Saturday, January 28, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
At Home
I've been a performing musician for a decade, give-or-take, so I've played in variety of places. Inside (preferred). Outside (never as good an idea as the person who asked you to do it thinks it is). Big concert halls. Small concert halls. Universities. Black box theaters. Castles. Art museums. Lobbies. Conference rooms. Nursing homes. Elementary schools. Bitterly cold churches. Blazingly hot churches. Churches of blessedly middling temperature. Churches with boats hung across their upper reaches; with elaborate wooden screens; empty; full; round; orange; dark; with galleries; with cats; with crypts. More churches.
But I'd never, in all that time, performed in a private home. Which meant yesterday, when I played a house concert down the road in Charlottesville, was my first time.
The older we get, the fewer first times we have, so I tend to sit up and take notice when one comes my way. And this particular first time was worth noticing- house concerts may masquerade as smaller versions of traditional concerts, but there's some fundamental chasm, some alteration in the essence of the enterprise that sets it apart.
If you give a house concert, you like to entertain. You have a good-sized house and are willing to invest in a case of wine. You know some musicians, or you approach some musicians, and you send out a finite number of invitations, usually 20-30, to your friends and acquaintances. You set up a slew of chairs in your graciously-appointed living room; you serve wine and deserts. You charge $20-35 per person, which is how you pay the musicians. Then you sit back, sip your hooch, and enjoy a concert in the privacy of your living room.
As an audience member, I am all for house concerts. They're short, intimate, and tasty; they take music down off the shelf and put in in your hands for you to examine and wonder at and love. By bringing music to you, if forces you to engage with music in your own context, in the wild, so to speak, as opposed to within the square cage of the concert hall. It's the way music used to played -in the chamber- yet, somewhere along the way, at least in classical music, we've left it behind.
Accordingly, the format requires some adjusting to. We classical musicians have to re-evaluate, and perhaps relinquish, many of the trappings of traditional concert-giving. Sweeping in from offstage is awkward when offstage is the coat closet. Dressing in all black smacks of the funereal, as opposed to the professional, and maintaining the fourth wall, or silence in the face of your audience, seems cold.
Ultimately, we'll have to accustom ourselves to bringing more party-going into our playing. More jokes, musical and non-. More entertainment; more stories; back-and-forth. It's still a cocktail party- even if you do happen to be lugging a violin.
In the mean time, go host some house concerts!
But I'd never, in all that time, performed in a private home. Which meant yesterday, when I played a house concert down the road in Charlottesville, was my first time.
The older we get, the fewer first times we have, so I tend to sit up and take notice when one comes my way. And this particular first time was worth noticing- house concerts may masquerade as smaller versions of traditional concerts, but there's some fundamental chasm, some alteration in the essence of the enterprise that sets it apart.
If you give a house concert, you like to entertain. You have a good-sized house and are willing to invest in a case of wine. You know some musicians, or you approach some musicians, and you send out a finite number of invitations, usually 20-30, to your friends and acquaintances. You set up a slew of chairs in your graciously-appointed living room; you serve wine and deserts. You charge $20-35 per person, which is how you pay the musicians. Then you sit back, sip your hooch, and enjoy a concert in the privacy of your living room.
As an audience member, I am all for house concerts. They're short, intimate, and tasty; they take music down off the shelf and put in in your hands for you to examine and wonder at and love. By bringing music to you, if forces you to engage with music in your own context, in the wild, so to speak, as opposed to within the square cage of the concert hall. It's the way music used to played -in the chamber- yet, somewhere along the way, at least in classical music, we've left it behind.
Accordingly, the format requires some adjusting to. We classical musicians have to re-evaluate, and perhaps relinquish, many of the trappings of traditional concert-giving. Sweeping in from offstage is awkward when offstage is the coat closet. Dressing in all black smacks of the funereal, as opposed to the professional, and maintaining the fourth wall, or silence in the face of your audience, seems cold.
Ultimately, we'll have to accustom ourselves to bringing more party-going into our playing. More jokes, musical and non-. More entertainment; more stories; back-and-forth. It's still a cocktail party- even if you do happen to be lugging a violin.
