The Last Thing Needed

There’s a moment in the movie The Queen when “Tony Blair” is watching the royal family on television. “Somebody has got to save these people,” he says, “from themselves.”

Which is a little like how I feel about Joe Ratzinger, as he prepares to leave his church in an absolute mess.

Consider it—we have a secret report that only the pope knows about and only the next pope will see. This couldn’t be more made-for-television.

Nor does the response from the Vatican do anything to calm the waters. They come out swinging, accusing the media and other enemies of the church of attempting to influence the election of the next pope.

Things settle down for a day and then BAM! A top Catholic in Great Britain, a cardinal, steps down after four people came forward with allegations of abuse from the 1980’s. So he’s out, and cancels his trip to Rome to elect the next pope.

Unlike the cardinal of Los Angeles, who has been rebuked as well as stripped of his diocesan duties by his successor. Well, he’s in Rome now, having been deposed in a civil case over the weekend.

And he’s fighting—he’s just written in his blog about how hard it is to forgive his enemies, to love them, to take to heart Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness. So screw you to the 10,000 Los Angelinos who have signed a petition saying he’s hardly qualified to select the next pope.

Well, that does seem sensible. Whatever his “diocesan duties” are, they can’t be more important that a papal conclave, right?

He makes, by the way, a good point. Here’s the Los Angeles Times:

"I can't recall a time such as now when people tend to be so judgmental and even self-righteous, so quick to accuse, judge and condemn," Mahony wrote on his personal blog. "And often with scant real facts and information.  Because of news broadcasts now 24/7 there is little or no fact checking; no in-depth analysis; no context or history given.  Rather, everything gets reported as 'news' regardless of the basis for the item being reported -- and passed on by countless other news outlets." 

Well, Jack would agree—he’d be howling in pain at the quality of journalism today. But it is a matter of record that the diocese of Los Angeles has had to cough up 660 million in a settlement with abuse victims. Oh, and Mahony was in charge there for about thirty years.

So we’re in Roman or Vatican fever. What’s really going on, what’s in the secret report, and mostly….

…what’s next?

Because it feels both that the ship is completely rudderless and that the seas have started roiling.

The pope, says a biographer who interviewed the pope’s brother, is losing sleep at night, sweating and tossing in bed as he thinks about the abuse scandals. The ordeal has ruined his health and wrecked his papacy. All he wanted was to retire, get the hell out of town, and go back to academia. He presented his resignation three or four times to John Paul II, and always the resignations were rejected.

Yeah? It may be true. It may also be that the pope is caught in a terrible time trap—he’s living in a world that no longer exists.

There was a time when the Catholic Church ruled—and no, it wasn’t as far back as the Middle Ages. Remember The Bells of St. Mary’s? It was a film from 1945 about a wonderful, dedicated, just a bit unconventional priest who fights to save his inner-city high school, assisted by that wonderful, dedicated, not-quite-so-unconventional Mother Superior. Bing Crosby played the priest, Ingrid Bergman the mother superior—and when Crosby sings the title song, surrounded by all the nuns in the immaculate wimples and veils, you’d better have at least fifty units of insulin in the syringe. It goes through sugary, and travels across saccharine and ends up, finally, nauseating.

The reality was different.

“We’d go to class all day, and then head down to the Gold Coast, where we saw most of our classmates and a lot of the faculty,” said a friend in Chicago, remembering his seminary days.

The Gold Coast was a gay bar.

And it was the seventies—times had changed, the cops were no longer raiding the bars, people were coming out and discovering an amazing truth: it was no big deal. Families got over it. The woman who 30 years ago would call from Puerto Rico wanting to speak to her son and refused to talk to me?

She was reading names on Plaza de Armas last Saturday, supporting a project of mine. And telling me she loved me and was proud of me.

Over fifty percent of the seminarians are gay, says Mark Dowd, himself a former Dominican friar. Here’s what he has to say about the subject:

Building on this, the lesbian writer on queer theology, Elizabeth Stuart, in a fascinating deconstruction of "liturgy queens", made the observation that in her experience it was more often than not the very closeted clergy who deployed an almost neurotic obsession with the size and length of the altar cloth and ecclesiastical protocol as "their own way of dealing with their demons". We have to be careful of a simplistic reductio ad absurdum here. Love of aesthetics in liturgy does not automatically prove anything about one's sexual orientation. But I think Stuart had a point.

