concert conversation

The scene: St. Ignatius Loyola Church on the upper east side, a lovely, and very rich, old Catholic church, where I'm indulging in my guilty pleasure of some sacred choral music--Bach and Part, as sung by the Hilliard Ensemble.

I'm sitting in my pew (oddly they'd removed the pew in front, so it felt like I was in the bulkhead pew or the exit row pew; very nice) waiting for the concert to start or God to strike me down when a woman comes in and sits down to one side of me.

She's a classic Manhattan type, an old lady, middling income, maybe no husband anymore, almost certainly liberal to a fault, kind of frumpy and lumpy in her old age, but in whom you can still almost see the younger person who probably had amazing experiences and wild adventures. Like, the kind of person where you hope she has grandkids, and if you do you easily imagine they think she's way cool. No clue what her name is, but since I have to call her something, let's go with Alice.

There's also a woman about my age sitting on the other side of me, who I will not describe in as much detail, since she's only got one line. But I will call her Monique, even though she's not the Monique I know.

Anyway, now that the scene is set:

Alice (getting settled, sort of under her breath): Are all Catholic churches like this?
Me: ?
Alice: Well, it's just the seats are so hard. Episcopal churches usually have cushions, I think. Maybe the Catholics will add them eventually.
Me (considers this, then slightly sadly): I don't think Benedict's going to be all that into cushions, unfortunately.
Alice (Immediately picks up on this): Hmm you're probably right. Not for women anyway.
Me: Yes. Actually, under Benedict, they might start adding spikes.
Monique: Hmm, they'll probably start by making the seats bumpier.
Me: Exactly, bumps first, spikes maybe sometime down the road...

And we sit there, kind of laughing, and kind of not, because as a thumbnail sketch of what everyone's expecting from Benedict, it's kind of funny. And kind of not.

And then the concert started. Review maybe sometime later.

haiku review: sin city

gorgeous noir killing
as bright white blood comes like rain
violence is sex

personal fitness goals

Yesterday I did something that I've been talking about for pretty much the last decade. I actually walked into a gym. Once I reassured myself that lightning hadn't struck me down immediately (I feel much the same walking into churches), I had a quite nice chat with a membership person, and it seems I'm on the verge of actually starting to work out.

This would complete the...what's one more than a trifecta? Quadfecta? of long-term things I always talk about and never do: join a gym, take a refresher Japanese course, get a piercing, and change my hair. As such it would be a fairly stunning development, personally. It would leave only relatively minor trivia, like learning to juggle and dating.

But when Kelli the membership person asked about my personal fitness goals, all I could muster was "you know, just be a little more personally fit." Which doesn't really cut it, goal-wise.

So I've been brainstorming some more concrete goals that I might actually be able to build a fitness regime around. Here's what I've come up with so far:

I want people to be attracted to me for things besides my hilarious wit, brilliant mind, brooding melancholy, hidden depths of kindness, and really really good looking face.

high compliment

My friend Monique, who is in Zimbabwe visiting her family there, IM'd me just about the nicest thing anyone's said about me in a good long while.

As an aside, there's something very weird to me about IM'ing with somebody in Zimbabwe. Something about the distance, and my perception of how low technology the place should be. I picture my friend Monique in a pith helmet, with giraffes and elephants walking by, tapping away at her laptop. I'm sure there's zero accuracy to that, but that's what I imagine.

Anyway, my friend Monique said to me:

you're brilliant, easy to listen to--you dumb things down but dont talk to people like they are idiots, you make complex things clear, you have a kind aura (although you are horrible inside) and you're nice to look at.

For context, she's trying to talk me into pursuing a career path as a talk show host of some type. It kind of made my day.

typical saturday

8:00: wake up
8:15: fix breakfast
9:00: begin to suspect I've done something stupid and fallible and human which I will regret forever
9:15: leave house
10:00-12:00: tutoring
12:15: visit Farmer's Market in Union Square
12:45: return home
12:45-1:00: attempt to disprove that I've done something stupid and fallible and human which I will regret forever
1:00: confirm that I've done said stupid, fallible, human thing
1:00-2:15: loathe self for same
2:15-2:20: attempt flimsy rationalizations
2:20-2:45: give up attempts at flimsy rationalizations, return to self loathing
2:45-3:00: tire of self loathing. Run some errands.
3:00-4:30: discover new reserves of self loathing
4:30-4:45: go to nearby street fair, have a crepe
4:45-5:00: more self loathing
5:00: discover that as it turns out I didn't do the stupid, fallible, human thing after all. Feel not relief or joy so much as chagrin.
5:05: suspect I'm hallucinating or unconscious and that I did actually do the thing, but I've convinced myself I did not.
5:07: discard that hypothesis
5:07-6:00: loathe self for believing even for a second that I could do something so stupid and fallible and human.
6:00-7:15: rollerblading in Riverside Park
7:30-8:00: fix dinner
8:00-12:30: tidy up, watch a DVD, send some e-mail, play a video game.
12:30-12:45: compose blog entry
1:00: bed.

haiku review: tallis scholars at riverside church

Reviews are probably the second most common feature in personal blogs, following slightly behind posts along the lines of "God I'm so into Jimmy but he was mean to me today in fourth period but Alicia says that Tanya said that he likes me too but so I don't know what he really thinks and it's all so confusing and my parents don't get me and I'm hating life right now but if Jimmy really likes me then everything is great :)" Please imagine the appropriate spelling errors...

In any case, I'm hoping to use this venue primarily for mid-length anecdotes and short essays, but I'm certainly not above a review or two. However, in an effort to balance the greater length of my typical entry, I will endeavor in all but rare cases to constrain myself to reviews in the form of haiku.