In the mean time, go host some house concerts!
Monday, January 16, 2012
The Uncoupling
The Uncoupling is Wolitzer's lastest novel, and I went so far as to contemplate paying $12.99 for it on the Kindle before I came to my senses and checked it out of library, together with the subject of my last post.
The book has got a strange, sweeping premise: the women of a close-knit community, in this case the faculty and students of a large suburban New Jersey high school, succumb to a spell that causes them to lose all desire to sleep with men. There's a Lysistrata angle- the high school is in the midst of mounting a production- though Wolitzer's novel is quite far from being a modern retelling of that play.
The premise was big, but the execution, I trusted, would be small enough to keep me interested. And, indeed, there were details aplenty. The sex lives of five or six women were entered, explored, and, abruptly, deflated. The fallout was dissected. Happy marriages were thrown on the rocks. Some women experienced empowerment; others, helplessness.
Wolitzer, like any good scientist, like any good novelist, is asking questions: What role does female desire play in our lives? What does its absence or presence mean to us? Who are we, as women, apart from our desire? The questions are not uninteresting and, in fiction, they are not particularly well-charted. The fictional upswing and downswing of male desire is by now so familiar it's reducible to a couple of viagra jokes and a nod to Philip Roth, but women's wanting, for the most part, has gotten short shrift.
With all that going for The Uncoupling, I thought I'd be no less bespelled than the novel's protagonists. I wasn't. My apathy had less to do with Wolitzer's writing (close-grained as promised, and wry) and more to do with the fact that there is, ultimately, a critical difference between science and fiction.
Both novelists and researchers experiment, it's true. They ask questions; they frame scenarios to probe for answers. But where scientists merely observe results, fiction writers are responsible for creating their own experimentors, for bringing to life their own question-askers and hypothesis-generators. Wolitzer's enchanted protagonists make no choices. Unlike Lysistrata and her coterie, they do not choose chastity but are compelled to it; Wolitzer's women don't trade away their desire or suppress it, but merely proceed without it, like rats trundling through a maze.
Without choice-making, without want, there's not much story left. Wolitzer plumbs the dregs, but, like her frustrated menfolk, I want to whine that it's not enough.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
I Put a Spell on You
I should clarify, for any non-readers out there, that this marks a clear reversal of the proper order: customarily, you go to the library and become enchanted thereafter.
Or, more explicitly, you go to the library to become enchanted, to select a particular oblong, to take it home knowing that, despite its weight of less than a pound, it will inhale you, revealing itself to be magically capacious enough to take the whole of you into itself and spit you back out, visibly unaltered but with all of your organs, all the furniture of yourself, rearranged.
But I was already enthralled this particular Wednesday. Or, more exactly, in thrall. Eleven months into accidental Kindle ownership, I had become a One-Click-depressing, digital-book-jonesing Amazonian rat, nosing at plot summaries and thinking hey, what's another $9.99? Again and I again I pushed my button; again and again, the sweet words flowed.
I went to the library to break the spell.
It was not easy, this disenchantment. It required the payment of $9.60 worth of fines accrued during the great insect battle of 2011, during which concerns like reading revealed themselves to be as important, as necessary, as vestigial limbs, and during which the vacuum cleaner assumed a place within my personal cosmos of ineluctable significance: that time when, in the smother of summer, William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways lay mouldering, unread, in a plastic bin.
There was an address change to take care of, the ritual placating of the dragon of the anti-theft machine. But soon enough it was mine, a real book, square and hefty and, due to its advanced age, not yet available in a Kindle edition. It was a book I miraculously hadn't managed to read by an author I reliably enjoy: Friends for Life, by Meg Wolitzer.
I paraded home. I curled up victoriously on the couch, made tea, prepared to be pleasantly engulfed. Meredith and Lisa and Ann were 28; they lived in New York; they had industrious, if angsty, love lives....small pings of familiarity were sounding themselves within me, like arthritic joints giving notice: you've felt this before.