Well, I think she had a point too. The more you suppress it, the more you get it, as a friend used to say.

The Catholic Church has always known it—some of it highest officials, including popes, have not been celibate. And no—we’re not talking Medieval Era, but the Modern Era.

Whatever or wherever Ratzinger’s sexuality is or isn’t, his temperament is intellectual and theoretical, not administrative and organizational. His was to be a teaching papacy, and the problem?

It was the last thing needed.

Doña Ilia Charms the Plaza

We’re forty lives short of California.

It took us an hour and 45 minutes to read through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas.

It felt like a performance—mouth was dry, hands were shaky, my focus had narrowed. Pablo picked up on it, and asked if I was OK.

“Nerves,” I said.

So what was there to be nervous about?

Raf carried the camcorder, I carried the materials: the two books of the 33,050 names; the information flyers; two chairs, one for reading, the other for the 33,050 people who are not there.

“You’re such a drama queen,” said Pablo, as I was clothes-pinning the shirt to the back of the chair, and the blue jeans to the seat. “I love it….”

“Let’s go around the plaza and tell people about the project,” I said. So we did for fifteen minutes or so.

“You know, it’s really important to engage with people—that’s what I’ve been learning,” said Pablo.

He’s a social anthropologist, but that’s incidental. He’s also my Puerto Rican brother, who went away for a while and now is back.

So he started the reading the names—Robert Schneider, Marc Perry, Frederick Hogan…. He read for fifteen minutes, and then went off to his next project or commitment. Just before doing so, I ran into my first, and only, gun rights advocate.

“I wonder if you’d read the list of people whose lives have been saved by guns,” he started out.

“No, but if you want to compile the list, you’re more than welcome to sit on the other side of the plaza and read it….”

I’d been dreading meeting this guy or one of his ilk—a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the NRA who recited the Second Amendment word for word, though transposing the militia clause from front to back.

Which he may have done on purpose, since he immediately asked me why we need guns.

“Protection.”

“Yes, and protection from what?”

“I think you’re gonna tell me…”

“The government,” he exploded. “From a tyrannical government. We need to have guns so that in the event of a tyranny, we can rise up and protect our rights!”

I had forgotten one of the great American crazinesses—this wild belief that the damn Federal government is plotting away back there in Washington to take away my rights and my land and my children but by God they step one foot on my land I’ll blow the brains out of them fuckers!

It’s completely irrational, although maybe not. Thanks to George W. Bush and the war on terror (decided not to cap that term….) we’re probably less free than we’ve ever been as a nation and as citizens. But somehow, I don’t think that was what he meant.

“Hitler killed 30 million people and never fired a gun,” he said.

I didn’t get it.

And still don’t. He said that words kill more people than guns.

So guns don’t kill, words kill!

OK—the talk was cordial, respectful. Did he want to go before the camera and give his point of view? This is all about fostering debate.

“No,” he said quickly. And I wondered—what was he afraid of? Because there were many “noes” yesterday—the “no, I’m shy,” the “no, I’ve got to meet someone,” the “no, this isn’t my thing.”

Into the scene improbably walked Nydia, Raf’s sister, who had completely panned the whole idea two days previously. But there’s a thing about Nydia, she’s totally loyal. So if I’m out making a fool out of myself under the hot Caribbean sun, well, she’ll be there.

“I’m here to read names,” she said, kissing me, and then, having heard a bit of the conversation, dropped the news “but guns kill,” onto the man.

“Go give Raf a break,” I said. Somehow, the combination of a strongly emotional, passionate Nydia and a fearful gun owner didn’t seem like a good idea. So she went off to read.

And then, into the plaza and into the picture stepped doña Ilia, Raf’s indomitable 83-year-old mother. Who is here to read as well, and does so, sitting in her walker.

