web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
For the past few years, Utopia (2019) by the Danish instrumental duo Bremer/McCoy has been my go-to album when I’m spending some alone time and I don’t know what I’m feeling. It’s calm, positive music, with slow, sparkling keyboard melodies dancing around bouncy acoustic bass lines. It’s not going to be a downer, and equally at home when I’m staring into the dark night and trying to wake up during a morning shower.
I’m pleased to see they’re now on Luaka Bop. That David Byrne!
There’s Las Vegas and there’s Las Vegas. Technically the Las Vegas Strip isn’t even in Las Vegas. It’s in the Clark County townships of Winchester and Paradise. The name Winchester was chosen by the public in a naming contest. “It was said to have more of a Western flavor” than the other nominations. The name Paradise was chosen by five casino owners in celebration of its shelter from the Mojave Desert and municipal tax collectors. And somewhere off the Strip, far from Paradise, was a resort that my aunt owned a timeshare in.
I’ve heard that timeshares suck. I don’t understand how they work. I do know that my family ended up in Las Vegas often. I don’t know it if the timeshare ended up less expensive than regular hotels, but we used it.
One day in 2002, I was waiting outside the resort for the Deuce to take me and my family to the Strip. There was a guy, a townie, waiting for another bus. I saw two things that would become omnipresent over the next 10 years. I saw a pair of Apple earbuds, and I saw him reach into his pocket, pull out his iPod, change a song, and put it back into his pocket.
I may have seen The iPod ads with the dancing silhouettes. If so, they hadn’t made an impression. In an instant I saw that the iPod was freedom. No more flipping tapes. No more pretending that the Walkman’s anti-skip buffer was enough to make CD playing portable. I had to have it.
I never quite owned an iPod classic. Their time came and went. For years they were too expensive. I had a knockoff, then lost the knockoff. The iPhone came out and I begged my dad for one. In the Apple Store, my dad mugged a heart attack to the guy ringing us up after hearing the total. He thought he was hilarious. The Apple guy awkwardly stood waiting for him to stop laughing at his own joke. I wanted to die.
This weekend I bought a secondhand Panasonic CD player with integrated iPod dock. I love designer CD players from the early to mid 2000s. They will never design them like that again. It’s all Bluetooth speakers from here on out.
It’s hipster consumerism, but I can’t apologize for being sentimental. It’s a beautiful thing to construct romance and meaning from consumer technology that was everywhere basically yesterday. I’ll find the poetry in the Bluetooth speaker too. Give it time.
I am preparing to move house in a few weeks, so I have been going through and downsizing some of my things. I am very selective about the items that I choose to attach to. At least that’s what I tell myself; for the past three years I have moved at the end of the summer, and at each move I find more things to let go of. This move, one of the big changes is that I am ruthlessly culling my sheet music library. For the past 15 years, I have basically said yes to everything, and I built up a full 2X4 IKEA Kallax full of music. This has meant a lot of wandering down memory lane and revisiting all of the piano music that brought me to the present.
I am always surprised to find the pieces of music that are 80% finished. There’s a Haydn sonata that I worked on in college but I could never get the fast movement going fast enough. The last piece I worked on with my hometown piano teacher was a Clementi sonatina, and it too has piano markings that stop on the second to last page. I was so close. I was also drowning in shame, I hated the scale and arpeggio practice needed to smooth out my performance, and I didn’t know how to use a metronome.
I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it was never clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triaged effectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the open ticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I was tasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trend in the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down to zero.
So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. […] I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.
The trend reversed immediately after that: we were able to close several hundred tickets immediately as duplicates, and triaging new issues now took minutes instead of a day. It took I think a year or more to drive the count to zero, but it was all fairly smooth sailing. People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.
I have a very quick intelligence, but it has some limitations. When problem solving, if I find the right answer, I will find it first. If I don’t see the answer quickly, I will never see it myself. The patient work, the “grind,” is very hard for me. If I can see the next 10 steps to a fix, I get the dopamine reward. Completing those 10 steps does nothing for me.
