Up the Hill Alone

They were two pewter candlesticks, a pewter bowl and a pewter vase—all with strongly and somewhat crudely rustic Norwegian designs. Oh, and a Russell Wright bowl which I had given her to match the Russell Wright vase, which she already had. So—six objects, and I was sobbing over them. That was all that was left of her.

It wasn’t, of course. It just felt that way, those six objects that had been taken out of my mother’s house a month ago and sent to New York. A renter has been found for the house in the woods where my mother had lived and where she had died, and so John and Jeanne had gone out and taken even more of the personal possessions out the house. And that meant that when I came into their apartment four days ago—I was greeted by the Norwegian chest that had been in the place she had designed for it all those years ago. (Note—I just added it up, and it’s over thirty years….)

It looked beautiful, it looked wrong. And I decided, it would be best to go around the apartment while I was along—examine every nook and cranny, and find everything from my mother’s house that was now living in my brother’s house.

Winnie the Pooh—the edition from 1946—was on the tea table. The blue and white ginger bowl was in the hall. There were some post Art Deco-ish vases of which my mother had been fond. And there was a whole raft of small pieces that we had to go through.

“The trouble was the coffee ladies,” I told John. “Every time a member of her coffee klatch went off somewhere, they had to bring something home, and then Franny had to put them somewhere and keep them there forever because who could offend the coffee ladies?”

She was like that….

So John and I went through the box, and soon made a game of it.

Marc (holding reproduction Egyptian cat): Barbara Shaw in the souks of Cairo!

John (moving his head sideways like an Egyptian, imitates native): 50 piasters.

Marc (imitating Barbara): 50! 25, and not a piaster less!

Life teaches you how to get through some moments—and no, no tears were shed over the chulerías that Franny had had forced on her all those years. But what to do about the stuff she had used, had liked, had admired? Such as the Russell Wright stuff, or the Norwegian pewter?

“The last thing we need is more stuff,” I said to Jeanne. “Who else do you know who has eight or ten china sets between them? Oh, and three sets of silver?”

But it also seemed like I had to have them—and what, beyond memories, do I have of my mother? And that’s when the thought hit—this is all that’s left of a woman who had laughed and loved and told stories and wept on the passing of her man. I had held her ashes in my hand and thrust them into the earth—and that I did dry-eyed.

I looked down at the six items on the floor and thought of her hands holding them, lifting them to her eyes. I saw the roadside flowers we had gathered that would go into the Wright vase that would end up on the Norwegian wood-burning stove. I thought of the time I had played cello at Herb Fritz’s barn in Spring Green. Fritz, a friend of my parents and a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, had long died; his widow, Eloise, was soldiering on. And on the grand piano was a beautiful plain blue vase, with sunflowers stuck into it.

“Our own van Gogh, as Herb used to say” said Eloise.

It was the last time I had played for my mother.

“How much stuff is still in the house?” I asked Jeanne.

Who may have taken it as criticism—“there was just no way we could get it all out in one weekend,” she said.

“It’s not that, I just want to know how much more of this I have to go through…”

The answer?

Some more.

There’s a house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods that, one day, will be another man’s or woman’s pride and problem—not John’s, who is waking up at 3AM to worry about it. There will be a long, graveled driveway wending through green woods in summer, gold in fall, and grey and black in winter—and that driveway, once so welcoming, once leading to arms yearning to hold me? That driveway will tell me ‘no, not today.’

‘She came and she went about her business, but she’s gone. And you should go, too. Go away—back to your life, back to the living. Let her molder here, if she wills, or slip through her woods on the back of the cold winter winds, of sit on the rocks you both sat on, when you were wailing. When she could wail. And now?’

‘She could be rough, that mother of yours. Remember how she told John, who was wailing for a lost child, that he had to suck it up, stop crying, get on with his life? And why? For Jeanne. So he squared his shoulders and did it. Now, let’s see you’

And I do it, of course. I square my shoulder and lift my chin and turn around and begin the trudge up the hill…

…alone.

The Upper West Side

Has it always been like this, or am I just noticing it?

One of the bad things about depression is that you do a remarkably poor job of seeing the world. You’re internally absorbed—lost in your misery of defeat and despair, so you’re barely able to peer out anyway. And if you do—what do you see? Right: it’s not pretty.