She’s full of charm, this rheumatoid-arthritis-wracked lady who went, almost seven years ago, into cardiac, pulmonary, and kidney arrest, met God and told him to go to hell—she wasn’t ready yet. And so she was moving about the square, telling little girls “Ay, ¡qué linda, m’hija!” and patting them and beaming at the parents. Or she was standing behind Nydia, and proudly holding the sign that announces the project—“30,000 Lives.” Or she was telling the two visitors from Wisconsin about how many of her children went to the University of Wisconsin—three, plus a grandchild.

Nydia more or less trapped a girl into reading—she did so for five minutes and then joined her friends who would do a flash mob and dance. Then the Wisconsin kids took over, the girl reading, the guy holding the sign. Lastly, there was a guy, don Miguel, walking through the plaza and carrying two signs—one in English, the other in Spanish. So he read some names, and then talked about his project—the proposed plan to sell the airport.

It was hot, we were tired, we were done for the day. People had drifted by, taken pictures of us on their cell phones, stopped to chat. The only person who doesn’t have a picture?

Me—completely forgot to bring the stills camera.

No matter—stay tuned for the YouTube clip that will instantly go viral.

How do I know?

Who can resist an 83-year-old lady who told God to take a hike reading names in the middle of a square in San Juan, Puerto Rico?

If anyone can get a message out, doña Ilia can….

Secrecy

Well, he’s getting old, getting tired, he’s not up to the job. So he does what any other guy would do. After all, he doesn’t need the dough, he’s comfortably well off, he’ll have everything he needs. And really, who needs the headache? The politicking and rivalry for power, the machinations in the office, the rat race. Guys call it quits all the time—why shouldn’t he?

Well, Pope Benedict is the first guy in over 700 years to do it. And don’t think, Gentle and Trusting Reader, that Ratzinger had this papacy thrust on him. His elbows were very sharp indeed, so often and so well had he used them to knock the others out of his way. He turned the adage into a lie: the man who enters the conclave as a pope leaves as a cardinal.

One of the things about Latin culture is our love of conspiracy theory. There are Cubans who swear—Fidel died years ago. But not before finding a guy who looked almost identical to him, and happened to be in superb health. Or maybe the real powers behind the regime have consistently identified ever so slightly younger “Fidels” and they keep replacing the fading “Fidel” as needed.

Well, could any culture be more Latin than the Vatican, which actually is the only town where the language is still spoken? (By the way, the resignation was announced in a routine Monday morning meeting, and yes, it was in Latin. Fortunately, one of the Italian press had boned up on the language, and managed to scoop a lot of other more prestigious media….)

So the idea that a pope not particularly known for modernism, innovation, hey-let’s-throw-tradition-to-the-winds was doing something as radical as resigning the position he had spent decades scheming for left a lot of Vatican-watchers scratching their heads. He did WHAT!!!!

Right, so it took a couple of weeks for us all to close our mouths, wobble to our feet, and look dizzily around us, but now the news is in. We figured it out.

Or not.

We’ll know or we won’t know if the conspiracy theory is true, but here’s how it runs, courtesy of the Guardian, which reports that a Rome Newspaper, La Repubblica, is alleging that Benedict is being forced to step down because of twin causes: stealing and gay sex.

You may remember the pope’s butler, who was tried and convicted (and then pardoned by the pope) of stealing important documents and leaking them. The documents, according to the Guardian, painted the Vatican “as a seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting.”

Well, we all knew that, of course. But the pope put together a little threesome to investigate the whole mess, and what turned up—remember, this is theory—was ugly indeed.

Here’s the Guardian again, describing the report:

The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation".

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

The seventh enjoins against theft. The sixth forbids adultery, but is linked in Catholic doctrine to the proscribing of homosexual acts.

Like so many purportedly happy families, there are a few little secrets. But the world is a different place now, and things that were known but not talked about are now not just talked about but filmed, recorded, spread via the media and the social media.

In 2007, a senior official of the Vatican was filmed in a sting operation making sexual advances to a young man. In 2010, a chorister was found to be arranging for male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. A few months later, priests were filmed in gay bars, as well as filmed having sex in gay clubs.

“Well, darling, you could have knocked me over with a steel girder,” I said to Pablo. (No, it’s not mine, but Dorothy Parker’s…)

“Well, darling, you could have knocked me over with a feather from my boa,” returned Pablo, more originally.

