The Labyrinth and the Garden

Joining the Ranks

2009-01-15T22:21:00.000-08:00

I've tended to think of myself as young, though--heck, I was born in 1942, and that makes me 66. But I still think of myself as young. But, playing in the bands I'm playing in, I'm starting to adapt to the reality that I'm one of "those" people--people whom the really young, like I used to be, back in the day, looked at and hoped they would never become. I confess--I looked at old people and subconsciously thought, I'm not one of them, and they make me uncomfortable because they're old. Even some musicians, who are now friends, I looked at with suspicion--they were old, and I didn't want to be associated with them.

But I've become nicer to old people, more considerate, more supportive--I cheer them up (I think), I'm friendly, I listen to their tales. And I've discovered more of a fellowship with them. Some guys I thought were pretty alarming are funny. They may not be physically as spry as they were, and some move pretty slowly, but they're quick, witty, they want to be liked (just like me), and they appreciate being appreciated and treated like real people, not "old" people.

Truth to say, a number of them (especially the musicians) have been better than I will ever be--they've been first call studio guys, played with the likes of Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton. Now they do any playing they can just to keep playing, and they often still sound very good. A couple lament the loss of their chops--they sound good now, but when I tell them so, they say I should have heard them 20-30 years ago. I bet. They were monsters.

I used to think, wow, these guys are way older than me. But they're not. Maybe 10-20 years, and that's not sounding like much any more. I'm not that far behind them chronologically, though they out-experience me by light-years. The best I can do is keep my chops up to their current level and don't make mistakes they're going to look down on me for. But then, maybe they wouldn't anyway--they've been there too, and they're pretty generous-spirited. Maybe they've gone through the same transition I'm going through.

A Superseding Commandment

2009-01-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

There's always a big to-do about the Ten Commandments. Put them in courthouses, make public displays, blah blah.

But few people commit murder, and coveting isn't necessarily detrimental to mental health--it often leads to achievement. Not all fathers and mothers deserve to be honored. The name of the lord is taken in vain all the time without much effect one way or the other except to vent the speaker's frustration, which might be beneficial.

So let's try an eleventh commandment: gain a benefit, return a benefit. This is for the edification and moral/ethical instruction of all people who are continually takers and rarely givers, who, if they see an opportunity to get something, seize it without regard for their own obligation to be honest and decent. This might be considered a version of "do unto others," but stating it this way adds a dimension of reciprocality. "Do unto others" has the doer always doing; gain a benefit, return a benefit makes it possible for the doer to get some benefit from the world; the do-gooding is not one-sided.

The Minotaur with a Steel Plate

2009-01-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

"Hey, get me a coke . . . "

That was the cordial greeting I received the first time I met Joe Vento. I was subbing on a gig, he was eating dinner, I introduced myself, and that was what he said. No more, no less. No, "Hi, glad to meet you, welcome to the band. I'll be through in a minute here."

And the evening went downhill from there. His claim to fame is that his accordion stopped the bullet that would have terminated him with extreme prejudice in the military (I don't think he was being shot at because of his playing, but I can't guarantee it).

Now, years and crotchety, crusty years later, he has a dilapidated big band that plays Wednesday eves. at Los Hadas Mexican Restaurant in Northridge.

He conducts this band with a baton.

A woman dressed in her finest plumage--she used to be some kind of dancer--flits and cavorts fitfully in front of the bandstand.

He tunes up the women, but not the men.

The fourth trombone part is played by a man with an amplified bassoon.

A high school kid in the trombone section made a mistake, and Joe humiliated him publicly.

I mentioned Joe Vento to a trumpet player friend, and he said, "Everyone has a Joe Vento story."

If someone calls me to play Los Hadas on a Wednesday night, I know whose band it is, and I'm always busy. There are certain labyrinths I refuse to venture into--I know the minotaur already.

Music as Mayhem: New Year's Eve with Zing Zany

2009-01-01T01:07:00.000-08:00

Music is the garden, where we should be able to wander and thrill to the sounds, the sights, the inner excitement, serenity, beauty, sense of spiritual uplift, joy.

Then there's the labyrinth: Zing Zany and His Musical Mobsters of Mayhem

Mayhem gig, where there's no intonation, where the trumpet plays way too loud--all the time--or tries to squeal every hit instead of just hitting the note clean--sounds like mice in heat; and the drummer crashes away, unaware that he's driving the band off the cliff, and the leader tells Wanda Warbly, an invited guest singer--old but not wise beyond her years--he's got a chart of a tune she knows, and she should sing it, and Wanda says she doesn't know the chart or the key, and he says, you know the tune, don't you, you can do it, wait 8 bars and come in, so she stands there not sure how to count 8 bars, or what her first note should be, and the band slams mercilessly ahead in its fanatical devotion to music while she stands there waiting for something that might be a cue, but the chart is over, and she maybe tried half a verse somewhere in the middle. And she bitches at the musicians, but it's not their fault--it's the leader's and hers, because she didn't bring any charts for herself. Who said a chick can just stand up and sing--hey, that's for the movies, not pretenders to stardom. This is the real world--the world of Zing Zany.

So Wanda says, I'll do "My Foolish Heart" in F, okay? And she looks at the vibes player, who has the Real Book but the tune is in Bflat, but he figures he can sound it out--after all, how many notes are there in the dumb tune anyway--and he does, more or less, but the bass player doesn't know the tune in that key, and the rest of the band is at sea without life jackets, the fog has settled in and the radio's broke, and the drummer, chewing on strands of his beard, brushes blithely along blinking into the disco ball, and the trombone player tries a few notes in various keys to see if anything works, and nothing does so she ducks aft, and the singer is humiliated and leaves early because the one song she called disintegrated under her and she sank in it like quicksand, or she ran aground in the fog, and the band cut itself loose from its moorings and drifted into a perfect storm, and that's the leader's fault too--when he told the vibes player the singer would sing a few tunes, the vibes player warned him that if she didn't have the music in her key, it was going to be a problem, but the leader ignored that, and when the singer told the leader the first tune, with the band, sounded awful, the leader said, "Well, I liked it." It should have been a warning sign that the leader had a shirt with flames on it because the gig went up in smoke--where's there's fire, smoke ensues, and the Latin tunes got kicked off at "Cherokee" tempos--they were in the key of frantic frenzy, eyeballs blazing like stunned bunnies in the cartoons. The whole gig was a musician's nightmare. But this is the kind of thing Zing Zany loves. It's such a release from life in the Zing Zany motor home.

And then it was six minutes to midnight, and the band riffed through a countdown by the DJ, until 1 minute to 12, when the Zing Zany suddenly screamed, "Auld Lang Syne in F!!!!!" and started playing the tune too soon, and the male singer said, no, no, wait until midnight, and the Zing, who was playing so loud he couldn't hear, blasted ahead anyway, and the rest of the band started at midnight on the dot, and the band was in two places simultaneously, as though Charles Ives had written "Auld Lang Syne," and the party horns tooted, and the DJ put on Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly with Me," craftily mixing it with a rap song with f words, and some disco, which was all drums and thunder, and the band wondered whether they should take a break or pack up, and Zing said, "We're going to play a couple more," but the band, assessing the determination of the DJ and the flagellations of the dancers, said no, they were packing up, and Zing saw his musicians drifting away, putting their instruments in cases. And the leader, who owns a piece of Chinese junk in the shape of a motorcycle, is looking for the straitjacket he wears off the stand and wondering when the attendants will arrive, but the gig is the asylum, except for the guests, who by now are dancing to a DJ whose equipment would beat a DC-7 at arm-wrestling. And everyone at the party is happy! The bari player, after 11 drinks, says he's fine to drive--he only lives 5 minutes away; and the tenor player is glad her husband is on the gig, because she needs someone to drive her home, and he's so focused on the way that the van never strays one inch from its center positioning in the lane no matter what. And a musician friend who came as an onlooker and opined that the band might be a little loud, the leader told him to "Shut up."

And so here we are at home, drinking to forget, or wondering about smoking, except that it hurts one's throat, you know, so beer calories--at least you can work them off. Hopefully, however, not by playing another insane gig with Zing Zany and his Musical Mobsters of Mayhem.

Everyone Wants to fill the Void

2008-12-31T20:59:00.001-08:00

I recently, finally, joined the American Humanist Association by making a donation. Secularism needs all the support it can get, what with being labeled "satanic" by the mindless followers of mindless pastors who mindlessly repeat what someone has told them. Insofar as I'm a secular person who thinks people are responsible for their own destiny--they can't afford to leave it up to a God or gods who historically have shown a penchant to be skimpy on miracles when they're most needed--I'd also consider myself a humanist.

Today, however, I received in the mail a whole packet, accompanied by a cheaply-printed paper back book, of humanist literature. It's like I just joined a church. I suppose the AHA, since it's an institution, feels obligated to show its gratitude to supporters by inviting them to think institutionally. But the whole idea is that I'd just as soon not think those institutional thoughts--I can find my own ideas, thanks. But all is not lost, the humanist literature found its way quickly into the recycle bin, where pretty much all ideological stuff goes, since most of the stuff is recycled intellectuality anyway. I'm happy to be part of a movement that will ignore me but campaign heartily on its own behalf and oppose the institutions I certainly don't want filling the void I'm always busy filling for myself.

Reckoning with the Reckoners

2008-12-31T20:48:00.001-08:00

When I was a little boy of college age, I thought the cops are my enemies. This was in Berkeley--and often the cops did seem to be enemies. And then, you read about police brutality, and historically the police have been enlisted in the "law and order" agendae of suppressers and thugs. The police become thugs.

But, I've been playing in the LAPD Band for the last two years, and I'm developing a very different perspective. Among our other performances, we do the police graduations every month on Friday mornings. Those ceremonies are tributes to idealism, dedication, commitment, and the sense that the young people who go into police work are people on a mission. The upper administration seem to be bright, good-humored, talented: one of the regular MC's is Michael Ellington--the nephew of, who would have thought--Duke Ellington. And Michael knows who his Uncle was.

You see 100 young people a month who've gone through rigorous training in a variety of areas, and then they get out to survive on the streets. This morning, a veteran of 35 years, dismissed his graduating class for "the last time." He took the mike and joked that a chill went over the rest of the staff just now--they realized they had just turned the mike over to someone who was on his last day, and they were quaking at what he would say. Everyone laughed. He laughed, and proceeded to praise the new class highly for talent, dedication, general excellence.

Every graduation I play, I see camaraderie, discipline, pride, and families who are thrilled to witness the ceremony. There will no doubt be mistakes, errors in judgment, even some graft somewhere in the future--but I now think that will be exceptional, not the rule. The department puts out good people who do their best.

Doddering Ahead of the Crowd--Way Out Front

2008-08-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

This could also be titled "A view of the Labyrinth from the Garden."

Facebook has brought a Truth to light! My adult daughter recently listed me as a friend on Facebook. I gladly accepted. Her daughter informed her that it's generally frowned upon to have parents as "friends" on Facebook. When I told another friend that, he admitted that he has a Facebook page, but his daughter won't accept him as a friend because she thinks he's weird.

This calls for action, so I urge adults to unite! I have implemented my own action plan.

I do everything I can to be part of the NOW generation: I even have those little bud headphones dangling from my ears as though my Ipod is on all the time. Generally, I don't know where it is, but I wear the headphones anyway as a badge of belonging. My jeans are as low as I can get them (which isn't very), my sandals are unbuckled, I'm designing several hip tattoos and gaining a lot of weight so I'll have more room for them. Actually, I could say that the more weight I gain, the more I look part of a certain segment of the youthful population. I also play my car stereo as loud as possible with the windows wide open, even when it's raining. Boy you should see the envious looks of the teens when they hear that Glenn Miller! As far as hip currency goes, I'm leaving the younger age far behind. I've got a cabinet full of colors for my hair (black, brown, reddish--all the latest Mr. Clairol stuff), a closet full of red and green tennis shoes, t-shirts with aggressively offensive logos, my hair is in various kinds of disarray (what there is of it). What more do I have to do??? It's cruel, I tell you, cruel, of the young to be so callous toward their elders. The age wars are replacing the culture wars.