And so when I came to New York all those many years as a depressed person, the city overwhelmed me, and I retreated by going deeper within. Completely unnecessary, of course, since the city bore me no grudge and certainly wasn’t hostile. It may, in fact, have been doing its best to beguile, and I was churlishly refusing its efforts to engage me.

Which is to say that simple things came hard—hailing a cab, engaging in conversation, dealing with a doorman. Absurd to the non-depressed; real to the others.

And yesterday I flew in to Manhattan, since Erica, one of my nieces, is celebrating her 40^th birthday. So there I was, mostly decaffeinated and walking through what had to be the longest airport terminal I have ever paced, searching for the AirTrain—the little tram that carries you around to different terminals, and then finally to the subway. OK—at this point the subway has lost its “sub” and is now just a “way:” it’s running on land, not under it. And of course I got confused, went the wrong way, and instead of going into Manhattan, I was heading for the last, outer limits to the city, across a long stretch of an inlet of the Atlantic, water mixed with marshes with russet and gold reeds with feathery white plumes. Ducks and geese were circling above, and the fall colors were spectacular against a grey, sullen sky. It was New York as the Indians must have seen it, and it was magical.

“Why are you taking the subway in?” asked John, when I called to tell him of the adventure. I was now waiting as I would for a half hour for the train back into the city.

John takes a cab, which takes forty minutes and 80 bucks. But the subway costs six bucks. Do I need to say anything further?

Well, I can also tell you—it takes two hours, especially if you go the wrong way at first. And then you land—if like me you have absentmindedly gotten on to the Eighth Avenue Express—at 125 Street. You get out, and are immediately behind a black guy who is muttering, “and the fucker raped a fucking two-year old.” This information—jarring as it is—is made more jarring by hearing him repeat it ceaselessly as he walks behind you down the platform. ‘Right,’ you think, ‘it may be better to be behind this gentleman’ and so you stop, pretend to fish something out of your pocket, and proceed out to the heart of Harlem.

Not a problem, since Harlem is considerably more upscale than it was—still, you’re one of the few non-brothers on the street. Right, so you call Jeanne, and then hail a cab. Oh, not before getting completely drenched in a sudden thunderstorm.

Life on the Upper West Side—very nice. It’s a neighborhood that pushes affluence to the border of opulence. What keeps it from going over the border? It’s understatedness—everybody is a corporate lawyer or has just written the definitive text on the expulsion of the Moors from Andalucía or has returned from a sabbatical in Oxford researching…. You get the picture.

And the apartment where John and Jeanne live is very much their creation—filled with books, crammed with interesting food, and spacious: a pre-war, the hallway into the dining room is almost the exact length of a bowling alley. And on entering the apartment, I saw that every light was on, and that the black extension cord led to a vacuum. And Ángela, from Guatemala, was there cleaning.

We’ve met, we’ve chatted, and so we greeted each other. So I went to do my thing—which was to rent a cello. I’ve just gotten back my calluses, and I didn’t want to lose them. (Think about it, Reader—you spend three hours a day pressing your fingers rapidly on steel strings: what do you think your fingers feel like at the beginning?)

So I google “rent a cello New York City” and there it is: a place ten blocks away. And started four years ago by a nice guy named Elliot, when his daughter wanted to learn the violin, and he realized there were no acceptable, reasonably priced instruments to be rented. So I call him up, and tell him I want a cello for the week, and the answer?

No. He only rents for three months.

And here is where I know—I am not the depressed, mousey character who is trying to slip by, hoping the city won’t bite me. Because I want a cello, and he has a cello, and I have a credit card so…?

“Do you have a cello,” I ask.

“Is anybody using the cello?”

“Are you getting any money out of the cello?”

“Well, you are in business, aren’t you?”

And so I go to see Elliot, who has agreed to rent me for 100$ the very best cello China can mass-produce. Expensive, but this is New York.

And so I get the cello and am practicing and playing with the sonorities and thinking, ‘wow, am I lucky to have the cello I have,’ and Ángela comes to say goodbye. She pauses, unsure of what to say, and then says, “I don’t understand the music, but I like…”

“If you like it, you understand it,” I said. I was playing Bach cello suites, and the movements are based on dances. And dance is integral in every culture, so what’s the big deal? It’s not dissimilar to the folk dances of Guatemala—just dressed up.

