Really, Must we?

It’s the old, old story: what should we do to “popularize” classical music?

To the purists, the answer is nothing: inserting a Cuban popular song into an already quite jazzy rendition of “Sound the Trumpet,” by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell, cheapens and degrades the music. And—so goes the thinking—it makes us look ridiculous. Who are we kidding, after all, when classical musicians venture into heavy metal? Will we ever be as good—or as bad—as AC / DC, or whoever they are? Do we want our bankers and US senators to wear purple Mohawks, black leather and chains?

The other side of the story, of course, is that if we keep being purists, we’ll end up playing to six old ladies in Dwindling Light Nursing Home. And when the fl;u epidemic carries them off, where will we be?

Tonight, we will go to the opera, taking young Montalvo with us. But Lady will come along as well, and Gabriela. And though I say it’s the opera, it’s really a hybrid form: the Metropolitans Line in HD, which is shown in movie theaters throughout the world.

Since Montalvo has been sprung from puritan clutches of the criminal justice system, there is every likelihood that he will approach the opera with a chemically enhanced brain. It’s probably for the best, because the crowd at the opera takes a little getting used to: there’s no disputing that they are lovely, absolutely lovely ladies. And so it’s no surprise that they have many friends, each one of whom will also be attending the opera. And so the ladies will stop and kiss, compare notes on their most recent trips to Gstaad, and invite each other to their villas in Nice. This will take time, of course, but it will also take place in the absolute middle of the lobby, and since there will be three or four such pairings, the lobby will be completely impassable. And so there we will be, wondering if it would be really low-class to cough, murmur “excuse me,” and wade our way through.

Raf’s mother, of course, has solved the problem for us, since she uses her walker on the ladies as the train uses the metal triangular device on the cows. My point? Montalvo has become an adept at the opera: “didn’t we see Kristine Opolais in Manon Lescaut,” he asked recently. We told him he had, and he went away. The next day he posted a video of a pre-paraplegic skateboarder performing death-seducing feats. And the music? The worst of Reggaeton!

It’s an open world for Montalvo, in short. And does anyone think, by the way, that whoever the “singer” of the Raggaeton will be singing “O mio Babbino Caro” tomorrow? Of course not!

What an extraordinary cowardly people we have become! Because tonight we will see La bohème, the plot of which is a familiar as the tears that will spring from my eyes. Yes, Mimi will lose her keys on the dark stairs, Rodolfo will find them but pretend not to have, since what has happened?

Really, do I need to tell you?

Montalvo, of course, will snort at this, since in his mentally-unenhanced state, while under the wing of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, well, he had been rather different.

“He was high as a kite last night at the poetry slam,” said Lady. “And really, he was totally cool: chilling, relaxed, good with the world. Is it too terrible to say that I like him….”

I knew just what she meant….

“I’ve noticed that these bitches always get their way in these operas,” he snorted, when he was in an unimproved state, several months ago.

“You know,” I will tell him, “this opera is the absolute best way to get any woman to…well, be where you want her to be. It’s a total aphrodisiac for them. You take her out, ply her with oysters and champagne, and then, bam! Hit her with Puccini!”

“Panties off!” he will respond, probably in a voice that will carry through the lesser Antilles, and be heard in Caracas.

“It’s a bit easier than winning the Nobel Prize for literature,” I will tell him. “Though also a bit more expensive. Anyway, it’s a definite plan B….”

These are the fatherly tips that it is my duty to confer….

So we will see the opera, and I know everything but when it will be set.. Because the stage director has to do something, after all, to ear those juicy Metropolitan bucks. So it may be that the whole thing will be staged in ancient  Mesopotamia, or mayber in a distant planet in a far distant time. So Mimi will lose her keys in a spaceship, and….

It won’t be quite that bad, of course. Though I have seen a clip of Philippe Jaroussky covered in motor oil—supposedly—and singing Monteverdi. Oh, and in the same production, poor Cecilia Bartoli had to sing “Piangero, La Sorte Mio” wearing a canvas hood. Wonderfully—opera singers have such good training—the sound was quite unmuffled.

Well, Montalvo at the opera is definitely as good as the opera itself, since he has proven himself completely capable of giving a “popcorn shower” to the woman in front of him. Just as, of course, I immediate countered by proving that a 6’3” man can quite easily cower under a movie seat….

Stay tuned!     