Let's get our own planet.

The Dead are there to Eat

2008-08-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

On the way home from rehearsal at Forest Lawn tonight, we saw something heartwarming: deer eating the flowers off people's graves.

Before rehearsal, coyotes howled in the hills.

St. Paul had two heads: in the middle ages, two different churches claimed to have "the head of St. Paul" in their collections of saints' relics. Peter Bartholomew, in the First Crusade, had to have bodyguards, lest he be torn apart by the crowd, who wanted body parts for relics.

In Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, there is a glass cabinet with strands of beard from, I think, Muhammed.

Jazz and Discrimination

2008-08-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

Jazz and Discrimination

Anyone even distantly familiar with the history of jazz knows that African-Americans suffered indignities, insults, exclusions because of their race—they played for people who would not let them stay in the same hotels, prohibited them from entering by the front door, and would not sit with them on a bus. Paul Whiteman couldn’t get a person of color on the same stage as his all-white orchestra. Overall, it was an ugly period, and persists, perhaps less overtly, into more recent times.

There has been a kind of reverse discrimination at times as well—the idea that only African Americans can play jazz authentically, or have the true, soulful spirit required for the deepest expression of jazz. At a concert by the Clark Terry band once, I heard a very fine white trombonist’s solo get a mild reaction, while a black trombonist’s much less technical but more blues-inflected solo drew enthusiastic response. Acknowledging, for the record, that technique by itself does not a fine solo make, it seemed to me that the audience was responding to the second soloist’s racial background as much as to his ideas, which were pretty shopworn.

Jazz is for all players, and there are many kinds of jazz. The Japanese have adopted it enthusiastically, and one of the finest bands in the world is fronted by a Swiss pianist/composer/arranger, George Gruntz. His musicians play like forest fires, and they come from everywhere; over the years, they have included many of the most notable American jazz soloists, black and white. For probably unpleasant reasons, jazz has been more widely accepted and admired in Europe than in America. Americans who hadn’t been able to get a career started here were able to do so in Europe. Bertrand Tavernier’s film Round Midnight depicts the experience of many African Americans in Europe.

But then, America has often been behind the curve when it comes to the arts and international politics.

I give thanks for jazz. It isn’t that African Americans forged from their grim experiences something that others have been able to rip off without going through the suffering; it’s that African Americans brought to the surface a dimension of universal humanness that others recognized and responded to, then discovered in themselves. The reservoir of the inner was enlarged with the creation of jazz, and it transcends race and culture.

Racism is shameful, a nasty, small-minded impulse with devastating consequences. To the extent that The Other represents something universal, discrimination is ultimately a rejection of part of the self, a fear of acknowledging that you might be something you haven’t realized. It is a terror of the self. I remember a powerful statement by Ishmael Reed from one of the essays in his book Airing Dirty Laundry. He realized, after years of collecting stories about racism, that white people’s accusations and fears— that black people represented savagery, lust, violence—were really projections of their own nature, fears of their own impulses. Ralph Ellison hits the nail on the head in his depiction of a black family where the father has had an incestual relationship with his daughter. The man is an innocent, good-hearted father who didn’t intend harm (as he relates the incident). White men drool over this story: in their conscious minds, it confirms their stereotype of the unbridled lust of the black man; Ellison makes it evident, however, that white men relish the story because this black man has done something they wish they could do. The character Emerson, in fact, has had an incestual relationship with his daughter. As a wealthy New Englander, though, he is able to keep his shameful act a secret and send his daughter to a European boarding school to cover up her shame. He recognizes in the black man’s situation a mirror of his own.

I am certainly not advocating incest, nor was Ellison. His point was, that as humans, regardless of color, we share a great deal. By coincidence, one man’s secret shame is another’s public shame. In all this mix, hypocritical self-righteousness is the greatest shame. We see that in leaders of the Church who have been found out to have mistresses, or who fulminate against homosexuality but are caught soliciting gay sex.

True terrorism is the rage against aspects of our own nature. It results in the suppression of women; it results in the repression of sexuality, it results in brutal treatment of homosexuals, male and female.

Western religion is one institutional manifestation of that terror—its deepest principles—hostile to joy in daily life—were formulated for everyone by men who rejected fullness in their own lives and recommended that choice as the right one for all. St. Paul and St. Augustine, to name only two, lived single lives (St. Augustine, after he had fully accepted the Christian faith—he had a mistress and child prior to accepting the faith). St. Paul was explicit: he wished all could be like himself—celibate, not distracted by the vicissitudes and demands of daily life. Paul’s allowances for married life were just that: concessions to the “weakness of the flesh.”

We’ve had our heads on backwards about that idea for centuries. What terrified many in America about both black people and “their” music (blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll) was the insistence on strong feeling, its tendency to be like a hurricane, or a flood, or a tidal wave, leaving the listener helpless. The European composers were much safer (until the modern era)—their music stayed safely within the bounds of decorum, or had an acceptably romantic tinge (Beethovan and his successors could be pretty dangerous, too). Performances are “correct”—whatever happened to improvisation in “legit” music? Bach and Mozart were both superhuman improvisers; now classical musicians study how to produce the most accurate and sensitive rendition of stable musical texts.

It isn’t an accident that the Seven Deadly Sins refer to acts like overeating, overindulging in sex, wanting too much, getting too angry. At extremes, these can be destructive. But these impulses bubble up from the same well as jazz, or Beethovan’s 9th Symphony. This may be one reason why so many artists’ and musicians’ strong impulses spill over from their art into their personal lives. The problem is fearing strong emotion and impulse in any form (like jazz, which, well-played, has the fury of unbridled greed, lust, anger, appetite, or envy). People seem to have trouble distinguishing between the acceptable, the unacceptable. In order to avoid the destruction they fear, they reject everything.

Everyone is everything. Whites have the savagery and lust in their nature, as well as the humanity, the joy, the sense of intensity. Jazz is a gift to the world at large, a gift of self-realization, and a key to the inner nature of its source. Ostracizing it is cutting yourself off at the pass, as my grandmother did: for her jazz was Gene Krupa, and Gene Krupa was the Devil: a heroine addict, He Who Must Be Shunned, along with his music and everything about him and his associates.

My grandmother—the one portrait she had done of herself (pictures taken by others are less severe) shows her in her rocking chair with her Bible. If we misbehaved, she was Armageddon herself, storming the house with a strap. No wonder someone wrote a tune called "Ain't Misbehavin'." The archetypal grandmother with her strap threatens us all and makes us fear music that "misbehaves."

The Garden of Brass

2008-08-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Humboldt Brass Ensemble Workshop.

“Garden of Brass” sounds oxymoronic, but it isn’t. Labyrinths are baffling, confusing, frustrating. The garden is peace, achievement, exhilaration, satisfaction. I just spent a week in the garden of brass—chamber music for brass, that is.

It’s a modern version of monastic devotion, without the self-denial or the threats of eternal punishment. Adults of all ages, genders, and skill levels assemble for one or two weeks at Humboldt State University to play brass chamber music, from trios to nearly orchestral size ensembles, in configurations from horn and trombone choirs to tuba and euphonium choirs. Adults spend precious vacation time here, or they plan retirement trips around a week or two at this workshop. Like the monastic life, it is a time of intense focus, a chance to withdraw from the day-to-day world of politics and paychecks. We lived in small (dorm) rooms, spent morning, noon, and night rehearsing and playing. I ignored the world at large for six days, except I found out that there had been an earthquake strong enough to knock knick-knacks off shelves at home. The only un-frugal thing was the food, which was served with high-metabolic-rate college students in mind. I ate and ate, and now have to renew my dedication to weight loss from a higher board, so to speak, which means a longer, more dizzying time in the air before I plunge into the water with my (hopefully) diminished body-mass. The penalty for self-indulgence is the inferno of self-denial.

But I also acted for the greater glory—playing and learning. Nurturing the spirit, so to speak.

The workshop has a wholesome and humane theology—complete with an end-times vision. The most important commandment is this: copying is forbidden, unless to practice a part, or make a page-turn easier. A composer writes to write, but also to live; publishers publish to make money—why should we begrudge them? If we take one composition and copy it 80 times, the publisher and composer have lost 79 opportunities to live. This is worthy of the Catholic church’s institution of fish on Fridays to help the Italian fishing industry centuries ago.

String and woodwind players have acres of chamber music from the last four centuries. Brass players, whose instruments evolved into their present niches more recently, lag way behind. Discouraging composers is self-defeating. Like the organic world, the world of music changes over time; there is no single, comprehensive, act that established a static universe. So: nurture composers, who in turn will nurture players in a glorious, thriving symbiosis.

Me—I was a tuba player among ten or twelve other tuba players, nearly all of whom were more skilled, but I learned not to be bothered by this: I played as well as I could and didn’t do badly, even when I missed notes. The more important thing, I was told, was to be able to keep moving with the music and the ensemble, which I could do. The skills will continue to develop with practice.

Too many helpings of decent food aside, though, the real hunger is for more music, more opportunities to be among people who, whatever their regular activities—computer programmers, teachers, social workers, retirees coming back to play instruments they haven’t thought about for years—yearn for the camaraderie of music. A further hunger is for more writing of music—as a composer, it’s very exciting to be among people who want to play music, and to see that your music can be played (even if only once). I don’t particularly write to make money so much as to get music out of my head, so I can go on to more music. I have at least a dozen projects inspired by the camp. They sit in my head, or in a notebook, while I look at the next month before I have to go back to teaching, and wonder how much I’ll actually get done before the real world closes in around me.

Let Everyone Marry

2008-06-17T07:36:00.001-07:00

There is a labyrinth of public opinion about same-sex marriage, a garden of wisdom and happiness for those who enter into it.

It's only reasonable to acknowledge, as newspaper articles have recognized, that, like all marriages, some gay marriages will end in divorce, others won't be any happier or less happy than marriages generally. But that being said, the only argument against same-sex marriage is that the "sacred" institution of marriage has been historically a one-man-one-woman relationship and to allow same-sex marriage "makes a travesty" of something sacred.

This is all so much hot air: there is the labyrinth. People who can't stand the thought of same sex couples actually being happy, being intimate, being "normal," don't want to allow them the right of official recognition that everyone else has. They're fighting a losing battle in the courts, trying to get stays, hoping to buy time so the constitutional amendment can be voted on by an electorate they can whip into a froth over the fear that straight marriages are somehow endangered by same-sex marriages.

Here is the garden: marriage generally is beneficial. (I give credit to my wife for these observations, with which I wholeheartedly agree.) It creates more stability in society, confirms a commitment that already exists, is conducive to longer life, and therefore greater productivity. It contributes, under the best of circumstances, to emotional stability, and also therefore to greater productivity and peace of mind. If marriage has all these benefits, we should be eager to have people enter into matrimony, not desperate to keep a small percentage of the population from it.

That same-sex marriages make a travesty of the institution is about as bogus an argument as I can think of: the real travesty is in any couple where there is emotional torment, infidelity, brutality, selfishness, domination, or any other twisted, non-loving dynamic. Heterosexual marriages are filled with such cases. A recent article, after a survey of many same-sex relationships, found them often stronger and emotionally healthier in many ways than traditional marriages: more egalitarian, more rational in the resolution of disagreements, etc.

