Sunday Paranoia, Resolved

It was too much, I decided. After all, if everybody on the west coast of North America will have to be evacuated, and they’re not worrying, why should I? Shouldn’t they be writing intemperate, fiery screeds to the Japanese government, demanding that an international team of scientists / experts be given complete control of stabilizing the failed—and melted-down—reactors at Fukushima?

Warning to any readers out there—Fukushima, the nuclear power plant that sustained major damage from the tsunami following the earthquake in April of 2011, seems to evoke two reactions, the first being indifference. And the second? Complete, rampaging paranoia, as you can see in the clip below.

OK, I admit it—I fall into the second camp, since no, I don’t trust the Japanese government in the least to come out and say to the world, “Ooops, sorry, but the situation is completely out of control and we have absolutely no clue about what to do, and so everybody on the West Coast? You’re fucked.”

Well, I justify this by the fact that at least two respected scientists feel the same way: Dr. Helen Caldicott, who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility; and David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, activist, and broadcaster. 

And what do they say?

That we are not just on the edge of the precipice but hanging over the void, with gale winds behind us.

Anything, you see, can happen. The cleanup will take decades to complete—they just covered Chernobyl a month or two ago, and the meltdown occurred in 1986. So Suzuki points out that if there is an earthquake of 7.0 or more, reactor four will collapse, and the amount of radiation released? Here’s one writer:

According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, there are 1,533 spent and unused fuel rod bundles in the cooling pool that contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

Right—an earthquake is just one unfortunate event. There’s also the fact that the ground around the reactor is saturated, and the building is unstable, and may collapse even without an earthquake.

Then there’s the possibility that the fuel rods, which TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and raise your hands anyone out there who believes those guys know what they’re doing….) is trying to remove, will get dropped, will be jammed into position, will lose their cooling system, will jostle one another and all of that? 14,000 Hiroshimas!

Or maybe a little less, because we also know radioactive water from the plant is spewing into the ocean, so maybe it’s only 13, 999 Hiroshimas! Whew, what a relief.

Oh, and who’s doing all this work? Well, from the same source cited above:

The shortage of qualified workers has been an opportunity for the yakuza. Gangsters have stepped in to supply labor to subcontract to TEPCO's contractors. The yakuza's labor pool is the most desperate men in Japan. They are poorly trained, suffer from wage theft, and are over-worked and demoralized. TEPCO is enabling the yakuza because management is unwilling to cut profits to pay competitive wages.

Guys?

‘It’s too much,’ I think, ‘ so I’ll do what I always do, when I can’t cope anymore and it’s too early to start drinking.’ So I went over to bother Lady, which is permissible since she has been painting houses from the days dinosaurs roamed the earth, and can easily chat and paint.

So we recreate what Harry, my friend who grew up half a century ago in Old San Juan, told me was a typical Sunday afternoon.

“People would sit for hours at a time in each other’s houses, talking, chatting, sometimes just sitting. You would pass by, and they’d just be sitting there in silence. And time seemed to stretch out—the afternoons were infinities. No worries, no anxieties, no rushing around or doing errands. Just sitting with family and old friends….”

Well, yesterday it was a new friend, since Mary Anne, a neighbor of Lady’s and a woman of a certain age, strolled in, bearing frozen yogurt. We smile at each other.

“How can two really important people in my life not know each other,” asks Lady; to a gringo, this is plausible. To a Puerto Rican? Completely crazy.

So now we shake hands, and discover: Mary Anne is a music lover, a painter, a professor.

“Marc is a cellist, and a writer. He plays Bach every day at five in the Poet’s Passage, and gives whatever money people throw into the case to charity.”

“You gotta do it,” I tell Mary Anne, “all cellists have to play an hour of Bach every day.”

“Yeah?” says Lady. You can tell she’s not buying in….

“Absolutely,” I tell her. “It’s like the Spaniards: they have to read a chapter of Don Quixote every day.”

Now she’s really not buying in….

“Well, run over to Spain when you go off to France in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see: all the Spaniards are sitting around reading Don Quixote.

I get a look….