     

Bearing the Sorrows of our Parents

So is it true? Because if so, then there is every reason for my taking 10 mg of Lexapro every morning and 30 mg of Mirtazapine in the evening.

For those not in the know, the two drugs above are antidepressants. And you may, as many people do, think they make the world a brighter place. But to a depressive, they actually do much more.

There is a cognitive aspect to depression that is every bit as real and destructive as the affective aspect. And so, the depressive will say, “why should I get out of bed and make breakfast, when after all, nothing I do will make any difference in the world? Is anyone reading this blog? Aren’t we all going to die in the end? So why bother?”

In fact, I read somewhere that this particularly depressive way of thinking is just a shade more realistic that non-depressed thinking. In fact, very few lives will make any significant difference in the world. True, some of us may be a Gandhi or a Jonas Salk; some of us may be parents or ancestors of such folk. But the vast majority of us simply go along until we die, and then that’s that.

Depressing, right?

I’m thinking this way because of Rachel Yehuda, who discovered that parents who had survived trauma had a molecule affixed to one gene that changed the expression of that gene. OK—that made sense. But what was really interesting is that the same molecule was also present in their children, even though those children had never gone through the stress.

It was something we vaguely knew—there was talk for years about how the Holocaust children were somehow different than regular kids, even if they were growing up in the US, even if their parents never talked much about the Holocaust. But everybody noticed it: the Holocaust survivors’ children were moodier, and more prone to anxiety. Now, for the first time, we may have an explanation for it.

Yehuda studied the children of Holocaust survivors, as well as those children who were in utero of September 11 survivors. OK—neither one applies to me, but I wonder if I am not, in a sense, also the child of a parent who had survived an horrific event. Consider the picture below:

There was, according to many sources, no way of keeping the dust out. Yes, in the 1930’s, people in North Dakota were putting wet towels against window frames, but somehow, inevitably, the dust got in. Nor was it just in your house—it was in your lungs, it was in your food, it was everywhere. How could it not have been, when you consider the photo below:

My father was born in 1909: he was just 20 when the stock market crashed. And though he never said it, his parents must have been hit hard by the depression. And so, he left Carleton University and went out to North Dakota, where his parents had land.

The family communicated feelings through stories, by which I mean that my father never said he was desolate, young, alone and terrified. What he told me was that there wasn’t any wood for fuel, so he hit on the novel idea of cutting down telephone poles. Or that he was stuck with feeding new-born lambs: his strategy was to section off the two rooms of the house, feed one lamb, throw it over the partition, and stafrt in one the next. Oh, and there was the time the hailstorm came, and completely destroyed the wheat crop. He stood in silence with his mother and father, and watched as an entire year’s income went down the drain. The field was covered with ice; his father went out, gathered some up, and made ice cream.

The dust bowl provoked the greatest migration in the history of the United States: people got in their cars and headed—for the most part—west, to California. My father returned east, to Minnesota, but there was a part of him that never left North Dakota. He never quite believed his later good fortune: that he had married the love of his life, that he had had the job of his dreams.

He told me once that he had spent a large part of his childhood seeing his father off on the train: the family business required frequent travelling to North Dakota. And the sound of a train whistle, my father told me, filled him with sorrow, and brought tears to his eyes. He was, in short, a marked man ever after.

My question: am I?

A Privileged Life

Can it be true? Because if so, my mood is seriously out of sync with my reality.

Yeah? I thought I would score at least an 80—after all, I’m a white male. Hey, that should account for something, right? But either the test is screwy, or I’m not getting something. Because question after question asked about things that, yes, put me ou8t of the mainstream.

Religion, for example. Has anyone tried to convert me to his or her beliefs? Well, yeah, but that never seemed too big a deal to me. And has anyone in the workplace imposed his or her beliefs on me? Again, yes—there was that very beautiful, and very life-sized crèche that appeared one Christmas in the Human Resources department at Walmart. But no worries—I spoke to the director of the department, and it vanished. (Now that I’ve been laid off, I’m sure it’s a regular fixture each year….) OK—and I was sufficiently open with my students that one of them took me aside, and told me that the rumors were spreading that I was an atheist.

“What rumors,” I asked, “I am an atheist!”

All right—I’m a little lacking in the religion department….

Then, of course, there’s sexuality, and I was expecting that. Yes, people have called me a fag, I was once chased down a street in Boston (I have long legs—something that arguably is a privilege, or at least it seemed so at the time—so again, no worries). Discrimination in the workplace? Nothing overt that I can point a finger to, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Put it this way—being gay didn’t help.