In piano, like so many other things, doing the small patient work is the whole game. I love improvising music the most. I can sit down at a piano and play for hours before running out of juice. Yet for every one hour that I spend working through a piece of written music that is pushing the edges of my skill range, I get better and sharper in a way that I couldn’t when improvising. Practicing improvisation makes me quicker and calmer while performing, but it doesn’t make me better.
I’m still learning to love it, though.
This delightful tweet from Linda Holmes sent me down the rabbit hole this afternoon exploring “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” and learning a little more about its composer, Frank Loesser.
“Sit Down” is a showstopper from the musical Guys & Dolls: the gambler Nicely-Nicely bullshits a temperance congregation into buying that he has been reformed after a religious epiphany in a dream. A context that isn’t as visible to today’s audiences, as both the early 1930’s in which the musical is set and the early 50’s in which it was staged blur together in the rear-view mirror, is that Dolls was a loving tribute to the outsize characters of a time past; it is a similar project to the 80’s movies/musicals that pay tribute to 50’s and 60’s styles, like Grease, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, American Graffiti, and Little Shop of Horrors. Most of Dolls is written in a sophisticated pastiche of Big Band and Swing-era jazz, and it’s a mark of success that so many songs from the musical have become standards. For story reasons, “Sit Down” also draws upon the densely chromatic close harmony choral style that you might be familiar with from Disney animated musicals like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, or Dumbo, and the white gospel/tent revival style from a song like “In That Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’.”
Frank Loesser was a truly fascinating American character. His father was a pianist and made his living teaching, but for whatever reason—reading between the lines here, some tough personality clashes—his father never formally taught Loesser. He was self-taught on several instruments on the incredible strength of his ear, but seemed never to develop his musical reading or writing skills. Still, I think all of that dense European classical harmony is shot through his music.
The first song of his that really came to my attention is “Inchworm,” from the movie musical Hans Christian Andersen. It has a beautiful childlike melody, and wrings so much sensuality from small and deceptively simple harmonic movements. [In addition to the many jazz and pop artists that covered it, it was a special favorite of David Bowie, who wrote, “Ashes To Ashes wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for Inchworm. There’s a nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.“]
Loesser was always connected to music but had to make his way in the world from a young age and made his living as a young man in various creative fields like advertising and business. His first entrance into show business was writing jokes for Borscht Belt comedians, then started writing lyrics for other composers. It is astounding to me, given how fresh and unique his musical style was, that he was well into mid-career and his forties before he was able to compose and write lyrics for his own musicals.
The lyrics are great! Steven Sondheim singled out Loesser as having virtually perfect lyric writing technique, marveling at his ability to sound both conversational and stylishly playful in verse. Just look at that line I quoted in the title: “by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat”—those marvelous assonant plosive p’s in sharp and lapel and c’s in chekered and coat (by assonant, I mean the same consonant sound is repeated, and by plosive I mean that the consonant sound is made by a sudden burst of air). Those are the kind of words that demand to be sung, even if they weren’t also funny and charming and told a story.
But it’s the music that has been stuck in my ears all day. I love the way that the sopranos in the chorus keep going up the pentatonic scale to hit the high note at 1:16 in the first video, and the way the chorus builds a chord in the phrase after at 1:23. I love the surprising cadences that lead into the verse, the chordal motion echoing church hymns. For such a big company number, the verses are surprisingly slow and its an incredible role for somebody who has the energy to ham it up.
Walter Bobbie at the 1993 (94?) Tony’s
Just a murderer’s row of early 90’s talent, including J.K. Simmons, who is dead center and looking totally committed (this was even before his breakout role on Oz as a sadistic gay neo-Nazi), Nathan Lane, and Ernie Sambella (who would voice Timon and Pumbaa a few years after this performance).
This was before Burgess’ breakout performance as Titus Andromedon on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and really shows off his incredible upper range. Worth it to watch the moment when he had to roll with switching the mics due to a technical malfunction on live TV!
