Phoenix, Day One

It has been a long time since J. and I traveled anywhere together just to travel and get a change of scenery, so shortly after Christmas I booked two tickets to Phoenix, AZ, our old stomping ground (we had lived there on a couple of occasions, most recently from July 2001 until August 2003). The timing proved to be serendipitous as J. just came back from a three-week business trip to Watertown, NY – a god-forsaken, ice-bound town thirty miles from the Canadian border with nothing but an army base and a couple of old motels that would be infested with bugs if the bugs weren't all in hibernation. So at an ungodly early hour last Friday, we climbed into a cab and rode to National Airport to get on a plane to Phoenix.

There has been no shortage of press coverage for the supposed horrors of contemporary air travel, so in a direct expression of the “time is money” principle, we splurged on a non-stop flight from our luxurious little National that normally caters to lobbyists and consultants. Despite being a 7:00 a.m. non-stop flight, its stated on-time performance was a laughable 50% (is there a law that requires airlines to post this information? I cannot imagine any other business boasting that their performance is satisfactory only half the time), but on that day, reality was in our favor – we left and arrived exactly on time, and the flight was uneventful. I even fell asleep for a while – getting older does have its advantages – and dreamed, I kid you not, of an airplane hitting a building. The building looked like a warehouse, and there was no fire or explosion; the plane simply disappeared into the wall. The two rescue helicopters that showed up a minute later had US Airways logos on them.

Weather in Phoenix was uncharacteristically cloudy when we landed, and by the time we drove out of the monstrous car rental compound that some bozo committee decided to build a full four miles from the nearest terminal, it was drizzling. The car rental experience was the only glitch in our travels, if it can even be called that. Happy that we were getting the class of car that we actually booked (last time, the rental agent was intent on putting me in an eight-cylinder gas guzzler when I booked a compact, and was bewildered when I kept resisting even after she uttered the supposedly magic words “no extra charge”), we arrived at the designated space to find a filthy, mud-splattered Corolla with Louisiana plates and aftermarket hubcaps that looked like it was driven two-thirds of the way across the country five minutes ago. “Oh well, just transportation,” we thought, until we climbed inside and discovered that the entire interior was splattered with sticky stuff that looked like spilled coffee. At least we hoped it was. There was no reason to put up with this when the lot was chock-full of cars, so I headed back to the counter. To their credit, the Hertz agents had us in a brand-new and, more importantly, squeaky-clean Hyundai Sonata in five minutes. Would that all businesses had that kind of customer service.

Since my own car is receding further from modernity every day, this one bears mentioning. It was fantastic. It felt immense – far larger than anything I would want to drive on a daily basis – but it was also luxurious and very refined. Smooth, quiet, with adequate power from what I assume was its four-cylinder engine and a transmission that seemed tuned to get the most from it. I had no trouble finding a comfortable driving position, the visibility was good, and the sunroof would prove to be a welcome bonus once the rain stopped. This Hyundai was a far cry from a high-school friend's first-generation Excel I remember riding in back in the day. I cannot imagine a family of three or four, let alone a childless couple, needing anything larger or better equipped for daily transportation.

Driving around the streets of Phoenix again dredged up memories. As much as I believe that the darker side of human nature is the more fascinating one, even the crankiest among us can be amazingly positive creatures. When you leave a place permanently, you tend to retain the good experiences and confine the negative and the unpleasant to distant corners of your mind's attic, hopefully never to be retrieved again. I hate to say it, but I was feeling nostalgic for the good times and good places that J. and I experienced in Phoenix, even in the darkest hours of our life there. I also couldn't help reflecting, as I frequently have in recent years, how easy it is to blame a place for problems that in reality have nothing to do with it, and how guilty I was of doing that my entire time in Arizona. To be sure, a city can be objectively better or worse than another city. Transportation, weather, availability of activities you enjoy, ease of reaching other places where you want to go. Ultimately, however, a city is passive. It does nothing to you on its own; it requires you to form a relationship to it on your terms. When other important things in your life – social and romantic relationships, job, health, money – are in good working order, you can live almost anywhere, within reason. When they are not, however, it is often easier to move than to confront the problems. You think you're making a change, when in reality you're just running away, away from things than more often than not will catch up with you regardless of where you go. I would be far happier living in Phoenix – the very city I used to despise five years go – today.