“Anyway, if you don’t play your hour of Bach every day, they don’t let you call yourself a cellist….”

“Yeah?”

“Yup, they take away your license…”

“You got a license?”

“Of course I have a license! Good Lord, Lady, do you know what damage could be done, having a lot of unlicensed cellists buzzing around out there! I’m a board certified cellist, licensed by the American Society of Cellists!”

Nobody believes me, of course, but is that the point? I am waving my mouth as ladies waved their decorative fans a century or so ago: not to much effect but prettily. So a beautiful man strolls in with his four-month old baby—named Abel, and no, I didn’t ask and neither should you—and I have to go talk to him, because who doesn’t like new fathers, especially beautiful ones? And then Naïa strolls in, with her hair looking like one half of a giant dandelion, very much gone to seed.

So Lady goes to deal with that, and I kiss everyone except the one I really, really, want to, and then it’s time to go home.

Oh, and by the way? It’s true about the Spaniards reading a chapter of Don Quixote and how do I know…?

Harry told me!

Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

Introduction to my Next Book

It started when I came home from England, where I was cold, and got back to Puerto Rico, where it was hot. And then, they decided on a particularly extreme form of torture: repaving the street. This involved ripping up the asphalt, igniting generators, shouting, dropping chunks of pavement into trucks, more shouting, more generators, more asphalt…you get the picture.

What was the result? Well, we now have a bricked road, vaguely reminiscent of the famous blue adoquines that pave the rest of the old city. When the street was finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, and concluded that the affair was over, that there were no new ways to confound my life.

Ah, innocence!

I hadn’t noticed, you see, that while the street was done, the corner was not—so that meant that that had to be ripped up, that the asphalt had to be dropped, the generators ignited, the greetings shouted. Oh, and there’s a problem—funny how often there is, somebody should really look into it—because while we are nearing completion of the corner to my right, the corner to my left? It still has that dreadful asphalt.

We do many things well in Puerto Rico, but silence? We shatter it, we slaughter it, we massacre it. An example: Puerto Rican children are routinely taken to Old San Juan, to see the adoquines, to look at the colonial architecture, and to scream slogans, such as “Yo soy boricua, ¡pa’ que tú lo sepas!” (Roughly, “I’m Puerto Rican, so that you know it!?”)

This is done at the urging of their teachers.

OK—it was hot, it was loud, and how could I write? I was driven to find an alternative, a place where they would feed me, know my name, and let me watch the characters come and go. There is, for example, Elizabeth, who is mopping the floor of the gift shop she minds on the other side of the café, and whose two children drift in from school around three PM and sleep on the couches or play video games. Then there’s Naïa, who…well, why not check in with her?

“Naïa, are your dragons behaving themselves?”

“Yes,” she replies, from around the corner, where she is sitting making a virtual zoo, which, at the moment, is animal-less.

“All except Screaming Death….”

“So what did he do,” I ask.

“Almost ate a baby dragon…”

She then goes on to show me the dragon that is currently accompanying her, as she munches on pretzel sticks. Called “Toothless,” after a character in How toTrain Your Dragon—“it’s a really good movie,” reports Naïa,—it in fact does have teeth. But the coolest thing is that it also opens its mouth and ejects smoke. 

People can’t do it—at least in the café—but the dragon can. Is that fair? I point this out to Naïa, who gives me a disgusted look.

Well, not really—we move past disgust and into is-he-being-stupid-again, the answer to which is so often “yes.” She returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the virtual zoo.

There’s a woman—probably homeless—who is snoozing in a chair in the gift shop’s open-mic area next door. Why do I think she’s homeless? Well, do you walk around with a backpack stuffed with clothes?

There’s Jorge, the manager of the café, of whom I keep waiting to see: will he ever lose his cool? In the year plus that I’ve been here, he never has. I did get the report, though, that he’s capable of it, since the café, during the mayhem that is the San Sebastián Street Festival, was the object of a dog-knapping. Yup, somebody stole the toy Chihuahua, Lorca, and it was only via the intervention of a customer who spotted Lorca, grabbed him, and brought him back, that we have Lorca today.