She left, I put down the cello and thought. And here’s where I am, this day after meeting the city on its own.

I’ve just wandered through John and Jeanne’s apartment—the one Ángela cleaned, yesterday—wondering how to say this and here it is: the class lines are invisibly but rigorously defined. When I traveled through Brooklyn, I was one of two whites in the subway car. Then, magically, there were two stops when the blacks all got off and the whites all got in. What had happened? The black people were getting off to do their jobs in the stores and the cafes and the homes of the white people. Then, at Columbus Circle, all the white people got off—because the next stop was Harlem.

Elliot—the cello guy—lived in an apartment very similar to the one that Ángela was cleaning. And he had checked me out, and must have known that, well…I was one of his kind.

“Where are you from,” he had wanted to know.

“Oh, we have an apartment in Old San Juan,” I said. Notice—the “have” implies ownership, and I’m not saying that I’m from Puerto Rico, which has many a slum.

“And what do you do down there?”

“Oh, I’ve just finished writing a book….”

“Could you fill out the contact information and send it to me?”

We had been doing over the phone what dogs do when they meet—sniffing each other’s behinds. And now he would do it electronically, via Google. Fair enough—I had done it to him.

And the doorman, when I got to Elliot’s building, had no terror for me, and turned out to be a pleasant chap.

I’m lucky to live in the world of books and space and cleaned-by-somebody else and cellos. But I wonder—are Ángela’s kids going to be able to get into my world? Because none of the black people on the subway—getting on in Brooklyn—looked as it they had had much chance. And if that’s true?

We’re fucked.

Guarding the Palace

Right—there’ll be no shirking here. Previously, I had the doubtful responsibility of buffing up the English language skills of 500 Wal-Mart associates. Before that I was a nurse. Then there was the cello, to which I’ve recently returned. And now?

Defender of Buckingham Palace!

It seems that The Queen’s Guard—the one that gets changed every day, you remember—is completely slipping up. Because take a look at the picture below!

Yup—it’s a firework exploding against Buckingham Palace.

OK, having taken on Putin (see here and here) and won, a few days ago—he now assures us that he’ll welcome LGBT folk with open arms and vodka bottles—I was all in the mood for a nice quiet time. But no, with the slackers apparently overtaking the Guard, somebody has to step up to the plate. What if the queen had been strolling on her balcony?

So I turned to The Guardian for the dope, and discovered that the protest was part of a worldwide demonstration against austerity cuts; here’s what they had to say on the topic:

Similar events were staged in cities in Japan, Australia and New Zealand in opposition to austerity cuts, corruption and an increase in state surveillance.

Well, the event attracted hundreds of people, of whom 11 were arrested. In addition to the fireworks directed at the palace, a fire was started near the gates of the building, and the Lord Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square sustained damage. And apparently things got a bit heated—here’s more from the Guardian:

Ceylan Hassan, 24, a university graduate, who was among the protesters in London, said: "They started shouting 'move back, move back', but we had nowhere to go. The police started pushing us, screaming 'move back, move back'.

"There was a fire on the right hand side of the monument and people started throwing things."

OK, so I absorbed that, but then the question became: who was Anonymous, apparently the group behind the protest? And what were they all about?

In fact I don’t know—or rather, they don’t. But here’s what Trent Peacock (love the name, by the way), an Anon (as they call themselves) had to say, as cited in Wikipedia:

We [Anonymous] just happen to be a group of people on the internet who need—just kind of an outlet to do as we wish, that we wouldn't be able to do in regular society. ...That's more or less the point of it. Do as you wish. ... There's a common phrase: 'we are doing it for the lulz.'

Lulz, according to that Wikipedia entry, is “entertainment.” But the group’s idea of entertainment includes hacking—for some of its members—and they’ve gone after some really worthy targets, including Scientology and the Westboro Baptist “Church.” Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Several attacks by Anons have targeted organizations accused of homophobia. In February 2011, an open letter was published on AnonNews.org threatening the Westboro Baptist Church, an organization based in Kansas in the US known for picketing funerals with signs reading "God Hates Fags".[83] During a live radio current affairs program in which Topiary debated church member Shirley Phelps-Roper, Anons hacked one of the organization's websites.[84] After the church announced its intentions in December 2012 to picket the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Anons published the names, phone numbers, and e-mail and home addresses of church members and brought down GodHatesFags.com with a DDoS attack.[85] Hacktivists also circulated petitions to have the church's tax-exempt status investigated.[86] In August 2012, Anons hacked the site of Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi in retaliation for the Parliament of Uganda's consideration of an anti-homosexuality law permitting capital punishment.[87] 

Good work, guys!

