right in Bermuda. The rest are apparently made in the US and shipped back.

The historic town of St. George, which we visited a few days later, is located on the opposite end of the island. It was Bermuda’s original capital, and features the oldest buildings on the island, some dating from the XVII century (the island was settled in 1609). The centerpiece is St. Peter’s church, in continuous operation since the early 1700s. All this was interesting, but I found the town somewhat depressing. Since it was advertised as a major piece of local history and the Island’s most important tourist attraction, I expected some vibrancy or at least glitz, but the place had a decidedly dusty and forgotten feel about it. A few shops ringed the main square, but by the time we decided to stop in and browse, it was after 4:00 p.m. and everything was closed. Private houses started a few blocks from the center, and they were the least prosperous-looking we’ve seen anywhere in Bermuda. The large unfinished church, further damaged by a hurricane since construction was abandoned in the mid-1800s, and the ruin of a large house a block away only added to the joyless impression.

One pleasant surprise in St. George was the Bermuda Perfumery. It has been making perfume locally since 1928, and much of the original equipment is still in use. Everything is blended and bottled by hand. We took a tour of the old house in which it is presently located and did the olfactory equivalent of a tasting (a sniffing?) of their products. Their signature men’s cologne, unchanged since the early 1930s, is still made by collecting sawdust from local carpenters who use local Bermuda cedar in their work and macerating it in alcohol in upside-down jars to extract the oils.

About a kilometer from the center of St. George lies Fort St. Catherine, the second largest in Bermuda. It, too, is now a museum. We walked to it in the afternoon and found it completely deserted. We wondered around for a while, briefly looking at the exhibits and taking in the magnificent views of the ocean from the ramparts. The excruciating amount of detail about British naval artillery got very quickly even to me, who is occasionally capable of enjoying that sort of thing, though I must admit that I found fascinating the fact that a cannon originally commissioned in the 1880s was still in use by the Royal Navy in the 1950s.

Your second worst enemy in Bermuda is the food. When I was making our travel arrangements, I was struck by the abundance of cottages and housekeeping units relative to traditional hotels. We quickly found out why when we got there. Restaurants are outrageously expensive – a combination of the local economy and the fact that pretty much everything has to be imported. The cooking tradition is definitely pre-modern British – cook everything to death and serve it with a minimum of vegetables. There is some seafood being caught commercially in local waters, most notably wahoo, black grouper and some species of tuna, but we were not willing to pay gourmet restaurant prices, and lesser places just did not do it justice. The biggest disappointment was Bistro J. in downtown Hamilton (the capital and the only real city). It was a small place, about a dozen tables, quaint, candle-lit, good service, chalkboard menu that changed daily, and an impressive wine list, but the wahoo which both J. and I ordered was drier than a shoe sole. Pubs, of which there is a good number, offer decent food, but it’s not really distinctive and still pricey, though more reasonable than the upscale places.

The one bright spot in the otherwise bleak culinary landscape of Bermuda is the fish chowder, another island specialty. It is ubiquitous – every restaurant serves it regardless of the type of the rest of their cuisine, and it is usually excellent. Dark brown, thick with chunks of fresh and smoked fish and tender cubes of potato, it is deeply flavorful and usually served with cruets of black rum and sherry peppers (a slightly medicinal vinegary sauce) which you can use to doctor up your bowl to the extent you see fit. We’ve had several bowls over the course of the week and loved every singe spoonful.

Another meal worth mentioning was a late lunch at a place called Island Cuisine in Southampton, about 12 kilometers outside of Hamilton, where we stopped after a long meandering bike ride around the southern part of the island one day. Probably the least touristy of the places we’ve tried, it was essentially a Bermudian diner. We had delicious salt cod cakes – a humble version of our own crab cake made with potatoes and bacalao (dried salt cod soaked in milk), the most prominent evidence of Bermuda’s substantial Portuguese community.

One of the most pleasant aspects of the trip was our hotel, the Royal Palms. A little less than a kilometer outside of Hamilton proper, it was an oasis of peace and quiet in a place that was already pretty peaceful and quiet. The 1903 building was clean, comfortable, and in excellent condition, with smallish but impeccably kept rooms. The real treasure, though, were the lush, overgrown grounds filled with palm trees and rose bushes where you could happily while away an afternoon in a lawn chair with a good book. We were shocked that the hotel was almost completely empty -- we saw only one other couple regularly at breakfast, plus a smattering of business guests throughout the week, but on the whole the place was pretty much dead. It does cater to business visitors, evidently, and even political ones – one morning while having breakfast in the giant sunroom, we saw a man in business attire get into a white Chevy Impala with two large US flags flying on its front fenders.

There as a restaurant at the hotel, Ascots – reportedly one of the best on the island – but it was completely unaffordable. The bar, on the other hand, was very inviting and no more expensive than a moderately classy place in the US would be. We stopped there at the end of almost every evening to wind down over Bermuda’s signature drink – the Dark and Stormy, equal parts of black rum (Gosling’s is the locals’ favorite, though the volume producer is Bacardi, whose world headquarters are in Hamilton) and ginger beer. They were absolutely delicious. The spicy sweetness of the ginger beer which regular ginger ale lacks made all the difference.

Despite being thwarted in our attempts to spend time on the water, the week passed quickly, though by the end I felt like we were running out of things to do. If we were to go back, we would definitely rent a place with a real kitchen well outside of town, rent scooters (there are no car rentals in Bermuda) and do some research on where to get fresh fish directly from the fishermen and Bermuda onions (some are still grown on the island) from the farmers. If you can cook your own food, it’s a great place to relax.

Rant: Weddings

2009-04-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

There was a report on NPR last week about people scaling back on lavish weddings due to the implosion of the economy. "Hallelujah," I exclaimed to myself and felt instantly better even though I was slogging North along congested Rt. 295 in pouring rain on the way to the Baltimore Airport. "If there is anything positive for our culture that will come out of the recession, this must surely be it." They were interviewing a woman who was shopping for a wedding dress at a thrift store. She really wanted a fairy-tale wedding, she said, but was worried that she would lose her job later this year, so she was sticking to a strict budget. "Attagirl," I thought. "Let's hope that this is the beginning of a major trend in our society." Then she dropped the bomb -- that budget was $15,000. 15K on a wedding when you're about to lose your job?! What would she have spent if we weren't in a recession? THAT number, it turned out, was more like $35,000. What the hell are these people thinking? And where do they get that kind of money? They blow everything they've got, or borrow it, apparently, and then can't afford a normal down payment for that McMansion they so want, so they take out an ARM with no money down, and we all know where that got us. Thirty five thousand? Even here in DC, one of the most expensive areas for real estate in the country, where house prices in desirable neighborhoods are off no more than 2-3%, $35K is 10% on a very livable condo. And they blow it on a single day of frilly tackiness, bad food, worse music, and drunken revelry they won't even remember the following day. Any wonder we're in such a mess?

Roquefort

2009-04-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

A grass-roots reaction to government idiocy from one of my favorite local businesses. I don't really have anything to add right now to what Jill (the store owner in the video) says.

Coffee

2009-03-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

My friend K.R. and I recently got into a conversation about coffee. She loves a good cup, and always brews good beans at home, as do I. The year before last, she gave me a Christmas present of delicious freshly-roasted beans from a boutique roaster in, of all places, Bisbee, AZ. So I asked her where she got her beans these days. “Murky,” she replied without hesitation. “I didn’t know they roasted,” I said. “It’s Counter Culture beans,” she replied, fully expecting me to know who these people were. I had a vague recollection of reading about them in the WaPo, and, generally trusting my friend in matters of food and drink, resolved to stop in for some beans the next time I was in the neighborhood.

