The Earth Angel

      During rush hour traffic on a crowded crosstown M16 bus, a high baritone voice with a thick Italian accent chimed over the rumble of the engine and the shuffle of the passengers.
      “I am an angelic being!” it pronounced with an audible smirk. “I didn’t say anything about Jelly Beans! I am an angelic being!”
      A few people glanced up—then returned to their crossword puzzles.
      The speaker sported a long, black mullet. In one hand, he held at his chest an orange folder with a sheet of paper taped to it. On the paper, in the lettering of a bad punk band, were the words, “Earth Angel,” written in blue ballpoint pen.
      The Earth Angel wore a long coat and slouched while standing.
      The bus trudged through traffic.
      People crowded past each other, sitting or preparing to exit.
      “Please don’t pass in front of the Angelic Being,” declared the voice with mock anxiety. “This is terrible and terrifying for me!”
      A few seated passengers looked up skeptically.
      The bus inched along.
      “People on this planet are confused! They sometimes don’t know if they’re crocodiles, or dogs, or what!”
      Traffic ground to a stop.
      A moment passed.
      “Girls, if you’re a second over 29, you’re obsolete!”
      One seated woman snapped with her eyes.
      “Excuuuuuuuuse me?!” she said.
      A few heads turned. The only other movement was the gentle sway of the bus.
      “Please, if you can move away from the Earth Angel, I’d greatly appreciate it!”
      “Shut the fuck up.”
      A few people grinned at their neighbors. The Earth Angel smiled guiltily and looked somewhere else.
      “No more foreigners here! The Earth Angel is Eye-talian originally! He is a descendant of Amerigo Vespucci!”
      “Bus driver,” the same woman called out, “can you please kick this man off the bus?”
      The Earth Angel squinted.
      “Ohhh! I can feel the knife going through my back! I got stabbed!”
      The Earth Angel paused.
      “Mental stabness!” he cried out.
      The bus driver stared lazily ahead.
      Traffic started back up again.
      The engine rumbled and passengers shuffled around.
      The bus stopped at a curb.
      “Now folks,” the Earth Angel declared, “you didn’t think you were going to run into the Earth Angel out here! The only Earth Angel!”
      The door opened.
      The Earth Angel grinned, looked around, and said, before he got off the bus:
      “Of course not!”

Old & New

In Biddeford, Maine, the old mills have mostly been gutted. They remain hollowed out relics of the town’s history in textiles, and their generative power has been reduced to nil. But, as if tipping a nod to this industrial past, a towering new wind turbine stands atop a hill just next to one of the large brick buildings.

Precocious Perspective

      A young family walks into a small Thai restaurant in Biddeford, Maine. The father is tall and carries a one-year old girl. The mother, a tall brunette with streaks of platinum, wears a black t-shirt with the name of a heavy metal band on it. Two four-year-old twins with bright green coats and wonder-filled eyes wander in behind her, weaving as they gape up at the ceiling.
      One boy, awestruck, says to the whole room, “This place seems so big to me!”

A Few Thinks

I think people are built to sleep when the sun goes down.
I think people are built to rise when the sun comes up.
I think people are built to live surrounded by the color green.
I think people are built to eat vegetables and animals alike.
I think people are built to eat many small meals throughout the day.
I think people are built for struggle and not for luxury.
I think people are built both to compete and to cooperate with each other.

This is not to say that all or any of these are best for us,
And this is not to say that I act as I think I am built to act,
But I think that these things are in our nature.

New York City and Variety, III

      “Networking” used to be a dirty word.
      As I imagined it, networking was a shallow ritual of fake smiles, meeting and greeting, and endless meaningless conversations. It reeked of climbing the social ladder and dropping the right names to the right people.
      It didn’t take long, however, to discover that in the city, a network is a means of survival.
      Cities are saturated with supply, and when you’re the demand, it’s often hard to sort out the good supply from the bad supply. Imagine you’re a musician looking for a drummer. There are thousands of drummers in New York City. Do you call every drummer on craigslist? You can, but it isn’t very efficient or fun. Instead, imagine that for the previous year every other time you played or attended a show, you happened to notice a good performer before or after you. Each time, you introduced yourself between sets and maybe swapped cards or numbers. In the process, you met a number of interesting people that you admire—which is most important—and you also built up a roster of people who can help you when you need a drummer or a guitarist. And, you can help them by hiring them.
      In time, some of these people that you meet turn into friends, and others you never so much as think about again.
      Now imagine you’re looking for a dentist, or a tasty restaurant for a date, or a good band to see. Or imagine you’re a parent looking to hire a tutor for your child, or an athlete looking for a sports club. There are thousands of dentists, restaurants, bands, tutors, and sports clubs—some of them are good and many of them are bad—and you only want to invest your resources into something worth your time, energy and money. The surest way to find the good ones is to ask your friends. The larger your network, the easier you find what you’re looking for.
      But here’s the most important part. Living in a city is about meeting people. Living itself is about meeting people. It’s how we learn and grow. People and friends are what keep us human and healthy. So far, I’ve explained building a network in functional terms, but having a network is, most importantly I think, a human necessity. Truly, “network” is just a cold and heartless word for “friends.”
      The familiar irony of the city is that it’s easy to be lonely when you’re surrounded by millions of strangers. Your friends spur you out of your apartment and into the world. There, the people you meet and the variety they bring to your life remind you why you came to the city in the first place.