Yes, where others will blather through 500 or 1,000 words to tell you what they thought of "Constantine" or "The Lovely Bones," I will distill my thoughts about media I've consumed to 17 syllables. If I really need to, I'll resort to the tanka, an older but lesser known (in the West) Japanese poetic form, which has 5 lines, of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.

With that introduction, on Saturday night I saw the legendary (I don't use that term lightly) Tallis Scholars perform some Flemish polyphony at Riverside Church up near Columbia.

Authentic? No way!
No real Renaissance choir
Could sound so sublime.

bad tutor

As part of my general recent self-improvement kick, I've been tutoring some high school kids getting ready to take the SAT. Figured it was about time that I do something volunteerish, and there have been many times in my life when I've felt that taking standardized tests was my unique, special skill.

New York Cares has a program whereby I got some training pro bono from Kaplan, and then was paired up with a couple of kids at a local public school. Our sessions are only 2 hours per week, on Saturday mornings, but I've been into it, and if nothing else, the guys will at least have a very good sense of what they're in for, and will have done a ton of practice, and hopefully picked up some tricks of the standardized test trade, before they sit down to write the exam.

Actually, I was feeling like I was doing a pretty good job as a tutor. Both my parents are teachers, I figured education was sort of in my blood, and it seemed to be showing.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. We were running through some math practice when Carlos, one of my charges, says to me kind of out of the blue, "You know, Joe, you're a very monogamous person."

Normally, I'm one for the witty comeback; finding me at a loss for words is a very rare thing. But I must admit, I blinked once or twice, and the best my eloquent mind could manage by way of a reply was, "Um, I'm WHAT?"

And poor Carlos repeats himself: "You know, monogamous. You're a monogamous person to be tutoring us like this."

I got it. Gently, deploying my tutoring skills, I guided him in the right direction: "Oh! You mean magnanimous."

Carlos: "Right, right...magnanimous. So, uh, what does monogamous mean?" (As he's flipping through the lesson book to the relevant vocabulary page.)

Me: "Well, it means you date or marry only one person at a time and you don't cheat on them." And in my head I appended "I guess it's an accurate statement, at least theoretically." But (see, Monique, I do have some tact, albeit rarely) I opted not to say that part out loud.

And the moral of this story is, don't go thinking you're an excellent SAT tutor until after you've done a ton of thorough vocabulary drills.

Epilogue. In happier news, Carlos decided a better word for me is actually "nefarious," proving himself a good judge of character. And at our session today, the word "melee" came up, and he suggested that it meant "fight or battle," because he knew it in the context of the Gamecube title "Super Smash Brothers Melee." Who says video games don't teach you anything?

on opera

A week or two ago I saw Madama Butterfly for the first time. One would think that given simultaneous strong interests in Japan and opera, I’d’ve seen it long before. But no. My interest in opera is worth exploring. It’d be easy to chalk it up to my general tendency to like things that are pretentious, high-brow, and slightly gay. Fair enough. But then too opera is among the gloomiest of arts, so if you’re me, what’s not to like? People are miserable, go mad, and die (often pretty gruesomely) with great regularity, and sing loudly about how that all makes them feel.

And there’s the real point. I have a fair degree of difficulty with emotions. Not the simple ones: I feel sad as well as—better than!—the next guy. And happy once in a while too. I look forward to the rare moments when something makes me angry: I find it fun. But more complicated emotions confuse me. I can pretend to empathize, and most people don’t notice, but I simply don’t understand them. Two of these tricky emotions, the ones for which music plays a vital role in my life, are love and faith.

I think I’ve loved. Once. Maybe twice. Never wisely, and never well. And never, it should be added, requitedly. But once upon a time. But I have trouble with the emotion, and I’ve slowly come to believe, as I survey my life bereft of deep human relationships, that I’ve lost what small ability I may once have had to love someone. So opera. I’ll assert that gloom aside, opera is fundamentally about love, and expresses it in a way no other art form is capable of.

So I go. And I listen, and I watch, as Violetta and Mimi perish coughing blood, As Aida and Radames slowly suffocate in their tomb, as Tosca tosses herself off that roof yet again, as Siegfried and Brunnhilde bring the whole world crashing down around them. All for love. Love and death. Death and love. And for a moment, in the midst of my suspension of disbelief, as a fat woman is a consumptive waif, as an old man is an action hero, I convince myself that I almost understand how love works, and why, and what makes people do such stupid things for it. Of course it doesn’t hurt that after the bows are taken and the lights come up and you rub your eyes and stop sniffling, it sinks in that opera’s not just about love, but more precisely about how much love sucks. It reassures.

Faith is the other hard one. I have a sort of vague deism about me, I suppose, and I’ve flirted with Gnosticism a little. But real faith, like the Christian Right manages…I envy it. To believe with such certainty so much that’s so outlandish. Of course, they’d feel the same about me and evolution, if they thought about it. Which they don’t. Hence the difference between us. But I digress.

Given my fascination with faith, churchy music fascinates me too. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that to my ears the greatest music humans have created has been motivated by faith—and more precisely by Christianity. I comment flippantly sometimes that just by itself Bach’s Mass in B Minor goes a long way toward atoning for Inquisitions and Crusades and sundry other atrocities. But on the scales by which I assess the world it’s true. And so I go to the opera to momentarily suspend my disbelief in love, and I go to requiem masses, and renaissance polyphony, and other, stranger, God-based stuff, to momentarily suspend my disbelief in Faith.

There are very few operas that take on the subject of faith rather than love. I’ve never given it much thought before, but in the context of this essay it suddenly seems very logical that Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (a gaggle of French nuns meet the guillotine) and Glass’s Akhnaten (a crazy, possibly hermaphroditic Egyptian Pharaoh dumps thousands of years of contented polytheism in favor of one true god) are among my very favorite operas.