I have a secret to admit—I’m not actually much of a musicals or theater person, very much an interested casual fan—, so I didn’t know what the Guthrie Theater was. If this is representative of the average quality of productions out there in Minnesota, though, I think I need to make a visit to Minneapolis. Fantastic singing, incredible costuming and choreography.
Rowe has a wonderful voice for this character (he does an incredible vocal trick at 2:02 that made my jaw drop). The tempo here is a little sleepy and takes a lot of energy out of the number, imho, but the orchestration is a little less swing-band and a little more Dixieland/hot jazz, which I thought was cool.
Given the influence of Glee on theater kids, gay boys, and future Broadway cast members of my generation, I thought it was interesting that “Sit Down” was featured on the very fist episode of the show, showing how central it is to the American songbook.
This was far and away the best high school performance I found on YouTube. Ashton Harris did a great job here. If you look through other high school performances, you can see where the trouble spots for less-trained voices are: In the narration verses, a lot of the long belted notes are high in the range, so if the young singer does not have strong pitch control it is very easy to go sharp. The choruses are very lyric-dense for the soloist, the words come fast, the tempo is fast, adrenaline is cranking your heart rate up and throwing your internal clock off, everyone around you is singing at full volume so you can’t hear the pit very well, and the line is syncopated. Almost all of the high school soloists rush through “And the devil will drag you under” and end up a full beat ahead by the end of the choruses.
Here’s the man himself. He had a perfectly serviceable voice, and it’s interesting to hear this simplified solo piano reduction by the man who wrote it, it shows what he thought was the essence of the song, and which lines he liked to mug with.
Loesser’s other big Broadway hit was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which also has a faux-revival big production number, “Brotherhood of Man.” NBC inexplicably chose this number for their network promo in 2012, which I was introduced to by this tweet. It feels insane to see this chosen, given NBC’s institutional problems with sexism in leadership and the no less than 4 sexual predators featured in the casts here. Every segment has something hilarious to look at. [Also it’s catchy as fuck and I will pay you $10 to tell me what that insane dance move that Ken Jeong does is.]
A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a newish person I’ve been enjoying getting to know better, who is about 10 years younger than I am. I was talking about playing music in high school, and he asked “Did you ever dream of becoming a big pop star?”
That question caught me off guard. I tried not to get it on my face but inside I was wincing. Even worse, I then got totally in my head, getting stuck in a thought loop about whether that was a valid reaction and oh god what does it mean that I’m even picking apart my reaction, and on and on. The part of me that was melting down heard the question as Obviously you are not a pop star, and nothing about what I know suggests that you want to be famous, but you play music and people who play music generally want attention, so did you ever dream of becoming a big star? and if I’m going deeper, and not flinching from the sensitive part of that interaction, I think I also heard it as You are a nobody, and you don’t seem like you’re trying to be a somebody, so did you ever dream of being somebody?
Obviously, that is a pretty dark way to interpret a totally normal question. It just hit really close to the thoughts I use to beat myself up, the broadcast that Anne Lamotte calls “radio K-FUCKED” that becomes depression when it’s turned up too loud. I walk around every day with at least a small part of me telling myself that I’m a nobody who spends all his life force maintaining a life that I don’t want. Sometimes countering that voice gives me a higher self-esteem, other times I feel a flood of shame for thinking that I could be better.
It is true that I wanted to be a pop star when I was a teenager. But here’s another truth: I know so much more about what being a pop star is. I am grateful that I wasn’t my family’s breadwinner since I was 16, like Beyoncé, or sexualized from a young age through beauty pageants and needing to immigrate alone to a different country as a teenager like Rihanna, or navigating having my image made over by coaches and dealing with body image issues in the public eye like D’Angelo. I know now that whether I have talent is as important a question as whether I had rich parents. I know that the whole conversation about what is luck and what is talent is not real. It’s always both, and if they lived 1,000 times, in 999 of them we wouldn’t recognize their name.