See, I was a coffee snob before I was any other kind. Since childhood, in fact. I grew up in a tea-drinking part of the world. In the capital where I lived at least, coffee was invariably instant, always imported, and was such a hot commodity that it almost never made it to store shelves, having been skimmed along the way by those with access, like distributors and store managers. So much so that the urban folklore of the time featured a satirical two-liner on the topic, untranslatable, but culminating in a pun along the lines of instant coffee instantly dissolving. I have my mother and her circumstances to thank for my love of the stuff. Her parents, while instilling in their daughter a love of reading and learning and the patience of a stoic, were not necessarily great parent material when it came to the pragmatics of life, so from a relatively early age my mother spent very little time at home, bouncing around instead from friend to friend and relative to relative. In her late teens, she was fortunate to have been befriended and semi-adopted by a couple of transplanted Armenians, great lovers of food, brandy and, of course, coffee. Real coffee – ground powder-fine and brewed slowly in a small copper pot with an almost equal proportion of sugar until it foamed up and rose to the surface. Suspend your vigilance for a moment, and it would be all over your stove – “runaway coffee” it was called. Served in small cups, it was dark, syrupy and sweet. In the US, when it is mentioned at all, it is usually referred to as Turkish coffee, to the Armenian diaspora’s great consternation. My mother has been drinking it ever since. When I was young, she would pour a bit into the bottom of a cup and fill the rest with warm milk. As I got older, the ratio of coffee to milk increased. By the time my family was a year or so away from moving to New York, I could drink the stuff straight.

In the bagel shops of 1980s Queens coffee was something else entirely. Sold in 8-oz. Styrofoam cups, it cost around 50 cents. Today that sounds refreshingly no-frills, but in reality the stuff was foul. Luke-warm, sour and stale, no amount of sugar and Mini-Moos could redeem it. I hardly ever drank it, preferring to go home to mom’s tarry goodness. There was cappuccino to be had, but not easily. I first tried it in Italy in 1987, where you could get one anywhere for about 1,000 lire (around 85 cents in those days), and a virtually identical cappuccino, minus the marble counter, could be had for only twice that at any number of Greenwich Village Italian cafes, but for a clueless kid from Queens, that wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence. We had a place in the neighborhood that served them, but those were Kappucinos – squirted noisily from a machine fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus from seafoam, into a stemmed glass mug of the type you’re likely to get if you ask for an Irish Coffee at a neighborhood bar, topped with Cool Whip from an aerosol can.

My exposure to “modern” American West Coast-style coffee came when I was in college in Rochester, NY. It was the nineties, all things Seattle were the rage, and quality brewed coffee was beginning to spread into second- and third-tier American cities, especially those, like Rochester, that had enough students to support a coffeehouse culture. The place to be was Java Joe’s downtown (still in business, apparently) – it was located on the same block as the main building of the Eastman school, and on weekends turned into a jazz club featuring student bands. The only guitar teacher I have ever had played there. I spent my fair share of time there, but my regular spot became Moonbeans, now sadly defunct, at the corner of Unversity and Atlantic, a few blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years of school. Atlantic hit Univeristy at a sharp angle, and Moonbeans occupied the first floor of the cool old building on the corner. It was the sort of place that was briefly in vogue but, sadly, is already starting to disappear – mismatched old couches, bookshelves with actual books on them, some board games and a chess set for use by patrons. When I didn’t have a pile of philosophy reading to get through, I would bring my friend S.L. and we’d sit at the bar, making lame attempts to chat with Jill the barista, on whom we both had an enormous crush. Moonbeans’ house brew was Sumatra – the first time I encountered a varietal coffee. It had a flavor I had never experienced before – intensely smoky and strangely compelling despite its bitterness. Doctored up with a fair amount of sugar (because I was weaned on Turkish coffee, to this day I drink all coffee sweeter than most people), it became the defining flavor of my college days, thanks, no doubt, to lazy afternoons reading Kierkegaard at Moonbeans as much as to the drink itself.

From there, it was coffee, coffee and more coffee. When I moved to Phoenix after graduation to be with J., we made a point of exploring every coffeehouse in the area. I read Korby Cummer’s seminal The Joy of Coffee and, on its recommendation, bought a French press – still my preferred method of brewing. I sought out a local source of quality beans. When I moved to DC in 1998, I lived a couple of blocks away from Java House, a café that roasted its own beans, at 17th & Q, and quickly became a regular there. Come to my house today, and, as much as I love the Asian tradition of automatically serving tea, you will not be able to avoid being offered a cup of coffee. Which brings me to the present day and Murky.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks after my conversation with K.R., I found myself heading West on Wilson Blvd., so I swung in. I picked up a bag from the shelf, and my heart sank – it was instantly obvious that they have outsnobbed the snob. Being from a specific part of the world or a certain country was no longer enough. The beans I ended up buying had the precise location specified. Not just Papua New Guinea, but the Waghi Valley of that country. Below, the label listed the specific varieties of cofea arabica (the coffee plant) – Bourbon, Typica and Arusha. Then came the description, or should I say tasting notes, worth quoting in full:

Wonderfully complex, this coffee has a rich, syrupy body with notes of thick chocolate, vanilla, and dark honey, with a savory note throughout. A classically balanced cup from a fascinating coffee growing region.

I love coffee, it’s great. It tastes delicious and helps me to get going in the morning. I can tell the difference between fresh and stale beans, and I’ve been known to mope for an hour if the coffee I was served was too weak. But coffee is not wine, people! One of the best things about coffee is that it helps you clear your mind so you can discuss other things, not coffee itself! What happened to just sitting down with a cup of coffee and enjoying it without having to think about it? There is a reason meeting for coffee is still a valid activity even in our age of Facebook tyranny – it helps friends socialize. Must I analyze everything in order to enjoy it? By the way, the 12-oz. bag cost almost 14 dollars – obscene even in our culture of paying prices for artisan products that would have seemed outrageous a decade ago.

I must admit that the coffee was absolutely delicious. Some of the best I have ever had. Rich, flavorful and complex, it lived up fully to its promise of chocolate notes. I cannot fault Murky and Counter Culture for the quality of their product. But the combination of the description, price, and heightened expectation made it something more than just a cup of coffee while making it difficult to relax while drinking it. It demanded to be noticed. It was the narcissist of beverages. I have not been back. I prefer to keep the pleasure of sinking into my reading chair with a good book and a steaming cup of coffee, or catching up with a dear friend over a café table, without being distracted by High Coffeeness.

AIG

2009-03-16T18:36:00.000-07:00

The fact that AIG decided to use $165M of government bailout money to pay bonuses is infuriating. Now, those who know me might be surprised to hear me say this. But there are a couple of things at play. There should not have been a government bailout in the first place. We would not even be dealing with this question. But given that there was a bailout, and that we did pay for it, a properly managed company should have stopped paying bonuses long before it needed a government bailout. AIG says that they are contractually obligated to pay these bonuses. Well, someone didn't do their job and wrote a lousy contract. Any contract worth the paper it's written on ought to have a clause that says if business is in the toilet, bonuses go out the window, end of story. I guess it's the whole bubble thing -- if they tried to write it into the contract, the people getting the bonuses would have hightailed down the road to BJH or some such. And who is paying for this nonsense now? We are. Which brings me back to my first point -- there shouldn't have been a bailout in the first place.