Money? Well, I’ve felt poor, and not, at the same time. I remember those days of having less than 500 bucks in the bank—but I also had a job, and I felt secure there. Granted, I was underemployed, and definitely underpaid, but I also had a long-term relationship, and he was doing great. And no, I’ve never worried about being able to afford a doctor’s visit, or gone to bed hungry.

Are my parents alive?  Seemed like a dumb question, though I suppose that having live parents might be a boon (assuming, of course, they were any good at parenthood). Anyway, I’m six months short of 60, so having live parents is both unlikely and, perhaps, a distinct disadvantage (my father would be 107, and almost certainly in terrible shape….)

Right, so then we came to illnesses, specifically mental illnesses. Depression? Check! Suicidal ideation? Check! Actual suicide attempts? Fortunately, no. But still, it weighed against me.

What was odd was what wasn’t on the test. Physical health, for example—which, despite high blood pressure, has been remarkably good. And having been in severe pain, recently, I have a renewed appreciation for having lived so many years without disability.

The questionnaire—if I remember correctly—asked if I had grown up in a house without a television. Well, yeah—but only because my parents preferred reading. Oh, and in those days, there was a hill between them and the local PBS station, which made transmission spotty. So what was the point?

It was, I suppose, an unusual household. Yes, you always had to lift your feet, every time you drove over a puddle, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that there was a cello in the back seat, and my father was driving me to a rehearsal of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

And then, of course, there was the fact that I had a father at all. And that he was there, driving me around, and not somewhere else. Oh, and he taught me a lot: how to treat bank presidents and janitors, for example (hint—the same). How to look at every side of an issue. Oh, and how to hate, just hate, the bastards who get away with shit.

Maybe it’s true that I’ve been or am underprivileged. Both of my brothers, when my mother was fasting to her death, told me essentially the same thing: I had had a harder life than they.    

At the time I dismissed the idea, then I began to see how it could be true. Then I began to wonder: well, so what? Maybe my life had been harder, and maybe other people—brothers included—had had it easier. But I had never felt unduly unprivileged; in fact, I thought I was, for the most part, supremely lucky.

Think the test is bogus!

The Day After Dallas

Wonderful!

So now I know. If the cop pulls me over, I have to turn the car off, get my license and registration out of the pocket and glove compartment, put them on the dashboard, and then sit facing the steering wheel. My hands should be at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, and my fingers should be pointing outward. That way, said the guy in the video clip, you’ll both go home safe. Oh, and before I do anything, I have to say, “Sir, I’m going to move my hands to give you my license…” So now I know, but unfortunately, I don’t react well in dangerous situations. And so that means that I would probably get out of the car, forget to put my hands up, and be reaching for my wallet. And that, of course, would be taken for reaching for a gun. So, I’d be dead meat, right?

Wrong—I’m white.

Everything about the last month or so has been all wrong. Forty-nine people get killed in a nightclub, and so I spent a week looking at clips of “how to survive an active shooter situation.” The child of two writers, I winced at the phrase, “active shooter situation.” Why? Because it was clearly a term that had evolved after long use: there have to be a lot of shootings before they become “active shooter situations….”

So I absorbed that, and now I know that first I run, then I hide, then I fight. Great, and I suppose that I could fight, though I never have in life. Of course, maybe someone will do it for me, since several million people viewed the same clip. So they will not be sitting, as will I, glued to their chair in the café as the gunmen storm the joint. They will be running, hiding, and fighting, as I am taking note of the fact that the gunman is wearing khaki camouflage, but curiously, sneakers instead of boots. Writers like those kind of details….

So then we got a period of relative normality, during which I could wonder about the Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, and his sexuality. Was he or wasn’t he? And wasn’t it interesting that not just one, but several sources came out and said that, yes, Mateen was gay. Or sort of gay. Or heavily conflicted. But the FBI pooh-poohed all that, though it also never came out and said that he was an out and out ISIS murderer.

Remember the Boston bomber? Well, we got his mother, father, uncles, imam, and his third grade teacher, along with anyone who ever seen his brother box. In short, no stone went unturned, and it all went along for weeks. But with the Orlando shooter, the stone was never turned. Apparently, it was too much of an obstacle.

It was, then, an eerily quiet time, during which I learned the ten steps for how to survive that, well…is it time for the acronym? ASS—and by that I only mean Active Shooter….