Anons also supported the Occupy movement in its early days, and have protested stock exchanges and major corporations; they also were active in the Arab Spring.

For all this, the group attracts attention, if not notoriety. In 2012, Time Magazine named them on the 100 most influential people; according to Wikipedia, the NSA agreed. Here’s what it says:

In 2012, Public Radio International reported that the US National Security Agency considered Anonymous a potential national security threat and had warned the president that it could develop the capability to disable parts of the US power grid.

I report all of this dispassionately—it’s hard to get a finger on this group’s pulse. But one thing I’ll say: we’re skating quite rashly on the thinnest of ice. The 1% is getting unimaginably rich, and worse, frightenly isolated. The rest of us are forming a collective time bomb of unemployment, poverty, and disenfranchisement.

Anybody remember the French Revolution?

Easy Playing

I knew that he did it—I didn’t know that he did it so well, and to such an extent.

Because there he is, the preeminent cellist of our day, Yo-Yo Ma, playing baroque cello, and playing it damn well.

It may not look like it to you—but there are real differences in the equipment and the technique. First, the strings are gut—not the metal strings that the modern cello has. And that accounts for the softer sound.

Second of all, the endpin—the metal rod that goes from the bottom of the instrument to the floor—is not there. And that means that the instrument has to be cradled in between the legs, a feeling which I, at least, enjoy.

The bow is radically different: here’s one writer on the subject:

Italian music was light and airy, requiring agility and rapidity. German music was more introspective; tempi were slower, and the music frequently required individual string players to produce true chords.

These two musical styles were reflected in the violin bows. The Italian bow was slim and light, the bow strings fixed in relatively high tension, while the German bow was highly arched, and the string tension was fairly loose. In contrast to the Italian technique of holding the bow lightly from above with curved wrist, the German bow was held with the thumb placed under the bow strings. In this way the player could tighten or relax the bowstring tension at will. A tighter tension in the bow was used for single string, single melodic line playing, while a relaxing of the bowstrings' tension permitted playing on two or more strings simultaneously, and thus of course, the playing of true chords.  

The instrument is also held differently—more vertically, with the pegs near the left ear, not behind it.

But one of the most important elements of baroque playing is that the pitch is different. To start with, the A—the note that the oboe plays at the beginning of a concert to tune the orchestra—is not the 440 Hz, but varied from 392 to 465 Hz. But generally, the A was much lower—which contributed as well to a softer, darker sound. And so the standard among baroque players has settled at 415 Hz.

There are stylistic differences, as well. The tendency of the baroque era was to ornament heavily—whatever got written on the page was meant as a guideline, not a Bible. So a performer was free to ornament, and did so.

When I first moved to Puerto Rico, I played in a baroque group, and the experience was a revelation. It was hard, initially, to limit the vibrato, and to create the long, expressive notes that start softly, grow slowly, and then recede again. Most difficult was tuning—the high leading tones and major thirds of modern playing vanish when playing baroque.

But there’s something tantalizing about it—it is the simplest, easiest playing in the world.

“I never want to work so hard again,” I said to the violinist of the group. She knew exactly what I meant: a large, major Romantic work like the Dvorak Concerto is less a piece of music than a battle. To play baroque music is…well, to play.

The last question, of course, is whether Ma gets away with it. Has he really mastered the baroque cello? I drifted over to Amazon.com to check on what the audience was saying.

Predictably, Ma has his critics. But me? I’m convinced!

Of Dix and Spontini

OK—it’s not really a day when you want to look at island news. The New Day couldn’t be clearer: 53% think things are going muy mal (very badly) and 40% think things are bastante mal (fairly badly). Oh—and bad news for the governor, who promised everybody that he would create 50,000 new jobs in the first 18 months of his…err, reign. Because 73% say that there are few jobs, and only 2% believe that there are many (hard to believe that the governor’s family is so big….)