Tindersticks

2009-03-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

Went to see Tindersticks at the 9:30 club Thursday night. My friend C.S., who originally introduced me to the band a few years ago, came up with the idea. I can’t say I was a huge fan before – C.S. burned some CDs for me, a couple of compilations of what he thought were the best songs – and I enjoyed listening to them now and then, but I never took the time to learn more about the band or explore other recordings. So I didn’t actually have a burning desire to go on Thursday, but I’m sure glad I did; the concert proved to be excellent.

Tindersticks are virtually unknown in the US. They got a lot of critical acclaim for their early records in the mid- and late-1990s, but it remained confined largely to the UK. They went on a hiatus over the last couple of years, but did release a new record in 2008, which is what prompted this tour, mostly around Europe with a few dates in the US.

What drew me to the band originally was their sound – far more distinctive than just about all of their contemporaries, not that I really have a good idea of what those sound like, not having followed the British rock and pop scene in any meaningful way since Catherine Wheel and Ride in the early nineties. First, there is lead singer Stuart Staples’ baritone – deep, clear, and far lower-pitched than a typical, or even an atypical, rock singer, it has some Jim Morrison in it, maybe a little Steve Kilbey of the Church, but is really all his own. Occasionally, Staples sings falsetto, but because his voice is so low to begin with, the falsetto takes on an immediately recognizable quality. His voice draws you in instantly – I remember getting into C.S.’s car one night several years ago and hearing it on the car stereo. My reaction was, “who is THIS?”

Then there is the band itself. I stand by my claim that nothing in rock and pop is ever truly original, but a few bands do come closer than the rest once in a great while, and Tindersticks definitely fall into that category. I guess they’ve absorbed so many influences, and digested them so thoroughly, that something approaching uniqueness emerged. There is some lounge in there, a little progressive pretense, some folksy songwriting, all sprinkled with just a dash of sixties’ psychedelia and postmodern jam-band sound. In addition to traditional rock instruments, played with admirable restraint I should point out, the band frequently uses a vibraphone, strings and a variety of horns, though they rarely get truly orchestral. Above all, their sound is beautifully clear – Tindersticks are the anti-noise, anti-Radiohead wing of British rock.

The most amazing thing was that all of this came across when they played live. They sounded phenomenal on stage. They were never loud or bombastic. Every instrument, and Staples’ voice, was crystal-clear. They played, I am shocked to say, with something I did not think was possible in rock – taste. The acoustic instruments were there, too – the keyboardist doubled on vibraphone and another high-pitched tuned percussion instrument I couldn’t quite see – some sort of miniature glockenspiel perhaps – and a trumpeter, a saxophonist (baritone!) and a cellist occupied stage right, appearing and disappearing as the tunes required.

The entire concert was a brand-new experience for me. I did not recognize a single tune. But that is perhaps the greatest testament to the show’s success – I was drawn in instantly and stayed focused the entire time. It was almost like going back to the days before recording existed, when listening to music at all meant listening live. Not all songs were great as songs – in fact, some were quite monotonous when stripped of their arrangements, but of course the arrangements were an integral part, and if nothing else, Staples’ voice kept me listening. They played a few instrumentals, something they are known for, and those sounded good as well, though for once, I wish the instrumentalists soloed more, especially the horns. The trumpeter took a couple of solos, but the sax player, who turned out to be the fairly well-known Terry Edwards, stuck mostly to playing counterpoint to the rest of the band, and the cellist’s job, aside from a beautifully minimalist, Steve Reich-like intro, was to provide color.

I did wonder about the economics of the concert. There were eight musicians on stage, plus roadies, but the tickets were only $25, a bargain in this day and age, and the club, admittedly fairly large, was maybe one-third full. 250 people at the most, by my very imprecise estimate. The audience was refreshingly tame and polite, clapping enthusiastically, and letting out a few quiet whistles between songs, but otherwise listening attentively. The whole thing had kind of an MTV Unplugged air about it. The concession stand, in another pleasant surprise, was selling the new record on LP, as well as colored vinyl 7-inch of one of Terry Edwards' side projects, which turned out to be a revival of the eighties ska band Department S. I bought both, but have not heard either yet, my turntable being in need of some attention.

Anyway, great show. Very un-rock-n-roll, and that’s precisely why I enjoyed it so much.

Midnight Oil (not the band)

2009-03-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

I feel young again, coming home around midnight after a show at the 9:30 club, eating a bowl of instant noodles, firing up the laptop and doing some late night work. I'll pay for it in the morning, no doubt.

David Remnick

2009-03-04T18:43:00.000-08:00

Finished David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire a few days ago. Excellent. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Remnick, now at the New Yorker magazine, was the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from the fall of 1987 until the fall of 1991, and though he did not originally bargain for it, ended up witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union first-hand.

Remnick is first and foremost a journalist, and the book is written that way - quick pacing, lots of direct quotations, personal observations - but his chief accomplishment is that he does not neglect history. On the contrary, Lenin's Tomb is an excellent primer on Soviet history. Any reader who wants not just the basics but a hefty dose of historical analysis, compellingly written, could do a lot worse than this book. Though his focus is, obviously, on the Gorbachev years, he really leaves no period untouched, especially the Stalin era. In fact, the major conclusion of the book that will still be worth something generations from now is that Gorbachev's first, and greatest, accomplishment, was that he allowed ordinary Russians to regain their history. As George Orwell, among many others, has pointed out a long time ago, any totalitarian regime could survive only as long as it had complete control of the society's historical knowledge. Once people really learned what happened and why, it was all over. So in that sense, as Remnick is keenly aware, Gorbachev was bound to lose control over the transformations he himself had started, which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Another of Remnick's achievements is the attention he pays to the reactionary elements in Soviet sociaety and the Communist Party, first and foremost of which was, of course, the KGB. Many Westerners still think of the KGB as Russia's equivalent of the CIA, but it was far more than that. It was the CIA, the FBI and something that no modern democracy has (a recent blip in Maryland notwithstanding) - honest to goodness secret police, in the sense of internal espionage - rolled into one. I am grateful to Remnick for making that abundantly clear.

Remnick's faults are few. In the introduction, he expresses hope for the continued democratization of Russia, and in that he has been proven wrong already. And though I am tempted to ask how someone with as deep an understanding of the Soviet system and Russian society as he is could do that, I will chalk it up to his inherently American sense of optimism. He does include something darkly prophetic in the book, perhaps without realizing entirely just how significant it is. In the city of Perm, the former site of a large Gulag camp, he interviews the mayor:

"There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won't be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs - the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." (p. 276)

My only other complaint, irrelevant to the general reader, is his rendering into English of certain Russian words and phrases. His Russian is obviously fluent, idiomatic even, but I've seen this elsewhere -- perhaps there is an unwritten imperative among scholars of Russia to use the closest cognate when translating certain words where a much more common and sensible English word would not only work, but actually make more sense. Thus, he translates the common salutation "Uvazhayemy" (sorry, I have no good way to quote Cyrillic at the moment) as "Respected," which is literally correct, but wouldn't you use "Esteemed" to address someone? Similarly, and more misleadingly, "rayon" becomes "region" instead of "district." It is true that sometimes the problem is intractable. He renders the extremely evocative, strong and sharp "avanteurist" as "adventurer." Not even close, but my Oxford Concise Russian Dictionary agrees, and I suppose there is no better solution short of resorting to a third language.