Party Time: A Fiction

    A Democrat and a Republican stand together in the middle of a room.
    “Everyone in our country should have health care,” says the Democrat.
    “You would waste my hard-earned money to get it,” says the Republican.
    “We must provide for our neighbors as ourselves,” urges the Democrat.
    “This is not a socialist welfare state,” responds the Republican.
    “You are cold-hearted and don’t care for other people,” sneers the Democrat.
    “You are thoughtless and would sacrifice our freedom to a wasteful government,” spits the Republican.

    The Democrat and Republican move to opposite sides of the room and glare at each other.
    Other people enter the room and the Democrat and Republican point out the folly of the other.
    The Democrat thinks about how the Republican doesn’t do anything but object to everything meaningful. The Democrat doesn’t think about the importance of freedom from our own government.
    The Republican thinks about how the Democrat would force others to do what they may not want to do. The Republican doesn’t think about how health care for everyone would be a good thing.
    The Democrat doesn’t see that the Republican’s objection is not with health care itself, but with its implementation.
    The Republican doesn’t see that the Democrat’s goal is not to make the government bigger, but to help people.
    Neither recognizes that their goals are not mutually exclusive.
    Instead, they quarrel.

    A new and unusual Democrat wanders in.
    “Can we have health care for everyone—but in a way that keeps freedoms and an efficient government?” asks the new and unusual Democrat.
    “I don’t think so,” says a suspicious Republican.
    “What if we tried this... Help me out?” says the new Democrat, stepping to the middle of the room.
    “Mmm,” says the Republican cautiously.
    They move a little closer...

Muggle Quidditch

Not Gryffindor, nor Hufflepuff,
Was there upon the pitch,
Nor Slytherin, nor Ravenclaw,
Nor yet a wizard nor a witch!
But brooms galore, a quaffle, too
And bludgers finely stitched,
And could it be, all dressed gold:
A running man who played the snitch?!

I thought it was for magic types
This game I did behold,
But there before me, muggle-style,
Was quidditch played by young and old!
An exhibition team had come
From lands of ice and cold
And local students had arranged
A team of players, bright and bold!

From Hunter College, NYU,
Columbia and more
Came beaters, seekers, keepers, and
A loyal crowd prepared a roar!
But Middlebury’s seasoned squad
A journey did endure,
For they on spring break did arrange
A multi-city quidditch tour!

They brought the league’s commissioner
With top hat on his head,
And with a cane and microphone
He made up teams in blue and red.
Then for the afternoon they played
And plenty could be said,
But if I told of all the fun
I'd never reach my nightly bed!

A blog is like a Sorting Hat
That metes out right and wrong
And so I’ll add a moral here
Before I end this song:

Imagination feeds the mind
And joy, it feeds the soul,
But quidditch, with the two combined,
Ensures a heart will ne’er grow old.

I Have a Theory...

...that every menu in New York City has at least one typo.

Yes, every single one.

Chickenhawk

A red-tailed hawk and her mate have taken up residence in at least one NYC park. I happened to pass by when she was perched up in a tree devouring the remains of a pigeon she had just grabbed off the sidewalk. I could hear the snap and crunch of bones. Feathers fluffed up into the air every now and then.

It wasn't the carnage that I found compelling, but the rarity of the hawk to me. While the red-tailed hawk is the most common hawk in North America, it is not at all common in my every day life. But there it was, just a short walk out my door, a surprise on a Sunday afternoon.

It was a good reminder to go outside more often.

Stuff happens when you do.

Click on the image above to take a goooood look at those claws.

Jazz, Words, Race - Part 3 of 3

      And so it is with race.
      Advertisements, evening news, history classes, television, music and other sources have defined for us the characteristics and behavior of entire demographics. This is, assuredly, an unworthy representation of individual, complex people. But further, for most Americans, these information outlets defined races and ethnicities in our minds before we even had a chance to develop our own understanding.
      We barely had mental pictures of the Middle East before September 11th, 2001. But after the attacks, images of cheering Arabs flooded our evening news, fanning our anger and emotional memory such that our first (utterly incomplete and unfair) definition of the word “Arab” was of extremists. Attached to such a strong emotional experience, this definition perched in our minds involuntarily until we discovered that the overwhelming majority of Arabs are, instead, everyday people just like us. They get up and commute to work in the morning. They take care of their kids after school. One visit to Google Earth showed us their neighborhoods, their driveways, and their playing fields—just like ours.
      But since then, we have battled between our first emotional definition, which is often most tenacious, and the one we later learned to be true. We have struggled with competing definitions of the same thing.
      This is the movement from innocence to experience, from simplicity to complexity, from a unilateral definition to a multifaceted definition. It is a movement, in this case, from understanding a word as a symbol of one thing to understanding a word as a symbol of many sometimes-contradictory things.
      So it is with people and political parties. When we say a person is a Democrat or a Republican, that person becomes bound by the meanings we associate with the party. But that inevitably misrepresents both the person and the party. Call me by my votes and the majority of my values—care for one’s neighbor, universality, transparency—and I am a Democrat, but call me by my preference for a small, efficient government and individual liberties, and I am a Republican. Both terms misrepresent me (though the former may be more accurate), and I misrepresent both terms.