By the time we were on the road, it was lunchtime, so we headed to an old favorite -- My Florist Cafe, which we were happy to discover was still in business. It was as good as we remembered it – freshly-made salads and sandwiches centered around the bread made at Willo Bakery next door. Willo bread, back in the day at least, was the best in Phoenix by a long shot, and some of the best I've had anywhere.

After a lunch of salad, antipasto and a glass of white wine to unwind after the flight (Grüner Veltliner for J., Albariño for me), we bought a few pastries to bring as an offering to C.&S., with whom we were staying and, fanning the flames of nostalgia, headed to another old favorite, Lux Coffee Bar on Central Ave. It was a complete anomaly when it first opened – D., visiting from New York in 2004, marveled that it could give SoHo coffeehouses a run for their money. I spent many an afternoon at Lux back in the day, slacking off when I should have been working, reading and chatting with the owner. It was quiet then, the empty lots around it just beginning to be built up with condos, the pawn shop across the side street conspicuously devoid of customers, and I worried that the place wouldn't stay afloat. It did, though the ownership changed and the prices rose a bit, and was now packed with students and hip twenty-somethings. The space was more cramped – the new owner added more furniture to accommodate the crowds, thankfully keeping to the mid-century modernist look of the original – and the local art on the walls, once carefully chosen and arranged, now sprawled from floor to ceiling and varied greatly in quality. It's not that the vibe was fundamentally different than it was five years ago, there was simply more vibe. Our cappuccinos, made by the surliest barista I've ever seen, were as good as we remembered them.

Our next stop was J.'s old office, where she shocked her former colleagues by showing up unannounced and spent some time chatting with a few of them. By then, it was time to head to C.&S.'s house in Chandler, in the extreme south-east of the sprawl that is Greater Phoenix. To give ourselves a tour, we forewent the highway in favor of surface streets. Much has changed. Downtown Tempe acquired some new buildings, but lost some old ones – the local institution Long Wong's, which we knew had closed, and our old favorite Caffe Boa, which we didn't. The park around Tempe Town Lake (a dammed up and artificially filled stretch of Rio Salado) was larger. The most obvious change, however, as we swung east on Apache Blvd., was the light rail line, which looked fully-baked here, with stations already named. More on the light rail later. We arrived at C.&S.'s house around 6:00, just beating C. himself.

We had befriended C.&S. towards the end of our stay in Phoenix in 2003 – J. worked with S. then. We didn't even had time to get to know one another all that well before J. and I moved. C. and I hit it off, however, and kept in touch. When I made a quick trip to Phoenix last year to connect with the artistic director of the Downtown Chamber Series, for whom I do some volunteer work, C. invited me to stay with him and S., and with some reluctance I accepted. I need not have worried – C.&S. are some of the most generous, welcoming and easy-going people we know. I felt instantly at ease at their house last year, and and grew more comfortable as C. and I got to know each other better over that weekend. It was even better now, with J. accompanying me. We caught up a bit, waiting for S. to get home from a meeting across town, then went to have dinner at Pita Jungle, another old favorite. Pita Jungle serves what I've come to think of a “gourmet hippie” food – mostly, but not entirely, vegetarian, some middle-eastern and some Mediterranean overtones, and lots of beans and brown rice. It's a distinctly West Coast cuisine, and it can be repulsive in the wrong hands, but Pita Jungle pulls it off beautifully, helped by a decidedly non-hippie wine and beer list. They also know not to mess with a good thing – the menu was exactly the same as it was five years ago. We loved every bite.