“And can you believe the dog-knappers had the gall to insist that Lorca was their dog! That’s when Jorge flew into a fit, and cursed the people in both English and Spanish. He nearly got into a fist fight….”

So reported Lady, the prevailing muse of the place. She comes in and the kissing begins, since she knows everyone and if she doesn’t she soon will, so why not start out on the right foot and give a stranger a kiss? Because of this, she enjoys robust good health, having fortified her immune system by night and day mingling with the microbial world. So she never gets sick, and everybody is her friend.

“I don’t have a college degree, but I have the Poet’s Passage,” she reports. In her early forties, she’s a poet, though she’s decided that seven is enough: she’s not doing any more. She married a Frenchman, who came over to do a project for his MBA program, and who stayed to fall in love, marry, and paint. That, for a Frenchman, seems more fitting than an MBA program.

“In the early days, we were so poor that we were eating—sharing, actually—a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs,” she once told me. Surprising, Naïa was born with no genetic abnormalities, unless preferring dragons to Barbie counts as one.

“And when we were looking to buy the building, I gathered all the facts and went down to the bank. And there were all these men in suits, and there was me—a poet, answering all their questions. There’s money in poetry….”

Well, the bank went bust a couple years ago (not quite that dramatically—at the insistence of the FDIC, it was “bought” by another bank, but the whole thing fooled nobody). But the Poet’s Passage? Still here!

“Sunshine, what would happen if I stole a cookie?” I ask. Yes, his name is Sunshine—why shouldn’t it be? Do we all have to be Toms and Bills?—and yes, he agreed to look the other way.

It was better as a kid, or maybe it was better when it was more illicit….

“Are you going to play today?” asks Omar. Probably I will, since at about five every day, I start thinking about scotch, which I’m trying not to do. So playing Bach Suites on the cello is a nice alternative. What I need to do now is start playing later and later. I might have a chance at sobriety at last. People come by and throw money in my cello case, and I donate it to four charities in the Third World.

And in the year or so that I’ve worked here, well…what have I created? A blog with 585 posts and over 43,000 page-views.

That’s a year’s work? Shouldn’t I have written the great American novel, or a scholarly treatise on the enriching effect of the Caribbean literary tradition on mainstream American literature? What’s a blog?

The electronic version of a newspaper, and where’s yesterday’s newspaper? Very likely in a corner, under your new puppy….

So I looked back. Was there anything there? Could I put the best of what I had written into a book? Something I could hold, and maybe—wow!—sell. The New York Times, of course, would rave—a major literary voice has been found!—and I would have stalkers, all of whom, of course, I would ignore.

(Time out for an interruption. Sunshine has just informed me that El Barco de Vapor—the Steam Boat—is giving 12,000 bucks to anyone who wins the first prize in the children’s book competition. I instantly remember Naïa.

“Hey, can I use your dragon to power a steam boat?”

“Marc, it’s a toy dragon….”

Ohhhh….)

Now where was I?

Oh yes, a book, which will give me something to do (besides honest work). But is there anything there?

You decide….

On Failure—Or Not

Well, the work of this morning was supposed to be to tell you about failure, since Lady, Mr. Fernández and I had not so much been to the opera last night as we had been Igorred.

As in Prince Igor, the opera by Borodin that the Metropolitan Opera is putting on for the first time in nearly 100 years. So we went, all of us, to the broadcast at the Metro Theater. The broadcast (or rebroadcast, in this case) is absolutely better than actually going to the Met, since try eating popcorn at the Met! Oh, and another small advantage—you can see the singers, without having to shell out 300 bucks…..

“How long will this last,” asked Lady, who was attending for the first time. Four hours, I told her, wildly over-exaggerating, or so I thought—it actually clocked in at 4 and a half hours, and that was without the curtain calls (we scrambled out of the theater to grab the last bus home).