The history of marriage as one-man-one-woman argument is also bogus. If we want to use history as a guide to marriage, we need to remember the thousands of marriages for money, for social position, for the establishment of inheritance lines.

If we want role models, we should remember that Jesus (apparently) never married and seems to have associated only with men; and Paul recommended that marriage itself is a distraction from the spiritual focus necessary to salvation. Looking back into the part of the Bible that conservative Christians rarely want to think much about, Abraham had a first son with someone other than Sarah; Jacob had multiple wives, Solomon and David likewise. Monogamy itself is not necessarily biblically sanctioned.

I always have to laugh when someone says, "Yeah, the devil can quote scripture." If scripture supports two different positions, how are we to know which one the devil is espousing? Maybe the real devil is the one making the accusation about his/her opponent. Maybe the real devil is the sanctimonious, self-righteous denier of human happiness and satisfaction on the specious high ground of moral imperatives.

My advice for people who think their marriages have been irreparably damaged by allowing same sex marriage: get divorced. Don't sanction this degraded, tarnished institution by continuing to be participants. Leave the rest of us alone. When God is cited for such mean-spirited agendas, small wonder that God begins to seem irrelevant to a meaningful life.

Charming Mistakes of Childhood

2007-12-31T14:12:00.001-08:00

It's almost the New Year, and, of course, time to remember the comical misunderstandings of "back in the day."

When I first started listening to the radio, I had one big question: how did they get all those bands in and out of the studio so fast? Or, maybe they had two studios? Before long, I realized they were playing records.

Another time we were driving past a building that I thought had one of the best ad campaigns ever for a bank: "Jesus Saves."

Are those the only two mistakes I ever made? Just the ones I remember for now. I've forgotten many others, and they deserve to go to the grave with me.

Forward, March! into the Labyrinth

2007-11-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

Play an instrument long enough, and you learn to start thinking like a true artist: how can I make some money off of something—anything?

I noticed, at the Masonic Lodge concert, that the Scottish Rite Band played out of two small books of marches—small, so they will fit on the lyres of musicians when they are actually (God forbid!) marching.

One book was called “Marching to Victory.” The other was called “Marching to Fame.”

Now, with all due respect to the writers of marches, and the amount of time it takes to write anything at all, these were pretty insipid.

Yet, I discovered a possible niche. One can write a book of marches with martial titles and an inspiring cover title, and take the world of high school students, community bands, nay, even the whole military establishment by storm. The world could know me. I smell power.

I begin at the hard part: a title for the collection. Here is where imagination, savoir-vivre, je ne sais pas, are required.

Just the collection titles below constitute a life's work of march-writing:

Marching to Triumph
Marching to Empire
Marching to Disaster
Marching to Doom
Marching to a Different Drummer
(Editorial note: this is for bands whose rhythm sections are lured away from the conductor’s tempo by their own inner metronomes—by the way, it is part of the drummer’s job description that he/she must always criticize the conductor for wavering and unsteady tempi, especially during accelerandos and ritardandos. Italian drummers have no difficulty with this sort of thing—drummers with a Teutonic background should be playing horns—since they are, ahem, “teutonic.”)

Marching to Oblivion
Marching to Hegemony (could be combined with the preceeding)
Marching to Armageddon
Marches for the End Times
The Twelve Marches of the Apocalypse
Cataclysms of Jericho—Seven Marches Guaranteed to Destroy
Lucky Marches for the Acacacademy of Anthropopopopopometry
Dada Marches (all music must be played with the eyes closed on an instrument for which the player has no training)
Effete Marches for Literati
Manly Marches for the Ineducati
XXX-Rated Marches for the Orgiati
Political Marches in Ineffective Meters
Marches without Melodies
Arrhythmic Marches
Harmonica Band Reed Marches
Guessing Marches
Marches on One Note (easy to get 11 marches out of this theme)
Marches based on Themes from Bad Movies
Ironic Marches on Saracstic Motifs
Marches in Polymetric Polytones
Rhetorical Marches for Speeches on Occasional Topics on Topical Occasions
Painful Marches for the Marchise de Sade
Fiddling While Cities Burn: Marching Forward Through History Backwards to Rome
Marching to Destiny: Deterministic Marches for Free People
High Colonic Marches
A Treasury of Monetary Marches
A Wine Cellar of Marches that may turn to Vinegar
A Sweet Evening of Acerbic Marches
Odd-Metered Marches for Acrobatic Musicians
Aerobic Marches for the Under-Exercized
Abrasive Marches for the Weak of Heart
Marches for Cat-Scans and Birdbrains
Bellicose Marches for Boxers and other Belligerents
Serpentine Marches with Sinuous Melodies

Somewhere, there is a computer program that will, on a simple command, generate marches in a variety of acceptable keys. With a second computer, marches can be written while I practice, or nap. Or both. With several computers running the program simultaneously, the life's work could be finished in a week. Then it will be time for a computer that generates more titles.

The Story of Someone Else's Labyrinth

2007-11-17T22:42:00.000-08:00

This is about a Patty I knew, whose last name is lost to me, but I do remember the day she was standing in my office door, hanging around, chatting me up about the possibility of us getting together outside of school, getting it on, and she checked the hallway quickly and exposed her breasts. "What do you think?" she asked, holding her bra up. Caught by surprise, I could only agree, "Those are breasts, all right."

She was trouble. She was danger. She was a bottomless pit. She was an aspiring actress and stand-up comic, involved in theater at PCC, and apparently not bad, since the faculty directors both wanted her in their plays. She was attractive enough, but had to be slenderer, she thought, so she had liposuction and got infected. She showed me the bandaged staples in her sides.

She was very bright in class, but a labyrinth inside. I lost track of her until a year or so later, when she called me at school, not in Pasadena, but in Detroit, when I was still teaching at the Center for Creative Studies (now called the College for Creative Studies). She wanted to meet for lunch. We met at a restaurant somewhere near where the Mexican restaurants were located. We ate, she said she was pregnant, living with a man--an ex-con--who abused her, and related that she needed $700 for an abortion. I told her I'd be glad to help, but there was no way I could put my hands on that kind of money, to which she replied that she had a lawyer friend who could help. She also revealed that this was not the first time she had been in an abusive relationship. Her life was a mess and heading downhill.

She called me because she needed money, certainly, but also because she must have been lonely and needed a sane person to confide in.

I had to get back for afternoon classes, so I dropped her off near where she was living. She could not be seen getting out of another man's car, I guess, so we were several blocks away from the actual apartment. It was a chilly day in November. She wore a long dark coat. She was still attractive, but she seemed to have lost the high and hopeful spirit of her Pasadena existence--it takes some crazy, bizarre energy to bare your breasts in public, even if it also reveals a troubled mind.

The neighborhood was the new Patty: one of those spiritless and desolate working-class areas where many of the buildings have been bulldozed, and the ones left aren't reassuring among the dry, weedy vacant lots. The cold and snow left cracks in the sidewalks, potholes in the street--everywhere in Detroit there seemed to be potholes in the streets. Trash stuck in the broken down fenceposts, and cans and bottles lay in the dirt.

She turned a corner and disappeared.

Trombone in the Wilderness

2007-11-17T21:58:00.000-08:00

Being a musician takes you into a lot of out-of-the-way places. Tonight I played with a community band, the Scottish Rite Band, for a dinner at the Masonic Lodge in South Pasadena, California. My wife was playing flute, dinner was free, and so I went and joined in with the regular trombone section--they were glad to have reinforcements.

Community band playing, in general, is a blog for the future. This is about the Masonic Temple and the people I saw there. Very strange. My deepest information about the Masons, and their ancestors, the Knights Templar, comes from novels like Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 and Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code (I admit, shamefaced, I read it). From these books, I gather the real history of the organization is lost in the dim mists of myth, mysticism, folklore, and religion. It must also have connections with the military, since people seemed to focus on the war, veterans, commemorating soldiers of the past. A speaker at the end intoned the axioms that "Freedom is not free," and "All of us have given something; some have given all."

The building itself must have dated from the thirties. The lighting was dim, the stage right out of the proscenium tradition of old auditoriums. The dinner: some overcooked steak, scalloped potatoes, peas and carrots from one of those large cans you see on the shelves at Costco. They had wine, too: 2-buck Chuck.

I had expected a rousing affair, but the members of the band outnumbered the audience, which was mostly older people. The hall gave the band and its spouses dinner for free; others had to pay $8. The Masons must have lost money on that, because the Masonic membership seemed pathically low or indifferent to the occasion. (I have seen similar lack of enthusiasm at the American Legion Hall in Pasadena, where I rehearse weekly with another band. We play the occasional event there, and the audience is almost always the spouses of the bandmembers and American Legion stragglers.)

I can't help thinking at events like this, that these organizations seem to be on their way out, a relic of the forties, slowing dying, their traditions maintained by diehards with a need to attach themselves to some cause and no other cause in immediate sight. There were one or two families with children, but neither the food, the music, nor the ambience seemed such as to encourage the children to say, when they are free to make their own decisions, "Wow, let's check out the Masonic Lodge tonight--it's bound to be a happening place."

Both the Lodge and the American Legion hall are home to strays--guys who come down to drink cheap during the day, hang out with a few friends, watch game shows on tv without being heckled by their wives (or watch different game shows than their wives want to watch). You can start drinking the moment the doors open--around 8 am. For the men who have lives, the occasional events are barely appealing enough to spend a Sunday afternoon, judging from the attendance. There is a musty quality about it all, from the lifeless American flags, to the scuffed hardwood floors, to the darkened bar room with its dart board and pool table. Office-brown faux-leather chairs line the anteroom. In the hall, old theater seats, four or five rows deep, surround the center, where Events take place (or used to take place, when such Events could give meaning to a young man or young woman's life). It's a milieu that regards women skeptically, as bothersome appendages, who show up occasionally as guests but have a vaguely uncomfortable feeling that they're admitted as a courtesy, not because they are valuable to the institution.

However, the Masons do have their Women's Auxiliary: the Job's daughters.

I don't know why they're called Job's Daughters. Presumably not because they counsel the men to "Curse God, and die," as Job's wife famously did in the entertaining Biblical book about his unjustified suffering.

Once, in a world long ago, when I was in high school, I was invited to a Job's Daughters ceremony. My upbringing must have been terribly deficient--I had no idea what I was witnessing. I saw girls (some of whom I knew from school) dressed in these white semi-ball gowns; I think one was being crowned. I don't remember recognizing any of the guys. I don't know who invited me, or what I was expected to do. I was a peripheral onlooker. I can believe there is mysticism in those rituals: they were a complete mystery to me. At school in the days following, no one alluded to it. It was as though I had been kidnapped by aliens, taken to another world, watched their alien rituals, and then been deposited back on earth to resume a normal life.

At that time--the late fifties--the hall was packed with attendees.

On this night, at the South Pasadena chapter, it was virtually empty, except for the band, which number about thirty, and the audience, which numbered about twenty-five, including five or six children who could not possibly have been interested in anything except dessert.

The band played old marches, patriotic pieces, all at a tempo roughly one-third slower than they should have been, so it sounded sluggish, pervaded with the same sense as the hall: the time is running out, the energy has given way to the entropy of change. It's like the dead or dying limb on a tree that will eventually fall off as the tree takes new forms, as kids go on to new types of experiences, as even new veterans (we'll always be producing them--war is big business) find post-war bonding in other venues.

When the Knights Templar appear only in novels, it will be a sad day. There are few enough places anymore where a musician can get a free meal.

Lost in My Labyrinth

2007-10-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

Lost in my labyrinth: three provocative tales.

Attraction is sometimes a garden inside a labyrinth, other times a labyrinth inside a garden.