We’re being campy—something I do maybe once a decade. But with Pablo, it’s fun, like having a martini with lunch. Any more than once a decade is dangerous.

And we’re doing it in a drugstore, as Pablo waits for some Motrin to ease the strained shoulder muscles a week of family warfare has afflicted him with. People pass by, observe us, think nothing of it. Of course we’re gay, everybody knows we’re gay… so?

So the great thing about being out and open is that you become invisible. Ordinary, in fact. Boring, which is a good thing to be, at times. None of my family is going to be crushed by any hint that Uncle / Brother Marc is gay.

Secrecy, however, breeds a whole set of problems, of which deception and hypocrisy head the list.

Pablo has a hole in his heart this week, after dealing with serious craziness in the family. He came limping home, bleeding but alive.

“You know, you’ll forgive them because it’ll make you feel better—you’re not gonna want to carry all that hate and hurt around. And you’ll realize, you’re living in a much better world than they are.”

That’s what I told Pablo.

Ratzinger has spent an entire life seeing and acquiescing to evil, going along with it, condoning it, decrying it publicly while practicing it privately. Now, he has been undone by it.

The Edge

“It’s badly organized,” my friend told me bluntly.

Well, I had sought her out for her opinion—what right did I have to be offended?

And she may well be right—organization is not my strongest point. You want ideas? Hey, sit down, grab a pencil and start writing. And probably you won’t be able to keep up.

But there was more. An ardent supporter of independence, she took umbrage at being included in a project involving the fifty states.

“We’re a separate nation,” she said, “and we’re recognized by the international community as a separate nation….”

I learned long ago—this is the thinnest of ice. I heard her out, and agreed on several points.

Virtually all the guns here in Puerto Rico are illegal, and come from the United States, where they are cheap and plentiful. And since we are a colony of the United States, we rely on the federal government to police our borders—if we were independent, we could do the job ourselves.

In addition, it’s our status as a colony that has made us a major entry point for cocaine and other drugs, which we ship up north. What comes back? Guns.

She made another point—we are about to privatize our airport, and to whom? Well, critics on the left say to a company which has ties to the drug traffickers. If true, the situation will be a mess—the drug lords will have assured their logistics, better than even Sam Walton could. And there will be guns littering our streets like cigarette butts.

Well, her suggestion was to focus on the Puerto Rican angle, organize better, get the media involved, and especially get well-known people involved. That’s how it’s done. One person sitting in a square reading names? Just another lunatic.

Or maybe a writer. I spent seven years inside a cold grey building. Then I spent another year alone in an apartment, creating a new life for my mother. Now it’s time to get out, get stirring, take the plunge, talk to people.

I’m scared, of course. Scared that some nut will pull out his gun and kill me, or worse, incapacitate me. I can’t look at Gabby Giffords without wondering—could I do what she’s done? Would I have that strength, that courage to come back after that kind of trauma?

Scared of looking ridiculous, though that’s lesser. I pretty much AM ridiculous most of the time—unlike organization, it’s really one of my fortes.

Scared of the passion that some gun owners have: the blind fury and paranoia that, mixed with fear and hate, makes them seethe with rage.

Which may be why I had a waking dream—a dream in which, inadvertently, I had stepped from a tall building, and was falling, falling to the pavement below.

“Courage is a muscle,” said Ruth Gordon, “and like a muscle, it gets stronger with use.”

Or words to that effect.

I say that it’s time to move out of the comfort zone. If you’re not out there poking around, hearing stories, getting people to talk or rant or weep, you’re not where you should be.

On the edge. 

Still a Lot to Do

Somewhere in Puerto Rico, there’s an unhappy and confused twelve-year old girl.

In the grand scheme of affairs, that’s not too bad. Atrocious things are happening all over the world to kids—famine, abuse, displacement. The little girl, whose name no one knows, has two good parents, both professionals, and presumably all the comforts of the upper middle class. In short, she’s well-off, a nice kid living with her two parents who are…

…lesbians.

Ho-hum, you say, and what’s the big deal here?

Well, the mother who is not the biological mother would like to adopt her daughter. In short, she wants to be legally recognized as a mother. And the Puerto Rico Supreme Court has just said, in a 5 / 4 decision, no.