Well, it was a thing to have done to one—the first act alone came in at an hour and forty five minutes, and half of that was spent in a long hallucinatory scene set in a blaze of poppies (12,500 artificial, spring-loaded poppies—so loaded since the dancers were energetically crashing their way through the famous Polovtsian Dances {well, famous to all but the computer, my little red-squiggling friend….})

You see, Prince Igor, a twelfth-century figure, has made the fatal mistake of going off to fight the Cuman / Polovtsian tribes, despite having received a blazingly clear message from the heavens that it was a damn fool thing to do. OK—not so blazing, since the celestial tidings came in the form of a solar eclipse. But what sort of operatic moron goes off to war right after an eclipse? Hellooo!

Well, the predictable happens, but does Igor pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back to the world of the living—which in this case is to be a prisoner? Although not, since his captor seems to be a perfectly splendid man—and a khan, no less—who insists on treating him as a guest, even to the point of offering him one of the Polovtsian maidens. Oh, and he suggests that they go off and conquer all Russia together. Quite a reasonable offer, given that look—Igor isn’t bringing to the table much clout in the way of bargaining.

Right—so while Igor is moping around refusing to escape (since he’s a prince, get it?  And escaping, you see, is for the less exalted than he—therefore he’ll just sit around being operatically moody, which will draw out the opera…)

Now where was I?

Right—Igor is moping, but his wife’s brother? He’s having a great old time, stealing maidens from their havens by night and plotting to overthrow his brother-in-law by day. While all of this is going on, the khan attacks and—guess what!—the city falls. So now it’s one chicken salad wrap, two large coffees, one bag of popcorn with some illicit-but-oh-so-good Coca-Cola (suck it up, Bloomberg! Hah!) later, and now we’re in the fourth act / fourth hour—which is a scene of utter devastation!

Well, let’s go further—utter devastation, social ruin, economic collapse, and a profound, vast, bleak spiritual wasteland, from which no one will escape.

The Russians just love this stuff….

Igor, it seems, has now decided to escape, presumably so that he can come back when it’s entirely pointless (except, of course, to be in the final act). Obviously, being treated as the honored guest of the khan is insufficiently hair-shirted, especially when there is now the devastated city which he once ruled to mope about in. So there he is, Russianly catatonic, contemplating his and his city’s ruin, when two old souses come upon him, and decide to ring the bell, and get the citizenry (in this case the Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—handy, hunh?)

Well, the wife is happy to see him, but Igor? Unlike all the operatic characters who are told not to speak to their loved ones but cannot, Igor ignores his beloved, so steeped in grief is he. So now it’s the crowd’s turn—very useful, since the chorus is now on overtime, and you might as well use ‘em—and soon they’re dancing about and tossing Igor in the air like a fraternity prank.

At last—and I do hope nobody in the audience last night was afflicted with hemorrhoids—Igor spins off, and lurches around for a minute or so in what appears to be a near-psychotic break. Then he takes hold of himself, goes to a crate and begins to lug it to the side. Gradually, the others join in—moving the rubble to the side, beginning the process of cleaning up.

“That was it?” asked Mr. Fernández, puzzled about how he had passed the last five hours of his life. The steppes of Russian, you see, are slightly chillier than Hollywood.

So I thought about it all this morning, over coffee. And it’s a curious thing, the need of my country—despite having experienced it several times—never to have admitted defeat.

Let’s face it—we lost Vietnam. And Iraq? Afghanistan? Even our war on drugs? The American dream?

Yes—we’ve been attacked. But have we ever experienced the devastation of a ruined landscape / countryscape, coupled with the bitter taste of knowing that another nation has invaded and conquered? Have we gone through what so many nations around the world have endured?

‘I know about defeat,’ I thought, remembering four or five auditions that I completely choked. Each time it was the same—the disbelief of being gob sacked in the psychic solar plexus, the wailing of despair and frustration, the shame of calling friends and family and announcing that, yes, once again, I had failed. Reader—some things repetition does not make easier.

“We thoroughly enjoyed it,” said the tourist yesterday, handing me ten bucks for the organizations I support by playing Bach suites in the café. The story, you see, has a happy ending—I’m playing better than I ever have. More importantly, I’m playing in public, enjoying it, and tackling the solo suites without having the aid of another musician (often a pianist) to bolster me. It’s just the instrument and I.