By this time I was eighty pages in. Eighty pages in to a book I'd definitely read, sometime within the last decade but probably not within the last three years, because the heroines, at 28, reeked freshly, painfully, of youth; they'd been older the first time around. Eighty pages into a book the title of which, the jacket of which, the plot summary of which, for the love of God, had, in succession, failed to ring any bell.
It's undeniable; my mind is going.
This is not news. It's been a slow process of mental retrenchment, of resorting to list-making and calendar-keeping and all the circus tricks of leading one's life I remember, as a child, I scorned. Up through middle school I used to keep track of my assignments -multiple assignments for various classes, plus a full calendar of extra-curricular activities- in my head. Thursday, I'd think, and everything I had to do that day would appear before me. A planner, like an outline, like the dreaded "pre-writing" was just one more idiotic, wholly unnecessary intermediary adults kept trying to thrust upon me.
If the purpose of adulthood, of living, is to humble you, I am humbled.
At 31, I depend on ICal. I try to make to-do lists and can't recall what I was supposed to put on them. I forget appointments and lessons and get-togethers; I need reminder alarms and grocery lists and Facebook's sorry proddings to recollect my friends' dates of birth. In college, I easily tracked the names of everyone in a 100-member cooperative. Now, I can't retain the names of the group of a dozen music students I see monthly.
My mind is going.
I am, it should be acknowledged, mildly terrified. There's Alzheimer's in my family, a lot of it. What if the disease is misunderstood; what if you decline your whole life, but it's only in your sixties and seventies that other people start to notice? I miss, achingly, my own reliability, the trustiness of my short-term recall. I've never trusted much, in life, but I used to trust myself.
On the other hand, I'm sitting here with a book by one of my favorite authors. Sure I've read it before. But I don't remember a thing, so it's fresh and ready and waiting in the way of the best unread books, the most alluring doors, the muffling, late-spring snows that take what you love and transmute it -enchantment!- into a vast and terrible world.
Monday, January 9, 2012
TV or not TV
(It's a teensy bit irritating, incidentally, to have a written record of your New Year's resolutions. Before I blogged I usually managed to forget about them sometime between March and April, rendering the question of success deliciously moot.)
Anyhoo, according to the archives, January of last year, I was:
1) Resolving to dwell.
2) Detoxing from an overdose of TV.
This year, coincidentally or not, I am:
1) Resolving to dwell.
2) Fighting an unholy and financially disastrous addiction to my Kindle. On the flip side, TV watched thus far in 2012 = one 25-minute episode of Parks and Rec.
I can't tell if this marks progress or very clever loss-leading marketing on the part of Amazon.
I do know that I am constitutionally resistant to the sort of living-in-the-moment-ness to which I have aspired and continue to aspire, which probably means I should stop bothering to try to come up with novel & exciting New Year's resolutions and accept that I'll be desultorily dwelling all the Januaries of my days.
I also know that reading, though considerably more expensive than streaming free crap though Hulu, is a deeper, richer, dwellier experience than TV could ever be. I just hope it doesn't bankrupt me.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Winter Blues
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
2011: A Year in Gratitude!
- 12.31.11: Terminal! The movie, not the cancer.
- 12.30.11: Slow
- 12.29.11: Drive
- 12.28.11: Lemon ricotta pancakes
- 12.27.11: Pizza & beer
- 12.26.11: Boxing
- 12.25.11: Gifting
- 12.24.11: Tree's up
- 12.23.11: Reading in bed
- 12.22.11: Getting there
- 12.21.11: Internet
- 12.20.11: Sweet potato; art museum
- 12.19.11: Sunday NYT
- 12.17.11: Aerobics
- 12.16.11: Sleep
- 12.15:11: Teaching
- 12.14.11: Coffee
- 12.13.11: Coffee
- 12.12.11: Coffee
- 12.11.11: Singing
- 12.10.11: 60-minute run
- 12.9.11: Cider with rum
- 12.8.11: Crossing stuff off
- 12.7.11: Reading
- 12.6.11: Free coffee redux
- 12.5.11: Free coffee
- 12.4.11: Seat warmers (Volvo!)