Did you know, by the way, that if shot, you should try to stanch the blood by applying pressure on the wound? Yes, as a former nurse, I could imagine that. But I didn’t know that I should, if I start to feel faint, grab a book, place it on the floor, and then lie with my wound on it. That way, the pressure of my body would keep the bleeding under control.

See?

Somehow, I didn’t see. So I kept on looking at the videos. Because suddenly, it was not just about surviving that ASS—I began to realize: in the manner of hardcore porn, the videos got more specialized, or perhaps fetishized. So then I was lost in videos like “How to survive ASS in a supermarket.” Next, in a hospital. I never quite got to surviving in a café, which might in fact be of some use, but I can tell you, hot coffee can be used as a weapon, as can scissors and also a stapler! So that bureaucrat, pushing about the papers on his desk, has every chance of surviving that… you know what.

I knew that I had to stop watching them, since it was getting to me: strolling down the produce aisle, I realized that an excellent weapon could be hot chili peppers , which could be particularly nasty if I smashed them into the shooter’s eyes. I stood in front of them for a long five seconds: I have no stomach for hot food, but shouldn’t I grab some? Remember—the steps you take now may save your life.

Oh, and I knew, then, exactly what to say to the gunmen, as he trained his automatic weapon onto me. I would disarm him, of course, with an offbeat question. I knew this because one of the videos had been distinctly unnerving, since it attempted to soften the message but using stick figures and drawings. It was chilling to contemplate: were parents sitting down with their children in front of the computer? The children would be munching on cookies and drinking their milk, while mother would be cuing up, “How to survive a school shooting!”

At any rate, the little stick figure had provided the best question to confuse and momentarily distract the shooter: “Is it raining outside?” Ever courteous, the shooter might well peer out the window, giving me valuable seconds to flee.

I knew: taking those peppers would be the first step down the path to madness. Just as, for example, checking whether the second door into the gift shop is unlocked would usher me into full paranoia. (Full disclosure—I just checked, it’s locked!)

Then of course, it was two black men who got killed by cops, and somebody tell: which happened first? Think it was Minnesota, then Baton Rouge, but did it matter? By then, we were all sort of numbed up, and then Obama had to go out and do what he has spent his presidency doing, which was decrying the horror, expressing his grief on behalf of the nation, and saying with increasing discouragement—as the shootings piled up—that we had to talk about gun control.

And then, Dallas happened.

It was going to happen—didn’t we know that? Of course, nobody is willing to say what the FBI, of all people or organizations, said a decade ago. And that is? The white supremacists have infiltrated our police departments. Or perhaps the news was out: both Huffington Post and the Daily Kos had stories on it. Anyway, the news is out there, and we now know that we have problem. But why should we?

“Every situation is different,” runs the old adage. But is that true? If any situation has the possibility of being a routine, it’s getting stopped by a cop. So why shouldn’t we establish a protocol, and stick to it? The cops—at least down here—have speakers on their cars: why shouldn’t the cop have a card like the Miranda rights? The card could instruct the cop to tell the driver stopped to turn off his car, turn off the radio, place his license and car registration, etc. After he or she had done all that, the cop could tell the driver to tap his horn. And then, with the situation relatively stable, the cop could approach the car.

Why hasn’t that happened? Why are we having these killings? I haven’t asked the young man I consider a son, who is black, but I think I know the answer he might give me. Don’t I know a war when I see one? Isn’t clear to see that the cops are killing black men systematically? Do you really think—in the age of the internet, where young Muslims can be radicalized by imams from Saudi Arabia—that these white supremacists aren’t talking among themselves? The narrative is that this was a shootout in Dallas, but really, wasn’t it just another volley in the war?

So now, I have to listen on Facebook to a very talented cellist, who has recorded all four parts of the Barber Adagio, which got played to death after September 11. But as gorgeous as the Barber is, it has always had the feel—to me—of a young man’s anguish. I turned, instead, to another man’s anguish, Gustav Mahler. There was a reason that in the movie, Death in Venice, Visconti used the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as the theme music. In the film, the tragic, repressed, older man—obsessed with a beautiful Polish youth—is deathly ill. In the final scene, the boy opens his arms, as if to embrace the sun, and then reaches towards it. The older man reaches toward the boy, and then dies. It was cholera, we know. And we know, as well, through the music, that it wasn’t cholera.

It was the end of a civilization.