The first two tales are about gardens before me, within reach, if I could have seen beyond my own labyrinth. The third is about a genuine labyrinth, not of my own making, of which I skirted the edges and stayed clear.

All are from long ago, when I taught at Wayne State University. I listen to Ray Anderson and his “Ibrahim Electric” cd as I write this.

A very sexy young lady, toward the end of the term, came to my office hours for a conference on how she could improve her grade. Her blouse was open at the top, revealing a generous cleavage and ample breasts; she wore very short shorts. I duly went over her paper—she was smart, and with minor improvements would write very good papers. At the end of the conference, she thanked me, stood up with her paper and smiled, and said, “Thanks, teach.” This was probably one of the last times I would see her, and it was hard to keep from staring. I didn’t want her to leave. I was embarrassed, said something like “Stay in touch,” and had to consciously keep from watching her go out the door. Months after the class was over, I ran into her and a date at a pizza parlor. She looked as beautiful then as she had in my office. She smiled very warmly, extended her hand, reminded me of her name, and asked if I remembered her. Of course I did. I think on both occasions I was being offered an opportunity, but I was too naïve to respond.

In another class, I had another beautiful young lady. She was not “hot,” but she was very attractive, slender, had a dancer’s body, and was very bright. As it turned out, she was a dancer. By the fourth or fifth week, I was on the verge of asking her out. By the seventh week, I did so. She seemed shocked and instantly declined. I was shot down, but thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and quit thinking about her, knowing also that it was better for me not to develop any personal relationship with a female in a class. The next week, though, she asked me a question after class and was very warm in her smile, as though she might have given my invitation some thought and decided it might not be so amiss. She continued to be very friendly. But by that time, I had abandoned all hope and never renewed the invitation. I never saw her after the class finished, but I thought some time later that I had perhaps once again missed an opportunity.

Both woman, in addition to being attractive, seemed very nice.

Then there was a third occasion. This girl was not attractive in her face—she had buck teeth and stringy blond hair, but her body was tremendous. I finally asked her out, she accepted, and we came back to my apartment after a dinner where conversation was somewhat desultory. She demurred at any hint of intimacy, but the next week invited me to dinner with her family.

She lived with them in a small house, and we sat down to dinner. Her father, whom she introduced as a Baptist minister, was in a wheelchair. I don’t remember the mother talking much at all, but the father was friendly in a way that suggested the ferocity of an ancient prophet, and I began to size up the situation. I was there to be sized up myself, by a very Puritanical family, the mother cowed, the children obedient under threat of severe discipline, and the attractive daughter terrified of any kind of sexual adventure beyond looking attractive. I, of course, must have seemed like an alien: boots, beard, longish hair, and teaching job at that notoriously Communist/atheist institution, Wayne State University. It may have come out that I had done graduate work at U.C. Berkeley—the nail in my coffin.

After that evening, she continued to be friendly, but I didn’t ask her out again. After she moved on from my class, I saw her periodically in the halls—still the slumpy posture, stringy blonde hair and buck teeth, but an even more blatant, even desperate, attractiveness—long white skirts slit nearly up to her underwear and shirts open at the top. I even commented on it one day when I stopped to chat with her. She just shrugged. I’m sure her dress was a sign of some kind of raging, unsatisfied, and puzzling sense of Hormones Rising, but she didn’t seem aware of the full range of implications to her appearance and the way men might respond. Then after awhile, I didn’t see her anymore.

There are lessons here. If I weren't married, I would pay more attention to them. The most important is, be alert to encouragement and don't feel that really desirable women are beyond your reach. (I must say that my wife is one--so the early lessons paid off.)

The Pleasures of Discretionary Logic

2007-09-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

One of the great pleasures of being a rational being is the ability to conduct oneself in a logical way. Logic and reason are unimpeachable. Impulse, irrationality, rash behavior--these lead to the breakdown of civilization as we know it. Hence the reaction against the Beat generation, which believed in spontaneity, exuberance, and living in the moment. Their only linearity was the lanes on the pavement as they criss-crossed America in On the Road.

But, to the point. My mother is a child of the Depression. She told us more than once, when we asked for this or that, and especially at Christmas: "Do you kids think money grows on trees?" (Believe me, at the suggestion of even that remote possibility, we ran out and scanned the trees.) Another recurrent theme: "When I was a kid, I was lucky if I got a toothbrush for Christmas."

Although I now earn my own living and can presumably do what I please, I still feel a twinge of ancient guilt over self-indulgence if I spend money on something my mother might not approve of--which, in my residual child, is anything but the bare necessities.

So, I've had to invent rational justifications for the purchase of some musical instrument or other, or most recently a scooter. This form of justification I call "discretionary logic": that is, logic that works to justify what you've done--you think through the problem and arrive at the conclusion you want to by any means that seems convenient. It was not long before I realized that I had many precedents: all of Christianity would be one. Courtroom litigation would be another.

The most recent example comes from a luncheon conversation with my delightful mother, whose hawk ears (her eyes are not so functional anymore) readily detect the appearance on my scene of some new object (another trombone, for example, or a drum kit) that has cost money. I try to prepare for these revelations with the positing of an acceptable principle (according to discretionary logic).

This time, it was the value--even the compelling moral nature--of impulse buying. As I recall, the reasoning was something like this: the movements of one's soul have been recognized throughout history as indices of deep conviction, of the revelation of the divine (cf. the Biblical prophets, or Mohammad), the dictates of conscience (cf. Socrates). Martin Luther King knew, in his deepest soul, that racism was wrong, and he set his life's agenda on eliminating it. Similarly, St. Paul, who had his revelation on the road to Damascus (or so the dramatic story goes, as told in Acts, though Paul himself does not describe the scene and one suspects the hand of an able fiction writer in the Acts account). Paul's inner sea-change led him to found a religion, suffer pain, humiliation, and the discomforts of ancient travel, which were even worse than the discomforts and terrors of modern travel. There is Joan of Arc, the saints, especially Sister Theresa, who seems to have been plunged into a continuing "dark knight of the sole." And so on. Examples abound. If I had my calculator at hand, I could multiply them.

I am in a tradition of devotees, martyrs, noble minds, exalted souls, and fast-track candidates for sainthood when I obey the dictates of impulse, recognizing them as having a divine provenance.

Thus, when I heard from a friend that he had a drum kit available at a good price, I thought it would be cool to get it, though, strictly speaking, I don't need it. But that kind of logic (do you need it?) is puny and cavilling compared to the logic of divinity. Rationality, I have come to realize, is in the mind of the beholder. It seems logical to one person to protect the snail-darter or the horned owl, but to another, the disappearance of this or that species has been recurring throughout the history of life. I like preserving species, but I have to like it as a matter of faith and conviction rather than reason, since reason is, in a sense, hermaphroditic--that is, it swings both ways depending on the context in which it is used.

You can rationalize your love for dime-store romances, and you can rationalize your love for James Joyce. I suppose it is human nature not simply to trust your instincts--you have to build an edifice of justification as a bulwark against other edifices. How many arguments have there been over whether the Beats wrote legitimate literature? How many arguments from one generation of musicians at the next over whether be-bop is really jazz, or (from be-boppers) whether fusion is really jazz? Etc., etc.. Oddly, arguments often expose the pointlessness of reason, since they expose the immorality of reason: she's a whore available to any bidder.

So, mom, impulse buying is A-okay. Let it not outrage your moral sense of conservatism. Whole religions have been based on an ascetic outlook, the point being that the "spirit" is destroyed by greed and materialism. There is something virtuous about self-restraint. Maybe yes, at times, but, at other times, maybe no.

There are other reasons, having nothing to do with "logic," to use as guides to action. For example, consequences.

Well, mom, I guess there are times when discretionary logic won't work--creditors and judges don't buy it.

I felt my soul move when I heard that a drum kit was available

Lost in the Labyrinth, Stumbling on Rocks, Banging Your Head on the Hard Place

2007-08-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

These days a musician can be between a rock and a hard place. There is so much technology available to help with the music-making, from super-advanced and complex computer recording programs, to keyboards that practically write and harmonize the tunes for you, to sound-enhancements, and much more. The question I've heard bandied about is how far one should go before the technology swamps the music-making, which we all originally got into music for.

Here is a moral tale concerning that very issue.

For at least two years I played in a small, experimental band organized by the bass player--vibes, two saxes, bass, and drums, sometimes guitar, once in awhile trombone. Many good musicians came and went. I think now that the smartest and most efficient sized the situation up quickly as one that would never come to fruition, even though the playing itself was intense and exciting. We played mostly the leader's charts of his own tunes. And we got very tight at some points. In all that time, we had two gigs--one at a fund-raising marathon over in, I think, Irwindale (home of experimental jazz), another at a carnival out in the San Fernando Valley, where we were followed by a rock band. Our drummer filled in for the rock band, since their drummer somehow failed to show. Neither venue was right for this kind of band, but we never got into any suitable venue.

The leader knew we should do a CD in order to shop the band around for gigs, and each time we rehearsed at his house (we were doing three hours per rehearsal, almost every week) we began to notice an accumulation of recording equipment.

He (for the sake of not having to always use pronouns, I'll call him Jeb, though that's not his name--he's still working in the area) had always recorded every rehearsal, first with an MP3 recorder, then a small DAT recorder. Then the equipment became more sophisticated: a big Mac with Digital Performer, mikes for everyone, one mixing board, then another mixing board; then the house was being run with snakes and the musicians separated, the drummer in the original rehearsal room, the sax players off in a bedroom (many jokes about two guys in a bedroom together), me on vibes in the living room. We recorded and recorded. An engineer friend came on the scene--this man had great professional experience, he owned high-end pre-amps (I think--I tend to get lost in this equipment morass beyond a certain point), very high-end mikes, he had a great ear, he knew the mixing board (by this time a BIG board), and he knew Digital Performer.

We recorded and recorded. We got some great material.

That was two years ago (at least).

What has become of the all that recorded material? The CD?

To my knowledge, the equipment became a kind of quicksand. The leader and his friend kept "improving" the sound quality; we kept re-recording with each addition of new, enhanced equipment; the same music over and over.

Two years later, there is nothing. The last I heard, Jeb needed me to overdub 8 bars in one tune. Once, when the drummer came back for a visit from Phoenix, we all jammed, did a little recording, and he came out of the control room and said, "You should see those guys! They're like mad scientists in a lab. I got a group together in a studio for one day and had a good CD a month later."

And that's the way it can be--musicians get together, leave the technology to experts, make the music, do some mixing with the engineers, and voila! A finished product in a timely manner.

I'm in another group where something similar is happening. One of the members has Cubase on his computer, and we're trying to record one track at a time. We've bogged down in conflicting schedules, the weirdness of making music happen one instrument at a time. This is possible technically, but we haven't produced anything yet. Putting trust in technology is okay, but when you put all your eggs in that basket, you wind up with nothing.

I contacted Jeb recently to see if I could get even an imperfect (by his ever-more stringent standards) recording of what we'd done. I don't know if I'll hear back. I think he wandered into the labyrinth of technology and got lost. He's somewhere out there, as my sister says, in the "bewilderness."

And a big hi to all the musicians I met and enjoyed playing with in that phantom band, serious and talented people, tucked away in a plain looking house in the San Fernando Valley, rehearsing like mad for gigs that never happened and recording a CD that's still on the hard drive while perfectionists slave over it surrounded by empty Chinese-food containers and posters of Miles and Coltrane, and they take breaks at the pool table and drink from the cartons of Perrier purchased at Costco. Or, indeed, my two mad scientists could have moved on to some other sublimity by now.

God Exists!

2007-08-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

This just in:

A man purchased a Mexican day-of-the-dead mask from a garden sculpture shop and wanted to hang it on the wall of his garage, where it could be enjoyed from the patio while he and his family repasted on their usual repasts. Here is his story.