Back at C.&S.'s house, we caught up a bit more over a beer, then turned in, citing jet lag – we had been awake for 23 hours by then.

Elliott Smith

One part of G.&N.'s excessively generous Christmas present to me was a copy of Elliott Smith's Either/Or. It was they who turned me onto Smith in the first place, several years ago, by including the gorgeous "Between the Bars on" a mix. Eventually, I acquired a copy of his later XO and have been listening to it ever since. It has become one of my favorite albums. Even as I sang the praises of XO, however, G.&N., especially N., kept saying that Either/Or was better. Finally, I could compare them, and at the risk of violating the gift horse principle I had to conclude that I didn't like Either/Or nearly as much. There are several reasons for this, most of them not entirely good, I suspect.

First of all, G.&N. have talked up Either/Or so much over the years and raised my expectations so unreasonably that no record could meet them, in all likelihood. Second, I have been listening to XO frequently for over a year, and in music, rock and pop music in particular, familiarity doesn't breed contempt – quite the opposite, in fact. So any newcomer had to challenge a well-entrenched incumbent. Finally, and I am a little embarrassed even to be taking this into account, XO sounds better. Either/Or sounds like the self-produced album recorded in Smith's basement that it is. The dynamic range is compressed, the mix is muddy, and the nuances in both vocal and instrumental parts are lost more often than not. XO, on the other hand, is a polished, professionally engineered studio job. So on some level I am comparing apples to oranges, but the net result is unavoidable – XO is simply more pleasant to listen to.

From a purely musical perspective, Either/Or is good, but XO is excellent. It has everything – great melodies, killer arrangements, and solid playing. It is not original, but nothing in rock music is, and the models Smith imitates on XO – mostly post-Sgt. Pepper Beatles – are nothing to scoff at. By that measure, one could argue that Either/Or is more original, but as we all know, originality alone does not a quality record make (cf. Cecil Taylor, John Cage, and countless others). The melodies, to my ears, are not as strong, the songs are more monotonous, the arrangements simplistic.

To be fair, Either/Or does have its moments. The aforementioned "Between the Bars" is a masterpiece – melancholy, wistful, the sparse accompaniment beautifully supporting Smith's brooding lyrics. I really wish it sounded better. I suppose no remastering will help if the original tape is poor, and Smith, being dead, is not readily available to re-record it. "Alameda" hits the bull's eye with its Beatlesque refrain, and prefigures later tunes like "Bottle Up and Explode." "Punch and Judy" gets points for its general seventies' vibe. But as a whole, XO remains undeposed. I hear all of Smith's official albums are available on vinyl as of last fall. I'm planning to check out Figure Eight, reportedly his lushest and most orchestral, in the near future.

Spanish class

Spanish class number four last night. Going pretty well in general, though this one was a bit of a slog. Like French, Spanish has three basic kinds of regular verbs, and we learned how to conjugate one of them. Memorizing the endings is the easy part. It's the concept of conjugation that about half the people in the class -- I'd wager it was the half that have not been exposed to any foreign language at all until now -- had trouble with. Trying to figure out, on the fly, what person and number the sentence they are trying to say is in, and remembering the proper ending. This is where my French helped tremendously, so I was bored trough about half the class. This, by the way, I think is evidence for my highly unscientific idea that foreign languages should be taught "situationally" rather than analytically. Having read, and said, enough phrases with enough occurrences of pagamos, viajamos and cocinamos, most people will make an intuitive connection when to use llamamos and tocamos, and will use them correctly, without having to reason through the fact that this is first person plural and therefore must end on an ...amos.