      And so, what do we do when the words we use polarize the American landscape? What happens with all these distinctions between “us” and “them”? How, with race, do we become “post-racial” and think beyond black and white?
      Advertisements, evening news, history classes, television, and music have drawn lines between races. Political leaders have often struggled with addressing these lines. Sometimes, they avoid them altogether. For a brief time, in a good-intentioned but misguided and ultimately misunderstood move, social convention tried to “correct” our political language, and we’re still sorting through the debris.
      Sometimes we talk about something like a “pre-racial” condition. When I first sat at the piano, the keys didn’t belong to scales. When we met our childhood friends, we had personalities before we attached racial identities to each other. I was “Peter” before I was ever “white.” There was once a kind of color-blindness.
      But with race in America today, we are no longer innocents. We see in black and brown and white, and yet our experience has not carried our understanding very far. In all of our variety, we still have a limited racial vocabulary. Just as my early piano playing used only a few rarely overlapping scales, our conversations about race still refer to only a few rarely overlapping constituencies.
      The key as a musician was to keep learning new scales and chords. As my musical vocabulary grew, individual notes no longer belonged to individual scales, but became shared points of inflection between them. Notes became opportunities to pivot in multiple directions, to switch keys—and the keyboard opened back up into a sea of options informed by countless now-underlying relationships. It didn’t and still doesn’t happen instantaneously—I can’t access lush harmonies when I improvise—but when I sit and work at a composition, I find a greater richness in the keyboard now than I ever previously knew.
      Racial understanding must work the same way. If we learn more about race then race will no longer be our lens. This means traveling, learning, reading, and expanding our experience. As our racial vocabulary grows, we will recognize that experiences, like notes, no longer just distinguish races, but also become shared points of inflection between them—ours, theirs, any. We will also learn that some experiences, like some notes, will never overlap, but we will yet have some common relationship from which we can understand our differences.
      But further, the way we converse must also change. If the way we use language cannot keep up with the complexity of our experiences, then we will not understand our own conflicts—and so they will be even harder to overcome. Barack Obama’s speech this week is an increasingly rare example in recent politics of someone speaking to the country with a nuanced understanding of a complex issue—and with the ability to convey that same nuance.
      When the words that we use to describe each other expand from simple demographic names and unqualified and unexplained statements of opinion to something more indicative of the complexity of who we are, then our conversation and understanding will take on truer and more constructive shades.

~

      But, we don’t all have time to become jazz musicians.
      Working to get by, we don’t all have time to study language, to travel or to read in order to catch up with our increasingly complicated environment. And when we do have the time, we don’t often have the energy or inclination. This is fine, healthy, and human.
      But, if we are to hope for reconciliation of racial divides in future generations, we must at least understand one thing: the paramount importance of education. Only with greater education will future generations be able either to understand and articulate the growing complexity of the world they will inhabit or at least recognize when someone else has a better ability to understand and articulate those truths—and then entrust their leadership to that person.
      Only with this focus can we anticipate that the racial differences that we struggle with will, like the scales that so limited me, and like the rules of grammar that so restricted us all, with fresh insight and greater understanding, resolve into our own or another person’s richer vision for our future expression.

Jazz, Words, Race - Part 2 of 3

      As children, we learn language intuitively. We arrange words and sentences in our heads just as the beginner musician arranges notes and chords, and we come to understand that certain combinations of words are used in certain ways. Without trying too hard, we pick up patterns of speech. Then, in school, we formalize these patterns through grammar lessons, and these lessons, like theory classes in music, explain how and why words traditionally fit together.
      These classes, however, engender similar limitations as those the musician encounters once he has learned the basic scales. Once we learn to write complete sentences, it takes a long time to feel comfortable writing incomplete sentences.
      And so our ability to communicate with either music or language depends on the depth of our command of it. If we cannot stretch the fabric of language, then we are caught in patterns of speech the same way a beginner piano player is caught in the C major scale. Without versatile control over our language—without the ability to use the notes outside the scale—we struggle to convey complexity, subtlety or nuance.
      Better understanding, therefore, must come from greater control over language—and that means a study of words and sentences equivalent to a jazz musician’s study of chords and scales. This is the great importance of English teachers. For without good language skills, we are not good communicators, and without clear communication, we sow discord.
      But at its fundamental level, language—which is the medium for virtually all modern communication—is itself merely a symbol, and that carries with it a significant challenge.
      Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that “words are signs of natural facts,” but in our minds we only conceive of elements or representations of that natural fact when provided a word. Asked to picture a tree, some people imagine a great oak, others a pine, others a banzai. Others may even imagine a family tree or a sports bracket. The word “tree” takes on individual meanings to individual people. Similarly, mention “subways” and some people will think of fast and easy travel while others may think of subterranean grime. In each case, the mind summons only one or two aspects and leaves out—for it is impossible to contain—the entirety of the thing. The word may be a perfect symbol, but it is only as accurate as our understanding of it.
      So it is that in our conversations we may say one thing, but different listeners may take away other meanings. This becomes particularly tricky when we start stringing words together:
      “Peter is a Yankee.”
      My childhood friends from Boston would cringe to associate me with such an unfortunate baseball team, but my Southern relatives would laugh and think about my New England accent. It is both true and untrue.
      “Peter is a Republican.”
      My Democratic and Independent friends would resignedly shake their heads and associate me with tax cuts for the wealthy; my Republican friends would proudly nod and acknowledge this blog as evidence of my do-it-yourself work ethic. It is both true and untrue.
      In the first case, the very meaning of the word “Yankee” is different to different people. In the second, the value judgments applied to being Republican are different. In both cases, the many elements that make up the person (in this hypothetical example: me) are left entirely out of the picture—and so I am not accurately represented.
      A complex person, in this way, cannot be bound by simple words, just as a jazz song cannot be limited to a single scale.