Keith Jarrett

2009-02-27T20:19:00.000-08:00

I had always wondered how ECM Records funded itself. Its catalog is vast, its production values are extremely high, but the commercial appeal of its artists, even in Europe, is, in the grand scheme of things, limited. Now I think I know - whenever the label needs money, they release another recording by Keith Jarrett, then sit back and watch his rabid fans gobble it up, lining the label's coffers.

I'm really starting to think that Jarrett has managed to attain that enviable position where critics and listeners alike stopped trying at anything resembling objectivity. It doesn't matter what he plays. He achieves instant holiness just by touching the keyboard.

His latest recording is Yesterdays, with his usual trio of Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. Though released a couple of weeks ago, it was recorded back in 2001, so clearly it is from the vaults. I was initially drawn to it because it was purported to be available on LP - the first new recording ECM has issued on vinyl in fifteen years. Turned out the LP was not officially available in the US, and to get it from Europe would have cost me €30 plus trans-Atlantic shipping. But by the time I found this out, I was convinced, on no basis whatsoever, that I had to hear it. So I got a copy of the CD.

While Yesterdays is not bad per se, it is definitely not essential. Turns out Jarrett's trio has released several other trio records since my last acquisition --1999's Whisper Not. Yesterdays is just another link in a seemingly endless chain. Everything they play here they have played before. The songs are all standards - their stock in trade these days - and while everyone plays competently, and I normally love standards, it is just not that interesting. The band grooves, Peacock plays some tasteful solos, and DeJohnette tosses off some pretty wild stuff now and then without ever losing the beat, but as a whole package it doesn't make me go "wow." I suspect one of the major problems is Jarrett's infamous humming and moaning. I realize that anyone who is going to listen to him in any quantity is going to have to live with it and learn to listen through it. But on Yesterdays it seems louder and far more distracting than on any other record I've heard. I've played the disc all the way through a few times now, both through the speakers and on headphones, and it still grates in a major way.

To give credit where it is due, the last two tracks come a ways towards redeeming the record. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is lovingly played, with one of those floating, harmonically ambiguous extended intros that used to be Jarrett's trademark but have not been heard much since he recovered from a major illness in the 1990s. "Stella By Starlight," recorded during a sound check (the rest of the record is live), is more uptempo, but Jarrett is still a bit restrained, not only articulating extremely well (he usually does), but holding back from gratuitously long and fast passages. Download those two from a music source of your choice and forget the rest, I say.

Theodore Dalrymple

2009-02-16T09:02:00.000-08:00

Finished Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple a few days ago. Enjoyed it, if that’s the right word. I read quickly, without taking notes, so I can’t get into too much detail, but here are a few reactions.

Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in Birmingham, where he practices in an inner-city hospital and, part-time, in a prison. The book is a collection of essays originally published in magazines, primarily City Journal, that describe his interactions with his patients and proceed to infer from these interactions certain generalizations about these people’s lives. The subtitle of the book is “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” and while the term “underclass” is easier on an English ear than an American one, it does capture Dalrymple’s intent better than any American equivalent could. These people are poor, but only in government’s definition (specifically, England’s essentially socialist government). As measured against history and, more importantly, against current economic conditions in much of the rest of the world, these people’s level of economic comfort, in many cases provided government programs, is far above basic. They are not, in a vast majority of cases, homeless. There is no official policy of discrimination against them the way there was in, say, the Jim Crow American South (often quite the opposite, Dalrymple argues). So perhaps “underclass” is an apt term to capture the general cultural and moral decrepitude he describes.

The book is not prescriptive. It is neither a scientific report nor a policy paper. Dalrymple merely describes his experiences, sometimes citing individual cases, other times describing his observations in the community (to his great credit, he lives among those he studies). His argument is essentially this. The vast majority of the underclass finds itself in the position it is in not through any sort of misfortune, unfairness, or circumstances beyond its control. On the contrary, its predicament is a direct result of specific moral choices. It is enabled – nay, encouraged – to believe that it is acceptable, and even desirable, to make such choices by pervasive government policy that deemphasizes individual responsibility in favor of being provided for by society as a whole in the name of fairness. This policy was, for decades, promulgated by liberal intellectuals, both in academia and politics. The net result is a moral and intellectual collapse that goes far beyond the loss of “traditional values” and permeates one’s very notion of right and wrong.

Some of Dalrymple’s claims and examples do come across as faintly ridiculous. In a chapter dedicated to tattoos, he claims that in his experience, there is a universal correlation between tattoos and criminality. He seems to recognize the silliness of his suggestion – the tone of the essay seems to say, “look, I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t help it – this is what I see in front of me every day” – but a reality check would have still been useful. I personally have an acquaintance who, while tattooed, is a hard worker, a dedicated mother and a loving wife, and another who, while far less tattooed than the first, is a promising scientist and a dedicated researcher. My sample size is smaller than Dalrymple’s, I realize, but it still shows that it pays to slow down now and then when making generalizations.

On balance, however, Dalrymple’s observations are sharp, informative, and successful precisely because while he does, to a point, blames (correctly, I believe) the members of the underclass for making the choices they make, the bulk of his blame is reserved, also correctly in my opinion, for the rotten intellectual climate among the social elite that made these choices possible in the first place.

NSO

2009-02-04T07:56:00.000-08:00

I seem to be in permanent catch-up mode these days.

Went to hear the NSO a couple of weeks ago. Interesting program – Stravinsky's Jeu de Cartes, Crumb's A Haunted Landscape and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Stravinsky was fun – great wind parts, especially bassoon, a good horn solo, and an amusing quote from Rossini's Barber of Seville towards the end. It was the Crumb that made the concert worthwhile, though. I have mostly avoided his music, largely on the basis of his reputation for an almost complete lack of structure. Landscape, though, was worth hearing, and it absolutely had to be heard live. The work is a percussionist's wet dream. Every percussion instrument was dragged out for the occasion, including ethnic instruments not normally seen in an orchestra. The structure was predictably lacking, the orchestration sparse in the extreme, and the melodic content equally minimal. The basic pattern was a sequence of short pairwise solos, with one conventional and one percussion instrument in each. It was all about sound in its pure form, and as long as you approached the work with that in mind, it was fascinating. What made hearing it live essential was the fact that we could see the percussionists reach for their next instrument. The stage was partially obscured from our usual perch in the chorister, but we saw enough to build anticipation. Had we been listening on record, the sounds would have seemed random. I don't know that I need to hear the work again – it is too fragmented to serve as ambient music, and too abrasive for repeated active listening, but experiencing it once was definitely worth it.

The second half of the concert was Lief Ove Andsnes playing Rachmaninoff. He played well, at least as far as we could tell. The main distinguishing feature of the work, to me, is the fact that the soloist and the orchestra are almost always playing together, the way they might in a Baroque concerto, as opposed to alternating solo and tutti sections common to Romantic concertos. This is interesting. Unique at the time it was written, in fact. The problem was that from where we were sitting, we could barely hear the piano most of the time, so much of the solo part was lost to us. Still, I had to give it to Rachmaninoff for some gorgeous string parts, which sounded fresh since I haven't heard the concerto in years, even though I have an LP of Horowitz playing it. I wish I had pulled it out – had I been reminded of the mass of sound that it is most of the time, I might have splurged for orchestra seats.