So what, you say. The couple has been together for 25 years, they planned the child together, the I-don’t-want-to-say unnatural mother was the first face the child saw when she was born. No one’s going anywhere….

Yeah? Do we know that? What if the birth mother (don’t know if that’s a term, but it is now) gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Does the Family Department have the right to come in and take the child and assign her to foster care?

There’s also something called divorce, in which case the non-birth mother would be out in the cold. A father could argue for every other weekend and two weeks in the summer, but the non-birth mother? She’d better hope for a good judge.

Predictably, the decision fell on political lines. Our former governor, who was / is a poster boy for the GOP (and implemented the same strategies two years before Scott Walker of Wisconsin) was rumored to be Opus Dei. There were, according to some, prayers—and by no means ecumenical—before meetings. So all of his appointees have dictated the fate of this mothered / motherless child.

The scene is looking potentially better in Washington, where the Supreme Court will begin deliberating on the Proposition 8 decision on March 26. As you remember, the citizens of California—funded liberally by the Mormons—voted against marriage equality in 2008. The decision was challenged, and eventually a federal district court ruled that the citizens didn’t have the right to determine who gets married and who doesn’t. Now, the Supreme Court is going to decide it.

In addition, the Defense of Marriage Act—signed into law by that devoted family man, that upholder of traditional values, that pillar of moral and sexual rectitude Bill Clinton—is up for deliberation by the Supreme Court. Curiously, the court is hearing the DOMA case one day after the Proposition 8 case.

It’s been a long road, this battle for the rights of LGBT folks. So long that it’s a little hard to see how much progress we’ve made in so—relatively—little time. I was born in the worst decade of the twentieth century, perhaps, for gay people—a decade where Joe McCarthy was flaunting a list of “homosexuals” employed by the government, which by executive order made it illegal to be gay and work in the federal government. Gay bashing was not speaking ill of gay people—it was literally assault on men leaving the bars at night. Families routinely invaded houses that two men and women had made homes for years after one partner died—and the legal battles weren’t easy or pretty.

So we’ve done a lot. There’s a reason so many fundamentalists are going crazy: they’re seeing their world vanish.

A lot, yes.

But still so much to do….

A Forgotten Cello Concerto

OK—here’s the deal. I’m taking a break today from rescuing America from its rising tide of gun violence to take on another, just-as-worthy cause.

Yesterday, I wrote about all the music that should be heard, the composers we should be listening to, the pieces that are never played. In the post, I mentioned Carl Reinecke, whose cello sonata (one of them) I had played and loved.

So I was on to YouTube, this morning, to see if I could hear that sonata, and guess what? In all of YouTube, there is only ONE video of a Reinecke cello sonata, played by what looked to be a German conservatory student (very talented). And no, it wasn’t the one I had played.

YouTube offered me the consolation, however, of the Reinecke cello concerto, and so why not? And Readers, Dear Readers, we’ve got work to do!

“I’m Michael Samis,” the guy starts out, “and tonight I’ll be playing the Reinecke cello concerto with the Gateway Chamber Orchestra…” He then sits down and plays a ravishingly lovely, lyrical theme—just the stuff I remembered from the sonata. He then stopped—a musical coitus interruptus.

OK—I was off. I HAD to hear the rest of that piece. First stop, amazon.com—zip. iTunes—ditto. Google, and I’m back on Michael Samis.

First however, I had checked out Reinecke, who has a career somewhat parallel to yesterday’s man whom time forgot, Hans Gal. Reinecke was born in 1824 as a German but in an area controlled at the time by Denmark. He studies in Leipzig with an impressive triumvirate: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt. He later spends time in Copenhagen as court pianist to Christian VIII, and in 1848 goes to Paris.

In 1851, he becomes a professor in the conservatory of Cologne, and then in 1860 is appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a post he will occupy for thirty years. While there, he will conduct the premiere of the full seven movements of the German Requiem of Brahms, as well as the premieres of several of Brahms’s chamber works.

He is—one has to admire that 19^th discipline—teaching as well; his students include Grieg, Bruch, Albéniz, and Leoš Janáček.