People drift past, off to the bathroom. Often, I shift to another point in the bow, to allow them to pass. The parrot squawks. People take photos—shooting a red flash of light into the middle of a sarabande. Casals was right—a café is excellent practice for a developing musician, whatever his or her age….

Did it come easily? No. But if it came at all, it came from the devastated landscape of failure. And if I had denied that I had failed? If I had fallen for the rationale—perhaps real but not true—that no gringo could land a job with a Puerto Rican orchestra?

There are times, I decided, when you need devastation, failure, dirt in the mouth. That’s the only landscape from which to travel to other, better places.

Enter Susan, who wrote a comment on yesterday’s post, saying that she’d not heard of the French countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, ‘how can that be?’ So I turned to YouTube, and came by chance on the clip below.

However many decades it took this bear of little brain to figure out his instrument, it took Jaroussky only a couple of years to go from starting to sing to conquering the world of song. And why shouldn’t he? He’s young, mouth-wateringly cute, and the voice?

But as you can see below, it’s the completely natural—and funny—way he approaches his music that carries the day. He has not, it looks, travelled the same paths that I have trod, at least not in music.

I rejoice for him, as I rejoice for the failures that—bitter as they were—led me onward to a world of such joy….

A Bow to a Bow

Well, it was a revelation, and I’m happy to say it was a good one.

I had to taken my bow to my luthier—and if you don’t have a luthier, you should get one, if only because it adds total class to be able to say “my luthier.” Of course, you could be a little clearer by saying “string instrument repairman,” but in a choice between clarity and class? No contest….

Actually, his name is Rodrigo, and he’s a totally cool guy. More to the point, he’s a serious luthier, having studied at Indiana University’s Violin Making and Repair Program. So he was the person to whom I fled, several years ago, when I detected the perfect round hole, about the diameter of a pencil point. What was it? I knew too well—a termite.

“I’ll have to freeze your cello for a couple of weeks,” said Rodrigo.

He explained it all carefully. Did I listen? Of course not—I knew it had to be done, I knew he was the man to do it. But how was I going to live for the next two weeks, imagining my cello in a meat locker?

Two weeks later, I was back in his taller, or workshop (OK, how about atelier?) And while I fully expected the cello to sound as good as it had before, it didn’t.

“It sounds much, much better,” I told him.

“The concert master of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra used to take his violin to New York for the least little thing,” his mother boasted, “now, he won’t let anyone but Rodrigo touch his violin….”

Mothers get to say stuff like that.

So there I was on Monday with a bow that had its hair firmly attached to the frog (yup—bows have frog: that’s the black thing under the player’s hand; it has a screw in it, so that you can tighten the hair.)  The problem? The hair had popped out at the other end of the bow (logically called the tip).

So there were two orders of business, beyond getting the bow fixed. The first was to ask about getting a baroque bow—very important, since I’m doing Bach and Beer every day. And the baroque bow is designed to do so something very important: messa di voce. It’s when a sustained note starts quietly, gradually becomes louder, and then becomes soft again. Done right, it’s ravishing.

As I knew he would, Rodrigo had the answer, with the happy news that a good baroque bow wouldn’t cost me too much—under two hundred bucks. And if my father had collected Leica cameras, can’t I collect bows?

The next order of business was to see if Rodrigo had a spare bow lurking around, waiting for the errant cellist to drift by and claim it. Well, it turns out that Rodrigo has a seriously good bow—which he would lend Yo-Yo Ma, maybe—and another bow, a French bow with German weight. Guess which one I got?

There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what you know experientally (well, computer, if Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I?). Because when I start playing with that bow, it was what Stanley said to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: “baby, we’ve had this date from the very beginning!”

“The bow is more important that the instrument,” said a cello teacher to me when I was in my teens. So why had it never occurred to me: I had a very good cello, but I had never gone from what were essentially student bows to a better bow.

And if your cello is your sound, your bow is your voice. Or perhaps your speech, since the bow was somehow, miraculously suggesting nuances that I hadn’t thought of. I swear—that bow was telling me how to play Bach.

Bach—which I was playing because I had grown tired of killing myself playing stuff like the Dvorak concerto or the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. They’re great pieces of music, but for the cellist? It’s a battle: one cellist against 100 musicians. I had gotten tired of working so hard, and besides, it’s strangely unusual how infrequently the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony are calling me these days….