Miscellaneous Beers

2009-01-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

Some tasting notes from beers I’ve tried over the last couple of months, but haven’t had a chance to write up until now.

Flying Dog Kerberos Triple
Appearance: Almost orange color. Murky, but noticeably clearer than my reference American Triple – Victory Golden Monkey. No head to speak of.
Nose: Fresh, grassy, slightly metallic. A little caramel in there somewhere.
Palate: Subtle. A little sweetness, but not clying. A touch of hops is noticeable – slightly more than Golden Monkey, especially on the finish.
Comments: The understated Triple. My initial reaction was to be disappointed, but it grew on me. Not very memorable, but pleasant while you’re drinking it.

Flying Dog Dogtoberfest
Appearance: Gorgeous reddish amber color. No head – completely flat.
Nose: Flowers. Slightly sweet. A touch of strawberry? No yeasty smell at all.
Palate: Smooth, slightly metallic mouthfeel. Good balance. Hoppier than classic German Oktoberfests. Long finish.
Comments: Delicious. I could drink way too much of this stuff.

Gouden Carolus Chrismtas Ale 2008
Appearance: Mahogany, very dark amber. Light head with a few medium-sized bubbles.
Nose: Molasses with a bit of smoke. (Mesquite? Maybe it’s all those years in Arizona talking).
Palate: Creamy but not syrupy. Tootsie Roll. Sweet. Can definitely taste the alcohol (ABV is 10%). Vanilla? Complex, deep flavor.
Comments: Definitely a once a year indulgence. Screams for a fireplace.

Weihenstephan Dark Hefeweisen
Appearance: Murky medium brown. Huge foamy head.
Nose: Yeast, unbaked bread, just a touch of barnyardy funk.
Palate: Smooth. Medium weight. A bit dense. Tastes like the wheat beer that it is. Tangier than a regular hefeweisen. A touch of brown sugar?
Comments: Tasty, but not as refreshing as a real hefeweisen.

Stefan Fatsis

2009-01-29T18:11:00.000-08:00

Finished Word Freak: Heatbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitve Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis the other day. Excellent, for the most part. Fatsis explores a world most of us are not even aware exists – professional Scrabble. And what a world it is.

Fatsis, who is ordinarily a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had always been a decent Scrabble player, but had no idea it could be played competitively, until he happened upon some players in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. He started playing more frequently and meeting more and more advanced players, observing them, interviewing them, and researching the history of the game. What made the book possible, however, was that Fatsis got completely obsessed with the game and became one of “them.” He took a leave of absence from his WSJ job and started studying and practicing in earnest and playing tournaments, eventually winning two and reaching a rating of 1733 (out of a possible 2000).

Along the way, Fatsis introduces us to the most colorful characters in competitive Srabble, some of whom he gets to know pretty intimately, and colorful they are. Their extreme eccentricity is not surprising. Any game, especially one that requires the mental pyrotechnics, memory and pattern recognition skills of Scrabble, attracts the extremely dedicated, the obsessed, and the just plain weird at its highest level. Fatsis portrays them well – charitably but fairly. He also expounds on the origins of the game, its inventor Alfred Butts, and the issues raised by Scrabble’s unique position as the only commercial, trademarked game that has a thriving international competitive scene surrounding it.

A large part of the book, however, is dedicated simply to words. Words in their infinite variety, their acceptability (or not) in the game, the various dictionaries and lists that have been used to play the game over the decades, and the differences between US and non-US Scrabble dictionaries (and the fact that the World Championship uses a combination of both). Fatsis spends many pages (too many, some might say), describing the overwhelming numbers of words and letter combinations one must memorize and be able to recognize in a mess of Scrabble tiles to play well, the methods top players use to study them, and their superhuman skills at anagramming. For me, one of the more interesting, and somewhat sad, conclusions that emerges is that being good at Scrabble has little to do with being good at English. If you have any ambition at all to become competitive, you will never have time to learn the definitions of the words you’re studying. You memorize strings of letters and learn to recognize patterns. Hundreds of thousands of them. The official dictionary used in US tournaments – the Official Word List (OWL) – contains no definitions. Many of the world’s top players have minimal command of spoken English.

If I have any complaints about the book at all, it is the fact that Fatsis recounts too many individual games in too much detail. He is obviously really into Scrabble, and is clearly fascinated by every single game. He also brings his experience as a sports writer to bear and does a convincing job of depicting a game of Scrabble the way someone might do with an exciting basketball match or a close car race. But after a while, it got a bit too much for my taste. I do play Scrabble recreationally (and very poorly – I enjoy learning the meanings, etymology and use of new words way too much to learn very many actual words), but after a while all the game descriptions started to sound the same. On balance, however, the book is thoroughly enjoyable, and with just a bit more editing, could have become a non-fiction classic.

Iceland

2009-01-27T06:45:00.000-08:00

This is the scary part of the economic crisis. When Eastern Europeans demonstrate and topple their governments, no one bats an eyelash. When our own unemployment rate edges towards ten percent, that's hardly unprecedented. But police in Iceland -- ICELAND, for crying out loud -- tear-gassing protesters?

Gaza, Slight Return

2009-01-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

A reader has recently left an extensive comment on my recent post on the situation in Gaza (as it was at the time of the post). While much of what he said really went well beyond the very limited scope of the original post, I only have myself to blame for having opened that can of worms in the first place, so I feel obligated to respond. Since a proper response would have been too long and unwieldy to leave as another comment, I am doing it in this post instead.

Before I get to the individual points, however, I think it would be useful to remind ourselves of two facts. One is simply that Israel exists. The other is that although Gaza and the West Bank were acquired by force, Israel itself was not. Its founding was certainly enabled by the European colonial powers, but in physical terms, it was largely bought, one plot of land at a time, from local Arabs. With those facts as a backdrop, I will consider my commentator's points one by one.

Saying the goal is to "stop the rocket fire" is a very one sided way to look at it. One side fires rockets, and that upsets the other side. The other side, meanwhile, practices its own brand of genocide and terrorism, and that upsets uh... I lost track. There aren't any good guys here.

While I could (and should) challenge some of the terminology, that is not my intent, neither here nor in the original post. Fact is, I agree with this... mostly. If there are any good guys here, it is the ordinary Palestinians trying to live some semblance of a normal life under adverse conditions. Given that Hamas's embrace of reason and reality is not forthcoming, it is they, and only they, who have any chance of changing the situation by taking matters into their own hands. That is really all that I was trying to argue in the original post. Nothing more. I certainly did not set out to propose a comprehensive Middle East policy.

Israel tried this: unilateral withdrawl, but hey we'll keep up the siege, not allow you to leave, and make sure you can't feed or medicate your kids. Hamas responded with what, 98% less rocket fire? Who is being unreasonable here?

It's simple, really – Israel's tactical aim is to stop the rocket fire, but the strategic one is to topple Hamas. I think we all know this. I personally think that aim is reasonable as long as Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. Changing that is fundamental, and a prerequisite to anything else. I know many will disagree, and that's their right, but I really do believe that with respect to Gaza specifically (not the entire Palestinian problem), Hamas must either recognize Israel's right to exist or be eliminated. Both Israel and the West have failed to achieve the former either by negotiation or by isolation; the next step is war. This really opens up a huge topic that I am not prepared to get into here. Suffice it to say that if Hamas provided de facto recognition by stopping 100% of the rocket fire, stopping 100% of the weapons smuggling from Egypt, etc., Israeli tanks would not be rolling into Gaza. Yes, I know that had Israel not conquered Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 in the first place, we would not be where we are right now, but like I said – a whole separate discussion. The facts on the ground are what they are, and both sides need to deal with them as they are.