This all came up while I was reading Kate Wagner’s excellent piece in The Baffler about the broken meritocracy in classical music:
Classical music is cruel not because there are winners and losers, first chairs and second chairs, but because it lies about the fact that these winners and losers are chosen long before the first moment a young child picks up an instrument. It doesn’t matter if you study composition, devote years to an instrument, or simply have the desire to teach—either at the university level or in the public school system. If you come from a less-than-wealthy family, or from a place other than the wealthiest cities, the odds are stacked against you no matter how much you sacrifice, how hard you work, or, yes, how talented you are.
Wagner describes how classical music requires a long, expensive training process as a price of entry to even compete for a small number of high paying spots at the top of the pyramid. And, as always, social connections and family wealth allow you to jump the line:
The prestige of classical music obscures a range of unseemly realizations: arts managers are union-busting bosses like any other; private conservatories cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend partially because schools figured out they can charge that much and people will still go—either out of desperation to make it or because certain students are wealthy enough to afford it. And, at the same time, scholarships are cut under austerity deanships, tenure is eliminated, and adjuncts are paid poverty wages with no benefits, while the administrators get bigger and bigger paychecks. The rest of us sacrifice to prove our dedication, go to school full-time, work under the table, and teach for free in order to get a degree. And if you bow out of this gladiatorial arena, where only the affluent and well-connected are armed, like I did, like many of my friends did, you are understood to be a failure who didn’t try hard enough. In the meantime, the gilded band plays on, scoring the lives of the well-heeled and propertied.
There are some truths that it’s taken me a long time to learn. There are some that my head knows and it’s taken a lot longer for my heart to learn them, and there are some that my head knows and my heart still doesn’t believe. One such truth is that what I love about classical music—the thing I find in it that mirrors something that is in me— is not the same thing as the institutions, the traditions, and even the people that produce it. It is always in the interest of the institution to claim that they are the sole caretakers of the art form, and to conflate any change to the way that the art and their position in the hierarchy with a threat to the art form. I couldn’t see that college, and I paid a price for it. I always saw myself in the music. But month by month, semester by semester, the more that I learned about this cultural world that I wanted to take my place in, the less I saw myself in the people in it. The dissonance of trying to maintain a self-mythology in which I was a genius in training with a bright and shiny future ahead of me in the face of this discouragement was stressful, and I couldn’t keep it going for very long. That experience left me with this profound feeling of failure which has taken me years to dig out of.
Another truth that’s taken me even longer to come to is that this fantasy self that I carry around, the version of myself who was even luckier, who got the breaks that I didn’t or took advantage of the opportunities that I blew or had the mentors I didn’t meet—that person is not real. If I’m really looking deeply inside, even though my head knows better, on an emotional level, I think I do believe that if you add up the sum total of all the advantages and opportunities I’ve had, and compare them against the next person’s, it all kind of evens out. Therefore, there’s some kind of “perfect playthrough” where making all the right decisions and getting all of the breaks means that I get success, however I envision it. Because my other self is not real, he never makes mistakes. Because his perfect future is known and mine is very not, he can have a confidence that all of his compromises were worth it that I will never feel as I make my way through living with mine.
When I get hung up on ideas about myself, particularly when there are Principles and Beliefs attached, my therapist asks me, “Does this belief serve you now?” For the longest time it seemed like that doppelganger was my motivator, the source of my ambition. Now it’s only around to compare myself negatively to, and it probably was never as good a motivator as others. When I fixate on imperfect choices, I end up looking at my life with contempt, and that doesn’t serve anyone. On the other hand, letting go of the idea of the perfect playthrough still scares me, and still feels like a betrayal of so many past iterations of myself. I think I’m there in my head, my heart still has a ways to go.
I don’t know what’s on the other side of that belief, I can’t even imagine what it might feel like to move through the world without that drag. A quality I admire, though, is the courage to look at what is, to remove the filters and fears that adjust reality to suit us. I am not afraid to look at myself, and that’s the truth. Going back to the question, I wish I had just said, “Yes.”
hammer & jack 