After retirement, he devotes his time to composition—which he’s been doing in his “free” time all his life. He writes several operas, which are unperformed today, as well as four piano concertos.

And as you will hear Michael explain below, he’s writing in a musical style of the past. German music had evolved—Michael might say devolved—into Wagner and his followers. Reinecke stays in the style of his teachers, Mendelssohn and Schumann. He writes those long, lyric, lush themes and has the dazzling technical displays that leave you breathless.

And nobody wants his music.

He’s old, he’s out of fashion. The cello concerto, written in 1864, may never have been heard in the United States. And then Michael Samis comes along and falls in love with it—it’s the kind of music he’s loved all his life.

And now Michael has a dream—recording the concerto, as well as the Schumann concerto and various shorter pieces. But to do that he needs…

…sigh…

…do I have to tell you?

Look, if you go on kickstarter.com and donate 100 bucks, you can get a high quality DVD of Michael performing the concerto. For 2000 bucks, you get a 90-minute recital in your home! Hey, the Jones’s are gonna have to work pretty hard to top that.

And the tragic thing?

This guy needs just 8500 bucks. Oh, and if he doesn’t get it—no recording. Kickstart is all or nothing.

I’m in, I’m totally in. Readers, send this to everybody before the next 32 days. Get Michael’s message out there. Twitter and Facebook—this music has gotta be heard.

Long URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelsamis/a-forgotten-cello-concerto?ref=live

Twitter-friendly shortened URL: http://kck.st/ZgH5iP

A Composer Reborn

There’s music that gets played all the time and shouldn’t. How many times have you heard the Moldau, the Bartered Bride, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?

There’s also music that never or almost never gets played and should. Zelenka comes to mind, as well as Reinecke—guys who languish in undeserved obscurity.

As does a guy named Hans Gal, who appeared on a recording done by a new follower on Twitter, Kenneth Woods. Well, there’s a lot I don’t know—and more and more piling up every day—so it was time to head for Wikipedia.

Which has, I was relieved to find, only a couple of paragraphs on Gal; clearly he’s not as mainstream as I had feared. Ironic, because at one point in his life he was well known and much played.

Born in a small town near Vienna, he attended the New Vienna Conservatory and went on to win an important competition, the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize, in 1928. The conductor Furtwangler and composer Richard Strauss helped him obtain the position of director of the Mainz Conservatory. This lasted until 1933, when the Germans overtook Mainz. Gal, a Jew, was dismissed and his music, extremely popular and influential through the twenties, was banned.

Fortunately, there’s a backup. Donald Tovey invites him to Scotland, and he assumes a position at the University of Edinburgh. All is well—as far as we know—until about 1940, when, according to one source, Churchill said, “collar the lot” and Gal and other German émigrés found themselves in an internment camp. Did I mention—there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know?

It was, as you can imagine, a pretty distinguished bunch, this cultured group of German Jews who had not so much escaped the camps as found a decidedly better one—so what do they do?

Write and stage a revue, called “What a Life!”

It took, according to Wikipedia, about six months to determine who was who, and most of the Germans were released. Presumably, Gal goes back to the University and resumes his career. As well, he edits the Brahms symphonies, composes a lot of chamber music, symphonies, songs and incidental music.

He was played extensively in the ‘20’s but, by the end of his life he was forgotten. (Grammar break—the computer has just green-squiggled that last phrase and suggested “the end of his life forgot him!” Your choice, dear Reader!) His symphony number four, his last work in the genre, was premiered in 1972, and then sat on the shelf for another 30 years.

Then along came Kenneth Woods, a writer / cellist / conductor / rock guitarist, who decides to pair the Gal with another composer of four symphonies—Robert Schumann. And it’s well received, becoming a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in 2012.

Woods, in a short clip introducing the disc, makes the point that Gal never jumped on board whatever musical style was fashionable at the time—the  Second Viennese School, or twelve-tone music. The music sounds crisp, distinctive and at least in the clip below, wonderfully lyrical.

Woods also mentions that it must have been frustrating for Gal’s daughter Eva to have to wait thirty years for the rediscovery of her father’s work. She replies with understatement: “the first thirty years are the hardest.” In fact, thirty years is not too long—in the case of Bach, it was one hundred years. And the sad fact is that there are many fine composers that we will never hear.