Jazz, Words, Race - Part 1 of 3

      I’ve played the piano since I was five, and aside from two years of lessons, I've been self-taught. At the age of seven or eight, I took a year or two of lessons and learned to read music, but I quit soon after because, like many brash tykes, I wanted to play the cool stuff right away. But when I quit lessons, I didn’t stop playing. Instead, since I had learned how to read music, I played from books with music that I was interested in, and I played often. I also started learning music by ear, and I started writing.
      I was undisciplined with my technique, and that still has repercussions today, but I was inquisitive about the music. I began recognizing chordal and scalar relationships. I had a sense of what sounded good, and although I didn’t know the technical bounds of harmony and dissonance, I could tell what satisfied and didn’t satisfy my ear. My fingers began, at a certain point, to find their way to what I felt were the right notes. I never became a virtuoso—far from it—but I explored and I learned from the experience.
      In college, the first of my two majors was a music major. I soon took music theory classes. In them, I learned the names of what I had discovered over the years, formalizing them in my mind—and I’m still struggling to escape this.
      I found it hard to branch out once I had learned the standard scales (which notes are in; which notes are out) and chord progressions (this is where tradition goes, and this is where it doesn’t). Scales and chords organized the keyboard in a particular way; they superimposed a grid through which I saw relationships between notes and keys. Instead of being a sea of equally valid keys, some became out-of-bounds. Some notes you didn’t pair with others. This quickly became restricting, and it became increasingly difficult to play outside the scale. When I tried, it was an intellectual experiment and not an instinctive move. Locked into familiar patterns from too much time with basic scales, I tried to explore and use other notes, but it didn’t sound right.
      The jazz musician, however, learns not just the basic scales, but learns all of them. The jazz musician learns them all so thoroughly that all the different combinations of notes become second nature, and moving between them becomes as simple as when a bilingual person switches from Spanish to English and back in the middle of a sentence while talking to her father on the telephone. The musical scales are no longer boundaries, as they were for me, but rather tools that, once prescriptive, now offer context and resource and meaning.
      The jazz musician forgets that this is major, that is minor, this is Dorian and that is Lydian. Instead, he recognizes melody and draws upon major, minor, Dorian and Lydian to support it.
      For the jazz musician, the scales and chords disappear, and what is left is the song.

Creativity

When we write or paint or design or compose—when we create anything in any way—we bring into existence something that wasn’t there before.

Poof!

Ta da!

A Speech for Our Time

Barack Obama today gave a historically thoughtful and comprehensive characterization of race relations in America. Driven by the need to answer questions about his former pastor’s inflammatory remarks, Obama’s response was better than the simple denunciation many expected. Instead of the usual rebuttals we expect these days, the speech used the recent controversy as a stepping-stone for a larger, more relevant, and more important conversation.

Take the time to watch the whole speech.

Or read the full text online.

It is worth noting at the outset that the speech is entitled, “A More Perfect Union.” It begins and ends with our national dedication to self-improvement and our promise of prosperity. Race, in this context, is cast as only one factor in these larger goals. Many detractors would like to say that Obama’s candidacy is only about race, but this speech looks far beyond that.

It offers, instead, a nuanced and historically considered exposition the likes of which one rarely hears from today’s politicians. It acknowledges and explores multiple perspectives. It takes in our nation’s history—as far back as the conflicts about race our forefathers faced when writing the Constitution—and illuminates the tensions of our most recent generations in that light.

The result is something very complex. Obama connects race to history to our founding documents to families to generations and more. This acknowledges not only the complexity of our nation, but also the complexity of people. And further, it shows that he, on the fly, has a discerning and reflective character that no other candidate has shown. He wrote the speech, one article reported, over the past several days.

But in an era of sound bytes and evening news summaries, this presents other challenges. The discussions this inspires, unless they are lengthy and have a copy of the full speech at hand, will likely deal only with issues in isolation—and this is a tragedy.

Nearly all of us, myself included, will struggle terribly with holding the interrelated elements of this conversation together in our minds at the same time. This, unfortunately, does disservice to the comprehensiveness of the speech (and speechmaker), to the complexity of our human nature, and to the level of dialog in our country. Perhaps most unfortunate, though, is that most of us will also never recognize or admit that our grasp is so incomplete.

But if we remember that something smart and true was spoken, and if we remember the closing anecdote, then we will have an idea of how to put ourselves back on the path to a more perfect union.

In the meantime, that we may yet wrap our minds around today, I’ve done my best to outline his speech. It is thoughtfully structured, and the full text supports the claims that I only summarize, but condensing it helps bring together the various points.

1. He starts with an introduction about how America has a historical mission to achieve “a more perfect union” – and he explains how race has been an obstacle since the very beginning.
2. He states that moving towards eliminating this obstacle has been one of his campaign’s cornerstones so that America can be more prosperous. He describes his campaign’s trajectory and success over the past year.
3. He reaches the present: the Wright controversy. He responds. A paraphrasal:
1. He condemns Wright’s statements…
2. …but Wright was worse than wrong, he was divisive…
3. …so why, Obama imagines people asking, should he have associated with Wright at all?...
4. …because, Obama says, Wright is more than his mistakes; he also inspires hope…
5. …and, his church represents all of the black experience, good and bad…
6. …and that is something that Obama cannot ignore…
7. …and he shouldn’t, because:
4. He suggests that an honest dialog about race is necessary for America to move forward.
1. There is anger in the black community because of America’s history.
2. There is anger in the white community because of present economic decisions.
3. And so there is conflict, which sometimes provokes counterproductive anger.
5. He suggests ways that both the black and white communities can take steps to resolve that conflict.
1. The black community must embrace the burden of America’s past without becoming victims of it.
2. The white community must acknowledge the disparity that exists between the races—and respond with deeds and not just words.
3. Essentially, we must do unto others as we would have them do to ourselves.
6. He also says, however, that we must change the way we engage politics, by actually talking about the issues and not distractions. This addresses the media as well as citizens.
   