"I couldn't believe it!" he said. "Every time I tried to drive a nail into the garage wall, the nail bent! I must have gone through, gosh, two boxes of big nails, and after hitting them with the hammer just once, even, they bent. It's like that story in the Bible, you know, where Dagon falls on his face before the power of God. God did not want me to hang that devil-worshipping mask, and He showed his displeasure by bending my nails. I wanted to hang that devil above the headless statue of St. Andrew, see, to kind of balance things out--a little of the sacred, a little of the profane--but, God does not like jokes! I was standing on a ladder at first, and after about thirty nails, I thought I'd better get off the ladder--if God was causing those nails to bend, he could cause me to fall, and I could fall right onto that headless statue and injure myself in the you-know-wheres, and that would be a blasphemy to the statue. I mean, St. Andrew--the statue doesn't have a head, see--wouldn't be able to defend himself, and I would be desecrating him by God punishing me with a nasty jab in the you-know-wheres with St. Andrew's neck and shoulders. And St. Andrew is holding a baby child--that gets to be almost pedophilia if my you-know-whats fall on that baby child's head. And he looks so innocent."

But what did you finally do with the day-of-the-dead mask?

"Well, that's the weird thing. I was afraid if I hung it out there in front of God and everybody, the garage might get struck by lightning or something--doesn't stone attract electricity? I think I read that somewhere. God protected me by putting that article in front of me. Or I saw it on the internet, or something. But God didn't mind if I hung the mask in the bathroom so we can look at it while we take showers."

But won't you be punished there too? I would think God's idea is that you shouldn't hang such a thing anywhere at all. And you should probably find some kind of head to put on the St. Andrew statue.

"Well, so far nothing's happened in the bathroom. I mean, I seem to drop the soap more often, and it gets smushed on the side that way. Maybe that's a warning--I have to bend down to pick it up, you know, and if I ever have to go to prison . . . . And the bathroom mirror broke, and I stubbed my toe on the base of the toilet, and my wife's contact lens dropped into the drain, and God can make those things happen. But things like that always happen in the bathroom. Like n the kitchen when a spoon gets stuck in the garbage disposal. Those are the normal ways God messes with us. That's the price we pay for Eve's sin! (Adam was helpless there.) But, look, don't get me confused: I think my point is that I want everyone to know that God exists! God tempted me by suggesting that I hang that mask on the garage wall, and then when I did it, He let me know what he thinks of that idea. It's just like if he tempts you to go through a stoplight, and you do it, and your car gets totalled--see, you knew you shouldn't do it! God is Holy, God is Just. Or he tempts you to be a mono . . uh . . homosexual, and you do it. And you enjoy it, and you live a happy, satsifying life because you can be honest and straightforward about who you are. See, that's your punishment. Or having sex with your significant other--be it male, female, or consenting adult pet. And you enjoy it. See!

God bless!"

Saint Dog

2007-08-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have a Christian dog, and I'd like to propose him for sainthood.

What name does he answer to?

His name is Dexter (after Dexter Gordon, the be-bop tenor player who had the starring role in the film Round Midnight.

How do you know Dexter is Christian?

Because he is directed by God to perform acts worthy of sainthood.

What acts are these?

(Notice my catechistic format? Maybe I should propose myself for sainthood. For another writer who has mastered a sacred form, see James Joyce, who in Ulysses wrote a long penultimate chapter in catechistic form. I don't know who is my influence: the Pope or James Joyce.)

Ahem (you don't seem to be listening): what acts are these?

In our backyard, I have a statue of the Buddha. Dexter regularly treats this statue with holy disdain. No matter how many times I cleanse it with the hose, Dexter returns with the usual contemptuous baptism.

Why does Dexter do this?

He does this to extend his dominion, as we are instructed to carry the gospel to the hinterlands and bless non-believers with it.

Why else does he do this?

The statue is in his territory, and he ascertains that it is like Gog and Magog (though it is only Buddha, and Buddha is meditating, hardly aware of the golden showers befalling him) and he must try to make it fall forward on its face, and chip its nose. He must, like Samson, destroy the theaters of the Philistines.

But is there anything that redeems this infidel garden?

Yes, around the corner there is a statue of a saint.

Describe this statue.

It has no head, and it carries a babe in its arms, symbolizing the saint's tenderness toward little children.

Is the babe a male or a female?

The statue is stone, so it is impossible to determine the gender of the child in the usual way.

What happened to the head of the statue?

Mysteriously broken off--perhaps doing battle with the statue of some pagan deity. There were several at the shop.

At that shop, were there headed saints, besides this headless one?

Yes.

Why did you not purchase a saint with a head?

My wife made the decision.

Hmph. Adam's excuse. What were her reasons for preferring headlessness to headedness?

She is a former Catholic. Though I do not inquire into her motivations, I suppose that her background gives her an especial insight into the nature of sainthood.

Does Dexter pee on this statue as well?

No, he genuflects.

What is your religion?

I suppose that my background is Protestant, though my grandmother carted me off to Episcopal church, and I'm not sure that really qualifies, since it began as the English flip-of-the-finger to the Pope over Henry VIII's divorce. Catholics, Protestants of all stripes, and Anglicans duked it out for quite awhile in England, and with much loss of life, which often seems to accompany the most devout religious commitment. To my credit, I have participated in no burnings at the stake of people whose beliefs disagreed with mine, nor have I assented to torture, or burnt any heretical books. This disqualifies me, perhaps, from belonging to any religion.

So, you and your wife are quite compatible because your religious backgrounds are similar?

We are compatible because we have left our religious labyrinths behind and bask in the garden of no religious belief.

Has Dexter had the requisite visions for sainthood?

He sometimes moves his legs frantically in his sleep.

Is his character saintly, worthy of emulation by all who adopt him as their guiding spirit?

He is mellow, modest, humble, cheerful, and companionable. The only possible chink in his saintly armor is this: he is not above lying and manipulating when it comes to food. Though I have fed him, if there is any chance at all that my wife, when she gets home, will fall for his scam, he will not hesitate to act starved.

Is Dexter kind to children?

He adores them and does not molest them.

Is he kind to his fellow creatures?

We have a blind dog named Punky. Dexter delights in trying to pull her out of the van by her ear.

Is Dexter temperate in all ways?

Yes, except for food, and the mailman. And sometimes he strains at the leash, if he sees a skunk, a possum, or a coyote.

Dexter has many commendable qualities, but his most outstanding regards his respect for the headless saint, and his disdain for a mere stone idol.

But wait, the saint is stone too.

The stone Buddha is a sacreligious idol; the stone saint is a holy image, even without its head. The Headless Horseman was still a terror.

Here is an analogy: some bread is just bread--other bread is holy flesh. Some wine (or grape juice) is just wine (or grape juice)--other wine (or grape juice) is blood. The attitude you bring to it is transformative. God did not make Reality to be Reality: He made Reality to be everywhere and at all times a test of Faith. You demonstrate your Faith by denying Reality wherever and whenever necessary.

Dexter understands this. He is saved. You are lost. Dexter will be submitted for sainthood. As for you, things are grave. You too must go out and pee on the Buddha.

In Memoriam

2007-08-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't often been asked to attend a funeral, and the last one was, fortunately, some six or so years ago: a colleague's wife, who had died of breast cancer after trying everything--the broccoli, surgery, etc. She was only in her forties. Before that, I attended the funeral of a colleague, not that old, who died of generally miserable health--he weighed in the vicinity of 400 pounds, and the last time I saw him before his death, he could barely walk up the slight incline in the campus auditorium without wheezing loudly.

The funeral I attended last Saturday was for a drummer, Steve Sykes, who died at 51 of colon cancer. The news of his death was sudden, though he had been ill for some time. I had only heard about the illness a month or so previous. I hadn't seen him for over a year, but I thought of him fondly, and I loved being in a group with him.

Others stood up at the funeral and offered comments about their experiences with Steve, which were all positive, though he had a reputation in some circles as curmudgeonly.

If I hadn't been too shy to say my piece at the time, here's what I would have talked about.

I first met Steve when he subbed on a gig for another drummer. I was playing vibes. Within four bars of the first tune, I knew we were going to have some exciting times that night. Steve was a really fine, swinging, drummer. When I wasn't playing, I watched him (I'm also a drummer) and began to understand things about playing drums I had never understood before. Steve played easily, naturally, musically. When it came time to do some recording, I wanted him on the gig, and he was great. I suggested doing "Well You Needn't" (Monk) as a funk tune, and Steve was into it instantly--he laid down a cooler funk than I had imagined, and we all fell into the groove. That version is on the cd "Live at the Balzac."

Another time, I got a combo gig near Cal Tech in Pasadena, playing for someone's garden party. I kicked off "Just Friends" at a medium tempo--warm-up tune, you know--and Steve pushed the tempo up to something really swinging. I didn't mind, though I was grimacing inwardly--I was used to playing it down. But Steve swung, and made us swing. I had this inner sense of excitement when he was at the drums, like being in a new reality.

We did a gig with the pianist Dave Mackay. I paid extra money to get Dave for the gig and had Steve on drums and Mike Flick on bass. We played a couple of tunes, and Dave Mackay was smiling and swaying, and turned around at one point and said, "Hey, you guys are great! How come I've never heard of you?" Both Steve and Mike were too modest (I guess) to explain that that's often the situation in LA--there are literally thousands of great players who don't get heard on the radio or are buried on CDs that don't get too much play, or who just job around, playing professionally as sidemen. What can you do? A career in music is pretty tough.

One night at the Balzac, the bass player didn't show up. We called him at the hour the gig was supposed to be starting and he had just woken up from a nap and was getting on the freeway an hour away. I told him to stay home. But Steve had his little black book out, and we combed through it for other bass players. He told me never to call that guy again. Steve would show up plenty early for any gig, wheeling his equipment in on a cart--"It goes with the territory," he always told me placidly. I wished I had more gigs so I could hire him more.

I'm really sorry that Steve died. I loved making music with him and hanging out during breaks or before or after the gig. Every other speaker testified to his always being positive about life, and one said Steve would take his own time and come up to talk to his college Jazz History class without any compensation. He just liked doing it.

That's the kind of guy you really miss--he seemed to make life better for people, and he certainly made playing a joy for me.

'Bye, Steve. You were cool. I wish we had had more gigs, and I wish there could be more in the future.

Packing for Baja California, Mexico

2007-08-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

These are the essential supplies for a gig in Baja....

Reading: an aberration

2007-08-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

As an English teacher, I've heard many times that students' attention spans are being ruined by the rapid pace of events in the new technology. Films used to be more slowly-paced, people stuck it out to the end of a book. People Magazine articles don't tax the mind the way a New Yorker article does. Of course, people still read New Yorker articles. Or at least they look at the cartoons.

But what if technology is not destroying our attention span, but returning us to a more natural state of being? Humans did not evolve reading books--they are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity. The ideal of universal literacy is even more recent, barely a century old. To sit still for long periods of time with one's eyes moving minutely--and little other activity--across a page of small characters is a highly counter-intuitive act for an animal that for almost all of its history hunted, gathered, made artifacts, music, danced--all physical activities that engaged many parts of the body. The attention could engage more physical capabilities--not just the eyes and brain. Reading would naturally make the reader impatient, unless the book is so exciting that a degree of imaginary kinesis is aroused. I.e., the reader imaginatively runs through forests with Harry Potter, or is caught up in suspense. This may be why "popular" fiction is popular--there is action, and action is what humans evolved with. It feels more natural to be engaged that way. "Intellect" is touted by many as a higher form of humanity, but where did that judgment come from? From people interested in the intellectual life.