- 12.3.11: Free wi-fi
- 12.2.11: Alterra (Milwaukee, WI)
- 12.1.11: Nice neighbors
- 11.30.11: 31 years
- 11.29.11: Gifts by mail
- 11.28.11: Go go go!
- 11.27.11: Lieabout
- 11.26.11: Slow drive
- 11.25.11: Pie!
- 11.24.11: Sun; quiet; mountians; coffee
- 11.23.11: On the road
- 11.22.11: Hoofing it
- 11.21.11: We made it!
- 11.20.11: Safe and sound
- 11.19.11: Reading in bed
- 11.18.11: Couple hours off
- 11.17.11: Just a sprinkle
- 11.16.11: Pizza
- 11.15.11: Houseguests
- 11.14.11: Toil
- 11.13.11: Green Tea
- 11.12.11: Marathon
- 11.11.11: 11.11.11
- 11.10.11: Really exciting low voice
- 11.9.11: Someone to care for me when I'm sick
- 11.8.11: The right to vote
- 11.7.11: Saltines/gingerale
- 11.6.11: Netflix
- 11.5.11: Sweat
- 11.4.11: The bursting trees
- 11.3.11: Help
- 11.2.11: Vodka tonic
- 11.1.11: Coffee
- 10.31.11: Pooh costume
- 10.30.11: Pesto
- 10.29.11: Sleep
- 10.28.11: Cash
- 10.27.11: Day off!
- 10.26.11: Daze
- 10.25.11: Warm fall days
- 10.24.11: First homemade meal in a week
- 10.23.11: Waffles
- 10.22.11: Kleenex
- 10.21.11: Drugs
- 10.20.11: Back roads
- 10.19.11: Coffee; taco
- 10.18.11: Coffee
- 10.17.11: Coffee
- 10.16.11: Half a day
- 10.15.11: Free tickets
- 10.14.11: Old Cabell Hall
- 10.13.11: Teaching
- 10.12.11: Sleep
- 10.11.11: Nate's Taco Truck
- 10.10.11: Coffee!
- 10.9.11: Midwesterners
- 10.8.11: Cheese
- 10.7.11: Fall
- 10.6.11: Writing
- 10.5.11: BOOM
- 10.4.11: Green tea
- 10.3.11: Coffee
- 10.2.11: Free WiFi
- 10.1.11: Enthusiasm
- 9.30.11: Zingerman's
- 9.29.11: Cake
- 9.28.11: Retinue
- 9.27.11: I only work there part-time
- 9.26.11: Parks & Recreation
- 9.25.11: Frozen pizza
- 9.24.11: Evening sky
- 9.23.11: WS
- 9.22.11: A multiplicity of jobs
- 9.21.11: Pesto
- 9.20.11: Five-minute commute
- 9.19.11: Cheese
- 9.18.11: Cool & cloudy
- 9.17.11: Runrunrun
- 9.16.11: Cooldown
- 9.15.11: Coffee shop
- 9.14.11: Lime
- 9.13.11: Preschoolers
- 9.12.11: Light
- 9.11.11: Freakonomics Radio!
