Archive for August, 2010

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Busker Blues

August 29, 2010

I’ve been thinking more about the Joshua Bell story and why it’s so uncomfortable to be the one person standing and listening to a street performer.

During the summer there was an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where young country music star Miranda Lambert sang her #1 hit “The House That Built Me” to the people who had just received their dream house, mortgage-free. It’s a sentimental song, but she sings it with genuine emotion, and it’s a song that, if it catches you in the right mood, will leave you weeping.* These people sat on a couch watching her play the guitar and sing. They looked absolutely miserable. They had wept when they saw the house, wept again as they walked around it, but now they sat dry-eyed and looking like they couldn’t wait for the moment to end.

It was sooo uncomfortable. And I think I know why.

Art conveys emotion to its audience. When that art is something static, like a painting, we can absorb the feeling without self-consciousness. We know that it moves us, and we enjoy the experience because we have no expectations that the painting is watching us watching it or that the artist is nearby waiting for our reaction.

Performance art is different. When it’s you one-on-one with the performer, it feels like all of the emotion is directed at you alone. It feels personal, and that’s an intimacy that’s too intense to handle most of the time. You become self-conscious that the performer has expectations about a reaction from you, and you start to worry that you’re not conveying the correct one. That self-consciousness takes you out of the moment. I think we need a co-audience to deflect some of the emotion so that we can actually appreciate performance art.

I think if you re-did the Joshua Bell experiment and planted a small crowd in front of him you’d see a completely different reaction from passersby. I’m curious what y’all think.

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*This song always catches me in the right mood. It’s embarrassing, actually.

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Pearls Before Commuters

August 28, 2010

Today I stumbled across this fascinating old article from the Washington Post about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

A reporter challenged him to play in a Metro station as a street musician to see what would happen. Would commuters on their way to work recognize the transcendent beauty of his playing, or would they hurry on by?

Bell had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall three days earlier. Tickets for okay seats ran $100 each.

As a former commuter to work, I suspected I knew what would happen. The one and only time I stopped on my way to work in six years was when I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car. A marching band followed by a parade of elephants wouldn’t have slowed me; I was never an early arrival with time to spare.

Some folks worried beforehand that L’Enfant Plaza would have a crowd control problem on its hands with Bell playing, but out of nearly 1,100 commuters that passed by him in the 43 minutes he played, only one recognized him. And a crowd never gathered.

It’s been theorized that beauty is contextual, and I can agree with that. A sunrise when you’re running late getting the kids to school is nowhere close to as lovely as one that arrives after you’ve spent the night in restless sleep wishing the day would come. Especially if that restless sleep is a result of nightmares about evil, supernatural nocturnal creatures coming after you.

I have weird dreams. But that’s beside the point.

I think being in the right frame of mind for beauty is important. As a museum curator in the article pointed out, it’s easier to appreciate a great painting in a museum than to appreciate the same painting reframed and stuck in a coffeehouse with a $150 price tag slapped on it.

But I think that’s only part of the problem. Another part is recognition by others. I think we have so many stimuli coming our way that one way we filter them and decide to stop and pay attention is if other people are already paying attention. Who looks at the sky unless someone is pointing?

Think about paintings again. What painting commands the most attention and respect in the world?

It’s a great painting, sure, but the personal experience is far from transcendent. It’s just you and 100 jostling other people behind a velvet rope 10 feet back looking at a painting through bulletproof glass. But people want to see it because they know it because everyone talks about it.

My favorite paintings are at the Prado in Madrid. But again, this is not original. I was primed for them because at 19 I desperately wanted to go to Europe and I had taken art history and my best friend in childhood had a copy of Velazquez’s Las Meninas hanging in her house. And they’re in an art museum, not a coffeeshop.

I also like this one in the Prado by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son:

Did I mention the nightmares?

Going back to the subway station, if no one else were stopping to listen, would the music penetrate your consciousness to the point that you’d stop, especially if you were in a hurry?

I’d bet not. But if a huge crowd were gathered, you’d probably stop to look and ask people what was going on. And when they told you a famous musician was playing, you might stick around.

It’s an interesting article, and has video attached. Check it out.

EDIT:

The Big M reminds me that another reason that people aren’t stopping is that it’s uncomfortable to stand close to street musicians, who are just on the edge of panhandling. If it’s just you, you feel weird. If you’re part of a crowd, you don’t. Case in point: note that the only person who stood front and center to watch Bell was a woman who recognized him and knew he wasn’t really a street performer. Even the man who recognized his talent (if not him) and was enthralled by it stood away against a pillar out of the direct line of sight. When he had to get to work, he snuck in to drop money in the violin case and scurried away again as quickly as he could.