I heard an interview with the maker of a new computer game that involves the whole person in interactive music making online. I don't know why one wouldn't just buy an instrument, practice it, and get into a band. But this computer phenomenon is becoming wildly popular, and physical, interactive gaming is the new wave for computer games.

So, how do we promote reading when other activities can be characterized as more compatible with our human nature? It is not terribly cheering to argue that we must be able to read: unnatural as reading is, it has become necessary to survival. Moreover, intellectual activity had to drive all other activities, since we we are slower, smaller, and weaker than so many other animals.

We are in the early phases of new evolutionary directions--we must somehow combine the ability to interact intellectually (which is what reading should be) with physical activity, set aside time for each, cultivate both.

Economics, Flora, and Fauna

2007-06-29T23:57:00.000-07:00

As a neighborhood goes more upscale, so do its flora and fauna.

We live in Burbank, and the neighborhood has been changing: a mansion here, a mansion there, a modest house razed except for a single stud, around which a new home is built. We have mansionization--we also have Home Depotization--especially when it comes to the exterior decor, we are seeing more of the standardized columns that must be from Home Depot. You can find them in the lumber department, piled together waiting to support a faux-colonial facade.

But as this trend becomes more noticeable, other things bloom: Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars, and BMW's are seeming to drop from the trees and clutter the streets. They line parkways and driveways in clusters and bouquets; there is always a hum and a buzz in the air as bees seek them, or is that the rather large custom stereos some of them have been equipped with? The more modest and weedy Fords and Chevrolets seem to have migrated out into the North Hollywood area, and spikier older cars line the streets of Pacoima and Panorama City. You only see the occasional mundane tulip gray van here and there--even families prefer the more exotic, hothouse blossoms that need the loving care of the detailer. A shiny black Porsche sits regularly on the street up on Sunset Canyon. It sits there day after day and never gets dusty. The owner drives it to the car wash nursery the way pet lovers take their dogs to the groomer.

For a long time our black Camry sat in front of the house (where it still sits when someone isn't driving it) keeping the pepper tree droppings off the street. Now the whole car has a crusty appearance that no amount of washing will smooth away. You would have to use a grinder. In our walks around the neighborhood, I make sure to stop and smell the flowers along the way.

Standing Up

2007-06-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

My wife says my blogs are a form of "stand-up." Does she mean, where you make a rendez-vous with someone and then fail to appear? The many meanings of "stand up . . . "

I Used to Been a Art Critic

2007-06-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

This was in Detroit. I was a young prof in the academic department at an art college (teaching English--more about sometime that in "Adventures and Misadventures in Academe")--Center for Creative Studies--and I got a chance to do some writing for a Chicago-based arts paper that wanted a Detroit stringer. I went around to various exhibits--photography, painting, sculpture--and wrote up to 250 words per article on what I saw. It was fun for awhile, and I ate a lot of cheese and crackers and drank my share of cheap wine and more than my share of green grapes and watermelon squares (my then-wife was mortified that I hung around the food table all the time), but then reviewing became an onerous task for two reasons.

(Maybe three: the food was always the same.)

But first (and more importantly, of course, since I could eat at home), in 250 words, you use up everything you have to say on the specific exhibit, but you can never really develop any ideas meaningfully on a broad scale. Then I realized I didn't care about that, and decided my career as an art critic should come to an end.

But the other reason was this: I didn't see any way to continue without compromising either friendships or honesty. As soon as local artists discovered I was writing reviews, I noticed a tendency for them to want to get acquainted with me, tell me about their work, let me know where they were exhibiting. Some of them were already friends; some became more friendly. I was especially troubled when a friend lobbied on her husband's behalf. I did not like his work, and I did not want to be in the position of saying publicly what I would have to say if I were being honest. So, I stopped.

But not before doing a more fully developed article on photography in Detroit. I sent in one draft, and got it back with the comment that it didn't have enough of an "opinion." I presumed they wanted something more confrontive than a neutral overview of what people were doing, so I rewrote the article, calling it "Photo Faciticity in Detroit." The point of the article was that, to judge from the work of most of the photographers on the art college faculty at that time, as well as others I knew in the area, photographers in Detroit were under the sway of what I considered an antiquated idea: that photographs are facts about the world. This was before Photoshop, obviously, but not before there was plenty of discussion about how photographs can be made to misrepresent the world, and indeed, plenty of discussion--if one were reading in such discussive places--of how who knows what a fact is anyway?

The spokesperson for this philosophy (and he may have changed later, but his photography continued to reflect that notion) one day--before the article was written--kicked me out of his classroom for speculating, in a casual conversation, that Brassai's photographs of Paris night life looked like dream images in some respects. I thought the guy was kidding, but he was seriously ordering me, in a raised voice, to "Get out of my classroom!" In front of students. I don't know whether he thought my ideas were contaminative, or whether he just didn't like them. But out I went. He had a non-arrogant demeanour most of the time, but he was arrogant under his mild exterior.

Perhaps it was with some sense of satisfaction that I later wrote the article and used it as a platform to debunk the idea of photo as "fact."

I'm not sure how many of my acquaintances actually read the article, since it was in a Chicago-based arts paper, but my art critical career came to an end. I still have copies of my reviews, perhaps even of the "Photo-Facticity" article. I haven't seen copies on Ebay yet.

The next time I wrote something on photography, it was a fictional piece that got published in the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education, or SPE. Even now, I consider it funny--I think the title was "Steiglitz in Heaven," where Stieglitz, like God, gets to make the ultimate judgment about which photographers gain access to the Pearly Gates, and which don't.

Note to Self #1

2007-06-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

No more "Notes to Self." No one else would want to read it, and I certainly don't want to.

Pretty is as Pretty Does: All of Aesthetics in One Swell Foop, Proving that Photos are Facts about the world, and whoever believes the opposite is a

2007-06-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

Hey, I didn't get to finish my title--what's this?

I meant to say: "Whoever believes the opposite is a lunatic." Okay? Now I can get on to the important part of my blog: the blog itself. Titles are a bunch of crap anyway.

I take/make pictures with cameras. I got a degree in it from an art school, where I learned a lot that I now consider important, like the difference between lying and investing in your future, and when I get the chance I strike out and look at the world to see what I can see. Sometimes, it's a landscape, sometimes a cityscape, sometimes family members. Sometimes it's "serious" shooting, sometimes it's snapshots. I put the quotes around "serious" because who's to deny that a parent with a point-and-shoot digital camera isn't serious about capturing an infant's first stand-alone steps. I don't have to make a living with pictures, so I'm free to shoot whatever I want, and for whatever reason. Like Dick Cheney, who's also free to shoot at whatever he wants.

I've had to divest myself, though, of Biblical Commandment #11: a photograph that isn't gallery level excellent isn't worth shooting. I don't know where I picked this up, maybe from all the talk about archival prints, straight prints with no manipulation as the Supreme Ideal in photography, and the magic word: "vision."

Here's a definitive aesthetic proclamation: My vision is whatever I see. Duh, and Thank You.

This means I can do what Gary Winogrand said he did: take a picture to see what a scene looks like photographed. Or take a picture for the hell of it, even if no one would ever want to look at it in the future. Digital photography makes this much less expensive, but I often do the same with film. I'm amassing many negatives that will never be printed. Why? I'm not always sure I know. I don't print for shows (though at one time I felt compelled to get into shows--a career in art photography seemed important). Sometimes it just seems the thing to do. Considering how many image makers have made the ordinary and unprepossessing their subject matter, how can I go wrong? If anyone wants to contact me to purchase any number of my images, by all means contact me for a list of prices. I don't have (at this point) any list of images, or examples of images, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all. So, just send in your order, and I'll be glad to close my eyes and choose one for you. If you get enough of them, it will be like the patterns on the walls of mosques. (In my more etymological moments, I mull over the historical relationship between the edifice and the insect: "mosqueito." When I finish my definitive proclamations on aesthetics, I'll take up etymology.)

One of my daughters and I were in Yosemite recently, and I was clicking the shutter for all kinds of reasons: I saw some tree bark and remembered that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston shot tree bark; a waterfall looked cool; I wanted souvenir pictures of my daughter in front of impressive geological features--waterfalls, Half Dome, all of Yosemite Valley, Nevada and Vernal Falls. Photo Tip: when the falls are at a distance, as they are when you view them from Glacier Point, you hardly have to do any hiking at all to get pictures of both of them. I believe I may have taken two or three steps. I might even just have turned to my right or left, and Voila! A lady sat on the stone steps overlooking that immense landscape. She sat motionless for a long time. I considered calling 911, but then I saw her take out a pair of binoculars and gaze. I believe she was gazing rather than gaping. I was gaping. When my mother looked earnestly at me, I thought of her as my gaping Maw. But this woman continued with this activity for some time. Then she put her binoculars away, picked up a walking stick, and changed locale. There, she gazed again. I was filled with a rush of human feeling.

Another Photo Tip: The spiritual value of a strenuous hike. After much consternation, we found the trail head to Inspiration Point, where we thought we should go for a drink of some inspiration. It turned out to be right across the street from the Tunnel Outlook, where every visitor entering Yosemite Valley from Fresno is required by law to stop and gape. We had gaped long and hard. I have a picture of the Yosemite Tour Bus to prove I was there.

But the real point is this: Inspiration Point was the shortest of several hikes listed on the trailhead sign. 1.3 miles (one way, I think). I looked for a menu for the snack bar that would surely be at the end of the trail, but couldn't find it and considered that just one more thing to beef with the rangers about--those clucks. They never want you to have any fun.

Let's Go! I yelled "Geronimo!", and then I thought better and yelled "On y va!" instead, after my favorite comic book characters, Asterisk and Obelisk, two late-Roman Empire Gallic warriors who fought courageously against the Roman occupation. We started determinedly up a 45 degree incline. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. My day was just getting started.

My daughter said, "Are you sure this is necessary? I thought we were taking a walk. When does it level off?" I said, "Soon, I'm sure. But to make sure, I'll check ahead."

I hiked forward, my jaw jutting, legs pumping, fist clenched, for about twenty yards. When she was out of sight, I dropped all pretenses. I peered hard as far as I could see. If eyes can pump iron, that's what mine were doing.

I'm told that "rose" by any other name is the same, so it doesn't matter whether I say the trail inclined, heightened, elevated, angled upward, or eventually met my eyes at their own level. It was up, up, up as far as the eye(s) could see, off into the trees, the forest primeval, where piney monuments to time lay about, a bunch of dead trunks on the ground, or, alternately, blasphemed into the air like pirates in a pew looking to the crucifixion for provocative ideas about how to entertain their next hostage.

My daughter was not amused. I, sensitive parent that I am, even at a considerable distance, sensed her frustration and offered her an out: "We could stay here, and say we took a hike." Actually, I sensed nothing. I wanted an out and pretended to let her off the hook. She, hearing me pant from 50 yards away, agreed that Inspiration starts at home, so I made the round trip back to the trailhead in record time, and we decided to move on.

"But not before we document our achievement," I said. "Stand by that sign. I'll take your picture, which will be worth a thousand words, and we'll use it to prove that we hiked--let's see, what's the longest hike here?" I checked the sign--"Hm, Tijuana--yes, we hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Tijuana, and back, in one day, and had time for lunch at some dingy place (what else is there in Tijuana?). We arrived back at the Trailhead, nearly dead for thirst, our clothes ragged (if you don't look too hard at the photograph, this is defensible--I'll only mention to the inner circle of my blog readers that Jessie seems to have just showered) and tattered, nearly falling off us, and struggled, gasping to the car.

"Dad, Mexico's not on the John Muir Trail, and there's no hike to Tijuana listed on this sign."