What if Israel offered a real peace solution, like: we'll make you a proper country; you have the right of return; you can leave; you can import food and medicine and we won't even look at it; you can have a real government and we will stop pretending that you aren't legit even if you were democratically elected? Then if Gaza still started firing rockets, I might join in with our friends at the New Republic and say kill 'em all. (disclaimer: I haven't read the trash at the new republic since Michael Kinsley left so maybe its all peace and love over there now...)

The Palestinians' decision to elect Hamas, however democratically, was, in my opinion, a grave mistake. I understand why they did so, and can sympathize. But short term gains in basic necessities have carried with them the cost of a long-term threat to their lives. Note that I am not exonerating Israel of anything by making that statement – I am merely pointing out the predicament in which the Palestinians placed themselves. I suppose I am expecting an unreasonable level of political sophistication from an ordinary Palestinian by expecting him to reason as I do. Perhaps.

Yes, of course it would be better if Israel offered all of these things. But the fact is, that is not about to happen, and hoping for it to happen in the short term is naïve in the extreme.

As to the New Republic, I have never read it, so cannot comment.

What you are saying to Hamas is this: give up, its hopeless, the Israels are much more powerful than you, don't worry so much, and just keep moving west. The problem is that eventually there's an ocean out there, and the Israelis will be perfect happy to drive the Palestinians into it.

This seems to equate “Hamas” with “Palestinians” -- an equivalence I am not willing to endorse. I am, in fact, saying to Hamas, give up and recognize Israel, or be eliminated. There is no third permanent solution. What I am saying to the ordinary Palestinian, however, is exactly the opposite – you need to worry more, because no one else will do it for you, not the people you elected, nor their adversaries.

Its very much like if we took all of the native americans and pushed them into tiny reservations, and then surrounded those reservations and said: you can't leave here, and btw you can't import enough food or medicine either. "Suck. On. That." Or "Don't Fuck With the Jews", or whatever is fashionable in the "mainstream" Amero-Israeli press world these days.

The American Indian analogy still does not make sense to me. As to the last sentence – I am not going to take that bait. Sorry.

More Obama

2009-01-22T05:39:00.001-08:00

Ah, good to know that even artificial gods (not that there is any other kind) fall quickly. Obama t-shirts are already 50% off at the aforementioned kiosk.

Rant: Obama

2009-01-14T06:20:00.000-08:00

I don't get it. To say that the inauguration frenzy has reached fever pitch would be an understatement of colossal proportions. Four and a half million people expected to attend? There aren't that many Christians that would attend the second coming of Jesus, I bet. The deification has gone through the roof. We have seen our God, and his name is Barack Obama.

The hagiography was already in high gear throughout the campaign, but at the time, at least the mainstream press would include some substance in its coverage at regular intervals, making it at least possible to ignore the vaguely constructivist-looking blue and red posters – the less charitable among us might call them WPA-style, or, dare I say, Socialist-realist – plastered on walls. But now that the papers have moved onto things they are supposed to cover, like cabinet picks, Obamamania has got downright tawdry. In a nearby shopping mall, on the food court level, an enormous kiosk has sprung up, selling nothing but Obama souvenirs. The kiosk occupies the same spot where the Photos-with-Santa station was at Christmas time, and it's about the same size, if you include the tree. And that's in addition to the permanent gift kiosk a hundred or so feet away that a couple of months ago has switched from its normal mix of international flags, Washington Memorial calendars and FBI t-shirts to an all-Obama inventory. The examples go on on. Some people are using Obama's photo on their Facebook profile. Since we no longer seem to go to each other's houses much, but instead socialize on Facebook, this becomes the equivalent of hanging Obama's portrait in a prominent place in one's house. I can think of a very similar phenomenon. It's called Dear Leader.

The frightening thing is that unlike the North Koreans, we are not required to worship Obama. We do it all on our own. Yes, I appreciate the historical nature of his election. But come on – this is a guy whose only claim to fame is a brilliantly-run election campaign. I can't believe I even need to spell this out. Are we so desperate for an external source of moral validation that we make one up? Have we none left in ourselves?

Gaza

2009-01-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

I am surprised that the vast majority of writers and commentators, when talking about the current Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, use the word civilian without even pausing to consider that in the context of the Israeli-Hamas war, it has become meaningless. After September 11th, many pointed out that the nature of war has fundamentally changed. Wars had once been fought between two or more identifiable political entities such as nation-states and their governments. Even civil wars more or less fit that definition – the fighting was between a government holding power and another believing that it should be holding it instead. Wars against terrorists do not fit that definition, as just about everyone who had anything to say about the topic has been pointing out for the past seven years. What most of them failed to recognize, or at least state, was that this change of the nature of war has an inescapable corollary. If you cannot identify a political entity capable of raising and maintaining an army, you can no longer distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

This is exactly the case in the Gaza Strip today. The Qassam rockets that Hamas is firing at Israel are launched from people's yards, as the rocket man's family cowers in fear inside the house, or, more chillingly, goes about their business. The rockets are built in the basements of shops even as regular Gazans are buying groceries or clothes upstairs. How do you distinguish between civilians and fighters in cases like this? How do you target the rocket launching operations without killing “civilians?” You don't.

So what is the solution? Absent Hamas's abandonment of the core principle on which it was founded – the refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, the abandonment that is obviously not forthcoming – I see two possibilities. One is a scorched earth policy on the part of Israel. Simply razing Gaza to the ground and killing all of its inhabitants will stop the rocket launches. For obvious reasons, Israel will not do this. This leaves only one other – Gazans themselves overthrowing Hamas. Hamas gained public support and eventually power by addressing people's basic needs – medical care, rule of law, a modicum of economic opportunity -- better than anyone else at the time could. However, they need not, and should not, continue to receive this support now that their mere existence has made Gaza a magnet for Israeli bombs and missiles. If enough houses are destroyed and enough people killed by the Israeli offensive, Gazans whose neighbor has a Qassam launcher in his yard need to walk over there and tell him stop immediately, or stop it for him. For their own good, they need to do this now, and in large numbers. It's not Tony Blair's babbling that will stop the war. It is only a grass-roots anti-Hamas revolution in Gaza that has even a remote chance of doing so.

Philadelphia, Day Two

2009-01-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

Our second day in Philly was low-key, and centered around brunch. We slept in a bit, stashed the bags at the hotel’s front desk, checked out and headed for Morning Glory, a gourmet diner on the edge of South Philly. The weather had turned dramatically overnight – it was now in the 30s with buffeting winds – but we decided to walk nonetheless. I was reminded how much I liked the character of the city. It’s very walkable, and the neighborhoods flow right into one another. Colonial-era townhouses intermingle with utilitarian International Style high-rises. This might strike some as unfortunate – the beautiful historic architecture being polluted by the worst that urban renewal of the 50s and 60s had to offer. To me, however, it spoke of the city’s vibrancy and its preoccupation with the present at any given moment in its history. It was a sign of a desire to make a place where a wide variety of people could live and function.