More generally, a curious pattern is emerging among students. Some people just don't get it. They can't put together the simplest phrase or answer the simplest question. Some people sound so awful when they talk, and their accent is so hopelessly American, that even I, who doesn't know the language yet, cringe. The two sets of people, however, are almost completely disjoint. A certain young blonde whom I mentioned in a previous post speaks with an accent that screams not just "American" but "Valley girl," yet she makes very few mistakes, answers questions with minimal hesitation, and absorbs most of the vocabulary on the fly. Examples in the opposite direction are less striking (people who can't put together a sentence rarely have really good pronunciation), but still, on a couple of occasions, once the instructor walked them through the answer word by word, they sounded somewhat convincing. Evidence that analytical and auditory information are processed by different parts of the brain?

State-controlled bullies masquerading as big business, Round II

I am not usually in the habit of just posting a link without making at least some comment about what it links to -- those who are interested can perfectly well find the information themselves. This, however, is such a succinct yet comprehensive summary of what will happen after Russia's upcoming "elections" in March that I have nothing to add.

Spanish class

Third Spanish class last night. Going well, for the most part, but I have to tell you – Washington, DC is the worst place to ask people for their profession. It's bad enough in English, never mind in a foreign language. I, with some plausibility, could claim to be an engineer (ingeniero). There is a lawyer in the class (abocado). Everyone else, however, was impossible. Policy analyst? Human resources coordinator? Web producer? Congressional staffer? Complete disaster. No one should learn how to say “non-profit organization” in an introductory foreign language class.

Christopher Hitchens

I finished Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything this weekend. I must say that even though I agree with him pretty much 100%, I was underwhelmed. Whom is Hitchens writing for, and what is he trying to accomplish? Anyone who is likely to read this book doesn't really need to have it explained to them that the crusades, the Inquisition, and sharia have caused immeasurable suffering to countless people because they are based on dogmatic faith rather than rational principles. The vast majority of people with even a modicum of Western education would not find it in the least surprising that the Bible, or any scriptural text, for that matter, is a collection of fables written by many individuals, over the course of decades or even centuries, and are meant to instruct through allegories and analogies. And those who do view their chosen scripture as literal truth, whether in the Gaza Strip or in Springfield, MO, are not likely to run to their local bookstore for a copy of Hitchens. Even his observation that ostensibly secular totalitarian systems on the Stalinist model in fact replace, rather then negate, religions, while important and correct, is not really original.

On the other hand, Hitchens conspicuously ignores the one question that does have relevance to our understanding of human behavior. Namely, what continues to make religious practice attractive to otherwise modern, educated, tolerant and rational people? People who fully accept Darwin and the scientific method. People who advocate free inquiry and reject dogma. Is it the comforting nature of ritual in a world full of uncertainty? Is it a desire for moral guidance they feel is unavailable elsewhere? A lack of intellectual sophistication to understand the world to a sufficient degree in purely rational, scientific terms? And what of inner spirituality, unconnected to a specific form of organized religion? Is that even faith as he defines it? These are all fascinating questions, and an attempt to answer or at least suggest some approaches, would go a long way towards understanding human behavior. Yet Hitchens does not do this.

Perhaps this book was a pet project. In the Acknowledgments section, he even says that he has been writing this book his entire life, and will continue to do so. Fine. I guess we can allow this indulgence to someone who risked his freedom reporting from North Korea, and his life in Bosnia. For my money, however, I would remain perfectly happy if he stuck to topics on which he has something meaningful to say.

Thank you to C.S. for lending me the book.

Verbal diarrhea?

I just submitted a record review to the Washington City Paper. Their guidelines recommend a length of 700 to 2,000 words for music reviews. With a title and a byline, I managed to eek out 798 words, and that after stretching to find something negative about the record just to contradict the New York Times. Who in their right mind could write 2,000 words about a CD?! No recording, good or otherwise, needs to have that much written about it. The better the record, the less commentary it should need, and one can take this argument to its logical extreme and say that a truly great album needs nothing at all -- the music stands on its own 100%. That's pushing it, I realize. We are creatures of analogy and similarity, and even a sublime album could benefit from a few words about roughly what the listener should expect, in general terms. But 2,000 words?! Give me a break.