"If I just adjust the focus, no one will be able to tell where these hikes go, or how long they are." I gave the focus knob my best English and rubbed my thumb on the lens as an extra precaution. "I'll print it in with Photo Shop. Don't stand too close to the sign, no one will recognize you. In fact, get way back there--that way it will seem like you're just coming around through those trees--hey, cool, like Shakespeare--enter, chased by a bear! Not only will this picture document a monumental achievement, it will have literary value! Better yet, get up here, right in front of the camera, then it will seem like more candid, you know, like I documented you struggling to the car. Good--got it! Here, another one--struggle a little more. Hunch your shoulder like you fell down a cliff or something, or into a deep ravine. Good, yes--here, throw some dirt on your face. It was a terrible fall, and we got it all on film, symbolically anyway." I emptied a bottle of Perrier on her in case we needed to say we had had to cross a raging river. I love how the camera never lies.

I've developed a knack for close and sustained argument. It's easier than spitting.

My conclusion from all this is that, even if you're an art photographer, and even if you have a confused idea of what that means--as I do--you can take a picture of anything you want. And you can enjoy a pretty sunset, or pretty waves at the beach, or a pretty member of either gender in a costume that shows off the particular virtues of that gender, whichever it might be.

This reminds me: I told some friends recently that my wife and I were going to Switzerland. One asked, "Which of you is getting the sex change?" We had only planned to be gone for six days, but it's not too late to extend our stay.

One final remark on the aesthetics issue, though I think I must pretty well have exhausted the subject and anyone reading about it. At Olmsted Point, I hopped about here and there with my camera, snapping this and snapping that, and then looking at the the screen to see just what I'd snapped and whether I should snap it again, or go snap something else. Snap snap snap. I noticed a fellow sitting with his legs in a perfect lotus position, his eyes closed, face into the full mid-afternoon sun, a touch of sunscreen on his nose. In spite of his eyelids being on fire, he was perfectly at peace with the cosmos, but he radiated unmistakable hostility toward me. I snapped him. Sitting still with an unearthly stillness (I know passive aggression when I snap it), he seemed to say, "Can't you commune with the grandeur before you without that infernal snapping? Do you think everything can be reduced to a 4x6? An 8x10? An 11x14? A 16x20? Etc.?" He virtually snapped at me, "You cheapen everything you snap. Nature is glorious. The scene before us is f-ing ineffable. What kind of camera is that anyway--how many megapixels? I f-ing can't count that high." Ha-ha, I silently laughed his scornful silence to scorn. Couldn't even count. I practice that all the time: watch--one, two, three, four, etc. A friend of mine once wrongly said, "When we see a landscape, we take a picture in order to control the magnificence in front of us." I made up the quote on his behalf, to represent the essence of his idea, and I haven't seen him for a long time: his name, in case he ever stumbles onto this blog and joins me on the trial by trail, is Dave Jacobs. Hi Dave! He became a dean of something somewhere, but he was really smart and a good photographer. But he was still wrong about controlling landscapes by photographing them. I snap the scape 'cause it f-ing awes me, and I want to get a little of that awe back in my house when I have to leave the awesome reality and that lotus-guy, and the lady with her binoculars, and the crowded "comfort stations" behind. And I want to prove that I went on this fabulous hike. So Dave, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, deaning, or maybe you're the president of something by now--you deserve it, you're smart--but control is not the issue. Okay? I love blogging--Dave will never see this, and so I never have to defend my ideas. Swift had a metaphor for this kind of writing: it's like the spider constantly spinning a web out of himself. Ew. Forget Swift.

This kind of writing is like a photograph--it proves the world is there, but you wonder what the world there is.

And that's the latest report on the most definitive approach to aesthetics, all in one swell foop. Except I forgot to mention Ralph Gibson. He got famous for some surrealist images that were pretty mysterious and impressive. He must have been intuitively good. I heard him talk about aesthetics once, and he thought he was really dazzling his audience with a bunch of blather about "style" and "content." How did he know that a picture consisted of those elements? The owner of his gallery in New York told him so. Right on, Ralph! That was one swell foop right there.

Seriously, though, folks, take any picture you want (pedophilia excepted). I've noticed that in the grand scheme of things, aesthetic theories are rather weak on the endurance scale, but works of art are still there hundreds of years later. Especially if they're archival.

A Bit of History

2007-06-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

With reference to the title "The Labyrinth and the Garden": when my wife was first demonstrating how to set up a blog a year or so ago, she said, "You have to have a title." I said, "What kind of title?" She didn't say, "A titular title," as she might have, but patiently said, "Just a title." So off the top of my head, I blurted out, "How about 'The Labyrinth and the Garden,'" hoping she would know how to spell either or both of those words.

This proves the validity of the folk wisdom that your first thought may be your deepest and most honest thought, before you filter it through all the filters that filter things about to become a matter of public record. Before you "spin" them.

Here's my interpretation of my own title: sometimes the things you think are going to be gardens, i.e, places of growth, beauty, rest, and peace of mind (never mind the weeds and mosquitos), turn out to be labyrinths--i.e., places of pain, confusion, anger, loss of direction, where neither is the end ever in sight, nor the way to get to the place you can't see. Sometimes the two places (the garden and the labyrinth) change their nature with time. That is, looking back on a labyrinth, you realize it might have been a garden, and visa-versa. Sometimes you yourself are one, sometimes the other. But that is certainly a tale for many more blogs than I intend to write at this sitting, especially since the IRS in its wisdom has decided that I, a teacher, ought to have to spend a lot of valuable time in the labyrinth of last year's tax return preparing for an audit.

And besides, those two terms seem like a reasonable summation of the literature I've taught in the last thirty-seven years. For those of you who may be professionally obligated to think that such a terminological dichotomy certainly must oversimplify things: welcome to my world.

And now, finally, the "bit of history" which was my original intention.

I finished grad school at UC Berkeley, typed out (one by one, since this is 1969 BC--"before computers" were widely available) approximately 125 letters of application to institutions almost entirely outside California, and waited. At that year's Modern Language Assocation meeting, I had fourteen interviews. Out of those, I got one job offer. I tried to negotiate a salary higher than $9500 (even $9750 would have been an improvement), but no dice. I went from California to Detroit, where I spent the next fourteen years. I had thought, if Detroit proved unpalatable, that I would be able to find other jobs in other places, but within two years, all the job listings seemed to dry up. All those positions, at all those institutions of higher education, vanished. Very few ivory towers seemed to love specialists in Milton and the Seventeenth Century anymore. To make matters worse, Detroit proved unpalatable. That will be either a long or short blog, depending on my tolerance for the topic.

Since then, I have taught at one semi-major state university, three colleges of art and design, and several community colleges. I will retire from my current position--at a community college--after some twenty years there.

For the record: the most interesting place to teach was my first art college. Politics were minimal, the academic department (this was truly a garden) had a free hand to create courses of interest pretty much at will, and (along with my own experience as a graduate student in photography at Cranbrook Art Institute some time after getting a PhD in English at Berkeley) I was in daily contact with people who were not only interested in music and the arts, but did them. Like all gardens, though, this one has fallen: new administrations have regularized the curriculum-development process, fulfill many bureaucratic requirements in the name of normalcy and accountability, etc.

At the risk of over-generalizing, there can be a big difference between people who study the arts and people who create them. Almost always, the people I've known who were creators of art have been energetic, eccentric but wide-ranging in their interests, and pretty agreeable. (Obviously, this can't always be true, since there are many instances of artists who are really abominable people, and many fine people who are not artistic at all.) What I remember most sharply about my colleagues at the university is a snide and often contemptuous attitude toward writers: one colleague, thinking of her colleagues on the creative writing faculty, I suppose, as "second-rate egomaniacs." More about this labyrinthine time in my life as we go along, but the university atmosphere seemed, to me, poisonous. I managed to learn a lot because I was always interested in learning, but I would have done that in any case, and the politics that accompanied this uneasy sojourn were borderline hideous. As one colleague put it, "The less there is at stake, the nastier people are about it."

The art colleges have had interesting students, but they're not there to take academic classes, and their studio professors remind them of that, indirectly encouraging them to put in minimal effort there while they applied themselves to their studio classes. This is, I have to say, as it should be--but it can be frustrating for an academic faculty member. The students may or may not be gratifying, and the studio faculty regard you as a second-class citizen, with few exceptions.

There were always studio faculty I regarded highly, one of whom, Joseph Bernard, who has recently retired, introduced me to non-narrative film, and we had frequent chats in the copier room about art and literature.

I had a student from one of his classes in a literature class. When I found out the student was in Joseph's twentieth-century art class, I asked how he liked it. He replied that it was terrible: the first meeting, Mr. Bernard had played them a tape of some woman talking in bed. I immediately recognized Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the many-paged last chapter of Ulysses, a perfect introduction to a class in modern art. I passed that along to Joe, and we had a good laugh about it.

My only description of the university is that it was a 50th-ranked place trying hard to be 49th and vying, in its own mind, with University of Michigan for the self-applied title "Harvard of the Midwest." A day in the life of an untenured assistant professor: at one point, the English department scheduled a group meeting with the Dean of Liberal Arts for some tips on successfully negotiating the tenure process. The standard criteria for tenure were said to be publication, excellent teaching, and public service. The Dean said the criteria were "publication, publication, publication." Most people of merit and potential who began their careers at this university moved on to other places. At least one is a well-known novelist who went to University of Michigan and is now somewhere in New York, perhaps Columbia University. The best things about this place: I read a lot of Faulkner, all of Jane Austen, and taught Shakespeare regularly.

This is the early seventies, and the subject of government surveillance came up one in class. One student pointed out that the government "plant" is always the one who looks most like a hippie. At that time, I had a beard and long hair. Suspicion immediately fell on me.

But I was the victim, not the agent. When the state of Michigan decided that its secret surveillance files had to be made public, I received a notice that there was a file on me. I applied to see it and discovered that the file had been started because my car was parked on a street where a "communist meeting" was taking place.

This reminds me, too, of looking for an apartment that first year. I interviewed with one building owner/manager. He looked at me with my beard and long hair, heard that I had come from Berkeley and that I was teaching at a place notorious for its so-called communists and warned me first of all that I could not have a still in my apartment. I thought stills had gone out with the end of prohibition and speakeasies. Then it was drugs. He would know, he said, whether I was using drugs or not. When I asked how he could possibly know that, he just looked sharply at me and said he would know. The interview concluded with his determination that I "was not right" for his building. I recalled that just before my interview, I had seen him congratulating a very well-dressed, clean-cut prospect. This was my first introduction to the mind of a conservative. The interviewer, a lawyer, had a messy, weedy, toady, infested labyrinth mind that would never be a garden. He would always need someone to hate.

Rejoinders and rejoicers

2007-06-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back--that's the rejoinder. Looking forward to retirement: that's the rejoicer.

Only now thinking about retirement from teaching, and discovering that I can't go out quietly. I have to blog out loud. This is from the community college--not the cockpit or the lookout, but down in the engine room, where we try to get the gears and pistons working: i.e., jumpstart the intellectual life of students who (like I was at their tender age) haven't had too much intellectual life, or are still in their cloud of unknowing.

This is all provoked by seeing a new-minted teacher panicked about an upcoming class, preparing like mad. My advice: take it easy, do something that interests you. No matter how you try to psych out the students, only some will be interested; others will go along for the ride because they have to fulfill requirements; others will drop out for any of a number of reasons, few of which have to do with the professor. Some are there because they need to qualify as their parents' dependents for tax or health-care purposes. At any rate: don't blame yourself for those students who don't seem interested. Although administrators like to claim that every student can be motivated, what they leave out of this high-sounding imposition on a professor's time, energy, creativity and conscience is that not every student can be motivated in every class. The combination of subject, professor, and student is a strange and unpredictable brew, sometimes bubbling, sometimes exploding, other times going flat like grandma's dumplings and sinking right to the bottom of the pot. It's affected by all kinds of other uncontrollable contaminants, like time of day, job demands, family demands, weather, health, hunger, sobriety, the position of the stars, the stock market, the success of favorite sports teams, a pet's health--who knows what? We do our best and are thrilled when there are a couple of students with whom our best seems to take.