7. He closes by telling a story to show how we can get back to reaching for perfection—where he started the speech—by crossing divides.
   

Indoor Soccer: a shanty... yar!

Like a naval battleship just launched from its berth
Clashes with its enemies to measure out its worth
And faces foes that freely fall beneath its polished hull
Before it finds an enemy that takes aim at its skull,
And continues, strong and proud, to set out on the sea,
Our soccer team, lean and loud, found early victory.

While praise and cheer pervade the beaming sailors on the ship,
Swells, alas, soon drown the mirth and scales reverse their tip;
Scurvy-free, yet flu bestruck, the crew grows thin on deck
And pirate vessels fire cannons, threatening a wreck.
Then the captain—woe betide!—he tumbles overboard!
And though the crew fights valiantly, their ship soon strikes the shore!

Fleets of swarming enemies sank passion, skill, and reason,
But unlike ships in similes, we’ll be back again next season!

(Yar!)

Cleaning House

I like cleaning my apartment.

It’s a return to the past in the form of old letters, projects, (bills,) music, magazines, newspapers, and other memorabilia that managed to find a flat surface instead of a filing cabinet. Some of these finds are treasures; others only find the trash. There’s a fondness for those things that I enjoyed or that made me proud, and it’s only partially mitigated by the discovery of forgotten letters or unfinished projects that have passed their moments.

But that spurs the present; it energizes me keep on sorting through the scattered elements of my carved out little corner of the world. It’s a taking stock. A reevaluation of where I am, of what I’ve done and left undone—of what I’m in the middle of.

But what is most invigorating is the reorganization and restructuring of it all—and the way that that redefines the future. There are more books and more CDs and less space to hold them. There is a fresh list of priorities, but the same house to support it. And so the bookshelves and CD racks shift around in the open spaces. My girlfriend and I stack this here; we clear that out there. The couch is repositioned, the speakers relocated, new music alphabetized, and new books filed on improvised shelves. What is meaningful is remembered; what is no longer meaningful is purged, and this physical reorganization of the space reflects and reinforces a new mental vision of a future that is, like the apartment, free to be defined in any way that we choose.

The Minor Blues

      I took an introduction to jazz class in college, and Tommy Flanagan sat in one day. He was slouching and playing quietly when we arrived. Each student stopped at the door before entering, awe-struck and nervous, fearful, for once, that we were interrupting something clearly more important and profound than ourselves. Our teacher, Fred Haas, waved us in with a smile.
      We tiptoed past the man who famously accompanied Ella Fitzgerald, who recorded with John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, who was probably the most revered jazz pianist of the 20th century.
      He played cool and mellow. If a friend had tried to play the same way, it would have sounded like melancholy soup, but Flanagan’s thick, smooth chords and wandering melody went down light and easy.
      Some time after everyone arrived, he stopped, almost startled out of a reverie, and slowly turned around a little towards Fred to apologize for keeping everyone waiting.
      “I’m sorry—” he said, peering over his glasses.
      His voice was raspy and slow.
      Fred smiled, “What were you playing?”
      We had already pulled out our notebooks and pens and were ready for some secret wisdom that we could absorb, for words that would allow us to transcend scales and chord progressions and make music that spoke to generations. We armed ourselves with attentiveness, our styluses at the ready.
      He turned back and looked down at the piano through his glasses like he was seeing the black and white keys for the first time.
      “That…” he said, and then paused, and then started up again, “…was the minor blues.”
      We furiously wrote down in our notes: “minor blues.”
      We looked up again, ready.
      He exhaled, let his head bob down a little, put his hands back on the keys, turned a little back towards us, peered over his glasses again, and continued.
      “…which is like the major blues…”
      He paused again and looked around, as if thinking about how to say it right.
      We scribbled down: “like the major blues”
      We waited. This was going to be it. The minor blues were like major blues…
      “…but minor.”
      We etched his words into our notebooks: “Minor blues: like the major blues, but minor!”
      He turned back to Fred as if to check if the answer was satisfactory. A little perplexed, we followed his gaze to see how—if—our teacher would respond. Our rudimentary knowledge of scales and progressions couldn’t yet absorb what Flanagan had meant, that modes meant moods, that major and minor keys translated into feelings and states of mind. Or even if we did understand it, we certainly couldn’t yet turn that into practice.
      Fred, on the other hand, understood quite well. He smiled, sat down at the second piano in the room, and started up a duet.

Criticism/Gossip

I remember growing up with the sense that if you didn’t have anything nice to say about someone, you didn’t say anything at all. I stuck with that for a long time, but I discovered once that that bears reevaluation.

Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend about someone that we had recently met:

     Me: “He seems like a nice guy.”
     Her: “I don’t know. He seems a little… creepy… to me.”
     Me: “Really?”
     Her: “Yeah.”
     Me: “Ouch. I don’t think I’d ever want to be described like that.”
     She looked at me.
     Her: “Pete, it’s not a bad thing to say if it’s what you feel.”
     Me: “But it’s just not a label I’d ever want to impose on someone.”
     Her: “But I’m not imposing it on him. It’s something that I felt, and so it’s an honest statement. Look, it’s not a bad thing to say something bad about someone if it’s the truth--if it's part of who they are. But it is important to remember that a bad trait isn’t all that a person is.”
     I sat in my seat.
     Her: “And saying it here to you is different than passing it to everyone I know.”
     I sat in my seat, thinking.
     She sat in her seat, thinking.

New York City and Variety, II

To me, here is the appeal of the city:

By definition, densely populated environments have more people in the same space than less densely populated environments. Because all these people share the same space, they have more opportunities to interact, and therefore more opportunities to expand.