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Mysterious Benedict, Part 2

August 28, 2010

I tried a new voice on as I read to the kids today. The character is called Constance Contraire, and she’s supposed to be a cranky, little thing. I decided she needed to sound nasal and annoying.

My six-year-old stopped me after the first line. “Who is Constance?” she asked. I explained that she was the character we had just read about.

She looked shocked. “My God!” she exclaimed, “she sounds like that?!”

After I stopped laughing, we worked together on an acceptable voice. So much for creating characters on the fly.

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The Mysterious Benedict Society

August 26, 2010

I *love* reading to my kids. We read intermittently over the summer, but I’ve decided to do nightly reading now that school has started. We wait until Dad is home and read as a family.

He plays Angry Birds on his iPhone and listens. Or surfs Craigslist for Corvettes. And listens.

He can multitask. I’m bad at that. I can’t even listen to the radio while I drive.

Reading to the kids used to bore the heck out of me until several years ago when I got smart enough to dump the repetitive picture books and pick up children’s novels instead. I do very theatrical readings, which is ironic because I always sucked at theater. (Is that ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense or in the literary sense? I always get those confused.)

Children’s novels are a good fit for my style. They’re generally not very subtle. Over-emoting is encouraged.

Here’s the weird thing, though: after interpreting characters on the fly for years (I never read ahead because then it would be boring) I’m becoming good at it.

I’ve had my challenges this summer. Make up melodies for the written lyrics that Pa plays on his fiddle in Little House? No problem. Alternate between a male American narrator and a female British narrator in Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid? Nailed it. Keep 20-odd characters in that novel straight,  including accents from the American South, the Middle East, Germany, France, and Russia? Exhausting, but done. And trust me, if I miss one, the kids call me on it.

We’re reading this one now, a book I picked up purely because of its cover:

I’m a sucker for any children’s book that reminds me of Edward Gorey, the brilliant 20th century Gothic illustrator. This one has the added benefit of being a puzzle book, á la The Westing Game, a childhood favorite of mine.

It’s so much fun. We’re three chapters in, and we’ve got a mysterious and quirky puzzle plot that has all four of us guessing, plus five distinct characters to voice so far. (Sticky Washington is my favorite to voice — my version of him has a slight Spanish accent that’s soft and lilting and makes every statement into a question.)

The kids hang on my every word, and even though I know it’s the story that rivets them I feel like I’m a part of it too. I get to inject my own creativity into each book. That’s really gratifying.

One thing I’m learning as an aspiring writer: reading aloud exposes bad dialogue very quickly. Luckily we’re not having that problem with this novel.

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Just in Case You Were Thinking About It

August 25, 2010

I love this sign. It’s outside the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. What would Socrates say?

P.S. Am looking through vacation photos now that the kids are in school. I’ll eventually write about The Bath.

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Our Little House

August 24, 2010

School started Monday. I finished my summer reading to the kids this afternoon with the end of Little House in the Big Woods, a book we read together three years ago (half my daughter’s lifetime) and that the kids wanted to revisit.

I’m so glad they did. I had forgotten how delightful this book is.

We finished re-learning about how Ma made cheese and how she prepared hominy (which she called hulled corn) and how Pa convinced all his neighbors in the Big Woods of Wisconsin to hire an eight-horse-powered (literally horse powered) threshing machine that could do three weeks of work in a single day. In the end they are ready for winter, with their ample food stores in attic and cellar, and Pa plays his fiddle, sending us out to the strains of Auld Lang Syne.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

That’s the end.

I found myself having to stop and take breaks reading this last bit because I kept choking up. Maybe it was Auld Lang Syne that set me off. I have a pre-existing weakness for that song because it’s what George Bailey sings when he’s reunited with his family and friends after he realizes that his life is worth living.

More than that, though, it was the understanding that Laura wrote this book in her 60′s, looking back on a way of life that by then no longer existed. I’m reading this book about a time more than 130 years ago, and little Laura thinks, “this is now”, and I’m looking at my own “now” and seeing how different it already is than the “now” of our last reading this book together, and I know that in a blink I’ll be in my 60′s and today’s “now” will be a long time ago.

What can I say? I’m a sentimental fool.

But now that I sit and think it out, I realize that I was this sentimental last time I read the book. And as much as I loved being with my 3- and 5-year-olds, I wouldn’t trade today’s “now” to go back to then. I’m enjoying today too much.

So I feel better.

Mostly.

Just trying to be honest.

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Long Live The King

August 17, 2010

I never know when a teaching moment will show up. Today it happened when I looked in the fridge at lunchtime and noticed that we were out of jelly.

“How about PB and banana?” I asked the kids. “That was Elvis’ favorite sandwich.”

“Who’s Elvis?” they wanted to know. Which was a better response than the expected, “Yuck!”

So while I slapped together the ingredients, I told them. “Elvis was a singer. He was one of the most successful singers who ever lived. He brought the blues to rock and roll.”