Molloy the Magnificent

2005-09-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

Molloy: the name sticks with me--the guy in Beckett's novel who couldn't remember his name when arrested by the police for leaning the wrong way on his bicycle. Why, of all names, is that the one that occurred to me when I had to choose a name? Why not Wilfred? Why not Orson? Some very fine people are named Orson, like Welles and Bean. Why not Augustus? I might have the blood of empire running in my veins. Is that empirical blood?

But I think I know the answer. It goes way back to college days at UCSB (hm, way, way back), when there was still an ROTC requirement (Reserve Officer Training Corps.). All males had to have two years of ROTC, unless, of course, they transferred in after their sophomore year. Those of us who went in unsuspecting as freshmen--we were up, uniforms pressed, brass polished, shoes spit-shined, at 6:00 AM every Thursday morning. And we took classes in military stuff. I remember two things from all those long ago classes: a) any little hillock in a landscape can provide cover from enemy fire (that was valuable); b) when in hot pursuit over the battlefield, make sure you bayonet any fallen enemy you pass; they could be scamming, rise up, and shoot you from behind, the scum. Somehow, it seemed like a terrible impediment to forward movement to have to stop, make sure you stabbed home, and then move on. But these were advisements from an ancient world. Modern technology has made such dangers obsolete.

But I started to relate the probable origin of my fascination with the name Molloy. First, it's an important fact that I was a musician in the ROTC band, not a future soldier at all. Early one morning, as I was warming up, noodling around, wanting, of course, to play my best when it came to all those 120 bpm Sousa masterpieces, the bandleader whispered a warning that one of the officers was advancing upon me with a glowering look and I should, in a word, can it. Well, before I knew what was happening, there was that officer demanding to know my name, rank, and serial number. Unfortunately, under pressure of his severe questioning--he had stern eyebrows that moved bushily when he barked, and his hat waggled behind his waggling ears--I couldn't immediately think of my name. Can you believe it? It was just like Molloy in the novel, only I hadn't read the novel yet. My hesitation was a deep source of consternation for the officer, who immediately flung a witty and cerebral taunt at me: "Can't you remember your name, soldier?" Being addressed as "soldier" threw me off, too. My fellow band members stood around in sympathetic anguish, and the band leader gave me this "I tried to warn you" look.

I redeemed myself under these stressful circumstances by looking down at my name tag. And lo, there was my name. I read it off, sounding it out carefully, to the officer, whose name, I believe (I glanced at his name tag as well) was "Reed." "Sir," I barked, "Molloy! My name is Molloy!" Now, of course, I didn't actually say that, because that isn't really my name. That's what the character in the novel says. But I did read off my name, which infuriated him even more than my martial noodling. He stormed off, grinding his jaws and clenching his military fists in a military way, probably wishing he could court martial me, or put me in the brig, or drive me off a plank. Me, I took my place in line,mulling over the possibility that I had , for the moment, brought to a halt, over a name, the American military establishment. I had found my hillock under fire and the enemy gave up on me.

A subordinate blog:

The demise of ROTC at UC: A protest in the best spirit of the 20th century. It was still two years before the Viet Nam anti-war uprisings and protests, but some anonymous persons, whose names shall remain unknown (I was not one of them, and I really have no idea who they were) found their voice. It was the last day of a year that had been uneventful except for my brave encounter recounted above. The students were assembled on the parade ground, brass bright and sparkling in the early sun. A breeze blew. Eucalyptus leaves waved. In the distance the ocean shimmered. The aspiring soldiers stood at attention; they shouldered their arms; they saluted smartly; they stared straight ahead. The officers on the platform exuded nobility (this was really just the front of an old and not too well-maintained barracks building left over from WWII) ready to inspect. The band played on.

When suddenly, above the fixed stares of the officers, Mickey Mouse, dressed in parade uniform, saluting smartly himself, unfurled before the ranks. He was smiling his happy-go-lucky cartoon smile. Laughter swept the ranks; apoplexy swept the officers, and angry shouts of "Order! Order! Stop that laughing! Now!!!!" burst from their 50mm mouths, spreading shrapnel. But that morning, America's finest could not squelch American's merriest, and the perpetrators escaped unknown and unrequited.

At the end of that year--unfortunately after I had finished my ROTC requirement--the University of California Regents, in their wisdom, did away with the requirement that America's young men should receive rudimentary military training as part of their intellectual growth. Two years later, UC Berkeley was in a turmoil of civil rights and anti-war protest; some three or four years later, the Bank of America in Isla Vista (the party-down community next to the university campus) went up in flames. By then, I was at Berkeley myself, trying to study in the graduate library. A friend tells me that one day (I happened to miss this one), the police or the California National Guard fired shots at protesters, and several bullets strayed into the serenity of that contemplative retreat and splintered its polished woodwork.

A final note on the ROTC. My first year, I played drums in the band. I was the only snare drummer, and there was a single bass drummer, who had never actually played an instrument before but loved jazz. As the only snare drummer, I could pretty much make up whatever cadences I wanted whenever I wanted. The bass drummer only had to keep time. But he and I, at dinner one night (we lived in the same dorm, went to the same dining commons), concocted a nifty idea: The US military should be exposed to unusual time signatures (Dave Brubeck was making headlines around this time). I remembered the inspiring scene from The Glenn Miller Story, in which Glenn Miller (Jimmy Stewart, really), in the midst of a desultory review parade, runs across the parade ground and has his band play the "St. Louis Blues March." The soldiers are transformed into a snappy, swinging unit. The message, obviously, is that jazz can make a person happy to be in the military. So John and I thought, if the "St. Louis Blues" can do that for Glenn Miller, a "Take Five" meter might have a similar effect for the Army Aspirants of UCSB. We put our plan into action the next morning and played 5/4 cadences on the march field.

It was exhilarating. We were exalted.

But something, somewhere, was wrong: the left foot only hit the ground on the first beat every now and then. The commanding officer, stopwatch in hand, came over and remarked: "The Scots Guard marches at 104 BPM; the U.S. Army marches at 120 BPM. Pick it up." The bandleader signalled to us to pick up the tempo. Which we did. Since we didn't get a signal to untangle the meter, we let that go, and the U.S. Army marched in 5/4 awhile longer.

At the end of the semester the bandleader informed me that I would get a B for ROTC instead of an A. After all, he said, we had had an agreement--I would play well, and things would be okay. I played the 5/4 cadences expertly, but it seems they were not what he--or the U.S. Military--had in mind.

This was 1961. I firmly believe that John and I, in our wisdom and in our small but artistic way, anticipated the protests that shook America to its foundations and reverberates today in the ongoing, so-called "Wars of Culture" that shake various Fox commentators to their foundations and have called down the wrath of such organizations as the Christian Coalition and the Traditional Values Coalition and the Right Reverend Lou Sheldon, who's been hawking his book on the "gay agenda" for America. Years later, I read the wonderful, exuberant scene in Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum where little Oskar, hiding under the stands, plays Viennese waltzes on his drum for a Nazi parade review. The rigid ceremony disintegrates into confusion.

John and I had to do our part. If I could remember his last name, I would, at long last, announce it loud and clear for celebration. He was a hero. He sacrificed for his country. I can still see him strutting along, banging hell out of that bass drum. We were both cracking up. The identify of Deep Throat, that great patriot, was revealed at last. Unless somehow, sometime, somewhere John reads this and reveals himself, another great patriot will go unsung. So much the worse for history. Historians talk about the thousands of people who disappear down Pynchon's vast toilet of history without ever being heard of. This, I'm afraid, is as close to rescue as I can bring John: the near wreck of a parade review on a college campus in a program about to be disbanded anyway. We gave it our own little nudge.

I can, at long last, tell this story. The statute of limitations on felony 5/4 has expired, and military tribunals today are otherwise occupied.

Peering into the well for the light at the end of the tunnel and seeing nothing but tunnel.

2005-08-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

I created this blog for my opinions a couple of days ago. Immediately after its creation, all opinions left my mind, so I put in a placeholder and waited. And waited. And waited some more, but went days without any opinions. I had a few thoughts, but they came and went at times when I wasn't near the keyboard, then I opened up my e-mail one day and what did I find? A note from a friend in response to a response I had left to one of her blogs of long ago. I mean, I left the response just yesterday--her blog was from a couple of years ago. And suddenly, as I responded to her response, I felt an opinion coming on. Thanks to Cont/C and Cont/V, I didn't have to work too hard. So, here it is.

Just to fill you in, Pilgrim's Progress was (you can still find it in bookstores and libraries, but it's not read as much as it was three or four centuries ago) an allegorical story in which an Everyman type saves his soul by pursuing spiritual enlightenment. It's the story of his quest and was immensely inspiring. It might be good reading today for a certain kind of person, but that person will probably be reading those loathsome, execrably written books by nouveau-riche opportunistic billionaire Tim LaHaye, or they'll be immersed in any of a number books in the devotional section of the bookstore. Pilgrim's Progress is much better than any of those, but still not compelling enough for someone not really interested to read.

Anyway, here's my note, which I think qualifies as a blogism.

Hi Molly (that's her name)

I liked your forthright nose-thumbing of Pilgrim's Progress. In English major school, it's one of those books, really, that you read about but never read. Lots of historians and commentators refer to it briefly--especially if they're writing histories of English literature, but it's rarely assigned for a class, except maybe some 17th century lit (I think I remember that it's a 17th century book) if the professor's really really old and comes into class just after taking communion. I finally read it because it had been referred to a lot, and it seemed like if I wanted to pass my qualifying exams, I'd sure better know it. I never got a single question on it--boy, was I bummed! I don't know that any of my professors had ever read it. It was a simple, instructional book with a fetching theme. Paradise Lost--now that's literature! Milton was my specialty long ago when I was just a little boy in the halls of academe. What did I write on? His prose. What's that? I forget. [Molly thought Paradise Lost was a much richer work of literature. She must be right--English majors are generally required to take a Milton course, never a Bunyan course.]

It's true, more people probably read Pilgrim's Progress than the Bible all the way through. I would also guess that anyone who reads the Bible all the way through now does so for seriously wrong reasons. Until the Protestant reformation, hardly anyone read any of the Bible, even if they were literate--the Church discouraged it, prefering that believers get their interpretations from priests, bishops, popes, cardinals, et al. If anyone asked me today, should they read the Bible all the way through, I'd say sure, but not all in one sitting. Save that for Harry Potter. If you ever want to read the Bible all the way through, too, I'd say--use 60% of that energy to read good historical/interpretive commentary. Without that context, the Bible will be a very strange set of texts. Christianity has ruined it.

Thanks for your response to my response. Now that I know someone's listening, I'll oppress you with responses to some other trombonemollyisms--they're very well written, very thoughtful. The trouble with blogs, though, is that you have to do them for the fun of it, like websites. Everyone has a blog (almost), so hardly any of them will be read. But think about the scholars of the future. They can build a life career out of blogosophies of blogology and barely scratch the surface. No one need ever disappear anonymously into the dustbin of history again; we'll all live forever in history books or works of scholarship. Even our post-blog notes back and forth will be topics of analysis in the new utopia of immortality. Hey, I should put this in a blog--I've gone too many days without an idea--maybe this will count as one.

And here it is.