Prices? 90% think they’ve risen in the past three months. Oh, and what about the threatened degradation of our credit into junk status? Well, 61% of us don’t understand at all or only a little the whole thing, but 67% think it would affect them personally. 41% rate the quality of life in Puerto Rico as bad or very bad, and guess what? Fully 33% think it likely to some extent that they will leave the island in the next four years.

Right—take that razor blade away from your wrist, Dear Reader!

(Note—all of these data appear in the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 4 November 2013, which I bought for 75 cents yesterday at the grocery store. Unfortunately, the survey is available only through the “paper” paper or a “digital” (read “for sale”) paper. Two choices, Readers! Trust me, or send me a comment, and I’ll scan the paper….)

Into this grim situation steps the governor, who electronically is reported as admitting that the situation, the mood on the island is “pesimismo.” He then wonderfully retreats to his delusional world by stating the following:

“El crimen se ha reducido, el desempleo se ha reducido, la luz se ha reducido, el agua hay que reducirla”, expuso sobre las metas que se ha propuesto o cumplido para acabar con la imagen negativa.

Here it is: “Crime has been reduced, unemployment has been reduced, electricity has been reduced, and water has been reduced,” he stated about the goals that he had proposed or achieved to put a finish to the negative image.

Well, well—time to check up on the gov, which I can now do, since I am one of the 22% of the population without a job. So let’s google “costo de agua Puerto Rico.” Right, and halfway down the first page is this, from El Nuevo Día of 31 August 2013:

Sube la tarifa del agua en los condominios en Puerto Rico

Subir—to rise, go up, increase, mount.

Electricity?

La electricidad de la Isla es la segunda más cara en EE.UU.

OK—that’s from two years ago, but according to WAPA television, as of 1 October 2013, the price may rise.

Look, do I need to go on? Is there any good news, anywhere?

In fact, there is: the world just got 1500 pieces of art back; here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The trove includes works by Picasso, Marc Chagall, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the German artists Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Carl Spitzweg, said Siegfried Klöble, the head of the Munich customs office, which oversaw the operation to recover the art.

Hey, great news—though it does come with an opportunity, as I used to say in my corporate days. And that is? Well, most of this stuff was either looted or bought at rock bottom price from Jews wanting out of Nazi Germany. So how do you figure out who owned what, and who sold what for what? Here, according to the Times, is what art historian Meike Hoffmann had to say:

She stressed that it is extremely difficult to nail down the origin and the ownership history of some of the works and that she has only begun initial research on some 500 of the works. Further research, she said, could take years.

Among other things found, by the way, was an unknown self-portrait of Otto Dix, about whom I knew nothing: here’s another self-portrait:

Right—so now we have two!

Oh—and good news in the world of opera: the Times is reporting renewed appreciation of the works of Spontini.

Spontini?

Damn—it’s one thing after another, the stuff I don’t know. So who was the guy?

Wikipedia to the rescue!

Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor, extremely celebrated in his time, though largely forgotten after his death.

Right—that made me feel better. And if our governor can live in his own private Puerto Rico, can’t I create a nice delusional cocoon myself. Why not listen to a 1954 recording of Maria Callas singing Spontini? So I ambled over to YouTube and dug her up.

Verdict?

Not sure—but why does the term “justly forgotten” spring to mind?

All Twitty

I’m beginning to feel what my mother must have meant when she said, towards the end of her life, that things were all twitty. Because today, I find myself absolutely unable to do anything—write, print labels, find anything to write about.

It may be the cat that got me into this mood. We’ve had Kitty for 16 years, ever since I heard him yowling on the top of a wheel on a parked car outside. OK—moral proximity: if a cat needs help outside your house, what can you do? So there we were, lying on our stomachs on the sidewalk, peering under the car. And there Kitty was, wisely deciding to retreat deep into the chassis of the car. After all, did he know who we were?

The solution was tuna fish, we realized, and it became clear: we were only going to get one chance; this was one smart cat. Fortunately, we lured him into the cage, and spirited him up to the apartment, where we put him into the one room that actually has a door, the guest bathroom.

The kitten at this point fit comfortably in Mr. Fernández’s hand—it was at that stage where the ears were seemingly bigger than the head. And speaking of the ears, there was a huge oil smear on the right ear; Mr. Fernández got to work on that the next day.