- 9.10.11: Louise Penny
- 9.9.11: Reality check
- 9.8.11: Diminishing numbers of fleas
- 9.7.11: Gin
- 9.6.11: Coffee
- 9.5.11: Labor
- 9.4.11: Cookies
- 9.3.11: Music makers close by
- 9.2.11: Wine
- 9.1.11: Card of appreciation
- 8.31.11: Job flexibility
- 8.30.11: First time
- 8.29.11: Locomotion
- 8.28.11: Electricity
- 8.27.11: Shelter
- 8.26.11: Wine & friends
- 8.25.11: Dark clouds
- 8.24.11: Walking
- 8.23.11: Windows; wood floors
- 8.22.11: Tudor's Biscuit World
- 8.21.11: Catching up
- 8.20.11: Feast
- 8.19.11: Chocolate Moose
- 8.18.11: Chocolate
- 8.17.11: Wednesday
- 8.16.11: Tricky Fish
- 8.15.11: Slow morning
- 8.14.11: Fruit snacks
- 8.13.11: Rain
- 8.12.11: The Parking Lot Movie
- 8.11.11: Quiet
- 8.10.11: VMFA
- 8.9.11: Project Runway
- 8.8.11: Coffee shops
- 8.7.11: Bacon
- 8.6.11: Stone
- 8.5.11: Printers
- 8.4.11: Perseverance
- 8.3.11: Back to bed
- 8.2.11: Coffee
- 8.1.11: Weariness
- 7.31.11: Summitting
- 7.30.11: Vows
- 7.29.11: Fire
- 7.28.11: Midnight sun
- 7.27.11: TSA
- 7.26.11: Not sure
- 7.25.11: Friends
- 7.8.11: Cafeteria style
- 7.7.11: Good news
- 7.6.11: Mille Regretz
- 7.5.11: Extra blankets
- 7.4.11: Pleasant folk
- 7.3.11: Old mountains
- 7.2.11: Cincy
- 7.1.11: Getting through it
- 6.30.11: 3.5 cents per page
- 6.28.11: Really good coffee
- 6.27.11: Bike path
- 6.26.11: Leaving
- 6.25.11: Sleep
- 6.24.11: Zolpidem
- 6.23.11: Streaming video
- 6.22.11: Better coffee than expected
- 6.21.11: Hold your breath
- 6.20.11: Road BBQ
- 6.19.11: Porch; Globe Road
- 6.18.11: Meadow; fat man squeeze
- 6.17.11: Cornbread & honey
- 6.16.11: Mountains
- 6.15.11: Harrisonburg
- 6.14.11: I'm a regular
- 6.13.11: Backwoods Italian restaurants
- 6.12.11: Skipping church
- 6.11.11: Saturday
- 6.10.11: Lazy daze
- 6.9.11: Empty UVA
- 6.8.11: Perversity
- 6.7.11: Heat
- 6.6.11: Coffee
- 6.5.11: Gibbons
- 6.4.11: Castoffs
- 6.3.11: Carbonara
- 6.2.11: Yoga
- 6.1.11: Up and down
- 5.31.11: Good review
- 5.30.11: Empty town
- 5.29.11: Coming home; also, chocolate-covered espresso beans
- 5.28.11: Fortitude
- 5.27.11: Old dudes
- 5.26.11: Articulation
- 5.25.11: Safe travels
- 5.24.11: Pad thai & gossip
- 5.23.11: Coffee
- 5.22.11: Consolation
- 5.21.11: Beethoven; pink velvet jacket
- 5.20.11: Cream ale
- 5.19.11: Deli
- 5.18.11: Listening
- 5.17.11: Peonies
- 5.16.11: Our offer was accepted
- 5.15.11: Froth
- 5.14.11: Slow day
- 5.13.11: Decision-making
- 5.12.11: The fillings were bad, but not dire
- 5.11.11: Porch
- 5.10.11: My last kid is my easiest kid
- 5.9.11: Sleep
- 5.8.11: Chives
- 5.7.11: Guac
- 5.6.11: Empty restaurant, 9:30 AM, Friday
- 5.5.11: Glottis
- 5.4.11: Prix fixe
- 5.3.11: Free lunch
- 5.2.11: Teacher coffee
- 5.1.11: Enthusiastic amateurs
- 4.30.11: Someone to take care of me when I am sick
- 4.29.11: I own a swimsuit and it looks ADEQUATE!
- 4.28.11: No choir
- 4.27.11: Thunderstorm; porch
- 4.26.11: I am doing a good job
- 4.25.11: Coffee! Again! Suprise!
- 4.24.11: Lamb
- 4.23.11: Tears
- 4.22.11: Middle-aged women
- 4.21.11: My car is sturdy and small
- 4.20.11: Other folks' cooking
- 4.19.11: Nice people
- 4.18.11: Xanax
- 4.17.11: Sun; deer; home; singing; cats
- 4.16.11: Pie
- 4.15.11: Breakfast
- 4.14.11: Clear skies; mist over the rivers
- 4.13.11: Vacation. Even if unpaid.