It’s like particles in a chamber:

Western Massachusetts (280 people per square mile) is like a chamber with only a few particles in it. They float around and have plenty of room, but they don’t interact very much. They stay pretty cool. They go for bike rides to enjoy the scenery, and maybe a few cars pass them on backcountry roads.

Jam smash cram pack that same chamber full to the brim, and you have something more like Manhattan (66,940 people per square mile). There, something else happens. Particles bounce off each other in new and unpredictable ways. The friction generates heat, and exciting reactions ensue. They spin and are surprised. They hardly dare to ride their bicycles for fear of getting run over by a delivery truck, and when they walk instead, they unsuspectingly encounter old friends, recent acquaintances, and sometimes complete strangers who also wear Red Sox baseball caps.

Office:mac

Yes, it’s true.

Microsoft copies everything Apple does.

They add a few whistles and bells, bulk it up with miles of code, and then package it in a sleek box.

Oh wait, they got the sleek boxes from Apple, too.

This just means, I think, that Microsoft is less creative and less graceful, but still smart. They know a good idea when they see it, and so they mimic it. Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery.

~

(But that expression isn’t quite right, is it? Shouldn’t it read: “Imitation is the highest compliment”? “Flattery” suggests that imitation is disingenuous or obsequious, and I don’t see Microsoft fawning over Apple products like Gollum over his Precious. Well, maybe that’s what Microsoft designers do when they go home…)

Inspired by: iWork: Pages and Office:mac 2008

New York City and Variety

New York City is a fearsome place.

Not because of crime or because the concrete, glass, and asphalt steel our insides, but because the same infinite variety that draws us here and enriches us also pressures us to narrow our vision and close ourselves off against it.

The result, in many cases, is an even greater narrowness, and the longer one stays, the more our field of vision seems inclined to close.

Surrounded by overwhelming options, we must find our favorites. Here are the grocery stores we shop at; over there are our favorite restaurants; around this corner is the Laundromat; etc. We locate what we need and what we like, and we learn to pass by or over everything else, because if we considered every option, we would be paralyzed.

Over time, unless we actively keep ourselves open to newness, our choices become our habits, and we shop at the same places, order from the same short list of delivery restaurants, and hang out with the same collection of friends, family, and office mates. The longer this lasts, the more familiarity breeds ambivalence, and the easier it becomes to stop paying attention to—or even noticing—everything else that stares us in the face every day. We stop admiring the tops of buildings and start burying our gazes in the pavement.

After less than a year in New York, I noticed that I had begun doing this myself.

~

But I noticed this narrowing effect most recently when working with kids. Adolescents raised in any borough of New York City, but particularly in Manhattan where the population density is highest, are raised by parents who have found their own paths through the city. The parents’ routes and destinations—restaurants, schools, entertainment venues, etc—become the routes and destinations of their children, plus or minus a few hangouts, and so the children are raised with a kind of tunnel vision already in place.

The result is a targeted sense of desire and an ease at dismissing what is outside the tunnel. Children in New York seem precocious in the way that they cut through the flurry of metropolitan bustle and navigate the complexities of this over-populated urban landscape. But it is a mistake to read this as sophistication, as many people often do. And it is an even greater mistake to read it as wisdom. Children are still children, and adolescents are still adolescents. All it takes is a few science articles or a few poignant high school memories and we recall that adolescent reason bends easily to impression and desire.

What children in New York have gained, however, is no small skill. Recent studies on decision-making directly link productivity to an ability to remove undesirable options. But productivity and confidence are not sophistication. Sophistication requires the wisdom to determine which options are more or less relevant or desirable. Sophistication requires perspective, something that, however much I might have argued then, I surely now don’t think I had much of at age 15.

~

Approaching three years into New York City, I still battle against habit. Relative freshness to the city still keeps me curious about its variety, and a little more sophistication allows me avoid the less savory aspects of the urban jungle.

Also, the danger of stagnation is visible almost everywhere. It’s not hard to find the people in any neighborhood who haven’t changed in 20 years. They are the people who have become caricatures of themselves. Their unchanging diets, vocabulary, or haircuts, even—never mind their unchanging technological understanding, social perspectives, or world views—have compounded over time so as to render them visibly and/or mentally out of touch with present reality.

It’s a regular reminder to stop and look around—to check out the fountains, squint at the skyscrapers, examine rooftop carvings, sneak a peek at what the person next to you on the subway is reading, say hi to your (in-touch-with-reality) neighbors, pick up a different newspaper, shop at a different grocery store, buy a few different ingredients, visit a new restaurant, and especially, when time and budget permit, leave town every now and then.

Wireless Connections...

...are like high school couples after the prom;

they just keep breaking up.

Also, here is a link to a review of The Great Gatsby that I just wrote.

Sent from my iPhone

Wireless Connections...

...are terribly unreliable.

Sent from my iPhone

Bathtub Lesson

    I remember when I was very young sitting in the bathtub with my brother. It was just about time to get out. My brother and I each had washcloths, and we needed to put them away.
    “Can you figure out the best way to get the water out of the washcloth?” one of my parents asked.
    I took the whole washcloth and crushed it into a ball.
    “Nope.”
    My brother started folding his up.
    “Nope.”
    I copied my brother and started folding it, but in a different way.
    “Nope.”
    My brother did something else, and so did I. We improvised—I think at one point I spun it around my head like a lasso—and every time, in my mind, I had found an even more ingenious way to remove the water from a washcloth.
    “Nope.”
    “Nope.”
    “Nope.”
    I was midway through something that must have looked like handtowel origami when I heard:
    “Yes!”
    It was not directed at me.
    I looked over and my brother was twisting the washcloth in opposite directions.
    I tried it, and it worked really well.

