uTopianTurtleTop

Ali Marcus talks about the overwhelming amount of available music.

Why do I crave new musics?

When I hear something new that pings my just-right buttons in any sort of unique way, I learn something about myself. Music reshapes reality. When I resonate or vibrate happily with a piece or a song, it’s like the resonating note in a bathroom, the perfect pitch that makes the whole room echo, only I’m the room & the music finds me. Music tunes us. So “With the Beatles” may find my pitches more consistently than “Beatles for Sale,” and with you it may be the reverse, or maybe the Beatles don’t find your pitches at all. When I hear new music that finds my inner pitches, I become aware of capacities within myself I didn’t know were there.

Ali is absolutely right that the amount of already-physically-extant musical possibilities outstrips one’s capacity to listen: Every year more music is recorded and distributed than there are hours in a year. She’s also right that because of music’s ubiquitousness, its value is downplayed, and more of it becomes background music for most of us -- me included, and, I’m willing to bet money, her included too. But the background-ness of music is not a simple product of the age of canned music. The rich characters in Edith Wharton’s great book The Age of Innocence, which takes place just before the age of recording, go to the opera to flirt and gossip. Hang out with toddlers and even babies and you learn: Music is fundamentally human. Babies respond to music many months before they can crawl, much less talk. Don’t be ashamed if you like it as a background to other activities.

Check out Ali’s music. It’s free. She’s a solo-acoustic singer-songwriter. Her songs are tuneful, her voice is a rich and pleasant pop-folk alto with emotional-tone-color nuance, she strums solidly and with energy. I’ve been enjoying her stuff.

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Nice jam session with Fingers Hilarity after dinner tonight. He had asked whether we have a violin. I said no, we have a mandolin. He asked to see the “vandolin.” His mispronunciation made me realize that the “man-” prefix of “mandolin” meant “hand” (“manual” = “by hand”; “mano a mano” = “hand-to-hand” [NOT man-to-man!]). I showed him the mandolin, and he got out my $40 beater guitar that I bought for road trips, and he led us in a bunch of songs he made up on the spot. My mandolin will never be in tune -- it was my great-grandfather’s and is very pretty but not in good shape. Nice tone, poor action and intonation. Fingers Hilarity didn’t mind that my licks were out of tune. It was just good to play.

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Shots from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” cut to Outkast’s “Hey Ya” over at Corndog’s new place. (And yes, I must update my links page -- this week!) Believe it or not, I had never heard the Outkast song. The video is totally charming, as is the song. I really dig how the whole thing is built on a riff 5 and a half bars long.

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Lots of music this week-end. Will report as I have TIME.

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For Beatles obsessives: Ben.H in comments to my recent Beatles post mentioned that the Australian cover of “With the Beatles” was different than the UK edition, and it’s true of “Beatles for Sale” and “Magical Mystery Tour” too.

Musical moments from the trip to Michigan

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Hearing a muzak version of "Paint It Black" in the small-town grocery store: terrific.

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A Sunday afternoon brass band concert in the downtown square of Kalamazoo. The usual fare of "light classics," Sousa, and show tune medleys, with some Brazilian tunes thrown in for spice. "Stars and Stripes Forever" made me tear up. What could be more (whitebread) American than Sousa on a Sunday afternoon on the town square? It's a powerful piece of music, but it's probably the wealth of attendant associations that got me. The myth of American justice has always been underwritten by imperial wealth stolen from the Native Americans, the African slaves and their descendants, and, today, the disenfranchised subjects of 3rd World despots working in poverty to provide us with cheap imports, as well as the disenfranchised "illegal" immigrants working in poverty to fatten the bottom lines of local businesses. Despite that, I still believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the first, fourth, ninth, tenth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and nineteenth amendments; and justice for all -- the idea of America, the ideals of America. ("Peter Bailey was a man of high ideals, so called" -- Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life.") The reality falls short. I can understand why some people may hear in Sousa only the betrayal of the ideals and the jingoism of empire, but I still hear the ideals. And it was a beautiful afternoon as my son napped on a blanket and my spouse and I quietly chatted.

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Earlier that day I had gone to church to hear my friend the 60-something radical preacher preach. (I have blogged about our friendship before.) He rocked it again. The topic was politics and religion. "Those who don't believe that politics should mix with religion should take their Bibles out of the pews and rip all of the prophets out." I asked him later if he had been responding to criticism that his sermons were too political, and he said, no, he was backing up his colleague Kevin, whose Easter sermon had talked about the recent extradition by the U.S. government of prisoners to allied countries that would torture them, and compared this action to that of the Jews who handed Jesus over to the Romans because they lacked legal authority to kill him themselves. The comparison had upset and angered people. "You ruined my Easter," someone had said. I don't know Kevin that well. He always struck me as a very sweet, mild-mannered man. Which he is -- and also a radical.

Got back a few hours ago from a week in Michigan. Good trip. Dad is hanging in through a 2nd round of chemotherapy. Lots of family and friends around, a party of some sort almost every night.

Not enough sleep last night, to bed soon. Sad to leave, good to be back. The 2nd day there I was moving a woodpile for Dad. He was deciding which pieces to keep and which to pitch. "Keep that one, I may want to use that for a project some day." The hopefulness of the statement struck me real -- it really was just one in an endless series of housekeeping projects, and I remembered: Live until you can't. The on-goingness of life.

My great-grandparents built the cottage 90 years ago. Shortly after we finished the woodpile project, someone let the back screen door slam shut, a sound I've heard all my life, and the exactitude of the sound pierced me and I teared up. The sound brought back dead grandparents and aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents and more aunts and uncles I never knew who passed their summers there before me. Where are they now? Where we're all going, some sooner, some later.


My last day there we went to a memorial service for the family friend who killed himself last November. A cousin of the mother of the deceased conducted the service and gave the sermon. The mother's cousin is also a friend of my parents' and I'd met him a number of times. Dr. L. is a professor of something related to Chinese studies and college provost at various institutions, a real sweet man who went to high school with my mom and is probably retired now. I had not known that he was an ordained minister. His sermon discussed suicide obliquely, in a quiet, deeply felt, understated manner. I can only paraphrase.

"The church, being a very human institution, has at various times attempted to ordain whom God will allow into his house, but the preponderance of the evidence is clear: as Paul wrote in the epistle to the Romans, 'Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.' "

And he went on to describe how Jesus was a healer who cast demons out of people when saw that they were sick, "and he didn't burden them with theological discourses on the nature of evil." Dr. L. said that the archaic imagery of demons can help us come to grips with mental illness, which really does make a sufferer feel as though they were being possessed by something outside of themselves.

My sister, who had been a good friend of the deceased's, cried, and seeing her cry made me cry. My dad, perhaps thinking of his own funeral to come, teared up.

It was beautiful ceremony. We had seen the parents at a restaurant our first night in Michigan, stopping from the airport on the way home. They were driving from the same airport picking up their daughter and her family, who were coming to pass the week ahead of the service. It was nice to see them all.

Before the service my dad had told me that R., the deceased, had sent him a basket of food upon hearing that he had cancer, just a few weeks before his own demise.

Lots more to the trip, but that's all for now. "The ongoingness of life" was the phrase that kept coming to me all week, and while my parents' home remains my home, my life now is centered here and this is my home as well. Great to be there, sad to leave, and good to be back.

Heartbreak and loss are inevitable, and it's only because we love that our hearts ever break.