But the bow was having none of that. It wanted a robust, full sound—or maybe it was that just by using the weight of my arm, the bow produced a wonderful, warm sound.

It was, as I say, a revelation. Equally revealing was how much I didn’t know about bows, or bow makers. I knew that François Xavier Tourte (1747 – 25 April 1835) was a big name among bow makers, but I didn’t know that he’s big enough to be called, “the Stradivarius of bow makers.” (If so, my computer is less than impressed—“Tourte” gets red-squiggled, whereas “Stradivarius” sails right through….)

Not only was he a fine maker, but he was the father of the modern bow: he lengthened it, devised the little screw that tightens the tension of the hair, and also came up with a new way to make the curve of the bow. Previously, it had been carved; Tourte cooked up the idea of heating a straight stick of pernambuco, and then, on the edge of a wood table, carefully producing the curve.

For all this, he deserves to have his picture in Iguanas; here he is, in an engraving from 1818:

  

 Nor did I know that the experimentation with the bow is still going on, until I stumbled across Benoît Rolland, a Frenchman of—quite logically—the French School. Because there are, you see, at least three distinct schools of bow making: the French, German and English schools. I get this from a sentence from Rolland’s website:

A musician can sense whether a bow belongs to the French, German or British traditions.

But it occurred to me: shouldn’t there be an Italian school, since the modern violin originated in Cremona, Italy? But it appears no—the origin of the modern bow occurred later, and happened simultaneously but unconnectedly in France and England (John Dodd was the Tourte of England…).

At any rate, Rolland studied at Mirecourt, sometimes called “the Cremona of bow making” and was awarded the prestigious Maitre Archetier d’Art, which beyond sounding totally cool, has only been awarded a few times in history.

Nor is that the only thing Rolland has won—he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012—and they don’t hand those babies out like candy. Why did he get it? Well, the quote below is drawn from his website:

Initially using marine technology, he conceived the first carbon fiber bow of concert quality. Bringing the project one step further, he invented a new generation of bows including a tension mechanism that allows the performer to adjust at will the camber of the bow. The bows embodying this invention were awarded First Prize Musicora in 1994 (also selected for Musicora Anniversary, 2004), and are distributed under the trademark Spiccato®.

Right—so I’m a bit more knowledgeable about bows and bow making. What don’t I know? How I could possibly give Rodrigo’s bow back to him.

Sorry—that’s not Rodrigo’s bow.

Not any more….

So here’s what I going to say to him: “Rodrigo, you’d better let me buy this bow, because I really don’t want to have to steal it!”

My Problem with Geek….

And so it’s my privilege, this morning, to present the following sentence:

I woke up yesterday, drank my coffee, and decided on the morning trot to listen to Biber’s Requiem, a tremendous piece.

That to me is totally normal—it could have been Buxtehude, who also has an amazing work, Membra Jesu Nostri. Or I could have listened to Bach, of course, because he is the molten core of the earth for classical musicians.

But if I can say stuff like this, and listen to stuff like this, it’s because somebody stuck a cello into my arms and suggested I might embrace it. And I did, variously, with mixed results until recently. And besides opening a seriously beautiful world, the cello gave me friends like Geek and Dorothy.

We were teenagers, which is by definition not easy. We were also fucked up in other ways—both Geek and I were gay and not talking about it. Which is a pity, since there wasn’t much we didn’t talk about. We hung out a lot together, played a really awful Rossini duet together, and did gigs together. Do you ever need to put a string bass in an early 70s Pinto? Unbelievably, Geek can do it.

Like every clique, we chose to define ourselves and forget what the rest of the world was saying about us, if anything. And happily, it worked. Music was our life, mostly—and what free time we had, we hung out in the orchestra room. There, we’d practice, talk, and devise new ways to torment Mr. Percy, perhaps the blandest man I have ever encountered. (He married, coincidentally, a woman who was exactly his equal in apersonality—dammit, computer, you know what I mean…..)