Which I found then, when I came upon Fernández sitting on the toilet, alternately drying and kissing Kitty. “I like this cat,” he crooned, and that was it. True, he was / is an orange cat, and none too beautiful. But that wasn’t the point; probably because of the vitamins we shoveled down him, he’s a truly intelligent cat.

(Sorry to disabuse you here, but most cats? Stupid as posts, despite their appearance….)

Smart enough, in fact, to break out of the guest bathroom after a few days. And how did he do it, since the door was still closed? By climbing up and then down an 8-foot louvered door—it was the only way.

So there he was, casually casing the place, completely unfazed be the three other adult cats who were tailing him. 

Over the years, it became obvious—this was Raf’s cat, not mine. Kitty sleeps by Raf at night, and stays sleeping on his pillow during the day. And at one point, Raf had a dream in which Kitty was talking to him.

“Kitty, you can talk!” exclaimed Raf.

“Of course I can talk,” said Kitty irritably. It was sort of an Alice and Wonderland moment….

Which last Monday was not. That’s when I took Kitty in to the vet, since he hadn’t been eating, and was looking lethargic. He knew, of course, what was coming the moment his saw the red carrying case; characteristically, he offered no complaint.

I knew, too, what was going to happen. I knew it the moment I saw the vet palpating Kitty’s lower abdomen.

“It’s always the kidneys in older cats,” said Jeanne over the weekend. At that point, Kitty had just come home from five days in the hospital, getting IV fluids, and enduring the constant barking of the neighboring dogs. And yes, he had cost us just under a thousand bucks.

We had to spend it, of course. But I can tell you now—we might as well have taken a vacation, instead. Despite Raf’s optimism—based on the statement by the vet that Kitty might last another two years—I don’t think this cat’s gonna be around long.

So he’s in the back bedroom now—isolated so we can see if he urinates and give him the diet he needs. And I puzzled this morning when I was feeding him, how strange life worked. I had a job, I had an office, I had a place to be on Monday mornings. And now? I was alone with an old, feeble cat—a cat we will one day put in the red carrying case, and head weeping—as I am now—for the vet…

…one last time. 

Olympic Hypocrisy

Wow—wonderful what this blog can do! True, I had to keep harping about it, and I do apologize to any reader who may have gone a bit crazy, hearing my rants over and over. But admit it, dear Readers: Aren’t you glad we kept up the pressure? Because now we have it from a new-found friend, no less than Vladimir Putin himself, that the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be… OK, here’s The New York Times itself:

Speaking at a meeting with leaders of Russian winter sports federations, which was also attended by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Putin said Sochi would be fully tolerant. 

Oh, and the name of this article? Putin Says Sochi Welcomes Gays!

Guys?

Look, I have lived over half a century, and I’m hard pressed to think of a more blatantly false and outrageously self-serving statement. And memo to Putin? Gay people, generally speaking, are not fools. So if you think this statement gets you off the hook, think again.

The question, of course, is who is more turpid—sorry, computer, but I looked it up, and Nabokov used the word too—here: Putin and his heinous laws that criminalize even talking about homosexuality, or the Olympic Committee, which sat around and watched Putin enact these laws without raising a word of protest. Then, of course, things got hot, so the Olympic guys had to go and put pressure on the Russian president to make this ridiculous statement.

Well, this was not the only news about LGBT issues in the Times, today, because Frank Bruni had a story about Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican who gave a pot of money to Mitt Romney, but who is also giving money to the Human Rights Campaign. Why? Well, Singer among other things has a gay son—and a gay son-in-law. And he thinks support for gay rights is not incompatible with the Republican Party. Here’s what Bruni has to say:

In Singer’s view, gay rights are consistent with a Republican philosophy of individual liberty, and gay marriage is “an augmenter of social stability, family stability and stability in raising kids.” In other words, it’s conservative.

Nor is Singer the only Republican to join with the HRC—there’s also Daniel S. Loeb; here’s what he has to say:

As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do.

Right—so what’s the campaign about? Well, the HRC has decided it’s time to act globally and support the organizations in other countries that are struggling to advance the causes of LGBT folk. Here’s what Singer has to say about the campaign:

“Every day around the world, LGBT individuals face arrest, imprisonment, torture and even execution just for being who they are,” said Paul Singer.