- 4.12.11: Glossy Maganizes
- 4.11.11: Azalea garden; pollen; wind
- 4.10.11: Pavane
- 4.9.11: Biscuits; family
- 4.8.11: Theater
- 4.7.11: Pianos in empty rooms
- 4.6.11: NPR streaming
- 4.5.11: Lie in
- 4.4.11: Complementary skill sets
- 4.3.11: Recovery
- 4.2.11: 10K
- 4.1.11: Walking
- 3.31.11: Kindness
- 3.30.11: Light white wine; risotto; peas
- 3.29.11: Coffee!
- 3.28.11: Budding
- 3.27.11: Song
- 3.26.11: Forecasted snow
- 3.25.11: G&T at the art museum
- 3.24.11: Half and half
- 3.23.11: I figured out how to stream NPR
- 3.22.11: Daylight
- 3.21.11: Jambalaya for lunch
- 3.20.11: Gracious hosts
- 3.19.11: Old friends
- 3.18.11: Lowlands
- 3.17.11: Daffodils; lunch
- 3.16.11: Bad coffee
- 3.15.11: Coffee
- 3.14.11: My throat no longer feels as if it is trying to crawl up my nose
- 3.13.11: Teaching
- 3.12.11: Cancelled
- 3.11.11: Online yoga
- 3.10.11: The rain held off
- 3.9.11: Prosciutto & peas.
- 3.8.11: Extra hour
- 3.7.11: Coffee
- 3.6.11: Brass band
- 3.5.11; Movie night
- 3.4.11: Oberlin
- 3.3.11: QET payments, come to Mama.
- 3.2.11: Red wine
- 3.1.11: All the tomoatoes of tomorrow
- 2.28.11: Circumstance
- 2.27.11: Pomp
- 2.26.11: Shimmer
- 2.25.11: Flattery will get you everywhere
- 2.24.11: Coffee & chocolate
- 2.23.11: All by myself
- 2.22.11: Development
- 2.21.11: Kindle
- 2.20.11: Dinner invitations
- 2.19.11: Sweat
- 2.18.11: Teapot
- 2.17.11: Play date; sweather weather
- 2.16.11: Half-price bottle night
- 2.15.11: Shivery, silvery clouds
- 2.14.11: Millionaire's Meatloaf
- 2.13.11: Live auction
- 2.12.11: Biscotti
- 2.11.11: Tin roofs
- 2.10.11: Pro.duc.tive
- 2.9.11: Walking to the library = double pleasure whammy!
- 2.8.11: Very very early to bed
- 2.7.11: Walking
- 2.6.11: Artichoke dip
- 2.5.11: Widow maker chili
- 2.4.11: Back roads
- 2.3.11: Relief after puking
- 2.2.11: Fog
- 2.1.11: One mile to the library
- 1.31.11: Sun
- 1.30.11: Leftovers
- 1.29.11: Clean clothes
- 1.28.11: Cocktail
- 1.27.11: Lox in the Hood
- 1.26.11: Lightening
- 1.25.11: Coffee
- 1.24.11: Old friends
- 1.23.11: The smile before the cue
- 1.22.11: Too many cookies
- 1.21.11: Purcell
- 1.20.11: Chicago
- 1.19.11: Hidden chocolate
- 1.18.11: Soba noodles
- 1.17.11: MLK
- 1.16.11: Sprouts
- 1.15.11: Croutons
- 1.14.11: Downton Abbey
- 1.13.11: Bad puns
- 1.12.11: Coffee
- 1.11.11: Coffee
- 1.10.11: Coffee
- 1.9.11: Secret poems
- 1.8.11: Running in the snow
- 1.7.11: Tom Yum
- 1.6.11: Yanking up the blinds
- 1.5.11: Sleeping
- 1.4.11: Reading to kids. Handing them back.
- 1.3.11: NPR
- 1.2.11: Dwelling
- 1.1.11: Lifting fog
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