Spanish class

First Spanish class last night. Completely entry-level, for people with no previous experience with the language. It went well, and I must admit that while no foreign language is easy in objective terms, Spanish does seem to live up to its reputation of being relatively easily grasped by a beginner. To compare with French, the only other language I've studied in a classroom setting, Spanish is far easier not only actually to pronounce, but to understand and remember how letters are pronounced. Silent letters are always silent. Non-silent letters are pronounced the same exact way every time, or, at most, two different ways based on the letter that follows. Certain sounds that we have in English do not exist. The instructor claimed that there are only twelve basic sounds in Spanish – six vowels and six consonants. While that is a bit of an oversimplification, it is not that far from the truth. And before I am accused of overstating the case because of my knowledge of French which, like Spanish, is a romance language, I should point out that I am not talking about myself – I am talking about a class of about 25 people ranging in age from college student to retirement.

Sure, people did have the kinds of trouble that you might expect native speakers of American English to have. The rolling “r,” especially the double-”r”, which is actually a separate letter in the Spanish alphabet, gave people grief. Even those few who could roll their “r”s could not hear the different between the two. The distinctly emphasized “d” was a challenge – people tended to deemphasize it the way we do in English, which made it sound like the Spanish “r,” and claimed not to be able to hear the difference. There was one woman who, while she was catching onto the concepts relatively quickly, spoke with such a pronounced San Fernando Valley accent and inflection that it was difficult not to laugh. She looked the part, too – bleached blond hair, tanning-booth tan and a pink sweatshirt. To think that in most Spanish-speaking countries, she would be the archetypal American...

By and large, however, people were getting it. After about two hours of class, everyone was able to read simple prose from the first few pages of the textbook with minimal stumbling, and make themselves comprehensible. Try that with French or German! I attribute the success rate to the ubiquity of Spanish in our daily life. In any urban area in the US these days, there is simply no way to avoid hearing it – you hear it in stores, you hear it on the radio, you hear it blaring from low-riders on a Saturday night. And our brains absorb it, whether we realize or not, and become comfortable with its sound. It may be a foreign language, but it is a lot less foreign than just about any other.

From the “Only in Washington, DC” Department:
Only in Washington, DC, do you learn how to say “Environmental Protection Agency” in the first few minutes of an introductory foreign language class. For the record, it is Agencia de Protección Ambiental.

Rustico

Dinner at Rustico with a couple of friends last night. With a perfect combination of creative new cuisine and bar favorites and a beer list that makes the Brickskeller seem old and dusty, it has become one of my favorite restaurants in the area a while ago, and last night only reinforced it. Though I was very tempted by the curry and sweet potato soup, it was a cold and rainy night, and I was in the mood for comfort food, so I opted for pizza. I had had Rustico's pizza before, but for some reason it tasted particularly good last night – the crust had a perfect yeasty chewiness to it, and the anchovies seemed extra plump. Against my better judgment, I ate the entire thing. An even bigger highlight, however, was Gouden Carolus Noël – a Belgian Christmas seasonal ale which I had never had before. Belgian Christmas ales, as much as I like them, can get a little syrupy, but this one was perfectly balanced and far less sweet than I expected. It had a slightly resiny quality and a pronounced flavor of black liquorice. Delicious; strong at 10.5% ABV, but Rustico gave me a sensibly-sized portion in a genuine Gouden Carolus glass. Next winter, I will have to try to find it in a bottle.

Bill Evans, You Must Believe in Spring

For Christmas, J.’s father gave me a copy of Bill Evans’s You Must Believe in Spring. Recorded in 1977 with Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums, it ended up being Evans’s last studio recording with a trio. It is absolutely spectacular.

It would be easy to dismiss the album as a downer: Evans dedicates the opening B-Minor Waltz to his estranged wife who committed suicide shortly before the sessions; We Will Meet Again, another Evans original, is dedicated to his brother Harry, who suffered from clinical depression and also committed suicide around that time, and Evans closes the original LP with the theme from the film and TV show M*A*S*H, subtitled Suicide is Painless. I suppose the fact that I love the record so much says something about my own natural predilections, but I do think Evans is doing much more than metaphorically slashing his wrists. True, much of the music is melancholy, and Evans favors minor keys more than usual (and he had always been more generous towards them than many other jazz musicians). But it is also beautiful in a way that is readily apparent. You don’t have to know a thing about jazz to hear instantly that this is simply gorgeous music. Evans’s soloing also sounds like he is doing much more than just crying into his beer. It is energetic, full of momentum, and the ease of his phrasing belies the underlying rhythmic complexity. The CD also includes three bonus tracks that lean much more in the direction of straight jams. They don’t have the expressive power and lyricism of the main LP material, but they do prove than Evans was still perfectly capable of cooking.

The standouts, for me, are the opening B-Minor Waltz which, while too short to develop properly, functions as a great intro and sets the mood for the rest of the material, the title track, and We Will Meet Again. The award for the most interesting track, though, has to go to Jimmy Rowles’ The Peacocks. Whether Evans dusted off for the occasion the music of Ravel and Bartok that he had studied decades earlier, or whether he was a keen observer of the then-new players coming to prominence in the seventies, I don’t know, but his solos’ harmonic and melodic turns are dark in an atmospheric sort of way that the rest of the album isn’t. I can hear Keith Jarrett, Ritchie Beirach and Steve Kuhn in microcosm.

I have only one complaint – Eddie Gomez again. Too loud, too assertive, not nearly enough subtlety. The more I hear him with Evans, the more surprised I am that Evans has kept him as long as he did. I guess he was willing to suffer Gomez's brash soloing in exchange for his expert comping. Overall, though, the CD is highly recommended. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start with Evans. Not as classic as his Riverside stuff from the fifties, but probably more accessible to a novice.