Kenneth—I’ve just bought the Gal Symphony No. 4 and the Schumann Symphony No. 2, and downloaded them to my iPad. Now then—could I suggest another forgotten composer?

Gunnar Johansen.

The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.

Notes From a Non-Creative Person

I’m a bear of little brain so I listened to it twice and if I still don’t get it, well, I probably won’t.

It all started when I read an article by a model who gave a TED talk about the fact that she didn’t deserve her luck. She makes zillions of dollars because of genetics: she’s tall and willowy and white. Oh, and also symmetrical. So everybody has decided, “wow, she’s hot,” and that’s very useful because you can sell things with sex and that’s important because, well, that’s how the world works.

So now the video has been seen by more than a million people and people are approaching her with book deals and TV shows and she’ll probably end up the Mistress of the Universe and we’ll all have to bow down six times a day to her Loveliness, as well as cede all our property to her and half of our sons.

Sense annoyance?

Dammit—I had a message I wanted to give through TED, and it was a hell of a lot more important than that. And guess what? They turned me down, in order to give a supremely entitled person a chance to be even MORE entitled. Of course beautiful people get everything, of course it’s the handsome guy who becomes the CEO or the senator or the whatever-he-wants-to-be. Remember high school? That’s what you learned there.

Now—thanks for asking—my message was this: you can organize your death just as my mother did. You don’t need to rot away from Alzheimer’s or cancer or just plain boredom. When the time comes, you stop eating and drinking. And no, it’s not a bad death—quite the opposite, really.

Well, I was storming or steaming my way through the article of Her Absolute and Obnoxious Loveliness who has, by the way, just graduated magna cum laude from Columbia (presumably Harvard and all the other Ivy League colleges were lusting to have her; she chose Columbia to be in New York, the center of the modeling world….) and watching my fists ball and hearing my nose snort when I came to a little link: Ted.com, Amy Tan on Where Creativity Hides.

Well, I have a particular debt to Amy Tan because in theory she follows me on Twitter—still think the whole thing had to have been a mistake—and I’ve never read any of her books and I feel badly about that. Come clean—I have read half of one of her books, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I finish it? Because the second part is set in a foreign place and I can’t read about foreign places. But aren’t you living in a foreign place, you ask?

It’s just a thing about me and you know what? OK, I’ll stop being defensive.

OK, so I can live in a foreign place but not read about them, would my debt to Amy be cancelled if I watched her talk about creativity? And what, by the way, is the word that defines your relationship with someone following you on Twitter? A twitterite? A fellow bird? Twitty?

So here she is talking about creativity, and I am understanding only a third of it, although I’m totally enjoying the humor of the slides and also the creative elements in them and I’m in trouble because whatever Amy says about not understanding quantum mechanics is exactly what I’m feeling about her talk.

I’m lost.

Which is totally not good because (sorry about that jump there—I was screwing around with those little callouts, in case you hadn’t noticed, although really shouldn’t there be a person attached? Just a sec—let me run over to the Internet…..)

Right—what I was saying before these damn dogs walked into the post was that I didn’t get any of what Amy was saying about creativity and that’s terrible because I want to be creative and think I should be creative but guess what?

I’m not.

(Though I have discovered where the dogs live on the computer and fiddled around for ten minutes with the callouts—every time I moved the callouts, the dog moved. Oh, and also discovered the spelling of “jejune”—thought it was jejeune….)

And there’s this thing lurking in my head—I have to write a novel.

Which is absolutely awful because it will take a million years and I’ll have to figure out about character development and structure and stuff I don’t even know that I should know.

The only thing I know about creativity is that I was compelled to do it and

WHAT! Shit, that’s my father, dead these two decades, come from the grave to tell me to write a novel?

She had more of a gift than I, and when I died, I stood by her side and watched her write, and then in the evenings and nights I went into the back bedroom where she wrote and cleared away the coffee cups and put her glasses where she could find them and then I read what she had written that day. Just the way you do, at five o’clock every day. And then she died and it fell to you and your gift is greater and she knew it and who kept you from throwing yourself in the traffic that day.

Domine.

Yes.

Thank you…and I’m fucked.