The walk was long but largely pleasant despite the weather. We arrived at Morning Glory to find a crowd of intimidating size waiting for tables. Our friend C.S., who suggested the place, warned us of this, and recommended going early, which we didn’t. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked – most groups were large, and we were seated in a little less than a half hour. The brunch was well worth the wait. I had an amazingly delicious egg scramble with smoked salmon, sautéed onions and goat cheese. In addition to the usual choices of bread for toast, olive bread was on offer. It was excellent – fresh, seriously crusty, and chock-full of moist, salty black olive slices. J. – the world’s biggest lover of pancakes, I think – ordered the version that came with granola and bananas. They were very good as well. Even the coffee was top-notch, and came in metal mugs.

After brunch, we walked around South Street a bit, stuck our heads into a couple of shops, then walked back downtown to claim our bags and take the subway to the train station. The subway proved to be much nicer than the street car – quieter, cleaner and more spacious. Our train was late, but we did eventually make it home in time for a late dinner at the neighborhood Vietnamese noodle shop, happy to have got a change of scenery, but sad that we couldn’t stay longer.

Philadelphia, Day One Continued -- Pumpkin

2009-01-06T18:06:00.000-08:00

Showered and changed (and recovered from the torrential thunderstorm that caught us as we walked the last four blocks to our hotel), we caught a cab to head out to dinner. Our original plan, on the recommendation of our friend C.S., was Mattyson, but apparently it is the hot place in Philly right now, and was completely booked up by the time I called. We settled for Plan B, which was a restaurant just South of downtown called Pumpkin. We had gone to Pumpkin on out first trip to Philly four or so years ago and had an amazing meal, so I did not hesitate to go back.

Pumpkin is a part of Philly’s vibrant BYOB scene, which alone makes a trip to the city worth it. Why couldn’t it be more widespread? Anyway, Pumpkin is tiny – a single minimally-decorated room that seats 26 if memory serves. The menu changes daily based on the ingredients at the chef’s disposal. Though nominally divided into appetizers and mains, all the plates are about the same size. Our waitress – one of only two working the room – was friendly and knowledgeable, and her service was excellent throughout the meal. I started with the Mediterranean rock octopus (a smaller variety with a more tender flesh compared to the giant “regular” octopus) served with chorizo, fingerling potatoes and romesco (tomato and bell pepper) sauce. It was unbelievable. Definitely the best octopus I have ever had. Up until then, my reference was the giant grilled octopus tentacle I had in Toronto’s Greek Town about ten years ago, but Pumpkin blew it, pardon the pun, out of the water. J., on the waitress’s recommendation with my enthusiastic encouragement, opted for razor clams. They proved to be delicious as well – large and plump and very clammy-tasting.

My second course was the most unusual thing I had had in a while – fresh sturgeon. It came from the Columbia River in Washington. I had no idea there were any sturgeon species in North America. It was excellent – very firm, with a deeply flavored, dense and oily flesh. It had some swordfish and some tuna in the taste, but in the end was its own animal. It was served with brussel sprouts and salsify, scattered with a few corn kernels, and accompanied with a dollop of a creamy sauce I could not quite identify. J.’s choice was the skate wing, which was also very good – tender, with a powerful lemon kick and served with the largest caper berries I have ever seen – they looked like figs. My only complaint, if it can even be called that, is that my sturgeon clashed mightily with the wine we had brought -- a half-bottle of the 2006 pinot noir from Baileyana in the Edna Valley of California. It was crisp, light-bodied and spicy with a pronounced flavor of cranberries on the palate, but the fish was just too, well, fishy for any red, even one as versatile as a pinot noir. That, and the fact that after the two courses, J. and I were too full to have dessert, delectable though it looked.

By the time we left the restaurant, the rain had stopped, and we walked back to the hotel through the rapidly cooling night, past a few inviting-looking bars and restaurants and across Rittenhouse Square. We had initially thought about going to the Apothecary – another happening place and Philly’s outpost of the burgeoning craft cocktail scene, but realized we really were not in the mood to deal with crowds of hipsters, so we got our nightcap back at our hotel’s bar. Situated as it was in the lobby of the hotel, separated only by a large divider, it retained some of the hotel-like sterility of most bars of its ilk. A few small round tables with two deep leather chairs at each helped a bit, and that is where we settled. I must say that the unremarkable atmosphere was deceptive – our drinks were excellent. Our waitress, who looked too young to know anything about real cocktails, looked confused when I asked if they had rye, but the bartender – a middle-aged guy who clearly knew his job and took pride in it – overheard me (the music was mercifully quiet) and nodded. I got one of the best rye manhattans I had ever had. J.’s French 75 – a forgotten classic if ever there was one – was very good as well. We sipped our drinks, mellowed by the long day and the delicious food, contemplating the fact that we were now married and attempting, unsuccessfully, to find some difference in how we felt.

Philadelphia, Day One

2009-01-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

The morning after our wedding in mid-November, J. and I took the train to Philadelphia for the weekend, for a micro-honeymoon of sorts. The trip was largely symbolic – we’re planning a real, albeit much-delayed, honeymoon, this coming spring – we mostly wanted to get away from the over-excited visiting families and get a change of scenery.

The train was a bit late to depart, but once on the way, the ride was trouble-free, and a hair over two hours later we pulled into 30th Street Station in the city of brotherly love. We took the streetcar – one of a seemingly endless variety of public conveyances in Philly, and a gross misnomer, for it spent not a moment of its trip above ground – downtown, checked our bags at the hotel and set out in search of lunch. Owing to the wedding, I did virtually no research on Philly before we left. We had been there once before, but it was several years ago, and we went with our friend C.S., who knew the city really well, so we were content just to follow him and his girlfriend around. This time, we were on our own, and in the absence of any information on lunch-appropriate spots in the vicinity of our hotel, ended up just grabbing a slice of pizza around the corner. It was surprisingly good – very much in the style of the New York’s famous slices, and though not quite that good, it was close. Our friend N. would later comment that she found Philadelphia to be an unfriendly city. I believe it stems from its frustration over its desire to be a New York in some important ways, but never quite reaching that ideal. The pizza was just a small manifestation of that.

Our lunch consumed, we set out for the Philadelphia Art Museum. According to the map we had picked up at the train station, the Museum occupied a location somewhat akin to the Kennedy Center in DC – not that far from anything, but not easy to get to. There was no Metro station anywhere near the museum, and Philly’s bus system looked intimidating even to a transit rat like me, so we walked. The weather was unseasonably warm – it would reach 71 degrees that afternoon – and the walk along Ben Franklin Parkway (more of a boulevard) pleasant.

The Museum is vast – the third largest in the US, after the Met and, I presume, either the National Gallery or maybe the Chicago Institute. There was no way we could see the entire thing in an afternoon, and we would not have wanted to, but we saw enough to make the visit memorable.

The current Classical style building was completed in 1928, though it looks older, and was the product of multiple architects and firms, which accounts for its generic architecture. It is enormous and is more functional than beautiful. Though superficially similar to the Met, it lacks the latter’s sense of proportion, especially when viewed from the front.

Some of the highlights and pleasant surprises we encountered were some early Miro from roughly 1920 that looked nothing like what we think of when his name is mentioned, some late, non-Cubist work by Georges Braque, and some seriously creepy modernist Mexican paintings by artists I was not familiar with. There was also a large gallery dedicated to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, which I enjoyed thoroughly, though J. was less enthused. Philly’s collection of Asian art, which we had to see selectively for lack of time, seemed heavy on Chinese artifacts, including, improbably, a complete study of a Chi’ing Dynasty scholar, but we did eventually find the Japanese stuff we were looking for. This included some beautiful ink-on-paper scrolls and some classic pottery. Unfortunately, we had to rush through the decorative arts galleries, but we saw enough to whet our appetites. All in all, a decent introduction to the monstrosity that the Museum is. We’re sure to be back more than once.