And guess what? The situation is getting worse around the world, just as it’s getting better in the United States. And why is that? Because we are exporting our bigotry around the world, as evangelical Christians have given up on the domestic market. So what have people like Scott Lively done? They’ve run down to Uganda and over to Russia to stir up hate and urge draconian laws.

Which makes it all the interesting what Bruni says:

It (the campaign) intends to name and shame American religious zealots who sponsor antigay campaigns abroad. So Republican money may wind up challenging a constituency within the party. (We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.)

Well, it’s an interesting world presenting itself today: Republicans supporting LGBT issues, and our new buddy in the Kremlin. Is it that I have the cynical blood of journalism coursing through my veins? Because I’m back to suggesting this….

Get going, Readers: download your print-ready image here at no cost, and order your label sheets (in an appropriate printing size) here! (Suggested brand; $6.68 per 100 labels is not bad!)

Meeting my Outer Critic

Well, I said I’d do it, and so I did. And yes, I wish it had been easier, but let’s be real. I hadn’t played in public for five years at least, and like María João Pires, I’ve never been that comfortable on stage. Some people love it—remember Pavarotti? But it’s never been easy for me.

And there’s also the thing about being alone on the stage—if you’ve got even one other person, you have support. But alone? That’s a lot of eyes on you. Two of which, as well, were Ilia’s, my mother-in-law, who had come with her daughter Nydia. So that was a bit of pressure.

But let’s be honest: I have choked every time I played an audition, and the fear of doing it again was and is almost as bad as doing it. And so would I fall flat on my face?

Nor am I talking about a performance that I wasn’t particularly happy with—I’m talking about playing as badly as I did a year after I first took up the instrument. The bow was shaking on the strings, the fingerboard was awash in sweat, the tone was feeble and tight—do I have to go on? When the disembodied voice of—presumably—the conductor finally said “gracias,” is was an act of charity, for me as much as anyone else.

‘I can’t do this,’ I thought, and strongly considered just putting the cello in the case and going away. I know, think mechanistically: there’s no way I could be a graphic artist, much as I’d like to. And so if I can’t play in public, it’s fine. Some things you can do, others not. Nothing personal—nor is it a moral failure, as somehow I had gotten it into my head it was.

It seemed easier—all right, less embarrassing—just to keep playing. And then, it started, very slowly, to get better. I relaxed; rather, I got into focus. Which meant that I could stop with all the voices in my head which were saying, “you can’t do this are you messing up why can’t you get a decent tone this is nothing like the way you sounded you can do better,” and finally just look at the musician making music.

And then that guy came in.

I had met him before—Félix, who had studied classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music. Right, after Juilliard, it’s probably the best school of music in the country. And I had met him before, when he had interrupted my practicing with the question: “why aren’t you playing with the music?”

He had also insisted on talking about himself, about the Bach that he plays, about…

Who knows? I tuned him out, finding him mildly irritating.

And so he appeared, just as the music was beginning to sound good, and where did he sit? Of course, three feet to my right, and the criticism began. Didn’t I know that the courante should be faster? And what about the articulation….

OK—this was as café, not a concert hall, and thus more informal. Still I was in the middle of a Bach suite, and I wasn’t in the mood to be interrupted. The guy wouldn’t stop talking, so what did I do? Right—I just started playing.

And he kept talking.

That’s when I got pissed. And that, of course was the best thing that could have happened.

‘I no longer talk to myself that way,’ I remember thinking, ‘and I don’t like anyone else talking to me that way….’

And then, at the end, came the final criticism: “when are you going to play at tempo? Is the gigue going to be so slow too?”

I played the first bars as slowly as I could. And the rest of the piece? Whirlwind!

“Are you satisfied,” asked Nydia.

The guy said nothing.

“Well, that’s his answer,” said I.

Of course he wasn’t satisfied—the critics never are. But I was happy: I had moved my critic from inside to outside, I had met him and given him the musical bird. Raf had joined us, we had counted the money to be donated to charity, Ilia and Nydia went up the hill. Raf and I went down the hill, home to the cats dozing on the rugs, home to dinner that would get put on the table. I had met my critic…

…and left him behind.

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