Heart surgery

I just found out that a friend's father had heart surgery over Christmas. He seems to be doing well, but still -- what a way to start the year. Best wishes and a speedy recovery to him.

Belgian ales

Woo-hoo. I'm finally hip. Evidently, Belgian ales are officially hot. I've been drinking them for years. Now, if I was a real hipster, I would need to stop immediately and find something new to drink. Instead, being the curmudgeonly old man that I am, I am going to continue drinking Belgian ales complaining all the while how trendy nightclubs are driving up the already high prices.

Walter Tejada

When I moved from DC to Arlington last February, I consoled myself by thinking that the relative loss of the urban environment I loved so much would be partially offset by not having to deal with activist, nanny-like local governments under the likes of which DC and Maryland have been suffering since time immemorial. Instead, we have Walter Tejada, our newly elected county board chairman. Apparently, he is threatening to push on us a triple whammy of proposals – banning trans fats in restaurants à la Montgomery Cty., banning smoking in public places and encouraging people not to own cars. The last one is the least offensive – it amounts, as far as I can tell, to an advertising campaign, though there are murmurs of a shared bike program. Spending public money on such advertising is problematic, no question about it, but I suppose we need to learn to live with the fact that if that's as far as it goes, we're not so badly off.

The other two are completely infuriating, but not because I want to eat Wonder Bread slathered with margarine while puffing on a Marlboro. They cut straight to the question of a government's job. I've struggled for years with the idea of public health, and finally concluded that there is no such thing. It is not the government's job to ensure that its citizens are healthy, even if “healthy” is defined according to well-researched science. It's simply none of its business what lifestyle choices its citizens make. But wait, you might reply, we're only talking about the public sphere, and it is the government's job to care about that. It is not trying to prevent you from eating trans fats at home, after all, only in restaurants. Even if you accept that premise, the argument doesn't hold water. A restaurant is not public sphere; being open to the public does not make it so. It is a private enterprise, and the government has no business dictating what goes on in its kitchens (unless they are making a dirty bomb out of smuggled uranium, I suppose, but even that is a tough sell unless the government can prove an intent to detonate it). Banning trans fats in a public school cafeteria is one thing. Trying to ban it in restaurants is something entirely different, and much more sinister. Someone who cares enough about trans fats has the responsibility to learn which foods have them and then avoid ordering them when going out, or patronize restaurants, which already exist, that voluntarily eliminate them.

Smoking is no different. I concede that second-hand smoke from your cigarette is more harmful to those around you than the trans fats in the margarine on your plate, and more difficult to avoid. But the principle is the same. Non-smoking restaurants and even bars have long existed, and if the government stopped trying to ban smoking by fiat, they would become a tremendous business opportunity, and I guarantee you many more would open very quickly. The same public/private principle applies: I can buy a smoking ban in a county courthouse, but not in a privately owned business.

About the only sensible thing Tejada has proposed so far is allowing the addition of rental units to private houses, though unfortunately it's couched in affordable housing rhetoric. House owners should be able to add rental units to their houses simply because the house is their private property. And if your neighbors don't like the fact that a large immigrant family just moved into your English basement, it's not the government's job to ensure that your neighbors are happy – it is the neighbors' own.

Home, sweet home

The holiday travels are over. A little hectic, but mostly good. Part One took J. and me (separately – J. flew, while I drove up the following day, with a detour to my parents' house in N.J.) to Schenectady, NY, to spend Christmas with her folks. It was my first ever actual Christmas there despite the amount of time J. and I go back, and I am happy to report that I escaped mostly unscathed. I even cooked Christmas eve dinner – pan-seared salmon, roasted sweet potatoes and spinach sauteed with garlic, preceded by a romaine lettuce salad with a walnut-gorgonzola dressing. Dead-simple and delicious, it came off without a hitch, even on J.'s parents' glass-top induction range. Everyone loved it, and the food snob in me was happy to have an opportunity to introduce people to salmon that hasn't had the life cooked out of it. Christmas morning was spent opening presents, the worst part of which was the fact that no coffee was made until after the entire affair was over. Next year, I'm marching into the kitchen and making a pot, manners be damned. In the evening, it was J.'s mother's traditional Christmas dinner -- ham, kielbasa, pierogi and sauerkraut. It did not feature anything even remotely green or crunchy, but was delicious nonetheless, simply because I never eat that kind of food. For someone who professes to hate cooking and is utterly incapable of relaxing in the kitchen, she did a great job. J. and I drove home the following day after meeting an old friend of hers for breakfast.

It has been said that spending winter holidays with a family gives one insight into its workings and dysfunctions that is otherwise unavailable. I have to agree. Though I've known these people for fifteen years, the visit did give me a new appreciation for some of the things that go on under the surface.

Part Two kicked off last Saturday, when, after two days at home and work, we drove back to Fort Lee, N.J., for New Year's eve with my parents. On Sunday, we spent the day in Manhattan, attempting to go to MoMA but failing. It was so insanely mobbed that we would not have been able to see a thing, and since admission is now $20, we bailed. Instead we walked around, J. did some shopping, and we had some coffee at La Lanterna. We had dinner back in Fort Lee, at Silver Pond – for my money, one of the best Chinese restaurants in existence. It was great to have a quiet day to ourselves. New Year's Eve, of course, was my mother's traditional big dinner, and it was as delicious as always – I can't think of a single occasion when it didn't come off beautifully. We drove home New Year's day, managing to beat the traffic for the first time in years, and catching up on sleep upon arrival. It's great to to be home.