Low Tables, High Chairs

There's a restaurant in Queens called the Brick Cafe,
and everything is perfect there,

except if you sit on the bench (not the chairs),
then your seat is too low,
the table too high,
and your shoulders are up round your ears while you dine.

I don't mind bumping knees or having to squeeze
in a cozy old corner cafe,
but a plate at my chest doth summon protest,
and turns me a premature gray.

Hark, summon low tables! Yea, conjure high chairs!
They'll complement the caliber of anyone's feast!
And all will be spared
of opinion laid bare,
by a poet whose palate was nonetheless...

...impeccably greased!


Inspired by: The Brick Cafe

Role Playing

Confession #1: I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid.

Confession #2: I would still enjoy playing it if I ever had the time.

(Be nice. Don’t judge me.)

News item #1: Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died this week.

News item #2: Also this week, Michael Chabon wrote in the New Yorker about a childhood religious school class in which “the explicit lesson… was that… ‘fantasy’ meant pretty lies. Fantasy rendered you unfit to face ‘reality’ and its hard pavement.”

Chabon was writing about comic books, but the criticism of Dungeons & Dragons back in the day was the same. The only difference, of course, was that comic books were kind of cool, and Dungeons & Dragons was decidedly nerdy.

But hear me out here, and I’m going to try, as a tribute to Mr. Gygax, to bring “D&D” into your good graces.

~

Playing Dungeons & Dragons always started with creating a character. Players began by imagining, defining, and then inhabiting a personality. This is role-playing, the fundamental element of D&D and all the games that spun off from it. One could choose to inhabit the role of a character from a different race (white, black, human, elf, dwarf, etc..) or a different moral compass (lawful or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil). One could play characters with different professions (warriors, bards, clerics, etc.) or with different worldly possessions (leather, steel, gems, etc.).

But before all that, players had to define their characters’ attributes, the elements that made up their person: their strength, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. There were limits, however. A character could be average across the all attributes, or strong in some and weak in others. It was a puzzle that led to the personality that the player enacted during the game.

~

This a challenge for young players. The first time a kid plays he or she usually takes a generic or stereotypical role. Let’s say he wants to be a warrior: he imagines himself a six-foot-four muscle-bound hulk that wields a massive sword—because this is all he knows—and so he loads up on strength and constitution and plows through adventures. But this grows tiresome, and so the second time he decides to be a little different; he imagines that he’s a fighter again, but this time he’s a little smaller and quicker and smarter—perhaps because, he imagines, his character had to scrounge for a living before his career of vanquishing evil foes in complex kingdoms.

Over time, characters become more nuanced and real. They take on their own personalities, and the players explore those personalities. Then they try out different professions, races, and alignments, and in so doing explore how different people engage the world around them. In one adventure they may play a monk, whose philosophy eschews material objects, and in the next they may play a sorcerer, who carries bags full of clinking potions and cases of archaic papyrus scrolls. In each, they try on a new identity.

~

Think about this for a moment. When in their boisterous lives are children asked to take someone else’s perspective? How often, as adults even, are we asked to do this? And how successful are we?

This is the same exercise lawyers go through when arguing different sides of a case, the same exercise office workers go through during professional development retreats, the same exercise English students go through when analyzing characters in a novel. It’s a childhood version of empathy, of understanding the lives of others.

And this game makes it fun. Dungeons & Dragons, like a book, taps into your creative imagination and then channels that imagination into an understanding of people, puzzles, and systems.

And this is the very stuff of what it takes to navigate a world full of people, puzzles, and systems.

...even if it is a little nerdy.


Inspired by: Gary Gygax, one kid's video blog

What were we thinking?

One day we feel that our thoughts are reasoned,
And the next we reason that our thoughts were just felt.

But does that diminish their validity?

Primaries

I would write about something else if I could think about anything else.

There is work yet to do.

Food for Thought

Consider this: cooking is the greatest art.

No other art engages every sense. Painting, for example, provokes visual and sometimes textural/touch responses; music stimulates not only our hearing but also our sight when we watch a performance; but only cooking appeals to all of our senses.

Naturally, we taste the food and smell it, but we also enjoy the texture or touch of food when we eat it—its hardness, crispiness, or temperature, for example. We also appreciate the visual presentation of a dish—its color and arrangement. Lastly, and this is the only stretch, we enjoy the sizzle and hiss of a stir fry, of a burger on a grill, or of the flame touching the sherry in the pan; food preparation can often produces a veritable symphony of sounds.

What an idea! A friend of mine suggested this all to me a while back, and I think about it every now and then. One side of me is skeptical, however:

Cooking probably is the greatest aesthetic art form. If we consider art as both an aesthetic and intellectual experience, then food preparation seems sorely lacking. Only an exceptional chef could find ways of making intellectual statements through cooking. And it seems nearly impossible that a diner would make the leap from consuming a meal to thinking about a meal. We experience the act of eating on a very basic level. Right?