Geek had a quirky sense of humor, which extended to putting the local wunderkind, Sharon Levanthal, into his bass case (the bass having been removed), standing it and her up in front of our friends’ houses, and ringing the doorbell. Then, from the bushes is which we were hiding, we could observe the astonished reactions.

There was nothing malicious in this, and mothers began to take as a matter of course the sight of a vertical bass case, which began to talk, if memory serves, in the course of time. In fact one friend’s mother routinely greeted Sharon, and would pat her head through the case. Sharon squeaked back.

Weekdays were West High, and the orchestra room. Saturday mornings were WYSO, or the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras. And if Mr. Percy suffered from severe micropersonality, Dr. Rabin was seemingly the opposite. Generally, he was heard before he was seen, and the character force was felt before he entered the room. And to this day, Geek swears that the best interpretation of the violin solo in the Shostakovich Fifth that he’s ever heard is Sharon Levanthal’s.

For years, we called each other, always starting with the formula:

“Myrc,”

“Geek”

For some reason, my mother Franny found this fascinating. “What do you say after the Myrc / Geek,” she asked. Answer—nothing: we just started talking.

Geek, wisely, decided to go to Interlochen—the high school, not the summer camp. And there, well—let the school’s website tell the story:

Interlochen Arts Academy is the world's first and foremost fine arts boarding high school, offering the highest quality training with college-preparatory academics.

Right—nice to know! Though I might ask why, if you’re so great, my computer has never heard of you…..

So Dorothy and I soldiered on at West High, and later at the University of Wisconsin, where we both studied nursing. (She stayed in the field, I moved on, as do most nurses—Dear Reader, there is never a nurse shortage, just an active nurse shortage.) And we played music together too, and through her I met a genteel lady of European charm, Mrs. Hagen, who played the viola in the Beethoven string trio (Dorothy was a violinist).

“Air your cello,” she would greet me, in her remarkable house filled with art, (her husband had been a distinguished professor of art history).

It was a refuge—the house, the music, the friendship. Because things were seriously not right at home. How not right? Not mine to say, and perhaps neither I nor anyone knows the full hell of it. Because however successful Dorothy’s parents were, they were miserable together. And I could feel it—especially when I stayed with the family in their Lake Superior summer home.

She’s a brave woman, Dorothy—a woman who raised a child by herself, and who decided, she once confided, to go on through the pain of her life just for him. And she always gave more than she got. When my father Jack landed in the ICU five days before his death, who was there? Dorothy, and what was she doing? Untying my father’s hands, since all of the other nurses were worried that he would try to rip out his breathing tube. (Of course he would—wouldn’t you?)

“Do you need money,” she whispered, as I got off the plane that day, the day I got the call from Franny. She knew I was in Puerto Rico, that I was underemployed, that I was still harboring the ridiculous dream: I was gonna make a living as a musician.

I didn’t, of course. Nor did Geek, who told me, a couple years ago, that the bass was now sort of a party trick—and there weren’t many parties.

I can imagine that. Geek is running a bookstore / bar, and it’s one of the few independent, gay bookstores left in the country. As such, it gained the gracious attention of the Phelps family, who were standing around in the freezing February weather with their signs announcing that God Hates Fags outside of the Aut Bar. Where was Geek? Warm, inside, and busy running a fundraiser—he had hit on the scheme of getting people to pledge money for every minute the Phelps family spent outside the bar.

Right—so he had gone on and given back. And I? I had written a book and after years of silence, called Geek to ask him what to do about it. He was generous with a young and not-so-young writer, who went on to do the unthinkable.

Publish the damn thing as a paperback through CreateSpace, an Amazon-owned company. Yes, that Amazon—the company that is busy putting him out of business.

I tell myself that independent bookstore owners are going to have to look at Amazon as small businesses look at Sam’s or Costco, as a business that supports their business. I tell myself that I will call Geek and confess—he’ll sigh and forgive me, I hope. I tell myself that I’ll just send him the book, with a little note, begging forgiveness. I tell myself that Geek would like to know that I’m playing cello again, and raising money for kids in the third world—Bach and Beer. I have no problem telling myself things.

The question?

What am I gonna tell Geek?