We walked back through the warm late afternoon, stopping for a cup of coffee on the way, then checked into our hotel. It being a special occasion, we had splurged a bit and booked a room at the Sofitel, which was far nicer and more expensive than what we normally allow ourselves. There was some history to the place. Though the building looks newer, it was originally built in 1964 to house the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (now owned by NASDAQ). After acquiring the property several years ago, Sofitel did a nice remodeling job, managing to avoid the generic hotel feel for the most part, especially in the guest rooms. Ours was nicely appointed and tastefully decorated in dark woods and bright but not garish fabrics. Far nicer than what we’re used to when traveling. The biggest difference, however, and one that almost made the room worth the high price, was the bed. It was incredibly comfortable. Hands down the best of any hotel we’ve ever stayed in, in the US or abroad, and, to be perfectly honest, better than ours at home. After a day on our feet, it would prove to be a godsend.

Rick Warren

2008-12-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-29T19:02:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-22T05:18:00.000-08:00

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!

Wedding

2008-12-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

After fourteen years together, J. and I finally got married about a month ago. Given my sentiments about the institution of marriage, I suppose I ought to say a few words about why I agreed to it. To make a long story short, J. wanted to get married. To her, it had significance, though I am not sure I could explain fully just what that significance was. It had nothing to do with legal status. Nor was it religious. I guess for lack of a better word I would call ritualistic. She found it meaningful to mark and celebrate our being together in a socially-noticeable way, and she wanted to imbue the occasion with some, albeit small, level of ceremony that she could share with those closest to her. Though I did not feel the same way, I went along, mostly out of a desire to accommodate and support. One could argue that it is a critical enough aspect of a relationship that the couple ought to agree fully on it, and the fact that we do not bodes ill for the future. But I do not feel that way. In every relationship, each partner makes his or her own unique set of sacrifices. I felt comfortable making this one. Plus, having thought about it a bit, I realized that having a party to which all of our friends were actually likely to come was a rare opportunity that demanded to be embraced.

The celebrant was one Reverend Daniel Kane that J. found on the Internet. He was nominally a Catholic priest, though he has not been attached to a congregation in some years, and has been performing very open-ended, vaguely spiritual but strictly non-denominational wedding ceremonies, ostensibly under the radar of the disapproving Catholic establishment. Needless to say, I was quite skeptical to have someone who had anything at all to do with a formal religion perform the ceremony. Plus, I didn’t really care for the guy once I met him. He talked too much and too fast, and had a cheesy moustache. There was something of a con artist about him. But we were trying to fast-track the whole thing a bit to squeeze it in before Thanksgiving, and once I read the text of the ceremony and found it only minimally unpleasant and refreshingly flexible, I agreed to retain his services. I thought he was kind of expensive. Though I am sure he was far cheaper than having the use of an entire church for a formal ceremony, I still grumbled, especially when he eventually arrived at the ceremony in a late-model 5-series BMW.

Finding a place to hold the reception was a no-brainer – EatBar, the lounge section of Tallula restaurant, was available for private events. Tallula being one of our favorites, we were sold even before we discovered that it was “free,” in the sense that we did not need to pay to rent the space – only for food and drinks, with an easily-attainable minimum. A few e-mail messages and one telephone call later, we had the place booked and the date set.

The biggest challenge was finding a space to hold the ceremony. Neither J. nor I had any interest to have it in any kind of church (nor to pay for it!). The ceremony itself was to last about twenty minutes and would feature no music, aisles, veils, ring-bearers or flower-brats. Plus, from the very beginning we resolved to keep it private – the two sets of parents, a witness on each side, and us. Counting the witnesses’ guests, whom we didn’t feel right keeping away, and an extra witness on J.’s side (she couldn’t decide which of her two childhood friends to invite, so she invited both), the total attendance would be eleven. Our initial plan was to hold it outside, but mid-November in DC is dicey weather-wise, and we didn’t want to risk it (good thing, too, for it ended up pouring all day). However, it proved almost impossible to find a remotely nice space that could be rented by eleven people for an hour for a reasonable price. I called at least a dozen locations, and they were all happy to rent me giant Victorian houses, historic farms, or art galleries, for an entire day for rates starting at around $3,000 and ending somewhere near the size of the proposed auto industry bailout. A couple of people I talked to sympathized, but said that they simply had no arrangement in place to accommodate my requirements. We were starting to despair, and started preparing to hold the thing outdoors after all, wearing raincoats and huddling under umbrellas if necessary.

Finally, about two weeks before the date, one Ms. Carol Cope, the keeper of the Wilson-Farr House in Fairfax City, took pity on me and offered to argue before the board of the association that owned the house on my behalf and attempt to work out a deal. Having the wedding on a Friday helped. Two days later, we had secured the use of the Farr House from 3:00 until 4:00 p.m. for $150.

The day itself could not have gone off more perfectly. Out of town guests arrived on schedule and settled into their hotel in Arlington without incident. J.’s and my parents finally met each other at dinner the preceding evening and hit it off better than we could have ever hoped. Friday afternoon was unseasonably warm – mid-sixties – and very wet. J. and I picked everyone up at the hotel and caravanned out to Fairfax City, pressing J.’s father’s car into service in addition to ours. Though neither one of us goes in for Victorian décor, the Farr House was lovely, and perfect for a festive occasion. Rev. Dan, as we came to call him, to his credit showed up on time and married us in the living room. The text of the ceremony, which we assembled ahead of time out of segments that he e-mailed us, was actually nice – only a couple of Gods, no Lords or Jesuses at all, and some nice turns of phrase about facing the future together and all that good stuff (we've faced plenty over the years, but still). We had no official photographer, but immediately after the ceremony, our friend N.H. took some valuable time out of her involvement with Foto Week DC to stop by and shoot a few photos. At 4:00 p.m. sharp, we piled back into our cars and drove back to Arlington for the reception.

The reception was lovely. We had printed some invitations at home and sent them out about a month ahead of time. Too short a notice by wedding standards, I realize, but that, together with the fact that we were inviting people only to the reception and not to the ceremony, worked to our advantage. We ended up with everyone we wanted to see and no one we didn’t. Aside from our parents, there was no family (I have none in the Western Hemisphere, and none of J.’s cousins bothered to come), but all of our close friends made it, including a few out-of-towners. Even G.&N. from Ann Arbor, for whom it is usually very difficult to travel, and J.’s friend K.W., whom we haven’t seen in at least four years, found a way to be there. J. and I were thrilled. We had about twenty-five guests – an almost perfect size for a party. Amazingly, everyone took us up on the admonition not to bring presents.

The space was perfect, the drinks delicious, and the munchies up to Tallula’s usually high standard. Through no effort on our part, we even ended up being served by a local celebrity bartender. The service was excellent, and everyone at Tallula was friendly, helpful and professional. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

After two or three rounds of drinks, a bit of catching up, and some hugs and handshakes, J. and I said our good-nights, drove the wedding party, such as it was, back to the hotel, and went home a married couple.

The following morning, we took a cab to Union Station and caught a train to Philadelphia for a weekend-long micro-honeymoon. Watch this space for details.

PX

2008-12-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

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

National Symphony and Itzhak Perlman

2008-12-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-27T08:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-10-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T05:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-21T21:10:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

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.