“What are the blues?”

This question caused me to bust out in my own blues riff about being out of jelly and having to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They weren’t impressed.

“You don’t sound very sad,” my boy told me.

So then I did my best imitation of Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog. It’s sort of mid-tempo, and she’s disgusted with the guy she’s singing about. They seemed to like that one better.

“Elvis changed it like this,” I said, and I did my rendition of him. I’m two lines in before my girl starts dancing. So then I pulled out my laptop and we listened to the real Elvis. They forgot all about sandwiches and started rocking out to The King in the kitchen.

“Y’all have no idea how radical this music was. When Elvis first came out, this was the kind of music people listened to…” On my computer I pulled up a bunch of doo-wop and mid ’50s rock. We listened to it in all its chorale earnestness and sleepy tempo.

“This is really boring,” my girl said.

“Now Elvis.” I put Hound Dog back on, and they were rocking out again. We danced to All Shook Up, Jailhouse Rock, and Don’t Be Cruel. They wandered off to the living room when I put on a ballad, so I took that opportunity to finish assembling lunch. Afterward, we watched this YouTube of Elvis’ breakthrough performance on Milton Berle:

“Elvis looks like a scientist,” my boy said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s wearing a white coat. He looks like he could do experiments when he’s not singing.”

I thought that was pretty funny.

As it turned out, the experimental sandwiches were kind of yucky. But we had fun.

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The Truck

August 13, 2010

The Big M has long had a dream of owning a Corvette. To help make this dream a reality, he sold his nice truck and used a portion of the proceeds to buy a less nice truck as his daily driver so as to free up funds for the dream car.

Our boy has been very involved in the process. Every time Dad takes out his wallet, an eight-year-old voice pipes up. “Dad, is that the Corvette money?” On the rare occasions that yes, it is some of the Corvette money being spent on a necessity, Dad must endure the wrath of a small boy.

It’s been a lot of fun watching the two of them search Craigslist together for dream cars and daily drivers. They discuss options and colors and condition quality ad nauseum, and I’m glad to let them do it.

Our kid is very opinionated, and very interested in making his opinion heard. When Dad decided to buy a particular daily driver that the boy didn’t like, he let his father have it. And when Dad cut off the audio assault, he moved to a written one. Here it is:

I don’t know if I find the assertion that “it smells weard” funnier or the line about “it had ants so it creaped me out.” Or maybe the fact that he split up the word “truck” so as to stay within the margins.

To bolster his argument, he got his sister in on it:

You’ll have to insert “The Boy” into the blank part. But he had her sold on the windows not rolling down part.

Alas for those two, their dad bought the truck anyway. It seems for now that he has rid it of ants, and he figured out how to replace the window motors so that they now roll down. We’re hoping it will be a reliable daily driver while he searches for his dream car.

Happy Friday.

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I Hope This Isn’t Too Silly to Post, But…

August 7, 2010

Yesterday I saw about the cutest thing I’ve seen in a while: my 8-year-old boy dressed up in his brand-new Cub Scout uniform for his very first Cub Scout meeting. He was so proud in his new cap and blue shirt and shorts with the scarf and belt and matching socks. I had spent part of the afternoon applying all of the required insignia. And there was a lot.

He was a little apprehensive about starting scouts. I can appreciate that. It’s scary joining a new group, especially one that’s already established. But he got to his meeting, and one of his best friends from school was there to greet him, so it started great.

The meeting got better, apparently. The guest speaker was a local sheriff’s deputy, there to teach the kids about safety and to fingerprint them. First of all, police-types are right up my boy’s alley. Secondly, he loves to match wits with adults, and this man was asking questions.

“How do fingerprints work?” asked the deputy.

After some false starts and hemming and hawing from various scouts, my boy jumped in. “Your fingers have oil on them, and when you touch things, it leaves the oil behind in the shapes that are on your fingertips.”

“Right,” said the deputy, who then moved his presentation to the next Power Point slide which, according to The Big M, said almost verbatim what our boy had just said.

I knew sending him to Spy Camp this summer would pay off.

Later the deputy was showing the kids how to dial 9-1-1, and showed a picture of various kinds of phones. He pointed to a rotary dial phone. “I’ll bet none of you know what this is.”

Au contraire. “Actually,” replied my boy, “my dad and I are restoring an old phone like that.” And they are — it’s an old black rotary dial wall phone from my grandparents’ farm. It’s almost ready for install in my library. It’s pretty complicated to get it to work on a digital phone line, apparently.

Question after question, the deputy tried to stump my boy. He finally succeeded when he asked my kid to dial 9-1-1 on his cell phone. It was one of those sliding types, which my son hadn’t seen before. That got him.

I’m so looking forward to this season of scouting!

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