And yet, it strikes me now that certain foods suggest different cultures (tacos, escargot, General Tsao’s chicken), social class (caviar, fresh versus frozen, beer versus wine), or interest groups (vegetarian, vegan, kosher). The decisions we make in preparing and serving these varieties of dishes can send powerful intellectual statements:

• Serving or not serving certain foods makes personal value statements. Use only kosher products, and dining becomes a dialog. And we don't have to be Jewish to buy kosher ingredients. Mix up and serve to friends a tasty vegetarian chili, and consumption becomes a conversation. Cook up only free range chicken or cattle, and you assert a kind of consumer authority.
• Place foods in different contexts and we explore class differences; the greatest art celebrates the every day. Ketchup with steak au poivre? Burgers on fancy-pants plates with goblets of wine? Even fancy restaurants serve french fries.
• Comb foreign recipes and we raise international awareness. Serve up some tasty kebabs to your xenophobic friends, and you begin to ease their irrational fear of the Middle East. Bake some empanadas and you fuel interest in Spain and Latin America.

The more I think about it, the more I think it’s time to hit the cookbooks.

Indoor Soccer

(Five on five.)

Keep the passes low and the shots high.
Use the walls.
Sub often.
Position the offense like basketball players: a point and two wings.
Defense: challenge attacks and stay between the ball and the net.
Drink lots of water.
Show up early.

And next time, run every day for at least a month before the season begins...

Innocence, Experience

I wonder often about innocence and experience. In particular, I wonder about how we should understand experience and how much we should seek to preserve innocence. I wonder whether innocence—which is only truly innocence in untainted and rhetorical religious or philosophical landscapes like the Garden of Eden or John Rawls’ intellectually conjured societies; innocence which in our present society is more aptly named ignorance—I wonder whether some kind of return to innocence is desirable or not. I wonder about the direction that modernism has taken us. I don’t know if it is good or bad or both (which is most likely), but I wonder about it.

~

Some historians now call the period of time during and between the first and second world wars the “Age of Catastrophe.” It was a time when all of the long 19th century’s “progress” seemed to rebound against its creators. Innovations in technology, the arts, science, politics, sociology, economics and more all seemed turned on their heads—redirected into a string of crises and fears. The social momentum of the airplane and the automobile, political revolution, the theory of relativity, and new ideas in all forms of art were suddenly painted with the negative reality of disaster. The wars demonstrated failures of government and social organization. The stock market crash and the depression marked failures of economic policy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: monstrous failures of human conscience. As a result, if the long 19th century said, “Look at all that we can accomplish and create if we put our minds to it,” then the Age of Catastrophe forced the modernist question, “But should we be accomplishing and creating these things? Look at the result.”

This made sense to me when I was tutoring from a history textbook last spring. It seems a clear organization of the life cycle of modern ideas. The arrival of progress means innovations in all fields of study and life. Innovation means debate: “Here we have something new. Is it valuable? How do we engage it appropriately and responsibly? Do we have to redraw the parameters of our lives? Of our society? Of our world culture?” These questions lead us to an ethical understanding of our modern world.

Technology is the surest example of this today. Cell phones: when should we use them? What regulations, implicit or explicit, should govern their use? Different people have different feelings. School boards argue with parents about permitting them in schools. Dinner companions apologize for answering calls at restaurants.

One hundred years ago it was the same. Cars: when should we use them? What regulations, implicit or explicit, should govern their use? City dwellers debated fiercely about whether dangerous horseless carriages belonged on urban streets.

Certainly, we must ask this about guns. When should we use them? What regulations, implicit or explicit, should govern their use. What does our Constitution mean?

Every physical and intellectual innovation demands that we ask these questions.

And in order to reach ethical understanding, we must constantly ask these questions thoughtfully and deliberately.

~

But we are not so lucky.

While tutoring last spring, suddenly the past century and a half collapsed together in my head. I saw the period since the industrial revolution as a geometric explosion of unparalleled innovation and creation in human history. Pace of life rocketed with it. Mass production (people, material, ideas) and rapid transit (people, material, ideas) launched society into an era of growth in which intellectual and physical property was and still is created, consumed, and rendered obsolete before we have barely finished asking the questions about their place and proper use—and every year the pace gets faster and faster and the reach extends farther and farther. Progress, after several millennia of calmly hovering and wavering at the same dynamic technological, sociological, artistic, political and economic volume, began a slow crescendo in the last half of the last millennium. Then, about 150 years ago, at a tempo of presto, that crescendo began a geometric swell that seems ready to burst into a blaring, cacophonous fortissimo. It is like we’re in the tail end of a deep breath, but we don’t know if we’re about to sing, laugh, or scream. But we keep taking the breath, and progress and innovation keeps coming—and we keep doing what we’re doing without fully answering the questions that we need to answer about what we're doing in order to ensure an ethical understanding of what we’ve just done.

~

With our unending innovation, I wonder about the rules we put in place to protect our innocence--or is it our experience? I wonder about our schools, with security guards; and our airports, with liquid-free travel; and our street corners, with police officers every other block; and our legislation, with unending constitutional revisions; and our living rooms, with locked front doors; and our national parks, with guard rails at every viewpoint; and our libraries, with theft detection devices; and I wonder why, in life, we keep putting the training wheels on instead of taking them off.

Inspired by: Amish schoolhouse shootings, Lord of the Flies

Leap Day

Yesterday was Leap Day. Many of you may know why this day exists, but others may not. Because I think it’s fascinating and relevant, I’m including here an explanation of why we have Leap Days.

The earth has two motions that contribute to the need for Leap Days: its elliptical orbit around the sun (the first motion) and its rotation on its axis (the second motion). Every time that the earth makes one full rotation on its axis, it swings a distance around the sun. After 365 of these rotations—and the 365 distances that it travels during these rotations—the earth has nearly covered one full loop around the sun. But it is a little short, and so the next year begins its orbit a little behind the previous year--by about one quarter of a day. After four years, the total distance that the earth has fallen behind adds up to the distance it travels during one rotation, or one day, and so it is to make up for this lost distance that we add a Leap Day every four years.